With the exception of the president’s personal secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, the Kennedy White House is very much a fraternity, with every man deeply loyal to his charismatic leader. Conversation often lapses into the profane, as the president’s naval background lends truth to the saying “swears like a sailor.” “I didn’t call businessmen sons of bitches,” Kennedy once complained about being misquoted in the New York Times. “I called them pricks.”
The tone is courtlier when women are around. The president, for instance, never refers to his secretary as anything other than Mrs. Lincoln. But even then, crudeness can be camouflaged. Once, in his wife’s presence, Kennedy uses a version of the military’s phonetic alphabet to lash out at a newspaper columnist, referring to him as a “Charlie-Uncle-Nan-Tare.”
When the confused First Lady asks the president to explain, he deftly changes the subject.
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Kennedy’s half-hour midday swim is an effective tonic for his pain, but sometimes he also uses the swimming sessions to conduct business, inviting staff and even members of the press to put in laps alongside him. The catch? They have to be naked, too. Dave Powers, a regular swimming partner, is quite used to it. For some on the White House staff, however, the scene is almost surreal.
Enigmatically, the president’s informal aquatic habits belie the fact that he is the polar opposite of his easygoing vice president. Lyndon Johnson is well-known for grabbing shoulders and slapping backs, but Kennedy keeps a physical distance between himself and other men. Unless he is campaigning, a chore he relishes, the president finds even the simple act of shaking hands to be a burden.
After swimming, Kennedy eats a quick lunch upstairs in the residence—perhaps a sandwich and possibly some soup. He then goes into his bedroom, changes into a nightshirt, and naps for exactly forty-five minutes. Other great figures in history such as Winston Churchill napped during the day. For Kennedy, it is a means of rejuvenation.
The First Lady wakes him up and stays with him to chat as he gets dressed. Then it’s back to the Oval Office, most nights working as late as 8:00 P.M. His staff knows that after business hours, Kennedy often puts two feet up on his desk and casually tosses ideas back and forth with them. It is the president’s favorite time of the day.
When everyone has cleared out, Kennedy makes his way back upstairs to the family’s private quarters—often referred to as “the residence” or “the Mansion” by his staff—where he smokes an Upmann cigar, enjoys Ballantine scotch and water without ice, and prepares for his evening meal. Often, Jackie Kennedy puts together last-minute dinner parties, which the president tolerates.
Truth be told, JFK would rather be watching a movie. The White House theater can screen any film in the world, anytime the president wishes. His preferences are World War II flicks and Westerns.
Kennedy’s fixation on movies rivals his other favorite recreational pursuit: sex.
The president’s bad back does not discourage him from being romantically active, which is a good thing, because, as JFK once explained to a friend, he needed to have sex at least once a day or he would suffer awful headaches. He and Jackie keep separate bedrooms, connected by a common dressing room—which is not to say that John Kennedy limits his sexual relations to the First Lady. While happily married, he is far from monogamous.
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The president’s philandering aside, unquestionably the biggest change between the Kennedy and Eisenhower administrations is in the lady of the house. Jackie Kennedy, at thirty-one, is less than half the age of Mamie Eisenhower. The former First Lady was a grandmother while in the White House and a known penny-pincher who spent her downtime watching soap operas. By contrast, Jackie enjoys listening to bossa nova records and keeps fit by jumping on a trampoline and lifting weights. Like her husband, Jackie keeps her weight constant, a slim 120 pounds to compliment her 5-foot, 7-inch frame.
Her one true vice is her pack-a-day cigarette habit—either Salems or L&Ms—which she continues even throughout her pregnancies. As her husband does with his physical ailments, Jackie Kennedy keeps her smoking a secret—during the recent presidential campaign, an aide was charged with staying within arm’s reach with a lighted cigarette so Jackie could sneak a puff anytime she wanted.
Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, pictured here at a 1962 inaugural party, brought glamour to her role as First Lady. (Abbie Rowe, White House Photographs, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston)
Jackie’s parents divorced before she was twelve, and she was raised in wealth and splendor by her mother, Janet. She attended expensive girls’ boarding schools and then Vassar College before spending her junior year in Paris. Upon her return to the United States, Jackie transferred to George Washington University, in D.C., where she got a diploma in 1951.
Throughout the First Lady’s developmental years, she was taught to be extremely private and to hold thoughts deep within herself. She likes to maintain “a certain quality of mystery about her,” a friend will later note. “People did not know what she was thinking or what she was doing behind the scenes—and she wanted to keep it that way.”
The fact is that Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy never fully reveals herself to anyone—not even to her husband, the president.
* * *
In far-off Minsk, Lee Harvey Oswald is having the opposite problem. The woman he loves just won’t stop talking.
On March 17, at a dance for union workers, he meets a nineteen-year-old beauty who wears a red dress and white shoes and who styles her hair in what he believes to be “French fashion.” Marina Prusakova is reluctant to smile because of her bad teeth, but the two dance that night, and he walks her home—along with several other potential suitors smitten by the talkative Marina.
But Lee Harvey is defiant, as always. He knows the other men will soon be distant memories.
And he is right. “We like each other right away,” the defector writes in his journal.
After her mother’s death two years before, Marina, who was born out of wedlock, was sent to live with her uncle Ilya, a colonel in the Soviet Ministry of Internal Affairs and a respected member of the local Communist Party. She is trained as a pharmacist, but quit her job sometime ago.
Oswald knows all this, and so much more about Marina, because between the nights of March 18 and 30, they spend a great deal of time together. “We walk,” he writes. “I talk a little about myself, she talks a lot about herself.”
Their relationship takes a sudden turn on March 30, when Oswald enters the Fourth Clinic Hospital for an adenoid operation. Marina visits him constantly, and by the time Lee Harvey is discharged, he “knows I must have her.” On April 30 they are married. Marina almost immediately becomes pregnant.
Life is getting more and more complicated for Lee Harvey Oswald.
* * *
In the winter of 1961 the world outside the White House is turbulent. The cold war is raging. Americans are terrified of the Soviet Union and its arsenal of nuclear weapons. Ninety miles south of Florida, Fidel Castro has recently taken over Cuba, ushering in a regime thought to be friendly to the Soviets.
In America’s Deep South, there is growing racial strife.
In the marketplace, there is a new contraceptive device known simply as “The Pill.”
On the radio, Chubby Checker is exhorting young Americans to do the Twist, while Elvis Presley is asking women everywhere if they’re lonesome tonight.
But inside the Kennedy White House, Jackie sees to it that none of these political and social upheavals intrude on creating the perfect environment to raise a family. Her schedule revolves around her children. In a break from the traditional style of First Lady parenting, in which children are managed by the household staff, she is completely involved in the lives of three-year-old Caroline and baby John, taking them with her to meetings and on errands.