But White had been educated at the prestigious Boston Latin School and at Harvard College, and he was familiar with the classics. Stripped of its knightly ideals and courtly romance, Camelot was the tale of flawed humanity. At the heart of the legend was the story of how King Arthur’s wife Guinevere betrayed him with his best friend, Lancelot, and brought disaster and ruin to her husband’s magic kingdom.
What, White wondered, was a storyteller to make of that?
“LORDS OF IT ALL”
Around midnight, White disappeared into a maid’s room and began the job of sorting out his notes. As he wrote years later in his memoirs, he saw himself at this juncture of his career as a sort of court musician, a modern troubadour, who sang his stories for attention, applause, and a fee. His immediate audience was composed of the millions of middle-class, middlebrow readers of Life, but in his heart of hearts he knew that he was singing for the men of politics, diplomacy, and finance who ran America.
Many of these men were White’s close friends, and they expected him to lay a respectful wreath on the grave of John F. Kennedy. And so, as he sat down in front of his portable typewriter, White made an important decision. He would not expose Camelot as a misreading of history. Nor would he try to explain Jackie’s comparison of herself to Guinevere, a woman who was responsible for betrayal and disaster. He would leave the riddle of Jackie’s true identity to her future biographers.
Instead, Jackie’s farewell to Camelot would stand as a sad good-bye to a golden age of America, a time never to be recaptured. White had always been attracted by the notion of such a golden age. He liked to quote the lines in Archibald MacLeish’s poem Conquistador, in which Bernal Díaz, MacLeish’s storyteller, is made to say: “but I… saw Montezuma: I saw the armies of Mexico marching, the leaning Wind in their garments: the painted faces: the plumes…. We were the lords of it all.”
Americans had felt like the lords of it all during the brief reign of John F. Kennedy, and the storyteller who had made them feel that way was Theodore H. White. In 1959, after writing two novels that received lukewarm critical receptions, White returned to his first love, public affairs, and embarked on a nonfiction book about the coming 1960 presidential campaign. He cast Richard Nixon as the villain of his story. The hero who emerged from White’s yearlong adventure on the campaign trail was John F. Kennedy, who, as White wrote,
was the first postwar American leader who could see how changed were the circumstances in the country which he had left for war twenty years earlier. Moreover, and just as importantly in terms of a popular story, Kennedy was young, rich, heroic, witty, well read—and handsome.
White, of course, was the physical opposite—a homely little man with short arms and thick glasses. And from the moment he laid eyes on the tall, gleaming figure of John Kennedy descending the steps of the Caroline, his campaign airplane, White fell into a journalistic swoon. The future President was all the things that White wished to be, but was not: graceful, immaculate, wry and witty, and irresistibly attractive to women.
What was more, White had grown up as a poor Jewish boy in the ghettos of Boston, and like millions of people who felt that they had been excluded from the American Dream, he admired Kennedy because he had unlatched the door of opportunity. Through that door, as White wrote in a typically hyperventilating passage,
marched not only Catholics, but blacks, and Jews, and ethnics, women, youth, academics, newspersons and an entirely new breed of young politicians who did not think of themselves as politicians—all demanding their share of the action and the power in what is now called participatory democracy.
White would always remember that he was lunching with an old war-correspondent acquaintance when a waiter came over to their table, and told them, “The radio says Kennedy has been shot.” At that moment, White believed, America passed through an invisible membrane of time that divided one era from another. Kennedy’s murder marked a great divide in history, separating an era of hope and idealism from an era stained by assassination, Vietnam, racial strife, sexual permissiveness, Watergate, and national disillusionment.
Or so White chose to believe.
But like so many other Americans who adored John Kennedy, the awestruck White had shut his eyes to certain facts. During most of his presidency, Kennedy was a grave disappointment as a leader. He was an inexperienced executive who was woefully unprepared for great office. It was only through a series of missteps and blunders that he began to learn the complicated art of statecraft. And just when it looked as though he was finally getting the hang of it, he was struck down in Dallas.
It was those facts that concerned Jackie. She did not want her husband to be judged as a president who had been cut off at the promise, not after the performance. Camelot was her effort to rescue John Kennedy from the merciless inquest of history. And White became a willing collaborator in her fanciful version of history.
FRIENDS OF THE KENNEDYS
White took a long snort of whisky, then began pounding out the first draft of his story:
It rained hardest in Hyannis Port on the Cape, in those sheets of rain that Verlaine called in his poetry the “sobbing of the autumn.”
His clacking portable woke up Clint Hill, Jackie’s Secret Service man, who had gone virtually sleepless for days. Hill burst into the
