Jacqueline Kennedy - Caroline Kennedy [68]
It was fantastic.
You know, it looked like a pink snowstorm—that paper coming down, and the cheers, and the "vivas." And they'd keep thinking of new things to yell "vivas" about. "Viva Kennedy!" "Viva Los Kennedys Católicos!" Viva everything!
He had an extraordinary sympathy for Latin America, the problems of Latin America which was, which they had, which they got and it—
And he liked the Latins, too. And I remember I was so surprised because I thought, and I said this to him, and he agreed—of all the great men that I met while we were in the White House or before—you think, there's de Gaulle, Macmillan, Nehru, Khrushchev—the one that impressed me the most was Lleras Camargo of Colombia.46 You know, he wasn't at all—and Betancourt47 enormously, but Lleras Camargo more. He was this thoughtful—he almost seemed—not German, but Nordic in his sadness. And just this dedication—that man getting thinner and thinner. When he came here to the hospital and I went to see him, nothing was ever in the papers about it. And he came in so thin to Jack's office. I said, "He looks so awful since we saw him in Colombia." And he said yes, he's done all that, working for the Alliance, and he said he'd help again. And then I said to Jack—I'd always had this mania before about making my children learn French because I saw how that other language absolutely doubled my life, and made you be able to meet all those people that you—but I said, "I'm going to make my children learn Spanish as their second language." We should just—if de Gaulle and everyone want to have their own little thing—but really, we should turn to this hemisphere. And I'm going to do that, anyway.
JACQUELINE KENNEDY VISITS MEXICO
Cecil Stoughton, White House/John F. Kennedy Library and Museum, Boston
I think one of the greatest things he did was to restore a sense of this being a common hemisphere, which had gone out of the United States entirely since Roosevelt and the Good Neighbor policy.
And it's so shocking—he noticed it in Mexico, and I noticed it again—I remembered it before. When we say America there, meaning our country, but America to them means both continents. They say North America and South America. And, you know, you have to bite your lip a couple of times when you're talking about America. And, well—
The Kennedy name means more—it's the best asset we have in Latin America at the moment. I wish, you know, I wish the new administration, for example, would ask Bobby to go down to Venezuela—
They want—Venezuela asked especially for Bobby, and Lyndon Johnson wouldn't send him.
Did this just happen, or wait—to go to—for—because you know, to mark Betancourt, the first president of Venezuela who had served out his term. It would have been great.
Yeah, I suppose.
I hope you'll go there sometime.
I'll go but that won't have anything to do with policy.
No, but it will remind them what America—what North America is capable of, which would mean a lot. At the same time that all the Cuban things were going, there was this problem of Laos.48 Do you remember anything about that? There was some talk of American intervention there which—
Oh, yeah. Well, it just seems always there was Laos, Cuba, South Vi—you know, I remember Laos so well—and Berlin, but I can't remember which month was which. And didn't he go on the television and speak about Laos?
Yeah, that was next year, I think, the year after the crisis was sort of simmering. No, no, that was, no you're right, it was that spring that he did.
And then twice he went on about Berlin, didn't he?
Yeah, um-hmm, spoke about Berlin in June.49
See, I don't remember. You know, there was always something like that about to blow up, and always Jack living with that and the pressure of being in the White House, and yet trying to live in an ordinary way and be what you should be for him when he came home. You know, hear what he had to say, but not ask too many questions about something painful. I remember once this year about South Vietnam. Well, usually, I was so good about not asking