Just Jackie

by Edward Klein

  He had begged her not to take the case to court. The fact that she had gone ahead anyway was interpreted by some people as a sign that Jackie was struggling to break free of Bobby’s iron control.

  The battle of the book pitted Kennedy-lovers against Kennedy-haters, and old friends against each other. James Reston, the influential Washington bureau chief of The New York Times, wrote a column entitled “The Death of Camelot,” in which he portrayed Jackie as an imperious woman who had launched an assault against the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of speech. Reston’s dear friend Teddy White fired back in a letter to the editor of the Times, chastising the columnist for a “rare lapse from excellence,” and praising Jackie for her “great courage and honor.”

  Jackie’s action made front-page news all over the world. As New York Times reporter John Corry wrote in his book-length account, The Manchester Affair, it was the stuff of high political drama. It touched on two presidencies—John Kennedy’s and Lyndon Johnson’s—and potentially a third—that of Robert Francis Kennedy.

  No one enjoyed the squabble more than Lyndon Johnson. Though he looked robust, LBJ had never entirely recovered from his first heart attack back in the late 1950s, and Lady Bird Johnson feared that the gathering domestic storm over the Vietnam War might prove too much for his health. She was urging him not to run for reelection in 1968.

  But Johnson did not want to hand over the White House to his old nemesis, Bobby Kennedy. That was something he dreaded almost as much as a second heart attack. As a result, Johnson, who feared Jackie’s power, handled the Manchester affair with extreme caution.

  He asked his White House image consultant, Robert Kintner, the former president of ABC and NBC, to get him an early copy of Manchester’s galley proofs. The thin-skinned Johnson read the book with mounting rage, but he was careful not to say anything that might offend Jackie. On December 16, 1966, LBJ wrote her a letter that dripped with honey:

  Lady Bird and I have been distressed to read the press accounts of your unhappiness about the Manchester book. Some of these accounts attribute your concern to passages in the book which are critical or defamatory of us.

  If this is so, I want you to know while we deeply appreciate your characteristic kindness and sensitivity, we hope you will not subject yourself to any discomfort or distress on our account.

  Jackie replied to LBJ that she had no choice but to sue. But, she went on, “winning … seems a hollow victory—with everything I objected to printed all over the newspapers anyway.”

  Before the controversy was over, Manchester would flee to a Swiss sanitarium, where, it was later reported, he suffered a mental breakdown. In January 1967, Jackie reached an out-of-court settlement with her adversaries. She forced Harper & Row, Look, and Manchester to make most of the changes that she wanted. But as she had pointed out to LBJ, it was a Pyrrhic victory. Shortly after the settlement was announced, the New York World Journal Tribune began running a five-part series of articles by Liz Smith under the astonishing headline JACKIE COMES OFF HER PEDESTAL.

  “Regardless of whether she was right or wrong,” Liz Smith wrote, “Jackie was not escaping from the highly publicized [Manchester] controversy unscathed. From now on, she would never again appear in the limelight with quite all that queenly dignity intact. Things were being said, innuendos repeated, the very deletions from the book itself being magnified and publicized to the point that it had all badly tarnished the Kennedy halo.”

  Like Liz Smith, many people were puzzled by Jackie’s behavior. Why had she risked her spotless reputation to suppress a book? The answer was quite simple: It had never occurred to her that The Death of a President was William Manchester’s property. After all, it was she who had thought up the idea for the book, she who had chosen the author, she who had given him the most important interviews, and she who had made other witnesses available to him. She had put it all together.

  In her eyes, Manchester was merely a tool for expressing her vision. When the manuscript of the book failed to reflect her version of things, she felt that she had no choice but to destroy it.

  In the end, Jackie hurt herself far more than she hurt the book. It was one of the rare instances in her life when she acted alone, not through the instrument of a powerful male figure.

  Women gain power by affiliating themselves with powerful men, her father had taught her.

  She would never forget that lesson again.

  AN UNABASHED LOVE LETTER

  Even as her affair with Warnecke was cooling down, another man with connections to Jackie’s past had been doing his best to woo the former First Lady. His name was Aristotle Onassis.

  From the instant he learned of John Kennedy’s assassination, Onassis had lost interest in Lee Radziwill and become obsessed by thoughts of Jackie. As far as he was concerned, she was not only the most famous woman in the whole world, she was the Mount Olympus of women, beyond the reach of mortal men.

  Among Greeks, it was considered altogether natural and proper that powerful men should use marriageable women as a way to keep score, and that they should compete with each other to marry these women. If Onassis could win Jackie, he would be elevated in the eyes of his Greek rivals into the pantheon of modern gods. He would also command the world’s spotlight, which was his very favorite place to be.

  Onassis had first met Jackie at a dinner party in Georgetown in the 1950s, when Jack Kennedy was a senator. The Greek shipowner and the Senator’s shy wife only exchanged a few words. A year later, when Jack and Jackie were visiting Jack’s parents in the South of France, Onassis invited them aboard the Christina, which was docked in Monte Carlo, to meet Sir Winston Churchill.

  “Churchill and Kennedy immediately flung themselves into a politically nostalgic conversation that revolved around some of the stories that JFK’s father had told him about his experiences as U.S. Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s from 1937 to 1941,” wrote Frank Brady, an Onassis biographer. “… While the two men talked, Onassis gave Jackie a personal tour of the yacht.”

  Jackie found the Christina vulgar. The dining-room walls were covered with murals of naked girls that had been painted by Vertez, a fashionable muralist of the 1930s. The china was bad and the flowers were overdone. Everywhere, there was tacky French reproduction furniture in the Napoleonic style.

  “Mr. Onassis,” Jackie fibbed as she and Jack left the Christina, “I have fallen in love with your ship.”

  Several years later, when Jackie was First Lady, she and Lee visited Greece, and Onassis was present at a cocktail party given in their honor. But Onassis spent most of his time talking to Lee—with whom he was by then sexually involved—and showed little romantic interest in Jackie.

  The turning point came after the death of the infant Patrick Bouvier Kennedy. Lee informed Ari that her sister was in a deep depression. He suggested that Jackie come to Greece for a recuperative cruise.

  “Tell Jack that Stas and I will chaperon you,” Lee told Jackie. “It will be perfectly proper and such fun. Oh, Jacks, you can’t imagine how terrific Ari’s yacht is, and he says we can go anywhere you want. It will do you so much good to get away for a while.”

  Jackie was enthusiastic about the idea. She loved Greek history and mythology, and she saw the opportunity to visit legendary places that she had only read about. In her usual methodical way, she began making notes for the trip on a yellow legal pad: “October 2 arrive Athens by plane … Afternoon October 2 depart Athens for boat….”

  But Jack Kennedy was dead set against her going.

  “For Christ’s sake, Jackie, Onassis is an international pirate,” he said.

  Kennedy had a vivid imagination, and nobody had to tell him what went on during these cruises. In his womanizing days before the White House, he had chartered yachts, and had sailed the Mediterranean with his “girling” companions. They had turned those boats into floating bordellos, ferrying women back and forth, and passing them around freely.

  He doubted that things would
be any different on board the Christina. After all, hadn’t Onassis flaunted his affair with Maria Callas? Nowadays, Kennedy might occasionally frolic in the White House swimming pool with a couple of young female assistants, but that was nothing compared to Onassis’s life as a sexual predator. Or, at least, that was how Kennedy imagined Onassis’s life to be.

  Kennedy’s objections went beyond mere jealousy, however. He was worried about a political backlash when it became public knowledge that Jackie was cruising the Mediterranean in the lap of luxury with the notorious Onassis. Such a trip could not come at a worse time. In the summer of 1963, Kennedy was laying plans for his reelection campaign, and what he really feared about his wife’s proposed trip on the Christina was that he would be tarred by the brush of Aristotle Onassis.

  He ordered the FBI to check into reports that Onassis was violating the American embargo against Cuba by shipping oil to Castro. And he reminded Jackie that during the Eisenhower Administration, Onassis had been indieted on criminal and civil charges of fraud in connection with United States surplus ships that he had acquired. The criminal charges were dropped, and Onassis settled the civil suit by paying a hefty fine. But the scandal continued to plague him for years, and he never quite lived down his reputation for being an amoral businessman who routinely skirted the law.

  Nonetheless, Jackie insisted on going on the trip. And rather than fight her about it, Kennedy relented. But he was so concerned about the potential for negative publicity that he personally took charge of drafting a White House press release. The draft, which did everything possible to disassociate the trip from Onassis himself, said that the Christina had been “secured” by Prince Stanislas Radziwill from Onassis, and suggested that Jackie would be Stas’s guest, not Onassis’s.

  “If asked, we should state that Onassis is not expected on the trip, at least not in the beginning,” Kennedy wrote.

  In order to spare Jackie any embarrassment, Onassis told Lee that he would be more than willing to stay on shore. But when Lee conveyed this offer to her sister, Jackie said that she would not think of it.

  “I could not accept his generous hospitality and then not let him come along,” Jackie explained to Lee.

  For weeks Lee continued to act as a mediator between Ari and the Kennedys. To be helpful, Ari suggested to Lee that the White House issue a press release stating that his yacht had been “arranged” by Prince Radziwill, rather than “secured.”

  “Mr. Onassis thought that ‘arranged’ was even vaguer,” Lee wrote Kennedy’s secretary, Evelyn Lincoln. “Please check with the President.”

  Finally everything was settled, and Jackie flew to Athens accompanied by Kennedy’s choice of chaperons—Undersecretary of Commerce Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr. and his wife Susan. On October 4, 1963, Captain Costa Anastassiadis, the master of the Christina, set sail from the port of Piraeus and headed for the island of Lesbos.

  The Christina, a converted 2,200-ton Canadian frigate, consumed thirty tons of fuel a day, and cost nearly a million dollars a year to run, including its insurance and crew of sixty. As usual when there were guests on board, the vessel was stocked with rare vintage wines, and had a sommelier to serve them. There were two chefs—one for French cuisine, the other for Greek dishes, including Ari’s favorite, papatsakia, eggplant baked with onions, cheese, celery, tomatoes, and peppers. A Swedish masseur and two hairdressers were on call twenty-four hours a day. There were nine double guest cabins, each decorated in a different style and named after a different Greek island. Jackie was given “Ithaca,” which was the most lavish, and had been occupied at various times by Lady Pamela Churchill, Greta Garbo, Maria Callas, and Lee Radziwill. Her bathroom was done in solid pink marble.

  Late on her first night out at sea, Jackie retired to her cabin and wrote a long, rambling letter to Jack. She began by describing her visit to the palatial villa of Greek shipowner Markos Nomikos and his wife Aspasia, and ended the letter by trying to tell Jack how much she missed him. When she finished, she read it over, and was dissatisfied. She tore it into small pieces, threw it away, and started all over again.

  She wrote for the next couple of hours, filling seven pages. It was an unabashed love letter, the most passionate letter of her life. She poured out her heart, telling Jack how much she missed him, how she knew that he had suffered from the death of Patrick, how their relationship had been deepened and transformed by the baby’s death. She said that she felt there was a new, stronger bond between them. She loved him more than ever before. She promised to be a better wife, to campaign with him whenever and wherever he wanted. She wrote:

  I miss you very much, which is nice though it is also a bit sad—but then I think how lucky I am to be able to miss you—I know that I always exaggerate—but I feel sorry for everyone else who is married—I realize here so much that I am having something you can never have—the absence of tension—I wish so much that I could give you that—so I give you every day while I think of you everything I have to give.

  The next morning, she handed the sealed letter to the Christina’s purser and asked him to mail it at their next port of call. The love letter would be postmarked October 6—six weeks and six days before her husband’s assassination.

  From Lesbos the Christina made its way to Crete. Still, none of the guests had laid eyes on Onassis. He had decided to remain below decks in his cabin, discreetly out of sight, as a concession to Jackie’s reputation, and to John Kennedy’s political ambitions. Finally, after they had docked at Smyrna, the birthplace of Onassis, Jackie sent Franklin Roosevelt Jr. to implore him to join the others. To everyone’s delight, their host sent back word that he would act as their guide.

  And with that, Aristotle Onassis made his entrance.

  ARISTO

  He was a short man, not even five feet six, with a barrel chest, thick forearms, and the face of a gangster. He gave off the impression that he was both dangerous and disreputable, and this sinister aura was enhanced by the tinted glasses he wore to protect his weak eyes.

  Jackie had heard all the rumors about Onassis—how he was a skirt-chaser, a star-fucker, and a loud vulgarian. He might not be the richest man in the world, people said, but he was second to none when it came to fraud, deceit, and double-dealing. It therefore came as a great surprise to Jackie to discover that Onassis was nothing like his reputation.

  He turned out to be the most completely sociable person she had ever met, not excepting Jack Kennedy, who was no slouch in that department. Ari struck her as a man with a conflicted personality, as insecure and vulnerable as he was egotistical and grandiose. One moment, he could be brash, exuberant, and effervescent; the next, he was plunged into a mood of deep melancholy. He was like a chameleon, constantly changing to adapt to his surroundings.

  “His most characteristic stance is with shoulders slightly hunched, arms spread out, and swaying a little on the balls of his feet like a bantamweight watching which way his opponent is going,” wrote Randolph Churchill, Winston’s son, in an article for the London Evening Standard. Randolph went on to note:

  As well as Greek, he speaks fluent Spanish, French, and English. Though his choice of words in English is sometimes slightly off-center, his sense of the balance of a spoken sentence is uncannily acute. He is a born orator with a poetic sense and can build up a list of adjectives in an ascending order of emphasis and weight which are as perfect as a phrase of music.

  Just as his listener is caught by the spell, he will suddenly bring the whole edifice tumbling down by a deliberate piece of comic bathos. He will burst into laughter at the very moment when almost any other man would be exploding into passion. Sometimes he changes from a gentle whisper to a deafening bellow between two words.

  Jackie fell completely under his spell. She hardly noticed that Ari drank heavily—mostly Dom Perignon champagne and Courvoisier—and that he sweated so profusely that he had to change his clothes frequently throughout the day. After she got over the initial shock of his appearance, she hardly gave
it a second thought.

  For Ari, talk was the breath of life. And as the cruise continued, Jackie sat with him on the poop deck under the stars, listening to the tales of his youth, which he made sound like an adventure yarn starring himself as the plucky hero. Jackie was especially attracted to Ari’s portrait of himself as the underdog.

  He lied to her about his origins, repeating the rags-to-riches legend of his childhood. In fact, his father had been a prosperous tobacco merchant in the Turkish port city of Smyrna. The Greek pale of settlement on the western shores of the Ottoman empire was the cradle of the ancient Ionian civilization.

  “Ionia is the birthplace of Homer, and of all true Greeks like me,” Ari said.

  He was the only son, and his mother, Penelope, whom he remembered all his life as being very beautiful, died as the result of a kidney operation when he was six years old. The early loss of his mother was, most likely, the source of his lifelong melancholy, and of the deep insecurities that he always sought to cover up.

  When his father remarried, Aristo did not accept his stepmother, Helen, whom he regarded as a usurper. Nor did he develop much affection for the two stepsisters, Merope and Kalliroi, who joined the family over the next few years. He reserved all his love for his full sister, Artemis, and his grandmother, Gethsemane, a deeply religious woman, who regularly scrubbed the little boy’s body and washed his mind of sins.

  Among Greeks, modesty is not a highly regarded virtue, and when Aristo’s rebellion against his stepmother led to cruel beatings by his father, the young boy was determined to show up the old man. He entered a famous athletic contest run by his uncle Homer at the Pelops Club in Smyrna. But he failed to win the top prize, “Champion of Champions.”