Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis: The Untold Story

by Barbara Leaming

  Jackie related the story of his strange request to Anita Fay, though she knew Anita hardly at all.

  “What shall I do?” Jackie asked.

  In the end she refused to fly home by herself, but not two weeks after she had remarked on how perfect it was being married to Jack Kennedy, perfection was a memory at most.

  When she and Jack arrived in Hyannis Port, it became evident that rather than buy a house of their own, Jack intended for them to live indefinitely in the poky room in his family’s house that he had previously occupied by himself. He expected her to remain at the Cape during the week while he was off working in Washington. These living arrangements troubled her very much. Not only would she and her husband be apart most of the time, but also they would have no privacy when he came home for the weekend. Besides, to Jackie’s eye that awful room was really “only big enough for one.”

  But none of this seemed to concern Jack. His priorities lay elsewhere. Now that he was a married man, suddenly everything in his political life was flying forward on greased wheels. He had accomplished little as a congressman, and his senatorial career to date had been equally undistinguished. Apparently all that was due to change, but rather than hear her husband’s plans directly from him, Jackie tended to learn of them in overheard fragments of family conversation. No one would tell her anything, not even when she inquired. On one occasion during that fall of 1953, she walked in on Jack and his father at a moment when the men seemed to be speaking of the vice presidency. Afterward, when she asked Jack point-blank, “Were you talking about being vice president?,” his only response was laughter. The ability to laugh at himself was part of Jack’s charm. And in this case laughter adroitly deflected Jackie’s query, as it no doubt was intended to do.

  Though her questions went pointedly unanswered, it was hardly as if no one would talk to her. Joe Kennedy could scarcely have spent more time contentedly parleying with his new daughter-in-law. Indeed, he talked to her more than to his own daughters, which may have accounted in part for the Kennedy sisters’ coolness toward her. Kick while she lived had been “the only one” of his daughters he believed he could really talk to. At least to all outward appearances, the other sisters “bored” him. Now he and Jackie regularly indulged in what an observer described as long “wonderful” conversations reminiscent of those he had once enjoyed with Kick. Whether or not John White’s efforts to groom Jackie had had anything to do with it, old Joe seemed to have discovered in her something very much like “a substitute for Kick.” She bantered. She teased. She presented herself as someone unwilling “to take any guff” from him or any other member of the Kennedy tribe. (A merciless mimic, Jackie perfected a cruel imitation of Rose Kennedy, whose voice was said by one family friend to call to mind “a duck with laryngitis.”) At the same time she made it clear that she absolutely adored Jack’s father, and he in turn left no doubt that he was enchanted by her.

  As Jackie was to learn, however, behind her back he was capable of speaking of her in tones of arctic expediency. Once, when she overheard her father-in-law conferring with Jack and his younger brother Bobby about Jack’s political future, she was surprised to hear herself mentioned as well. And the experience was by no means comfortable to her. “They spoke of me as if I weren’t a person,” Jackie said years later, “just a thing, just a sort of asset, like Rhode Island.”

  All her life, Jackie had been very picky, very proud. Inclined to believe that she ought to have things exactly as she wanted them, she had waited until she saw just the type of man she would like to marry. And when that man had proven to be rather less than eager, she had not rested until he made his move at last. All of her maneuvers and travails in the marriage market, all of her efforts to escape the traps that the world she grew up in had contrived to set for her, had finally landed her in this small, spartan room on the first floor of her in-laws’ house where she slept alone most nights. A little bookshelf held certain of the volumes, many with mauve bindings, that Jack had first read when he was a sickly boy who was often confined to bed. These, she came to understand, were some of the books that had shaped her husband. Jackie could not help but be fascinated by them and by the tumultuous family drama in which they had played a part.

  Early in life, Jack Kennedy had experienced what it is like to lay close to death. His first potentially fatal episode, a bout of scarlet fever, had occurred when he was just two years old. Rose Kennedy had been pregnant at the time, and having gone into labor on the day Jack’s ordeal began, she had been unable to come to his room. Nor had she visited him afterward lest she or the newborn be exposed. In Rose’s place, Joe had cared for the little invalid. He cradled Jack in his arms and faithfully lingered at his bedside. He left the child in no doubt that nothing else mattered except his survival and recovery. Joe subsequently reflected that he had been unprepared for the magnitude of his emotions when he grasped that it was possible Jack might die. Unable to comprehend why Rose had stayed away, the child bonded powerfully and permanently with his father. Rose may have had a reasonable excuse for absenting herself in this instance, but it was also the case that even in the best of times, she was just not physically demonstrative with her children. In later years, Jack would bitterly declare that he could not recall so much as a single hug from Rose. For parental affection, the boy had learned to rely on his father. Joe Kennedy, wonderfully, uninhibitedly emotional and tactile, was all that Jack had in this respect. To the child’s dismay, however, he was by no means all that his father had. Joe Kennedy had dedicated himself to Jack’s welfare when the boy was near death. Otherwise, more often than not he made the eldest son, Joe Junior, his priority. It was certainly not that Jack’s father did not really love him, only that he seemed to prize the robust young Joe, twenty-two months Jack’s senior, so much more.

  To the father’s thinking, young Joe was the model boy, healthy, handsome, and strong. In this regard, frail Jack, with his ever-lengthening record of illnesses both grave and routine, could scarcely compete. If old Joe did not overtly encourage the bullying to which the smaller, weaker brother was routinely subjected, he surely countenanced it. But Joe Junior was not the only instigator of these brutal encounters, which often ended with the older boy smashing the younger one’s head against a wall. Despite the odds, Jack was known to incite countless fistfights with his brother. Jack longed to disrupt the pecking order by proving to their father that he too was the fierce, hardy kind of boy old Joe preferred. But in view of old Joe’s maxim, “We want winners, we don’t want losers around here,” Jack’s efforts were inevitably for naught. In these ludicrously ill-matched physical confrontations, he always seemed to get the worst of it. Yet, contrary to all reason, Jack, as stubborn as he was slight, kept rushing in for more.

  Jack despised being restricted to bed, as he often was during his boyhood and teenage years. In any case, he managed to extract an advantage from these mortifying but unavoidable interludes. He used the time to read. The legends of King Arthur and the Round Table appeared on the shelf beside his bed. Then came works by Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Walter Scott, and Thomas Babington Macaulay. And then, titles by Winston Churchill, John Buchan, David Cecil, Duff Cooper, Edmund Burke, and others. Already physically out of harmony with the Kennedy atmosphere, Jack by his reading widened the breach. He also steadily, stealthily confirmed his belief that he was superior to his brother. Recasting delicacy in the form of refinement, he established himself, as Jackie would perceive years afterward, as the more imaginative of the two boys.

  Still, it was regarded as “heresy” in the family to suggest that Joe Junior was in any way the lesser figure. Yet that was precisely what Kick, the sibling born in 1920 as Jack fell ill with scarlet fever, long and defiantly maintained. Kick’s status as, in Rose’s phrase, old Joe’s “favorite of all the children” prevented her from being swatted down for daring to challenge the accepted order of things. She was permitted to speak out, but that did not mean her father was required to listen. He persisted in
touting young Joe as the best of the boys, the Kennedy son for whom preeminence had been foreordained. When by the time Jack was about fourteen years of age he had failed to persuade old Joe to alter his views, the second son finally seemed to give up the fight. As both Kick and Lem Billings, Jack’s prep school roommate at the time, understood, that did not mean Jack had abandoned his conviction that he was better than his brother. But, to all outward appearances, he did seem to put aside any hope of displacing him in old Joe’s eyes. If their father persisted in thinking Jack inferior, the teenager thenceforth would gamely play along. Onstage, he cast himself as the sluggard Kennedy brother, whose lack of discipline and ambition his father never ceased to complain of. Offstage, Jack burrowed the more deeply into his reading.

  Both tall, handsome brothers were in their early twenties when they appeared together in London at the time of old Joe’s ambassadorship. The English debutantes dubbed Joe Junior “the Big One,” by way of contrast with scrawny Jack. Known to speak often and openly of his confidence that Joe Junior would one day become America’s first Irish-Catholic president, the ambassador encouraged the eldest son to write up his impressions of contemporary Europe as a way of generating the “international publicity” that could be so helpful when at last he was ready to launch himself in public life. The adoring father pitched Joe Junior’s letters on travel and politics to leading periodicals. He urged him to find a way to stitch those letters together in the form of a book. He failed or perhaps refused to see that despite Joe Junior’s ability to look and act the part of a rising man, his perceptions when set on paper tended to be second-rate at best. Meanwhile, Jack drew on his own European experience, as well as on the fund of knowledge laboriously built up in the course of years of reading, to produce the serious, successful political book that had been expected of Joe Junior. Written in less than six months, Why England Slept, about Britain during the run-up to the Second World War, became a surprise bestseller in the United States in 1940 and utterly altered Jack’s standing in the family. At a moment when Joe Junior had managed to accumulate little more than a welter of notes and a stack of publishers’ rejections, the second son had garnered the wide praise and prestige that was supposed to have been his brother’s. Old Joe, who always loved a winner as much as he disdained a mere runner-up, was soon gaily citing Jack’s bestselling opinions in public, whereas previously it almost certainly would have been Joe Junior he quoted.

  After Why England Slept, the firstborn son never quite managed to regain his footing, whether it be in the family or in life. When Jack moved to Washington the following year, he began to speak, with his signature air of amused detachment, to an intimate circle including Kick, Inga Arvad, and Betty Coxe of the possibility that he might one day decide to seek the presidency. At the end of the war, when he returned to London on the eve of the 1945 general election, he left no doubt in the minds of his young English friends who were launching their political careers that he meant to study the electioneering with an eye to an impending run of his own in the States. In 1946, when the second son portrayed himself to voters as a most reluctant bearer of the family flag, that reluctance, like so much else in Jack Kennedy’s complex demeanor, was a pose. In important ways, he had been fighting all his life, at moments literally with his fists, for the right to carry that flag. In suggesting that he would never have dared, or even wished, to attempt something like this had Joe Junior survived, he was advancing a biographical narrative that scarcely corresponded to anything that had actually happened in the privacy of his family. He was dissipating perceptions, as he had long found it useful to do, of the ambition that had fired him to surpass Joe Junior during the eldest son’s lifetime.

  Years later, when Jackie thought back to her early married life, it was the velocity she seemed to remember above all. Hardly had she reached her goal of becoming Mrs. John F. Kennedy when she found herself caught up in a new kind of momentum as her story intersected with Jack’s. “Life with him was just so fast.” She associated his high-vaulting ambition with one of the qualities she most prized in him, imagination. It struck her that had his older brother lived and been elected senator, Joe Junior, lacking anything like Jack’s imaginative capacities, would simply have stalled there. But not Jack: “He never stopped at any plateau, he was always going on to something higher.” The relentless propulsion Jackie later sought to evoke did not fully manifest itself to her until the couple acquired a first, albeit temporary, house of their own. In January 1954, they began a six-month rental of a fourteen-foot-wide “dollhouse” on Dent Place in Georgetown, which was owned by Auchincloss family friends who were traveling in Europe. During this period, there began the real work of recasting Kennedy’s image, of which the decision to marry had been but an initial necessary step: The senator drew unprecedented attention with a principled but highly controversial vote in favor of the construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway, a stance that risked alienating constituents who protested that the bill would cost Massachusetts jobs. He delivered his first major Senate address, arguing against calls to send U.S. troops to Indochina. In the run-up to the 1954 midterm elections, he traveled extensively, campaigning on behalf of Democrats he might call on later to return the favor. He exhibited his nasal Boston twang to any print interviewer, and on any television or radio show that would have him. He and Jackie became regulars at the dinner parties, usually for ten or twelve, that were a staple of political life in the capital.

  As a place of residence, Georgetown had been exceedingly fashionable during the Truman epoch. But the social geography of Dwight Eisenhower’s Washington had since shifted, Georgetown having acquired the reputation in some Republican circles as a community of enervated eggheads and left-wingers that was best avoided in favor of more ideologically salubrious neighborhoods. Around the time Eisenhower was inaugurated, Joe Alsop had lamented that everyone he liked seemed to be going away, and no one he liked very much was replacing them. A year later, when Senator and Mrs. John F. Kennedy moved to Georgetown, they became part of an emergent social nexus that included the senators Stuart Symington, George Smathers, Mike Mansfield, and the Republican John Sherman Cooper, among others. On the one hand, it was unquestionably an advantage in this milieu for a politician to be married. On the other, as Jackie noted, some of the most valuable dinner party conversations tended to take place when the men had a chance to talk to one another afterward once they had peeled off from their wives. Before long, Jackie was presiding over such highly ritualized evenings of her own. As “Night and Day” and other tracks on the recording The Astaire Story wafted seductively through the tiny house, the Kennedys hosted their first candlelit formal dinner party in the narrow dining room at Dent Place. It was also during these months that they first returned in triumph to Dumbarton Avenue, where, before they were married, both had been known to attend the considerably more raffish gatherings at John White’s. On the present occasion, however, the couple’s destination was not the cave, but rather the distinctly different social and intellectual universe epitomized by the soirees at Joe Alsop’s. After years of banishment, Jack Kennedy’s invitation was a sign that he was finally projecting the gravitas that entitled a man to dine on Alsop’s blue Sèvres china and to sip Pol Roger champagne from his monogrammed crystal glasses.

  Meanwhile, early on, the young wife was confronted with aspects of marriage, or at least of her particular marriage, that she seems not to have anticipated fully. First, there was the matter of her husband’s health. Here too the storm came on very quickly. Before the wedding, Lem Billings had made an effort to enlighten her on Jack’s medical history. At the very least, she had often observed him hobbling about on crutches during their courtship. Still, by the time of the honeymoon, his back pain had subsided considerably, as the feats of water-skiing that his bride found so thrilling in Acapulco attest. But no sooner had the newlyweds begun their short-let than renewed pain caused him to seek advice from the surgical head at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York. At a mome
nt when Kennedy was about to embark upon a demanding program aimed at reinventing himself politically, the recommendation offered by Dr. Philip Wilson could scarcely have been more inopportune. Wilson urged him to undergo a double spinal fusion, noting that while there was no guarantee that the procedure would be effective, without it the senator would surely become incapacitated.

  Quite apart from the disastrous timing, there was also a huge medical complication. Seven years previously at the London Clinic, Jack had learned that he had Addison’s disease, a disturbance of the suprarenal glands known to produce extreme fatigue, nausea, weight loss, low blood pressure, and susceptibility to infection. Then, and on a subsequent occasion in Japan in 1951, he had nearly died. At the time of the initial episode, the London physician, Sir Daniel Davis, had predicted that Jack had no more than a year to live. Dr. Elmer Bartels, the endocrinologist at the Lahey Clinic in Boston who had overseen his treatment for Addison’s disease since his return to America following the 1947 diagnosis, had been a good deal more optimistic provided that Kennedy, never the most compliant of patients, agreed to submit to proper management. Still, as Bartels never tired of pointing out, people with Addison’s disease tolerate surgery poorly. For such a patient, the back operation Wilson was recommending in 1954 posed two grave risks. First, the trauma from the surgery might spark a new Addisonian crisis, which could lead to a loss of circulation in the legs and subsequent heart failure. Second, the operation could result in a fatal infection. So, almost from the moment Jackie began life in Washington with a new husband, their existence together was shadowed by death. To Jack, the specter was nothing new. She, on the other hand, simply had never had to absorb anything like that before. In any case, after the diagnosis at Special Surgery, Jack, having yet to decide about the spinal fusion, plunged back into the Washington fray. Though troubled additionally by problems of the stomach and urinary tract, among other physical woes, he strove to act before the world as though nothing were wrong. He had long “schooled himself” to live gracefully with pain, to exert what Chuck Spalding described as “an actor’s control.” When there was no choice but to speak of his medical misfortunes, he tended to make light of them as much as possible.