"The Winter of Her Despair" - Jackie Kennedy

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Vanity Fair SOCIETY October 2014

The Winter of Her Despair A symbol of strength for a traumatized nation in the winter of 1963–64, Jacqueline Kennedy was in fact falling apart—grieving and endlessly reliving her husband’s assassination, afflicted with what we’d now call post-traumatic stress disorder. Barbara Leaming, adapting her new biography, uncovers what was known to few outside the former First Lady’s inner circle: the nightmares, the drinking, the suicidal thoughts, but also the unexpected gesture that helped save her sanity. By Barbara Leaming

MOURNING IN AMERICA James Auchincloss, Lady Bird Johnson, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, Sargent Shriver, Jacqueline Kennedy, Stephen Smith, and Senator Edward Kennedy in President John F. Kennedy’s funeral procession, Washington, D.C., November 25, 1963. During the long winter of 1963, during the lonely nights that seemed to never end, the wakeful nights that no quantity of vodka could assuage, Jackie Kennedy would relive the sliver of time between the first gunshot, which had missed the car, and the second, which hit both the president and Texas governor John Connally. Those three and a half seconds became of cardinal importance to her. In the course of her marriage, she had constructed herself as Jack Kennedy’s one-woman Praetorian Guard—against the doctors, against the political antagonists, against the journalists, even


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