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

him on the trip to Texas. Now, Bobby played the same guilt card.

According to what he and Jackie told their friends later, their exchange was less like a conversation than an interrogation.

“Why Onassis?” Bobby asked. “Can you give me one good reason why him out of all the men you have to choose from?”

“You know I’ve always talked about going to the Mediterranean to stay,” Jackie answered. “Ari is there. The moment is there.”

“I guess he’s a family weakness,” Bobby said, alluding to Lee’s earlier liaison with Ari. “He is a complete rogue on a grand scale.”

Jackie protested. Bobby didn’t know Ari. He was a kind and generous man. He was wonderful with her children.

“Even if that’s true,” Bobby said, “what’s the big rush?”

“Who said there was a rush?” Jackie said.

“Couldn’t you wait at least until after the election before making any public announcement about your future plans?” Bobby asked.

“Of course I can,” Jackie said. “It’s just something I have in mind.”

“Good,” said Bobby. “Then let it wait. Just let it wait.”

“All right,” Jackie said. “I’ll just let it wait.”

“And how about coming out of your retirement from public life to campaign for me?” Bobby asked.

“Sure, Bobby,” Jackie said. “I’ll go wherever you want.”

“THE LAST LINK”

Shortly after ten o’clock on the morning of June 6, 1968, Ari received word in London that Robert Kennedy had been assassinated in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Ari picked up the phone and called Costa Gratsos in New York.

“She’s free of the Kennedys,” Ari said. “The last link just broke.”

“Ari had always taken what he wanted,” recalled Gratsos, “and for the first time in his life he had come up against a younger man who was as tough, competitive, and determined as he was. And now that man was dead.”

But Ari was a Greek, and Greeks did not believe in happy endings.

“Another assassination might just double their [the Kennedys’] right of veto over Jackie’s life,” he said.

There was no time to lose. Ari flew to Los Angeles to comfort Jackie, then flew back with her to New York to attend Robert Kennedy’s funeral at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

“I called out her name and put out my hand,” said Lady Bird Johnson of her encounter with Jackie at the conclusion of the mass at St. Patrick’s. “She looked at me as if from a great distance, as though I were an apparition.”

THE ONLY ONE WHO COULD HAVE STOPPED HER

The funeral train that carried Bobby’s remains from New York to Washington was packed with eleven hundred invited guests. Many of them got drunk during the eight-hour movable Irish wake. Only a select few were allowed into the hushed precincts of Jackie’s private Pullman car. They went there to give her hand a gentle pat and say a few words of condolence. But they came away profoundly disturbed by the person they met.

Jackie was not the same brave young woman who had impressed the world with her flawless performance after the death of President Kennedy. She had lost her grip on reality. She rambled on incoherently, sounding as though she thought she was still the First Lady. She seemed unsure who was going to be buried today—Bobby or Jack.

Bobby’s death had deranged her. She blamed herself for persuading Bobby to stay in public life and run for office. It was her idea that he put himself in harm’s way. It was her fault that they had killed him.

One of the guests on the train, Frank Mankiewicz, Bobby’s press secretary, recalled a conversation he had with Jackie at the Los Angeles hospital where Bobby died. Jackie could talk of nothing but death.

“The Church is … at its best only at the time of death,” Jackie told him. “The rest of the time it’s often rather silly little men running around in their black suits. But the Catholic Church understands death. I’ll tell you who else understands death are the black churches. I remember at the funeral of Martin Luther King. I was looking at those faces, and I realized that they know death. They see it all the time, and they’re ready for it… in the way in which a good Catholic is…. We know death…. As a matter of fact, if it weren’t for the children, we’d welcome it.”

Night had fallen by the time the funeral train arrived in Washington. The mourners, carrying twinkling candles, followed the coffin into Arlington National Cemetery.

“The cemetery itself was dark and shadowed,” wrote the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. “The pallbearers, not sure where to place the coffin, walked on uncertainly in the night.”

At the graveside, the priest picked up a handful of earth and began saying the prayers. A few minutes later, the sound of the earth striking the lid of Bobby’s coffin snapped Jackie out of her delusional state. Suddenly she was no longer confused about whose corpse was in the coffin. It was the body of the one she had truly cared for. The one she had loved. It was Bobby. His death made her more angry than sad.

“If America ever had a claim on her after Jack’s death,” wrote Willi Frischauer, a friend of Aristotle Onassis’s, “that claim was now forfeited. If she ever had any doubt or obligation to consider the impact of her action on the political prospects of the Kennedys, they were resolved by the shots that ended Bobby’s life. For her, escape was the only way out. Jackie was shedding the Kennedy shackles … her decision to marry Onassis was made at the grave of Robert F. Kennedy.”

SOME KIND OF STATEMENT

On the morning of October 15, 1968, Pierre Salinger, the master political spin doctor who had served as JFK’s press secretary, received a call in his Washington office from Steve Smith.

“I need to see you right away,” Smith told Salinger.

Smart and ruthless, Smith was the Kennedy son-in-law who had been tapped to run the family