The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [297]
The Democrats did not know quite what to do with Jackie, an exotic orchid set among daisies and marigolds. They feared that Jackie lived so far outside the world of middle-class America that most voters would be uneasy having her in the White House. The Republicans trundled out their “Pat for First Lady” campaign. Presumably most Americans could identify more with this cloth-coated, modest matron, a veritable Betty Crocker of a politician’s wife, than the elegant, sexy, baby-talking, foreign-sounding Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy. That contrast had not yet sunk in when the Democrats announced that the Kennedys were going to have a second child. A pregnant mother trumped even a Bible-touting, cloth-coat-wearing matron. But there were still cynical whispers in some quarters “that it [the pregnancy] was planned that way to keep that supposedly lethal glamour out of circulation.”
Jackie’s seeming extravagance was such a problem that she appeared for one interview in a $29.95 maternity dress, wearing it as if it were a uniform of the middle class. “I’m sure I spend less than Mrs. Nixon on clothes,” Jackie said, a subject that, fortunately for the Democrats, was not pursued.
Jackie could not talk to Jack about just how difficult she found it being forced into the confining mold of a public person. She turned to Joe Alsop, whose insights into Washington social life were often deeper and truer than those found in his political columns. Alsop contrasted his cousin Eleanor Roosevelt, who in public managed “oddly humorous and even downright fantastic things,” with Pat Nixon, who created “false homey touches” that reeked of an “adman’s phoniness.” Alsop wrote Jackie of “things that can be done for public purposes without any departure from or falsification of your private self.”
Jackie was seeking to maintain her authenticity and to preserve her rich inner life. “You have been of more help than you can imagine,” she wrote Alsop. “And there is one more thing you have taught me—to respect power. I never did—possibly because it came so suddenly without my having had to work for it—(power by marriage I mean). But if things turn out right—I will welcome it—and use it for the things I care about.”
Jack would have preferred to spend his campaign days talking largely exclusively about foreign affairs, but there was one domestic issue that would not wait any longer, not for him or for anyone else. That was the continued disenfranchisement of black Americans. Bobby at least had played beside a black teammate on the Harvard football team, but except for his gentleman valet, Jack had practically no contact with Americans of other races. That made him no different from most men of his class, but he was neither intellectually nor emotionally attuned to the great domestic moral issue of his time. He was, moreover, the titular head of a party that included as a crucial element segregationist southerners.
American blacks understood that fact full well, and in the 1956 presidential election, 60 percent had voted Republican, considering the party of the sainted Abraham Lincoln, if not the vehicle of their deliverance, then at least the lesser of two evils. They had voted Democratic during the New Deal, but that bond was now broken, and black voters appeared woefully slow in moving toward a Democratic Party that vowed to serve their interests. The prominent Atlanta minister Martin Luther King Sr. was one of a large number of the older generation of black southern preachers who had come out for Nixon, in large part in opposition to Jack’s faith.
Martin Luther King Jr. had followed his father’s calling, but unlike many of that generation, he considered his faith not a substitute for justice but the very engine of its enactment. The Reverend King was a disciple of Mahatma Gandhi, the martyred Indian leader, and like his mentor, King was a man dangerous to all who looked on the world as it was and thought that was the way the world would always be. Despite what his enemies believed, in the first year of this new decade the Reverend King was not