Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis: The Untold Story

by Barbara Leaming

  The question of whether, in his oft-repeated phrase, Jack’s wife had “too much status and not enough quo” would be merely academic, however, if he failed to make a compelling case for why Americans should vote for him. He began to find his voice as a presidential candidate in the summer of 1958, when, soon to run for another Senate term, he assailed Eisenhower for permitting the United States to become dangerously weak in the face of soaring Soviet military strength. In a landmark August 14, 1958, Senate address, Kennedy forecast (inaccurately, as it turned out) an imminent “missile gap” when Washington would cede nuclear superiority to Moscow. Alluding to Churchill’s 1936 speech “The Locust Years,” one of the addresses collected in Arms and the Covenant that had so fascinated Kennedy as a young man in London, he made the case that the Eisenhower years had been “the years the locusts have eaten.” Kennedy argued that the present Republican administration had put fiscal security ahead of national security, and that that policy would soon bring the United States into even graver danger. Yet, he maintained, it was still possible to catch up. “In the words of Sir Winston Churchill in a dark time of England’s history, ‘Come then—let us to the task, to the battle and the toil—each to our part, each to our station.… There is not a week, nor a day, nor an hour to be lost.’” With the missile gap speech, Kennedy began to run for president, as Harold Macmillan later said, “on the Churchill ticket.” Here and in subsequent addresses, the candidate asked voters to examine present international problems through the prism of interwar Britain, when the Nazi threat had been foolishly ignored. Kennedy portrayed himself as a statesman in the tradition of Churchill, prepared to tell the unwelcome truth and to demand the sacrifices necessary to guard American supremacy against the Soviets, who, he emphasized, hoped to bury the United States not only militarily, but also economically, politically, culturally, and in every other sphere of interest. He argued that under Eisenhower the United States had lost ground in each of these areas.

  JFK finally had a chance to meet Churchill when he and Jackie vacationed in the South of France after the Senate adjourned. It is at this point that a celebrated or, depending on how one views it, notorious vessel, part secure residence, part floating pleasure palace, materializes however briefly in Jackie’s story for the first time. The senator’s unhappy encounter with the hero of his life took place aboard the Christina, the former wartime escort frigate owned by the Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis. Churchill had first met Onassis at Roquebrune, near Monte Carlo, in 1956, when they were introduced at dinner by Churchill’s son, Randolph. Two years later, Churchill, who had been staying in Cap d’Ail since the end of July 1958, was about to embark on his first cruise on the Christina, which was scheduled to begin in late September. Onassis had the well-earned reputation of a celebrity-hunter who loved to play host to the Greta Garbos of this world. For the moment, anyway, he regarded Churchill as the greatest trophy guest of them all. Churchill’s physician, Lord Moran, wondered in his diary whether it was “the man or the yacht” that appealed to Churchill. “He is a little fellow,” the doctor dryly noted of Onassis, “not as tall as Winston when they stand side by side.” Clementine Churchill worried, by no means for the first time in a half-century of that difficult but delightful marriage, that her husband had fallen in with a bad element. She disapproved not so much of Winston’s love of luxury as of his willingness to countenance the personal and ethical shortcomings of those in a position to provide the good things and surroundings he craved. Hilariously, Churchill’s Cap d’Ail host Lord Beaverbrook, whom Clementine had been known to scorn for precisely this reason, shared, perhaps even exceeded, her indignation about Winston’s new friend and benefactor, over whom such an air of disreputableness hung. Unmentioned in any of this, of course, was that a similar air had long hung over Churchill, who like his father before him had been widely regarded as an opportunist and adventurer.

  In the course of a controversial and rampaging business career, Onassis had catapulted from penury in the aftermath of the Greco-Turkish War of 1922 to a personal worth estimated to be in the area of $500 million. Determined never to have to answer to shareholders or a board of directors, he individually managed about a hundred interlocking companies housed in a dozen nations. With Churchill, however, Onassis was always prepared, even eager, to abase himself symbolically. Metamorphosed into a devoted caregiver, he would tenderly brush the hairs from Churchill’s coat collar and even spoon-feed him caviar, as one might feed an infant. These days, there were moments when the old man’s bulbous, pink-veined eyes were blank and expressionless, other times when they gleamed again with interest and humor. Onassis, reveling in the luster that Churchill’s presence seemed to confer upon him, was happy to dote on the former prime minister whether he was wonderfully alert and talkative or, as was often the case now, a mere shell of his previous self.

  Unfortunately, Churchill was in the latter state when Jack Kennedy, attired in a white dinner jacket, and Jackie, in a white Saint Laurent trapeze dress, accompanied by the Gianni Agnellis, the William Douglas-Homes and some other friends, came to see him on Onassis’s yacht. Weeks from his eighty-fourth birthday, the titan proved to be, at least on this particular occasion, quite beyond useful conversation. JFK had been, Jackie remembered, “so hungry to talk to Churchill at last,” but it quickly became apparent that he had waited too long to approach him. Usually so calculatedly nonchalant, Jack could scarcely hide his upset afterward. Jackie saw and understood his immense disappointment, yet to all outward appearances she seemed to be inhabiting almost an alternate emotional universe when she mocked: “I think he thought you were the waiter, Jack.”

  When the Kennedys returned to the United States, they were greeted by disturbing political news. Presumably due to his stance on the St. Lawrence Seaway, his joust with Onions Burke, and certain other controversies during his first term, his vote count in the Boston senatorial primary was not all it ought to have been for a presidential aspirant. Presently, Jackie accompanied her husband during the statewide campaign, which she would remember as a blur of seemingly endless cars and hotels. “Just running, running.” At length, the senator handily reclaimed his seat with more than 73 percent of the vote, the largest popular margin any political candidate in the state had ever received. And then, at least as his wife experienced it, he was gone again, away almost every weekend and more, as he sped from state to state in anticipation of 1960.

  Meanwhile, Jackie endeavored to give him, in Bill Walton’s words, “his first really marvelous house.” Walton, who, like Alsop, enjoyed separate and distinct relationships with Jack and Jackie, had a unique take on the senator’s visual predilections. Many people then and later assumed such things were of little concern to Kennedy. Not so, insisted Walton: “A big, rich, well-run house, he’d look at it with envy. He’d comment on it. He was always absolutely aware … what women wore, what service was on the table, how the place looked, totally aware. It always amazed me, the accuracy of his reporting about it.” His parents’ houses had never been of the sort he later came to admire, and his subsequent living arrangements as a Washington bachelor had been characterized by a certain dishevelment bordering on squalor. For many years thereafter, the fastidious Joe Alsop liked to tell the tale of his first alarming encounter with Jack in the Kennedy siblings’ Georgetown house, which appeared to have suffered “from the ravages of a small, particularly unruly tornado.” Jackie meant to provide Jack with something else, something she sensed he wanted very much. But her exertions were not to be understood solely in terms of his needs, or for that matter of the way in which he and his family had been known to live. Jackie’s family was also a reference point. To Walton’s eye, on N Street she was aiming at a level of refinement considerably beyond anything the mistress of Hammersmith Farm and Merrywood had ever accomplished. Jackie pointedly had never wanted to be what she saw as a Newport wife, and so it was now. “The Auchinclosses lived awfully well,” Walton reflected, “but not with the elegance that Jackie
eventually [attained].”

  That aspiration went to the heart of the problem as Jack came to perceive it. For all of his family’s wealth, he was nothing if not cheap. And the constant physical upheaval in the house, as Jackie chased an ever-elusive ideal of taste and charm, was indeed a tremendous source of irritation to him. Still, when he protested the expenditure; when he insisted that she return objets that had been sent over on approval; and when he was adamant that the high-Wasp decorator Sister Parish, a friend of Mrs. Mellon’s, be fired partway through a new complete redo at N Street, there was a clear consistent subtext that transcended money and comfort. It was the old issue of political viability, of whether Jackie was not fast becoming too rare a bird to appeal to voters.

  Nearly half a century later, Bunny Mellon said of her: “She knew all about the women, of course, but she stuck, and decided she was going to do a good job.” Which no doubt made it so much worse when he balked at Jackie’s efforts in that respect. Jackie saw a good deal less of him than she would have liked to in this period, yet when they were together, aside from the usual carping about furniture, wallpaper, and the like, he was often simply too fatigued to say very much. Finally, during a chinning session with Joe Alsop, Jackie questioned whether it was “really worth it” to have Jack seek the presidency. Calmly but authoritatively (though it cannot be guaranteed that at no point was Alsop tempted to lift his knuckles to his lips), he reassured her: “It’s the only game that’s worth the candle.”

  Set to take place in April 1960, the Wisconsin Democratic presidential primary, which pitted Kennedy against Senator Hubert Humphrey of the neighboring state of Minnesota, was to be the first major test of Kennedy’s political strength. Beginning in January, Jackie joined her husband on the hustings. She cut a piquant figure, carrying the novel War and Peace under one arm of a beautifully cut red coat that proved to be a Givenchy copy. By turns, she complained that the people of Wisconsin were “really hard” and she conquered voters with her hushed voice and protestations of shyness. She despaired that the citizenry recoiled from her overtures, yet, on one occasion, she adroitly smoothed the feathers of an audience that her husband had kept waiting for an hour. It was said of her that she could be aloof and arrogant, but also that when she and Senator Kennedy worked opposite sides of the avenue, she always seemed to draw the larger crowds.

  During this time, her reading, apparently, was by no means limited to Tolstoy. On election night, when she encountered a reporter named Miles McMillin who had written critically of her husband, Jackie, rather than follow Jack’s example and be polite to the newsman, twice cut him dead. Following a huge win in Wisconsin, the Kennedys went on to barnstorm in West Virginia, where the senator scored another considerable victory. And then, almost imperceptibly at first, Jackie receded from public view.

  At the cottage that she and Jack had on the Hyannis Port property, she secluded herself among the plants and flowers that Sister Parish had arranged to have sent over from a source in Boston. Excitedly, Jackie reported to the decorator that Jack had changed his mind after all about finishing the latest redo at N Street. The last time she had spoken to Mrs. Parish about any of this, Jackie had been nearly in tears; now her voice on the phone emanated the old enthusiasm. While she was at the Cape, she wanted Mrs. Parish to return to the charge at the couple’s Georgetown house immediately. Meanwhile, in view of what had happened to her in 1956, Jackie hesitated to disclose even to Joe Alsop that she was pregnant again. In a phone conversation with her mentor shortly before the Democratic National Convention, she found that she still could not tell him why, alone among the Kennedy tribe, she would be absent from Los Angeles that July. Jack finally explained it all to Alsop in advance of a public announcement issued by his campaign. Once the news had been blazoned to the world, Dorothy Kilgallen, who was emerging as something of a specialist in the matter of Jackie Kennedy’s pregnancies, insisted on maintaining a properly skeptical posture. She snidely suggested that Jackie was not really pregnant and that the senator’s people had devised the ruse to sideline a wife who was simply too fey and fancy to be embraced by voters. The charges scorched, not because Jackie had been lying, but rather because the columnist had it right about the Kennedy campaign’s ambivalence about the senator’s spouse.

  Following the convention, where Jack Kennedy became his party’s 1960 presidential nominee, Alsop, who had been in Los Angeles to cover the proceedings, flew to Massachusetts to celebrate with the family at the Cape. He brought with him a gift for Jackie. It was a rare copy of Manoeuvring, an 1809 novel by Maria Edgeworth, about a woman whose stratagems in life produce results that are the very opposite of what she had intended. Amid the general rejoicing in Hyannis Port, Jackie greeted her guest in full war paint. In the course of several meals, as well as on a boat trip they took together, she spoke to Alsop of her discontent. She railed against the press. She protested the personal questions that reporters felt free to lob at her, and complained of the news photographers who seemed intent on transforming her daughter into, in Jackie’s phrase, “a ghastly little Shirley Temple.” She evinced irritation with her Kennedy sisters-in-law, who all seemed to “adore” the publicity process that Jackie had grown to detest in the years since her first photo shoot at Hyannis Port after Jack proposed.

  Both in person and in a follow-up letter from Washington, Alsop pressed her to try to view the privacy problem unemotionally. He urged her to accept that as the wife of a presidential candidate she was just going to have to do things she would never have undertaken had she been, as Alsop archly put it, “plain Mrs. Kennedy of New York, London, and the Riviera.” He suggested, for instance, that it would be wise if in addition to the relentless chatter in the press about her taste for European haute couture, there were also some articles about her buying her maternity clothes at the American department store Bloomingdale’s. Though initially resistant to much of this, Jackie finally admitted to having been “unreasonable.” In the interest of peace, she pledged to follow Joe’s advice.

  But peace, she discovered, was not so easily to be had. The newly anointed Democratic candidate’s wife was pummeled by angry letter writers who mocked her hairstyle as a “floor-mop” and complained that she spent too lavishly on couturier clothes. The trade paper Women’s Wear Daily and other publications similarly targeted her shopping habits. Finally, the Kennedy people summoned reporters to the Waldorf Towers in New York, where, in keeping with Alsop’s recommendations, Jackie dutifully modeled various inexpensive, American-made maternity dresses. For all of her forced cooperativeness and unctuous good cheer, however, a morsel of unalloyed snark did creep into her comments. Scoffing at reports that she spent $30,000 a year at the houses of Balenciaga and Givenchy, Jackie declared: “I couldn’t spend that much unless I wore sable underwear.”

  Six

  Later, Jackie would tell the story of her marriage to Jack Kennedy in terms of his evolving sense of her political viability—a process that, as she saw it, was not complete until the very last hours of his life.

  “I had worked so hard at the marriage,” she told the Rev. Richard T. McSorley, a Jesuit priest who counseled her after the assassination. “I had made an effort and succeeded and he had really come to love me and to congratulate me on what I did for him.”

  Jackie constructed a similar narrative when she spoke to the society decorator Billy Baldwin of her sense of the state of the marriage at the time her husband was murdered, in 1963: “It took a very long time for us to work everything out, but we did, and we were about to have a real life together. I was going to campaign with him.”

  The couple had been married for seven years when Jack Kennedy defeated his Republican opponent, Richard Nixon, in the 1960 presidential election. JFK had at last reached the goal he had been hurtling toward for nearly the entire time he had been with Jackie, who was now thirty-one years of age. In the beginning, he had married for political reasons, confessedly and unabashedly so. The presidential hopeful had needed a wife, if only to
eradicate his frivolous playboy image. But Jackie Bouvier, when he selected her, had had significant other advantages as well. She had not just been any attractive young woman, but rather one who, by virtue of her mother’s advantageous second marriage, promised to confer upon Jack the luster of old Newport, Rhode Island, society that Joe Kennedy Senior so ardently desired for his boy.