Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [67]
Clearly, Jack had found a devoted ally, someone who could see through to the idealist in the politician. Sorensen knew whom he was serving. “He was much the same man in private as he was in public. It was no act—the secret of his magic appeal was that he had no magic at all. Few could realize, then or now, that beneath the glitter of his life and office, beneath the cool exterior of the ambitious politician, was a good and decent man with a conscience that told him what was right and a heart that cared about the well-being of those around him.”
Yet it didn’t take Sorensen long to realize he and Jack came from very different worlds. “During my first year in JFK’s Senate office, when dropping me off after work to catch my bus home, he confessed that he had never ridden one in his life.”
They spent an enormous amount of time together, working, thinking, and planning. Not long before his death, Sorensen wrote this: “I do not remember everything about him, because I never knew everything about him. No one did. Different parts of his life, work, and thoughts were seen by many people—but no one saw it all.”
In the beginning she was Jackie Bouvier. The year was 1951. To hear the name now conjures up that early time and a young, fresh beauty untouched by fame and position.
But what was it about this young woman? Looks, certainly. Jackie was stunning, with large eyes so far apart it took two eyes to see them. Her beauty was original. She was elegant, self-contained, aristocratic. To Jack she was the only woman he “could” have married, he once confided to Red Fay.
Charlie Bartlett had been one of Jack’s best friends ever since they met and began hanging out together in Palm Beach in 1945. Now living in Washington, where he was working for the Chattanooga Times, he remained a careful observer of his pal. “The thing to remember, and that really made him special in my book, was a mind that went right to the problem. I mean, he must have inherited it from his old man. When you discussed anything with Jack, politics mainly, he’d go right to the bottom. He had a wonderful way of separating all the crap from the key issue. . . . It made him great fun to discuss things with.
“He always had a pretty clear picture of the motives of the people he was with, and he was good on that. I don’t know how to say it, but Jack wasn’t, sort of, in love with humanity. He was cool. His attention moved quickly. That mind would start going, and he did get bored awfully easily. This was part of his being spoiled, and I found it sometimes annoying. I mean, if you wanted to get into a long story, why, you were apt to not have Jack with you at the end of it.”
When the moment came for settling on a partner, Jacqueline Bouvier managed to grab his attention and hold it. She possessed both the personality and the pedigree. She also lacked what Jack himself lacked: a childhood cushioned by a warm upbringing. She, too, had been raised by a cold, willful mother and had a father—the handsome but philandering, alcoholic stockbroker known as “Black Jack” Bouvier—who did exactly as he pleased. Whether she told him about her childhood, or he intuited it once they’d met, it could have made her intriguing. Jack was most of all driven by curiosity.
Asked once to describe Jackie in a word, he chose fey. Her otherworldly qualities made her unlike all the other women he’d known and dated. She was detached, elusive, like him.
Jackie, who’d spent her first two years of college at Vassar, followed by a junior year in France, was finishing her college degree at George Washington University. She felt about France the way Jack did about Great Britain. Like Jack, she’d sought escape and refuge in books when she was young, especially as she sought shelter from her parents’ stormy marriage. Her father, John Vernou Bouvier III, was as unreliable as he was attractive, and her parents’ 1928 marriage lasted just a dozen years. Jacqueline Lee—Lee was her mother’s maiden name—was the firstborn child, in 1929; her sister, Caroline Lee, known