The house that Jack and Jackie built

Within just a week of the tragic assassination in Dallas, the widowed Jackie Kennedy summoned the presidential chronicler Theodore H. White to a midnight conference at the family compound on the stormy Cape Cod shore. For four hours her whispery voice mesmerised him as she set out her vision of the Kennedy White House as Camelot, and, against his better judgment, White went along with it. Within years, as Jackie’s own image as Camelot’s widowed queen was defaced by her ‘gold-digging marriage’ to Onassis, and more and more scandal from the Kennedy years bubbled to the surface, the image of Camelot became a target for Kennedy critics, notably Seymour Hersh in The Dark Side of Camelot.

As always, the revisionists went too far; their muckraking obscured the real achievements of Jack and Jackie in making the White House the glamorous focus of the international social and political world. Sally Bedell Smith is an accomplished, supremely well-connected Beltway biographer and she has used her reputation and her connections to redress the balance. A few more women have been unearthed to increase Jack’s incredible tally and there are some new revelations about the couple’s sex life, but the real focus of the book is the Kennedy court with Jack as king and Jackie as queen of her self-created Versailles on the Potomac. As the arbiter elegantiarum, Diana Vreeland, put it, ‘Before the Kennedys, “good taste” was never the point of modern America at all.’

And the Kennedys, or rather Jack and Jackie, were graceful: intelligent, witty, soigné, and, above all, cool. Like a mediaeval king Jack maintained a court to amuse him and was not above playing one off against the other. Extremely well read, perceptive and self-contained, he had some of the best brains in the United States vying for his favour.