First Ladies by Margaret Truman Read Free Book Online Page B

she and Jack had owned. Once, returning from a trip to their pre-presidential Georgetown mansion, he had cried: “Dammit, Jackie, why can’t I come home and find the same house I left?”
    Clothes were a major item. Mary Gallagher, her secretary, said one of Jackie’s closets “was like… a little private shoe store.” Dresses and accessories filled the storage closets on the third floor of the White House. Jackie kept friends busy scouting Europe for the latest and best from Paris and Rome. She even sent Oleg Cassini to Paris to check out his competition. He bought her two dresses from Balenciaga, which she hated. “You picked the two worst,” she told him, which was quite possibly true.
    Soon Cassini—and Jackie—were prepared to try out some decidedly unstuffy outfits. The first was a one-shouldered evening gown that Jackie loved. She told Cassini the President would not tolerate it: “It’s too advanced.” Cassini tackled the problem by invading the OvalOffice and giving a lecture on the role of queens as style setters. JFK approved the dress—and later allowed Jackie to appear with both shoulders bare in a pink and white lace dress that she wore to the Elysée Palace when they visited Paris.
    Washington Post
Executive Editor Ben Bradlee once described the President as “boiling” over his wife’s dress and decorating bills. But JFK soon realized he was in a losing war. Jackie used wit as well as willpower to joust with her putative lord and master over who had control of the money. One day she sent a framed painting which consisted of daubs and streaks in a half dozen colors to the Oval Office with a note saying it was the best work of a brilliant new modern painter and she wanted to buy it for a mere nine thousand dollars. JFK exploded—until Jackie informed him it was one of John Jr.’s first experiments in finger painting.
    As readers may have gathered from her remark about fat little ladies, Jackie more than equaled Elizabeth Monroe in her dislike for the hoi polloi of American politics. She specialized in what she called the “PBO”—the polite brush-off—for numerous semiofficial visitors to the White House. “I can’t stand those silly women,” she said, refusing to attend a Congressional Wives Prayer Breakfast. As for the Girl Scouts, the March of Dimes, the American Heart Association—the myriad organizations a First Lady is expected to greet when they convene in or near Washington—Jackie had a standard, all-inclusive phrase: “Give them to Lady Bird.” Always agreeable and a hardworking political partner in a way Jackie could scarcely envision, Lady Bird Johnson, the vice president’s wife, filled in for the First Lady again and again and again.
    Jackie once boasted to Mary Gallagher that “they” had told her ninety-nine things she had to do as First Lady and she had not done one of them. She even boycotted a Distinguished Ladies Reception held in her honor. “Jackie! You can’t do this!” her husband roared. In the end the fuming President went in her place and made polite excuses for her. Jackie justified many of these withdrawals by saying she was too busy restoring the White House or wanted more time with her children. But a lot of her PBOs were rooted in a visceral repugnance foraverage Americans and their inclination to treat her as public property. She escaped with only a few public bruises thanks to the overwhelming success of her ability to project a personality that combined mystery and allure and sincerity while saying hardly a political word.
    Not that Jackie lacked good political instincts. In Vienna, when she lunched with Nina Khrushchev at the Palais Pallavicini while her husband, Nikita, the Soviet leader, was talking tough to a flabbergasted President at the Soviet embassy, a crowd gathered outside the palais and began chanting “Jac-kie! Jac-kie.” Gradually, Mrs. Khrushchev and her party grew visibly uncomfortable. No one was yelling Nina’s name. The