In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

52 President Kennedy came to Milford to make a bit of mischief. That was Benjamin Bradlee’s later memory of the presidential trip to Grey Towers . Then a Newsweek correspondent covering the White House, as well as a presidential confidant—the Kennedys and Bradlees had lived next door to one another in Georgetown before the Massachusetts senator claimed the White House in November 1960—Bradlee’s version of events was a tale of three women: his wife Antoinette (Toni) Pinchot Bradlee, a niece of Gifford Pinchot’s; her sister, Mary Pinchot Meyer, the former wife of top CIA official Cort Meyer and a onetime mistress of the president’s; and their mother Ruth Pickering Pinchot, the second wife of Amos Richard Eno Pinchot, Gifford’s brother. It helps to know two additional elements of this story’s staging. The Pinchot sisters flew with the president to Milford. His offer of transport was a gesture of respect for those for whom he had warm regard, bringing his friends back to their formative grounds.1 As for their mother, Kennedy liked Ruth Pinchot after a fashion though their political opinions could not be more opposed. She and her husband had shared Gifford and Cornelia Pinchot’s progressive politics until the early 1930s (Amos, for instance, had been one of the founders of the American Civil Liberties Union, and Ruth had written for the left-wing journal the Masses). But with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s election in 1932, the couple began to pull hard right. As their criticism of what they believed was the Chapter six Greening the Presidency It is a source of interest to me that the three Americans in this century who have been most clearly identified with the maintenance and development of our natural resources and the conservation of those resources, particularly in the West, have been three Easterners—Gifford Pinchot and the two Roosevelts. —President John F. Kennedy GREENING THE PRESIDENCY 53 New Deal’s intrusive and paternalistic agenda deepened, Amos and Ruth embraced ever-more conservative positions and organizations. By the end of that decade they were in full support of America First, an isolationist group strongly opposed to the country’s entrance into the Second World War.2 This rock-ribbed opposition to Democratic Party initiatives continued to define Ruth Pinchot’s political calculations when the president, who inherited FDR’s foreign policy engagements and faith in social safety nets, visited Grey Towers in 1963. “Her affection for her daughters led her to be more than civil to their friend the president,” Bradlee noted, “but it was assumed that every time she saw him she assuaged her guilt by doubling her contributions to Senator Barry Goldwater and to William F. Buckley’s National Review magazine.” Knowing something of this lore, Kennedy reportedly could not resist touring Ruth Pinchot’s nearby cottage, where a group photo was snapped. Captured on film, Bradlee recalled, was “one of history’s most frozen shots . . . the Democratic president surrounded by the arch-Republican mother and her two Democratic daughters.”3 This bit of insider hijinks was the real story behind Kennedy’s trip to the site, Bradlee inferred, for how else to explain the chief executive’s presence at an event that was of relatively little import? How else to make sense of the fact that the president did not bother to tour Grey Towers? About this slight, Bradlee was wrong—Gifford Bryce and Sally Pinchot guided the president through the house and some of its grounds. Yet that truth was less compelling than the journalist’s dismissive story line: the gift of the Pinchot family manse “was probably not enough to command the president ’s presence,” Bradlee mused, but “a chance to see where his friends the Pinchot girls had grown up, and especially a chance to see their mother, was apparently irresistible.”4 As risible, Bradlee thought, was the conservation focus of the presidential tour for which Grey Towers served as the kickoff event: “Except for his love of the sea, John Fitzgerald Kennedy was about the most urban—and urbane—man I have ever met. A well-manicured golf course, perhaps, or an immaculate lawn turned into a touch football field, but that was as far as he could comfortably remove himself from the urban amenities without wondering what the hell he was doing. . . . An outdoorsman he was not.” Interior Secretary Udall concurred: “I can hardly, with fairness, complain that my man does not have a streak of...

Share