Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis: The Untold Story

by Barbara Leaming

  What had begun as a tryst arranged in secrecy was suddenly transformed into a relationship conspicuously conducted in front of Mama Brita, Papa Olle, who was nearly two decades his wife’s senior, and various other people. However improbably, the tumult of Jack’s social life that week in Sweden nearly rivaled that which his wife had been delighting in elsewhere in Europe. Stranger still, all the Swedes seemed to know that Gunilla’s lame lover was an unhappily married U.S. senator who aspired to be president someday. The senator, meanwhile, cunningly played his game. He assured Gunilla that he still loved her. He insisted to Brita that he wanted to leave Jackie in order to marry Brita’s daughter. He pledged to discuss the matter with his father as soon as he left Sweden. Gunilla, speaking confidentially to Torby MacDonald, acknowledged that Jackie must love her husband and that she certainly seemed to have been kind to him throughout his ordeal. Torby replied that while Jackie had indeed visited at the hospital, “I don’t think she was that concerned.”

  Jack and Jackie were reunited in Cap d’Antibes, where they made up a merry group with the Canfields and William and Rachel Douglas-Home, even as the senator diligently and discreetly maintained his Swedish contacts. On August 22, a day when he and Jackie, along with their companions, were lavishly entertained by the Kennedys’ Palm Beach friends Charles and Jayne Wrightsman, Jack also managed to draft two letters, both in red ink on Hôtel du Cap stationery. In one missive, he reported to Gunilla that he had been doing nothing in the South of France but sit in the sun, look at the sea, and think of her. For some reason, he also felt the need to lie that he had just that day received word that his wife and sister-in-law were about to arrive in Cap d’Antibes, and to predict that when he saw them presently “it will all be complicated the way I feel now.” In his second letter, lest the stewardess’s door be closed to him in future, he politely sought to explain why he had failed to call her. Reporting that he had spent the entire week in Båstad, he emphasized that he had seen “nobody as nice” there as he had during his previous visit to Sweden, the latter a reference to an affair Kennedy had had with another airline employee, a close friend of the stewardess’s, in Stockholm in 1949. There followed several calls to Gunilla, whom he hoped to persuade to meet him in Capri. He had already put in motion the plan that promised to free him up.

  Due in Poland presently, he told Jackie that she must not accompany him because it would seem less than “serious” were he to arrive in Warsaw with his wife. No sooner had Jackie left Cap d’Antibes with her sister in anticipation of joining him later in his official travels than he headed directly for Capri. In the course of several phone calls, he implored Gunilla to come to him there. She, however, did not desire merely a second rendezvous with the senator. This time, she was playing for marriage. When Jack arrived in Warsaw, he went to the Swedish embassy to speak to Ambassador von Post both of his passion for Gunilla and of his desire to leave Jackie. It was a safe bet that the diplomat would pass on to his young cousin all that Jack said. Subsequently, on the phone to Gunilla, Jack claimed also to have spoken at last to Joe Kennedy. According to Jack, the old man had angrily refused even to listen to his reasons for wanting a divorce. Whether or not Jack had really had that conversation with Joe, the sad story in which he weakly (or was it shrewdly?) portrayed himself yet again as a mere pawn in the hands of his controlling father stirred the hapless, smitten Swedish girl, who finally agreed to meet him in Copenhagen. The senator, however, soon called back to cancel. Set to visit the NATO countries with his wife, he reported that Copenhagen was going to be, as they say, “difficult.”

  Jackie, when she traveled with her husband to Rome, Paris, and London, among other destinations, was beginning her third year as Mrs. John F. Kennedy. The marriage, it need hardly be said, was not everything she might have hoped for. Even in a period when the couple had seemed to achieve a modicum of tranquility as Jackie assisted him with his manuscript and otherwise ministered to his needs, the wheels in his brain had persisted in tirelessly spinning out plans for future assignations. Jack also kept significant other areas of his life carefully curtained off from her. As she later came to understand, in the period after the Kennedys returned to the United States on October 11, 1955, she had known almost nothing about how his mind was working with regard to the immediate political future. It was also during this time that the senator had made a point of instructing Janet Travell, when she came to see him in Palm Beach: “It’s best if you don’t go into my medical problems with Jackie.”

  All in all, then, Jackie was operating blind when she seized on the notion of acquiring a home near Merrywood, in McLean, Virginia, as a salve to the perturbations of her marriage. Originally, she had thought of building a one-story house atop a cliff on her mother and stepfather’s land overlooking the Potomac. But the expense of bringing in water proved to be too great, and she abandoned the idea after Janet told her about a nineteenth-century Georgian-style brick house nearby that had come up for sale. Set on five acres, the property was known as Hickory Hill. Immediately, Jackie saw it as the anchor her marriage had been lacking, a place in the country where she could enjoy quiet weekends with her husband, who, she assumed, would welcome the opportunity to rest and recover from his public exertions. Jackie did not require a pain specialist to tell her what she already knew experientially: The senator’s back problems were still far worse than he was prepared to disclose. After the couple purchased the property in October, she set to work overseeing the renovations with an eye toward Jack’s comfort. In his bedroom and dressing room, for instance, drawers and shoe shelves had to be specially installed at a level that would not require him to lean over when he wished to get at them. But even as she was attending to all of this detail, she perceived that something was amiss. At the end of the workweek, instead of secluding himself with her at Hickory Hill, Jack was ever on the move again, chasing a new goal of which he had previously given her no inkling.

  During the time that he had been in the South of France with Jackie, word had come from the States that he was under consideration to be Adlai Stevenson’s running mate in the 1956 presidential election. Jack was, in his father’s words, “very intrigued” by the rumors, whereas the old man for his part feared that being on a ticket with Stevenson could damage Jack’s long-term presidential ambitions. Sorensen wrote to him at the Hôtel du Cap to report on a front-page story in the Boston Post confirming that the Stevenson people were indeed looking at him. When Jack returned to the States, he had wasted no time notifying Stevenson that he planned to formulate a public statement of support for the latter’s candidacy, to be released whenever Stevenson judged it would be most helpful to him. Jack wanted the second spot, but he did not wish to seem too eager. Instead of staking his prestige on an open campaign for the number two position, he preferred that Stevenson make the gesture of coming to him. The challenge to Kennedy was how to get Stevenson to make his move. He therefore undertook what one presidential biographer has aptly described as a “surreptitious candidacy.” He traveled, he gave speeches, he fought for control of the Massachusetts Democratic Party. But he was loath to disclose his real objective, either to the public or to his wife.

  As Jackie came to understand only after she established herself at Hickory Hill and began to spend solitary weekends there, Jack was already utterly caught up in the furious momentum toward the August 1956 Democratic convention. The battle for the Massachusetts party leadership, which pitted the senator against the present chairman, a plump, pugnacious onion farmer named William “Onions” Burke, was actually about who would control the state’s delegation to the national convention. As Burke was opposed to Stevenson, were the current leader to be left in place, Kennedy would appear weak at the convention. Never before had Jack permitted himself to participate in a full-out local political mud-fight. But in the present emergency, it was clear that if he did not stoop, he could not conquer. His political operatives had never known him “so angry and frustrated” as he was during the fight, which came to
a head when, at the close of a large fractious party meeting involving much booing, pushing, and grabbing at the gavel, and which threatened at several points to erupt in fisticuffs, the anti-Onions faction prevailed. At home as well, Jackie could not help but be struck by her husband’s high agitation in the course of an internecine struggle that she gauged to be constantly in his thoughts.

  Early in 1956, Jackie learned that she was pregnant. The baby was due in October, two months after the Democrats congregated in Chicago. News of the pregnancy was very pleasing to Jack, who made no secret of his desire for a large family like the one he had grown up in. Though Bobby and Ethel, who had four children and a fifth on the way, already enjoyed a substantial lead, Jack insisted that he and Jackie meant to catch up with them soon enough. For Jackie, children were integral to the life she hoped to have with Jack at Hickory Hill. She methodically set about assembling a nursery and otherwise equipping the house. For all of Jackie’s great plans, however, her mother thought her just “too lonely” in the country, Jack being away so much. Nor, it turned out, did he intend to come home after Chicago. Whether or not he succeeded in becoming his party’s vice-presidential nominee, he planned to go abroad immediately. The previous August, he had vacationed with Jackie in the South of France following his pas de deux with Gunilla. This year, as he wrote to his father on June 29, he expected to go with George Smathers right after the convention. When Jackie learned of her husband’s plans, she asked him to forgo the trip, but Jack was unconquerable.

  Finally, in a Chicago steak house on Friday, August 17, 1956, the last day of the weeklong Democratic convention, Jackie, twenty-seven years of age and seven months pregnant, broached the unhappy subject of the South of France with the big, brash, oily, jocose self-described “redneck” known to legions of Washington women as “Gorgeous George.” Jackie disliked Smathers intensely. Smathers for his part had thought little of Jackie Bouvier when he first met her, and he had gone so far as to advise Jack that he believed he could do better, but the Florida senator had revised his opinion entirely when he saw the wonderful care Jackie Kennedy had given her husband during his long medical ordeal. In the recently published Profiles in Courage, which had been an immediate bestseller and a critical success, Kennedy had left unnamed the fellow senator who had unashamedly acknowledged to him that he always voted with the special interests in the expectation that they would remember him positively at election time and that the public would never know about, much less recall, his vote against their welfare. That politician had been George Smathers, now the chairman of the Florida delegation at the Chicago convention. He represented everything Kennedy had been writing against in his new book, yet it was he whom Kennedy asked to put his name into nomination at the International Amphitheater. Jackie’s fraught encounter with Smathers took place after her husband, in the words of The New York Times, had come before the convention “as a movie star,” when he narrated a slick Hollywood-produced documentary about the party; after Jack had nominated Stevenson in a speech painstakingly crafted to prove that the speaker was not just sexy but smart; after Stevenson had made the unexpected move of leaving the VP choice to the convention; and after the Kennedy contingent had stayed up all of Thursday night scrambling for delegates’ votes.

  Still rushing about on Friday, Jackie had paused to watch on a bank of television screens as her husband nearly secured the nomination, then lost to Estes Kefauver. Afterward, with one errant wing of his shirt collar inching upward as if he were a hastily dressed prep school student en route to dine with his parents, Jack faced the first failure he had ever known in public life. To make matters worse, he had to do it before an audience of 40 million at-home viewers. In a terse, gracious, gallant concession speech that Jackie sadly observed from a box in the Amphitheater, he asked that Kefauver be named by acclamation. Coming as it did at the close of a nail-biting real-life television drama, this affecting last little star turn consolidated what would henceforward be Kennedy’s reputation as America’s most telegenic politician. The vicissitudes of his unsuccessful bid for second spot on the ticket had riveted the nation, and in a matter of hours the modern-day alchemy of television had spun the name “Jack Kennedy” into political gold. Losing was far from delightful to him, certainly, but after his speech he left the hall in something very close to a haze of glory. “Don’t feel sorry for young Jack Kennedy,” proclaimed the Boston Herald. “He probably rates as the one real victor of the entire convention. His was the one new face that actually shone. His charisma, his dignity, his intellectuality, and in the end his gracious sportsmanship … are undoubtedly what those delegates will remember. So will those who watched it and heard it via TV and radio.”

  Following the great defeat, Kennedy and some of the people who were closest to him repaired to the steak house behind the Amphitheater. At the meal, Jackie, wearing a black dress and pearls, was crying openly. Eunice, said to look “like Jack in a wig,” wept as well, but nowhere near as much as her sister-in-law. It had been thought wise to attempt to cushion Jackie somewhat from the hurly-burly of the politicking by having her stay with Eunice, who had a home in Chicago, while Jack roomed with Torby MacDonald, now a U.S. congressman. But in the end there really had been no protecting her. At one point during the convention, she had climbed up on a seat in her box to cheer Jack’s nominating speech and to wave a Stevenson placard. At another, she had fled a reporter’s questions by disappearing into a stairway that led to the bowels of the Amphitheater, then hiking up her dress and dashing across an underground parking garage. And on Thursday, she had stayed up through the night with other members of the (no-longer-“surreptitious”) Kennedy campaign. In the course of the week, she had witnessed what might almost be described as her husband’s apotheosis. She had seen the crowds of delegates press in on him from all sides wherever he went, heard the cheers and lavish praise for “her” Jack. She had watched the cup draw very near to his lips, but she had also been present when it was snatched away and given to another man. Clearly she had wanted this victory as much as Jack did, and at the steak house her demeanor left no doubt that she was, in the words of an observer, “very disappointed.” So much so that Jack blamed what happened to her afterward on the frustrating outcome of the vice presidential balloting. “Jackie got too excited at the convention,” the senator would tell his doctor in September. “It was all my fault for losing.”

  After the vote, Jackie was furious with Stevenson, who she believed had treated her husband shabbily at the convention. In contrast, by the time Jack reached the steak house, he was already contemplating what today’s near-win might mean for the future. “I could really be president with a little more planning.” Some people at the time saw Kennedy’s decision to seek the vice-presidential nomination in 1956 as an important first break with his father. She who had had a chance to soak up the ether in Jack’s childhood room at the Cape understood better than most that in fact his independence and ambition had taken root when he was a boy. Though it was solely in his imagination, he had been, as Jackie perceived, always moving, always charging forward, often in spite of his father’s particular plans for him. The only real difference in Chicago was that the relentless momentum was suddenly palpable to everyone else as well. Now he meant to leave for the South of France, and as his wife had already discovered, in this matter as well there was to be no stopping him. Certainly nothing she said to Smathers when they faced each other at the steak house was going to change that. It sounds as if her words were flavored with irony when she told him: “Why don’t you and Jack take a trip to the Mediterranean? He wants to go.” With a flourish of faux-courtliness, Gorgeous George promptly “agreed,” though in fact the yachting vacation had been arranged long before. Jack accompanied her as far as Massachusetts, where he declined to talk to reporters, with the explanation that he had had no sleep for three days. Not two hours later, he was gone.

  On August 23 at Hammersmith Farm in Newport, Jackie began to hemorrhage. An emergency cesarean was per
formed at Newport Hospital, but the daughter whom she had planned to call Arabella was stillborn. Jack, on a chartered yacht with various young women who appear not to have been overly concerned with keeping their clothes on, was unreachable by phone or any other means. When at about two in the morning Jackie emerged from the vapors of anesthesia, the first face she glimpsed was that of Bobby Kennedy. After the convention, where Bobby had served as floor manager, Jack’s thirty-year-old brother had left Chicago still fuming (Bobby seems ever to have been fuming) that the sole reason they had lost to Kefauver was that someone on the other side had “pulled something fishy.” Directly, Bobby had gone off to rest at the Cape in anticipation of joining the Stevenson campaign, not because he had any particular love for the candidate, but rather because the experience would be helpful when Jack ran for president. And, whether Bobby liked it or not, his designated role was to be useful to Jack.

  To this point in Jackie’s story, Bobby has occupied a position at the margins of the narrative. Tonight, having raced from Hyannis Port, he appears center stage at Jackie’s bedside with all of the fury and intensity that have long characterized the unhappy third of the original four Kennedy brothers. His “raging spirit,” as Chuck Spalding would call it, was formed early in life as a consequence of Bobby’s desire to “fight his way to the top” of a pecking order where his older brothers, who were both larger and personally more formidable than he, held sway. Scrape away the accumulated impasto of Bobby’s ferocity, however, and there emerge reserves of tenderness and empathy that are suddenly on unrestrained display in his sister-in-law’s hospital room. “Action Man,” as someone dubbed him years later, takes charge immediately. He tells Jackie that she has lost the baby. He arranges for little Arabella’s burial. He assures Rose Kennedy that he has chosen not to notify Jack because in view of Jackie’s deep depression it would be best for them both if they did not see each other just yet. Convoluted reasoning, but given the supreme embarrassment of Jack’s behavior, Rose seems eager to swallow it. In the older brother’s absence, Bobby, who has not previously been especially close to Jackie, ministers to her needs as once she had for Jack when he was hospitalized.