Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis: The Untold Story (10 page)

Deprived of power in 1945, Churchill had again become prime minister in 1951, but as David spoke to Jack, the British leader was widely believed to be about to hand over power to his heir apparent, Anthony Eden. Certainly, Eden himself and various other Conservative leaders, as well as the administration in Washington, were eager for the old man to leave the stage. To some minds, the all-party eightieth-birthday tribute to Churchill set to take place in November seemed an ideal time for him to announce his retirement. Churchill, however, insisted that he needed more time in office. Furiously working to avert the third world war that in an age of nuclear weaponry threatened to destroy mankind, the PM remained intent on finishing the business left undone at Potsdam.

The year before, when Jackie, in her role as the Inquiring Camera Girl, asked people, “Malenkov said all issues between the United States and Russia are solvable by peaceful means. Do you agree?,” the question touched on a key difference between Churchill’s and Eisenhower’s approaches to postwar East-West relations. Georgy Malenkov had been one of the new leaders in Moscow who had taken over after the March 5, 1953, death of Stalin. Churchill wanted to meet with the fledgling Russian leadership unconditionally and at once, not so much in the belief that they would immediately give ground on the Soviet presence in Eastern and Central Europe (and on other matters of contention) as that any contact between East and West inevitably helped to open up the heretofore hermetically sealed totalitarian society. In Churchill’s view, each meeting, each agreement no matter how modest, each infusion of words and ideas from the West, was another step toward defeating the Soviet Communists without bloodshed. He argued that such contacts and infiltration were feared by everything that was evil in the Kremlin regime, and that by contrast Western leaders had nothing to fear from top-level talks so long as they approached those encounters from a position of military strength. Eisenhower, still bristling from having been lied to by Stalin over Berlin in 1945, took a sharply different view. He insisted that Stalin’s successors demonstrate good faith by making specific concessions before he would agree to face them across a conference table.

As of October 1954, there the battle lines between the two chief Western Allies, Washington and London, remained. Churchill was still passionately fighting Eisenhower on the matter of a summit meeting, but time was clearly on the American president’s side. Quite simply, the aged, ailing Churchill could not last long in office. When Ormsby-Gore spoke at length to Kennedy of the expertise he had been developing in disarmament negotiations, the context of his comments was the Churchillian policy of seeking the peaceful defeat of Soviet communism through contact and agreements. Ormsby-Gore suggested to his old friend some of the great things the latter might accomplish in the next phase of his political career—if only Kennedy, having reached what Disraeli called the fatal age of thirty-seven, the age that had snatched away Raphael and Byron, survived the October 21 operation.

At first it appeared he might not. Some seventy-two hours after the three-hour-plus operation, Kennedy developed a urinary tract infection. Before he lapsed into a coma, he called out for Jackie, who was waiting outside his room, but hospital staff declined to admit her. The incident led her to vow that she would never again permit doctors or nurses to keep her from her husband’s side when he needed her. Meanwhile, Evelyn Lincoln, when the hospital reached her at home at a late hour, was notified that the senator’s physicians did not anticipate he would live until morning. Finally, Jackie joined other family members at his bedside as a priest administered last rites. Afterward, Jackie prayed, by her own account for the first time in her life. When next Mrs. Lincoln called the hospital, she was told that Kennedy had rallied in the course of the night.

Informed that the next ten days would be critical, Jackie read to her husband, clutched his hand, applied a moist cloth to his forehead, spoon-fed him—anything to help. When, though he was still gravely ill and in tremendous pain, the worst of the crisis seemed to have passed, Jackie, sitting not far from his hospital bed, wrote thank-you letters to various dignitaries who had sent good wishes to the senator. “It will be so long before he can write a letter or talk on the phone or anything,” she wrote to Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson on November 4, “and he wants you to know how much he appreciates your thinking of him and all the nice things you said.” When Jack was finally well enough, he managed to undertake some correspondence of his own. Most other messages he could entrust to Jackie, but not the charming epistle he drafted on November 11. “I was terribly disappointed that at the last moment I was not able to come to Europe, especially when you were going to be in Paris and we could have had such a good time.” The day after Joe Kennedy had publicly and not a little frantically denied a swirl of rumors in Washington that his son would never return to his Senate seat, Jack assured Gunilla von Post, and was probably also reassuring himself, that he would be back in Washington in January and would “without fail” come to Europe as soon as the Senate adjourned for the summer. As a sickly child in that tiny, bleak bedroom at Hyannis Port that Jackie would later share, he had often used the weapons of stealth, guile, and imagination to fight his battles. Now, dreaming of his reunion with the Swedish girl whom he had seen only once before in his life, it was as if he were willing himself to get better, projecting himself forward to a better time. Though Jackie was a constant comforting presence in his hospital room, it was Gunilla’s face that, he wrote, haunted him still. Two months after the operation, Kennedy’s doctors feared it had been a failure; indeed, that he might never walk again. In anticipation of being moved to the Kennedy family home in Palm Beach, he wrote again to Gunilla on December 18 to fantasize about his European summer plans and to suggest that in the meantime she write to him care of his father. Three days later, at a quarter past nine in the morning, a grim-faced Jackie walked alongside and whispered phrases of encouragement as her emaciated husband, supine beneath a plaid blanket, was rolled out of the hospital on a gurney en route to the ambulance due to transport the couple to LaGuardia Airport.

In the sprawling family house in Palm Beach, whose stucco facade was pocked with areas of mildewed peeling paint, and where a two-room suite on the first floor had been specially equipped with a hospital bed, Jack soon lapsed into a deep depression. It had been thought in New York that the move would be helpful to him. Instead, he was manifestly not improving. The pain from the metal plate that the doctors had inserted in hopes of stabilizing the spine was unceasing. The smelly, suppurating eight-inch-long wound failed to heal. The taped-down dressing had to be changed regularly, and he spent a good deal of time lying on his stomach because he could not tolerate any pressure on his back. After many months of frenetic political activity since the Kennedys’ honeymoon, everything appeared to have come to a crashing, anticlimactic halt. It seemed to Jackie, who slept in an adjoining bedroom in case she was needed at night, that it was all Jack could do “just to keep from going mad.” He grew bitter and dark in a way he simply had never been before. His father and others worried that, though it had not actually killed him, the botched operation threatened to destroy Jack as a man.

Which is why it was so important when he began to call for great numbers of books and other printed materials. Work tables were carried in, along with filing cabinets and a dictating apparatus. Jackie read to him, took notes on lined yellow paper, arranged for the professor who had taught her at Georgetown University to sign on as a researcher. The senator also had more than a little help with the actual writing of what slowly emerged as his new book. Trifles such as his letters to Gunilla he had no trouble producing on his own. More serious efforts were another matter. Though he responded powerfully, even viscerally, to great prose, he had always been an awkward writer, his ideas tending to outpace his ability to capture them on paper. Kick had known about this problem. So had Inga Arvad and John White. Thus, he had made it his habit of late to use a young senatorial aide named Theodore Sorensen to assist in the preparation of articles and other publications, in addition to the helper’s myriad other duties.

On the book project, Kennedy himself appears to have been largely responsible for the introductory and concluding chapters, whereas Sorensen labored more extensively on the interior sections. The manuscript’s underlying theme of political courage, however, and its application to present problems were entirely the product of Kennedy’s thought and experience. In 1938, Jack had joined David Ormsby-Gore and the other bloods who comprised their London set in ardently debating the questions about leadership raised by Churchill in the newly published book
Arms and the Covenant,
a collection of his speeches since 1932. Alongside his accusations that the government of Stanley Baldwin had abdicated its duty by letting Britain “drift” while Germany systematically rearmed, Churchill had juxtaposed the prime minister’s rejoinder in the House of Commons. Baldwin maintained that, given the temper of the electorate, had he pressed for rearmament—in the necessity of which he privately believed—he would have been defeated in the 1935 election. He made the case that his motivation for putting politics first had not been mere personal ambition, but rather his anxiety that the Socialists, whose statements and votes against defense measures were a matter of record, would triumph and that as a consequence things would be much worse than under his leadership. The marathon talkers in Jack’s group went furiously back and forth about whether it was the duty of a leader in a democratic society to take action that, though to his mind right and necessary, jeopardized his political survival.

Sixteen years later, that question would be central to Kennedy’s book
Profiles in Courage
. Writing out of his pivotal recent conversations with Ormsby-Gore, Kennedy suggested that a fresh approach to East-West relations, one likely to prove unpopular with a broad swath of American voters, was needed to beat a “foreign ideology that fears free thought more than it fears hydrogen bombs.” That phrase owed much to Churchill’s perception about the Kremlin’s fear of words and ideas as a threat to their closed totalitarian society. Since boyhood, Kennedy had been steeped in the thought of the prewar Churchill. The passage, along with others like it, signaled that Kennedy had begun to engage the postwar Churchill as well. Churchill left office on April 5, 1955, before he had succeeded in initiating the new epoch in East-West relations he hoped would bring about the peaceful defeat of Soviet Communism.
Profiles in Courage
quietly suggested that in Churchill’s absence from public life, that dream might yet be realized by others.

Meanwhile, Kennedy had regained his resolve but not his health. His pain was the greater now that he had endured the operation than it had been beforehand. When doctors determined that the oozing wound in his back was infected, he returned to the Hospital for Special Surgery to have the metal plate removed and to undergo a bone graft. In the course of a follow-up visit three months later, the endocrinologist associated with the hospital, Ephraim Shorr, who had assisted Philip Wilson at the time of the original surgery, admitted to Kennedy that he too had believed the operation ought not to have been performed. Why had he not said anything previously? Because he had felt that it was not his place to second-guess his orthopedic colleague. Had it been up to Shorr, he, like his Boston counterpart, Elmer Bartels, would have recommended some other course of treatment. Now that the operation had failed, however, he wanted Kennedy to see a new doctor in New York. Jackie, when she learned that a matter of professional etiquette had prevented Shorr from speaking up prior to the surgery, was furious. As far as she was concerned, it was “just criminal” that the operation had been allowed to be undertaken in the first place. Jack did not share her rage. It was to be typical of the marriage that whereas Jackie, perceiving some medical, political, or journalistic affront to her husband, would be indignant on his behalf, he tended to respond objectively and pragmatically. In this respect, she resembled Joe Kennedy Senior, who once remarked that, unlike Jack, when he had a bad experience with someone, he was inclined to “remember it forever.” As Jackie came to understand and admire, Jack preferred to coolly regard certain people as if they were mere pieces “on a chessboard.” The problem for Jackie, of course, was when he viewed her that way as well.

In May, after an absence of seven months, Jack Kennedy returned to Washington pretending to be almost fully recovered. He was richly tanned and he insisted to the reporters at the airport that he had discarded his crutches but a few days before. Beside him, Jackie, by contrast, appeared wan and tense, but then it was not Mrs. Kennedy whom the journalists were there to inspect. The senator delivered another demanding performance the following day, when he ascended the front steps of the Capitol, then pointedly walked, rather than rode, across the grounds to the Senate Office Building. He brought it all off to perfection, but the exertion cost him massively. Afterward, alone with Jackie, he retreated in agony to the hospital bed that had been set up for him at their hotel. Later that month when the Senate recessed for the Memorial Day weekend, Kennedy, on crutches again, secretly checked into the Cornell Medical Center at New York Hospital to begin receiving Novocain injections from Dr. Janet Travell, the pain specialist whom Ephraim Shorr had been urging him to see. He was back in the Senate on June 1, 1955, and Travell continued to treat him until the Senate adjourned in August. The Novocain injections were a partial fix at best, but they did at least allow him to live with the pain and to persist in acting before the world as if nothing very much was wrong.

In private, meanwhile, he delivered a second masterly performance, this time for his wife. The nervous young woman who, several months previously, had mystified and irritated an older, graver observer by chattering on about some magazine photographs when life-and-death matters urgently needed to be discussed had since incontrovertibly shown her mettle in the course of her husband’s long, arduous, and not entirely successful convalescence. Now that Jack was somewhat better, he insisted she had done enough. He thought she deserved to have some fun. He felt confident that with the Novocain injections he was receiving, he was finally well enough to manage without her. He maintained that just because he had to remain in Washington until August, there was no reason she should be required to do the same. In truth, she was exhausted and did long to get away. After all those many months, the gift he proposed to give her was far from unwelcome. Jackie’s sister Lee had moved to London, where her husband, Michael Canfield, had become a social secretary to the U.S. ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, Winthrop Aldrich. Jack suggested that Jackie visit the Canfields in July. As soon as the Senate adjourned, he would join her for a real vacation together in the South of France. In the meantime, he was in a position to make the prospect of London even more alluring. Jackie had loved seeing David the previous autumn. In England, Jack would arrange for her to be entertained at dinners and country house weekends by other members of his prewar set of whom she had heard much but had yet to meet. He cast the trip as a gesture of gratitude and adoring self-sacrifice on his part. Actually, it was anything but that.