The stories you want. The opinions that matter.
No, thanks
Tag: jackie kennedy
Rose Garden, The White House

Murder In The Rose Garden (Melania Did It)

The laziest first lady in American history paved over parts of the White House Rose Garden for her husband's four addresses to the Republican National Convention.

So, why should we care in a summer of sorrow and woe, wildfires and hurricanes, a reckoning on race and the pandemic? What are crab apple trees to thee and me?

Ruining the Rose Garden design brought destruction of the tulip bulbs that dance in bloom, leading a lively parade of other flowers and shrubs. Gone, just like that. News of the "renovation" landed like a cross to my spirits, a bell of warning that there's more to come from President Donald Trump and Melania Trump. Nothing's sacred to these people.

Gardeners do not renovate, by the way. That's for houses, buildings, man-made places. I have it from the best of historians that Melania Trump is the laziest first lady ever, so perhaps the president plotted the murder and used her as a shield from critics.

Still, the bloody deed is done. Melania Trump is now implicated in her husband's radical disrespect for the dialogue between ages and presidents that goes on in the White House. There's only one president he shows any feeling for: fierce Southern slaveholder, lawyer and warrior general Andrew Jackson, who marched Native American tribes away from their land.

President John F. Kennedy envisioned the Rose Garden as a sublime gathering place and asked a family friend to design the colonnade space and bright colors for each season. He loved the seamless connection to the Oval Office, walking outside to beauty back in 1962. Every time he saw Rachel Lambert "Bunny" Mellon, he asked her how plans for the garden were coming along. He read Thomas Jefferson's garden writings and wished to plant Virginia magnolia trees in an unbroken pattern of history.

It's often thought Jacqueline Kennedy designed the Rose Garden, but it was President Kennedy's signature gift to the White House. Jacqueline Kennedy concentrated on art, furnishings and historic preservation. She once gave a dinner to celebrate Renaissance music and poetry.

Those days are over. The garden, until five minutes ago, exuded a cheery, unfussy elegance that sang of American optimism and belief in the future. Every garden is a world and a vote for the future.

This captures the heart of the loss: a shared concern about the 2020 election and what the future holds.

I was too young to remember the enchanting Kennedy era, of which the garden was a living remnant. The bloom was never off Camelot's rose. Jack Kennedy's sojourn on earth was short. He broke our hearts in a swift snap when he died by murder in Dallas.

Trump has broken our hearts in a different way — slowly, one day at a time, sowing seeds of discord and fury for his summer garden of thorns. And perhaps he has us where he wants us — demoralized, fragile, indoors, boarded up.

We're all missing people or things we love, little and large, under stress and siege since March. Like the post office, reader, our democratic service for all spelled out in the Constitution. The rage Trump rains and sleets on this precious institution is unheralded, trying to shake American faith in voting by mail before the election.

There are two 2020 anniversaries that we marked: Ludwig von Beethoven's 250th birthday, to be celebrated by orchestras worldwide, from Berlin to Washington. I had my tickets ready, choosing among my favorite symphonies. Don't tell me virtual playing is just as good. There's nothing like a full concert hall.

Then there's women's suffrage, winning the vote in August 1920. The centennial got lost in the crush, lucky for Trump. He wouldn't like knowing a young leader, Alice Paul, prevailed over President Woodrow Wilson.

My home state of California, once a promised land, is burning. New Orleans, which holds sweet memories, may be lashed by hurricanes. Somehow, it's all of a piece.

Time hangs heavy on our hands. Biking around town frees my soul, but I miss swimming's summer kiss on my skin. Crickets and cicadas sing me to sleep, a sound that gets back to the gardens we've lost.

Jamie Stiehm can be reached at JamieStiehm.com. To read her weekly column and find out more about Creators Syndicate columnists and cartoonists, please visit creators.com.

Hillary Was No ‘Enabler,’ Nor Were Eleanor and Jackie

Hillary Was No ‘Enabler,’ Nor Were Eleanor and Jackie

Having lost badly to Hillary Clinton in their first debate, Donald Trump has turned to a subject on which he can claim expertise: screwing around.

Not his own, in this case, but Bill Clinton’s sexual indiscretions, which he is attempting to hang around Hillary’s neck. The logistical challenge is obvious: Most of the world regards the betrayed wife not as the cheater but as the cheated upon.

Trump’s workaround is to portray Hillary as an “enabler” who knew all about Bill’s various affairs. He contends that contrary to the feminist code, she attacked the women Bill consorted with.

Let’s dispose of the first rap and greatly reduce the charges on the second. Hillary did not enable her husband’s extramarital activities — any more than Eleanor Roosevelt enabled Franklin’s or Jacqueline Kennedy enabled John’s.

None of these first ladies condoned her husband’s wanderings. They endured them. And their marriages went on.

In the older moral tradition, adultery was a matter for adults to work out among themselves. But divorce hurt children. Thus, divorce also wrecked political careers.

In 1963, former Sen. Prescott Bush (George W.’s grandfather) refused to back the presidential candidacy of his friend New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller over divorce. “Have we come to the point where a governor can desert his wife and children?” Bush fulminated.

A married man who paraded publicly with his mistress, as Trump has done, inhabited an entirely lower category of scoundrel than the conventional sneak. Bill Clinton, for all his weaknesses, never intended his frolics to become public.

In a perfect world, Hillary would have withheld criticism of Bill’s trysting mates. But there are mitigating circumstances. A woman is entitled to dislike her husband’s paramours. And her reference to Gennifer Flowers as a “failed cabaret singer” came at a time when she genuinely did not believe the Flowers story.

In the case of Bill’s fling with Monica Lewinsky, more than a political career was at stake. The presidency was.

Hillary’s calling Lewinsky a “narcissistic looney tune” may have been overdoing it, but the first lady thought she was saying it in confidence to a friend.

It needs repeating that Bill Clinton’s partners were all consenting adults. Unsubstantiated claims that Clinton physically forced himself on women — or that Trump did the same — can be dismissed.

The real outrage of the Lewinsky frenzy was its paralyzing effect on Washington. Governance froze for months as Clinton’s tormentors danced around the maypole with Monica’s blue dress.

The American public eventually tired of the inquisition and turned on the inquisitors. Hillary’s popularity soared. In the next midterm election, Democrats actually gained seats in the House. At the end, Bill Clinton left office with a higher approval rating than did Ronald Reagan.

For all of Bill’s bad behavior, the Clintons appear to be a solidly married couple joined in political passion. Like Eleanor and Jackie before her, Hillary has been no partner in crime — and she’s not getting a divorce.

Follow Froma Harrop on Twitter @FromaHarrop. She can be reached at fharrop@gmail.com. To find out more about Froma Harrop and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators webpage at www.creators.com.

I Like The Real Jackie

Finally, we can hear — in her own voice, in her own words — what it was like to be Jackie Kennedy in the wake of unspeakable grief.

What a bold and generous gift to the American people.

What an unsettling development for those who want to cling to an earlier, easier version of one of America’s most memorable first ladies.

Four months after her husband’s violent death, Jacqueline Kennedy sat down with historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. to record more than eight hours of interviews about her life with John F. Kennedy.

The recordings were sealed in a vault for nearly 50 years.

This month, her daughter, Caroline Kennedy, released the unedited conversations, on CDs and in book form, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of her father’s presidency.

Until now, the persistent narrative about first lady Jackie Kennedy has cast her as a whispery waft of eye candy, with impeccable taste in fashion and design and a sideshow talent for foreign languages.

Now, with the release of these recordings, some want to recast her as a shrew.

We have such demanding expectations of the women we will never be.

The New York Times got an early grab at the recordings before the official release last Wednesday. That single story, published last Monday, included snippets of her conversation. This was enough to trigger apoplexy.

Hours of reflection by a 34-year-old widow have been reduced to sound bites of bad behavior. Many of the early verdicts, rendered without making the effort to listen to the tapes or read the transcripts, are scornful.

Repeatedly, Jackie is criticized for finding no fault with her husband, whose assassination she witnessed only four months earlier. Numerous stories recount her sniping at Martin Luther King Jr., delivered in the wake of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s questionable claims to her and Bobby Kennedy that the civil rights activist spoke disdainfully about JFK’s funeral.

Other frequent mentions: Jackie called Indira Gandhi “a bitter prune” and Charles de Gaulle an “egomaniac.” She declared women unfit for politics, too.

Echoing many who rushed to uninformed judgment, the New Yorker‘s Amy Davidson wrote, “So far in these tapes, Jackie doesn’t sound all that nice.”

It is a long-held tradition in American journalism to measure political wives by their usefulness to their husbands’ ambitions. We also tend to depict politicians as either heroes or charlatans, but versions of both often reside in the same human being. In politics, even the most principled philosopher must perform at the circus. The wife is a smiling sidekick.

The supposed shock over Jackie’s less-than-Stepford responses to Schlesinger’s often probing questions reflects a stubborn commitment to the stereotype. As a columnist married to a U.S. senator, I am disappointed, but not terribly surprised, that in 2011 we still struggle so with the notion that a politician’s wife might have opinions of her own, and that not all of them are gracious.

I am also grateful to Jackie Kennedy, and her daughter, for this attempt to whittle away at one of the most enduring icons of impossible standards. What a relief to discover that she was as human as the rest of us.

Jackie Kennedy was smart and in love with her husband, despite his deep flaws. She was also capable of making withering observations about the people trying to hold sway in his life. She sounds like many bright women I know who are married to powerful men. I laughed out loud when she described how some cabinet members and senators never stop talking about themselves.

She is far more nuanced than the quick jabs going viral on the Internet. One of her opinions — that women are not suited for politics — has been quoted out of context. Schlesinger asked about her husband’s efforts to avoid permanent grudges, quoting the adage that, in politics, “there are no permanent friendships or alliances, there are only permanent interests.”

Jackie’s full response, as transcribed in the book:

“Yeah, but he never got — I mean, I’d get terribly emotional about anyone, whether it was a politician or a newspaper person who would be unfair, but he always treated it so objectively, as if they were people on a chess board — which is right. I mean, how could you if you — if he’d gotten so mad at all these people, then you may need to work with them again later. So, it’s the only way to be effective — which is one reason I think women should never be in politics. We’re just not suited to it.”

Surely, we disagree today with her conclusions, but her broader point — that women tend to take personally the attacks on those we love — still resonates.

Caroline Kennedy knew that her mother’s opinions would spark furious debate.

As she wrote in her introduction to the book, “(I)f my mother had reviewed the transcripts, I have no doubt she would have made revisions. … It isn’t surprising that there are some statements she would later have considered too personal, and others too harsh. … (H)er views evolved over time.”

Still, Caroline trusted the American public, if not the pundits, to appreciate this richer portrait of her mother.

“As her child, it has sometimes been hard for me to reconcile that most people can identify my mother instantly, but they really don’t know her at all. … (T)hey don’t always appreciate her intellectual curiosity, her sense of the ridiculous, her sense of adventure, or her unerring sense of what was right.”

Sounds like women living anonymously all around the world.

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and essayist for Parade magazine.

COPYRIGHT 2011 CREATORS.COM

Jackie Kennedy As Betty Draper

Betty Draper from AMC’s “Mad Men” is a grown child, hyper-feminine and superficial, vindictive and petty. She bears a striking resemblance to the portrait that emerges of First Lady Jackie Kennedy in audio interviews with historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., recorded just months after her husband John’s assassination in 1963 and released for the first time this week.

Recently widowed and still grieving, she shares some of her most intimate moments in the White House and dishes on senior officials, American political figures, and foreign leaders. Perhaps most noteworthy is the defensive — or perhaps just ignorant — posture she takes toward her husband and his likely infidelity.

At just 34, and in what her daughter, Caroline Kennedy, describes in a foreword to the book as “the extreme stages of grief,” Mrs. Kennedy displays a cool self-possession and a sharp, somewhat unforgiving eye. In her distinctive breathy cadences, an intimate tone and the impeccable diction of women of her era and class, she delivers tart commentary on former presidents, heads of state, her husband’s aides, powerful women, women reporters, even her mother-in-law.

Charles DeGaulle, the French president, is “that egomaniac.” The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is “a phony” whom electronic eavesdropping has found arranging encounters with women. Indira Gandhi, the future prime minister of India, is “a real prune — bitter, kind of pushy, horrible woman.”

The White House social secretary, Letitia Baldrige, Mrs. Kennedy tells Mr. Schlesinger, loved to pick up the phone and say things like “Send all the White House china on the plane to Costa Rica” or tell them they had to fly string beans in to a state dinner. She quotes Mr. Kennedy saying of Lyndon B. Johnson, his vice president, “Oh, God, can you ever imagine what would happen to the country if Lyndon was president?” And Mr. Kennedy on Franklin D. Roosevelt: “Charlatan is an unfair word,” but “he did an awful lot for effect.”

She suggests that “violently liberal women in politics” preferred Adlai Stevenson, the former Democratic presidential nominee, to Mr. Kennedy because they “were scared of sex.” Of Madame Nhu, the sister-in-law of the president of South Vietnam, and Clare Boothe Luce, a former member of Congress, she tells Mr. Schlesinger, in a stage whisper, “I wouldn’t be surprised if they were lesbians.”

Any shortcomings on the part of her husband are not mentioned. She speaks of his loyalty, sensitivity, courage — traits consistent with the Camelot template she had been the first to invoke. She presents herself as adoring, eager for his approval and deeply moved by the man. There is no talk of his extramarital affairs or secret struggle with Addison’s disease, though she does speak in detail about his back pain and the 1954 back surgery that almost killed him.

Besides betraying her elite and sheltered upbringing, Kennedy’s words display an almost-childish fixation on the trivial and mundane; she appears divorced from reality, like someone who compartmentalizes and ignores the unpleasant. That she would argue all of Martin Luther King’s civil rights and social justice work should be discredited by his alleged affairs is really quite silly when her own husband’s sexual exploits during his time in the White House are the stuff of legend.

“My feeling is that people in a kind of informal situation say things without completely thinking them through. My guess is some of the thoughts, in retrospect, she might have taken them back or reconsidered them or not gone down that particular route,” said Stephen Schlesinger, son of the legendary historian.

“In his journals there’s a lot of things people say that look silly in retrospect. I’m willing to give her a pass on most of the stuff she said.”