Jacqueline Kennedy - Caroline Kennedy [22]
READING IN HYANNIS PORT, 1959
©2000 Mark Shaw/mptvimages.com
He'd read in short takes, and then remember it and come back and pick up a thread?
Anything he wanted to remember, he could always remember. You'd see things he'd use in his speeches. You'd be sitting next to him on some platform, and suddenly out would come a sentence that two weeks ago in Georgetown he would have read out loud to you one night, just because it interested him.
He had the most fantastic and maddening memory for quotes, because—while he remembered the quotes, but he couldn't always remember where they were from.
I remember the winter he was sick. His father had a whole shelf of books—The World's Great Orations or something that his father had given him and he'd read every single one of those books, and then I made—I asked his father to give them to him for Christmas, which, of course, he was delighted to do. But he'd been through every one of those. And he used to read me Edmund Burke's "To the"—what is it?
The address to—
"To the People of—"
Bristol.2
That's it, and well, all things through there, you know, he just—of course, that was a different winter. He'd just have days and days in bed to go through all that.
You gather he'd done this as a child—been a great reader?
Yes, I know he'd read Marlborough3 when he was about ten or eleven, because in his room at the Cape, which he's had since he was a boy, those books were in a little bookshelf by his bed—all old, sort of mauve backs. And he was always sick and in bed. He had scarlet fever. Then one year, he had some—either asthma or blood trouble—anemia or something, when he went out to Arizona.
That was when he left Princeton.4
Yeah. Then there was another summer—you know, he'd always been reading—all these things—and he used to give me books when we were going out before we were married. I remember the first one he gave me was Sam Houston by Marquis James—The Raven. Then he'd give me John Buchan—Pilgrim's Way—lots of John Buchan.5 But he was just always reading, practically while driving a car.
Would he ever read novels besides thrillers?
Listen, the only thrillers he ever read were about three Ian Fleming books. No, I never saw him read a novel.
Did he really like Ian Fleming much, or was that sort of a press—
Oh, well, it was sort of a press thing, because when they asked him his ten favorite books, he sort of made up a list, and he put in one sort of novel. You know, he liked Ian Fleming6—I mean, if you were in a plane or you're in a hotel room and there's three books on your bedside table—I mean, he'd sometimes grab something that way. There was one book he gave me to read—something about "time"—it was a novel where someone goes back in the eighteenth century and uncovers a mystery.7 It was just a paperback book he'd found in some plane or something—the last two books he told me to read this fall—he was reading The Fall of the Dynasties8 and—
Edmond Taylor.
And Patriotic Gore9 he kept telling me to read—neither of which I've gotten around to.
Patriotic Gore, particularly, is a marvelous book.
I still haven't read it. But you know, he was reading all that in the White House, and I was growing illiterate there.
It is a matter of constant mystery, because he was surrounded by all these academics who supposedly read books all the time. None of us ever had time to read books, and he would say in a slightly accusatory way—ask us about books that had recently come out that none of us had read.
Every Sunday, he'd rip three pages out of the Times book section, with an "x" around what I was to get. You know, it'd be rather interesting to look over my bills from the Savile Book Shop, because all these things I'd order that Jack would say to get. And you know, on the weekends all the time, he'd be reading—
It would be fascinating. Are the bills somewhere?
I have all the bills. I suppose they're—and Savile Book Shop has a list. What else would he— For instance, at Camp David sometimes, if it was a rainy day or something,