Just Jackie (6 page)

Jackie had no doubt harbored such aggressive wishes herself, especially when Jack Kennedy wounded her with his public displays of philandering and his callous disregard for her feelings. Her best friend, Bunny Mellon, called Jackie “a witch with supernatural powers,” and there were times when Jackie must have wished she was a sorceress so she could punish her rogue of a husband for all the pain he had inflicted upon her.

“Jack would walk into a room and spot a young, attractive girl, and make a beeline for her,” Jackie confided to a friend.

But then, in the last few months of their marriage, she and Jack had reached a new understanding, which was why she had agreed to go with him to Texas. And there in the blinding sunlight of Dallas, the third bullet from Lee Harvey Oswald’s rifle had torn away the back of Jack’s head, leaving Jackie with chunks of his brain quivering in her hands.

She would surely have given anything to obliterate the memory of her shameful wishes. But of course she was powerless to change the past. All she could do was deal with the present, and especially with the assassination’s impact on her children.

Jackie was even more concerned about John than she was about Caroline. She worried that John might somehow be damaged in his masculine development by the absence of a father figure. Her son had always been a handful, but he was growing more difficult to control. He was wild and impulsive, and unwilling to listen to anybody. Managing him was becoming a chore.

At age three, John was in the midst of Erikson’s stage three—the conflict between “initiative” and “guilt.” John was trying to figure out which of his independent moves were socially acceptable, and which were not. It was the duty of his mother to help him internalize socially correct behavior through loving discipline. At the same time, according to Erikson’s theory, she was to encourage free expression, and not raise a little automaton.

Erikson talked about the shooting in Dallas. A child’s early concept of his body was often related to mechanical objects, and a great deal of childhood was devoted to working out the desires to retain and eliminate. So it might be important to learn how little John viewed the gun, the bullet, and the hole in his father’s body.

Erikson then excused himself, and led John into his private study and closed the door. The room had an analyst’s couch with a throw, and was filled with books and paintings by friends, including a couple of seascapes by a Cape Cod artist named Gyorgy Kepecs. Erikson had also brought back art from his trips to India. He had won a Pulitzer Prize for his biography
Gandhi’s Truth
, and he believed in the concept of nonviolence—another reason he was deeply affected by John Kennedy’s assassination.

There was a pile of toys on the floor—blocks, bears, marbles, cars, a broken bowl, a pinwheel, clay, paint, and small dolls made to look like male and female adults and children. Erikson got down on the floor and asked John to build a house. For several minutes, the white-haired therapist remained silent, allowing John to concentrate on his play undisturbed.

For all Erikson knew, John’s participation in the events following his father’s assassination had not been as traumatic for the little boy as most adults might have imagined. In a certain sense, the funeral, with its drums and flags and Scottish pipers, could have been exciting and fun for him. The whole experience might have given John the chance to perform on a large public stage.
And besides, with his father’s disappearance, John no longer had to compete with another male for his mother’s attention.

“What kind of house is that?” Erikson asked John. “And why is that doll outside the house?”

“Because the doll went away,” John replied.

“And why did he go away?” Erikson asked.

“Because,” said John, “he doesn’t belong in the house anymore.”

NO PLACE
TO GO

December 1963

A
bitter wind was blowing off the Potomac when Jackie’s Air Force C-131 transport touched down at Washington National Airport the next evening. Caroline came down the ramp first, dressed in the same blue overcoat she had worn at her father’s funeral. She hopped into the waiting limousine, and Jackie followed with John; Maude Shaw, the children’s nanny; and one of the family dogs, a blue roan cocker spaniel named Shannon.

The drive to the White House took them within a half mile of Arlington National Cemetery. The children could see the Eternal Flame fluttering on their father’s hillside grave. Maude Shaw said that their father was in heaven looking after Patrick, and the flame seemed to confirm her words as it winked at them in the clear, cold air.

John was sleepy and out of sorts, and Jackie was anxious to see him tucked safely into bed for the night. She herself would sleep hardly at all. Her wounds were too painful. The world might marvel at her strength and indomitable spirit, how she had orchestrated Jack’s funeral and held the nation together for three days of mourning. But as she confided to her sister Lee and to Bobby Kennedy, she felt that her usefulness to herself and others was coming to an end.

She had nothing more to give. Some days, she could not even get out of bed. She cried all day and all night
until she was so exhausted that she could not function. She drowned her sorrows in vodka, and was slipping into depression. She feared that she might be turning into an alcoholic. Or was she losing her mind?

Madness ran in the family. Jackie’s aunt Edith Bouvier Beale lived in a ramshackle mansion called Grey Gardens in East Hampton, on the south shore of Long Island, where she wandered like a crazed woman through rooms filled with rotting rubbish and piles of cat and raccoon excrement. Would that be Jackie’s fate? She felt it was possible.

After all, Jackie remarked ruefully, she was already living in her own private Grey Gardens.

A
fter the children were asleep, Jackie came down from the Family Quarters, and peeked into the Oval Office. Jack had always wanted a red rug, and while they were in Texas, she had instructed the White House decorators to lay a new scarlet carpet.

The refurbished office now belonged to Lyndon Baines Johnson, who had been urged by Secretary of State Dean Rusk and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara to move in as quickly as possible to minimize the shock of transition. But things had not gone as smoothly as expected. On the day after the assassination, as Johnson approached the Oval Office for the first time as President, he had been surprised to find John Kennedy’s personal
secretary Evelyn Lincoln still sitting at her desk in the anteroom.

“Can’t you clear out of here so my girls can come in?” Johnson said.

Mrs. Lincoln reported the rude remark to Robert F. Kennedy, the Attorney General. Bobby Kennedy was so outraged that he virtually ordered Johnson to stay out of the Oval Office until after his brother’s funeral. Not wanting to look like a usurper, Johnson acquiesced, and waited three days before moving in.

During that time, word spread that the new President had been barred from the Oval Office by the Kennedys. It was said that Johnson was being forced to conduct the nation’s business from across the street in the vice president’s office in the old Executive Office Building. Even after he took possession of the Oval Office, Johnson had to return each night to the vice president’s residence to sleep, because Jackie and her children were still occupying the Family Quarters.

“I can’t even live in my own house,” Johnson complained to a companion one day while he was doing laps in the White House swimming pool.

Pressure mounted on Johnson to get Jackie and the rest of the Kennedys out of the White House.

“You’re the President,” Harry Truman scolded Johnson. “Clear this bunch out, and move your people in.”

Jackie had promised Lady Bird Johnson that she would move within a week after her return from Hyannis Port. Her shock and sorrow were etched in every word of the memo she sent to the new First Lady.

The women of the White House press corps, whom Jackie had dubbed “the harpies,” had never warmed to the aristocratic Mrs. Kennedy, and they were eager to see her go. In the dispatches they sent back to their local newspapers, they noted that Eleanor Roosevelt had vacated the President’s House the day after Franklin’s death. When, they asked Liz Carpenter, Lady Bird’s press secretary, would Jackie make way for the Johnsons?

“So I went to Mrs. Johnson and I said, ‘They just keep asking when are we moving in,’ “ recalled Liz Carpenter. “It’s the first time I’ve ever seen Mrs. Johnson really angry. She turned and said with rather intense indignation at the question, ‘I would to God I could serve Mrs. Kennedy’s comfort. I can at least serve her convenience.’ ”

“Everything was in a jumbled state as we were packing for the move,” recalled Mary Barelli Gallagher, Jackie’s private secretary. “The third floor was the busiest those days, fairly buzzing with activity. All the storage rooms had been opened and the things brought out to be packed. That moved smoothly enough. But the complication was Jackie’s clothes: special tall cartons had to be made to hold the closets full of gowns.”

“Now that I look back on it,” Jackie admitted later, “I think I should have gotten out the next day. But at first I didn’t have any place to go.”

J
ackie received a call from Mrs. Averell Harriman, the wife of JFK’s patrician undersecretary of state, offering the use of her house on N Street in Georgetown until Jackie could make more definite plans about a place to live.

Marie Harriman had attended Miss Spence’s School with Jackie’s mother, and she was a popular figure in Washington social circles. She had an appreciation for expensive Impressionist and Postimpressionist artists—van Gogh, Gauguin, Picasso—and for rich, handsome men. She was the kind of woman who could amuse a man for an entire evening by telling off-color jokes in a husky voice out of the side of her mouth. Jack Kennedy had been very fond of her.