Tragic Homecoming - Washington Life Magazine - November 2013

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EXCLUSIVE EXCERPT

TRAGIC HOMECOMING Jacqueline Kennedy tried to re-start her life when she and her children moved to Georgetown after her husband’s assassination B Y J A M E S L . S WA N S O N

James L. Swanson’s “Manhunt:The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer” was a New York Times bestseller and became mandatory reading for official Washington. Its fans included President George W. Bush, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Speaker of the House John Boehner.

Now, for the 50th anniversary of the death of President John F. Kennedy, Swanson returns with “End of Days:The Assassination of John F. Kennedy,” a gripping account of the murder and its aftermath. In the style of a true crime thriller, the author covers not only the death of the president but also the saga of Jackie Kennedy. Here, in an exclusive excerpt that includes a hitherto unknown and previously unpublished Jackie letter, Swanson recounts her heartbreaking return to Georgetown.

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ven before the funeral, Jacqueline Kennedy decided that she did want to remain living in the White House for long. Her memories of happier times haunted her. She wanted distance from them. Despite President Johnson’s gracious invitation to remain as long as she wished, Jackie wanted to be out of the White House within two weeks of the assassination.

But she had nowhere to go. She longed to return to her old neighborhood in Georgetown, but she and the president had sold their house at 3307 N. Street NW after the election. On the night of the assassination, on November 22, 1963, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara had offered to get it for her. “That first night [he] said he’d buy back our old house in Georgetown. That was the first thing I thought that night – where will I go? I wanted my old house back.” But she chose not to take advantage of McNamara’s heartfelt gesture. “I thought – how can I go back to that bedroom? I said to myself – you must never forget Jack, but you musn’t be morbid.”

W. Averell Harriman, the famous American diplomat and elder statesman who had held several posts in the Kennedy administration, offered Jackie the use of his elegant residence at 3038 N Street NW, a few blocks from the old Kennedy place. She accepted the offer.

At the White House, Jackie packed Caroline and John Jr.’s toys, books and clothing into cardboard boxes that she labeled herself

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with marking pens. She instructed artisans to mount a plaque to the marble mantle in the president’s bedroom: “In this room lived John Fitzgerald Kennedy with his wife Jacqueline during the two years, ten months and two days he was President of the United States.” Then she handwrote thank you notes to members of the White House staff.

Jackie’s self-imposed two-week deadline for moving out fell on Friday, December 6. On the day she left the presidential mansion, she left a note and flowers for Lady Bird Johnson, the new First Lady. She and John Jr. paid a farewell call on White House usher B.C.

West. They posed with him in his office for a photograph. The boy sat on the desk while Jackie, putting on a brave face for the camera, smiled. But she wore a black dress. In other photos taken of her that day, she did not smile.

Then Jacqueline Kennedy left the White House, returning to her beloved Georgetown, where her life with Jack had begun. She vowed never to set foot in the presidential mansion again. Now she was back on familiar ground and took comfort in it. In her first few days in the Harriman house, she enjoyed private visits from intimate friends, including Attorney General Robert Kennedy.

On December 11, the McNamaras sent over a gift to Jackie at the Harriman place.

It was an oil painting of President Kennedy by the artist Charles Fox. When Jackie unwrapped it, she was shocked. She was not expecting it. And she did not want it. It was not an issue of whether she liked it. She could not bear to look at it. It was too painful. She sent a handwritten letter asking forgiveness for declining a gift “from the man in his cabinet who gave the most (as much as Jack’s own brother Bobby gave)” to JFK. Jackie explained: “I am in strange locking of horns with where I am sure the Secretary of Defense and his wife can outwit me. PLEASE I don’t want you to give anything more for Jack – you gave him all – and my consolation is that he will be remembered as great – because of Bob McNamara.”

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The widow confided that she could not even bear to display photos of her late husband. “The only photograph I have here of Jack is where his back is turned.” She did not hang the oil painting. The picture stayed on the floor, “propped up against the wall at the little study outside my bedroom.” But the president’s three-year-old son could not take his eyes off the portrait. “Tonight,” Jackie wrote, “John came out of my bedroom with a lollipop in his mouth. The picture … was right in his way – and he took the lollipop out and kissed the picture and said Goodnight Daddy.”

That broke her heart. Jackie warned McNamara “Mr. Fox may find sugary imprints he never painted in, on that picture, but you see why we could never bear to have it near us – it brings to the surface too many things.”

Jackie suggested that the McNamaras take back the painting and donate it to the Kennedy Library several years down the road, after the institution was built. “So if you wish to give it to the Library and keep it till then, it would be such an honor – but what I would love most of all – is if both of you who have given so much would give nothing more – except your friendship always.”

Jackie decided to make Georgetown her permanent home, so in February 1964 she bought a house at 3017 N Street NW. She wanted to live a quiet life. She wanted to stroll the streets of Georgetown, visiting her favorite bookshops, florists, antique shops, and corner groceries as she did in the old days when Jack was a senator. But her home became a tourist attraction. Gaping passersby hoped to get a glimpse of Jackie through a window, or encounter her on the sidewalk. Photographers staked out the house day and night, hoping to snap a saleable picture of the widow and he children.

She had become an American heroine and a public obsession.

She was a prisoner in her own home, unable to step outside without taking the risk that intrusive – and possibly dangerous – strangers might accost her in the street. She hoped that public fascination with her might die down, but every month the harassment got worse.

In July 1964 Jacqueline Kennedy announced that she was selling her Georgetown home. She had moved in less than five months ago. Not only that – she was abandoning Washington.

Her decision shocked the political and social elites of the nation’s capital. Less than a year after the assassination, in an attempt to reclaim her private life, she said goodbye to her Washington days and moved to New York City, where she had spent many happy times before her marriage.

But that did not end the obsession. For the rest of her life, Jacqueline Kennedy remained an icon, forever an unwilling star in the spotlight on the American stage.

From “End of Days:The Assassination of John F. Kennedy” Copyright 2013 by James L. Swanson.

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President John F. Kennedy and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy arrive on Air Force One at Love Field in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963.

President Kennedy in the Oval Office of the White House with his children Caroline and John Jr.

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