She who had just failed in her efforts to hold back an avalanche of reminders wrote on March 7 to tell McNamara how proud she was of him: “With all the grinding power of government, of military against you—and just you, trying to hold it all back, trying to stop the nightmare.” She who had often lain awake at night dwelling on what she felt certain had been her errors in Dallas assured this man who now privately acknowledged the miscalculations that had cost so many lives in Vietnam: “I know how much you must give up in the dark.” She who had sought on countless occasions to imaginatively undo the tragic past avowed: “I feel so close to you in the times I know must be difficult for you—because in my dark times you were always the one who helped me. I wish I could change the world for you.”
Jackie wholeheartedly bought into McNamara’s self-justificatory sense of himself as laboring passionately and selflessly to alter American foreign policy from within the present administration, where he could operate so much more effectively than if he simply quit. Where many others viewed McNamara as a symbol of the American war machine, Jackie saw a man single-handedly attempting to end the war. Where strangers in the street greeted him with angry cries of “Murderer!” and “Baby burner!,” Jackie wondered how many people would one day “owe their lives, or any peace they might know in their lives or their children’s lives,” to him. Where a legion of skeptics saw a carnivorously ambitious individual endeavoring to hold on to power under Johnson while jockeying to assure that he would have a position in a new Kennedy administration, Jackie beheld a figure determined to do the right thing at whatever personal cost.
She once told him apropos of his efforts to stop the Vietnam War: “You are the Master Builder.” Strange to say, in her relations with McNamara, Jackie replicated the role of the fanciful young woman in the Ibsen play who thinks that she alone understands the Master Builder (“Oh, no one knows him as I do!”) and perceives the heights he is capable of attaining.
In April 1967 came the tsunami of publicity surrounding the 600,000-copy first printing of, depending on one’s perspective, the long-awaited or long-dreaded Manchester book. For a woman who still needed to find a way to relegate the assassination to the past, Jackie’s challenge was made the more difficult by the fact that her husband’s murder was again incessantly in the news. During this period, she lapsed into a frenzy of anticipation of a public event she was scheduled to attend, the christening of the aircraft carrier John F. Kennedy in Newport News, Virginia. At the ceremony, as at Runnymede, Jackie would inevitably confront a host of traumatic triggers, this time in the form of numerous familiar faces associated with her White House years. As the day drew near, she was conscious of dwelling in a self-protective state of emotional numbness, which she described afterward to Marg McNamara as “a kind of trance.”
When she actually encountered all those faces at the May 27, 1967, dockside ceremony, the trance, by Jackie’s own account, became all the more intense. That day, it fell to Bob McNamara to steer her through the crowd on her arrival and to extricate her as soon as possible after LBJ’s brief but barbed speech. The president’s remarks proved to be a thinly veiled attempt to claim JFK’s authority for the current administration’s pursuit of the Vietnam War. Among his listeners at the event was Bobby Kennedy, who, a few weeks before, had outraged him with a speech that called on the administration to seize the initiative in Vietnam by halting the bombardment of the North and announcing Washington’s readiness to negotiate. RFK had been worried that such a move on his part would be too risky politically, but he had been under acute pressure from within his own circle to speak out. In view of all this, the prevailing narrative of the spectacle that unfolded in Newport News highlighted current presidential politics.
For Jackie, by contrast, from first to last the occasion had been about something else entirely, her abrupt early departure following the ceremony far from the tacit expression of displeasure with Johnson’s Vietnam policy, and of familial solidarity with RFK’s, that some observers took it for. Desperate to escape before the floodgates opened, Jackie, as she later told it, held her breath while McNamara cunningly sent Johnson on to the reception area with the assurance that she would be right along. This was one of those moments when the need to remove herself from public view was very strong in her. The unbidden memories and emotions, when inevitably they came forth in a rush, were not anything she cared to endure in front of other people. So, before the president had had a chance to realize that he had been cheated out of a photo opportunity with his predecessor’s widow, McNamara had hurried Jackie and the children off to the helicopter waiting to take them to their small jet. On her return to Hyannis Port it was evident that, though she had gotten out in time, the day had been an excruciating experience. “I have reached the point where I cannot go through any more public functions,” Jackie said to old Joe’s nurse, the unfortunately named Mrs. Dallas. “Today was heartbreaking … and I cannot keep it up.”
Still, she had little choice but to try. Seventy-two hours later, Jackie was suddenly arranging to travel to England with RFK and other Kennedy family members for the funeral of Sissie Harlech, aged forty-five, who had been killed in an automobile accident in Wales. Since Lord and Lady Harlech’s departure from Washington, David Harlech had accepted a position in Edward Heath’s shadow cabinet as deputy leader of the House of Lords. Meanwhile, he had been a frequent visitor to the United States, where he had been prominently associated with both Harvard’s rechristened Kennedy School and the planned Kennedy Library where JFK’s presidential papers were to be housed. He also had served as a trusted adviser to Bobby Kennedy, as well as to Jackie. Following Sissie’s funeral, he arranged to visit Jackie in Ireland, where she was to stay for six weeks. “They were like two wounded birds together,” said his daughter Jane Ormsby-Gore of the widow and widower. “Ghastly things had happened to them.”
Another ghastly thing very nearly occurred in the course of Jackie’s stay. Evenings, without telling anyone, including the Secret Service agents who had accompanied her and her children abroad, Jackie would slip out of the house she was staying in and drive herself to a cove where she could have a long, solitary swim across the channel and back. One afternoon, she was out picnicking on a sandbar with some others when she felt the familiar urgent need to escape. In the belief that no one in the party had seen her go off, she walked along the beach for approximately half a mile to her secret spot. Jackie, veteran of many summers at East Hampton, Newport, and Hyannis Port, was an expert swimmer. In an earlier time, she almost certainly would have recognized that the waters she was about to enter were at high tide, perilously so. But, focused by turns on her demons and on the process of numbing herself to them, as she tended to be these days, she was oddly oblivious to the danger. Midway across the channel, Jackie was caught in an overpowering current so icy that she could not keep her fingers together as she swam.
Greatly fatigued, helpless against the mix of cold and current, she feared she was about to slip past the spit of land opposite and be flung into the twelve-mile-long bay. Suddenly, however, “a great porpoise,” as she later described her rescuer, materialized at her side. It proved to be a Secret Service agent who, unbeknownst to her, had followed her to the cove night after night. Today, fortuitously, he had broken away from the party of picnickers in order to pursue her here. Setting his shoulder against hers, he guided her to shore, where she sat on the beach for a long while, coughing up seawater. Had the agent not been there, Jackie would likely have drowned. During the previous few months, she had privately characterized herself as dazed; as uncertain whether she would ever be able to feel anything again; as existing in a kind of trance. While she certainly had not chosen to live in this manner, body and brain had withdrawn, the better to concentrate on avoiding painful memories and emotions. In Ireland, however, a posture designed to spare her a certain amount of anguish had almost had fatal consequences. Being, in effect, dead to the world so much of the time had nearly cost her her life.
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bsp; Another consequence was that she often found herself suppressing not just painful feelings and perceptions, but potentially pleasurable ones as well. It was as though any stimulation were dangerous; as though the only safety were to be found in the complete absence of feelings. At the same time, she longed to feel and enjoy, to make herself, in her phrase, “interested in things again.” Expressly to that end, in this period she had conceived of a journey to inspect the temples of Angkor, the seat of an empire that flourished between the ninth and fifteenth centuries. It was quite the sort of trip Jackie would have found exhilarating when she was first lady. Might it be that for her again? Might a visit to the ruins help free her from the tyranny of the past? Reaching Angkor would be no simple undertaking. Cambodia, where the temples were located, had severed relations with the United States two years previously due to the Vietnam War and other sources of friction.
She asked McNamara to see what could be arranged. At length, he discovered that not only would Cambodia’s chief of state, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, agree to a visit, he actually welcomed it. President Johnson, evidently, was not the only world leader eager to be photographed at her side. For Sihanouk, playing host to an American president’s widow would be a way of irritating China, his erstwhile ally in the region. The prince also seems to have viewed the invitation as an overture of friendship toward Bobby Kennedy, whom he thought likely to occupy the White House one day very soon. In any case, McNamara’s successful efforts to gain entry for Jackie into a nation ostensibly hostile to the United States caused her to affectionately liken him to Harry Lime, the roguish character played by Orson Welles in the 1949 film The Third Man, who miraculously produces a passport for a beautiful young actress portrayed by Alida Valli. Jackie extracted McNamara’s promise to screen The Third Man while she was in Cambodia, but she was soon flirtatiously lamenting the prospect of his falling in love with Alida Valli.
In other ways as well, The Third Man, which Jackie had first seen as a college student in Paris in 1950, figured prominently in her imagination that tempestuous fall of 1967. She told McNamara how, seventeen years previously, the movie had inspired her to make a side trip to Vienna, where Soviet troops patrolled the streets with machine guns, and where she had been scared as never before in her life. Proposing, curiously, that present-day America was very much like the era depicted in The Third Man, Jackie seemed to suggest that she was similarly fearful now. The occasion for these fraught reflections was a newspaper photograph she had seen of McNamara gazing out his office window at many thousands of demonstrators, who had converged in Washington on October 21, 1967, determined to shut down the Pentagon. In consultation with LBJ, McNamara had surrounded the building with a cordon of rifle-bearing troops. Because of all that firepower, any confrontation with the missile-hurling demonstrators, not a few of whom seemed intent on provoking the troops, threatened to ignite major violence, the culmination of months of national disquiet that had included not just rising anti–Vietnam War protests, but also the urban race riots known as the Long Hot Summer of 1967.
By this point, McNamara’s standing in the administration had decayed markedly since the time, shortly before the christening of the aircraft carrier John F. Kennedy, when he had advised the president that the Vietnam War was not winnable and that it would therefore be wisest to negotiate a peace, however unfavorable. In the course of pursuing this war, Johnson had clung to the fact that his advisers had been JFK’s counselors as well. Now that such a key adviser had unequivocally taken a dissenting view, LBJ oscillated between blaming McNamara’s conversion on the corruptive influence of Bobby Kennedy and suggesting that the defense secretary had grown mentally unstable. “He’s a fine man, a wonderful man, Bob McNamara,” Johnson effused. “He has given everything, just about everything, and … we just can’t afford another [James] Forrestal,” the latter a pointed reference to the Truman-era defense secretary who, in a bout of depression, had committed suicide by jumping to his death from a hospital window. Might McNamara be about to crack as well? Might he too be about to take his own life? Johnson was not the only figure in Washington to regard McNamara as “an emotional basket case.” Burdened with a heavy load of guilt about the many lives that had been sacrificed in Vietnam, but also about the wife whose severe ill health due to an ulcer he felt similarly responsible for, the Bob McNamara of these months was a gray, gaunt figure, who, according to one White House aide, seemed to be barely “hanging on by the fingernails.” On the day of the Pentagon march, McNamara showed a tortured visage to the world as he surveyed the angry crowd from his window, but Jackie emphatically did not perceive him that way. Putting on a cast recording of the Broadway musical Man of La Mancha, which she and McNamara had often listened to together, she wrote to assure the embattled defense secretary that she had never seen “anything so brave” as he.
Whether that was quite the way to describe him became a matter of passionate discussion within the Kennedy camp when, presently, LBJ, in response to another dovish screed from McNamara, undertook to maneuver him out of office by nominating him to lead the World Bank. Bobby Kennedy implored McNamara not only to refuse the new post, but also to resign as defense secretary with a public announcement to the effect that he could no longer continue to serve this administration in good conscience. Bobby urged him to go out “with a hell of a blast at Johnson.” McNamara’s principled defection, though no doubt costly to himself in the short term, would lend a certain legitimacy to Bobby Kennedy’s antiwar posture. On the other hand, a decision by McNamara to acquiesce to the president’s efforts to silence him would be, in the words of one RFK supporter, “a big blow” to Bobby politically. In the end, McNamara’s willingness to servilely accept the World Bank post seemed to confirm the view of him as a man who was less interested in principle than in place. RFK, responding to an aide’s tart analysis that McNamara, when he chose “safe submission,” had permitted Johnson to “break him into nothing” and “tear out his spine,” commented sadly: “That’s about right.” By contrast, Jackie saw no reason to revise her heroic conception of McNamara. Later, recalling all that he had accomplished during his tenure as defense secretary, she said she wondered if he knew how many lives he had saved—beginning with her own.
On October 18, 1967, Jackie and an entourage finally flew to Rome on the first leg of her Cambodian journey. In Italy, she was joined by David Harlech, whose diplomatic flair promised to be useful when, presently, she was the first American to be received with high state honors since Cambodia had broken relations with the United States. On various occasions, both she and McNamara had attempted to leave Sihanouk in no doubt that she wanted to keep the visit private. In deference to her host’s political needs, Jackie had consented to major press coverage on her arrival in Cambodia as well as on her departure. Otherwise, she stipulated that it would be sufficient for Sihanouk’s personal photographer to take a single picture of them both at Angkor, which the prince would be free to distribute afterward. Whatever hopes Sihanouk and others had invested in her trip, she persisted in viewing it primarily in personal terms.
Hardly had Jackie and her party landed in Cambodia on November 2, 1967, however, when her great plans unraveled. The waiting crowd of ten thousand; the welcoming rituals involving the prince, various Cambodian officials, and members of the diplomatic corps—it was all somehow too much for her. At length, Jackie was shown to her rooms, where she and David Harlech quarreled over her insistence that she was too tired to attend Sihanouk’s dinner in her honor that night. Unlike McNamara, who had grown accustomed to Jackie’s outbursts and who saw it as his role to do whatever she appeared to require of him at the moment, Harlech, with his finely honed sense of duty to matters greater than oneself, was furious at behavior he perceived as childishly selfish.
Jackie finally consented to go to the palace dinner, but before she gave in, she and Harlech had quite a row, at the end of which he said something unexpected. Widowed but six months previously, JFK’s great friend selected this most
peculiar of moments to ask Jackie to marry him. His proposal was incongruous, embarrassing, and not a little odd, yet she had to respond. Speaking in general terms, she told him that she did not want to marry and have her heart hurt again.
Despite this rejection, Harlech did not abandon his efforts to make Jackie his wife. Thereafter, he saw her frequently in New York, where his youngest daughter, Alice Ormsby-Gore, went to school. He and Jackie were also to take another trip together, to the Georgia plantation of their friend, former U.S. ambassador to Britain John Hay Whitney, which they had previously visited when Sissie was alive. But, though he repeatedly raised the issue of marriage, Jackie continued to put him off. Her line about not wanting to be hurt again appears to have been a gentle way of saying no without having to raise any specific objection to a man she sincerely admired and held dear. As long as David Harlech lived, she seems never to have wavered in the conviction, expressed soon after Dallas, that he might be just the figure “who could save the Western world.”
As she wistfully suggested many years later, however, it had been David’s capacity to make one person in particular feel safe that had been in doubt. That person, of course, was Jackie herself.
Thirteen
On Sunday, February 18, 1968, the sound of revolver shots automatically tripped off the security system in Jackie’s brain. Cecil Beaton, who had escorted her to the New York City Ballet that evening to attend a rare performance by the choreographer George Balanchine in the title role of Don Quixote, watched her nearly jump out of her seat and over the rail of the dress circle. It was a false alarm, the gunfire being part of the show. But since the assassination, Jackie had been wired to react instantly, without so much as a moment’s reflection. Ever on guard for a repetition of the trauma, the limbic memory, kicking in independently of her conscious control, reacted to the staged gunshots as if Jackie continued to be threatened with annihilation. At that moment, it was as if the violence she had experienced in 1963 were about to be played out all over again.
Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis: The Untold Story Page 25