Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [68]
Jackie’s part-time job at the Washington Times-Herald as an “Inquiring Camera Girl” resembled the one Inga Arvad once had held, while requiring far less writing. All Jackie had to come up with were brief captions for the snapshots she took of whoever was being featured that day.
The encounter that set off the romance between Jack Kennedy and Jacqueline Bouvier occurred one evening at Charlie Bartlett’s house. “I leaned across the asparagus and asked for a date,” Jack would recall in a much-quoted line. A Georgetown dinner party was a perfect setting for what began—at least, in the eyes of others—as a fairy-tale union, and became an almost mythical one.
Even at the outset, though, the courtship was uneven; nothing out of the ordinary there. Jack would ask her out for a date, then disappear. Yet he always returned. Following his election to the Senate, he proposed in ’53, and she accepted. The chemistry between them, however you try to analyze it, was undeniable, and they knew it.
While he was wooing her, Jack presented Jackie with copies of his two favorite books, John Buchan’s autobiography, Pilgrim’s Way, and Lord David Cecil’s Young Melbourne. These men each expressed, in their different ways, ideals of honor, sacrifice, and political nobility that continued to inspire him. When she learned his favorite poem was Alan Seeger’s “I Have a Rendezvous with Death,” she memorized it. In the years to come, he would often have her recite it for him.
“Jack appreciated her. He really brightened when she appeared,” Chuck Spalding recalled. “You could see it in his eyes. He’d follow her around the room watching to see what she’d do next. Jackie interested him, which wasn’t true of many women.”
Jackie’s temperament, though, was very far from the rambunctiousness of the large and competitive Kennedy brood. “Jackie was certainly very bored by politics and very bored by the very aggressive camaraderie of the Kennedy family, which was absolutely foreign to her nature,” Alistair Forbes said. “Fortunately, I think, she also spotted that it was really foreign to Jack’s nature.” She saw him as being more sensitive and “much less extroverted than they all were.”
Jackie offered the handsome and popular young senator a social status he didn’t quite have on his own. For all their recently amassed wealth, his family was still nouveau riche and thus lacked entrée to certain clubs, certain circles. Jack knew it, didn’t like it, but made the best of it. His friends, mostly, were like him—the sons of the successful—but others, met at Choate and Harvard and in Palm Beach, were from old money or old bloodlines. Charlie Bartlett, himself an old-line Yalie, could see the effect the Bouvier name had on his friend.
Bartlett, however, liked to speculate, in later years, on what Jack’s life would have been like had he chosen another sort of wife. “There was this beautiful girl up in Boston. Her name was K. K. Hannon. Her father was a policeman. She was gorgeous. If Jack had married her, she could have dealt with him, I think. She was Irish and tough and damned good-looking. But, no, he had to marry up.”
Jackie, whose father’s infidelities had helped destroy his marriage, recognized she was marrying a husband of similar habits. “Well, she knew what she was getting into when she married him,” Bartlett said. “She was in love with Jack, and he had this terrible habit of going out with these other girls.” As Bartlett figured it, his friend’s intended bride simply made a vow that she’d “take it all on, and she did.”
Jack’s concern was more on the politics of his decision. “I gave everything a good deal of thought,” he announced in a letter to Red Fay out in San Francisco. “So I am getting married this fall. This means the end of a promising political career, as it has been based up to now almost completely on the old sex appeal. Let me know the general reaction