Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis: The Untold Story (40 page)

Jackie’s arrival at Doubleday’s Park Avenue headquarters that February of 1978 had a Sisyphean quality. Again, there were the reporters and other curious people who descended en masse to monitor her comings and goings. Again, there was abundant skepticism about her intentions, some of her new coworkers being among the doubters. John Sargent, for his part, detected a certain amount of initial resentment among Doubleday staff members—“a feeling that perhaps Jackie wasn’t all that serious … [a] perception among the troops that this was just a diversion for her.” Jackie had spent the better part of two years proving herself at Viking, yet now it fell to her to demonstrate all over again that she really did mean to build an important career. More than that, she somehow had to make it possible for colleagues to deal with her as though she were any other Doubleday employee, which of course she was not. In effect, Jackie’s challenge was identical to the one that had faced her at Viking, and many were the predictions that her new job would end in disappointment and debacle as well. This time, however, she proved the skeptics wrong. At length, Jackie made such a point of wanting to be treated like everyone else, downplaying her glamour, scoffing at her fame, that, to Sargent’s sense, her new colleagues “couldn’t help but be charmed.”

At this most intensely and unabashedly commercial of houses, where she was to spend the rest of her career, Jackie would go on to publish numerous best sellers, the memoirs of Gelsey Kirkland and Michael Jackson, Joseph Campbell’s
The Power of Myth,
and Bill Moyers’s
Healing and the Mind
notable among them. But what might be best described as her signature titles tended to be smaller, more personal affairs, reflecting as they did a certain late-twentieth-century patrician sensibility—the product of a once all-powerful world that she wistfully acknowledged to be in decline. With their overlay of poetic regret, a good many of the books Jackie produced at Doubleday—stylish volumes about such topics as women in the age of the Sun King, Indian court life from 1590 to 1947, the garden photography of Eugène Atget, and Stanford White’s New York—might almost have been created to adorn the window display at the carriage trade Madison Avenue Bookstore (now defunct), where she was herself a customer.

Interestingly, a similar preoccupation with cultural evanescence infused Jackie’s work during this period on behalf of the landmarks preservation movement. At various times, she spoke with poignance of Manhattan monuments disappearing, of patches of sky being snatched away, of a cityscape that was dying “by degrees.” Pressed to explain why she had become involved in the fight to save the ornate Beaux Arts–style Grand Central Station, whose bankrupt owners hoped to raise money by allowing a fifty-five-story commercial tower to be built above it, Jackie said: “It’s a beautiful building that I’m used to seeing. I’d be outraged if it was replaced by steel and glass.” The occasion for this remark was a widely publicized April 16, 1978, train trip by some three hundred authors, artists, performers, and other preservationists to Washington, D.C., where the U.S. Supreme Court was to hear the owners’ suit to remove Grand Central’s previously accorded landmark designation in order that construction on the modernist Marcel Breuer–designed tower might begin. For all the notable names on the passenger list of the Landmark Express, as the train had been named for the day, none elicited greater press interest than that of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Her participation brought the preservationists’ cause national publicity that by their own reckoning they could not otherwise have hoped to attain. For once, instead of ducking the melee of cameras and reporters, Jackie seemed eager to speak up: “A big corporation shouldn’t be able to destroy a building that has meant so much to so many for so many generations. If Grand Central goes, all of the landmarks in this country will go as well.” Still, it was less anything Jackie said or did that was so helpful as it was the very fact of her presence.

After the Supreme Court upheld the railroad station’s protected status, Jackie went on to play a prominent part in other Manhattan landmark disputes. She lent her star wattage to avert the razing of Lever House; to halt the construction of a fifty-nine-story office tower above St. Bartholomew’s Church; and to force a developer to decrease the size of a new office complex planned for Columbus Circle. The dynamic in all of this was comparable to what had occurred when she managed to secure the release of the princess’s sleigh from the Soviet archives; or when, at a later date, she won the assent of heretofore intransigent French authorities to let the photographer Deborah Turbeville into certain spectral back rooms of the palace of the Bourbons for the Doubleday book
Unseen Versailles,
the original creative concept for which had been Jackie’s. The exercise of personal power was certainly not a new experience for Jackie. In the past, she had done it on behalf of JFK, RFK, and others. The difference at this point was that she was acting not to advance anyone else’s purposes, but rather her own. Her interventions had important private consequences, in addition to the well-known public ones. Quite apart from any books produced or landmarks saved, Jackie’s successes contributed to her quiet, ongoing process of healing, as she whose life had been forever transformed by eight and a half seconds of absolute powerlessness asserted again and again that she was anything but helpless.

Similarly conducive to Jackie’s health of spirit was her 1978 purchase of some 375 acres of undeveloped land on Martha’s Vineyard. Having finally been awarded a $26 million settlement by the Onassis estate, Jackie paid $1.1 million for the land, where she began work on the construction of a secluded New England–style gray shingled saltbox summer house, which, by the time it was completed in 1981, would cost another $2 million. One motive for leaving Hyannis Port was that from the time of her early married days, she had never enjoyed any real privacy there. Another sprung from Jackie’s long-standing anxiety about the influence upon her son and daughter of certain of their wilder Kennedy cousins, for whom drugs had lately become a significant problem.

Successful book editor; highly effective “public face” of the landmarks preservation movement; soon-to-be chatelaine of a Martha’s Vineyard estate; and exceedingly rich besides—by 1979, Jackie had certainly accomplished much since she moved back to the States full-time after the death of Aristotle Onassis. Yet, one element necessary to any trauma survivor’s course of recovery continued to be missing: a feeling of basic safety. How could she feel at all safe when the “continuing American nightmare” about a third Kennedy killing remained so prominent a factor in national life? 1977’s
Shall We Tell the President?
had been a work of fiction, but there was nothing make-believe about Teddy Kennedy’s decision, two years later, to challenge Jimmy Carter in the 1980 Democratic presidential primaries, precisely as the character in the assassination novel had done.

Though Teddy’s formal announcement was still weeks away, most people at the October 20, 1979, dedication of the recently completed John F. Kennedy Library in Dorchester, Massachusetts—including President Carter himself—had at least some idea of what the senator was finally about to do. For many attendees, a mixture of exhilaration and anxiety tinctured the proceedings. Exhilaration, because these were precisely the individuals whom McGeorge Bundy once described as that “circle of people who felt that their happiness and hopes died on the twenty-second of November unless they could be revived by the younger brother.” Anxiety, because of the presentiment tersely recorded by Arthur Schlesinger in his diary: “Ted will be shot if he runs.”

Jackie, who had been a driving force behind the creation of the library, took a seat beside her children on the blue-carpeted outdoor stage. Red roses adorned either side of a podium at which eighteen-year-old John Junior was scheduled to read Stephen Spender’s elegiac poem “I Think of Those Who Were Truly Great”; and where both Jimmy Carter and Teddy Kennedy were set to speak. Twelve years after the christening ceremony for the aircraft carrier
John F. Kennedy,
when the fiercer rivalry of LBJ and RFK had been similarly on display, Jackie remained coolly composed in the presence of many of the identical faces from her White House years that had formerly posed such a threat to her self-possession. Today, the dreaded trigger did not come in the form of one of those familiar visages, but rather from that of a person she hardly knew. Striding onstage to the accompaniment of “Hail to the Chief,” the president shook hands with various other Kennedy family members before he reached Jackie. Observers of the scene could not but be struck by what happened next.

When Carter leaned in to kiss her, Jackie, by Schlesinger’s account, “seemed to recoil visibly.” To the eye of Richard Burke, Teddy’s aide, it was as if Jackie had been “bitten by a snake.” In the wake of that tense encounter, many were the efforts to parse her bodily response in terms of current presidential and sexual politics. But the moment was also suggestive of the terrors with which, for Jackie, another Kennedy White House bid was inevitably freighted. The picture of her suddenly stiffening, then drawing back, recalls other such occasions, whether with Galella or Guinzburg, when she also had reacted to a sense of looming threat as if she were about to be, or had just been, physically attacked. Interestingly, she persisted in this spirit afterward when she caustically remarked to Schlesinger that Carter had acted as if the presidency carried with it the droit du seigneur—a feudal lord’s privilege to take the virginity of his serf’s daughters. But it is also telling that in contrast to her behavior at the battleship christening, this time Jackie did not require Bob McNamara or some other cavalier to help extricate her from the ceremony. Today, the flickers of agitation and apprehension vanished almost as abruptly as they had disclosed themselves, and her face became again the “enameled mask” that was its more habitual guise.

Nor at this point would Jackie find it quite impossible, as she had when RFK chased the Democratic presidential nomination in 1968, to publicly participate in the effort to secure a Kennedy restoration. She consented to appear at a limited number of Teddy’s campaign and fund-raising events. Still, in view of the suggestive fissures in Jackie’s demeanor at the library ceremony, it is hard not to hear at least a trace of irony in her insistence that she was “rather thrilled” at the prospect of his insurgent candidacy. What seems clear, at any rate, is that by this time her fears had diminished in intensity and oppressiveness to the degree that she was finally able to confront them.

Jackie appeared alongside eighty-nine-year-old Rose Kennedy (who had been widowed in 1969) when Teddy announced his intentions at Faneuil Hall in Boston on November 7. Thereafter, she cut a sometimes robotic figure on the hustings, greeting voters with what one press account described as “a fixed smile on her face and a right hand frozen open for handshakes.” Seated onstage beside Teddy at a Queens, New York, event, she made a point of pushing the microphones in front of her away. Was the gesture simply a reflection of Jackie’s ancient distaste for politicking or, under the circumstances, was it something else besides? Was she working very hard to anticipate and modulate the reactions of body and brain to the crowds and cameras, not to mention the sharpshooters and anti-sniper teams that were part of a Secret Service detail said to be larger than the one assigned to President Carter? Ironically, the senator’s Uzi-machine-gun-toting protectors had the unfortunate effect of heightening the overall sense of peril. Wherever Jackie accompanied Teddy now, there were always extra press people on hand in addition to the standard pool reporters in case another assassin suddenly sprang out of nowhere. Among themselves, certain of the journalists darkly referred to the task of covering Teddy as a “death watch.”

Finally, however, this particular campaign ended not with the bang for which everyone had been so excruciatingly on guard, but with a whimper. Teddy performed disastrously in on-camera interviews, flubbed questions about Chappaquiddick, and failed either to articulate his concept of presidential leadership or to explain why Democrats ought to choose him over Carter. The senator lost a majority of primaries and bowed out early at the Democratic National Convention in New York. Thus ended the struggle to reclaim the crown that had begun seventeen years previously at Andrews Air Force Base when Bobby Kennedy rushed onto the presidential jet to collect Jackie. The historian Garry Wills characterized Teddy’s unfortunate campaign as “the end of the entire Kennedy time in our national life.” By contrast, for Jackie personally, it had proven to be very much a beginning. Jackie had at last faced down the danger, and, crucially, the instant of horror had failed to recur. Like other survivors of psychological trauma, Jackie would never be able to fully expunge the old terrors. In the course of Teddy’s 1980 campaign, she had, however, begun to discover a way to live with them.

Jimmy Carter, of course, went on to be defeated by his Republican challenger, Ronald Reagan. Meanwhile, it had been among the quieter accomplishments of Carter’s single term to have named a new Veterans Administration national director, Max Cleland, a disabled Vietnam veteran intensely sympathetic to the problems of others who had been damaged in that unpopular war. Cleland’s appointment, coupled with the inclusion of PTSD as an officially sanctioned diagnosis in the 1980 edition of the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
of the American Psychiatric Association, marked a watershed in the treatment of readjustment issues experienced by veterans of the Vietnam War and subsequent conflicts.

Jackie, whose struggle with PTSD had started long before President Johnson committed U.S. combat forces in 1965, was operating on a different timetable from that of the Vietnam vets. By the time there existed an accepted name for what she had been suffering, her journey of recovery was already well under way. She had had to proceed in the absence of a conceptual framework that might have assuaged her feeling of isolation and helped her begin to make sense of her ordeal rather than suspect, as she had at times, that she was losing her sanity. But she had had significant advantages as well. Obviously, not every survivor of psychological trauma possessed the glittering backstory that had been so vital to the success of Jackie’s efforts to regain a sense of control. Not everyone had access to an eminent psychoanalyst or the financial means to undertake the construction of a serene, secure world of one’s own on Martha’s Vineyard.