Close Encounters with Jackie Kennedy Onassis

In case you missed it Jackie Kennedy Onassis was back in the news recently. In his tell all memoir Jim Hart wrote that the widowed former first lady of assassinated President John F. Kennedy and widow of Aristotle Onassis asked him to arrange a date for her with Alec Baldwin, then a 33-year-old actor. Jackie was nearly 62.

On The Late Show with Stephen Colbert earlier this week the now 59-year-old Baldwin recounted that for him it was a blind date, though he downplayed any suggestion it could be classified as a date. Hart had asked if he wanted to see the play Dancing at Lughnasa. They waited at Hart’s apartment (by the way, Hart was married to Carly Simon at the time) for Baldwin’s date to arrive when in flowed Jackie Kennedy Onassis. 

When it was time to go, Baldwin related, she said it would be more discreet if she left the building before them so the paparazzi would not photograph them together. At the theater Baldwin said she sat a row ahead of him. Baldwin provided no indication they went out socially again.

Several days after the broadcast I was swapping stories of encounters with famous people during lunch time at the Omaha Jewish Community Center on Deli Friday. I had joined Doug at his table. Shortly, Steve made up our threesome.

Doug recalled the time back in late 1973 or early 1974 he went with his brother Robert to see Dudley Moore and Peter Cook in Good Evening on Broadway. It was a series of comedy sketches by the incorrigibly satiric duo. The brothers scored great seats—fourth row center orchestra. Two rows, in fact, behind Jackie Kennedy Onassis and members of her family.

Throughout the first act few in the audience knew she was in the theater, but once intermission began her presence became well known.

Perhaps not as well known as it should have been.

The second act began with Cook placing a chair at center stage followed by Moore placing a chair slightly behind him to the left. From Cook’s movement the audience surmised he was driving a car.

Their dialogue, as Doug recalled, concerned Moore’s trepidation at his forthcoming initial speech in the House of Lords, to which Cook commented that he would like to be famous one day.

And then the bombshell exploded.

Cook said he knew how to become famous. He only had to emulate Lee Harvey Oswald and kill somebody famous.

Assuming you were as startled as I was to hear that dark comedy, imagine how the Kennedy family must have felt. Doug recalls no public reaction but to this day, some 44 years later, he wonders if Jackie knew in advance about the black humor Cook and Moore projected.

One of the perks of my being a field editor on Nation’s Restaurant News back in 1977, I told Doug and Steve, was being able to dine at some of the classier eating spots in Manhattan. One day, I found myself with co-workers Liz and Peggy having lunch in an expensive, over the top restaurant off Park Avenue in the mid-East 60s. The décor was gaudy—lots of mirrors and gold accents. 

As it had recently made its debut, the restaurant (long since closed) had yet to be discovered by the lunchtime crowd of power elites. It was, to be honest, rather thinly patronized that day. Aside from we three, only one other table was occupied. As I looked around I saw two people sitting at the table, a professorial-type man with unruly grey hair and a strikingly composed, thin, raven-haired woman with big glasses, eating a salad.

As Peggy’s back was to the other table, I whispered to her to glance in the mirror to see the reflection of what I thought was Jackie O. Instead, she twisted her body for a full frontal look and then, in no semblance of a stage whisper, blurted out, “It’s Jackie Kennedy!” 

I shrank in my seat, but Jackie didn’t bat an eyelash. A perfect example of being cool, calm and collected to what must have been a common occurrence in her lifetime.

Longing for No News Alerts That Scare The Hell Out of Me

I think I was like most teenagers growing up. I generally knew what was going on in the country and the world in the early and mid-1960s. I watched Walter Cronkite on CBS and listened to his colleague, the avuncular Eric Sevareid, dispassionately analyze current events and long term trends. And there were huge stories for both Cronkite and Sevareid and their fellow broadcasters to parse. The Cuban missile crisis. The civil rights movement. The assassination of a president. The Great Society initiative. The growing war in Vietnam. The space race.

It wasn’t until the summer of 1966, however, that I became aware of a need to listen to news every hour on the hour. Keep in mind that WCBS Newsradio 880 in New York did not become a 24 hour news station until August 1967.

I absorbed the importance of listening to news headlines every hour from a high school graduation present my parents provided—a trip to Israel. As I would ride the Egged buses across Jerusalem or Tel Aviv I would notice passengers intently listening to news broadcasts upon each hour.

Living during a perilous time in that nation’s history—that phrase applies to every moment of Israel’s 68-year history, but I digress—Israelis not only wanted to know the latest news. They also were listening for broadcast codes to alert them should their reserve units be called up.

A year later, during the Six Day War, I became obsessed with knowing the latest news from Israel. For good reason—my sister was in Israel, ending the second year of study abroad. Our family had no way of knowing if she were safe, where she was, what she was doing (turns out she was packing crackers for the soldiers). 

Naturally, after I became a journalist, I continued, to this day even in retirement, to turn on the radio at the top of each hour. For decades it was to hear if anything traumatic had transpired in the Middle East. Now, in addition, it is to hear if anything Trumpatic has traumatized (at least half) the nation.

I obviously do not agree with what our new president and his sycophantic Republican House and Senate are doing. But let’s be honest. Nothing was not foretold during the campaign. 

Hearing the hourly news keeps me abreast of the latest rollbacks. That’s what we have so far. Donald J. Trump is bringing us back to the pre-Obama years. He is doing what Obama did to Bush II-era regulations, what George W. Bush did to Clinton-era regulations, what Bill Clinton did to Reagan-Bush I era regulations. You can’t blame the public for feeling whipsawed by the constant change, the feeling on both sides of the aisle of one step forward then two steps backward.

We want transparency from our elected officials. What could be more transparent that the money grab schemes of the Trump family? What could be more blatant than Trump’s assertion that the public doesn’t care? Republican elected officials have shown they don’t. And so far, average GOP Joe Citizen hasn’t shown he cares either. 

Even on forced repatriation of illegal aliens Trump has been no more extreme than the deporter-in-chief Barack Obama (more than 2.5 million sent back to their countries of origin). Yes, the separation of a woman from her family made for heartrending visuals last week but if Trump’s storm troopers round up criminals of whatever stripe he would be acting within the bounds of socially acceptable power, even if a portion of those deported are no more dangerous than any street corner drunk or check kiter.

What any sane person doesn’t want is a violation of fundamental trust in our government and country. We don’t want truth to be undermined by “alternative facts.” We don’t want science to be rejected and supplanted by alternative theories. We don’t want our commitment to international leadership to be replaced by isolationism, a void to be filled by Russia and/or China. We don’t want our status as a nation of immigrants to be sullied by fear. We don’t want our cherished Constitution and its rule of law, as protected by an independent judiciary, to be trampled. We don’t want the long march of equality for all religions, people, gender and sexual orientation to be stalled. We don’t want to fall into the abyss like past empires that rewarded a sliver of oligarchs while the populace struggled to maintain dignity and economic independence.

And so we listen to the news every hour to see and hear the latest excess from a White House turned into a golden goose by a leader who never had to worry about his next meal, who never developed empathy for those who did, who never had to burnish in the crucible of public opinion a plan to help the less fortunate, who never engaged in any domestic or international exchange if it did not directly impact his personal wealth, who treated the public as rubes with money for the taking through shady construction deals and phony education programs, who denigrates our institutions, our elected officials and our judiciary even as he cozies up to dictators who murder their opposition, muzzle the free press and subject their people to deprivation so that they and their acolytes can live comfortably. 

A Saturday Night Live skit provided an apt closing to this blog posting. In it, a People’s Court judge tells Trump, portrayed by Alec Baldwin, he’s doing too much. She pleads with him, “I want one day without a CNN alert that scares the hell out of me.”

Donald Trump Provides Whole New Meaning to the Phrase "I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas"

Twenty-five more days until the opening line of the classic song “White Christmas” takes on a significance way beyond the meteorological meaning Irving Berlin could have imagined when he wrote “I’m dreaming of a white Christmas just like the one I used to know.”

In Donald Trump’s America, any skin shade but white (except his own orange tone) represents a divergence with the norm. 

Consider how his election has emboldened racism, bigotry and prejudice across the land, a most repugnant example of which came forth last week from Carl Paladino, a former Republican gubernatorial candidate in New York, co-chair of Trump’s New York state campaign and currently s member of Buffalo’s school board.

As one of many asked by a Buffalo media outlet Artvoice, a weekly newspaper, to respond to four questions including what they want most in 2017, Paladino displayed racial bigotry heretofore reserved for white supremacist outlets, rants so offensive I refuse to reproduce them but will provide a link: http://artvoice.com/2016/12/23/want-2017-lot-different-opinions/

It was a no-brainer for Team Trump to disavow Paladino’s comments but the man himself was not rebuked. Moreover, a president-elect who has taken the time to chastise via Twitter Saturday Night Live, Alec Baldwin, the cast of Hamilton, among others, has yet to send out 140 characters admonishing Paladino.

In Donald Trump’s America, white will be the dominant color upon which success may be assured. His exhortation of “Merry Christmas” is a bellicose rejection of the multicultural, religiously diverse “Happy Holidays.”

Is Trump truly a racist? Hard to say definitively, but it would be naive to believe he does not recognize the bigotry that has burst into the open because of his candidacy and election. Whether he accepts their support or not, Trump has made it acceptable to openly hate, to openly oppose civil rights advances of the last half century, to openly question the legitimacy of legal immigrants and their constitutional rights.

Carl Paladino exposed the racist underbelly of many of Trump’s supporters. Unless the next president forcefully rejects this cancer of hate, not once, not twice but every time it rears its ugly, divisive head, Donald Trump will not be upholding the oath of office he will swear to at noon on January 20, 2017.