By Maureen Callahan For Daily Mail. Web
The day was warm and crazy, the sun so powerful. Jackie Kennedy went to put on her glasses, but the senator said: ‘ No, please do n’t — they actually came to notice you.’
Driving along the roads of Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas, she may hear the cries of her father’s followers over the political parade. A tunnel was constructed ahead of the temperature and the noise.
Finally John F Kennedy, the youngest leader in US background, turned to her in their seat, his appearance puzzled. A portion of his head, light, no green, flew off his hand, and he was slumped in her chest, his blood and brains all over her face and legs as he held it out.
Her rose and white mittens soaked in blood all over. It was so heavy, almost bright.
‘ My God, what are they doing?’ Jackie screamed.’ My God, they’ve killed my father! Jack! Jack!’
Eventually, she’d had no recollection of leaping out of her desk and crawling onto the tree. Their dark Caddy was now traveling at speeds of 70 or 80 mph.
If she had n’t been grabbed by Secret Service agent Clint Hill, who saw the terror in her eyes, she would have fallen.
‘ Get us to a medical!’ Hill screamed. The Cadillac was moving so quickly that his glasses escaped his mouth.
Jackie cradled her husband’s mind, feverishly tamping head matter into his skull as if this may save him, and she huddled over him. Jack!’ She yelled out loud to the vehicles blazing all over them and alarms. Jack! Does you hear me? My God— they’ve shot his nose away!’
She never again asked if she’d been hit. She never inquired whether any of the blood was it. She always sprained from the blatant destruction in that rear seat. Jack was the only thing that worried her.
At the hospital, she refused to let anyone near the leader. Jackie slammed down toward the side of the car, pressing her mind firmly into her stomach. If she could n’t save her father’s life, at least she could keep his dignity.
It was Hill who realized: She did n’t want the world to see the president this way.
He removed his coat jacket and placed it over Jack’s brain. Regretfully, Jackie let the Secret Service agents lift her up, but she held Hill’s coat over Jack’s mind as she ran beside his bed, clutching its edge.
Then the screen swayed outward, leaving her on the wrong part of the emergency room. Coming towards her was Dave Powers, one of Jack’s closest assistants, known casually as his ‘ another wife.’ It was Dave who woke the leader in the morning, who tied his tie.
Jackie truly loved Dave, mainly because she had no idea what he actually did: buy and conceal Jack’s many young enthusiasts.
Dave burst into tears as Jackie, waterless- eyed, sat on a foldable chair and smoked, shooing aside the physicians who kept trying to placid her.
All around her, these large American men, officers and doctors, orderlies and interns, were losing their calm.
Amazingly, the president was also taking deep breaths.’ I want to be in that when he dies,’ Jackie said.
A caregiver named Doris stood outside the veil.’ You ca n’t go in,’ she told Jackie.
The previously sultry Jackie, tougher than people knew, shoved her away.
‘ I’m going to get in that room’, she said. Jackie had another voice, no the bright, high- pitched one she used in open but the deep, sonorous one she used in private.’ It’s my father. His heart, his neurons are all over me.’
The night before, the next day she and Jack would actually make like, they’d been hoping for another child. However, Jackie got her first time that morning, having just recently lost their newborn son Patrick.
She had not anticipated that she would live that loss; Patrick had only lived for two days.
The screen parted. Jackie sat on her knees and prayed. The doctor’s key doctor came in, took one look and knew the senator was useless.
He still performed CPR for ten days. Jackie therefore pressed Jack’s cheek against his. She glared at his tongue and considered how lovely it was.
Previous rites were performed by two priests. After all left, only with her father for the last time, Jackie kissed his naked figure everywhere: his lips, his chest, his knee, his penis.
For all Jack’s people, she was the last to have him.
Jackie had witnessed Jack, a then-US legislator, having oral sex with a young woman under his office shortly after their marriage in 1953.
Jackie was n’t naïve: she’d known from the start that Jack would n’t be faithful, but she had n’t known just how promiscuous he was. He did n’t even try to hide his affairs.
Times into their wedding, he’d suggested Jackie fly back solely so he could travel with’ friends’. She declined, and afterwards felt guilty she’d perhaps considered his plea.
She’d had no lack of suitors before Jack. She’d really been engaged to a trader, John Husted, when she first met Jack Kennedy, who was then aged 35 to her 23.
Jackie omitted her wedding band and left in a blur of her own two months later.
Husted thought it was the coldest point anyone had ever done to him, but to Jackie, who hated messy emotional scenes, it was the nicest, nicest cut she could offer.
She was laser-focused on landing him, even though Jack was hardly a sure thing. He had excellent conversational skills and, like her, he had a love for both gossip and badminton as well.
Husted would have left her to rot in some leafy suburb, but Jack was a sign of a larger life.
Jackie knew she had to entice Jack Kennedy while he was unavailable, so he knew he was nothing if not a hunter. In the beginning, she’d miss his calls or not return them right away, but it turned out that he was just as elusive. She became even more interested in him.
Slowly, she began making herself indispensable — travelling to other states to hear him speak, accompanying him to rubber- chicken dinners, translating ten books in French for him, the junior senator from Massachusetts, just so he could have a more nuanced take on Indochina.
Three years after they married, in August 1956, Jack made a last- minute run to become the vice- presidential candidate.
Jackie, having suffered two miscarriages, was finally carrying a baby to the third trimester.
Years later, she discovered that all the sexually transmitted diseases that Jack had passed to her were likely to blame for her miscarriages, including asymptomatic chlamydia, were likely to be the result of all the lost pregnancy.
But now, weeks away from giving birth, she was understandably anxious and afraid.
She still fought hard for Jack, and she asked him to stay with her when he did not receive the vice-presidential nod. He said no.
The next morning he was off to the Mediterranean, sailing with his brother Teddy and fellow senator George Smathers — and everyone in Washington, DC, knew what Smathers and Jack got up to together.
Days after Jack’s departure, Jackie woke up in agony. She was taken to the hospital where she delivered a girl she named Arabella via emergency caesarean section.
The baby was stillborn.
Jackie’s brother-in-law Bobby Kennedy broke the news, held her hand, and offered the reason she so desperately desired to believe: Jack was still at sea and unreachable in the Med when she emerged from anesthesia at two in the morning.
Of course, Jack was reachable in the Med. Bobby knew, because he’d already spoken to his brother.
‘ What’s done is done,’ Jack told Bobby over the phone.’ The baby is lost.’ He thought it was pointless to cut short his vacation.
Mourning a child she was never allowed to see, Jackie got the message: Her husband could n’t — would n’t — bother with comforting her, or grieving for their baby.
She was so weak and depressed that she could n’t even attend the burial.
So it was Bobby who stood over Arabella’s coffin while Jack was sailing with his starlets and bikini babes off the south of France, drinking, smoking cigars, having fun.
‘ I’m never going back,’ Jackie said. She desired a Catholic Church annulment rather than just divorce.
When Jack learned this, self-preservation must have begun, because he had unexpectedly appeared in Jackie’s hospital room three days after Arabella’s funeral, ten days after her stillbirth.
Her nemesis, the equally lecherous George Smathers, was also responsible for Jack’s return.
If he ever wanted to be president, Smathers said,’ you better haul your ass back to your wife.’
Jack told reporters that his wife had n’t told him about the stillbirth because she did n’t want to ruin his vacation when he greeted the press outside the hospital.
When Jackie was released, she retreated to her mother’s Rhode Island estate, where she mourned her baby and her marriage.
‘ How could I have been so stupid?’ she’d ask through tears.
Towards the end of that year, she confided in her neighbor, the newspaper magnate Walter Ridder, and asked him how a divorce would play out in the media.
‘ We have all known Jack is difficult in the ways of women,’ Ridder told her.’ But: A), you knew that from the beginning, and B), I’m sure there are many moments that make up for it.
‘ If you should leave him and divorce him, there is no way he can be president. And I doubt you’d like that to be your life’s purpose.
She did n’t. She did n’t realize Jackie was n’t causing this harm to Jack; rather, it was harming himself, she said.
Despite everything, Jackie was still deeply in love with Jack.’ When he’s around,’ she told Ridder,’ he’s just an enchantment.’
Nor was the admiration one- sided. Jack genuinely admired his wife’s irreverence, her defiant streak, her capacious mind, her elevated taste level, the way she’d re- styled him with designer suits. Jackie really classed up the Kennedys, and she enjoyed it.
So, Jackie asked herself: Should she stay? Could n’t she just tolerate the infidelities, as so many women of their class did? After all, married couples who were faithful did n’t necessarily produce the most captivating couples, let alone future presidents.
There was another incentive: Jack’s father, Joe, knew Jackie was a high- value asset. He gave her$ 1 million to continue living in the marriage and$ 1 million more if Jack ever infected her with a sexually transmitted disease.
Jackie’s depression intensified. But Jack either could n’t see it– or did n’t care.
Instead, he secretly packed off his wife to a mental hospital for the elite, Valleyhead in Massachusetts, where she had three rounds of electroshock therapy in one week.
Each treatment caused her to shiver so violently that her bones began to ring as though they were breaking. Jack never called, never visited. After a week, he sent his aide, Chuck Spalding, to collect her.
When she arrived at their DC home, Jack was n’t there, nor had he left a note. In the bathroom, Jackie thought it would be simple to draw a warm bath down each wrist while also reaching for his razor blades.
Had she ever been truly happy? She thought she’d gone into this marriage with eyes wide open, but Jack’s cheating was unbearable, the humiliations unrelenting.
That night, Jack came home to find his wife utterly distraught. For once, he put her first, becoming the loving, supportive husband she so badly wanted. And it made a difference — for a while.
In 1957, Jackie gave birth to their first child, Caroline. Jack was the first person Jack saw when she arrived, bringing their baby to her bedside this time. She would frequently refer to it as her happy day.
When Jackie first met Dr. Frank Finnerty in the spring of 1961, he was only 37. He seemed kind and grounded, and she asked if she could call him occasionally, just to talk. Finnerty was n’t a therapist, he was a cardiologist, but he was moved by Jackie’s gesture. She seemed lonely.
‘ I know what’s gFoing on,’ she told Finnerty.’ All these reporters believe I’m odd, that I must live off of in my own world not to see what he’s up to, and they’re almost always men. I know exactly what he’s up to.’
There were so many women. Jackie suspected that even Lee, her sister, had slept with Jack once.
She knew about Jack and Pamela Turnure, her own press secretary.
She was aware of Jack’s euphemistic “pool parties” that were almost daily held in the White House and were frequently attended by his brothers Ted and Bobby and various lackeys.
When Jackie was away, the women always went up and down the back stairs, leaving behind bobby pins and blonde hair.
One she did n’t know about was 19- year- old Mimi Beardsley, who worked in the White House secretarial pool. Jack had invited Mimi to the White House residence, gotten her drunk, and taken Mimi’s virginity on the bed he shared with his wife.
In that same bed, Jackie once found a pair of women’s knickers.
Would you kindly browse around and discover who these people belong to? she asked Jack coolly.’ They’re not my size.’
She was aware of his propensity to pick up women while traveling. But did Jackie know about the three- ways, four- ways, and five- ways? Considering if he could exchange hookers with his friends? About the 15-year-old babysitter Jack had conceived while he was a senator.
‘ Jack needs to expel some kind of hormonal surge,’ she told Dr. Finnerty.’ I do n’t believe he even has feelings for them. It’s just this characteristic of his life, a trait he inherited from his father.
For a man with such a high libido, Jackie continued, Jack was terrible in bed. Was it her fault?’ He just goes too fast and falls asleep,’ she said.
She was n’t to know that this was the complaint of every woman who’d had sex with Jack Kennedy: no kissing, no build- up, no intensity or sensuality or fun. He did n’t even seem to enjoy having sex, despite lasting more than three minutes. It was like a compulsion, there was never anything personal about it.
Jackie was advised by Finnerty to tell her husband that foreplay would be his gift to her because she needed more affection. Have the talk over a meal in a non- threatening way, he advised, and approach the problem logically and unemotionally.
Jackie did just that, and Jack’s response surprised her. He claimed that he had no idea that her sex was so important. Her interest was impressive. How did a decent girl like her become so drawn to all things sexual?
Jackie had for a long time considered herself an actress.
When she became First Lady in January 1961, she had to camouflage the spicier parts of her personality: the rapier wit, the rebellious nature, the ability to identify the sycophants and frauds. She was the lone woman who Jack took seriously.
Whenever out in public, she secretly wore a wig, insuring she only ever looked the part: immovable perfection.
What if she wanted Chanel suits in every color, or stacks of fine jewelry, or even had her hairdresser fly in from New York? After all, she was working as a global brand ambassador for the House of Kennedy at a significant personal expense.
Later in the afternoon of November 22, 1963, as her husband’s casket was loaded onto Air Force One in Dallas, Jackie sat alone in the back of the plane, still wearing her pink Chanel suit, caked with Jack’s blood and brains.
Everyone else, even the Secret Service detail, was weeping. An Air Force general was almost hysterical.
She’d been shocked, upon boarding, to find Vice President Lyndon Johnson— now the president — splayed on the bed she and Jack had made love in the day before. He was waiting for her with a clean white dress.
Jackie’s husband had been dead for just two hours. She stood before Lyndon in disbelief.
He left without saying a word, then came back with his wife, Lady Bird. Between the new president and the First Lady, Jackie was now seated on the bed. Trapped.
‘ Well,’ Lyndon said,’ about the swearing- in … ‘
They desired that Jackie take the oath of office next to Lyndon in order to create a picture that would spread throughout the world. Jackie is now America’s most significant political figure. Without her, he could easily lose half the electorate.
Jackie’s inner image- maker guided her now: The Actress. Yes, she said, she’d do it, but everyone had to stop trying to force her into that white dress. She was n’t changing.
‘ Let them see what they’ve done,’ she said.
Jackie understood instantly: If she controlled the optics, she controlled the messaging. She had the power to influence how history perceived her husband.
As they entered the main cabin, Lyndon took Jackie’s hand.’ This is the saddest moment of my life,’ he said, pulling her close. Then he turned to the White House photographer.’ Is this how you envision us?
Jackie was the only one thinking three steps ahead: live television, tragedy, pageantry, history.
So Jackie, who was still wearing the stained Chanel and clutching her handbag tight in full view of the media, made the decision to deplane Air Force One.
Jackie made the decision to let Bill Greer, the driver of the Cadillac in which the president had been shot, drive the ambulance that was transporting Jack’s body to the autopsy so he could be certain she did n’t blame him.
And Jackie was the one who fought to board the ambulance with Bobby, the cork in their coffin.
‘ What is the line,’ Jackie asked Bobby,’ between histrionics and drama?’ She planned to pursue high theater, but she was concerned she might be going camp. Her intention, however, was pure: this was all for Jack.
The ensuing three days of ceremonies, televised worldwide, were all down to Jackie.
She insisted on a riderless horse to draw the casket out of the White House Drive, simple flowers, no’ fat, ugly’ black Cadillacs, and an eternal flame to light his grave at Arlington National Cemetery.
She had her eye not only on history but iconography. She and her two fatherless children were standing on the North Portico of the White House on the day of Jack’s funeral. Among the images seared in 20th- century history: their two- year- old son, John Jr., stepping forward and saluting.
Jackie led the funeral procession in a black veil and Givenchy dress despite the Secret Service’s protests, walking the quarter mile from the White House to the church behind Jack’s flag-draped casket.
This funeral would be the first step in accepting Jack’s assent as appropriate. Her eye was n’t only on history, she was going to enshrine their marriage as sacred. True. Real.
And she was going to transform the country’s trauma, the violent death of a charismatic young president, into something regal and majestic.
Theodore White, a historian, was summoned to Jackie’s house on Cape Cod one week after the assassination. As long as she had the final edit, she gave him an exclusive interview for Life magazine.
‘ How do you want him remembered?’ White asked.
‘ One thing kept going through my mind,’ she said. It was a lyric from a song Jack loved in the musical Camelot: ‘ Do n’t let it be forgot that, for one brief shining moment, there was Camelot.’
At night in the White House, she said, he’d play the song on their old Victrola record player, over and over.
White, like everyone else familiar with the president, knew this was untrue. Jack had n’t been interested in middlebrow Broadway musicals. He’d never employ such heavy- handed metaphor. He was n’t the type of husband who cozied up with his wife every night.
When White had finished writing, he handed his draft to Jackie. She began making her own additions and cutting ruthlessly.
Meanwhile, Life magazine was holding the presses at a cost of$ 30, 000 per hour.
At around 2 a. m., White dictated the final draft to his editors from Jackie’s kitchen. Jackie looked at White and shook her head as they laughed at the Camelot detail, thinking it was just her.
And so Jackie’s first draft of history won out. The very last line, written in her own back- slanted cursive, read:’ For one brief, shining moment, there was Camelot.’
UK READERS: Adapted from’ Ask Not’ by Maureen Callahan, to be published by Harper Collins on July 4 at £25.  , © Maureen Callahan 2024. To order a copy for , £22.50 ( offer valid to 30/06/24, UK P&, P free on orders over , £25 ) go to mailshop. co. uk/books  , or call 02031762937.
US READERS: Adapted from’ Ask Not’ by Maureen Callahan. Copyright © 2024 by Maureen Callahan. Used with permission of Little, Brown and Company. New York, NY. All rights reserved. Order a copy here.  ,
