by Edward Klein
Warnecke’s chartered helicopter touched down on the front lawn of the Kaisers’ main house. He reached out a hand and pulled Jackie on board. Moments later, they lifted off and disappeared into a perfect blue sky. Jackie’s infuriated Secret Service men were left behind.
That day they visited Maui, where they lunched at Lahaina’s Pioneer Inn. Another time, they hopped over to the island of Hawaii, which was sometimes called the Big Island, where they enjoyed the privacy of Laurance Rockefeller’s guest cottage on the Parker Ranch. Once, they went trekking in the mountains of Kauai, where they hunted goats and wild boar.
“Sometimes we would just go off alone to a remote beach and swim,” Warnecke said. “We had endless conversations about JFK. His memory was the thing that had bound us together in the first place. The John F. Kennedy Memorial Grave was nearing completion. I knew that despite the monument, his reputation wasn’t inviolable. Stories about his womanizing would be coming out sooner or later.
“I told Jackie about some of those stories involving Jack and other women. I did it so she wouldn’t be shocked when she read about them later. She was prepared for the worst when it came.
“I told her stories about my own personal experiences with women, too,” he went on. “One story took place when I was in Thailand, designing the American embassy, and one of my Harvard classmates, a Thai, invited me to dinner at his home in the mountains of northern Thailand. At dinner I was told that I would be given twelve beautiful women for dessert, and that I could choose any of them I desired.
“ ‘Oh,’ Jackie said, ‘to think you had your choice!’
“And I said, ‘Well, it was all very proper. It was arranged by the family. After all, I had to be polite.’
“She loved that, and broke into gales of laughter.
“She teased me with her own stories, except that she didn’t have many sexual experiences to talk about. She told me about her first love, John Marquand Jr., the son of the famous novelist, whom she had met during her junior year abroad in Paris.
“ ‘Were you seduced by Marquand before you married Jack?’ I asked her.
“ ‘Well, just let’s say I came very close,’ she said.
“I thought maybe she said ‘very close’ because she couldn’t bring herself to admit to me that she had gone all the way when she was so young.
“And we talked about getting married. I had a beautiful five-bedroom house on Black Point off Diamond Head Road. Jackie decided that a room off the living room, a nice soft den, needed remodeling. She did a watercolor-and-ink sketch, and set to work redecorating the room with fabric. She did the whole thing in no time flat. But we talked about starting out fresh, and buying another house after we got married.
“ ‘I wonder,’ she said, ‘if we could live in a house on a hill overlooking the harbor?’
“I was a good Presbyterian with a grandmother who had been a Christian Science practitioner, but Jackie was pleased when she found out that I could not remember having been baptized as a child. She thought I could be baptized as a Catholic. She was exultant over the idea.
“ ‘I’m going to turn you into a Catholic to make you more suitable as a husband,’ she said.
“All this time, the Secret Service guys were looking after the kids, and leaving Jackie and me pretty much alone. Our summer together in Hawaii was a fairy tale.”
When it was time for Jackie to return to the mainland, she wrote a farewell thank-you letter to the editors of the Honolulu Advertiser and the Star-Bulletin.
I had forgotten, and my children have never known what it was like to discover a new place, unwatched and unnoticed. It was your papers that made this possible for us, by deciding at the beginning not to follow our activities. … I truly appreciate the extraordinary gesture you made.
But as she prepared to leave Hawaii, Jackie had to face some hard questions. Did she truly want to be unwatched and unnoticed, and pull a disappearing act like Greta Garbo? And even if she could somehow vanish from public view, would she be satisfied by such a life?
She was less sure of the answers to these questions than she sounded in her letter to the editors. No one, perhaps not even Jackie herself, knew exactly what was in her heart. But before she left Hawaii she had a conversation with Mrs. Kaiser in which she alluded to her future.
“My mother told me later about that conversation,” said Michael Kaiser. “Jackie made it clear to my mother that she had no present intention of marrying Jack Warnecke.”
Of course, Warnecke did not know that.
“Before she left,” Warnecke said, “I told her that my goal was to get her back to a normal life. A private life, not a public one. I wanted to let her be her own person. Away from the press. Away from prying eyes. Away from all that pressure. And I was a little surprised by her response.
“ ‘One of the biggest forces of all between two human beings is the search for power,’ she told me. Tower is a strong force and motivation in people. I don’t want to wield power myself, but I’ve observed that the ultimate motive in humankind is power.’ ”
EIGHT
TARNISHED
HALO
July 1966–August 1967
“OUT OF CONTROL”
Soon after Jackie returned from Hawaii, she learned that Look magazine had bought the serial rights to William Manchester’s book, The Death of a President, for the astounding sum of $665,000. It was the biggest deal in magazine history (the equivalent in today’s money of more than $5 million). Jackie did not think that Manchester had any right to profit so obscenely from her husband’s murder.
It was not only the money that bothered Jackie. She and Bobby had enlisted the editorial help of several old Kennedy friends: Edward Guthman of the Los Angeles Times, John Siegenthaler of the Nashville Tennessean, the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, former JFK speech-writer Theodore Sorensen, and Jackie’s private secretary, Pamela Turnure. When these proxies came back with scores of suggested revisions to the manuscript, Manchester balked. He refused to make many of the changes. Now, to make matters even worse, he had sold his unacceptable text to a popular weekly magazine.
Who was going to choose the excerpts that ran in Look! Jackie asked. And what about the photographs? The art director in Jackie always thought in terms of packages—visuals and text together.
The trouble was, Bobby had already approved both the publication of the book and the Look serialization. In a telegram that he had sent to Manchester, Bobby promised:
[T]he Kennedy family will place no obstacle in the way of publication of his work.
Jackie did not care what promises her brother-in-law had made. She wanted Look to cancel the serialization. In late August, she summoned Mike Cowles, the chairman of the board of the media company that owned Look, to Hyannis Port.
Cowles arrived the next day with his lawyer Jack Harding at his side. To their surprise, Jackie was there to greet them at the small airport. She was wearing a pretty smile and a Pucci dress.
They drove to the Kennedy compound, where she served them iced tea and sandwiches and took them on a tour of her house. Then she, Bobby, and her attorney Simon Rifkind, whose law firm was one of the most prestigious in New York, got down to serious business.
“Bobby doesn’t represent me,” Jackie explained to Mike Cowles. “He sort of protects me.”
Jack Harding, Cowles’s attorney, pointed out that Look had paid $665,000 for the serial rights.
“If it’s money, I’ll pay you a million,” Jackie said.
No, no, said Harding, it was not just the money. Look wanted to excerpt the book because it was an important historical document.
It was a huge mistake for Harding to lecture Jackie Kennedy about history.
“You’re sitting in the chair my late husband sat in,” she said. “I will demand that publication of both the book and the serialization be stopped.”
“No,” Bobby interjected, “not the book.”
Jackie turned to Mike Cowles and demanded to know: �
�Are you going to serialize?”
“First, let me ask a question,” Cowles replied. “I sense an undercurrent of feeling that Look didn’t act in good faith.”
“Look acted in good faith,” Bobby conceded.
“Well, then, yes, Mrs. Kennedy,” Cowles said, “we will publish.”
No one had dared to say no to Jackie in a very long time. She exploded in a fit of anger.
“You’re a son of a bitch!” she told Cowles. “And a bastard! You can’t do this!”
The men sitting around the table stared at her, aghast.
“She became quite hysterical and violent, verbally violent,” said William Attwood, Look’s editor in chief, “to the point that Mike Cowles came back [to New York] a little amazed that the great lady of the funeral and all that could talk just that way. …
“I agreed that [Manchester’s] prose was very purple,” Attwood continued, “and we all decided that the [series] could easily have been trimmed down…. But Manchester is a very baroque writer, and he loves to describe the color of the brains on the lapels, that sort of thing. And so, nevertheless, this is what he wanted.
“We were caught between two rather neurotic people—Manchester, who is subject to fits of depression, and exhilaration, and all that… and Mrs. Kennedy, who had by this time become really out of control.”
“US AGAINST THEM”
Desperate now, Jackie turned for help to Richard Goodwin, JFK’s old speechwriter and political jack-of-all-trades. With his craggy face, hirsute appearance, and slightly slurred speech, Goodwin reminded some people of a man with a perpetual hangover. But he was one of those brilliant Renaissance men who seemed to know everything and have friends everywhere—in politics, academia, the arts, publishing, medicine, and business.
Goodwin had come to Jackie’s rescue once before, when he had arranged for her to take her traumatized children to the psychoanalyst Erik Erikson after the assassination. Since then, Goodwin had become an important member of Bobby’s shadow cabinet, and while he waited for the Kennedy Restoration, he had taken a teaching post at Wesleyan University, where—conveniently enough—William Manchester also taught. In fact, the two men were close neighbors in leafy Middletown, Connecticut.
Jackie hoped that Goodwin could make Manchester see the light. And on Wednesday morning, September 7, she dispatched the Caroline to La Guardia Airport to pick them up and fly them to Hyannis Port.
“Jackie was waving to us as we came down the ramp,” Manchester wrote. “I remember that she was wearing sunglasses and a green miniskirt; she looked stunning. In the compound, we drank iced tea on the porch of President Kennedy’s house. Then Dick strolled off and Jackie and I changed to bathing suits.
“I sat on the back of a towing boat with young John on my lap while she water-skied behind—Jackie at her most acrobatic, at one point holding the tow rope with one foot and zipping along with the other foot on a single ski. After she had tired of this, I dove in, and the two of us struck out for shore. Wearing flippers, she rapidly left me far behind. Wallowing and out of breath, I momentarily wondered whether I would make it. I remember thinking: What if I drowned? Would that be good for the book or bad for the book?”
Like many men before him, Manchester was overcome by an irresistible impulse to please Jackie.
“She’s incredible,” he recalled. “She’s all woman. You’ve got to spend a little time with her, to see her in the full spectrum. When she looks at you with those big eyes …”
But Manchester was in for a big letdown.
“Back on the porch,” he went on, “with the three of us seated at a luncheon table in dry clothes, I slowly realized that nothing good for the book could possibly come out of this meeting. The atmosphere was completely unrealistic … Jackie was hostile toward Look, bitter about Cowles, and scornful of all books on President Kennedy, including [Arthur] Schlesinger’s. Repeatedly, she expressed affection for Goodwin and me, saying, ‘It’s us against them,’ and to me, ‘Your whole life proves you to be a man of honor.’ She was going to fight, she said savagely, and she was going to win: ‘Anybody who is against me will look like a rat unless I run off with Eddie Fisher.’ ”
It slowly dawned on Manchester that Jackie did not want any published account of her husband’s death—whether in book form or in a magazine excerpt. Beyond the personal revelations that she found so objectionable, Jackie was concerned about the political passages in Manchester’s book.
There were many references to discord between Bobby Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. Manchester portrayed Johnson as a man who had been eager to seize power, and who had been insensitive to the dead President’s family. For instance, Manchester described Kenneth O’Donnell, JFK’s White House secretary, pacing up and down the aisle of Air Force One, his hands clapped over his ears so that he would not have to hear the judge administering the presidential oath of office to Johnson.
All this could be used against Bobby if he should run for national office. Jackie did not want to offend the thin-skinned Johnson, who was well aware that the Manchester book had been commissioned by her. When Bobby had talked about retiring from the public arena, it was Jackie who had begged him not to quit, arguing that the country needed him. If the book turned Johnson into an implacable foe, and scuttled Bobby’s chances for the White House, it would be all her fault. Once again, she would bring disaster upon someone she loved.
TAKING CARE OF BUSINESS
In the midst of her troubles over the Manchester book, Jackie received a call from John Warnecke. They had not seen each other for several weeks.
“I’ve just got back to my office here in San Francisco,” he told her, “and I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news.”
“What’s wrong?” Jackie asked.
“My bookkeeper tells me that I owe the bank six hundred thousand dollars,” he said. “The bank says the loan is more like a million dollars. And it’s due Monday.”
“How could that happen?” Jackie asked.
She had been led to believe that Warnecke was a wealthy man and was insulated from problems like this.
“That’s what I asked my bookkeeper,” he said. “She says I haven’t been paying enough attention to my business, and the office always relied on me in the past to generate the commissions. The last couple of years I’ve been preoccupied with the memorial grave. Then you and I spent the last two months together in Hawaii. I guess I just let things go.”
It sounded as if he was trying to lay the blame for his money problems on Jackie.
“What are you going to do?” she asked.
“I have to spend a lot more time taking care of business.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means I don’t think I can see you quite so much,” he said. “Not as often as before, anyway. At least not until things calm down a bit.”
It all sounded bizarre. For the past two years, Warnecke had told Jackie over and over again that he loved her. But now, out of the blue, he seemed to have changed his tune. He could no longer be to her what he had been before—a man did not say that to the woman he loved.
Obviously, something had changed. And it was not only Warnecke’s financial condition. He seemed to have suddenly realized that those fairy-tale weeks in Hawaii were not real, and that he would never be able to change Jackie into a normal person. He could not provide Jackie with what she really needed: total security from the outside world.
There was a long silence on the phone. It went on for so long that Warnecke thought Jackie might have hung up, or that they had lost their connection.
Then Jackie said, “I understand.”
“We’ll still see each other,” Warnecke said. “This isn’t good-bye.”
“Of course not,” she said.
“I still love you, Jackie,” he said.
But this time Jackie did not say that she loved him back.
WALTER SCOTT’S PERSONALITY PARADE
Parade was the first national magazine to run a full-fledged s
tory on Jackie’s secret relationship with Warnecke. The piece appeared in early December 1966, and was titled “Jackie Kennedy, World’s Most Eligible Widow—WILL SHE MARRY AGAIN?” It was written by Lloyd Shearer, a well-connected journalist, who also wrote the magazine’s famous page-two column “Personality Parade” under the pseudonym Walter Scott.*
“The name one hears most frequently in connection with Mrs. Kennedy and romance,” wrote Shearer, “is John Carl Warnecke, 47, the architect in charge of the John F. Kennedy Memorial grave now under construction at Arlington National Cemetery….
“One of Jack Warnecke’s friends in Marin County, Calif., says, They have a lot in common, love of art, architecture, athletics, culture, but I don’t think there’s a thing to it. My own opinion, for what it’s worth, is that Jackie for the first time is enjoying her own freedom, her own identity, indulging in her own tastes too much to give all that up for any guy.’ ”
Jackie and Warnecke were still sleeping with each other, but things were not the same. In conversations with friends, Jackie had begun to drop hints that her feelings for Warnecke had cooled. That may have been part of the reason he was not awarded the design commission for the John F. Kennedy Library. That coveted job would go instead to I. M. Pei, a little-known Chinese-American architect who was recommended by Bunny Mellon.
* When Shearer retired in 1991, the author of this book took over as Waller Scott.
ACTING ON HER OWN
Nine days before Christmas in 1966, an emotionally distraught Jackie filed suit against Harper & Row, Look, and William Manchester to prevent publication of The Death of a President. No one was more shocked and dismayed by her legal action than Bobby. Jackie had placed him in an untenable position. On the one hand, he could not be seen to be favoring censorship. On the other, he could not abandon his brother’s widow.
