Jackie, Ethel, Joan: Women of Camelot (45 page)

Still, Johnson resented Bobby, was always convinced that Bobby had attempted to sabotage his nomination for the Vice Presidency in 1960, and felt that the defiant younger Kennedy brother had no respect for his knowledge and ex- perience. For his part, Bobby was revolted by Johnson’s personality and style, and his lack of “refinement.” He also didn’t like LBJ’s politics. Somehow, though, they managed a working relationship, but—as historians have demon- strated in books about their tenuous alliance before and after Jack’s death—it was not easy.

A bit more than a week after the murder in Dallas, on the afternoon of December 2, 1963, LBJ spoke to Jackie, whom he called “Sweetie,” and told her, “You just come over and put your arm around me. That’s all you do. And when you haven’t got anything else to do, let’s take a walk. Let’s walk around the backyard, and let me just tell you how much you mean to all of us, and how we can carry on if you give us a little strength.”

Jackie liked Johnson personally but had never really got-

ten over his 1960 primary challenge to Jack. When historian and Kennedy insider Arthur Schlesinger once mentioned to her Johnson’s “mild personal thrusts” at Jack, Jackie lashed out at him, “Were they mild? Didn’t he say his father had been a Nazi? And having Connally talk about Jack’s Addi- son’s disease? They were not mild.”

Also, Jackie was always a bit uneasy about Johnson’s flir- tatious manner toward her. However, because she under- stood that it was his nature—some have called it a Southern trait—to forge an extremely familiar relationship with the people in his life, she was not offended by it as has been pre- viously reported. “To say ‘honey,’ or ‘sweetie’ or ‘darling,’ well, that was just LBJ’s way of expressing himself, of ex- pressing concern,” says George Christian, who was press secretary to Johnson from 1966 to 1969. “Of course, he was not flirting. He liked to tease.” However, probably because of her own more formal upbringing, Jackie did not know how to respond to LBJ’s informal personality and would, at a loss, just dissolve into giggles.

Jackie thanked Johnson for a letter of support he had sent her earlier in the week. “I
know
how rare a letter is in a Pres- ident’s handwriting,” she said, her voice cracking as if on the verge of tears. “Do you know that I’ve got more in your handwriting than I do in Jack’s now?”

Johnson reminded her that he was depending on her for emotional support. “You got the President relying on you,” he said. “And this is not the first one you had. They’re not many women, you know, running around with a good many Presidents. So you got the biggest job of your life.”

Jackie had to laugh. “She ran around with two Presidents, that’s what they’ll say about me,” she joked. “Okay. Any- time.”

“Good-bye, darling,” he said to her. He asked her to “do come by,” before signing off. She said she would.

When Jackie finally left the White House permanently on December 6—accompanied not only by Clint Hill and two other Secret Service agents but also, at LBJ’s direction, by two Navy stewards—she didn’t say good-bye to anyone, ex- plaining later that she “couldn’t bear the scene.” Rather, she left a simple, handwritten card for Lady Bird in her bedroom that read: “I wish you a happy arrival in your new home, Lady Bird. Remember, you will be happy here.” She signed it, “Love, Jackie.”

The next day, Jackie and the President spoke about the Johnsons’ move into the White House. That evening, De- cember 7, would mark the first that the new President and his wife would spend in their new home. When LBJ admit- ted that he was “afraid,” Jackie noted that “it’s worst on your first night . . . the rooms are all so big, you’ll get lost.”

“Darling, you know what I said to Congress,” Johnson told her, chuckling nervously, “I’d give anything in the world if I wasn’t here today.”

Johnson asked her when she was “going to come back and see me,” as he did every time they spoke. “Someday I will,” she promised, halfheartedly. But when he pushed her for a specific date, she tried to return to the subject of the Johnsons’ first night at the White House. “Anyway,” she said, “take a sleeping pill.” But, pushing for that photo op- portunity with the most famous woman in America, Johnson insisted that he would sleep so much better if she would just promise to visit him. “Please come,” he pleaded, “and let me walk down to the seesaw with you, like old times.” When Jackie agreed, he seemed almost giddy. “Okay, darling.

Give Caroline and John Jr. a hug for me. Tell them I’d like to be their daddy.”

Ten days later, on December 17, Jackie would visit the White House for the last time. The occasion was a Christ- mas play performed by Caroline’s class, which would be meeting there until the end of the year. Jackie said that she planned to call on Johnson, but realized from reading the newspaper that day that he was in New York to address the United Nations. In a letter to him, she wrote that she felt “so stupid” to have forgotten and would, instead, see him after the holidays as he had suggested.

Four days before Christmas, on December 21, 1963, LBJ called Jackie again. “I love you,” he began. “Aren’t you sweet?” she said, her voice sounding demure, but somewhat exhausted. Johnson joked that he was angry with her for leaving “without coming by and hugging me and telling me good-bye,” and that he should have her “arrested.” Then Jackie and Lady Bird spoke for a few moments before LBJ took the phone and went back to the business of getting Jackie to agree to visit the White House. He told the former First Lady that he would “spank” her if she didn’t “come by.” Jackie promised that “As soon as you get back [from Texas for the holiday], I’ll come and get a vitamin B shot from Dr. [Janet] Travell, and see you.”

So by the time LBJ telephoned Jackie two days before Christmas, she knew what he wanted: for her to visit the White House. What she didn’t know was that he was trying to prove to four reporters that he and Jackie were “like this.” An hour after LBJ’s Christmas call to Jackie, her secre- tary Nancy Tuckerman received a telephone call from a fact checker at the Associated Press. It seemed that AP reporter Francis Lewin, one of the reporters present in the Cabinet

Room during the call, intended to file a story about it. Would Jackie like to comment?

“You must be joking,” Jackie exclaimed when Tuckerman told her about the story. “But how did they even know that the President called me?” When she was told that there were reporters listening on the speakerphone during the conversa- tion, she was angry. “I think that’s going just a bit far,” Jackie told Nancy Tuckerman. “I don’t like it at all. I think you should talk to Pierre [Salinger] about this. Tell him I’m very angry.”

Before Tuckerman had an opportunity to call Salinger, Bobby had already done so. “Look, he’s using Jackie,” Bobby said. “Tell him we know it, and we want him to fuck- ing stop it.”

Salinger telephoned the President and, during another conversation recorded by Johnson, carefully asked if there had been newspaperwomen present during the time Johnson made his Christmas call to Jackie. Sounding defensive, LBJ confessed that there had been, and added he had cautioned the reporters to report only that he had talked to the former First Lady, and nothing more about their conversation, “be- cause I didn’t want a private conversation to be recorded.” (Meanwhile, Johnson had not only recorded Jackie, but was also surreptitiously recording his conversation with Salinger.)

“I see nothing wrong with the President calling Miz Kennedy and the children and wishing them a Merry Christ- mas,” Johnson told Salinger, his tone testy. “I want to be as nice and affectionate and considerate and thoughtful of Miz Kennedy as I can during these days. I just think that’s good politics.”

The Kennedy Camp on LBJ: “A Blight on the New Frontier”

I
n early January 1964, Ethel Kennedy telephoned Jackie to ask if she would have lunch with her and Bobby at Hickory Hill. She explained that she had something important to dis- cuss with the former First Lady.

With three Secret Service agents in tow (including the trusted Clint Hill) as well as Maud Shaw, John Jr., and Car- oline, Jackie arrived at Bobby and Ethel’s home just after noon. She wore a simple, black pantsuit, a white blouse, an elegant strand of pearls, and a black scarf tied at the chin. She also wore large sunglasses, foreshadowing the mysteri- ous “Jackie look” of the 1970s.

Ethel, Bobby, and Jackie—still wearing the scarf but hav- ing taken off the glasses—sat at the kitchen table. Over a meal of stuffed eggplant, which Jackie didn’t touch, Ethel got right to the point. “This thing with Johnson is out of hand,” she said. “Do you realize that every time he talks to you, he goes to the press. He’s using you, Jackie. You know that, don’t you?”

Ethel turned to Bobby for support. He nodded absent- mindedly.

“Oh, of course I know that,” Jackie said. “I’m not stupid, Ethel.” Jackie went on to say that, in her opinion, Johnson was “a sweet man.” She felt that what the two had gone through in Dallas had cemented a relationship between them.

Ethel strongly disliked the Johnsons, as did many in the Kennedy circle. She couldn’t relate to their folksy ways,

thought of them as argumentative, and believed that they looked down upon the Kennedys. She had customarily deleted Lyndon and Lady Bird from the guest lists of her ex- travagant parties at Hickory Hill under the Kennedy admin- istration, and when she was forced to invite them as a matter of protocol, she usually ignored them once they arrived. “Look at her standing over there glarin’ at us like we’re den- tists,” LBJ once said of Ethel at a Hill party he and Lady Bird managed to attend.

Most people in the Kennedy camp felt that LBJ was a blight on the New Frontier. He just didn’t fit. Kennedy had offered him the Vice Presidency only to keep him safely tucked away. JFK realized early on that if he won the elec- tion, it would probably be by a small margin and, as he put it to Kenny O’Donnell, “I won’t be able to live with Lyndon Johnson as the leader of a small Senate majority.” So with Lyndon out of the way as Vice President, Kennedy would have Mike Mansfield as the Senate leader, someone upon whom he could depend.

For all intents and purposes, Bobby had taken over the position as Jack’s right-hand man, and Johnson was either ignored or placated by most of Kennedy’s administration. LBJ had it right when he once said that the Kennedys thought of him as “a good ol’ country boy with tobacco juice on my shirt.” When friends gave Ethel and Bobby an LBJ voodoo doll a month before the Dallas tragedy, “the merri- ment was overwhelming,” recalls
Time
magazine’s Hugh Sidey, a frequent visitor at Hickory Hill. But were it not for LBJ, Kennedy probably would not have won the election. With Johnson on the ticket, Kennedy took not only Texas but also the important Southern states of Alabama, Georgia, Missouri, and South Carolina.

Jackie had always felt a strong empathy for Lyndon John- son. Jack had been killed in Johnson’s beloved Texas, and Lee Harvey Oswald was killed there, as well. “He thinks Americans will never accept him as President,” she said, “and if he wants to use me in that regard, well, can you blame him?” Though Jackie realized that Jack didn’t have much of a relationship with Lyndon Johnson and, in fact, practically never relied on him for anything, she liked John- son anyway.*

When Ethel called him “a worthless President,” Jackie disagreed, citing his eagerness to see Jack’s civil rights pro- grams passed (which were actually LBJ’s first civil rights programs as Senate Majority Leader).

Jackie turned to Bobby for rescue, but he just stared straight ahead. He was in a dour mood with a pinched look around his mouth, perhaps still depressed over Jack’s death.

*At this time, in his continuing effort to involve Jackie in his ad- ministration, Johnson was considering making Jackie the Ambas- sador to Mexico. “She doesn’t want to do anything, but God almighty, all she would have to do would be to just walk out on her balcony about once a week,” he told Pierre Salinger. “I talked to her a while ago and she just
oohed
and
aahed
over the phone,” he said of Jackie. “She was just the sweetest thing. She was always nicer to me than anybody in the Kennedy family. She always made me feel like I was a human being. God, it would electrify the West- ern Hemisphere. It would do more than any Alliance for Progress,” Johnson continued, excited by the thought of it. “And she could go and do as she damn pleases. She can just walk out on that balcony and look down at them and they’ll just pee all over themselves every day.” A skeptical Salinger said he needed time to consider the idea. It is not known if LBJ offered her that post, though Pierre Salinger says he did offer her the position of Ambassador to France, and she turned it down.

He probably looked smaller and more frail than Jackie had ever seen him, for this is what others who knew Bobby have said about him after his brother’s murder.

“Oh, you would
so
like Lady Bird if only you’d give her a chance,” Jackie said—and she was right about that: Lady Bird Johnson was much more Ethel’s kind of woman than was Jackie. Whereas Jackie was the epitome of the modern jet-set age, her life brimming with action and excitement, Lady Bird’s idea of fun was a trip to wide open spaces where she could don Levi’s and tennis shoes and tramp around the countryside to her heart’s delight. Just like Ethel. But Ethel wasn’t interested in developing a kinship with Lady Bird.