Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis: The Untold Story (23 page)

So Johnson was hugely disappointed when at the end of February, Sorensen resigned to produce his own literary take on the Kennedy years. With considerable fanfare, Harper & Row announced the Sorensen book on March 1, the day before Schlesinger’s initial oral history interview with Jackie, whose friendship and favor Schlesinger could not but regard as a glittering prize. During the White House years, he had been a social friend of President and Mrs. Kennedy’s, a status to which Sorensen could make no comparable claim. Further, Jackie was not alone in disliking and distrusting Sorensen; Bobby, who early on in the speechwriter’s tenure had exhibited a certain jealousy of his relationship with JFK, had long been cool to Sorensen as well. In any case, as Schlesinger and Sorensen competed to be first with a book in the stores, could Schlesinger really be trusted to scrupulously forget everything the widow told him in the course of their supposedly privileged interviews? Would he even be inclined to do so?

Potential problems in this regard were not limited to the fact that he was simultaneously at work on a book. Given Schlesinger’s status as a player in the post-assassination power struggle, might certain of Jackie’s remarks, though made with the assumption that they would long remain under seal, suddenly become ammunition in that fight? Once Schlesinger had extracted certain critical information about, say, JFK’s private views on Johnson, or the late president’s intentions as to whether or not to retain Dean Rusk as secretary of state after the ’64 election, could Jackie reasonably expect that that information would not somehow find its way into the present political fray?

At length, 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 JFK. 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 spanned 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 JFK’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 still yet to meet. As Jackie later said, if Manchester’s book were ever to be published at all, she imagined that it would be “bound in black and put away on dark library shelves.” The image is immensely suggestive. At moments, Jackie acted as if once she had spoken for the book, the oppressive recollections could be filed away in some densely shadowed corner of the mind where they would never be able to intrude upon her consciousness again. In a sense, her cooperation with Manchester may be seen as an attempt to master material that heretofore had proven impervious to anything like conscious control.

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, RFK assured him that there was no need. As the attorney general had been doing since that first night at Bethesda Naval Hospital, he made it clear that he spoke for Mrs. Kennedy. In the present negotiations, if at this point Manchester’s dealings with the family might even be called that, he proved to be as deferential as he had been when he invited JFK to alter his own quotes. After various decrees from on high had been transmitted to Manchester by both Salinger and RFK 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 RFK. Presently, Manchester’s eager offer to come 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 in 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 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 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 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. 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. Manchester’s aesthetic, which, then and later, emphasized sensations, impressions, and the minutely detailed moment-by-moment reconstruction of events, reflected his wartime experiences as a marksman for whom everything seen over his sights had had, in his words, “a cameolike quality, as keen and well-defined as a line by Van Eyck.” At his most acutely intense, Manchester brought to the act of writing the hyperawareness that soldiers experience in the war zone when the body, faced with high threat, diverts blood to the limbic neurons in a concentrated effort to locate and dissipate danger.

Curiously, when Manchester encountered JFK’s widow, he was still years away from being able to write about the war, his war. “It lay too deep,” he later said. “I couldn’t reach it. But I had known it must be there.… Some recollections never die. They lie in one’s subconscious, squirreled away, biding their time.” Manchester was, by his own telling, “a troubled man who, for over thirty years, repressed what he could not bear to remember.” By contrast, Jackie’s memories of Dallas, some of them anyway, were readily, plentifully available, indeed, too much so for her comfort, if not for her sanity.

“It’s rather hard to stop once the floodgates open,” Jackie was to say ruefully of the Manchester interviews, which the author captured on a tape recorder that he arranged to place out of her sight, though she knew it was running. Lest the floodgates close at any point, Manchester fed her daiquiris, which he poured liberally from large containers. RFK, unlike his sister-in-law, refused to take a drink when interviewed; as a consequence, Manchester lamented, the attorney general’s replies were “abrupt, often monosyllabic—and much less responsive.” From the interviewer’s perspective, in Jackie’s case it also helped that before talking to her he had already interrogated others connected with the assassination. Crucially, he came to her with an abundance of detail culled from other sources. The episodes he repeatedly guided Jackie over were already familiar terrain to him. He also gleaned, from the widow herself, that she devoted many sleepless nights to obsessively turning certain of these episodes “over and over” in her mind; she knew that brooding was useless now, yet she was unable to stop herself. For Manchester, rather than have to start from scratch, it became a matter of cuing her properly and inserting himself in an agonizing process she had been through many times before.

Various people, from RFK on, who had heard Jackie speak of Dallas had sensed that they were about to be told more than they wanted to hear. Manchester, by contrast, could never seem to get enough detail. He did not just want objective information; he wanted to know how it all had felt at the time. “He must be there, and he must be there then,” Manchester once said of the imaginative act that has to occur if a nonfiction writer is to succeed in recapturing the past. In the present instance, he required Jackie to take him there. For literary reasons, he needed her to reexperience the assassination, whereas for personal reasons, she needed to learn somehow to tell her story without wholly reliving it. The Manchester interviews were exceptionally painful to her, and at moments her voice dropped so low that he feared his tape recorder might not have captured every word.

It is not too much to suppose that further intensifying the emotionalism of these sessions was that certain of the experiences she talked about proved to have been uncannily like Manchester’s own during the battle for Okinawa, the very material he had yet to be able to resurrect in his own mind. Strange to say, in the Pacific theater he too had been spattered with blood and brains when someone nearby was killed. He too had narrowly escaped being slaughtered himself. He too had felt guilt at having survived. So, when Jackie spoke of such matters, it had to be fascinating, even stimulating, to Manchester for sheerly personal reasons as well.

“I just talked about the private things,” Jackie was to say with regret of her sessions with Manchester. “Then the man went away, and I think he was very upset during the writing of the book.”

Their meetings that month took place on May 4, 7, and 8. By the nineteenth, Father McSorley found himself growing fearful that Jackie, as he wrote, “was really thinking of suicide.” The priest had briefly hoped she might be doing better, but the way she talked now spurred him to take a different view. Speaking again of the prospect of killing herself, Jackie told him that she would be pleased if her death precipitated “a wave” of other suicides because it would be a good thing if people were allowed to “get out of their misery.” She disconcerted the priest by insisting that “death is great” and by alluding to the suicide of Marilyn Monroe. “I was glad that Marilyn Monroe got out of her misery,” JFK’s widow maintained. “If God is going to make such a to-do about judging people because they take their own lives, then someone ought to punish Him.” The next day, after Father McSorley strove to persuade Jackie that suicide would be wrong, she reassured him that she agreed and that she would never actually attempt to kill herself. Still, it was clear from all she had said previously that she was not improving—far from it.