Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis: The Untold Story (25 page)

For Jackie, the problem with saying no to this was that Bobby was cooperating enthusiastically with the magazine, which he had already invited in to photograph at Hickory Hill. At a moment when Bobby’s immediate active options included not only the vice presidency, but also a Senate seat from New York, a
Look
feature that showed him assuming his brother’s political mantle, as well as looking after JFK’s widow and children, was not to be turned down lightly. At length, Bobby persuaded her to participate.

Though RFK had briefly considered abandoning, or at least taking a hiatus from, politics after Teddy Kennedy was severely injured in a plane crash in June, the attorney general had since enthusiastically recommitted himself to public life. A June 24–July 1 trip that he and Ethel had taken to Germany and Poland had been immensely successful, particularly the visit to Cracow and Warsaw, where Bobby seemed to discover in lighthearted exchanges with adoring crowds of young people a new, easier, more effective public persona. The cheers that greeted RFK in Poland appeared to sandblast away the despair that had accrued to him since his brother’s death. Back home he returned to a spate of press articles conjecturing about what he planned to do next politically. Among these articles was a major piece in the July 13
U.S. News & World Report
titled simply “Bobby Kennedy’s Future.”

By some lights, RFK never entirely emerged from his depression. “When did he come out of that?” his sister Jean would say many years later. “I don’t think he ever came out of that.” Still, at the time, a certain perceptible change for the better does seem to have occurred. Ethel Kennedy referred to it, characteristically, as a matter of “getting Bobby over the hump.” And Chuck Spalding would later say: “It seemed to me that that mood [of dejection] prevailed right up until the time that Bobby just rid himself of it, as everybody else had to sooner or later … And then I think that probably time doing what it does it removes these things from you. You simply … can’t exist like that, and you begin to fill in your life with other things and that becomes a memory. What formerly held your attention so completely becomes a memory and fades.”

Jackie, by contrast, seemed to experience no such improvement. “I am a living wound,” she said of herself at the time. Heretofore, she and RFK had seemed at moments to be almost a unit apart from other people. The electric intensity of their bond (which, then and later, persuaded many people that they must be having an affair) derived not only from her great need, but from his as well. In lavishing care and attention on his brother’s widow, he was fulfilling the role of family leader he had coveted all his life but had never had reason to believe would ever be his, though he naturally despised the manner in which it had come to him. So how to account for the disparity in their respective aspects and outlooks that began to be noticeable that spring and summer of 1964? In incipient form, it had already been present in the ambulance to Bethesda Hospital, he intermittently peering through the curtains at the world flying past outside, she riveted to the ghastly images inside her head.

Eight months later, instead of fading out, or even beginning to lessen in immediacy, November 22 remained powerfully present to her. The floodgates were constantly in peril of reopening, which is why the photographic session at Hyannis Port, with all of the chaotic feelings it threatened to incite, was just not something she wanted to do. But Bobby needed her to pose with the children, and at last she consented out of loyalty—loyalty to her brother-in-law, but also to Jack, whose agenda RFK pledged to keep alive.

As July drew to a close, the question of how far Jackie would go the following month in support of RFK remained paramount at the White House. The Republicans had indeed anointed Barry Goldwater, whose strength lay in the Southern states, precisely where RFK was weakest. Even with the numbers emphatically on Johnson’s side, however, the president was frantic Bobby might yet outmaneuver him. “He’s got the lady [Jackie] thinking about going to the convention, and he put that out yesterday,” LBJ complained on the morning of the twenty-ninth. “He thinks that most of the delegations are for him, and this is the thing he wants more than anything else in his life. If he’s denied it, it’ll be ‘very cruel.’” When Johnson spoke those words, he was bracing himself to face down Bobby, who was due in the Oval Office later in the day. Even when RFK seemed to react calmly to being told that he would not be on the ticket after all, the president continued to worry. On the thirtieth, a news report that JFK’s widow did indeed plan to come to Atlantic City, where she would press delegates to support Bobby’s vice-presidential bid, sent Johnson into a new fit of agitation. “There have been stories this morning that Teddy wanted him [to fight for the second spot on the ticket] and Miz Kennedy was going to the convention,” the president lamented to Dean Rusk, “… and that this means a war.”

Word that Bobby had invited key political advisers to Hyannis Port that weekend further inflamed the president. Did the summons mean that RFK and his supporters were indeed planning to stampede the convention? In fact, the meeting with former New York governor Averell Harriman and other boosters proved to be, in Ethel Kennedy’s words (citing news accounts), “a turning point for Bobby”; he emerged determined to run for the Senate now that the vice presidency was no longer in play. McNamara, who prided himself on maintaining extremely close personal contacts with the Kennedys though he continued to work for LBJ, assuaged the president’s fears somewhat when he reported that Bobby was indeed going to seek a Senate seat. That was good news for the Johnsonites, as it meant RFK would be less likely to disrupt the convention.

McNamara had encouraging news about Jackie as well. By this time, she had taken the children to Hammersmith Farm, where she planned to leave them with her mother while she traveled by yacht along the Dalmatian Coast of Yugoslavia with the Wrightsmans, the Radziwills, and the Harlechs (as David and Sissie Ormsby-Gore were now known). McNamara told LBJ that he had talked to her and that she wanted no part of any RFK–LBJ showdown. Besides, she was to be in Europe throughout the critical run-up to the Democratic National Convention. “I hope she’ll stay a little longer than planned,” McNamara went on, “… and that will keep her out of it.” McNamara himself had been urging RFK to pursue the Senate seat, and he assured Johnson that he had asked Jackie “to push him” as well. McNamara’s private conversations with Jackie before she left the United States on August 5, and his willingness to report on them to the president, epitomized the vulnerability of a woman who could rely on none of these figures—McNamara, RFK, or LBJ—to advise her in terms of her interests alone. Each man spoke to her in a manner that was kind, warm, and understanding, yet each had his own interests at heart and did not scruple to use her to further those interests. Which is not to suggest that they failed to care for her deeply and sincerely, only that politics and careers were ever in the mix of their dealings with her.

While Jackie was abroad, the Kennedyites examined how most effectively to employ her to further RFK’s chances in New York, where some key politicos, New York City mayor Robert Wagner not least among them, regarded Bobby as an interloper. A tribute to JFK was scheduled in Atlantic City, which LBJ had insisted take place after both he and his chosen running mate, Hubert Humphrey, had been nominated, lest Bobby and his supporters use the opportunity to storm the convention. LBJ’s recurrent Jackie nightmare notwithstanding, there had never really been any question of her appearing at the Convention Center. Like Johnson, she too feared the outpouring of emotions her presence there would elicit from the delegates, but whereas the president dreaded the potential political impact of those feelings, she worried about the effect upon herself.

Given the Kennedyites’ inability to position Jackie at RFK’s side on the evening of the tribute, when he was scheduled to introduce a short film about his late brother, their next-best idea was to produce her at an invitation-only afternoon reception hosted by Averell Harriman at a nearby hotel, where she and RFK would greet delegates together. Soon, however, a telephone call that Johnson placed to Bobby in Maine on the morning of August 12 scrambled calculations within the Kennedy camp. Due to meet with Mayor Robert Wagner later that same day, Johnson unexpectedly offered to help Bobby in New York. “I just want to make it clear that I want to do what you want done,” said Johnson, binding to him a man he despised and who was known to loathe him in turn. “I think that would be damn helpful,” said Bobby, for whom Wagner had hitherto loomed as a—perhaps the—major obstacle.

But how would Johnson react when he learned that Jackie was indeed coming to the Jersey Shore? Might he fear that an insurrection was yet in the works? The president was capable of bringing in Wagner and other key figures, but he could just as easily assure their opposition to a Kennedy candidacy. In an effort to forestall such a disaster, Teddy Kennedy was delegated to call Johnson on the thirteenth. “Mr. President,” said the Massachusetts senator, who was still convalescing after the plane crash, “we have had a very nice invitation from Governor Harriman to have a reception at the convention on Thursday after the selection of the presidential and vice presidential candidates … for Mrs. Kennedy. Jackie has indicated that she would be delighted to accept this, but of course we wanted to have this in complete accord with your wishes.”

What could Johnson do but assent, though it is hard to imagine he was delighted when he said: “I want to do anything and everything I can at any time to make her as happy and as pleased as she can be, under the circumstances.” LBJ’s strategic countermove was to invite Jackie to sit with him in the presidential box during the nationally televised tribute to her late husband; that way, if she really had to be there, at least the luster of her presence would be conferred upon Johnson.

In the event, Jackie preferred to fly into Atlantic City for the day only, and to leave well before the evening tribute. At the August 27 reception in her honor, she, along with Bobby, a pregnant Ethel, and other Kennedys, greeted some five thousand delegates in three shifts. The husband-and-wife actors Frederic March and Florence Eldridge read a program of excerpts from some of JFK’s favorite literary works, much of it about death and dying young, which Jackie had selected for the occasion. Introduced to the audience by Harriman, Jackie spoke in a scarcely audible voice: “Thank you all for coming, all of you who helped President Kennedy in 1960.” If possible, her words were even harder to make out when she continued: “May his light always shine in all parts of the world.” In the course of the five-hour reception, Jackie twice appeared on an exterior balcony, first with Bobby, then with Ethel, to wave to excited crowds on the Atlantic City boardwalk.

By design, she was safely back in Newport that night when RFK received a rapturous sixteen-minute ovation in the Convention Hall when he came out to introduce the documentary about his brother. Bobby concluded his own remarks with a passage from Shakespeare’s
Romeo and Juliet
that Jackie had suggested: “When he shall die / Take him and cut him out in little stars / And he will make the face of heaven so fine / That all the world will be in love with night, / And pay no worship to the garish sun.” Then and later, many people would note the thrust, as Arthur Schlesinger called it, of the last line.

Was the reading a deliberate jab at LBJ? Not likely. Two days previously when Bobby, with Mayor Wagner at his side, announced his entry into the Senate race, he had noted that President Johnson had pledged to campaign for him in New York. RFK was hardly about to do anything at the convention to jeopardize that crucial White House support.

Afterward, Jackie wrote to Joe Alsop that she ought never to have watched the filmed tribute to JFK on television in Newport, where the last photographs of him and John on the beach had been taken nearly a year before. Having successfully ducked one situation likely to unseal disturbing recollections, Jackie had promptly and calamitously placed herself in another. As it happened, viewing the documentary in this particular setting had provoked a whole separate chain of anguished associations.

To make matters worse, when she read Alsop’s August 28 account of his own deeply felt response to the JFK film, which he had seen at the convention, his letter, she reported, “opened the floodgates” anew. Nine months after the assassination, rather than diminishing, the potential triggers of trauma-related memories and emotions seemed only to proliferate. She had come to a point where even a letter meant to be helpful, as Alsop’s plainly was, was capable of setting off strong feelings of distress. Simply by causing her emotions to surge, Alsop’s remarks had plunged her back into the trauma. Jackie replied to Alsop on the thirty-first by observing that contrary to what people said about time making everything better, it was proving to be “just the reverse” for her. She noted that every day she had to steel herself, as she put it, took a little more out of her that she needed for her task of making a new life. Jackie’s abject suggestion that JFK’s death had left her to be the “miserable self” she had long been seeking to escape horrified her former mentor.

“You have never had nearly enough self-confidence,” Alsop passionately retorted. “… Your self is not ‘miserable.’” Reminding Jackie that when she first came to him, he had given her the highest handicap he had ever bestowed on any starter, Alsop urged her to concentrate on all that faced her presently when she endeavored to start over again.

Jackie had a fantasy of what might be possible in New York, where she was to take up temporary residence at the Carlyle Hotel while an apartment that she had purchased at 1040 Fifth Avenue was being prettified. As she told Treasury secretary C. Douglas Dillon, whose purview included the Secret Service, she longed to be able “to walk around the city, take taxis, do all the little daily things, without two people always following.” On her first day in Manhattan, Monday, September 14, the indications certainly seemed positive. She took both children rowing in Central Park, where few people appeared to notice them. This was nothing like Washington, where she had needed only to appear at her front door for onlookers to call her name and snap photos in rapid succession. For a few halcyon hours it seemed as if New Yorkers might actually afford her a modicum of privacy, but the picture changed abruptly the next day.