Jackie, Ethel, Joan: Women of Camelot (37 page)

It seemed, also, that Jackie’s long absence aboard the
Christina
on the seas had spurred Jack on to greater desire for her, because he was more solicitous than ever before. “The last weekend he was ever home [in Hyannis Port],” said Rita Dallas, “he commented that the one bright thing on the horizon was: ‘Jackie’s coming back.’ ”

As well as the death of his son, the Cuban Missile Crisis had a great impact on Kennedy. “It was so close,” he had said to the British ambassador. “Too, too close.”

In fact, during that crisis, the President asked Jackie to cancel some of her outside appointments and stay at the White House, so that he could spend as much time with her and the children as possible.

Dr. Janet Travell recalled a scene just before the crisis. “President Kennedy was leaving on a trip west. At my office window, I watched him walk briskly from the West Wing across the lawn to Chopper Number One. The usual retinue trailed behind him. They bounded into the helicopter and I waited to see the steps drawn up. Instead, the President un- expectedly reappeared in the doorway and descended the steps alone. How unusual, I thought. Then I saw why. Jackie, her hair wild in the gale of the rotors, was running from the South Portico across the grass. She almost met him at the helicopter steps and she reached up with her arms. They stood motionless in an embrace for many seconds. Perhaps no one else noted that rare demonstration of affec- tion. A few days later in the publicized hours of the Cuban Missile Crisis, I remembered it. I thought of its deep signif- icance—the unbreakable bond of love between them that showed clearest in times of trouble.”

Some have reported that by 1963 Jack was completely faithful to Jackie. As George Smathers put it, “By 1963, Jack was about as faithful as he was ever going to be. It was more than Jackie had hoped for, but less than she deserved.” “I once asked him if he’d ever fallen desperately, hope- lessly in love,” James McGregor Burns, a friend and adviser of Jack’s once said. “He just shrugged and said, ‘I’m not the

heavy lover type.’ ”

Jackie’s efforts in redecorating the White House also had a positive effect on her marriage. More than a public mu- seum, the White House was now a comfortable home where Jack and Jackie could play out what sometimes seemed to be a charmed existence.

Rita Dallas, who would accompany Jack’s father, Joseph, there on visits, recalled the almost mythical appearance the First Family created in their renovated living quarters, “Often, late at night, the upstairs light would be turned low. It gave the whole area a solemn tone. At one end of the hall, the presidential living room would be softly and dramati- cally lighted. There would be muted music mingling with the shadows.

“The First Lady would be sitting on the couch, outlined by a gentle halo of light, and then the President would step from the elevator that opened out to the living room. He would stand still, waiting, while his wife rose from the couch to come to him. He would rest his hand on her cheek and then take her in his arms in a quiet embrace. How often I thought, if the world had ever seen those moments there would be no doubt that Camelot existed,” Rita Dallas con- cluded.

“She forced a separation between his private life and work,” recalls Pierre Salinger. “That was the deal. Unlike Johnson, when Kennedy was finished, once he went back upstairs, he went to his wife and that was the end of it. No staff, no more interruptions every half hour.”

The way that Jack doted on Caroline and John Jr. also made Jackie’s feelings for her husband that much stronger. “He loved his children, he spent so much time with them,” recalled Dave Powers. “Every night, no matter what was going on, he’d say, ‘I want them brought over before they

go to bed.’ He had breakfast with them and lunch with them. When there was something going on, like the Cuban Missile Crisis, he’d go up to look at that boy. One day, the President was with some ambassador, Caroline was on Macaroni [her pony], and he went and yelled, ‘Caro- line.’ She rode the thing right through the Rose Garden, right into the White House office. He didn’t care. He loved it.”

Five days after Jackie’s return to Washington, on October 22, she and Jack dined with White House correspondent Ben Bradlee and his then-wife, Tony.

Jack had just endured a bad day. In shirtsleeves, he com- plained to Jackie and Tony that everything had gone wrong, beginning with the Birmingham, Alabama, police depart- ment’s refusal to hire Negro police officers. Also, Bobby Baker, Secretary to the Senate Majority and a protégé of LBJ’s, had just been sued for allegedly accepting a bribe in- volving a vending machine franchise in the plant of a com- pany from which a lot of governmental business was conducted. Jack said he thought of Baker not as a crook, but as a rogue.

As Jack unwound with a stiff scotch, Jackie told Tony Bradlee that she so regretted the negative publicity her cruise with Onassis had caused—especially an article in
Newsweek
about it—but added that she found Onassis to be “an alive and vital person who has come up from nowhere.” She told the reporter of Ari’s hesitancy to go on the cruise, and of her insistence that he be aboard. She also said that Jack was being “really nice and understanding” about the cruise.

Jackie’s opinion of him aside, Jack made it clear to Bradlee that Onassis would not be welcome at the White

House until long after the 1964 election. Jack clearly in- tended to run again and didn’t want the controversy that al- ways surrounded Onassis to become an issue. The topic then turned to 1968, and of whom JFK was thinking in terms of his successor.

“So who do you have in mind?” Jackie asked, as the guests all walked to the screening room to see a movie.

“Well,” answered Jack, “I was actually thinking about Franklin [Roosevelt, Jr.] . . . until you and Onassis fixed that.”

Jackie didn’t say a word.

Jack also said that he believed Jackie felt a bit guilty about her trip—odd, in that she didn’t really want to go in the first place. She said nothing, however, to contradict him. He added that “Jackie’s guilt feelings” could possibly work to his advantage.

“Maybe now you’ll come with us to Texas next month,” he said with a grin. The President’s handlers had advised him that he needed to shore up his popularity in that state, so a trip was being planned. The first stop would be San Anto- nio, then Houston, Fort Worth, and finally, Dallas.

“Sure I will,” Jackie answered. “I’ll campaign with you anywhere you want.”

Then, the contingent joined Ethel and Bobby, who were waiting in the theater for the screening of
From Russia with Love,
starring Sean Connery. Jack had a short attention span for movies. He would usually leave the theater after about an hour and go upstairs to read. This time was no exception; he left before the first spectacular gunplay. Everyone else, however, enjoyed every moment of it, except for Jackie. After the film ended, she observed to Ethel, “To be honest, I find such violence to be deplorable. Don’t you?”

Tragedy

H
ow is it that a person’s entire life can be so completely changed in just a matter of seconds?

It was Friday, November 22, 1963. The motorcade’s progress had been slow. Jackie Kennedy sat next to her hus- band in the backseat of a Lincoln convertible, wearing a light wool strawberry pink Chanel suit with a navy-blue col- lar and a matching blue blouse. She held a bouquet of red roses in her lap; on her head sat a pink pillbox hat. Texas Governor John B. Connally and his wife, Nellie, sat in front of her as a police motorcycle escort led the way. Behind the Kennedys’ Lincoln was a car of Secret Service agents, trailed by another automobile, this one carrying Vice Presi- dent Lyndon Johnson, his wife Lady Bird, and Texas Sena- tor Ralph Yarborough.

Jackie smiled and waved at the cheering crowds, accus- tomed to the manic adulation and blurred excitement that re- sulted whenever she and Jack appeared in public. Both were surprised and delighted to have this kind of reception—the chanting and cheering, the jostling for position, the shaking of placards—in Texas, a state where the President’s popular- ity was in question.

By rote Jackie turned to her left and waved. Then to her right. Then again to her left.

Suddenly, the shots rang out, followed by a gush of blood. Jack was hit. Jackie went from shock to fear as pandemo- nium broke out. The governor started shouting, something about “they’re going to kill us.”

Clint Hill, who still cannot give voice to the terrible mem- ory without great difficulty, recalls, “I heard a sound from my right rear. I was on the left hand, front, of the follow-up car [on the running board]. As I began to turn to my right to- ward that sound, my eyes crossed the back of the presiden- tial car and I saw the President grasp at his throat and lurch a little bit to his left, and I realized that something had hap- pened. I got off the car as quickly as I could and ran to the presidential car. By the time I got there, two more shots had been fired and he had been hit in the head.”

“I’ve got his brains in my hand!” Jackie screamed. “My God, what are they doing? My God, they’ve killed Jack, they’ve killed my husband . . . Jack, Jack!”

A piece of Jack’s skull had come off—a “perfectly clean piece,” as she would later remember—and he slumped into her lap.

Then, in one of those frantic, dizzying moments when every horrible emotion possible clashes together at once— the blinding panic of fear, the horror of mutilation, the shock and despair of unexpected loss, the unbelievable finality of sudden death, the destruction of life as it once was—Jackie scampered out of her seat onto the trunk of the car. She began crawling to the rear of the vehicle, though she would have no recollection of ever having done so. In a moment of blind courage, Clint Hill jumped off his car and began rac- ing toward Jackie, risking his life. He could have easily been hit by any of the motorcycles or even his own car.

“I slipped when I first tried to get up on the presidential car,” Clint Hill recalls. “It took me four or five steps to get there, and in that time Mrs. Kennedy was out on top of the trunk attempting to grasp part of the President’s head that had been blown off and had fallen into the street. I grasped

her and put her back in the backseat and placed my body on top of her and the President.”

“Oh Jack, oh, Jack, I love you,” Jackie sobbed.

Six minutes later, the car carrying the First Couple would pull up to Parkland Memorial Hospital. Jackie, still in the backseat, would cradle Jack in her arms. “Please, Mrs. Kennedy,” she recalled Clint Hill begging, “we must get the President to a doctor.”

She would refuse. Terror mixed with grief still had com- plete possession of her. As her shoulders heaved with wrack- ing sobs, she would cradle Jack’s ruined head in her hands and try to hold the top of his head together, even though there was nothing between her hand and his brain. The en- tire right side of his head was gone, beginning at his hairline and extending all the way behind his right ear. Pieces of skull that hadn’t been blown away were hanging by blood- matted hair. Part of his brain, the cerebellum, was dangling from the back of his head by a single strand of tissue. The memory of how she would try to hold the top of her hus- band’s head on would fuel Jackie’s nightmares for years to come.

How would she ever be able to forget Jack’s face in those final moments? Though his gray suit and shirt were blood- ied and the top of his head gone, his face remained un- marked and exquisite. His skin was so bronzed he appeared to be tanned, a physiological phenomenon caused by Addi- son’s disease, from which he had suffered for years. His blue eyes were open and clear but stared blankly ahead.

Clint Hill had somehow understood that she was unable to allow strangers the unspeakable horror of seeing this great man’s shattered skull, his brain spilling into her lap. Hill tenderly wrapped his jacket around Kennedy’s head so

that the terrible wound would not be exposed. It was only then that Jackie would allow the Secret Service men to lift her husband’s body onto the gurney to be wheeled into the emergency room.

A blur of doctors and nurses rushed by her into the trauma room, including Dr. Robert McClelland and Dr. Charles Crenshaw. “The look on her face forever marked my mem- ory,” Crenshaw would recall years later of Jackie. “Anger, disbelief, despair, and resignation were all present in her ex- pression. In all the sentiments I have seen displayed and heard expressed in my thirty years of practice by people grieving and hurting over trauma victims, I never saw or sensed more intense and genuine love.”

Twenty minutes passed.

Jackie was alone, but not really. All around her, doctors and nurses hurried about, shouting to one another in a scene of total and utter chaos and panic. Kenny O’Donnell, one of Jack’s closest friends, a man Jackie never thought of as frag- ile, his emotions always so impenetrable, sat in a corner, sobbing. Nellie Connally, a woman she barely knew, had suddenly become a kindred spirit as she stood at Jackie’s side in stunned silence. In another corner stood Lady Bird Johnson, her eyes wide with alarm and concern, reluctant to approach the two women. What could she say to them as they stood vigil to learn if their husbands were dead or alive?