Jackie, Janet & Lee

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  As Janet slowly roamed the White House alone, she probably couldn’t help but acknowledge that she would miss this place. She likely remembered the night cellist Pablo Casals played here; she and Hugh were present and it was a wonderful evening, as was the sensational dinner Jackie gave for André Malraux, France’s first minister of cultural affairs. She’d certainly miss those kinds of special events. She’d also miss all of the dedicated people who worked here at the White House. She would say that during her first weeks as mother of the First Lady, she wondered if she would ever get used to the idea of being in the White House. It never failed to take her breath away, though. She would always find herself just a little light-headed and starstruck by the trappings of so much history.

  When she wandered into the East Room, Janet’s eyes lingered on the black decorations being set up by employees. This was where Jack would lie in repose. “So, what do you think, Mrs. Auchincloss?” The voice came from above. Janet looked up and saw the White House curator, James Ketchum, on a ladder draping a chandelier in black. She was so well known at the White House by now, it seemed as if everyone knew her name. Certainly, she’d miss that, too. She gave the room a slow look of appraisal. “Shouldn’t there be a flag somewhere, Mr. Ketchum?” she asked. “Yes, of course,” Ketchum said as he climbed down from the ladder. He then instructed one of his helpers to go off in search of one. Janet stood in place in the East Room and took it in, her eyes trained on its awesome enormity, its stately design. “Horrible day, Mrs. Auchincloss,” Ketchum said as he extended his hand. “I’m so sorry.” She shook his hand and nodded. “Mrs. Kennedy is a big admirer of yours,” she told him, according to his memory of the conversation. “Thank you so much for all you did for her in the restoration of this place. It’s quite magnificent.”

  As the two spoke, Ketchum explained Jackie’s instructions to him relating to the upcoming ceremonial process in the East Room. “When the President’s body lies in repose here, Mrs. Kennedy wants the room decorated just as it had been for Abraham Lincoln ninety-eight years ago when he was assassinated,” he said. He added that he and his team had been examining books and photographs in search of any clues as to exactly how the East Room looked during that mourning period. He pointed to a wooden framework against one of the walls. “That’s the Lincoln catafalque,” he said. “The real one?” Janet asked, incredulously. He said it was authentic, that it had been found at the Capitol. There were also two candelabra beside two enormous urns filled with magnolia leaves. He explained that the cuttings came from a magnolia tree President Andrew Jackson had planted on the South Lawn. “The history here,” Janet exclaimed, “never ceases to amaze me. Has Mrs. Kennedy seen any of this yet?” James said she hadn’t. “I understand that she will be back here at the White House at around two in the morning,” he said. “We’re to have it ready for her by then.”

  “Well, I’m sure she will love it,” Janet said. She noticed tears in Ketchum’s eyes. He took such pride in his work; all he wanted was to do the President proud and please his First Lady. She asked if he would be staying on with the next administration. He said he didn’t know, but he certainly hoped so, adding, “This is my life, Mrs. Auchincloss. I love this place.” She put her hand on his shoulder. “Duty and honor,” she said, the admiration she had for him ringing in her tone. (In fact, Ketchum would remain with the White House for another six years.)

  Janet said good-bye to James Ketchum and watched as he climbed back up his ladder with an American flag that had just been handed to him. She then turned and walked out of the East Room into the hallway and then to the living quarters. Now, after having had a chance to calm down, she felt bad about the scene she’d had with Maud. When it came to “duty and honor,” certainly Maud had demonstrated as much in her loving care of Janet’s grandchildren. She wasn’t about to apologize to the nanny, though. Janet apologizing to the help would be a rare occurrence. Besides, she was sure she was not in the wrong. However, she decided to knock on Maud’s door anyway, to see if she and the children were all right.

  When Maud answered the door, it was clear that she had been crying. However, she seemed more relaxed and composed. “Miss Shaw told Caroline [the news] that night, before she went to bed,” Janet would later recall. “John, of course, wouldn’t understand what death meant, and Caroline not very much more. But Miss Shaw told [Caroline] … that her father had gone to heaven and talked a bit with her, and [she told me] that Caroline had cried a good deal.” As the two women spoke in hushed tones, it was clear that any hard feelings between them had been settled even without apologies. Maud told her that, in the end, she believed it was good for Caroline to hear the news before going to bed. Janet remembered, “Miss Shaw said, ‘You know, when children are Caroline’s age, it’s better for them to get a sadness and a shock before they go to sleep so that it won’t hit them very hard when they wake up in the morning. I think this was wise.’” After the two women embraced, Janet asked Maud to be sure to tell the children that she and Hugh would be staying in their father’s room that night. “I don’t want them running in expecting to see Jack in the morning,” she said. Maud agreed.

  “Jackie had earlier said to Daddy, ‘Can you please sleep in Jack’s four-poster bed?’” Jamie Auchincloss recalled, “‘because I don’t want it empty.’ It had a hard board under the mattress because of Jack’s bad back. So Daddy didn’t get any sleep that night at all. Mummy did, though. They either rolled in another bed for her, or there was another bed already in the room. I’m sure they didn’t sleep in the same bed.”

  Janet woke up at about eight, and much to her astonishment, she found Jackie sleeping next to Hugh. As she later learned, about two hours earlier Jackie had come to the door and told Hugh that she couldn’t bear to sleep alone. Hugh suggested that she crawl into bed with him. Janet now watched as Jackie tried to get comfortable by slipping just a little farther under the warm covers. She wondered how her daughter would ever again sleep soundly. She feared that she would probably never be the same, not after the horror of Dallas. How could she recover from such an ordeal? Though she was just thirty-four, Janet knew that the days, months, indeed the years ahead would pose all manner of challenges for Jackie, the likes of which, in that moment while watching her try to sleep, she probably couldn’t even fathom.

  “Good Night, My Darling Jacks”

  Early Saturday morning, November 23, Lee Radziwill arrived from London just in time for a ten o’clock Mass in the East Room for Jack. Lee, Janet, and Jackie were able to have a tearful reunion before the service.

  Later that morning, Lee and Janet decided to take a stroll through the West Wing. They wanted to have one more look at the Oval Office. They’d never forgotten—nor would they ever—the night Jackie surprised them by taking them there for the first time two and a half years earlier. They walked down the colonnade, past the press quarters and the Cabinet Room before finally getting to the Oval Office. They stood in place in the doorway, astonished. It was already being dismantled, workers taking framed artwork off the walls, moving furniture out. Jackie’s remodel of the room had just been completed, the red carpet just installed. She hadn’t even had a chance to see it! Nor had Jack. They were going to celebrate the redesign as soon as they returned from Texas. Now most of it was being quickly remodeled to Lyndon Johnson’s specifications. Even the Resolute desk would be moved out, since Lyndon felt it was too small for his lanky frame. “But it hasn’t even been twenty-four hours,” Janet said, upset. “You mean to tell me that Johnson can’t wait even a day?”

  Actually, as is now well known, Secretary of State Dean Rusk and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara had urged Johnson to move in as quickly as he could to make for a fast and painless transition. He would try to do just that in a few hours’ time, after this visit by Janet and Lee, but he’d find Jack’s loyal secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, at her desk. He’d ask when she might be able to move on so “my girls can come in.” Lincoln would be so upset by what she viewed as a callous qu
estion, she’d report it to Bobby. In turn, Bobby would pretty much order Johnson to not even try to set foot in the Oval Office until after Jack’s funeral. Therefore, Johnson would wait.

  Lee took a book off a cart as it was being hauled out of the room. It was a copy of Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage. She opened it to the first page to see if it was signed. It was. Saying that she didn’t want it to end up in a stack of books somewhere in the basement, she said she was going to hold on to it and give it to one of Jackie’s children later, as a gift. The worker pushing the cart of books just shrugged as if he couldn’t have cared less what she did with it. As mother and daughter stood on the scarlet carpet in the middle of the historic room, they looked around, sadly. “It’s the end of an era,” Janet told her daughter. She said she was angry—very angry. The two then walked out of the Oval Office knowing full well that they’d never step foot in it again.

  Jackie, Lee, Janet, and Hugh then went to O Street to check on Jamie and Janet Jr., leaving Stas behind at the White House nursing a vodka and tonic. He, like everyone, was shaken, having been so close to Jack.

  Janet and Hugh decided to spend the night at O Street while Jackie and Lee went back to the White House. In fact, Jackie said she wanted Stas to sleep in Jack’s bed, just as Hugh had done the evening before. Lee couldn’t understand Jackie’s determination that her family members spend these awful nights in Jack’s bed, but if that was her wish, she was determined to see it through.

  Stas wasn’t so sure he approved of the sleeping arrangements. Disoriented, he took a look around the room at his old friend’s beloved books and his many prescription medicine bottles on the two nightstands next to the four-poster bed. There was no way he could sleep in that bed, Stas decided. He said he wished he could just spend the night in the Lincoln Bedroom instead. That’s where he usually slept when he was at the White House, whereas Lee took the bed in the Queen’s Room. However, Lee told him that Bobby Kennedy would be spending the night in the Lincoln Bedroom. There are dozens of other rooms in this massive house, he argued. Why must he stay in Jack’s? “Because it’s what Jackie wants,” Lee said. She didn’t like it, either, she said, but if Hugh had managed to deal with it the night before, Stas would just have to bear it tonight. “Well, I’m sorry my dear, but that is not going to happen,” he told her. He then made a few calls and arranged for a cot to be rolled into the room. He set it up at the foot of Jack’s bed, and that’s where he slept. “With his old-fashioned European dignity … he even refused to use the bathroom,” William Manchester would later write in his book Death of a President. “No one knew where Stas shaved; razor and toothbrush in hand, he wandered through the mansion for ablutions elsewhere.”

  Jackie had also asked Lee to sleep with her in her bedroom so that she wouldn’t have to be alone. Lee did as Jackie asked, and would rise before Jackie. When Jackie woke up, she found a note from Lee under her pillow: “Good night, my darling Jacks—the bravest and noblest of all. L.”

  Onassis in Washington

  It was Sunday morning, November 25, when the phone rang in the White House’s private quarters. A maid picked it up. “It’s a Mr. Onassis,” she told Jackie. Jackie was surprised. She took the phone. “Ari? Is that really you?”

  Aristotle Onassis was in Washington?

  On the night of the assassination, Lee had received a telephone call from Onassis. He was in Germany at the time, where he had launched a 50,000-ton tanker called Olympic Chivalry, when he heard about Kennedy. He was concerned about Lee, he said. He knew how close she was to Jack, and he wanted to make sure she was all right. She said, according to one account, that she was deeply grieving, but that it was nothing compared to what she knew Jackie was going through. Onassis then said he wanted to express his sympathy to Jackie. Apparently, she had given him her private phone number while they were on the Christina together. However, he told Lee he couldn’t get through to her because of the congestion of telephone communication to Washington. Lee said she would pass along his condolences. He then surprised her by saying he wanted to go to Washington to attend Jack’s funeral. Was this appropriate? He wasn’t a friend of Jack’s and he barely knew Jackie. It would seem from all available evidence that Lee definitely didn’t want Onassis in Washington, not at this difficult time anyway. Her family was anguished; Stas was going to be in town … it just wasn’t a good time. However, as was well known about him, Onassis wasn’t the kind of man to take no for an answer. He said he would fly into Washington and promised to sit tight and wait for Lee to contact him at the Willard Hotel for further instructions.

  Alone, with no secretary or other assistant, Onassis quietly checked into the Willard. He didn’t stick to the plan, though. Instead, he picked up the phone and called Jackie. From all accounts, she was surprised to hear from him. The details of their conversation would remain known to only the two of them, but at some point Jackie, apparently, insisted that he check out of the Willard and stay at the White House. She apologetically explained that all of the formally named rooms were occupied and that, much to her embarrassment—especially considering the extravagance he had shown her on the Christina—she would have to put him in one of the more simple guest rooms. Onassis was so pleased to be invited to the White House for the first time, it didn’t matter to him where he stayed. By midafternoon he was on his way. “In a cab,” Taki said with a chuckle, considering the tycoon’s great wealth. “He took a cab from his hotel to the White House.”

  “Years later, Lee told me that she had an uneasy conversation with Jackie about Onassis’s arrangements,” said one friend of Lee’s. “‘Ari called. I arranged for him to stay here at the White House,’ Jackie told her. Lee said that Jackie shouldn’t have troubled herself, that Onassis was her guest and that she would have seen to it that he was taken care of. ‘Well, what am I to do, Lee, when this man calls me and puts me on the spot during such a difficult time?’ Jackie asked. And that’s how Lee found out that Onassis had telephoned Jackie directly. That’s also when she realized that once he was loose in Washington, she wouldn’t be able to control him. Knowing the terrain at the time, I would have to say that this worried Lee. After all, she knew Ari. She knew him well.”

  “Well, look, Onassis was a fast mover,” said Taki. “He had been with Lee, the sister-in-law of the President. Now that the President was gone, knowing him as I did, he’d already decided to go for the real prize, the sister—the former First Lady. That was very Onassis, always planning ahead to the next acquisition. This decision would have had nothing to do with Lee. There was no reason that he shouldn’t have both sisters if he wanted them—and I’m pretty sure that this is what he wanted.”

  That evening, Rose Kennedy dined with Stas Radziwill upstairs at the White House, while Jackie and Lee ate with Bobby Kennedy in the sitting room. Onassis, with a few other guests—including Kennedy acolytes Robert McNamara, Dave Powers, and Phyllis Dillon (wife of C. Douglas Dillon, JFK’s secretary of the treasury)—ate in the family dining room. At about ten, Bobby joined McNamara, Powers, Dillon, and Onassis for dessert and coffee. It wasn’t a maudlin scene. Despite the fact that Bobby could not have been too thrilled to see Ari there—and was probably quite surprised—the levity of that time they spent together was described later by McNamara as “rather like an Irish wake.”

  That same night, Ari visited Jackie in her private quarters. Their time together was brief. Since neither ever spoke of it in detail, no one can know for certain what was said between them. All we know is that the idea of Onassis seeing Jackie without Lee’s permission was more than a little unnerving to Lee. It all seemed strange but, given that everyone was in shock, the events seemed to just unfold quickly without anyone having much time to analyze them.

  The next morning as everyone slept, Aristotle Onassis slipped out of Washington. He didn’t even attend the funeral, nor did he tell Jackie or Lee he was leaving.

  It would be about a month before Janet would find out that Ari had even been in Washington. Over di
nner at O Street, Lee slipped and said something to Jackie about “when Ari was at the White House after Jack died.” According to one of Janet’s household employees, Janet smacked both hands to the table, bolted up from her chair, and exclaimed to Lee, “Please do not tell me you invited that man to the White House, Lee! Please do not even tell me that!” Jackie, according to the source, took one look at Lee’s bewildered expression and decided to cover for her. “No, it was my idea, Mummy,” she quickly said. “Mr. Onassis was so nice to me after Patrick died. When he called to offer his condolences about Jack, I suggested he come to the White House.” Lee offered no information at all. When Janet wanted to know why she’d not seen him at the funeral, her daughters said he left before the services. “The disrespect that shows boggles the mind,” Janet decided. She was glad he left, though, she said. This dark time was awful enough, she said, without having to think about where Aristotle Onassis was, and what he was doing.

  Though she didn’t give it voice yet, now Janet had another fear about Onassis—something that hadn’t previously occurred to her: Was he also interested in Jackie? “This was something she didn’t see coming,” said someone who knew her well at the time. “I think she hoped she was being overreactive—‘fear does stoke the imagination,’ is how she put it to me—but her mother’s intuition was telling her otherwise. She said she had a bad feeling about the future where Onassis was concerned. She didn’t know what to do about it. Not yet, anyway.”

  “Nothing But Black”

  What can be written that hasn’t already been reported about the historic funeral services for America’s fallen 35th President, John Fitzgerald Kennedy? After lying in state in the East Room for twenty-four hours, JFK’s flag-draped coffin was carried on a horse-drawn caisson to the Capitol, where it would be viewed by hundreds of thousands of people. There would be a Requiem Mass at St. Matthew’s Cathedral, then the burial at Arlington National Cemetery. “The day before the funeral, we heard that Oswald had been shot by Jack Ruby,” recalled Jamie Auchincloss. “It was all so shocking that, looking back on it now, I think we were all just numb. So much was going on, such a dramatic chain of events, it was as if nothing was actually registering.” Throughout it all, of course, Jackie remained a symbol of strength and courage for the country. “It was her sense of duty that got her through it,” recalled Jamie, who marched behind his sister during the caisson procession to the Capitol. All of Jackie’s family was present, of course, “and we just tried to be there for her—me, Mummy, Daddy, Lee, Janet Jr., Yusha, Tommy, Nini … all of us … but, really, what could one do? Yes, it was a huge tragedy for the country, the magnitude of which we couldn’t even grasp at the time, but for us—for the Auchinclosses—it was … Jack. The grief we felt cannot be described.”