Jacqueline Kennedy - Caroline Kennedy [116]
One of the greatest gifts was his capacity to switch from one thing to another and not be nagged at by problems, to put them aside knowing that he can't do anything more at that moment about them and not let them worry him.
And that's—did I ever tell you about him making me move my desk?
No.
Well, I used to have my desk in the West Sitting Hall, where we always sat, and it would be piled high—and especially when Tish was always sending in those damn folders. Just when you'd be sitting happily with Jack, some other messenger would come running in, I think—and he said, "Move your desk out." I knew I did tell you this.
You told this. Yes.
Down to the Treaty Room. Well, and I couldn't get problems off. But he could always go to sleep, too, which I thought was so important. He didn't have this in—you know, he could just turn it off. And I always thought one thing, and I think it's true of Lyndon Johnson, and I think it might have been true of Adlai Stevenson. That these things get on you and on you and there's indecision or something—and you can't sleep. You really become—I always thought any president would become an insomniac. But Jack had this built-in thing that Ted Reardon78 told me about before—like soldiers in a foxhole. When it was time to go to sleep, he just could. And that was one of his greatest—it was fortunate he had that. That's about all.
[John enters the room and plays with tape recorder]
THE PRESIDENT AND FIRST LADY, WASHINGTON, D.C., MAY 3, 1961
Stanley Tretick/BettmannCORBIS/John F. Kennedy Library and Museum, Boston
NOTES
INTRODUCTION
1. In early 1963, Schlesinger had pleaded with the President to tape his own reminiscences after "major episodes." But with the exception of dictating an occasional memo for the record, Kennedy had declined. Schlesinger did not learn until 1982 that, in the summer of 1962, JFK had started discreetly taping hundreds of hours of his White House meetings and telephone calls. Even this collection covered only a small fraction of the conversations in which the President did business.
2. Decades later, after her death, the phenomenon persisted. Half a million people flocked to the Metropolitan Museum in New York to view the first public exhibition of Jacqueline's White House wardrobe.
3. JFK sardonically quipped that the rescue of Lafayette Park "may be the only monument we'll leave." In October 1963, expanding the case into a general principle, he declared while dedicating a library to Robert Frost at Amherst College that he looked forward to an America "which will preserve great old American houses and squares and parks of our national past."
4. For her family's flight to England for the Queen's ceremony in 1965, President Johnson offered a presidential aircraft. Remembering her Air Force One journey back from Dallas, Jacqueline wrote LBJ that she did not know "if I could steel myself to go on one of those planes again." Nevertheless, to honor her husband, she would accept: "But please do not let it be Air Force One. And please, let it be the 707 that looks least like Air Force One inside." In 1968, before boarding a presidential jet taking Robert Kennedy's casket from Los Angeles to New York, she demanded to be reassured that it was not the Air Force One of 1963. Though afflicted until the end of her life by such painful sensitivities, Jacqueline was blessed with loving and protective children. Once when John was reading a children's volume about his father, he called out, "Close your eyes, Mummy!" and tore out a photograph of the presidential car in Dallas before showing her the book.
THE FIRST CONVERSATION
1. ADLAI EWING STEVENSON (1900–1965) was governor of Illinois from 1949 to 1953 and Democratic presidential nominee in 1952 and 1956. At the 1956 Democratic convention in Chicago, Stevenson unexpectedly broke tradition by allowing the delegates to decide themselves who should be vice president. In the ensuing contest, JFK lost to Tennessee senator Estes Kefauver by a hairbreadth.
2. JOSEPH PATRICK KENNEDY (1888–1969) was a financier,