William Safire on a New Book About JFK & Jackie

William Safire, in the NYT (April 21, 2004):

A stunning new history coming in May about the relationship between Jacqueline and John F. Kennedy came floating into my office. I immediately flipped though "Grace and Power: The Private World of the Kennedy White House" by Sally Bedell Smith to see if it included "the lunch" of March 22, 1962.

On that afternoon, F.B.I. Director J. Edgar Hoover met privately with President Kennedy to disclose what his wiretaps had revealed: a woman named Judith Campbell had been heard frequently calling the president's secretary to arrange trysts with J.F.K.

In that era, a president's private life was his own business. The Secret Service facilitated arrangements, the press winked, and Hoover's discretion ensured that he would never be fired. But this case was different.

"The reason for Hoover's disclosure," Ms. Smith writes, "was the F.B.I.'s evidence that Campbell was also having affairs with Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana and his associate Johnny Roselli, who had been involved in the C.I.A.'s assassination attempts against Fidel Castro. That afternoon, Kennedy called Campbell for the last time and broke off the relationship."

The secret of the 70 calls held for 13 years. Then a Senate committee investigating F.B.I. and C.I.A. predations during the Nixon years gingerly alluded in a footnote to calls from a "president's friend." Scripps Howard broke the story; I observed in print "that must have been some lunch"; The Times editors decided the Mafia connection was news, and the wall of silence around "the dark side of Camelot" came tumbling down.

With taste and sensitivity, biographer Smith covers this affair and other, less sinister, liaisons with teenage interns and highborn artists. After 40 years, it seems everybody became willing to share intimate memories of a beloved, historic figure....

At the core of "Grace and Power" is the complex, far-from-storybook relationship of the husband and wife. Was the perceptive Jackie unaware of his hunger for diversion, serious or sporting, whenever they were apart?

Jacqueline Kennedy is quoted by Smith as saying she did know, but the source the author scrupulously gives is a conversation Adlai Stevenson recounts in the papers of his longtime friend Marietta Tree. That's secondhand, and I wouldn't use a direct quotation.

In this unveiling of the Kennedys' private world, we are left with the impression that this elegant and strong-minded first lady chose not to let on that she knew — a painful decision, at once selfless and self-serving, made before and since.