Curious, I leafed through it. “Who else is reading this stuff?” I anguished, mentally reaching for an editing pencil to strike out some fawning adjectives. “Was I ever that wide-eyed? That ingenuous? That unsophisticated?”
Ancient love letters and photos can be burned, but oral histories live on forever for strangers to examine. So there I am, pressed in amber, caught in a time warp, in a world that existed before.the.. civil-rights and sexual revolutions, the rise of feminism, the pseudo-eventing of politics.
My White House job was a joy–a box seat on the world. Overseeing photographers and TV crews, I was in and out of the Oval Office, the Cabinet Room and Rose Garden a dozen times each day. I traveled to Dublin, London, Paris, Rome and the Berlin wall; to Hyannis Port and Palm Beach. I dealt with the peripheral helping to choreograph the ceremonial dance of the presidency.
I had no incisive insights to offer future historians about how the president handled international crises or political pressures during high-stakes policymaking sessions. My testimony was more an anecdotal mishmash of the president in action on the ceremonial front. His easy grace with heads of state and corporate CEOs during his Oval Office “photo ops”; his ready wit and disdain of the cliche at Rose Garden ceremonies. But how could I reminisce about the dynamics of that young, vigorous presidency without speaking of the underlying sexual tension that made the West Wing such a titillating place to work? It was a discreet, but sexually charged White House.
I was at the time mending from a failed, brief marriage and a bit of a Puritan about such matters as infidelity and one-night stands. But even as I disapproved, I relished the vicarious thrill of being “an insider,” privy to rumors of presidential escapades, a recurring topic of gossip among the White House press corps and staff.
Today, such rumors would be fodder for Georgetown dinner parties. But 85 years ago, the press did not write of it, and I never discussed it, at parties or at home with family and friends. I shareda Georgetown house with a young woman who also had ties to the administration. I now marvel that this subject was not bandied about as we played and partied together. Perhaps it was because no woman ever went public with charges of sexual misbehavior- as Paula Jones has accused President Clinton and we could remain protective, in denial, rationalizing that circumstantial evidence and gossip best be kept within the White House family.
But the value of the oral history, I was told. when I was asked to participate in the project, was that it would capture the immediacy, the flavor of the Kennedy presidency, providing future scholars with material they could not gain firsthand. Surely it was not a disservice to speak of these things when documenting an era for history. The White House assistant who was overseeing the project urged me to be candid, pointing out that two of the young women who had had close relationships with President Kennedy already had been interviewed and were “very open.”
So candid I was: about the presidential coed swimming parties; about the young women who unexpectedly showed up on trips; about the endless speculation, among press and staff, about just who was enjoying whose favors. It suddenly dawned on me, as I browsed through my almost forgotten oral history, that those stories were missing. Had the library sanitized my remarks? Leafing through the 105-page transcript again, I found a notation: “Pages 16-82 closed.” When I queried the library I was told that they closed 16 pages in an attempt not to embarrass living persons. I had originally sealed the interview for 15 years. But when Sen. Edward M. Kennedy was testing the presidential waters in the late 1970s, I wrote the library asking that the embargo be extended for an additional five years as I feared its release.might create an unwelcome diversion during the senator’s presidential quest.
Even now, my former colleague the investigative reporter Seymour Hersh tells me he is writing a book about the Kennedy presidency and has lots of “hot stuff.” Am I relieved my words will not lend credibility to his “hot stuff”? I still feel an allegiance to that White House and the dreams we dreamed for America. Does my testimony undercut the purpose and vision we shared? Or should I be discomforted that the Kennedy Library has broken faith with the spirit and purpose of oral history? It is history, I tell myself. Those somewhat innocuous anecdotes that library officials censored reflect the way it really was. If the library is going to play editor of the Kennedy memory, what can history really mean?
But then I ask: How would those missing pages serve history other than to spawn a round of salacious snickers when this country is already stricken with a National Enquirer mentality? Why subject the Kennedy children to yet another speculative tale?
Particularly today when our pop culture glorifies celebrities who give birth sans wedding ting, when randy sex is the norm on television and when reporters who hold others to account must sometimes plead guilty themselves to residing in the glass house of marital infidelity. There are no oral histories to haunt them.
