Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis: The Untold Story (42 page)

Wearing high black boots and a long, fur-lined black wool coat, Jackie wandered alone in the hills. At the top of a ridge loomed a stone lookout tower that gave long views of the ruins of Harlech Castle, the medieval fortification that had withstood the longest siege in British history, during the Wars of the Roses in the fifteenth century. The castle perched on a steep cliff face with a long stairway that had once provided a supply route to the sea. The waters had long since receded, but the stone ruins remained the picture of impregnability against the outside world. Jackie had never seen all this before, not in the years when Sissie was alive, nor afterward when everything Lord Harlech possessed had been on offer if only Jackie accepted his marriage proposal.

By the time Jackie appeared at the house, more than two hours had passed and guests were starting to leave following the meal. Immediately, she gravitated to David’s eldest daughter, Jane. “My God,” Jackie said with visible emotion, “if only I’d known this place then.” Was Jackie reflecting on what might have been had she chosen to become Lady Harlech rather than Mrs. Onassis? Such was the younger woman’s sense, at any rate. Still, for all of the security that broad acres and mighty fortifications seemed to provide, David and his family had hardly been insulated from the tempestuous times. His son Julian Ormsby-Gore had committed suicide after a losing battle with drugs; and Alice Ormsby-Gore, who had been Caroline’s playmate during the presidency, had become addicted to heroin in the course of a relationship with Eric Clapton, and would herself eventually die of an overdose. Had Jackie sought refuge in Wales, Lord Harlech’s estate almost certainly would have succeeded no better than Skorpios had in giving her what she wanted and needed. Under the circumstances, no castles or island kingdoms would have been sufficient. To paraphrase Harold Macmillan in the intuitive 1964 letter that had long meant so much to Jackie, that was something she simply was going to have to find within herself. Intermittent relapses and resurgences of traumatic memories notwithstanding, by the mid-1980s there was ample evidence that, to whatever degree possible, she had found it.

Fog enveloped Hyannis Port shortly before midnight on July 18, 1986, when Jackie, standing in the middle of the huge white tent on the heavily policed Kennedy family property where her daughter’s wedding supper was to take place the next day, extended both sinewy arms and exulted: “Isn’t it wonderful?” In years past, Jackie, on the principle that safety was to be found only in an absence of feelings, might have fought against allowing herself to experience such delight; but that was very far from her attitude now. Ostensibly, she was referring to the elaborate preparations under way—the numerous tables in the process of being set up for more than four hundred guests, the flower baskets to be filled and overhead Japanese lanterns to be arrayed. But it is not too much to suppose that Jackie’s outstretched arms also registered the immense pleasure and pride she took in both of her children: Caroline, now twenty-eight years of age, and John, twenty-five, the latter hovering nearby. In harsher times when, by Jackie’s own account, the prospect of death had held no small attraction for her, the children had given her a reason to live. In the beginning, she had struggled to put JFK out of her thoughts expressly for the sake of her daughter and son. She had striven to pull herself together enough to be helpful to them. She had pledged to try to make them the people their father would have wished them to become. She had alternated between worrying that because she had been overly intense as a parent they would grow up to be awful; and hoping that if they turned out well, that would constitute her “vengeance on the world.”

On a hazy summer day at the Cape, Caroline was married to forty-one-year-old Edwin Schlossberg in the small white, flower-filled Church of Our Lady of Victory, about six miles from the Kennedy family property. The bride, a Radcliffe graduate and second-year student at Columbia Law School, had met Schlossberg, the holder of a Columbia University doctorate and president of a New York firm that designed museum shows, when she had been employed at the Metropolitan Museum after college. Her brother, a Brown University graduate who was about to begin law studies of his own at New York University that fall, served as Schlossberg’s best man. At the wedding supper afterward, John also functioned as his mother’s escort-of-record, dancing attendance on Jackie, who wore a pistachio-colored crepe dress and white gloves, and seemed by turns joyful and sad.

In the years that followed, Jackie saw her daughter, and then her son, graduate from law school. She became a grandmother to Rose, Tatiana, and John Schlossberg. She watched JFK Jr. address the 1988 Democratic National Convention in Atlanta, a charming debut that led to wide speculation about whether he intended to assume the role of family standard-bearer. She saw him anointed
People
magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive and she watched him struggle manfully with an inability to pass the bar exam until his third attempt. Publicly he shrugged off his failures and the accompanying jeers of the press (which included the
New York Post
headline “The Hunk Flunks”), but in private he wept.

On a November evening many years after President Kennedy’s assassination, when Jackie, aged sixty-one, was dining with her son at home in New York during what she still referred to as her difficult time of the year, she said something she had never told him before. She declared that were his father to return to her now, she wondered whether she might not send him away. When, after a moment’s hesitation, Jackie, whose eyes were closed at the time, held up her hand, palm facing outward, the gesture, as vehement and expressive as any in a Martha Graham solo, encapsulated one PTSD sufferer’s long lonely struggle to shut out the tragic past. For people who have witnessed the violent death of someone they loved, part of the problem later can be the difficulty of letting go. By endlessly reconstructing and replaying the ghastly sequence of events that culminated in trauma, the survivor in some sense keeps the beloved alive, if only in mind. Jackie’s soulful conversation with her son suggests that she who had once consciously endeavored to put her murdered husband out of her thoughts for the children’s sake was finally prepared to try again, but this time for herself.

Jackie made another significant advance when she was in her early sixties. Interestingly, it was not until these last years that she finally acquired the thick hide that she had heretofore lacked when, in RFK’s words at the time of the Manchester controversy, she had been “so upset and really crushed” by the tremendous amount of severe public criticism directed against her. Through the years, she had been painted as selfishly willing to prolong the nation’s trauma; as wallowing in self-pity; as faking her pain; as faithless to the legacy of the martyred president; as ready to sell herself to the highest bidder; and even as the cause of her second husband’s decline and demise. Much of this had been devastating to her. When Jackie resigned her post at Viking, she had been frantic that anyone could actually believe that she had not been sincerely distressed by the publication of the Archer book. “I just don’t understand sometimes why they work so hard at hurting me,” she once remarked apropos of her legion of detractors. At a certain point, however, the excruciating solitude of Jackie’s ongoing experience of the aftershock of Dallas seemed to liberate her from worrying about how the public saw her. She was one of the most famous women in the world, photographed and written about wherever she went, yet by her lights, few people had even the remotest understanding of what she had long had to endure in what she once called, in another context, “my most secret heart.” So what did it really matter what anyone said?

A shared sense of being beleaguered and misperceived had long undergirded Jackie’s enduring personal bond with Bob McNamara. In these last years, however, she and McNamara, now retired and a widower, diverged in important respects. By this time, there could be no doubt that Jackie had survived and thrived. McNamara, by contrast, was a disappointed and defeated man. Jackie, after numerous failed attempts, had finally succeeded in fashioning a new life. McNamara, said an associate, was still “crawling around the ruins of a life.” Jackie assiduously cultivated an aura of sanity. McNamara, with his tearful outbursts and thousand-yard stare, seemed at times haunted and half mad. When Jackie learned that the beloved friend whom she credited with having helped her in her dark times was himself in despair about an unflattering biography of him that had recently been published, she did what she could to mitigate his pain.

In a February 24, 1993, letter, Jackie offered the seventy-six-year-old McNamara some advice that sounded as if it were based on personal experience and reflection. She suggested that by letting himself get upset, he was just allowing his critics to diminish him. Jackie remained confident that people would eventually learn the truth about McNamara—at least the truth as she and he perceived it—and take the correct measure of his actions. Meanwhile, she paraphrased Eleanor Roosevelt: “No one can humiliate me without my assent.” In short, Jackie was advising this man, whose fatal flaw had perhaps been too devout an adherence to the illusion of control, to at least try to master his own emotions.

That same year, Jackie finally overcame her long-standing reluctance to allow herself to, in JFK Jr.’s phrase, “reconnect” with political Washington in an emotional sense. On August 24, Jackie, wearing a red-and-white polka-dot scarf, prepared to greet Bill and Hillary Clinton in Martha’s Vineyard. She had invited the Clintons, who were staying at the home of Bob McNamara, to join her and Maurice Tempelsman, along with Teddy Kennedy and other family members, on a four-hour-plus cruise on Maurice’s yacht. To the perception of Jackie’s son, the January 1993 inauguration of President Clinton, a forty-six-year-old JFK devotee who, on the eve of his own swearing-in, had made the gesture of placing white roses on the graves of both Kennedy brothers in Arlington National Cemetery, had marked something of a sea change in Jackie’s overall attitude toward Washington. In the years since the assassination, Jackie had consented to return to the White House on only one occasion, in 1971 during the Nixon presidency to view the official painted portraits of her and JFK. Otherwise, Jackie had preferred to stay away for fear of the unwelcome recollections that a visit threatened to unseal. Notably, in the Clinton years, Jackie, though she had a standing invitation from Hillary Rodham Clinton, persisted in her avoidance of the many potential triggers that awaited her there. The warm friendship she conducted with both Clintons on her own home ground was another matter, however. According to her son, Jackie “seemed profoundly happy and relieved to allow herself” to connect again with Washington through them. The relationship, John wrote in a 1994 letter to the Clintons, had “helped her in a profound way.”

That August of 1993, Jackie for her part was also intent that the Clintons’ much-trumpeted vacation visit to Martha’s Vineyard also help the sixty-one-year-old Teddy Kennedy, who faced a tough reelection campaign in 1994. After his failed 1980 quest for his party’s presidential nomination, he and his wife, Joan, had divorced; whereupon he had embarked on what would amount to a decade-long spree of public carousing and womanizing that was extensively depicted in the press. The Kennedys had come to political prominence through the youthful figures of Jack and Bobby, who, on account of their early deaths, had remained eternally young and handsome in the popular imagination. To many Massachusetts voters, especially newer, younger ones, Teddy Kennedy, heavy and lumbering, was a relic from another era. Factory closings and unemployment had become a significant problem in the state, prompting citizens’ questions about what the dissipated, seemingly irrelevant old man planned to do about it.

Meanwhile, two episodes that coincided with Teddy’s present term of office had raised important questions about the degree to which his private life had impacted on his political effectiveness. Public knowledge of the senator’s dissolute behavior had plainly and severely constricted him during the 1991 airing of Anita Hill’s charges of sexual harassment against Clarence Thomas. How could Teddy hold President George H. W. Bush’s Supreme Court nominee to standards of conduct that the senator had long and famously failed to meet himself? If Teddy said relatively little at the hearings, was it not because to say anything would seem like hypocrisy? So a good many people, not least the senator himself, appeared to believe. When Teddy did speak up, however briefly, in Anita Hill’s defense, his remarks were met by Republicans’ snide allusions to Chappaquiddick. That same year, revelations at the time of the William Kennedy Smith rape trial that on the night of the episode in question, Teddy had escorted the nephew who now stood accused (and was subsequently acquitted of all charges) to a Palm Beach bar that had the reputation of a pickup spot for older males in search of female companionship did the senator’s reputation no favors. Teddy delivered a mea culpa at the Kennedy School of Government (“I recognize my own shortcomings—the faults in the conduct of my private life. I realize that I alone am responsible for them, and I am the one who must confront them”) and he entered into a stable and apparently stabilizing second marriage with lawyer Victoria Reggie. Despite his efforts to this point, however, Teddy’s supporters had reason to be concerned that it was not enough for voters, and that after three decades in the Senate he could well be defeated the following year.

Looking ahead to 1994, Jackie, so much of whose life had been about optics and nuances, seized on the opportunity that Bill Clinton’s visit presented, if only the choreography were precisely as it must be. In ancient times, it had been the role of old Joe Kennedy to artfully arrange such matters for his politically ambitious sons, but today the task was Jackie’s. Upon learning that the young president and his wife were about to come aboard the yacht, she directed Teddy, who was with her on the upper deck, to welcome them. When Teddy pointed out that Maurice was already in place, Jackie flung back that Maurice was not seeking reelection in the state of Massachusetts. Teddy was, and it had better be he who was reported as having greeted President Clinton.