Just Jackie by Edward Klein Read Free Book Online Page B

bedroom in her home in Hyannis Port. It was an almost exact replica of her bedroom at Merrywood: gambrel roof, patterned wallpaper on the ceiling, bulging scrapbooks. There was even an easel, which Jackie used when she and Caroline painted in the afternoons.
    With only three days to go before she would move into the borrowed Harriman house, Jackie asked her maid Provi Paredes to bring the President’s clothes to the third floor. After Provi put them on racks and laid them out on couches, Jackie looked them over, deciding what to keep and what to give away. It made her even more depressed to see Jack’s things go.
    “I suppose I was in a state of shock, packing up [in the White House],” Jackie said. “But President Johnson made you feel that you and the children [could stay], a great courtesy to a woman in distress…. It’s funny what you do in a state of shock. I remember going over to the Oval Office to ask [President Johnson] to name the space center in Florida Cape Kennedy. Now that I think back on it, that was wrong, and if I’d known [Cape Canaveral]was the name from the time of Columbus, it would be the last thing that Jack would have wanted.
    “The reason I asked was, I can remember this first speech Jack made in Texas … that there would be a rocket one day that would go to the moon. I kept thinking, That’s going to be forgotten, and his dreams are going to be forgotten. I had this terrible fear then that he’d be forgotten.”
    Ever since Jack’s murder, Jackie had been searching for ways to secure his place in history. She had asked her old friend Teddy White to write the authorized account of the death of the President. But White had respectfully declined, as had another Kennedy family favorite, Walter Lord, the author of
A Night to Remember
, the story of the sinking of the
Titanic
, and
Day of Infamy
, an account of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Jackie finally settled on William Manchester, who had won her trust with a fawning book on JFK,
Portrait of a President
. Unlike White and Lord, Manchester was willing to sign an agreement ceding to Jackie and Bobby Kennedy the right to approve his manuscript before it was published. He gave every sign of being a malleable author.
    But Jackie’s desire to art-direct her husband’s death had begun even earlier. It was on the flight back from Dallas that a picture had formed in her mind—a beautiful, brave picture of what Jack’s funeral should look like. She recalled seeing an old woodcut in a bound copy of
Harper’s Weekly
in the White House library that showed the East Room during Lincoln’s funeral.
    She observed parallels between her husband and the assassinated Civil War President. Both were inspiring leaders; both had died victims of hate. She sent instructions to Angier Biddle Duke that she wanted the President “laid out as Lincoln had been,” with the same black cambric fabric. Jack’s funeral was to be a carbon copy of Lincoln’s.
    In the course of his research, Duke learned that beforeLincoln became president, he had lost a child, just as Jack had lost a child when he was a senator. While in the White House, Lincoln had lost a second child, just as Jack had lost Patrick Bouvier. And when Lincoln died, he was buried next to his children at Oak Ridge Cemetery in Springfield, Illinois.
    As Jackie packed away Jack’s things, she decided to follow Lincoln’s example one more time. She made two telephone calls—one to her mother, in Georgetown, and the other to Richard Cardinal Cushing, in Boston.
    Exhume the bodies of my dead children from their graves in New England, she instructed them, and have them reburied beside their father at Arlington National Cemetery.

“WHY, GOD? WHY?”

    J anet Auchincloss was met at Washington National Airport the next morning by Ed Zimny, a veteran World War II aviator. Zimny was used to flying charters for wealthy people, but he was unprepared for Janet, a woman with lovely pink-and-white skin and