by Edward Klein
Erikson spent weekends and holidays in Cotuit, a few miles from Hyannis Port. He taught at Harvard, and was friendly with many of the brainy types who ran the New Frontier. His telephone number had been given to Jackie by Richard Goodwin, one of JFK’s closest advisers, who had an amazing network of friends and acquaintances.
“The children have been through a terrible experience, as you know,” Jackie told Erikson. “I would like to bring them to see you.”
“I teach full-time now, and haven’t practiced in years,” Erikson explained in his slight German accent. “I’m not taking formal patients.”
“It might be well for the children to see a person like you,” Jackie persisted.
Erikson did not find it any easier to say no to Jackie than had Teddy White.
“Of course,” he said. “You can bring them here if you like.”
That afternoon, as Jackie was hustling Caroline and John out the door for their appointment with Erikson, she caught sight of a Marine guard lowering the presidential standard in the front yard. The wind was still blowing hard, and the flag dipped and slapped against the flagpole, resisting the guard’s efforts to retire it from service for the last time at Hyannis Port.
The White House message center at the Cape was located in the basement of the Yachtsman Hotel, but there was also a communications trailer just beyond the tall cedar fence that marked the boundary of the presidential property on Squaw Island. As Jackie piled Caroline and John into the back of a two-toned Buick, she saw workmen hauling away that trailer.
Jack had once told Jackie, only half in jest, that when they left the White House, the thing he would miss the most would be the White House telephone operator, who was a wizard at finding and connecting you to anyone in the world within a matter of seconds. Now, just as Jack had predicted, the red telephone with the direct line to the White House switchboard was gone.
Jackie climbed into the front seat of the Buick next to Clint Hill, her tall, curly-haired Secret Service agent. He and the other bodyguards were all that was left. Her husband had been taken away from her; now she was being stripped of her identity.
She had undergone a dramatic metamorphosis in the White House. At first she felt as though she had been stuffed into a tight cocoon, and she tried to extricate herself by staying away from Washington as much as possible. She spent the three months of each summer in Hyannis Port and in Newport, Rhode Island. She left on weekends for her Virginia horse-country retreat. Christmas and Easter were passed in Palm Beach. And she went for long stretches of time abroad—five weeks in India and Pakistan, four in Italy, two in Greece. White House reporters began to sign off their stories on Jackie with the line “Good night, Mrs. Kennedy, wherever you are:”
Jackie was terrified of snoopy aides who, as she said, “hit the White House with their Dictaphones running.” She feared that she was a political liability to her husband, and told him, “Oh, Jack, I’m sorry for you that I’m such a dud.”
“She was such an innocent girl when she first came to the White House in 1961,” said Robin Duke, the wife of JFK’s chief of protocol, Angier Biddle Duke. “She didn’t know how to talk on television. She was so inexperienced that she put on that wispy little baby voice, which none of us had ever heard her use before.”
But by 1962 Jackie had gained a voice. People began to notice a striking alteration in her attitude. The crowds that shrieked “Jack-ee, Jack-ee, Jack-ee!” no longer seemed to terrify her. She came to understand that the public loved her as much as they loved Jack. Her poll numbers were sky high, higher even than Jack’s; this so impressed his Irish mafia (“the Murphia,” she called them) that they started to treat her like a key player in the Administration.
More comfortable in her role, she began to change the face and character of Washington. Nothing symbolized that change as much as the parties she gave at the White House.
“[Jack] loved the gaiety and spirit and ceremony of a collection of friends, especially beautiful women in beautiful dresses,” wrote Benjamin Bradlee, then the Washington bureau chief of Newsweek magazine. “They liked to mix jet setters with politicians, reporters with the people they reported on, intellectuals with entertainers, friends with acquaintances. Jackie was the producer of these parties. Jack was the consumer.”
Behind her back, the women of the press corps started calling her the Cleopatra of the Potomac. And it was true that she assumed an almost regal air. She was looking forward to continuing in power during Jack’s second term. She was confident that it would be a triumph. There would be more parties, more beautiful dresses, more trips abroad. And Jack would have the opportunity to answer the great questions he had posed when he first entered the White House: What kind of people are we Americans? What do we want to become?
By 1963, she had achieved a life beyond her wildest dreams. She had the love of the most powerful man in the world; a mansion with a staff of servants who catered to her every whim; a fleet of limousines, airplanes, and helicopters to take her wherever she wanted to go; round-the-clock security; a wardrobe created by her own couturier; and the adoration of millions of people around the world.
Then, in a split second, she lost it all. And she was left to ask: Who am I? And what do I want to become?
As agent Clint Hill headed west on Route 28 toward Cotuit, he kept the speedometer below forty miles per hour and turned on his parking lights. The wind had dispelled the rain and fog, but the temperature was near freezing, making the surface of the roads treacherous. The Secret Service had just lost a president, murdered before the eyes of the world, and Hill did not want to be responsible for another national tragedy.
When Hill reached Cotuit, he followed Main Street out past the town to a spit of land on the water. The Erikson house, which stood at the end of a long, pebble driveway, was a modern brown wooden structure in the shape of a hexagon. The famed psychoanalyst was waiting for them on the steps of a screened-in porch.
Erikson looked like a well-groomed, Nordic version of Albert Einstein. He had a high forehead, and his fluffy white hair blew every which way in the wind. His large, sparkling-blue eyes and permanent little smile gave him an approachable air. He came forward to welcome his guests.
The Kennedy children had been trained by their mother to watch their manners, and even in their time of grief, they did not need to be reminded to shake the doctor’s hand.
Erikson patted John’s head and said, “I remember the picture of this little boy dressed in his formal coat, and saluting his father’s coffin.”
He led them into the house, where he introduced Jackie to his attractive wife Joan, who was also a psychotherapist. Mrs. Erikson seemed less than thrilled to meet Jackie Kennedy.
“My mother was taken completely by surprise by Jackie’s visit,” according to Erikson’s daughter, Sue Bloland, who followed in the family tradition and became a psychotherapist herself. “My mother was an elegant woman in her own right, and she was the type who would be envious of anybody with Jackie’s image. Knowing her, I suspect that she interpreted the fact that my father hadn’t told her ahead of time about Jackie as a sign that he considered Jackie more important than his own wife.”
While the two women were trying to decide what they thought of each other, Erikson put the children at ease by offering them soft drinks, as well as some toys to play with.
Erikson’s personal experiences made him an especially appropriate therapist for Jackie’s children. When Erik was three—exactly John’s age—his Danish mother married a German-Jewish pediatrician named Theodor Homburger, and little Erik Homburger was raised believing that he was Jewish, and that his stepfather was his birth father. “This loving deceit,” as the psychoanalyst later put it, was a prime reason for his interest in identity problems, and it gave him a deep empathy for children who had lost their fathers.
He had other identity confusions as well. Was he Danish or German? Jewish or Gentile? His anti-Semitic German classmates considered him Jewish, and rejected him. His
peers at synagogue called him “the goy” because of his Nordic features, and did not accept him, either. Finally, setting out for Boston in 1933 to escape the Nazis, he created a new identity, and gave himself the name Erikson, becoming Erik the son of Erik—his own creation.
Through his practice and teaching, Erikson had met many famous people, but none as famous as Jackie. She was an interesting study for him—a shy, vulnerable woman with the determination of a drill sergeant. He had written about the particular struggles women had in establishing their identities. He said that married women who hoped to find their identities through their husbands, without first establishing a firm sense of self, often ended up woefully unhappy.
“What seems to be the problem with your children?” he asked Jackie, knowing full well that her answer would reveal a great deal about herself.
“A CHAIR HANGING IN SPACE”
“More than anything else,” Jackie told Erikson, “I want life to go on as normally as possible for my children. They were born in the same week, three years apart this month, and after the assassination I held birthday parties for them in the White House. But since then, things seem to have unraveled.”
For Jackie, it had become a major effort to get through each day. She was taking large doses of the tranquilizer Amytal, which left her speech slurred and her mind disoriented. Erikson could see, without being told, that Jackie was existing in a shell of grief. She evidently felt guilty that she was neglecting her children at the very moment they needed her the most.
Jackie told Erikson that the assassination had transformed Caroline from a bright and lively little girl into a dour and lethargic child. Jackie was concerned about Caroline because of her daughter’s deep attachment to her dead father. Even under normal circumstances, Caroline was not nearly as outgoing as John, but now she walked around with her hands clenched in angry little fists. She refused to play with other children, and at dinnertime she toyed with the food on the plate. She did not say much, or show any emotion, and she seemed to be pulling away from her mother.
Jackie had read many of Erikson’s books, including Childhood and Society, and was familiar with his theories. He believed that there were eight stages of human development, and that each of them involved an “identity crisis.” It was necessary for a child to resolve each crisis successfully in order to go on to the next stage, and become a whole person.
At age six, Caroline was entering stage four, which Erikson characterized as reflecting the conflict between “industry” and “inferiority.” The little girl was beginning to figure out the rules of the larger society beyond the walls of her home. But how did a six-year-old integrate personal lessons of right and wrong with the moral outrage she must have felt about her father’s assassination? Was this the beginning of a conflict between a public and a private self that would bedevil Caroline for the rest of her life?
Jackie identified with the sudden change in her daughter’s personality. The same thing had happened to her when she was a child. Jackie had grown up in a home torn by bitter discord. She often saw her father, John Vernou Bouvier III, sprawled drunk on the living-room sofa. Dressed in nothing but his underwear, socks and garters, and shoes, he ranted against “kikes” and “micks” and “wops.” He cursed God for the unfair way the world had treated him, and hurled abuse at Jackie’s mother, Janet Lee Bouvier.
Janet generally gave as good as she got, hurling the family china at her husband. She denounced him in front of Jackie and her younger sister Lee as “a no-good drunk,” and constantly threatened to leave him. Sometimes the fights went beyond words, and there were blows, blood, and black eyes.
As the older, more responsible daughter, Jackie was expected to help her mother carry her drunken father into the bedroom and undress him. Before they put him to bed, they had to clean up the mess left by his night of debauchery—his semen, vomit, and urine. The next morning, Jackie would watch in shame and pity as her father poured out his tearful apologies and begged his wife for one more chance.
When he was sober, her father was a totally different man. He was especially warm and compassionate toward Jackie, whom he favored over Lee. Jackie responded to his affection by secretly siding with him in the explosive marital battles. She came to see her father as a victim. If she had been his wife, she would not have driven him to drink. She would have known how to make him happy.
In later years, Jack Kennedy joked that Jackie had “a father thing.” Her friends agreed; they said that the men Jackie found attractive bore a striking resemblance to her roué of a father, whose dark good looks accounted for his nickname, Black Jack. She was drawn to older men, piratical types with rampant sexual appetites.
However, that was only part of the story. Black Jack Bouvier was Jackie’s first and greatest mentor in the art of life. He had an eye for color, shape, and form, and he delivered lectures to his daughter on everything from architecture and art to antiques, interior decoration, and fashion.
For Black Jack the most interesting art of all was the mating game between men and women. Pay attention to everything a man says, he told Jackie. Fasten your eyes on him like you are staring into the sun. Women gain power by affiliating themselves with powerful men.
He called her “Jacks”—a sexually ambiguous term that stuck as her family nickname. And in many ways they were more like sexual confidants than father and daughter. He engaged her in sexually stimulating conversations and bragged about his conquests. Jackie was flattered, because her father made her feel as though she was his most important girl.
When Jackie was a teenager, her father visited her at her boarding school, Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, Connecticut. They played a lewd game in which Jackie would point to the mothers of her classmates.
“That one, Daddy?” she would ask.
And if Jack Bouvier had not slept with the woman in question, he would reply to his daughter, “Not yet.”
And Jackie would point to another mother and ask, “That one, Daddy?”
“Oh, yes,” he would say, “I’ve already had her.”
“And that one, Daddy?”
“Yes.”
“And that one, Daddy?”
“Yes.”
As the child of an alcoholic—and a verbally incestuous alcoholic at that—Jackie sought ways to deny the existence of the painful and ugly. She did not hear things she did not want to hear; she did not see things she did not want to see.
“If something unpleasant happens to me, I block it out,” she once said. “I have this mechanism.”
Jackie’s father provided her with the mechanism: style.
“Style is not a function of how rich you are, or even who you are,” Black Jack told Jackie in what was his most important lesson. “Style is a habit of mind that puts quality before quantity, noble struggle before mere achievement, honor before opulence. It’s what you are. It’s your essential self. It’s what makes you a Bouvier.”
It was the Bouvier in Jackie that had prompted her to enter Vogue magazine’s famous Prix de Paris writing contest when she was in college. The first-prize winner was offered a trial period as a junior editor on French Vogue, and a permanent position on the staff of New York Vogue if she made good.
Asked by the organizers of the contest to write an essay on “People I Wish I Had Known,” Jackie chose three unusual artists: the French poet Charles Baudelaire, the Irish author Oscar Wilde, and the Russian ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev. Her choices reflected her father’s influence.
“If I could be a sort of Overall Art Director of the Twentieth Century, watching everything from a chair hanging in space,” Jackie wrote in her essay, which won first prize, “it is [the theories of Baudelaire, Wilde, and Diaghilev] that I would apply to my period, their poems that I would have music and painting and ballets composed to.”
Here, in her own words, was the best definition the world would ever get of Jackie. She saw herself as a detached observer safely suspended in space, a sort of celestial figure wh
o employed the power of male gods to make things turn out her way.
“It was a sensibility best described as ‘artistic’ in that it was her own ‘version’ of things,” wrote her stepsister Nina Auchincloss Straight. “Sometimes it was caught in her caricatures—simple, yet detailed, intimately funny pen, ink, and watercolor sketches of family and friends. But her singular view of life could best be seen in a photograph. Pictures were about being beautiful, brave; they were about family relations and friends. Her photograph of choice would have been the kind selected for a postcard: what to look like in life. Jackie knew what kind of a ‘postcard’ she wanted to send, as well as what message she wanted to deliver on the flip side.”
Jackie’s genius for staging artistic effects was apparent from the moment she entered the White House, her “chair hanging in space,” where she reigned as a supreme, if detached, first lady. She became an inspiration to a generation of postwar Americans, who yearned to be shown what to do with their newfound affluence. She taught these ambitious but socially insecure Americans how to dress, decorate their homes, raise their children, and become confident consumers of culture.
In years to come, it became popular to dismiss Jackie as a woman of great personal style but little real accomplishment. She was no Eleanor Roosevelt, it was said. Some people sneered at her interest in interior design, flower arrangement, and fancy sit-down dinners.
But that was not only unfair, it was untrue. Jackie wielded great power. But she wielded it indirectly, like an art director, and through men. If the primary role of a president’s spouse is to generate popular support for the man who occupies the Oval Office, then Jackie had to be ranked as one of the most effective first ladies in American history.
