0062439650 (N) by Kate Andersen Brower

Author:Kate Andersen Brower
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2016-04-12T06:00:00+00:00

JACKIE SPOKE IN a childlike whisper of a voice (Kennedy’s sisters called her “the Deb” behind her back), but she was tough as nails and would cut people off if she felt they had betrayed her. She delicately crafted the image of Camelot after persuading her friend journalist Theodore H. White to refer to the Kennedy years as Camelot—a magical time that was too good to last—in Life magazine. “Only bitter men write history,” she told White. “Jack’s life had more to do with myth, magic, legend, saga and story than with political theory or political science.” She was terrified that her husband’s dreams and accomplishments would be forgotten. In the days following the assassination she asked President Johnson to rename the Florida space center, Cape Canaveral, after her husband. Within an hour, Johnson had it done. She did not want her contributions to be forgotten, either, and she wrote an eleven-page memo listing the treasures she had brought to the White House and had it sent to Lady Bird before she moved out.

Jackie summoned White to the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port on Cape Cod in Massachusetts just a week after her husband’s murder and delivered an incredibly compelling four-hour narrative of their tenure in the White House. According to handwritten notes White took during the interview, Jackie told him, “I’m not going to be the widow Kennedy in public; when this is all over I’m going to crawl into the deepest retirement there is.” Jackie painted a vivid picture of those frightening moments after her husband was shot, when she cradled him in her arms as they raced to Dallas’s Parkland Memorial Hospital. “Jack, Jack, can you hear me? I love you, Jack.” When they finally got to the hospital (the short ride felt interminable) Jackie’s beloved Secret Service agent, Clint Hill, pleaded with her to allow them to get the President out of the car. But she didn’t want anyone to see him like that, with his brains exposed and blood everywhere.

“Mrs. Kennedy,” Hill said. “Please let us help the President.” But she would not let go of her husband.

“Please, Mrs. Kennedy,” he begged her. “Please let us get him into the hospital.” When she didn’t answer he instinctively knew the problem and took off his jacket and placed it over the President’s head. It was only then that she let go.

She insisted on going in to see her husband before they closed the casket in the hospital, and a police officer helped her pull off her stained white gloves that were stiffened with his blood. She put her simple bloodstained gold wedding band on his finger and kissed his hand. Later, she regretted the decision and felt she had nothing left of him, so one of Kennedy’s most trusted aides called the morgue and got the ring back. “This is the closest thing I have to a memory of him,” she told White as she quietly twisted it around her finger. “He bought it in a hurry in Newport just before we were married.

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