Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis: The Untold Story (24 page)

Jackie described herself in this period as having tried “to climb a little bit of the way up the hill,” only to abruptly discover that she had rolled back down to the bottom again. She was speaking of her feelings during a May 29 memorial Mass at St. Matthew’s, presided over by Bishop Hannan on what ought to have been President Kennedy’s forty-seventh birthday. Jackie later remembered that as she stood “in the same place in the same church” she had been in in November, she felt “as if time had rolled back six months.” When the bishop approached her afterward to exchange the peace of Christ, Jackie discovered that she could not bear even to look at him, for she doubted that she would be able to restrain her tears. Following the Mass, she told David Ormsby-Gore (who had become Lord Harlech on the recent death of his father) that she was no closer to being reconciled to events than she had been in November. Later in the day, Jackie flew to Hyannis Port, where she and RFK participated in a satellite television tribute to President Kennedy, which also included contributions by former prime minister Macmillan, speaking from England, and other world figures.

The next morning brought unsettling news. It was reported in the press, erroneously as it would turn out, that the Warren Commission’s findings were expected to show that, contrary to much previous opinion, the first bullet had struck both the president and the governor and that the last of the three shots had gone wild. That certainly was not how Jackie remembered it. She had been there. The mental pictures with which she continued to be inundated were so sharp and detailed. Yet here was new information that seemed to challenge the validity of her memories. Nor was this the first vertiginous discrepancy between what she thought she remembered and what she subsequently read or saw. Similarly disorienting had been film stills of Jackie crawling on the rear of the presidential limousine. Try as she might, she could recollect no such episode. She did not deny that it had taken place, but it had no particular reality for her either. As Jackie prepared to deliver her widely anticipated testimony before the Warren Commission, it was becoming apparent, even to her, that despite the many times she had retold and relived the events of November 22, she was less certain than ever of what had actually occurred.

Back in Washington on June 1, Jackie told Bishop Hannan of the sense she had had at the birthday Mass that her recovery efforts to date had been “for nothing.” She pledged to try “so hard” for her children’s sake in the years that were left to her—“though I hope they won’t be too many,” she added pointedly and poignantly. Following two days, June 2 and 3, of further interviews with Arthur Schlesinger, she received representatives of the Warren Commission at her home on the fifth. Facing Chief Justice Earl Warren and the commission’s general counsel, J. Lee Rankin, along with the attorney general and a court reporter, in her living room late on a Friday afternoon, Jackie asked for the umpteenth time: “Do you want me to tell you what happened?”

On countless occasions since the night at Bethesda Naval Hospital when she had greeted visitors in her bloodied garments, she had related this same story, often in nearly identical phrases, to friends and interviewers. “Let her get rid of it if she can,” the physician had urged, yet for all the words and images that had poured from Jackie’s lips, there could be no denying that, six months later, the horror was still very much with her. The assumption at Hickory Hill, and increasingly in various other quarters, was that Jackie needed to try harder to, in her brother- and sister-in-law’s phrase, “get out of the doldrums.” “Sorrow is a form of self-pity,” Bobby counseled her. “We have to go on.” Even Jackie seemed to ascribe the absence of progress to some personal weakness of her own. In conversation with Father McSorley, she bitterly lamented that she lacked Bobby and Ethel’s drive and energy. She blamed herself for, among other failings, spending so much time in bed in a mist of depression; some mornings, she required as long as ninety minutes to wake up fully. Still, when RFK, Father McSorley, and others urged her to stop brooding and to get on with her life, they were asking her to do something that in ways they seemed never to comprehend was simply beyond her capacity. When Jackie had spoken of feeling as though she were losing her sanity, Father McSorley appears to have interpreted her remarks exclusively in terms of a widow’s longing for her husband. When she talked repeatedly about taking her own life, it seems not to have occurred to the priest, focused as he was on her recent bereavement, that she might be responding as much, if not more, to the pain of living day to day with all that was still going on inside her head.

Jackie had hoped to start a new life when she moved to a house of her own on N Street. But how was she to do that when memories of November 22 kept invading and usurping the present? She had an abiding need to endlessly go over the sequence of events in Dallas. She persisted in having nightmares and otherwise finding it hard to sleep; in feeling, even hoping, that she had no future; in perceiving herself to be constantly under threat; and in perpetually seeking to avoid things that might call up recollections of the assassination.

In 1964 there was as yet no name for what she was enduring. At the time, Harold Macmillan perhaps came closest to intuiting the character of her post-Dallas ordeal when he compared it to the experiences of war veterans like himself. Macmillan could not precisely identify the problem, but he suggested exactly the right frame within which to begin to think about it. In the following decade, the efforts of Vietnam veterans and a small number of psychiatrists sympathetic to their plight led to the 1980 inclusion of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in the American Psychiatric Association’s official manual of mental disorders. Subsequent study of the effects of trauma on a wide range of subjects, including veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, added a profusion of invaluable detail to the picture. In every significant respect, Jackie’s ordeal conforms to the portrait that has gradually emerged of the effect of overwhelming experiences on body and mind. Symptoms of PTSD include reliving the traumatic event; avoiding situations that threaten to provoke memories of the event; feeling numb; and feeling keyed up. Among other hallmarks are suicidal thoughts; nightmares and sleep disturbance; obsessive ruminations; and a significant spike in distress around the anniversary of the traumatic event.

Not everyone who has experienced a traumatic event—such as combat exposure, assault, sexual abuse, or a natural disaster—will later suffer the thralldom to the past that characterizes PTSD. For some people, the painful pictures really do begin to fade when the trauma becomes assimilated as an extreme experience in their personal past that, so long as they have been removed from the threatening environment, is unlikely to recur. A crucial distinction between people who are temporarily stressed and those who develop PTSD is that, at a certain point, the latter start to painstakingly organize their lives around the trauma. A diagnosis of PTSD requires that the symptoms be in play for at least a month. When they last as many as three months, the disorder is said to be acute. When they persist beyond that point, it is described as chronic. People who have witnessed the violent death of someone they loved are at especially high risk for developing PTSD.

Central to the traumatic experience is the acknowledgement of humankind’s existential vulnerability that it forces upon us. The notion that much of life is random and beyond our control is almost too uncomfortable to acknowledge. We look for any way around it. We ask the unanswerable questions. We blame ourselves, however unjustly and irrationally, for the unspeakable thing that has occurred, aiming to shore up, even at our own expense, the fragile illusion of human mastery. It is characteristic of PTSD that whereas certain episodes are recollected in rich, vibrant limbic detail, others, often those in which we were confronted with our own powerlessness to alter the course of horrific events, we may remember not at all.

Nine

“I think we gotta give a little thought to our vice president,” said Lyndon Johnson. “You know who’s campaigning for it, and that’s gonna be a knock-down drag-out probably. With Miz Kennedy nominating him and all the emotions … you can’t tell what’ll come there.”

It was July 3, 1964, a month before Democrats were due to assemble in Atlantic City to name their presidential and vice-presidential candidates. Johnson, at the LBJ Ranch for the weekend, was on the phone talking to John Connally about what White House aides had taken to calling “the Bobby problem.” As Johnson’s remarks made clear, he was haunted by visions of Jackie appearing at the Convention Center and effectively closing the deal for her brother-in-law by nominating him for the number two position.

In the immediate aftermath of the assassination, Bobby had been far from the only one to consider the possibility of a Kennedy vice presidency. Also by December 1963, LBJ too had begun to reflect on the suitability of RFK as a running mate. In private, the president left no doubt that the prospect of anointing Bobby was abhorrent to him. “I don’t want history to say I was elected to this office because I had Bobby on the ticket with me,” Johnson declared. “But I’ll take him if I need him.” Seven months later, the president’s superb approval ratings, coupled with preliminary poll numbers suggesting that he would handily obliterate any Republican adversary in November, indicated that he did not need his enemy on the ticket after all. Besides, the Republicans when they assembled in San Francisco in mid-July seemed likely to nominate the ultraconservative senator from Arizona, Barry Goldwater. One Washington wag quipped that should Goldwater be the candidate, LBJ could choose Mickey Mouse as his running mate and yet be assured of victory.

Accordingly, LBJ’s Bobby problem went from deciding whether he needed RFK to determining how best to cut him from contention. At this point it was something the president was going to have to do soon, but he was exceedingly nervous about what might happen afterward. From first to last, the specter of Jackie’s intervention loomed large in LBJ’s perfervid calculations. Johnson had worked hard to get his predecessor’s widow on side, or at least to convey the impression that she was on side. Having failed in both respects (a particular disappointment had been her unwavering refusal to visit Johnson at the White House, because, she said, “I’m so scared I’ll start to cry again”), he shifted his energies to at least preventing Jackie from speaking for RFK in Atlantic City. The day after Johnson had talked to John Connally about his fears of precisely such a setback, the president called Jackie at the Cape, where she and the children had been installed since mid-June. Rather than request anything of her directly, LBJ, in the course of the customary affectionate banter, clutched her with hoops of steel.

The woman to whom LBJ imputed an almost mystical capacity to influence great events in Washington was, when he called her on July 4, about to make a public announcement of her decision not to return to the nation’s capital. Her effort to start anew there had already folded its wings. Spring had come and matters were not even “a little better,” as she had once anticipated. Washington aroused too many unwelcome recollections. The new residence had quickly become contaminated by the trauma, her words and images in the course of various interviews having worked their way into the freshly white-painted living room walls like wood smoke. And not least, there had been the problem of those enormous windows overlooking N Street, and of an adoring, but also somehow threatening, public’s access to her there. Jackie’s Warren Commission testimony (“I was trying to hold his hair on. From the front there was nothing—I suppose there must have been. But from the back you could see, you know, you were trying to hold his hair on, and his skull on”) proved to be her Washington swan song.

Echoing the phrase she had used on the eve of her previous move, Jackie told Marg McNamara of her intention to attempt to start a new life in New York. In Washington, she acknowledged, she had been becoming more and more of a recluse. Along with Father McSorley, who continued to advise her, she hoped that the move to a new city would, among other advantages, help her to stop brooding. But, whatever Jackie and the priest may have wished, it would not be so easy to escape the traumatic memories that, wherever she went on earth, would long persist in causing havoc in her life. She and Father McSorley both believed her to be suffering from an inability to get over her grief. He went so far as to suggest that Jackie felt guilty about getting better and that she needed to divest herself of that guilt. But in ways he simply did not grasp, Dallas had burdened her with a condition that was not so much psychological or emotional as physiological. As she was soon to discover, her problem was not something that she could just choose to leave behind in Georgetown as though it were a sofa she preferred not to take with her to Manhattan because it might clash with the new decor.

That July, the assassination inevitably pursued her to Hyannis Port in manifold guises, among them the persistent person of William Manchester, whose visits to N Street had been so disturbing to her. The author turned up at the Cape to interrogate Rose Kennedy, Pat Lawford, and the widow herself. Unbeknownst to him at the time, his July 20 session with Jackie would be his last. Lest she further allow Manchester, by his highly detailed questioning, to repeatedly hurl her back to the events of November 22, Jackie arranged never to be interviewed by him again. To his monumental frustration, henceforward whenever he contacted Jackie’s office, he would be referred to RFK’s secretary, who in turn would pass him on to various aides.

Jackie’s dealings with
Look
magazine, which was preparing a special JFK memorial issue in conjunction with the upcoming first anniversary of the assassination, were a good deal more complicated because of the clashing Kennedy interests in play. She had previously rejected the idea of an upbeat story about her life since Dallas that the photographer Stanley Tretick wanted to do for the memorial number. Tretick had pitched her unsuccessfully on May 21, two days after Father McSorley had begun to fear that she might actually be about to kill herself. And she remained opposed when Tretick re-pitched her on July 12. “My feeling,” Tretick wrote, “is that in the context of the Memorial Issue it would not be harmful to show that [JFK’s] children … are getting along fine with the help of his brother and some of the rest of the family. And that Mrs. John F. Kennedy (even though the scar will never heal) is not in the depths of deep despair, that she is working hard to preserve the fine image of President Kennedy and that she is building a new life for her and her children.”