The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [312]
Later that day, Kennedy met with John Kenneth Galbraith to discuss balance-of-payments problems. The Harvard professor seemed scarcely aware that a “briefing” is called that for a reason. On and on he went, in his professorial monotone. Kennedy had one of the greatest gifts with which a human spirit can be blessed, an Odysseus-like enchantment with the world around him. Even now, in the midst of Galbraith’s lecture, he could not abide sitting any longer when there was a world to explore. He suggested that the professor continue his monologue as the two men took a tour of the White House.
Kennedy’s interest in music reached no higher than the Broadway musical. His knowledge of art was limited to the greatest hits of Western culture that his mother had drilled into her sons. His curiosity about antiques stopped at the price. For the most part, his cultural taste developed by osmosis, from living with Jackie. Yet he did not envision himself living in a White House that was decorated with all the panache of a businessman’s hotel. He roamed through the rooms, criticizing the lackluster furniture, the sad reproductions, the dreary decor. Despite his bad back, he got down on his hands and knees and looked underneath some of the tables. He moved from room to room, even entering storerooms where presidents rarely or never ventured. On another one of his early explorations, he discovered what appeared to be two large covered portholes upstairs in the wall of the Oval Room. The mysterious coverings opened up to disclose matching his and her television sets that the Eisenhowers enjoyed in their cozy evenings at home.
Kennedy was no more willing to live in what he considered a pedestrian decor than he was to surround himself with pedestrian human beings whose ideas were as much reproductions as the furniture. “I won’t have this,” he said. “We must replace these with the correct pieces.”
He took the derivative, mediocre furniture as a perfect metaphor for what he considered the derivative, mediocre presidency of his predecessor. “I’d like to make this White House the living museum of the decorative arts in America,” he said, a task that Jackie would brilliantly fulfill.
As Kennedy settled into office, the White House was inundated by phone calls, few of which reached Lincoln’s secretarial desk. One of the few calls that did reach the president’s office on his sixth day in office was from Marguerite Oswald, whose son, Lee Harvey Oswald, had defected to the Soviet Union. Mrs. Oswald had come to Washington seeking help, and though apparently the president did not talk to her, Lincoln noted the call in the official list of calls.
Kennedy had been in office for less than a month before those officials who could not speak the president’s idiom were pushed to the antechambers. “Jack feels that Stewart Udall [Secretary of Interior], though very bright, talks too much and that Arthur Goldberg [Secretary of Labor], also very bright, goes on and on,” Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote on February 22 after a small private dinner at the White House.
Schlesinger, a liberal Harvard history professor, had been brought into the administration in part to write its official history and to provide a liaison with his close friend and ideological colleague, Adlai Stevenson, the UN ambassador. “He [O’Donnell] has caught Adlai Stevenson in two lies regarding agreements that he’s made with Jack [Kennedy] as to personnel at the United Nations,” Schlesinger wrote after the dinner. “As Kenny [O’Donnell] said, the people that he has got around him now at the United Nations are mostly queers and I don’t think that is far from the truth.” Whether true or not,