Just Jackie (8 page)

More than likely, this explained Jackie’s difficult birth pattern. But what of Jackie herself? Was her health affected by the venereal infection, too?

“These bacteria,” explained Dr. Toth, “do not stay inside the woman’s uterine canal solely; they go through her tubes, her pelvic cavity, her ovaries, and they interfere with ovarian function. Those sluggish ovaries do not produce the normal complement of hormones. These are the women who, after deliveries, after miscarriages, develop hormonally related emotional problems, and go through hormonal withdrawal and severe depression that can last for months.”

This explained why Jackie suffered from severe bouts of postpartum depression after her pregnancies. And why she had felt so despondent after giving birth to John.

I
t was dark and beginning to sleet when Richard Cardinal Cushing left his Boston Archdiocese residence and drove to Holyhood Cemetery in nearby Brookline, where Patrick Bouvier Kennedy was buried. Patrick was born five and a half weeks prematurely by caesarean section, and weighed four pounds, ten ounces at birth. He was the first to be placed in the large family plot, a wedge of land with a gray granite gravestone that had been purchased by Joseph Kennedy.

The Cardinal was a tall man, with a square jaw and a seamed face. He possessed a big personality and a big Boston Irish voice—“the harshest in Christendom,” said McGeorge Bundy, JFK’s national security adviser. Cardinal Cushing had delivered the invocation at John Kennedy’s Inauguration.

“I thought it was a pretty good prayer,” he said, “but less than three years later Jack was killed. So it didn’t seem to do any good.”

The prelate was dressed in black vestments. He watched as Patrick’s intact casket was exhumed from its shallow grave. Then he sprinkled it with holy water and said a short prayer:

“Blessed be the name of the Lord, now and forever.”

The Cardinal had officiated at Patrick’s funeral, and witnessed the spectacle of the President of the United States slumped over his son’s coffin, his body wracked by tears. He watched as Jack encircled the tiny coffin
with his arms. Now, in an impulsive reenactment of the moment, Cushing reached down, picked up Patrick’s little casket, carried it over to his car, and placed it in the backseat.

It was midnight when he left Holyhood Cemetery and set off on the eighty-mile journey to Newport. There, the Cardinal met Janet Auchincloss at the Naval Air Station and turned the coffin over to her.

It was an especially poignant moment for Janet. As a consequence of her divorce from Black Jack, she had been excommunicated from the Catholic Church, and though in her heart she still felt like a Catholic, she knew that in the eyes of that church, she had irrevocably lapsed. Like Jackie, she had a Catholic sense of her own sinfulness, and whenever she was in the presence of high Catholic officials, like Cushing, she was uncharacteristically at a loss for words.

And so Janet did not say more than a terse thank-you to the Cardinal before she boarded the
Caroline
for the flight back to Washington. Inside the narrow cabin, Patrick’s coffin rested beside the coffin of Baby Girl Kennedy.

A
t eight-thirty the following night, Jackie stood shivering in Arlington National Cemetery and watched as a crane lowered the coffin of Baby Girl Kennedy on the right side of the President’s grave. There was
something so final about seeing your own flesh being put into the ground.

Jackie’s father was buried in East Hampton, Long Island, and she and her sister Lee had plots in the same cemetery. But now that Jackie’s husband and two of her children were laid to rest in Arlington, it seemed more than likely that this would be the site of her last resting place, too.

The reinterment ceremony had been kept secret from the press. The only other people present were Jackie’s mother; the surviving Kennedy brothers, Robert and Edward; and the Most Reverend Philip Hannan, the auxiliary bishop of Washington, who said the Lord’s Prayer:

“… and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil…”

Jackie had told friends that Jack’s death and the deaths of her children were all interlaced in her mind. Why did Jack have to die so young? she asked. Even when you’re sixty, you like to know your husband is there.

She might have known that it was expecting too much to grow old with Jack and see their children grow up. That dream was now being buried along with the bodies of little Patrick and Baby Girl Kennedy.

Could she have saved the children? Could she have saved Jack?

She played the events in Dallas over and over in her mind. She told friends that she hoped the assassination had been part of a conspiracy, and that Oswald had not acted alone. That way, Jack’s death would have an air of inevitability about it. For even if Oswald had missed, the conspirators would have gotten Jack anyway.

She did not want to accept Jack’s death as a freak accident, for that meant that his life could have been spared—if only the driver in the front seat of the presidential limousine had reacted more quickly and stepped on the gas … if only the Secret Service had stationed agents on the rear bumper … if only
she
had insisted on a bubble-top …
if only
she
had turned to her right sooner … if only
she
had done something to save him.

And so, as Jackie later remembered it, she went over and over the last three minutes in the car in Dallas, and there in the flickering shadows of the Eternal Flame, she wondered whether she was the cause of all the ruin and destruction:
What could I have done? How could I have changed it?

THE FREAK OF
N STREET

January 1964

T
oward the end of January, Jackie moved out of the Harriman house and into a home of her own, a handsome, three-story Georgian structure at 3017 N Street in Georgetown. At her behest, Billy Baldwin, the famous interior designer, flew down from New York to help her with the decorating.

“Look, I have some beautiful things to show you,” Jackie told Baldwin, producing a few small fragments of Greek and Roman sculpture. “These are the beginnings of a collection Jack started…. It’s so sad to be doing this. Like a young married couple fixing up their first house together. I could never make the White House personal…. Oh, Mr. Baldwin, I’m afraid I’m going to embarrass you. I just can’t hold it any longer.”

She collapsed into a chair, and buried her face in her hands while she wept.

“I know from my very brief acquaintance with you that you are a sympathetic man,” she said after she had recovered her composure. “Do you mind if I tell you something? I know my husband was devoted to me. I know he was proud of me. It took a very long time for us to work everything out, but we did, and we were about to have a real life together. I was going to campaign with him. I know I held a very special place for him—a unique place…. Can anyone understand how it is to have lived in the White House and then, suddenly, to be living alone as the President’s widow?”

Decorating the house helped Jackie begin the long journey back to life. So did the excitement of going out and buying new clothes. She was no longer using Oleg Cassini, the temperamental couturier who had dressed her as First Lady. Once again, she turned for fashion guidance to
Vogue’s
flamboyant editor Diana Vreeland, who had put her together with Cassini in the first place. But as always, Jackie was involved in every detail of her own attire, down to the size of her hats.

“The smaller the better,” she told Vreeland, “as I really do have an enormous head, and anything too extreme always looks ridiculous on me.”

After two months of bleak seclusion, she was ready for company. She invited Benjamin Bradlee and his wife Tony to spend a weekend with her at Wexford, her 166-acre property on Rattlesnake Mountain in Atoka, Virginia, adjoining the Oak Spring estate of Paul and Bunny Mellon.

A secret passageway had been built for the President in Atoka, leading from the master bedroom to a bomb shelter beneath the stables. But Jack and Jackie had stayed at Wexford only two weekends before his death.

Bradlee recalled that he, his wife, and Jackie all tried—with no success—to talk about something other than Jack Kennedy.

“Too soon and too emotional for healing, we proved only that the three of us had very little in common without the essential fourth,” Bradlee wrote in his memoirs. “Only four weeks after the assassination, after the last of these weekends, we received this sad note from the President’s widow.”