Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis: The Untold Story (17 page)

Jackie would later speak of the autumn crisis, when a single miscalculation, either in Washington or Moscow, threatened to set nuclear weapons flying, as the period in the entire marriage when she had been the closest to her husband. “Please don’t send me anywhere,” she begged him. “If anything happens, we’re all going to stay right here with you. Even if there’s not room in the bomb shelter in the White House, please then I just want to be with you, and I want to die with you, and the children do too—[rather] than live without you.” At length, by a combination of adroit negotiation, deft timing, and sheer nerve, JFK successfully resolved what came to be known as the Cuban missile crisis. In the end, it was Khrushchev who backed down, when he consented to remove the missiles from Cuba.

There followed a strange interlude in Kennedy Washington, when, amid the resounding chorus of praise for the president’s strategic victory over Khrushchev, there was also, for the first time, significant open dissension among certain members of JFK’s intimate circle about the sex parties, the mistresses, the prostitutes, the procurers, and the drugs that were regular features of his private life. “They had turned that place into a brothel, hadn’t they?” said Betty Coxe Spalding of the debauched atmosphere that President Kennedy, Dave Powers, and their group had established at the White House. Spalding was one of those who finally decided that she could no longer countenance Jack’s womanizing. “I didn’t approve of the way he behaved,” she recalled. “It was sick.” Sissie Ormsby-Gore, who had herself known Jack since before the war when they were members of the same elite London set, also made it known now that she was “disgusted” by his betrayals of Jackie, to whom Sissie had become close during David’s tenure in Washington. Presently, Sissie was one of the very few people to whom Jackie initially confided, not long after the missile crisis, that she was pregnant. Jackie’s pregnancies had always been troubled, and now, as before, she was concerned from the outset that the baby might not survive. The first lady thereupon quietly withdrew from the active public role she had undertaken at a moment when her husband had needed her help.

For all of Jackie’s precautions, however, the baby was born prematurely, with the same lung deficiency that had afflicted John Junior, except that in the present case the condition was much worse. At Children’s Hospital in Boston, to which the four-pound, ten-and-a-half-ounce newborn, Patrick Bouvier Kennedy, had been moved, specialists, hoping to keep his lungs open, planned to try a pressure chamber typically employed in open-heart surgery. That night, JFK insisted on sleeping at the hospital, where the child visibly struggled to breathe. The president, wearing a white surgical cap and gown, held tiny Patrick’s fingers for hours. He was still touching them when, shortly after four
A.M.
on August 9, 1963, the baby died. Directly, JFK went to Jackie at Otis Air Force Base Hospital, where, as she later described the scene, he knelt by her bed and sobbed. Afterward, Jackie told Betty Spalding that she had “never seen anything like that in him.” He had reacted so heartlessly to the stillbirth of a daughter, seven years before. His response this time was entirely different, and Jackie, by her own account, was “stunned” and not a little hopeful that the ordeal might yet change him as a person.

At the same time, the child’s death sent Jackie into a deep depression, news of which prompted an invitation, conveyed by her sister Lee, to cruise the Aegean as a guest on Aristotle Onassis’s yacht. Previous European yachting holidays having been a big problem for this family on at least two occasions, the president initially did not like the idea of the new trip. For one thing, Onassis’s history of legal skirmishes with the U.S. Maritime Commission and the Justice Department made it unseemly to accept the magnate’s hospitality. More generally, his substantial business dealings with the U.S.government through Victory Carriers, a New York–based shipping company in which he held a large stake, posed conflict-of-interest problems. To make matters worse, there had been speculation in the press that Onassis was having an affair with Jackie’s sister. The columnist Drew Pearson went so far as to suggest that Onassis was maneuvering to become the American president’s brother-in-law, with all of the advantages that the familial status would provide. Under the circumstances, it seemed wisest to decline the invitation.

Still, Jackie wanted to go, and at length JFK conceded, as he said, that the cruise would probably be “good for her.” Jackie insisted that there could be no question of accepting her host’s offer to deflect some of the potential criticism by absenting himself from the yacht for the duration of her stay. So, in light of the misleading photographs that had been published at the time of her cruise with the Agnellis, JFK, at his wife’s behest, drafted Undersecretary of Commerce Franklin Roosevelt Jr. to accompany her on the
Christina
in the role of a chaperon. The anticipated presence neither of Roosevelt nor of Stas Radziwill, who would be accompanying his wife, mollified those administration figures, Attorney General Robert Kennedy not least among them, who regarded the cruise as an ethical and electoral nightmare. As though there were any need to do so, Kenny O’Donnell warned the president that he had “an election year coming up.” In a similar vein, the American ambassador in Greece, Henry Labouisse, urged the president to keep Jackie off of Onassis’s yacht—not because her presence on the
Christina
would be wrong in itself, but rather because it was bound to leave “a poor impression.”

Such criticisms were nothing, however, compared to the storm that erupted as soon as Jackie’s trip was announced to the public. Angry letter-writers pelted the White House with protests. Some of the complaints were the work of the usual cranks, but a good many letters voiced the apparently sincere feelings of betrayal experienced by average citizens who had mourned the death of young Patrick and felt somehow mocked by Jackie’s vacation on the playboy’s boat. Why, they demanded to know, if she was well enough to go to Europe, did she not simply resume her responsibilities as first lady? Why not be a good wife and remain at home to help and care for her busy husband? The uneasy subtext of much of this was the question of whether people of her stratum of existence reacted differently to life’s tragedies than everyone else did. The angry chorus intensified when Jackie turned up in Greece, where reports of all-night revelries on the
Christina
attended by the first lady and about a dozen other guests drew bitter protests from the American press and public. Jackie’s cruise also caused JFK trouble in Congress, where Republicans branded the trip “improper” and asked why she did not simply choose to see more of her own country rather than gallivant about Europe.

Looking back at the episode in light of all that was so soon to follow, Jackie regretted her prolonged absence in Europe, as well as certain of her private behavior in the aftermath of her October 17, 1963, return to the United States. “I was melancholy after the death of my baby, and I stayed away last fall longer than I needed to,” she would tell Father McSorley. “And then when I came back he [JFK] was trying to get me out of my grief and maybe I was a bit snappish; but I could have made his life so much happier, especially for the last few weeks. I could have tried to get over my melancholy.” That, at least, is how she remembered it in 1964, when she was being counseled, by the priest among others, that it was time to “get over” the death of her husband. Interestingly, guilt feelings of a very different origin were already in the mix when she returned to the States on October 17, 1963, ten days after JFK had signed the instruments of ratification of the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which, in close consultation with Harold Macmillan, he had at last secured with the Soviets—the “beginning” JFK had often spoken of during the presidential campaign, as well as in his inaugural address. So, unlike his hero Churchill, who had had to leave office before he could accomplish the great goal, Kennedy had managed to win the first precious postwar agreement with the Soviets after all.

Jackie, for her part, was uncomfortably aware of the political trouble her stay on the
Christina
had just caused him; he, coolly conscious of appealing to her “guilt feelings” when he asked her to accompany him, along with Vice President and Mrs. Lyndon Johnson, on an upcoming political trip to Texas. Jackie’s assent, offered unhesitatingly, took the form of “a gesture of contrition” from a wife who, by her own account, had always been the partner in the marriage to make the first move toward conciliation.

Jackie had never accompanied the president on a domestic political trip before. Quite simply, it was not the sort of thing she relished or felt confident doing. Could she bring it off now, especially after the torrent of public criticism she had just drawn? Kennedy’s political consultants saw Texas as a trial run for the 1964 presidential campaign. Despite everything that Jackie had accomplished to date as first lady, in the Kennedy camp there remained significant skepticism about quite how she would play there.

Hardly had she emerged from Air Force One in San Antonio, Texas, on November 21, 1963, however, when that skepticism evaporated. Dressed not like the jet-setter of recent controversy but rather like the conservative, though young and pretty, wife of a well-to-do American businessman, Jackie skillfully endeared herself to the crowd with what Lady Bird Johnson approvingly described as “a big, hesitant smile.” That hesitancy seemed to signal Jackie’s humble acceptance that whatever her past triumphs in Paris, Vienna, London, and elsewhere, today it was for the people of Texas to make up their own minds about her. Throughout the junket, she dutifully, strategically, played the part of the good, ordinary wife, ever doting on and deferring to her husband. Afterward, the first lady’s press secretary reflected: “I think she wanted to be the woman to accompany John Kennedy to Texas.” Ironically, that very determination to linger in the background quickly made Jackie, in the words of one press commentator, “almost the focus of the trip.” That night, in their suite at the Texas Hotel in Fort Worth, the president assured her: “You were great today.” The next morning, he humorously told an audience in the hotel’s Grand Ballroom: “Two years ago, I introduced myself in Paris by saying that I was the man who accompanied Mrs. Kennedy to Paris. I am getting the same sensation as I travel about Texas.” Back in the presidential suite afterward, before they flew on to Dallas, he asked her if she would accompany him on a campaign trip to California in two weeks.

“And, then, just when we had it all settled,” Jackie recalled in conversation with Father McSorley, “I had the rug pulled out from under me without any power to do anything about it.”

Of course, by the time she said that, sudden horrific events had inevitably and irreversibly made her a different person than the one she had been when her husband made his pitch about California. Still, what exactly did she think, or at least wish the priest to think, had finally been “settled” that last day of JFK’s life? Certainly, whatever Jackie may once have hoped, the loss of a child had not changed him any more than marriage had. In both cases, he had soon reverted to past sexual habits. Had the assassination never taken place, Jackie would still have had to live among men who not only knew of the president’s infidelity, but who in certain cases routinely shared girls with him. She would still have had to constantly face women—White House employees, journalists, members of her social circle—who at one time or another had slept with, or enjoyed somewhat briefer exchanges with, her husband.

From the moment in 1952 when Jackie had broken her engagement to another man in order to pursue a relationship with Jack Kennedy, politics had been both enemy and friend to her. Enemy, because, in the beginning, Jack’s decision to seek a senatorship meant that he would often be away. Friend, because if Jack did manage to win a place in the Senate, given his particular ambitions he would soon no doubt require a wife. From the outset, their relations had been characterized by a good deal of separation and longing, the latter on Jackie’s part anyway. At times, he had vouchsafed her little more than the voice heard amid a crash of coins in what she imagined to be some oyster bar on Cape Cod; the books, mainly British, that he left with her by way of suggesting how he saw himself intellectually; the French-language texts about Indochina, which she spent many late lonely nights translating in hopes that “he has got to ask me to marry him after all I have done for him.” On their honeymoon she had been careful, as reported in a letter to his parents, to leave him alone a few hours each day. But even then, Jack had suddenly sent his young bride reeling when he suggested that she return to the East Coast, while he enjoyed a few extra days in California by himself. “What shall I do?” she had frantically asked another, older woman at the time. In one form or another, Jackie had been confronted with that very question over and over in the course of the decade of marriage that had followed.

But now again, politics, in addition to being the enemy, had also presented itself as a friend. Her brilliant reception in Texas thus far had finally persuaded Jack that America was “ready” for her.

Henceforward, when he went on the road, he wanted Jackie at his side.

Seven

During the long winter that followed, during the lonely nights that never seemed to end, the wakeful nights that no quantity of vodka could assuage, Jackie would relive the sliver of time between the first gunshot, which had missed the car, and the second, which hit both the president and Texas governor John Connally. Those three and a half seconds became of cardinal importance to her. In the course of her marriage, she had constructed herself as Jack Kennedy’s one-woman Praetorian Guard—against the doctors, against the political antagonists, against the journalists, even against anyone in his own circle who to her perception would do him harm. So, again and again that winter of 1963–1964, she rehearsed the same brief sequence. If only she had been looking to the right, she told herself, she might have saved her husband. If only she had recognized the sound of the first shot, she could have pulled him down in time.