we'll do it differently

{Schlesinger journal}
1963
October 13

I saw the President for a while about 7 o'clock [on Friday, October 11].  I asked how Jackie was.  He said that she was having a good time in Greece....When I came in, the President was looking at some books on his desk.  "No, these are not right," he was saying to Evelyn Lincoln.  "I wanted Peter Quennell's Lord Byron in Venice."  As I was leaving, he called after me, almost a little wistfully, "What are you doing tonight?"  I told him that we were going to a dance at the Walter Ridders'....I hate to repeat the cliché about the loneliness of the job, but it is a lonely job.

Tonight we dined at the Stewart Alsops'.  The Herters were there -- a somewhat sanctimonious and poisonous couple, who preserve an indestructible Republicanism under an eastern cosmopolitan cloak.

Frank Wisner and Mac Herter went into a long bit about how terrible it was for Jackie Kennedy to go off on the Onassis yacht.  Wisner said that "everyone" in Europe knew that [Jackie's sister] Lee Radziwill was having an affair with Onassis, and that Jackie was along as cover.  The gossip of the idle rich is exceedingly boring.

October 27

However, to continue the previous item, there is no question that the Greek trip has caused a certain amount of doubt and resentment.  Even my mother feels there is something wrong about la dolce vita in the isles of Greece while the President slaves away in Washington.  I try to point out Jackie's distress, her exhaustion, her need for a rest; but the trouble is that her idea of a rest (with which I wholly sympathize) strikes too many Americans as unduly gay and energetic.  But this will soon blow over.

On Thursday I attended the President's luncheon for Tito.  I went with considerable curiosity.  Tito is one of the heroic figures of our epoch, for better or worse, and I wanted to see what he was like.  I expected a rather massive, powerful man.  I met instead a small, plump, old man, with rimless (or steel-rimmed) glasses, a benign expression and a high-pitched voice.  He looked rather like the owner of a successful department store in, say, Akron, Ohio. 

The luncheon passed agreeably, though Averell thought (and I agree) that the President was a little defensive and stressed unnecessarily the existence of ideological differences.  Of course the differences exist; but emphasis on them did nothing to appease the opponents of the Tito visit, while it introduced a faint note of reserve so far as Tito was concerned.

Against my inclination, I have been doing more and more in the way of speech-writing in recent weeks.  I wrote the speech the President gave before the National Academy of Sciences on October 23 (on the basis of material supplied by Jerry Wiesner); and on Wednesday the President called me in, handed me a draft Ted Sorensen had written for Amherst on Saturday, said that it seemed to him thin and stale, and asked me to try my hand at it. 

Accordingly I wrote a speech on the place of arts in a democracy. 

The President read it and said that it was fine except for a number of sentences which sounded too much like Adlai Stevenson.  On Friday night, he called me and invited me to go along with him to Amherst.  He worked over the speech on the plane north, toned down the fancier passages and added an opening section of his own on the obligations of young men of privilege.  The result, I think, was most successful.  Certainly no previous President has ever talked this way about the arts.

We chatted about the Eisenhower reminiscences on the way up.  The President commented on their self-righteousness.  "Apparently he never did anything wrong," he said.  "When we come to writing the memoirs of this administration, we'll do it differently."

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Journals, 1952-2000
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
The Penguin Press, New
York, 2007

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