Just Jackie Her Private Years

A giant thunderbolt split open the night sky, and in the shuddering light a car emerged from a swirl of fog and raced on through the storm. Slumped in the backseat was the journalist Theodore White, a stubby little man in his late forties with thinning hair and an owlish expression. He took a slug from a plastic bottle that contained a decanted pint of Scotch whisky--his self-imposed allotment of alcohol for the long hours that lay ahead. There was another huge flash of lightning, followed this time by a thumping crash of thunder. White peered out the window at the flooded stretch of highway. It was coming down in solid sheets of water, just the way it had rained a week ago on the night President Kennedy's body was brought back from Dallas in a dark bronze coffin. White had covered the assassination and the three-day pageant of Kennedy's funeral for Life magazine. He was still physically exhausted and emotionally drained from the experience. Now, however, he found himself in a rented limousine, with a strange chauffeur, driving at break-neck speed through an old-fashioned northeaster on his way to another assignment for Life. "There is something I want Life magazine to say to the country," the President's widow, Jacqueline Kennedy, had told White during a brief phone conversation from her home on Cape Cod, "and you must do it." White did not know what Jackie had in mind, but he could guess why she had chosen him above all other journalists to carry her message to the American people. He was the author ofThe Making of the President 1960, a book that had caught the mood and the strains of the election campaign, and that helped give birth to the myth of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Jackie had selected White because he was a storyteller with a talent for hero worship. The limousine slowed down as it approached the summer resort town of Hyannis on Nantucket Sound. The board of selectmen of Barnstable Township had decked the facade of the town hall with black crepe in memory of the dead President, but the merchants had strung up colored Christmas lights along Main Street in an effort to dispel the gloom. White tossed down another stiff slug of Scotch and instructed the chauffeur to stop at a gas station. He got out, ducked into a telephone booth, and placed a call to New York City. "How's my mother doing?" he asked. The thunder and pelting rain drowned out the reply. "What?" White shouted. "I can't hear you. "She's doing as well as can be expected," Dr. Harold Ritkin, his family physician, yelled back into the phone. White's mother was gravely ill. It was she who had answered the telephone at her son's East Side town house in Manhattan when Jackie called from the Cape, and in all the excitement, the old woman began having a heart attack. White was forced to make a hard decision: stay with his mother, or answer Jackie's call. On the phone, Jackie had not spoken to White in her tiny, whispery voice. She had used her other voice, the one rarely heard by strangers, the deep, expressive vibrato that she employed when she refused to take no for an answer. You must do it, she had told White, and he felt compelled to heed her summons. He chose Jackie over his mother, and drove off into the raging storm. He was afflicted by pangs of guilt as his car pulled up to a checkpoint in front of the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port. It was not quite eight-thirty on Friday, November 29,1963. The presidential flag, illuminated by floodlights and tugged by the wind, was flying in the front yard of John and Jacqueline Kennedy's rented summer house on nearby Squaw Island. The place was crawling with Secret Service men. No one knew if the assassination had been part of a larger coKlein, Edward is the author of 'Just Jackie Her Private Years' with ISBN 9780345490322 and ISBN 0345490320.