Just Jackie

by Edward Klein

  With her art director’s skills, she became John Kennedy’s most potent political ally. She transformed a White House that brimmed with rampant sexual infidelities and secret assassination plots against foreign leaders into a storybook place called Camelot. She established for all time the ideal of a golden age in American politics, making people yearn for the kind of heroic leaders who were probably no longer possible. And, in the words of the poet Archibald MacLeish, she “made the darkest days the American people had known in a hundred years the deepest revelation of their inward strength.”

  All this was done on such a grand scale that it was easy to overlook Jackie’s other great achievement, which came after she left the White House. In her private years, Jackie suffered an ordeal by the media such as no other woman in this century, with the possible exception of Britain’s Princess Diana, has had to undergo. But even as the public’s image of Jackie was dulled by gossipy sludge, the private flesh-and-blood Jackie developed into an ever more appealing, self-confident person.

  Over the next thirty years, Jackie struggled to recapture her old life, with all the power and the glory, only to discover that the key to her happiness lay where she least expected to find it: in the simple pleasures of family, friendship, work, and nature.

  “It’s queer how her public persona and her real self are so unlike,” one of her oldest friends, Charles Whitehouse, told the author toward the end of Jackie’s life. “I’ve given a lot of thought to this, and I think it is because she didn’t become connected in the public mind with any virtuous cause. She is not perceived like Lady Bird Johnson, planting and making things beautiful, or like Barbara Bush with reading. And, you know, being involved with a national problem might have eased Jackie’s situation.

  “So why didn’t she do it?” Whitehouse continued. “It may have been connected in some way with her being fiercely independent, and not willing to be involved superficially in something just for the sake of the press. Jackie is clearly not gripped by children with rickets. What she is, is a fascinating, somewhat perplexing human being—lively, sporty, affectionate, youthful. Not at all like the acquisitive monster that was portrayed in the press.”

  Erik Erikson was fascinated to listen to Jackie talk about herself and her children. Rarely had he encountered a woman who seemed so soaked in guilt.

  “There are children who mourn invisibly,” Erikson told her, speaking about her feelings as much as those of her children. “These children may show little emotion, but they are often concerned with the idea that some aggressive or sexual act or wish of their own might have been the cause of the death.”

  Jackie had no doubt harbored such aggressive wishes herself, especially when Jack Kennedy wounded her with his public displays of philandering and his callous disregard for her feelings. Her best friend, Bunny Mellon, called Jackie “a witch with supernatural powers,” and there were times when Jackie must have wished she was a sorceress so she could punish her rogue of a husband for all the pain he had inflicted upon her.

  “Jack would walk into a room and spot a young, attractive girl, and make a beeline for her,” Jackie confided to a friend.

  But then, in the last few months of their marriage, she and Jack had reached a new understanding, which was why she had agreed to go with him to Texas. And there in the blinding sunlight of Dallas, the third bullet from Lee Harvey Oswald’s rifle had torn away the back of Jack’s head, leaving Jackie with chunks of his brain quivering in her hands.

  She would surely have given anything to obliterate the memory of her shameful wishes. But of course she was powerless to change the past. All she could do was deal with the present, and especially with the assassination’s impact on her children.

  Jackie was even more concerned about John than she was about Caroline. She worried that John might somehow be damaged in his masculine development by the absence of a father figure. Her son had always been a handful, but he was growing more difficult to control. He was wild and impulsive, and unwilling to listen to anybody. Managing him was becoming a chore.

  At age three, John was in the midst of Erikson’s stage three—the conflict between “initiative” and “guilt.” John was trying to figure out which of his independent moves were socially acceptable, and which were not. It was the duty of his mother to help him internalize socially correct behavior through loving discipline. At the same time, according to Erikson’s theory, she was to encourage free expression, and not raise a little automaton.

  Erikson talked about the shooting in Dallas. A child’s early concept of his body was often related to mechanical objects, and a great deal of childhood was devoted to working out the desires to retain and eliminate. So it might be important to learn how little John viewed the gun, the bullet, and the hole in his father’s body.

  Erikson then excused himself, and led John into his private study and closed the door. The room had an analyst’s couch with a throw, and was filled with books and paintings by friends, including a couple of seascapes by a Cape Cod artist named Gyorgy Kepecs. Erikson had also brought back art from his trips to India. He had won a Pulitzer Prize for his biography Gandhi’s Truth, and he believed in the concept of nonviolence—another reason he was deeply affected by John Kennedy’s assassination.

  There was a pile of toys on the floor—blocks, bears, marbles, cars, a broken bowl, a pinwheel, clay, paint, and small dolls made to look like male and female adults and children. Erikson got down on the floor and asked John to build a house. For several minutes, the white-haired therapist remained silent, allowing John to concentrate on his play undisturbed.

  For all Erikson knew, John’s participation in the events following his father’s assassination had not been as traumatic for the little boy as most adults might have imagined. In a certain sense, the funeral, with its drums and flags and Scottish pipers, could have been exciting and fun for him. The whole experience might have given John the chance to perform on a large public stage. And besides, with his father’s disappearance, John no longer had to compete with another male for his mother’s attention.

  “What kind of house is that?” Erikson asked John. “And why is that doll outside the house?”

  “Because the doll went away,” John replied.

  “And why did he go away?” Erikson asked.

  “Because,” said John, “he doesn’t belong in the house anymore.”

  THREE

  NO PLACE

  TO GO

  December 1963

  HER OWN PRIVATE GREY GARDENS

  A bitter wind was blowing off the Potomac when Jackie’s Air Force C-131 transport touched down at Washington National Airport the next evening. Caroline came down the ramp first, dressed in the same blue overcoat she had worn at her father’s funeral. She hopped into the waiting limousine, and Jackie followed with John; Maude Shaw, the children’s nanny; and one of the family dogs, a blue roan cocker spaniel named Shannon.

  The drive to the White House took them within a half mile of Arlington National Cemetery. The children could see the Eternal Flame fluttering on their father’s hillside grave. Maude Shaw said that their father was in heaven looking after Patrick, and the flame seemed to confirm her words as it winked at them in the clear, cold air.

  John was sleepy and out of sorts, and Jackie was anxious to see him tucked safely into bed for the night. She herself would sleep hardly at all. Her wounds were too painful. The world might marvel at her strength and indomitable spirit, how she had orchestrated Jack’s funeral and held the nation together for three days of mourning. But as she confided to her sister Lee and to Bobby Kennedy, she felt that her usefulness to herself and others was coming to an end.

  She had nothing more to give. Some days, she could not even get out of bed. She cried all day and all night until she was so exhausted that she could not function. She drowned her sorrows in vodka, and was slipping into depression. She feared that she might be turning into an alcoholic. Or was she losing her mind?

  Madness ran in the family
. Jackie’s aunt Edith Bouvier Beale lived in a ramshackle mansion called Grey Gardens in East Hampton, on the south shore of Long Island, where she wandered like a crazed woman through rooms filled with rotting rubbish and piles of cat and raccoon excrement. Would that be Jackie’s fate? She felt it was possible.

  After all, Jackie remarked ruefully, she was already living in her own private Grey Gardens.

  “THE MOMENT I WAS ALWAYS SCARED OF”

  After the children were asleep, Jackie came down from the Family Quarters, and peeked into the Oval Office. Jack had always wanted a red rug, and while they were in Texas, she had instructed the White House decorators to lay a new scarlet carpet.

  The refurbished office now belonged to Lyndon Baines Johnson, who had been urged by Secretary of State Dean Rusk and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara to move in as quickly as possible to minimize the shock of transition. But things had not gone as smoothly as expected. On the day after the assassination, as Johnson approached the Oval Office for the first time as President, he had been surprised to find John Kennedy’s personal secretary Evelyn Lincoln still sitting at her desk in the anteroom.

  “Can’t you clear out of here so my girls can come in?” Johnson said.

  Mrs. Lincoln reported the rude remark to Robert F. Kennedy, the Attorney General. Bobby Kennedy was so outraged that he virtually ordered Johnson to stay out of the Oval Office until after his brother’s funeral. Not wanting to look like a usurper, Johnson acquiesced, and waited three days before moving in.

  During that time, word spread that the new President had been barred from the Oval Office by the Kennedys. It was said that Johnson was being forced to conduct the nation’s business from across the street in the vice president’s office in the old Executive Office Building. Even after he took possession of the Oval Office, Johnson had to return each night to the vice president’s residence to sleep, because Jackie and her children were still occupying the Family Quarters.

  “I can’t even live in my own house,” Johnson complained to a companion one day while he was doing laps in the White House swimming pool.

  Pressure mounted on Johnson to get Jackie and the rest of the Kennedys out of the White House.

  “You’re the President,” Harry Truman scolded Johnson. “Clear this bunch out, and move your people in.”

  Jackie had promised Lady Bird Johnson that she would move within a week after her return from Hyannis Port. Her shock and sorrow were etched in every word of the memo she sent to the new First Lady.

  Maybe I will be remembered as the person who start[ed] restoring the White House—but you will be remembered as the one who PRESERVED it—and made sure for all time it would be cared for. That was the moment I was always scared of—Would the next President’s wife scrap the whole thing as she was sick to death of hearing about Jacqueline Kennedy.

  The women of the White House press corps, whom Jackie had dubbed “the harpies,” had never warmed to the aristocratic Mrs. Kennedy, and they were eager to see her go. In the dispatches they sent back to their local newspapers, they noted that Eleanor Roosevelt had vacated the President’s House the day after Franklin’s death. When, they asked Liz Carpenter, Lady Bird’s press secretary, would Jackie make way for the Johnsons?

  “So I went to Mrs. Johnson and I said, ‘They just keep asking when are we moving in,’ “ recalled Liz Carpenter. “It’s the first time I’ve ever seen Mrs. Johnson really angry. She turned and said with rather intense indignation at the question, ‘I would to God I could serve Mrs. Kennedy’s comfort. I can at least serve her convenience.’ ”

  “Everything was in a jumbled state as we were packing for the move,” recalled Mary Barelli Gallagher, Jackie’s private secretary. “The third floor was the busiest those days, fairly buzzing with activity. All the storage rooms had been opened and the things brought out to be packed. That moved smoothly enough. But the complication was Jackie’s clothes: special tall cartons had to be made to hold the closets full of gowns.”

  “Now that I look back on it,” Jackie admitted later, “I think I should have gotten out the next day. But at first I didn’t have any place to go.”

  HALF-FORGOTTEN DREAMS

  Jackie received a call from Mrs. Averell Harriman, the wife of JFK’s patrician undersecretary of state, offering the use of her house on N Street in Georgetown until Jackie could make more definite plans about a place to live.

  Marie Harriman had attended Miss Spence’s School with Jackie’s mother, and she was a popular figure in Washington social circles. She had an appreciation for expensive Impressionist and Postimpressionist artists—van Gogh, Gauguin, Picasso—and for rich, handsome men. She was the kind of woman who could amuse a man for an entire evening by telling off-color jokes in a husky voice out of the side of her mouth. Jack Kennedy had been very fond of her.

  “You need a place to live while you get your act together,” Marie told Jackie.

  It was a generous offer, and Jackie immediately accepted it. But she knew that the Harriman house, like all the houses she had lived in since her marriage, would be just one more way station in her life. She clearly yearned for something more permanent.

  During the Depression, when her father lost most of his money, the family had been forced to move a number of times. They lived a rootless existence until Janet Bouvier’s father, James T. Lee, a real-estate investor whom everyone called Old Mister Lee, let them borrow an apartment he owned in Manhattan, a grand Art Deco duplex at 740 Park Avenue, which had been designed by the famous architect Rosario Candela.

  “Remember, you’re living rent-free in my house,” Old Mister Lee barked at Black Jack, humiliating him in front of Jackie.

  After Jackie’s parents divorced, Janet had married Hugh Dudley Auchincloss Jr., an heir to the Standard Oil fortune and a prominent member of the hereditary WASP ruling class that had set the standard of behavior in America for nearly three centuries. But Janet and Black Jack had continued to carry on their bitter feuding. Mostly, they argued about money. As one of Jackie’s biographers wrote:

  Perhaps it was the growing-up years in the Depression, her mother’s complaints about the size of her alimony payments, her parents’ constant bickering over dentists’ bills, the graveside quarreling among the Bouviers over wills, estates, and trusts—whatever it was, [Jackie] had learned to draw an equation between money and peace of mind.

  Jackie’s teenage years were spent at Merrywood, the Auchinclosses’ storybook estate in Virginia just across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C. But even there, she was aware of the disparity between her luxurious surroundings and her own fragile financial state. Five of the seven children at Merrywood were the direct descendants of her stepfather Hughdie Auchincloss; they bore his family name, and they received trust funds from the matriarch of the family, Grandmother Auchincloss, the former Emma Brewster Jennings. By contrast, Jackie and her sister Lee were impecunious Bouviers.

  Jackie considered herself an outsider. Born into an aristocratic Catholic family, she never felt at home in the narrow-minded world of the WASPs. But as much as she wished to be emancipated from that world, she loved Merrywood—and everything it stood for. To her, Merrywood was a golden place of idealized beauty, splashed with sunlight and provided with every comfort and convenience.

  What she remembered most about this lost Camelot of her youth was her bedroom. It was located on the third floor of the imposing Georgian mansion. The ceiling of the room slanted sharply beneath a gambrel roof, which gave the space a cozy feeling. The furnishings were simple: a few pieces of painted furniture, twin beds, and fleur-de-lis wallpaper that also ran across the low ceiling. An easel stood near a window. On the dresser, there were scrapbooks bulging with newspaper clippings, society columns, and hundreds of photos of Jackie.

  After John Kennedy’s assassination, the place that made Jackie feel the safest was the bedroom in her home in Hyannis Port. It was an almost exact replica of her bedroom at Merrywood: gambrel roof, patterned wallpaper o
n the ceiling, bulging scrapbooks. There was even an easel, which Jackie used when she and Caroline painted in the afternoons.

  With only three days to go before she would move into the borrowed Harriman house, Jackie asked her maid Provi Paredes to bring the President’s clothes to the third floor. After Provi put them on racks and laid them out on couches, Jackie looked them over, deciding what to keep and what to give away. It made her even more depressed to see Jack’s things go.

  “I suppose I was in a state of shock, packing up [in the White House],” Jackie said. “But President Johnson made you feel that you and the children [could stay], a great courtesy to a woman in distress…. It’s funny what you do in a state of shock. I remember going over to the Oval Office to ask [President Johnson] to name the space center in Florida Cape Kennedy. Now that I think back on it, that was wrong, and if I’d known [Cape Canaveral] was the name from the time of Columbus, it would be the last thing that Jack would have wanted.

  “The reason I asked was, I can remember this first speech Jack made in Texas … that there would be a rocket one day that would go to the moon. I kept thinking, That’s going to be forgotten, and his dreams are going to be forgotten. I had this terrible fear then that he’d be forgotten.”

  Ever since Jack’s murder, Jackie had been searching for ways to secure his place in history. She had asked her old friend Teddy White to write the authorized account of the death of the President. But White had respectfully declined, as had another Kennedy family favorite, Walter Lord, the author of A Night to Remember, the story of the sinking of the Titanic, and Day of Infamy, an account of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Jackie finally settled on William Manchester, who had won her trust with a fawning book on JFK, Portrait of a President. Unlike White and Lord, Manchester was willing to sign an agreement ceding to Jackie and Bobby Kennedy the right to approve his manuscript before it was published. He gave every sign of being a malleable author.