Jacqueline Kennedy - Caroline Kennedy [124]
27. CHARLES-ANDRE-MARIE DE GAULLE (1890–1970), the Free French leader of World War II, served as French president from 1959 to 1969. In the mid-1950s, Jacqueline named her French poodle "de Gaulle." As an ardent Francophile in art, architecture, literature, history, and couture, she was all the more vexed, as the Kennedy years unfolded, by de Gaulle's willingness to poison his relations with JFK and the United States, as well as the rest of the Western alliance, by upholding his extreme standard of French pride and independence.
28. Announcing his presidential candidacy on January 2, 1960, JFK said, "I have developed an image of America as fulfilling a noble and historic role as the defender of freedom in a time of maximum peril. . . ."
29. In 1886, when Lord Randolph Churchill resigned as chancellor of the Exchequer, he presumed himself indispensable and was startled when Lord Salisbury quickly appointed George Goschen to succeed him, prompting Churchill to lament that he had "forgot Goschen." The more recent example she is thinking of was probably Peter Thorneycroft, who resigned in 1958 as chancellor of the Exchequer, along with two lesser officials, to protest increased public spending. Dismissing the resignations as "little local difficulties," Prime Minister Harold Macmillan quickly replaced them all.
30. JFK hoped that his victory in heavily Protestant West Virginia would quash the Catholic issue for good, but it remained virulent enough that in September 1960, he felt compelled to appear before a group of Protestant ministers in Houston and reaffirm his strong support for separation of church from state, saying, "I am not the Catholic candidate for president. I am the Democratic party's candidate, who happens also to be a Catholic." Kennedy's youth was another obstacle: at 43, he would be the youngest man ever elected President.
31. In the most acute eruption of the youth issue all year, on July 2, 1960, appearing at the Truman Library in Independence, Missouri, former President Truman asked JFK, the front-runner for the Democratic nomination, to step aside on grounds that he was too young and inexperienced, and that the convention had been "rigged" in advance. Two days later, at the Hotel Roosevelt in New York, the candidate replied by saying that if "fourteen years in office is insufficient experience" (referring to his tenure in Congress but not his wartime naval years, which he elsewhere included in what he called his eighteen years of "service to the United States") that would rule out every twentieth-century president, including Truman himself. After making this statement, he flew to Los Angeles for his party's convention.
32. One of LBJ's favorite sayings. To Johnson, a reliable friend was someone "you would go to the well with" in order to draw water, referring to the days when American Indians threatened settlers of European origin.
33. CAROLINE LEE BOUVIER CANFIELD RADZIWILL (1933– ) was Jacqueline's younger sister.
34. Referring to Ted Sorensen.
35. DREW PEARSON (1897–1969) was the foremost muckraking journalist of the day, with a widely syndicated column and weekly television program on ABC. Clark Clifford (1906–1998) was a St. Louis lawyer who was counsel and close adviser to President Harry Truman before starting a lucrative Washington law practice and earning a reputation as one of the "wise men" of Washington. During the 1950s, JFK was one of his clients. In 1957, Pearson charged on ABC that Profiles in Courage had actually been written by Sorensen. With Clifford's help, JFK forced Pearson to retract