The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [372]
Jack and Jackie were impresarios of style. In the emerging society of the last years of the twentieth century, style was substance, and the famous Kennedy style was as much a part of history as legislation and summit conferences. Norman Vincent Peale and his ministerial colleagues had condemned Jack’s faith, fearing that if he were elected, the pope would stand behind him whispering orders. The ministers would have been closer to the mark if they had condemned Kennedy’s style, for that was the engine that would help lead America away from the narrowly Protestant society of the midcentury.
Washington was the most provincial of the world’s great capitals, a somnolent, socially suffocating city full of the prejudices and mores of the South and the wary, conservative attitudes of any company town. Any culture beyond the road shows of Broadway musicals and the local opera and ballet companies that performed in a movie theater and a college auditorium was a dangerous, foreign business. To Kennedy, the Eisenhower years had reeked of flabby self-satisfaction. As the young president saw it, in the name of conservative Americanism, the Republican administration had celebrated the mediocre and elevated the second-rate. Eisenhower, however, had lived perfectly comfortably in the White House; what Kennedy viewed as hopelessly pedestrian decor was to the Republican president a statement of stolid virtues.
“You know, we really ought to have the nicest entertaining here with the greatest distinction,” the new president told Letitia Baldrige, the social secretary, on his first day in office. That comment was a subtle critique of the Rotarian-like atmosphere of the last eight years. Baldrige took the president at his word, starting with the first party for the staff. The Eisenhower administration had served only lightly spiked fruit punch, but that particular abomination hardly fit the definition of “greatest distinction,” and Baldrige ordered that alcoholic drinks be served.
The president’s grandfather and father had both made part of their fortunes in the liquor industry, and though he was not much of a drinking man himself, Kennedy hardly saw a scotch and soda as the devil’s drink. It was only after the convivial staff event that he learned that liquor was not served at major functions in the White House and he had outraged many of the Baptists in America.
The fundamentalist teetotalers may have been sincere, but across America they were achieving not high morality but low hypocrisy. Though prohibition was long gone, the country was riven by a patchwork of bottle laws and drinking regulations that many Americans had learned to evade or avoid. As the Baptists mounted their assault, Kennedy’s first reaction was irritation that he had unknowingly attacked one of the silly double standards of the age; if a politician started attacking all the petty hypocrisies of his constituents, he would not be reelected.
“You know, the fact that you put one over on us and served hard liquor that first party—and we have been serving it ever since—was the greatest thing that’s ever been done for White House entertaining,” he told Baldrige a few months later when the controversy was forgotten. “It’s relaxed the whole thing, and you’ve proved it to be a success, and I just want to say thank you.”
A stylish social life served his administration’s image, but that alone did not explain Kennedy’s involvement in the intricate details of White House events. In part, he enjoyed the respite from a desk full of woes and worries. The president did not like to be bored, and his social life was an attempt to transform the tedious rituals of Washington into amusement.
With his sense of detail, the president enjoyed nuances that many men neither appreciated nor even noticed. For a ceremony at the first state dinner for President Habib Bourguiba of Tunisia, two hundred soldiers would not do. Three hundred was not enough. Even a thousand was not enough. Kennedy wanted two or three thousand. He wanted them tall and handsome, plenty of blacks too, and nobody