Just Jackie by Edward Klein (web based ebook reader txt) 📗

Erikson then excused himself, and led John into his private study and closed the door. The room had an analyst’s couch with a throw, and was filled with books and paintings by friends, including a couple of seascapes by a Cape Cod artist named Gyorgy Kepecs. Erikson had also brought back art from his trips to India. He had won a Pulitzer Prize for his biography Gandhi’s Truth, and he believed in the concept of nonviolence—another reason he was deeply affected by John Kennedy’s assassination.

There was a pile of toys on the floor—blocks, bears, marbles, cars, a broken bowl, a pinwheel, clay, paint, and small dolls made to look like male and female adults and children. Erikson got down on the floor and asked John to build a house. For several minutes, the white-haired therapist remained silent, allowing John to concentrate on his play undisturbed.

For all Erikson knew, John’s participation in the events following his father’s assassination had not been as traumatic for the little boy as most adults might have imagined. In a certain sense, the funeral, with its drums and flags and Scottish pipers, could have been exciting and fun for him. The whole experience might have given John the chance to perform on a large public stage. And besides, with his father’s disappearance, John no longer had to compete with another male for his mother’s attention.

“What kind of house is that?” Erikson asked John. “And why is that doll outside the house?”

“Because the doll went away,” John replied.

“And why did he go away?” Erikson asked.

“Because,” said John, “he doesn’t belong in the house anymore.”

THREE

NO PLACE

TO GO

December 1963

HER OWN PRIVATE GREY GARDENS

A bitter wind was blowing off the Potomac when Jackie’s Air Force C-131 transport touched down at Washington National Airport the next evening. Caroline came down the ramp first, dressed in the same blue overcoat she had worn at her father’s funeral. She hopped into the waiting limousine, and Jackie followed with John; Maude Shaw, the children’s nanny; and one of the family dogs, a blue roan cocker spaniel named Shannon.

The drive to the White House took them within a half mile of Arlington National Cemetery. The children could see the Eternal Flame fluttering on their father’s hillside grave. Maude Shaw said that their father was in heaven looking after Patrick, and the flame seemed to confirm her words as it winked at them in the clear, cold air.

John was sleepy and out of sorts, and Jackie was anxious to see him tucked safely into bed for the night. She herself would sleep hardly at all. Her wounds were too painful. The world might marvel at her strength and indomitable spirit, how she had orchestrated Jack’s funeral and held the nation together for three days of mourning. But as she confided to her sister Lee and to Bobby Kennedy, she felt that her usefulness to herself and others was coming to an end.

She had nothing more to give. Some days, she could not even get out of bed. She cried all day and all night until she was so exhausted that she could not function. She drowned her sorrows in vodka, and was slipping into depression. She feared that she might be turning into an alcoholic. Or was she losing her mind?

Madness ran in the family. Jackie’s aunt Edith Bouvier Beale lived in a ramshackle mansion called Grey Gardens in East Hampton, on the south shore of Long Island, where she wandered like a crazed woman through rooms filled with rotting rubbish and piles of cat and raccoon excrement. Would that be Jackie’s fate? She felt it was possible.

After all, Jackie remarked ruefully, she was already living in her own private Grey Gardens.

“THE MOMENT I WAS ALWAYS SCARED OF”

After the children were asleep, Jackie came down from the Family Quarters, and peeked into the Oval Office. Jack had always wanted a red rug, and while they were in Texas, she had instructed the White House decorators to lay a new scarlet carpet.

The refurbished office now belonged to Lyndon Baines Johnson, who had been urged by Secretary of State Dean Rusk and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara to move in as quickly as possible to minimize the shock of transition. But things had not gone as smoothly as expected. On the day after the assassination, as Johnson approached the Oval Office for the first time as President, he had been surprised to find John Kennedy’s personal secretary Evelyn Lincoln still sitting at her desk in the anteroom.

“Can’t you clear out of here so my girls can come in?” Johnson said.

Mrs. Lincoln reported the rude remark to Robert F. Kennedy, the Attorney General. Bobby Kennedy was so outraged that he virtually ordered Johnson to stay out of the Oval Office until after his brother’s funeral. Not wanting to look like a usurper, Johnson acquiesced, and waited three days before moving in.

During that time, word spread that the new President had been barred from the Oval Office by the Kennedys. It was said that Johnson was being forced to conduct the nation’s business from across the street in the vice president’s office in the old Executive Office Building. Even after he took possession of the Oval Office, Johnson had to return each night to the vice president’s residence to sleep, because Jackie and her children were still occupying the Family Quarters.

“I can’t even live in my own house,” Johnson complained to a companion one day while he was doing laps in the White House swimming pool.

Pressure mounted on Johnson to get Jackie and the rest of the Kennedys out of the White House.

“You’re the President,” Harry Truman scolded Johnson. “Clear this bunch out, and move your people in.”

Jackie had promised Lady Bird Johnson that she would move within a week after her return from Hyannis Port. Her shock and sorrow were etched in every word of the memo she sent to the