Kati Marton (23 page)

When he asked her to travel with him to Texas on his first campaign trip for the upcoming presidential race, she agreed. Many were astonished that she would go to a place where Adlai Stevenson had been pelted with eggs and spat upon weeks earlier. “You know how I hate that sort of thing,” she told friends, “but if he wants me there, that’s what matters.” And so she went to Dallas.

UNTIL NOVEMBER 22, 1963
, Americans of a certain age found common ground by recalling where they were when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor or when they heard FDR was dead. Now those dates were joined by a third. And Jacqueline Kennedy’s performance in the days that followed her husband’s assassination is deeply etched in America’s national memory.

November 25, 1963. Jackie and her children wait for President Kennedy’s coffin to be placed on the caisson for the start of the procession to the Capitol.

The country learned as much about her during the days after Dallas as in the three and a half years she was first lady. She did not fall apart after the unimaginable horror of witnessing her husband’s assassination. She took charge of his funeral and of his legacy. She lavished as much care, showed as much respect for history in orchestrating the world’s mourning of him, as she had on any state dinner. Again she demonstrated her grasp of the power of symbols. The riderless horse, the great men walking silently behind his coffin, her little boy’s soldierly salute to
his father, her own ravaged, composed face—she knew the world would not soon forget these images.

Then she sat down and wrote her final letter from the White House. It was not to a friend or family. She was thinking of history. His legacy was now hers. She wrote Nikita Khrushchev.

One week later, Jackie summoned Theodore White to Hyannis Port, where she had gone to spend Thanksgiving. On a stormy night Jackie poured out her memory of Dallas to the stunned reporter, who scribbled down notes that would be unavailable to the public for thirty-one years. Patrick’s death foreshadowed her husband’s, she told him. Their new closeness made Jack’s death two months later even more heartbreaking for her. She opened up to this virtual stranger in part for personal
release, but with another purpose as well. She wanted to set down her version of her husband’s presidency before the historians had a chance. “Only bitter old men write history,” she told White. “Jack’s life had more to do with myth, magic, legend, saga and story than with political theory or political science.”

She was ready with the epitaph to the Kennedy years: Camelot. The lines her husband loved from the Lerner and Loewe Broadway musical
Camelot
were the ones that best expressed the way she wanted him to be remembered: “Don’t let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot.” There will be other great presidents, she told the reporter, but there will never be another Camelot. It was the beginning of the Kennedy myth, and the famed reporter was her willing tool in its creation. “She put it so passionately that, seen in a certain light, it almost made sense,” White said later.

The conceit was too romantic to have suited John Kennedy’s dry realism, and based on too much fantasy to endure. But Jackie was ruthless in her battle to control the history of the Kennedy White House. She broke with old friends who did not entirely share her misty vision of Camelot. She did not approve of Ben Bradlee’s affectionate but familiar account of his times with Jack,
Conversations with Kennedy,
and never spoke to him after its publication in 1975. The man she herself enlisted to write a definitive account of the assassination, the historian William Manchester, would receive even harsher treatment years later. She had poured her heart out to Manchester, who based his
Death of a President
in part on her account. Later, she found the book far too personal and embarrassing and demanded that Harper & Row, Manchester’s publisher, and
Look
magazine, which was to run an exerpt from the book, make hundreds of changes. She also tried to block any of the profits from reaching the author. She failed, but Manchester was hospitalized with a nervous breakdown from the ordeal.

IRONICALLY, IT WAS JACKIE HERSELF
who dealt her carefully crafted image of Camelot its body blow. When she married Aristotle Onassis in 1968 she slipped off the pedestal she had worked so hard to erect—perhaps,
at a subconscious level, intentionally. Money, power and the security they purchase seemed her prime motives in choosing this hard, coarse man.

Most Americans no longer think of the Kennedy presidency as a thousand days of magic. The illusion has been shattered by revelations of unheroic conduct, and by public cynicism. Still, the Kennedy White House remains a metaphor for cool elegance and a combative self-assurance never again duplicated. Public fascination with Jack and Jackie goes on unabated. But now they are history. They were exquisitely of their moment, a time when Americans were unabashed and unquestioning of their preeminent position in the world. A respectful media and a still largely innocent public enabled them to project their chosen view of themselves on the world. It was a time before the lines between public and private conduct were blurred, many years before those lines were erased. In our memories the Kennedys are always young and beautiful, and so are we.

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LIKE JACQUELINE BOUVIER KENNEDY, LADY BIRD JOHNSON PAID A HIGH PRICE
for forging one of the nation’s legendary political partnerships. But while many people considered Lady Bird to be both long-suffering and blindly loyal, she never lost her own compass, nor was she consumed by her husband. Beneath her endlessly accommodating manner, she retained a core that was beyond even his reach. That fundamental independence enabled her not only to survive him but to retain his respect. While Lyndon Johnson’s legacy is still debated, Lady Bird’s is assured. Since his insecurities were as gargantuan as his ambitions, during six turbulent
years in the White House, Lady Bird’s steady presence enabled him to perform to his fullest capacity.

Perhaps nothing so clearly demonstrates both Lady Bird’s power and its cost than a conversation between the Johnsons on October 14, 1964, almost a year into the Johnson presidency. On that day, the first lady learned that Walter Jenkins, one of LBJ’s closest and most hardworking aides for twenty-five years, had been arrested on a homosexual morals charge in a YMCA men’s room a few blocks from the White House. With the presidential election just weeks away, LBJ wanted Jenkins fired immediately. Lady Bird decided that even on the eve of the election, consideration for Jenkins was essential. She called the president in New York. A remarkable tape recording of their conversation surfaced a few years ago in the LBJ Library. “I think a gesture of support on our part is necessary,” she told her husband, shrewdly adding, “to hold our own forces together.” She proposed offering Jenkins a job at the Johnson-owned television station. But Johnson wanted only to distance himself from trouble. “Talk to Abe [Fortas] and Clark [Clifford],” her husband instructed her, trying to end the conversation quickly.