First Ladies by Margaret Truman Read Free Book Online Page A

her passion for artistic perfection. The National Geographic editors, who were to produce the White House guide, wanted to include a picture of John Jr.’s second-floor bedroom. Jackie refused, and the picture was removed from the layout.
    The climax of Jackie’s efforts was her 1962 Valentine’s Day television tour of the completed public rooms, which attracted forty-eightmillion viewers and catapulted 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue into Washington’s number-one tourist attraction. It also zoomed Jackie herself into supercelebrity Historically speaking, she was not a new kind of First Lady, although the media never stopped babbling such clichés. There had been younger—and even prettier—First Ladies. But the public memory is not the same as historical memory. For people used to Eleanor Roosevelt, Bess Truman, and Mamie Eisenhower, Jackie was new in capital letters.
    While she was refurbishing the White House, Jackie launched a crusade to make the place a showcase for the best in American culture. She invited the cream of American writers, dancers, actors, musicians to entertain and be entertained. Pablo Casals, the world’s greatest cellist and number-one prima donna, was charmed into performing. (It was not, as we shall see, his first visit to the White House.) Jerome Robbins contributed a ballet. Frederic March read excerpts from Ernest Hemingway. Again, the press, with no historical memory worth mentioning, marveled, as if no First Lady had ever done anything like this before.
    They were really comparing Jackie’s taste with her immediate predecessors’. It was, of course, much more sophisticated. Jackie had been raised to admire and enjoy the best in art and culture, and she wanted more Americans to share her pleasure. She wanted to change the prevailing notion that we were a nation of corporate clunkheads who seldom read anything more challenging than a stock market ticker or hung anything on our walls besides family pictures. If she had planned a way to rocket herself into hyperpopularity, she could not have chosen better tactics. Granted, her main appeal was to the American intelligentsia. But by 1962, a new generation of college-educated reporters and editors were part of that influential group, and they rushed to embrace Jackie and her crusade.
    Almost as important was Jackie’s success abroad, which seemed to ratify the American intelligentsia’s approval. People still talk about her sensational reception in Paris, where her beauty and chic and French heritage and command of the language reduced the entire nation, including their austere maximum leader, General Charles deGaulle, to the Gallic equivalent of Jell-O. (Creme caramel?) Less well known is the way she also enchanted the English, who have a tradition of looking down their noses at American Presidents and their wives. “Jacqueline Kennedy,” intoned the
Evening Standard
, “has given the American people… one thing they had always lacked—majesty.”
    Even more astonishing, though not as well remembered, was Jackie’s goodwill trip to India. One New Delhi newspaper called her “Durga, Goddess of Power.” Screaming millions lined the streets to cheer her. Plain folk walked ninety miles from their modest farms to the cities to get a glimpse of the “Queen of America.”
    This tidal wave of approval enabled Jackie to escape the consequences of some very undemocratic behavior behind the scenes—and occasionally out front. One of her best-kept secrets was how much money she spent on clothes and other private expenses—$121,000 in 1962 alone. She was totally reckless in the expenditures she ran up renovating the White House’s private quarters on the second floor. Working with Sister Parish, one of the nation’s highest-priced decorators, she ordered the same room repainted two or three times when the results did not suit her. There was nothing new about Jackie’s fondness for endless redecorating. She had done the same thing in every house