Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis: The Untold Story (34 page)

Later that evening, at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Rose Kennedy attempted to comfort Jackie by wrapping both arms around her daughter-in-law’s shoulders after the younger woman exploded in tears over Bobby’s casket. Rose and Ethel Kennedy alike were sustained by the power of their faith. Andrew Devonshire, who attended RFK’s funeral, later remembered feeling nothing less than jealous of the unshakable religious convictions that allowed Rose Kennedy to react so calmly to the loss of yet another of her children. During the time that RFK’s body remained on public view in the vaulted nave, Jackie would have occasion to remember something Ethel Kennedy had told her after Jack died: “At least you have the comfort of knowing that he has found eternal happiness.” Now as then, much as Jackie might have wished to, she simply did not share Rose’s and Ethel’s steadfast beliefs. As she was soon to suggest, for her there was no consolation, no hope.

After a sleepless night, Teddy Kennedy, aged thirty-six, made a vivid impression when he delivered the eulogy at his brother’s June 8 funeral. “My brother need not be idealized or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life,” Teddy said, eyes downcast, “but be remembered as a good and decent man who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it.” In private, however, Teddy, like Jackie, palpably lacked the tranquility of Rose and Ethel. He had loved and depended on Bobby, whose existence had been one final buffer against a role that, unlike RFK or JFK, Teddy had never coveted. Teddy, the cosseted baby of the family, the beloved purveyor of joy and mirth, had long been content to leave it to his brothers to carry the Kennedy flag. Bobby had grieved deeply and at length after Dallas, but it is also indisputable that he had been quick to reconnoiter the newly altered political landscape in terms of his own long-range presidential ambitions, as well as to coolly calculate how JFK’s widow might prove helpful in his negotiations with LBJ. Four and a half years later, Teddy showed no comparable inclination when, less than an hour after his brother had been pronounced dead, Allard Lowenstein, a liberal Democrat and founder of the Dump Johnson movement, approached him in a hospital elevator to earnestly communicate that he, Teddy, a man whose senatorial candidacy had not too long ago been widely regarded as a joke, was all that the party had left.

In the days and weeks that followed, when other prominent Democrats sought to persuade him to take up his brother’s fight by running against Richard Nixon in 1968, Teddy tended to be no more receptive to their overtures. In a time of national anxiety about the madness that had already taken place that year and about the madness yet to come, party leaders saw Teddy as a link to what now looked to be a simpler and more optimistic era, the years when a Kennedy last inhabited the Oval Office. At length, Mike Mansfield would go so far as to say that Teddy Kennedy had no choice about whether to accept the leadership role in the party that Mansfield characterized as “preordained … a matter of destiny.” Given the myth of Jack Kennedy’s reluctance to take over from Joe Junior after the war, Teddy’s acquiescence to a long-entrenched family narrative that he, like Bobby before him, appears never to have questioned seemed preordained as well.

All of this put what proved to be an impossible burden on Teddy. In Jackie’s telling, he sailed Nantucket Sound that summer “with this terrible look of not real gaiety on his face—and his lips cracked with red wine … as he took Bobby’s sons and Jack’s son to sea.” She portrayed these voyages as a Celtic ritual, akin to Jack’s having taken Teddy sailing after Joe Junior died. But, as she well understood, they also served the purpose of facilitating the senator’s escape from the prominent public role that was being urged upon him. National polls suggested that the Kennedy name on the ticket, whether it be on the top or at the bottom, might assure Democrats a landslide, in contrast to the toss-up that was otherwise prophesied for November. In early July, however, when Schlesinger, over drinks at Jackie’s cottage in Hyannis Port, so much as suggested the possibility that Teddy might run, she was quick to reject the idea. Jackie was convinced that if Teddy took a more conspicuous part in public life, he too would be shot.

To Jackie’s mind, Teddy was being terribly brave under the circumstances. He unflinchingly embraced what he saw as his duty not only to serve in loco parentis to Jack’s and Bobby’s children, but also to comfort and care for his slain brothers’ widows. Nonetheless, he was far from the force in Jackie’s life that Bobby had been after Jack died. Beset by visions of her own annihilation as Jackie confessedly was, her perceived need at this point was for the powerful protector that it was simply beyond poor troubled Teddy’s capacity to be. Jackie compared the family atmosphere after the second Kennedy assassination to the milieu of the White Russians in Paris, grand dukes who drank and despaired all day, despair being the element in which they swam and breathed. But at night, she emphasized, they “have their music—and there is this wild moment of defiance and despair and laughter.” Such was the moral and emotional disarray that greeted Aristotle Onassis when he came to see Jackie less than two weeks after Bobby Kennedy’s funeral.

When they realized the magnitude of what Onassis had methodically accomplished during the four strange months that followed, even some of the people who had observed him then, in Hyannis Port, Newport, and New York City, were astonished. How had he brought it off? How had he successfully courted JFK’s widow at a time when both the Kennedys and the Auchinclosses, not to mention Jackie herself, were still reeling from Bobby’s murder? No one could later accuse Onassis, with his chunky gangster-style dark glasses, brilliantined hair, and enveloping cloud of Montecristo cigar smoke, of having failed to operate in plain sight. There had been nothing subtle or secretive about the gift boxes containing, all told, several million dollars’ worth of diamonds, rubies, emeralds, and pearls that had persisted in being delivered throughout the period when he was seeking to make Jackie his wife. The jewelry itself, in the form of bracelets, tiaras, necklaces, and the like, had been so ostentatious that it would be hard to accuse the sender of having failed to disclose his intentions when he had fairly screamed them to anyone who cared to see or hear. Turning the teachings of Bunny Mellon on their head, Onassis seemed to believe that everything should be noticed.

Nevertheless, Rose Kennedy, though she certainly had entertained Onassis at the Cape that summer (as well as received an expensive bracelet from him, which she had promptly had appraised in the mistaken suspicion that it must be a fake), appears to have been sincerely “stunned” and “perplexed” when, in the autumn, she finally learned of the impending marriage. Rose was troubled by the disparities in age (Onassis claimed to be sixty-two, though he was rumored to be even older) and religion—and certainly by the fact that he was divorced. She confided to her diary that David Harlech would have been the more logical choice by far because he was so much more intellectually compatible and because of his considerable history with the family. David was not a Catholic, of course, but at least he had been married to one. Janet Auchincloss, whom Onassis had similarly visited (and lavishly gifted) early on at Hammersmith Farm, later reacted hysterically to the news that she would soon have him as a son-in-law. There was perhaps no greater indication of Janet’s displeasure than when she evoked the detested name of Black Jack Bouvier. After she failed to turn Jackie from her purpose, the mother wept that her eldest daughter had finally found a way to punish her for divorcing Black Jack. Arthur Schlesinger had met Onassis that summer at the New York nightclub El Morocco. Onassis flattered Schlesinger by saying that he had heard a great deal about him from Jackie and would like to talk. But when the magnate went on to praise the new Greek military dictatorship that had seized power in Athens the previous year, Schlesinger excused himself. Subsequently, the former Kennedy adviser thought that Jean Kennedy Smith must be jesting when she informed him that Jackie was about to marry Onassis. Disbelief shaded into horror as he realized that it was true. Schlesinger’s opinion, that Jackie’s marriage to this unapologetic supporter of the Greek colonels would be an insult to JFK’s memory and a betrayal of everything the late president had represented, epitomized the view of a good many Kennedy-administration veterans. Finally, Jackie’s decision to accept this man with whom she had such emphatic differences in matters of intellect, style, politics, and much else besides prompted Bunny Mellon to ask her point-blank: “Why are you doing this?”

“I have no choice,” Jackie replied. “They’re playing Ten Little Indians. I don’t want to be next.”

In a similar vein, speaking in later years of her unlikely second marriage, Jackie would reflect of the aftermath of RFK’s murder: “I wanted to go off. I wanted to be somewhere safe.”

Never perhaps did it seem clearer that Jackie could no longer find safety under the warmth of the wings of the Kennedys than when she and Teddy traveled to Greece as Onassis’s guests at the beginning of August. Teddy delivered a cringe-worthy performance on Skorpios, Onassis’s four-hundred-acre private island in the Ionian Sea, near Greece’s west coast. At best Teddy’s mission had been to head off the marriage, at worst to negotiate a financial settlement in the widow’s favor. At length, he proved to be no match for Onassis, who, in advance of their parley, plied the younger man with ouzo and girls. In the course of a party aboard the
Christina,
a journalist who was thought to have insinuated himself among the hired bouzouki players (but whom some people later suspected of having been planted by Onassis) photographed the pink-shirted, flush-faced married American senator as he caroused with a young blonde. Teddy thereupon alternated between furious but futile demands that the reporter hand over the film and empty threats to destroy the fellow’s career. Onassis later made a show of using his influence with the rightist government to have the reporter arrested in Athens, where the authorities forced him to surrender the film that had the potential to cause such embarrassment to Jackie and her in-laws. So in the end, Teddy, who had landed on Skorpios as Jackie’s putative protector, had had to be protected himself—and by Onassis and the Greek colonels no less. Such, at least at this point, was the mortifying ineffectualness of the Kennedy family’s new leader, who returned alone to the United States, where calls had intensified that he make himself available to lead America. Ten days after Teddy’s departure from Skorpios, Jackie followed him home with a sense that Onassis, with his island kingdom, seventy-five-man armed security force, warship-sized yacht, and privately owned airline, could afford her the insulation she required against what she pointedly began to refer to as “the outside world.”

At the time, the latter seemed a very threatening place indeed—not just to her, but to anyone with a TV set. Jackie had returned to an America that was riveted by images, similar in form to the bang-bang coverage from Vietnam with which those pictures were interspersed, of young Americans being bludgeoned and tear-gassed in the streets of Chicago, where the thirty-fifth Democratic National Convention was then in progress at the International Amphitheater. Some ten thousand antiwar protesters were set upon by more than double that number of helmeted Chicago police and Illinois National Guardsmen, the latter with instructions to shoot to kill should it prove necessary. Deploying an array of weapons ranging from defense spray Chemical Mace to billy clubs and rifle butts, the authorities indiscriminately attacked people on the street. Following months of assassinations, civil unrest, and overall lawlessness, the images from Chicago depicted a society gone to smash.

The chaos was closely monitored in Hyannis Port, where Teddy Kennedy, meanwhile, pondered how best to respond to the Draft Kennedy movement that was being lashed together at the convention. On the one hand, Teddy reflected that his family had “a hell of an investment” in 1968, and on the other he acknowledged a strong feeling that 1968 was not his year. Eugene McCarthy, Bobby’s former antagonist, lacked the votes necessary to mount an effective challenge against the all-but-anointed Hubert Humphrey. Should Humphrey become president, he seemed likely to continue Johnson’s policies in Vietnam, where the casualty count had spiked since LBJ’s decision not to seek another term. McCarthy offered to swing his support to Bobby Kennedy’s kid brother, but at last Teddy chose to remove himself from the race. He spoke, halfheartedly it seemed, of preferring to run later, when he had had a chance to establish himself “to some degree as in control of events.” As it was, the nation had veered so perilously out of control since Bobby Kennedy presented a filmed tribute to President Kennedy at the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City that Teddy dared not appear in person in Chicago to introduce a similar documentary about RFK. Instead, Teddy’s voice had to be transmitted to the convention hall from Cape Cod.

A little over a week later, Jackie returned to Newport News, Virginia, for what would prove to be her final public appearance in the United States as Mrs. John F. Kennedy. The occasion was the commissioning ceremony at which the aircraft carrier named in honor of her late husband was officially handed over to the Navy. Teddy Kennedy spoke briefly, but the main address was delivered by Bob McNamara. Jackie found McNamara’s paean to JFK, with its echoes of Pericles’s funeral oration on the slain young warriors of Athens, to be an emotionally shattering experience, not least because she believed that of all the works Jack had admired, the Pericles text had been closest to him philosophically.

Late that night at Hammersmith Farm, after everyone else had gone to bed, Jackie wrote to tell “dearest, dearest Bob” that only his speech brought hope—“or rather it makes us all comrades of love and blood in a time of absence of hope.” As the violent and tumultuous summer of 1968 drew to a close, Jackie feverishly wrote of Teddy’s wine-cracked lips, of the certainty that she, Teddy, Bob McNamara, and the rest would “all be annihilated in the end,” and of what she took to be Pericles’s message that rather than seek consolation or hope it is best simply to accept “the terrible way things are.”