In the midst of further frantic back-and-forth with Bishop and his publishers, Jackie forgot to call off the delivery of her newspapers at the Carlyle before the September 28 release of the Warren Commission report. “I picked them up and there it was,” she said at the time, “so I canceled them for the rest of the week.” She soon learned that that would not be protection enough. Living with PTSD is a bit like inhabiting a country that has been besieged by terrorists. One has no idea when the next attack will occur or the precise form it will take. It may come in a place one had every reason to expect to be safe. Jackie was at her hairdresser Kenneth’s when she saw a copy of the October 2 issue of Life, whose lead story concerned the Warren Commission report. The stills on the cover, extracted from amateur footage of the assassination filmed by Dallas resident Abraham Zapruder, showed Jackie futilely struggling to pull her wounded husband down to safety in the moments before the fatal bullet struck.
“It was terrible,” she said of her brush with that particular magazine. Then she added: “There is November to be gotten through … maybe by the first of the year…” When she made these comments, a week had passed since the Kenneth’s incident, and Jackie was at home at the Carlyle having drinks with Dorothy Schiff, the publisher of the New York Post, whose endorsement RFK was then scrambling to secure. Early on in the New York Senate race there had been expectations both among the Kennedyites and in other quarters that by this point in the campaign the late president’s brother would have established a decisive lead among voters. With less than a month to go before the election, however, major polls showed RFK lagging behind the incumbent, Senator Kenneth Keating, a moderate Republican. It was said that Bobby was not as popular as Democrats tended to be among Jewish and Italian-American voters in the state, that many New Yorkers were as uncomfortable with him as they had been with Richard Nixon four years previously, and that a surprising number of people who had supported JFK in 1960 might well split their ticket and vote for Keating this time. Even certain of RFK’s backers worried that their man was running a lackluster campaign, that the more accessible public persona he had discovered in Poland was no longer in evidence, and that overall Bobby seemed somehow woefully ill-cast in his new role. An additional complication was that though Bobby publicly portrayed himself as JFK’s rightful political heir, he privately resented the necessity to dwell so much in the shadow of his late brother. On one occasion, as RFK looked out at a large crowd of New Yorkers who had come to see him, he protested to an aide: “They’re for him. They’re not for me.”
At a moment when the New York press appeared to have united against his candidacy, RFK was eager for a nod from the politically liberal Post. Dorothy Schiff privately likened Bobby to Sammy Glick, the ruthless, backstabbing protagonist of the Budd Schulberg novel What Makes Sammy Run?, but she also was keen to have Jackie sign on as a Post columnist. Hence the October 10, 1964, meeting that RFK engineered between the two women. The previous week he had promised to produce Jackie when Schiff mentioned how much she wanted to meet her. Still, the publisher had assumed until virtually the last minute that the meeting would never actually occur. But Bobby’s campaign was in trouble, and it fell to Jackie to emerge from her private hell in order to secure the endorsement herself. Jackie’s desperation in trying to help her brother-in-law when she was hardly in any condition even to try was reflected in the odd character of certain of her remarks about him. “He must win. He will win. He must win,” she said. “Or maybe it is just because one wants it so much that one thinks that.”
More usefully, perhaps, Jackie assured her guest that while many people called Bobby “ruthless and cold,” in fact he had “the kindest heart in the world.” Otherwise, she talked disjointedly about, among other subjects, her need to get away from Washington because of the many reminders there, and her apprehensions about moving to a new apartment, which suddenly seemed a good deal less welcoming than when she had first seen it.
“People tell me that time will heal,” she burst out. “How much time?” It was then that she spoke of her disastrous mistake the other day in forgetting to cancel her newspaper delivery, of the episode at Kenneth’s, of the new trials that faced her in November, and of her hope that things might be better in 1965.
The meeting with Dorothy Schiff was far from the only instance of Jackie’s permitting herself to be rolled out in support of Bobby’s candidacy. On one occasion, she even allowed him to produce young John, clad in a white sweater and red short trousers, at a photo opportunity in Riverdale, the Bronx, where Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. had once owned a home. By reminding voters that Bobby had lived in New York when he was a boy, the visit aimed to counter the carpetbagging charges that continued to vex his campaign. He might have taken any of his own children to Independence Avenue that day, but it was more politically advantageous by far to be pictured with JFK’s son. Lest there arise a perception among voters that Bobby alone enjoyed the favor of President’s Kennedy’s widow, LBJ, when he came to New York in keeping with his promise to campaign with Bobby, asked to be taken to see Jackie in her new apartment.
It was a maxim of LBJ’s that “when you get ’em by the balls, their hearts and minds are sure to follow.” What could Bobby do but acquiesce at a moment when, humiliatingly, his best hope for being elected seemed to be a big win on Johnson’s part, and when he needed to tie himself to Johnson at all costs? In the event that Johnson beat Goldwater by a huge margin, it was statistically unlikely that there would be enough ticket splitting to make the difference for Keating. Much was made of the lack of fanfare in advance of Johnson’s October 14 meeting with Jackie. There had been no prior announcement of LBJ’s stop at 1040 Fifth Avenue, to which he was transported in an unmarked car, but that did not mean that the strategic thirty-minute visit arranged by Bobby was not prominently reported in the papers the next day, which was all that the president needed to reaffirm his ties to JFK.
In the end, Bobby was elected to the U.S. Senate on November 3, the apparent beneficiary of a Johnson landslide. To certain of RFK’s admirers—perhaps best described by McGeorge Bundy as that “circle of people who felt that their happiness and hopes died on the twenty-second of November unless they could be revived by the younger brother”—the victory marked day one of the push to secure a Kennedy restoration in Washington. Jackie attended the election-night festivities at Delmonico’s along with Sissie and David Harlech, but Bobby’s triumph, much as she had wanted and worked for it, did nothing to alter her own situation as the first anniversary of November 22 drew near. More than ever, Jackie was privately preoccupied with armoring herself against all that the anniversary promised to bring—the tributes, the requiem Masses, the television dramas and documentaries, the magazine and newspaper articles.
Uneasily, she hung suspended between a determination to try, in her phrase, “to put [JFK] out of my mind,” and a sense that it was her duty to memorialize him. Though she did not intend to join Bobby, Ethel, Eunice, and the rest at Arlington National Cemetery on the twenty-second, or indeed to participate in any public tributes prior to that date, one last decision about JFK’s burial place still faced her. Jackie had yet to ratify the final plans for the grave design. Once she had done that, John Warnecke, the architect whom she and Bobby had appointed in the aftermath of the assassination, could call a press conference, as seemed fitting, in advance of the first anniversary of President Kennedy’s death. According to Warnecke, a six-foot-two, 220-pound former college football star who had then been in his mid-forties, on the same day Jackie gave her final approval to the grave design, she also went to bed with him. Given the signal conjunction of these two events, was the latter an effort on her part to jump-start the process of forgetting that, in another context, she spoke of consciously endeavoring to begin?
Finally, Jackie, who had noticeably lost a good deal of weight in the weeks since Bobby’s Senate race, remained in seclusion on the twenty-second. Her children and a few other family members were with her at the fieldstone house
overlooking Long Island Sound that she had recently taken as a weekend retreat. When the last of the church bells had tolled, she sat up late into the night scribbling letters, which she tore up afterward because, as she said, she feared they were overly emotional.
Her one-year period of mourning at an end, she planned to appear at a pair of charity events immediately thereafter, a Washington, D.C., screening of the film My Fair Lady to benefit the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and the International Rescue Committee, and a fund-raising dinner for Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles. As early as the twenty-fourth, however, it became apparent that even now there was to be no relief from the emotional triggers that could come at her unexpectedly at any time. Days before her Warren Commission testimony had been officially scheduled to be released, Jackie opened the newspaper to discover extracts of her remarks, including a description of her efforts to second-guess her actions in Dallas.
Whereupon she canceled her impending appearances. A spokesperson announced that Mrs. Kennedy had hoped to attend both events: “However, due to the emotional strain of the past ten days she feels unable to participate in any public engagement.”
Ten
“I just heard that you were probably going to go to the memorial to the president,” LBJ told Jackie on the phone.
When Johnson called her on March 25, 1965, she had only just arrived in Hobe Sound, Florida, a few hours previously. In the four months since the November 22 commemorations, Jackie had moved about a great deal; moved about almost compulsively. She had sojourned in Aspen, Colorado, and Lake Placid, New York. She had traveled to Mexico. Now she had taken a house for ten days at the Jupiter Club in Hobe Sound. After that, she was off to New Hampshire and Vermont. The question being not whether the mind’s floodgates might suddenly, spontaneously, reopen, but rather how best to keep those inevitable occasions to a minimum, she had persisted in shunning all public appearances since she canceled the two charity events in late November.
Finally, however, Jackie had nervously accepted one invitation, if only because it had come from David Harlech, who had recently resigned his post as ambassador in Washington and was back in England. On May 14, Queen Elizabeth was due to dedicate to JFK’s memory a parcel of land at Runnymede, where in 1215 King John had met with his rebellious barons to sign Magna Carta, the foundation of constitutional government. It was the dedication ceremony honoring President Kennedy that LBJ had called to discuss with Jackie in Florida.
“I wanted to suggest that if you cared to, that you and your party take one of the 707s. And I think that I might ask Bobby and Teddy if they wanted to go to represent me.… You just let me know and I’ll have it all set up for you.”
“Oh, that’s so nice, but that’s wasting taxpayers’ money!” said Jackie, whom Alsop had recently warned against allowing Johnson to put her in his debt.
LBJ, for his part, denied that flying the Kennedy party to England would be a waste of tax dollars. On the contrary: “It’s very important to us, and very important to the country.”
“Oh, listen, I just don’t know what to say,” Jackie returned.
“You don’t say anything.”
“That’s the nicest thing I ever heard of.”
“Just quit being so elusive. It’s been too long since I saw you,” said LBJ, suggesting by this rejoinder the character of his anxiety and calculations. “And whenever, wherever I can do anything,” the president went on, “you know I’m as close as the phone, dear.”
Perhaps he was, but three days later “Dear” chose to reply in writing to his offer. “I did not know if I could steel myself to go on one of those planes again,” Jackie told the president. On reflection she had decided to accept: “But please do not let it be Air Force One.” Lest the familiar ambience carry her back in memory to November 22, 1963, she preferred not to be confronted with the particular plane in which she had flown home with her husband’s remains. Nor would it be enough to keep clear of the plane itself. Though in her rational mind Jackie would know that she was not on the actual aircraft, even the palest reminder, imperceptible though it might be to other eyes, threatened to set her off, and once the images and emotions began to flow, there would be no stopping them.
“Please,” Jackie implored, “let it be the 707 that looks least like Air Force One inside.”
So Jackie and her children, along with JFK’s surviving brothers, flew to London on one of the other presidential planes. The day of the Runnymede ceremony was hot and sunny, the soft white tree-fluff that wafted in the air causing one commentator to think of “snow in May.” By three in the afternoon, approximately five thousand guests, some wearing impromptu hats of folded newspapers against the glare, had gathered in the meadow, which was flecked with the gold of buttercups and dandelions. That, at least, was the bucolic scene that most people would have observed. But Jackie no longer perceived the world quite as most others did. To her biased vision, Runnymede was an emotional minefield, not least of the dreaded reminders being the sight of Harold Macmillan. At the time David Harlech first broached the idea of the memorial, Jackie had told him that she could not conceive of traveling to Runnymede unless Macmillan was asked to speak. In the event, however, Macmillan’s hoary presence on the speakers’ platform, where she too was seated, proved to be too much for her. By this point, she associated Macmillan not just with her late husband, but also with the magnificent fifteen-page February 18, 1964, letter about herself, which had spurred so many unsent letters of her own. In Atlantic City, Jackie had spoken in a barely audible voice. At Runnymede, even that level of performance would be beyond her.
As Macmillan addressed the audience, Jackie became so overwrought that she realized she could not possibly deliver her own remarks. This was the same woman whose demeanor at the time of JFK’s funeral had so endeared her to her countrymen. Days after the assassination, she had still been in the warrior-like state of emotional lockdown into which she had been plunged in Dallas. As she said, there had been moments when she had wanted to cry but found that she could not. Eighteen months later, Jackie cried all too easily, and once she began, there was always the danger that she might not be able to stop. On this particular occasion, given her decision not even to try to speak, the text of what she had intended to say, a meditation on the way in which English literature and history had shaped JFK “as did no other part of his education,” was published in the London press instead.
Two days after Runnymede, Jackie was similarly affected in the course of a private Kennedy family visit to the Macmillan family at Birch Grove. The many mementoes of President Kennedy about the house, the special rocking chair he had used during his 1963 stay, the gifts that Jackie had helped select at the time for both the prime minister and Lady Dorothy, the various framed photographs of JFK and Macmillan together, along with the sight of their host steering Bobby into his library and closing the door in anticipation of the sort of private colloquy he used to conduct with JFK—all of it had the effect of sending her into what an observer described as “a very low mood.”
That mood persisted the next day when she was too upset even to get out of bed. Having missed the chance for anything like “a proper talk” with Macmillan though previously they had communicated so feelingly and unrestrainedly on paper, she set out to write a new long letter to him in which she spoke of the intensity of her emotions at Birch Grove; of her unsuccessful efforts since moving to New York to banish Jack from her thoughts for the sake of his children; and of the children’s role in giving her a reason to live in order that she might make them the people Jack would have wished them to be. “Probably,” she darkly suggested, “I will be too intense and they will grow up to be awful.” Again when she read over what she had written, she felt embarrassed by her words and judged that it might be best not to send the letter off, but when she tried to produce another letter, the result was so stiff and formal that, as she told Macmillan, she took a deep breath and dispatched both missives to Birch Grove in hopes he would underst
and.
Jackie had suggested in the original May 17, 1965, message to Macmillan that the things her husband most cared about were no longer priorities in Washington and that there was nothing she could do to affect that. Meanwhile, others at home, notably LBJ, took a different view of what a pointed word or gesture from her might mean just now in the political sphere. Despite his landslide victory in the 1964 presidential election, Johnson persisted in the belief that he had to continually paint himself as his predecessor’s legitimate heir, a leader determined to pursue the policies of President Kennedy. To some perceptions, Johnson had even been willing to politicize his presidential proclamation on the first anniversary of November 22 when he underscored that “the vision of John F. Kennedy still guides the nation.” Did it really? Or was LBJ, who had his own exceedingly ambitious agenda for the country quite apart from anything JFK had been prepared to pursue, merely seeking to reassure the American public that all was as it would have been? As far as Johnson was concerned, the White House could ill afford for RFK ever to be viewed as being more in sync with his late brother’s ideas than Johnson was. Especially now that RFK had left the administration, Johnson was ever striving to seem somehow more Kennedy than Kennedy.
LBJ’s blood had risen shortly before his January 1965 inauguration when he learned of rumors emanating from certain of the Kennedyites that he blamed America’s troubles in Vietnam on JFK’s immaturity and poor judgment. “Have you ever heard me blame Kennedy for anything?” LBJ demanded of Bob McNamara, who replied reassuringly: “No, no, absolutely not!… I have mentioned this to Jackie several times.” Johnson was under intense pressure from McNamara and McGeorge Bundy to choose between two alternatives in Vietnam, either to escalate U.S. military involvement there or to withdraw. Lest he damage himself with voters, the president had put off any decision until after the presidential election. Now that Johnson was in again, he had a new concern, that controversy over Vietnam could jeopardize the Great Society domestic program that was so dear to him. At the same time, LBJ did not wish to come under attack from RFK and his supporters on the grounds that he had neglected to pursue his predecessor’s Vietnam policy. The fact that there was no clear agreement among the various sects of the religion of Kennedy as to exactly what that policy had been added immeasurably to LBJ’s challenge.
Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis: The Untold Story Page 21