Other details of the “Camelot” interview are taken from White’s handwritten notes of his interview with Jackie. White donated these notes, known as the “Camelot Documents,” to the Kennedy Library in 1969, but they were not available to researchers until May 1995, one year after Jackie’s death.
Books that were used in this section include Theodore White’s autobiography, In Search of History (Warner Books, 1978), and Joyce Hoffman’s Theodore H. White and Journalism as Illusion (University of Missouri Press, 1995), which aided the author in his understanding of the Camelot myth and the ways in which Theodore White and Jackie collaborated in creating it.
The author conducted interviews with Theodore White’s former wife, Nancy Hechtor, and his children, David and Hay den.
Descriptions of the weather in New York and Hyannis on November 29, 1963, were drawn from The New York Times, November 30, 1963.
TWO: BEYOND HER WILDEST DREAMS
The account of Jackie’s Thanksgiving weekend in Hyannis Port, and how she coped with Caroline’s reaction to her father’s death, are drawn from several published sources: Rita Dallas’s The Kennedy Case (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1973), a memoir written with Jeanira Ratcliffe by the head nurse to Joseph P. Kennedy during the last eight years of his life; Robert Curran’s The Kennedy Women (Lancer Books, 1964); Lester David’s Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (Birch Lane Press, 1994); C. David Heymann’s A Woman Named Jackie (Lyle Stuart, 1989); and Marianne Means’s The Woman in the White House (Random House, 1963).
Caroline’s first words are quoted in A Life in Pictures: Remembering Jackie {Life, special commemorative edition, July 15, 1994).
The story about the white shark game that John F. Kennedy made up to amuse his daughter, Caroline, was recounted by Janet Auchincloss in her oral history housed at the John F. Kennedy Library.
The author first learned of Jackie’s consultation with the psychoanalyst Erik Erikson during an interview with Peter Beard. The description of Jackie’s consultation with Erikson is drawn chiefly from interviews conducted by the author and a research assistant with Erik Erikson’s biographer, Dr. Lawrence Friedman; Erikson’s children, Kai Erikson and Sue Erikson Bloland; Margaret Brenman-Gibson, a close colleague of Erikson’s; and Richard Goodwin.
Other published sources for the chapter on Erik Erikson include “Configurations in Play,” from Erik Erikson’s A Way of Looking at Things (W. W. Norton, 1987); Current Biography; History & Theory Magazine (May 1, 1995); a New Yorker profile (1970); Newsweek (May 23, 1994); and The New York Times (May 13, 1994).
Two other excellent sources for details on Erikson’s life and work were Margaret Brenman-Gibson’s film Erik Erikson: A Life’s Work and Dr. Richard Evans’s film Professor Erik Erikson.
The scene of Jackie refusing to confess to a priest after JFK’s death was recounted in Heymann’s A Woman Named Jackie. Descriptions of the birthday parties Jackie gave Caroline and John Jr. in the White House were drawn from Heymann and from Wendy Leigh’s Prince Charming (Dutton, 1993). Bunny Mellon’s calling Jackie “a witch” is recounted in Wayne Koestenbaum’s Jackie under My Skin (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1995).
Much of the material about Jackie’s relationship with her father, John Vernou Bouvier III; her mother, Janet Auchincloss; and her Vogue Prix de Paris entry is derived from the author’s previous book, All Too Human (Pocket Books, 1996). See the notes in that book, especially the notes to chapters two and three.
Additional interviews were conducted with Robin Duke and Charles Whitehouse.
THREE: NO PLACE TO GO
The account of Jackie and her children arriving back in Washington from Thanksgiving weekend in Hyannis Port is drawn from the Boston Herald, December 2, 1963.
Details of the changeover of the Oval Office after JFK’s assassination are drawn from William Manchester’s The Death of a President (Harper & Row, 1967) and Wendy Leigh’s Prince Charming (Dutton, 1993). In interviews with the author, Horace Busby recalled the reactions of Harry Truman and the White House female press corps, and Jack Valenti explained how LBJ took pains not to look like a usurper. Accounts of this transition period are also drawn from the oral histories of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Liz Carpenter, housed in the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library, and from Mary Barelli Gallagher’s memoir, My Life with Jacqueline Kennedy (David McKay, 1969).
The original memo Jackie sent to Lady Bird Johnson from Hyannis Port, dated Sunday, December 12, 1963, is housed in the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library.
The description of Marie Harriman was drawn from an interview with Peter Duchin.
Jackie’s family background and her life at Merrywood are described in the author’s first Kennedy biography, All Too Human (Pocket Books, 1996). Nina Auchincloss Straight recalls how Jackie’s bedroom in Hyannis Port copied her beloved Merrywood bedroom in J. C. Suares and J. Spencer Beck’s Uncommon Grace (Thomasson-Grant, 1994).
“I suppose I was in a state of shock” is recounted in Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s oral history in the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library.
JFK funeral preparations are described in Angier Biddle Duke’s papers at the Duke University Library Private Collections in Durham, North Carolina.
The history of Lincoln and the burial of his children in Arlington and elsewhere is in The New York Times, December 5, 1963.
The account of Janet Auchincloss’s involvement in the interment and reinterment of Jackie’s two children beside their father in Arlington National Cemetery is drawn from the author’s interviews with Janet’s son, James Auchincloss, and with Charles Hayes, the son of John F. Hayes Jr., the funeral director of Hayes-O’Neill funeral home in Newport at that time.
Descriptions of Ed Zimny and the plane he piloted are drawn from Joe McGuinness’s
