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was she enthralled by Jack’s friendship with the Red Scare monger Senator Joe McCarthy. She was dubious about me, too; the increasingly conservative Senator Gore was not a favorite of the Roosevelts. Eleanor did like my father because he was close to Amelia Earhart for whom she had a Sapphic passion that Amelia found disconcerting. Amelia said that Eleanor was always suggesting they make flights together all around the country, just the two of them, communing with the wind and the stars. Although my father maintained that his long relationship with Amelia was simply professional, his sister, while snooping around his bachelor flat in the Anchorage, a small residential hotel on Connecticut Avenue, found in the bathroom a silver-backed hairbrush with the initials A.E. and reddish blond strands of her curly hair in the brush. As a child I longed for Amelia to be my stepmother but nothing came of it. We used to show each other poems that we had written.
    In 1960 Jack persuaded FDR Jr., Walter Reuther, and me to be envoys to Mrs. Roosevelt and get her to support Jack for president. We failed: at the Los Angeles convention she was for Stevenson to the end. Once nominated, Jack flew into Hyde Park to woo her. Since Eleanor was nothing if not a realist, she promptly became a partisan. After the election, she sometimes gave me advice to give to him. The first was: “He must get a voice coach. He talks too fast. People can’t follow what he’s saying.” She told me how she herself had had a wonderful coach. Then she gave her sudden high giggle and flashed her Rooseveltian tombstone teeth so like her uncle Theodore’s. “Yes, I know my voice is still rather dreadful but it was ever so much worse.” She also thought the Kennedy children were in luck. “They will still be so young after eight years in the White House which is no place”—and she frowned grimly—“for young people to be brought up in, where they are flattered and tempted by all sorts of the wrong people.” I know that my father was not pleased that young Elliott Roosevelt, the president’s son, was going around saying that Gene Vidal was
his
man in the first administration “and so if you wanted an airline route…”

    I was not present at this meeting between JFK and Eleanor Roosevelt, disguised as a Sherman tank, but I heard from each
fairly
similar stories! Jack looks uncommonly nervous as she encourages him to be like Uncle Theodore and FDR. This was 1961, he has just been elected president. Dallas is two years ahead of him. She died in 1962. R.I.P.
    Politics. What was the 1960 race about? Overall, the election of 1960 was largely about appearances—literally. In the television debate between Kennedy and Nixon, Kennedy did not look too young as his handlers feared while, sweating on camera and looking ill-shaven, Nixon did not appeal to many viewers. The only substantive issue of their joint appearance were two islands off China’s shore, Quemoy and Matsu, and were these barren lumps a significant part of the free world to be defended to the death by the United States or simply ignored as they had been throughout history and so hardly worth a third world war. Since Kennedy looked handsome on camera, he won the debates. But tricky Dick Nixon did get one up on Jack. After they shook hands before the debate, Nixon suddenly scowled and pointed his finger accusingly at Jack, making for a stern winning picture of what Adlai Stevenson liked to refer to as Richard the Black Hearted.
    Quemoy and Matsu were promptly forgotten and Jack squeaked through to victory, thanks to Chicago’s Mayor Daley’s sly way with election returns. The country was also being told that we were—all of us—looking for a new generation of young vigorous leaders born in the twentieth century. Dutifully, we pretended that we were. Certainly President Eisenhower did not inspire those of us allegedly eager for new frontiers to cross. In retrospect, Eisenhower managed to keep the