Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis: The Untold Story

by Barbara Leaming

  Such criticisms were nothing, however, compared to the storm that erupted as soon as Jackie’s trip was announced to the public. Angry letter-writers pelted the White House with protests. Some of the complaints were the work of the usual cranks, but a good many letters voiced the apparently sincere feelings of betrayal experienced by average citizens who had mourned the death of young Patrick and felt somehow mocked by Jackie’s vacation on the playboy’s boat. Why, they demanded to know, if she was well enough to go to Europe, did she not simply resume her responsibilities as first lady? Why not be a good wife and remain at home to help and care for her busy husband? The uneasy subtext of much of this was the question of whether people of her stratum of existence reacted differently to life’s tragedies than everyone else did. The angry chorus intensified when Jackie turned up in Greece, where reports of all-night revelries on the Christina attended by the first lady and about a dozen other guests drew bitter protests from the American press and public. Jackie’s cruise also caused JFK trouble in Congress, where Republicans branded the trip “improper” and asked why she did not simply choose to see more of her own country rather than gallivant about Europe.

  Looking back at the episode in light of all that was so soon to follow, Jackie regretted her prolonged absence in Europe, as well as certain of her private behavior in the aftermath of her October 17, 1963, return to the United States. “I was melancholy after the death of my baby, and I stayed away last fall longer than I needed to,” she would tell Father McSorley. “And then when I came back he [JFK] was trying to get me out of my grief and maybe I was a bit snappish; but I could have made his life so much happier, especially for the last few weeks. I could have tried to get over my melancholy.” That, at least, is how she remembered it in 1964, when she was being counseled, by the priest among others, that it was time to “get over” the death of her husband. Interestingly, guilt feelings of a very different origin were already in the mix when she returned to the States on October 17, 1963, ten days after JFK had signed the instruments of ratification of the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which, in close consultation with Harold Macmillan, he had at last secured with the Soviets—the “beginning” JFK had often spoken of during the presidential campaign, as well as in his inaugural address. So, unlike his hero Churchill, who had had to leave office before he could accomplish the great goal, Kennedy had managed to win the first precious postwar agreement with the Soviets after all.

  Jackie, for her part, was uncomfortably aware of the political trouble her stay on the Christina had just caused him; he, coolly conscious of appealing to her “guilt feelings” when he asked her to accompany him, along with Vice President and Mrs. Lyndon Johnson, on an upcoming political trip to Texas. Jackie’s assent, offered unhesitatingly, took the form of “a gesture of contrition” from a wife who, by her own account, had always been the partner in the marriage to make the first move toward conciliation.

  Jackie had never accompanied the president on a domestic political trip before. Quite simply, it was not the sort of thing she relished or felt confident doing. Could she bring it off now, especially after the torrent of public criticism she had just drawn? Kennedy’s political consultants saw Texas as a trial run for the 1964 presidential campaign. Despite everything that Jackie had accomplished to date as first lady, in the Kennedy camp there remained significant skepticism about quite how she would play there.

  Hardly had she emerged from Air Force One in San Antonio, Texas, on November 21, 1963, however, when that skepticism evaporated. Dressed not like the jet-setter of recent controversy but rather like the conservative, though young and pretty, wife of a well-to-do American businessman, Jackie skillfully endeared herself to the crowd with what Lady Bird Johnson approvingly described as “a big, hesitant smile.” That hesitancy seemed to signal Jackie’s humble acceptance that whatever her past triumphs in Paris, Vienna, London, and elsewhere, today it was for the people of Texas to make up their own minds about her. Throughout the junket, she dutifully, strategically, played the part of the good, ordinary wife, ever doting on and deferring to her husband. Afterward, the first lady’s press secretary reflected: “I think she wanted to be the woman to accompany John Kennedy to Texas.” Ironically, that very determination to linger in the background quickly made Jackie, in the words of one press commentator, “almost the focus of the trip.” That night, in their suite at the Texas Hotel in Fort Worth, the president assured her: “You were great today.” The next morning, he humorously told an audience in the hotel’s Grand Ballroom: “Two years ago, I introduced myself in Paris by saying that I was the man who accompanied Mrs. Kennedy to Paris. I am getting the same sensation as I travel about Texas.” Back in the presidential suite afterward, before they flew on to Dallas, he asked her if she would accompany him on a campaign trip to California in two weeks.

  “And, then, just when we had it all settled,” Jackie recalled in conversation with Father McSorley, “I had the rug pulled out from under me without any power to do anything about it.”

  Of course, by the time she said that, sudden horrific events had inevitably and irreversibly made her a different person than the one she had been when her husband made his pitch about California. Still, what exactly did she think, or at least wish the priest to think, had finally been “settled” that last day of JFK’s life? Certainly, whatever Jackie may once have hoped, the loss of a child had not changed him any more than marriage had. In both cases, he had soon reverted to past sexual habits. Had the assassination never taken place, Jackie would still have had to live among men who not only knew of the president’s infidelity, but who in certain cases routinely shared girls with him. She would still have had to constantly face women—White House employees, journalists, members of her social circle—who at one time or another had slept with, or enjoyed somewhat briefer exchanges with, her husband.

  From the moment in 1952 when Jackie had broken her engagement to another man in order to pursue a relationship with Jack Kennedy, politics had been both enemy and friend to her. Enemy, because, in the beginning, Jack’s decision to seek a senatorship meant that he would often be away. Friend, because if Jack did manage to win a place in the Senate, given his particular ambitions he would soon no doubt require a wife. From the outset, their relations had been characterized by a good deal of separation and longing, the latter on Jackie’s part anyway. At times, he had vouchsafed her little more than the voice heard amid a crash of coins in what she imagined to be some oyster bar on Cape Cod; the books, mainly British, that he left with her by way of suggesting how he saw himself intellectually; the French-language texts about Indochina, which she spent many late lonely nights translating in hopes that “he has got to ask me to marry him after all I have done for him.” On their honeymoon she had been careful, as reported in a letter to his parents, to leave him alone a few hours each day. But even then, Jack had suddenly sent his young bride reeling when he suggested that she return to the East Coast, while he enjoyed a few extra days in California by himself. “What shall I do?” she had frantically asked another, older woman at the time. In one form or another, Jackie had been confronted with that very question over and over in the course of the decade of marriage that had followed.

  But now again, politics, in addition to being the enemy, had also presented itself as a friend. Her brilliant reception in Texas thus far had finally persuaded Jack that America was “ready” for her.

  Henceforward, when he went on the road, he wanted Jackie at his side.

  Seven

  During the long winter that followed, during the lonely nights that never seemed to end, the wakeful nights that no quantity of vodka could assuage, Jackie would relive the sliver of time between the first gunshot, which had missed the car, and the second, which hit both the president and Texas governor John Connally. Those three and a half seconds became of cardinal importance to her. In the course of her marriage, she had constructed herself as Jack Kennedy’s one-woman Praetorian Guard—against the doctors, again
st the political antagonists, against the journalists, even against anyone in his own circle who to her perception would do him harm. So, again and again that winter of 1963–1964, she rehearsed the same brief sequence. If only she had been looking to the right, she told herself, she might have saved her husband. If only she had recognized the sound of the first shot, she could have pulled him down in time.

  Jackie remembered that that initial gunshot, when she heard it, had seemed to be just some random backfire from one of the many police escort motorcycles. In the scorching sunlight, she had been sitting in the rear of an open midnight-blue Lincoln Continental convertible, smiling and waving to the crowds on her left. She had on a line-for-line copy of a pink wool Chanel suit with navy lapels, and white kid gloves buttoned at the wrist. A gold bracelet flashed and glittered on her left arm. Jack, seated beside her in the limo, had insisted that she not wear her sunglasses in order that the people of Dallas might see her face. The red roses she had been handed earlier at the airport lay on the seat between her and her husband.

  When the initial shot was fired, Jack stopped waving and peered into the crowd. Briefly he turned to the left and glanced at his wife. By the time Jackie looked to her right, he had already resumed waving to onlookers. Then, like the president, she too turned back to the people on her side of the car and began to wave again. The sound of the first shot had been ambiguous. Secret Service agents traveling in the motorcade had similarly taken it for the gunning of motorcycles, or perhaps a firecracker. But there could be no mistaking the character of the second shot, which ripped through the back of the president’s neck, exited below his Adam’s apple, and hit the right shoulder of the governor, who was seated in front of Kennedy. Connally’s cries, “Oh, no, no, no … My God, they are going to kill us all,” caused Jackie to turn. Jack seemed to be reaching for his throat. First with her right, then with both hands, she tugged at his raised left arm in a desperate effort to pull him down, as Nellie Connally had succeeded in doing for her husband. Both of Jack’s arms, however, were locked in place, and for five seconds Jackie struggled in vain.

  She was looking directly into Jack’s face when a third shot tore into the right side of his head. Upon contact, there was a loud thump, like a melon exploding on a pavement. A diaphanous pink cloud of brain and bone matter burst out of the wound, raining on Jackie’s hair, face, and clothes. As he fell toward her, she screamed: “My God, what are they doing? My God, they’ve killed Jack, they’ve killed my husband, Jack, Jack!” Rising on her knees, she continued: “I have his brains in my hand.” She might have been killed had the bullet’s trajectory been slightly different, or she could easily have been slaughtered in the open vehicle afterward. Though she survived, deep, distinct memories of the interval between the first and third shots, and of certain of the incidents that followed, would color the rest of her life in ways over which she had no, or at best little, control, and which few observers appeared even to begin to comprehend. From then on, everything would be different for her because of a total of eight and a half at once evanescent and indelible seconds.

  At the time of the second shot, Jackie’s lead Secret Service agent, Clint Hill, had leapt off the sideboard of the follow-up car and begun running toward the presidential limousine. He had been struggling to climb onto the rear of the limo when the third shot split the president’s head asunder. Suddenly, Jackie was crawling on hands and knees along the trunk of the now-speeding Lincoln. She appeared to be reaching futilely for a shard of her husband’s head that had flown out the back. Dave Powers, in the follow-up vehicle, feared she was about to fall off and be ground under the advancing motorcade. Hill, as he drew near, sensed that she had no idea he was there. At last, he successfully propelled himself onto the trunk and pushed her into the rear seat, where he shielded her and the catastrophically wounded president with his own spread-eagled body.

  Jackie cradled her husband in her lap. Tightly she held his head in both hands in a conscious effort to keep the brains from leaking out. “He’s dead, he’s dead,” she heard someone shout. The pale blue interior of the limousine had been transformed into an abattoir. A hairy skull fragment lay beside Jackie’s roses. As sirens roared and the car radio crackled, she muttered to Jack, asking if he could hear and repeating that she loved him: “Jack, Jack, what have they done to you?”

  Six minutes later, the car halted at the emergency admitting platform in the rear of Parkland Hospital. Another agent, Paul Landis, found Jackie still holding her husband in her lap. Landis took her by the shoulders, attempting to help her up, but she refused to let go of the president’s head. “No, I want to stay with him.” Meanwhile, a hospital resident had appeared with a gurney. Surveying the interior of the car, he judged that the president was dead. He had never encountered anyone with a head wound of that magnitude, with so much brain matter strewn about, who survived. Finally, Clint Hill, sensing that Jackie did not want her husband to be seen like this, removed his own suit jacket and draped it over Kennedy’s head and the upper portion of his chest. Thus reassured, she let go. A few ensanguined red roses clung to Kennedy’s body as the agents removed it from the vehicle. Jackie’s eyes gave the appearance of looking but not seeing. Yet when a nurse reached for the president’s head in anticipation of lifting it onto the cart, Jackie pushed her out of the way and insisted on doing it herself.

  As hospital staff raced the gurney to Trauma Room 1, Jackie dashed alongside, grasping her husband’s hand. En route, the suit jacket dropped off his face. Initially, she refused suggestions that she wait in the hallway. In the belief that Jack was dead or dying, however, she did eventually allow herself to be lured out of the room, but shortly thereafter when a medic emerged with the information that the president was still breathing, she demanded to be allowed to return. Nurses had covered the floor around the cart with sheets to prevent slippage. Ignoring a Niagara of blood, Jackie dropped to her knees and prayed.

  Doctors, meanwhile, were performing closed chest massage on the president, who had been stripped down to his undershorts and a back brace. Every time Kennedy’s heart was compressed, a red geyser erupted from his skull and streamed down the right side of the table onto the floor. Neither chest massage nor a tracheotomy, which had been performed earlier, did much to improve his breathing. In any event, it was the head that had sustained the mortal wound, and when Dr. Kemp Clark, a neurosurgeon, saw the damage, he told Dr. Malcolm Perry, who was doing the cardiac massage, that there was no need to go on. When Perry continued notwithstanding, Clark stressed: “No, Malcolm, we are through.” Jackie by this time had taken to pacing the trauma room, her hands clasped before her. Poking an anesthesiologist with her elbow, she hopefully presented him with a fragment of the president’s brain.

  Finally, Dr. Charles Baxter, the emergency room chief, told her that her husband was dead. She held Jack’s hand beneath the sheet and softly joined in the prayers as a priest performed the last rites. When everyone else had left, she sat with Jack for a bit. Afterward, she waited in the hallway while nurses prepared his remains for the journey back to Washington. Since he was still oozing, they wrapped his head in four sheets, and when blood persisted in leaking through, they further insulated the casket with a plastic mattress cover. Jackie returned with the intention of depositing her wedding ring in the coffin. But when she attempted to remove her gloves, she discovered that the blackened white leather was so stiff with dried blood that she could not get them off without a policeman’s assistance. Escorted by Dr. Baxter, she approached the dark red bronze casket, where she kissed Jack’s toe, stomach, and lips. Then she attempted to put the wedding ring that she had worn for the past ten years on his hand. The ring too was bloody, and she managed to push it down no further than the joint of his little finger.

  The corridor outside the emergency room was “deathly still” as the door opened and the casket appeared on a rubber-tired dolly. Jackie walked alongside, her left hand resting on the coffin. There was, said an observer, “a completely gl
azed look in her face.… If somebody had literally fired a pistol in front of her face … she would just have blinked. It seemed that she was absolutely out of this world.” In the belief that any delay in removing the body from Dallas would have an incalculable effect on Jackie, Kenny O’Donnell and Dave Powers were eager to get the casket to Air Force One before local authorities enforced a state law that prescribed that an autopsy be performed in the jurisdiction where the homicide had taken place. The Dallas county medical examiner had already appeared at the hospital to warn that the body must stay where it was. Jackie was unaware of the controversy and thus, said O’Donnell, “perhaps confused as to the speed with which we were attempting to depart.”

  In the rear of the hospital, agents lifted the casket into a hearse and closed the vehicle’s curtains. Declining suggestions that she ride in a follow-up car or even in the front seat of the hearse, Jackie insisted on sitting next to the coffin. The race to remove the remains continued at the airport. “We arrived … and we’re all punchy now,” O’Donnell recalled. “I’m concerned that the Dallas police are going to come and take the body off the plane and Jackie Kennedy’s going to have a heart attack right in front of us there. I’m petrified.” But when O’Donnell sent word to the pilot, urging him to take off immediately, the reply came back that Kennedy was no longer commander in chief. President Johnson was, and it turned out that he was already on the plane waiting to be sworn in prior to takeoff. In the meantime, when Jackie went to her bedroom for a moment, she found her husband’s successor there. Immediately she repaired to the rear compartment, where Jack’s coffin had been placed. At length, though Johnson had been assigned the presidential quarters when he boarded, he insisted that they ought properly to be occupied by the widow. Initially reluctant to return, Jackie finally acceded to the urgings of Lady Bird Johnson. Prior to the swearing-in, therefore, she had her first bit of privacy since the assassination.