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

in the form of a book. He failed or perhaps refused to see that despite Joe Junior’s ability to look and act the part of a rising man, his perceptions when set on paper tended to be second-rate at best. Meanwhile, Jack drew on his own European experience, as well as on the fund of knowledge laboriously built up in the course of years of reading, to produce the serious, successful political book that had been expected of Joe Junior. Written in less than six months, Why England Slept, about Britain during the run-up to the Second World War, became a surprise bestseller in the United States in 1940 and utterly altered Jack’s standing in the family. At a moment when Joe Junior had managed to accumulate little more than a welter of notes and a stack of publishers’ rejections, the second son had garnered the wide praise and prestige that was supposed to have been his brother’s. Old Joe, who always loved a winner as much as he disdained a mere runner-up, was soon gaily citing Jack’s bestselling opinions in public, whereas previously it almost certainly would have been Joe Junior he quoted.
    After Why England Slept, the firstborn son never quite managed to regain his footing, whether it be in the family or in life. When Jack moved to Washington the following year, he began to speak, with his signature air of amused detachment, to an intimate circle including Kick, Inga Arvad, and Betty Coxe of the possibility that he might one day decide to seek the presidency. At the end of the war, when he returned to London on the eve of the 1945 general election, he left no doubt in the minds of his young English friends who were launching their political careers that he meant to study the electioneering with an eye to an impending run of his own in the States. In 1946, when the second son portrayed himself to voters as a most reluctant bearer of the family flag, that reluctance, like so much else in Jack Kennedy’s complex demeanor, was a pose. In important ways, he had been fighting all his life, at moments literally with his fists, for the right to carry that flag. In suggesting that he would never have dared, or even wished, to attempt something like this had Joe Junior survived, he was advancing a biographical narrative that scarcely corresponded to anything that had actually happened in the privacy of his family. He was dissipating perceptions, as he had long found it useful to do, of the ambition that had fired him to surpass Joe Junior during the eldest son’s lifetime.
    Years later, when Jackie thought back to her early married life, it was the velocity she seemed to remember above all. Hardly had she reached her goal of becoming Mrs. John F. Kennedy when she found herself caught up in a new kind of momentum as her story intersected with Jack’s. “Life with him was just so fast.” She associated his high-vaulting ambition with one of the qualities she most prized in him, imagination. It struck her that had his older brother lived and been elected senator, Joe Junior, lacking anything like Jack’s imaginative capacities, would simply have stalled there. But not Jack: “He never stopped at any plateau, he was always going on to something higher.” The relentless propulsion Jackie later sought to evoke did not fully manifest itself to her until the couple acquired a first, albeit temporary, house of their own. In January 1954, they began a six-month rental of a fourteen-foot-wide “dollhouse” on Dent Place in Georgetown, which was owned by Auchincloss family friends who were traveling in Europe. During this period, there began the real work of recasting Kennedy’s image, of which the decision to marry had been but an initial necessary step: The senator drew unprecedented attention with a principled but highly controversial vote in favor of the construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway, a stance that risked alienating constituents who protested that the bill would cost Massachusetts jobs. He delivered his first major