Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis: The Untold Story by Barbara Leaming; Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin's Press, $27.99
In the last paragraph of his unflattering best-selling biography of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis 25 years ago, C. David Heymann wrote of his subject as an everlasting mystery. "One question remains: What is Jackie really like? And the answer is: We may never truly know." In her new biography of Jackie, Barbara Leaming suggests she has solved the enigma by showing that after the assassination of her husband Jack, much of her behavior can be explained by the fact that she was suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Leaming lists all the symptoms Jackie exhibited that are telltale signs of PTSD: overwhelming sadness, depression, constant flashbacks and reliving the trauma over and over again, nightmares, negative reactions to noise and crowds, drinking, and thoughts of suicide. Nine months after Dallas, Jackie described herself as "a living wound."
Leaming makes a persuasive case that in the devastating murder of Jack "everything she had painstakingly created and made herself known had been snatched away in an instant." Jackie was tortured by the irrational erroneous obsession that in the 8.5 seconds in-between the first and third shots, she could have saved her husband. Her Chanel dress soaked in blood and holding Jack's brains in her hands, Jackie's life was irrevocably altered.
Leaming's book is not a full-scale biography of Jackie. If you want a detailed, salacious outlay of her entire life, this is not the book to read. Leaming has two short chapters on her background before Jack, another skimpy one on the White House years, but the majority of her analysis focuses on Dallas and the hellish year following the assassination, where in addition to starting a new post-First Lady life as a single mother of two children and being hounded by the media and the public, Jackie had to contend with Pres. Lyndon Johnson's and brother-in-law Robert Kennedy's attempts to use her for political purposes. In that first year, she repeatedly said, "I consider my life over, and will spend the rest of my life waiting for it really to be over." Leaming paints an overall picture of a hard, mostly sad existence: the acrimonious divorce of her parents that drove a wedge between Jackie and her philandering bisexual father Black Jack; a largely (until the last month) unfulfilling marriage to a man often absent, frequently ill, and perpetually unfaithful to the point of humiliation; and the loss of two babies, plus an earlier miscarriage. Then there is the disastrous union with her second husband Aristotle Onassis, and an unsuccessful attempt to provide safety and security for her and her children after Robert Kennedy's assassination sent her fleeing from those awful Dallas memories.
Leaming's depiction is mostly sympathetic, but Jackie is revealed as a real woman with vices, especially emotional coldness, snobbery, and shopaholicism. The widow whose emotional control at Jack's funeral became a symbol of resolute strength that helped heal the country was later branded almost a traitor for deserting America when she moved to Greece with Onassis. It was only toward the final five years of her life that she regained the legend/icon status she enjoyed in the 1960s. By then she had created her own life; become an accomplished book editor; found happiness with another wealthy (though married) man, financier Maurice Templesman; and, with money from Onassis' estate, built her own mansion on Martha's Vineyard.
In 1980 at a New York City dinner party, when asked by gay British poet Stephen Spender what she considered her greatest achievement, Jackie replied, "I think it is that after going through a rather difficult time, I consider myself comparatively sane. I am proud of that." Her victory over the assassination trauma came by her being able to rigidly control her surroundings and her life, a necessary healing element for PTSD according to Leaming. One missing element in her book is the critical role motherhood played in her recovery. Also, Leaming downplays the feminist interpretation of a woman who finally rejected her finishing school Miss Porter's indoctrination of the debutante using her acquired knowledge and graces in service of a rich and successful husband; and began to rely on herself, rather than the older, powerful men who surrounded her with adoring gazes and bulging wallets.
Jackie has always been a gay icon. Certainly her beauty, charm, elegant taste, and diva manner contributed to that status, as did the media who constructed her. She was instrumental in creating the false Camelot image of the Kennedy years and her own role as queen. Twenty-one years after her death from non-Hodgkin's lymphoma (the cancer she couldn't control) at 64, we are still intrigued by this woman, perhaps forever frozen in time, stuck in that lapsed moment of the Zapruder film, condemned to sit forever in that doomed motorcade beside her martyred husband. For all Leaming's claims to having found the tabula rasa to unlock Jackie's aura, she remains a Sphinx. Outside of the post-assassination interviews she gave to Theodore White and William Manchester to help shape posterity's historical assessment of Kennedy, she never spoke to the press, only adding to her mystique. That deafening silence, perhaps standing in for her dead husband, appeals to LGBTQ people, who for many years were shushed up, unable to reveal their true selves.