• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1118 0

so bitter, only alone—I don't tell anyone—but I do truly think that any poor school child looking at the record of the 1960s—could only decide that virtue is UNrewarded. The two greatest men of our time, you and Jack—all you fought for and cared about together. . . . And how does it all turn out? De Gaulle is there . . . and bitter old Adenauer—and the two people who have had to suffer are you and Jack. . . . You worked together for the finest things in the finest years—later on when a series of disastrous Presidents of the United States, and Prime Ministers who were not like you, will have botched up everything—people will say Do you remember those days—how perfect they were?' The days of you and Jack. . . . I always keep thinking of Camelot—which is overly sentimental—but I know I am right—for one brief shining moment there was Camelot—and it will never be that way again. . . . Please forgive this endless intrusion—but I just wanted to tell you how much Jack loved you—and I have not his gift of concision." Macmillan replied, "My dear Friend—this is how I used to write to Jack—so I am going to write it to you. . . . You have written from your heart to me, and I will do the same. . . . Of course one becomes bitter. How could you not be? . . . May God Bless you, my dear child. You have shown the most wonderful courage to the bitter outer world. The hard thing is really to feel it inside." On June 1, 1964, the day before this oral history interview, Jacqueline reported to Macmillan that she was feeling better now and the worst had passed. Later she wrote him that she was trying to raise her children as Jack would have wished—and that if she prevailed, then that would be her vengeance against the world. (This was one reason why, in later years, Jacqueline was particularly cheered when told by friends that she had succeeded as a mother.)

30. Launched in 1962, Telstar was the first communications satellite to allow television images to be beamed across the Atlantic. On the President's forty-seventh birthday, Jacqueline and Robert Kennedy appeared from Hyannis Port (using the same CBS crew that had produced her White House tour broadcast) in an international tribute that included Macmillan, Berlin mayor Willy Brandt, and other foreign leaders.

31. In August 1963, Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Macmillan consented to a treaty to ban nuclear tests in the atmosphere, outer space, and under water. De Gaulle, eager to build his own French nuclear deterrent, refused to sign it. (JFK privately carped at the time that de Gaulle would be remembered for one thing—his failure to accept that treaty.) Despite Kennedy's large efforts, the document did not preclude underground testing, but it represented the first serious mutual effort by Americans and Soviets to control the Cold War nuclear arms competition that threatened the planet from 1949 until 1991. Especially after the almost-apocalypse of the missile crisis, Kennedy considered it his proudest achievement. He signed it on October 7, 1963, in the Victorian splendor of Jacqueline's new Treaty Room.

32. ARTHUR DEAN (1899–1980), William Foster (1897–1984), and John McCloy had all been asked by JFK to help to negotiate a test ban treaty with the Soviets.

33. W. AVERELL HARRIMAN (1891–1986) was the son and heir of one of the late nineteenth century's most famous railroad barons. He served as Franklin Roosevelt's wartime ambassador to Moscow and governor of New York before he was a high official in JFK's State Department. The President sent Harriman to Moscow to demonstrate the seriousness of his commitment to achieving a treaty and was impressed by Harriman's brilliant success. In December 1963, he lent his Georgetown house to Mrs. Kennedy for her family to use as they waited to move into their new home.

34. THEODORE WHITE (1915–1986), a friend of JFK's who had overlapped with him at Harvard and wrote the landmark book on presidential politics, The Making of the President, 1960. In that volume, White wrote that "no man proved more capable of exercising the end form of American power around