Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis: The Untold Story (32 page)

Another consequence was that she often found herself suppressing not just painful feelings and perceptions, but potentially pleasurable ones as well. It was as though any stimulation were dangerous; as though the only safety were to be found in the complete absence of feelings. At the same time, she longed to feel and enjoy, to make herself, in her phrase, “interested in things again.” Expressly to that end, in this period she had conceived of a journey to inspect the temples of Angkor, the seat of an empire that flourished between the ninth and fifteenth centuries. It was quite the sort of trip Jackie would have found exhilarating when she was first lady. Might it be that for her again? Might a visit to the ruins help free her from the tyranny of the past? Reaching Angkor would be no simple undertaking. Cambodia, where the temples were located, had severed relations with the United States two years previously due to the Vietnam War and other sources of friction.

She asked McNamara to see what could be arranged. At length, he discovered that not only would Cambodia’s chief of state, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, agree to a visit, he actually welcomed it. President Johnson, evidently, was not the only world leader eager to be photographed at her side. For Sihanouk, playing host to an American president’s widow would be a way of irritating China, his erstwhile ally in the region. The prince also seems to have viewed the invitation as an overture of friendship toward Bobby Kennedy, whom he thought likely to occupy the White House one day very soon. In any case, McNamara’s successful efforts to gain entry for Jackie into a nation ostensibly hostile to the United States caused her to affectionately liken him to Harry Lime, the roguish character played by Orson Welles in the 1949 film
The Third Man,
who miraculously produces a passport for a beautiful young actress portrayed by Alida Valli. Jackie extracted McNamara’s promise to screen
The Third Man
while she was in Cambodia, but she was soon flirtatiously lamenting the prospect of his falling in love with Alida Valli.

In other ways as well,
The Third Man,
which Jackie had first seen as a college student in Paris in 1950, figured prominently in her imagination that tempestuous fall of 1967. She told McNamara how, seventeen years previously, the movie had inspired her to make a side trip to Vienna, where Soviet troops patrolled the streets with machine guns, and where she had been scared as never before in her life. Proposing, curiously, that present-day America was very much like the era depicted in
The Third Man,
Jackie seemed to suggest that she was similarly fearful now. The occasion for these fraught reflections was a newspaper photograph she had seen of McNamara gazing out his office window at many thousands of demonstrators, who had converged in Washington on October 21, 1967, determined to shut down the Pentagon. In consultation with LBJ, McNamara had surrounded the building with a cordon of rifle-bearing troops. Because of all that firepower, any confrontation with the missile-hurling demonstrators, not a few of whom seemed intent on provoking the troops, threatened to ignite major violence, the culmination of months of national disquiet that had included not just rising anti–Vietnam War protests, but also the urban race riots known as the Long Hot Summer of 1967.

By this point, McNamara’s standing in the administration had decayed markedly since the time, shortly before the christening of the aircraft carrier
John F. Kennedy,
when he had advised the president that the Vietnam War was not winnable and that it would therefore be wisest to negotiate a peace, however unfavorable. In the course of pursuing this war, Johnson had clung to the fact that his advisers had been JFK’s counselors as well. Now that such a key adviser had unequivocally taken a dissenting view, LBJ oscillated between blaming McNamara’s conversion on the corruptive influence of Bobby Kennedy and suggesting that the defense secretary had grown mentally unstable. “He’s a fine man, a wonderful man, Bob McNamara,” Johnson effused. “He has given everything, just about everything, and … we just can’t afford another [James] Forrestal,” the latter a pointed reference to the Truman-era defense secretary who, in a bout of depression, had committed suicide by jumping to his death from a hospital window. Might McNamara be about to crack as well? Might he too be about to take his own life? Johnson was not the only figure in Washington to regard McNamara as “an emotional basket case.” Burdened with a heavy load of guilt about the many lives that had been sacrificed in Vietnam, but also about the wife whose severe ill health due to an ulcer he felt similarly responsible for, the Bob McNamara of these months was a gray, gaunt figure, who, according to one White House aide, seemed to be barely “hanging on by the fingernails.” On the day of the Pentagon march, McNamara showed a tortured visage to the world as he surveyed the angry crowd from his window, but Jackie emphatically did not perceive him that way. Putting on a cast recording of the Broadway musical
Man of La Mancha,
which she and McNamara had often listened to together, she wrote to assure the embattled defense secretary that she had never seen “anything so brave” as he.

Whether that was quite the way to describe him became a matter of passionate discussion within the Kennedy camp when, presently, LBJ, in response to another dovish screed from McNamara, undertook to maneuver him out of office by nominating him to lead the World Bank. Bobby Kennedy implored McNamara not only to refuse the new post, but also to resign as defense secretary with a public announcement to the effect that he could no longer continue to serve this administration in good conscience. Bobby urged him to go out “with a hell of a blast at Johnson.” McNamara’s principled defection, though no doubt costly to himself in the short term, would lend a certain legitimacy to Bobby Kennedy’s antiwar posture. On the other hand, a decision by McNamara to acquiesce to the president’s efforts to silence him would be, in the words of one RFK supporter, “a big blow” to Bobby politically. In the end, McNamara’s willingness to servilely accept the World Bank post seemed to confirm the view of him as a man who was less interested in principle than in place. RFK, responding to an aide’s tart analysis that McNamara, when he chose “safe submission,” had permitted Johnson to “break him into nothing” and “tear out his spine,” commented sadly: “That’s about right.” By contrast, Jackie saw no reason to revise her heroic conception of McNamara. Later, recalling all that he had accomplished during his tenure as defense secretary, she said she wondered if he knew how many lives he had saved—beginning with her own.

On October 18, 1967, Jackie and an entourage finally flew to Rome on the first leg of her Cambodian journey. In Italy, she was joined by David Harlech, whose diplomatic flair promised to be useful when, presently, she was the first American to be received with high state honors since Cambodia had broken relations with the United States. On various occasions, both she and McNamara had attempted to leave Sihanouk in no doubt that she wanted to keep the visit private. In deference to her host’s political needs, Jackie had consented to major press coverage on her arrival in Cambodia as well as on her departure. Otherwise, she stipulated that it would be sufficient for Sihanouk’s personal photographer to take a single picture of them both at Angkor, which the prince would be free to distribute afterward. Whatever hopes Sihanouk and others had invested in her trip, she persisted in viewing it primarily in personal terms.

Hardly had Jackie and her party landed in Cambodia on November 2, 1967, however, when her great plans unraveled. The waiting crowd of ten thousand; the welcoming rituals involving the prince, various Cambodian officials, and members of the diplomatic corps—it was all somehow too much for her. At length, Jackie was shown to her rooms, where she and David Harlech quarreled over her insistence that she was too tired to attend Sihanouk’s dinner in her honor that night. Unlike McNamara, who had grown accustomed to Jackie’s outbursts and who saw it as his role to do whatever she appeared to require of him at the moment, Harlech, with his finely honed sense of duty to matters greater than oneself, was furious at behavior he perceived as childishly selfish.

Jackie finally consented to go to the palace dinner, but before she gave in, she and Harlech had quite a row, at the end of which he said something unexpected. Widowed but six months previously, JFK’s great friend selected this most peculiar of moments to ask Jackie to marry him. His proposal was incongruous, embarrassing, and not a little odd, yet she had to respond. Speaking in general terms, she told him that she did not want to marry and have her heart hurt again.

Despite this rejection, Harlech did not abandon his efforts to make Jackie his wife. Thereafter, he saw her frequently in New York, where his youngest daughter, Alice Ormsby-Gore, went to school. He and Jackie were also to take another trip together, to the Georgia plantation of their friend, former U.S. ambassador to Britain John Hay Whitney, which they had previously visited when Sissie was alive. But, though he repeatedly raised the issue of marriage, Jackie continued to put him off. Her line about not wanting to be hurt again appears to have been a gentle way of saying no without having to raise any specific objection to a man she sincerely admired and held dear. As long as David Harlech lived, she seems never to have wavered in the conviction, expressed soon after Dallas, that he might be just the figure “who could save the Western world.”

As she wistfully suggested many years later, however, it had been David’s capacity to make one person in particular feel safe that had been in doubt. That person, of course, was Jackie herself.

Thirteen

On Sunday, February 18, 1968, the sound of revolver shots automatically tripped off the security system in Jackie’s brain. Cecil Beaton, who had escorted her to the New York City Ballet that evening to attend a rare performance by the choreographer George Balanchine in the title role of Don Quixote, watched her nearly jump out of her seat and over the rail of the dress circle. It was a false alarm, the gunfire being part of the show. But since the assassination, Jackie had been wired to react instantly, without so much as a moment’s reflection. Ever on guard for a repetition of the trauma, the limbic memory, kicking in independently of her conscious control, reacted to the staged gunshots as if Jackie continued to be threatened with annihilation. At that moment, it was as if the violence she had experienced in 1963 were about to be played out all over again.

For many months Bobby Kennedy had vacillated about whether or not to challenge Johnson for their party’s 1968 presidential nomination. He worried that from the point of view of his own ambitions it might be best to wait until 1972; that a decision to take on Johnson would appear to give credence to those who had long insisted that RFK was motivated not by principles but rather by a sick personal vendetta against his brother’s successor; and that even a fruitful bid on RFK’s part for the Democratic nomination would only divide the party and elect Richard Nixon or some other Republican.

Suddenly, however, beginning in late January of 1968, the Vietcong’s massive Tet offensive within South Vietnam, launched mere weeks after General Westmoreland had confidently prophesied that U.S. gains in 1967 would be increased manyfold in 1968, scrambled political calculations in Washington. Suddenly, the “bang-bang coverage” (as the footage of troops shooting at one another in Vietnam was known in TV industry parlance) on the nightly news seemed to underscore enemy strength and resilience, and thereby to call into question the veracity of an administration that had emphatically portrayed the Communists as in no condition to essay anything like a major offensive.

Tet transfigured the antiwar candidacy of Senator Eugene McCarthy, who came within three hundred votes of beating LBJ in the March 12, 1968, New Hampshire Democratic primary. In one fell swoop, McCarthy had proven that an insurgent bid could be viable; yet it was Bobby Kennedy who, at least by some calculations, still seemed to have the better chance of vanquishing Johnson. Four days after New Hampshire, speaking in the very Senate Caucus Room where JFK had announced his own presidential bid eight years before, Bobby Kennedy declared his intent to challenge Johnson.

From the first, he made the violent tenor of American life in the waning 1960s a campaign theme. “Every night we watch horror on the evening news,” the senator told an audience in Kansas on the eighteenth. “Violence spreads inexorably across the nation, filling our streets and crippling our lives.” He maintained that the Johnson administration offered no solution to the war—“none but the ever-expanding use of military force … in a conflict where military force has failed to solve anything.”

The specter of violence was much in Jackie’s thoughts as well when she contemplated the prospect of her brother-in-law’s candidacy. She was in Mexico to view the Mayan ruins in the company of former U.S. undersecretary of defense Roswell Gilpatric, a married man who frequently escorted her in public, when reporters asked her about Bobby’s decision to seek the nomination. “Whatever Senator Kennedy will do, I know it will be all right,” she said. “I will always be with him with all my heart. I shall always back him up.” Still, the greatest fear of any traumatized individual is that the instant of horror will be reprised. Contrary to anything Jackie said in public, that fear tinctured her anguished private remarks about RFK’s presidential bid. In the course of a dinner party at the home of
Vogue
magazine editor Diana Vreeland on April 2, 1968, Jackie asked Arthur Schlesinger: “Do you know what I think will happen to Bobby if he is elected president?” Schlesinger indicated that he did not. “The same thing that happened to Jack,” Jackie went on. “There is so much hatred in this country, and more people hate Bobby than hated Jack. That’s why I don’t want him to be president.” Jackie had spoken of her concerns directly to Bobby on several occasions, but he had pressed forward notwithstanding. Certain of the senator’s aides also were known to worry about his safety, but again and again he refused to take the precautions that were urged upon him.