Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis: The Untold Story (20 page)

Like others before and after to whom Jackie would describe the events, White sensed that he was about to hear more than he wanted to. And just as she appeared to have no choice but to recount them, the visitor saw no alternative but to listen.

Jackie began: “There’d been the biggest motorcade from the airport. Hot. Wild. Like Mexico and Vienna. The sun was so strong in our faces. I couldn’t put on sunglasses. Then we saw this tunnel ahead. I thought it would be cool in the tunnel. I thought if you were on the left the sun wouldn’t get into your eyes.” She spoke of the gunning of the motorcycles, which she had heard throughout the motorcade, and then the noise she mistook for yet another backfire. She spoke of Governor Connally’s outcry and of the instant when she turned to see Jack.

“Then Jack turned back, so neatly. His last expression was so neat. He had his hand out. I could see a piece of his skull coming off. It was flesh-colored, not white. He was holding out his hand. And I can see this perfectly clean piece detaching itself from his head. Then he slumped in my lap. His blood and his brains were in my lap.” Skipping over the interval when she crawled along the rear of the speeding Lincoln, she cut abruptly to the endless ride to the hospital after Clint Hill had made his way to the car. “I kept saying, ‘Jack, Jack, Jack,’ and someone was yelling, “He’s dead, he’s dead.’ … I kept bending over him, saying, ‘Jack, Jack, can you hear me? I love you, Jack.’ I kept holding the top of his head down, trying to keep the brains in.”

White, listening to her evoke the rose-pink ridges on the inside of her husband’s skull, felt as if he were paralyzed. While the editorial offices and printing plants waited through the night to hear from the
Life
reporter, time in the Kennedy cottage seemed to slow down. Jackie spoke “softly” with a “composure” and matter-of-factness that seemed at once to be at odds with and to give greater relief to the terrors she minutely detailed. “These big Texas interns kept saying, ‘Mrs. Kennedy, you come with us.’ They wanted to take me away from him. Dave Powers came running to me at the hospital.… My legs, my hands, were covered with his brains. When Dave Powers saw this, he burst out weeping. From here down”—she held her hand slightly above her forehead to indicate the spot—“his head was so beautiful. I’d tried to hold the top of his head down. Maybe I could keep it in. I knew he was dead.… They came trying to get me. They tried to grab me, but I said, ‘I’m not leaving.’ When they carried Jack in, Hill threw his coat over Jack’s head. And I held his head to throw the coat over it. It wasn’t repulsive to me for one moment. Nothing was repulsive to me.”

She spoke of standing in the hall outside the trauma room; of forcing her way back in; and of the doctor, Malcolm Perry, who wanted her to leave. “But I said, ‘It’s my husband. His blood, his brains, are all over me.’ … There was a sheet over Jack. His foot was sticking out of the sheet, whiter than the sheet.… I took his foot and kissed it. Then I pulled back the sheet. His mouth was so beautiful. His eyes were open.… When he was shot, he had such a wonderful expression on his face. You know that wonderful expression he had when they’d ask him a question … just before he’d answer. He looked puzzled. And then he slumped forward.”

As Jackie talked on, White perceived, “she lived the horror of the hour.” In a strange sense, for her it was as if it were all happening again right then.

What exactly was it that her visitor was witnessing? The sudden loss of conscious control to a flood of hellish images; the abundance of vivid detail; the incongruously calm, detached style of narration—all point to an instance of traumatic memories being summoned from the brain’s limbic system, which processes violent, highly distressing, and life-threatening events. This more primitive, “reptilian” part of the brain is located beneath the cerebral cortex, where rational thinking takes place. Certain extreme experiences—helplessly watching the death of a person one cares for; nearly being killed oneself; handling human body parts—carry a greater neurological punch than routine events. The brain stores this emotionally fraught material more deeply and in a much more concentrated form than it does other memories. Were one to face a similar high threat later on, the brain is able to instantly call up these images for purposes of warning and guidance. The process is involuntary, and it may be set off at moments when there is no authentic danger. Then, far from enhancing survival, the flashbacks make one a helpless victim of the brain’s animal responses.

Soldiers returning from battle are often racked by intense intrusive memories of certain of the episodes they have endured. So was the slain president’s widow, who, in another context, compared the experience to the opening of “floodgates.” For some veterans, the painful pictures begin to fade in the fullness of time; for others, they do not.

Suddenly that night in Hyannis Port the floodgates closed, and Jackie, speaking in a different register, returned to the subject that she had broached on the telephone several hours before. “I want to say this one thing. It’s become almost an obsession with me.” She evoked Jack’s nightly habit before going to sleep of playing some records on the old Victrola they had owned for a decade. She explained that the song he loved best came at the end of a recording of the Broadway musical
Camelot
. She proposed that his favorite line from that recording might serve as a fitting epitaph to his presidency: “Don’t let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot.” This was the message she wanted
Life
magazine to convey before other authors sought to define her husband’s administration. She wanted people to think of the Kennedy years as Camelot. She wanted the public to understand that though there might be other great presidents in the future, “there’ll never be another Camelot again.” Whether or not the Camelot metaphor was valid, a desire to put it out there was the rational reason she had had for summoning White in the first place. The rest of the strange session had been something else entirely.

Jackie went on to evoke the picture of Jack that she had created to anesthetize herself during those first solitary nights in his room at the Cape shortly after their honeymoon. She spoke with much tenderness of the “lonely sick boy” who as he lay in bed had read about the Knights of the Round Table and about Winston Churchill’s ancestor the 1st Duke of Marlborough. She communicated her sense that what she arrestingly referred to as the “satin-red history” (i.e., the violent, blood-drenched stories of heroes and warriors) that Jack had devoured in youth had made him the man he was.

But then, moments after she had offered these reflections, suddenly, to White’s sense, she “reverted to the assassination scene again.” Was it the phrase “satin-red history” that had stimulated this new outpouring of blood imagery? For whatever reason, she was back on Air Force One, where others were urging her to wipe off Jack’s blood in anticipation of his successor’s swearing-in ceremony.

At midnight, White withdrew to a servant’s room in the cottage to type his story. He had just witnessed a mesmerizing spectacle. The handwritten notes he had taken of the approximately three-and-a-half-hour session were so disturbing to him that, by his own subsequent account to Jackie, it would be three weeks before he could bring himself to transcribe them. And when he did, he refrained from sharing any of it even with his wife or his secretary. Five months hence he would send Jackie a “rough-typed” transcript, which he characterized as “historical material,” along with the strong suggestion that she show it to no one with the possible exception of Bobby Kennedy. On the night of the interview, however, White worked swiftly to produce a very different sort of document for his editors. He shaped an account that protectively eliminated all of the widow’s most searing images of the assassination and made no reference to the oddly affectless manner of her narration.

Forty-five minutes later, he presented Jackie a first draft of the
Life
magazine piece for her approval. Whereupon another remarkable thing happened. The widow’s pencil left not a single paragraph of his prose untouched. She transposed words and lines. She added phrases and beats. She slashed whole passages. In certain instances, not satisfied to draw a line through the offending material, she made a point of laboriously blacking it out. The typed pages when she returned them to the author were buried beneath an avalanche of her insistent markings. The wan, whispery figure whom White had just seen succumb on at least two occasions to an involuntary rush of agonized flashbacks had moved emphatically to seize control of his copy. With the vigilance she had often displayed when she perceived her husband’s interests to be at stake, she hovered nearby as White dictated his story to New York from a kitchen wall phone at two
A.M.
Though Jackie could not hear what was being said on the other end, she shook her head with displeasure when she gleaned that his editors wanted to tone down the Camelot theme.

Responding to her signal, White insisted that Camelot dominate the published article.

And so in the end it did.

Eight

“I just wanted you to know you were loved by so many and so much. I’m one of ’em,” said Lyndon Johnson, whose Texas twang oscillated between the fatherly and the flirtatious, sometimes suggesting both attitudes at once, as he talked to Jackie on the telephone.

It was Monday, December 2, and she and the children had returned from Cape Cod the night before in anticipation of moving out of the White House family quarters at the end of the week so that Lyndon and Lady Bird could move in. She had initially hoped to be ready to go on Tuesday, but the move had had to be put off until Friday. She was to move temporarily to a borrowed house on N Street in Georgetown, three blocks from the house where the John F. Kennedys had lived at the time he was elected president. Packing had begun in Jackie’s absence, but in the course of the next few days she planned to pick through her husband’s wardrobe herself in order to determine which items to keep and which to disperse. Helpers laid out the president’s clothes on sofas and racks for her to inspect. Seeming to connect the irrational death of her young husband and the loss of the two babies, Arabella and Patrick, she also planned to immediately reinter the latter beside their father’s grave. As far as she was concerned, there was not a moment to be lost. The secret burial was set to take place that week under the auspices of Bishop Philip Hannan, who, at Jackie’s request, had given the eulogy for President Kennedy at St. Matthew’s. It remained only for Teddy Kennedy, youngest of the Kennedy brothers, to fly in the remains of both children on the family jet.

In the meantime, an affectionate letter from LBJ had been waiting for Jackie when she came in on Sunday, but, as she told him now on the phone in a hushed, impish voice, she assumed he would be so busy that she “didn’t dare bother” him with a written reply.

“You got some things to learn,” said Johnson, slathering on the down-home schmaltz, “and one of ’em is: You don’t bother me, you give me strength.” As far as the notion of a written response was concerned, LBJ had a better idea: “Don’t send me anything! You just come over and put your arm around me. That’s all you do. When you haven’t got anythin’ else to do, let’s take a walk. Let’s walk around the backyard. And let me tell you how much you mean to all of us and how we can carry on if you give us a little strength.”

Johnson, who was speaking to her from the Oval Office, went on to talk of an earlier time in his political life when everyone but his mother, his wife, and his sisters seemed to have given up on him. “You females got a lotta courage that we men don’t have. So we have to rely on you and depend on you. And you’ve got somethin’ to do. You’ve got a president relyin’ on you. And this is not the first one you’ve had. There’re not many women, you know, runnin’ around with a good many presidents!” This last remark prompted an explosion of girlish gaiety from Jackie: “She ran around with two presidents, that’s what they’ll say about me!”

To judge by her reaction to Johnson in this and certain other recorded conversations at the time, it is hard to imagine that she did not derive some grain of genuine comfort from their talks. Still, was LBJ really just being kind to the young widow, whose voice cracked piteously at one point in the December 2 exchange when she said that she now had more letters in his hand than she had in Jack’s? Or was he simply jockeying to get her on his side in the toxic struggle that had erupted when Bobby Kennedy brushed past him on Air Force One on his way to collect Jackie? In the ten days since Dallas, tremendous accretions of ill will had rapidly built up on both sides of the eternal LBJ–RFK conflict.

Bobby Kennedy was convinced that Johnson had shown the most appalling disrespect for Jackie in Dallas, appropriating her bedroom on Air Force One, calling her “honey” when he offered his condolences, unconscionably postponing the departure of the presidential jet, contriving to have her photographed beside him as he took the oath. The political iconography of the latter images was especially distressing to RFK, who believed them to be grossly exploitative of his sister-in-law at a moment when he had not been there to protect her. It is a fact that, thereafter, Johnson surreptitiously taped his calls with her. And while it is true that he recorded calls with other people as well, in Jackie’s case he went considerably further: In the course of the Christmas holiday of 1963, when she and the children traveled to Palm Beach, Johnson sought to demonstrate the intimacy of his relationship with the martyred president’s widow by allowing four reporters to secretly listen in on a call he placed to her from the Cabinet Room. In private, he certainly was blunt about how helpful she could be to him. A month after the assassination, he mentioned the idea to Pierre Salinger, the press secretary whom he had inherited from his predecessor, of appointing Jackie ambassador to Mexico. “God almighty!” the president went on. “It’d electrify the western hemisphere.… She’d just walk out on that balcony and look down on ’em, and they’d just pee all over themselves every day.” When Salinger suggested that he needed time to consider the proposal, Johnson returned defensively: “You think they’d think we were trying to use her or something?” Salinger confessed that that indeed was his concern.