“would sit with them at the dining room table and ask how was school. He might have been an older man, but he paid attention to them, and they loved him.”
Still, Jackie never cuts the ties she’s been building with the Kennedy family for fifteen years, as a daughter-in-law, and as a protector of heirs to an American dynasty. “Her [Caroline’s] father was gone, but her mother never flinched or withdrew from her obligations. She handled the loss, as a widow and mother, quietly and taught her only daughter the grace of dignity,” Rita Dallas observes of Jackie. “After her marriage, she still maintained her home on the compound and saw to it that both of her children remained Kennedys.”
But Jackie’s new union is clouded by a second premonition—one far more troubling than de Gaulle’s. Just as Jackie had sensed when she met Jack that he “would have a profound perhaps disturbing influence on her life,” Onassis’s daughter, Christina (who is not a fan of her new stepmother), similarly believes that she will bring tragedy upon her father, cruelly blaming Jackie for the deaths of her husband and brother-in-law. When a number of Onassis’s business ventures start to downturn—and, most tragically, after his son Alexander is killed in a plane crash in January 1973—Onassis’s health takes a sudden decline. He bitterly reflects on his daughter’s warning (though Christina’s prediction may have been self-fulfilling: in 1988, she dies of a heart attack determined to be caused by years of drug abuse), and he and Jackie separate, though they do not officially divorce.
“I was a happy man before I married her,” Onassis takes to saying. “Then I married Jackie and my life was ruined.”
By February 1975, Onassis is dead. Now forty-five, Jackie is again a widow.
And it’s back to being just Jackie, Caroline, and John Jr.
Chapter 55
Shortly after JFK’s death, Jackie had feared her own wish to die would prevent her from being an effective parent, especially a solo one. “I’m no good to them. I’m so bleeding inside,” she tells her confidant, Father Richard T. McSorley. For a time, she contemplates accepting Ethel’s offer to raise Caroline and John Jr. among their cousins at Hickory Hill, but Father McSorley cautions against that arrangement, citing the public and family pressures on Ethel. “Nobody can do for them except you,” he says.
Not to mention that Ethel and Jackie have nearly diametrically opposite approaches to parenting. Kennedy biographer Jerry Oppenheimer notes, “John, after his father’s death, was brought up by a controlling and domineering mother, but one who obsessively looked out for his care and well-being.” Conversely, life at Hickey Hill among Bobby and Ethel’s children is much more rough-and-tumble, and later, after Bobby’s death, Ethel’s “moods could swing drastically,” Oppenheimer writes. Grief makes Ethel alternately neglectful or abusive, and the troubled kids lash out. (Bobby Jr. even starts a gang he calls “The Hyannis Port Terrors.”)
Jackie listens to Father McSorley’s counsel and instead moves her family of three from Washington to New York City’s Upper East Side, where she grew up. They move into a five-bedroom, five-and-a-half-bath apartment spanning the entire fifteenth floor of a limestone prewar building at 1040 Fifth Avenue, with views of Central Park and the reservoir (eventually named for Jackie in 1994). Between interest from Kennedy family trusts and an annual government widow’s pension of ten thousand dollars, Jackie has an income of approximately two hundred thousand dollars a year. Impressive, even by today’s standards, but for Jackie it requires careful spending. The Kennedy family friend Chuck Spalding voices the impossible challenge: “Jackie on a budget?”
All that changes, of course, after her brief marriage to Aristotle Onassis—money is not something she need worry about again—but even beforehand, one thing Jackie can afford to give her children is personal independence. Although she threatens the Secret Service, “If anything happens to John, I won’t be as nice to you as I was after Dallas,” she insists her son “must be allowed to experience life,” citing the dire consequence that “unless he is allowed freedom, he’ll be a vegetable.”
But only so much freedom. In the spring of 1973, Caroline (now fifteen) begins to exhibit the same obsession with flying machines her now twelve-year-old brother has shown since before the age of three. Lem Billings, without telling Jackie, brings the siblings to Hanscom Field in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, where a flight instructor takes Caroline up in a Cessna. “Me too,” John begs, but he is too young.