Thurston Clarke - JFKs Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President

THE PORTRAIT

, and biography so interesting [is] the struggle to answer that single question: Whats he like.

John F. Kennedy

E laine de Kooning, a garrulous, promiscuous, hard-drinking Greenwich Village bohemian who had flirted with communism and championed the death-row inmate Caryl Chessman, came to the Kennedy estate in Palm Beach on the morning of December 31, 1962, to paint a portrait of President John F. Kennedy for the Truman Library in Independence, Missouri. The artist William Walton, a close friend of the president and First Lady, had recommended her because he knew that Kennedy was too restless to tolerate a formal sitting and expected that de Kooning, who was known as The Fastest Brush in the East, could finish a portrait after a single session. After years of working in the shadow of her estranged husband, the famous abstract artist Willem de Kooning, she had earned a reputation as a figurative expressionist who could capture the essence of a subject in the vivid colors and bold brushstrokes of abstract art, and Walton and the Truman Library trustees were undoubtedly expecting a portrait like her celebrated take on the painter Robert De Niro, Sr. (father of the actor Robert De Niro), praised by one dealer as that expresses so much character in a nearly abstract painting.

She arrived to find Kennedy huddled on the patio with reporters and had trouble picking him out. She had expected, she said, the , appeared and stood next to de Kooning with her own easel, sketching him until he came over and drew a cat on her pad.

De Kooning drew him sitting and standing, full face and in profile, arms akimbo or folded over his chest, wearing dark glasses or squinting into the sun. She was a handsome and lively woman whose wit was as quick as her brush. They joked, flirted, and he threw a leg over the arm of a chair, putting his crotch at the center of her sketch and asking, ?

Well, its supposed to be an official portrait, she said.

He smiled and held the pose.

She thought, Ill take what I get, and kept working.

She papered the theater with sketches, charcoals, and watercolors, and worked late into the night. The more she drew him, the more he fascinated her, and frustrated her attempts to capture his essence in a single portrait. She began working on several canvases at once. she was in love with his mind and captivated by the idea of such a gallant, intelligent, handsome man leading the country and the world. She also admitted falling a teeny little bit in love with him.

She returned to New York with dozens of sketches and uncompleted portraits. Soon there were more. She realized that she had seen only one facet of him while his staff saw another, as did a public that saw him only on a two-dimensional television screen or in a photograph. She began sketching him when he appeared on television, and clipping his photographs from newspapers and magazines, tacking them to her walls and using them as models for more drawings and oils. Soon she was painting only him.

Walton visited her studio in early November 1963 to find photographs and sketches of Kennedy scattered across the floor, and the walls covered with so many of her studies that she had to climb a ladder to reach them all. Thirty-eight oils between two and eleven feet high and in various stages of completion leaned against walls and sat on easels. , she had papered her living quarters with more sketches and photographs so that whenever she cooked, ate, took a bath, used the toilet, or made love, she saw him. A photograph shows her surrounded by photographs, drawings, and oils, as if trapped in a maze of mirrors reflecting and re-reflecting his image. It was testimony to the difficulty and vastness of the task she had assumed: capturing the essence of one of the most complicated and enigmatic men ever to occupy the White House.

The playwright Robert Sherwood once spoke of Franklin D. Roosevelts , who understood him better than any other female reporter, believed that no one knew the total of him and called him the prismatic president because of the way he cultivated people to serve different needs and play different roles. When she asked, What does it feel like to be president? he had nervously rubbed his ankles, fingered his tie, jumped up from his rocking chair, and paced around the room before saying, Lets go on to another question. Im not very good at that couch talk.

Ted Sorensen, who had been his principal aide and speechwriter for ten years but seldom socialized with him, decided that , not all of him.

Because he compartmentalized his friends and family, parts of him remained hidden even to those who thought they knew him best. His brother Bobby was his attorney general and de facto assistant president, but when he and the former cabinet member Abraham Ribicoff went sailing off Palm Beach after Dallas, Ribicoff was shocked to find that he knew things about Jack that Bobby did not. The experience confirmed his sense that Kennedy was a and almost dangerous for people like that [the Kennedys]Id say Jack didnt want to reveal himself at all.

His fondness for secrecy contributed to his elusiveness. in Hyannis Port to run a parallel campaign organization, telling him to communicate via a post office box and coded address so that his secretary Evelyn Lincoln could give it to him directly, and nobody elses eyes will get to see it.

His contradictory qualities were another barrier. He was a brass-knuckles politician and an idealist whose rhetoric encouraged nobility and sacrifice; a reckless driver but a cautious politician; a man who disliked close physical contact, even with his best friends, but who had a voracious sexual appetite. He was known for his wit and humanity, and for being chilly and remote. He gave the impression of being comfortable in his own skin, but he abhorred solitude. More than most presidentsmore than most middle-aged menhe was a work in progress, a moving target for anyone trying to capture him on a canvas or in prose. The literary critic Alfred Kazin decided his most essential quality was and remaking himself, and called him the final product of a fanatical job of self-remodeling.