Just Jackie (19 page)

Goodwin had come to Jackie’s rescue once before, when he had arranged for her to take her traumatized children to the psychoanalyst Erik Erikson after the assassination. Since then, Goodwin had become an important member of Bobby’s shadow cabinet, and while he waited for the Kennedy Restoration, he had taken a teaching post at Wesleyan University, where—conveniently enough—William Manchester also taught. In fact, the two men were close neighbors in leafy Middletown, Connecticut.

Jackie hoped that Goodwin could make Manchester see the light. And on Wednesday morning, September 7, she dispatched the
Caroline
to La Guardia Airport to pick them up and fly them to Hyannis Port.

“Jackie was waving to us as we came down the ramp,” Manchester wrote. “I remember that she was wearing sunglasses and a green miniskirt; she looked stunning. In the compound, we drank iced tea on the porch of President Kennedy’s house. Then Dick strolled off and Jackie and I changed to bathing suits.

“I sat on the back of a towing boat with young John on my lap while she water-skied behind—Jackie at her most acrobatic, at one point holding the tow rope with one foot and zipping along with the other foot on a single ski. After she had tired of this, I dove in, and the two of us struck out for shore. Wearing flippers, she rapidly left me far behind. Wallowing and out of breath, I momentarily wondered whether I would make it. I remember thinking: What if I drowned? Would that be good for the book or bad for the book?”

Like many men before him, Manchester was overcome by an irresistible impulse to please Jackie.

“She’s incredible,” he recalled. “She’s all woman. You’ve got to spend a little time with her, to see her in the full spectrum. When she looks at you with those big eyes …”

But Manchester was in for a big letdown.

“Back on the porch,” he went on, “with the three of us seated at a luncheon table in dry clothes, I slowly realized that nothing good for the book could possibly come out of this meeting. The atmosphere was completely unrealistic … Jackie was hostile toward
Look
, bitter about Cowles, and scornful of all books on President Kennedy, including [Arthur] Schlesinger’s. Repeatedly, she expressed affection for Goodwin and me, saying, ‘It’s us against them,’ and to me, ‘Your whole life proves you to be a man of honor.’ She was going to fight, she said savagely, and she was going to win: ‘Anybody who is against me will look like a rat unless I run off with Eddie Fisher.’ ”

It slowly dawned on Manchester that Jackie did not want
any
published account of her husband’s death—whether in book form or in a magazine excerpt. Beyond the personal revelations that she found so objectionable, Jackie was concerned about the political passages in Manchester’s book.

There were many references to discord between Bobby Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. Manchester portrayed Johnson as a man who had been eager to seize power, and who had been insensitive to the dead President’s family. For instance, Manchester described Kenneth O’Donnell, JFK’s White House secretary, pacing up and down the aisle of Air Force One, his hands clapped over his ears so that he would not have to hear the judge administering the presidential oath of office to Johnson.

All this could be used against Bobby if he should run
for national office. Jackie did not want to offend the thin-skinned Johnson, who was well aware that the Manchester book had been commissioned by her. When Bobby had talked about retiring from the public arena, it was Jackie who had begged him not to quit, arguing that the country needed him. If the book turned Johnson into an implacable foe, and scuttled Bobby’s chances for the White House, it would be all her fault. Once again, she would bring disaster upon someone she loved.

I
n the midst of her troubles over the Manchester book, Jackie received a call from John Warnecke. They had not seen each other for several weeks.

“I’ve just got back to my office here in San Francisco,” he told her, “and I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news.”

“What’s wrong?” Jackie asked.

“My bookkeeper tells me that I owe the bank six hundred thousand dollars,” he said. “The bank says the loan is more like a million dollars. And it’s due Monday.”

“How could that happen?” Jackie asked.

She had been led to believe that Warnecke was a wealthy man and was insulated from problems like this.

“That’s what I asked my bookkeeper,” he said. “She says I haven’t been paying enough attention to my business, and the office always relied on me in the past to generate the commissions. The last couple of years I’ve been preoccupied with the memorial grave. Then you and I
spent the last two months together in Hawaii. I guess I just let things go.”

It sounded as if he was trying to lay the blame for his money problems on Jackie.

“What are you going to do?” she asked.

“I have to spend a lot more time taking care of business.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means I don’t think I can see you quite so much,” he said. “Not as often as before, anyway. At least not until things calm down a bit.”

It all sounded bizarre. For the past two years, Warnecke had told Jackie over and over again that he loved her. But now, out of the blue, he seemed to have changed his tune.
He could no longer be to her what he had been before
—a man did not say that to the woman he loved.

Obviously, something had changed. And it was not only Warnecke’s financial condition. He seemed to have suddenly realized that those fairy-tale weeks in Hawaii were not real, and that he would never be able to change Jackie into a normal person. He could not provide Jackie with what she really needed: total security from the outside world.

There was a long silence on the phone. It went on for so long that Warnecke thought Jackie might have hung up, or that they had lost their connection.

Then Jackie said, “I understand.”

“We’ll still see each other,” Warnecke said. “This isn’t good-bye.”

“Of course not,” she said.

“I still love you, Jackie,” he said.

But this time Jackie did not say that she loved him back.

P
arade
was the first national magazine to run a full-fledged story on Jackie’s secret relationship with Warnecke. The piece appeared in early December 1966, and was titled “Jackie Kennedy, World’s Most Eligible Widow—
WILL SHE MARRY AGAIN?”
It was written by Lloyd Shearer, a well-connected journalist, who also wrote the magazine’s famous page-two column “Personality Parade” under the pseudonym Walter Scott.
*

“The name one hears most frequently in connection with Mrs. Kennedy and romance,” wrote Shearer, “is John Carl Warnecke, 47, the architect in charge of the John F. Kennedy Memorial grave now under construction at Arlington National Cemetery….

“One of Jack Warnecke’s friends in Marin County, Calif., says, They have a lot in common, love of art, architecture, athletics, culture, but I don’t think there’s a thing to it. My own opinion, for what it’s worth, is that Jackie for the first time is enjoying her own freedom, her own identity, indulging in her own tastes too much to give all that up for any guy.’ ”

Jackie and Warnecke were still sleeping with each other, but things were not the same. In conversations with friends, Jackie had begun to drop hints that her feelings
for Warnecke had cooled. That may have been part of the reason he was not awarded the design commission for the John F. Kennedy Library. That coveted job would go instead to I. M. Pei, a little-known Chinese-American architect who was recommended by Bunny Mellon.

N
ine days before Christmas in 1966, an emotionally distraught Jackie filed suit against Harper & Row,
Look
, and William Manchester to prevent publication of
The Death of a President
. No one was more shocked and dismayed by her legal action than Bobby. Jackie had placed him in an untenable position. On the one hand, he could not be seen to be favoring censorship. On the other, he could not abandon his brother’s widow.

He had begged her not to take the case to court. The fact that she had gone ahead anyway was interpreted by some people as a sign that Jackie was struggling to break free of Bobby’s iron control.

The battle of the book pitted Kennedy-lovers against Kennedy-haters, and old friends against each other. James Reston, the influential Washington bureau chief of
The New York Times
, wrote a column entitled “The Death of Camelot,” in which he portrayed Jackie as an imperious woman who had launched an assault against the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of speech. Reston’s dear friend Teddy White fired back in a letter to the editor of the
Times
, chastising the columnist for a “rare lapse
from excellence,” and praising Jackie for her “great courage and honor.”

Jackie’s action made front-page news all over the world. As
New York Times
reporter John Corry wrote in his book-length account,
The Manchester Affair
, it was the stuff of high political drama. It touched on two presidencies—John Kennedy’s and Lyndon Johnson’s—and potentially a third—that of Robert Francis Kennedy.

No one enjoyed the squabble more than Lyndon Johnson. Though he looked robust, LBJ had never entirely recovered from his first heart attack back in the late 1950s, and Lady Bird Johnson feared that the gathering domestic storm over the Vietnam War might prove too much for his health. She was urging him not to run for reelection in 1968.

But Johnson did not want to hand over the White House to his old nemesis, Bobby Kennedy. That was something he dreaded almost as much as a second heart attack. As a result, Johnson, who feared Jackie’s power, handled the Manchester affair with extreme caution.

He asked his White House image consultant, Robert Kintner, the former president of ABC and NBC, to get him an early copy of Manchester’s galley proofs. The thin-skinned Johnson read the book with mounting rage, but he was careful not to say anything that might offend Jackie. On December 16, 1966, LBJ wrote her a letter that dripped with honey:

Jackie replied to LBJ that she had no choice but to sue. But, she went on, “winning … seems a hollow victory—with everything I objected to printed all over the newspapers anyway.”

Before the controversy was over, Manchester would flee to a Swiss sanitarium, where, it was later reported, he suffered a mental breakdown. In January 1967, Jackie reached an out-of-court settlement with her adversaries. She forced Harper & Row,
Look
, and Manchester to make most of the changes that she wanted. But as she had pointed out to LBJ, it was a Pyrrhic victory. Shortly after the settlement was announced, the New York
World Journal Tribune
began running a five-part series of articles by Liz Smith under the astonishing headline
JACKIE COMES OFF HER PEDESTAL
.