Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis: The Untold Story

by Barbara Leaming

  From the outset of the marriage, Jackie had been accustomed to being spoken of by the patriarch and his surviving elder sons, Jack and Bobby, in tones of icy expediency. She had had to learn to navigate life with a man who was often absent, frequently ill, and perpetually unfaithful. She had had to live among people who, though most never mentioned the subject to her, were aware of her husband’s infidelity, and who, fond of the young wife though they professed to be, could always be expected to put Jack’s interests first. Along the way, she who had been brought in to help her husband politically had had to face the reality that he and his counselors had begun to wonder whether she might actually be doing him more harm than good.

  Such questions about Jackie’s usefulness remained very much in play at the time of JFK’s narrow victory in 1960; indeed, they were amplified in the run-up to Inauguration Day, when a controversy over the first-lady-to-be’s plans for the White House caused her husband to erupt in anger.

  “Not one of my cabinet officers has had an interview,” Jack confronted Jackie when he arrived in Washington on November 23, 1960, to celebrate Thanksgiving with her and their daughter. “Would you mind telling me what the hell Tish Baldrige is doing?”

  In the weeks since the election, Jack had been at his father’s house in Palm Beach, by turns resting and assembling his administration. Jackie had remained at their N Street residence in anticipation of giving birth by cesarean section at Georgetown University Hospital on December 12. In the meantime, she had hired an old friend, Letitia Baldrige, who like Jackie had attended both Miss Porter’s and Vassar, to be her White House social secretary.

  The Roman-nosed, six-foot-one Baldrige’s tenure began calamitously when, on November 22, in response to reporters’ questions, she affected a bantering manner that left it unclear at times whether she was speaking seriously or not. She announced that Mrs. Kennedy intended to make the White House a showcase of contemporary culture. She winked that the new first lady would enliven the premises with displays of current art. She jested that Jackie might even choose to temporarily hang certain twentieth-century works over paintings that had long been on exhibit. More often than not on this occasion, Baldrige’s remarks were the lighthearted whim of the moment, but the journalists’ pencils flew nonetheless. Also in this vein, Baldrige referred to the innumerable clubwomen across America who would soon be trying to meet her boss as “those great vast hordes of females.” Even more interesting to the press people were her comments on Mamie Eisenhower’s failure thus far to invite her successor to tour the White House before the thirty-fourth president and his wife moved out. It was not so much anything the new social secretary said about Mrs. Eisenhower that the journalists seized upon as it was the faint tone of mockery in which, to certain ears at least, she appeared to say it.

  The next day’s papers, which Jack read on the flight up from Palm Beach, rang with the incident. “Jack got so mad,” Jackie later remembered. “It was the first set of bad, sensational headlines.” On the one hand, the controversy was all rather absurd. Given the magnitude of the issues that had figured in the presidential campaign, the prospect of a new first lady’s hanging modern pictures in the White House hardly seemed worth agonizing about. On the other hand, the tempest over Jackie’s intentions reflected the unease in some quarters about the potentially tectonic cultural shift represented by the outcome of the 1960 presidential election. Politically, culturally, philosophically, Dwight Eisenhower really had been the ordinary heartland American portrayed in his TV advertising campaign when he ran for president in 1952. Eight years later, a good deal of the national nervousness about what the election of Jack Kennedy might mean for the country seemed to manifest itself in anxiety about Kennedy’s wife.

  Eager to make himself more palatable to voters, JFK, despite a lifetime of reading and study, often found it useful to play the yahoo to his supposedly more cultivated spouse. Still, at a moment when Kennedy remained acutely sensitive about his narrow margin of victory (the Democrat won the popular vote by a mere 118,574), he was furious about all the bad press Baldrige had drawn to the incoming administration. The intimation of contempt—for venerable White House traditions, for American clubwomen, for Mamie Eisenhower—that many listeners had detected in Baldrige’s flippant comments seemed to confirm previous hints of Mrs. Kennedy’s sense of cultural superiority.

  Jack’s upset spoiled what was supposed to have been a happy family reunion. As scheduled, he headed back to Florida the following day. The family-owned aircraft carrying the president-elect had nearly reached Palm Beach when JFK—who believed that the stresses of political life had been responsible for Jackie’s 1956 stillbirth—found himself abruptly summoned back to Washington on the news that she had gone into premature labor. Delivered by cesarean section shortly past midnight on November 25, the couple’s new six-pound, three-ounce son, John F. Kennedy Jr., had inadequately developed lungs and needed to be placed in an incubator. Over the course of the nearly two weeks that followed, as Jackie and the newborn remained in the hospital and Jack shifted his transition headquarters to Washington in order to stay close to his son, the Baldrige controversy dragged on in the form of newspaper articles that portrayed the “dim view” taken by Washington traditionalists of Jackie’s White House agenda, as previewed by her social secretary.

  Meanwhile, it turned out that JFK had not been the only prominent political figure whom Baldrige had annoyed. At a moment when Eisenhower was still stinging from JFK’s relentless disparagement of his leadership, there was much distress at the White House about the attention that had been focused on Mamie Eisenhower’s failure to receive Jackie. Directly, pressure from Mrs. Eisenhower led to Jackie’s reluctant acceptance of a belated invitation, which came with assurances that a wheelchair would be available should she need one. The visit had to be squeezed in between the younger woman’s discharge from the hospital, on the morning of Friday, December 9, and the flight to Palm Beach with her husband and children several hours thereafter.

  In the event, the promised wheelchair never materialized, which meant that Jackie, still weak and in considerable discomfort following major surgery, was required to tour the mansion on foot. Whether that, or the failure even to ask her to sit down at any point, had been an oversight on Mamie Eisenhower’s part or the expression of malice Jackie believed it to be, the ordeal robbed her of her last bit of strength at a moment when she felt as if she had almost none left. When Jackie finally got to Palm Beach, she lapsed into a “weeping fit” and spent the better part of the next two weeks in bed.

  Jackie continued to be ill and dispirited on Inauguration Day, January 20, 1961. When, in the hours after her husband’s hugely successful inaugural address, she awakened for the first time in the White House family quarters, where she had gone to rest, paralyzing muscle spasms gripped both legs. Dr. Janet Travell, summoned from the reviewing platform where she had been watching the inaugural parade with America’s new thirty-fifth president, gave Jackie a Dexedrine in hopes the drug would help sustain her through the round of parties that were scheduled to begin at ten P.M. It would not be long before far more potent and dangerous medications would be required if the newly minted first lady were to fulfill her official duties.

  In the meantime, an air of elation settled over the White House, where JFK was soon boasting of a 72 percent approval rating, numbers even better than Eisenhower had enjoyed after a single month in office. Kennedy’s inaugural address had thrilled the nation with its soaring rhetoric and Churchillian themes. In the manner of Churchill, Kennedy took as his starting point the way in which the introduction of nuclear weapons at the end of the Second World War had made the world a very different place. “For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life.” Churchill in various postwar addresses had postulated exactly this choice. Like his political and intellectual hero, Kennedy urged East and West to “begin anew the quest for peace, before the dark powers of destruction un
leashed by science engulf all humanity in planned or accidental self-destruction.” Also like Churchill, the new young president insisted that it would be a grave mistake to tempt the other side with weakness. “For only when our arms are sufficient beyond doubt,” said Kennedy, “can we be certain beyond doubt that they will never be employed.”

  Drawing on his pivotal conversations with David Ormsby-Gore about the policy of outmaneuvering Moscow through contact and agreements (“the strategy of peace,” as candidate Kennedy had dubbed it), JFK declared: “Let both sides, for the first time, formulate serious and precise proposals for the inspection and control of arms.” That longed-for crucial first agreement with the Soviets had eluded Churchill. For Kennedy, it was the “beginning” to which he had referred in the course of the campaign (“The problem is to find a beginning”) and to which he repeatedly returned in his inaugural speech (“begin anew the quest for peace,” “So let us begin anew,” “But let us begin”). Kennedy’s oratorical triumph suggested to many listeners, both at home and abroad, that he might indeed be just the man to reverse the humiliations (the downing of an American U-2 reconnaissance aircraft over the Soviet Union and the resultant breakup of the four-power Paris peace conference attended by Eisenhower and other world leaders) that had blighted the thirty-fourth president’s last months in power and diminished voter confidence in Eisenhower.

  The postinaugural euphoria did not last long, however. On April 20, 1960, Jackie observed something that, she later reflected, she had only seen once before, in 1954, when her husband had been so ill and depressed after the botched back surgery that nearly killed him. This morning, in their private quarters at the White House, she watched Jack drop his head into his hands and weep. He had previously authorized a CIA plan to overthrow the Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, which had been handed down to him from the Eisenhower administration. Now the attack, undertaken by a force of U.S.-trained Cuban exiles, had come to grief. Castro crowed that he had captured nearly two thousand prisoners and that the U.S.-backed invasion had been thwarted.

  That day, President Kennedy, who had seemed so ebullient in recent weeks, had the appearance of a “shattered” man—like someone who had just endured “an acute shock.” Within a few months of coming to office, he who had repeatedly cited the loss of power and prestige in the Eisenhower years had now himself overseen a debacle that had much of the world puzzling about what looked to be unprecedented new American incompetence. He who had excoriated Eisenhower for a failure to approach the 1960 four-power Paris peace talks from a position of strength would now himself have to embark on previously scheduled top-level meetings with France and the Soviet Union at a moment when American, not to mention JFK’s own personal, prestige, had been badly tarnished. As a consequence of the failed invasion, France’s leader, Charles de Gaulle, regarded Kennedy as “inept,” and Russia’s leader, Nikita Khrushchev, judged him to be “a soft, not very decisive young man” who had lacked the nerve to send in U.S. forces after the Cuban exiles failed. In the States, Eisenhower, when he conferred with Kennedy about the fiasco, seized the opportunity to privately humiliate his successor by cataloging the mistakes, both of planning and execution, that had led to defeat.

  Jackie, for her part, found the spectacle of Jack’s public failure almost unbearable to witness. “She was undone by it,” remembered Betty Coxe Spalding, who spent the weekend with the Kennedys after the Cuban debacle, “and undone by the fact that he was so upset by it.” Lest the first lady’s depression prevent her from accompanying him to Europe, where protocol required her presence, Jack soon sent in a new doctor to see her. On May 12, at the Wrightsman estate in Palm Beach, where the Kennedys and the Spaldings were guests, Jackie received her first injection from Max Jacobson, otherwise known to a legion of celebrity patients as Dr. Feelgood. JFK, who had been introduced to the New York physician by Chuck Spalding, had himself secretly relied on the mood-enhancing injections at the time of his game-changing presidential debates with Richard Nixon. In the run-up to President and Mrs. Kennedy’s departure for France, Jackie had several more doses of the mysterious elixir. Referred to by enthusiasts as Jacobson’s “joy juice,” the shots were a concoction of methamphetamine, steroids, calcium, monkey placenta, and other ingredients that the doctor steadfastly refused to disclose.

  “It’s not for kicks, only for people who have work to do,” Jacobson was known to scold in a thick German accent that, according to one devotee, made him sound “like a caricature of Sigmund Freud.” The president, after severely injuring his unstable back in the course of a tree-planting ceremony in Ottawa, also asked to be treated by Jacobson, though JFK had previously discontinued the injections because, he told Chuck Spalding, he did not like the feeling of being out of control that they gave him. Besides, though other patients attested to decidedly different results, JFK was convinced that the shots impeded sexual performance. Determined to disregard Dr. Travell’s recommendation that he openly use crutches when he met with de Gaulle and Khrushchev in Paris and Vienna, respectively, Kennedy arranged for Jacobson to quietly accompany him and the first lady to Europe. Prior to takeoff on May 30 in New York, the unkempt doctor, who habitually stank of cigarettes and medicine and whose fingernails were stained black by chemicals, injected both Kennedys in the presidential stateroom of Air Force One.

  In the course of their visit to France, Jacobson charged them up before their official appearances, and eased them down afterward in order that they might sleep serenely at night. His cocktail of drugs permitted President Kennedy to function in spite of an injured back, and it allowed the first lady to cheerfully and energetically perform public duties from which, almost certainly, she would otherwise have recoiled. It soon became apparent, however, that other factors were in play that made Jackie, in the phrase of the very political consultants who had previously doubted her appeal, “the hit of the show.”

  Immediately, the motorcade that carried the Kennedys, and their hosts President and Mrs. de Gaulle, from Orly Airport was greeted by cries of “Vive Jacqueline!” along the ten-mile route. It was certainly not anything Jackie had done on the trip thus far that stirred the crowds so much as it had been an interview with her, previously taped in Washington and aired on French television the night before. Speaking in very pretty French, Jackie had charmingly presented herself as a daughter of France. The broadcast caused a huge sensation, and the seventy-year-old de Gaulle, seated beside JFK in an open limousine, attributed the turnout of as many as a million people to the French public’s fascination with Mrs. Kennedy. JFK, in turn, jestingly commented through a translator that he ought to be jealous. In fact he was pleased—up to a point, anyway—by the effect Jackie seemed to have, not just on the crowds, but on de Gaulle himself. One French newspaper satirized the latter dynamic in a political cartoon that depicted the famously puritanical de Gaulle asleep in a canopied bed dreaming of Mrs. Kennedy, whose image hovered above. Beneath the covers, the French leader’s mousey wife, Yvonne, glared at Jackie and declared with outrage: “Charles!” At a luncheon at the Élysée Palace on the day the Kennedys arrived, Jackie, seated next to de Gaulle, delighted him with her command of his language and her knowledge of his country. The woman who in Newport in 1945 had dared not disclose how much she knew about such matters spoke unreservedly of them now to the hero of her youth. “Mrs. Kennedy knows more about French history than most Frenchwomen,” de Gaulle presently informed JFK. When talks with America’s prickliest ally went well, Kennedy remarked to aides (not perhaps without a dash of irony) that he and de Gaulle were getting on—“probably because I have such a charming wife.”

  The better part of two truckloads of baggage that the Kennedys had brought with them to Paris consisted of Jackie’s wardrobe, which was comprised largely of costumes created for her by the American designer Oleg Cassini. On the occasion of the Kennedy–de Gaulle dinner on the second day of the state visit, however, she departed from her Alsop-inspired made-in-America rule and appeared at the Palace of Versail
les in a beaded and embroidered white satin evening gown and matching coat designed by the French couturier Hubert de Givenchy. The next day’s headlines blazoned the news of Jackie’s triumph: “Paris Has a Queen” and “Apotheosis at Versailles.” Addressing journalists at a farewell press conference, JFK displayed the ability to laugh at himself that admirers had long found irresistible about him. “I do not think it altogether inappropriate to introduce myself to this audience,” America’s leader dryly declared. “I am the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris, and I have enjoyed it.” To some perceptions, however, afterward, JFK was not without ambivalence, even annoyance, about the tremendous amount of attention Jackie had received. Still, he seems to have been enough of a pragmatist to appreciate the advantage to himself of her success.

  In Vienna, Jackie drew more hyperbole and headlines. “First Lady Wins Khrushchev, Too,” trumpeted The New York Times. “Smitten Khrushchev Is Jackie’s Happy Escort,” concurred The New York Herald Tribune. In what looks to have been a burst of mimetic desire, the crowds in the street were almost as eager to see Jackie as the French had been, though she certainly had never declared herself a daughter of Austria. On one occasion, as the president’s car approached the Soviet embassy, a waiting crowd called for Jackie and was disappointed to discover that JFK and Secretary of State Dean Rusk had arrived without her. “Rusk,” the president jested, “you make a hell of a substitute for Jackie!”

  In London as well there was universal fascination with the first lady when the Kennedys arrived, ostensibly to attend the christening of the child of Jackie’s sister Lee (now the wife of the Polish prince Stanislas Radziwill), but actually so that JFK might confer with Prime Minister Harold Macmillan about what de Gaulle and Khrushchev had told him. “In the pubs,” reported The New York Times, “the talk is more of ‘Jackie’ … than of her husband and international politics.” Joe Alsop encountered the Kennedys at the christening party at the Radziwill residence, and though Alsop had had much to do with preparing Jackie for public life, today it was a “visibly shaken” and “strangely preoccupied” President Kennedy who riveted the journalist’s attention. In cryptic conversation with Alsop, JFK alluded to the threat that, as yet unbeknownst to the world, Khrushchev had made in Vienna. Determined never again to face a unified Germany, and most especially not a unified anti-Communist Germany, Moscow was threatening to cut off Western access to Berlin, even if that meant igniting a new world war. Kennedy, for his part, worried that his own lack of firmness in Vienna had lent credence to Khrushchev’s opinion, formulated in the wake of the Cuban fiasco, that America’s callow new young leader would accept almost anything to avoid a nuclear confrontation. In private, Jackie saw her husband lapse into “a gloom” that he refused to talk about, but which caused her on more than one occasion to feel what she later described as “a little shooting pain of fright” that even Jack would not be able to make this turn out for the best.