Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis: The Untold Story (12 page)

Still rushing about on Friday, Jackie had paused to watch on a bank of television screens as her husband nearly secured the nomination, then lost to Estes Kefauver. Afterward, with one errant wing of his shirt collar inching upward as if he were a hastily dressed prep school student en route to dine with his parents, Jack faced the first failure he had ever known in public life. To make matters worse, he had to do it before an audience of 40 million at-home viewers. In a terse, gracious, gallant concession speech that Jackie sadly observed from a box in the Amphitheater, he asked that Kefauver be named by acclamation. Coming as it did at the close of a nail-biting real-life television drama, this affecting last little star turn consolidated what would henceforward be Kennedy’s reputation as America’s most telegenic politician. The vicissitudes of his unsuccessful bid for second spot on the ticket had riveted the nation, and in a matter of hours the modern-day alchemy of television had spun the name “Jack Kennedy” into political gold. Losing was far from delightful to him, certainly, but after his speech he left the hall in something very close to a haze of glory. “Don’t feel sorry for young Jack Kennedy,” proclaimed the
Boston Herald
. “He probably rates as the one real victor of the entire convention. His was the one new face that actually shone. His charisma, his dignity, his intellectuality, and in the end his gracious sportsmanship … are undoubtedly what those delegates will remember. So will those who watched it and heard it via TV and radio.”

Following the great defeat, Kennedy and some of the people who were closest to him repaired to the steak house behind the Amphitheater. At the meal, Jackie, wearing a black dress and pearls, was crying openly. Eunice, said to look “like Jack in a wig,” wept as well, but nowhere near as much as her sister-in-law. It had been thought wise to attempt to cushion Jackie somewhat from the hurly-burly of the politicking by having her stay with Eunice, who had a home in Chicago, while Jack roomed with Torby MacDonald, now a U.S. congressman. But in the end there really had been no protecting her. At one point during the convention, she had climbed up on a seat in her box to cheer Jack’s nominating speech and to wave a Stevenson placard. At another, she had fled a reporter’s questions by disappearing into a stairway that led to the bowels of the Amphitheater, then hiking up her dress and dashing across an underground parking garage. And on Thursday, she had stayed up through the night with other members of the (no-longer-“surreptitious”) Kennedy campaign. In the course of the week, she had witnessed what might almost be described as her husband’s apotheosis. She had seen the crowds of delegates press in on him from all sides wherever he went, heard the cheers and lavish praise for “her” Jack. She had watched the cup draw very near to his lips, but she had also been present when it was snatched away and given to another man. Clearly she had wanted this victory as much as Jack did, and at the steak house her demeanor left no doubt that she was, in the words of an observer, “very disappointed.” So much so that Jack blamed what happened to her afterward on the frustrating outcome of the vice presidential balloting. “Jackie got too excited at the convention,” the senator would tell his doctor in September. “It was all my fault for losing.”

After the vote, Jackie was furious with Stevenson, who she believed had treated her husband shabbily at the convention. In contrast, by the time Jack reached the steak house, he was already contemplating what today’s near-win might mean for the future. “I could really be president with a little more planning.” Some people at the time saw Kennedy’s decision to seek the vice-presidential nomination in 1956 as an important first break with his father. She who had had a chance to soak up the ether in Jack’s childhood room at the Cape understood better than most that in fact his independence and ambition had taken root when he was a boy. Though it was solely in his imagination, he had been, as Jackie perceived, always moving, always charging forward, often in spite of his father’s particular plans for him. The only real difference in Chicago was that the relentless momentum was suddenly palpable to everyone else as well. Now he meant to leave for the South of France, and as his wife had already discovered, in this matter as well there was to be no stopping him. Certainly nothing she said to Smathers when they faced each other at the steak house was going to change that. It sounds as if her words were flavored with irony when she told him: “Why don’t you and Jack take a trip to the Mediterranean? He wants to go.” With a flourish of faux-courtliness, Gorgeous George promptly “agreed,” though in fact the yachting vacation had been arranged long before. Jack accompanied her as far as Massachusetts, where he declined to talk to reporters, with the explanation that he had had no sleep for three days. Not two hours later, he was gone.

On August 23 at Hammersmith Farm in Newport, Jackie began to hemorrhage. An emergency cesarean was performed at Newport Hospital, but the daughter whom she had planned to call Arabella was stillborn. Jack, on a chartered yacht with various young women who appear not to have been overly concerned with keeping their clothes on, was unreachable by phone or any other means. When at about two in the morning Jackie emerged from the vapors of anesthesia, the first face she glimpsed was that of Bobby Kennedy. After the convention, where Bobby had served as floor manager, Jack’s thirty-year-old brother had left Chicago still fuming (Bobby seems ever to have been fuming) that the sole reason they had lost to Kefauver was that someone on the other side had “pulled something fishy.” Directly, Bobby had gone off to rest at the Cape in anticipation of joining the Stevenson campaign, not because he had any particular love for the candidate, but rather because the experience would be helpful when Jack ran for president. And, whether Bobby liked it or not, his designated role was to be useful to Jack.

To this point in Jackie’s story, Bobby has occupied a position at the margins of the narrative. Tonight, having raced from Hyannis Port, he appears center stage at Jackie’s bedside with all of the fury and intensity that have long characterized the unhappy third of the original four Kennedy brothers. His “raging spirit,” as Chuck Spalding would call it, was formed early in life as a consequence of Bobby’s desire to “fight his way to the top” of a pecking order where his older brothers, who were both larger and personally more formidable than he, held sway. Scrape away the accumulated impasto of Bobby’s ferocity, however, and there emerge reserves of tenderness and empathy that are suddenly on unrestrained display in his sister-in-law’s hospital room. “Action Man,” as someone dubbed him years later, takes charge immediately. He tells Jackie that she has lost the baby. He arranges for little Arabella’s burial. He assures Rose Kennedy that he has chosen not to notify Jack because in view of Jackie’s deep depression it would be best for them both if they did not see each other just yet. Convoluted reasoning, but given the supreme embarrassment of Jack’s behavior, Rose seems eager to swallow it. In the older brother’s absence, Bobby, who has not previously been especially close to Jackie, ministers to her needs as once she had for Jack when he was hospitalized.

Finally, on August 26, a day after the baby had been buried, Jackie heard her husband’s voice on the telephone from Genoa. Directly—at the urging of George Smathers, who counseled him that to do otherwise would be disastrous for his presidential hopes—Jack returned to the United States. When he flew in to Newport on the twenty-eighth, an Auchincloss family member was waiting for him with a car. Even after Jack had been told about his daughter, he had been disinclined to return much before he was due to begin campaigning nationally for Stevenson in September, with an itinerary that promised to keep him busy until election day. Now, suddenly, he seemed frantic to reach the hospital. “I’ll pay for any tickets,” he said, pressing the driver to run stop signs and yellow lights en route. When at last he beheld Jackie at Newport Hospital, a week had passed since the convention, where it had been made manifest that the White House was suddenly achingly within their grasp. But a tremendous amount had changed in those few days. There could be no mistaking that he had come home to a wife who was angry, grieving, dispirited, confused about what came next. After two failed pregnancies, Jackie worried that she might never be able to have a child of her own, and after all those months of lovingly outfitting a nursery, she questioned whether she could bear to see Hickory Hill again, let alone live there in the future. To be sure, at this point she was as powerless to influence her husband’s behavior as she had been when she spoke to George Smathers of the impending yachting holiday as though every fiber of her being were not ardently opposed to it. Yet for all that Chicago had done for Jack, she needed only to decide to walk away from the smoldering ruins of her marriage to destroy him politically.

Five

“Let’s face it. There are rumors going around in Washington about the senator and his wife, that they’re not getting along, and that they’ve been separated. What about that?”

The woman asking the question was the
Look
magazine journalist Laura Bergquist. At work on a piece about the Kennedys, she was visiting the University of South Carolina campus, where the senator was about to deliver the commencement address. It was May 31, 1957; Dwight Eisenhower had begun his second term as president; and in the wake of the defeat of the Stevenson-Kefauver ticket, Jack Kennedy had decided to go after his party’s 1960 presidential nomination. Following Kennedy’s incandescent appearances in Chicago, so many speaking invitations had come in to his office as to fill the briefcase Ted Sorensen had presented him with after the ill-fated yachting holiday. In the intervening months, even when his campaign duties were done, he had been constantly in transit, coming home rarely, as Jackie later said, and then mostly to sleep. All the while, the political badinage at certain Washington dinner parties had begun to include talk about the senator and his wife. Newspaper coverage disclosing the family’s inability to reach Jack on the Mediterranean while Jackie lay in Newport Hospital; the sudden, surprising sale of Hickory Hill to Bobby Kennedy; Jackie’s having spent the better part of November 1956 abroad with her sister; the knowledge in Washington that she and her goatish husband were so often apart; and even a published story to the effect that in the aftermath of the stillbirth Joe Kennedy had paid Jackie a million dollars to remain in the marriage—all this had been responsible for the rumors that Bergquist had decided to raise with the Kennedy camp.

Though Sorensen, the upright, socially awkward twenty-nine-year-old senatorial aide to whom Bergquist had posed the question, did not in any obvious way resemble Kennedy, he was nevertheless oddly, even disturbingly, similar to his employer. Chuck Spalding judged that in the course of their professional association, Sorensen, whether unconsciously or by design, had by slow degrees “modeled himself, his gestures, his language, his thoughts” on Kennedy. Laura Bergquist perceived that Sorensen, whom she had known well prior to his association with Kennedy, had “picked up a lot of Kennedy’s attitudes and mannerisms along the way.” Given Sorensen’s adoration of Kennedy, she described the process overall as an act of “passionate self-effacement.” Joe Alsop, similarly, spoke of the aide’s “self-abnegation.” Of course, Sorensen needed to sound like the senator when writing for him. But before long, things had gone substantially beyond that. There came a point when, should the need present itself, Sorensen had no difficulty impersonating Kennedy on the office telephone. At such times, it was almost as if an alien spore had taken over Sorensen’s body. But it was also the case that Sorensen had managed somehow to insinuate himself in Kennedy’s head. The aide was proud of his ability, when conversing with Kennedy, to complete his boss’s sentences and anticipate his questions.

Jackie found the dynamic creepy. Not without a palpable twinge of discomfort, she later insisted that she could remember when Sorensen began to ape her husband. She was sure the younger man had been blushing at the time. She perceived that he had “such a crush” on Jack and that that adulation was perilously rooted in feelings of “resentment” and “inferiority” on Sorensen’s part. “I think he wanted to be easy all the ways Jack was easy.” But then, her husband no doubt would have given much to possess Sorensen’s easy way with a pen. McGeorge Bundy, later a national security adviser in the Kennedy administration, also picked up on the element of danger in, as he characterized it, “a relationship that was so close and so entangled and so full of worry to both” men. Indeed, that May of 1957, the relationship had been on the verge of imploding. Kennedy had just won the Pulitzer Prize for
Profiles in Courage,
and Sorensen had been making noises about town that in fact he had written a good deal of the book for the senator. Word of another man’s considerable involvement in the preparation of a work for which Kennedy alone had won the Pulitzer seeped into the public discourse in the form of charges by the culture critic Gilbert Seldes, who wrote on May 15 in
The Village Voice
about the senator’s having had a collaborator; and later and far more explosively by the political columnist Drew Pearson, who spoke on national television of Kennedy’s having used the services of a ghostwriter. It is easy to see why in the wake of the literary award Sorensen would resent his position vis-à-vis Kennedy. Kennedy’s abiding upset, as Bundy perceived it, about the need to employ a writer is also understandable. Finally, that month, Sorensen accepted a payment, which he regarded at the time as “more than fair,” in exchange for his written agreement to back off from seeking public recognition of the extent of his role in Kennedy’s writing life.

So in the end, contrary to rumor, it had not been Jackie who had had to be paid off lest she behave in such a way as to damage her husband politically. The real recipient of the hush money had been Sorensen, whom she would long persist in calling “sneaky.” At a moment when Jackie was widely believed to be at odds with her husband, she cast herself, neither for the first time nor the last, as Jack’s one-woman Praetorian Guard. Rather than futilely wax indignant about Jack’s repeated betrayals of her, she found it much more satisfying to focus on what others had done to him. “Jack forgave so quickly,” she later recalled, “but I never forgave Ted Sorensen. I watched him like a hawk for a year or so.” Strange to say, the garrulous ghostwriter, whom her husband had meanwhile contrived to clutch with hoops of steel, also saw himself as Kennedy’s impassioned defender. Sorensen responded to the question about marital rumors, as Bergquist remembered, “rather heatedly.” “Well, that’s not true,” said Sorensen, who when speaking of his boss had a tendency to sound, at least to Bergquist’s ear, a bit self-righteous. “As a matter of fact, I can tell you this in confidence. Jackie is pregnant and that’s why she’s not traveling with him.” At the time Sorensen made that statement, Jackie was three months pregnant and had no plans to trumpet the news that she was expecting. If anything went wrong, the prospect of its being rehearsed in the press, as the stillbirth had been, horrified her. Additionally, Jackie had been eager to minimize any worries or pressures on herself for the duration of the pregnancy. So the gossip about her marriage, the gathering storm about the authorship of
Profiles in Courage,
and finally a series of newspaper items about the pregnancy, notably one by the Broadway columnist Dorothy Kilgallen, were especially unwelcome.