Historical Notes: Steam from the Bubble Bath

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"I guess," Jacqueline Kennedy told an aide in 1963, "if Pierre ends up putting me and the children on the cover of Look in a bubble bath, I'll have to put up with it." JFK's press secretary, Pierre Salinger, might well have concocted such a scheme—and Mrs. Kennedy was determined to "do anything to help" the President's campaign for a second term. Nonetheless, she could never quite accept the fact that for a glamorous couple with charming children, life in the White House was indeed a perennial and public bubble bath.

The extent of Jackie's antipathy to unremitting publicity is recorded by Salinger in a book which is to be published by Doubleday in September and is being serialized meanwhile in Good Housekeeping. The First Lady bombarded him with memos, "usually in outrage," protesting "deficiencies in my efforts to preserve the privacy of the children." One little-known factor with in the Kennedy menage was the President's allergy to animal fur—a handicap he bore nobly in view of the expansive zoo of dogs, hamsters, ponies and other pets maintained by the Kennedy children. One of the hamsters doubtless attained rodentian nirvana by drowning in the presidential bathtub.

John Kennedy, Salinger recalls, was at first irked by Jacqueline's ambitious and ultimately triumphant campaign to refurbish the White House in a style consonant with its symbolic and historic stature. He was particularly upset by his wife's redecoration of the family dining room, which he used for breakfast meetings with congressional leaders. At one of the first sessions in the restored room, chunky Larry O'Brien, Kennedy's chief congressional liaison man (and now Postmaster General), plunked down on a delicate antique chair—and crashed to the floor. "It's a good thing that wasn't the President," said House Speaker John McCormack. A few minutes later Kennedy entered and seated himself. He, too, wound up in a pile of priceless splinters.