Jackie, Janet & Lee

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  On Thursday night, December 5, at about eight-thirty, Janet and Lee—who had arrived earlier in the day—stood next to Jackie at a grave site at Arlington National Cemetery, along with Bobby and Ted Kennedy. Also present were Father Cushing and the Most Reverend Philip Matthew Hannan, the auxiliary bishop of Washington who had long been a close friend of the Kennedy family. Jackie had called him earlier to ask him to be present, telling him that an army staff car would pick him up at the rectory and bring him to the cemetery. She’d stressed the importance of secrecy.

  “The sight of two such tiny white caskets was truly heart-wrenching,” Father Hannan would recall many years later. “Before starting the ceremony, Jackie and I placed each coffin on the ground near her husband’s fresh grave. The graves had already been dug. As a crane lowered the first casket, I began to recite the words of the Lord’s Prayer.”

  “Our father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name,” the priest said as the workman lowered the coffin into the ground. Then, the second coffin. He continued to pray—“Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee”—as the workman covered both coffins with soil. “Conscious of Jackie’s fragile, emotional condition, I decided to offer only the prescribed short prayers of the ceremony,” the priest recalled.

  After the brief service, Jackie stood alone at the graves of her husband and children while the rest of the small, sad coterie stepped away to give her a moment of privacy. With a somber expression, she genuflected, made the sign of the cross, rose, and stood in place for a long time, her head bowed. She wasn’t crying. Rather, she appeared to be numb, frozen in place.

  Later, as the small group made its way back to the car, Jackie began peppering Father Hannan with questions. He would later recall, “She asked if she could have the ritual book and stole that I’d used for the service. As I gladly handed them over, they seemed to unleash a torrent of spiritual concerns that only a priest could possibly help her work through: Why had God let this happen? What could possibly be the reason? Jack had so much more to give, was just hitting his stride. What was our destiny in heaven? Did I think he was there? How would the children ever understand? What should she tell them?

  “The more she talked, the more that Jackie’s real feelings surfaced, her comments frank and to the point,” he remembered. “Particularly galling, she confided, was the public’s surprise at her stoicism while preparing—and during—the funeral. Why had so many columnists marveled at her composure? It was the least she could do for Jack. He would have expected nothing less.

  “Given the presence of her mother and sister, I thought it might be more appropriate if she and I, privately, continued our conversation at my rectory or the White House,” he remembered of that night. “But Jackie was undeterred. ‘I don’t like to hear people say that I am poised and maintaining a good appearance,’ she said, resentfully. ‘I am not a movie actress.’”

  Finally, Janet and Lee couldn’t take it another second. They approached their loved one. “Come now, dear,” Janet said as she took Jackie by the hand. She seemed determined not to allow her resolve to crumble in front of her daughter, no matter her personal anguish. Lee tried to mirror her mother’s stoic demeanor. “It’s over, Jackie,” Lee told her sister. “Your babies are with Jack now. Let’s go. Please.”

  Janet took Jackie by one arm. Steadying her gently, Lee took her sister by the other. The three Bouvier women then walked slowly and uncertainly to a waiting limousine.

  Jackie’s Torment

  By early February of 1964, Jackie and her children had vacated the White House and, after a brief time at a temporary residence, were living at 3017 N Street in Georgetown. Lee had found the place for her, a good-sized, twelve-room, eighteenth-century Colonial house. Billy Baldwin, the Kennedys’ designer and good friend, recalled being concerned when he first saw the place. “It had been chosen for Jackie with the greatest possible bad decision by her sister. I think the home was designed by someone for purposes of publicity. There was no hope for privacy, it was out in the open, high atop a mountain of steps. When I saw it, it looked like a monument. I thought, Why, Lee, why? Why?”

  Lee’s idea was that she would momentarily move into the second floor with Jackie to help out and keep an eye on her. Because Stas had business in New York, the couple was thinking of relocating there. Meanwhile, Lee would be able to spend more time with her sister; her children, Anthony and Tina, would sleep on the third floor with Caroline and John.

  It was also at this time that the Bouvier women’s Mother-Daughter Tea came back into their lives. Janet insisted upon it, especially with all three living in Washington; Janet liked the high tea service at the Mayflower Hotel, a few blocks from the White House. It was at that first tea, though, that Janet and Lee saw plainly that Jackie wasn’t the same woman she’d been before the assassination. The trauma she’d endured in Dallas had, not surprisingly, changed her, especially coming just three months after the death of baby Patrick. She was, understandably, upset, constantly crying and, she admitted, never sleeping. She confessed that she was drinking too much, taking pills, and, basically, doing whatever she could do to get through the day.

  Shortly after the sisters moved into the N Street house, they invited Janet to dinner with a group of other friends, including the Bradlees; Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and his wife, Marian; and Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr. and his wife, Suzanne. They were to be joined by Tom Braden, president of the state board of education and former CIA official, and his wife, Joan, one of the Kennedys’ most loyal confidantes. Once everyone was settled in the parlor, Janet could immediately tell that Jackie was in no shape for company. Her hair wasn’t properly combed, her clothes disheveled. She even seemed wobbly, as if she’d been drinking again.

  Prior to February of 1964, Janet had heard only a few details of Jackie’s version of the events surrounding the assassination. Lee knew more since her sister had confided in her while they were living under the same roof. With Jackie’s remembrances this evening, though, Janet would be privy to much more. Her face wiped clean of all emotion, Jackie recited the story with eerie stoicism, as if it had happened to someone else, not her. Tom Braden remembers, “She poured it all out in detail, in shocking detail. Things you wouldn’t expect to hear, she told, such as, ‘I realized suddenly I had his brains in my hand.’”

  Because Jackie was nursing a Scotch and soda as she told her story, Janet had to wonder if what she was saying was even true. She thought the morbid scenario might possibly be drawn from one of Jackie’s nightmares. Certainly there seemed no end to the grisly events of late. It made sense that Jackie’s imagination had run wild. “Jackie, you know that none of that really happened, don’t you?” Janet said, squeezing her daughter’s hand. Smiling faintly, she suggested that Jackie had imagined it, or maybe dreamed it. With anger flaring in her dark eyes, Jackie said, “Of course I didn’t make it up, Mummy! Why would I make up such a thing?” Everyone was at a loss for words.

  Finally, Lee spoke. “You’re not going to get through this without the love of your family,” she told Jackie, according to what Joan Braden would later recall. Lee then reminded her sister that they were all there for her. Since they were already together, Lee suggested, “Let’s just sit and share stories about Jack that will make us remember him. Would that make you feel better, Jacks?” Jackie nodded. For the next two hours, her friends and family surrounded Jackie with warmth as they sat around the fireplace and remembered their beloved Jack.

  Janet’s Advice

  By July, Jackie was really no better. Today we understand all too well that she was suffering from PTSD—post-traumatic stress disorder. Back then, however, it really wasn’t recognized as such. In fact, the American Psychiatric Association wouldn’t add PTSD to its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders until 1980, and mostly in response to those suffering from it after serving in the Vietnam War. However, in retrospect, the symptoms Jackie exhibited could not be clearer in pointing to a diagnosis of PTSD. A car’s back
firing would send her into a tailspin, reminding her of a gunshot. Any sudden noise, in fact, would startle her to the point of practically immobilizing her. She kept insisting she had no reason to live and often threatened suicide. She couldn’t sleep; she had recurring nightmares. She blamed herself for Jack’s death, wishing it had been her instead—“If I had just been a little more to one side, it could have been me.” She was sad and morose all of the time, and there was really nothing anyone could do to help. Everyone felt powerless.

  The latest development was that Jackie couldn’t bear being around her own children. For the most part, she was leaving the kids in the care of their nanny. Janet certainly didn’t like the way that sounded when Lee told her about it. It was unlike Jackie. She and Lee were the ones who left the raising of their children to nannies, not Jackie. Jackie was the maternal one!

  Feeling the need to step in, Janet telephoned Jackie and suggested a visit to Hammersmith. “Therefore, Jackie came to Hammersmith for a week,” recalled Jamie, who was at the farm just prior to returning to boarding school. “She arrived on the nineteenth and brought Caroline, but not John. This was when Mummy saw how bad off Jackie still was. She never laughed. She never cried. Mummy noticed bottles of prescription pills on her bedroom dresser and wondered what was going on.”

  Because she couldn’t sleep, Jackie would drag herself down to the Deck Room in the middle of the night and set up her easel in a corner. She would then open the French windows along the wide terrace on that side of the house, the west side, and allow the cold bay air to flood the room, all the while wrapping herself in a robe for warmth. She would then begin to paint, using her watercolors until about four in the morning. Exhausted, she would then go back up to her room at four-thirty. Maybe she would sleep with the help of tranquilizers. Maybe she wouldn’t.

  Janet’s schedule at Hammersmith had always been precise. Breakfast was served to her in her bedroom at eight in the morning and then to everyone else in residence at exactly eight-thirty, and not in their rooms either, but in the kitchen. That’s the way it had been for years, and it would never change. By nine-thirty, the servants were supposed to be making the beds and cleaning the guest rooms. Then it would be time for them to prepare for lunch. After lunch, they usually had a few hours off, during which time they would be free to go to their own accommodations on the north side of the Big House. At about four, they were to be back at the main house to begin preparation for the cocktail hour and then dinner. “Because Jackie had been up all night, she would rise at about noon and call down for breakfast,” Jamie recalled. “Then she would want it served in her room, not in the kitchen. Well, by that time, the serving of breakfast was long over and lunch was supposed to be up next. This rearranging of the household schedule quickly became an issue for my mother. Maybe it was for the best, though, because it would be the catalyst for a serious talk Mummy would have with Jackie.”

  One afternoon, after Jackie finished with her late breakfast, she dragged herself down to the beach to join Janet and Jamie under an umbrella. She looked dreadful, maybe medicated or hungover. Janet was as annoyed as she was worried. “Jacqueline,” she began—and this is according to Jamie’s memory of the conversation—“we’ve all lost Jack, but it’s been eight months! You have to snap out of it.”

  Jackie looked at her mother with a perplexed expression. Janet continued by telling Jackie that she would no longer be permitted to awaken at noon and then expect the servants to prepare breakfast for her and bring it to her room. Instead, Janet continued, she would be expected to rise in the morning with everyone else, and eat breakfast at eight-thirty in the kitchen. “You cannot keep treating my servants like this,” Janet said. Jackie nodded her agreement. Janet then reached for her daughter’s hand and said, “The only way you’ll ever get through this thing is to start living your life again in a normal fashion. Do we have an understanding?”

  Jamie recalled, “Jackie was a little startled. She blinked a few times and then she said, ‘Thank you, Mummy. Somebody had to tell me that. Because nobody has said no to me in a long time. I guess it takes a mother to say “snap out of it,” doesn’t it?’ Mummy nodded. Then Jackie said, ‘I really needed to hear that today.’”

  What to Do About Jackie?

  Jackie Kennedy realized that in order for her to hope to recover from what had happened to her, from what she had witnessed in Dallas, she needed to leave Georgetown. She couldn’t bear her residence there another day. It was too much like a fishbowl, with people camping outside her front door, watching for her, waiting for her, wondering about her. The scrutiny it invited from the public just added another level of stress to her life. Therefore, in July of ’64, she followed Lee to New York, purchasing a fourteen-room apartment at towering 1040 Fifth Avenue, on the fifteenth floor. It was just seven blocks away from Lee and Stas’s cooperative. However, even after moving in, Jackie still found herself feeling alone and depressed. She sent the children to Hammersmith to spend the summer with Janet, who was happy to take them but worried about her daughter.

  “I don’t know what to do about her,” Lee told Sherry Geyelin, the daughter of Hugh’s late partner, Chauncey, over lunch one afternoon at Sardi’s. Oatsie Charles, Janet’s socialite friend, was also present, as was Adora Rule’s daughter, Janine, who had just started working for Oatsie as a secretary. “I haven’t slept in a month,” Lee said. “I am up all night with Jackie, either in person or on the phone. She’s in dreadful shape. I’m scared to death for her.” The stress was evident on Lee’s face. She seemed drawn and exhausted.

  Lee said that, a week earlier, Jackie had called her in the middle of the night to say she was experiencing a strong impulse to take as many pills as she could and wash them down with vodka, all in the hope that she wouldn’t awaken the next morning. Frantic, Lee raced to Jackie’s apartment and stayed up all night with her, talking to her, trying to reason with her, drying her tears. The next day, she decided not to leave Jackie’s side; she spent the next three days caring for her sister. “But I am not a psychiatrist,” she said. “I don’t know what I’m doing! I’m just a sister trying to come up with answers!” Lee said that while Jackie slept she went rummaging about the apartment, finding drugs prescribed by doctors and then flushing them down the toilet. She was amazed at how many doctors Jackie had, and how many different kinds of drugs she was taking. She said there should be “some sort of law” to prevent doctors from overprescribing serious drugs to patients who were clearly in danger of hurting themselves.

  Lee also said Jackie wasn’t open to the idea of seeking professional help and that, instead, she’d been talking to a Jesuit priest named Father Richard McSorley. The two would sit and talk for hours. Jackie said she had told him she was considering suicide; she wondered whether she did such a thing would she see Jack on the other side, in heaven? Because of her global celebrity, she even said she figured her suicide would set off a rash of suicides among Americans. Maybe this fad would not be such a bad turn of events, she reasoned. At least those people who made the decision would be set free from their pain.

  “Do you know what she said to me just yesterday?” Lee asked. “She said, ‘I should have just married John Husted and then none of this would have happened to me.’”

  “Who in the world is that?” asked Sherry Geyelin.

  “Exactly!” Lee exclaimed. (Of course, Husted was the man to whom Jackie had been engaged in 1951, the one from whom Janet instigated a breakup.)

  Janine Rule recalled, “Lee said that she’d asked Aristotle Onassis to keep an eye on Jackie that week because he happened to be in Manhattan on business. Mrs. Charles said, ‘Do you trust him?’ Lee said, ‘With my life.’ Mrs. Charles and I looked at one another with raised eyebrows as if to say, ‘Really?’ But we didn’t say it. Lee was under enough pressure. I had never seen her so upset. I didn’t want to add to it.”

  In fact, Ari stopped by to see Jackie quite often. He’d call first and then visit with gifts for her and the childre
n. He said he didn’t believe she should be locked away. She was young and vital and full of life, he told her. “You have to mourn, Jackie. But, soon, you must live,” he concluded.

  Meanwhile, Lee’s affair with Onassis continued unabated. It was strained, though, and definitely not the same. They argued constantly. He wasn’t kind to her. In fact, he was a brute most of the time. However, she still cherished their rare good moments together and held on to each one tightly, hoping against hope that he would soon return to the dashing, loving man he’d been in her life before she renewed her vows to Stas. It also worried her that Onassis seemed just a tad too invested in her sister’s happiness, but what could she do about it? She just had to wait, hope for the best, and see what developed.

  Maybe Lee didn’t have anything to worry about where Jackie was concerned. Though Ari was certainly solicitous to her, it was really Jack Warnecke who held Jackie’s interest. Whenever he came to town, her spirits were lifted. The two had been growing closer ever since she had hired him to design JFK’s new tomb. She was impressed with him. He’d consulted at least fifty different architects, painters, stonemasons, and calligraphers to put together what he thought she’d most appreciate for her late husband. With work set to begin in the fall of ’65, it was as if Jackie had one foot in the past with the old Jack and another in the future with the new one. Dogged by indecision, she didn’t know what to do.

  Bobby Kennedy didn’t make things any easier. He still strongly disliked Jack, so much so that Warnecke’s associate Harold Adams was now forced to act as a liaison between the two men. It was better if they weren’t in the same room together. Though there were rumors that Bobby and Jackie had somehow become involved, these stories simply were not true. However, Bobby definitely didn’t want Jackie to be with Warnecke, and he didn’t want to be around him, either. Jack felt the same way about Bobby