Janet spent the night at Hammersmith Farm, the Auchincloss country seat in Newport. Once Janet had acquired the Auchincloss name and money, she had become quite grand. She had always been a mercurial woman with a cyclonic temper, but during Jackie’s teenage years, Janet’s violent outbursts seemed to know no bounds. She thought nothing of strafing Jackie across both cheeks with her open hand.
After witnessing examples of Janet’s cruel behavior, many of Jackie’s school friends assumed that she hated her mother. But that was not true. Jackie admired her mother’s spirit and courage (Janet’s nose had been broken three times in horseback riding accidents), her passion for art, her personal discipline in diet and grooming, and her talent for household organization. Jackie may have loved her father more, but she spent her life trying to please her mother.
Her parents’ messy divorce left a lasting mark on Jackie. She was ashamed that her schoolmates could read newspaper accounts of the divorce, in which her father was described as an adulterer. Her shameful feelings of exposure would color Jackie’s attitude toward the press for the rest of her life.
Once a carefree and happy-go-lucky child, Jackie became stiff and introverted. She began a lifelong habit of biting her nails. She retreated into a life of fantasy and seemed to relate better to books than to people. She identified with legendary heroines who were sought after by powerful men, and whose beauty brought betrayal, war, and disaster: Helen of Troy; Persephone, the mythological queen of the underworld; and, most of all, Queen Guinevere.
It was difficult for Jackie to show her feelings. She found it even harder to form attachments. She became a loner; she had no real friends. People said it was almost impossible to get to know her. One young woman remembered being introduced by Jackie as “my best friend,” when in fact they had not seen or spoken to each other in years.
Jackie’s shyness never left her, and her childhood wounds started to heal only after Caroline was born. She began to develop the capacity to get outside herself, to understand pain and joy, kindness and pity, and to interpret them more movingly than she ever could before. Through Caroline, she came to realize that someone other than herself was real.
The night of the exhumation of Baby Girl Kennedy, Janet called Jackie and in some detail described her ordeal at the cemetery. It must have sounded hellish to Jackie, who had tried so hard to be a good wife and mother, but whose own life was spoiled and corrupted, just like the tiny bodies that were being disinterred from their graves.
Jackie had been pregnant five times in the ten years of her marriage. She lost one child in a miscarriage. The second, Arabella, was stillborn. The third, Patrick, died shortly after delivery. Two more—Caroline and John—survived, John only barely. Over and over, Jackie asked: Why, God? Why?
Whether she wanted to admit it or not, Jackie must have known the answer to that question. After Jack’s assassination, Jackie had not wanted the doctors who performed the autopsy on his body to mention any diseases that might have been present. She feared that a thorough examination would uncover evidence of the President’s chronic venereal disease.
From the earliest days of her marriage, Jackie was aware that Jack took enormous amounts of antibiotics to eradicate the bacteria that caused his sexually transmitted disease—nongonococcal urethritis, or chlamydia. She lived in deadly fear that he would infect her.
“Where you have a man who carries nongonococcal urethritis,” according to Dr. Atilla Toth,* a specialist in the relationship between infections and infertility, “… after the first intercourse, the woman always becomes infected, and the bacteria usually stays behind and multiplies, and her subsequent pregnancies can be affected. Her second baby might come to term immature, and subsequent pregnancies can be miscarried.”
More than likely, this explained Jackie’s difficult birth pattern. But what of Jackie herself? Was her health affected by the venereal infection, too?
“These bacteria,” explained Dr. Toth, “do not stay inside the woman’s uterine canal solely; they go through her tubes, her pelvic cavity, her ovaries, and they interfere with ovarian function. Those sluggish ovaries do not produce the normal complement of hormones. These are the women who, after deliveries, after miscarriages, develop hormonally related emotional problems, and go through hormonal withdrawal and severe depression that can last for months.”
This explained why Jackie suffered from severe bouts of postpartum depression after her pregnancies. And why she had felt so despondent after giving birth to John.
* Dr. Toth never treated either Jack or Jackie Kennedy. His comments to the author were based on his knowledge of many apparently similiar case histories.
AT A LOSS FOR WORDS
It was dark and beginning to sleet when Richard Cardinal Cushing left his Boston Archdiocese residence and drove to Holyhood Cemetery in nearby Brookline, where Patrick Bouvier Kennedy was buried. Patrick was born five and a half weeks prematurely by caesarean section, and weighed four pounds, ten ounces at birth. He was the first to be placed in the large family plot, a wedge of land with a gray granite gravestone that had been purchased by Joseph Kennedy.
The Cardinal was a tall man, with a square jaw and a seamed face. He possessed a big personality and a big Boston Irish voice—“the harshest in Christendom,” said McGeorge Bundy, JFK’s national security adviser. Cardinal Cushing had delivered the invocation at John Kennedy’s Inauguration.
“I thought it was a pretty good prayer,” he said, “but less than three years later Jack was killed. So it didn’t seem to do any good.”
The prelate was dressed in black vestments. He watched as
