Just Jackie (4 page)

November 1963

E
arly the next morning, after Teddy White had departed, Jackie stood at her bedroom window, gazing across the lawns that sloped gently down to the beach. Huge white clouds scudded across a putty-colored sky. The
Honey Fitz
, the presidential yacht, and the
Martin
, the Kennedy family power launch, rode high on the angry waves that roiled Nantucket Sound.

Off in the distance, Jackie could see that someone had ventured out onto the dunes. It was several moments before she realized that the figure was her daughter, who was sitting by herself at the edge of the beach, staring out to sea. Caroline’s arms were locked around her legs, and her chin rested on her knees. Her blonde hair, cut in a pageboy, was lashed by the harsh wind. She made a bleak picture, lonely and despairing.

Jackie slipped into wool slacks and a cable-knit turtle-neck, and went downstairs. The smells of freshly brewed coffee and frying bacon filled the house. Louella Hennessy, the Kennedy family nurse who had been called back into service after the assassination, could be heard arguing in the kitchen with George Thomas, the President’s valet. Everything was just as it had been in the past, except for one thing. Providencia Paredes, Jackie’s Dominican maid, had set the breakfast table for only three people. The fourth was dead.

Jackie’s home on the Cape was called Bambletyde. A shingled house on Squaw Island, not far from the
Kennedy family compound, it was furnished very simply. There were a few upholstered chairs, and some woven rugs scattered on the bare wood floors. The dominant color was yellow—one of Jackie’s favorites—and the walls were covered with landscapes by André Dunoyer de Segonzac and with several seascapes that had been painted by Jackie herself.

She pulled on a pair of knee-high Wellingtons and went outside. As she strode down the long sweep of lawn toward Caroline, her soles sank into the wet grass and made sucking noises. When she reached the dunes, she stood behind Caroline for a moment, hesitating to interrupt the girl’s thoughts. Then she sat down beside her daughter, and they remained side by side, not touching, only looking out toward the colorless rim of the horizon.

Caroline had been her daddy’s girl. The first words of more than one syllable that she had spoken were “New Hampshire,” “Wisconsin,” and “West Virginia”—names of the key presidential primary states responsible for her father’s long absences. Whenever he returned home from his political travels, Caroline would ask him to tell her a story. He had invented a fictitious character, a white shark that ate people’s socks. “Where’s the white shark, Daddy?” Caroline would ask, and he would say, “Well, I think he is over there, and he’s waiting for some socks to eat.”

She had just turned six, and unlike her brother John, who was only three, she was old enough to understand what had happened to her father in Dallas.

“He’s dead, isn’t he?” she kept on saying. “A man shot him.”

After a while, Jackie could feel Caroline begin to shiver. She gave her a gentle nudge, and the little girl struggled to her feet and offered a hand to her mother. They stood silhouetted against the gray sky, and the wind struck against their bodies. Caroline leaned hard against
her mother, and Jackie wrapped both her arms around her and pressed her close.

W
hen Jackie returned from the dunes with Caroline, she placed a call to Erik Erikson, the famous child psychoanalyst. She told friends she was haunted by the fear that the assassination would inflict permanent psychological damage on her children. They needed help right away.

Erikson spent weekends and holidays in Cotuit, a few miles from Hyannis Port. He taught at Harvard, and was friendly with many of the brainy types who ran the New Frontier. His telephone number had been given to Jackie by Richard Goodwin, one of JFK’s closest advisers, who had an amazing network of friends and acquaintances.

“The children have been through a terrible experience, as you know,” Jackie told Erikson. “I would like to bring them to see you.”

“I teach full-time now, and haven’t practiced in years,” Erikson explained in his slight German accent. “I’m not taking formal patients.”

“It might be well for the children to see a person like you,” Jackie persisted.

Erikson did not find it any easier to say no to Jackie than had Teddy White.

“Of course,” he said. “You can bring them here if you like.”

That afternoon, as Jackie was hustling Caroline and John out the door for their appointment with Erikson, she caught sight of a Marine guard lowering the presidential standard in the front yard. The wind was still blowing hard, and the flag dipped and slapped against the flagpole, resisting the guard’s efforts to retire it from service for the last time at Hyannis Port.

The White House message center at the Cape was located in the basement of the Yachtsman Hotel, but there was also a communications trailer just beyond the tall cedar fence that marked the boundary of the presidential property on Squaw Island. As Jackie piled Caroline and John into the back of a two-toned Buick, she saw workmen hauling away that trailer.

Jack had once told Jackie, only half in jest, that when they left the White House, the thing he would miss the most would be the White House telephone operator, who was a wizard at finding and connecting you to anyone in the world within a matter of seconds. Now, just as Jack had predicted, the red telephone with the direct line to the White House switchboard was gone.

Jackie climbed into the front seat of the Buick next to Clint Hill, her tall, curly-haired Secret Service agent. He and the other bodyguards were all that was left. Her husband had been taken away from her; now she was being stripped of her identity.

She had undergone a dramatic metamorphosis in the White House. At first she felt as though she had been stuffed into a tight cocoon, and she tried to extricate herself by staying away from Washington as much as possible. She spent the three months of each summer in Hyannis Port and in Newport, Rhode Island. She left on weekends for her Virginia horse-country retreat. Christmas and Easter were passed in Palm Beach. And she went for long stretches of time abroad—five weeks in India and Pakistan, four in Italy, two in Greece. White
House reporters began to sign off their stories on Jackie with the line “Good night, Mrs. Kennedy, wherever you are:”

Jackie was terrified of snoopy aides who, as she said, “hit the White House with their Dictaphones running.” She feared that she was a political liability to her husband, and told him, “Oh, Jack, I’m sorry for you that I’m such a dud.”

“She was such an innocent girl when she first came to the White House in 1961,” said Robin Duke, the wife of JFK’s chief of protocol, Angier Biddle Duke. “She didn’t know how to talk on television. She was so inexperienced that she put on that wispy little baby voice, which none of us had ever heard her use before.”

But by 1962 Jackie had gained a voice. People began to notice a striking alteration in her attitude. The crowds that shrieked “Jack-ee, Jack-ee, Jack-ee!” no longer seemed to terrify her. She came to understand that the public loved her as much as they loved Jack. Her poll numbers were sky high, higher even than Jack’s; this so impressed his Irish mafia (“the Murphia,” she called them) that they started to treat her like a key player in the Administration.

More comfortable in her role, she began to change the face and character of Washington. Nothing symbolized that change as much as the parties she gave at the White House.

“[Jack] loved the gaiety and spirit and ceremony of a collection of friends, especially beautiful women in beautiful dresses,” wrote Benjamin Bradlee, then the Washington bureau chief of
Newsweek
magazine. “They liked to mix jet setters with politicians, reporters with the people they reported on, intellectuals with entertainers, friends with acquaintances. Jackie was the producer of these parties. Jack was the consumer.”

Behind her back, the women of the press corps started calling her the Cleopatra of the Potomac. And it was true that she assumed an almost regal air. She was looking
forward to continuing in power during Jack’s second term. She was confident that it would be a triumph. There would be more parties, more beautiful dresses, more trips abroad. And Jack would have the opportunity to answer the great questions he had posed when he first entered the White House: What kind of people are we Americans? What do we want to become?

By 1963, she had achieved a life beyond her wildest dreams. She had the love of the most powerful man in the world; a mansion with a staff of servants who catered to her every whim; a fleet of limousines, airplanes, and helicopters to take her wherever she wanted to go; round-the-clock security; a wardrobe created by her own couturier; and the adoration of millions of people around the world.

Then, in a split second, she lost it all. And she was left to ask: Who am I? And what do I want to become?

As agent Clint Hill headed west on Route 28 toward Cotuit, he kept the speedometer below forty miles per hour and turned on his parking lights. The wind had dispelled the rain and fog, but the temperature was near freezing, making the surface of the roads treacherous. The Secret Service had just lost a president, murdered before the eyes of the world, and Hill did not want to be responsible for another national tragedy.

When Hill reached Cotuit, he followed Main Street out past the town to a spit of land on the water. The Erikson house, which stood at the end of a long, pebble driveway, was a modern brown wooden structure in the shape of a hexagon. The famed psychoanalyst was waiting for them on the steps of a screened-in porch.

Erikson looked like a well-groomed, Nordic version of Albert Einstein. He had a high forehead, and his fluffy white hair blew every which way in the wind. His large, sparkling-blue eyes and permanent little smile gave him an approachable air. He came forward to welcome his guests.

The Kennedy children had been trained by their mother to watch their manners, and even in their time of grief, they did not need to be reminded to shake the doctor’s hand.

Erikson patted John’s head and said, “I remember the picture of this little boy dressed in his formal coat, and saluting his father’s coffin.”

He led them into the house, where he introduced Jackie to his attractive wife Joan, who was also a psychotherapist. Mrs. Erikson seemed less than thrilled to meet Jackie Kennedy.

“My mother was taken completely by surprise by Jackie’s visit,” according to Erikson’s daughter, Sue Bloland, who followed in the family tradition and became a psychotherapist herself. “My mother was an elegant woman in her own right, and she was the type who would be envious of anybody with Jackie’s image. Knowing her, I suspect that she interpreted the fact that my father hadn’t told her ahead of time about Jackie as a sign that he considered Jackie more important than his own wife.”

While the two women were trying to decide what they thought of each other, Erikson put the children at ease by offering them soft drinks, as well as some toys to play with.