Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis: The Untold Story (31 page)

Hours after the issue containing the first installment went on sale in New York’s Times Square, an estimated four thousand copies had been purchased in that venue alone. In the course of the heavily ballyhooed four-part serialization of what
Look
was calling “the most important book of 1967,” the magazine sold the highest number of copies per issue in its history. Overall circulation jumped from 7.5 million per issue to 9.5 million. Newsstands, where sales spiked from 500,000 to 2 million an issue, could scarcely keep the magazine in stock, prompting
Look
’s admen to launch a poster campaign based on the slogan “If you can’t buy it, borrow it.” Meanwhile, Governor Connally and other players in the assassination saga suddenly and conspicuously entered the fray with complaints to the press about their various disagreements with Manchester’s account.

Also crowding the newspaper columns were reports of the refusal of the West German magazine
Stern,
which had purchased the serialization rights, to follow the edits agreed to by
Look.
The first German-language installment included a letter written by Jackie to her husband while she was in Europe during the summer of 1963. The contents of that letter were among the personal details she had demanded be stricken from the
Look
magazine excerpt. Now, however,
The New York Times
published the letter in the context of the paper’s coverage of the
Stern
matter. The episode imparted new meaning to Jackie’s perception, previously communicated to LBJ, of the hollowness of her victory. A month after the
Times
’s James Reston had suggested in his column that she was futilely “holding up her hand to [an] avalanche,” she sadly agreed to settle the lawsuit that had done so much to help publicize the very work she had hoped to suppress. Whereupon Manchester, whom Harper & Row had hitherto been rather keen to restrain, felt free to publicly assail the woman he regarded as the author of his latest woes.

His blasts against her, both spoken and written, went on for weeks. Challenging the widely held assumption that the imprimatur of the slain president was Jackie’s to confer, Manchester suggested that, despite the widow’s complaints, he had told the story exactly as JFK would have wanted it written. He insisted that JFK was the only Kennedy he needed to please. He noted that Jackie’s air of fragility had always been deceptive and that she had become increasingly strong-minded since Dallas. He argued that “nothing in her new life discouraged this tendency.” He maintained that she was isolated from the world by her wealth and by the sycophants who danced attendance on her in hopes of assuring their own political futures in an RFK administration. He encouraged the public to view her as an accomplished tragic actress. “She must be seen to be believed,” Manchester insisted. “When she turns on the charm, it’s incredible.” Jackie was also, he suggested, quite capable of turning on the tears, as she had when she spotted reporters on the day of the
Look
settlement talks. The implication in all of this was that the figure who had exerted such impressive emotional control at her husband’s funeral was similarly the master of her effects now, and that Jackie’s public display of anguish over
The Death of a President
had been a performance to cover her own grasping, imperious nature.

In the book, by contrast, Manchester portrayed Jackie as the heroine whose conduct at JFK’s funeral had, as he wrote in another context, “held us all together … and … rekindled our national pride.” It is suggestive that Manchester believed his final chapter, covering the events of November 25, to be the best and most important he had written. As an artist and a storyteller, he aimed to deliver the “redemption” that the more clumsily and haphazardly presented offerings of the Warren Commission had failed to provide. (“So far as I know,” Manchester wrote, “no committee has ever composed a brilliant symphony, produced a stunning painting—or written a memorable book.”) In terms of his book’s architecture, he conceived of the penultimate scenes, presided over by the widow, as a “catharsis,” which somehow invested the “ghastly futility” that had gone before with meaning. The fact that Manchester in his public remarks about the lawsuit was now gleefully and not a little rabidly comparing that same heroine to Marie Antoinette and Mao Tse-tung did provoke some skepticism. Still, the consensus of opinion favored Manchester, the underdog who came off as a brave battler for press freedom against the woman who would capriciously deny the nation the resolution it deserved.

At the close of January 1967, both the Harris and Gallup polls made it clear who the loser had been. According to the former survey, one in three Americans thought less of Jackie as a consequence of the Manchester dispute. No doubt the public stoning to which she had been subjected in the press, from Vera Glaser on, had had an effect on people’s perceptions as well. Having previously assured Jackie that her tranquility was paramount to Lady Bird and him, LBJ rejoiced at national polls that documented the self-inflicted damage wrought by her lawsuit, both to her personal reputation and, even more delightfully, to RFK’s 1968 presidential ambitions. “God, it just murders Jackie and Bobby both!” the president exulted when he reviewed the latest poll numbers. “It just murders them on this thing!”

Jackie’s sense of beleaguerment in this period bonded her the more strongly to Bob McNamara. She felt a sense of imaginative kinship with the defense secretary, whom she saw as similarly misperceived and menaced over Vietnam. Then and later, Jackie focused on those moments when McNamara seemed dangerously under assault from, on the one side, antiwar activists and, on the other, his opponents in government, who, in her view, hoped to snuff out McNamara’s light bit by bit “for their own misguided ends.” By this time, McNamara’s personal crisis had deepened to the point where he was taking pills to sleep, his nights vexed by brooding reveries and bad dreams that Jackie associated with her own. Shortly after the last of the
Look
extracts had run, a major profile of McNamara in
Parade
magazine brought Jackie to tears whose authenticity not even William Manchester, had he known about them, could be tempted to doubt, as they had been shed in private. Recalling JFK’s line “One man can make a difference,” Jackie asked herself apropos of McNamara’s solitary struggle: “When has one man ever made such a difference?”

She who had just failed in her efforts to hold back an avalanche of reminders wrote on March 7 to tell McNamara how proud she was of him: “With all the grinding power of government, of military against you—and just you, trying to hold it all back, trying to stop the nightmare.” She who had often lain awake at night dwelling on what she felt certain had been her errors in Dallas assured this man who now privately acknowledged the miscalculations that had cost so many lives in Vietnam: “I know how much you must give up in the dark.” She who had sought on countless occasions to imaginatively undo the tragic past avowed: “I feel so close to you in the times I know must be difficult for you—because in my dark times you were always the one who helped me. I wish I could change the world for you.”

Jackie wholeheartedly bought into McNamara’s self-justificatory sense of himself as laboring passionately and selflessly to alter American foreign policy from within the present administration, where he could operate so much more effectively than if he simply quit. Where many others viewed McNamara as a symbol of the American war machine, Jackie saw a man single-handedly attempting to end the war. Where strangers in the street greeted him with angry cries of “Murderer!” and “Baby burner!,” Jackie wondered how many people would one day “owe their lives, or any peace they might know in their lives or their children’s lives,” to him. Where a legion of skeptics saw a carnivorously ambitious individual endeavoring to hold on to power under Johnson while jockeying to assure that he would have a position in a new Kennedy administration, Jackie beheld a figure determined to do the right thing at whatever personal cost.

She once told him apropos of his efforts to stop the Vietnam War: “You are the Master Builder.” Strange to say, in her relations with McNamara, Jackie replicated the role of the fanciful young woman in the Ibsen play who thinks that she alone understands the Master Builder (“Oh, no one knows him as I do!”) and perceives the heights he is capable of attaining.

In April 1967 came the tsunami of publicity surrounding the 600,000-copy first printing of, depending on one’s perspective, the long-awaited or long-dreaded Manchester book. For a woman who still needed to find a way to relegate the assassination to the past, Jackie’s challenge was made the more difficult by the fact that her husband’s murder was again incessantly in the news. During this period, she lapsed into a frenzy of anticipation of a public event she was scheduled to attend, the christening of the aircraft carrier
John F. Kennedy
in Newport News, Virginia. At the ceremony, as at Runnymede, Jackie would inevitably confront a host of traumatic triggers, this time in the form of numerous familiar faces associated with her White House years. As the day drew near, she was conscious of dwelling in a self-protective state of emotional numbness, which she described afterward to Marg McNamara as “a kind of trance.”

When she actually encountered all those faces at the May 27, 1967, dockside ceremony, the trance, by Jackie’s own account, became all the more intense. That day, it fell to Bob McNamara to steer her through the crowd on her arrival and to extricate her as soon as possible after LBJ’s brief but barbed speech. The president’s remarks proved to be a thinly veiled attempt to claim JFK’s authority for the current administration’s pursuit of the Vietnam War. Among his listeners at the event was Bobby Kennedy, who, a few weeks before, had outraged him with a speech that called on the administration to seize the initiative in Vietnam by halting the bombardment of the North and announcing Washington’s readiness to negotiate. RFK had been worried that such a move on his part would be too risky politically, but he had been under acute pressure from within his own circle to speak out. In view of all this, the prevailing narrative of the spectacle that unfolded in Newport News highlighted current presidential politics.

For Jackie, by contrast, from first to last the occasion had been about something else entirely, her abrupt early departure following the ceremony far from the tacit expression of displeasure with Johnson’s Vietnam policy, and of familial solidarity with RFK’s, that some observers took it for. Desperate to escape before the floodgates opened, Jackie, as she later told it, held her breath while McNamara cunningly sent Johnson on to the reception area with the assurance that she would be right along. This was one of those moments when the need to remove herself from public view was very strong in her. The unbidden memories and emotions, when inevitably they came forth in a rush, were not anything she cared to endure in front of other people. So, before the president had had a chance to realize that he had been cheated out of a photo opportunity with his predecessor’s widow, McNamara had hurried Jackie and the children off to the helicopter waiting to take them to their small jet. On her return to Hyannis Port it was evident that, though she had gotten out in time, the day had been an excruciating experience. “I have reached the point where I cannot go through any more public functions,” Jackie said to old Joe’s nurse, the unfortunately named Mrs. Dallas. “Today was heartbreaking … and I cannot keep it up.”

Still, she had little choice but to try. Seventy-two hours later, Jackie was suddenly arranging to travel to England with RFK and other Kennedy family members for the funeral of Sissie Harlech, aged forty-five, who had been killed in an automobile accident in Wales. Since Lord and Lady Harlech’s departure from Washington, David Harlech had accepted a position in Edward Heath’s shadow cabinet as deputy leader of the House of Lords. Meanwhile, he had been a frequent visitor to the United States, where he had been prominently associated with both Harvard’s rechristened Kennedy School and the planned Kennedy Library where JFK’s presidential papers were to be housed. He also had served as a trusted adviser to Bobby Kennedy, as well as to Jackie. Following Sissie’s funeral, he arranged to visit Jackie in Ireland, where she was to stay for six weeks. “They were like two wounded birds together,” said his daughter Jane Ormsby-Gore of the widow and widower. “Ghastly things had happened to them.”

Another ghastly thing very nearly occurred in the course of Jackie’s stay. Evenings, without telling anyone, including the Secret Service agents who had accompanied her and her children abroad, Jackie would slip out of the house she was staying in and drive herself to a cove where she could have a long, solitary swim across the channel and back. One afternoon, she was out picnicking on a sandbar with some others when she felt the familiar urgent need to escape. In the belief that no one in the party had seen her go off, she walked along the beach for approximately half a mile to her secret spot. Jackie, veteran of many summers at East Hampton, Newport, and Hyannis Port, was an expert swimmer. In an earlier time, she almost certainly would have recognized that the waters she was about to enter were at high tide, perilously so. But, focused by turns on her demons and on the process of numbing herself to them, as she tended to be these days, she was oddly oblivious to the danger. Midway across the channel, Jackie was caught in an overpowering current so icy that she could not keep her fingers together as she swam.

Greatly fatigued, helpless against the mix of cold and current, she feared she was about to slip past the spit of land opposite and be flung into the twelve-mile-long bay. Suddenly, however, “a great porpoise,” as she later described her rescuer, materialized at her side. It proved to be a Secret Service agent who, unbeknownst to her, had followed her to the cove night after night. Today, fortuitously, he had broken away from the party of picnickers in order to pursue her here. Setting his shoulder against hers, he guided her to shore, where she sat on the beach for a long while, coughing up seawater. Had the agent not been there, Jackie would likely have drowned. During the previous few months, she had privately characterized herself as dazed; as uncertain whether she would ever be able to feel anything again; as existing in a kind of trance. While she certainly had not chosen to live in this manner, body and brain had withdrawn, the better to concentrate on avoiding painful memories and emotions. In Ireland, however, a posture designed to spare her a certain amount of anguish had almost had fatal consequences. Being, in effect, dead to the world so much of the time had nearly cost her her life.