Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis: The Untold Story (22 page)

At midnight on January 31, 1964, on the eve of her move, Jackie wrote to former prime minister Harold Macmillan, who was then two weeks from his seventieth birthday. Macmillan had left office on account of illness in October 1963. Still unwell by the time of President Kennedy’s funeral, he had designated Andrew and Debo Devonshire to represent him there. Bobby Kennedy had spoken to Macmillan on the phone recently; and Jackie’s intention in writing to him, as she said, was to tell him how much Jack had loved him. But, as was often the case with her these days, her original aim was soon derailed. Hardly had she begun to write on her black-bordered mourning stationery when she found herself speaking of the bouts of bitterness that continued to vex her; of her failed efforts to find religious consolation; and of her sense of life’s unfairness and of its being the best people who were made to suffer.

Still, at a time when Jackie was yet darkly insisting to friends that her future had died with her husband, she expressed the tender hope to Macmillan that the next day’s move might actually be the start of “a new life.” During her 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 to Jackie. 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, she felt her body tense for another attack, and 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 ten thousand tourists visited President Kennedy’s grave every day. Many made the pilgrimage to inspect the widow’s new house as well. By moving day, 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.

Jackie’s first month of residence there coincided with the opening sessions of the Warren Commission, a seven-man bipartisan panel convened by the president to review and reveal all of the facts and circumstances surrounding the assassination and the subsequent killing of the alleged assassin. Oswald’s death had left the nation in suspense about who had been responsible for the murder of President Kennedy. Among Johnson’s aims in establishing the commission was to restore order by reassuring Americans that the crime had been fully investigated and solved, responsibility for the cataclysm firmly fixed. Johnson was also eager to terminate the speculation about Soviet involvement that persisted in many quarters. He worried that Moscow, were it to grow fearful that Washington planned to retaliate, might make a first strike.

Beginning on February 3, the day when Marina Oswald, the alleged assassin’s widow, appeared before the committee, the panel took the testimony of 552 witnesses, including associates and acquaintances of both Lee Harvey Oswald and his killer, Jack Ruby; doctors; bystanders; policemen; journalists; and Secret Service agents. Five months into the proceedings, 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 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.

Approximately three weeks after Jackie sent off her letter to Macmillan, she received a fifteen-page answer written in the barely decipherable scrawl that was a result of his having been shot through the right hand during the battle of Loos in 1915. Jackie later said that no letter in her life “could ever have been” what that letter was for her. She called it “the rock that I went back to over and over” throughout the winter of 1964. A year and a half later, she would insist that she could still almost remember it “word for word.” And even after four years had passed, there would be moments when, she avowed, a sentence from Macmillan’s long letter came “crashing back into my head—and I could see the page it was written on as I did the first time—the color of the ink and paper.”

Macmillan told her that he had “read & re-read” her own message and “pondered deeply about it.” Though he did not mention it to her, prior to responding he had also conferred with his longtime aide Philip de Zulueta and learned what he could about Jackie’s present circumstances from David Ormsby-Gore. In the end, however, it was Macmillan’s formative personal experience of having, as he said, “lived through two wars” that would shape his February 18, 1964, reply. That personal history allowed him to make an imaginative leap. It encouraged him to look beyond Jackie’s status as a grieving widow and to take into account certain other factors that were also crucially in play. It allowed him to view her ordeal through the unexpected lens of the stories of warriors whose overwhelming experiences on the battlefield, like hers in Dallas, had forever set them apart.

As a captain in the Grenadier Guards in the First World War, Macmillan had been severely wounded in the left thigh during the Battle of the Somme. He had lain for hours surrounded by the dead and screaming wounded. He had been in shock and very nearly died himself. As he told Jackie in his letter, the casualties in that war had been “on a frightful scale.” By 1918 he had had “scarcely a friend or relation alive, of military age, except those who had been too ill or weak to go.” He too had felt much bitterness. He too had been moved to ask “Why—oh, Why” in an effort to make sense of the senseless. He too had suffered bouts of depression. It struck Macmillan that in important ways Jackie’s tribulations had been even worse than his own, for soldiers at least have the consolation of feeling that their sacrifices are for something. “But this,” Macmillan wrote, “what has happened to you and (in its way) to all of us. How can we accept it? How can we explain it? Why did God allow it? I am sure you must say this to yourself (as I do) over & over. Such a waste! Such folly! Such bad workmanship! Can there really be a God, who made & guides the world?” He admitted that there were no satisfactory answers and that the only thing to do was to try somehow to retain one’s faith in the face of what had occurred.

At the heart of Macmillan’s letter was his offer to serve as “a sort of safety-valve or lightning conductor” for Jackie. He encouraged her to view him as a kindred spirit to whom she could write of her anguish in the expectation that he at least would understand.

“You have shown the most wonderful courage to the outer world,” he wrote. “The hard thing is really to feel it, inside.”

Many times in the course of that winter, Jackie undertook to write back to Macmillan. But when in the morning she reviewed the night thoughts that she had committed to paper, she concluded that it would be wisest not to let anyone see them. So she discarded what she had written. At last, Jackie asked David to explain to Macmillan why he had yet to hear from her.

In the meantime, she promised herself that eventually, perhaps when spring came and things were “a little better,” she would manage to produce a letter that actually went off to Birch Grove. Then she would tell the former prime minister that he had helped her more than he would ever know by spurring her to produce all those unsent letters.

The act of writing them, she later said, had been a release for so much that would have destroyed her had she kept it all inside.

During this same period, 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 “an historian of the twenty-first century.” These interviews, conducted between March 2 and June 3 of 1964, 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 at length be transcribed and deposited in the archives of the projected John F. Kennedy 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 JFK 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 George Smathers, 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.

There were other potential pitfalls in her talks with Schlesinger, who, in addition to his chores as an oral historian, had recently embarked on the preparation of a much-ballyhooed book about the Kennedy presidency for the publisher Houghton Mifflin. Given the recent upheaval in Schlesinger’s professional circumstances, he had an awful lot at stake in the book project. At a time when Johnson had been frantic to retain as many Kennedy people as he could, the new president had scarcely concealed his disdain for Schlesinger, whom he had systematically isolated within the administration. Not inaccurately, Johnson viewed Schlesinger as being in league with RFK. When Schlesinger submitted his resignation, it was accepted, to his perception, with alacrity. Schlesinger in turn was surely no admirer of Johnson’s, yet the president’s eagerness to see him go stung nonetheless. To make matters worse for Schlesinger, Johnson was intent on inducing the other Kennedy administration insider said to be planning a book, Ted Sorensen, to remain in the administration. Unlike Schlesinger, whom Johnson regarded as a useless intellectual, Sorensen possessed the invaluable skill of being able to write in JFK’s voice.