“PARTS TOO PERSONAL FOR MENTION”
“What shall I say? What can I do for you?” Jackie asked after the others had left the room.
What could she do for him?
White was taken aback by the question. He unsnapped the leather case of his tape recorder and placed the machine on a table between them. Then, as the cold, driving rain rattled the windows in Hyannis Port, he flipped open his reporter’s notebook and scribbled his first impressions:
Composure … beautiful… eyes wider than pools … calm voice …
“Why don’t we pick up from our telephone call,” White suggested. “You said that journalists like Arthur Krock and Merriman Smith and all those people were going to write about Jack as history, and that isn’t the way you want him remembered. How do you want him remembered?”
Jackie took a long drag on her cigarette, making the tip turn red. As soon as she began to speak, White realized that he was going to hear more than he had bargained for. Jackie regarded him as a friend who also happened to be a journalist, rather than as a journalist who would record everything she said. He felt an obligation to protect her, and he pushed aside his tape recorder—a signal that it was safe for her to speak her mind.
“She poured out several streams of thought which mingled for two hours,” White recalled. “There was the broken narrative, the personal unwinding from the horror, the tale of the killing. Then there was the history part of it. And parts too personal for mention in any book but one of her own.”
White took eleven pages of notes, but as he confided years later to the author of this book and to one or two other close friends, he did not transcribe many of the most personal things that Jackie told him that night….
… How in Fort Worth, on the eve of the President’s assassination, Jackie and Jack had separate bedrooms in a suite on the eighth floor of the Hotel Texas. Her room was a hideous green, and it overlooked a neon-lit parking lot. Before turning in, she went into Jack’s bedroom. He was exhausted from the day’s politicking. Normally she would have said a quick good-night and returned to her room. But something had changed in the chemistry of their relationship, which in the past had been poisoned by Jack’s insatiable need for sex with an endless succession of women.
Jackie attributed the change in the relationship to the death three months earlier of their son Patrick Bouvier Kennedy. The premature baby had put up a stirring fight for life, and Jack had said, “Nothing must happen to Patrick, because I just can’t bear to think of the effect it might have on Jackie.” Then, when the infant died, Jack broke down in tears. It was the first time that Jackie had seen him cry.
Since then their relationship had deepened and been transformed, Jackie told White, and she felt closer to Jack than at any time in their ten-year marriage. And so Jackie slipped into her husband’s bed, and in the sickly green reflection cast by the neon light, she aroused him from the depths of his fatigue, and they made love for the last time….
… And the next morning, in a light drizzle, Jack addressed an outdoor rally of union men and they shouted, “Where’s Jackie?” And Jack pointed to his wife’s eighth-floor hotel window and said, “Mrs. Kennedy is organizing herself. It takes her a little longer, but, of course, she looks better than we do when she does it.”
The truth was, Jackie was delayed because she had just begun her menstrual period. It was her first normal monthly flow since Patrick Bouvier had been delivered by cesarean section, and she remembered that it filled her with joy.
She and Jack had talked about having more children, but she feared that she might never get pregnant again. So the day that ended in blood had begun in blood, but the first blood was a sign of life. It meant that Jackie could begin to try to have another baby….
And White did not record the personal things that Jackie told him about her time alone with Jack as he lay dead in Trauma Room No. 1 at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas. Or, rather, what White chose to put down in his notebook was a bowdlerized version of the truth.
They kept trying to get a priest … there was a sheet over Jack, his foot was sticking out, whiter than the sheet. … I took his foot and kissed it. Then I pulled back the sheet. His mouth was so beautiful… his eyes were open. They found his hand under the sheet, and I held his hand all the time the priest was saying extreme unction There;.
There was blood everywhere. Not only on Jackie’s hair and gloves and skirt and stockings. Her panties were soaked with menstrual blood, too. She was covered in blood from head to foot. The heartrending Latin words, so familiar to her from her Catholic childhood—Si capax ego te absolvo …—staggered her, Jackie recalled, and she almost lost her balance. She felt that if she let go of Jack, she would collapse in their commingled blood.
She was determined to hold on to Jack at all costs. She did not see how she could go on without a man in her life, she told White. Her own father was dead. Jack’s father, Joe Kennedy, had been left speechless by a stroke, and could not protect her. Her brother-in-law Bobby was as devastated as she was by Jack’s murder.
There was no one to look after her.
And so after the tube was withdrawn from the hole they had cut in Jack’s trachea, and after the nurses removed the corset he had used for his bad back, and after they had
