Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis: The Untold Story (19 page)

Seated across from her brother-in-law in the rear of the Navy ambulance where the casket had been taken, Jackie looked not into Bobby’s face but rather at the closed gray curtain just behind his shoulder. Partaking of a ritual in which those returning from the battlefield have often engaged through the centuries, she began to tell the story of the horrors she had seen. She spoke of the motorcade, of the gunshots, and of the chaos that ensued. Like other people to whom Jackie would subsequently relate some version of this same story, Bobby perceived that whether or not he wanted to hear any of it, he had little choice but to listen. She needed to tell him this. She had to unburden herself. One must not interrupt. So, for approximately twenty minutes, Bobby sat in silence as Jackie talked on. At moments Bobby found himself peering through the curtains at the world flying past outside, but that was not an option for Jackie, who remained utterly preoccupied with the pictures that November 22 had etched in her brain.

To be sure, she and Bobby had their grief in common—deep, intense, gnawing grief—but in Jackie’s case there was an additional factor, something that many people, then and in the future, would find it impossible to distinguish from grief. She was simultaneously bereaved and traumatized. Unlike her brother-in-law, she had had a direct experience of the bloodbath in Dallas, both as victim and witness. She had been rendered helpless in the face of overwhelming force. She had been powerless to save her husband and had been mortally threatened herself. She had, as she would say pointedly and repeatedly, held Jack’s brains in her hands.

After Jackie had told her story to Bobby, she persisted in telling it to others when she reached Bethesda Naval Hospital. Over and over, she recounted the murder for the benefit of visitors to the seventeenth-floor presidential suite, where she had been brought for the duration of the autopsy, which was taking place elsewhere in the building. She described her husband’s death to her physician, John Walsh; to Ben Bradlee; to Tony Bradlee; to Bob McNamara; to Charles Bartlett. Dr. Walsh referred to this episode as her talkathon. “She moved in a trance to talk to each of us,” remembered Ben Bradlee. “She wasn’t sobbing,” recalled Charles Bartlett. “Tears were just a breath away, but they never came.” Initially, Jackie’s doctor advised the others to allow her to talk herself out no matter how painful it might be to listen to her. Said Walsh: “Let her get rid of it if she can.”

“Do you want to hear?” Jackie would begin. But, as had been the case in the ambulance with Bobby, she left them no choice really but to listen. Resisting her monologue would have been like trying to fight against the wind. RFK had asked Bob McNamara to come with him to the airport. Accordingly, the defense secretary had been waiting with Bobby when Air Force One landed. But he had declined Bobby’s request that he accompany him onto the plane to collect Jackie. Now, when McNamara arrived at the hospital, he cut a commanding figure, the epitome of what one witness described as “naked strength.” He was a man who always seemed to be operating on a strict schedule, and that remained oddly true on the present occasion. He had left his wife in their car in the expectation that his visit with the widow would be brief. But when it became apparent that Jackie preferred he remain, he instructed Marg McNamara to go on alone to collect their son from his Scout troop. Soon the towering defense secretary with the no-frills rimless wire spectacles; slicked-back, precisely parted hair; and dour Grant Wood countenance was seated on the floor gazing up at Jackie, who perched on a high stool. “She was in that suit with the bloody skirt and blood all over her stockings,” McNamara recalled. “I felt I had to be calm for her and listen to her.… I was concentrating entirely upon her, because she needed me and I felt, the hell with the others; let them take care of themselves.” To the hearer, it seemed as if Jackie’s account of Dallas went on for hours.

Though dazed, she showed no sign of wanting sleep. She felt herself to be, in her phrase, “keyed up.” Again and again, she reacted with an emphatic shake of the head to the urgings of visitors that she change her clothes. Meanwhile, Bobby Kennedy was overseeing the arrangements for Jack’s funeral service at St. Matthew’s Roman Catholic Cathedral and burial at Arlington National Cemetery, which were to take place on the twenty-fifth. There had been a time when Bobby had routinely issued orders in his brother’s name. Tonight he repeatedly cited the authority of Jack’s thirty-four-year-old widow. As the evening wore on and Jackie failed to wear out, Dr. Walsh suggested she try a sleeping pill. When the pill failed to take, he injected her with a strong sedative. Walsh anticipated that Jackie would fall asleep within no more than thirty seconds, but ten minutes later she was restlessly padding about the presidential suite in search of a cigarette. The physician, who had dozed off in a chair, was surprised to find her still on her feet.

In the preceding hours, she had refused to be parted from her dying husband. She had made it clear that she would not leave Dallas without his remains. She had declined to go on to the White House before the autopsy at Bethesda was completed. In the days that followed, she would be equally tenacious about a related matter. She intended to walk behind Jack’s casket in the funeral procession in Washington, D.C. This posed a problem because of fears within the U.S.government that the assassination had been merely the beginning of a larger, Kremlin-based move against American power. Johnson himself suspected that the shooting could be the harbinger of a surprise attack in the manner of Pearl Harbor and that the missiles might start to rain on the United States at any time. The capture of Lee Harvey Oswald seemed to lend credence to such theories, for when Undersecretary of State George Ball ordered that Oswald’s name be checked in the department records, it was quickly discovered that the suspected assassin had spent thirty-two months in the Soviet Union as recently as June 1962.

Though it had not been her intention, immediately Jackie’s resolve to accompany the coffin on foot between the White House and St. Matthew’s seemed to put pressure on high-ranking government figures, as well as on foreign dignitaries, to do the same. The Secret Service and the FBI urged that “under no circumstances should the American president take that risk.” Dean Rusk and Undersecretary Ball worried over the possibility that an assassin might target one or more of the heads of state who had announced plans to attend the funeral. There was particular concern that Charles de Gaulle’s height would make him an easy target for the assassins who had doggedly stalked him in the past. As the French leader had already survived at least nine attempts on his life, provisions had to be made in advance of his travels to refrigerate quantities of his rare blood type in the event that an emergency transfusion was required. Given the rumors of Communist involvement in President Kennedy’s murder, there was also worry that an American revenge-seeker might go after Khrushchev’s emissary to the funeral, Anastas Mikoyan, first deputy of the Soviet Council of Ministers, and thereby spark off a crisis, if there were not one already, between Washington and Moscow.

On Sunday, November 24, an already impossible situation became much worse. As the former first lady was preparing to attend a daylong public viewing at the Capitol, a mysterious killer shot Oswald while the latter was in police custody in Dallas. Observed on television by millions of Americans who had been waiting to see the cortege, Oswald’s murder exacerbated fears that further violence might yet be planned. Still, Jackie resisted efforts to persuade her to abandon her plan to walk in the next day’s funeral procession. Told that there was much concern about the danger to the heads of state and other dignitaries who might decide to walk if she did, Jackie replied: “They can ride or do whatever they want to. I’m walking behind the president to St. Matthew’s.” Concurrently, Dean Rusk attempted to persuade General de Gaulle to allow himself to be driven to the funeral, but he too refused. “I shall walk with Mrs. Kennedy.”

On the twenty-fifth, though anonymous death threats on both de Gaulle and Mikoyan had been received that very morning, Jackie walked behind the casket to the cathedral, a distance of eight blocks. In her present state of detachment, the renewed peril, rather than daunting her, seemed almost to act as a spur, causing her to stringently narrow her attention to the objective of reaching St. Matthew’s. Prepared to act in the event of another shooting, George Ball and Deputy Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs U. Alexis Johnson monitored events from a nearby office as Johnson, de Gaulle, Mikoyan, and other figures representing ninety-two nations followed the veiled, black-clad widow, who remained in the state of emotional lockdown that had kicked in when she and her husband were under high threat in Dallas.

Finally, as Jackie stood beside RFK at the grave site, a cemetery official leaned in to caution her that there was about to be a twenty-one-gun salute. Seven soldiers fired three volleys each. Every shot caused her to tremble anew, yet she sustained her outward composure throughout.

Rose Kennedy attended the funeral without the patriarch, who, having suffered a devastating stroke two years previously, was in no condition to travel to Washington. Jackie, when she arrived at the Cape on Thanksgiving Day, went first to the main house, where she asked to see old Joe. His nurse, Rita Dallas, who was upstairs with him when Jackie entered the house, could hear the widow’s voice below as she addressed one or more family members: “From the tone of it, she sounded aggravated and determined. I could not hear what was being said back to her, but her voice was louder than I had ever heard it.” “Please, please,” Jackie nearly shouted, “leave me alone. I’m fine.” At last, she forced her way up to the paralyzed old man’s room, where she placed herself on a low stool beside his bed. By turns pressing and caressing his stiff, speckled hand, Jackie again poured out the story of Jack’s death. She retold and relived it, said the nurse, “in total detail.”

Like Joe Kennedy’s nurse, the next person to hear Jackie’s story, the
Life
magazine writer Theodore White, was struck by what he characterized in his copious notes that day as her “total recall” of her ordeal. When she evoked the killing, White later remembered, “the scene took over, as if controlling her.” Ten years after she had come to Hyannis Port for what she anticipated would be a private family occasion, only to be confronted with the magazine people whom old Joe had invited in to publicize his son’s politically advantageous engagement, now it was Jackie who had arranged to have a further story about herself published in
Life
. The day after Thanksgiving, at a moment when there was reason to assume that she had left Washington in quest of privacy, Jackie personally summoned an astonished Theodore White, who had just covered the assassination for
Life
.

In the week since Dallas, she had insisted on staying close to her husband’s casket, sitting with it, riding with it, marching behind it. Today it was Jack’s historical reputation she sought to guard. Frantic about the assessments of the Kennedy presidency that would no doubt soon begin to be published, Jackie had something she wanted
Life
magazine to convey to the nation, and she wanted Theodore White, whom she viewed as a friendly journalist, to be the one to write it. The Camelot myth is what tends to be remembered about White’s Friday, November 29, visit to Hyannis Port. Not unfairly, Arthur Schlesinger would later say of Jackie’s comparison of the late president and his administration to King Arthur and Camelot that it would likely have “provoked John Kennedy to profane disclaimer.” White eventually had to admit that Jack Kennedy’s magic Camelot never really existed, and even Jackie privately conceded that her metaphor had been “overly sentimental.” Interestingly, it is the interview’s assassination subplot, as detailed in White’s notes but barely hinted at in the article printed in
Life
magazine on December 6, 1963, that was by far the more valuable contribution to the record. In the course of listening to the widow’s message to America, White witnessed something extraordinary.

The limousine carrying the author of the bestselling campaign narrative
The Making of the President 1960
arrived at the Kennedy family property at half past eight at night in a cold, heavy rain. As he had done when he covered the funeral, White had asked that
Life
magazine not go to press until his story was ready. Indeed, in this case he was not even certain that there would prove to be a story. That depended fully on what the widow had to tell him. Since it cost some thirty thousand dollars an hour overtime to hold the presses on a weekend, he naturally felt a good deal of pressure to check in with his editors as quickly as possible.

At first, however, seated on a low sofa opposite the pale but utterly calm widow, he struggled to know where to begin the interview. Jackie asked how she could help him, a peculiar question, as it had been she, not the writer, who had requested a meeting. White attempted to direct their talk by picking up the thread of their telephone conversation earlier in the day. In rancorous tones, she had mentioned that several journalists were then at work on historical assessments of the Kennedy presidency and that she did not want her husband to be remembered in that way. How, White asked tonight, did she wish him to be remembered?

There followed some desultory talk on Jackie’s part. She spoke of her intention to retreat from public life. “When this is over, I’m going to crawl into the deepest retirement there is.” She touched on what had been her initial desire to return to her former house in Georgetown; on Bob McNamara’s promise to her at Bethesda Naval Hospital that he would personally buy the property back for her; and on the thought that came to her immediately thereafter, that she could never go back to that bedroom. “I said to myself, ‘You must never forget Jack.…’” The remark seemed to completely derail the original tenuous line of her conversation. Suddenly, without transition, she was speaking of something else she could never forget. This was the moment when, to her guest’s perception, the “blood scene,” as he called it, seized control. Images of the assassination poured out in a torrent, but even at the most brutal points in Jackie’s narrative, White observed, “it was all told tearlessly, her wide eyes not even seeing me, a recitative to herself.” It was almost as if the speaker had forgotten that anyone else was there.