NOTES

1. In early 1963, Schlesinger had pleaded with the President to tape his own reminiscences after "major episodes." But with the exception of dictating an occasional memo for the record, Kennedy had declined. Schlesinger did not learn until 1982 that, in the summer of 1962, JFK had started discreetly taping hundreds of hours of his White House meetings and telephone calls. Even this collection covered only a small fraction of the conversations in which the President did business.

2. Decades later, after her death, the phenomenon persisted. Half a million people flocked to the Metropolitan Museum in New York to view the first public exhibition of Jacqueline's White House wardrobe.

3. JFK sardonically quipped that the rescue of Lafayette Park "may be the only monument we'll leave." In October 1963, expanding the case into a general principle, he declared while dedicating a library to Robert Frost at Amherst College that he looked forward to an America "which will preserve great old American houses and squares and parks of our national past."

4. For her family's flight to England for the Queen's ceremony in 1965, President Johnson offered a presidential aircraft. Remembering her Air Force One journey back from Dallas, Jacqueline wrote LBJ that she did not know "if I could steel myself to go on one of those planes again." Nevertheless, to honor her husband, she would accept: "But please do not let it be Air Force One. And please, let it be the 707 that looks least like Air Force One inside." In 1968, before boarding a presidential jet taking Robert Kennedy's casket from Los Angeles to New York, she demanded to be reassured that it was not the Air Force One of 1963. Though afflicted until the end of her life by such painful sensitivities, Jacqueline was blessed with loving and protective children. Once when John was reading a children's volume about his father, he called out, "Close your eyes, Mummy!" and tore out a photograph of the presidential car in Dallas before showing her the book.

1. ADLAI EWING STEVENSON (1900–1965) was governor of Illinois from 1949 to 1953 and Democratic presidential nominee in 1952 and 1956. At the 1956 Democratic convention in Chicago, Stevenson unexpectedly broke tradition by allowing the delegates to decide themselves who should be vice president. In the ensuing contest, JFK lost to Tennessee senator Estes Kefauver by a hairbreadth.

2. JOSEPH PATRICK KENNEDY (1888–1969) was a financier, first chairman of the Securities Exchange Commission, pre–World War II ambassador to the Court of St. James's under President Franklin Roosevelt, and the father of nine children, including the thirty-fifth president of the United States. Jacqueline's comment refers to the senior Kennedy's insistence to several reporters in the late 1950s that he had originally decided that his first son, Joseph, Jr. (1915–1944), should one day be president, and that when Joe, Jr., was killed in World War II, he turned to Jack.

3. ROBERT FRANCIS KENNEDY (1925–1968) was the fifth of Joseph and Rose Kennedy's nine children, a lawyer, Senate committee counsel, and manager of his brother's 1960 campaign, after which the President-elect made him attorney general. Despite his formal mandate to run the Justice Department, as his brother's presidency unfolded, RFK served as his chief adviser and enforcer on virtually all matters that faced him. In 1964, after his brother's death, RFK was elected senator from New York. Four years later, he was assassinated while running for the Democratic presidential nomination.

4. THEODORE SORENSEN (1928–2010) was the son of Nebraska's progressive Danish-American attorney general and his Russian Jewish wife. Ted Sorensen joined JFK's staff in 1953 and, as a speechwriter, helped give the senator his voice, with the staccato phrases, contrapuntal phrasing, soaring rhetoric, and historical references so widely praised. Later, at the White House, Sorensen served as special counsel to the President. In the spring of 1956, Kennedy had him draft and circulate a memorandum that showed how many votes a Catholic running mate might bring to a Democratic ticket in 1956. (Since the 1928 landslide defeat of Al Smith, the only Catholic candidate ever chosen for a major-party ticket, many feared that Catholicism was a liability for a nominee.) But Mrs. Kennedy is correct that her husband did not overtly press Stevenson to put him on the ticket. When the Illinoisan made his unusual, surprise decision to throw open the nomination, and Kennedy made his hasty effort to win the prize, Joseph Kennedy, vacationing in Cap d'Antibes, was furious that his son would try something so ill planned. JFK later said he was glad that he lost, because when Stevenson was defeated by Dwight Eisenhower that fall, some Democrats might have pointed at his Catholic running mate.

5. RICHARD MILHOUS NIXON (1913–1994) had served from 1947 to 1951 with JFK in the House, where they were cordial colleagues. Nixon was a senator from California when chosen by Dwight Eisenhower for the 1952 Republican ticket. On November 7, 1960, Vice President Nixon lost the presidency to Kennedy by the tiny margin of 112,827 popular votes. By "Nixon business," Schlesinger means conspicuous ambition.

6. EUNICE MARY KENNEDY SHRIVER (1921–2009) was JFK's sister. In 1956, she was living in Chicago with her husband, Sargent Shriver, president of the city's Board of Education. Before her marriage, she had shared a townhouse with her brother in the Georgetown section of Washington. Tireless, greatly religious, Mrs. Shriver did pathbreaking work to bring the intellectually disabled into the mainstream and was always prodding Jack to do more to help the cause. (Their sister Rosemary [1918–2005] had been institutionalized in Wisconsin.) JFK indeed established the first presidential commission on mental retardation. Joseph Kennedy once said that had Eunice been a man, she might have been president.

7. TORBERT MACDONALD (1917–1976) was a Kennedy chum, captain of the Harvard football team, and one of JFK's roommates at Harvard, who was married to Phyllis Brooks, a B-movie actress of the 1930s. He served as a Democratic member of Congress, representing Malden, Massachusetts, from 1954 until his death.

8. In 1956, the chairman of the state Democratic party was a loud conservative named William "Onions" Burke (1906-1975), an onion and tobacco farmer and barkeeper from Hatfield, Massachusetts. Burke was plotting to keep the state's delegation out of Adlai Stevenson's hands at the Chicago convention by having it vote for House Majority Leader John McCormack of Boston (1891-1980) as a "favorite son." McCormack was delighted, but JFK considered the move a slap in his face. As he later explained, "I had publicly endorsed Stevenson and I wanted to make good on my commitment." Kennedy wished to avoid putting an illiberal face on the Massachusetts party, and he feared looking powerless in his home state in case Stevenson considered him for vice president. In May 1956, he launched a major effort to depose Burke in favor of the former mayor of Somerville, Pat Lynch. This culminated in what Sorensen called "a stormy meeting—complete with booing, shoving, name-calling, contests for the gavel, and near fistfights." Since Kennedy's first election to the House in 1946, McCormack had viewed the young tiger as a threat to his dominance, and now his dread had come to pass. Burke was ousted, and JFK assumed effective control of his party in Massachusetts. The Kennedy-McCormack schism divided the state's Democrats until 1962, when Edward Kennedy defeated then Speaker McCormack's nephew Edward to win the party's nomination for JFK's old Senate seat.

9. PATRICK MCCARRAN (1876–1954) was a Democratic senator from Nevada from 1933 until his death in 1954. Scourge of potential Communists in government, admirer of the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, he commanded influence in his state far beyond that suggested by his job title.

10. NORMAN BILTZ (1902–1973) was known as the "Duke of Nevada." A Republican with many Democratic cronies, he was one of the most powerful tycoons and largest landowners in the state.

11. KENNETH O'DONNELL (1924–1977), son of the Holy Cross football coach, had been a Harvard roommate and football teammate of Robert Kennedy's and World War II bombardier in England. Since JFK's 1952 Senate campaign, he had been a key member of the circle of Kennedy aides known as the "Irish Mafia," serving as appointments secretary in the Kennedy White House. Lawrence O'Brien (1917–1990) of Springfield, Massachusetts, labored on JFK's campaigns for the Senate and presidency, then as the President's liaison to Congress.

12. JEAN ANN KENNEDY SMITH (1928– ) was JFK's youngest sister. Her husband, Stephen Edward Smith (1927–1990), shrewdly managed the Kennedy family finances and served all three Kennedy brothers as political strategist and behind-the-scenes troubleshooter.

13. Terms used by many in the Kennedy circle to refer to the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961 and the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.

14. This McLean, Virginia, estate was briefly occupied by Union Army General George McClellan during the Civil War. Jacqueline and her husband sold it to Robert and Ethel Kennedy in 1956 for $125,000, the same price they had paid for it. Especially compared to Georgetown, driving from the house to Capitol Hill took considerable time in traffic.

15. Referring to JFK's serious back surgery of 1954.

16. On August 23, 1956, Jacqueline gave birth to her first baby, a daughter, who was stillborn. Her husband wanted a large family, and her difficulty producing children, especially in contrast to Kennedy sisters and wives who did so with little apparent effort, led to frustrations that inevitably affected her morale, her marriage, and her ability to make frequent trips with her husband during the 1960 presidential campaign and as First Lady. This made the stillbirth of their first child, three years into their marriage, and the death of the premature Patrick Bouvier Kennedy two days after his birth on August 7, 1963, all the harder for both Kennedys to bear.

17. The Kennedys bought the three-story Federal redbrick edifice at 3307 N Street in Georgetown (of which she said, "My sweet little house leans slightly to one side") and stayed there until they left for the White House.

18. MAX FREEDMAN (1914–1980) was Washington correspondent for the Manchester (England) Guardian.

19. EDMUND G. ROSS (1826–1907), Republican senator from Kansas, won his place in Profiles in Courage by casting the decisive vote in 1868 against President Andrew Johnson's impeachment, which cost Ross reelection.

20. EPHRAIM SHORR (1896–1956) was a New York Hospital endocrinologist. Philip Wilson (1886–1969) was chief surgeon at the city's Hospital for Special Surgery, where the operation was performed, and a Harvard classmate of JFK's father.

21. JANET TRAVELL (1901–1997) later became JFK's White House physician, the first woman to serve in that role.

22. JFK's double spinal fusion operation at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York was actually on October 21, 1954, and included insertion of a metal plate to support the lumbar spine. That August, he had been warned by Lahey Clinic physicians that without such an operation, he might lose the use of his legs—and that for an Addison's disease patient like JFK, the surgery might produce an infection that could kill him. When the doctors operated, the latter occurred, leaving the senator in a coma. Last rites were administered. The following February, when doctors feared that the plate was infected and recommended another operation to remove it and perform a bone graft on his spinal column, Jackie wanted a second opinion, but doctors persuaded her not to seek it. The second surgery threw her husband into three months of agony and depression while recuperating in Palm Beach; she wished she had fought the doctors. After JFK's first operation, when he was on the brink of death, she had heard him calling for her but was barred from the room. She resolved never to let it happen again. Therefore on November 22, 1963, in Dallas, when a Parkland Hospital nurse tried to prevent her from entering the chamber where her husband was receiving desperate measures, Jackie told her, "I'm going to get in that room," and she did, which enabled her to be with him when he died.

23. The Carroll Arms Hotel was across the street from the Old (now Russell) Senate Office Building, in which JFK had his office.

24. RFK wrote the foreword to a memorial edition of his brother's book, which was published in 1964.

25. JFK played softball at a Georgetown park with Senate colleagues.

26. FRANCIS X. MORRISSEY (1911–2008) of Charlestown, Massachusetts, a dockworker's son who put himself through night law school, worked in JFK's campaigns for the House and Senate, and won appointment as a Boston municipal judge.

27. The Last Hurrah (1956) by the Boston novelist and newspaperman Edwin O'Connor re-created the old, dying Irish-American politics of his city and was made into a 1958 feature film starring Spencer Tracy.

28. JOHN FRANCIS FITZGERALD (1863–1950) was JFK's maternal grandfather and namesake, briefly a congressman from Massachusetts, then the first Irish-American mayor of Boston, known for his renditions of "Sweet Adeline." On the night in 1946 when JFK was elected to the House, "Honey Fitz" performed an Irish jig and forecast that his grandson would someday be President. Kennedy admired the upward mobility of his grandfather's political generation and enjoyed its folktales, but his own identity was so conspicuously different that some in his state called him "the first Irish Brahmin."

29. DAVID POWERS (1912–1998) was another Irish-American from Charlestown, jovial and unflappable, who started with JFK during that first House campaign and stayed with him for the rest of Kennedy's life, as friend, raconteur, traveling companion, and man-of-all-work.

30. The three-story Boston apartment houses known for housing newly arrived immigrants and factory workers and their descendants, especially Irish-American ones, such as Morrissey and Powers.

31. JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH (1908–2006), born in Ontario, was a Harvard economist and liberal activist, best known in the late 1950s for his book The Affluent Society. He supported JFK in 1960 and became his ambassador to India.

32. CHARLES BARTLETT (1921– ) was a Washington columnist for the Chattanooga Times, later nationally syndicated, who, with his wife Martha, introduced JFK to Jacqueline in 1951 and remained a close friend of the President's. A fellow Catholic, Bartlett had served in naval intelligence in the Pacific during World War II. Mrs. Bartlett was godmother to John Kennedy, Jr.

33. BENJAMIN BRADLEE (1921– ) was Washington bureau chief for Newsweek. He and his then wife Tony were Kennedy neighbors in Georgetown, became fast friends, and spent considerable leisure time with the Kennedys in the White House and other venues.

34. Two months after losing her prematurely born second son in August 1963, Jacqueline and her sister Lee Radziwill sailed with Franklin Roosevelt, Jr., and his wife on the Aegean as guests of the Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis.

35. OLEG CASSINI (1913–2006) was a New York couturier whom Jacqueline asked to design most of her White House wardrobe and who also participated in the Kennedys' social life. She wrote him that she wished to dress "as if Jack were President of FRANCE." She added, "Plan to stay for dinner every time you come to D.C. with sketches." "Steve" refers to Stephen Smith.

36. JOSEPH ALSOP (1910–1989) was a Washington political columnist, Anglophile, Roosevelt cousin, and esteemed Georgetown host. He backed JFK in 1960 as "a Stevenson with balls." Alsop and his new wife Susan Mary, a descendant of John Jay, entertained a diverse mixture of guests during the Kennedy years, and theirs was one of the few private homes at which the President and First Lady dined while in the White House, which began with Kennedy's impromptu visit to Alsop late on his inaugural night.

37. Meaning JFK's sign of the zodiac.

38. Referring to reports of President Johnson's volcanic temper.

39. STUART SYMINGTON (1901–1988) was an Eastern-born patrician businessman, the first secretary of the air force, under Truman, and senator from Missouri from 1953 to 1976. Symington and his wife Evelyn lived four doors down from the Kennedys on N Street. John Sherman Cooper (1901–1991) was a Republican senator from Kentucky and had been Symington's classmate at Yale. Before both couples were married, Jacqueline and Jack had more than once gone out with the courtly Cooper and his wife Lorraine. John and Lorraine Cooper were also guests at the first dinner the Kennedys had at home after their honeymoon. George Smathers (1913–2007) was a conservative Democratic senator from Florida from 1951 to 1969.

40. HUBERT HUMPHREY (1911–1978), liberal senator from Minnesota, ran against JFK in the Wisconsin and West Virginia primaries of 1960 but pulled out after losing both. During the latter effort, he publicly carped about his campaign's relative poverty in contrast to what he thought to be the free-spending ways of Kennedy's side. After his withdrawal, Humphrey and JFK resumed their old friendliness.

41. Mr. and Mrs. Blair Childs. The address was actually 3321 Dent Place.

42. MIKE MANSFIELD (1903–2001) became Democratic senator from Montana in 1953, and served as majority leader from 1961 until 1977. The quiet, upright Mansfield had played softball with JFK and other senators in the early 1950s. One reason why Kennedy was glad to have Lyndon Johnson as vice president was that his Senate leader would not be the brash Texan but the loyal Mansfield. When Mansfield retired from the Senate, he said that of the presidents he had known, Kennedy was "the best of the lot." Honoring Mansfield's expertise on Asia, two presidents later made him ambassador to Japan.

43. EUGENE MCCARTHY (1916–2005) was senator from Minnesota from 1959 to 1971. He resented JFK, whom he considered his intellectual inferior, and, at the 1960 convention, gave an impassioned nominating speech for Stevenson. Kennedy suspected that McCarthy's real purpose was to stop his bandwagon so that Lyndon Johnson could win the prize.

44. LYNDON BAINES JOHNSON (1908–1973) served as congressman, senator from Texas, and Senate majority leader before Kennedy placed him on his ticket in Los Angeles in 1960. On November 22, 1963, after President Kennedy's assassination, Johnson became the thirty-sixth president of the United States.

45. Actually seventeen.

46. JAMES "SCOTTY" RESTON (1909–1995) was a New York Times Washington columnist who did much to shape East Coast political opinion.

47. DEAN ACHESON (1893–1971) was Harry Truman's secretary of state, a towering figure in that era and a skeptic about JFK, sharing Truman's view that he was too callow and inexperienced to be president.

48. An exclusive Newport club, frequented by Jacqueline's mother and stepfather, which now represented to her a cloistered social world she had outgrown.

49. Hoping to be drafted for president at the 1960 convention, Stevenson had refused to say he would decline the nomination, if offered.

50. In the spring of 1964, Jackie was reading and much influenced by Edith Hamilton's popular The Greek Way. The following spring, after examining the early version of Schlesinger's A Thousand Days, she wrote him in longhand, "You remember in my oral history—I disputed your remark that Adlai was a Greek + JFK a Roman. . . . Leaving Adlai out of it . . . I know what he brought to American politics in 1952—but he certainly showed many weaknesses + sad deficiencies of character later—you can make him sound as wonderful as you want—but just don't say that JFK was Roman. . . . Lyndon is really a Roman—a classic Emperor—maybe [Michigan Republican Governor George] Romney is one too. . . . Can't you make him Greek + Adlai Egyptian—or leave Adlai out + just make him Greek." After finishing her letter to Schlesinger, Mrs. Kennedy tore it in half and wrote him a milder one on the same theme.

51. During those years, Stevenson was able to build a decent rapport with the First Lady, which he never managed with the President, whom he resented for denying him what he considered his political birthright, starting with the presidency and the State Department. But by now, Jacqueline has adopted her husband's disdain for Stevenson.

52. MICHAEL FORRESTAL (1928–1989) was a family friend; son of the first secretary of defense, James Forrestal, for whom JFK had briefly worked in 1945; a New York lawyer; and later a staff member of Kennedy's National Security Council, specializing in Southeast Asia.

53. This traditional Chicago convention hotel was actually called the Stockyard Inn, and stood across the street from the International Amphitheatre, where the delegates were meeting.

54. Jacqueline's mother and stepfather spent summers at Hammersmith Farm in Newport. The Kennedys sometimes used the place, which was near a naval station and quieter than the Kennedy houses at Hyannis Port, as a summer White House.

55. JFK ran for reelection as senator in 1958. He was eager to win by a margin so impressive that it would give him a running start for the 1960 presidential race.

56. FOSTER FURCOLO (1911–1995) was the Democratic governor of Massachusetts from 1957 to 1961. Kennedy thought so little of him that if Furcolo should win the Democratic nomination against Republican senator Leverett Saltonstall in 1960 (as it happened, he lost), JFK planned to cast a quiet vote for the Republican. Some of the reasons Kennedy's poll ratings were down were his support for the St. Lawrence Seaway, which diverted jobs and commerce from Massachusetts; his work on labor reform, which outraged Teamsters and their allies; residual antagonisms from the "Onions" Burke fight; and political quarrels with the Italian-American Furcolo, which, Republicans vainly hoped, might cause an Italian-American stampede toward Kennedy's little-known opponent, Vincent Celeste.

57. JAMES MACGREGOR BURNS (1918– ) was a Williams College political scientist, biographer of Franklin Roosevelt, and Democratic liberal activist who in 1958 ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. House from western Massachusetts.

1. JFK's Senate reelection victory of 1958, winning 73 percent of the vote.

2. In his 1774 "Speech to the Electors of Bristol," the Anglo-Irish statesman-philosopher said, "Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgement; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion."

3. Winston Churchill's long biography of his best-known ancestor, John Churchill, the first Duke of Marlborough (1650-1722). In 1704, in the War of the Spanish Succession, Marlborough and his regiments defeated the French at Blenheim on the Danube, thwarting Louis XIV's campaign against Austria. Churchill's volumes are history as heroism, romance, and drama. JFK's lifelong interest in the book and its protagonist suggests one source of affinity with his wife, who used Churchillian language in a 1978 letter describing the "treasured friends, noble figures, shared moments, great endeavors" of her husband's presidency.

4. JFK had to leave Princeton at Christmas 1935, during his freshman year, to be hospitalized for chronic abdominal problems and a worrisome white blood cell count. On his release, he recuperated in Palm Beach, worked the summer of 1936 at an Arizona cattle ranch, and restarted his college career at Harvard that fall.

5. JOHN BUCHAN (1875–1940) was the first Baron Tweedsmuir, a prolific author of both fiction and nonfiction, and governor general of Canada from 1935 until his death. Kennedy loved Buchan's autobiography Pilgrim's Way, which he read on publication in 1940, and often cited Buchan's insistence that politics was "still the greatest and most honourable adventure."

6. IAN FLEMING (1908–1964) was the author of the thrillers starring James Bond, the British secret agent. The Kennedys met Fleming at a Georgetown dinner in 1960. The President enjoyed From Russia with Love in the White House theater shortly before his death.

7. The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey (1951) has a Scotland Yard official investigating whether Richard III had killed the princes in the Tower of London.

8. Having been absorbed by Barbara Tuchman's book about the coming of World War I, The Guns of August, JFK sought out a broader treatment, Edmond Taylor's The Fall of the Dynasties: The Collapse of the Old Order, 1905–1922. It is not hard to imagine why Kennedy, having averted a nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis the previous October, wanted to read it.

9. Patriotic Gore, the book on the Civil War by the critic Edmund Wilson, whom the Kennedys once invited to a White House dinner.

10. While a senator, JFK had accompanied his brother several times to a speed-reading course in Baltimore but dropped out. After he became President, press accounts exaggerated the importance of this minor episode.

11. The writings of the Chinese Communist leader (1893–1976) would have been of particular interest to JFK in the spring of 1961, when, with considerable foresight, he was considering how much effort, if any, he should make to seek a rapprochement with China (he pragmatically decided that was a project for a second term)—and when he was preparing for a summit with the man who had, until the recent schism between Moscow and Beijing, been Mao's chief world ally—the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. And indeed during his private conversations with Khrushchev in June 1961, Kennedy quoted Mao's aphorism that power comes out the end of a rifle.

12. MAURICE DE SAXE (1696–1750), born a German, was a French marshal general and hero of the Battle of Fontenoy in 1745. He wrote a classic treatise, Reveries on the Art of War, that was posthumously published in 1757.

13. MAXWELL TAYLOR (1901–1987) was World War II commander of the 101st Airborne division and the first general of the Allied forces to ascend the French beaches on D-day. In 1959, he retired as President Eisenhower's army chief of staff, inveighing against what he thought to be Ike's overreliance on nuclear weapons—a complaint that he published in a book called The Uncertain Trumpet. Kennedy agreed with Taylor and cited his arguments during the 1960 campaign. Asked by JFK to investigate the Bay of Pigs failure, Taylor impressed him with his willingness to buck conventional wisdom. The President made Taylor his chief military adviser and then chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

14. One of the presidential yachts, which JFK had renamed for his grandfather.

15. Gielgud's recitings from Shakespeare (1958).

16. JULES DAVIDS (1920–1996), a gentle Georgetown University diplomatic historian who at the time was little known or published, performed research on five chapters of Profiles in Courage. His wife later noted that his honorarium of $700 was "a lot of money for us in those days."

17. The Whig party of the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries epitomized the British style of wealthy aristocrats standing for political office. The Whigs resisted a strong monarchy, just as their nineteenth-century American namesake party opposed powerful presidents such as their hated Andrew Jackson. Asked by James MacGregor Burns in 1959 about presidential power, JFK insisted, "I am no Whig!"

18. In Churchill's four-volume A History of the English-Speaking Peoples. She means the English civil war of 1692–1696.

19. DANIEL WEBSTER (1782–1852), senator from Massachusetts, had his own chapter in Profiles in Courage for supporting the Compromise of 1850.

20. In 1970, Jacqueline wrote about her husband to Ted Kennedy, "He was the only president after Jefferson, to care about gardens—(A letter that came up at Parke-Bernet the fall of 1963, which he thought was too expensive to buy, I was going to try and give him for his birthday—Jefferson writes to France—for 4 gardeners—they would also play chamber music at Monticello in the evenings.) Like Jefferson, he cared about architecture—or rather the harmony of man in his environment."

21. ALICE ROOSEVELT LONGWORTH (1884–1980), herself a landmark of Washington social life for most of the twentieth century, was Theodore Roosevelt's daughter by his first wife. Busch's book was T.R.: The Story of Theodore Roosevelt and His Influence on Our Times (1963).

22. This was in the 1930s, while Joseph Kennedy served FDR as chairman of the Securities Exchange Commission and ambassador to the Court of St. James's.

23. JFK's private coolness toward Franklin Roosevelt was almost unique among Democratic leaders of the 1960s, who usually regarded him as a household saint. It reflected Joseph Kennedy's painful break with FDR in 1941 over intervention in Europe, JFK's lingering resentment over Eleanor Roosevelt's hostility toward him before the 1960 Democratic convention, and his own lifelong aversion to almost all hero worship. Like many others, JFK was critical of what he considered to be FDR's overtolerance of Soviet military power in Europe at the end of World War II, leaving the West at a military disadvantage in Berlin and the rest of Europe, which proved to be one of Kennedy's biggest troubles as President. Still JFK was not unwilling to recognize Roosevelt's qualities of greatness, especially in domestic affairs. In the Republican household of her early upbringing, Jacqueline's father used to jocularly quote from Peter Arno's famous New Yorker cartoon, "Let's go down to the Trans-Lux and hiss Roosevelt!"

24. Criticized for speaking too rarely to the American people on television, Kennedy was urged to follow the example of FDR's radio "fireside chats." He asked Schlesinger to find out exactly how many such chats Roosevelt had during twelve years as president to counter the popular impression that they were almost weekly. By contrast, President Kennedy had a press conference roughly every two weeks.

25. ROSE ELIZABETH FITZGERALD KENNEDY (1890–1995) was the President's mother, whom Jacqueline called "Belle Mère." At this point, she had an affectionate but somewhat distant relationship with her mother-in-law, especially in comparison to the instant connection she had felt on first meeting Joseph Kennedy. After the President's death, Rose and Jacqueline became closer.

26. Both Kennedys had resented the closing passage of Burns's 1960 book John Kennedy: A Political Profile, written with JFK's cooperation, which, while praising the Senator's talent and energy, questioned his emotional commitment to political goals. (In the final sentence of his book, Burns wrote that for Kennedy to bring "passion" to the presidency "would depend on his making a commitment not only of mind, but of heart, that until now he has never been required to make.") Jacqueline so vehemently objected to this that she wrote Burns a crisp rebuttal in longhand: "I think you underestimate him. Anyone sees he has the intelligence—magnetism and drive it takes to succeed in politics. I see, every succeeding week I am married to him, that he has what may be the single most important quality for a leader—an imperturbable self-confidence and sureness of his powers. . . . When you have someone like Jack, why write him off as a pathetic little string bean, groping and searching and somehow finding himself near the top, blinking in the sunlight?"

27. CHARLES-ANDRE-MARIE DE GAULLE (1890–1970), the Free French leader of World War II, served as French president from 1959 to 1969. In the mid-1950s, Jacqueline named her French poodle "de Gaulle." As an ardent Francophile in art, architecture, literature, history, and couture, she was all the more vexed, as the Kennedy years unfolded, by de Gaulle's willingness to poison his relations with JFK and the United States, as well as the rest of the Western alliance, by upholding his extreme standard of French pride and independence.

28. Announcing his presidential candidacy on January 2, 1960, JFK said, "I have developed an image of America as fulfilling a noble and historic role as the defender of freedom in a time of maximum peril. . . ."

29. In 1886, when Lord Randolph Churchill resigned as chancellor of the Exchequer, he presumed himself indispensable and was startled when Lord Salisbury quickly appointed George Goschen to succeed him, prompting Churchill to lament that he had "forgot Goschen." The more recent example she is thinking of was probably Peter Thorneycroft, who resigned in 1958 as chancellor of the Exchequer, along with two lesser officials, to protest increased public spending. Dismissing the resignations as "little local difficulties," Prime Minister Harold Macmillan quickly replaced them all.

30. JFK hoped that his victory in heavily Protestant West Virginia would quash the Catholic issue for good, but it remained virulent enough that in September 1960, he felt compelled to appear before a group of Protestant ministers in Houston and reaffirm his strong support for separation of church from state, saying, "I am not the Catholic candidate for president. I am the Democratic party's candidate, who happens also to be a Catholic." Kennedy's youth was another obstacle: at 43, he would be the youngest man ever elected President.

31. In the most acute eruption of the youth issue all year, on July 2, 1960, appearing at the Truman Library in Independence, Missouri, former President Truman asked JFK, the front-runner for the Democratic nomination, to step aside on grounds that he was too young and inexperienced, and that the convention had been "rigged" in advance. Two days later, at the Hotel Roosevelt in New York, the candidate replied by saying that if "fourteen years in office is insufficient experience" (referring to his tenure in Congress but not his wartime naval years, which he elsewhere included in what he called his eighteen years of "service to the United States") that would rule out every twentieth-century president, including Truman himself. After making this statement, he flew to Los Angeles for his party's convention.

32. One of LBJ's favorite sayings. To Johnson, a reliable friend was someone "you would go to the well with" in order to draw water, referring to the days when American Indians threatened settlers of European origin.

33. CAROLINE LEE BOUVIER CANFIELD RADZIWILL (1933– ) was Jacqueline's younger sister.

34. Referring to Ted Sorensen.

35. DREW PEARSON (1897–1969) was the foremost muckraking journalist of the day, with a widely syndicated column and weekly television program on ABC. Clark Clifford (1906–1998) was a St. Louis lawyer who was counsel and close adviser to President Harry Truman before starting a lucrative Washington law practice and earning a reputation as one of the "wise men" of Washington. During the 1950s, JFK was one of his clients. In 1957, Pearson charged on ABC that Profiles in Courage had actually been written by Sorensen. With Clifford's help, JFK forced Pearson to retract the allegation. During the 1960 campaign, Kennedy asked Clifford to start preparing for a potential transition to the White House. Through JFK's presidency, Clifford continued to advise both Kennedys on various matters private and public.

36. At this moment, Schlesinger was not averse to provoking Mrs. Kennedy against Sorensen. At the time of these oral history interviews, both men were rushing to complete rival books on President Kennedy, which for a time frayed their relations. In his 2007 autobiography (Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History), Sorensen notes Pearson's charge "that I had privately boasted or indirectly hinted that I had written much of the book (a charge that, I regret to say, may have been—it was all too long ago to remember—partly true)." He insists that "like JFK's speeches, Profiles in Courage was a collaboration, and not a particularly unusual one, inasmuch as our method of collaboration on the book was similar to the method we used in our speeches." Sorensen writes that in 1953, he and JFK agreed that on any outside published work on which they collaborated, Sorensen would receive at least half the fees or royalties. He adds that when Profiles became a major bestseller, generating royalties "far in excess of anything either of us had ever contemplated," JFK "unexpectedly and generously" gave him "a sum to be spread over several years, that I regarded as more than fair," and which, by 1961, still exceeded half the book's earnings. Despite her tart comments about Sorensen during these interviews, Jacqueline soon mended her differences with him and later, during her New York years, their friendship resumed.

37. RFK had served as assistant counsel of Senator Joseph McCarthy's Subcommittee on Permanent Investigations before finally resigning in protest over McCarthy's excesses. From 1957 to 1959, he served as chief counsel for Senator John McClellan's committee on labor racketeering, a perch from which he relentlessly pursued Teamsters president James Hoffa.

38. EDWARD MOORE KENNEDY (1932–2009) was the ninth Kennedy child. After Teddy's birth, Jack asked his parents, "Can I be godfather to the baby?" They agreed. Ted Kennedy was the campaign manager of record when JFK ran for a second term in the Senate, but as he was studying at the University of Virginia law school, he was not involved full-time. In 1962, Ted won his brother's old Senate seat and occupied it until his death.

39. ARTHUR GOLDBERG (1908–1990) of Chicago, son of Jewish immigrants from Poland and Ukraine, was general counsel to the AFL-CIO and United Steelworkers before JFK appointed him as labor secretary and then, in September 1962, to the Supreme Court.

40. GEORGE MEANY (1894–1980), a rough-hewn former Bronx plumber, was chief of the AFL-CIO.

41. SEYMOUR HARRIS (1897–1974) was a Harvard economist.

42. The Landrum-Griffin labor reform act of 1959 sought to regulate union practices to avoid the excesses that the Kennedy brothers had uncovered in their hearings. JFK wished to ensure that it did not also restrict honest union activity.

43. In 1957, the French were waging war against Algerians who wished to liberate their country from being a part of "metropolitan France." JFK gave a controversial speech denouncing French dominion over Algeria, taking the then-bold (and farsighted) view that it was in the American interest to side with anticolonial movements, both because it was right and because it would help the United States attract newly independent nations in which such movements had succeeded.

44. From 1951 to 1953, she was the "Inquiring Photographer" for the Washington Times-Herald, whose editor, Frank Waldrop, noted that Jackie "could see around corners." In that role, she covered the coronation of Elizabeth II.

45. In 1954, the French withdrew from Vietnam after an embarrassing defeat at Dien Bien Phu, and the United States was under severe pressure to replace them and pick up the struggle to keep the North Vietnamese leader, Ho Chi Minh (1890–1969), from seizing the entire country. JFK was skeptical and wished to learn more. With her excellent command of French, Jacqueline translated books for him on the history and politics of French colonies in North Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia and other subjects.

46. Georges d'Argenlieu was French colonial administrator in Indochina from 1945 to 1947. The Ammonites were Biblical seminomadic descendants of Lot. Swiss Mennonites emigrated to Algeria in the nineteenth century.

47. By voting for construction of the seaway, which would expand U.S. commerce at the expense of jobs in Massachusetts, Kennedy outraged many of his constituents, who complained that he was more concerned about the rest of the country than his own state.

48. During their first debate in September 1960, JFK rebutted Nixon's charge that he was "too extreme" by complaining that Republicans were opposing an increase in the federal hourly minimum wage, then a dollar, to $1.25: "I don't think that's extreme at all."

49. Kennedy's meeting with Eisenhower was actually in April 1961, after the unsuccessful Bay of Pigs invasion.

50. This refers to the effort to build a National Cultural Center in Washington (later renamed the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts), finally opened in 1971.

51. CLEM NORTON (1894–1979) was a crony of JFK's Fitzgerald grandfather who comes to life in Edwin O'Connor's The Last Hurrah as Charlie Hennessey, "a sallow, happy tub of a man in his fifties with bulging excited eyes." Norton had been superintendent of Commonwealth Pier and, campaigning from his own one-man sound truck, a perennial loser for mayor of Boston.

52. In June 1963, during a trip to Europe, JFK viewed the Berlin Wall and then gave a rousing speech (in what is now John F. Kennedy Platz) assuring free West Berliners that he would support them against Soviet threats to drive them from the city. When he spoke the words "Ich bin ein Berliner!" there was such an ovation that he later joked that he would offer three words of advice to later presidents at a moment of discouragement: "Go to Germany."

53. By contrast, Robert Kennedy was shocked in 1964 when LBJ told him that of all the things in life, he liked campaigning the best.

1. When JFK entered the Senate in 1953, his Republican colleague Joseph McCarthy was using the Senate's Subcommittee on Permanent Investigations to pursue supposed hidden Communists in the U.S. government, damaging innocent lives in the process. Caught between the many Massachusetts voters (especially Irish-Americans) who loved McCarthy and the liberal Democrats who abhorred him, Kennedy was criticized by some for failing to publicly denounce the Wisconsin demagogue. In December 1954, when the Senate voted to censure McCarthy, JFK was recovering from his near fatal back operation and was the only Democratic member not to participate.

2. PAUL DOUGLAS (1892–1976) was a liberal Democratic senator from Illinois.

3. JOHN FOX (1906–1985) bought the Boston Post in 1952 for $6 million (including a loan of $500,000 from Joseph Kennedy, for which Fox expressed his thanks by renouncing his endorsement of Henry Cabot Lodge in favor of JFK for the Senate). Fox made the paper shrill and McCarthyite, and deployed it in strong support of "Onions" Burke in the spring of 1956. Later that year it went bankrupt. Fox ultimately died penniless.

4. In January 1953, Robert Kennedy started work for McCarthy's committee as an assistant counsel under McCarthy's abrasive and unscrupulous counsel, Roy Cohn. The animosity between the two men over matters great and small at one point almost led to a fistfight. By the summer, Robert had moved to the Democratic side of the committee staff, then quit altogether.

5. HENRY "SCOOP" JACKSON (1912–1983) was a Democratic senator from Washington whom JFK seriously considered for vice president in 1960.

6. MILES MCMILLIN (1923–1982) was a reporter and later publisher of the Capital Times of Madison, Wisconsin. His wife Elsie Rockefeller McMillin (1924–1982) had been married to the state's new senator, William Proxmire. JFK thought McMillin was anti-Catholic.

7. In 1964, Mrs. Kennedy still thought of liberals as people who gave Jack trouble—as did, on occasion, her husband. Members of the group that JFK called "professional liberals" had mistrusted him since he first ran for the House in 1946 because of his conservative father. Once he was President, they charged that he was a militant Cold Warrior and too intimidated by conservative southern Democratic congressional committee chairmen to vigorously pursue the liberal agenda on civil rights, education, labor, health, poverty, and other domestic issues.

8. FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT, JR. (1914–1988) served in Congress with JFK from 1949 to 1955. Kennedy especially valued his endorsement in 1960 because it offset the pre-convention opposition of his mother, Eleanor, who much preferred her close friend Stevenson. After failing to find him a suitable position in his government (he asked McNamara to appoint him secretary or assistant secretary of the navy, as his father had been under Wilson, but the new Pentagon chief refused), the President made him undersecretary of commerce in 1963.

9. Campaigning for JFK in West Virginia, Roosevelt told reporters that Humphrey was "a good Democrat, but I don't know where he was in World War II." In fact, the Minnesotan had tried to enter the wartime military but was rejected because of a hernia.

10. This melodrama was Private Property, by director Leslie Stevens, so low budget that it was filmed in Stevens's Hollywood Hills home, starring his wife, Kate Manx. It portrays a housewife taking up with hoodlums, with scenes of rape and murder. By Bradlee's recollection, JFK speculated (correctly) that Private Property was on the Catholic Church's index of prohibited films, and joked that it would have helped him with some of West Virginia's Catholic-hating voters, had they known he would be watching it.

11. TOM MBOYA (1930–1969) was a young Kenyan nationalist leader who, during their July 26, 1960, meeting in Hyannis Port, convinced JFK, chairman of the Senate subcommittee on Africa, to have the Kennedy family foundation support the effort by Mboya's Airlift Africa to place Kenyan students in American universities. One young Kenyan studying in America was Barack Obama, Sr., an Mboya friend and supporter who had arrived in 1959.

12. STANISLAS ALBERT RADZIWILL (1914–1976), known as Stas, was an exiled Polish prince and London real estate investor who was the second husband of Jacqueline's sister Lee. He campaigned among Polish voters for JFK in 1960 and was John's godfather.

13. Although it was not publicly advertised at the time, Mrs. Kennedy was suffering through a difficult pregnancy. She had been asked by doctors to stay as quiet as possible until the expected birth in December. "Janet" refers to her half-sister, Janet Auchincloss.

14. Referring to the Illinoisan's encouragement of a Stevenson draft movement in Los Angeles.

15. Before the convention in Los Angeles, operatives for Lyndon Johnson had cast grim forebodings about Senator Kennedy's health.

16. In Los Angeles, LBJ had castigated Joseph Kennedy (with whom he had previously been quite amicable and who had quietly urged him to run for president in 1956 with Jack as running mate) for his pessimism before World War II about Britain's chances against Nazi Germany. Johnson said, "I never thought Hitler was right."

17. Off the tape, Jacqueline told Schlesinger that during the visit, she had asked Lady Bird what she had been doing since the convention, expecting her to say something like she had been "resting up since that madhouse." Instead Mrs. Johnson replied that she had been sending notes to all those people who had been so kind to her husband in Los Angeles.

18. On the day of his nomination, Kennedy had told Symington's close Missouri friend Clark Clifford that he intended to make Symington—who had run his own desultory presidential campaign, hoping to be chosen after a convention deadlock—his running mate. Symington thereupon started writing his acceptance speech. But the next day, JFK told Clifford that, having been persuaded during the night that he couldn't win without Lyndon, he would have to "renege on an offer made in good faith." Jacqueline wrote to Eve Symington that it would have been "such fun if it had been you and Stu."

19. LBJ had called an extraordinary post-convention session of the Senate. Jacqueline had always liked Johnson—he felt she was "nicer" to him than anyone else in the Kennedy entourage, but this passage suggests some disenchantment with the new president. Two days before Christmas 1963, LBJ demonstrated his tendency to overreach. He telephoned Mrs. Kennedy to wish her a happy holiday ("How's my little girl?") without telling her that he had reporters listening in so that he could show off his closeness to the revered widow. And Robert Kennedy, who detested Johnson, had regaled her with such tales as LBJ's hasty request of JFK's personal secretary on the morning after the assassination to vacate her West Wing office "so I can get my girls in" and his reversal of various Kennedy appointments, policies, and intentions. But, although unsettled by Johnson's periodic gaucheries and his negation of a number of JFK policies, Mrs. Kennedy liked LBJ and had great fondness and admiration for Lady Bird, who had often filled in for her as First Lady. Jacqueline was also grateful to her successor for pledging to complete her White House restoration designs and to preserve the White House Historical Association and her other improvements intended to ensure that the mansion would remain a museum-quality showcase of American history and culture.

20. PHILIP GRAHAM (1915–1963) was publisher of the Washington Post and a close Johnson ally who, in the habit of many newspaper proprietors of the time, liked to be involved in politics behind the scenes. But in his posthumously published memorandum on his role in LBJ's selection, he in no way suggests that he was anything close to a kingmaker. Nor does Alsop in his memoirs. By Graham's account, his own role was limited to urging both men to run together and then—after JFK went down to Johnson's Biltmore Hotel suite and made the deal with him—encouraging LBJ not to bolt the ticket when angry liberals threatened a floor fight. RFK, who even in 1960 disliked the Texan, much later insisted that his brother's offer of the vice presidency had been merely pro forma, and that Johnson had "grabbed" it. Graham, Alsop, and others insisted that JFK had planned in advance of his nomination to make a serious offer to Johnson in order to carry important southern states and thus win the presidency. There is unlikely to ever be a definitive verdict on how much Kennedy really wanted Johnson on his ticket.

21. Now John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York.

22. Meaning JFK's father, the former envoy to the Court of St. James's.

23. Referring to the director, who made pictures such as The Informer (1935), about an Irish rebel who betrays a comrade.

24. JOHN CONNALLY (1917–1993) was a lawyer and Texas crony of Lyndon Johnson's. At a press conference before the balloting in Los Angeles in 1960, Connally had demanded a medical evaluation of whether Kennedy was healthy enough to serve as president. Nevertheless, JFK made him secretary of the navy. Elected governor of his state in 1962, Connally and his wife Nellie rode with the Kennedys through four Texas cities on November 21 and 22, 1963. During the Dallas motorcade, in the last words they spoke, Connally, a conservative Democrat, told the President of a soon-to-be-published poll that showed him running ahead of JFK in Texas in 1964. Kennedy replied, "That doesn't surprise me."

25. One of the purposes of the Texas trip of November 1963 was to resolve an intra-party feud in that state which pitted Johnson and Connally against their political nemesis, Texas senator Ralph Yarborough. Connally refused to ride in the presidential motorcades with Yarborough. Yarborough refused to ride with Johnson. In Fort Worth that final morning, JFK had been compelled to tell Yarborough, "For Christ's sake, Ralph, cut it out!" The other politician with the same name was liberal Don Yarborough (no relation), who had almost defeated Connally for the Democratic nomination for governor of Texas in 1962.

26. WILLARD WIRTZ (1912–2010) was Kennedy's undersecretary of labor before moving to the top spot in 1962. George Ball (1909–1994) was his undersecretary of state for economic affairs. Thomas Finletter (1893–1980) was his ambassador to NATO. All three men had been ardent Stevensonians.

27. HENRY CABOT LODGE, JR. (1902–1985) was a Republican senator from Massachusetts and namesake grandson of the Brahmin senator who killed Woodrow Wilson's dream of American membership in the post–World War I League of Nations. Appearing alongside the well-respected Lodge gave JFK a boost similar to that of appearing with the vice president of the United States in debate. After losing to Kennedy, Lodge served as Eisenhower's ambassador to the United Nations before joining Richard Nixon's losing ticket in 1960.

28. WILLIAM GREEN (1910–1963) was a congressman from Philadelphia and the city's Democratic chairman. Jacqueline's description here of Joseph Kennedy's efforts for his son's campaign is minimalist.

29. JOHN BAILEY (1904–1975) was chief of Connecticut Democrats and an early Kennedy supporter whom the President appointed as Democratic national chairman.

30. The modest apartment some distance beyond the gold-domed Boston State House that JFK had taken in 1946 to establish residency for his first campaign for Congress, which by 1960 served as his and Jackie's voting address.

31. The Convair plane bought by the Kennedy family for JFK to use in the 1960 campaign.

32. CORNELIUS RYAN (1920–1974) was the Irish-born author of The Longest Day: June 6, 1944, a 1959 bestseller made into a feature film by Darryl F. Zanuck at Twentieth Century Fox.

33. JFK's press secretary, Pierre Salinger.

34. Meaning on the tape recording.

35. The seventeenth-century philosopher Blaise Pascal argued that even though God's existence could not be proven by reason, one should behave as if He did exist because there was nothing to lose by living in a God-fearing manner—and potentially everything to gain.

36. PHILIP HANNAN (1913– ) was auxiliary bishop of Washington, a World War II Army chaplain who parachuted into the Ardennes and helped to liberate a concentration camp, with whom JFK had maintained an unpublicized, quiet running conversation about religion and politics during his presidency, and who officiated at his funeral. John Cavanaugh (1899–1979) was a priest who was president of Notre Dame from 1946 to 1952.

37. FRANCIS CARDINAL SPELLMAN (1889–1967) was archbishop of New York from 1939 until his death. Although he had officiated at the weddings of Robert and Edward Kennedy, he strongly supported Richard Nixon in 1960, disdaining JFK's opposition—in his ardor to demonstrate fealty to the separation of church and state—to federal money for parochial schools and to the appointment of a U.S. ambassador to the Vatican. In 1945, Spellman launched the annual white-tie Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner, a fund-raiser for Catholic charities which, in presidential election years, usually features jocular speeches by both candidates, as it did in 1960.

38. RICHARD CARDINAL CUSHING (1895–1970) was archbishop of Boston from 1944 until the year of his death. Son of an Irish immigrant blacksmith, the gravel-voiced Cushing, who had originally wished to be a politician, was a Kennedy family intimate who presided over JFK's wedding to Jackie, prayed at both JFK's inauguration and funeral, and strongly supported the widow when she was remarried in 1968 to Aristotle Onassis.

39. In October 1960, three Catholic bishops in Puerto Rico declared it a sin for Catholics to vote for any candidate opposed by the Church, which gave ammunition to those charging that no Catholic should be elected president. Delighted to do damage to JFK just before the balloting, Cardinal Spellman publicly endorsed the bishops' edict. Cardinal Cushing opposed it.

40. Spellman found himself on the losing side of the debate over the progressive reforms initiated by Pope John XXIII at the Second Vatican Council in 1962.

41. She refers to the Catholic custom of prayer and Holy Communion on the first Friday of nine successive months.

1. Middleburg, Virginia, was the de facto capital of that state's "Hunt Country." They were looking for a weekend place that would allow their family to escape the city and Jacqueline to go riding and fox hunting.

2. The Kennedys had planned for Jacqueline to give birth in New York Hospital, as with Caroline, in mid-December. But on November 24, 1960, while the President-elect was flying to Palm Beach, a radioed message told him that she had gone into premature labor and been taken by ambulance to Georgetown University Hospital. When she arrived, she asked, "Will I lose my baby?" After midnight, John F. Kennedy, Jr., was born by caesarean section.

3. ROBERT MCNAMARA (1916–2009), born in San Francisco, son of a shoe store manager, was a Harvard Business School professor with a devout faith in the value of statistical analysis. After World War II, during which he analyzed the effectiveness of U.S. bombing forays in Asia, he rose through the ranks of the Ford Motor Company, becoming president in 1960, two days after JFK's election. Eager for at least one big business Republican in his cabinet, Kennedy met him at his Georgetown home and offered Treasury or Defense. McNamara accepted the latter, provided that he could appoint his own people. Kennedy agreed, impressed with his toughness. Later McNamara was the architect of President Johnson's escalation in Vietnam, until his resignation in 1968.

4. DEAN RUSK (1909–1994) of Cherokee County, Georgia, was a Rhodes Scholar who had been Truman's assistant secretary of state for the Far East, and then president of the Rockefeller Foundation. When other possibilities for the State Department did not pan out, Kennedy turned to the mild but tenacious Rusk, whom he had not known, consoling himself with the notion that he planned to be his own secretary of state anyway.

5. J. WILLIAM FULBRIGHT (1905–1995) was a Rhodes Scholar who was Democratic senator from Arkansas from 1945 to 1975. As a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which Fulbright chaired, JFK had admired his allergy to conventional wisdom, but knew that as secretary of state, the Arkansan would have been doomed by his opposition to civil rights and his outspoken support for the Arab states, which would have hampered his ability to deal with African countries and Israel, not to mention alienating African-American and Jewish voters at home. "Caroline walked in" refers to the occasion when the President-elect and Fulbright were meeting reporters behind the Kennedy house in Palm Beach, and the three-year-old Caroline tottered into the scene, wearing her mother's high-heeled shoes.

6. At the end of May 1961, the Kennedys went to Vienna, where the President met for two days with the Soviet leader Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev (1894–1971). The two men had only met once, briefly at the Capitol in September 1959, when JFK was a senator and Khrushchev had come to the United States to meet with President Eisenhower at Camp David. Now that Kennedy was in power, each wanted to take the other's measure. Kennedy hoped that behind closed doors, without the need to posture for the public, he and Khrushchev could reach some kind of worldly modus vivendi about Berlin, Cuba, Southeast Asia, and other Cold War powder kegs. Khrushchev, who had risen to power under Stalin, interpreted Kennedy's private willingness to deal as political weakness. Knowing that the Soviets had many fewer nuclear-tipped missiles than the United States, Khrushchev aimed to overcome that military weakness by impressing his ferocity on the new American President, telling him, "If you want war, that's your problem." Kennedy left Vienna feeling shaken, saying, "Roughest thing in my life." Khrushchev told his aides that Kennedy was "too intelligent and too weak." His underestimation of the President in Vienna was one factor in his decision to challenge Kennedy in 1962 by slipping offensive missiles into Cuba.

7. MCGEORGE BUNDY (1919–1996), an Eisenhower Republican, was the son of a Boston Brahmin mother and a diplomat from Grand Rapids, Michigan, known as "the brightest boy at Yale." Fluent in French, he collaborated at age twenty-six on the memoirs of his father's friend Henry Stimson, FDR's wartime secretary of war, and became the youngest dean of the faculty ever appointed by Harvard. JFK appointed him as national security adviser, which until that time had been something of a clerk's position. After the Bay of Pigs, with his shrewd and gentlemanly instinct for power, Bundy convinced Kennedy that it should be much enhanced, so that the President would have a full-time in-house counselor to protect him against future bad cabinet advice—a redefinition of the job that has prevailed ever since. He also felt such an affinity with the President that he changed his registration to Democratic.

8. J. EDGAR HOOVER (1895–1972) was the first director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which he helped to create, and its predecessor agency, from 1924 until his death. Hoover's admirers cited his success in pursuing criminals and Communists. His detractors noted Hoover's metastasizing hatreds (for example, Martin Luther King and the few journalists and politicians who dared to criticize him), eccentricities (after an automobile mishap while making a left turn, he ordered his driver to abjure all future left turns), abuse of civil liberties, and Napoleonic tendencies. All agreed that Hoover spent his FBI years amassing unprecedented and largely unaccountable power, with his files of potentially damaging information on those who might stop him. In 1960, the newly elected JFK felt that, especially with his narrow margin, he had little choice but to immediately reappoint Hoover. But unlike his predecessors, Kennedy required the old man to deal with the President through the attorney general—in this case, Robert Kennedy, whom Hoover predictably detested—and hoped that resounding reelection to a second term would allow him to fire the FBI director and replace him with someone more cognizant of civil liberties. By contrast, President Lyndon Johnson made Hoover virtually director-for-life.

9. ROBERT LOVETT (1895–1986) was a Wall Street investment banker and Truman's final secretary of defense. JFK was eager to show continuity with the previous Democratic government by appointing a well-respected figure, but Lovett declined any appointment for reasons of health.

10. When he went to Kennedy's Georgetown house to learn about his future, Stevenson was nonplussed when the President-elect offered him not secretary of state but ambassador to the UN. After their meeting, on his doorstep in the cold, Kennedy told reporters that he had asked Stevenson to go to the UN and the Illinoisan declared that he would have to think about it. Stevenson's diffidence was understandable, but at a time when others were happily accepting presidential appointments, Kennedy was annoyed to be so publicly rebuffed. Stevenson's friends persuaded him that if he turned down the UN, Americans would forget about him. Thus Stevenson grudgingly accepted the job.

11. In April 1961, JFK approved a revised version of an existing secret plan left by Eisenhower to launch CIA-backed Cuban exiles in an invasion of Cuba to overthrow the government of Fidel Castro. When the landing, on Cuba's Bay of Pigs, failed, causing the President a mammoth embarrassment less than three months into his term, Kennedy publicly took responsibility.

12. C. DOUGLAS DILLON (1909–2003) was a Republican investment banking heir who served as Eisenhower's ambassador to France and undersecretary of state before JFK appointed him as his treasury secretary.

13. ROBERT SARGENT SHRIVER (1915–2011) was working for Joseph Kennedy at the family-owned Merchandise Mart in Chicago when he met his boss's daughter Eunice and married her in 1953. During the interregnum, he served as the President-elect's highly effective chief talent scout. Kennedy made him the first head of his new Peace Corps. Later Shriver commanded President Johnson's War on Poverty, served as U.S. ambassador to France, and ran as Democratic nominee for vice president in 1972.

14. GORDON GRAY (1909–1992) held the post at the end of the Eisenhower years.

15. CARMINE DE SAPIO (1908–2004) was the Tammany Hall boss who had blocked FDR, Jr.'s, dream of becoming governor of New York.

16. JFK gave FDR, Jr., substantial credit for helping him win the pivotal West Virginia primary, reassuring many voters who worried about his Catholicism but who venerated President Roosevelt for saving their homes and jobs during the Great Depression.

17. STEWART UDALL (1920–2010) was a Democratic congressman from Arizona when JFK made him secretary of the interior.

18. ORVILLE FREEMAN (1918–2003) was governor of Minnesota before he became Kennedy's secretary of agriculture. He was a former Marine who, like the President, had won a Purple Heart for valor in the South Pacific during World War II. Freeman gave JFK's nominating speech at Los Angeles in 1960.

19. LUTHER HODGES (1898–1974) was a one-term North Carolina governor who had swung his state to JFK for vice president in 1956. The President-elect, who needed at least one southerner in his cabinet, made him secretary of commerce.

20. J. EDWARD DAY (1914–1996) had been Illinois insurance commissioner under Governor Adlai Stevenson before serving as an insurance executive in California.

21. ROSWELL GILPATRIC (1906–1996) was a Wall Street lawyer who served under McNamara as undersecretary of defense.

22. New York Times v. Sullivan, March 9, 1964, which decreed that a plaintiff in a defamation or libel case must prove that the defendant's statement was made with actual malice, in full knowledge or reckless disregard of its falsity. This ruling granted new license for publication of vicious comments about presidents and other public figures. Goldberg felt it would never be possible to firmly establish a defendant's motive, so he preferred a wider berth for the press.

23. Referring to a full-page extreme right-wing advertisement in the Dallas Morning News on JFK's last morning, accusing the President of treason, which had moved him to warn Jacqueline that Dallas, bastion of the radical right, was "nut country."

24. JOHN MCCLOY (1895–1989) was a wartime aide to FDR's war secretary, Henry Stimson, as well as a Republican Wall Street lawyer known as "Chairman of the Establishment." He advised JFK on disarmament.

25. Sargent Shriver, who was performing reconnaissance on potential appointees.

26. After the election, JFK found that the prospect so depressed his wife that he asked FDR, Jr., to reassure her.

27. In June 1962, Jacqueline wrote her friend William Walton, "My life here which I dreaded & which at first overwhelmed me—is now under control and the happiest time I have ever known—not for the position—but for the closeness of one's family. The last thing I expected to find in the W. House."

28. In 1962, the United States abruptly cancelled its program to build Skybolt missiles, including some promised to British prime minister Harold Macmillan as an incentive to shut down his own surface-to-air missile program. Washington's seemingly cavalier treatment of its British ally nicked Macmillan's prestige in his own country.

29. DAVID FINLEY (1890–1977) was the first director of the National Gallery of Art; first chairman of the White House Historical Association, founded by Mrs. Kennedy; member of her White House Fine Arts Committee (he refused unwanted gifts on the committee's behalf); and, from 1950 to 1963, chair of the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, which oversaw the design of federal buildings and monuments in the capital. As Jacqueline wrote another official, Bernard Boutin, she found Finley "a most cultured man + preservationist—but if only he would act more forcefully—so much could have been saved." John Walker III (1906–1995) was director of the National Gallery from 1956 to 1969. After the inauguration, she was still recovering from John's traumatic birth.

30. LETITIA BALDRIGE (1925– ), tall, energetic, and intense, had preceded Jacqueline at Farmington and Vassar and was a family friend of the Auchinclosses. She served in two American embassies in Europe and had resigned as a Tiffany executive to start her own public relations business in Milan when, in July 1960, Jackie called her and asked her to be White House social secretary "if Jack makes it." When Baldrige left her job in the spring of 1963, JFK told her she was the most "emotional" woman he had ever met.

31. She was later informed that Mamie Eisenhower had told her staff to keep a wheelchair behind an ornamental screen but only bring it out if Mrs. Kennedy specifically asked for it. After flying to Palm Beach, Jacqueline spent the next fortnight in bed.

32. J. BERNARD WEST (1912–1983), who served as chief usher from 1957 to 1969, directing the household staff of the White House, had a close and productive relationship with Mrs. Kennedy. He welcomed and provided crucial aid to her efforts to restore the White House.

33. The two men met in an oceanside villa near the Key Biscayne Hotel.

34. George Smathers, Democratic senator from Florida.

35. President Truman had been denounced in 1947 for his apostasy in adding a second-floor balcony to the mansion's south front. In March 1963, Jacqueline wrote David Finley, whose job it was to rebut complaints about some of her innovations, "The President told me you were the only person who stood by President Truman on his balcony problem!—I didn't know that—but I should have—because it is so like you." The South Carolinian replied, "I must be quite honest. . . . I agreed with the other members of the Commission that an eighteenth century Georgian house, such as the White House, should not have the line of columns broken by a balcony, as was done in the nineteenth century plantation houses." But the president had taken his objection kindly, and "Mr. Truman and I were friends." Replying to Finley's notice that he would leave the Fine Arts Commission that year, Mrs. Kennedy wrote him one of the emotive longhand notes that won loyalty and affection from so many with whom she worked: "I never dreamed that such a terrible thing could happen—while I was alive— It is inconceivable to think of existing without you—What will I do? . . . I could never find words to express all the gratitude and affection and indebtedness I will feel for you until my dying day."

36. HENRY DU PONT (1880–1969), the Republican heir to a famous fortune, was a well-respected expert on American art, furniture, and horticulture, and had done much to reshape Winterthur, his family's old 900-acre Delaware estate, opened to the public in 1951, with period rooms and gardens. Du Pont chaired Mrs. Kennedy's bipartisan Fine Arts Committee of prominent Americans advising her on the White House restoration. As an Americanist, du Pont was sometimes distressed by the French-inspired improvisations of Stéphane Boudin. On some of his visits, du Pont would rearrange White House furniture, after which Jacqueline would discreetly have it moved back. When du Pont was trying to block one of Boudin's designs for the Green Room, she wrote J. B. West, "Please enclose this humble letter soliciting his approval. If we don't get it he will have the shock of me doing it anyway!"

37. Clifford also helped Mrs. Kennedy establish the White House Historical Association, which to this day supports the upkeep of the mansion's public rooms, helps first families to acquire paintings and furniture, and publishes contemporary versions of the guidebook, The White House: An Historic Guide, and books on presidents, first ladies, and the White House gardens, all launched by Jacqueline Kennedy. The guidebook was purchased by a half million readers during its first six months, swelling the coffers of the new association.

38. Among neglected White House treasures, Jacqueline discovered the Victorian desk made from the H.M.S. Resolute that became famous in JFK's Oval Office and has been used by every president but one since Gerald Ford.

39. In February 1962, Jacqueline's hour-long tour of the White House restoration was seen by 56 million television viewers and won her an honorary Emmy.

40. Mrs. Kennedy is being modest here. From the time of their grand trip to Paris of May 1961 and, especially, her vastly popular televised tour of the White House, she was not only no longer a political liability but would have been a major asset to the President when he ran for reelection in 1964. Knowing this, JFK used strong persuasion to have her agree to accompany him on planned trips to Texas and California that were to be the forerunner of that campaign. In her presence at the Rice Hotel in Houston on their final evening together, the President asked Dave Powers to compare the crowd that had greeted them that day to the one when he had come to Houston alone the previous year. Kennedy beamed when Powers said it was about the same, "but there were about a hundred thousand more for Jackie."

41. During the White House years, the Kennedys kept an apartment at the Carlyle Hotel in New York. Parke-Bernet was an auction house and J. J. Klejman an antiquities dealer.

42. STéPHANE BOUDIN (1888–1967), president of the Paris design firm Maison Jansen, who had advised on restoration at Versailles, Malmaison, Leeds Castle, and other historical monuments, was quietly secured by Mrs. Kennedy to guide her on her White House project. She told one of her aides, "I've learned more about architecture from Boudin than from all the books I could have read." To avoid public controversy about employing a non-American, her staff took pains, with Boudin's consent, to keep him in the background. But privately Jacqueline thought it completely appropriate that she consult a Frenchman, because of French contributions to the American Revolution, the French talent for using architecture and the arts to convey national glory, and because, as she considered how the White House should look, she was captivated by the sensibilities of Presidents Jefferson and Monroe, both former ambassadors to Paris, who adorned the mansion with French and French-inspired artifacts, painting, and furniture.

43. She feared a public outcry against the room's new design, which was no longer dominated by blue. But by 1980, she considered the chamber "Boudin's masterpiece," with its "sense of state, ceremony, arrival and grandeur."

44. Wildenstein & Company was a Manhattan art gallery.

45. SYLVIA WHITEHOUSE BLAKE (1930– ) had been Jacqueline's Vassar classmate and one of her bridesmaids. Her husband, Robert, was an American diplomat.

46. In the ground-floor corner bedroom of his parents' house in Palm Beach.

47. In what he came to call his "peace speech" at American University in June 1963, Kennedy said, "These problems are man-made. Therefore they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants."

48. SAMUEL RAYBURN (1882–1961) was speaker of the house until 1961 and a mentor to the young congressman Lyndon Johnson.

49. PIERRE SALINGER (1925–2004) of San Francisco, bon vivant, former journalist and aide to Robert Kennedy, served as press secretary during the 1960 campaign and White House years.

50. FRANK SINATRA (1915–1998), singer and JFK friend, had organized a pre-inaugural gala featuring Hollywood performers such as singer Nat King Cole and comedian Alan King.

51. A Washington restaurant.

52. STYLES BRIDGES (1898–1961) was a Republican New Hampshire senator and one of those responsible for inaugural arrangements.

53. Not the most diplomatic comment Mrs. Eisenhower could have made sitting beside the wife of the man who was now the nation's most prominent Irish-American.

54. During Cushing's very long invocation, smoke curled up from the lectern, due to an electrical malfunction, and when the aged poet rose to read a poem he had written for the occasion, he was blinded by sunlight and so instead recited his classic "The Gift Outright."

55. EARL WARREN (1891–1974) was the governor of California whom Eisenhower had appointed as chief justice in 1953. Although a Republican, Warren had been glad to swear in Kennedy, rather than Nixon, who was a political enemy.

56. JANE WHEELER (1921–2008) was a Washington hostess and early Kennedy supporter.

57. EDWARD FOLEY (1906–1982) was a well-known Washington lawyer, former undersecretary of the treasury under Truman, and chairman of JFK's inaugural committee.

58. Refers to the Alsop house.

59. ROWLAND EVANS (1921–2001) was a Washington reporter for the New York Herald Tribune. John Hay "Jock" Whitney (1904–1982) was the paper's owner and publisher.

60. GEORGE THOMAS (1908–1980) was an African-American from Berryville, Virginia, who was JFK's longtime valet and lived on the third floor of the White House.

61. ARTHUR KROCK (1886–1974) was a conservative New York Times columnist. Krock had once been a close friend of Joseph Kennedy's and adviser to Jack while writing Why England Slept, but had broken with them in 1960 over JFK's growing liberalism while seeking the presidency. An old friend of Jacqueline's grandfather, John V. Bouvier, Jr., and her stepfather, Hugh Auchincloss, Krock had helped her get her job on the Washington Times-Herald.

62. Referring to the exuberant tours of the White House given by Lyndon Johnson since becoming president.

63. HANS KRAUS (1905–1995), an Austrian-born mountain climber, was an orthopedic expert who extolled exercise as a remedy for back injuries. When JFK's back problems grew worse in 1961, he consulted Kraus, who agreed to take on the case as long as Dr. Travell was removed from the President's case and that Kraus would be able to reach Kennedy at any time by direct telephone. Aghast that Travell had simply cured the President's pain with Novocain and let the President's chest, abdominal, and back muscles atrophy, Dr. Kraus warned him that he would soon need a wheelchair unless he began a strict regimen. Under Kraus's care, JFK was telling friends by 1963 that he had never felt better and felt hearty enough to resume golf. Dr. Travell, who was well-known to the public as the first female White House doctor, was allowed to keep her title and observe at least the fiction that she was still caring for the President.

64. Joseph Kennedy was one of the owners of the New York restaurant Le Pavillon.

65. An estate in Middleburg, Virginia, which the Kennedys rented in 1961 and 1962. Writing to a friend in July 1962, she called it "the most private place I can think of to balance our life in the White House." Campaigns, travels, and pregnancy had kept Jacqueline from riding regularly since her marriage in 1953.

66. JOHN VERNOU BOUVIER III (1891–1957) was the debonair father whom Jacqueline adored.

67. In 1963, the Kennedys built a seven-bedroom yellow ochre stucco and fieldstone house, with a breathtaking view of the Blue Ridge Mountains, on thirty-nine acres in Atoka, Virginia. They named it Wexford, for the Kennedy ancestral home in Ireland.

68. JFK spent the long weekend before Texas in Tampa and Miami, where he made speeches, and Palm Beach, where he stayed at his father's house with his Harvard friend Torbert Macdonald and watched televised football. Having lost substantial support in most of the Deep South states he had won in 1960 over his stand for civil rights, he considered it essential to his reelection to carry Florida in 1964.

69. EVANGELINE BELL BRUCE (1918–1995) was the second wife of David Bruce (1898–1977), who was JFK's ambassador in London after occupying the same job in Paris and Bonn. Clare Boothe Luce (1903–1987) was the second wife of Henry Luce (1898–1967), founder of what was probably the most powerful single print influence on American public opinion of those years, the Time-Life organization. Partly influenced by their longtime friend Joseph Kennedy, who had persuaded Luce in 1940 to write the foreword to Jack's first book, Why England Slept, and who went to the length of watching his son's Democratic acceptance speech on television with Luce after they dined together, the conservative publisher had been surprisingly benign toward JFK during the 1960 campaign. But when Kennedy became President, his more doctrinaire wife, a former Connecticut congresswoman and ambassador to Italy, tended to lecture him as if he were still the student he was when they had first met.

70. Jacqueline had taken a room in the family quarters that recent presidential families had called the "Monroe Room" and renamed it the "Treaty Room." Used by presidents from Andrew Johnson to Theodore Roosevelt as a Cabinet Room, it was restyled by Mrs. Kennedy as a dark green Victorian chamber featuring Ulysses Grant's ornate cabinet table, other late-nineteenth-century furniture and fixtures, and framed facsimiles of agreements signed in the room, such as William McKinley's peace treaty ending the Spanish-American War.

71. NANCY TUCKERMAN (1928– ), Jacqueline's close friend (whom the First Lady called "Tucky") and White House social secretary from June until November 1963, had known her since the age of nine, when they both attended the Chapin School in New York, and later roomed with her at Farmington, where, as Tuckerman recalled, Jackie had her walk under her horse's belly "twenty times a day to get over my fear of horses." Expecting a baby, Mrs. Kennedy planned to be "taking the veil" and winding down her public commitments from the brisk regimen pressed on her by Tish Baldrige.

72. PAMELA TURNURE (1937– ) was Mrs. Kennedy's press secretary. Jacqueline asked her to give reporters "minimum information with maximum politeness."

73. ELIZABETH VIRGINIA BEALE (1911–2006) was an extroverted and widely read Washington social columnist.

74. ELIZABETH GUEST CONDON (1937– ) was later married to the film director George Stevens, Jr.

75. NINA GORE AUCHINCLOSS STEERS (1937– ) was Jacqueline's stepsister.

76. LORRAINE WAXMAN PEARCE (1934– ), the first White House curator, was an alumna of the Winterthur graduate program and a specialist in the French impact on decorative arts in America. Although she found Pearce "as excited as a hunting dog," Mrs. Kennedy was displeased by what she saw as Pearce's desire for the limelight. For her part, with no political experience, the young Pearce felt baffled by the complex interplay among the First Lady, her Fine Arts Committee, the White House Historical Association, du Pont, and Boudin. After a year, Jacqueline had her reassigned to oversee the new White House guidebook. In September 1962, the First Lady wrote du Pont, "Why are some people so avid for publicity—when it poisons everything. I hate & mistrust it & no one who has ever worked for me who liked it has been trustworthy."

77. WILLIAM VOSS ELDER III (1933– ) succeeded Mrs. Pearce as curator.

78. ANDRé MEYER (1898–1979) was a French Jewish refugee who headed American operations for the Paris investment bank Lazard Frères. He first met the First Lady when he contributed the Aubusson rug for the French Empire–inspired Red Room. After President Kennedy's death, Meyer became one of Jacqueline's closest friends.

79. PIERRE MENDèS FRANCE (1907–1982) was French president from 1954 to 1955.

1. FIDEL CASTRO RUZ (1926– ) and his guerrilla army entered Havana in triumph in January 1959, having overthrown the Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. That April, he visited Washington, D.C., at the invitation of the National Press Club and was refused an audience by President Eisenhower. The following year, Castro began importing Soviet oil and expropriating American firms.

2. EARL E. T. SMITH (1903–1991), a Newport-born sportsman and financier, of New York and Palm Beach, was ambassador to Havana from 1957 to 1959. His wife, Florence Pritchett Smith (1920–1965), had been a friend of President Kennedy's since school days.

3. HERBERT MATTHEWS (1900–1977) was a New York Times correspondent in Cuba whose reports were criticized for being too pro-Castro.

4. NORMAN MAILER (1923–2007) was a novelist and essayist best known for The Naked and the Dead (1948). Mailer wrote the laudatory "Superman Comes to the Supermarket" in Esquire about JFK's victory at the 1960 convention, but the following spring, after the Bay of Pigs, he denounced the President for sponsoring the invasion and declared Castro one of his "heroes."

5. Smith's 1962 book The Fourth Floor lambasted Assistant Secretary of State Roy Rubottom and other Eisenhower officials for being too relaxed about letting Castro seize power in Cuba.

6. ALLEN DULLES (1893–1969) was a Wall Street lawyer and brother of Eisenhower's secretary of state who served as director of Central Intelligence from 1953 to 1961. Along with J. Edgar Hoover, he was JFK's first reappointment as President-elect—and, like Hoover, in the name of continuity. On July 23, 1960, Dulles came to Hyannis Port to brief the newly minted Democratic nominee on national security.

7. In his 1962 memoir Six Crises, former Vice President Nixon insisted that during the July briefing, Dulles told Kennedy that for months, the CIA had "not only been supporting and assisting, but actually training Cuban exiles for the purpose of supporting an invasion of Cuba itself." Nixon complained that JFK had abused this access to classified information in October 1960 to criticize Eisenhower's government for failing to help "fighters for freedom" eager to overthrow Castro. In Nixon's telling, in order to preserve the operation's secrecy, he felt compelled during the debates with Kennedy to argue the other side, although in secret he had actually been a champion of CIA plans to upend Castro.

8. Referring to the attempted invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961 by anti-Castro Cubans, backed by the CIA. The Agency had given Kennedy to believe that if the exiles, after landing, managed to establish a beachhead in Cuba, public dissatisfaction with Castro might generate a national uprising that would topple the dictator and put the exiles in power—and that if they failed, they could "melt into the mountains" of Cuba as guerrillas. None of these assurances proved accurate, which inflicted a severe blow to Kennedy's prestige. JFK's circle blamed the CIA for its faulty intelligence and planning. The CIA and its partisans blamed Kennedy for refusing to suspend his order that U.S. military forces stay out of the battle.

9. In September 1962, Senator Kenneth Keating, New York Republican, charged that the Soviets had placed offensive missiles in Cuba and that the Kennedy administration was trying to conceal their presence. This was weeks before the CIA provided President Kennedy with the first hard evidence, gathered from U-2 photographs, of the missiles on the island.

10. By that Sunday afternoon, April 16, 1961, six American B-26s painted with Cuban insignia had already destroyed almost half of Castro's air force. CIA officials had presumed that, once the invasion was under way, JFK would be willing to discard his public pledge not to invade Cuba and authorize U.S. military forces to openly support the freedom-fighters then landing on Cuban beaches. Rusk's call warned the President of the importance of concealing any American role in the invasion. Kennedy thus witheld U.S. air power until the exiles were established on Cuba, at which time such a strike might be plausibly explained as coming from Cuban soil. At that moment, a ban on American air strikes was likely to doom the invasion, and Kennedy knew it.

11. LYMAN LEMNITZER (1899–1988) had been appointed by Eisenhower in 1960 as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In March 1962, Lemnitzer approved a highly classified plan, called Operation Northwoods, for the U.S. government to commit acts of terrorism in Miami and other American cities and blame them on Castro as a pretext for a full American invasion of Cuba. The plan even had suggested that if a U.S. astronaut perished during a mission, the finger should be pointed at Castro. Appalled by Lemnitzer's proposal and still fuming over the general's ham-handed advice during the Bay of Pigs, JFK denied him a second term that fall as chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

12. JOSE MIRO CARDONA (1902–1974) was a Havana lawyer, professor, and prominent Batista critic who, after the revolution, was briefly Castro's prime minister before he broke with him and fled to Florida. Before the Bay of Pigs, Cardona was leader of the committee of anti-Castro Cubans who were quietly cooperating with the CIA and the tiny group of Kennedy officials involved in the forthcoming invasion. Had the Cuban exiles managed to seize a substantial portion of their island, they would have declared Cardona provisional president of Cuba.

13. ADOLF BERLE (1895–1971) was a law professor, economic theorist, and FDR-era diplomat who was assisting the State Department on Latin America.