Jacqueline Kennedy - Caroline Kennedy [130]
41. She refers to the Catholic custom of prayer and Holy Communion on the first Friday of nine successive months.
THE FOURTH CONVERSATION
1. Middleburg, Virginia, was the de facto capital of that state's "Hunt Country." They were looking for a weekend place that would allow their family to escape the city and Jacqueline to go riding and fox hunting.
2. The Kennedys had planned for Jacqueline to give birth in New York Hospital, as with Caroline, in mid-December. But on November 24, 1960, while the President-elect was flying to Palm Beach, a radioed message told him that she had gone into premature labor and been taken by ambulance to Georgetown University Hospital. When she arrived, she asked, "Will I lose my baby?" After midnight, John F. Kennedy, Jr., was born by caesarean section.
3. ROBERT MCNAMARA (1916–2009), born in San Francisco, son of a shoe store manager, was a Harvard Business School professor with a devout faith in the value of statistical analysis. After World War II, during which he analyzed the effectiveness of U.S. bombing forays in Asia, he rose through the ranks of the Ford Motor Company, becoming president in 1960, two days after JFK's election. Eager for at least one big business Republican in his cabinet, Kennedy met him at his Georgetown home and offered Treasury or Defense. McNamara accepted the latter, provided that he could appoint his own people. Kennedy agreed, impressed with his toughness. Later McNamara was the architect of President Johnson's escalation in Vietnam, until his resignation in 1968.
4. DEAN RUSK (1909–1994) of Cherokee County, Georgia, was a Rhodes Scholar who had been Truman's assistant secretary of state for the Far East, and then president of the Rockefeller Foundation. When other possibilities for the State Department did not pan out, Kennedy turned to the mild but tenacious Rusk, whom he had not known, consoling himself with the notion that he planned to be his own secretary of state anyway.
5. J. WILLIAM FULBRIGHT (1905–1995) was a Rhodes Scholar who was Democratic senator from Arkansas from 1945 to 1975. As a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which Fulbright chaired, JFK had admired his allergy to conventional wisdom, but knew that as secretary of state, the Arkansan would have been doomed by his opposition to civil rights and his outspoken support for the Arab states, which would have hampered his ability to deal with African countries and Israel, not to mention alienating African-American and Jewish voters at home. "Caroline walked in" refers to the occasion when the President-elect and Fulbright were meeting reporters behind the Kennedy house in Palm Beach, and the three-year-old Caroline tottered into the scene, wearing her mother's high-heeled shoes.
6. At the end of May 1961, the Kennedys went to Vienna, where the President met for two days with the Soviet leader Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev (1894–1971). The two men had only met once, briefly at the Capitol in September 1959, when JFK was a senator and Khrushchev had come to the United States to meet with President Eisenhower at Camp David. Now that Kennedy was in power, each wanted to take the other's measure. Kennedy hoped that behind closed doors, without the need to posture for the public, he and Khrushchev could reach some kind of worldly modus vivendi about Berlin, Cuba, Southeast Asia, and other Cold War powder kegs. Khrushchev, who had risen to power under Stalin, interpreted Kennedy's private willingness to deal as political weakness. Knowing that the Soviets had many fewer nuclear-tipped missiles than the United States, Khrushchev aimed to overcome that military weakness by impressing his ferocity on the new American President, telling him, "If you want war, that's your problem." Kennedy left Vienna feeling shaken, saying, "Roughest thing in my life." Khrushchev told his aides that Kennedy was "too intelligent and too weak." His underestimation of the President in Vienna was one factor in his decision to challenge Kennedy in