Similarly conducive to Jackie’s health of spirit was her 1978 purchase of some 375 acres of undeveloped land on Martha’s Vineyard. Having finally been awarded a $26 million settlement by the Onassis estate, Jackie paid $1.1 million for the land, where she began work on the construction of a secluded New England–style gray shingled saltbox summer house, which, by the time it was completed in 1981, would cost another $2 million. One motive for leaving Hyannis Port was that from the time of her early married days, she had never enjoyed any real privacy there. Another sprung from Jackie’s long-standing anxiety about the influence upon her son and daughter of certain of their wilder Kennedy cousins, for whom drugs had lately become a significant problem.
Successful book editor; highly effective “public face” of the landmarks preservation movement; soon-to-be chatelaine of a Martha’s Vineyard estate; and exceedingly rich besides—by 1979, Jackie had certainly accomplished much since she moved back to the States full-time after the death of Aristotle Onassis. Yet, one element necessary to any trauma survivor’s course of recovery continued to be missing: a feeling of basic safety. How could she feel at all safe when the “continuing American nightmare” about a third Kennedy killing remained so prominent a factor in national life? 1977’s Shall We Tell the President? had been a work of fiction, but there was nothing make-believe about Teddy Kennedy’s decision, two years later, to challenge Jimmy Carter in the 1980 Democratic presidential primaries, precisely as the character in the assassination novel had done.
Though Teddy’s formal announcement was still weeks away, most people at the October 20, 1979, dedication of the recently completed John F. Kennedy Library in Dorchester, Massachusetts—including President Carter himself—had at least some idea of what the senator was finally about to do. For many attendees, a mixture of exhilaration and anxiety tinctured the proceedings. Exhilaration, because these were precisely the individuals whom McGeorge Bundy once described 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.” Anxiety, because of the presentiment tersely recorded by Arthur Schlesinger in his diary: “Ted will be shot if he runs.”
Jackie, who had been a driving force behind the creation of the library, took a seat beside her children on the blue-carpeted outdoor stage. Red roses adorned either side of a podium at which eighteen-year-old John Junior was scheduled to read Stephen Spender’s elegiac poem “I Think of Those Who Were Truly Great”; and where both Jimmy Carter and Teddy Kennedy were set to speak. Twelve years after the christening ceremony for the aircraft carrier John F. Kennedy, when the fiercer rivalry of LBJ and RFK had been similarly on display, Jackie remained coolly composed in the presence of many of the identical faces from her White House years that had formerly posed such a threat to her self-possession. Today, the dreaded trigger did not come in the form of one of those familiar visages, but rather from that of a person she hardly knew. Striding onstage to the accompaniment of “Hail to the Chief,” the president shook hands with various other Kennedy family members before he reached Jackie. Observers of the scene could not but be struck by what happened next.
When Carter leaned in to kiss her, Jackie, by Schlesinger’s account, “seemed to recoil visibly.” To the eye of Richard Burke, Teddy’s aide, it was as if Jackie had been “bitten by a snake.” In the wake of that tense encounter, many were the efforts to parse her bodily response in terms of current presidential and sexual politics. But the moment was also suggestive of the terrors with which, for Jackie, another Kennedy White House bid was inevitably freighted. The picture of her suddenly stiffening, then drawing back, recalls other such occasions, whether with Galella or Guinzburg, when she also had reacted to a sense of looming threat as if she were about to be, or had just been, physically attacked. Interestingly, she persisted in this spirit afterward when she caustically remarked to Schlesinger that Carter had acted as if the presidency carried with it the droit du seigneur—a feudal lord’s privilege to take the virginity of his serf’s daughters. But it is also telling that in contrast to her behavior at the battleship christening, this time Jackie did not require Bob McNamara or some other cavalier to help extricate her from the ceremony. Today, the flickers of agitation and apprehension vanished almost as abruptly as they had disclosed themselves, and her face became again the “enameled mask” that was its more habitual guise.
Nor at this point would Jackie find it quite impossible, as she had when RFK chased the Democratic presidential nomination in 1968, to publicly participate in the effort to secure a Kennedy restoration. She consented to appear at a limited number of Teddy’s campaign and fund-raising events. Still, in view of the suggestive fissures in Jackie’s demeanor at the library ceremony, it is hard not to hear at least a trace of irony in her insistence that she was “rather thrilled” at the prospect of his insurgent candidacy. What seems clear, at any rate, is that by this time her fears had diminished in intensity and oppressiveness to the degree that she was finally able to confront them.
Jackie appeared alongside eighty-nine-year-old Rose Kennedy (who had been widowed in 1969) when Teddy announced his intentions at Faneuil Hall in Boston on November 7. Thereafter, she cut a sometimes robotic figure on the hustings, greeting voters with what one press account described as “a fixed smile on her face and a right hand frozen open for handshakes.” Seated onstage beside Teddy at a Queens, New York, event, she made a point of pushing the microphones in front of her away. Was the gesture simply a reflection of Jackie’s ancient distaste for politicking or, under the circumstances, was it something else besides? Was she working very hard to anticipate and modulate the reactions of body and brain to the crowds and cameras, not to mention the sharpshooters and anti-sniper teams that were part of a Secret Service detail said to be larger than the one assigned to President Carter? Ironically, the senator’s Uzi-machine-gun-toting protectors had the unfortunate effect of heightening the overall sense of peril. Wherever Jackie accompanied Teddy now, there were always extra press people on hand in addition to the standard pool reporters in case another assassin suddenly sprang out of nowhere. Among themselves, certain of the journalists darkly referred to the task of covering Teddy as a “death watch.”
Finally, however, this particular campaign ended not with the bang for which everyone had been so excruciatingly on guard, but with a whimper. Teddy performed disastrously in on-camera interviews, flubbed questions about Chappaquiddick, and failed either to articulate his concept of presidential leadership or to explain why Democrats ought to choose him over Carter. The senator lost a majority of primaries and bowed out early at the Democratic National Convention in New York. Thus ended the struggle to reclaim the crown that had begun seventeen years previously at Andrews Air Force Base when Bobby Kennedy rushed onto the presidential jet to collect Jackie. The historian Garry Wills characterized Teddy’s unfortunate campaign as “the end of the entire Kennedy time in our national life.” By contrast, for Jackie personally, it had proven to be very much a beginning. Jackie had at last faced down the danger, and, crucially, the instant of horror had failed to recur. Like other survivors of psychological trauma, Jackie would never be able to fully expunge the old terrors. In the course of Teddy’s 1980 campaign, she had, however, begun to discover a way to live with them.
Jimmy Carter, of course, went on to be defeated by his Republican challenger, Ronald Reagan. Meanwhile, it had been among the quieter accomplishments of Carter’s single term to have named a new Veterans Administration national director, Max Cleland, a disabled Vietnam veteran intensely sympathetic to the problems of others who had been damaged in that unpopular war. Cleland’s appointment, coupled with the inclusion of PTSD as an officially sanctioned diagnosis in the 1980 edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders of the American Psychiatric Association, marked a watershed in the treatment of readjustment issues experienced by veterans of the Vietnam War and subsequent conflicts.
Jac
kie, whose struggle with PTSD had started long before President Johnson committed U.S. combat forces in 1965, was operating on a different timetable from that of the Vietnam vets. By the time there existed an accepted name for what she had been suffering, her journey of recovery was already well under way. She had had to proceed in the absence of a conceptual framework that might have assuaged her feeling of isolation and helped her begin to make sense of her ordeal rather than suspect, as she had at times, that she was losing her sanity. But she had had significant advantages as well. Obviously, not every survivor of psychological trauma possessed the glittering backstory that had been so vital to the success of Jackie’s efforts to regain a sense of control. Not everyone had access to an eminent psychoanalyst or the financial means to undertake the construction of a serene, secure world of one’s own on Martha’s Vineyard.
Jackie’s comments at an October 28, 1980, dinner party in New York City suggest how the woman herself perceived the arc of her life. Her dinner partner that evening, the British poet Stephen Spender, who had last encountered her before JFK became president, asked what she considered her greatest achievement to have been. Notably, it was not her fabled tenure as first lady, not the conquest of Paris or the myriad other triumphs of the White House years, not her demeanor at President Kennedy’s funeral and what it had meant to so many Americans, that Jackie spoke of when she replied without hesitation: “I think it is that after going through a rather difficult time, I consider myself comparatively sane. I am proud of that.”
Sixteen
By the time of the book party for Louis Auchincloss’s new nonfiction work, Maverick in Mauve, which Doubleday was bringing out that fall season of 1983, more than thirty years had passed since the champagne-stoked evening when Auchincloss, then aged thirty-four, and Jackie Bouvier, aged twenty-two, had both been in crisis over how they intended to spend the rest of their lives. Auchincloss, who had wanted to write rather than pursue the traditional law career his parents envisioned for him, had just published a novel, Sybil, whose female protagonist reminded Jackie of her own dilemma as the bride-to-be of a nice but bland New York stockbroker named John Husted. “That’s it. That’s my future. I’ll be a Sybil Husted,” Jackie had proclaimed, not long before she decided to return her sapphire-and-diamond engagement ring in favor of chasing a less predictable and therefore more alluring relationship with Jack Kennedy.
In the intervening decades, Auchincloss, who had successfully pursued careers both as an author and an attorney, had published more than thirty works of fiction, history, and biography—including the novel regarded in some quarters as his finest book, The Rector of Justin. After Jackie went to Doubleday, she commissioned him to contribute learned pieces to a volume about the privileged French of the waning eighteenth century, and to the Deborah Turbeville book about the “ghosts and memories” that haunted Versailles. At length, Jackie had acquired the publication rights to Maverick in Mauve, an edition of the diary of his wife’s grandmother, the society figure Florence Adele Sloane, which Auchincloss had supplemented with his own piquant commentary and analysis. Strange to say, yet again he had produced a volume with which Jackie identified passionately and profoundly. By Jackie’s own account, it was not the choice details of mauve-decade (1890s) opulence and social intercourse that spoke to her so much as the diarist’s status as a survivor whose existence had been transformed by a jolt of sudden tragedy that snatched away well-nigh everything she had possessed but a moment before. Jackie was especially interested in the process that had allowed Adele, as she was known, to survive and thrive afterward. In the course of the book party at the Museum of the City of New York on upper Fifth Avenue where Auchincloss served as president, Jackie detailed her response to Adele’s story in conversation with the writer Marie Brenner: “What was so moving to me was the spirit of this woman … That her life would seem to be ideal, and then tragedy would strike her … but somehow her spirit and her character would carry her through.” Jackie might almost have been speaking of herself in the years of trial since Dallas.
Set alongside each other, the particular pair of Louis Auchincloss works with which Jackie identified across a span of three decades points to a crucial difference between her twenty-two- and fifty-four-year-old selves. Jackie Bouvier had scorned predictability, whether in life or in the man whose role it would be to provide her with that life. By contrast, an abiding sense that the earth beneath one’s feet could crumble at any moment had led the Jackie Onassis of these later years, like Adele a survivor, to crave and cultivate predictability. After she had dated a number of Manhattan men, the writer Pete Hamill and the filmmaker Peter Davis prominent among them, she had finally entered into a loving and lasting relationship with a partner who was quite unlike any of the potential husbands that would have most appealed to her in her restive post-deb years. Plump, pouchy-eyed, and still officially married to the mother of his three children, Maurice Tempelsman, international diamond trader and financier, was conspicuously devoid of the personal panache that Jackie’s two husbands, for all of their dramatic differences, had shared. Also unlike Kennedy and Onassis, Tempelsman was steady, reliable, and absolutely devoted to Jackie.
Born in Belgium in 1929 one month after Jackie, Tempelsman had grown up in an Orthodox Jewish, Yiddish-speaking family that escaped to the United States in 1940 as Hitler was conquering Europe. Living in a Jewish-émigré community on New York’s Upper West Side, Tempelsman when he was still a teenager went to work for his father in the diamond trade. Early on, he became associated with the DeBeers diamond cartel in South Africa. Jackie had first encountered Tempelsman in the 1950s when he introduced Jack Kennedy, then a U.S. senator and presidential aspirant, to leading figures in the South African diamond business. During the White House years, Tempelsman, a supporter of Democratic political causes, had been a guest, along with his wife, Lilly, at the 1961 state dinner in honor of President Ayub Khan of Pakistan, at which Jackie had displayed her new personal confidence and clout in the aftermath of Paris and Vienna. Early in her second widowhood, Tempelsman had taken over as her financial adviser upon the death of her previous money manager, the financier André Meyer. As he set to work adroitly multiplying Jackie’s settlement from the Onassis estate, he emerged by degrees as a discreet presence in her social life, squiring her at dinner parties and cultural events.
“MT,” as Jackie liked to refer to him, had a cast of mind that was similar to hers in important respects. Art and antiquity, ballet, theater, reading, scholarship—these and other shared interests they delighted in speaking of to each other, often in melodious French. That they were so often observed about New York conversing in a language other than English suggests the manner in which, when they were alone together in public, a kind of mist hung about them that excluded anyone else. Above all, Jackie’s new companion proved to be wonderfully protective. When, as they loved to do, she and he took long walks in Central Park near her home, he shielded her from photographers and others who threatened her serenity. Jackie once compared life with JFK to “living in a whirlwind.” By contrast, with Tempelsman, everything seemed somehow to proceed at a stately pace.
At length, Tempelsman moved to a hotel not far from where Jackie lived, then at last into her Fifth Avenue apartment, where he resided for the rest of her life. Jackie, when she married Jack Kennedy and Aristotle Onassis, had become part of their personal and professional universes, emphatically so. She would have been expected to do the same had she become John Husted’s bride. Significantly, Jackie’s last love, when he assumed what was to become his regular place at one end of the candlelit, rustic plank pine dining room table at Red Gate Farm, as her Martha’s Vineyard estate was known, joined her in a life she had created for herself—a life painstakingly constructed to fit her own needs.
No setting more fully embodied the spirit of that life than the oasis where Jackie spent the better part of every summer, between Memorial Day and Labor Day. At a glance, the decor at Red Gate Farm seemed nothing if no
t cozy and comfortable. Rough-hewn benches, baskets, and other countrified pieces mingled with inviting, unostentatious chairs and sofas. Flowers in a variety of receptacles were scattered throughout the house. But the prevailing air of casualness and happenstance was deceptive. As in the homes of her friend and preceptress Bunny Mellon, on close inspection every visual element was calculated and perfect—perhaps, to certain tastes at least, a bit too perfect. Jackie’s dominion extended to the tiniest details. She wrote out her copious instructions to staff on index cards, such as the one affixed to a kitchen cabinet interior, which specified exactly which flowers were to be placed in which vessels in which areas of the house. Even in such minor matters, she wanted there to be no surprises. Though officially on holiday, Jackie lived by rigid rules. She rose unvaryingly at seven and ate breakfast—a half bowl of bran cereal with skim milk, fruit, and coffee—served on a tray in bed, before the wood fire she insisted be laid no matter the weather. Religiously, she massaged her face with cold cream in anticipation of donning a bathing suit, cap, and rubber fins for a strenuous two-hour swim in Squibnocket Pond, which bordered her property.
What may have been the most sustaining ritual of all took place in the interval between lunch and dinnertime. Of a summer’s afternoon, Jackie would sit barefoot on a padded chaise in the brick patio behind the house, laboring in solitude on manuscript pages, which she festooned with penciled corrections and comments. To understand the signal role that editing came to play in her life, it is worth revisiting the scene witnessed by Theodore White a week after President Kennedy’s assassination. The Life magazine writer, in the course of his interview with Jackie, was confronted with a fascinating dichotomy. First, the widow’s exceptionally vivid and visceral memories of Dallas asserted themselves, to the journalist’s perception, “as if controlling her.” Then, in turn, it was she who seized control, burying his typed pages beneath an avalanche of scribbled revisions. What White seems to have observed that strange stormy night in 1963 were the manifestations of two distinctly different parts of her brain at work. Jackie’s spoken evocations of “the blood scene” issued ineluctably from the limbic system, the brain’s survival center, where such images and sensations are stored. Her emphatic pencil marks on White’s first draft were the product of the cerebral cortex, where rational thinking takes place. The latter appears to have been her instinctive way of regaining control after the absolute loss of mastery in the just-completed episode of remembering and re-experiencing. On a personal level, the editing process seems to have performed a similar function in the course of Jackie’s last years. When she worked with single-minded intensity on a manuscript, she was in control and, to whatever extent remained possible, at peace. That peace was hard-won, and tenuous at best.
Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis: The Untold Story Page 32