JFK: the Great American Novel

...Later, when the child was born dead, he balked at returning...

...When its interest lies outside politics, in fundamental and eternal themes...

...Noemie Emery writes frequently for THE WEEKLY STANDARD...

...Charles Bartlett to bring them together...

...If Mrs...

...Truman also suggests that the energy Jackie poured into her restoration projects was a bid for her husband’s approval...

...Ostensibly a casual evening for some charming young people, it had been engineered with care by Joe Kennedy’s agents, step one in a transfer of money for power and as calculated as the meeting of Henry VIII and Anne of Cleves...

...At around the same age, the young Jackie Bouvier won first prize in Vogue magazine’s Prix de Paris, writing wittily of poets and dancers, placing herself firmly at the crossroads where communications, art, and fashion meet...

...But she was like Sergei Diaghilev, third man in the essay, the celebrated Russian impresario...

...You’ll get it back with your face,” her mother tells Lily, of the fortune lost by her imprudent father...

...Or are they only saying they are what they seem at the moment— two people in one place, at one time, who deserve the freedom of their private lives...

...Trollope couldn’t have plotted it better...

...She had gotten her wish: She was the Overall Art Director of the Twentieth Century...

...Jackie was found as a prospect by Joe’s friend Arthur Krock, whose socialite wife was a friend of Jackie’s mother, and who knew of the gap between Jackie’s inheritance ($3,000) and the world she was groomed to inhabit...

...John Kennedy was at times a bad husband, but he was a good son, a good father, a good brother and friend...

...Later, there are two other scenes worthy of Henry James and Edith Wharton: one in Hyannis, before the engagement, when Joe Kennedy takes Jackie aside to tell her she will want for nothing if she marries his child...

...Jackie did not marry him or stay with him only for money, but because he offered something else that she wanted: the opportunity for a “tremendous” life...

...Compulsive philanderers like King and Kennedy proved capable of moral leadership...

...He did...

...Krock ordered his prot?g...

...Jackie was such an impresario, choreographing a pageant with a cast of thousands, transitory but living on in film...

...From this grew an excitement that has not yet subsided and that truly was their work, not his...

...From that moment on, the relationship changed...

...It was like Jekyll and Hyde...

...We meet the ingenue, raised penniless in the midst of big money, already addicted to beauty and luxury, trained to marry rich by her shrew of a mother: Jacqueline Bouvier is Edith Wharton’s Lily Bart, with an iron will and much more intelligence, who will not only flourish in the House of Mirth, but have the last laugh there...

...As Cassini says, there are four public Jackies: the girl and young woman...

...Kennedy was not the ideal partner, and the marriage was often under great stress...

...Tough and romantic, athletic and literate, ethnic and Anglophile and Francophile, stunning to look at, they became a public phenomenon, wish fulfillment of a very high order...

...John Kennedy is the great American novel, possibly the greatest novel of all time...

...But when it came to women, he was a different person...

...Jack got his chance to use power in history...

...Jack was like them...

...Jackie, who had grown up as the poor relation in other people’s great houses, was now mistress of the greatest house of all...

...But this fails on all but the financial level, proving by contrast how effective the original bargain was...

...She made him the Irish Brahmin, who captured the imagination of the world and the country as one merely Irish, or merely a Brahmin, could not have...

...In the campaign appearances where they looked so appealing, they were a couple, united in a common enterprise...

...Both views were real...

...Within the strained marriage were affinities and compensations...

...There is also the invalid, born with a malformed spine and a failed immune system, always in pain and often in danger, whose daily routine involved a staggering array of pills, baths, tests, and injections...

...In fact, for most of these books, until Joe’s stroke when Jack is president, one feels the marriage is maintained by Joe and Jackie, around the indifferent, almost marginal, presence of Jack...

...No novel would dare a denouement so shattering or characters so wildly complex...

...Backed by Joe and his checkbook, she met designer Oleg Cassini before the inauguration to plot the sets and costumes for a longrunning play...

...But for each of these cases there is another— a John Kennedy, a Moshe Dayan, a Martin Luther King— whose license seems an aberration in an otherwise controlled persona...

...In the White House, they were united, too...

...Or do they connect...

...Margaret Truman credits her with being the only first lady to master “the perilous passage between democracy and upper-class style,” enabling “a reign of genteel taste which managed to mesmerize Americans without alienating them...

...They tell the story of two people who seemed truly mated, in an imperfect bond that was also a practical transaction...

...But her wish had been granted at the cost of her husband’s life...

...We spoke of how fashion is a mirror of history,” Cassini writes...

...In the August 12 New Republic, Jean Bethke Elshtain decries the “political attitude that presumes an identity, rather than a relationship, between the personal and the political” and leads to “the harsh conclusion that an episode of weakness exhausts the entire truth of the individual’s private life...

...Klein, in All Too Human: The Love Story of Jack and Jackie Kennedy (Pocket Books, 406 pages, $23), and Christopher Andersen, in Jack and Jackie: Portrait of an American Marriage (Morrow, 370 pages, $24), look both forward to the new age of packaged political families and back to the old one of dynastic bargains...

...What these books and others agree on is that John Kennedy— like his father and Jackie’s (who slept around on his honeymoon)— was almost genetically incapable of domesticity or commitment as these are understood...

...In John F. Kennedy, the prevalent belief that a public man can be judged by his doings in private meets its ultimate test...

...What do we say of the man who is a good father and an errant husband...

...In Gary Hart and Bob Packwood, license seems symptomatic of a general oddness...

...Post-Camelot Jackie is the heroine of a picaresque novel, not a social one, an entertaining and resourceful figure who travels through an ever-changing scene...

...Next to her, the Kennedys seemed like old money...

...And who decides...

...and in “The Politics of Promiscuity,” Joe Klein makes a case for seeing the public and private Bill Clinton as one...

...An artist by temperament, she did for her husband in the ultimate crisis what a more mundane woman could not...

...It was she who dug up a lot of the quotes that Jack started dropping in his speeches in the course of that campaign...

...Joe paid back FDR and the WASPs who had snubbed him...

...For the first time,” Cassini says, “Jack realized she was not just a wife, but a great political tool—a force to be reckoned with, and a powerful symbol...

...It is this wedge of the Kennedy story—the Jack-Jackie angle—that two new books on the Kennedy marriage evoke...

...Themes recur, not only from Trollope and Tolstoy and Eliot, but from all those American novelists concerned with the movement of power and money in a fluid class structure...

...In the end, the real difference between fact and fiction is the probability factor: Art is so much less puzzling than life...

...In a sense, the Kennedy funeral was her Vogue prize essay come to life...

...Her dress style—clean lines rendered in opulent fabrics—suggested simplicity married to richness, the ideal of republican power...

...Joe Kennedy, who began it all, got a better deal than he could have foreseen: not just a running mate and a gracious first lady, but the woman to bury his son...

...Camelot,” says Christopher Matthews, “colorized the career of John F. Kennedy,” changing it in retrospect...

...A wrenching ordeal, the Kennedy funeral was also a great piece of theater, staged by a master of effect and expression, who knew the importance—in a riderless horse, an eternal flame, a small boy saluting—of the way things looked...

...Especially if he wants to be president...

...Kennedy saw herself as an “Overall Art Director of the Twentieth Century,” a title she coined in her winning essay for Vogue...

...At 19, the young Eleanor Roosevelt found her way to the settlement houses of New York and the advocacy that would become her vocation...

...Roosevelt was a political advocate, Mrs...

...Which face is real— the rake or the stoic...

...When these books end, two of these Jackies are still in the future...

...She would become a student, restorer, conservator, and editor of books dealing largely with artistic experience: All her life, she would make the preservation and integrity of the aesthetic inheritance her main calling and cause...

...It is that there are many private figures, who tell us different things...

...What Jackie did as first lady is hard to measure, since she was a type few politicians marry or know...

...Worse than philandering were his detachment and boredom: Famously given to compartmentalizing his life—to keep anyone in it from having him totally—he relegated his wife to a discrete part of his experience, instead of giving his life to be shared...

...There was a strong collaborative aspect in this supposedly dark period,” said Charles Bartlett...

...It is not merely that the reckless, sometimes callous, private person is so different from the disciplined and prudent public figure...

...Clinton an activist-lawyer, other first ladies primarily wives, mothers, and hostesses, Mrs...

...The face was one of an exotic beauty,” writes Edward Klein of Jackie, as Bart meets Jack Kennedy, son of Jay Gatsby, at a carefully planned dinner in Georgetown in 1951...

...As these authors write, he was depressed and shaken at losing the baby, but others had to explain to him that his presence might console his wife...

...who had faced death four times before 40 and was told to expect to die young...

...Beside her, Jack looked like a prince...

...How the bargain was struck—between Jackie’s need for “real money” and Joe Kennedy’s need for a Catholic woman with “brains, beauty, and breeding” to validate his son’s quest for executive office—is chess on a very high level, on the order of The Golden Bowl...

...Or both...

...Though not an artist himself,” Jackie had written, “he possessed what is rarer than artistic genius . . . the sensitivity to take the best of each man and incorporate it into a masterpiece all the more precious because it lives only in the minds of those who have seen it, and disintegrates as soon as it is gone...

...we discussed the message her clothes would send— simple, youthful, but magisterial elegance—and how she would reinforce the message of her husband’s administration through her appearance...

...She was often depressed, resentful, driven to spending sprees and (these books say) retaliatory infidelities...

...Public leaders like Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt failed dramatically as spouses and parents and led complex, unhappy private lives...

...There is the playboy, a distant and indifferent husband...

...and the assimilated, more refined son who attains them, the Irish Catholic who wins our affection by seeming so much like a WASP...

...Jackie was Camelot...

...Matthews has a Nixon aide thinking, as he watches a film of the couple during the campaign...

...She saw things as metaphor, language, as symbols of a state of mind...

...With her there, the progress of the Kennedys from fame and money to aristocracy was accomplished in one leap...

...Yet they were also a unit, who shared much and worshipped their children...

...the regal first lady...

...Joe Kennedy had chosen well, indeed...

...In fact, the Nixons were enraged at the depiction of John Kennedy as a model husband, and Kennedy himself feared rumors of his “girling” might explode...

...In November 1960, the bargain begun in May 1951 paid off for all parties...

...Did Kennedy, consciously or otherwise, allot to himself the right to indulgence to make up for bad health and bad luck...

...He was so disciplined,” a friend said of him...

...Thus we meet the crass millionaire from an immigrant background, hungry for power and social acceptance...

...Each had a literary imagination, a romantic streak, a deep sense of history...

...And a wish to move in it: a sensibility that reached, and thrilled, the public...

...In 1956, after she had gallantly supported him at the Chicago convention, he left her with her mother at Newport, to await their first child, and went off on yet another European orgy...

...She was a woman for whom caring about the way things looked mattered almost as a moral imperative...

...The marriage survived...

...She began to realize her own political value, and that boosted her confidence...

...Cleverly positioning herself outside of politics— as a symbol of the nation’s cultural heritage—she was what so many partisan women fail to become, a potent asset, changing more than any other first lady the way her husband’s administration was perceived...

...Something new had entered the chemical balance: As Joe Kennedy may have sensed when he insisted that his son’s wife have “breeding,” she could change the way that Jack was seen...

...crass new money and tired old money...

...As Klein notes, they helped each other’s hidden sides surface: her ambition and toughness (her letters to Nixon, quoted by Christopher Matthews in Kennedy and Nixon, show a remarkable grasp of the political temperament), his introspection and reverie...

...It is a truth universally acknowledged,” Jane Austen tells us, “that a single man, in possession of a fortune, must be in want of a wife...

...Boston faded, and Harvard and England seemed central...

...How do you run against that...

...filial struggles, sibling love, and sibling rivalry...

...It was after this that Jackie asserted her leverage, knowing a separation or scandal would destroy his ambitions...

...Are two marriages, one of them good, better or worse than a single, long-sustained union marred by adultery...

...John Kennedy did not want a wife (and afterward seldom behaved as if he thought he had one), but he wanted power and children, and a wife was a means, not an end...

...You have an opportunity here,’ I told her, ‘for an American Versailles.’” Inevitably, the entertainments she staged for state occasions presaged the ornate decors of Masterpiece-Theater and Merchant-and-Ivory versions of the great social novels...

...the story is about to undergo a change in tone...

...As Klein writes, “Jackie made all the decisions for what would become the greatest pageant in American history...

...She did not leave, or want to...

...Jackie, who wanted a big life and real money, got more of both than she could have imagined...

...the billionaire’s trophy wife, dripping with rubies...

...The Cold War centrism of John Kennedy’s presidency may bore today’s think tanks, but in the complications of his life, any student of the great social novels of the 19th and early 20th centuries finds familiar ground: ambition and power and business and money...

...He did...

...To some extent, it succeeded, along with the trips, to Canada and France, that made her an international sensation...

...Not only was she strong enough to stand up to murder, but her imagination was keen enough, under stress, to pick exactly the right set of visual symbols to fix her husband forever in the mind of the country as the hero he wanted to be...

...gifted people not quite fatally flawed by interesting sins such as lust and avarice— Jack and Joe, Jack and Young Joe, Jack and Jackie, Jack and Nixon...

...If a couple appears in public and is charming, are they saying the marriage is perfect...

...Was the real FDR the duplicitous husband or the gallant survivor of polio...

...But the dissolute playboy, the disciplined pol, the student of history, were all the same person, as were the sybarite spendthrift, the stoic Madonna, the careful and devoted supermom...

...Of the complex strata of private identity, which ones are relevant to the public man...

...Jackie helped lay the intellectual groundwork for a lot of the ideas in that presidential race...

...And therein lies the trouble, and the tale...

...And the way things sounded: The prize essayist, the future editor, knew exactly what she wanted Teddy White to say...

...Yet on some levels, the couple had bonded...

...Klein’s description of the young Jackie Bouvier—“ a voracious reader, who expressed herself wonderfully, and had a literary wit”—also applied to Jack Kennedy...

...If it isn’t, should they be outed, exposed...

...On the honeymoon, he was bored within days, suggesting Jackie fly home while he visited old friends...

...There is one more attempt at a Jamesian bargain: the Onassis marriage, a putative barter of fame for BIG money, facilitated by Jackie’s attraction to roguish and dangerous men...

...and the working editor and mother in New York...

...And the greatest test was yet to come...

...Within the frame of material interests, they were still a couple, who meshed well, understood each other, shared much...

...Or an indifferent father and a good husband—to his second wife...

...In the essay, she had honored Charles Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde—sinners, like Jack, yet idealists, who believed in “something higher” than themselves and their appetites...

...Immediately after the engagement, he went off with friends on what can only be described as a whoring vacation...

...As Klein writes, “During this period, when many of their friends thought that their marriage had sunk to the low point, Jack and Jackie spent many nights at home going through books,” combing them for campaign purposes, her more exotic artistic sensibilities complementing his historical interests...

...another years later, when the marriage has been stretched to its limits by Jack’s infidelities, when Joe and Jackie meet at a posh New York restaurant to negotiate the conditions under which the Kennedy marriage will continue...

...John Kennedy got to live inside history, an American hero and martyr...