Jackie ‘bitter against God’ over JFK’S death
Letters to Irish priest reveal former US first lady’s deepest feelings,
IT IS more than 50 years since Jacqueline Kennedy stood and mourned her husband in front of the watching world while keeping her thoughts intensely private, but now a trove of personal letters has disclosed her innermost feelings.
“I am so bitter against God,” she wrote in 1964 to Father Joseph Leonard, a bon viveur Irish Catholic priest with whom she corresponded in confessional tones for nearly 15 years.
“I feel more cruelly every day what I have lost — I always would have rather lost my life than lost Jack,” she wrote in another letter that year.
Her husband, John F Kennedy, the US president, was assassinated in 1963.
The correspondence, which began in 1950 and continued until Leonard’s death in 1964, has excited Kennedy experts, who have long craved an insight into her thinking.
Kennedy gave no interviews for 30 years and banished friends from her circle if they spoke out.
The two letters that tell of her loss are among 30 from an undisclosed source that will be sold at auction in Ireland next month and are expected to fetch at least £1-million (about R17-million).
In more than 130 handwritten pages, Kennedy, who died in 1994, confided about her hastily broken-off engagement to a New York stockbroker, her courtship and marriage to Kennedy and her grief and anger at his killing.
Even before her marriage to the future president in September 1953, she wrote with startling prescience about a husband whose vanity and insatiable appetite for womanising would diminish his reputation when it emerged in the years after his death.
“He’s like my father in a way — loves the chase and is bored with the conquest — and, once married, needs proof he’s still attractive, so flirts with other women and resents you. I saw how that nearly killed mummy,” she wrote.
In another letter, written in early 1953 when she was only 23, she admitted she was consumed with ambition “like MacBeth” while making clear she was under no illusion about the world she was marrying into — a world that, for all its flaws, she would later deliberately mythologise as “Camelot”.
“Maybe I’m just dazzled and picture myself in a glittering world of crowned heads and Men of Destiny — and not just a sad little housewife . . . That world can be very glamorous from the outside — but if you’re in it, and you’re lonely, it could be a hell.”
A year later, Kennedy — who had broken off her engagement to John Husted in March 1952 — sounded confident she had made a good decision: “I love being married much more than I did even in the beginning.”
The letters are part of a correspondence she struck up with Leonard after a visit to Ireland in 1950, when the priest took her to the theatre and dinner at Jammet’s, one of the city’s best French restaurants. — ©