Jackie Kennedy, fierce war critic

She was just trying to be of assistance.

Hmm, McNamara. He was kind of evil. Can’t read anything about Vietnam without realizing how responsible he was for so many useless deaths.

Highly recommend The Fog of War documentary; I can't imagine anyone talking sense to him at the time because even now as he explains his faulty logic, he still seems to believe that the war would've been different if he'd received all the firepower he requested.

In that belief, R3, he was not alone. Some if not many of the most “brilliant” military, political, and academic minds of the era didn’t understand the situation in Vietnam much less how to “win” an unwinnable conflict.

The long, intense workdays that Robert McNamara logged as John F. Kennedy’s Secretary of Defense, and the immense pressure he put on himself to excel, were coupled with a very active social life that often, but not always, included his wife.

For a man known around the Pentagon as a relentless, humorless taskmaster, McNamara seemed virtually unrecognizable on the party circuit, mingling casually with journalists, fellow government officials, and vivacious Georgetown hostesses. His appearance in Washington newspaper gossip and social columns must have astounded his Pentagon colleagues.

On February 9, 1962, a little over a year after taking office, McNamara made headlines by dancing the twist with Jackie Kennedy at a White House party. The moment was chronicled by society writer Betty Beale. Declaring that “The Twist has truly arrived,” Beale reported: “Anyone who still had any misgivings about the current dance craze simply hasn’t seen it done the way Mrs. Kennedy, who looked lovely in a long white satin sheath, and Secretary McNamara, frequently called ‘the brain’ of the cabinet, performed it. It was rhythmic, fun and peppy, and more restrained than the good old Charleston which doesn’t seem to shock anyone.”

Jackie partied and danced until 3 the next morning. The president, who disappeared at least once during the night for an assignation with Mary Meyer (the sister of Toni Bradlee, wife of Ben Bradlee, who was then the Washington Bureau Chief of Newsweek) in the family quarters upstairs, stayed at the party until 4:30 A.M., when the band finally quit.

A few days after the gala, the First Lady sent McNamara a lighthearted valentine collage she had pasted together, their faces superimposed over photos of bodies doing the twist. The four-­page collage featured snippets of news coverage about the dance, including Drew Pearson’s account in his “The Washington Merry-­Go-­Round” column in The Washington Post. “Bob McNamara proved to be the most agile of the Cabinet twisters,” Pearson reported. Jackie had the collage delivered by hand in a White House envelope, simply addressed to “The Secretary of Defense.”

Around the same time, Jackie playfully wrote to McNamara, apparently enclosing a few photos of them dancing together. She jokingly asked McNamara if they would have to invoke executive privilege if Senator Strom Thurmond ever saw the photos. (Thurmond was a staunch conservative from South Carolina who had run unsuccessfully for president in 1948 as a Dixiecrat opponent of desegregation.)

Jackie’s early 1962 missives to McNamara seem inspired by an amiable friendship that had developed between them by that time. How it got started and grew quickly is not fully evident in historical records, their own writings and oral histories, and the recollections of friends and associates, but some clues are available. Ben Bradlee, a close friend of the Kennedys, recalled an evening at the Kennedy White House when the president told him that Jackie thought McNamara was attractive and had told him that “Men can’t understand his sex appeal.” Jackie’s sister, Lee Radziwill, thought Jackie warmed to McNamara because “he was very quick and very affectionate.”

Years later, McNamara confided to two people collaborating with him on a book—author Brian VanDeMark and publisher and editor Peter Osnos—that he had stayed overnight with Jackie at her family home in Newport, Rhode Island, while he was defense secretary and his wife, Margy, was traveling. “I was, am close to Jackie. I am very fond of her. But I don’t think that has to be part of the book,” McNamara said.

Jackie’s exuberant handwritten notes and letters to McNamara as the Kennedy presidency unfolded reveal a deepening relationship, possibly fueled by a sense that McNamara offered a stable, supportive refuge from her husband’s predatory sexual pursuits. The tone moves from her saucy February 1962 note about doing the twist, and the accompanying valentine collage, to a profound admiration for McNamara’s role during the October 1962 Cuban missile crisis.

When Valentine’s Day arrived in February 1963, McNamara crafted a handmade card for Jackie. She quickly replied with a White House card on which she drew a heart with an arrow through it and described McNamara’s note as the “most marvelous” valentine she had ever received, saying she might put it in a future Kennedy museum. She mischeviously added that Godfrey McHugh, President Kennedy’s military aide, had received an unsigned valentine card and thought it was from McNamara.

How John Kennedy felt about the growing friendship between his wife and McNamara is unclear, or even whether he knew a close bond was developing. As for Jackie, the attraction she felt for McNamara may have reflected her life with a womanizing husband. An offstage friendship with McNamara may have offered an escape from the glare of the White House and the intensity of the Kennedy clan and its preoccupation with politics and competitive sports.

For McNamara, the friendship with Jackie must have been exciting. Arthur Schlesinger, who knew her well, said of Jackie: “Why besides being so astonishingly beautiful and intelligent is Jackie so fascinating? Because of the impression she gives of total, exclusive and absorbed concentration on oneself, as if she felt she were talking to the most fascinating person in the room. One knows it is simply her way, but it is irresistible all the same.” How scintillating for a straight-­arrow auto executive—McNamara rose up in the ranks at Ford Motor Company to become its president just before Kennedy hired him—to find himself a close friend of the First Lady of the United States.

For Better and Worse

Early on the afternoon of November 22, 1963, the Pentagon Command Center pulled McNamara out of a meeting to inform him, as he recalled, “that a CIA agent had reported that the president had been shot and killed.”

In the following minutes, McNamara instructed the Joint Chiefs to place American military forces around the world on alert, not knowing whether the attack was part of a wider plot against the United States or how the assassination might affect America’s foreign relations. In several phone calls, McNamara and Attorney General Robert Kennedy agreed that they should go by helicopter to Andrews Air Force Base outside the capital to await the arrival of Air Force One carrying Kennedy’s body, his wife, and the new president of the United States, Lyndon B. Johnson, who had taken the oath of office aboard the plane before it left Dallas.

At Johnson’s request, McNamara joined the new president as he flew by helicopter to the White House. Johnson made clear to the men that he wanted him to stay on in his administration.

After returning home for a brief, mournful dinner with Margy, McNamara headed for Bethesda Naval Hospital at Jackie’s request, conveyed by Robert Kennedy over the phone, to join her while the autopsy of the president was conducted. Family and friends were gathering in a suite on the 17th floor of the hospital.

Traumatized and consumed by the day’s events—­when the lethal bullet shattered Kennedy’s head, blood and brain matter splattered Jackie, seated next to the president in a pink suit—­Jackie recounted the harrowing moments to various guests. McNamara listened patiently for hours, seated on the floor of the kitchen next to Jackie, who was perched on a high stool. “I got to the hospital at 7:45 P.M., and she talked for the entire time until we left for the White House, arriving there at 4:25 A.M.”

“She was in that suit with the bloody skirt and blood all over her stockings,” McNamara said. “I felt I had to be calm for her and listen to her . . . I was concentrating entirely upon her.”

A week after the assassination, as Jackie was preparing to move out of the White House, she sent a gift to McNamara—­the Chippendale-­style black leather armchair he sat in during cabinet meetings at the White House. The custom then, sometimes continued to this day, is that secretaries of state and defense flank the president at the cabinet table. In a note to McNamara, she said she wanted to give him something “special of Jack’s” that would be meaningful to McNamara and that her late husband would have wanted McNamara to have.

Over time McNamara reached a personal turning point as he came to see that the Vietnam war, started under Kennedy and continued under Johnson, was unwinnable with the strategy the latter had set. His quandary was exacerbated by his continuing relationships with Jackie and Bobby Kennedy and their rising pressure on him to deescalate the war. The closer he got to them, the greater grew his concerns about Vietnam. Johnson, well aware of McNamara’s ties to the Kennedys, enlisted him to inform on them. He did so. He was walking a psychologically and emotionally treacherous tightrope.

By mid-­1966, McNamara was making a habit of visiting Jackie in New York and dining with her at La Caravelle, an upscale French restaurant, when his wife, Margy, was traveling. “When Marg would go out of town, I frequently went up to New York,” he recalled. Their encounters happened roughly once a month, McNamara later told Bob Woodward.

In May, he headed to Manhattan on a commercial flight, without a security detail, as was his custom when traveling within the United States. New York taxi drivers were on strike. McNamara hopped onto a bus that was headed uptown from his room at the River House on East Fifty-Second Street. Jackie lived at Fifth Avenue and 85th Street. As he exited the bus, unrecognized, he later insisted, he was jostled by passengers in front and behind him. He soon realized they had stolen his wallet. Without cash or credit cards, he had no way to pay for dinner.

“So here I am, picking up Jackie for dinner,” he recalled, “and I think, What in the hell to do?” He was rescued by George Woods, the president of the World Bank, who happened to be seated at a nearby table at La Caravelle and slipped McNamara some cash.

McNamara’s relationship with Jackie seemed to grow even closer in late 1966 and 1967. In a fall 1966 letter that outlined his wish that he and Margy be buried at Arlington National Cemetery adjacent to the Kennedy gravesite, he talked of Jackie’s “beauty, intelligence, grace and wit.”

Jackie, increasingly disturbed by the war and convinced that McNamara desperately wanted to end it, implored him to do so when they met at her Fifth Avenue apartment in New York one evening while Margy McNamara was traveling. (The date of this encounter was not recorded but appears to be in late 1966 or the first months of 1967.)

Unlike so many Americans who saw McNamara as the callous architect of the war, Jackie viewed him as an ardent opponent. Her intuition about him was right, up to a point. But Jackie’s faith in McNamara seemed to go beyond the private doubts about the war that he shared with her and others at the time. Rather, it seemed grounded in a naive perception of him as a heroic figure battling against the belligerent military brass and a cruel president to end the suffering in Vietnam. And it seemed to draw on her steadfast sense of him as a sensitive, isolated, emotionally troubled figure with whom she had forged an intimate bond during the Kennedy presidency and whom she had come to see as her protector after the assassination.

McNamara described their encounter at Jackie’s apartment overlooking Central Park:

At one point during my long process of growing doubt about the wisdom of our course, Jackie—­this dear friend whom I admired enormously—­erupted in fury and tears and directed her wrath at me. I was so overwhelmed by her feelings that I still remember every detail of the incident.

Marg was traveling, so I had gone to New York to dine with Jackie. After dinner, we sat on a couch in the small library of her Manhattan apartment discussing the work of Chilean poet and Nobel Prize winner Gabriela Mistral. Both [of] us were especially fond of her poem “Prayer.” It is a plea to God to grant forgiveness to the man Mistral loved, who had committed suicide. She writes, “You say he was cruel? You forget I loved him ever. . . . To love (as YOU well understand) is a bitter task.”

Jackie was indeed a glamorous woman. But she was also extremely sensitive. Whether her emotions were triggered by the poem or by something I said, I do not know. She had grown very depressed by, and very critical of, the war. In any event, she became so tense that she could hardly speak. She suddenly exploded. She turned and began, literally, to beat on my chest, demanding that I “do something to stop the slaughter!”

On October 21, McNamara and the Pentagon became the target of one of the largest antiwar protests of the Vietnam conflict. More than 20,000 demonstrators surged from the Lincoln Memorial over the Memorial Bridge to the Pentagon, bringing the antiwar movement to McNamara’s doorstep. McNamara knew that defending the Pentagon, surrounded by open lawns and parking lots, would be impossible unless combat troops were employed and given orders to shoot protestors who tried to storm the building. He was determined to avoid a bloody confrontation.

Combat soldiers from the Eighty-­Second Airborne Division, ordered to Washington to defend the Pentagon, blocked the main entrance but were restricted by rules of engagement that prohibited the firing of their weapons. Protestors taunted the troops but remained peaceful, some placing flowers in the rifle barrels of soldiers, and the day ended without bloodshed or a shot being fired. Norman Mailer chronicled the events in The Armies of the Night, a blend of fiction and nonfiction that won him a Pulitzer Prize. As the protestors assembled, a photo­journalist recorded a striking photo of McNamara peering impassively out an open Pentagon window at the crowds below.

Jackie saw the McNamara photo the next day and promptly dispatched an admiring letter to McNamara about his role during the protest.”Dear, Dear Bob,” she wrote, “I am thinking so many kind thoughts of you tonight.” Referring to the photo of McNamara watching the protest from his Pentagon window, she said, “I never saw anything so brave.”

After Johnson made McNamara president of the World Bank, worried about McNamara’s stability and loss of faith in the war, Jackie’s presence in McNamara’s life lightened the emotional burden for him as he started his new job in early 1968. Their relationship reached a high point in the fall of 1968, just before she married Aristotle Onassis, the Greek shipping tycoon. But once wed, Jackie pulled away, despite repeated efforts by McNamara to stay actively engaged with her.

McNamara eventually turned for companionship to Joan Braden, a married woman in Washington, while Margy was failing, and then made no secret of his affair with Braden in the years that followed Margy’s death in 1981. McNamara also remained close to Robert Kennedy, who entered the 1968 presidential race following Lyndon Johnson’s withdrawal after almost losing the New Hampshire primary to Senator Eugene McCarthy, a war critic. McNamara openly endorsed Kennedy, violating the World Bank’s neutrality code of conduct.

Deborah Shapley’s biography of McNamara came out in 1993. It is a comprehensive, well-­researched book in which Shapley tries to present a balanced portrait of McNamara, documenting both his virtues and shortcomings. But according to his secretary at the time, Jeanne Moore, McNamara was “finding the reading of this book very difficult indeed.”

Letters from friends and former colleagues tried to comfort McNamara. President Kennedy’s brother-­in-­law Sargent Shriver reminded him that it wasn’t he, but JFK and LBJ, who decided “what was to be done or not done in Vietnam.”

But the most emotional message and most meaningful to him came from Jackie Kennedy on February 24. By this time, their relationship had cooled. Her letters to him, while still cordial, had grown shorter over the years and were clearly sent as courteous responses to many missives from him as he tried to stay in touch. But in light of the Shapley book and McNamara’s dark reaction to it, word of which must have reached her, Jackie penned a brief but heartfelt letter to him, reminiscent of letters from years earlier.

She told him never to doubt that he was respected, admired, and loved, a special figure in American history. She reminded him of Eleanor Roosevelt’s comment that no one could humiliate her without her consent.

“You will always be my shining knight,” she wrote.