Free Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis: The Untold Story by Barbara Leaming

Now he and Jackie regularly indulged in what an observer described as long “wonderful” conversations reminiscent of those he had once enjoyed with Kick. Whether or not John White’s efforts to groom Jackie had had anything to do with it, old Joe seemed to have discovered in her something very much like “a substitute for Kick.” She bantered. She teased. She presented herself as someone unwilling “to take any guff” from him or any other member of the Kennedy tribe. (A merciless mimic, Jackie perfected a cruel imitation of Rose Kennedy, whose voice was said by one family friend to call to mind “a duck with laryngitis.”) At the same time she made it clear that she absolutely adored Jack’s father, and he in turn left no doubt that he was enchanted by her.
    As Jackie was to learn, however, behind her back he was capable of speaking of her in tones of arctic expediency. Once, when she overheard her father-in-law conferring with Jack and his younger brother Bobby about Jack’s political future, she was surprised to hear herself mentioned as well. And the experience was by no means comfortable to her. “They spoke of me as if I weren’t a person,” Jackie said years later, “just a thing, just a sort of asset, like Rhode Island.”
    All her life, Jackie had been very picky, very proud. Inclined to believe that she ought to have things exactly as she wanted them, she had waited until she saw just the type of man she would like to marry. And when that man had proven to be rather less than eager, she had not rested until he made his move at last. All of her maneuvers and travails in the marriage market, all of her efforts to escape the traps that the world she grew up in had contrived to set for her, had finally landed her in this small, spartan room on the first floor of her in-laws’ house where she slept alone most nights. A little bookshelf held certain of the volumes, many with mauve bindings, that Jack had first read when he was a sickly boy who was often confined to bed. These, she came to understand, were some of the books that had shaped her husband. Jackie could not help but be fascinated by them and by the tumultuous family drama in which they had played a part.
    Early in life, Jack Kennedy had experienced what it is like to lay close to death. His first potentially fatal episode, a bout of scarlet fever, had occurred when he was just two years old. Rose Kennedy had been pregnant at the time, and having gone into labor on the day Jack’s ordeal began, she had been unable to come to his room. Nor had she visited him afterward lest she or the newborn be exposed. In Rose’s place, Joe had cared for the little invalid. He cradled Jack in his arms and faithfully lingered at his bedside. He left the child in no doubt that nothing else mattered except his survival and recovery. Joe subsequently reflected that he had been unprepared for the magnitude of his emotions when he grasped that it was possible Jack might die. Unable to comprehend why Rose had stayed away, the child bonded powerfully and permanently with his father. Rose may have had a reasonable excuse for absenting herself in this instance, but it was also the case that even in the best of times, she was just not physically demonstrative with her children. In later years, Jack would bitterly declare that he could not recall so much as a single hug from Rose. For parental affection, the boy had learned to rely on his father. Joe Kennedy, wonderfully, uninhibitedly emotional and tactile, was all that Jack had in this respect. To the child’s dismay, however, he was by no means all that his father had. Joe Kennedy had dedicated himself to Jack’s welfare when the boy was near death. Otherwise, more often than not he made the eldest son, Joe Junior, his priority. It was certainly not that Jack’s father did not really love him, only that he seemed to prize the robust young Joe, twenty-two months Jack’s senior, so much more.
    To the father’s