Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis: The Untold Story

by Barbara Leaming Narrated by Eliza Foss

Overview

The untold story of how one woman's life was changed forever in a matter of seconds by a horrific trauma.

Barbara Leaming's extraordinary and deeply sensitive biography is the first book to document Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis' brutal, lonely and valiant thirty-one year struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) that followed JFK's assassination.

Here is the woman as she has never been seen before. In heartrending detail, we witness a struggle that unfolded at times before our own eyes, but which we failed to understand.

Leaming's biography also makes clear the pattern of Jackie's life as a whole. We see how a spirited young woman's rejection of a predictable life led her to John F. Kennedy and the White House, how she sought to reconcile the conflicts of her marriage and the role she was to play, and how the trauma of her husband's murder which left her soaked in his blood and brains led her to seek a very different kind of life from the one she'd previously sought.

A life story that has been scrutinized countless times, seen here for the first time as the serious and important story that it is. A story for our times at a moment when we as a nation need more than ever to understand the impact of trauma.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

09/01/2014
Much has been written about J.F.K.’s first lady, who was generational icon, but Leaming (Churchill Defiant) approaches Jackie’s story from a new perspective, contending that she suffered from PTSD, with all of its recurrent triggers and episodes. The first half of book focuses on Jackie’s early life and marriage; the second half is an examination of Jackie suffering in the wake of her husband’s traumatic assassination. Leaming explains Jackie’s behavior and reactions to specific events through the lens of contemporary knowledge about human reactions to trauma. For instance, her marriage to Aristotle Onassis is explained in terms of what it provided for her for a short time: safety. The possibility that Jackie had PTSD was first suggested in a letter from U.K. Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. Leaming draws the parallels between what Jackie went through and the cases of others who experienced trauma. Well-written and engaging, the book presents readers with yet another facet of a woman who has intrigued and beguiled the public for decades. (Nov.)

From the Publisher

Provocative.... Recast in this light, Jackie's post-1963 actions make a new kind of sense.... With a diagnosis of PTSD in mind, incidents once criticized as selfish or at least self-indulgent can be reassessed.” —USA Today

“An intimate and revealing look at one of the 20th century's most remarkable—and misunderstood—women.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis provides suggestive evidence that her subject suffered from the clinical symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, including flashbacks, insomnia, numbness, avoidance, fear, depression, and anger. ... Her documentation — which includes Jackie's remarks to intimates, as well as her behavior — is compelling. Interpreting the post-assassination life through the lens of PTSD turns out to be a fruitful way of making sense of Jackie's sometimes odd-seeming choices.” —The Boston Globe

“Barbara Leaming offers a startling and fascinating look at Jackie's life. ... Sensitive and stylish, intimate and insightful.... At once harrowing and humane, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis stands as a deeply moving narrative.” —Richmond Times-Dispatch

“Both refreshing and uniquely insightful.” —Maclean's

“Successfully provides a fresh perspective on the widow of assassinated U.S. president John F. Kennedy....Award-winning biographer Barbara Leaming's take on Kennedy Onassis is well-written and thoroughly researched. ... Leaming's new biography brings her back to life in an important new light.” —Winnipeg Free Press

“Barbara Leaming makes a strong argument, based on original research, that Jackie suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) at a time before the condition had been diagnosed.” —Bookpage

FEBRUARY 2015 - AudioFile

Mrs. Onassis’s life story is thoroughly explored in this lengthy work. Leaming’s highly specific approach is to explain her post-presidential-assassination years within the framework of post-traumatic stress disorder, from which the author believes Mrs. Onassis suffered. Eliza Foss’s narration is workmanlike and pleasant to the ears; however, it lacks emotion and enthusiasm. Furthermore, the author’s narrow view of her subject wears thin and becomes repetitive, which creates an additional challenge for Foss. Her tone is erudite while the writing itself is conversational in style. This mismatch becomes grating at times. Those intrigued by even a hypothetical approach to explaining the mysteries of the former first lady will likely enjoy this. For others, it may be one biography to skip. W.A.G. © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

2014-08-11
A best-selling biographer chronicles the fabled life of Jackie Kennedy (1929-1994) and advances the claim that the former first lady spent the bulk of her post-Camelot life battling PTSD.Jacqueline Bouvier seemed to have it all: an upper-crust upbringing and personal and social connections to the most elite families in America. Yet when the time came for her to wed, she was determined to escape "the bland predictability" of a high-society marriage that would require little else of her but to cater to the needs of a well-heeled husband. She met her match in "bad boy" John Kennedy, who she believed was her ticket to all the excitement she could ever want. JFK's larger-than-life ambition brought the young couple international fame, but it also forced an essentially private woman to endure the brutal glare of the media spotlight and gradually transformed a dream into a nightmare long before JFK's murder. Beset by personal difficulties, including two infant deaths and a foundering marriage, the assassination—to which she bore bloody witness—was the final straw. Leaming (Churchill Defiant: Fighting On 1945-1955, 2010, etc.) reveals that Jackie suffered from all the hallmarks of PTSD: sleep disturbances, obsessive ruminations about her husband's murder and even thoughts of suicide. The assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and her beloved brother-in-law, Robert, in 1968 became triggers for even more psychological instability and led her to wed Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, who she falsely believed would provide her the safety and distance she craved. Hounded by paparazzi and reviled by an American public eager to forget the historical traumas of the 1960s, Jackie nevertheless managed to build a life for herself on her own terms—rather than those dictated to her by her class—and emerge from tragedy, permanently wounded but "comparatively sane." An intimate and revealing look at one of the 20th century's most remarkable—and misunderstood—women.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940172183904
Publisher:	Macmillan Audio
Publication date:	10/28/2014
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis

The Untold Story

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By Barbara Leaming

St. Martin's Press

Copyright © 2014 Barbara Leaming
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-250-01764-2

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CHAPTER 1

At a cocktail party in Newport, Rhode Island, in the waning summer of 1945, a loquacious college boy was delivering a chest-thumping monologue to a frizzy-haired, snub-nosed sixteen-year-old named Jacqueline Bouvier. As the young man talked on, her wide-set hazel eyes settled on his face. Jackie, as she was known, allowed him to speak without interruption, but at intervals she nodded to signal that she understood him and the many important things he had to tell her. An observer of the scene would have had no reason to surmise that the quiet, worshipful beneficiary of the collegian's wisdom had information and strong opinions of her own about his theme. Jackie was only just discovering boys that year, but she already understood that it was her duty to ensure that he enjoyed himself immensely and had no inkling of what she actually knew or thought.

The boy's subject was Marshal Philippe Pétain, the former head of the collaborationist Vichy government. When, in the last days of World War II, a French court sentenced Pétain to face a firing squad, the provisional government's president, General Charles de Gaulle, had moved swiftly and controversially to commute the sentence to life imprisonment, in the interest of relegating the war to the past as soon and as much as possible.

A similar determination to get on with life animated the reopening of Newport society's marriage market eleven days after Japan surrendered unconditionally following the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. At the time, young men in military uniform were everywhere to be seen throughout the moneyed American resort, presaging a whole series of Newport debutantes' marriages to returning soldiers. Immediately, the expansive spirit of the first grand-scale debut party since before Pearl Harbor carried over to other gatherings of the Newport tribe in the final days of August and early September, before the rich summer residents—along with those less fortunate souls who, having no money of their own, lived and maneuvered among them—dispersed for the winter.

It was at one such gathering that Jackie Bouvier was treated to the lecture on the Pétain affair. As it happened, the college boy had had the misfortune to speak of matters she probably knew a good deal more about than he. When Jackie was eleven, her paternal grandfather had dedicated to his ten grandchildren a privately printed family history asserting that the American Bouviers were descended from French nobility. The claim would later prove to have been fraudulent, but it had a tremendous impact on her nonetheless. She was a child who loved to escape into her books, and now French history had become not just reading to her, but a source of personal identity, a guarantee of her own specialness and superiority, consolation for the indignities of a daily life where money was not always as plentiful and one's parents' behavior not always as spotless as one might wish. When the Vichy regime signed an armistice with Hitler in 1940, de Gaulle, speaking on BBC Radio from the sanctuary of London, had urged his countrymen to resist. The broadcast provoked Pétain, the idol of de Gaulle's youth, to charge de Gaulle with treason and threaten him with death. Impressed by de Gaulle's staunch refusal to accept defeat, little Jackie Bouvier seized on him as her hero. For five years, she avidly followed him in newspaper accounts. She named her poodle "Gaullie" in his honor.

Yet when the young man at the cocktail party held forth, she did what most sensible, well-brought-up girls who hoped to win the Newport matrimonial sweepstakes circa 1945 would have done. The point was to seem bright enough to interest a man but not so bright as to imperil his ego. So Jackie played her part and said nothing. Afterward, her only outlet was to vent her frustration in the form of mockery when she recounted the episode to a female friend: "He sounded like a little boy who's just read a big book and is having a lovely time expounding it all to a little country urchin without really knowing what it was all about. I wanted to give him a big maternal kiss on the cheek and tell him he was really a big boy now!"

The author of those spiky sentences delighted in being very different from the shy, timid girl, in her own phrase petrified of everything, who had first appeared in Newport two years before, after her mother, Janet Lee Bouvier, married investment banker and Standard Oil heir Hugh D. Auchincloss Jr. Previously, the dissolution of Janet's marriage to Jackie's father, John "Black Jack" Bouvier, a stockbroker with a Social Register background, had been prominently chronicled in the tabloid press under the headline "Society Broker Sued for Divorce." Accompanying the article, which documented a pattern of infidelity on Mr. Bouvier's part, had been a photograph of small-boned Janet and her daughters, Jackie and little Lee. It was not the first time Jackie and her mother had made news. Both were ribbon-winning equestriennes, and prior accounts had spotlighted their accomplishments in the riding ring. Now this new coverage seemed to chip away at the idealized public image to expose the ugly family reality beneath. Taunted by classmates at the private day school she attended in New York at the time and teased by certain of her Bouvier cousins, Jackie reacted to the publicity as if she had been flayed alive. In the aftermath of the ordeal, she became secretive, withdrawn, willfully impossible to read or know. The summer of 1945 was important to her for a number of reasons, not least her newfound popularity among the boys of Newport. It was certainly not that Jackie, who had oddly broad features, a splash of freckles across her nose and under both eyes, and disproportionately large hands and feet, was prettier than her female contemporaries, only that in a world where most of the young people had known one another all their lives, she suggested a flavor the boys had not tasted before.

On her return to boarding school, Miss Porter's in Farmington, Connecticut, two of those boys wrote repeatedly to her from Harvard. Jackie judged that her replies had better be "devastatingly witty." She also calculated that since her correspondents knew each other well and belonged to the same college social club, the Owl, it was necessary to compose entirely different letters to each. This required a good deal of labor on her part. Half in earnest and half in jest, she was soon bemoaning the agony she had to endure drafting separate missives to nineteen-year-old John Sterling and twenty-year-old R. Beverley Corbin Jr. Despite her laments, both boys struck her as tremendously appealing. John Sterling was the son of a distinguished career diplomat and former U.S. ambassador to Sweden, Bev Corbin of an attorney who was also the president of Bailey's Beach in Newport. When she was with him, she loved talking to John, who was smart and interesting and had actually seen a bit of the world. The problem, by her own account, was that she was not physically attracted to him. With Bev, by contrast, it was "all physical."

Jackie found Bev shallow and was ashamed of liking him as much as she did, but there it was. She acknowledged that some of her friends, mystified by what she saw in Bev, had begun to look at her as though she were insane or had "queer glands." "I'm beginning to think so myself!" she declared. Neither fellow had kissed her yet. Jackie said she would love it if Bev tried, but would "upchuck" if it were John. Still, on paper John enjoyed a distinct advantage. While Bev's letters tended to be ordinary, John's were clever and funny. In Jackie's own letters, instead of the backbiting about mutual friends and acquaintances she might have indulged in had her correspondent been a girl, it seemed wiser to reserve her venom for prison, as she referred to her boarding school and the quiet, conservative New England town where its porticoed white-clapboard dormitories were set. "If schooldays are the happiest days of your life," she deadpanned to Bev, "I'm hanging myself with my skip-rope tonight."

Sarah Porter, who established the school in 1843, never married, yet she had persisted in regarding marriage as a woman's fitting and proper state. A century after its founding, Miss Porter's endeavored to prepare young women, most of them Wasp and rich, for essentially the same lives their mothers had led. In 1945, as in Sarah Porter's time, it was the purpose of a woman's education to make her a more pleasing companion to her husband. In important ways, Jackie Bouvier (though Catholic and relatively poor) was the model Farmington girl. She rode, she wrote, she sketched. She read widely and acted in school plays. She was by turns hardy and graceful, pragmatic and romantic, serious and fey. She did not question the assumption that it should be her goal in life to marry becomingly. She did not doubt that one lived through a man and that without him there could be nothing. At the same time, her caustic remarks about Farmington suggest that she was beginning to sense she might want something more than was on offer.

Meanwhile, she looked forward to a reprieve from routine when she had a chance to attend the Harvard-Yale game in the company of both the Interesting Boy and the Sexy Boy. This year's Harvard-Yale matchup was to be the first in three years, one of football's oldest and best-loved rivalries having been suspended in wartime. Because a number of players were veterans who would be returning to the field for the first time since the war, in both New Haven and Cambridge there was a huge amount of emotion invested in the event, which could not be scheduled to take place until Saturday, December 1, after the traditional Thanksgiving weekend windup. John Sterling was set to escort Jackie, but as Bev Corbin had no date of his own, it had been agreed that he would sit with them and some others at the Yale Bowl. Two days before the football game of games, however, it looked as if she might not get to go after all. A combination of snow, sleet, and rain pounded Connecticut. The next day, when it seemed as if the game might have to be played in knee-deep snow, university officials had the field cleared, then covered over with a tarpaulin. That evening, Jackie took the train to New York to spend the night at her father's apartment. Black Jack Bouvier, whose nickname derived from his exceptionally (some might say weirdly) intense year-round tan, was scheduled to drive her to New Haven in the morning.

Jackie kept a photograph of her father—slim, suave, impeccably attired in plus fours, calf-hugging licorice-striped stockings, and immaculate two-toned shoes—on her desk at Farmington. In the picture, said to have been taken in Cuba or Florida in the 1920s, Black Jack was indeed, as his elder daughter judged him to have been, a beautiful specimen of a man. A slender mustache above sensuous lips looked as if it might have been finely penciled in. The crease darting from the center button of his slim-tailored, wide-lapeled suit jacket highlighted the flat, hard stomach beneath. By 1945, however, despite a punishing exercise regimen religiously pursued, that frame had thickened. And though at fifty-four he dressed and comported himself as though he were still the pretty boy Cole Porter was reputed to have fallen in love with decades before, his sunlamp tan could not conceal that he had begun to go jowly and pouchy-eyed. Instead of letting the air out of Jackie's father, a lifetime's disappointments and dissipation seemed to have inflated him to a parody of his former self.

After numerous martinis, he would sprawl on his living room sofa dressed in baby-blue boxer shorts and black patent-leather shoes, inveighing against all the people he blamed for the shipwreck of his life. High on the list were Janet and Hughdie, as Janet's second husband was known. Black Jack was sure that Janet had married again principally to spite him. He was certain the Auchincloss clan intended to steal away his daughters. Of the two girls, Jackie, who resembled him facially, was his favorite. He called her "the most beautiful daughter a man ever had." At his two-bedroom, fourth-floor apartment on East Seventy-fourth Street in Manhattan, her ubiquitous image stared out from walls, tables, bookshelves. But all the photographs on earth could not alter the fact that, as he believed, he was slowly losing her. How could he compete with all that Auchincloss money? Though Black Jack continued to work on Wall Street, his personal finances had never recovered from the Great Crash of 1929, after which he had burned through capital and borrowed from relatives in order to maintain a frail veneer of wealth. In the narrative he constructed of his life, he traced his inability to right himself to the tough new trading rules introduced by the fledgling Securities and Exchange Commission in 1934.

Before Janet remarried, he had insisted that her cash demands were suffocating him. Now that she had attached herself to riches, he resented any implication that he was incapable of providing for his own children. In the perpetual scramble for funds, he did business with several bookies, notably a Lexington Avenue butcher who took bets in a room-sized freezer thick with hanging carcasses. Black Jack always seemed to have money on various sporting events and followed the scores on four radios that blasted simultaneously in his apartment. He was ever at daggers drawn with his father about the latter's will, never grasping until it was too late that the old man had spent much of what he had on annuities that assured substantial returns during his lifetime but would stop paying when he died. Tellingly, while the forty-six-acre Auchincloss family estate in McLean, Virginia, where Jackie lived during the year when she was not at boarding school, gave long views of the Potomac, and while the seventy-five-acre Auchincloss estate where she spent her summers was perched high above Narragansett Bay, Black Jack's apartment faced a sunless ventilating shaft.

He was right to perceive that her stepfather's world had begun to envelop her. Yet she loved Black Jack no less for her attraction to that world. Years later, Jackie's first husband would laugh that she still suffered from a major father-crush. Since girlhood, she had worshipped Black Jack for the very things that her disciplined, driven, mercenary mother was not. Janet was a survivor who had done whatever was necessary for her and her girls to get on in life. By contrast, louche, self-pitying Black Jack was one of the beautiful losers. Jackie savored the worst in him, especially the compulsive womanizing that had doomed her parents' marriage from the outset. Through the years, she would speak with cringe-inducing glee of his having bedded another woman during his and Janet's honeymoon. She loved that, on a subsequent occasion, he had been photographed affectionately holding a pretty girl's hand while, a few inches away, poor oblivious Janet smiled idiotically and stared in the other direction. When, as often as possible, he visited Farmington, Jackie delighted in quizzing him about which of her classmates' mothers he had already slept with and which he had in his sights. Many years afterward, when she was herself a wife and mother, she liked to reminisce about how all her boarding school friends had adored Black Jack. They regarded him, in Jackie's telling, as "a most devastating figure." Had she been aware that a number of the girls thought him a cartoonish dirty old man? When certain of her classmates laughingly shook their backsides at him, did she register that they were making cruel fun of the parent they regarded as a repulsive lecher? Had she really been oblivious to the insult? Or had she just pretended not to notice? Such perhaps was Jackie's craft that, then and in retrospect, her father's tormentors could never be sure.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis by Barbara Leaming. Copyright © 2014 Barbara Leaming. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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