Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis: The Untold Story

by Barbara Leaming

  During the past two years, Manchester had worked twelve-, fifteen-, sometimes twenty-hour days, seven days a week. He ate little, and if he slept at all, he dreamt of Dallas. At a certain point, he later said, time seemed to have stopped for him on November 22. “The book had become an obsession with me; I was possessed by it.” Manchester sought to live in the shoes of the slain president, of his killer, and of the president’s widow. He retraced JFK’s itinerary through Texas, leading to Parkland Memorial Hospital. He crawled across the roof of the Texas School Book Depository and gazed out at the world from the point of view of Oswald’s sixth-floor hiding place. He located and opened the carton where the first lady’s pink suit had been stored away. He undid the white towel containing the stockings she had worn that day, and he noted how, in the intervening months, President Kennedy’s blood had dropped off the sheer fabric in flakes that now rested on the nap of the towel in the form of tiny brittle grains.

  Manchester also amply fulfilled his pledge to put himself into the account, though in ways that neither he nor Jackie might have anticipated at the outset. The few “flickers” of memory that remained of his own traumatic episodes on Okinawa were “blurred” because, he later judged, “there was so much that I did not want to remember.” It was not until years afterward that those memories came rushing back with the “blinding” clarity, as he called it, that eventually allowed him to compose his 1980 memoir of the Pacific War. To examine that memoir, Goodbye, Darkness, side by side with The Death of a President is to begin to sort out quite how much of himself he had written into the Kennedy story and quite how much of the latter he subsequently wrote into his own.

  Such, at any rate, was the intensity with which Manchester labored in 1965 that he gripped his pen so tightly, blood oozed from beneath his thumbnail, sullying the pages of text. The finger became infected and needed to be lanced on three occasions, but Manchester kept writing nonetheless. Schlesinger informed mutual friends that he feared poor Manchester might be about to crack. Indeed, on the second anniversary of the assassination, Manchester had been at work on the section of his narrative devoted to the killing of Oswald when his pen stopped dead and he found that he simply could not will himself on. Four days later, he was admitted to a Connecticut hospital to be treated for nervous exhaustion. During the latter part of his hospitalization, Manchester completed much of what remained to be written of the book. “When I awoke this morning,” he informed RFK after he had finished, “I felt as though I had emerged from a long, dark tunnel.” Manchester was convinced that he had produced a masterpiece. This, then, was the man whom RFK had advised the publishers to notify that his book was to be canceled.

  Notwithstanding anything Harper & Row might decide, there remained the problem of the serial sale. Manchester, when he faced off with RFK in Washington after learning of the latter’s decision, maintained that he had signed a contract with Look from which he could not now simply withdraw. The meeting degenerated into a suffering contest. Manchester alluded to his recent hospitalization and noted that he remained under a physician’s care. RFK flashed out: “Do you think you’ve suffered more than Jackie and me?” And so it went, all to absolutely no avail.

  Jackie, when she learned that Look still planned to publish, angrily blamed RFK for the mess. She had cried out for help, yet he had failed her. As far as she was concerned, controlling Manchester was a life-and-death matter, and she had absolutely relied on her brother-in-law to do what was necessary. Hence her fury at what most other people would probably regard as a mere lapse on Bobby’s part in the context of all that he had done for her in the past. Seeking to distance herself from the written approvals Bobby had conferred, Jackie claimed to Look publisher Gardner Cowles that her brother-in-law did not really represent her. What was his role, then? “He sort of protects me,” she said. It is hard not to feel the irony of Jackie’s “sort of.” Unspoken was that Bobby had not protected her very well this time, thank you very much. In conversation with Manchester, whom she invited to the Cape in a futile effort to personally persuade him to withdraw from the Look deal, she went further in her mockery of Bobby, acidly comparing his behavior of late to that of “a little boy who knows he’s done wrong.”

  Manchester, for his part, grew troubled and confused when his hostess’s conversation digressed from publishing matters to what struck him as a completely irrelevant topic: the problem that had arisen over President Kennedy’s grave site at Arlington National Cemetery. For Jackie, however, the two subjects were far from unconnected. It had long been planned that the bodies of JFK and the two babies buried alongside him would be moved to new permanent graves, some twenty feet downhill from the temporary site, as soon as construction of the Kennedy Memorial had been completed. In the meantime, a disagreement about the landscaping at the final grave site had developed, with Jackie and Bunny Mellon on one side and the Army Corps of Engineers on the other. Jackie, who like many people with PTSD had a tendency to catastrophize, was absolutely convinced that she saw another “disaster” coming.

  Frantic at what she regarded as RFK’s ineptitude with Manchester, she turned the landscaping dispute over to Bob McNamara. The can-do man promptly and smoothly settled the matter of the grave site to Jackie’s complete satisfaction. Afterward, she insisted that as a consequence of his intervention she felt “peaceful and optimistic” for the first time in many months. At a moment when Jackie had begun to lose confidence in her brother-in-law, the episode immeasurably deepened her attachment to and dependence on McNamara. The defense secretary, in turn, appears to have especially welcomed the involvement with her at a moment when he had begun to lose confidence in himself.

  The Bob McNamara of 1966 was no longer the person who had cut such a commanding figure at Bethesda Naval Hospital on her return from Dallas. The escalation he had championed in Vietnam, the use of ground forces, the bombing, had not accomplished what he had said they would. McNamara had had to acknowledge that his vaunted computer printouts had failed him and that the military commanders he believed himself to have managed so adroitly had misled him. This man who had always been so sure that every problem was solvable had finally come up against one problem (Jackie called it “more complex than any dark hell that Shakespeare ever looked into”) that challenged all of his most fundamental assumptions. Confronted by the evidence of his own fecklessness, the architect of the Vietnam War became a man at war with himself.

  RFK and Schlesinger found it puzzling that when McNamara conversed with them, he was an advocate for limiting the war, though publicly he remained the administration’s spokesman for widening it. Such was McNamara’s duality of mind that he delivered a controversial address in Montreal that appeared to give succor to critics of the war, a speech in which he painted himself as a utopian dreamer, a seeker, like his beloved Ibsen character the Master Builder, of the impossible. Then, not long afterward, he disowned those remarks as childish, adding that as a sitting defense secretary whose job it was to motivate men to fight, he ought never to have permitted himself to say such things.

  At home, he agonized; he wept; he ground his teeth in his sleep, keeping his wife awake at night. Presently, also like the Ibsen character, McNamara sought solace in the companionship of another woman, one who believed in him utterly, and not a little misguidedly; a woman to whom he found that he could speak as he could not to his wife. At the same time, he was not always sure of what to make of his confidante; of the extremity, even the violence, of certain of Jackie’s feelings and actions.

  One night after he and Jackie had dined together at her Fifth Avenue apartment during this period, they were seated on a sofa in her library. McNamara had come up to New York to see her while Marg was traveling. By this point, Jackie had become depressed by and critical of the Vietnam War, carnage-filled images of which it was almost impossible to escape being inundated with on the nightly news, so much so that Vietnam came to be called “television’s war.” But it was not Vietnam he and Jackie were speaking of when M
cNamara witnessed the outburst that, in his phrase, “so overwhelmed” him that he would puzzle about it for years to come. Jackie and her guest had been discussing the Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral, specifically her poem “Prayer,” a plea to God to forgive the compulsively unfaithful man she loved (“You say he was cruel? You forget I loved him ever.… To love … is a bitter task”). Suddenly, McNamara saw a change come over Jackie’s body. She seemed to grow so tense that she could scarcely speak. Erupting in anger and tears, she directed her fury at him. Pounding McNamara’s chest with her fists, she demanded that he “do something to stop the slaughter!” Long afterward, McNamara reflected in his memoirs: “Whether her emotions were triggered by the poem or by something I said, I do not know.”

  Had talk of Gabriela Mistral’s beloved called to mind Jackie’s similarly unfaithful late husband? Had the war, which trailed McNamara wherever he went, become for her a trigger that elicited feelings and perceptions associated with the slaughter in Dallas? Had the violent images on TV become intertwined with the violent images in her head? In some strange way, when she implored McNamara to stop the slaughter, was she referring not just to Vietnam, but also to the troubling memories she found herself unable to escape? Whatever it was that set this particular episode in motion, the image of Jackie hitting McNamara’s chest encapsulates a critical feature of advanced PTSD. The terrifying inability to control the responses of body and mind to an ever-expanding network of triggers traumatizes the sufferer anew. The present sense of helplessness echoes the powerlessness experienced during the original traumatic incident. Interestingly, McNamara was not the only person close to Jackie to be confounded by her sudden physical and emotional outbursts. Her sister Lee spoke to a friend, the photographer and diarist Cecil Beaton, of the manner in which Jackie would suddenly, inexplicably, hit her across the face.

  Along similar lines to those who struggled to comprehend such behavior, throughout the autumn of 1966 RFK’s people tried to make sense of Jackie’s frenzied reaction to the Manchester manuscript. What exactly was it in the sprawling text, which she appeared not even to have read, that was upsetting her so? Which of Manchester’s nuggets of detail would have to be excised before she would give her assent? In deference to her anguish at the prospect of the magazine extracts appearing on newsstands during her “difficult time,” Gardner Cowles had agreed to put off serialization until January 1967, with the book to follow in March. Jackie, when she secured that concession, basically turned the negotiations back to Bobby, whose lieutenants used the breathing space provided by the postponement to scour the manuscript with an eye toward assuaging her concerns.

  Would she be happy if they managed to remove this image, or that vignette, or some other morsel they had yet to seize upon? Theirs was a guessing game, really, and necessarily a futile one because it was founded on a false premise. In this one area at least, Manchester had a more acute understanding of his antagonist than the Kennedyites did. To the author’s sense, it was not any particular fact or constellation of facts that Jackie objected to; it was the entire manuscript. In short, no number of cuts would ever satisfy her. “The only thing Jackie wanted, and the one thing she couldn’t have,” Manchester judged, “was no magazine series, no book; just one big blank page for November 22, 1963.”

  In any case, when the third anniversary of the assassination had passed, and the twin disasters of the magazine serialization and the book continued to draw near, Jackie, emerging from her customary seclusion during her “difficult time,” sought out a new protector. Cass Canfield, the chairman of the executive committee of Harper & Row, who also happened to be her sister’s former father-in-law, agreed to notify Manchester that if he did not immediately make all the changes that had been demanded on Jackie’s behalf, Canfield would cancel publication. Jackie, for the moment, seemed to focus on the publishing executive’s willingness to speak in terms of cancellation, rather than on any interest he might have in forcing through a list of edits that would satisfy her once and for all. Persuaded that Canfield would never allow the book to go to press in the absence of her approval, which of course she would never give, she relaxed and began to make plans for Christmas. Bobby’s Washington office announced that she intended to spend the holiday with him and his family in Sun Valley, Idaho.

  Manchester, in the meantime, expressed indignation at the publisher’s ultimatum. “I have reached the point where, if the integrity of my manuscript is violated, I have no wish to go on living,” he told his agent, Don Congdon. “It sounds vainglorious, I know, but I am ready to die for this book.” Rather than a refusal to negotiate, however, that was merely Manchester’s histrionic way of instructing Congdon to do it for him. With the agent in charge, there was suddenly a good deal of progress in the editing. At length, Canfield notified Jackie that as far as he was concerned, all of the legitimate requests for changes that had been made in her name had been satisfied, and the Manchester manuscript was finally ready to be published.

  That, of course, was far from what she’d had in mind. Over Bobby’s strong objections, Jackie instructed her lawyer to sue Manchester, the publishing house, and the magazine. RFK, advised by an aide that a lawsuit was a terrible mistake, replied: “Yes, it is a terrible mistake, but nothing can be done about it.” His partisans would later maintain that loyalty to the widow had trumped any practical political considerations on his part, but it was also plainly the case that—like Bob McNamara and Lee Radziwill when Jackie’s fists began to fly—RFK was powerless to stop the woman whom he privately and not a little ruefully referred to as “my crazy sister-in-law.” Though it was soon widely known in Washington that he had urged Jackie to refrain, his public posture was to support her wholeheartedly in her impending court fight. In an effort to bolster Jackie’s charge that Manchester had exploited the emotional state in which she had recounted her recollections to him in early 1964, Bobby regretted to the press that it had been he who had counseled her to tell the whole story to Manchester in the first place. In view of RFK’s conferral of written approval the previous August, Jackie’s other accusation, that Manchester had violated his contract, was decidedly a weak point in her case. Bobby, in an affidavit to the court, sought to explain away his telegram by claiming that he had sent it only after Harper & Row told him that Manchester had been becoming ill with an obsession that his manuscript might never be published. According to Bobby, the purpose of his telegram had been nothing more than a kindly desire to allay the writer’s fears.

  Still the damning document existed, and there was reason to believe that the magazine, at least, would prevail in court. Under pressure to settle with Look, Jackie attended what was to have been a clandestine meeting at the Wall Street office of the magazine’s attorney. Methodically, dispassionately, she reviewed the proofs of the upcoming serialization, noting numerous personal details that she wanted expunged. She was smiling as she left the meeting, but her eyes moistened at the sight of waiting reporters. Manchester had not been present at the attorney’s office, but when he learned of the disparity between the calm countenance Jackie had worn during the proceedings and her tearful public display afterward, he judged the latter to have been nothing more than a pretty piece of theatrics.

  From the moment that word of the gathering storm over the Manchester book first reached the White House, LBJ had been tracking it with immense interest and concern, not least because of rumors about the author’s relentlessly negative portrait of him. The psychological atmosphere in the Johnson camp approximated that of a bunker as the president, Lady Bird, and Johnson appointee to the U.S. Supreme Court Abe Fortas strategized on how best to respond to the charges of gross insensitivity to Jackie and the Kennedys that were about to fall on the White House like so many bombs. Intermittently, the president would break away from this anxious conversation, the better to concentrate on the latest news about the debacle in Vietnam from his perpetually blaring television set. The fact that such an unflattering account of his behavior in the aftermath of Da
llas was about to be published was especially unwelcome at a moment when the nightmare that had haunted LBJ since day one of his presidency—that RFK would move to reclaim the throne—was threatening to become a reality.

  For all that, it soon appeared as if the controversy might actually benefit the president as well. Reports of the internecine disagreement over whether to sue the author and his publishers appeared to offer Johnson the long-sought opening to detach Jackie from RFK. On December 16, the very day it was announced that Jackie would not be joining Bobby and his family in Sun Valley for Christmas after all, a carefully crafted letter that was deeply sympathetic to her court battle (“Lady Bird and I have been distressed to read the press accounts of your unhappiness about the Manchester book”) went out to her from LBJ. The president said he had seen accounts of her displeasure with certain passages in the manuscript that were unfavorable to Lady Bird and him. “If this is so,” Johnson wrote, “I want you to know while we deeply appreciate your characteristic kindness and sensitivity, we hope you will not subject yourself to any discomfort or distress on our account. One never becomes inured to slander but we have learned to live with it. In any event, your own tranquility is important to both of us, and we would not want you to endure any unpleasantness on our account.”