The heroism and human frailty behind the myths

If there is little earth-rattlingly new to say about Jack and Jackie Kennedy, their private lives, their restive travels together and separately, the international aristocrats, butchering dictators, arms dealers, piratical shipping magnates, aging debutantes, desiccated diplomats, dress designers, fashionable hairdressers and antiques experts they cultivated along with the obligatory politicians, reporters and other useful and often loathed Washington insiders, Sally Bedell Smith at least says everything worth mentioning about these matters in one book. Everything, that is, relating to the social ambience of the White House (along with countless other Kennedy residences, borrowed houses, hotels booked by the floor, yachts and scattered embassies) and of the Kennedy marriage during Jack’s vivacious, if systemically ineffectual and abbreviated, presidency.

“Grace and Power” reads like something you’d be giddy to find in your dentist’s waiting room, a gracefully written tell-all that really does tell a story worth reading. Smith has wisely eschewed the corny evocations of Camelot that Jackie promoted after Jack’s assassination, incarnated ad nauseam in hagiographies by mesmerized apostles like Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., Theodore Sorensen and William Manchester and lesser lights such as Kenneth O’Donnell, David Powers and a clutch of tenacious barnacles left over from Jack’s “formative years” at various schools, his military service and a faraway time when he needed procurers rather than beards.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s years of power, in Smith’s account, were a constant swirl of sycophants of every known description (above a certain income level). While evenings of rampant boozing, sexual hijinks and adultery among famous names emit a somewhat smelly species of glamour, the picture Smith paints of the “fun” that followed every formal state dinner and stuffy function leaves one wondering how many of his government-employed coterie, or Kennedy himself, managed the reality of statecraft. Smith wonders what he might have accomplished had he paid more attention to the affairs of state and not pushed aside his powerful legislative ally, Vice President Lyndon Johnson.

Smith has the salient advantage of writing at a wide temporal distance from the frantic post-assassination myth-making and subsequent deification of JFK, enabling her to parse facts from the key players’ convenient memories and to avail herself of 40 years of ever-burgeoning scholarly research.

She has several surprises to add to those historic 1,000 days. Her detailed book is hardly prurient, but it does clock -- and I do mean clock -- JFK’s infidelities, which emerge here in a somewhat different light than we’ve seen them before. He seems to have had rotating shifts of mistresses of long duration, few of them famous or even named in earlier accounts, including at least two White House interns. He seldom spent two consecutive nights with any of them; yet they remained in his orbit, ever available, for years at a time. (One, Helen Chavchavadze, had a serious breakdown when the CIA began intimidating her over a security clearance.) Kennedy was hardly discreet about his womanizing; he once told British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan that if he went without sex for three days he got a terrible headache.

Moreover, the popular cant that the press “didn’t go after people’s personal lives” in that long-ago era has little to do with Kennedy’s immunity. His best friend was Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee. Another intimate was Philip Graham, the newspaper’s owner (until his spectacularly public breakdown at a press convention in Phoenix in January 1963 and subsequent suicide). Kennedy’s charisma was such that reporters scrambled to gain access, which he calculatedly bestowed. He could banter about his sex life all night over Scotches in complete assurance that none of these news mavens would ever repeat a word of it in print.

Often when Jackie was in attendance, JFK’s squeeze du jour would be at White House dinners accompanied by a beard. No fool she, Jackie once walked into JFK’s office with a visiting French diplomat to discover a young, attractive woman there, Smith writes. “This is the girl who’s allegedly sleeping with my husband,” she told the startled visitor in her impeccable French.

“Grace and Power” is stuffed with resonant names from yesteryear, the menus of state dinners, a roster of imported entertainers and an inventory of what Jackie wore when she deigned to appear, a sort of day-by-day recounting of the opulent off-hours of the rich and powerful. We learn that at the height of tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union, Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev thoughtfully sent the Kennedys a delicious tub of Beluga caviar.

Smith devotes at least as much space to Jackie’s restoration of the White House, if not considerably more, as to the Bay of Pigs invasion, the building of the Berlin Wall, the Cuban missile crisis, the Laotian crisis, Kennedy’s escalation in Vietnam and racial conflicts bubbling in cities across America. That Kennedy was more concerned with his popularity ratings and reelection chances than with urgent domestic problems registers very clearly in this book. Kennedy was, in fact, keenly engaged in lethal gamesmanship with the Soviets, much of it inept and wildly ill informed thanks to his claque of clashing advisors. (As Mary McCarthy once observed, these were hardly the brightest and the best, but rather “pale fish out of university think-tanks.”)

True, Smith gives serviceable and often lively accounts of the several near-apocalyptic crises Kennedy and his advisors seemed to whip up regularly out of a combination of machismo and boredom, accounts that fastidiously redact the factual details but never mention their effect on ordinary U.S. citizens and the rest of the world. She is keen on showing us the floral schemes and lobster bisque on tables arranged for the shah of Iran or Haile Selassie, the endless rounds of golf JFK played at every available country club, his sang-froid at social events on evenings when the country was teetering on the brink of nuclear annihilation, the myriad cruises on the presidential yacht the Honey Fitz, and Jackie’s fondness for queening it up on vessels owned by Greek shipping tycoons rather than presiding over some dreary patriotic luncheon.

If there is a protagonist in this book, it’s Jackie. One has to admire the way she refused to play first lady for months at a go, devoting herself to her children’s upbringing and expanding her cultural knowledge in every direction. The restoration of the White House was an impeccably executed, arduous effort of research and a prodigious exercise of infallible good taste, obliging Jackie to shake down all sorts of well-off people for gifts of furnishings and cash. She was, Smith says, stingy with the ordinary citizen’s money and extravagant only when spending private donations from those who could easily afford it.

Smith is a compelling writer; still, it’s hard to make Macy’s Thanksgiving floats from stick figures, and many among her cast are interesting mainly for the money they throw around and the supposedly endearing neuroticisms and tics that come with having too much of everything. One eventually wearies of Smith’s ponderous inventories of possessions and birthday gifts and the many side characters whose accomplishments, if any, have strictly to do with the acquisition and display of inert objects.

Even Kennedy familiars with worthwhile minds and independent personalities, like John Kenneth Galbraith and Adlai Stevenson, come off as charcoal sketches, important only vis-a-vis their relationships to Jack and Jackie. (Jack detested Stevenson, Jackie thought Galbraith a pompous publicity hound, but they all, for reasons of state, put up with one another.) Jack and Jackie were consciously simulating the atmosphere of the court at Versailles, apparently unfazed by what happened to Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette when their subjects realized they couldn’t fill their stomachs with noblesse oblige.

Smith’s portrait of Jackie is irresistible. The only fully fleshed person in this book, one falls in love with her all over again, if only because she so effortlessly outclasses her philandering husband. Even if Smith lavishes far too many sentences on Jackie’s preoccupation with horses and shopping, and the jewelry given her by foreign potentates -- any four pieces of which could feed a small African country for a year -- what also comes through are Jackie’s mischievous intelligence, her unerring sense of style, her wit, her love of the arts, her empathy for others, her forbearance and stoicism. I don’t want to quibble too much about what this book isn’t, since Smith plainly intended to fill a specific gap plugged in ages past by such astute court observers as the Duc de Saint-Simon, Madame de LaFayette and Cardinal de Retz. Smith wasn’t there at the time, of course, but this works entirely to her advantage. We need history observed from the bottom of the class system, but history from the top down is invaluable in its own way, and despite the book’s chronic descriptive anemia, Smith has, I think, achieved what she set out to do.

Smith’s JFK is a supposed Brahmin intellectual who fell asleep at films like “Last Year at Marienbad” and preferred James Bond; he had an impressive command of Shakespearean soliloquies and was hardly an ignoramus (compared with President Bush, Kennedy was Einstein, Michelet and the count of Monte Cristo rolled into one), but he was so much at the mercy of satyriasis that he operated more like a priapic boy of 18 than the most powerful leader on Earth, the father of two children and husband of a woman he seemed to deeply love and respect but couldn’t stop humiliating with his indiscretions.

What gives Jack Kennedy heroic dimension in this remarkable book is Smith’s emphasis on the excruciating physical pain he endured almost every day of his presidency from back injuries, Addison’s disease and a host of other ailments. Worse, he had to pose as an athletic, robust, supremely confident leader, when much of the time he was strapped in a corset and puffy from cortisone, often unable to walk.

In this connection, Smith has at last clarified the role played in Kennedy’s life by Dr. Max Jacobson, whom many of us living in Manhattan at a certain period remember vividly as “Dr. Feelgood,” whose waiting area often resembled an asylum’s communal rumpus room as every bleary creature of the night waited for a miraculous poke of “B-12 shots,” a fortifying and propulsive mixture of various vitamins and pure amphetamine.

I was aware 30 years ago that Jack, and sometimes Jackie, had often called upon Jacobson for his “special medicine” -- as did virtually everybody from the Warhol Factory, movie stars, ambulatory psychotics, exhibitionists, United Nations diplomats and even lowly people who could afford that special three-day booster injection. But I had always assumed the doctor made house calls to whatever hotels they’d checked into in Manhattan. I was astounded to learn from Smith that, for a considerable period, Kennedy had Jacobson and his wife jetted into foreign and domestic cities to medicate himself and Jackie, and at least once Jacobson was rushed to Europe on a charter plane with no other passengers aboard.

The most memorable occasion, in Smith’s telling, was when JFK sneaked Jacobson into his Vienna hotel room while preparing for his first summit conference with Khrushchev. Kennedy’s back problems were especially crippling at that juncture and he didn’t want his Soviet counterpart to see him lurching into the summit on crutches. After Jacobson’s ministrations, Kennedy sailed out the door under his own steam, looking the epitome of invincible health and vigor.

Khrushchev trumped him at every hand anyway, but that’s a story you will have to read Smith’s book to get the skinny on. *