The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [455]
That summer he was sitting at mass one Sunday at St. Francis Xavier Church in Hyannis when he turned to the three White House correspondents sitting behind him. “Did you ever think if someone took a shot at me, he would probably get one of you first?” Kennedy asked. It was classic Kennedy irony, but clearly the president had been thinking about assassination.
A tragedy does not by itself bring people together, bur it allows those affected to display a humanity, generosity, and vulnerability that they may not usually expose. This was as true for the president and first lady as for anyone else, and out of Patrick’s death came a marriage they had never had before. “Jack was one of these men who was incapable of being loyal to one woman,” reflected Feldman. “But in the last year of their marriage, he cared for her as he had not before, and they had a closeness they had not had before.”
Their friends looked on as Kennedy displayed a gentle tenderness toward his grieving wife. “I think that Jack and Jackie both had their own particular problems,” reflected Betty Spalding, who often talked with both of them. “She had the same emotional blocks and limitations that Jack had, but they were both growing up emotionally. They were catching up. Their relationship was getting better and better.”
In September, Jackie was invited to go along with her sister, Lee Radziwill, for a cruise on Aristotle Onassis’s 303-foot yacht, the Christina. The president felt nothing but disdain for the Greek shipping magnate who had been indicted for his business manipulations. When Kennedy returned from his European trip, there had been an exquisite model ship sitting outside the Oval Office. It was the kind of object that Kennedy immensely admired, but when he asked who had given him this marvelous gift, his secretary had not completed Onassis’s full name before Kennedy ordered, “Take that out of here.”
The president clearly would have preferred not to have his wife sailing around the Mediterranean with Onassis, but there was no other luxury yacht in the world like the Christina, and he figured it was just the tonic that Jackie might need before facing the rigors of his reelection. To keep up a pretense that the journey had some other purpose than amusement, and to watch over his wife, he asked Franklin Roosevelt Jr., his undersecretary of Commerce, and his wife, Suzanne, to go along.
Kennedy was consumed enough by the idea of his wife going off with the Greek magnate that while staying at the Carlyle Hotel on September 20, he doodled on a notepad “Jackie—Onassis.” Nine days later he drafted the precise words of a press release that Pierre Salinger was to read at his press briefing the following noon. “The yacht has been secured by Prince Radziwill for this cruise from her owner, Aristotle Onassis,” Kennedy wrote, a statement that was both untrue and unkind.
Jackie sailed off on October 5 from Athens, along with a crew of sixty, including two coiffeurs and a dance band. The ship had hardly left port when the previously sacrosanct Jackie became the subject of criticism. Was it “improper for the wife of the president … to accept [Onassis’s] lavish hospitality?” asked Congressman Oliver Bolton, an Ohio Republican. With his reelection campaign less than a year away, Kennedy was attuned to even the most subdued criticism. He knew that the Republicans would attempt to create an image of the White House, in the words of the GOP national chairman, as a scene of “twisting in the historic East Ballroom … [and] all-night parties in foreign lands.”
“Well, why did you let Jackie go with Onassis?” Kennedy was asked at a private party while the boat sailed the Aegean, bad publicity traveling in its wake.
“Jackie has my blessing to go anywhere that will make her feel better,” he