Free Kennedy: The Classic Biography by Ted Sorensen

Kennedy was more likely to discuss raising children than NATO.
    His closest friends differed from him and from each other in background and interests—and not all of them liked each other. But they were all normal, healthy, intelligent and affable men, and they were all loyal to Jack Kennedy. He in turn was loyal to them—one expressed surprise to me after the Presidential election that “Jack still has time to bother with me.” But the President said later at a news conference, “The Presidency is not a very good place to make new friends. I’m going to keep my old friends.”
    Both friends and family volunteered (or were drafted) for Jack’s political campaigns. Sisters Eunice, Pat and Jean helped organize the famous 1952 tea parties. But at those gatherings the star attraction, next to the candidate, was the articulate, intelligent and elegant Mrs. Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr., always looking amazingly younger than her years.
    Although her father, Mayor John F. “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, had been a more ebullient and colorful politician than Patrick J. Kennedy, her husband’s father, Rose Kennedy was more quietly devout and less outwardly combative than her husband and sons. From her the latter inherited much of their shy but appealing warmth and spiritual depth. But the mother was no less proud of their success and no less determined to help. Often after she had watched her son on television she would telephone me with a suggestion about some word he had misused or mispronounced. “She’s a natural politician,” the President remarked to me in 1957 with mingled pride and astonishment, after a long-distance call from his mother. “She wanted to know the political situation and nationalities in each of the states she’s visiting this fall.”
    Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, on the other hand, was not a natural politician—but, exquisitely beautiful, highly intelligent and irresistibly charming, she was a natural political asset. She had been an apolitical newspaper girl when they met at the home of their friends, the Charles Bartletts, “who had been shamelessly matchmaking for a year,” she said. On her first visit to the Senator’s office (as his fiancée) in the summer of 1953 she seemed awestruck by the complexities of his work. After their marriage in Newport on September 12 of that year, she interested him slightly in art and he interested her slightly in politics.
    Reared in a world of social graces far from the clamor of political wars, she at first found little to attract her in either the profession or its practitioners. Politics kept her husband away too much. Politicians invaded their privacy too often. “It was like being married to a whirlwind,” she was quoted by one reporter in speaking about their early life. “Politics was sort of my enemy as far as seeing Jack was concerned.” She had no desire to write speeches or right wrongs, though her interest in her husband’s concerns gradually grew. She had been, she admitted in a brief 1960 talk, “born and reared a Republican. But you have to be a Republican to realize how nice it is to be a Democrat.”
    Campaigning, moreover, was a fatiguing experience. She was an active horsewoman, water skier and swimmer, but in some ways as delicate in health as in manner. Touch football on the Kennedy Hyannis Port lawn was a novel undertaking (in one huddle she said to me, “Just tell me one thing: when I get the ball, which way do I run?”), and she once broke her ankle while being pursued across the goal by two of Teddy Kennedy’s “giant” Harvard teammates. Of greater concern to both the Senator and Jacqueline (as she preferred being known, or Jackie, as everyone called her) was the fact that she suffered a miscarriage and a stillbirth before Caroline’s birth in 1957.
    Understandably, she was slow to accept, and he was reluctant to impose, the rigors of campaigning and handshaking. Her shy beauty and smile intensified crowd interest in the