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

Nine days before Christmas in 1966, an emotionally distraught Jackie filed suit against Harper & Row, Look, and William Manchester to prevent publication of The Death of a President. No one was more shocked and dismayed by her legal action than Bobby. Jackie had placed him in an untenable position. On the one hand, he could not be seen to be favoring censorship. On the other, he could not abandon his brother’s widow.

He had begged her not to take the case to court. The fact that she had gone ahead anyway was interpreted by some people as a sign that Jackie was struggling to break free of Bobby’s iron control.

The battle of the book pitted Kennedy-lovers against Kennedy-haters, and old friends against each other. James Reston, the influential Washington bureau chief of The New York Times, wrote a column entitled “The Death of Camelot,” in which he portrayed Jackie as an imperious woman who had launched an assault against the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of speech. Reston’s dear friend Teddy White fired back in a letter to the editor of the Times, chastising the columnist for a “rare lapse from excellence,” and praising Jackie for her “great courage and honor.”

Jackie’s action made front-page news all over the world. As New York Times reporter John Corry wrote in his book-length account, The Manchester Affair, it was the stuff of high political drama. It touched on two presidencies—John Kennedy’s and Lyndon Johnson’s—and potentially a third—that of Robert Francis Kennedy.

No one enjoyed the squabble more than Lyndon Johnson. Though he looked robust, LBJ had never entirely recovered from his first heart attack back in the late 1950s, and Lady Bird Johnson feared that the gathering domestic storm over the Vietnam War might prove too much for his health. She was urging him not to run for reelection in 1968.

But Johnson did not want to hand over the White House to his old nemesis, Bobby Kennedy. That was something he dreaded almost as much as a second heart attack. As a result, Johnson, who feared Jackie’s power, handled the Manchester affair with extreme caution.

He asked his White House image consultant, Robert Kintner, the former president of ABC and NBC, to get him an early copy of Manchester’s galley proofs. The thin-skinned Johnson read the book with mounting rage, but he was careful not to say anything that might offend Jackie. On December 16, 1966, LBJ wrote her a letter that dripped with honey:

Lady Bird and I have been distressed to read the press accounts of your unhappiness about the Manchester book. Some of these accounts attribute your concern to passages in the book which are critical or defamatory of us.

If this is so, I want you to know while we deeply appreciate your characteristic kindness and sensitivity, we hope you will not subject yourself to any discomfort or distress on our account.

Jackie replied to LBJ that she had no choice but to sue. But, she went on, “winning … seems a hollow victory—with everything I objected to printed all over the newspapers anyway.”

Before the controversy was over, Manchester would flee to a Swiss sanitarium, where, it was later reported, he suffered a mental breakdown. In January 1967, Jackie reached an out-of-court settlement with her adversaries. She forced Harper & Row, Look, and Manchester to make most of the changes that she wanted. But as she had pointed out to LBJ, it was a Pyrrhic victory. Shortly after the settlement was announced, the New York World Journal Tribune began running a five-part series of articles by Liz Smith under the astonishing headline JACKIE COMES OFF HER PEDESTAL.

“Regardless of whether she was right or wrong,” Liz Smith wrote, “Jackie was not escaping from the highly publicized [Manchester] controversy unscathed. From now on, she would never again appear in the limelight with quite all that queenly dignity intact. Things were being said, innuendos repeated, the very deletions from the book itself being magnified and publicized to the point that it had all badly tarnished the Kennedy halo.”

Like Liz Smith, many people were puzzled by Jackie’s behavior. Why had she risked her spotless reputation to suppress a book? The answer was quite simple: It had never occurred to her that The Death of a President was William Manchester’s property. After all, it was she who had thought up the idea for the book, she who had chosen the author, she who had given him the most important interviews, and she who had made other witnesses available to him. She had put it all together.

In her eyes, Manchester was merely a tool for expressing her vision. When the manuscript of the book failed to reflect her version of things, she felt that she had no choice but to destroy it.

In the end, Jackie hurt herself far more than she hurt the book. It was one of the rare instances in her life when she acted alone, not through the instrument of a powerful male figure.

Women gain power by affiliating themselves with powerful men, her father had taught her.

She would never forget that lesson again.

AN UNABASHED LOVE LETTER

Even as her affair with Warnecke was cooling down, another man with connections to Jackie’s past had been doing his best to woo the former First Lady. His name was Aristotle Onassis.

From the instant he learned of John Kennedy’s assassination, Onassis had lost interest in Lee Radziwill and become obsessed by thoughts of Jackie. As far as he was concerned, she was not only the most famous woman in the whole world, she was the Mount Olympus of women, beyond the reach of mortal men.

Among Greeks, it was considered altogether natural and proper that powerful men should use marriageable women as a way to keep score, and that they should compete with each other to marry these women. If Onassis could win Jackie, he would be elevated in the eyes of his Greek rivals into the pantheon of modern gods. He would also command