Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis: The Untold Story (21 page)

Confronted with charges that he had treated Jackie improperly, even exploited her, Johnson always insisted that on the contrary he had been unfailingly respectful, holding her up on a pedestal and treating her with dignity and deference. To LBJ’s sense, it had been Bobby Kennedy, the “little shitass” as he was known to call him, who had been outrageously disrespectful to him on Air Force One in Maryland, rushing past “so that he would not have to pause and recognize the new president.” Johnson had been indignant when Bobby ushered his sister-in-law off the plane, leaving the president to make his exit without any of the customary courtesy being directed toward him. In later years, Johnson reflected that from day one of his new presidency he had dreaded the moment when RFK would openly announce his intention “to reclaim the throne in memory of his brother.”

Jackie Bouvier’s aura of the Wasp patriarchate had greatly appealed to old Joe Kennedy when Jack first brought her to meet the family. Now, because more than any other person Jackie possessed the aura of JFK, she became from the first a critical prize in the post-assassination struggle for place and power. Her natural allegiance was emphatically with Bobby, who, in his capacity as new head of the Kennedy family, had assumed the role of powerful protector at a moment of supreme need on her part. In the days immediately after the assassination, Bobby had been “the one person” who seemed capable of soothing her. “Shall we go visit our friend?” he had asked on the night of the funeral after everyone else had left them alone at the White House. A midnight trip to the grave, where they knelt in the enveloping darkness to pray, was only the first of many such emotionally charged visits to Arlington Cemetery together. Late afternoons in the cold months that followed, as she observed a one-year period of mourning, Bobby would sit with her near the firelight in her Georgetown living room and talk. Compared to RFK, Johnson was clearly the underdog in their contest for the widow’s imprimatur. Still, as Jackie’s fond, often mirthful conversations with LBJ attest, she was by no means impervious to his Big Daddy charm. More importantly, the fact that she and Johnson had both been in Dallas at the time of the assassination was a tremendous bond; in later years, they communicated about what had happened on November 22 in ways that leave little doubt of the sincere empathy each felt for the other. But that empathy did not prevent Johnson from endeavoring to use to personal political advantage a bond that had been forged in tragedy. He was not altogether without hope of prevailing with Jackie, and as a consequence even his seemingly most earnest and well-intentioned exchanges with her have the capacity to bristle with ambiguity and subtext. Motives tend to be mixed in such matters, yet it is worth asking whether, when in this early period Johnson told her to tell her children that he wanted to be a “daddy” to them, it was their interests he was thinking of primarily or his own.

At the same time, behind the wasted face and haunted, sleep-deprived eyes, Bobby Kennedy in these weeks was not exactly artless himself. The impact on him of his brother’s death had been palpably physical. “I don’t think I ever saw human grief expressed as in the face of Robert Kennedy after the assassination,” remembered William vanden Heuvel. Pierre Salinger described him as “the most shattered man I had ever seen in my life.” Nevertheless, two full weeks had yet to pass since the assassination before Bobby was speaking about the possibility of seeking the vice presidency. And before the end of December, he too was already contriving to use Jack’s widow to personal political advantage. JFK’s purpose in traveling to Texas had been, in Charles Bartlett’s phrase, “to set the stage for 1964.” A month later, again it was the impending presidential election that was in play, but with a significantly altered cast of characters. Oddly, one constant was the sense that Jackie’s participation could be of immense benefit to the Democratic presidential candidate. As yet undecided about whether he would prefer to be vice president or secretary of state in 1964, Bobby saw her as a crucial negotiating chip with Johnson in either case.

Arthur Schlesinger was an ardent supporter of what he already understood to be RFK’s long-range presidential ambitions. Yet he expressed skepticism when Bobby spoke to him of what he was certain would be their “bargaining power” with Johnson in advance of the next election. Schlesinger maintained that whether or not Johnson gave Bobby the particular job he wanted in 1964, Bobby and his supporters would have little choice but to play a role in LBJ’s presidential campaign or “be finished forever in the party.”

“Yes,” Bobby replied, “but there is a considerable difference between a nominal role and a real role. We can go through the motions or we can go all out. It may make a difference, for example, whether Jackie appears with Johnson at the last big rally, or whether she goes to Europe in the autumn for her health.” Bobby’s implication, of course, was that he would be in a position to dictate his sister-in-law’s decision in the matter.

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 take 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. At length, 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 forty-one-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 JFK 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, along with Bobby, her mother and sister, and a few others, gathered at night at Arlington Cemetery to reinter 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 demanded 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 priest recalled many years later, “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 oppressed 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 Joe Alsop (who clutched her hand throughout her narration), Betty Spalding, 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 gunning 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?

Two days after Dallas, Bobby Kennedy had phoned the British embassy to ask David and Sissie Ormsby-Gore to spend the day with Jackie, who, he explained, had had another bad night. In Jackie’s view, of all the people who had been close to Jack, David had been, next to Bobby and herself, the one who had been “the most wounded” by his death. As did Bobby, David regarded it his bounden duty to help care for Jack’s widow. Nineteen years previously, he and Sissie had felt similarly responsible for Jack’s sister Kick after her young husband died. Sitting with Jackie in the traumatic aftermath of the assassination, hearing her repeatedly recount the evil hour, was a wrenching experience for the Ormsby-Gores, who were both of an exceptionally sensitive, even fragile, cast of mind. Sissie had grown tremendously fond of Jackie in the course of David’s ambassadorship. Both wives were accomplished horsewomen; both were Catholics; both were noted for their panache in matters of dress and decor. In the words of McGeorge Bundy, during the presidential years Sissie had been “company and friend for Jackie in a way that very few official wives were.” Sissie’s daughter Alice, though older than Caroline, had played with Jackie’s daughter, and following the widow’s move to N Street, the Ormsby-Gores had volunteered to host Caroline’s school at the embassy when it could no longer be located in the White House. In mid-January 1964, David and Sissie accompanied Jackie on a visit to the Georgia plantation of the former U.S. ambassador to Britain John Hay Whitney. Afterward, Sissie, feeling half mad herself, reported to a friend that listening to Jackie’s eruptions of violent imagery, usually the same episodes involving blood and brains, often in nearly the identical words, invariably in a flat tone of voice, was becoming well-nigh unbearable; yet listen she must.

At other 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 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 Bob and Marg McNamara sent over two painted portraits of JFK 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 eighteenth-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.