Kati Marton (19 page)

“We’re a couple of icebergs,” Jackie famously said of herself and
her husband, “with most of who we are submerged beneath the surface.” Both of them liked it that way. Jack’s friend Ben Bradlee once said that Jack and Jackie fell in love with each other’s images—he with her camellia-like beauty, her worldly air and the aristocratic pedigree that Boston’s Old Guard still withheld from the Irish Kennedys. Perhaps she was drawn to the whiff of danger about him (so like her father’s), his fortune and his unlimited prospects. They both got more and less than they bargained for.

His heart was rarely engaged. The love stayed inside the family. Jack’s adored sister Kathleen wrote her brother, “I really can’t understand why I like Englishmen so much, as they treat one in quite an offhand manner and aren’t really as nice to their women as Americans, but I suppose it’s just that sort of treatment that women really like. That’s your technique, isn’t it?” she teased. Kennedy cast women in specific roles: sex partners, objects of beauty and charm, and mothers. At age thirty-six he knew he had to marry; political tradition required it of him. He thought he chose a woman who shared his view that men had all the power, and that philandering was encoded in their genes. He would discover only later that he had also married a woman who, in her way, was as tough and combative and as calculating as he himself.

Psychiatrists sometimes contend that in an attempt to “make right” our past, we marry the parent we had most trouble with. Jackie’s father, “Black Jack” Bouvier, was a handsome scoundrel who shared tales of his bad behavior with his daughter, including stories of his philandering. She listened carefully to his admonishment never to reveal too much of herself. Preserve the mystery, he instructed her. Much as Eleanor Roosevelt felt closer to her alcoholic father than to her cold, beautiful, suffering mother, Jackie, too, was obsessed by her weak father. His erratic, unpredictable behavior—by turns too present, too demanding or altogether absent—left Jackie scarred and emotionally detached. Unlike Eleanor, whose absent father made her yearn for a real emotional connection, Jackie decided that sensitive, caring men were not for her.

Also in contrast to Eleanor, Jackie did not leave behind a great paper trail documenting her emotional life. She wrote no memoirs, and what there is of her correspondence reveals her intelligence and sophistication,
not her heart. Like so many children of divorce, she learned to mask her feelings as she navigated between two bitter, disappointed parents. If sexual adventures were Jack’s chosen form of escape, books, particularly on art and history, were Jackie’s. Like her husband, she read voraciously, assimilating the lessons of self-possessed actors on the world stage.

“I took the choicest bachelor in the Senate,” she wrote with pride. In an unusual reference to her ambivalence about marrying him, Jackie analyzed herself in the only way she could: in the third person. “She knew instantly that he would have a profound, perhaps disturbing influence on her life. In a flash of inner perception, she realized that here was a man who did not want to marry. She was frightened. Jacqueline in a revealing moment envisaged heartbreak, but just as swiftly determined that heartbreak would be worth the pain.” She was prepared to pay a heavy price for the life he could provide. “Look,” she confided to a friend, “it’s a trade-off. There are positives and negatives to every situation in life. You endure the bad things, but you enjoy the good. And what incredible opportunities—the historic figures you meet and come to know, the witness to history you become, the places you would never have been able to see that now you can. One could never have such a life if one wasn’t married to someone like that.” If she had the normal illusions about changing her husband once they were married, Jack soon dispelled them. In a revealing comment regarding how trapped the thirty-six-year-old Jack was by his history, she said of him, “He found his true love too late in life.”

One year into their marriage, spinal fusion surgery resulted in an infection that almost killed him. She was heroic by his bedside, tireless and imaginative at finding ways to divert him. But when he recovered, she was marginalized. When a reporter doing a magazine profile of Senator Kennedy asked to talk to his wife, he retorted, “What do you want to talk to my wife about? She’s out of it. You’re doing a piece on me.” When it came to Jackie’s needs, her husband could be breathtakingly callous. In 1956, her first child had been stillborn while Jack was cruising in the Mediterranean with his brother Ted and Senator George Smathers. It was Jack’s brother Bobby, alerted by Rose Kennedy in the middle
of the night, who rushed to Jackie’s bedside to comfort her and to take care of the child’s burial.

Emotionally Jack and Jackie were out of sync. “It was difficult,” her husband later understated, “I was thirty-six, she was twenty-four. We didn’t fully understand each other.” Jack did not share Jackie’s spiritual longings, which led her to seek out Benedictine priests for a time and reach into poetry and philosophy, back to the ancient Greeks. Jack’s reckless womanizing continued, seemingly unabated. In 1958, Jack’s father, Joseph Kennedy, summoned elder statesman Clark Clifford and asked him to help his son Jack out of a potentially career-derailing bind. Jack was being blackmailed for his extramarital relationship with Pam Turnure, a beautiful young Senate staffer who bore a striking resemblance to his wife. Clifford settled the matter with discretion and dispatch. But Jack’s relationship with Turnure continued for several more years—along with others.

As a senator, Jack was away most weekends. Even when Jackie was with him, they seemed apart. Sometimes, while he gave his stump speeches, she stayed in the car or sat unnoticed in the shadows of a cavernous hall. But even then her wit and her exceptional literary bent occasionally pierced the political rituals. Her letters sparkled with her intelligence and flattery. “I could never describe to you how touched and appreciative Jack was at the message you sent him,” she wrote Vice President Richard Nixon on December 5, 1954, during Jack’s convalescence. “If you could only know the load you took off his mind. He has been feeling so much better since then—and I can never thank you enough for being so kind and generous and thoughtful …. I don’t think there is anyone in the world he thinks more highly of than he does you.” Sitting next to Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr at a fund-raiser, she dazzled him with her command of the intersection of sociology and theology. “She’s read every book I ever wrote,” the astonished Niebuhr later remarked, and subsequently decided to support Kennedy to become the country’s first Catholic president.

The most astonishing fact about Jackie was her youth. She was thirty-one years old when she became first lady. But she had a remarkable grasp of the historical role she inhabited. She instinctively understood what the times called for, and that this was her moment. From her
hospital bed, convalescing after her son, John’s, birth during Thanksgiving 1960, she penned a nine-page letter to designer Oleg Cassini, prescribing what she wanted to wear to the inaugural ball: clothes she would wear “if Jack were president of France—très Princesse de Rethy—mais jeune … pure and regal.” She perceived that the White House was the greatest stage in the world and she became fearless about using it. The president instructed his chauffeur on the way to the inaugural ball to turn on the light, so people could see Jackie.

From the start, this was the image the American people wanted. But even during that first glittering night, Jack left his wife, sneaking out of the presidential box to join Frank Sinatra at another, less formal gathering. As always, there was a woman in the picture: this time starlet Angie Dickinson. The president rejoined his wife after a while, a folded copy of the
Washington Post
tucked under his arm. Did he really think his wife believed he had slipped out to pick up an early edition of the paper? Historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., said Jackie was not a woman to miss a single detail.

But they both seemed to keep his compulsive need for other women sealed off from their marriage, as if his philandering had nothing to do with them, as if it were a medical condition that couldn’t be helped. In the middle of a working lunch on nuclear arms, Kennedy startled British prime minister Harold Macmillan by asking, “I wonder how it is with you, Harold? If I don’t have a woman for three days, I get a terrible headache ….”

Jackie never expressed concern about her husband’s philandering to outsiders. Rex Scouten could not recall any time Jackie was not composed. “I could not guess how she felt but she certainly never let on that it bothered her.” To emphasize what different times the Kennedys lived in, Scouten recalled an incident in the White House press room where two reporters nearly came to blows. One of the two had been talking about Kennedy’s womanizing, and the other turned on him, enraged. “How can you say things like that about the
President?”

IN THE WHITE HOUSE,
Jack needed Jackie as much as she needed him. As first lady, she had an independent role for the first time in their marriage.
If politics and his womanizing had pulled them apart, the presidency brought the Kennedys closer. Their White House years would reveal unexpected qualities in each; they were at their best then. “The one thing that happens to the President,” Jackie noted later, “is that his ties with the outside world are cut. And the people you really have are each other …. I should think that if people weren’t happily married, the White House would really finish it.”

Jackie may not have been the most energetic political wife on the campaign trail—she was too aloof, too reserved—but “sharing” the presidency provided the perfect showcase for her particular talents. Jack’s victory was earned with the thinnest possible margin. He was not going to unite the Congress and the country behind his leadership through domestic programs. “Nobody gives a shit about the minimum wage,” he told one of his aides, Ted Sorensen. Kennedy’s mark would be made in foreign affairs. In his ringing inaugural address he articulated his view of the imperial presidency. The world he depicted was a dangerous place—Communism was gaining ground.

The Kennedys’ one thousand days were a period of dizzying contrasts, the majestic side by side with the inglorious. A president who seemed the image of youth and health was often in pain and on crutches. A chain-smoking, snobbish first lady made the White House a showcase for American civilization. Some of the behavior defies explanation. At her husband’s insistence Jackie hired Pam Turnure to be her press secretary. “I think you are rather like me,” Jackie wrote Turnure, outlining her responsibilities, “and so will answer questions the way I would—which is such a great relief—I feel so strongly that publicity has gotten out of hand and you must really protect the privacy of me and my children—but not offend them all—you can invent some lady-like little title for yourself …. I hope you will be fairly anonymous—for nothing you say is taken as Pam Turnure saying it—You are speaking for me …. Also, in your own private life—when you go out in NY, etc., you just mustn’t answer their questions about what it is like working for us—just smile and look evasive.” Could Jackie have been oblivious to the relationship? “Jackie had a low sexual charge,” Schlesinger noted years later. “And she was not unused to this sort of behavior. After all, her father had behaved
in much the same way. I suppose she just averted her gaze. And rolled with the punches.”

The punches never stopped. A Yale graduate student named Raymond Lamontagne attended a party at Kennedy brother-in-law Sargent Shriver’s house. No sooner had the young man planted himself next to a beautiful blonde sitting alone on a sofa than a presidential aide signaled her that someone wished to see her in a back room. Lamontagne did not see the blonde again. Moving over to sit beside another elegant young woman, a second aide whispered a warning in the luckless man’s ear, “She’s executive material.” The second woman was Pamela Turnure. The man in the “back room” turned out to be the president.

While it may be wrong to impose contemporary standards on the Kennedys’ marriage, Jack’s treatment of women often seems extraordinarily unsympathetic. “I don’t think he understood women,” Ben Bradlee maintained. “I don’t think he saw equality of the sexes as a viable option. He didn’t think about it. I suppose that’s the ultimate statement. I don’t think he could talk to women if he weren’t thinking about ‘it.’ We didn’t talk about our wives then. Jackie didn’t give him a lot of shit about issues that a modern wife would …. Jack didn’t like to talk about relationships, none of us did. It wasn’t a topic until after the seventies.” Besides, Bradlee noted, echoing Schlesinger, “I’m not convinced that Jackie was deeply interested in sex. She said one night to Jack, ‘Ben doesn’t think I’m sexy.’ You know, she was right. I didn’t. Very chic. But not sexy. I think I was reflecting her own lack of interest in sex.”

Schlesinger also agreed with Bradlee’s characterization of Jack’s view of women. “He was raised in the Irish tradition where women had a strictly defined domestic role …. Jack and Jackie were both ultimately reserved. They kept their center shrouded.” The women’s movement was a decade away and Jackie had little interest in it at this stage. She did not identify with “career women.” “I have the same feelings about career women that you do,” she told journalist William Lawrence. “You told Jack you might sleep with those Washington newspaperwomen, but you’d be damned if you’d have lunch with them.”