Just Jackie (11 page)

In the months after Dallas, when Jackie was at her most vulnerable, Bunny gained a great deal of control over her. Jackie tried to please Bunny, as she had once
tried to please her mother, and she frequently asked Bunny for advice. One question that weighed heavily on Jackie’s mind was whether she would ever be able to shake off her melancholy, and feel pleasure again.

She talked this over with Bunny, and they agreed that she would eventually recover. But a life of refined pleasure, such as Bunny’s, required a great deal of money. And, of course, a very rich husband.

“I wrote Ben and Tony Bradlee that I would never marry again,” Jackie said to Bunny. “Do you think what I said was right? That I will never want to marry again?”

Before Bunny had a chance to answer, Lee broke in.

“Jacks,” she said, “I see no reason why you would ever want to marry again. You have already had a great love affair with a wonderful man. You have children. You have already had everything—love, romance, and all that marriage can offer. Why would you ever want to marry again?”

“W
hile we were in Antigua over Easter, Jackie and Bobby were as close as you can get,” said Chuck Spalding. “What do I mean by that? Just anything you want to make of it.”

One person who did not know what to make of it was Clint Hill. The Secret Service agent’s nerves were shot, but he insisted on accompanying Jackie to Antigua anyway. He never let her out of his sight, and what he saw,
day after day, was the spectacle of Jackie clinging to Bobby like a moonstruck lover.

One time, after they had waterskied on Nonesuch Bay, Jackie threw her arms around Bobby’s neck and hugged and kissed him. Another time, on Mill Reef Beach, they strolled arm in arm, heads together, reading aloud to each other from a copy of one of Jackie’s favorite books, Edith Hamilton’s classic study of ancient Greece,
The Greek Way
.

“I’d read it quite a lot before, and I brought it with me,” Jackie said. “So I gave it to him and I remember he’d disappear. He’d be in his room an awful lot of the time … reading that and underlining things.”

Bobby was seeking solace in ancient Greek literature, and he compared his underlined passages with Jackie’s. His favorite, which reflected the anguish he was suffering over the loss of his brother, came from Aeschylus’s
Agamemnon:

Bobby exhibited all the classic symptoms of a severe depression. He had trouble sleeping at night, and was preoccupied with thoughts of death. He appeared physically diminished by his brother’s assassination, as though he had actually shrunk. He was forever wearing Jack’s old garments, as if he was trying to grow into his brother’s clothes.

Deep creases were etched across his forehead and down the sides of his mouth. His thick mop of hair was suddenly splashed with gray. His blue eyes, which had once seemed so bright and steely, were now dimmed by sadness. There was a tentative quality to the way he
talked. He groped for words, unable to express the things he felt.

“[A] large part of Robert Kennedy’s agony stemmed from his fear that one of his campaigns—whether organized crime, union racketeers, Castro, or white supremacists, or right-wing forces within the government itself—had invited retaliation upon his brother,” writes James W. Hilty, a Bobby biographer.

“I thought they would get one of us,” Bobby confessed to a friend on the afternoon of the assassination. “But Jack, after all he’d been through, never worried about it. … I thought it would be me.”

Guilt weighed heavily on Bobby, and he lost his old vigor and zest for life. He had trouble keeping up with Jackie on the beach, because he had recently injured a leg in a touch football game at the Florida home of Treasury Secretary C. Douglas Dillon.

“It was the roughest, wildest game I have ever seen,” Pierre Salinger, JFK’s press secretary, recalled. “Everybody was trying to get the hate and the anger out of their system. There had never been anything like it at Hyannis Port, Hickory Hill, or anywhere else. Bobby was absolutely relentless. He attacked the man with the ball like a tiger, slamming, bruising, and crushing, and so did everyone else. One guy broke a leg, and you couldn’t count the bloody noses and contusions. It was murder. I was never so battered in a game before. For a week I could hardly walk. Every bone in my body hurt.”

Bobby’s adjustment to life after Jack was eased by the attention he showered on Jackie and her children. It helped him get out of himself. He talked to Caroline and John about the greatness of their father. He took Jackie with him wherever he went. In February, she had accompanied him to the Waldorf Towers in New York City for a visit with ex-President Herbert Hoover.

“Bobby bossed his sister-in-law around, and said,
‘Jackie, sit there,’ ‘Jackie, do this,’ ‘Jackie, do that,’ “ Hoover’s nurse said.

Bobby had always been a commanding presence in Jackie’s life. He was the best man at her wedding in 1953. He was at her side three years later when Jackie had a stillbirth, and Jack could not be found on the yacht he had chartered in the Mediterranean. Bobby was at Andrews Air Force Base in Washington in November when Jackie brought Jack’s body back from Dallas. He put an arm around her and said quietly, “I’m here, Jackie.”

“Bobby’s the one I’d most gladly put my hand in the fire for,” Jackie said. “I wish Bobby were an amoeba, so he could divide in two…. He’s always there—helpful, willing … a blessing.”

All the sympathy, guilt, and hope that people felt for the dead President were now focused on Bobby. He was the repository of the Kennedy mystique, what Jackie called Camelot. High public office was available to him, though not the one he wanted the most, the vice presidency. Lyndon Johnson made sure of that. In order to avoid having Bobby on his ticket in 1964, the new President announced his intention to bypass all the members of his cabinet for the position.

Richard Goodwin, who was now writing speeches for LBJ, told Bobby, “If Johnson had to choose between you and Ho Chi Minh as a running mate, he’d go with Ho Chi Minh.”

Aloof, shy, and a poor public speaker, Bobby was not a natural politician. He was once described as “the least poised, the least articulate, and the least extroverted of the Kennedy brothers.” His high-strung personality, with its flashes of ruthlessness, seemed better suited to dark, smoke-filled rooms than to the bright lights of television. In Antigua, he talked with Jackie about retiring from the public arena.

She begged him not to quit, arguing that the country needed him now more than ever. As they talked, Bobby
slowly came around to Jackie’s way of thinking. He told her that there was an opening for a Senate seat from New York. But he would have to establish his legal residence in the state. Jackie could not imagine living away from Bobby, and he urged her to follow him to New York if he made the move.

There were many who thought that Jackie secretly wished to replace Jack with Bobby. And it was true that if Bobby could have been divided in two, Jackie might have considered marrying the half that was allotted to her. But Bobby was not divisible; he was singularly devoted to his wife Ethel, who had just received the news that she was pregnant with number nine—tying Rose Kennedy’s record for childbearing.

Until the assassination, it was Ethel, not Jackie, who was the center of Bobby’s emotional life. But Ethel had stayed behind in Stowe, Vermont, skiing with her children, while Bobby flew down to Antigua to be with Jackie.

“Well, what are you going to do about it?” Bobby’s sister Eunice asked Ethel. “He’s spending an awful lot of time with the widder.”

A small court of friends gathered around Ethel to lend support. It was composed of such Washington social stalwarts as Martha Bartlett and Joan Braden, who resented Jackie’s husband-stealing ways. The Bobby-Jackie-Ethel triangle became the talk of the nation’s capital.

“I was aware of the appearances,” said the columnist Charles Bartlett, a great friend of the Kennedy family, who had introduced Jackie to Jack. “I don’t understand why Bobby wasn’t more concerned about appearances. This wasn’t the Bobby that I knew. I knew a Bobby who was pure, while everyone else was playing around.”

“I don’t know if [Bobby] became infatuated or not,” said Paul “Red” Fay, Jack Kennedy’s old PT-boat buddy from World War Two. “[Jackie’s] a fascinating woman. If
she’d throw her charm at you, why, you’d be emotionally swayed.”

Was it possible that in their grief and crushing sorrow Jackie and Bobby had fallen in love? Were they sleeping with each other? Was Bobby the Lancelot in Jackie’s Camelot?

Many people believed that when it came to understanding the Kennedys, you had to forget all the ordinary rules of behavior. In this view, the Kennedys did exactly as they pleased, and their family motto should have been: If you want to—why not?

This attitude did not sit well with J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI, who knew that any dirt he could dig up on Robert Kennedy would be welcomed by the new man in the White House, Lyndon Johnson. Hoover had FBI memoranda in his private files linking Bobby to Marilyn Monroe. Unfortunately for Hoover, the source of those rumors proved to be totally unreliable.

Nonetheless, Hoover sicced his agents on Jackie and Bobby. After weeks of surveillance, the agents came up empty-handed. There was not a single incriminating note or memo about Bobby’s relationship with Jackie in Hoover’s bulging files.

“I was talking to Bobby one day about Jackie,” said his friend, the journalist Murray Kempton. “I was saying something—it wasn’t a probing question—and Bobby said in that sad voice of his, ‘Oh, she’ll never be happy.’ You can say that about someone with whom you’ve slept. But that’s one thing I could not imagine Bobby doing—knowing how he felt about his brother—that he would sleep with his widow. To the extent that he was a very Catholic person, I think he would regard it as a cardinal sin.”

One person who had a chance to study the subject at close hand was the author William Manchester, who was writing the authorized account of the assassination.

“When I flew to Washington … for preliminary discussions
with Bobby at the Justice Department, I was shocked by his appearance,” recalled Manchester. “I have never seen a man with less resilience. Much of the time he seemed to be in a trance, staring off into space, his face a study in grief.

“Bob said of the book that the family was anxious to avoid flamboyance and commercialism,” Manchester continued. “I replied that he should let me know what was acceptable to him. I did suggest that since the project had apparently originated with Mrs. Kennedy, it might be wise for me to discuss it directly with her. That would be unnecessary, he answered; he represented her.”

To Manchester, it seemed clear that Bobby and Jackie were enveloped in some kind of love relationship. Each recognized in the other his or her soul’s counterpart. They were both recovering from a terrible trauma, slowly coming back to life, and if love was the exquisite pain one felt for being truly alive, then Jackie and Bobby felt that emotion.

But that was a long way from sexual consummation. Manchester was a student of the Middle Ages, and the behavior of Jackie and Bobby reminded him of medieval courtly love—passionate but chaste.

What was more, Bobby was not the type to carry on an extramarital affair. He had once planned to enter the priesthood, and he had a Catholic sense of right and wrong. His fierce self-righteousness had led him to become a prosecutor. Any overt sexual act with his dead brother’s wife would have been antithetical to his nature.

“The difference between the brothers was that Jack had a voracious sexual appetite, while Bobby was the exact opposite,” said Manchester. “He channeled all of his sexual energies into his marriage with Ethel. An affair with Jackie would have been a violation of every moral fiber in Bobby’s character. It would have been a desecration of his brother’s memory.”