Just Jackie (2 page)

The car crunched up the long driveway, past broad lawns that swept down to the gray, restless waters of Nantucket Sound. White took another snort of Scotch, cupped a hand over his mouth to check the smell on his breath, and climbed out of the limousine into the pouring rain. He dashed up the steps to the big veranda that wrapped around the white clapboard house belonging to Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., the family patriarch.

He knocked on the door and a maid ushered him into the first-floor parlor, which was filled with comfortable stuffed furniture. In the room, he spotted a number of familiar faces—Dave Powers, the President’s political crony; Chuck Spalding, Jack’s classmate at Harvard; Pat Lawford, the President’s sister; Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr.; and Clint Hill, the agent in charge of Jackie’s Secret Service detail. They greeted him with a chorus of friendly hellos, followed by polite inquiries about his mother.

He placed another call to New York City from the phone in the hallway, and while he waited for the long distance operator to connect him to Dr. Rifkin, he snuck another nip from his plastic bottle. He caught sight of himself in a mirror. His pale and frantic face was glistening with perspiration.

His mind reeled with what seemed like a thousand
thoughts. The editors of
Life
were holding the magazine’s giant presses for him at a cost of $30,000 an hour. He must notify them as soon as possible about what Jackie had to say. His contract with
Life
called for him to be paid $5,000 for long pieces and $1,500 for so-called white-fang pieces—stories that could be done in one quick bite. He wondered whether his editors would try to pay him the lower rate for tonight’s work.

“There’s no change in your mother’s condition,” Dr. Rifkin informed him.

White put down the phone just as Jackie entered the room.

Out of the dozens of hours of funeral coverage that White had watched on television and events he had witnessed in person, he retained a few indelible images of Jackie: her swollen eyes behind the sheer veil, her sad black stockings, her firm, long stride as she marched behind the caparisoned horse and the President’s catafalque on the way to St. Matthew’s Cathedral. Jackie’s flawless performance during the President’s funeral had transformed her in the eyes of the public into a kind of paragon of virtue, practically a saint, and White half expected to find her here in Hyannis Port still dressed in mourning.

Instead she was turned out in trim black slacks, tapered at the ankles, and a beige pullover sweater. Even in flat shoes, she looked taller than White remembered. This impression of height was enhanced by her long, graceful neck, broad shoulders, and slim hips. Everything about her, even her hands, seemed slightly out of proportion, yet somehow absolutely right.

She had not bothered to fix her hair. It was tucked casually behind her ears, exposing the broad contours of her face with its high cheekbones and full, voluptuous mouth. Without eyeliner or mascara, her eyes seemed to be set even wider apart than they appeared in photos. But that was not what made them look different, White decided.
It was their color. They were darker than before. Tragedy had both darkened and deepened her beauty.

“Oh, Teddy,” she said, “you came all the way up here in the storm just for me.”

He was suddenly stone-cold sober.

His fatigue, his anxiety over
Life’s
idle presses, his concern over his fee—all these worries left him in an instant. Even the guilt about his mother evaporated without a trace. The storyteller in White took over, and he thought: A talk with Mary Todd Lincoln a week after Lincoln’s assassination wouldn’t have been nearly as compelling as this.

“W
hat shall I say? What can I do for you?” Jackie asked after the others had left the room.

What could she do for
him?

White was taken aback by the question. He unsnapped the leather case of his tape recorder and placed the machine on a table between them. Then, as the cold, driving rain rattled the windows in Hyannis Port, he flipped open his reporter’s notebook and scribbled his first impressions:

“Why don’t we pick up from our telephone call,” White suggested. “You said that journalists like Arthur Krock
and Merriman Smith and all those people were going to write about Jack as history, and that isn’t the way you want him remembered. How do you want him remembered?”

Jackie took a long drag on her cigarette, making the tip turn red. As soon as she began to speak, White realized that he was going to hear more than he had bargained for. Jackie regarded him as a friend who also happened to be a journalist, rather than as a journalist who would record everything she said. He felt an obligation to protect her, and he pushed aside his tape recorder—a signal that it was safe for her to speak her mind.

“She poured out several streams of thought which mingled for two hours,” White recalled. “There was the broken narrative, the personal unwinding from the horror, the tale of the killing. Then there was the history part of it. And parts too personal for mention in any book but one of her own.”

White took eleven pages of notes, but as he confided years later to the author of this book and to one or two other close friends, he did not transcribe many of the most personal things that Jackie told him that night….

… How in Fort Worth, on the eve of the President’s assassination, Jackie and Jack had separate bedrooms in a suite on the eighth floor of the Hotel Texas. Her room was a hideous green, and it overlooked a neon-lit parking lot. Before turning in, she went into Jack’s bedroom. He was exhausted from the day’s politicking. Normally she would have said a quick good-night and returned to her room. But something had changed in the chemistry of their relationship, which in the past had been poisoned by Jack’s insatiable need for sex with an endless succession of women.

Jackie attributed the change in the relationship to the death three months earlier of their son Patrick Bouvier Kennedy. The premature baby had put up a stirring fight for life, and Jack had said, “Nothing must happen to
Patrick, because I just can’t bear to think of the effect it might have on Jackie.” Then, when the infant died, Jack broke down in tears. It was the first time that Jackie had seen him cry.

Since then their relationship had deepened and been transformed, Jackie told White, and she felt closer to Jack than at any time in their ten-year marriage. And so Jackie slipped into her husband’s bed, and in the sickly green reflection cast by the neon light, she aroused him from the depths of his fatigue, and they made love for the last time….

… And the next morning, in a light drizzle, Jack addressed an outdoor rally of union men and they shouted, “Where’s Jackie?” And Jack pointed to his wife’s eighth-floor hotel window and said, “Mrs. Kennedy is organizing herself. It takes her a little longer, but, of course, she looks better than we do when she does it.”

The truth was, Jackie was delayed because she had just begun her menstrual period. It was her first normal monthly flow since Patrick Bouvier had been delivered by cesarean section, and she remembered that it filled her with joy.

She and Jack had talked about having more children, but she feared that she might never get pregnant again. So the day that ended in blood had begun in blood, but the first blood was a sign of life. It meant that Jackie could begin to try to have another baby….

And White did not record the personal things that Jackie told him about her time alone with Jack as he lay dead in Trauma Room No. 1 at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas. Or, rather, what White chose to put down in his notebook was a bowdlerized version of the truth.

There was blood everywhere. Not only on Jackie’s hair and gloves and skirt and stockings. Her panties were soaked with menstrual blood, too. She was covered in blood from head to foot. The heartrending Latin words, so familiar to her from her Catholic childhood—
Si capax ego te absolvo
…—staggered her, Jackie recalled, and she almost lost her balance. She felt that if she let go of Jack, she would collapse in their commingled blood.

She was determined to hold on to Jack at all costs. She did not see how she could go on without a man in her life, she told White. Her own father was dead. Jack’s father, Joe Kennedy, had been left speechless by a stroke, and could not protect her. Her brother-in-law Bobby was as devastated as she was by Jack’s murder.

There was no one to look after her
.

And so after the tube was withdrawn from the hole they had cut in Jack’s trachea, and after the nurses removed the corset he had used for his bad back, and after they had gone out of the room, leaving her alone with Jack, she bent over the corpse, and showered the body with kisses. She kissed his foot, his leg, his thigh, his chest, and his lips.

“I could not let go,” Jackie said.

For a moment, her voice faltered, and as White waited for her to go on, he was aware of the flicker of lightning in the panes of the living-room window. Then Jackie spoke again, but her voice was almost drowned out by the thunder that came rolling in over Nantucket Sound.

She ran her hand along her husband’s body, Jackie told White. And she found his penis and caressed it.

J
ackie’s face was drained of color, and she looked as though she might faint. White reached out to console her.

“No, no,” Jackie said, recoiling, “don’t protect me now.”

For the past week, no one had been able to comfort her. To Father John Cavanaugh, another priest, who met privately with her in Washington after the assassination to hear her confession, Jackie had said: “What am I supposed to confess, Father? That I neglected to watch the calendar and ate meat some Friday three months ago?”

She demanded that the clergyman explain her husband’s murder.

“Why, why? How could God do something like that?”

Jackie was a lax Roman Catholic, but in her heart she embraced the teachings of her church. She believed, for instance, that the universe was kept in a kind of moral balance by a just God who rewarded the good and punished the wicked. Now, however, that faith presented her with a perplexing problem, for over the past few years the God of her understanding had seen fit to snatch away her husband and two of her children—one by a stillbirth in 1956, and another in the first few hours of his life that past summer.

What sin had she committed to deserve such terrible punishment at the hands of God? Would God now choose to take Caroline and John as well? The prospect of that
happening was too painful for her to contemplate, she told White. She could not even talk about it. In fact, talking about Jack’s murder only served to remind her that she was utterly inconsolable. Surely there must be something in these horrible events to salve her pain.

“One thing kept going through my mind,” she said, groping for words. “The line from a musical comedy. I kept saying to Bobby, I’ve got to talk to somebody, I’ve got to see somebody. I want to say this one thing.”

White intuitively sensed that he was about to hear the story he had come for.

“This line from the musical comedy has been almost an obsession with me,” Jackie said. “At night before going to bed … we had an old Victrola. He’d play a couple of records. I’d get out of bed to play for him when it was so cold. He loved
Camelot
. It was the song he loved the most at the end … on a Victrola ten years old … it’s the last record, the last side of
Camelot
, sad Camelot … ‘Don’t let it be forgot that for one brief shining moment there was Camelot.’

“Jack’s life had more to do with myth, legend, saga, and story than with political theory or political science,” she continued. “There’ll be great presidents again—and the Johnsons are wonderful, they’ve been wonderful to me—but there’ll never be another Camelot.”