Jacqueline Kennedy - Caroline Kennedy [140]
47. RóMULO BETANCOURT (1908–1981), Venezuelan president from 1945 to 1948 and 1959 to 1964, known as the "father of Venezuelan democracy."
48. In 1961, Kennedy resisted pressures to deploy the U.S. military against pro-Communist forces in Laos. Instead he authorized negotiation, which resulted, the following year, in the country's neutrality.
49. At the end of World War II, when the Allies drew up plans for postwar Germany, they left Berlin deep within the Soviet zone of occupation. The city itself was effectively divided into two sectors—East Berlin for the Soviets, West Berlin for the Americans, British, and French. By the late 1950s, Soviet-backed East Germany was an economic ruin, in contrast to the "miracle" of West Germany. Vast numbers of East Germans were escaping to the West through Berlin. To stop this refugee flow and score points against the Free World, Khrushchev demanded that the city be unified, which, because of its geographical position, would make it subject to Soviet whims and effectively force the West out of the German capital. The Western allies had committed themselves to preserve their rights in Berlin, if necessary, by going to war. When Kennedy left Khrushchev after their harsh Vienna encounter in June 1961, the Berlin Crisis was on, with the President calling up American reservists. Then suddenly in August, the Soviets and East Germans built a hideous wall around West Berlin to stop the "brain drain" to the West. Although Kennedy opposed the wall politically, he privately realized that the Soviet leader was providing himself a face-saving means to wind down the Berlin Crisis. The President told aides, "A wall is a hell of a lot better than a war."
50. NGO DINH DIEM (1901–1963) was president of South Vietnam from the French withdrawal in 1955 until his death in a military coup. Jacqueline refers to protests like that of the Buddhist priest who burned himself to death in Saigon in the summer of 1963 to protest Diem's repressive policies.
51. Both Kennedys were engaged by the literary quality and humor of the cables from JFK's ambassador to India.
52. During times of stress, Jacqueline would cheer the President up by leaving him hand-drawn cartoons and limericks, bringing the children to his office, and having him served some of his most preferred foods, such as from Joe's Stone Crab from Miami. In private, she also performed uncanny impersonations of some of the people with whom JFK had to deal. She could imitate the French ambassador doing his own impersonation of de Gaulle.
53. WILLIAM WALTON (1910–1994), journalist, novelist, painter, and soldier, had been dropped into France at the start of the D-day invasion. A close friend of both Kennedys (he hung paintings in JFK's Oval Office after the inauguration), Walton accepted Jackie's appeal to serve as chair of the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, which oversaw the aesthetic design of federal buildings and monuments. "It is all going to be involved with all the things we care about," she wrote him in June 1962. "Lovely buildings will be torn down—and cheesy skyscrapers go up. Perhaps saving old buildings and having the new ones be right isn't the most important thing in the world—if you are waiting for the bomb—but I think we are always going to be waiting for the bomb and it won't ever come and so to save the old—and to make the new beautiful is terribly important.''
54. KWAME NKRUMAH (1909–1972) became the first president of an independent Ghana in 1960. Soon Nkrumah was busy amassing a corrupt fortune, placing restrictions on his people's freedoms, and flirting with the Soviet Union.
55. HAILE SELASSIE (1892–1975) was the Ethiopian emperor, known as the "Lion of Judah," and by tradition descended from King Solomon.
56. SUKARNO (1901–1970), after