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

for fashion guidance to Vogue’s flamboyant editor Diana Vreeland, who had put her together with Cassini in the first place. But as always, Jackie was involved in every detail of her own attire, down to the size of her hats.

“The smaller the better,” she told Vreeland, “as I really do have an enormous head, and anything too extreme always looks ridiculous on me.”

After two months of bleak seclusion, she was ready for company. She invited Benjamin Bradlee and his wife Tony to spend a weekend with her at Wexford, her 166-acre property on Rattlesnake Mountain in Atoka, Virginia, adjoining the Oak Spring estate of Paul and Bunny Mellon.

A secret passageway had been built for the President in Atoka, leading from the master bedroom to a bomb shelter beneath the stables. But Jack and Jackie had stayed at Wexford only two weekends before his death.

Bradlee recalled that he, his wife, and Jackie all tried—with no success—to talk about something other than Jack Kennedy.

“Too soon and too emotional for healing, we proved only that the three of us had very little in common without the essential fourth,” Bradlee wrote in his memoirs. “Only four weeks after the assassination, after the last of these weekends, we received this sad note from the President’s widow.”

Dear Tony and Ben:

Something that you said in the country stunned me so—that you hoped I would marry again.

You were so close to us so many times. There is one thing that you must know. I consider that my life is over and that I will spend the rest of it waiting for it really to be over.

With my love,

Jackie

There were other friends in Jackie’s life. During the Kennedy Administration, an informal group consisting of the President, his cabinet officers, and some close advisers had met once a month for lively policy debates at Hickory Hill, Bobby Kennedy’s estate in McLean, Virginia. Now, members of the so-called Hickory Hill Seminar—Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr., Charles Bartlett, McGeorge Bundy—made it a point to stop by for late afternoon tea at Jackie’s new house to buoy up her spirits.

One day, Robert McNamara came calling. As he stepped from his chauffeured car, the bespectacled Secretary of Defense was greeted by an astonishing sight: a vast throng of shivering people had gathered in the snow in front of Jackie’s house. They filled both sidewalks and spilled onto the street for as far as the eye could see. Some of them carried binoculars. Others had brought boxes and ladders to stand on. They were silent and sad-faced, watching reverently. A couple of photographers, perched on tree limbs, snapped McNamara’s picture as he crossed the street carrying a large package in brown-paper wrapping.

He was almost run down by one of the smoke-belching diesel buses that plied N Street day and night with tourists eager for a glimpse of the former First Lady and her children. The front door was raised high off the street by several flights of stairs, and McNamara had to push his way past a group of tourists who were taking each other’s pictures on Jackie’s front stoop. He rang the doorbell, and was ushered inside by Secret Service agent Clint Hill.

“I’m a freak now,” Jackie told McNamara as she escorted him into the living room. “I’ll always be a freak. I can’t take it anymore. They’re like locusts, they’re everywhere. Women are always breaking through the police lines trying to grab and hug and kiss the children as they go in and out. I can’t even change my clothes in private because they can look into my bedroom window.”

Jackie had not counted on becoming a national institution as a result of her televised performance after Dallas. She walked over to the living-room windows and drew the curtains, then turned back to McNamara. Her eyes were rimmed in red. Her uncombed hair looked dry and brittle.

McNamara felt pity for her. She had been elevated to the position of a mythical folk heroine, and yet she was a virtual prisoner in her own home. In the first few weeks after the assassination, she was inundated by several hundred thousand letters of condolence. Congress voted to give her office space for one year, and secretarial expenses of $50,000 to handle the bales of letters that arrived daily. She was assigned ten Secret Service agents—the first time the widow of a president had been given round-the-clock protection.

Jackie was the widow of the wealthiest man ever to occupy the White House, and people assumed that she was rich. But in fact she had been left with relatively little money. In his will, President Kennedy had given her a lump-sum payment of $70,000 in cash, plus all of his personal effects—furniture, silverware, dishes, china, glass ware, and linens. In addition, there was the interest income from two trusts, valued at $10 million, which he had established for his wife and children. Jackie’s annual income came to less than $200,000—a handsome sum by most people’s standards, but an inadequate amount for a woman who was now expected to play the role of Her American Majesty.

Like most of the men who came to visit Jackie, McNamara was a little bit in love with her. Eager to please, he wasted no time in unwrapping his present. As the brown paper fell to the floor, an unfinished oil portrait of John Kennedy was revealed. The painter had completed the President’s face and shoulders, but had left a large part of the canvas blank.

“This artist came to me, and said that he had been working on this portrait from life,” McNamara told her. “He had a few more sittings to go when the President died. He said he didn’t intend to complete it, and that he knew of my love for the President, and thought I’d find the painting appealing, and that I could buy it. So I did. If you want it, Jackie, it’s yours.”

Jackie was extremely fond of McNamara. He had played a key role in picking out the