The House of Kennedy(82)
“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.
When Jackie learns what Lem has done, she puts a stop to it. “We cannot tempt fate in this family,” Jackie tells Benedict F. Fitzgerald Jr., Rose and Joe Sr.’s attorney as well as a licensed pilot. “We’ve had enough tragedy. I will never let my children fly. Never.”
Jackie understands better than anyone what disasters have come from the longstanding Kennedy tradition of pressing the odds. On hand for Ted’s protracted recovery following his 1964 plane crash, Jackie is privy to the dramatic yet accurate opinion of family physician Dr. Watt, who says, “These people [the Kennedys] are jumping all over the place. Joe Jr. was warned that his plane had a problem. Kathleen was on a small plane. Ted tried to find a pilot who would fly in bad weather when his crash occurred.” Not only that, but Ethel has also lost both her parents and her older brother to plane crashes, and just months earlier, Jackie’s twenty-four-year-old stepson, Alexander Onassis, suffered the same fate.
Jackie is far more tolerant of earthbound adventures. When thieves set upon thirteen-year-old John Jr. in Central Park and steal his pricey Italian bicycle, Jackie says “the experience was good for her son, that it would help him to grow up like other boys.”
Jackie did send teenage John to boarding school at prestigious Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. The English instructor and dorm master Meredith Price remembers, “When he was in tenth grade, he was full of life and somewhat happy-go-lucky. There was absolutely nothing pretentious about him.”
“He had to deal with some incredible pressure,” John Jr.’s school friend Jim Bailinson remarks, but notes, “He turned out remarkably normal for someone who led such an abnormal existence. He did totally normal teen stuff, but his mother kept a pretty tight rein on him.”
The new student lives with a roommate, and, since he’s never taken public transportation, has to ask how the bus system works (though as an adult, he prides himself on navigating New York City’s public transit). Jackie “was a great boarding school mother,” sending cookies and care packages and coming for visits with Caroline. “Not all parents are attentive as she was,” Price says.
John Jr. uses his natural charm to “push the disciplinary envelope at Andover,” fellow alumnus and author William D. Cohan notes. “He didn’t intentionally flaunt the rules as much as sort of pretend they never really existed in the first place, since it was pretty clear from his own experiences in life that the rules of the road would never apply to him anyway.”