Those interested in gleaning new information about the Cuban missile crisis or the Peace Corps or the Berlin Wall should not read Sally Bedell Smith's "Grace and Power: The Private World of the Kennedy White House"
Backstage at Camelot
By DOUGLAS BRINKLEY
Published: June 16, 2004
Caption: Sally Bedell Smith
It was a horrific moment now seared into our collective memory. At 12:30 p.m. on Nov. 22, 1963, three shots rang out from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas. Two of the bullets pierced President John F. Kennedy, causing a piece of his skull to fly into the air.
"My God, they've killed Jack," his wife, Jacqueline, shrieked. "They've killed my husband, Jack, Jack!" Immediately Kennedy's blue Lincoln convertible sped to nearby Parkland Hospital. En route a sobbing Mrs. Kennedy cradled the president's bleeding head. It seemed that a hopeful new era in American history had suddenly been snuffed out.
A week after the assassination, Jacqueline Kennedy spent four hours talking to the journalist Theodore H. White. She acknowledged that before going to bed most evenings, Kennedy would listen to the melodramatic Broadway song "Camelot" on his antiquated Victrola. His favorite lines were: "Don't let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment, that was known as Camelot." On Dec. 6 Life magazine published White's poignant essay, "For President Kennedy: An Epilogue."
The article helped engender the mythology of Kennedy's Camelot, a gallant place of courageous deeds, glamorous pageantry and enduring mystique. Like the story of the medieval King Arthur, Queen Guinevere and the brave Knights of the Round Table on which the musical "Camelot" was based, Kennedy's 1,036 days in the White House had become the stuff of legend. As Arthur Schlesinger Jr. noted in "A Thousand Days," his 1965 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, which put historical meat on the bones of White's Camelot metaphor, it was a frenetic Washington kingdom filled with life-enhancing zest.
More than a thousand books have been written about the Kennedys since the mid-1960's. They range from authoritative (Robert Dallek's "Unfinished Life") to tabloidlike (Seymour M. Hersh's "Dark Side of Camelot") to tawdry (Nellie Bly's "Kennedy Men"). It is no exaggeration to say that Camelotery has become a cottage industry, a lucrative business in which cold facts are often superseded by wicked innuendo. A single new revelation about Kennedy's womanizing is today's literary equivalent of hitting a jackpot at a Las Vegas casino. Still, it is no longer shocking to learn that for Kennedy, the 35th president, recreational adultery was nearly as commonplace as brushing his teeth.
So it was with great trepidation that I began reading "Grace and Power: The Private World of the Kennedy White House" by Sally Bedell Smith, a biographer, journalist and former arts news reporter for The New York Times. The book documents, among other realities, the revolving door of women with whom Kennedy slept from 1961 to 1963. And while it's true that the adulterous Kennedy's elite harem makes regular cameo appearances throughout "Grace and Power," this is nevertheless a serious book — to a degree.
What Ms. Smith has done is to write the first substantial narrative that captures what daily life was really like in the inner sanctum of the White House during the Kennedy years, with Jack and Jackie appropriately cast as the lead actors in the intriguing drama. It is not a high-minded policy book. Those interested in gleaning new information about the Cuban missile crisis or the Peace Corps or the Berlin Wall will be disappointed. Power is a forgotten ingredient in Ms. Smith's kiss-and-tell stew. But she does bring into focus a marriage that still has the world talking.
To accomplish her historical objective, Ms. Smith interviewed 142 people close to Kennedy's administration, including the editor Benjamin C. Bradlee, the fashion designer Oleg Cassini and the novelist Gore Vidal. Others she spoke with are now dead, among them former Treasury Secretary C. Douglas Dillon and the writer, editor and raconteur George Plimpton. Her greatest coup, however, was gaining exclusive access to the papers of the historian William Manchester, including his interview notes from writing "Death of a President" and "Portrait of a President." (Manchester died on June 1.)
As a reporter Ms. Smith is first-rate. She coaxes her subjects to open up. Jack Valenti, the Washington power player and chairman of the Motion Picture Association of America, talks about how Kennedy's hands would sometimes tremble as if they were palsied; for the first time, the former debutante Helen Chavchavadze details her long-standing affair with Kennedy; and the Georgetown University cardiologist Frank Finnerty explains how he offered the First Lady regular tips on how to encourage her husband to engage in foreplay to make her sex life more fulfilling.
Readers even learn that Jacqueline Kennedy sought desperate counsel from a priest after her husband's assassination. "Do you think God would separate me from my husband if I killed myself?" she inquired. "Wouldn't God understand that I just want to be with him?"
Paradoxically "Grace and Power" showcases Camelot as an amoral carnival while somehow making the reader still feel that Kennedy's White House days were grand moments frozen in time. But by glossing over the plight of James Meredith at the University of Mississippi in favor of endless stories about designer clothes, Ms. Smith renders much of her narrative trivial. As a subject she clearly prefers cocktail party gossip to civil rights activism. "Grace and Power" is exceedingly well-written and ably researched fluff, the kind in which every filtered L&M cigarette Jacqueline Kennedy lights seems to presage bold possibilities.
Without question, Jackie is the real star of "Grace and Power." She decorates the White House, organizes dinners and rears two perfect children. She arranges a Shakespeare performance for a Sudanese leader and a concert by the cellist Pablo Casals for the governor of Puerto Rico. Style was her calling card. She exuded magic, even in a casual glance. Maybe because her father had had numerous affairs, she was able to write off her husband's dalliances as products of "some hormonal surge."
But her greatest contribution to American life was mythologizing her husband. (There are echoes in Nancy Reagan's homages to her beloved Ronnie.) For while presidential historians rank Kennedy as only average, public opinion places him in the category of the greats, standing alongside George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.
Elevating him to this degree was really quite a trick. As the Washington diarist Katie Louchheim correctly summarizes at the book's end: "She took the man she loved and made him unforgettable. It was Jackie who created Jack Kennedy's legacy."
Douglas Brinkley is professor of history and director of the Eisenhower Center for American Studies at the University of New Orleans.
