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By Root 1191 0

own hands, or something. And what I can remember is when the coup came, Jack was just sick. I know he'd done something to try and stop—Lodge had started something and they'd stopped. All of this you can learn from other people because a lot of it I learned later. But he'd done something to stop it. But anyway, when Diem was murdered, Jack was—oh, he just had that awful look that he had at the time of the Bay of Pigs. I mean, he was just so—just wounded, and he was shaking his head and it was home in our—you know, in our room at the White House—and he was saying, "Oh!"—you know—"No! Why?" And he said Diem fought Communism for twenty years and everything, and it shouldn't have ended like this. He was just sick about it. Madame Nhu tearing all around, saying things about him—I suppose she was more of an irritant. But once I asked him, "Why are these women like her and Clare Luce, who both obviously are attractive to men, why are they—why do they have this queer thing for power?" She was everything that Jack found unattractive—that I found unattractive in a woman. And he said, "It's strange," he said, "but it's because they resent getting their power through men." And so, they become really—just hating men, whatever you call that. She was rather like Clare Luce. [whispers] I wouldn't be surprised if they were lesbians.

Clare Luce wrote very favorable pieces about you, remember?

Yeah, but Clare Luce had come to lunch with Jack once in the White House when Tish was still there.25 And I remember—oh, she so badly wanted to come to see him as a man would. She wanted to see him in his office, or something. Anyway, a sort of a male lunch was arranged, and Tish told me she was so nervous before, she'd had about three martinis.26 And I was so mad at her that I stood—I managed to be just outside our dining room, standing there, pretending to shuffle through my desk, and I just really cut her dead, so that when Jack introduced us and I just stood with my hands at my side and finally walked over. He said to me later, "You know," he said, "if you're going to cut someone dead, dear"—you know, he was sort of touched at my loyalty because it could only make Mrs. Luce hurt me more,27 but he really wasn't very pleased at my doing that. He said, "Do it naturally, but don't just set it up and lay the trap for them." And apparently, all through that lunch, Mrs. Luce, who I guess was a bit loaded, just went on and lit into him and told him all these things. And finally—he was always, you know, so courteous to women—he said, "Well, I'm sorry, Mrs. Luce, but unfortunately you're not in a position to do anything about these things, and I am." And that's how it ended. And the sad thing about that is they'd been friends and she'd been a friend of Mr. Kennedy's and he'd helped her so. You know, the time when Morse and all that, when she didn't go to Brazil?28 Well, both Harry Luce and Mr. Kennedy told her she shouldn't go and Jack called her up especially and said, "You know, now, they're wrong. You know, you'll be much happier there. You need to be doing something." And he said, "All this will blow over and, you know, I really advise you to take it." And, "My father's older and he sees things his way." Well, she didn't take it and I think Jack was completely right. What did she do? Then she went back to Arizona and made little mosaic tables, and got bitterer and bitterer and more and more venomous.29

And swam underwater.

Yeah. And he tried to help her. So for her to turn on him like that—well again, this resentment of men.

And Harry Luce remained friendly.

Yeah, I think. Well, I know Jack saw him a couple of times and, you know, it was all right—I mean, he might blow up at him for certain things, but they would— it never got bitter that way.

How did Luce happen to write the introduction to Why England Slept?

Oh, that was Mr. Kennedy, because Jack had gotten Arthur Krock to do it. And then Mr. Kennedy thought that it might look as if Arthur Krock had written the book or something, because he'd been an old friend of the family—and