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.”
***********
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.
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