The winter of Her Despair (Jacqueline Kennedy)

A symbol of strength for a traumatized nation in the winter of 1963–64, Jacqueline Kennedy was in fact falling apart grieving and endlessly reliving her husband’s assassination, afflicted with what we’d now call post-traumatic stress disorder. Barbara Leaming, adapting her new biography, uncovers what was known to few outside the former First Lady’s inner circle: the nightmares, the drinking, the suicidal thoughts, but also the unexpected gesture that helped save her sanity.

During the long winter of 1963, during the lonely nights that seemed to never end, the wakeful nights that no quantity of vodka could assuage, Jackie Kennedy would relive the sliver of time between the first gunshot, which had missed the car, and the second, which hit both the president and Texas governor John Connally. Those three and a half seconds became of cardinal importance to her. In the course of her marriage, she had constructed herself as Jack Kennedy’s one-woman Praetorian Guard—against the doctors, against the political antagonists, against the journalists, even against anyone in his own circle who, to her perception, would do him harm. So, again and again that winter of 1963-64, she rehearsed the same brief sequence. If only she had been looking to the right, she told herself, she might have saved her husband. If only she had recognized the sound of the first shot, she could have pulled him down in time.

It was Monday, December 2, and she and the children had returned from Cape Cod the night before in anticipation of moving out of the White House family quarters at the end of the week so that Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson could move in. Jackie had initially hoped to be ready to go on Tuesday, but the move had had to be put off until Friday. She was to move temporarily to a borrowed house on N Street in Georgetown, three blocks from the house where the John F. Kennedys had lived at the time he was elected president. Packing had begun in her absence, but in the course of the next few days she planned to pick through her husband’s wardrobe herself in order to determine which items to keep and which to disperse. Helpers laid out the president’s clothes on sofas and racks for her to inspect. Seeming to connect the irrational death of her young husband and the loss of the two babies, Arabella (who was stillborn in 1956) and Patrick (who died at two days old in August 1963), Jackie also planned to immediately transfer the remains of both of them from Holyhood Cemetery, in Brookline, Massachusetts, to beside their father’s grave, in Arlington. As far as she was concerned, there was not a moment to be lost. The secret burial was set to take place that week under the auspices of Bishop Philip Hannan, who, at Jackie’s request, had given the eulogy for President Kennedy at St. Matthew’s Cathedral. It remained only for Teddy Kennedy, youngest of the Kennedy brothers, to fly in the remains of both children on the family jet.

In the weeks following the assassination, Jackie was, as she later said of herself at this point, “not in any condition to make much sense of anything.” In spite of that, she had yet to move out of the White House when she was confronted by the need to make an immediate decision about the first of the assassination books to be commissioned. Author Jim Bishop, whose previous titles included The Day Lincoln Was Shot and The Day Christ Died, was first out of the gate with his planned The Day Kennedy Was Shot, but other writers no doubt were soon to follow. Appalled at the prospect of this same painful material, as she said, endlessly “coming up, coming up,” she decided to block Bishop and others by designating one author who would have her exclusive approval to tell the story of the events of November 22. Finally, she settled on a writer who, curiously, had voiced no interest in undertaking such a project and had no idea he was under consideration. Nor, at the time Jackie chose (she later used the word “hired”) William Manchester, had she ever even met him. Manchester was a 41-year-old ex-Marine who had suffered what his medical-discharge papers described as “traumatic lesions of the brain” during the carnage on Okinawa in 1945. Among his seven previous books was a flattering study of J.F.K. called Portrait of a President, galleys of which Manchester had transmitted to the White House in advance of publication so that the president might have an opportunity, should he desire it, to alter any of his own quotes. Now, at a moment when Jackie could do nothing to stanch the flow of her recollections of Dallas, she selected Manchester because, she judged, he at least would be manageable.

Prior to the move to N Street, Jackie; Bobby Kennedy; her mother, Janet Auchincloss; her sister, Lee Radziwill; and a few others gathered at night at Arlington National Cemetery to re-inter Arabella and Patrick. She and Bishop Hannan deposited the heartbreakingly small white caskets on the ground near Jack’s freshly dug grave. Given what he saw to be the state of her emotions, the bishop elected to say only a short prayer, at the conclusion of which Jackie sighed deeply and audibly. While he walked her back to her limousine, she broached certain of the conundrums that had been torturing her since Dallas as she struggled to comprehend events that, after all, could not be explained in any rational terms. To the bishop’s perception, she spoke of these things “as if her life depended on it—which perhaps it did.”

As he and the widow were not alone, he wondered whether it might not be, in his words, more appropriate if they continued their talk elsewhere. He thought perhaps it would be better to meet in his rectory or at the White House, but Jackie continued to pour out her concerns notwithstanding. She did not care who else heard her speak of such intensely private matters. Her behavior in this respect was sharply out of character for a woman who, as her mother said, tended to cover her feelings, but she had all these urgent questions and she demanded answers: Why, she wanted to know, had God allowed her husband to die like this? What possible reason could there be for it? She emphasized the senselessness of Jack’s being killed at a time when he still had so much more to offer. “Eventually,” the bishop recalled in his memoir The Archbishop Wore Combat Boots, “the conversation turned more personal.” Jackie spoke of her unease with the role that the American public had thrust upon her in the aftermath of Dallas. “She understood that she was forever destined to have to deal with public opinion, the differing, not always flattering feelings toward her. But she did not want to be a public figure…. Already, however, it was clear that the world viewed her, not as a woman, but as a symbol of its own pain.”

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The unanswerable questions that Jackie had posed to Bishop Hannan continued to preoccupy her when, on December 6, she moved to the house that Undersecretary of State W. Averell Harriman had provided for her use until she was able to acquire a property of her own. “Jackie’s bedroom was on the second floor and she seldom left it,” remembered her secretary Mary Gallagher. “I was constantly aware of her suffering.” She wept. She drank. By turns unable to sleep and tormented by recurrent nightmares that caused her to awaken screaming, she lacked even the solace of safely withdrawing into unconsciousness. Trying to make sense of the assassination, she lay awake, endlessly going over the events of November 22. By day, she told and retold her story to writer Joe Alsop (who clutched her hand throughout her narration), family friend Chuck Spalding’s wife, Betty, and numerous others. She pinballed between being, in her phrase, “so bitter” about the tragedy and futilely enumerating the things she might have done to avert it. Though she had no rational reason to feel guilty, she second-guessed her every action and reaction that day. She pounced on every missed opportunity and pondered how it all might have been made to happen otherwise. Again and again in these scenarios, it came down to some failure on her part: If only she had not mistaken the sound of a rifle shot for the revving of motorcycles. If only she had been looking to the right, “then,” as she later described her line of reasoning, “I could have pulled him down, and then the second shot would not have hit him.” If only she had managed to keep his brains in as the limo sped to Parkland Hospital. She even dwelled on the red roses with which she had been presented when the presidential party arrived at Love Field, in Dallas, whereas at previous stops she had been given yellow roses of Texas. Ought she to have recognized them as a sign?

Widow’s Pique

At times, conversations with Jackie were like skating on a pond of thin ice, with certain areas designated dangerous. Easily provoked to anger, she bristled when a woman in her social circle praised her bearing during the memorial services. “How did she expect me to behave?” Jackie remarked afterward to historian Arthur Schlesinger with what struck him as a certain contempt. Jackie was, in her word, stunned when other friends said they hoped she would marry again. “I consider that my life is over,” she informed them, “and I will spend the rest of my life waiting for it really to be over.” She became indignant when, however well-meaningly, people suggested that time would make everything better.

She found it too painful to see so much as an image of her husband’s face—the face she had been looking into when the fatal bullet struck. The single photograph of Jack that, by her own account, she did have with her at the Harriman house was one in which his back was turned. Paintings as well were problematic. When Secretary of Defense Bob McNamara and his wife, Marg, sent over two painted portraits of J.F.K. and urged her to accept one as a gift, Jackie realized that though she especially admired the smaller of the pair, which showed her late husband in a seated position, she simply could not bear to keep it. In anticipation of returning both paintings, she propped them up just outside her bedroom door. One evening in December, young John emerged from Jackie’s room. Spotting a portrait of his father, he removed a lollipop from his mouth and kissed the image, saying, “Good night, Daddy.” Jackie related the episode to Marg McNamara by way of explanation as to why it would be impossible to have such a picture near. She said it brought to the surface too many things.

For all that, she did everything she could to sustain an atmosphere of normalcy, threadbare though it might be, for Caroline and John. Before leaving the White House, she held a belated third-birthday party for John, whose actual birth date had coincided with his father’s funeral. In Palm Beach at Christmastime, she was determined to make it, in the words of the nanny, Maud Shaw, “a good time for the children,” putting up the familiar lights, stars, and baubles, hanging stockings over the fireplace, and repeating other of the little things they had done as a family when Jack was alive. And when she purchased an 18th-century fawn-colored brick house across from the Harriman residence on N Street, she showed the decorator Billy Baldwin photographs of the children’s White House rooms and specified that she wanted their new rooms to be precisely the same.

During Jackie’s two months as a recipient of the undersecretary of state’s hospitality, the crowds that regularly stood vigil outside, sometimes shivering in the snow, had been a source of distress. At a moment of national catastrophe, people had anointed Jackie a heroine. In a time of mass confusion and anxiety, they had invested her with almost magical powers to hold the nation together. They had seized upon the widow’s demeanor of emotional control at the funeral to transform her from a symbol of helplessness and vulnerability to a symbol of resolute strength. Jackie for her part was irritated by the chorus of public praise for her conduct in the aftermath of tragedy. “I don’t like to hear people say that I am poised and maintaining a good appearance,” she resentfully told Bishop Hannan. “I am not a movie actress.” Nor did she feel like much of a heroine. On the contrary, she remained privately preoccupied with the notion that she had missed one or more chances to save her husband.

The crowds outside her house were upsetting to her in another way as well. Confronted with the throngs on N Street, she feared that real danger might suddenly spring forth, as it had on November 22. Easily startled, her body tensed for another attack, she grew exceedingly alarmed when people attempted not only to see but also to touch the woman who had survived the slaughter in Dallas, or when certain of them broke through the police lines in an effort to kiss and hug the slain president’s children. As January waned, the numbers on the sidewalk, instead of diminishing, seemed only to swell in anticipation of the widow’s move across the street. Every time Billy Baldwin came from New York to check on the paint, curtains, and other details, it struck him that there were even more people lined up outside the new place, straining to look in the huge windows.

Soon the problem was not just the crowds. Cars and eventually even tour buses began to clog the narrow street. At Arlington National Cemetery, an average of 10,000 tourists visited President Kennedy’s grave every day. Many made the pilgrimage to inspect the widow’s new house as well. By moving day, in February 1964, N Street had established itself as “one of the tourist sights of Washington.” The new residence, which Jackie dubbed “my house with many steps,” perched high above street level. Nevertheless, Billy Baldwin recalled, “I was shocked at how easy it was to see inside the house, despite its great elevation. Once I arrived in late evening, and the lights inside the house were making a doubly interesting show for the spectators.” After dark, Jackie had no choice but to draw the voluminous apricot silk curtains lest she be on full view to strangers who loomed adoringly, expectantly, until all hours.

Din of Commission

Jackie’s first month of residence there coincided with the opening sessions of the Warren Commission, a seven-man bipartisan panel convened by President Johnson to review and reveal all of the facts and circumstances surrounding the assassination and the subsequent killing of the alleged assassin. Six months into the proceedings—in June 1964—Jackie would testify as well. In the meantime, it was almost impossible to look at a newspaper or turn on a radio or television without encountering further talk of the assassination. At a moment when the country was frantic to learn definitively and at last who had killed President Kennedy, Jackie discovered that she had little interest in that particular whodunit. “I had the feeling of what did it matter what they found out?” she later reflected. “They could never bring back the person who was gone.”

Another problem for her was that every media reference to the official inquiry had the potential to cause a new flood of uninvited memories. She had acted at once to try to stop precisely this sort of provoking material from “coming up, coming up” (not by chance, her phrasing in this respect reflected the involuntary nature of these onerous recollections) when she moved to exert personal control over the books about the assassination. Suddenly, however, it became impossible to fully shield herself against the steady blast of information from the Warren Commission.

On March 2, 1964, Arthur Schlesinger made the first of seven official visits to N Street, where he set up his tape recorder and proposed that Jackie answer his questions about her late husband and his administration as if she were speaking across the decades to a “historian of the twenty-first century.” These interviews, conducted between March 2 and June 3, were part of a larger effort undertaken by a team of historians to record the memories of individuals who had known President Kennedy. The tapes would over time be transcribed and deposited in the archives of the projected John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, in Boston. The concept behind the emergent academic discipline of oral history was that, in an epoch when people were producing fewer letters and diaries, historians had better interview all the players directly lest precious details that would previously have been committed to paper be forever lost to posterity. Jackie’s willingness to participate in the oral-history project was predicated on two stipulations. The first was that her reminiscences would remain sealed until sometime after her death. The second was that, in any case, she would be free to strike anything from the transcript that on reflection she did not care to be part of the historical record.

Thus, whenever she instructed Schlesinger to turn off the machine so that she could ask, “Should I say this on the recorder?,” the bow-tie-wearing historian invariably reminded her of the original agreement. “Why don’t you say it?” he would reply. “You have control over the transcript.”

For Jackie, control was all-important in interviews that offered a chance to fashion a narrative not just of her husband’s life and presidency but also, more problematically, of their marriage. It had long been Jack’s plan that, when he left office, he would tell his story as he saw it and wished others to see it. Now, she believed, it fell to his widow to attempt to do it in his stead, if not in a book, then in the form of these conversations. Still, the undertaking presented a formidable challenge, not least because J.F.K. had had so many secrets. At moments in the tapes, Jackie clearly is not quite sure how much she ought to disclose about her husband’s precarious health. She whispers, she hesitates, she requests that there be a pause in the recording. The tapes therefore are often as interesting for their ellipses as for their content, for the intervals when the machine has been urgently turned off as for when it is actually running. On the matter of her marriage, Jackie’s task is even more complicated. One observes her proceeding gingerly, testing to see what she can feasibly claim to have been the case to an interlocutor who, on the one hand, knows full well about Jack’s dissolute sexual habits and, on the other, is likely, though by no means sworn, to go along with the lie.

At times, when the subject matter is especially sensitive, as when she finds herself compelled to comment on Jack’s friendship with Senator George Smathers (with whom he often pursued women), Jackie stumbles in the thicket of her own desperately contorted phrases. The thicket is filled with thorns, and at every turn they draw blood. First she insists that the friendship took place “before the Senate.” Then she says, no, it was indeed in the Senate but “before he was married.” Then she suggests that Smathers “was really a friend of one side of Jack—a rather, I always thought, sort of crude side. I mean, not that Jack had the crude side.”

When the subject matter is less personal than political and historical, the challenge that confronts her is no less of a minefield, for, more often than not, she is addressing subjects that she would never have dared or been even remotely inclined to pronounce on while her husband lived. Not only is Jackie doing something that she never anticipated having to do, she is operating in the worst imaginable circumstances—when she is unable to sleep, self-medicating with vodka, tyrannized by flashbacks and nightmares. For Jackie, the principal point of these interviews is to burnish her husband’s historical reputation. She certainly does not want to do him any damage, yet there is always the chance that inadvertently she will accomplish precisely that.

Later, when Jackie commented that the oral-history interviews had been an excruciating experience, it is a safe bet that she was referring not merely to the exertion involved in dredging up from memory so many details about J.F.K. As she faced Schlesinger, she also had to make spot judgments about which of those details to cover over and conceal—from posterity, from her interviewer, and even at times from herself.

The oral-history tapes span the late president’s life from boyhood on, with the freighted topic of the assassination deliberately left out. In the course of a brief discussion of J.F.K.’s religious beliefs, Jackie did touch on certain of the “Why me?” questions that had absorbed her of late. “You don’t really start to think of those things until something terrible happens to you,” she told Schlesinger on March 4. “I think God’s unjust now.” Otherwise, she preferred to leave the events of November 22 for her impending talks with William Manchester, whom, by design, she had yet to meet.

Until the moment when Jackie actually had to face Manchester, she contrived to deal with him through various emissaries. On February 5 she had reached out to the Connecticut-based writer via a phone call placed by Pierre Salinger. On February 26, Bobby Kennedy met with Manchester at the Justice Department to detail her wishes. When Manchester proposed that it might be a good idea to see the widow before he signed on, R.F.K. assured him that there was no need. As the attorney general had been doing since the assassination, he made it clear that he spoke for Mrs. Kennedy. In the current negotiations, if at this point Manchester’s dealings with the family could even be called that, he proved to be as deferential as he had been when he invited J.F.K. to alter his own quotes. After various decrees from on high had been transmitted to Manchester by both Salinger and R.F.K. lieutenant Edwin Guthman, the author unflinchingly signed an agreement that provided that his final text could not be published “unless and until approved” by both Jackie and R.F.K. Manchester’s eager offer to go to Jackie in Washington at any time on just a few hours’ notice fell flat. So did his request for a quick meeting the better to know what to say in response to press inquiries once the book deal had been announced. On March 26, the day after the attorney general’s office released the news of Manchester’s appointment, Jackie went off for the Easter weekend with Bobby and Ethel, and both sets of children, to ski in Stowe, Vermont. Manchester, meanwhile, assured the press that he intended to see her as soon as possible while her recollections were fresh.

Presently, Jackie, Bobby, Chuck Spalding, and the Radziwills assembled on Antigua, where they were due to spend a week at the waterfront estate of Bunny Mellon. The group swam and water-skied, but, as Spalding remembered, an “overwhelming” air of sadness pervaded the trip. It struck him that the immense beauty of the setting, which overlooked Half Moon Bay, merely highlighted “everybody’s terrible sense of dejection.” Jackie had brought with her a copy of Edith Hamilton’s The Greek Way, which she had been studying in an effort to learn how the ancient Greeks approached the universal questions posed by human suffering.

Bobby, who had been troubled by questions of his own since November 22, borrowed the Hamilton book from her in Antigua. “I remember he’d disappear,” Jackie later recalled. “He’d be in his room an awful lot of the time … reading that and underlining things.” To Spalding’s eye, Bobby was depressed nearly to the point of paralysis. Unable to sleep, frantic that his own actions as attorney general against Cuba or the Mob might inadvertently have led to his brother’s murder, he had lost an alarming amount of weight, and his clothes hung loosely from a frame that called to mind a Giacometti figure. For all of Bobby’s acute suffering, however, he was also worried about Jackie. Though in the course of a March 13 interview he had assured the television host Jack Paar that she was making “a good deal of progress,” it was evident in private that she was not. After they came back from the Caribbean, Bobby, concerned about Jackie’s abiding mood of despondency, asked a Jesuit priest, the Reverend Richard T. McSorley, with whom he and Ethel were close, to talk to his brother’s widow. First, however, in response to a new handwritten note from Manchester requesting a meeting, Jackie finally consented. When, shortly before noon on April 7, the edgy, rumpled, ruddy-faced author beheld her at last in her book-and-picture-filled living room, she told him that her emotional state made it impossible to be interviewed just now. Manchester had no choice, really, but to be patient.

Before Jackie received Manchester again, she began to see Father McSorley. The flimsy pretext for these sessions, which began on April 27, was that the Georgetown-based priest, who also happened to be an expert tennis player, had signed on to help Jackie improve her game. Almost immediately that first day on the tennis court at R.F.K.’s family estate, Hickory Hill, she broached certain of the preoccupations she had previously spoken of with others. On this and subsequent occasions, Father McSorley recorded her comments afterward in his diary (which came to light with the 2003 publication of Thomas Maier’s The Kennedys: America’s Emerald Kings). Today there were the unanswerable questions: “I don’t know how God could take him away,” she told the priest. “It’s so hard to believe.” There were the feelings of guilt at what she perceived to have been her failure to act in time to prevent Jack’s death: “I would have been able to pull him down,” she said remorsefully, “or throw myself in front of him, or do something, if I had only known.” But it was not until the next day, when Jackie and the priest faced each other again on the tennis court, that she began to speak overtly of suicide.

“Do you think God would separate me from my husband if I killed myself?” Jackie asked. “It is so hard to bear. I feel as though I am going out of my mind at times.” When she asked the priest to pray that she die, he responded, “Yes, if you want that. It’s not wrong to pray to die.” Jackie went on to insist that Caroline and John would be better off without her: “I’m no good to them. I’m so bleeding inside.” Father McSorley countered that the children did indeed need her. He argued that, contrary to anything Jackie said, Caroline and John certainly would not be better off living at Hickory Hill, where Ethel Kennedy could hardly give them the attention they required. “She has so much pressure from public life and so many children,” he said of Ethel. “Nobody can do for them except you.”

Six days after Jackie confided to Father McSorley that she had been contemplating suicide, she finally sat down with Manchester to talk about the assassination. Jackie asked him, “Are you just going to put down all the facts, who ate what for breakfast and all that, or are you going to put yourself in the book, too?” Manchester’s reply, that it would be impossible to keep himself out, seemed to please her. Nonetheless, in important ways, she and the writer were and would remain at cross-purposes. She longed to stop reliving the horror. He was determined to experience it himself, the better to enable readers to experience it as well. She needed to relegate November 22 to the past. He aspired by his craft to make it vividly present.