Literary Hill by Karen Lyon

the LITERARY HILL

A Compendium of Readers, Writers, Books, & Events

by Karen Lyon

Our Miss Bouvier

Meet LeMoyne Billings. Lem, as Jack calls him, has been by Kennedy’s side “since the third form of Choate” and serves as both friend and foil to the entire Kennedy clan. So when the Congressman is too busy running for the Senate to tend to the business of wooing the requisite political wife, who better to serve as surrogate than the “big bespectacled guy” whom Jack’s mother, “with just the barest brush of quotation marks,” has described as her “fifth son”?

In Louis Bayard’s breathtaking new book, “Jackie & Me,” Lem is tasked with squiring “Our Miss Bouvier” around DC and, as someone “uniquely qualified to explain Kennedy mating rituals,” with getting her to “stay the course” through a confusing and unconventional courtship. As he draws closer to Jackie and becomes her confidant, he also finds himself like “Squanto, translating the young squaw for the Kennedy pilgrims.” It’s a teetering line, but Lem loyally walks it ‒ because, as he says, “Every great leader needs a great friend.”

Bayard has a demonstrated talent for assiduously researching and bringing historical figures to life, as he has done with Abraham Lincoln and Edgar Allan Poe, among others. But his surpassing gift lies in the vivid scenes and dialogues he imagines and in his wickedly trenchant descriptions. Of Jackie’s mother, Janet Auchincloss, for example, he notes that she’s skilled in “the echolocation of husbands” and can be “quite abstract about her loathing” of people she’s never met. “[T]he Kennedys,” he writes, “were the full ultraviolet spectrum. Rancor and laughter and sailing into the wind … the world just seemed to accelerate around them.” And when Lem is asked to describe Jackie to her future husband, he comes up with “charming,” “elegant” and “quick on the draw.” Then: “I thought for a bit more. ‘Lonely.’”

Filled with a sad sense of foreboding, “Jackie & Me” is in some ways a story about those moments when life could have taken a very different turn, but is mostly a perceptive snapshot in time about two lonely people who find solace in an unlikely friendship, clinging to one another in the wake of the Kennedy tsunami and the forces of history.

Louis Bayard is the bestselling author of nine historical novels, including “Courting Mr. Lincoln” and “The Pale Blue Eye,” which is being made into a Netflix film starring Christian Bale. www.louisbayard.com

Louis Bayard’s latest novel, “Jackie & Me,” focuses on the future First Lady’s friendship with Kennedy intimate Lem Billings during Jack’s unconventional courtship. Photo: Anna Carson DeWitt “Damn Fool Lines”

Remember those World War II movies where the gung-ho unit was made up of one soldier of every color, religion and ethnic group, each bearing a tough but affectionate nickname? Well, Thomas Guglielmo is here to offer an alternative reality to the “band of brothers” trope.

In “Divisions: A New History of Racism and Resistance in America’s World War II Military,” the historian amasses a mountain of evidence to show that the military’s color lines ‒ whether enforced as official policy or simply followed by dint of tradition ‒ not only undermined the war effort but also created “enduring fractures” that affected American postwar politics for years. “Military racism hurt everyone,” he writes. “Even white people, by far the biggest beneficiaries of the military’s color lines, also paid a price, sometimes the ultimate price” ‒ by being overrepresented and dying on the front lines. “Military white supremacy,” he writes, “crowned few true victors.”

Guglielmo presents his case in five main sections ‒ Enlistment, Assignment, Classification, Training and Fighting ‒ describing in each how military racism affected African Americans as well as non-black groups such as Japanese Americans, American Indians and those of Mexican descent. Their experiences are disheartening, from being forced to serve in segregated units and assigned the dirtiest jobs to being denied promotions and given harsh punishments for trumped-up charges.

“It just don’t make any sense,” one African American soldier observed. Once the enemy starts shooting, he said, “they don’t try to find out who is white and who is black before they aim. Yet they draw all kinds of damn fool lines and say ‘black boys on this side, whites on the other.’” The racism was so profound, especially in the South, that some soldiers were relieved when they were sent overseas. Many soldiers of all stripes returned home haunted by the humiliation and trauma of being treated as less than full citi-

Historian Thomas A. Guglielmo exposes the racism rampant in the US military during World War II in “Divisions.”