Jacqueline Kennedy - Caroline Kennedy [96]
Oh, I see.
I don't know who that person was. [ribbing Schlesinger] Johnson putting it on tape! [both laugh]
I wondered exactly the—seems improbable. [long pause follows on tape, then] Macmillan looked very well.86
He did, didn't he? And the—he didn't have that funny, sort of droopy look he used to have.
No, exactly. He looked very—when I saw him—he looked very sort of spruce and chipper. And he looked like he'd just come in from the country and he looked—
Well, I hope things are looking up for him because he really—
Well, he intervened in a by-election at Devizes and gave a speech and the Tories held that—astonishing—and he felt, I think, very cheerful about that, as if, politically—
You know, in the Cuban crisis—I didn't say it in the tape, but I was so surprised that all these people that did go away whose husbands were working in it.
Really? Was there a—it seems to me that your reaction is sort of the reaction you'd have to have.
Yeah, and well, then, maybe a lot of them were friends and things later, you know, just not in government, or—but you know, the one thought there was, if anything was going to happen they wanted to get out with their wife and—I mean the mother and the children? My God, I don't think that shows you love your husband very much!
We ended up last time talking about the Cuban crisis, and the next event of great interest was the problem with the British over Skybolt. You remember, in December the President went to Bermuda and then afterwards, did Macmillan come back to Florida, I think, for a day?
I don't think so. Once they met at Key West. That was the very beginning.
That was the very beginning.
No, I don't think Macmillan did—
Oh, David Ormsby-Gore came back and Randolph Churchill, but not Macmillan.
Is this the Skybolt time?
Yeah.
That was at Nassau.1
PRESIDENT KENNEDY AND PRIME MINISTER MACMILLAN IN NASSAU, DECEMBER 1962
Cecil Stoughton, White House/John F. Kennedy Library and Museum, Boston
The—the meeting was at Nassau.
Yeah.
After Nassau, I think David and Randolph came and spent a day, didn't they, at Palm Beach?
That's right. And is that what you want me to tell about?
Yeah.
First, they met in Nassau because Jack told David to tell Macmillan he wouldn't meet in Bermuda again because there was no—in the governor general's house there was no hot water for the bath. [Both laugh] So they met at Nassau. Then I don't think Jack saw Randolph Churchill—not until later. But I remember the next day, sitting out, when Godfrey McHugh came running in with a dispatch that whatever company it is that shot Skybolt and saying, "Look what wonderful news, Mr. President!" And I said—I told you before about him saying, "Goddamn it, Godfrey!" It was just too awful to be true. And then he got on the phone and tracked everyone down and Gilpatric said he didn't know, and McNamara was away. I don't know if you've read Dick Neustadt's thing on Skybolt, have you?
I haven't.
Well, Jack gave me that about Novemb—on November 20 and said, this is the—usually he never brought anything home—and he said, "This is the most fascinating reading," and he said, "Read it." And so I took it to Texas with me. It's been in my briefcase ever since. I've never read it. But anyway, it explains all the little hitches back and forth.
Well, you think the President was deeply concerned?
Oh, he was just crushed because Nassau had gone so beautifully and Macmillan had—Macmillan was really in trouble at home, I guess, and whatever they'd worked out was Polaris—hadn't been quite what he wanted but together they'd both done the best they could to get something that would be all right for them. And I remember David's face. He just looked like he'd been kicked in the stomach, and Jack saying, "Ugh, you know, what are we going to do?" And he felt as if he betrayed the prime minister. So David went in another room, carrying his little red dispatch box, and talked on the phone to Macmillan and they made up what