Jacqueline Kennedy - Caroline Kennedy [83]
PRIME MINISTER NEHRU AND JACQUELINE KENNEDY IN INDIA
USIS/John F. Kennedy Library and Museum, Boston
And he'd be lively, would he? He wouldn't have this kind of vacant, passive—
Well, never lively, but sort of gentle and he would talk and he has those great brown eyes. I'd read all his autobiography and I'd ask him about some of those, you know, times—and he talked.
What would he talk about? About his own past and—
Well, I asked him about the times in prison, and everything—his life. And yeah, he'd talk about some of that. Or else he'd talk about people there, or make a little joke. He always was so—I've written it all down somewhere, everything we talked about, so maybe I can find it. It's the only thing I ever wrote down.
Oh, good. No, let's find that and the Library should have a copy.23 The other big thing that happened in the fall of '61, or another one, was the resumption of nuclear testing by the Soviet Union and then—which confronted us with the problem of whether we should resume nuclear testing or not.24 That was an old interest of the President's, was it?
Yes. I can remember him being so worried at the time about our resuming, and how long you should—you could possibly put it off and then everyone—I mean, that was a terrible time for him. There was nothing that worried him more through—would it be '61 and '62?—than all this testing. But it started so long ago. Because I can remember when David Gore came to Hyannis the fall we were married—would be October or November 1953—and he was doing something at the UN on disarmament and he and Jack were talking. And you know, it was the first time I'd ever heard—it seemed so extraordinary—you never saw it in newspapers here. That you should sort of disarm or come to some agreement and then that would be possible without selling out or—you know, when you always thought all the Bertrand Russells25 and "ban the bombers" and people were all sort of "pinks"—I mean, I just thought this from reading David Lawrence26 in the newspapers. And I remember then—from then on, Jack started to say in his speeches that it was a disgrace that there were less than a hundred people working on disarmament in Washington—or less than ten, maybe.
Less than a hundred.
Less than a hundred. But he said that in all—and I think he said it all through his Senate campaign.27 He certainly said it all through his campaign for the presidency, you know, but it started so long ago that he was thinking about that. And in a way, then David Gore came back again—in maybe '58 or—yes, or '57—I don't know what year he and Sissy came to the Cape. Again they'd be talking about that. And I remember when Harold Macmillan resigned last summer.28 Well, Jack was so sad for that man—that he should have to go out in all the messy, sad way he did, you know, and he said, "People really don't realize what Macmillan has done," and he said he was the greatest friend of the Atlantic Alliance. But he said this nuclear disarmament thing—he just cared about that for so long. So that's what I tried—and then he sent him this touching telegram and I remember poor Macmillan then.29 Not many people were saying nice things to him. And David asked if the telegram could be made public, and Jack said, "Of course." And that's what I tried to put in when I talked to him on Telstar30 just last week on Jack's—what would have been his forty-seventh birthday. You know, the things that I knew that Jack thought about him, and I found that telegram and read it and tried to say what Jack had said about him—and I kept thinking, "I just hope de Gaulle's listening." Not that anything matters now.
I have the impression that we would not have had a test ban treaty if both the President and the prime minister had not been so deeply committed and forced the