As a captain in the Grenadier Guards in the First World War, Macmillan had been severely wounded in the left thigh during the Battle of the Somme. He had lain for hours surrounded by the dead and screaming wounded. He had been in shock and very nearly died himself. As he told Jackie in his letter, the casualties in that war had been “on a frightful scale.” By 1918 he had had “scarcely a friend or relation alive, of military age, except those who had been too ill or weak to go.” He too had felt much bitterness. He too had been moved to ask “Why—oh, Why” in an effort to make sense of the senseless. He too had suffered bouts of depression. It struck Macmillan that in important ways Jackie’s tribulations had been even worse than his own, for soldiers at least have the consolation of feeling that their sacrifices are for something. “But this,” Macmillan wrote, “what has happened to you and (in its way) to all of us. How can we accept it? How can we explain it? Why did God allow it? I am sure you must say this to yourself (as I do) over & over. Such a waste! Such folly! Such bad workmanship! Can there really be a God, who made & guides the world?” He admitted that there were no satisfactory answers and that the only thing to do was to try somehow to retain one’s faith in the face of what had occurred.
At the heart of Macmillan’s letter was his offer to serve as “a sort of safety-valve or lightning conductor” for Jackie. He encouraged her to view him as a kindred spirit to whom she could write of her anguish in the expectation that he at least would understand.
“You have shown the most wonderful courage to the outer world,” he wrote. “The hard thing is really to feel it, inside.”
Many times in the course of that winter, Jackie undertook to write back to Macmillan. But when in the morning she reviewed the night thoughts that she had committed to paper, she concluded that it would be wisest not to let anyone see them. So she discarded what she had written. At last, Jackie asked David to explain to Macmillan why he had yet to hear from her.
In the meantime, she promised herself that eventually, perhaps when spring came and things were “a little better,” she would manage to produce a letter that actually went off to Birch Grove. Then she would tell the former prime minister that he had helped her more than he would ever know by spurring her to produce all those unsent letters.
The act of writing them, she later said, had been a release for so much that would have destroyed her had she kept it all inside.
During this same period, Arthur Schlesinger made the first of seven official visits to N Street, where he set up his tape recorder and proposed that Jackie answer his questions about her late husband and his administration as if she were speaking across the decades to “an historian of the twenty-first century.” These interviews, conducted between March 2 and June 3 of 1964, were part of a larger effort undertaken by a team of historians to record the memories of individuals who had known President Kennedy. The tapes would at length be transcribed and deposited in the archives of the projected John F. Kennedy Library in Boston. The concept behind the emergent academic discipline of oral history was that in an epoch when people were producing fewer letters and diaries, historians had better interview all the players directly lest precious details that would previously have been committed to paper be forever lost to posterity. Jackie’s willingness to participate in the oral history project was predicated on two stipulations. The first was that her reminiscences would remain sealed until sometime after her death. The second was that in any case, she would be free to strike anything from the transcript that on reflection she did not care to be part of the historical record.
Thus, whenever she instructed Schlesinger to turn off the machine so that she could ask, “Should I say this on the recorder?,” the bow-tie-wearing historian invariably reminded her of the original agreement. “Why don’t you say it?” he would reply. “You have control over the transcript.”
For Jackie, control was all important in interviews that offered a chance to fashion a narrative not just of her husband’s life and presidency, but also, more problematically, of their marriage. It had long been Jack’s plan that when he left office, he would tell his story as he saw it and wished others to see it. Now, she believed, it fell to his widow to attempt to do it in his stead, if not in a book, then in the form of these conversations. Still, the undertaking presented a formidable challenge, not least because JFK had had so many secrets. At moments in the tapes, Jackie clearly is not quite sure how much she ought to disclose about her husband’s precarious health. She whispers, she hesitates, she requests that there be a pause in the recording. The tapes therefore are often as interesting for their ellipses as for their content, for the intervals when the machine has been urgently turned off as for when it is actually running. On the matter of her marriage, Jackie’s task is even more complicated. One observes her proceeding gingerly, testing to see what she can feasibly claim to have been the case to an interlocutor who, on the one hand, knows full well about Jack’s dissolute sexual habits, and, on the other, is likely though by no means sworn to go along with the lie.
At times, when the subject matter is especially sensitive, as when she finds herself compelled to comment on Jack’s friendship with George Smathers, Jackie stumbles in the thicket of her own desperately contorted phrases. The thicket is filled with thorns, and at every turn they draw blood. First she insists that the friendship took place “before the Senate.” Then she says, no, it was indeed in the Senate but “before he was married.” Then she suggests that Smathers “was really a friend of one side of Jack—a rather, I always thought, sort of crude side. I mean, not that Jack had the crude side.”
When the subject matter is less personal than political and historical, the challenge that confronts her is no less of a minefield, for, more often than not, she is addressing subjects that she would never have dared or been even remotely inclined to pronounce on while her husband lived. Not only is Jackie doing something that she never anticipated having to do, she is operating in the worst imaginable circumstances—when she is unable to sleep, self-medicating with vodka, tyrannized by flashbacks and nightmares. For Jackie, the principal point of these interviews is to burnish her husband’s historical reputation. She certainly does not want to do him any damage, yet there is always the chance that inadvertently she will accomplish precisely that.
There were other potential pitfalls in her talks with Schlesinger, who, in addition to his chores as an oral historian, had recently embarked on the preparation of a much-ballyhooed book about the Kennedy presidency for the publisher Houghton Mifflin. Given the recent upheaval in Schlesinger’s professional circumstances, he had an awful lot at stake in the book project. At a time when Johnson had been frantic to retain as many Kennedy people as he could, the new president had scarcely concealed his disdain for Schlesinger, whom he had systematically isolated within the administration. Not inaccurately, Johnson viewed Schlesinger as being in league with RFK. When Schlesinger submitted his resignation, it was accepted, to his perception, with alacrity. Schlesinger in turn was surely no admirer of Johnson’s, yet the president’s eagerness to see him go stung nonetheless. To make matters worse for Schlesinger, Johnson was intent on inducing the other Kennedy administration insider said to be planning a book, Ted Sorensen, to remain in the administration. Unlike Schlesinger, whom Johnson regarded as a useless intellectual, Sorensen possessed the invaluable skill of being able to write in JFK’s voice.
So Johnson was hugely disappointed when at the end of February, Sorensen resigned to produce his own literary take on the Kennedy years. With considerable fanfare, Harper & Row announced the Sorensen book on March 1, the day before Schlesinger’s initial oral history interview with Jackie, whose friendship and favor Schlesinger could not but regard as a glittering prize. During the White House years, he had been a social friend of President and Mrs. Kennedy’s, a status to which Sorensen could make no comparable claim. Further, Jackie was not alone in disliking and distrusting Sorensen; Bobby, who early on in the speechwriter’s tenure had exhibited a
certain jealousy of his relationship with JFK, had long been cool to Sorensen as well. In any case, as Schlesinger and Sorensen competed to be first with a book in the stores, could Schlesinger really be trusted to scrupulously forget everything the widow told him in the course of their supposedly privileged interviews? Would he even be inclined to do so?
Potential problems in this regard were not limited to the fact that he was simultaneously at work on a book. Given Schlesinger’s status as a player in the post-assassination power struggle, might certain of Jackie’s remarks, though made with the assumption that they would long remain under seal, suddenly become ammunition in that fight? Once Schlesinger had extracted certain critical information about, say, JFK’s private views on Johnson, or the late president’s intentions as to whether or not to retain Dean Rusk as secretary of state after the ’64 election, could Jackie reasonably expect that that information would not somehow find its way into the present political fray?
At length, when Jackie commented that the oral history interviews had been an excruciating experience, it is a safe bet that she was referring not merely to the exertion involved in dredging up from memory so many details about JFK. As she faced Schlesinger, she also had to make spot judgments about which of those details to cover over and conceal—from posterity, from her interviewer, and even at times from herself.
The oral history tapes spanned the late president’s life from boyhood on, with the freighted topic of the assassination deliberately left out. In the course of a brief discussion of JFK’s religious beliefs, Jackie did touch on certain of the “Why me?” questions that had absorbed her of late. “You don’t really start to think of those things until something terrible happens to you,” she told Schlesinger on March 4. “I think God’s unjust now.” Otherwise, she preferred to leave the events of November 22 for her impending talks with William Manchester, whom, by design, she had still yet to meet. As Jackie later said, if Manchester’s book were ever to be published at all, she imagined that it would be “bound in black and put away on dark library shelves.” The image is immensely suggestive. At moments, Jackie acted as if once she had spoken for the book, the oppressive recollections could be filed away in some densely shadowed corner of the mind where they would never be able to intrude upon her consciousness again. In a sense, her cooperation with Manchester may be seen as an attempt to master material that heretofore had proven impervious to anything like conscious control.
Until the moment when Jackie actually had to face Manchester, she contrived to deal with him through various emissaries. On February 5 she had reached out to the Connecticut-based writer via a phone call placed by Pierre Salinger. On February 26, Bobby Kennedy met with Manchester at the Justice Department to detail her wishes. When Manchester proposed that it might be a good idea to see the widow before he signed on, RFK assured him that there was no need. As the attorney general had been doing since that first night at Bethesda Naval Hospital, he made it clear that he spoke for Mrs. Kennedy. In the present negotiations, if at this point Manchester’s dealings with the family might even be called that, he proved to be as deferential as he had been when he invited JFK to alter his own quotes. After various decrees from on high had been transmitted to Manchester by both Salinger and RFK lieutenant Edwin Guthman, the author unflinchingly signed an agreement that provided that his final text could not be published “unless and until approved” by both Jackie and RFK. Presently, Manchester’s eager offer to come to Jackie in Washington at any time on just a few hours’ notice fell flat. So did his request for a quick meeting the better to know what to say in response to press inquiries once the book deal had been announced. On March 26, the day after the attorney general’s office released the news of Manchester’s appointment, Jackie went off for the Easter weekend with Bobby and Ethel, and both sets of children, to ski in Stowe, Vermont. Manchester, meanwhile, assured the press that he intended to see her as soon as possible while her recollections were fresh.
Presently, Jackie, Bobby, Chuck Spalding, and the Radziwills assembled in Antigua, where they were due to spend a week at the waterfront estate of Bunny Mellon. The group swam and water-skied, but as Spalding remembered, an “overwhelming” air of sadness pervaded the trip. It struck him that the immense beauty of the setting, which overlooked Half Moon Bay, merely highlighted “everybody’s terrible sense of dejection.” Jackie had brought with her a copy of Edith Hamilton’s The Greek Way, which she had been studying in an effort to learn how the ancient Greeks approached the universal questions posed by human suffering.
Bobby, who had been troubled by questions of his own since November 22, borrowed the Hamilton book from her in Antigua. “I remember he’d disappear,” Jackie later recalled. “He’d be in his room an awful lot of the time … reading that and underlining things.” To Spalding’s eye, Bobby was depressed nearly to the point of paralysis. Unable to sleep, frantic that his own actions as attorney general against Cuba or the Mob might inadvertently have led to his brother’s murder, he had lost an alarming amount of weight, and his clothes hung loosely from a frame that called to mind a Giacometti figure. For all of Bobby’s acute suffering, however, he was also worried about Jackie. Though in the course of a March 13 interview he had assured the television host Jack Paar that she was making “a good deal of progress,” it was evident in private that she was not. After they came back from the Caribbean, Bobby, concerned about Jackie’s abiding mood of despondency, asked a Jesuit priest with whom he and Ethel were close to talk to his brother’s widow. First, however, in response to a new handwritten note from Manchester requesting a meeting, Jackie finally consented. When, shortly before noon on April 7, the edgy, rumpled, ruddy-faced author beheld her at last in her book- and picture-filled living room, she told him that her emotional state made it impossible to be interviewed just now. Manchester had no choice, really, but to be patient.
Before Jackie received Manchester again, she began to see Father McSorley. The flimsy pretext for these sessions, which began on April 27, was that the priest, who also happened to be an expert tennis player, had signed on to help Jackie improve her game. Almost immediately that first day on the tennis court at Hickory Hill, she broached certain of the preoccupations she had previously spoken of with others. On this and subsequent occasions, Father McSorley recorded her comments afterward in his diary. Today there were the unanswerable questions: “I don’t know how God could take him away,” she told the priest. “It’s so hard to believe.” There were the feelings of guilt at what she perceived to have been her failure to act in time to prevent Jack’s death: “I would have been able to pull him down,” she said remorsefully, “or throw myself in front of him, or do something, if I had only known.” But it was not until the next day, when Jackie and the priest faced each other again on the tennis court, that she began to speak overtly of suicide.
“Do you think God would separate me from my husband if I killed myself?” Jackie asked. “It is so hard to bear. I feel as though I am going out of my mind at times.” When she asked the priest to pray that she die, he responded: “Yes, if you want that. It’s not wrong to pray to die.” Jackie went on to insist that Caroline and John would be better off without her: “I’m no good to them. I’m so bleeding inside.” Father McSorley countered that the children did indeed need her. He argued that, contrary to anything Jackie said, Caroline and John certainly would not be better off living at Hickory Hill, where Ethel Kennedy could hardly give them the attention they required. “She has so much pressure from public life and so many children,” he said of Ethel. “Nobody can do for them except you.”
Six days after Jackie confided to Father McSorley that she had been contemplating suicide, she finally sat down with Manchester to talk about the assassination. Jackie asked him: “Are you just going to put down all the facts, who ate what for breakfast and all that, or are you going to put yourself in the book, too?” Manchester’s reply, that it would be impossible to keep himself out, seemed to please her. Nonetheless, in impor
tant ways, she and the writer were and would remain at cross-purposes. She longed to stop reliving the horror. He was determined to experience it himself, the better to enable readers to experience it as well. She needed to relegate November 22 to the past. He aspired by his craft to make it vividly present. Manchester’s aesthetic, which, then and later, emphasized sensations, impressions, and the minutely detailed moment-by-moment reconstruction of events, reflected his wartime experiences as a marksman for whom everything seen over his sights had had, in his words, “a cameolike quality, as keen and well-defined as a line by Van Eyck.” At his most acutely intense, Manchester brought to the act of writing the hyperawareness that soldiers experience in the war zone when the body, faced with high threat, diverts blood to the limbic neurons in a concentrated effort to locate and dissipate danger.
Curiously, when Manchester encountered JFK’s widow, he was still years away from being able to write about the war, his war. “It lay too deep,” he later said. “I couldn’t reach it. But I had known it must be there.… Some recollections never die. They lie in one’s subconscious, squirreled away, biding their time.” Manchester was, by his own telling, “a troubled man who, for over thirty years, repressed what he could not bear to remember.” By contrast, Jackie’s memories of Dallas, some of them anyway, were readily, plentifully available, indeed, too much so for her comfort, if not for her sanity.
“It’s rather hard to stop once the floodgates open,” Jackie was to say ruefully of the Manchester interviews, which the author captured on a tape recorder that he arranged to place out of her sight, though she knew it was running. Lest the floodgates close at any point, Manchester fed her daiquiris, which he poured liberally from large containers. RFK, unlike his sister-in-law, refused to take a drink when interviewed; as a consequence, Manchester lamented, the attorney general’s replies were “abrupt, often monosyllabic—and much less responsive.” From the interviewer’s perspective, in Jackie’s case it also helped that before talking to her he had already interrogated others connected with the assassination. Crucially, he came to her with an abundance of detail culled from other sources. The episodes he repeatedly guided Jackie over were already familiar terrain to him. He also gleaned, from the widow herself, that she devoted many sleepless nights to obsessively turning certain of these episodes “over and over” in her mind; she knew that brooding was useless now, yet she was unable to stop herself. For Manchester, rather than have to start from scratch, it became a matter of cuing her properly and inserting himself in an agonizing process she had been through many times before.
Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis: The Untold Story Page 18