Jackie After O (6 page)

“That's going to be my life—Sybil Husted,” Jackie said.

Auchincloss felt a conviction come over him—the realization that in fact her life would be anything but.
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One attendee described their engagement party at Hammersmith as “chilly”—noticeably absent of affection
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—and at the end of a visit to Merrywood in mid-March, she drove Husted to the airport and slipped the ring into his pocket.
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“She didn't say much and neither did I,” Husted recalled. “There wasn't much you could say.”
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What she didn't tell Husted, and what she didn't tell her boss, and what she had even denied to herself, was that she was falling hard for another guy. He was much older, thirty-four. His name was Jack Kennedy, a congressman from Massachusetts. She had met him at a dinner party in Georgetown the year before, in 1950, at the home of Charles Bartlett, Washington correspondent for the
Chattanooga Times
. After dinner, Kennedy followed Jackie and her host out to the car and “muttered shyly,” according to Bartlett: “Shall we go someplace and have a drink?” But Jackie couldn't join him because as she approached her Mustang, there was already another young man—a “friend”—waiting for her in the backseat; he had climbed in unexpectedly after seeing her car. Jack saw him and backed off.
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But shortly after she was engaged to Husted, whom Bartlett said “didn't seem worthy of her hand,” Bartlett's wife, Martha, was hosting a party that Husted could not attend and told Jackie to invite someone else: Jack.
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Who could blame her for falling for the young senator-elect? Tall, thin, with a mop of reddish-brown hair and blue eyes, he was a Harvard graduate and war hero. He was intellectually curious, outgoing, and exuded animal magnetism, always seeming to draw women to him. He was an eligible bachelor and had successfully crisscrossed Massachusetts to unseat the entrenched Senator Henry Cabot Lodge.

Jackie's romantic angst was evident in her journalism, where she processed her deepest fears, insecurities, and anxieties about the cultural expectation that a woman of her age (just twenty-two) and education should already be married. And perhaps because of her own parents' divorce, she also seemed worried about losing herself to a man—or choosing the wrong one.

“What do you think women desire most?” she probed in one of her columns.

“A Boston University professor said women should marry because they're too lazy to go to work,” began another column.

Jackie also wrote about politics. After the 1952 Republican convention, she went to Tilden Street in DC and asked residents—including family members—what they thought of Senator Nixon, who lived there.

“He's always away,” said six-year-old Tricia Nixon. “If he's famous why can't he stay home? See this picture? That's a coming home present I made for Daddy. Julie did one, too, but she can't color as well as me. All my class was voting for Eisenhower, but I told them I was just going to vote for Daddy.”
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A year into the job, she covered President Eisenhower's inaugural parade, writing about it but also drawing charming pen-and-ink cartoons of the crowds. At the end of the article, Jackie described Vice President Nixon as “wilting considerably more than Eisenhower”
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after the walk, a prescient comment seven years before Nixon would break into a sweat during a famous presidential debate with JFK.

A few months after the inaugural column, Waldrop told her to interview people who were recently elected, including Jack Kennedy, who had beaten Lodge for the Senate. Waldrop knew and liked Kennedy and had heard that Jack and Jackie had been seeing each other. Without telling Jackie that, he lectured her about him, warning that Kennedy “doesn't want to get married.”
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“This bird [Kennedy] is older than you and far more experienced,” he said. “Mind your step.”

“Yes, sir,” she said, rolling her eyes.
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When she told Kennedy that she needed to interview him, he told her to question him after all the others, giving him the advantage of the last word.

The column, which appeared on April 21, 1953, asked the young, boyish-looking Senate pages what they thought of the senators and then asked the senators—Kennedy and Richard Nixon, who had just moved from the Senate to vice president—about the pages. The interviewees' mug shots faced each other on opposite columns, their words completing the contrast between the young and more personable Kennedy and the older, stiff, and long-winded Nixon. The whole column was a bizarre prelude: here was JFK's future wife interviewing Nixon, his opponent in the 1960 presidential campaign.

“I would predict that some future statesman will come from the ranks of the page corps,” Nixon told her. “During my time as a senator I noticed that they were very quick boys, most of whom have a very definite interest in politics and feel that they could not get a better political grooming than by witnessing the Senate in session day after day as they do.”

Kennedy was more playful in his answer for the Inquiring Camera Girl. “I've often thought that the country might be better off if we Senators and pages traded jobs. If such legislation is ever enacted, I'll be glad to hand over the reins to Jerry Hoobler,” he said referring to his seventeen-year-old page. “In the meantime, I think he might be just the fellow to help me straighten out my relationship with the corps. I have often mistaken Jerry for a Senator because he looks so old.”

Hoobler said, “Senator Kennedy always brings his lunch in a brown paper bag. I guess he eats it in his office. I see him with it every morning when I'm on the elevator. He's always being mistaken for a tourist by the cops because he looks so young. The other day he wanted to use the special phones and they told him, ‘Sorry, mister, these are reserved for senators.'”

Through her columns, Jackie also asked more questions about men, women, and marriage.

Jackie knew she was smart, perhaps even smarter than some of the men she was interviewing. And she had a job. But by midcentury standards, she was thinking that both of these facts were not attributes; they were barriers to marriage. Having already missed the senior-year engagement deadline—the mantra was “a ring by spring”—Jackie was trying not to be unnerved by the passage of time as she attended cocktail parties of the powerful and famous around Washington. In April 1953, Lee had married Michael Canfield, adopted son of Cass Canfield, who was publisher of Harper & Row.

Her mother sensed Jackie's anxiety and urged her to take a trip to England with a family friend. Jackie was reluctant, probably because she did not want to leave Jack, but her mother insisted. Jackie asked Epstein—a newspaper editor who was as gruff as they got—for a two-week vacation in June. He did not mask his annoyance.

“You haven't been on the job long enough to rate a vacation,” he snapped.

“But I've been invited to the coronation of the queen,” she said, letting her stunning revelation seep in.

Epstein, who had been trying unsuccessfully to get someone into the event, shouted, “Go! But you have to write us letters you airmail back. And include a sketch every day.”
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She left, quietly longing for a ring from the man she truly loved but excited by the adventure of once again crossing the Atlantic, a trip she called “the Mayflower in reverse” in her report.
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The Duke and Duchess of Windsor were on the ship—as were their dogs, valet, and maid. “Sometimes the Duke of Windsor takes a turn around the deck in sports jacket and gray flannel trousers,” she wrote. “The Windsors are landing at La Havre. They are not going to the coronation. Passengers stare at the Duke, aware that if he had not abdicated, they would not be sailing to the coronation of his niece.” Waldrop published her words and sketches on the front page.

Back home, Janet marveled at her daughter's clever drawings and wondered if Jack had seen them. She figured he surely had, since he had been increasingly appreciative of Jackie's talents.
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Despite the deadlines and the news in London, Jackie managed to spend time there buying books. She bought so many that she needed a separate suitcase whose weight cost her $100 extra in baggage to ship home. She didn't mind paying the freight. They were a gift to JFK, mostly about history and legislation.
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When she landed, he picked her up and they headed to the Cape, where Kennedy presented her with a large emerald-and-diamond engagement ring, personally delivered by two men from Van Cleef and Arpels.

And then she did what so many other women at that time in history did when a man asked for her hand. She quit her job. She was twenty-three.
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“Who's the lucky guy?” Waldrop asked. When she told him, Waldrop said, “Isn't he a little too elderly for you?” Kennedy was thirty-six. Kidding aside, everyone knew the wedding would be an auspicious event. Waldrop ran the engagement announcement on the front page.

On September 11, 1953, the night before their epic wedding with twelve hundred guests at Hammersmith Farm, JFK, then a freshman senator, toasted his bride by saying he was motivated to marry her because she was so good as the Inquiring Camera Girl that he needed to remove her from the press corps to save his political future.

She needled him back, holding up a postcard from Bermuda he had sent to her—the only written communication she had received from him while they were dating.

“Wish you were here,” he scrawled. “Jack.”
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The winter after they were married, the Kennedys were settling into a home on Dent Place in Washington. Jackie put her thoughts and drawings on paper for her younger sister. It was called
A Book for Janet: In Case You Are Ever Thinking of Getting Married This Is a Story to Tell You What It's Like
.

One of the pictures she drew was of her waving good-bye to Jack as he left the house in the morning. Another was of the dome of the Capitol all lit up at night, and there was a rhyme underneath it about when you saw the light burning there late at night and Jack wasn't home yet, you knew that the country was safe.
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Although she was happy, the early years of their marriage were consumed by Kennedy's grave back problems. Born with one leg shorter than the other, he was also gimpy from aggressive tackling while playing football for Harvard. And then, during World War II, Kennedy had been a lieutenant in the US Navy, at the wheel of a small patrol boat in the Solomon Islands, when a Japanese destroyer sliced through the black of night into his boat, shearing off the starboard side and igniting a fire. Kennedy was slammed into the deck, rupturing a disc in his spinal column. He and five other shipmates hung on to the hull. Kennedy rescued three of the men, floating about a hundred yards away, while others rescued two more mates clustered equally as far in the opposite direction. Still stranded the next day, Kennedy, doing the breaststroke, towed on his back the badly burned and most injured sailor for four hours through three miles of water toward an island so small it had only six coconut trees. The ordeal did not end there. Kennedy swam even more through harsh currents and coral reefs, sometimes with the same injured sailor, looking to be rescued. Finally, days later, they were found by some natives in a canoe.
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The saga made him a hero and legend, but the damage to his back was done. He was invalided out of the navy and worked as a war correspondent briefly before having the disc removed in 1944.

A decade later, in October 1954, he couldn't even bend over to pick up a piece of paper, didn't want to sit in the car for long stretches, and was hobbling on crutches. Doctors told him he needed a lumbar fusion to save him from life in a wheelchair, and he went under the knife again, to insert a metal plate into his spine. Kennedy also had Addison's disease, which lowered his immunity to infection, and he slipped into a coma after the surgery. A priest delivered last rites. He recovered enough to fly—lying on a stretcher—to Palm Beach to be with his family over Christmas, with Jackie doting on him, even dressing his incision as he lay on his belly for hours, cranky and bored. Jackie mopped his brow, fed him, and helped him out of bed, read aloud to him and recited poems—anything to distract him from the agony. Kennedy had his own favorite poems to reflect on, especially Alan Seeger's “I Have a Rendezvous with Death.”
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But Kennedy's back was not healing, and he needed yet another surgery in February to remove the plate and perform a bone graft. He returned to Palm Beach again to recuperate in a hospital bed that had been set up in a two-room first-floor suite of his father's Spanish-style mansion on the ocean. The living room of the suite had been converted into a study filled with books and cabinets.