Personal History (55 page)

There was, indeed, a certain unreality to these evenings—to be dancing like that in those historic and elegant rooms. Once, while Phil was twisting with Ethel Kennedy, she used the occasion to ask, “Now that you have a president you can be 100 percent for, why aren’t you 100 percent for him?” “Well, I’ll tell you, Ethel,” replied Phil.
“You
can be 100 percent for him.”

A few months later, there was another dance at the White House. Guests were assembling in the Blue Room and Phil said, “Jackie, it’s even better this evening to be here. I loved the first time but I felt sort of tense.” In her magical voice, Jackie interrupted, “And now you just think it’s Hamburger Heaven?”

President Kennedy’s charm was powerful. His intense concentration and gently teasing humor, and his habit of vacuum-cleaning your brain to see what you knew and thought, were irresistible. The Kennedy men were also unabashed chauvinists, as were the great majority of men at the time, including Phil. They liked other bright men, and they liked girls, but they didn’t really know how to relate to middle-aged women, in whom they didn’t have a whole lot of interest. This attitude made life difficult for middle-aged wives especially, and induced—or fed—feelings of uncertainty in many of us in those years. Though the men were polite, we somehow knew we had no place in their spectrum. My ever-present terror of being boring often overwhelmed me in social situations with the president and at the White House, particularly whenever I was face to face with the president himself or one of his main advisers, and my fear was a real guarantee of being boring, since it paralyzed and silenced me.

I only felt secure when Phil, whom the president liked, was with me and could do the talking. Douglas Dillon’s wife, Phyllis, who I thought was the height of sophistication, confided to me that she felt the same way: she complained that she was always left on the sidelines with Rose Kennedy at parties in Palm Beach.

One notable exception to the chauvinist tradition was Adlai Stevenson. Women enjoyed Adlai. In the end, my mother, my daughter, and I all had close friendships with him. Clayton Fritchey once told me a story that helps explain Adlai’s appeal—and that contrasts it with what many of us felt about other men in the Kennedy administration, including the president himself. About three weeks before Kennedy was assassinated, Clayton saw the president in New York, at a time when Adlai was the ambassador to the United Nations and Clayton was his deputy. The three men were together at a party, and Clayton was helping himself to a drink on the balcony overlooking Central Park when the president came up behind
him and said, “We haven’t had a chance to talk much tonight, but we’ve got a good subject in common,” meaning Adlai. The president then told Clayton he didn’t understand the hold Adlai had over women, commenting on how much Jackie liked and admired him and confessing that he himself didn’t have the ease with women that Adlai had. “What do you suppose it is?” he asked, adding, “Look, I may not be the best-looking guy out there, but, for God’s sake, Adlai’s half bald, he’s got a paunch, he wears his clothes in a dumpy kind of way. What’s he got that I haven’t got?”

Clayton’s response hit on what I think women saw in Adlai and what they shied away from in other men of that era. “Mr. President, I’m happy to say that for once you have asked me a question I’m prepared to answer, one I can answer truthfully and accurately. While you both love women, Adlai also likes them, and women know the difference. They all respond to a kind of message that comes across from him when he talks to them. He conveys the idea that they are intelligent and worth listening to. He cares about what they’re saying and what they’ve done, and that’s really very fetching.”

The president’s response was: “Well, I don’t say you’re wrong, but I’m not sure I can go to those lengths.”

I
SPENT QUITE
a lot of time that fall of 1961 working on Lally’s coming-out party, to be given at my mother’s house over the Christmas holiday, when Lally was home from college. I adhered to the 26th of December as the night for a big party, because my mother had given annual gala parties that night as each of her four daughters came of age and made her debut. Mother, who tended to deal harshly in her appraisals of others, paid me the first lavish compliment I remember receiving from her. She looked at me one day during the preparations for the party and said, “Darling, you are very good with lists.”

At the party there was a happy mixture of our friends, some of my mother’s friends, and, of course, a great many of Lally’s. Grown-ups wore white-tie; the young wore black-tie. Don, Bill, and Steve wore their best suits, and Steve went through the receiving line several times. Susan Mary Alsop recalled how handsome Phil and Lally looked as “we all stood back and he waltzed Lally from one end of the ballroom to the other. They were the best-looking, most lovely couple I ever saw. And the most dramatic, with Lally’s black hair flying and he so fine.”

It was, indeed, an enchanting evening, and one of our last really good and happy times.

F
OR ALL THEIR BUSYNESS
, the first six months of 1962 had a certain stability and comforting routine to them. Phil still didn’t feel very confident and didn’t trust his instincts; one day he said he had an idea, but it couldn’t be a good one because it was his. A young Otis Chandler had taken over the
Los Angeles Times
as its publisher and had ambitious plans to develop it from a partisan and mediocre paper to an independent one of quality. Phil saw the chance to get together with Chandler and form a news service, with each paper adding to the number of its correspondents abroad and perhaps helping pay for the expansion by selling the combined product to twenty-five or so other big papers.

Otis reacted favorably, and Phil and I went out to California to advance the plan, and the Los Angeles Times–Washington Post News Service was launched successfully that year, with thirty-two initial subscribers. It has since grown and now goes to more than six hundred newspapers, broadcast stations, and magazines here and around the world.

On July 7, Phil and I left with Chip and Avis Bohlen for a week’s vacation to the lodge in Nova Scotia owned by Bowater Mersey, which supplied the
Post’s
newsprint. The trip with the Bohlens was memorable in part because Phil seemed well and in balance. Only once during the week did he ask me to take a walk and talk to him because he was a little down. He still needed help, but my main thought was, “How marvelous, he’s well again. He’s recovered.”

What we didn’t know during the trip was that Chip had been notified by President Kennedy that he was going to be appointed ambassador to France. Chip and Avis were extraordinarily discreet, not saying a word. Avis was reading Camus’
La Peste
in French, which might have tipped us off but didn’t. We had no sooner gotten back from Canada than the appointment was announced. A few days later, we went out on the president’s boat for a dinner in honor of the Bohlens. The guests were all on
the open fantail of the boat when Kennedy’s car pulled up. There was a largish circle of friends sitting on folding chairs, and the only unoccupied chair was one next to me, so the president had no choice but to sit in it. I looked at Phil, silently imploring him to come over and help, but, despite knowing of my nervousness at talking to the president—or perhaps because of it—he just looked at me and smiled sympathetically.

My insecurity was exacerbated by my feeling that the president had been forced to sit next to me. Nevertheless, we began chatting. He wanted to know about the Bohlens’ oldest daughter, Avis, who was a very able young woman. (Now one of the stars of the Foreign Service, she has just been named ambassador to Bulgaria.) I told the president that she was an extraordinary girl and that she was writing a book on Peter the Great. “I wonder if she’s been around her family too long?” he inquired—referring to their long diplomatic career. I knew what he meant—Avis was somewhat shy and retiring—but I reiterated that she was a terribly nice girl and how much I liked her. He looked at me quizzically and said, “Oh, we like nice girls, Kay.”

The day after the boating party, Phil and I left for Florida, taking Steve with us for the dedication of Bill Graham’s project, Miami Lakes, the planned development of the original family farm, which eventually became a community of almost twenty-five thousand people. Something very significant happened to me while we were in Florida. I had been feeling that Phil, after five long years, was finally better. His depression seemed gone, and he was growing more interested in work again. What baffled me was my own mood. My emotions seemed to be changing from one week to the next. I was happy in Canada, when we were with the Bohlens, but I found myself in tears much of the time we were in Florida and had no idea why. It was only later that I realized it was Phil’s sudden mood change that had so affected me. The little walk we’d taken in Canada to overcome his momentary depression had been the last time he’d been calm. It is clear to me now that the almost-in-balance period was suddenly over, and that one of hyperactivity—with its accompanying anger and vitriolic diatribes—was beginning. I have since learned that manic-depressive cycles, when left untreated, tend to grow more severe and occur closer together. What I was experiencing was a quickening and an intensifying of these cycles.

One thing he did was begin to buy things—some sensible, some less so. In addition to part of the Bowater paper mill—which he had more or less negotiated while we were on the boat returning from Canada, during a shuffleboard game with the head of the mill—the first week in August he bought the monthly magazine
ARTnews
, the oldest continuously published art magazine in the world. Phil considered the purchase “Not a big
investment of dough, nor a big bother of time and energy, but considerable fun and prestige—and a reasonable profit. So all very pleasant.” Essentially, he bought it for me, thinking I could be involved with it in some way that would fit my growing interest in modern art.

P
HIL’S INCREASING NEED
to be always on the go resulted in a hastily planned summer trip to Europe with the children, from which we returned in time for Don to head off to Harvard. He had graduated that June from St. Albans, a year younger than his class but close to the top. Phil’s advice to him on departure was clear—and unusual for a newspaperman: “Stay away from the
Crimson
. You have lived in a journalistic atmosphere, either at our house or the Friendlys’. You’ve edited the
St. Albans News
. You ought to study other subjects, to broaden your horizon.” Don waited three months before trying out for and making the
Crimson
. From then on it constituted much of his life at Harvard, and he eventually was its president.

Our own routine resumed after Europe, with the difference that we were going out more and Phil was working harder. He pulled off a significant coup by signing Walter Lippmann to write a fortnightly column for
Newsweek
and the
Post
, to be syndicated by the
Post
. This was a stunning development, since Walter’s column had been appearing in the
Herald-Tribune
since 1931. Despite his advancing years, Lippmann was still the pre-eminent commentator, and the column was a distinguished asset—much quoted and very influential and a great boon, especially for
Newsweek
. At the same time, Phil signed up Emmet Hughes for a weekly column for
Newsweek
. Oz Elliott, however, had not been told about this arrangement, and was none too happy that Phil had hired Hughes without consulting him.

The pace picked up still further. Phil was pressuring the president on two subjects. For one, he argued that Dean Rusk should be removed as secretary of state and replaced with David Bruce. The other subject—a tax cut—met with a more sympathetic reception. Phil was convinced that there was a need for a tax cut to boost the economy. He made his arguments in a long, well-reasoned letter to the president that makes it clear that his mind was still functioning brilliantly.

From October on, Phil was increasingly given to impatience and anger. Besides working constantly to improve the Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service, maintaining his trusteeships at RAND, the Committee for Economic Development, and George Washington University, and keeping his hand on the tiller at the
Post
and
Newsweek
, he had several other balls in the air. He had undertaken a major speech, which he hadn’t done for quite a while, agreeing to address the twenty-fifth
anniversary dinner of the Washington Building Congress. He spoke of the “full-blown crisis” facing Washington, saying that the Year 2000 Plan for the city was being used as “an opiate by planners and by out-and-out obstructionists to tranquilize us against our day-to-day and year-to-year problems.” The speech was positively received. Even the
Star
covered it and editorialized that Phil had “delivered an eloquent and perceptive analysis of the shortcomings plaguing the Nation’s Capital.” Incredibly, Larry Stern, a
Post
reporter who had helped draft the speech, also covered it for our paper.

One interesting sidelight on this dinner is that the executive secretary of the organization had written to Phil beforehand, inviting me by saying, “One way you can tell that the Washington Building Congress is getting older is that it has decided that the ladies should be invited to share the head table with their husbands.…” Phil sent this to his assistant with a note: “Call … and say Kay will be delighted and then tell Kay how delighted she is.” This peremptory message from Phil says something both about his mood and about our relationship; it also says something about the role of women in those days. It was assumed that I would go where Phil wanted me, and in fact I assumed it, too.

In October, Phil took on a job that changed both our lives and sped us up even more. He accepted an invitation from President Kennedy to serve as an incorporator of the Communications Satellite Corporation, known as COMSAT, with the understanding that he would be elected to head it, and in mid-October he was appointed chairman of the group. COMSAT was a groundbreaking /files/05/16/26/f051626/public/private organization, half government, half telephone company. Getting it launched—in essence, translating an exciting vision into a working, financially viable organization—was a full-time job, requiring massive organizational skills, infinite tact and patience, and a huge amount of time and energy. It was not what Phil needed at that time, but it was what he wanted—an irresistible temptation to be engaged in an exciting venture that would, in fact, alter the shape of the world.