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. Meanwhile Jackie created a grand setting for her Sun King, calling on her rich friends to finance the restoration of the house from the sad ‘military post’ ambience left by the Eisenhowers to a splendid series of historical interiors from the late 18th century to the early 20th. Jackie’s purpose was not only to provide a showcase for the Kennedy presidency but also to amuse the restless, easily bored president. The term ‘jet-setters’ was coined to describe the people who crossed the Atlantic to attend the glittering Kennedy soirées: to dance the Twist and drink far too much champagne. There was an atmosphere of excitement about the ‘New Frontier’, ‘the best and the brightest’ gathered in the service of the youthful president. Bedell Smith has conscientiously interviewed every Camelot survivor and combed the archives for their memoirs and oral histories to convey the atmosphere of the court.
Kennedy fostered an almost feudal sense of loyalty among his top aides, ‘a repressed but powerful affection that was unspoken, amusing, dry and understated’. When he died, he left a landscape littered with ‘widows’, both male and female. The brightness of the opening of his presidency descended into the gloom of his last year — civil rights, Vietnam, the personal tragedy of the death of his last son, Patrick Bouvier. Bedell Smith goes just deeply enough into the political crises of those years, from the disaster of the Bay of Pigs through the triumph of the Cuban missile crisis and the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. As Shakespeare might have said, he died just in time for his own reputation: the ‘snake’ of Vietnamese involvement might well have brought him down, as it did Lyndon Johnson. He did not control Congress and was deeply hated by the conservative Southern Democrats: Nelson Rockefeller might well have beaten him in 1964. Even had he won, ill-health might have defeated him in the end.
There is unlikely to be a better account of the Kennedy court than this, although it verges on the hagiographical. Jackie, heroically suffering the pain that her husband’s public infidelity (often with her friends) caused her, could be bitter, spiteful, even vengeful — and who could blame her? Here, however, she is Saint Jackie. Bedell Smith has chosen to burnish the image; she writes extremely well and has produced the best book on the subject for years. Too much mud has been thrown at the Kennedy White House and it is time the balance was adjusted.
Sarah Bradford is the author of America’s Queen: The Life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (Penguin).
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