Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis: The Untold Story

by Barbara Leaming

  Arthur Schlesinger was an ardent supporter of what he already understood to be RFK’s long-range presidential ambitions. Yet he expressed skepticism when Bobby spoke to him of what he was certain would be their “bargaining power” with Johnson in advance of the next election. Schlesinger maintained that whether or not Johnson gave Bobby the particular job he wanted in 1964, Bobby and his supporters would have little choice but to play a role in LBJ’s presidential campaign or “be finished forever in the party.”

  “Yes,” Bobby replied, “but there is a considerable difference between a nominal role and a real role. We can go through the motions or we can go all out. It may make a difference, for example, whether Jackie appears with Johnson at the last big rally, or whether she goes to Europe in the autumn for her health.” Bobby’s implication, of course, was that he would be in a position to dictate his sister-in-law’s decision in the matter.

  Jackie was, as she later said of herself at this point, “not in any condition to make much sense of anything.” In spite of that, she had yet to move out of the White House when she was confronted by the need to take an immediate decision about the first of the assassination books to be commissioned. Author Jim Bishop, whose previous titles included The Day Lincoln Was Shot and The Day Christ Died, was first out of the gate with his planned The Day Kennedy Was Shot, but other writers no doubt were soon to follow. Appalled at the prospect of this same painful material, as she said, endlessly “coming up, coming up,” she decided to block Bishop and others by designating one author who would have her exclusive approval to tell the story of the events of November 22. At length, she settled on a writer who, curiously, had voiced no interest in undertaking such a project and had no idea he was under consideration. Nor, at the time Jackie chose (she later used the word “hired”) William Manchester, had she ever even met him. Manchester was a forty-one-year-old ex-Marine who had suffered what his medical discharge papers described as “traumatic lesions of the brain” during the carnage on Okinawa in 1945. Among his seven previous books was a flattering study of JFK called Portrait of a President, galleys of which Manchester had transmitted to the White House in advance of publication so that the president might have an opportunity, should he desire it, to alter any of his own quotes. Now, at a moment when Jackie could do nothing to stanch the flow of her recollections of Dallas, she selected Manchester because, she judged, he at least would be manageable.

  Prior to the move to N Street, Jackie, along with Bobby, her mother and sister, and a few others, gathered at night at Arlington Cemetery to reinter Arabella and Patrick. She and Bishop Hannan deposited the heartbreakingly small white caskets on the ground near Jack’s freshly dug grave. Given what he saw to be the state of her emotions, the bishop elected to say only a short prayer, at the conclusion of which Jackie sighed deeply and audibly. While he walked her back to her limousine, she broached certain of the conundrums that had been torturing her since Dallas as she struggled to comprehend events that, after all, could not be explained in any rational terms. To the bishop’s perception, she spoke of these things “as if her life depended on it—which perhaps it did.”

  As he and the widow were not alone, he wondered whether it might not be, in his words, more appropriate if they continued their talk elsewhere. He thought perhaps it would be better to meet in his rectory or at the White House, but Jackie continued to pour out her concerns notwithstanding. She did not care who else heard her speak of such intensely private matters. Her behavior in this respect was sharply out of character for a woman who, as her mother said, tended to cover her feelings, but she had all these urgent questions and she demanded answers: Why, she demanded to know, had God allowed her husband to die like this? What possible reason could there be for it? She emphasized the senselessness of Jack’s being killed at a time when he still had so much more to offer. “Eventually,” the priest recalled many years later, “the conversation turned more personal.” Jackie spoke of her unease with the role that the American public had thrust upon her in the aftermath of Dallas. “She understood that she was forever destined to have to deal with public opinion, the differing, not always flattering feelings toward her. But she did not want to be a public figure.… Already, however, it was clear that the world viewed her, not as a woman, but as a symbol of its own pain.”

  The unanswerable questions that Jackie had posed to Bishop Hannan continued to preoccupy her when, on December 6, she moved to the house that Undersecretary of State W. Averell Harriman had provided for her use until she was able to acquire a property of her own. “Jackie’s bedroom was on the second floor and she seldom left it,” remembered her secretary Mary Gallagher. “I was constantly aware of her suffering.” She wept. She drank. By turns unable to sleep and oppressed by recurrent nightmares that caused her to awaken screaming, she lacked even the solace of safely withdrawing into unconsciousness. Trying to make sense of the assassination, she lay awake, endlessly going over the events of November 22. By day, she told and retold her story to Joe Alsop (who clutched her hand throughout her narration), Betty Spalding, and numerous others. She pinballed between being, in her phrase, “so bitter” about the tragedy and futilely enumerating the things she might have done to avert it. Though she had no rational reason to feel guilty, she second-guessed her every action and reaction that day. She pounced on every missed opportunity and pondered how it all might have been made to happen otherwise. Again and again in these scenarios, it came down to some failure on her part: If only she had not mistaken the sound of a rifle shot for the gunning of motorcycles. If only she had been looking to the right, “then,” as she later described her line of reasoning, “I could have pulled him down, and then the second shot would not have hit him.” If only she had managed to keep his brains in as the limo sped to Parkland Hospital. She even dwelled on the red roses with which she had been presented when the presidential party arrived at Love Field in Dallas, whereas at previous stops she had been given yellow roses of Texas. Ought she to have recognized them as a sign?

  Two days after Dallas, Bobby Kennedy had phoned the British embassy to ask David and Sissie Ormsby-Gore to spend the day with Jackie, who, he explained, had had another bad night. In Jackie’s view, of all the people who had been close to Jack, David had been, next to Bobby and herself, the one who had been “the most wounded” by his death. As did Bobby, David regarded it his bounden duty to help care for Jack’s widow. Nineteen years previously, he and Sissie had felt similarly responsible for Jack’s sister Kick after her young husband died. Sitting with Jackie in the traumatic aftermath of the assassination, hearing her repeatedly recount the evil hour, was a wrenching experience for the Ormsby-Gores, who were both of an exceptionally sensitive, even fragile, cast of mind. Sissie had grown tremendously fond of Jackie in the course of David’s ambassadorship. Both wives were accomplished horsewomen; both were Catholics; both were noted for their panache in matters of dress and decor. In the words of McGeorge Bundy, during the presidential years Sissie had been “company and friend for Jackie in a way that very few official wives were.” Sissie’s daughter Alice, though older than Caroline, had played with Jackie’s daughter, and following the widow’s move to N Street, the Ormsby-Gores had volunteered to host Caroline’s school at the embassy when it could no longer be located in the White House. In mid-January 1964, David and Sissie accompanied Jackie on a visit to the Georgia plantation of the former U.S. ambassador to Britain John Hay Whitney. Afterward, Sissie, feeling half mad herself, reported to a friend that listening to Jackie’s eruptions of violent imagery, usually the same episodes involving blood and brains, often in nearly the identical words, invariably in a flat tone of voice, was becoming well-nigh unbearable; yet listen she must.

  At other times, conversations with Jackie were like skating on a pond of thin ice, with certain areas designated dangerous. Easily provoked to anger, she bristled when a woman in her social circle praised her bearing during the memorial services. “How did she expect me to behave?” Jackie remarked
afterward to Arthur Schlesinger with what struck him as a certain contempt. Jackie was, in her word, stunned when other friends said they hoped she would marry again. “I consider that my life is over,” she informed them, “and I will spend the rest of my life waiting for it really to be over.” She became indignant when, however well-meaningly, people suggested that time would make everything better.

  She found it too painful to see so much as an image of her husband’s face—the face she had been looking into when the fatal bullet struck. The single photograph of Jack that, by her own account, she did have with her at the Harriman house was one in which his back was turned. Paintings as well were problematic. When Bob and Marg McNamara sent over two painted portraits of JFK and urged her to accept one as a gift, Jackie realized that though she especially admired the smaller of the pair, which showed her late husband in a seated position, she simply could not bear to keep it. In anticipation of returning both paintings, she propped them up just outside her bedroom door. One evening in December, young John emerged from Jackie’s room. Spotting a portrait of his father, he removed a lollipop from his mouth and kissed the image, saying, “Good night, Daddy.” Jackie related the episode to Marg McNamara by way of explanation as to why it would be impossible to have such a picture near. She said it brought to the surface too many things.

  For all that, she did everything she could to sustain an atmosphere of normalcy, threadbare though it might be, for Caroline and John. Before leaving the White House, she held a belated third birthday party for John, whose actual birth date had coincided with his father’s funeral. In Palm Beach at Christmastime, she was determined to make it, in the words of the nanny, Maud Shaw, “a good time for the children,” putting up the familiar lights, stars, and baubles, hanging stockings over the fireplace, and repeating other of the little things they had done as a family when Jack was alive. And when she purchased an eighteenth-century fawn-colored brick house across from the Harriman residence on N Street, she showed the decorator Billy Baldwin photographs of the children’s White House rooms and specified that she wanted their new rooms to be precisely the same.

  At midnight on January 31, 1964, on the eve of her move, Jackie wrote to former prime minister Harold Macmillan, who was then two weeks from his seventieth birthday. Macmillan had left office on account of illness in October 1963. Still unwell by the time of President Kennedy’s funeral, he had designated Andrew and Debo Devonshire to represent him there. Bobby Kennedy had spoken to Macmillan on the phone recently; and Jackie’s intention in writing to him, as she said, was to tell him how much Jack had loved him. But, as was often the case with her these days, her original aim was soon derailed. Hardly had she begun to write on her black-bordered mourning stationery when she found herself speaking of the bouts of bitterness that continued to vex her; of her failed efforts to find religious consolation; and of her sense of life’s unfairness and of its being the best people who were made to suffer.

  Still, at a time when Jackie was yet darkly insisting to friends that her future had died with her husband, she expressed the tender hope to Macmillan that the next day’s move might actually be the start of “a new life.” During her two months as a recipient of the undersecretary of state’s hospitality, the crowds that regularly stood vigil outside, sometimes shivering in the snow, had been a source of distress to Jackie. At a moment of national catastrophe, people had anointed Jackie a heroine. In a time of mass confusion and anxiety, they had invested her with almost magical powers to hold the nation together. They had seized upon the widow’s demeanor of emotional control at the funeral to transform her from a symbol of helplessness and vulnerability to a symbol of resolute strength. Jackie for her part was irritated by the chorus of public praise for her conduct in the aftermath of tragedy. “I don’t like to hear people say that I am poised and maintaining a good appearance,” she resentfully told Bishop Hannan. “I am not a movie actress.” Nor did she feel like much of a heroine. On the contrary, she remained privately preoccupied with the notion that she had missed one or more chances to save her husband.

  The crowds outside her house were upsetting to her in another way as well. Confronted with the throngs on N Street, she feared that real danger might suddenly spring forth, as it had on November 22. Easily startled, she felt her body tense for another attack, and grew exceedingly alarmed when people attempted not only to see but also to touch the woman who had survived the slaughter in Dallas, or when certain of them broke through the police lines in an effort to kiss and hug the slain president’s children. As January waned, the numbers on the sidewalk, instead of diminishing, seemed only to swell in anticipation of the widow’s move across the street. Every time Billy Baldwin came from New York to check on the paint, curtains, and other details, it struck him that there were even more people lined up outside the new place, straining to look in the huge windows.

  Soon the problem was not just the crowds. Cars and eventually even tour buses began to clog the narrow street. At Arlington National Cemetery, an average of ten thousand tourists visited President Kennedy’s grave every day. Many made the pilgrimage to inspect the widow’s new house as well. By moving day, N Street had established itself as “one of the tourist sights of Washington.” The new residence, which Jackie dubbed “my house with many steps,” perched high above street level. Nevertheless, Billy Baldwin recalled: “I was shocked at how easy it was to see inside the house, despite its great elevation. Once I arrived in late evening, and the lights inside the house were making a doubly interesting show for the spectators.” After dark, Jackie had no choice but to draw the voluminous apricot silk curtains lest she be on full view to strangers who loomed adoringly, expectantly, until all hours.

  Jackie’s first month of residence there coincided with the opening sessions of the Warren Commission, a seven-man bipartisan panel convened by the president to review and reveal all of the facts and circumstances surrounding the assassination and the subsequent killing of the alleged assassin. Oswald’s death had left the nation in suspense about who had been responsible for the murder of President Kennedy. Among Johnson’s aims in establishing the commission was to restore order by reassuring Americans that the crime had been fully investigated and solved, responsibility for the cataclysm firmly fixed. Johnson was also eager to terminate the speculation about Soviet involvement that persisted in many quarters. He worried that Moscow, were it to grow fearful that Washington planned to retaliate, might make a first strike.

  Beginning on February 3, the day when Marina Oswald, the alleged assassin’s widow, appeared before the committee, the panel took the testimony of 552 witnesses, including associates and acquaintances of both Lee Harvey Oswald and his killer, Jack Ruby; doctors; bystanders; policemen; journalists; and Secret Service agents. Five months into the proceedings, Jackie would testify as well. In the meantime, it was almost impossible to look at a newspaper or turn on a radio or television without encountering further talk of the assassination. At a moment when the country was frantic to learn definitively and at last who killed President Kennedy, Jackie discovered that she had little interest in that particular whodunit. “I had the feeling of what did it matter what they found out?” she later reflected. “They could never bring back the person who was gone.”

  Another problem for her was that every media reference to the official inquiry had the potential to cause a new flood of uninvited memories. She had acted at once to try to stop precisely this sort of provoking material from “coming up, coming up” (not by chance, her phrasing in this respect reflected the involuntary nature of these onerous recollections) when she moved to exert personal control over the books about the assassination. Suddenly, however, it became impossible to fully shield herself against the steady blast of information from the Warren Commission.

  Approximately three weeks after Jackie sent off her letter to Macmillan, she received a fifteen-page answer written in the barely decipherable scrawl that was a result of his having been shot through the right hand dur
ing the battle of Loos in 1915. Jackie later said that no letter in her life “could ever have been” what that letter was for her. She called it “the rock that I went back to over and over” throughout the winter of 1964. A year and a half later, she would insist that she could still almost remember it “word for word.” And even after four years had passed, there would be moments when, she avowed, a sentence from Macmillan’s long letter came “crashing back into my head—and I could see the page it was written on as I did the first time—the color of the ink and paper.”

  Macmillan told her that he had “read & re-read” her own message and “pondered deeply about it.” Though he did not mention it to her, prior to responding he had also conferred with his longtime aide Philip de Zulueta and learned what he could about Jackie’s present circumstances from David Ormsby-Gore. In the end, however, it was Macmillan’s formative personal experience of having, as he said, “lived through two wars” that would shape his February 18, 1964, reply. That personal history allowed him to make an imaginative leap. It encouraged him to look beyond Jackie’s status as a grieving widow and to take into account certain other factors that were also crucially in play. It allowed him to view her ordeal through the unexpected lens of the stories of warriors whose overwhelming experiences on the battlefield, like hers in Dallas, had forever set them apart.