Volume 38, Number 13 · July 18, 1991
Keeper of the Seal
By Garry Wills
Counsel to the President: A Memoir
by Clark Clifford, with Richard Holbrooke
Random House, 709 pp., $25.00
When not arranging the fate of nations, Clark Clifford took on humbler tasks, he informs us with a knowing grimace. One such assignment, offered almost as comic relief in this book of grand designs, came from Jacqueline Kennedy when she moved to the White House. Mrs. Kennedy, casting about for a weekend place to stay in 'hunt country,' had fixed her eye on Glen Ora, a four-hundred-acre estate. But the owner, a Mrs. Tartiere, did not want to sell or rent her house. She had the effrontery to prefer keeping what Mrs. Kennedy was determined to have. When the normal realestate agents failed, Mrs. Kennedy turned to Clark Clifford, the man who had served the Kennedys in earlier emergencies (handling the charge that John Kennedy was not the real author of his Pulitzer Prize–winning book, coping with Edward Kennedy's cheating record at Harvard).
Review, 3816 words
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