Grace And Power – Sally Bedell Smith, 2004 ★★½

Love, American Style

Power couples are formidable when seen from the outside; the realities of any romance built around image concerns and status enhancement are more complicated. Take the glamorous Jackie Kennedy and her husband, the 35^th President of the United States.

As explained by Sally Bedell Smith, it was a bond complicated by Jack Kennedy’s needs to lead a nation and squeeze in as much extramarital sex as possible. Jackie’s job was to support her husband through his travails and ignore his myriad infidelities as best she could.

Bedell Smith’s portrait of Jack is pretty much what you expect of a famous Lothario; Jackie’s is more disquieting and sad:

Both Jack and Jackie insisted on absolute loyalty from their friends, yet JFK’s profound disloyalty defined their marriage. While she would cut friends who violated her trust, Jackie feigned ignorance about her husband’s behavior.

Jack's bad back precluded much outdoor recreation with his wife, but the two did enjoy sailing together, as pictured here by Hy Peskin for Life magazine. Image from http://hypeskin.com/wpbeta/product/john-f-kennedy-sailing-life-cover-july-1953/.

Grace And Power came out at the right time. Both its principals were long dead, but many who inhabited their world were still alive and willing to talk to Bedell Smith, whose previous biography of William Paley, In All His Glory, is one of the best of our time.

Grace And Power is not in that league. It is fair-minded, probing, willing to explain Jack’s dalliances without getting too graphic, and broad enough in its approach to take in both Cold War face-offs and fancy-dress balls. But it is not a gripping read. Bedell Smith seems stuck between admiring the figures Jack and Jackie cut in public and ruing the devil’s bargain they made behind the scenes.

Bedell Smith notes a tendency by others writing about the Kennedy White House to fall into buckets, “this competition between the Camelot mythology and the powerful impulse to tear it down.”

...the harder they fall. After Life magazine published a photograph of the First Lady falling from her horse, Bedell Smith notes it became part of a display of treasured images on Jackie's bedroom wardrobe. Image from http://hglanham.tripod.com/Horses/horses12.html.

The middle ground she strives for is shifty, often unconvincing:

It is a story of people selected by history – some with extraordinary talents, others blessed with the gift of loyalty – struggling to guide the United States through perilous times even as they wrestled with their own frailties and the temptations of power. From the remove of four decades, the Kennedy White House emerges not as a model of enlightened government nor as a series of dark conspiracies, but rather as a deeply human place.

Jack and Jackie married in 1953; Grace And Power begins with the marriage more than seven years old and the couple awaiting returns on the 1960 presidential elections at the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts. This book is thus not so much about them as husband and wife as President and First Lady, take it as you will.

Significantly, the book opens with them physically separated. Jack is with friends and family watching returns on television; Jackie is by herself outside, pondering the future. Throughout the book, the couple is united but apart; him selfish, she aloof.

Portraits of a couple. According to Bedell Smith, Jackie was raised from birth to be in the thrall of powerful men, beginning with her father, who shared with his son-in-law a penchant for affairs. Image from pinterest.com.

“She breathes all the political gases that flow around us, but she never seems to inhale them,” Bedell Smith quotes her husband saying.

Both husband and wife tended to compartmentalize friends, which sprang to the fore when he entered office. He organized a cabinet of divergent personalities and political views which he drew from liberally; she took on the Herculean task of remaking the neglected White House interior by consulting a wide range of historians and interior-design experts whom she carefully confined to different rooms of the building.

Other Kennedy books focus on what Jack did in the Oval Office, Grace And Power spotlights Jackie’s work on the rest of the House. “Good taste was in Jackie’s bloodstream, along with a basic knowledge of historic periods in the decorative arts,” Bedell Smith writes.

Words like “chartreuse,” “cerulean,” and “organdy” are employed to describe the various fashions of the First Lady. We learn a lot about the exquisite meals served, the finery on display, the couturiers Jackie employed. It is all very soigné, another word Bedell Smith uses a lot.

Jackie and her younger sister, Lee, both beauties who were attracted to and desired by powerful men. "All I ask is someone with a little imagination, but they are hard to find," Jackie wrote Lee a year before meeting JFK. Photo by P. Horst from https://people.com/politics/jfk-assassination-jackie-kennedy-pills-alcohol-suicidal-thoughts/.

It is perhaps refreshing to read a book on the Kennedys where the most prominent Lee is not the guy who shot the president, but rather Jackie’s sister, Lee Radziwell, who accompanies Jackie on a swanky solo trip to Greece and brings out her sister’s mischievousness. But Jackie on her own doesn’t stir my interest the way Bedell Smith thinks it should:

Jackie’s decorating sensibility had evolved to embrace the Empire style of Monroe and its antecedents in the France of Napoleon and Josephine. The French aesthetic of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was infused with the motifs of classical Greece that had long fascinated Jackie. A French flavor even appeared in the wallpaper she chose for the Diplomatic Reception Room and second-floor President’s Dining Room covered with American scenes.

Jack, of course, had his own Monroe to embrace: Marilyn. She was but the most prominent of an informal harem of lovelies with whom Jack dallied throughout his presidency.

There was “Fiddle” and “Faddle,” a pair of conspicuously college-age White House staffers who went everywhere with JFK; teenaged staffer Mimi Beardsley, who successfully raised a howl when left off the manifest for a presidential trip; the older Helen Chavchavadze, who confesses to deep misgivings about their affair; and Mary Meyer, sister-in-law of the president’s most loyal press acolyte, Ben Bradlee.

Mary Meyer. According to Bedell Smith, her brother-in-law Ben Bradlee had no idea she was sleeping with JFK until her came upon her diary after her 1964 murder. Image from https://allthatsinteresting.com/mary-pinchot-meyer-murder.

About another JFK lover, Diana de Vegh, Bedell Smith describes her acceptance of “an emotionally barren and lopsided arrangement” based on their mutual devotion to his selfish needs.

“Kennedy had a need for the company of attractive and wellborn women half his age,” Bedell Smith observes.

Here and elsewhere, Jack enjoyed the willing assistance not only of his White House aides and a willfully ignorant spouse, but a pliant media. JFK amused reporters by noting he appointed his brother Bobby Attorney General so he could have “a little legal practice.” Bradlee and other reporters submitted advance copy to Kennedy and his aides. Kennedy in turn would solicit their input on speeches before he delivered them.

Bedell Smith notes: The membrane between politics and journalism was so thin in those days that such cozy cooperation was not only routine but a signal of eminence in the newspaper fraternity.

Ben Bradlee, on left, enjoys a cozy moment with Jackie at the White House while his then-wife Tony Bradlee and the President look on. According to Bedell Smith, Jackie retouched this photo to show less leg. Image from https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/kennedy-after-dark-a-dinner-party-about-politics-and-power-37509670/.

Despite such support, Kennedy’s time in office was hardly smooth sailing. Crises abounded, including a failed Cuban invasion at the Bay of Pigs, a standoff with Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev over West Berlin, and the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Civil-rights demonstrations became both more common and violent, while the specter of nuclear oblivion hovered over all like never before.

With the exception of Cuba, whose proximity to the United States made him bolder, Kennedy was a cautious leader, Bedell Smith notes, a straddler whose avowed positions depended on who was listening:

Because he managed to speak alternately like a hawk and a dove, JFK left plenty of evidence for partisans on both sides to argue how he would have proceeded in Vietnam had he lived.

The record shows he increased the U. S. military presence in South Vietnam by a factor of eight from what was there when he took office, but loyalists would long claim President Kennedy planned a full pullout once he had the flexibility of reelection in 1964.

Jackie with her brother-in-law Robert. Bobby Kennedy was a protective presence throughout Jackie's time as First Lady. According to Bedell Smith, Robert once pulled Gore Vidal away from her at a party when the writer dared to put his arm on her shoulder. Image from https://findingjackie.com/2014/02/22/sex-lives-of-dead-peeps-2/.

That would never happen. Kennedy’s murder in Dallas in November 1963 cut short his presidency, leaving behind both an incomplete legacy and an enduring myth, what Jackie christened “Camelot” in a post-assassination interview with journalist Theodore H. White, one of her husband’s most dutiful scribes.

It was an ill-chosen assertion, Bedell Smith notes, not only for its suggestion of royal elitism but in light of the infidelity and disloyalty that ironically characterized the original Camelot.

Some Kennedy books claim a rekindling of romance and intimacy between Jack and Jackie after the stillbirth of son Patrick early in 1963, suggesting a better marriage lay ahead. Bedell Smith cuts against this view:

Sally Bedell Smith. In addition to the Kennedys and William Paley, she has written several bios of British royals. For the last 20 years, she has been a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. Image from https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2012/01/QA-Sally-Bedell-Smith-on-Her-New-Book-iElizabeth-the-Queeni.

Jack and Jackie may have reached a new level of what she described as “understanding, respect, and affection,” but they were apart two-thirds of the time in September, October, and November – forty-two out of sixty-three days. (The previous year they had been away from each other during the same period less than half of the time, and in 1961 less than a quarter of the time.)

In fact, the month before Dallas Jack was taking advantage of Jackie’s absence by spending a night at the White House with Mary Meyer, most prominent of his mistresses in Bedell Smith’s telling, whose own murder less than a year later would prompt much conspiracy theorizing.

The real conspiracy was that of presenting a happy marriage to the public, which involved not only husband and wife but a game cast of friends, colleagues, media, and mistresses. Grace And Power does more by its title alone to explain what drove Jack and Jackie’s commitment to one another than anything within its pages.