In early June, a cable from General William Westmoreland, U.S. military commander in Vietnam, calling for extensive additional combat troops to pursue the conflict there led McNamara to conclude that a choice could no longer be postponed. While he waited for the president to make a decision at last, he repeatedly volunteered to run interference with his friends the Kennedys. At the moment, it seemed as if his best chance of bringing over at least one prominent Kennedy was to work a little more on Jackie.
He certainly was not without influence on her. Jackie called McNamara the Kennedy cabinet member who “gave the most … as much as Jack’s own brother Bobby gave.” She regarded him as one of the very few friends who had not failed her when she tried to start over in Georgetown after the assassination. Freshly reeling from her experience of absolute helplessness in the face of overwhelming events, she had responded strongly, welcomingly, gratefully, to this forceful figure who always seemed so sure of what needed to be done and so certain that he was the man for the job. It was McNamara who on the night of the assassination had immediately offered to buy her the old house in Georgetown where she had once lived with JFK; McNamara who had argued that the president needed to be buried not in Massachusetts as family members seemed to favor, but in a national cemetery; McNamara who had chosen the particular spot where JFK was laid to rest. She anointed McNamara her shining knight. She credited him with having saved her from drowning. She later said that in her dark times he had always been the one who helped her.
Among other things, he liked to read to Jackie Henrik Ibsen’s The Master Builder, a play that explored some of the very questions she had been struggling with since Dallas. The picture of Bob McNamara, technocratic manager par excellence, staunch believer in man’s capacity to intelligently and rationally control events, speaking the impassioned lament at life’s randomness and unpredictability that is at the heart of the play—“Oh, that such things should be allowed to happen here in the world!”—is a riveting study in contrasts. The play’s protagonist broods about the deaths of his two infant sons after a fire that occurred more than a decade before, a tragedy that still gnaws at him day and night. Seeking to make sense of the senseless, he alternates between blaming God for the deaths and holding himself responsible, though intellectually he knows he is not at fault. At times, these preoccupations appear to have deranged him. When he falls to his death at the close of the third act, whether or not he has taken his own life remains an open question.
It is well to remember that McNamara was referring to a woman who saw him, and to whom he had indeed acted, as a loyal, loving friend, when he crisply, confidently assured LBJ, not long after she had returned from Europe: “I’m planning to have dinner with Jackie tonight in New York. I can do something on that front, if I can’t on Bobby.” Paranoid though Johnson often was, his anxiety that Jackie might be displeased with his administration, whether wholly or in part, was not without factual basis. In private she had already written in a negative vein to both Macmillan and Alsop about the way things were proceeding under her husband’s successor. The danger for the White House was almost certainly not that she would say such things publicly or even that, à la RFK, she would leak any views she might have to the press. But there was always the chance that she could speak to a friend or an acquaintance who would in turn communicate to others that the widow was, in her word, disenchanted.
So LBJ was very keen on the idea of McNamara’s undertaking to influence Jackie over dinner in a new push to align her with the White House. Evidently, William Manchester was not alone in his willingness to use alcohol to get what he needed from Jackie. The president, seeming rather to relish the prospect, went so far as to suggest certain points McNamara might put off making to her until after they had had their second drink.
Nor was the June 17 dinner the end of it. McNamara continued to work on her in the weeks that followed. After a reconnoitering trip to Vietnam that led to his final recommendation to put in more troops, he turned up at the Cape bearing a gift for Caroline and John: a stuffed Vietnamese tiger, which America’s ally, the despotic, Hitler-worshipping new Vietnamese prime minister General Nguyễn Cao Kỳ, had given him in Saigon. Jackie responded with an elegant thank-you note in the form of a watercolor that the tiger had inspired her to paint. A delighted McNamara had the picture mounted and framed. While the widow and the defense secretary diverted themselves in this charming manner, fifty thousand American soldiers had been dispatched on the president’s orders, with many more troops to follow. In response to Johnson’s decision to commit American combat forces, Norman Morrison, a Quaker from Baltimore, Maryland, immolated himself some forty feet from McNamara’s office window at the Pentagon. Morrison had had his year-old daughter with him at first, but as onlookers begged him to let her live, he threw the child to safety. McNamara later wrote: “I reacted to the horror of his action by bottling up my emotions and avoided talking about them with anyone—even my family. I knew Marg and our three children shared many of Morrison’s feelings about the war, as did the wives and children of several of my cabinet colleagues. And I believed I understood and shared some of his thoughts. There was much Marg and I and the children should have talked about, yet at moments like this I often turn inward instead—it is a grave weakness. The episode created tension at home that only deepened as dissent and criticism of the war continued to grow.”
While McNamara had been wooing Jackie on behalf of LBJ, she proved to be considerably less malleable in her dealings with two other Kennedy administration veterans. It would scarcely have helped Arthur Schlesinger or Ted Sorensen to offer Jackie a second drink as both men vied for official approval of the manuscripts they had been racing to finish in time for publication before the looming second anniversary of November 22. Unlike their mutual friend William Manchester, neither writer had a contractual obligation to the family. But, as both former JFK aides hoped for a role in any impending Kennedy restoration, what other option did they have but to seek Jackie’s and Bobby’s blessing?
Her assent was by far the more difficult to secure. She called for excisions and alterations, and then when she had been given everything she asked for, she indignantly insisted on still more. Her complaints ranged from a well-founded objection to Schlesinger’s comment that JFK came to the presidency knowing more about domestic matters than foreign affairs, to the stipulation that the particular rooms she and JFK had inhabited together not be described. She sniped that she had shared those rooms with him, not with Book-of-the-Month Club readers. In view of the many Kennedy books being produced, the same woman who longed somehow to stop thinking about her late husband was also eager to stockpile certain private details that she alone would possess.
Though Manchester later claimed to have devoted two hours to begging Sorensen to be firm, Sorensen, who billed his book as a substitute for the one JFK would have written had he lived, quickly caved. He yielded to Jackie on “point after point,” in Manchester’s judgment “weakening what should have been a great volume.” When Sorensen’s book, titled simply Kennedy, was published that fall, the author publicly conceded that he had, in his word, softened the text. Arthur Schlesinger, by contrast, did put up something of a fight. In this he was aided by Manchester, who wrote to Jackie on his fellow author’s behalf, arguing that history ought not to be turned into bland custard by removing too much.
In the end, Schlesinger left Manchester with the impression that besides consenting to delete a single passage derived from his taped oral history interviews with Jackie, he had refused to budge elsewhere. Schlesinger’s own August 10, 1965, letter to Jackie, written apropos of her upset over the prepublication serialization of his book in Life magazine, tells a different story. Schlesinger maintained that the fundamental problem was that he had been trained all his life to be an historian, and that it was the Hippocratic oath of his profession to come as close as possible to the truthful reconstruction of past events. He therefore had set out to write A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in th
e White House, as his book was called, using the same kinds of materials and the same standards as in his previous works about the Roosevelt and Jackson administrations. Schlesinger continued: “I see now that I was mistaken, and that it is just not possible to write an honest account so close to the events. Accordingly when I get the proofs, I propose to go through the book and comb out everything (not yet published) which would produce a headline in a newspaper—controversies, personalities, intimacies, everything else.” Schlesinger said he feared that removing all of this material would give the book a certain blandness as history, but he consoled himself by asserting that the core of the story, which was the character of the president, would remain in any case. Even after the historian’s abject capitulation, Jackie fired back with demands for further revisions. When Schlesinger sent RFK a final batch of pages on September 4, he reported that he had decided practically to cut Jackie from the book.
In the course of these negotiations, Jackie had been resolutely pursuing what she described as a “mindless existence” dedicated to physical sensation—sun, food, exercise—first in Hyannis Port and then in Newport. Given her battle with the biographers, however, her summer at the shore was plainly neither as tranquil nor as grounded in the here and now as she liked to suggest. Still, on her final morning at Hammersmith Farm, September 14, 1965, before she returned to New York, where school was due to begin the next day, she judged herself to be in better condition than at the same time the previous year. In a new letter to Harold Macmillan, she rejoiced that she had pulled herself together enough to be of help to her children. Jackie felt a determination, “almost a rage,” she declared, to keep it up until she herself found some peace.
But could she keep it up? In the months ahead, would it really be possible not to brood, not to endlessly recall and replay the events of November 22? That she was worried about this is suggested by something else she told Macmillan: “When winter starts—you have to think again.”
At first she seemed determined to ward off the thoughts that promised to set her back. That autumn, squired by Bill Walton, she presided over a large, loud, lavish party for JFK’s ambassador to India, John Kenneth Galbraith, at the Upper East Side restaurant the Sign of the Dove that spectacularly marked the widow’s return to active public social life. Late-night passersby, looking beyond the police barricades and through the open street-level French windows, caught glimpses of Jackie performing the new hip-swinging fad dance the Frug with Galbraith, McNamara, and other partners amid shadowy torchlights. In the weeks that followed, New York witnessed a good deal more of the same. She visited the discotheques Arthur and Le Club. She hosted a dinner at the chic restaurant Le Pavillion. She appeared at parties and at theater and ballet events.
Gradually, however, in anticipation of another November 22 (the very date, like September 11 in a later era, exerted a strange malevolent power of its own), she began rerouting her life around this year’s anniversary coverage and commemorations. And even then, she could not reasonably expect to be able to bypass every trigger.
“There is November to be gotten through,” Jackie had told Dorothy Schiff the year before, and so it would be again.
And again.
And again.
To explain what promised to be her conspicuous absence from the parties and receptions in honor of Princess Margaret and her husband, the Earl of Snowdon, who were due in Manhattan in November, Jackie, employing a euphemism she was to use for the rest of her life, put out word that their visit coincided with her “difficult time” of the year.
Eleven
In keeping with Bunny Mellon’s detestation of publicity, the arrangements for Jackie’s thirty-seventh birthday celebration, to be held belatedly at the Mellons’ Osterville, Massachusetts, estate, on August 5, 1966, began in a haze of secrecy. Given the guest list, however, which included prominent figures from the worlds of politics, media, and the arts, the national press was soon trumpeting an occasion described by turns as “the event of the summer on Cape Cod” and as Jackie’s “farewell to sadness and … emergence definitely into a new life.” Throughout the early part of 1966 she had been widely photographed and chronicled as she traveled, rode, danced, dined, and appeared on the arm of various men, single and married, straight and gay. On the basis of all he had seen in the papers recently, William Manchester, who, it need hardly be said, had often had occasion to think of Jackie in the two years since they last met, concluded that she must be “fully emerged from mourning” at last.
RFK, who continued to represent her interests in the family’s dealings with Manchester, knew better. At least since the time of the 1964 dinner party in her honor, after which she had spoken to Arthur Schlesinger of the flight back from Dallas and of the efforts made to persuade her to change her clothes, she had often told listeners in various moneyed Manhattan settings some of the identical stories she had related to Manchester. “That’s the trouble,” Bobby had been heard to remark on one such occasion of late. “She lives in the past too much.”
Nevertheless, Bobby was unprepared for the violence of her reaction when, shortly before the Mellon party, he walked over to her Hyannis Port cottage on a Sunday evening to inform her of the sale to Look magazine of prepublication excerpts from the recently completed Manchester book for the record sum of $665,000. Jackie, who had spent the early part of the summer in Hawaii (a portion of that time in the company of John Warnecke), had just arrived from Newport, where she had celebrated her actual birthday, July 28, and attended the wedding of her Auchincloss half sister, Janet. In the turbulent weeks and months that followed Bobby’s July 31 talk with Jackie, he would regret having delegated the vetting of the voluminous manuscript to lieutenants rather than read it personally. “It’s really mostly my fault,” he would say. “I just never wanted to spend the time on that.” He would regret what he came to see as his failure to shield his sister-in-law from additional suffering, and he would regret the mighty political trouble he thereby had brought upon himself at what was looking to be a watershed in his career.
But up to that moment at the Cape when he conveyed to Jackie that, acting on her behalf as well as his own, he had already conferred his written assent to Manchester (“Members of the Kennedy family will place no obstacle in the way of publication”), he simply had not foreseen the extremity of the emotions that the news would elicit from her. There had been every reason to assume that she wanted to have as little as possible to do with the book. Had she not appointed Bobby her agent in all matters pertaining to it? Had she not conspicuously sought to avoid Manchester at almost every turn? Had she not been inclined to ignore Manchester’s letters, and, as recently as early 1966, had she not refused to read his manuscript on the explanation, which RFK passed on to the publisher Harper & Row, that it would only stir up difficult memories?
In spite of all that, when Jackie absorbed that the first extracts were scheduled to appear on newsstands in October, she was like a sea traveler who suddenly perceives the bow of another ship fast approaching through the fog. The fabulous price fetched at auction for the magazine rights suggested that the book itself, rather than languish “on dark library shelves” as she had allowed herself to imagine it would, was guaranteed to be major news. For many months, it would be impossible to completely avoid the book and the innumerable other potential triggers, in the form of publicity and comment, it was sure to engender. Jackie had once told Jim Bishop apropos of his work in progress The Day Kennedy Was Shot that she could not bear the thought of seeing, or of seeing advertised, a work with that title and subject. Now again, though Manchester had begun work at her behest, the very anticipation of being confronted with The Death of a President proved unbearable to her. She left Bobby Kennedy in no doubt that she wanted the enterprise stopped at once. He would do that for her, wouldn’t he? Had it not been his self-appointed role since Dallas to do such things for her?
For Bobby, the timing of all this could scarcely have been more unfortunate. Though the assassination
had instantly altered his place in the universe, it had only really been in the past few weeks that his closest supporters had started to seriously contemplate a presidential run in 1968. There had been a time when LBJ feared that Bobby would criticize him for a failure to take strong action in Vietnam. Now the danger seemed to be any word from RFK that Johnson had gone too far. Among the Kennedyites, the president’s apparent commitment to widening the war in Vietnam, a war that had spectacularly belied McNamara’s cocksure initial forecasts, seemed to make the idea of an RFK candidacy, as Schlesinger cheered in his diary, “both possible and necessary.” To this point, the senator’s people, when they vetted the Manchester manuscript, had striven to tone down evidence of the author’s flagrant dislike of LBJ, a bias that could reflect badly on RFK in a book known to have been sponsored and approved by him. Now a whole new problem presented itself. In the aftermath of Bobby’s bestowal of family approval, any move to suppress publication threatened to fuel the charges of arrogance and ruthlessness with which he had been vexed throughout his public life.
Though RFK let it be known at Harper & Row that Jackie was distraught, he did not yet go so far as to ask that the book be scratched. For Manchester, matters remained in this rather maddening state of limbo when, presently, the Bobby Kennedys, the Teddy Kennedys, the Bob McNamaras, the Averell Harrimans, the Leonard Bernsteins, the William Paleys, and many others feted Jackie at the Mellons’ Osterville home. The guest of honor was seated between Paul Mellon and the director Mike Nichols, the latter a frequent escort of Jackie’s during this period. Mrs. Mellon lived by the maxim that nothing should be noticed, and tonight, at least as far as the impending battle of the book was concerned, nothing was. Arthur Schlesinger, the Mellon party guest whom Manchester had delegated to learn how Bobby’s and Jackie’s minds were working, managed to glean no significant information from either source. It was not until five days later that Bobby suddenly notified Harper & Row of his view that The Death of a President ought neither to be published nor serialized: “I would appreciate it if you would inform William Manchester.”
Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis: The Untold Story Page 22