The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [203]
When Jack left Capitol Hill early for a party in Georgetown, or flew up to New York for an engagement, he knew that Sorensen would most likely still be there, writing articles and op-ed pieces, speeches, and letters, all with Jack’s name on them, for publications including the New York Times Magazine, American Magazine, The New Republic, and the Atlantic.
Jack liked men who were quick studies and there was no quicker study than Ted Sorensen. Within months, he had Jack down perfectly. “The Atlantic Monthly article was approved without substantial change by the senator; and both he and his father liked it very much,” Sorensen wrote Landis, with whom he had apparently co-authored a piece for Jack’s byline titled “New England and the South.” “I am looking forward to more collaboration in the future.”
Jack’s political life was in competent hands, but he still had a major problem if he ever hoped to run for president. His good friend Jim Reed observed that Jack thought of women as “chattel … in a casual, amiable way.” They were a pleasurable sideshow to the business of life, in which men were the only players.
Jack would have gone on a bachelor indefinitely if he had not been so politically ambitious. In Eisenhower’s America, a perpetual bachelor was considered most likely not an asexual mama’s boy or a high-living libertine, but a closet homosexual. “We used to kid Jack all the time about getting married,” recalled Ben Smith, one of his Harvard roommates. “I remember in the 1952 campaign he said that if he won he would get married.”
“You know, they’re going to start calling you queer,” Morrissey told Jack after the election. Jack decided that he would put on the velvet shackles of marriage, but he would do so only because he knew how to pick the lock.
Jack had met Jacqueline “Jackie” Bouvier at a dinner party at the Bartletts’ house in Georgetown in May 1951. Twenty-one-year-old Jackie had a wispy, gaminelike voice more suitable to a geisha than a sophisticated young woman who had studied at Vassar, the Sorbonne, and George Washington University. Despite the twelve-year difference in their ages, or perhaps in part because of it, Jack was intrigued enough to want to go out with her afterward for a drink. When they got out on the tree-lined street, there sat one of Jackie’s beaus asleep in her car, waiting for her, and Jack made a discreet retreat. Jack was so busy with his campaign for the Senate that he rarely saw Jackie, but he invited her to Eisenhower’s inauguration in January 1953, and then started seeing her regularly.
Jackie was working as an inquiring photographer for the Washington Times-Herald. It was a superficial job, running around the capital, taking pictures of prominent Washingtonians, and asking them benign, obvious questions. She had incredibly wide-spaced eyes that missed nothing, and nothing of what she truly saw found its way into her column. Although her manners were impeccable, she had a devastatingly wry humor that suggested the caustic way she viewed lesser mortals. Once, while driving with her stepbrother Hugh D. Auchincloss III from Washington to Newport, police stopped their car on the Merritt Parkway. While the Connecticut trooper stood there preparing to write a ticket, Jackie innocently and oh so generously offered: “Excuse me, officer, but your fly is undone.” The policeman murmured a thank-you and hurried off without writing a ticket.
Jackie did not talk much about her own childhood. Her parents had divorced when she was a young girl, and she had sought solace in horses and poetry and hours of dreamy introspection. She had an adventurous soul and as a girl had enjoyed many books that boys generally read, from Kipling’s Jungle Book to Sir Walter Scott