Jacqueline Kennedy - Caroline Kennedy [106]
Oh, really?
He called my mother "Mummy," because he thought it was such a funny name—as sort of a joke. But he always called my father "Mr. Bouvier."
He never called your mother "Janet"?
Never. And yet, you know, he knew them so well. But he just—he didn't think it was right.
What about some of the other people in the State Department? George Ball?39
Well, I can't exactly remember what, but I can remember he wasn't always entirely pleased with George Ball.
And of course, poor old Chester.
Oh, yeah, Chester. Chester Bowles would give some endless talk in a meeting about we should enslave—take the mud huts out of enslavement and raise the standard of the, blah—you know, go on with these rolling phrases for hours, and then Jack would say, "Yes, Chester, but I'm not asking you that. I'm asking you what we should do about this problem—X-Y-Z." Something rather simple, and Chester would never have an answer. And so he couldn't wait to get him out of there.
Averell he liked.
Yes, Averell he did like. Walt Rostow40—it was funny, one night I was at a seminar at the Dillons. Jack was out of town, and making a speech somewhere, and he called me up, and I was called out of the room, and he said, "What's the seminar?" And I said, "It's Walt Rostow, talking about underdeveloped countries." And a lot of people like you, and Bundy, and everyone were there. And he said—so loudly, I had to put my hand over the receiver—"Jesus Christ! You mean all those people are—Walt Rostow's got all those people trapped in there, listening to him?" Because he really thought Walt Rostow went on and on, and was hard to listen to. He said, "I'm glad I'm not at that seminar." But he liked him. He never said anything mean about him. He said Jerome Wiesner always used to peek through his door.41 He'd come around through Mrs. Lincoln's office and peek—he said it used to drive him crazy. Every time the door would be open, Wiesner's head would peek in and out, and it would finally drive him so crazy he'd say, "All right, come in or else go away," and it was usually something unimportant.
He liked Wiesner, though, I think.
Oh, yes.
On this—when it came to appointing ambassadors, there was always the—the State Department always wanted to appoint a Foreign Service officer, and the White House people always wanted to send some non–Foreign Service officer—someone like Bill Attwood, or someone like that. Did he ever comment on that general problem?
Well, just as I said, that the Foreign Service ambassadors were usually so awful. And, you know, sometimes you obviously had to send one. You couldn't demoralize the State Department so completely. Then he went over there to give a talk to them once and to tell them—and he really prepared that talk. He said, it's so awful in the State Department. They get so demoralized. They get sort of trained not to take a position one way or the other, but by the time they get way up—and he said younger people should get up quicker—they just can't give you any answer but the answer that's no answer—safe on both sides. And so the whole point of the speech that he gave to them was that you must, you know, be prepared to take an answer one way or the other, and you must be prepared to go to Congress, or—I don't know. Just that their training was wrong, and they were brainwashed by the time they got there, and, mostly too effete to do any good, which was sort of the standard the people at the State Department admired. And just to say something rather interesting and unfair about someone who was a friend, which Jack never said to me but I saw this later, this winter when he came to see me—it's Chip Bohlen. He loved Chip Bohlen, and when Chip Bohlen was around. And sometimes I used to tease Chip Bohlen, and say that he was too stuffy or State Department–ish. I used to just see this side in little things. But he was appointed ambassador