quickly and stepped on the gas … if only the Secret Service had stationed agents on the rear bumper … if only
she
had insisted on a bubble-top …if only
she
had turned to her right sooner … if only
she
had done something to save him.
And so, as Jackie later remembered it, she went over and over the last three minutes in the car in Dallas, and there in the flickering shadows of the Eternal Flame, she wondered whether she was the cause of all the ruin and destruction:
What could I have done? How could I have changed it?
FOUR
THE FREAK OF
N STREET
January 1964
“MORE THAN I CAN STAND”
T oward the end of January, Jackie moved out of the Harriman house and into a home of her own, a handsome, three-story Georgian structure at 3017 N Street in Georgetown. At her behest, Billy Baldwin, the famous interior designer, flew down from New York to help her with the decorating.
“Look, I have some beautiful things to show you,” Jackie told Baldwin, producing a few small fragments of Greek and Roman sculpture. “These are the beginnings of a collection Jack started…. It’s so sad to be doing this. Like a young married couple fixing up their first house together. I could never make the White House personal…. Oh, Mr. Baldwin, I’m afraid I’m going to embarrass you. I just can’t hold it any longer.”
She collapsed into a chair, and buried her face in her hands while she wept.
“I know from my very brief acquaintance with you that you are a sympathetic man,” she said after she had recovered her composure. “Do you mind if I tell you something? I know my husband was devoted to me. I know he was proud of me. It took a very long time for us to work everything out, but we did, and we were about to have a real life together. I was going to campaign with him. I know I held a very special place for him—a unique place…. Can anyone understand how it is to have lived in the White House and then, suddenly, to be living alone as the President’s widow?”
Decorating the house helped Jackie begin the long journey back to life. So did the excitement of going out and buying new clothes. She was no longer using Oleg Cassini, the temperamental couturier who had dressed her as First Lady. Once again, she turned for fashion guidance to
Vogue’s
flamboyant editor Diana Vreeland, who had put her together with Cassini in the first place. But as always, Jackie was involved in every detail of her own attire, down to the size of her hats.
“The smaller the better,” she told Vreeland, “as I really do have an enormous head, and anything too extreme always looks ridiculous on me.”
After two months of bleak seclusion, she was ready for company. She invited Benjamin Bradlee and his wife Tony to spend a weekend with her at Wexford, her 166-acre property on Rattlesnake Mountain in Atoka, Virginia, adjoining the Oak Spring estate of Paul and Bunny Mellon.
A secret passageway had been built for the President in Atoka, leading from the master bedroom to a bomb shelter beneath the stables. But Jack and Jackie had stayed at Wexford only two weekends before his death.
Bradlee recalled that he, his wife, and Jackie all tried—with no success—to talk about something other than Jack Kennedy.
“Too soon and too emotional for healing, we proved only that the three of us had very little in common without the essential fourth,” Bradlee wrote in his memoirs. “Only four weeks after the assassination, after the last of these weekends, we received this sad note from the President’s widow.”
Dear Tony and Ben:
Something that you said in the country stunned me so—that you hoped I would marry again.
You were so close to us so many times. There is onething that you must know. I consider that my life is over and that I will spend the rest of it waiting for it really to be over.
With my love,
Jackie
There were other friends in Jackie’s life. During the Kennedy Administration, an informal group consisting of the President,
she
had insisted on a bubble-top …if only
she
had turned to her right sooner … if only
she
had done something to save him.
And so, as Jackie later remembered it, she went over and over the last three minutes in the car in Dallas, and there in the flickering shadows of the Eternal Flame, she wondered whether she was the cause of all the ruin and destruction:
What could I have done? How could I have changed it?
FOUR
THE FREAK OF
N STREET
January 1964
“MORE THAN I CAN STAND”
T oward the end of January, Jackie moved out of the Harriman house and into a home of her own, a handsome, three-story Georgian structure at 3017 N Street in Georgetown. At her behest, Billy Baldwin, the famous interior designer, flew down from New York to help her with the decorating.
“Look, I have some beautiful things to show you,” Jackie told Baldwin, producing a few small fragments of Greek and Roman sculpture. “These are the beginnings of a collection Jack started…. It’s so sad to be doing this. Like a young married couple fixing up their first house together. I could never make the White House personal…. Oh, Mr. Baldwin, I’m afraid I’m going to embarrass you. I just can’t hold it any longer.”
She collapsed into a chair, and buried her face in her hands while she wept.
“I know from my very brief acquaintance with you that you are a sympathetic man,” she said after she had recovered her composure. “Do you mind if I tell you something? I know my husband was devoted to me. I know he was proud of me. It took a very long time for us to work everything out, but we did, and we were about to have a real life together. I was going to campaign with him. I know I held a very special place for him—a unique place…. Can anyone understand how it is to have lived in the White House and then, suddenly, to be living alone as the President’s widow?”
Decorating the house helped Jackie begin the long journey back to life. So did the excitement of going out and buying new clothes. She was no longer using Oleg Cassini, the temperamental couturier who had dressed her as First Lady. Once again, she turned for fashion guidance to
Vogue’s
flamboyant editor Diana Vreeland, who had put her together with Cassini in the first place. But as always, Jackie was involved in every detail of her own attire, down to the size of her hats.
“The smaller the better,” she told Vreeland, “as I really do have an enormous head, and anything too extreme always looks ridiculous on me.”
After two months of bleak seclusion, she was ready for company. She invited Benjamin Bradlee and his wife Tony to spend a weekend with her at Wexford, her 166-acre property on Rattlesnake Mountain in Atoka, Virginia, adjoining the Oak Spring estate of Paul and Bunny Mellon.
A secret passageway had been built for the President in Atoka, leading from the master bedroom to a bomb shelter beneath the stables. But Jack and Jackie had stayed at Wexford only two weekends before his death.
Bradlee recalled that he, his wife, and Jackie all tried—with no success—to talk about something other than Jack Kennedy.
“Too soon and too emotional for healing, we proved only that the three of us had very little in common without the essential fourth,” Bradlee wrote in his memoirs. “Only four weeks after the assassination, after the last of these weekends, we received this sad note from the President’s widow.”
Dear Tony and Ben:
Something that you said in the country stunned me so—that you hoped I would marry again.
You were so close to us so many times. There is onething that you must know. I consider that my life is over and that I will spend the rest of it waiting for it really to be over.
With my love,
Jackie
There were other friends in Jackie’s life. During the Kennedy Administration, an informal group consisting of the President,
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