Jacqueline Kennedy - Caroline Kennedy [18]
PRESIDENT KENNEDY AND DAVE POWERS, 1961
Abbie Rowe, National Park Service/John F. Kennedy Library and Museum, Boston
THE KENNEDYS WITH BEN AND TONY BRADLEE IN THE WEST SITTING HALL OF THE WHITE HOUSE
Cecil Stoughton, White House/John F. Kennedy Library and Museum, Boston
Best parties I've ever attended. Weren't they great? The greatest girls, the nicest times. Everyone was so much better than normal. Everyone was the gayest and prettiest and nicest.
And it was a mixture of cabinet and friends from New York, and young people. And I worked so hard on those parties because I felt once we were in the White House, I felt that I could get out, and I just can't tell you how oppressive the strain of the White House can be. I could go out and whenever Jack saw it was getting me down a little bit he'd really send me away—not exactly, but he'd say, "Why don't you go up to New York, or go see your sister in Italy?" And then he sent me to Greece, which was, you know, for a sad reason this year, but he thought I was getting depressed after losing Patrick.34 I thought, I can go out, I can go to a restaurant in New York or walk down the street and look at an antique shop or go to a nightclub. You've heard of the Twist, or something—not that you care about nightclubs—and I don't want to go more than once a year—but Jack couldn't get out. So then I used to try to make these parties to bring gay, and new people, and music, and make it happy nights. And did he love them.
He loved them. Danced very rarely, but loved to—
Just walked around, puffing his cigar.
Talked to the girls—make Oleg dance the Twist. Or Steve or somebody. 35
Yeah, then he'd move on very quickly. You know, to sort of see everyone.
He did have an extraordinary range of acquaintance and ability to enter in—to, sympathetically—to people of the whole range of the spectrum.
Yeah, that's so true, because the luckiest thing I used to think about him, you know, when we were early married and then later, was whatever you were interested in, Jack got interested in. When I started to be interested in French furniture, he got so interested in it, and then he'd be so proud, he'd go to Joe Alsop's36 and recognize Louis XVI and Louis XV. And I started to collect drawings, and then he wanted to know about them. And he got interested in animals, or horses. Or then, when I was reading all this eighteenth century, he'd snatch a book from me and read and know all of Louis XV's mistresses before I would. So many of the senators, when we'd go out to dinner—senators and embassies this first year—all those men would ever talk to me about was themselves. And Jack was so interested—maybe it's Gemini, or what?37 And once I asked him, the month before we were married in Newport, what he thought his best and his worst qualities were. And he thought his best quality was curiosity, which, I think he was right. He thought his worst was irritability, but, I mean, he was never irritable with me. I think by that he meant impatience. You know, he didn't like to be bored, and if someone was boring, he'd pick up the newspaper, but he certainly wasn't irritable to live with.
WEDDING OF JOHN FITZGERALD KENNEDY AND JACQUELINE LEE BOUVIER, SEPTEMBER 12, 1953
John F. Kennedy Library and Museum, Boston
He was not irritable in the current White House sense.38 No, I've just not seen anyone—from South Boston through Harvard to Palm Beach—he was at home in a greater variety of things and, as you say, made people from each of these kind of segments feel that he was with them. It was an extraordinary—
Yeah, then they'd all get interested in politics and things. You know, there's never been such a universal president before. It doesn't mean absolutely anything, but in the Washington Post the other day, I read the theater page—and Alain Delon, who's this little French "jeune premier" young movie star now, came to Washington. And so the drama critic went to interview him, and all he could talk about was Jack. And say, you know,