These Few Precious Days (45 page)

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Acknowledgments

They wanted to talk. No, they
needed
to talk, to set the record straight, to tell the story of these two remarkable people as they knew it—and before it was too late. Some of their names instantly conjure up images of John F. Kennedy’s bold New Frontier and of the Camelot myth Jackie so carefully nurtured: Theodore Sorensen, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Pierre Salinger, John Kenneth Galbraith, Evelyn Lincoln, Letitia Baldrige, to name but a few. Other noted personalities like Gore Vidal, Oleg Cassini, Clare Boothe Luce, and George Plimpton had no official role but veered in and out of the Kennedys’ orbit. Then there were the confidants virtually unknown to the public—people like Chuck and Betty Spalding, Charles and Martha Bartlett, and William Walton—whom Jack and Jackie turned to more than anyone for solace, advice, and companionship.

In the course of writing four bestselling books on JFK’s tight-knit little family over the past twenty years, I was honored to interview not only the people above—all but two of whom have since died—but hundreds of others: family members, friends, classmates, colleagues, neighbors, political allies and enemies, doctors, servants, staff members, Jack’s former girlfriends, Jackie’s ex-fiancé, and the journalists and photographers who covered the Kennedy White House. Only a few of these asked not to be identified, and I respected their wishes.

It should come as no surprise that so many of these people are no longer with us. It has, after all, been a half century since that fateful day in Dallas. But as I played the tapes and combed through the notes of my interviews with these eyewitnesses to history, the story of Jackie and Jack’s last few precious days as man and wife struck me as more compelling, heartbreaking, and inspiring than ever.

Once again, I am indebted to my editor, Mitchell Ivers, for his talent, insight, and commitment to bringing this bittersweet tale to life on the page. Mitchell is just one of the many fine people at Simon & Schuster and Gallery Books to whom I owe a debt of gratitude, most notably Louise Burke, Jen Bergstrom, Carolyn Reidy, Jennifer Robinson, Natasha Simons, Paul O’Halloran, Kelly Roberts, Lisa Rivlin, Eric Rayman, Felice Javit, Tom Pitoniak, Carly Sommerstein, Ruth Lee-Mui, and Janet Perr.

My agent, Ellen Levine, will be tired of hearing this for the thirtieth time in as many years and as many books, but she is simply the best agent and advocate an author could ever hope to have—and, more important, a treasured friend. I am also grateful to all of Ellen’s talented colleagues at Trident Media Group, particularly Claire Roberts, Monika Woods, Alexa Stark, Alexander Slater, and Meredith Miller.

My wife, Valerie, who has put up with me for more than forty-one years, knows there are no words to express how I feel about her. Our beautiful and gifted daughters, Kate and Kelly, have always contributed much to the process, joined now by Kate’s husband, Brooke Brower, and the newest member of our team to whom this book is dedicated, Graham Andersen Brower.

Historian Michael Foster was my original guide in tapping the vast store of information available at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, and I must also thank author Laurence Leamer and Northeastern University professor Ray Robinson for introducing me to him. My thanks as well to the library’s Maryrose Grossman, James Hill, Maura Porter, Megan Desnoyers, William Johnson, Ron Whealen, and June Payne. I am also grateful to noted British television producer Charles Furneaux and American documentary filmmaker Robert Drew for their kindness and generous assistance when I first began writing about this complicated, fascinating couple nearly twenty years ago.

My thanks again to Pierre Salinger, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Theodore Sorensen, Letitia Baldrige, John Kenneth Galbraith, Oleg Cassini, Gore Vidal, Paul “Red” Fay, George Plimpton, Roswell Gilpatric, Nancy Dickerson Whitehead, George Smathers, Evelyn Lincoln, Jacques Lowe, Hugh D. “Yusha” Auchincloss, Jamie Auchincloss, Chuck Spalding, Charles Bartlett, Theodore H. White, John Husted, Ham Brown, Helen Thomas, Angier Biddle Duke, Godfrey McHugh, Betty Beale, Clare Boothe Luce, Peter Duchin, Larry Newman, Priscilla Johnson McMillan, Sister Joanne Frey, Drew Middleton, Martha Bartlett, David Halberstam, John Davis, Cecil Stoughton, Charles Collingwood, Patricia Lawford, Tony Bradlee, Dr. Janet Travell, William vanden Heuvel, Jack Anderson, Gloria Swanson, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Dorothy Schoenbrun, Aileen Mehle, Dorothy Oliger, Marta Sgubin, Bette Davis, Vincent Russo, James E. O’Neal, Charles Whitehouse, Kitty Carlisle Hart, Charles Damore, Jack Valenti, Bertram S. Brown, Terry L. Birdwhistell, Otto Fuerbringer, Cleveland Amory, Henry Grunwald, John Bryson, Charles Furneaux, Roy Cohn, Wendy Leigh, Linus Pauling, Fred Friendly, Doris Lilly, Stephen Corsaro, Jesse Birnbaum, Richard Clurman, Richard B. Stolley, Ronald Grele, Barry Schenck, Rosemary McClure, Cranston Jones, Halston, Steve Michaud, David McGough, Paula Dranov, James Hill, John Marion, Dale Sider, Diane Tucker, Earl Blackwell, Tom Freeman, Perri Peltz, Jeanette Peterson, William S. Paley, Albert V. Concordia, the Countess of Romanones, James Bacon, Willard K. Rice, Dudley Freeman, John Perry Barlow, John Sargent, Laurence Leamer, Anne Vanderhoop, Betsy Loth, Bob Thomas, Larry Lorenzo, Brad Darrach, Maryrose Grossman, Shirley Clurman, Sandy Richardson, Farris L. Rookstool III, Janet Lizop, Yvette Reyes, Marybeth Whelan, and Corrie Novak.

This book could also not have been written without the help of the staffs of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, the Houghton Library at Harvard University, the Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library at Princeton University, the Columbia University Oral History Project, the Butler Library at Columbia University and Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the Robert Drew Archive, the Boston University Library, the Stanford University Archives, the University of Kentucky Library, the Library of Congress, the United States Secret Service, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library, the Choate School Archives, the Redwood Library and Athenaeum of Newport, Rhode Island, the Barnstable Public Library, Miss Porter’s School, the Boston Public Library, the Archdiocese of Boston, the
New Bedford Standard Times,
the Georgetown University Library, Vassar College Library, Winterthur Museum, the Gunn Memorial Library, the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, the Silas Bronson Library, the Carlyle Hotel, the Associated Press, Reuters, Globe Photos, Corbis.

CHRISTOPHER ANDERSEN
is the critically acclaimed author of fifteen
New York Times
bestsellers that have been translated into more than twenty-five languages worldwide. Two of his books—
The Day Diana Died
and
The Day John Died
(about JFK Jr.)—reached number one. A former contributing editor of
Time
magazine and senior editor of
People
, Andersen has also written for a wide range of publications, including
The New York Times
,
Life,
and
Vanity Fair.

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Authors.SimonandSchuster.com/Christopher-Andersen

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Sources and Chapter Notes

The following chapter notes have been compiled to give an overview of the sources drawn upon in preparing
These Few Precious Days,
but they are by no means all-inclusive. I have respected the wishes of those few interview subjects who asked to remain anonymous, and accordingly I have not listed them here or elsewhere in the text. The archives and oral history collections of many institutions—including but not limited to the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library, the Oral History Project of Columbia University, the Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library at Princeton University, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, and the Houghton Library at Harvard University—yielded a wealth of information, much of it emerging in stages since the death of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis in 1994.

Most significant, perhaps, has been the gradual release between 1993 and 2012 of more than 260 hours of taped conversations conducted in the Oval Office and in the Cabinet Room during the Kennedy administration—all part of a system the president had installed in an apparent attempt to capture history being made in real time. In 2011, Caroline Kennedy added to the excitement by authorizing the release of Arthur Schlesinger’s historic series of conversations with Jackie that took place in 1964 but had remained under lock and key ever since. In my own series of interviews with Schlesinger, he made reference to the contents of these tapes and predicted that they would not be released until 2044 if at all. Fortunately for us, he was wrong. The eight and a half hours of conversation between Schlesinger and Jackie shed important new light on life in the Kennedy White House and, more specifically, her life with JFK.