Just Jackie (25 page)

“Even if that’s true,” Bobby said, “what’s the big rush?”

“Who said there was a rush?” Jackie said.

“Couldn’t you wait at least until after the election before making any public announcement about your future plans?” Bobby asked.

“Of course I can,” Jackie said. “It’s just something I have in mind.”

“Good,” said Bobby. “Then let it wait. Just let it wait.”

“All right,” Jackie said. “I’ll just let it wait.”

“And how about coming out of your retirement from public life to campaign for me?” Bobby asked.

“Sure, Bobby,” Jackie said. “I’ll go wherever you want.”

S
hortly after ten o’clock on the morning of June 6, 1968, Ari received word in London that Robert Kennedy had been assassinated in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Ari picked up the phone and called Costa Gratsos in New York.

“She’s free of the Kennedys,” Ari said. “The last link just broke.”

“Ari had always taken what he wanted,” recalled Gratsos, “and for the first time in his life he had come up against a younger man who was as tough, competitive, and determined as he was. And now that man was dead.”

But Ari was a Greek, and Greeks did not believe in happy endings.

“Another assassination might just double their [the Kennedys’] right of veto over Jackie’s life,” he said.

There was no time to lose. Ari flew to Los Angeles to comfort Jackie, then flew back with her to New York to attend Robert Kennedy’s funeral at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

“I called out her name and put out my hand,” said Lady Bird Johnson of her encounter with Jackie at the conclusion of the mass at St. Patrick’s. “She looked at me as if from a great distance, as though I were an apparition.”

T
he funeral train that carried Bobby’s remains from New York to Washington was packed with eleven hundred invited guests. Many of them got drunk during the eight-hour movable Irish wake. Only a select few were allowed into the hushed precincts of Jackie’s private Pullman car. They went there to give her hand a gentle pat and say a few words of condolence. But they came away profoundly disturbed by the person they met.

Jackie was not the same brave young woman who had impressed the world with her flawless performance after the death of President Kennedy. She had lost her grip on reality. She rambled on incoherently, sounding as though she thought she was still the First Lady. She seemed unsure who was going to be buried today—Bobby or Jack.

Bobby’s death had deranged her. She blamed herself for persuading Bobby to stay in public life and run for office. It was her idea that he put himself in harm’s way. It was her fault that they had killed him.

One of the guests on the train, Frank Mankiewicz, Bobby’s press secretary, recalled a conversation he had with Jackie at the Los Angeles hospital where Bobby died. Jackie could talk of nothing but death.

“The Church is … at its best only at the time of death,” Jackie told him. “The rest of the time it’s often rather silly little men running around in their black suits. But the Catholic Church understands death. I’ll tell you who else understands death are the black churches. I
remember at the funeral of Martin Luther King. I was looking at those faces, and I realized that they know death. They see it all the time, and they’re ready for it… in the way in which a good Catholic is…. We know death…. As a matter of fact, if it weren’t for the children, we’d welcome it.”

Night had fallen by the time the funeral train arrived in Washington. The mourners, carrying twinkling candles, followed the coffin into Arlington National Cemetery.

“The cemetery itself was dark and shadowed,” wrote the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. “The pallbearers, not sure where to place the coffin, walked on uncertainly in the night.”

At the graveside, the priest picked up a handful of earth and began saying the prayers. A few minutes later, the sound of the earth striking the lid of Bobby’s coffin snapped Jackie out of her delusional state. Suddenly she was no longer confused about whose corpse was in the coffin. It was the body of the one she had truly cared for. The one she had loved. It was Bobby. His death made her more angry than sad.

“If America ever had a claim on her after Jack’s death,” wrote Willi Frischauer, a friend of Aristotle Onassis’s, “that claim was now forfeited. If she ever had any doubt or obligation to consider the impact of her action on the political prospects of the Kennedys, they were resolved by the shots that ended Bobby’s life. For her, escape was the only way out. Jackie was shedding the Kennedy shackles … her decision to marry Onassis was made at the grave of Robert F. Kennedy.”

O
n the morning of October 15, 1968, Pierre Salinger, the master political spin doctor who had served as JFK’s press secretary, received a call in his Washington office from Steve Smith.

“I need to see you right away,” Smith told Salinger.

Smart and ruthless, Smith was the Kennedy son-in-law who had been tapped to run the family business after Joe Kennedy’s stroke. When Smith whistled, the Kennedys and their hangers-on came running. Salinger was on the next plane to New York City.

“Guess what’s happened?” Smith said as Salinger walked through his door. “Jackie’s going to marry Onassis.”

He tossed a copy of that day’s Boston
Herald-Traveler
on the desk in front of Salinger. There was a story on the front page reporting that John Kennedy’s widow planned to marry Aristotle Onassis.

“We have to figure out some kind of a statement for the family to put out,” Smith said.

Salinger lit up one of his famous cigars.

“Have you got any idea of what you want to say?” he asked.

“How about, ‘Oh shit!’ “ Smith said.

T
hat very same day in Greece, Ari sent word to his children, Alexander and Christina, to meet him for dinner at the home of his sister Artemis. Her seaside villa in Glyfada was located on Vassileos Georgiou, a lovely street shaded by palm trees. The old house had large, well-proportioned rooms filled with shining new reproduction Napoleonic furniture in mahogany and gilt. An elegantly carved wooden staircase led to a set of airy bedrooms on the second floor. One of those rooms was now occupied by Jackie Kennedy.

Shortly after Alexander and Christina arrived, Artemis announced dinner, and Jackie appeared on the stairs wearing a simple sheath dress and a single strand of pearls. She joined the family in the dining room, whose walls were covered with old-master-style oil paintings in ornate gold frames. Alexander and Christina, who were just emerging from their teens, avoided looking at Jackie as they took their places at the long table. Each place was set with expensive silver, along with hand-painted china that matched the serving dishes that Panagotitis the butler used to dole out Artemis’s specialty, meatballs with chili.

Ari looked across the table at Christina. There was not a hint of love or kindness in his eyes. He was perpetually upset with his daughter. He did not like her crazy moods. She was addicted to uppers and downers, and she suffered from bouts of suicidal depression. Ari did not like to watch Christina eat. It made him extremely nervous. She consumed vast amounts of chocolate and Coca-Cola, and at times ballooned to more than two hundred pounds. Sometimes Ari could not suppress his disgust, and he ranted and raved at his daughter in front of everyone in the house.

Jacqueline, age twelve (right), and Lee with their mother, Janet Lee Bouvier, attend a summer wedding in East Hampton, Long Island. Jackie may have loved her father more, but she spent her life trying to please her mother. (Morgan Collection/Archive Photos)

Jackie, age eighteen, with her father, John Vernou Bouvier 111. As Jackie’s greatest mentor in the arts of life, “Blackjack” taught her that women gain power by affiliating themselves with powerful men. (Morgan Collection/Archive Photos)