Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis: The Untold Story (27 page)

When Johnson called her on March 25, 1965, she had only just arrived in Hobe Sound, Florida, a few hours previously. In the four months since the November 22 commemorations, Jackie had moved about a great deal; moved about almost compulsively. She had sojourned in Aspen, Colorado, and Lake Placid, New York. She had traveled to Mexico. Now she had taken a house for ten days at the Jupiter Club in Hobe Sound. After that, she was off to New Hampshire and Vermont. The question being not whether the mind’s floodgates might suddenly, spontaneously, reopen, but rather how best to keep those inevitable occasions to a minimum, she had persisted in shunning all public appearances since she canceled the two charity events in late November.

Finally, however, Jackie had nervously accepted one invitation, if only because it had come from David Harlech, who had recently resigned his post as ambassador in Washington and was back in England. On May 14, Queen Elizabeth was due to dedicate to JFK’s memory a parcel of land at Runnymede, where in 1215 King John had met with his rebellious barons to sign Magna Carta, the foundation of constitutional government. It was the dedication ceremony honoring President Kennedy that LBJ had called to discuss with Jackie in Florida.

“I wanted to suggest that if you cared to, that you and your party take one of the 707s. And I think that I might ask Bobby and Teddy if they wanted to go to represent me.… You just let me know and I’ll have it all set up for you.”

“Oh, that’s so nice, but that’s wasting taxpayers’ money!” said Jackie, whom Alsop had recently warned against allowing Johnson to put her in his debt.

LBJ, for his part, denied that flying the Kennedy party to England would be a waste of tax dollars. On the contrary: “It’s very important to us, and very important to the country.”

“Oh, listen, I just don’t know what to say,” Jackie returned.

“You don’t say anything.”

“That’s the nicest thing I ever heard of.”

“Just quit being so elusive. It’s been too long since I saw you,” said LBJ, suggesting by this rejoinder the character of his anxiety and calculations. “And whenever, wherever I can do anything,” the president went on, “you know I’m as close as the phone, dear.”

Perhaps he was, but three days later “Dear” chose to reply in writing to his offer. “I did not know if I could steel myself to go on one of those planes again,” Jackie told the president. On reflection she had decided to accept: “But please do not let it be Air Force One.” Lest the familiar ambience carry her back in memory to November 22, 1963, she preferred not to be confronted with the particular plane in which she had flown home with her husband’s remains. Nor would it be enough to keep clear of the plane itself. Though in her rational mind Jackie would know that she was not on the actual aircraft, even the palest reminder, imperceptible though it might be to other eyes, threatened to set her off, and once the images and emotions began to flow, there would be no stopping them.

“Please,” Jackie implored, “let it be the 707 that looks least like Air Force One inside.”

So Jackie and her children, along with JFK’s surviving brothers, flew to London on one of the other presidential planes. The day of the Runnymede ceremony was hot and sunny, the soft white tree-fluff that wafted in the air causing one commentator to think of “snow in May.” By three in the afternoon, approximately five thousand guests, some wearing impromptu hats of folded newspapers against the glare, had gathered in the meadow, which was flecked with the gold of buttercups and dandelions. That, at least, was the bucolic scene that most people would have observed. But Jackie no longer perceived the world quite as most others did. To her biased vision, Runnymede was an emotional minefield, not least of the dreaded reminders being the sight of Harold Macmillan. At the time David Harlech first broached the idea of the memorial, Jackie had told him that she could not conceive of traveling to Runnymede unless Macmillan was asked to speak. In the event, however, Macmillan’s hoary presence on the speakers’ platform, where she too was seated, proved to be too much for her. By this point, she associated Macmillan not just with her late husband, but also with the magnificent fifteen-page February 18, 1964, letter about herself, which had spurred so many unsent letters of her own. In Atlantic City, Jackie had spoken in a barely audible voice. At Runnymede, even that level of performance would be beyond her.

As Macmillan addressed the audience, Jackie became so overwrought that she realized she could not possibly deliver her own remarks. This was the same woman whose demeanor at the time of JFK’s funeral had so endeared her to her countrymen. Days after the assassination, she had still been in the warrior-like state of emotional lockdown into which she had been plunged in Dallas. As she said, there had been moments when she had wanted to cry but found that she could not. Eighteen months later, Jackie cried all too easily, and once she began, there was always the danger that she might not be able to stop. On this particular occasion, given her decision not even to try to speak, the text of what she had intended to say, a meditation on the way in which English literature and history had shaped JFK “as did no other part of his education,” was published in the London press instead.

Two days after Runnymede, Jackie was similarly affected in the course of a private Kennedy family visit to the Macmillan family at Birch Grove. The many mementoes of President Kennedy about the house, the special rocking chair he had used during his 1963 stay, the gifts that Jackie had helped select at the time for both the prime minister and Lady Dorothy, the various framed photographs of JFK and Macmillan together, along with the sight of their host steering Bobby into his library and closing the door in anticipation of the sort of private colloquy he used to conduct with JFK—all of it had the effect of sending her into what an observer described as “a very low mood.”

That mood persisted the next day when she was too upset even to get out of bed. Having missed the chance for anything like “a proper talk” with Macmillan though previously they had communicated so feelingly and unrestrainedly on paper, she set out to write a new long letter to him in which she spoke of the intensity of her emotions at Birch Grove; of her unsuccessful efforts since moving to New York to banish Jack from her thoughts for the sake of his children; and of the children’s role in giving her a reason to live in order that she might make them the people Jack would have wished them to be. “Probably,” she darkly suggested, “I will be too intense and they will grow up to be awful.” Again when she read over what she had written, she felt embarrassed by her words and judged that it might be best not to send the letter off, but when she tried to produce another letter, the result was so stiff and formal that, as she told Macmillan, she took a deep breath and dispatched both missives to Birch Grove in hopes he would understand.

Jackie had suggested in the original May 17, 1965, message to Macmillan that the things her husband most cared about were no longer priorities in Washington and that there was nothing she could do to affect that. Meanwhile, others at home, notably LBJ, took a different view of what a pointed word or gesture from her might mean just now in the political sphere. Despite his landslide victory in the 1964 presidential election, Johnson persisted in the belief that he had to continually paint himself as his predecessor’s legitimate heir, a leader determined to pursue the policies of President Kennedy. To some perceptions, Johnson had even been willing to politicize his presidential proclamation on the first anniversary of November 22 when he underscored that “the vision of John F. Kennedy still guides the nation.” Did it really? Or was LBJ, who had his own exceedingly ambitious agenda for the country quite apart from anything JFK had been prepared to pursue, merely seeking to reassure the American public that all was as it would have been? As far as Johnson was concerned, the White House could ill afford for RFK ever to be viewed as being more in sync with his late brother’s ideas than Johnson was. Especially now that RFK had left the administration, Johnson was ever striving to seem somehow more Kennedy than Kennedy.

LBJ’s blood had risen shortly before his January 1965 inauguration when he learned of rumors emanating from certain of the Kennedyites that he blamed America’s troubles in Vietnam on JFK’s immaturity and poor judgment. “Have you ever heard me blame Kennedy for anything?” LBJ demanded of Bob McNamara, who replied reassuringly: “No, no, absolutely not!… I have mentioned this to Jackie several times.” Johnson was under intense pressure from McNamara and McGeorge Bundy to choose between two alternatives in Vietnam, either to escalate U.S. military involvement there or to withdraw. Lest he damage himself with voters, the president had put off any decision until after the presidential election. Now that Johnson was in again, he had a new concern, that controversy over Vietnam could jeopardize the Great Society domestic program that was so dear to him. At the same time, LBJ did not wish to come under attack from RFK and his supporters on the grounds that he had neglected to pursue his predecessor’s Vietnam policy. The fact that there was no clear agreement among the various sects of the religion of Kennedy as to exactly what that policy had been added immeasurably to LBJ’s challenge.

In early June, a cable from General William Westmoreland, U.S. military commander in Vietnam, calling for extensive additional combat troops to pursue the conflict there led McNamara to conclude that a choice could no longer be postponed. While he waited for the president to make a decision at last, he repeatedly volunteered to run interference with his friends the Kennedys. At the moment, it seemed as if his best chance of bringing over at least one prominent Kennedy was to work a little more on Jackie.

He certainly was not without influence on her. Jackie called McNamara the Kennedy cabinet member who “gave the most … as much as Jack’s own brother Bobby gave.” She regarded him as one of the very few friends who had not failed her when she tried to start over in Georgetown after the assassination. Freshly reeling from her experience of absolute helplessness in the face of overwhelming events, she had responded strongly, welcomingly, gratefully, to this forceful figure who always seemed so sure of what needed to be done and so certain that he was the man for the job. It was McNamara who on the night of the assassination had immediately offered to buy her the old house in Georgetown where she had once lived with JFK; McNamara who had argued that the president needed to be buried not in Massachusetts as family members seemed to favor, but in a national cemetery; McNamara who had chosen the particular spot where JFK was laid to rest. She anointed McNamara her shining knight. She credited him with having saved her from drowning. She later said that in her dark times he had always been the one who helped her.

Among other things, he liked to read to Jackie Henrik Ibsen’s
The Master Builder
, a play that explored some of the very questions she had been struggling with since Dallas. The picture of Bob McNamara, technocratic manager par excellence, staunch believer in man’s capacity to intelligently and rationally control events, speaking the impassioned lament at life’s randomness and unpredictability that is at the heart of the play—“Oh, that such things should be allowed to happen here in the world!”—is a riveting study in contrasts. The play’s protagonist broods about the deaths of his two infant sons after a fire that occurred more than a decade before, a tragedy that still gnaws at him day and night. Seeking to make sense of the senseless, he alternates between blaming God for the deaths and holding himself responsible, though intellectually he knows he is not at fault. At times, these preoccupations appear to have deranged him. When he falls to his death at the close of the third act, whether or not he has taken his own life remains an open question.

It is well to remember that McNamara was referring to a woman who saw him, and to whom he had indeed acted, as a loyal, loving friend, when he crisply, confidently assured LBJ, not long after she had returned from Europe: “I’m planning to have dinner with Jackie tonight in New York. I can do something on that front, if I can’t on Bobby.” Paranoid though Johnson often was, his anxiety that Jackie might be displeased with his administration, whether wholly or in part, was not without factual basis. In private she had already written in a negative vein to both Macmillan and Alsop about the way things were proceeding under her husband’s successor. The danger for the White House was almost certainly not that she would say such things publicly or even that, à la RFK, she would leak any views she might have to the press. But there was always the chance that she could speak to a friend or an acquaintance who would in turn communicate to others that the widow was, in her word, disenchanted.

So LBJ was very keen on the idea of McNamara’s undertaking to influence Jackie over dinner in a new push to align her with the White House. Evidently, William Manchester was not alone in his willingness to use alcohol to get what he needed from Jackie. The president, seeming rather to relish the prospect, went so far as to suggest certain points McNamara might put off making to her until after they had had their second drink.

Nor was the June 17 dinner the end of it. McNamara continued to work on her in the weeks that followed. After a reconnoitering trip to Vietnam that led to his final recommendation to put in more troops, he turned up at the Cape bearing a gift for Caroline and John: a stuffed Vietnamese tiger, which America’s ally, the despotic, Hitler-worshipping new Vietnamese prime minister General Nguy
ễ
n Cao K
ỳ
, had given him in Saigon. Jackie responded with an elegant thank-you note in the form of a watercolor that the tiger had inspired her to paint. A delighted McNamara had the picture mounted and framed. While the widow and the defense secretary diverted themselves in this charming manner, fifty thousand American soldiers had been dispatched on the president’s orders, with many more troops to follow. In response to Johnson’s decision to commit American combat forces, Norman Morrison, a Quaker from Baltimore, Maryland, immolated himself some forty feet from McNamara’s office window at the Pentagon. Morrison had had his year-old daughter with him at first, but as onlookers begged him to let her live, he threw the child to safety. McNamara later wrote: “I reacted to the horror of his action by bottling up my emotions and avoided talking about them with anyone—even my family. I knew Marg and our three children shared many of Morrison’s feelings about the war, as did the wives and children of several of my cabinet colleagues. And I believed I understood and shared some of his thoughts. There was much Marg and I and the children should have talked about, yet at moments like this I often turn inward instead—it is a grave weakness. The episode created tension at home that only deepened as dissent and criticism of the war continued to grow.”