Jacqueline Kennedy welcomes Mikoyan at her post-funeral White House reception for world leaders.

She held no Cabinet meeting, issued no orders and signed no legislation.

Yet in a brief interim of several hours on the afternoon of Monday, November 25, 1963, with her late husband the President having just been buried and his constitutional successor purposefully keeping out of the White House, it was Jacqueline Kennedy who acted as the head of state of the United States, a commanding figure meeting with world leaders who showed her a level of respect reserved for their equals.

Edward and Jacqueline Kennedy welcome a delegation of East Asian representatives.

For about two hours, the former First Lady held court in the White House Red Room as she received some eight dozen separate international delegations, each one headed by a Prime Ministers, President, King or Queen and one Emperor, who had come for the funeral. Even though she held no official power, there was also nobody in the government at that moment to filter or censor whatever she determined to say. When Chief of Protocol Angier Duke attempted to order the delegations alphabetically, he got no where with her. She wanted it to flow naturally. She was in charge.

She seized the fleeting moments to affirm an agenda on behalf of her nation.

Jacqueline Kennedy with Romulo Betancourt during a state visit she made to Venezuela with President Kennedy in December of 1961 (Corbis)

While meeting with Rolando Leandro Mora, Venezuela’s Acting Minister of Foreign Affairs, she verbally conveyed to him a timely message, requesting he personally convey it to that nation’s president Romulo Betancourt.

Betancourt had not come to Washington himself because he was running in a crucial presidential re-election, which he would win one week after the Kennedy funeral.

Nine months before her husband’s funeral, Jackie Kennedy stood in a receiving line with Venezuelan President Romulo Batancourt at a Venezuelan embassy event.

An anti-communist ally JFK had relied upon to remain a bulwark of democracy in South America, Betancort had survived an assassination attempt the year Kennedy had been elected President. In a letter Jackie Kennedy then wrote Betancourt reiterating what she told Mora, she touched on the issue of assassination, from a political viewpoint, rather than her own personal loss:

“He [JFK] feared for your life and for the whole future of Latin America, if anything ever happened to you…Please be careful. You are so desperately needed now to make all your and his dream come true , and to save the Western Hemisphere.”

When the Colombian delegation had their Red Room conference with Mrs. Kennedy, she focused on the former Colombian President Alberto Lleras Camargo, opening their discussion with another personal yet political imploring on the need to maintain democracy in Latin America.

The Kennedys with Camargo during an Alliance for Progress ceremony during their trip to Bogota, Colombia.

In typical Jackie style, she wrapped it in flattery,  expressing appreciation for his early embrace of the Kennedy Administration’s Alliance for Progress program, which provided U.S. funding for the building of infrastructure, schools, housing projects and hospitals to Latin American nations. It wasn’t all altruism; many of the nations needing the funds were also among the “non-aligned,” allied to neither the U.S. or the Soviet Union. The financial support certainly helped keep such nations from leaning towards the communist block.

Camargo and the Kennedys.

Recalling the trip she had made with JFK to Bogota, to break ground for an Alliance of Progress housing project, she observed that the funding had become a strong bond of friendship between the two nations, remarking that surely it must continue, a gentle but unambiguous push to ensure that Colombia not consider aligning with the Soviets simply because the U.S. now had a new President.

What she did that afternoon as the representative of the late President in direct contact with foreign head of state was seemingly in conjunction with the broader symbolism conveyed earlier in the day.

Flanked by her brothers-in-law, the widowed Mrs. Kennedy walked fully exposed to crowds. (Washington Post)

Jacqueline Kennedy on the day of the funeral mass and burial.

While she conceived of the various parts of the funeral to reflect JFK as both a person and President, she also had the wherewithal to recognize a larger message she had the chance to convey, beyond the individual who had been killed, specifically, or even the office of president, generally.

Cognizant of the fact that millions of people from every part of the world would potentially be watching the funeral procession on television and forming their perceptions of the United States of America, she consciously cast herself as the very embodiment of her country.

It was during the portion of the day’s events when she walked from the White House to St. Matthew’s Cathedral that she telegraphed several specific characteristics which she intended to personify the United States.

Overall, there was the bravery of walking down a public avenue, exposing herself fearlessly to even thousands of more people on the sidewalks and in buildings than had been on the sidewalks and in the buildings of Dallas when her exposed husband was killed.

There was also the discipline of refusing to break down or lower her head, conveying an impression of mature strength without regard to her age. Further, there was independence when, after the procession left the gates of the White House, she dropped the hands of her two brothers-in-law and marched steadily without need of support.

Jacqueline Kennedy was visibly the leader of the largely male delegation which walked behind her.

These qualities combined to exponentially effect the most important commodity of a Cold War nation – that of power.

That Jacqueline Kennedy was affirming the United States as the leading power of the world was most obvious by the configuration of the procession.

Using herself as a national personification, at a point on Connecticut Avenue she stepped out alone to emerge as the leader and set a quicker pace of walking, ensuring that no others shared her solitary status.

Seven of the most prominent heads of state followed the American President’s widow.

The first row of seven recognizable leaders of other foreign powers only followed in the wake of this female United States.

The places of each nation’s delegations were determined alphabetically.

Whether by accident or intent, however, this row of seven national personifications represented global diversity, from Europe to Asia to Africa (France, Germany, Greece, South Korea, the Philippines and Ethiopia).

Mon Generale, as Jackie Kennedy somewhat sarcastically referred to De Gaulle.

To those who knew the machinations and egos of world leaders at the time, the public display of Jacqueline Kennedy’s comportment as she led the processional walk to the cathedral resulted in nothing short of an astounding diplomatic miracle.

French President Charles De Gaulle actually complimented an American and thereby made a concession that the United States was not a monolith of cowboys and consumerists: “She gave an example to the whole world of how to behave.”

In both her taped oral history made public in 2011, and the details notes she wrote on my First Ladies, Volume II manuscript in 1990, however, Jackie Kennedy offered commentary which showed her to be as good at the game of flattery as was the tactical DeGaulle, whom she nicknamed with some sarcasm, “Mon Generale.”

Jackie with De Gaulle at Versailles in 1961.

While she had charmed him with her ability to speak flawless French and her reverence for French history on the famous state visit she made with President Kennedy to Paris in 1961, she detected an arrogance that she felt was so embedded in his character that it would soon become not just a fatal flaw for France but its allies.

She crossed out an initial passage in the rough draft of First Ladies, for example, where I had asserted that she complained to JFK when Kennedy Administration officials were critical of De Gaulle. “Untrue,” she wrote in the margin, “or else a joke. JBK shared JFK’s frequent exasperation with De Gaulle.”

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis edited page of Carl Anthony’s manuscript mentioning De Gaulle

Although she surely appreciated De Gaulle’s complimentary words about her behavior in public, Jackie Kennedy saved some strong words for him that afternoon, in private.

Robert, Ethel, Jean and Teddy Kennedy received the heads of state as they entered the reception.

If the processional walk had a symbolic impact intended to impress the viewing citizens of the world,  it was at the White House reception where Jackie Kennedy delivered more substantive messages to certain world leaders.

As had been true throughout John F. Kennedy’s career his extended family was integrated into the event and helped facilitate a larger agenda.

Robert and Ethel Kennedy, Teddy Kennedy and Jean Kennedy Smith received the foreign heads of state as they began to arrive for the White House reception..

As the room filled up with guests, Eunice Kennedy, her husband Sargent Shriver, and Teddy’s wife Joan Kennedy were keeping track of specific heads of state in the room.

These particular world leaders were to be brought upstairs, individually, when signaled.

The late President’s siblings Edward Kennedy and Eunice Kennedy Shriver consult while keeping an eye on the room full of world leaders.

There, Jackie Kennedy wanted to confer with them privately in the Yellow Oval Room, doing so with Ireland’s President Eamon de Valera, Ethiopia’s Emperor Haile Selassie and Great Britain’s Prince Philip and Prime Minister Alec Douglas-Home.

Early that morning, before the funeral mass and burial, she had called the curator’s office and asked them to remove several stunning Cezanne landscapes from the Yellow Oval  Room.

Sargent and Eunice Shriver speak with England’s Prince Philip.

The staff was stunned and perplexed by this and her further requests that 1810s aquatint engravings of Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington by artists Cartwright and Bennet replace them.

The Kennedy Yellow Oval Room, looking south.

She then explained, “This afternoon I’m going to be receiving [France’s] President DeGaulle in this room, and I want him to be aware of the heritage of the United States, and these are scenes from our own history.”

Teddy Kennedy escorting De Gaule at the post-funeral reception.

To ensure that De Gaulle did not slip out of the White House before she had her time alone with him, she charged brother-in-law Teddy Kennedy with serving as a sort of personal escort to the Frenchman.

Once in the confines of the quiet room, Jackie made obligue reference to what she called “this French…English thing,” meaning a widening schism in the traditional North Atlantic alliance between the United Kingdom and France, having been largely driven by DeGaulle.

Teddy Kennedy escorting De Gaulle as he departs the White House.

After a long delay, Jackie Kennedy’s first cousin John Davis, then living in Italy, only finally arrived after the funeral, during the White House reception for foreign leaders.

Just after her private meetings with individual world leaders, Jackie Kennedy revealed in general terms to her first cousin John Davis what she had discussed with them.

Brought upstairs to see her, she revealed that she’d made an “attempt to patch up the enmity and tension that had developed of late between England, France, and the United States. Ten months earlier, De Gaulle had announced France’s veto on the application of Great Britain to join the European Common Market, declaring “l’Angleterre, ce n’est plus grand chose” (“England is not much any more”).

It is unclear from the vague description Davis left whether she had also politely questioned DeGaulle about what was being called his “politics of grandeur,” his effort to make French foreign policy independent from its European allies, a move that would potentially weaken the coalition of nations led by the U.S. against Soviet communism.

France’s DeGaulle and England’s Prince Philip engage in discussion, Joan Kennedy at far right. The new British Prime Minister Alec Douglas-Home stands behind DeGaulle.

Realizing that his cousin was “functioning now on a wholly new level,” it was John Davis who declared that, by determining to affirm U.S. interests directly with world leaders that for at least this one day, Jacqueline Kennedy was performing as “the real President of the United States.”

Davis had only arrived at the White House after Jackie Kennedy had held her individual conferences in the Yellow Oval Room and it may have been what led him to recount a detail that was in error.

He claimed that Jackie Kennedy had brought DeGaulle together to speak with England’s Prince Philip in their first conversation that day.

The new British Prime Minister Douglas-Home speaking with Jacqueline Kennedy as Edward Kennedy listens.

However, at least one random photograph shows the two men engaged in conversation, not in the Yellow Oval Room but down at the larger reception. As a ceremonial figure, Prince Philip was also unlikely to engaged the French President on Common Market or foreign alliance differences between the two countries.

What seems more likely is that Jackie Kennedy facilitated a dialogue upstairs between De Gaulle and the new British Prime Minister Alec Douglas-Home, who had assumed his post just over a month before.

Jackie was also more relaxed with the new Prime Minster, the uncle of her friend Robin, than she was with the Queen of England’s husband.

Jacqueline Kennedy clearly saw her role that day as not merely the representative of the slain President but also his policies and intentions.

Perhaps it was the shock of what had happened or her realization that the power she was infused with that day was fleeting, but Jacqueline Kennedy was unwilling for at least this one day to maintain a politically demure facade. As she admitted to John Davis, she had “felt imbued” with a “power she never knew she had.”

Jacqueline Kennedy receiving the Soviet delegation, November 25, 1963.

Potentially the most important interaction she had that day, however,  would lead Jacqueline Kennedy to not only write perhaps the most extraordinary letter ever penned by a First Lady but prove her foresight on a matter which remains relevant a half-century later, the threat posed to the world of nuclear weaponry in the hands of smaller nations.

In greeting the Soviet delegation, she addressed Anastas Mikoyan, First Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR, asking him to directly tell President Nikita Khrushchev that, “I know he and my husband worked for a peaceful world, and now he and you must carry on my husband’s work.”

Mrs. Kennedy felt, however, that the impact of her verbal message failed to articulate the importance of what she wished to convey. And so, five days before she lost her access to the ultimate symbol of power, she directly wrote on White House stationary to the Soviet Union’s leader:

Washington, December 1, 1963.

 

Dear Mr. Chairman President:

 

I would like to thank you for sending Mr. Mikoyan as your representative to my husband’s funeral.He looked so upset when he came through the line, and I was very moved.

 

I tried to give him a message for you that day—but as it was such a terrible day for me, I do not know if my words came out as I meant them to.

 

So now, in one of the last nights I will spend in the White House, in one of the last letters I will write on this paper at the White House, I would like to write you my message.

 

I send it only because I know how much my husband cared about peace, and how the relation between you and him was central to this care in his mind. He used to quote your words in some of his speeches-”In the next war the survivors will envy the dead.”

 

You and he were adversaries, but you were allied in a determination that the world should not be blown up. You respected each other and could deal with each other. I know that President Johnson will make every effort to establish the same relationship with you.

 

The danger which troubled my husband was that war might be started not so much by the big men as by the little ones.

 

While big men know the needs for self-control and restraint—little men are sometimes moved more by fear and pride. If only in the future the big men can continue to make the little ones sit down and talk, before they start to fight.

 

I know that President Johnson will continue the policy in which my husband so deeply believed—a policy of control and restraint—and he will need your help.

 

I send this letter because I know so deeply of the importance of the relationship which existed between you and my husband, and also because of your kindness, and that of Mrs. Khrushcheva in Vienna.

 

I read that she had tears in her eyes when she left the American Embassy in Moscow, after signing the book of mourning. Please thank her for that.

 

Sincerely,

 

Jackie Kennedy had far more acute political skills than she or JFK let on.

Throughout her tenure as First Lady, particularly on matters of foreign affairs, Jacqueline Kennedy had purposefully subverted the degree of interest and knowledge she had.

She often offered her observations and opinions on world leaders to President Kennedy.

To what degree she may have influenced or changed his thinking has never been fully determined and it is unlikely her political role can ever be entirely defined.

The new President Johnson with the British Prime Minister at his own reception for world leaders, held at the State Department.

Her iteration of U.S. policy to important world leaders on this one day, November 25, 1963, might well have been carried out with the tacit approval of the new American President.

The reason for Lyndon Johnson’s complete absence from the White House reception for foreign leaders is intriguing for if it was merely the post-funeral reception it was believed it to be, there would have been no reason for him to stay away. That same day, President Johnson hosted his own, if briefer reception for the foreign delegations, hosted at the State Department building.

The very next day, however, he met with only three world leaders, all of whom had first met with Mrs. Kennedy in private the day before.

Had she discussed her agenda with LBJ before her meetings? Had he asked her to meet with the particular world leaders that she did? Did she brief him on the response she got from them, in preparation for his own conferences with them the next day?

Perhaps there was more to her laugh than mere humor in one of her taped conversations with President Johnson shortly thereafter, when she cracked, “That’s what they’ll say about me – she ran around with two Presidents!”

Jacqueline Kennedy receiving in the Red Room along with “two Presidents.”

The funeral of President John F. Kennedy drew more representatives from foreign countries to the United States than did any other event in American history.

Among the positions held by these representatives were Prime Minister, Foreign Minister, Defense Minister, Ambassador, President, Vice President and Emperor.

The nations which sent representatives were: Afghanistan. Algeria, Argentina, Australia, Austria, Bahamas, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Burundi. Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Bulgaria, Cambodia, Cameroon, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, the two Republics of the Congo, Costa Rica, Cyprus, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Ecuador, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Finland, France, West Germany, Ghana, Greece, Guatemala, Guinea, Haiti, Hungary, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Ivory Coast, Jamaica, Japan, Jordan, South Korea, Laos, Lebanon, Liberia, Libya, Luxembourg, Malagasy Republic, Mali, Malaysia, Mexico, Morocco, Nepal, the Netherlands, Nicaragua, Norway, Pakistan, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, the Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Sierra Leone, Switzerland, South Africa, Somalia, Spain, Sweden, Thailand, Turkey, Tunisia, United Arab Republic, Yugoslavia, Venezuela, and South Vietnam.

Related articles

• A Second JFK Term: Jackie Kennedy’s Notes on What Was Planned (carlanthonyonline.com)
• Jackie Onassis Confirmed JFK “picked” her Pink Suit for Dallas, Four Years Before She Died (carlanthonyonline.com)
• JFK’s Children: John’s Birthday on his Father’s Burial Day & How Caroline Was Told JFK was Gone (carlanthonyonline.com)
• Jackie Kennedy’s Speech the Night Before JFK’s Murder (carlanthonyonline.com)

Categories: First Ladies, Presidents, The Kennedys

Tags: Alberto Lleras Camargo, Alec Douglas-Home, Charles DeGaulle, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Lyndon B. Johnson, Nikita Khrushchev