Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [173]
White would remember her appearance vividly. She wore trim slacks and a beige pullover sweater. Yet it was her eyes he most recalled. “They were wider than pools.” She was, of course, beautiful. Her voice, as she spoke to him, was low, and what she said seemed to offer almost total recall.
Jacqueline talked and talked for nearly four hours. Her companion was mesmerized and could barely write fast enough. The story that ran in Life was a careful selection from what she told him. He’d been summoned in a situation of the utmost distress as a respected journalist. But he was also a friend, and his instinct was to protect this woman whom he cared about when he dictated on deadline during those first hours of Saturday morning. She was listening to his every word as he called it in, he would confess years later, and she’d pushed hard for the idea of Jack Kennedy’s presidency being like Camelot.
Not surprisingly, what was left out of White’s story was far more fascinating than the narrative she’d designed. Her monologue had been simultaneously art and accident, and White was an expert assembler of information. But when you see his actual notes, the raw material, what you find is telling.
The piece quotes her as saying to White that “men are a combination of good and bad.” Yet it isn’t, in fact, how she’d phrased it. “Comb. of bad and good” is what sits there in White’s scribbled notes. Why would he transpose it for the magazine? Why did he transcribe it correctly later on? “His mother never really loved him,” she said, and that, too, is in the typescript of the handwritten interview, but again, not in the article. “She likes to go around talking about being the daughter of the mayor of Boston, of how she’s the ambassador’s wife. She didn’t love him,” Jackie had repeated.
She wanted to explain Jack Kennedy, not as a president, not as a husband, but as a man. It may not have been what she thought she intended, but it was what gripped her. “History made him what he was. He sat and read history.” She mentioned his scarlet fever. “This little boy in bed, so much of the time. All the time he was in bed, this little boy was reading history, was reading Marlborough. He devoured the Knights of the Round Table. And he just loved that last song.”
She was talking about Camelot now, the musical that was a hit on Broadway. The final song was the reprise of “Camelot,” and in it was the image that soon came to haunt a nation: “Don’t let it be forgot that once there was a spot / for one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot.”
Here are more of White’s raw notes, jotted quickly as he tried to keep up with her: “History is what made Jack. He was such a simple man. He was complex, too. He had that hero, idealistic side, but then he had that other side, the pragmatic side. His friends were all his old friends. He loved his Irish mafia.” She knew his compartmentalized way of living better than anyone.
She also said this: “And then I thought, I mustn’t think that bad way. If history made Jack that way, made him see heroes, then other little boys will see.” In the shock of tragedy, she was telling her husband’s story, as she put it, both the “bad and good.”
Aided and abetted by Jackie Kennedy, White produced a thrilling evocation of the fallen president, bringing home the immense loss. Around the world, everyone old enough to this day remembers exactly where they were when they heard the news of the assassination. When the story ran, the readers of Life, and then millions more, accepted his widow’s vision; they took to their hearts the notion of Camelot—that vanished, shining place presided over by a noble, merry hero.
It was her gift to him. She’d wanted only two monuments to her husband. First, there would be an eternal flame to mark his grave at Arlington National Cemetery. She told White about how, driving across Memorial Bridge to Virginia at night, you can see the Lee Mansion lit up on the side of the hill from “miles and miles away.” When Caroline was little, she said, that immense white building