Just Jackie by Edward Klein (trending books to read TXT) 📕

three of us seated at a luncheon table in dry clothes, I slowly realized that nothing good for the book could possibly come out of this meeting. The atmosphere was completely unrealistic … Jackie was hostile toward Look, bitter about Cowles, and scornful of all books on President Kennedy, including [Arthur] Schlesinger’s. Repeatedly, she expressed affection for Goodwin and me, saying, ‘It’s us against them,’ and to me, ‘Your whole life proves you to be a man of honor.’ She was going to fight, she said savagely, and she was going to win: ‘Anybody who is against me will look like a rat unless I run off with Eddie Fisher.’ ”

It slowly dawned on Manchester that Jackie did not want any published account of her husband’s death—whether in book form or in a magazine excerpt. Beyond the personal revelations that she found so objectionable, Jackie was concerned about the political passages in Manchester’s book.

There were many references to discord between Bobby Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. Manchester portrayed Johnson as a man who had been eager to seize power, and who had been insensitive to the dead President’s family. For instance, Manchester described Kenneth O’Donnell, JFK’s White House secretary, pacing up and down the aisle of Air Force One, his hands clapped over his ears so that he would not have to hear the judge administering the presidential oath of office to Johnson.

All this could be used against Bobby if he should run for national office. Jackie did not want to offend the thin-skinned Johnson, who was well aware that the Manchester book had been commissioned by her. When Bobby had talked about retiring from the public arena, it was Jackie who had begged him not to quit, arguing that the country needed him. If the book turned Johnson into an implacable foe, and scuttled Bobby’s chances for the White House, it would be all her fault. Once again, she would bring disaster upon someone she loved.

TAKING CARE OF BUSINESS

In the midst of her troubles over the Manchester book, Jackie received a call from John Warnecke. They had not seen each other for several weeks.

“I’ve just got back to my office here in San Francisco,” he told her, “and I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news.”

“What’s wrong?” Jackie asked.

“My bookkeeper tells me that I owe the bank six hundred thousand dollars,” he said. “The bank says the loan is more like a million dollars. And it’s due Monday.”

“How could that happen?” Jackie asked.

She had been led to believe that Warnecke was a wealthy man and was insulated from problems like this.

“That’s what I asked my bookkeeper,” he said. “She says I haven’t been paying enough attention to my business, and the office always relied on me in the past to generate the commissions. The last couple of years I’ve been preoccupied with the memorial grave. Then you and I spent the last two months together in Hawaii. I guess I just let things go.”

It sounded as if he was trying to lay the blame for his money problems on Jackie.

“What are you going to do?” she asked.

“I have to spend a lot more time taking care of business.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means I don’t think I can see you quite so much,” he said. “Not as often as before, anyway. At least not until things calm down a bit.”

It all sounded bizarre. For the past two years, Warnecke had told Jackie over and over again that he loved her. But now, out of the blue, he seemed to have changed his tune. He could no longer be to her what he had been before—a man did not say that to the woman he loved.

Obviously, something had changed. And it was not only Warnecke’s financial condition. He seemed to have suddenly realized that those fairy-tale weeks in Hawaii were not real, and that he would never be able to change Jackie into a normal person. He could not provide Jackie with what she really needed: total security from the outside world.

There was a long silence on the phone. It went on for so long that Warnecke thought Jackie might have hung up, or that they had lost their connection.

Then Jackie said, “I understand.”

“We’ll still see each other,” Warnecke said. “This isn’t good-bye.”

“Of course not,” she said.

“I still love you, Jackie,” he said.

But this time Jackie did not say that she loved him back.

WALTER SCOTT’S PERSONALITY PARADE

Parade was the first national magazine to run a full-fledged story on Jackie’s secret relationship with Warnecke. The piece appeared in early December 1966, and was titled “Jackie Kennedy, World’s Most Eligible Widow—WILL SHE MARRY AGAIN?” It was written by Lloyd Shearer, a well-connected journalist, who also wrote the magazine’s famous page-two column “Personality Parade” under the pseudonym Walter Scott.*

“The name one hears most frequently in connection with Mrs. Kennedy and romance,” wrote Shearer, “is John Carl Warnecke, 47, the architect in charge of the John F. Kennedy Memorial grave now under construction at Arlington National Cemetery….

“One of Jack Warnecke’s friends in Marin County, Calif., says, They have a lot in common, love of art, architecture, athletics, culture, but I don’t think there’s a thing to it. My own opinion, for what it’s worth, is that Jackie for the first time is enjoying her own freedom, her own identity, indulging in her own tastes too much to give all that up for any guy.’ ”

Jackie and Warnecke were still sleeping with each other, but things were not the same. In conversations with friends, Jackie had begun to drop hints that her feelings for Warnecke had cooled. That may have been part of the reason he was not awarded the design commission for the John F. Kennedy Library. That coveted job would go instead to I. M. Pei, a little-known Chinese-American architect who was recommended by Bunny Mellon.

* When Shearer retired in 1991, the author of this book took over as Waller Scott.

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