JFK’s last bash: booze, a yacht, skirt-chasing
The late U.S. president would have celebrated his 100th birthday on Monday
It has been 100 years since John F. Kennedy’s birth on May 29, 1917, at his parents’ home in Brookline, Mass., just outside Boston. Over the course of his life, Kennedy enjoyed lavish birthday celebrations, the most famous being a Democratic fundraising bash at Madison Square Garden on May 19, 1962, when a sequined Marilyn Monroe breathily purred, Happy burrthday, Mr. President.
But how did Kennedy celebrate his 46th birthday, the last of his short life?
On a boat, with Dom Pérignon, French cuisine and the president chasing the wife of a legendary Washington journalist.
On May 29, 1963, Kennedy and about two dozen others boarded the 104-foot Sequoia, the presidential yacht, for a dinner party cruise down the Potomac River. It was a family-and-friends-only affair. Aside from a few Secret Service agents, the roster of guests gleamed with a touch of Hollywood: actors David Niven ( Separate Tables and The Pink Panther) and Peter Lawford (a Rat Packer who was married to Patricia Kennedy, the commander in chief’s sister).
The powerful and the privileged were in attendance: Kennedy’s brothers, Robert F. Kennedy, then the U.S. attorney general, and Sen. Edward Kennedy; Ben Bradlee, the future editor of the Washington Post who worked as Newsweek’s Washington bureau chief, along with his then-wife, Antoinette “Tony” Pinchot Bradlee; and Sargent Shriver, the founding director of the Peace Corps, and his wife, Eunice Kennedy Shriver.
The party, organized by first lady Jacqueline Kennedy, also included one of Kennedy’s on-again-off-again paramours, Mary Pinchot Meyer, Tony Bradlee’s sister who was fatally shot a year later in Georgetown in a still unsolved murder, and Enud Sztanko, a young Georgetown foreign language instructor who later told a Kennedy biographer that she resisted the president’s sexual advances.
Guests arrived, per the invitation’s instructions, wearing “appropriately festive yachting suit and dress,” according to an archived White House telegram. As lightning lit the sky, they drank cocktails on the boat’s fantail, according to Ben Bradlee’s book, Conversations with Kennedy. But rainy weather forced everyone inside. Guests stood up to make toasts, but the Kennedys (except Jackie) interrupted with cheers and good-natured heckling, Bradlee wrote.
When it was her turn to toast Kennedy, Sztanko “felt absolute panic” before wishing the president “happy birthday” in her native Hungarian, according to Grace and Power, by journalist Sally Bedell Smith.
The partiers were guzzling 1955 Dom Pérignon and feasting on crabmeat ravigote, noodle casserole, asparagus Hollandaise and roast filet of beef. For dessert? “Bombe President sauce chocolat,” according to the menu. Kennedy was 2 1⁄ years into his
2 term as the 35th president. In the days leading up to his birthday, he had been juggling huge matters of race and war. At a May 22 news conference, he told reporters he hoped that Alabama’s new governor, George Wallace, would comply with a court order mandating integration at the University of Alabama, and that he wouldn’t have to resort to the deployment of federal troops. Answering another question, Kennedy declared that he couldn’t promise troop withdrawals in Vietnam because “there is still a long, hard struggle to go.”
With so many momentous issues facing the young president, Kennedy was clearly ready for his birthday cruise, which began at 8 p.m. and stretched to almost1:30 a.m., recalled Clint Hill, one of three Secret Service agents who stood sentry along the Sequoia’s mahogany walls.
“I was very happy to be there that night, and that I could witness this, and be able to see him have such a wonderful time,” Hill, now 85, said. Everyone was “more or less drenched” from the weather, Bradlee wrote in his memoir. Ted Kennedy, the president’s youngest brother, was “the wettest,” according to Bradlee, who also noted that the senator “mysteriously lost one leg of his trousers some time during the night.” Niven was more precise, telling Smith that they were “ripped off at the crotch with white underpants on the port side flashing.”
Clement Norton, a Kennedy family friend and Massachusetts political operative, got so drunk he fell onto the president’s gift from Jackie, stomping on the rare engraving depicting a scene from the War of 1812, according to Bradlee.
“It had cost more than $1,000 and Jackie had scoured galleries to find it, but she greeted its destruction with that veiled expression she assumes, and when everyone commiserated with her over this disaster, she just said, ‘Oh, that’s all right. I can get it fixed,’ ” wrote Bradlee.
It was the second time Kennedy had marked his birthday. White House staffers had thrown a surprise party for him at the navy mess at 5:45 p.m., according to the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum.
Kennedy was presented with several gag gifts: a pair of boxing gloves (for his fights with Congress) and “Debate Rules,” allegedly from vanquished Republican Richard Nixon.
Hill stood guard at the White House mess party. But it was the celebration aboard the Sequoia that night that was most memorable.
“They were doing the twist, the chacha and everything in between. It was wild,” Hill wrote in his memoir. “I don’t think I had ever seen the president and Mrs. Kennedy having more fun. Nobody wanted the night to end.”
In her book, Smith wrote that Kennedy, in particular, was having a lot of fun, maybe too much. He set his sights on Tony Bradlee and pursued her all evening. Pursued, in the most literal sense.
“I was running and laughing as he chased me. He caught up with me in the ladies’ room and made a pass,” Tony Bradlee recounted to Smith. “It was a pretty strenuous attack, not as if he pushed me down, but his hands wandered. I said, ‘That’s it, so long.’ I was running like mad.”