Trapped in an endless horror movie
How JFK’s gruesome death left Jackie Kennedy . . .
BIOGRAPHY DOMINIC SANDBROOK JACQUELINE BOUVIER KENNEDY ONASSIS: THE UNTOLD STORY by Barbara Leaming (Thomas Dunne Books £18.99)
The WORST hour of Jackie Kennedy’s life began in bright, searing sunshine. ‘There’d been the biggest motorcade from the airport. hot. Wild,’ she remembered a few years later. ‘The sun was so strong in our faces. I couldn’t put on sunglasses. Then we saw this tunnel. I thought it would be cool in the tunnel. I thought if you were on the left the sun wouldn’t get into your eyes.’
And then the first shot rang out from the Texas Book Depository, and everything changed.
The assassination of President John F. Kennedy, in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963, has become one of the most famous images of the 20th century.
Jackie Kennedy, instantly recognisable in her pink Mad Men-style outfit, clambers across the back of her husband’s open-topped limousine, while in the back seat the President of the United States lies stricken and bleeding.
In her melodramatic new biography of the most glamorous of all First Ladies, American journalist Barbara Leaming positively wallows in the moment.
‘A diaphanous pink cloud of brain and bone matter burst out of the wound, raining on Jackie’s hair, face and clothes,’ she writes. ‘Tightly she held his head in both hands in a conscious effort to keep the brains from leaking out … A hairy skull fragment lay beside Jackie’s roses.’ Later, at the hospital, Jackie poked a doctor with her elbow, and ‘hopefully presented him with a fragment of the President’s brain’.
how, you may well ask, can Leaming possibly justify raking over this well-trodden ground in such a lurid fashion?
But on the face of it, Leaming has a plausible excuse. She thinks that, from that day onwards, Jackie Kennedy suffered from undiagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), the same condition that strikes many soldiers after they return from the front line.
For the rest of her life, according to Leaming, she relived the gruesome nightmare. She was a prisoner, trapped in an endless horror film. For Jackie, every day was November 22. There is only one problem with this thesis: it is impossible to prove.
Leaming digs up plenty of evidence that, after the assassination, Jackie sank into a deep depression, punctuated by bouts of crying and drinking. But this hardly strikes me as one of history’s great surprises. Leaming also observes that Jackie never felt safe after the murder, telling friends and family that she dreaded another shooting.
But was this really PTSD, or just common sense? Not only had her husband been murdered in front of her, but his brother Bobby was assassinated on the campaign trail just five years later. Does Leaming think that Jackie ought to have had a good cry, sorted out her make-up and then got on with her life?
The truth, of course, is this book is less a serious biography — it is, in fact, Leaming’s second stab at Jackie — than a prize specimen of that ignoble genre, the Royal Cash-In.
Jackie Kennedy was, in effect, an American princess, crippled with the fantasies and expectations of millions of people who had never met her and knew nothing about what made her tick.
Rich, glamorous and well-born, with an affected whispery voice and an uncanny ability to charm intelligent men who should have known better, she was basically the Princess Diana of the New World. And as we all know, there is no limit to the Diana market.
Leaming’s singular achievement is to make you finish this book knowing little more about Jackie Kennedy than you did at the beginning — but caring far, far less. Born Jacqueline Lee Bouvier in Long Island in 1929, the daughter of a rich stockbroker, she went to a series of exclusive private schools and was awarded the title ‘Debutante of the Year’.
In the high society of the day, her degree in French literature gave her a faintly exotic, even intellectual air. But Leaming’s book is so plodding it makes her sound far less charismatic than she probably was.
WheN she married young Boston congressman Jack Kennedy in 1953, it was not much of a love match. Kennedy needed a wife for political reasons, and Jackie made the perfect trophy bride.
his sexual appetite has become a cliché, but one thing is certain: he was no romantic. he proposed by telegram, then sold the engagement photos to Life magazine. Later, Jackie overheard her husband talking about her to his father, the old crook Joe Kennedy, and his brother Bobby. ‘They spoke of me as if I weren’t a person,’ she later remembered, ‘ just a thing, just a sort of asset, like Rhode Island.’
Kennedy was a terrible husband. As President, he would cavort with his mistresses while Jackie was hosting official dinners downstairs. But Leaming suggests they grew closer just before his death, partly as a result of losing a two-day-old baby, Patrick, in August 1963.
After the dreadful events in Dallas, Jackie was not so much alone — in fact, she had a host of male admirers — as redundant. But five years later, she made probably the best decision of her life, marrying the Greek shipping millionaire Aristotle Onassis. The reaction in small-town America was horror — not unlike that in Britain when people discovered Diana was going out with Dodi Fayed. But, by any standards, Onassis was an excellent choice: a doting husband who gave Jackie what she required.
‘I wanted to go off,’ she said later. ‘I wanted to feel safe.’ So she did.
The rest is all pretty humdrum. When Onassis died in 1975, Jackie came back to New York, worked as a book editor and found a new consort. Then she pottered along — dinners at the White house, bustups with paparazzi — until she died of cancer in 1994, aged just 64.
There are hints in this book of a canny intelligence beneath the expensive clothes and breathy voice; but that is all they are, hints. Perhaps the really shocking truth about Jackie Kennedy, which no biographer would dare to print, is that she was just not that interesting.