by Edward Klein
But Jackie’s desire to art-direct her husband’s death had begun even earlier. It was on the flight back from Dallas that a picture had formed in her mind—a beautiful, brave picture of what Jack’s funeral should look like. She recalled seeing an old woodcut in a bound copy of Harper’s Weekly in the White House library that showed the East Room during Lincoln’s funeral.
She observed parallels between her husband and the assassinated Civil War President. Both were inspiring leaders; both had died victims of hate. She sent instructions to Angier Biddle Duke that she wanted the President “laid out as Lincoln had been,” with the same black cambric fabric. Jack’s funeral was to be a carbon copy of Lincoln’s.
In the course of his research, Duke learned that before Lincoln became president, he had lost a child, just as Jack had lost a child when he was a senator. While in the White House, Lincoln had lost a second child, just as Jack had lost Patrick Bouvier. And when Lincoln died, he was buried next to his children at Oak Ridge Cemetery in Springfield, Illinois.
As Jackie packed away Jack’s things, she decided to follow Lincoln’s example one more time. She made two telephone calls—one to her mother, in Georgetown, and the other to Richard Cardinal Cushing, in Boston.
Exhume the bodies of my dead children from their graves in New England, she instructed them, and have them reburied beside their father at Arlington National Cemetery.
“WHY, GOD? WHY?”
Janet Auchincloss was met at Washington National Airport the next morning by Ed Zimny, a veteran World War II aviator. Zimny was used to flying charters for wealthy people, but he was unprepared for Janet, a woman with lovely pink-and-white skin and dark eyes, her face framed by a thick head of hair. She was wearing a pair of white kidskin gloves, and looked as though she was on her way to a lady’s tea rather than to a grisly exhumation.
Janet was not squeamish. She had spent many nights cleaning up Black Jack’s mess. But the idea of digging up the bodies of dead children was too grotesque for words. Janet told Zimny that she had tried to talk her daughter out of her bizarre scheme, but nothing she said could change her mind.
Zimny was flying an Aero Commander 600, a small twin-engine six-seater, and it took him less than two hours to reach Newport, Rhode Island. There Janet was greeted by John F. Hayes Jr., the director of the Hayes-O’Neill Funeral Home. They drove in his hearse to St. Columba’s Cemetery, overlooking Narragansett Bay.
At the entrance, a few stubborn leaves still clung to the branches of the maple trees. The cemetery looked gray against the gray sky. The hearse made its way along a winding drive to Section 40, a gentle hillside where Jackie’s stillborn girl had been buried on August 25, 1956, by Father Murphy, a priest from St. Augustine’s Church, in the presence of Bobby Kennedy and Kenny O’Donnell, Jack’s right-hand man.
Two gravediggers were waiting in front of the marker, an upright headstone, about thirty inches high. Jackie had picked out a name, Arabella, for her stillborn daughter, but the gravestone simply read “Baby Girl Kennedy.”
At a signal from Hayes, the gravediggers shoved their spades into the ground, and earth began flying over their shoulders. While they dug away, Hayes removed a brand-new infant’s casket from the back of his hearse and placed it near the hole that was appearing in the ground.
It was a shallow grave, and the workmen quickly reached the lid of the coffin. They dug around its sides, creating a trench, then tried to lift it out of the ground. The moldy wood crumbled in their hands. Inside, maggots and beetles crawled over what remained of Arabella—a few muddy shards of bone, and tiny bits of soft tissue. The decomposed body was so thoroughly leached by water and bacteria that it was hard to identify any part of the skeleton.
Piece by piece, the gravediggers dragged out whatever they could. Everything went into the new casket. The small mass of putrefying matter gave off a horrifying stench. John Hayes, the undertaker, attempted to engage Janet in conversation to distract her during the gruesome proceeding. But she refused to speak. Nor did she utter a word as Hayes sealed the new coffin and slid it back into his hearse.
Janet spent the night at Hammersmith Farm, the Auchincloss country seat in Newport. Once Janet had acquired the Auchincloss name and money, she had become quite grand. She had always been a mercurial woman with a cyclonic temper, but during Jackie’s teenage years, Janet’s violent outbursts seemed to know no bounds. She thought nothing of strafing Jackie across both cheeks with her open hand.
After witnessing examples of Janet’s cruel behavior, many of Jackie’s school friends assumed that she hated her mother. But that was not true. Jackie admired her mother’s spirit and courage (Janet’s nose had been broken three times in horseback riding accidents), her passion for art, her personal discipline in diet and grooming, and her talent for household organization. Jackie may have loved her father more, but she spent her life trying to please her mother.
Her parents’ messy divorce left a lasting mark on Jackie. She was ashamed that her schoolmates could read newspaper accounts of the divorce, in which her father was described as an adulterer. Her shameful feelings of exposure would color Jackie’s attitude toward the press for the rest of her life.
Once a carefree and happy-go-lucky child, Jackie became stiff and introverted. She began a lifelong habit of biting her nails. She retreated into a life of fantasy and seemed to relate better to books than to people. She identified with legendary heroines who were sought after by powerful men, and whose beauty brought betrayal, war, and disaster: Helen of Troy; Persephone, the mythological queen of the underworld; and, most of all, Queen Guinevere.
It was difficult for Jackie to show her feelings. She found it even harder to form attachments. She became a loner; she had no real friends. People said it was almost impossible to get to know her. One young woman remembered being introduced by Jackie as “my best friend,” when in fact they had not seen or spoken to each other in years.
Jackie’s shyness never left her, and her childhood wounds started to heal only after Caroline was born. She began to develop the capacity to get outside herself, to understand pain and joy, kindness and pity, and to interpret them more movingly than she ever could before. Through Caroline, she came to realize that someone other than herself was real.
The night of the exhumation of Baby Girl Kennedy, Janet called Jackie and in some detail described her ordeal at the cemetery. It must have sounded hellish to Jackie, who had tried so hard to be a good wife and mother, but whose own life was spoiled and corrupted, just like the tiny bodies that were being disinterred from their graves.
Jackie had been pregnant five times in the ten years of her marriage. She lost one child in a miscarriage. The second, Arabella, was stillborn. The third, Patrick, died shortly after delivery. Two more—Caroline and John—survived, John only barely. Over and over, Jackie asked: Why, God? Why?
Whether she wanted to admit it or not, Jackie must have known the answer to that question. After Jack’s assassination, Jackie had not wanted the doctors who performed the autopsy on his body to mention any diseases that might have been present. She feared that a thorough examination would uncover evidence of the President’s chronic venereal disease.
From the earliest days of her marriage, Jackie was aware that Jack took enormous amounts of antibiotics to eradicate the bacteria that caused his sexually transmitted disease—nongonococcal urethritis, or chlamydia. She lived in deadly fear that he would infect her.
“Where you have a man who carries nongonococcal urethritis,” according to Dr. Atilla Toth,* a specialist in the relationship between infections and infertility, “… after the first intercourse, the woman always becomes infected, and the bacteria usually stays behind and multiplies, and her subsequent pregnancies can be affected. Her second baby might come to term immature, and subsequent pregnancies can be miscarried.”
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.
* Dr. Toth never treated either Jack or Jackie Kennedy. His comments to the author were based on his knowledge of many apparently similiar case histories.
AT A LOSS FOR WORDS
It 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.
IF ONLY …
At 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?
FOUR
THE FREAK OF
N STREET
January 1964
“MORE THAN I CAN STAND”
Toward 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 dea
th.
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.”
Dear Tony and Ben:
Something that you said in the country stunned me so—that you hoped I would marry again.
You were so close to us so many times. There is one thing that you must know. I consider that my life is over and that I will spend the rest of it waiting for it really to be over.
With my love,
Jackie
There were other friends in Jackie’s life. During the Kennedy Administration, an informal group consisting of the President, his cabinet officers, and some close advisers had met once a month for lively policy debates at Hickory Hill, Bobby Kennedy’s estate in McLean, Virginia. Now, members of the so-called Hickory Hill Seminar—Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr., Charles Bartlett, McGeorge Bundy—made it a point to stop by for late afternoon tea at Jackie’s new house to buoy up her spirits.
One day, Robert McNamara came calling. As he stepped from his chauffeured car, the bespectacled Secretary of Defense was greeted by an astonishing sight: a vast throng of shivering people had gathered in the snow in front of Jackie’s house. They filled both sidewalks and spilled onto the street for as far as the eye could see. Some of them carried binoculars. Others had brought boxes and ladders to stand on. They were silent and sad-faced, watching reverently. A couple of photographers, perched on tree limbs, snapped McNamara’s picture as he crossed the street carrying a large package in brown-paper wrapping.
