Vanity Fair The Kennedys

IVORY POWER With smiles blazing, John F. Kennedy, Joseph P. Kennedy, and Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. arrived in London, 1938. Joe senior, who had likely made sure photographers would be on hand, was the new U.S. ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. Joe junior was serving as his secretary. Jack was a junior at Harvard. From the December 2004 issue. From the December 2004 issue. Several months after his inauguration, in 1961, Jack Kennedy was relaxing at the family compound in Hyannis Port with his friend and distant in-law, Gore Vidal. “You know,” Jack said, “I’m get ting awfully tired of reading how my father bought me the election. I think of all the things I did—I was the one out there.” “Well,” Vidal responded, “he certainly made a…

On Wednesday morning, January 18, 1961, the restless, chestnut-haired 43-year-old man who was preparing, as he would soon put it, to defend freedom in its hour of maximum danger as the next president of the United States was feeling fat. From his family’s duplex penthouse at the Carlyle Hotel, in Manhattan, John Fitzgerald Kennedy had a telephone conference with his internist, who suggested that any extra pounds were the result of trading the frantic pace and infrequent meals of a presidential campaign for the more relaxing transition, and would soon burn away. Reassured, Kennedy ordered his usual high-cholesterol breakfast of broiled bacon, softboiled eggs, orange juice, buttered toast with marmalade, and coffee with cream and sugar. Later that day, he reviewed a selection of silk top hats and underwent a…

On November 29, 1963, a week after the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy in Dallas, his widow, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, summoned presidential chronicler Theodore H. White to the Kennedy-family compound in Hyannis Port, on Cape Cod in Massachusetts. She wanted White to write an essay about her husband for Life magazine. Jackie Kennedy spoke for four hours, with a “calm voice” and “total recall.” It was a rambling monologue about the assassination, her late husband’s love of history, dating from his sickly childhood, and her views on how he should be remembered. Well versed in the classics, she said she felt “ashamed” that she was unable to come up with a lofty historical metaphor for the Kennedy presidency. Instead, she told White, her “obsession” was a song from the…

Almost immediately following the inauguration of John F. Kennedy, Jacqueline Kennedy announced her plans to make the White House a “showcase for great American art and artists.” As White House adviser Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. astutely observed, Jackie’s response to life was aesthetic rather than intellectual or moralistic; in 1951, during her senior year at college, she had won Vogue magazine’s Prix de Paris, a writing contest that awarded the winner an internship at the popular fashion magazine and six months in Par-r is. In her essay Jackie said that the three men in history she would most like to have known were French poet Charles Baudelaire, Irish playwright Oscar Wilde, and Russian ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev. If she could be the overall art director of the 20th century, she…

A Prize–winning historian, presidential confidant, and White House aide, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. was the ultimate Kennedy insider, from campaign to graveside. He left extensive journals when he died, in February 2007, to add to his many published works, including A Thousand Days and The Imperial Presidency. July 19, 1959. Hyannis Port. Jackie Kennedy was the only other person present; and we all drank and talked from about 8 to 12:30… [Jackie] was lovely but seemed excessively flighty on politics, asking with wide-eyed naïveté questions like: “Jack, why don’t you just tell them that you won’t go into any of those old primaries?” Jack was in a benign frame of mind and did not blink; but clearly such remarks could, in another context, be irritating. This is all the more…

Within months of J.F.K.’s death, the president’s widow asked William Manchester to write the authorized account of the assassination. He felt he couldn’t refuse her. Two years later, nearly broken by the task, Manchester found himself fighting a bitter, headline-making battle with Jackie and Bobby Kennedy over the finished book. SAM KASHNER chronicles the toll Manchester’s 1967 best-seller, The Death of a President, exacted—physically, emotionally, and financially—before it all but disappeared It has never gone away, the nightmare of November 22, 1963. Each time one revisits the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 35th president of the United States, “one hopes for once the story will be different—the car swerves, the bullets miss, and the splendid progress continues. But each time, like a recurrent nightmare, the handsome head is shattered,” as…