Schlesinger Remembers

Schlesinger savored his Kennedy friendship. He is the third man in the evocative photograph of Marilyn Monroe and John and Robert Kennedy taken after JFK's Madison Square Garden birthday celebration in 1962. "I do not think I have seen anyone so beautiful; I was enchanted by her manner and her wit, at once so masked, so ingenuous and so penetrating," Schlesinger wrote of Monroe. "But one felt a terrible unreality about her -- as if talking to someone under water."
For Schlesinger, Dallas was a personal and political tragedy. He had lost a friend and a man he believed a great president. He could never really warm to Lyndon Johnson and became a sentry of Camelot. On Air Force One at Love Field, Johnson asked Kennedy aide Kenny O'Donnell to bring Mrs. Kennedy forward for the swearing-in. O'Donnell hesitated. Coldly, Johnson said, "When I tell you to do something, I want it done -- and fast." Back in Washington that night, Adlai Stevenson, long ambivalent about Kennedy, arrived at the White House, where, Schlesinger said, "we were all sitting around in various stages and forms of distress. Stevenson came in, smiling and chipper, as if nothing at all had happened. . . . He may well now feel that he will have a freer hand, and perhaps more influence, under Johnson than under Kennedy. In any case, it is a most disappointing reaction, and one that it will take me long to forgive."
Over lunch at the Century Association in 1977, Kissinger told Schlesinger that "Donald Rumsfeld was the rottenest person he had known in government -- that it was Rumsfeld who, in pursuit of his own ambitions, had set Kissinger and [Secretary of Defense James R.] Schlesinger against each other, and had persuaded Ford to make George Bush head of the CIA so he would be extinguished as the vice presidential candidate in 1976 (and thereby, Henry added, probably lost Ford the election)." After Anwar Sadat's funeral in 1981 -- at President Reagan's request, Nixon, Ford and Carter went together -- Kissinger told Schlesinger, "As soon as we got into the plane, Nixon was his old self again, trying to manipulate everybody and everything, dropping poisonous remarks, doing his best to set people against each other. Later, when we were in a car by ourselves, Ford said to me, 'Sometimes I wish I had never pardoned that son of a bitch.' "