Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis: The Untold Story (8 page)

Still, it was regarded as “heresy” in the family to suggest that Joe Junior was in any way the lesser figure. Yet that was precisely what Kick, the sibling born in 1920 as Jack fell ill with scarlet fever, long and defiantly maintained. Kick’s status as, in Rose’s phrase, old Joe’s “favorite of all the children” prevented her from being swatted down for daring to challenge the accepted order of things. She was permitted to speak out, but that did not mean her father was required to listen. He persisted in touting young Joe as the best of the boys, the Kennedy son for whom preeminence had been foreordained. When by the time Jack was about fourteen years of age he had failed to persuade old Joe to alter his views, the second son finally seemed to give up the fight. As both Kick and Lem Billings, Jack’s prep school roommate at the time, understood, that did not mean Jack had abandoned his conviction that he was better than his brother. But, to all outward appearances, he did seem to put aside any hope of displacing him in old Joe’s eyes. If their father persisted in thinking Jack inferior, the teenager thenceforth would gamely play along. Onstage, he cast himself as the sluggard Kennedy brother, whose lack of discipline and ambition his father never ceased to complain of. Offstage, Jack burrowed the more deeply into his reading.

Both tall, handsome brothers were in their early twenties when they appeared together in London at the time of old Joe’s ambassadorship. The English debutantes dubbed Joe Junior “the Big One,” by way of contrast with scrawny Jack. Known to speak often and openly of his confidence that Joe Junior would one day become America’s first Irish-Catholic president, the ambassador encouraged the eldest son to write up his impressions of contemporary Europe as a way of generating the “international publicity” that could be so helpful when at last he was ready to launch himself in public life. The adoring father pitched Joe Junior’s letters on travel and politics to leading periodicals. He urged him to find a way to stitch those letters together in the form of a book. He failed or perhaps refused to see that despite Joe Junior’s ability to look and act the part of a rising man, his perceptions when set on paper tended to be second-rate at best. Meanwhile, Jack drew on his own European experience, as well as on the fund of knowledge laboriously built up in the course of years of reading, to produce the serious, successful political book that had been expected of Joe Junior. Written in less than six months,
Why England Slept,
about Britain during the run-up to the Second World War, became a surprise bestseller in the United States in 1940 and utterly altered Jack’s standing in the family. At a moment when Joe Junior had managed to accumulate little more than a welter of notes and a stack of publishers’ rejections, the second son had garnered the wide praise and prestige that was supposed to have been his brother’s. Old Joe, who always loved a winner as much as he disdained a mere runner-up, was soon gaily citing Jack’s bestselling opinions in public, whereas previously it almost certainly would have been Joe Junior he quoted.

After
Why England Slept,
the firstborn son never quite managed to regain his footing, whether it be in the family or in life. When Jack moved to Washington the following year, he began to speak, with his signature air of amused detachment, to an intimate circle including Kick, Inga Arvad, and Betty Coxe of the possibility that he might one day decide to seek the presidency. At the end of the war, when he returned to London on the eve of the 1945 general election, he left no doubt in the minds of his young English friends who were launching their political careers that he meant to study the electioneering with an eye to an impending run of his own in the States. In 1946, when the second son portrayed himself to voters as a most reluctant bearer of the family flag, that reluctance, like so much else in Jack Kennedy’s complex demeanor, was a pose. In important ways, he had been fighting all his life, at moments literally with his fists, for the right to carry that flag. In suggesting that he would never have dared, or even wished, to attempt something like this had Joe Junior survived, he was advancing a biographical narrative that scarcely corresponded to anything that had actually happened in the privacy of his family. He was dissipating perceptions, as he had long found it useful to do, of the ambition that had fired him to surpass Joe Junior during the eldest son’s lifetime.

Years later, when Jackie thought back to her early married life, it was the velocity she seemed to remember above all. Hardly had she reached her goal of becoming Mrs. John F. Kennedy when she found herself caught up in a new kind of momentum as her story intersected with Jack’s. “Life with him was just so fast.” She associated his high-vaulting ambition with one of the qualities she most prized in him, imagination. It struck her that had his older brother lived and been elected senator, Joe Junior, lacking anything like Jack’s imaginative capacities, would simply have stalled there. But not Jack: “He never stopped at any plateau, he was always going on to something higher.” The relentless propulsion Jackie later sought to evoke did not fully manifest itself to her until the couple acquired a first, albeit temporary, house of their own. In January 1954, they began a six-month rental of a fourteen-foot-wide “dollhouse” on Dent Place in Georgetown, which was owned by Auchincloss family friends who were traveling in Europe. During this period, there began the real work of recasting Kennedy’s image, of which the decision to marry had been but an initial necessary step: The senator drew unprecedented attention with a principled but highly controversial vote in favor of the construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway, a stance that risked alienating constituents who protested that the bill would cost Massachusetts jobs. He delivered his first major Senate address, arguing against calls to send U.S. troops to Indochina. In the run-up to the 1954 midterm elections, he traveled extensively, campaigning on behalf of Democrats he might call on later to return the favor. He exhibited his nasal Boston twang to any print interviewer, and on any television or radio show that would have him. He and Jackie became regulars at the dinner parties, usually for ten or twelve, that were a staple of political life in the capital.

As a place of residence, Georgetown had been exceedingly fashionable during the Truman epoch. But the social geography of Dwight Eisenhower’s Washington had since shifted, Georgetown having acquired the reputation in some Republican circles as a community of enervated eggheads and left-wingers that was best avoided in favor of more ideologically salubrious neighborhoods. Around the time Eisenhower was inaugurated, Joe Alsop had lamented that everyone he liked seemed to be going away, and no one he liked very much was replacing them. A year later, when Senator and Mrs. John F. Kennedy moved to Georgetown, they became part of an emergent social nexus that included the senators Stuart Symington, George Smathers, Mike Mansfield, and the Republican John Sherman Cooper, among others. On the one hand, it was unquestionably an advantage in this milieu for a politician to be married. On the other, as Jackie noted, some of the most valuable dinner party conversations tended to take place when the men had a chance to talk to one another afterward once they had peeled off from their wives. Before long, Jackie was presiding over such highly ritualized evenings of her own. As “Night and Day” and other tracks on the recording
The Astaire Story
wafted seductively through the tiny house, the Kennedys hosted their first candlelit formal dinner party in the narrow dining room at Dent Place. It was also during these months that they first returned in triumph to Dumbarton Avenue, where, before they were married, both had been known to attend the considerably more raffish gatherings at John White’s. On the present occasion, however, the couple’s destination was not the cave, but rather the distinctly different social and intellectual universe epitomized by the soirees at Joe Alsop’s. After years of banishment, Jack Kennedy’s invitation was a sign that he was finally projecting the gravitas that entitled a man to dine on Alsop’s blue Sèvres china and to sip Pol Roger champagne from his monogrammed crystal glasses.

Meanwhile, early on, the young wife was confronted with aspects of marriage, or at least of her particular marriage, that she seems not to have anticipated fully. First, there was the matter of her husband’s health. Here too the storm came on very quickly. Before the wedding, Lem Billings had made an effort to enlighten her on Jack’s medical history. At the very least, she had often observed him hobbling about on crutches during their courtship. Still, by the time of the honeymoon, his back pain had subsided considerably, as the feats of water-skiing that his bride found so thrilling in Acapulco attest. But no sooner had the newlyweds begun their short-let than renewed pain caused him to seek advice from the surgical head at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York. At a moment when Kennedy was about to embark upon a demanding program aimed at reinventing himself politically, the recommendation offered by Dr. Philip Wilson could scarcely have been more inopportune. Wilson urged him to undergo a double spinal fusion, noting that while there was no guarantee that the procedure would be effective, without it the senator would surely become incapacitated.

Quite apart from the disastrous timing, there was also a huge medical complication. Seven years previously at the London Clinic, Jack had learned that he had Addison’s disease, a disturbance of the suprarenal glands known to produce extreme fatigue, nausea, weight loss, low blood pressure, and susceptibility to infection. Then, and on a subsequent occasion in Japan in 1951, he had nearly died. At the time of the initial episode, the London physician, Sir Daniel Davis, had predicted that Jack had no more than a year to live. Dr. Elmer Bartels, the endocrinologist at the Lahey Clinic in Boston who had overseen his treatment for Addison’s disease since his return to America following the 1947 diagnosis, had been a good deal more optimistic provided that Kennedy, never the most compliant of patients, agreed to submit to proper management. Still, as Bartels never tired of pointing out, people with Addison’s disease tolerate surgery poorly. For such a patient, the back operation Wilson was recommending in 1954 posed two grave risks. First, the trauma from the surgery might spark a new Addisonian crisis, which could lead to a loss of circulation in the legs and subsequent heart failure. Second, the operation could result in a fatal infection. So, almost from the moment Jackie began life in Washington with a new husband, their existence together was shadowed by death. To Jack, the specter was nothing new. She, on the other hand, simply had never had to absorb anything like that before. In any case, after the diagnosis at Special Surgery, Jack, having yet to decide about the spinal fusion, plunged back into the Washington fray. Though troubled additionally by problems of the stomach and urinary tract, among other physical woes, he strove to act before the world as though nothing were wrong. He had long “schooled himself” to live gracefully with pain, to exert what Chuck Spalding described as “an actor’s control.” When there was no choice but to speak of his medical misfortunes, he tended to make light of them as much as possible.

Nonetheless, by April 1954 the pain had become well-nigh intolerable and he entered the Lahey Clinic for additional consultations. By degrees, he lost the capacity to pick up a piece of paper that had fallen to the floor; to put on his own socks in the morning; to go up and down stairs normally. Navigating the marble floors between his Senate office and the Senate chamber; standing, as was required, to address the chamber—these and other routine tasks associated with his work were transformed into monumental undertakings. When, more and more, he found it necessary to use crutches, he scrambled to conceal them before anyone came into his office. From the time he first ran for Congress using the campaign slogan “The New Generation Offers a Leader,” he had been keen to associate himself in voters’ minds with the dash and vigor of youth. Now Evelyn Lincoln, his secretary, perceived that the incessant struggle to mask his condition made him snappish in private, so much so that at one point she considered quitting her job. When he returned to Dent Place at night, more often than not he was so drained, both physically and mentally, that all he wanted to do was go right to sleep.

Prior to the marriage, Lem Billings also had spoken to Jackie about Jack’s sexual habits. Nevertheless, according to Lem, until she was actually wedded to the man, she simply failed to comprehend “the depth of Jack’s need for other women.” Another old friend of Jack’s, Jane Suydam, judged that in spite of anything Jackie had heard or seen in advance, “I don’t think she anticipated a difficult marriage. We all thought we would change the man.” Jackie, Suydam assessed, had entered married life with “eyes filled with dreams.” In Lem’s view, Jackie proved to have been unprepared for “the humiliation she would suffer when she found herself stranded at parties while Jack would suddenly disappear with some pretty young girl.” Not even the wrenching back pain he was experiencing impeded his activities in this respect. On the contrary, the complicated stagecraft that was often necessary in these situations seems to have offered a welcome distraction. In addition to the women he compulsively targeted at Washington parties and otherwise pursued in the company of one of the married senators in his and Jackie’s set, George Smathers of Florida, there were also the long-range fantasies that absorbed him more and more. Three months into the Kennedys’ residence at Dent Place, he managed to track down the address of the statuesque Swedish girl whom he had met in Antibes on the eve of his wedding and had not seen or been in touch with since. “I expect to be in France in September,” he wrote to Gunilla von Post on March 2. “Will you be there?”

That spring the women’s magazine
McCall’s
pitched a story to Senator Kennedy’s office about young Mrs. Kennedy’s adjustment to her new life in political Washington. “The Senator’s Wife Goes Back to School” was to focus on Jackie’s decision to sign up to study political history at Georgetown University’s Foreign Service School. But hardly had the photo shoot begun in early May when it became evident that the senator intended for the piece to be as much about him as about his wife. During the course of five days, in locations ranging from Dent Place to the nearby cobblestoned streets of Georgetown to JFK’s Senate office,
McCall’s
generated nearly a thousand negatives. Almost a year had passed since Jackie had posed for a comparable set of pictures at the time of her first visit to Hyannis Port as a bride-to-be. Whatever her unease had been when a private family event was transformed into a photo opportunity, the excitement and elation of the twenty-three-year-old woman portrayed in the
Life
photographs had no doubt been genuine. Whatever the calculatedness and cynicism involved in Joe Kennedy’s decision to ask in the
Life
team, the images of a radiant young woman who adores the man who has finally asked her to share his life accorded with reality as Jackie Bouvier surely saw it in the spring of 1953. The
McCall’s
shoot would prove to be another matter entirely.