12/9/14

Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis, by Barbara Leaming - NYTimes.com

http://nyti.ms/1CNuUBC

SU NDAY BOOK RE VIE W

Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis, by Barbara Leaming

By MERYL GORDON

DEC. 5, 2014

It has been 20 years since Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis died at age 64 of non-Hodgkins lymphoma, and yet the
Jackie Industry remains robust. Earlier this year, All Hallows College in Ireland made headlines by
announcing
plans to auction for an estimated $1.6 million the former first ladys private letters to a now deceased priest,
which included critical comments about her mother-in-law, Rose (I dont think Jacks mother is too bright), and
anguish over her husbands assassination (I am so bitter against God).
After consulting with the Kennedy family, the college canceled the
auction. But publishers continue to turn out
new volumes every few years that promise to offer new insights and answer the tantalizing question: What was it
like to be her?
Now comes the biographer Barbara Leaming with a new book, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis: The
Untold Story, a follow-up to her 2001 book Mrs. Kennedy: The Missing History of the Kennedy Years. Robert
Caro and Taylor Branch have both written multiple biographies on one compelling subject, using each volume to
cover a different chronological period. But Leaming has taken the curious approach, in the first part of her new
book, of revisiting her previous volume, fleshing out anecdotes, rewriting herself and at times coming up with
different conclusions or emphases.

www.nytimes.com/2014/12/07/books/review/jacqueline-bouvier-kennedy-onassis-by-barbara-leaming.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=aut&bicmp=AD&bicmlukp=WT.mc_id&bicmst=1409232722000&bicmet=1419773522000&_r=0

1/4

12/9/14

Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis, by Barbara Leaming - NYTimes.com

For example, in Leamings 2001 book, Janet Auchincloss was depicted as a critical harpy who destroyed her
daughter Jacqueline Bouviers confidence and advised her to turn down a coveted Vogue internship. In the new
book, Jackie showed up for the first day of that internship, but Vogues managing editor made condescending
remarks that caused the young woman to flee.
Leaming is sufficiently gifted as a storyteller that the reader of this untold story can quite happily sail
through the familiar early material about Jackies family background, dating life, her courtship with and marriage
to John Kennedy, and the
unhappy discovery of his numerous infidelities. Then the story speeds up, and the
couples White House years are oddly truncated the Cuban missile crisis takes up a mere two paragraphs as
Leaming races to reach the turning point that forms the rationale for this book.
Leamings thesis is that
Jacqueline Kennedy suffered from undiagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder after
witnessing her husbands assassination. The American Psychiatric Association did not acknowledge PTSD as a
disease until 1980. Armed with the list of symptoms associated with PTSD, Leaming uses that template to examine
the former first ladys behavior in the aftermath of the assassination in 1963 until her death in 1994. The author
concludes that the disease explains
everything that Jacqueline Kennedy did during the next three decades: from
suing William Manchester to try to halt the publication of his book The Death of a President, to marrying
Aristotle Onassis in the hope that he could offer her safety, to taking a job as a book editor to seize control of her
daily life.
To make her case, Leaming diligently pieces together anecdotes and quotes from archival material as well as
articles and books by other authors, but she does not appear to offer much new information. Although there are
many people still alive who knew Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, I counted only 21 interviews in the authors source
notes that Leaming conducted herself; eight of those with people she had already quoted and cited in her earlier
book.

www.nytimes.com/2014/12/07/books/review/jacqueline-bouvier-kennedy-onassis-by-barbara-leaming.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=aut&bicmp=AD&bicmlukp=WT.mc_id&bicmst=1409232722000&bicmet=1419773522000&_r=0

2/4

12/9/14

Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis, by Barbara Leaming - NYTimes.com

Leaming is heavy-handed in constantly referring to PTSD in her narrative with such sentences as Still, the
greatest fear of any traumatized individual is that the instant of horror will be reprised and Yet, one element
necessary to any trauma survivors course of recovery continued to be missing: a feeling of basic safety. She
compares Jacqueline Kennedys demotion by the press from saintly figure to gold digger after her marriage to
Onassis to the experiences of New York firefighters after 9/11 who had to fight to win medical coverage for their
ailments, a jarring leap to say the least.
Of course, a woman who witnessed bullets slamming into her husbands head and was splattered with his
blood and brains suffered a horrendous trauma. As a country, we knew that to be true without an official
diagnosis.
Retrospectively pinning a psychiatric label on Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis may have seemed like an intriguing
framework for a reconsideration of her life. But retelling the same old stories, accompanied by a cause-and-effect
PTSD analysis, does not fundamentally alter our perception or enhance our understanding of how the former first
lady coped and went on to live her life.
JACQUELINE BOUVIER KENNEDY ONASSIS
The Untold Story
By Barbara Leaming
Illustrated. 358 pp. Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martins Press. $27.99.
Meryl Gordon is the director of magazine writing at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University and
the author of The Phantom of Fifth Avenue: The Mysterious Life and Scandalous Death of Heiress Huguette Clark. She is
writing a biography of Bunny Mellon.

www.nytimes.com/2014/12/07/books/review/jacqueline-bouvier-kennedy-onassis-by-barbara-leaming.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=aut&bicmp=AD&bicmlukp=WT.mc_id&bicmst=1409232722000&bicmet=1419773522000&_r=0

3/4

12/9/14

Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis, by Barbara Leaming - NYTimes.com

A version of this review appears in print on December 7, 2014, on page BR62 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Oh, Jackie.

2014 The New York Times Company

www.nytimes.com/2014/12/07/books/review/jacqueline-bouvier-kennedy-onassis-by-barbara-leaming.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=aut&bicmp=AD&bicmlukp=WT.mc_id&bicmst=1409232722000&bicmet=1419773522000&_r=0

4/4