Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis: The Untold Story (26 page)

After she delivered Caroline to her new school at the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Carnegie Hill, Jackie and young John visited RFK’s midtown campaign headquarters. Bobby’s staff had notified the press (though not the local police station) that his brother’s widow was to be there greeting campaign volunteers, and a battery of photographers downstairs on East Forty-second Street attracted a crowd of some four hundred people. When Jackie, holding young John by the hand, emerged from the campaign office after about ten minutes, the friendly, cheering crowd surrounded her. Amid the chaos, there was a bit of pushing. More than once, as campaign workers attempted to clear a path, Jackie seemed as if she might be about to fall. In the end, she and her son reached the car safely. Still, it was the sort of episode that, after Dallas, could not but propel her into heart-pounding, adrenaline-pumping high alert. She had yet to spend forty-eight hours in the city when the visit to Kennedy headquarters had thrust into stark relief the conflicting needs of Jackie and the brother-in-law whom she depended on and adored. At a time when he was seeking public office there, New York was almost certainly among the last places in which to search for any kind of peace.

The timing of her move proved inopportune in other ways as well. The findings of the Warren Commission were scheduled to be made public later that month in hopes of providing resolution before the first anniversary of JFK’s death. The panel’s assessment that a crazed lone gunman had been responsible offered no comfort to Jackie, who would have preferred for her husband at least to have died for some great cause such as civil rights. Instead, the official ruling merely highlighted the senselessness of the tragedy. That left her with no way to rationalize his violent death in terms of some higher meaning. At any rate, as she told Alsop, she was determined to read nothing that was written in the run-up to November 22. Given the degree of public interest in the assassination, however, it was one thing to actively attempt to avoid reminders of Dallas and quite another to succeed when the volume was so immense. The uncertainty about where and when they might suddenly materialize transformed Manhattan, even her own hotel suite, into an anxiety-laden obstacle course.

And it was not just the reminders themselves when they popped out at her, often in the form of words and pictures, that were so upsetting. The very anticipation of encountering some new trigger could be acutely painful, as when, in this period, Jackie worried at the prospect that she would one day be confronted with a book titled
The Day Kennedy Was Shot.
“The idea of it is so distressing to me, I cannot bear to think of seeing—or of seeing advertised—a book with that name and subject,” she wrote on September 17 to Jim Bishop, whose work-in-progress she had thus far failed to obstruct by commissioning another book on the same subject. Jackie went on: “This whole year has been a struggle and it seems you can never escape from reminders. You try so hard to avoid them—then you take the children to the news shop—and there is a magazine with a picture of Oswald on it, staring up at you.” Without mentioning that she was already fleeing from Manchester, she repeatedly cited his forthcoming authorized account in a renewed effort to stop Bishop. Jackie begged Bishop not to proceed with his book, noting that its very existence “would be just one more thing that would cause suffering.”

Bishop countered by pointing out that his book was only one among a great many on the subject. He cited various other accounts that had already been published or were even then (in case Jackie had not yet visualized the process herself) “being set in type.” “This morning,” Bishop helpfully continued, “ten thousand newspapers throughout the United States published a re-creation of November 22, 1963. Next week, Bantam books will place 500,000 copies of it in the bookstores. The Government Printing Office has a backlog of orders for the Warren Commission report. G. P. Putnam’s John Day sent an announcement to me that they were publishing the European bestseller: ‘Who Killed Kennedy?’” Far from assuaging her, these and similar details were the equivalent of a red rag to a bull. Jackie, meanwhile, sent copies of this fraught correspondence to Manchester, who, far from being pleased by her emphatic reiteration of his favored status, balked at Jackie’s reference to having “hired” him and to her assumption that so long as he was “reimbursed for his time” she had the right to decree that his book ought not to be published.

In the midst of further frantic back-and-forth with Bishop and his publishers, Jackie forgot to call off the delivery of her newspapers at the Carlyle before the September 28 release of the Warren Commission report. “I picked them up and there it was,” she said at the time, “so I canceled them for the rest of the week.” She soon learned that that would not be protection enough. Living with PTSD is a bit like inhabiting a country that has been besieged by terrorists. One has no idea when the next attack will occur or the precise form it will take. It may come in a place one had every reason to expect to be safe. Jackie was at her hairdresser Kenneth’s when she saw a copy of the October 2 issue of
Life,
whose lead story concerned the Warren Commission report. The stills on the cover, extracted from amateur footage of the assassination filmed by Dallas resident Abraham Zapruder, showed Jackie futilely struggling to pull her wounded husband down to safety in the moments before the fatal bullet struck.

“It was terrible,” she said of her brush with that particular magazine. Then she added: “There is November to be gotten through … maybe by the first of the year…” When she made these comments, a week had passed since the Kenneth’s incident, and Jackie was at home at the Carlyle having drinks with Dorothy Schiff, the publisher of the
New York Post,
whose endorsement RFK was then scrambling to secure. Early on in the New York Senate race there had been expectations both among the Kennedyites and in other quarters that by this point in the campaign the late president’s brother would have established a decisive lead among voters. With less than a month to go before the election, however, major polls showed RFK lagging behind the incumbent, Senator Kenneth Keating, a moderate Republican. It was said that Bobby was not as popular as Democrats tended to be among Jewish and Italian-American voters in the state, that many New Yorkers were as uncomfortable with him as they had been with Richard Nixon four years previously, and that a surprising number of people who had supported JFK in 1960 might well split their ticket and vote for Keating this time. Even certain of RFK’s backers worried that their man was running a lackluster campaign, that the more accessible public persona he had discovered in Poland was no longer in evidence, and that overall Bobby seemed somehow woefully ill-cast in his new role. An additional complication was that though Bobby publicly portrayed himself as JFK’s rightful political heir, he privately resented the necessity to dwell so much in the shadow of his late brother. On one occasion, as RFK looked out at a large crowd of New Yorkers who had come to see him, he protested to an aide: “They’re for him. They’re not for me.”

At a moment when the New York press appeared to have united against his candidacy, RFK was eager for a nod from the politically liberal
Post
. Dorothy Schiff privately likened Bobby to Sammy Glick, the ruthless, backstabbing protagonist of the Budd Schulberg novel
What Makes Sammy Run?,
but she also was keen to have Jackie sign on as a
Post
columnist. Hence the October 10, 1964, meeting that RFK engineered between the two women. The previous week he had promised to produce Jackie when Schiff mentioned how much she wanted to meet her. Still, the publisher had assumed until virtually the last minute that the meeting would never actually occur. But Bobby’s campaign was in trouble, and it fell to Jackie to emerge from her private hell in order to secure the endorsement herself. Jackie’s desperation in trying to help her brother-in-law when she was hardly in any condition even to try was reflected in the odd character of certain of her remarks about him. “He must win. He will win. He must win,” she said. “Or maybe it is just because one wants it so much that one thinks that.”

More usefully, perhaps, Jackie assured her guest that while many people called Bobby “ruthless and cold,” in fact he had “the kindest heart in the world.” Otherwise, she talked disjointedly about, among other subjects, her need to get away from Washington because of the many reminders there, and her apprehensions about moving to a new apartment, which suddenly seemed a good deal less welcoming than when she had first seen it.

“People tell me that time will heal,” she burst out. “How much time?” It was then that she spoke of her disastrous mistake the other day in forgetting to cancel her newspaper delivery, of the episode at Kenneth’s, of the new trials that faced her in November, and of her hope that things might be better in 1965.

The meeting with Dorothy Schiff was far from the only instance of Jackie’s permitting herself to be rolled out in support of Bobby’s candidacy. On one occasion, she even allowed him to produce young John, clad in a white sweater and red short trousers, at a photo opportunity in Riverdale, the Bronx, where Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. had once owned a home. By reminding voters that Bobby had lived in New York when he was a boy, the visit aimed to counter the carpetbagging charges that continued to vex his campaign. He might have taken any of his own children to Independence Avenue that day, but it was more politically advantageous by far to be pictured with JFK’s son. Lest there arise a perception among voters that Bobby alone enjoyed the favor of President’s Kennedy’s widow, LBJ, when he came to New York in keeping with his promise to campaign with Bobby, asked to be taken to see Jackie in her new apartment.

It was a maxim of LBJ’s that “when you get ’em by the balls, their hearts and minds are sure to follow.” What could Bobby do but acquiesce at a moment when, humiliatingly, his best hope for being elected seemed to be a big win on Johnson’s part, and when he needed to tie himself to Johnson at all costs? In the event that Johnson beat Goldwater by a huge margin, it was statistically unlikely that there would be enough ticket splitting to make the difference for Keating. Much was made of the lack of fanfare in advance of Johnson’s October 14 meeting with Jackie. There had been no prior announcement of LBJ’s stop at 1040 Fifth Avenue, to which he was transported in an unmarked car, but that did not mean that the strategic thirty-minute visit arranged by Bobby was not prominently reported in the papers the next day, which was all that the president needed to reaffirm his ties to JFK.

In the end, Bobby was elected to the U.S. Senate on November 3, the apparent beneficiary of a Johnson landslide. To certain of RFK’s admirers—perhaps best described by McGeorge Bundy as that “circle of people who felt that their happiness and hopes died on the twenty-second of November unless they could be revived by the younger brother”—the victory marked day one of the push to secure a Kennedy restoration in Washington. Jackie attended the election-night festivities at Delmonico’s along with Sissie and David Harlech, but Bobby’s triumph, much as she had wanted and worked for it, did nothing to alter her own situation as the first anniversary of November 22 drew near. More than ever, Jackie was privately preoccupied with armoring herself against all that the anniversary promised to bring—the tributes, the requiem Masses, the television dramas and documentaries, the magazine and newspaper articles.

Uneasily, she hung suspended between a determination to try, in her phrase, “to put [JFK] out of my mind,” and a sense that it was her duty to memorialize him. Though she did not intend to join Bobby, Ethel, Eunice, and the rest at Arlington National Cemetery on the twenty-second, or indeed to participate in any public tributes prior to that date, one last decision about JFK’s burial place still faced her. Jackie had yet to ratify the final plans for the grave design. Once she had done that, John Warnecke, the architect whom she and Bobby had appointed in the aftermath of the assassination, could call a press conference, as seemed fitting, in advance of the first anniversary of President Kennedy’s death. According to Warnecke, a six-foot-two, 220-pound former college football star who had then been in his mid-forties, on the same day Jackie gave her final approval to the grave design, she also went to bed with him. Given the signal conjunction of these two events, was the latter an effort on her part to jump-start the process of forgetting that, in another context, she spoke of consciously endeavoring to begin?

Finally, Jackie, who had noticeably lost a good deal of weight in the weeks since Bobby’s Senate race, remained in seclusion on the twenty-second. Her children and a few other family members were with her at the fieldstone house overlooking Long Island Sound that she had recently taken as a weekend retreat. When the last of the church bells had tolled, she sat up late into the night scribbling letters, which she tore up afterward because, as she said, she feared they were overly emotional.

Her one-year period of mourning at an end, she planned to appear at a pair of charity events immediately thereafter, a Washington, D.C., screening of the film
My Fair Lady
to benefit the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and the International Rescue Committee, and a fund-raising dinner for Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles. As early as the twenty-fourth, however, it became apparent that even now there was to be no relief from the emotional triggers that could come at her unexpectedly at any time. Days before her Warren Commission testimony had been officially scheduled to be released, Jackie opened the newspaper to discover extracts of her remarks, including a description of her efforts to second-guess her actions in Dallas.

Whereupon she canceled her impending appearances. A spokesperson announced that Mrs. Kennedy had hoped to attend both events: “However, due to the emotional strain of the past ten days she feels unable to participate in any public engagement.”

Ten

“I just heard that you were probably going to go to the memorial to the president,” LBJ told Jackie on the phone.