JFK: From Bermuda, With Love …
It was a case of “From Bermuda, with love …”– or at least affection — when Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy attempted to woo future wife Jacqueline Bouvier during a holiday on the island.
A member of the House of Representatives since 1946 for Massachusetts’ reliably Democratic 11th Congressional district, the future US President defeated Republican incumbent Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. during a hard-fought 1952 Senate race.
A newly elected Senator Kennedy is seen below teeing off at the Riddell’s Bay Golf & Country Club course during a visit to Bermuda following the 1952 election.
He is accompanied by his host, one-time Princeton classmate Oliver Brooks, the heir to a major US industrial fortune who owned a home, “Eventide”, on Burnt House Hill.
Senator Kennedy sent “Washington Times-Herald” photographer Jacqueline Bouvier — who he had been sporadically romancing for a number of years– a postcard from Bermuda on this trip which read: “Wish you were here. Cheers, Jack.”
The future US First Lady saved the card and used to show it to friends, ruing: “And that was my entire courtship correspondence with Jack!”
The couple married in 1953.
John F. Kennedy paid a second private visit to Bermuda while he was serving as a US Senator from Massachusetts; he held the seat until 1960 when he won the Democratic Party’s nomination for the Presidency, going on to best Republican contender Richard Nixon that November by a razor-slim margin.
As President, Kennedy returned to Bermuda in December, 1961 to hold a “Big Two” summit meeting with British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan at Government House. The meeting was called to discuss Cold War tensions arising from construction of the Berlin Wall.
In a mournful postscript to that trip, the President held talks with Bermuda Governor Sir Julian Gascoigne — his host at that summit — in his private rooms just off the Oval Office just days before he was assassinated in Dallas on November 22, 1963.
President Kennedy cheerfully reminisced about the various times he had spent on the island; he also showed Sir Julian the porcelain figurine of a Spanish Hog-Fish and a Sergeant Major fish and a piece of coral mounted on a cedar wood base presented to him at the end of the Bermuda talks.
Displayed in the Oval Office, the Royal Worcester figurine had a silver plaque on the cedar base which was engraved: “The Bermuda Meeting 1961/John F. Kennedy/President of the United States/From the People and Governor of Bermuda”
