What Jackie Love Tells Us About Newspeople

Listening to Ray Suarez interviewing Michael Becshloss on the PBS News Hour last night, I was astonished.

I had not been astonished when I saw the same sort of interview on a network news show, when the newscaster, a woman gushed on about how much Jackie loved Jack, and she played the recording of Jackie telling her interviewer (after JFK was in his grave) that she told Kennedy she wanted to bring the children home to the White House and die with him right there on the East Lawn, rather than be whisked away to some safe bomb shelter and live life without him.

Now, you have to remember, this is not Jackie actually talking to her husband. This is Jackie talking to an interviewer who is going to write about Jackie and her marriage to JFK.

This is a woman who has everything to gain by promulgating the image of a wonderful marriage to a charismatic, romantic President.

I don't know, they may have loved each other deeply, passionately, eternally.

But we cannot know from this sort of evidence. Anyone who thinks about it should know that much.

And why should we doubt her version of their storybook marriage?

By now the many examples of Jack's infidelities are well known, from famous women (Marilyn Monroe) to women we've most of us never heard of. Now, that doesn't mean he didn't love Jackie, after his own fashion. Men, at least some men, separate the type of love they have for their wives from the sporting sexual adventures they have with other women. But it at least makes you pause.

And then there was Jackie's own behavior after JFK's death. She married, most would believe, for money and power. If she did that once, might she not have done that the first time? After all, she came from some money, but she was marrying far more money, and she was attaching herself to a winner, a real Washington catch, war hero, son of an Ambassador, part of a wealthy Boston family.

What made me think of all this was a story my father told about Jackie Kennedy. He was a young government worker and got a phone call from this local newspaper reporter for a Washington paper, Jackie Bouvier. Her questions were the usual and expected variety, but what he really remembered about her was, "That awful, brassy voice." This all came up as we were watching Jackie give a guided tour of the White House on television, speaking in that now familiar breathy, hushed voice.

"What a phony!" my father expostulated.

He could not believe that act.

Which brings me back to the New Hour and Ray Suarez and the historian Richard Beschloss, neither of whom seemed capable of entertaining an alternative explanation, both of whom were completely taken in by that breathy voice on the tape.

Makes you wonder what other, more important, things this news correspondent and most especially this historian, who is supposed to deal with historical documents professionally, what other things they have got wrong by simple gullibility.