“I could not let go,” Jackie said.
For a moment, her voice faltered, and as White waited for her to go on, he was aware of the flicker of lightning in the panes of the living-room window. Then Jackie spoke again, but her voice was almost drowned out by the thunder that came rolling in over Nantucket Sound.
She ran her hand along her husband’s body, Jackie told White. And she found his penis and caressed it.
GUINEVERE
Jackie’s face was drained of color, and she looked as though she might faint. White reached out to console her.
“No, no,” Jackie said, recoiling, “don’t protect me now.”
For the past week, no one had been able to comfort her. To Father John Cavanaugh, another priest, who met privately with her in Washington after the assassination to hear her confession, Jackie had said: “What am I supposed to confess, Father? That I neglected to watch the calendar and ate meat some Friday three months ago?”
She demanded that the clergyman explain her husband’s murder.
“Why, why? How could God do something like that?”
Jackie was a lax Roman Catholic, but in her heart she embraced the teachings of her church. She believed, for instance, that the universe was kept in a kind of moral balance by a just God who rewarded the good and punished the wicked. Now, however, that faith presented her with a perplexing problem, for over the past few years the God of her understanding had seen fit to snatch away her husband and two of her children—one by a stillbirth in 1956, and another in the first few hours of his life that past summer.
What sin had she committed to deserve such terrible punishment at the hands of God? Would God now choose to take Caroline and John as well? The prospect of that happening was too painful for her to contemplate, she told White. She could not even talk about it. In fact, talking about Jack’s murder only served to remind her that she was utterly inconsolable. Surely there must be something in these horrible events to salve her pain.
“One thing kept going through my mind,” she said, groping for words. “The line from a musical comedy. I kept saying to Bobby, I’ve got to talk to somebody, I’ve got to see somebody. I want to say this one thing.”
White intuitively sensed that he was about to hear the story he had come for.
“This line from the musical comedy has been almost an obsession with me,” Jackie said. “At night before going to bed … we had an old Victrola. He’d play a couple of records. I’d get out of bed to play for him when it was so cold. He loved Camelot. It was the song he loved the most at the end … on a Victrola ten years old … it’s the last record, the last side of Camelot, sad Camelot … ‘Don’t let it be forgot that for one brief shining moment there was Camelot.’
“Jack’s life had more to do with myth, legend, saga, and story than with political theory or political science,” she continued. “There’ll be great presidents again—and the Johnsons are wonderful, they’ve been wonderful to me—but there’ll never be another Camelot.”
Camelot, as Teddy White knew, was adapted for the musical stage by Frederick Loewe and Alan Jay Lerner from The Once and Future King, the fantasy masterpiece written by T. H. White, a British author with the same initials and last name as his own. It just so happened that White and the lyricist, Alan Jay Lerner, were good friends. They were often invited to the same parties in New York and Washington, where White had heard Lerner boast on more than one occasion that he had attended Choate and Harvard with Jack Kennedy. Yet White could not recall Lerner ever mentioning that his old schoolmate and friend, the President of the United States, went to sleep at night listening to a recording of Camelot.
That was enough to make White suspicious of Jackie’s story. And it was not the only thing that bothered him about it. If anyone knew Jack Kennedy’s mind-set, it was White. While he was researching The Making of the President 1960, White concluded that of all the Kennedys Jack was the toughest, the most intelligent, the most attractive—and down deep, the least romantic. “Life is one continuous choice between second bests,” Kennedy was fond of saying. And his favorite songs were “Heart of My Heart,” “Bill Bailey (Won’t You Please Come Home?),” and “That Old Gang of Mine.”
White suspected that the metaphor of Camelot said more about Jackie than it did about Jack. She was a woman with an artistic temperament, one who knew little and cared less about politics. She had not even bothered to vote before she married John Kennedy, and her political influence had seemed so slight to White that he had mentioned her only three times in his exhaustive chronicle of the 1960 campaign.
During her husband’s thousand days in office, Jackie had avoided official functions as much as possible. But she had taken charge of the furniture, the paintings, the flowers, and the food. And she had invited a host of great artists and Nobel Prize-winners to state dinners, transforming the President’s House into a glittering showcase of American culture.
Before Jackie became First Lady, most Americans looked across the Atlantic for their serious art, literature, music, and dance. They felt culturally inferior to Europeans, especially to the British and French. But after Jackie entered the White House, all that began to change. She made everyone aware that America was not only the world’s major military power, it was its cultural superpower as well. More than anyone else at the time, Jackie was responsible for awakening Americans to their rich cultural endowment.
While Jack was
