Kennedy (69 page)

State dinners at the White House, I can testify from my few firsthand experiences, had an atmosphere of warmth as well as elegance. Formal protocol was held to a minimum. Changing clothes in my office and walking over, I was given my seat assignment and introduced to my dinner partner by one of the military or social aides. As the guests talked in the East Room, martial music announced the arrival on the staircase of the President and Mrs. Kennedy and the guests of honor. A receiving line formed, the President usually laughing at being formally introduced to me by a military aide and adding some humorous twist
to my job description as he introduced me to the visiting chief of state.

From my seat well below the salt at dinner, I could observe the President amusing the ladies on either side of him, then knitting his brow as he asked a guest a more serious question, then laughing once again at some bantering exchange. The guests on either side of me were among those personally selected by the President, who used dinner invitations as a means of honoring, influencing, thanking or meeting all kinds of people. Occasionally, the long horseshoe-shaped banquet table was replaced by a cluster of little tables. The food, the wine and the background music were delightful, the toasts short and frequently funny.

After the toasts, we went into the redecorated Red, Green and Blue Rooms of the White House.
²
Fires burned in the fireplaces, flowers filled every niche, and all the guests talked about Jacqueline’s transformation of those rooms from a cold museum and hotel lobby into authentic restorations of the best in American history. The President and First Lady moved from group to group, talking informally about newly collected paintings or heirlooms, and joking with me on one occasion about the antique chair which had suddenly cracked and collapsed under the President at our legislative breakfast that morning.

A performance was then presented in the East Room which honored both guests and artists by selecting the best in the nation, including a Shakespeare company (the first in the White House since 1910), a ballet troupe, a musical comedy, opera stars, Frederic March reading from Hemingway, Isaac Stem, Igor Stravinsky and Pablo Casals in his first visit to the White House since playing for Theodore Roosevelt. At the end of the evening, all of us felt we were truly in the First House of the land.

Jacqueline Kennedy acted to preserve the Mansion’s greatness for posterity. She obtained legislation from the Congress placing the White House under the National Park Service, permitting unneeded objects to be stored or exhibited in the Smithsonian Institution and preventing the loss or neglect of any heirloom. She appointed a Fine Arts Committee of experts (mostly Republicans) to advise her on historical re-creations and to receive contributions. She established the post of White House Curator. She created a White House Historical Association to publish a guidebook and other pamphlets about the Mansion, its history, its occupants and its contents, and the guidebook (which the President had been warned would be assailed for commercializing the White House) was a one-dollar best-seller which raised still more money for the work of restoration.

Nor did she confine herself to the rooms toured by the public. She redid the private living quarters above the first floor to fit her own tastes and family needs with art and furniture of her own choosing. (She and her husband also insisted that the private quarters remain truly private, and a staff member who had taken friends on a tour of the upstairs, even though the Kennedys were absent, was severely reprimanded.) The White House library was restocked and restored with the best in American literature. She rearranged furniture and pictures in the West Wing’s offices and Reception Room. She and the President were particularly proud of the once dilapidated Rose Garden which became a blazingly beautiful flower garden.

Kennedy had ambitious plans for beautifying the District of Columbia. With Jefferson’s love of architecture, he initiated a master plan for the sweeping redesign of Pennsylvania Avenue between Capitol Hill and the White House. With advice from his wife and Bill Walton, he took action to prevent historic, graceful Lafayette Park, across the street from the White House, from being permanently ruined by modernistic Federal structures on either side.

John and Jacqueline Kennedy had more than an architectural effect on the capital city. They had both lived there throughout most of their adult lives, they were more widely acquainted with its residents than any previous First Family, and they cared deeply about its role and stature.

Some skeptics said that the President was trying to prove that he was for “culture” in the same way that he was for Medicare or Mass Transit. Many artists, on the other hand, looked upon Kennedy as one of their own. Neither, in my view, was wholly right.

Clearly he was an intellectual, if that term has any solid meaning, although many of his fellow intellectuals would have disputed that conclusion almost as vehemently as he. He meditated, but on action, not philosophy. His was a directed intelligence, never spent on the purely theoretical, always applied to the concrete. He sought truth in order to act on it. His mind was more critical and analytical than creative, but it was better balanced by humor, practicality and even profanity than that of the typical intellectual.

Typical intellectuals, in fact, were rarely among his closest friends. He preferred the Waltons and Bundys and Galbraiths of this world, whose interests were not confined to their artistic or intellectual specialties. But he enjoyed the exchange of specific facts and ideas with almost anyone from whom he could learn.

To be sure, his own artistic talents and interests were limited. He had dabbled briefly in oil painting after his 1955 back operation, and some of the results, hung in his home, were considered good.
But he felt he had “no gift” for it, soon tired of it and turned to more active pursuits. Nor could he sing, although at times, when the spirit (or, more likely, spirits) moved him, he was known to render a passable version of “Won’t You Come Home, Bill Bailey.” In Dorchester, Massachusetts, on the last night of his 1958 campaign, too tired to present another speech to an already solid audience, he instead presented the three Kennedy brothers singing “Heart of My Heart.” They were awful.

His wife and his curiosity drew him to several cultural fields, but not in depth. He had a strong feeling for architecture, but pretended no expertness. He became interested in French period furniture, but deferred to Jacqueline’s judgment. He bought some ancient pieces of sculpture but was more impressed by their antiquity than their form.

In general his respect for artistic excellence exceeded his appreciation. He had no interest in opera, dozed off at symphony concerts and was bored by ballet. His taste in records ran from Broadway show tunes such as
Camelot
to romantic ballads to “Irish Sing Along.” In earlier days our Senate office, indeed the whole Senate Office Building, was enlivened once a year by a visiting Bostonian whom he induced to sing “Danny Boy.” (His wife once teased him that the only music he apparently liked was “Hail to the Chief.”) He liked stage shows, but preferred musicals and comedies to heavy drama. He liked movies such as
Casablanca
and
Spartacus
but nothing too arty or actionless. He liked the seascapes and ship scenes hung in his office, and the George Catlin paintings of Western scenes he placed in his living quarters, and, according to Walton, he liked Impressionists.

He was genuinely interested in sports and enjoyed meeting leading athletes in his office as much as artists. He had championship boxing matches, available to the public only on closed circuit television, piped into the White House, and he once delayed leaving for a more “cultural” event until a final knockout had been scored. Football, both college and professional, was his favorite sport. He enjoyed his annual ceremony opening the professional baseball season, but he remarked to me after one such outing that “Baseball is an awfully slow-moving game.”

His reading is best summed up by an incident related by a White House visitor who noticed, amidst the official volumes and weighty histories on the President’s shelves, a book by Abel Green, editor of the entertainment trade newspaper
Variety.
Assuming it was there by error, for comparatively few politicians or public officials had heard of either the magazine or its editor, he later asked the President what a book by Mr. Abel Green was doing in his bookcase; to which Kennedy punned in reply, “Don’t you think a President is entitled to variety?”

Variety was the keynote of his reading habits. Despite the volume of newspapers, magazines and memoranda he devoured daily, he continued
in the White House to read a surprising number of books. History, biography and current affairs dominated the list. He was willing to quote poetry in his speeches (but only occasionally, and never more than a few strong and simple lines) and he liked to teach it to Caroline and read it aloud to his wife. (“I always thought that was his Celtic side,” said Jacqueline, pointing to the poetry anthologies in their sitting room.) Novels and mysteries were relatively rare in his reading, but for relief from the rigors of his office he sometimes turned to the fantastic escapades and escapes of Ian Fleming’s delightfully exaggerated British Secret Agent, James Bond. (“Why,” the President was heard to remark after the Bay of Pigs, “couldn’t this have happened to James Bond?”)
Talleyrand, Marlborough
and
Melbourne
remained favorites. He studied
The Guns of August
, an account of the origins of the First World War, as a warning to his own generation.

Variety was also the keynote of all his interests and tastes. He liked Schlesinger’s books as well as Ian Fleming’s. He liked meeting the Jerome Robbins dance group and heavyweight champion Floyd Patterson. He was interested in the worlds of Carl Sandburg and Frank Sinatra. He could enjoy communicating at the level of the Bundy brothers and the Cassini brothers. His offhand observations could be profound and profane. He could laugh at quips from Ken Galbraith and Dave Powers. He was amused to learn one summer that his press aide’s son was going to music camp and his cultural aide’s son to baseball camp. He felt equally at home with Italian-American sopranos and Irish-American politicians.

But whatever limits there may have been to John Kennedy’s own artistic talents and interests, they in no way limited his respect for cultural achievement or his sincerity in promoting it nationally. Nor did he promote culture for the sake of appearances or for the sake of politics.

His effort, to be sure, had political advantages—which were not lost on this highly political President—just as his Academic Advisory Committee in 1959-1960 had political advantages. It was not the endorsements and entertainment which artistic celebrities could provide in future campaigns. That was never a reason. More important was the fact that liberal Democrats, reformers, wealthy contributors and independent Republicans were most often among the culturally minded. They warmed to an intellectual President who patronized the arts when his position on fiscal and other matters might well have cooled them. Nor was his view of art limited to its interest for the elite. The President frequently sought statistics on how many Americans (i.e., voters) played musical instruments, visited art galleries and museums or in some other way participated in our cultural life.

His desire to encourage the arts, to give recognition and support and leadership, was not hypocritical merely because he was not more artistic, just as his attack on poverty was no less sincere because he was wealthy. The artists and scholars whom he invited to the White House recognized that he was honoring their work, not merely using their names—that he recognized this nation’s debt to its artists for their contribution to our national heritage. He was a President who pursued excellence, and excellence in creative activity, he believed, was essential to excellence in the nation both now and generations from now. “If we can make our country one of the great schools of civilization” like Athens, he said,

One of John Kennedy’s most important contributions to the human spirit was his concept of the office of the Presidency. His philosophy of government was keyed to power, not as a matter of personal ambition but of national obligation: the primacy of the White House within the Executive Branch and of the Executive Branch within the Federal Government, the leadership of the Federal Government within the United States and of the United States within the community of nations.

And yet he almost never spoke of “power.” Power was not a goal he sought for its own sake. It was there, in the White House, to be used, without any sense of guilt or greed, as a means of getting things done. He felt neither uplifted nor weighed down by power. He enjoyed the Presidency, thinking not of its power but its opportunities, and he was sobered by the Presidency, thinking not of its power but its obligations. He was a strong President primarily because he was a strong person.

He was slightly annoyed by all the newspaper fuss during the transition over the fact that he enjoyed reading Dick Neustadt’s
Presidential Power
, with its emphasis oh “personal power and its politics; what it is, how to get it, how to keep it, how to use it.” For Neustadt would be the first to agree that John Fitzgerald Kennedy, a third-generation practitioner of political power, already knew its nature without being obsessed by either its burdens or its glories.

As a Senator he had supported more power and discretion for the President in foreign aid, trade, item vetoes and national emergency disputes, and opposed curbs on the President’s treaty-making power and electoral base. As an author and historian he had praised the independent
Presidency and the men who stretched its limits and preserved its prerogatives. As a candidate he both launched and closed his campaign with addresses focused upon Presidential responsibility as the No. 1 issue. And as President he both expanded and exerted the full powers of that office, the informal as well as the formal, “all that are specified and some that are not.” In my judgment, few features of the Kennedy Presidency were as distinctive as his concept and conduct of the office itself.