Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis the Untold Story Reviews
The image of a pink-suited, claret-spattered Jackie Kennedy scrambling onto the trunk of the presidential limousine is seared into our collective retention.
The Abraham Zapruder picture show that captured that strange, poignant scene was replayed countless times as our country processed the trauma of the Kennedy bump-off. It seems commonsensical to theorize that the president's widow, who was closest to information technology all, was traumatized, too, by those minutes in Dallas, and not irrational to imagine that, for many years, her life choices were shaped by their fallout.
Biographer Barbara Leaming, in her third Kennedy book, does more than theorize. "Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis" provides suggestive prove that her subject field suffered from the clinical symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, including flashbacks, insomnia, numbness, abstention, fearfulness, low, and acrimony. The syndrome, widely observed in returning Vietnam State of war veterans, did not enter the official psychiatric lexicon until 1980 and earlier that tended to be misunderstood and untreated.
Leaming's 2001 biography, "Mrs. Kennedy: The Missing History of the Kennedy Years," was salacious and fascinating, but speculative and thinly sourced. On scant evidence, information technology likened the human relationship between Jack and Jackie to his bond with his beloved sister, Kathleen, who died in a plane crash. And it asserted that Jackie's frequent absences from the White House were designed, in office, to let her husband's philandering to proceed unobstructed.
In the offset third of the new book, Leaming recycles considerable material from the first biography, minus these dubious theories. "Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis" is likewise marred by Leaming'due south tendency to mind read. Just this time around, much of her documentation — which includes Jackie's remarks to intimates, likewise as her behavior — is compelling. Interpreting the mail-assassination life through the lens of PTSD turns out to be a fruitful mode of making sense of Jackie's sometimes odd-seeming choices.
In the firsthand aftermath of Dallas, "[o]ver and over, she recounted the murder for the do good of visitors" and described herself as "keyed upwards," Leaming writes. Jackie's celebrated composure during the funeral, Leaming says, belied her private agony and difficulties in processing her grief and trauma — which patently lasted for years.
After the assassination, Leaming details how Bobby Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, political rivals who detested each other, sought both to comfort her and to use her. Taped telephone calls show how cannily LBJ sought to ingratiate himself with the politically valuable widow. Leaming concedes "the electric intensity of their bond" but is unpersuaded that Bobby and Jackie had an affair, as others accept claimed.
Instead, she writes, he recovered more than quickly, if never completely, from his deep grief, condemned her for living as well much in the past, and even referred to her privately every bit "my crazy sis-in-police."
If Jackie was indeed afflicted by PTSD, Bobby Kennedy'due south assassination in 1968 surely served as another trigger. Her sister Lee Radziwell'south words, excerpted from Cecil Beaton'due south published diaries, are telling: "You don't know what it'due south like being with Jackie . . . She's actually more than half round the bend! . . . The new horror will bring the onetime one alive again and I'm going to have to get through hell trying to calm her. She gets and then that she hits me beyond the face, and concerning of nothing."
Leaming's diagnosis sheds boosted light on Jackie'due south controversial decision, right after RFK'southward bump-off, to wed the much-older Greek tycoon Aristotle Onassis. Not money alone, merely the privacy and security she believed Onassis's money could purchase motivated this surprising and ill-destined matrimony. "I wanted to go off," Jackie said of the Onassis marriage. "I wanted to be somewhere safe."
"Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis" has something of a happy ending, Jackie's too-early death from cancer notwithstanding. Leaming argues that the former get-go lady fought her way back to mental health through her work in publishing, her contributions to landmark preservation, and her final, harmonious relationship with Belgian-born diamond merchant Maurice Tempelsman. When the British poet Stephen Spender asked, in 1980, virtually her greatest achievement, she told him: "I think it is that later going through a rather difficult time, I consider myself comparatively sane. I am proud of that."
Julia Chiliad. Klein is a cultural reporter and critic in Philadelphia and a contributing editor at Columbia Journalism Review. E-mail her at julklein@verizon.net .
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