Review by New York Times Review
IT HAS BEEN 20 years since Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis died at age 64 of non-Hodgkin's 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 lady's private letters to a now deceased priest, which included critical comments about her mother-in-law, Rose ("I don't think Jack's mother is too bright"), and anguish over her husband's 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 Learning 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 Learning 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. For example, in Learning's 2001 book, Janet Auchincloss was depicted as a critical harpy who destroyed her daughter Jacqueline Bouvier's 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 Vogue's managing editor made condescending remarks that caused the young woman to flee. Learning is sufficiently gifted as a storyteller that the reader of this "untold story" can quite happily sail through the familiar early material about Jackie's 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 couple's White House years are oddly truncated - the Cuban missile crisis takes up a mere two paragraphs - as Learning races to reach the turning point that forms the rationale for this book. Learning's thesis is that Jacqueline Kennedy suffered from undiagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder after witnessing her husband's assassination. The American Psychiatric Association did not acknowledge PTSD as a disease until 1980. Armed with the list of symptoms associated with PTSD, Learning uses that template to examine the former first lady's 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, Learning 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 author's source notes that Learning conducted herself; eight of those with people she had already quoted and cited in her earlier book. Learning 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 survivor's course of recovery continued to be missing: a feeling of basic safety." She compares Jacqueline Kennedy's 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 husband's 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. 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.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [November 30, 2014]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* She went from beloved First Lady and noble widow of a fallen hero to much-maligned and -pursued celebrity. Leaming argues that for much of Jackie's life in the public eye, some 30 years, she was struggling to recover from the trauma of her husband's assassination in 1963. Jackie started out as a spirited young woman who spurned a safe marriage and pursued an exciting young senator, then spent 10 years coping with his infidelities. Jackie developed her own political savvy and fought to be more than a useful tool to her husband and his powerful father. Just at a point when she felt her marriage was progressing, it ended in trauma. Drawing on interviews and archival material, Leaming offers horrific detail of Jackie's ordeal of watching her husband's murder and the long, painful recovery from what would be now diagnosed as post-traumatic stress disorder. Jackie self-medicated with alcohol and even considered suicide. She married Onassis, thinking that his wealth would protect her and her children from the mounting violence in the U.S. in the tumultuous 1960s, but she couldn't escape the inner chaos. Jackie's later career in publishing, while viewed as a newfound feminism, was really about coping by keeping busy. Leaming tells a heart-wrenching story of a woman who not only endured a horrific event but also struggled to recover and was often misunderstood as she eventually carved out a life of her own making.--Bush, Vanessa Copyright 2014 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Much has been written about J.F.K.'s first lady, who was generational icon, but Leaming (Churchill Defiant) approaches Jackie's story from a new perspective, contending that she suffered from PTSD, with all of its recurrent triggers and episodes. The first half of book focuses on Jackie's early life and marriage; the second half is an examination of Jackie suffering in the wake of her husband's traumatic assassination. Leaming explains Jackie's behavior and reactions to specific events through the lens of contemporary knowledge about human reactions to trauma. For instance, her marriage to Aristotle Onassis is explained in terms of what it provided for her for a short time: safety. The possibility that Jackie had PTSD was first suggested in a letter from U.K. Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. Leaming draws the parallels between what Jackie went through and the cases of others who experienced trauma. Well-written and engaging, the book presents readers with yet another facet of a woman who has intrigued and beguiled the public for decades. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis's life (1929-94) was one of privilege and wealth but much sadness and illness, too, claims Leaming (Churchill Defiant) in this engaging biography. Described are Jackie's debutante life and her subsequent less-than-storybook marriage to John F. Kennedy, in which she endured his infidelities and watched him suffer from debilitating back pain. Leaming then presents a convincing case that Kennedy struggled with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) following her husband's assassination and for the remainder of her life. Several examples of PTSD triggers discussed here include the former first lady's constant retelling of the assassination story, her anguish over not having done more to save Jack, her thoughts of suicide, and her compulsive need to guard herself and her children from all possible harm. The author attributes Jackie's marriage to Aristotle Onassis to the desire to find someone whose power and wealth could protect her. Ultimately, Onassis created a satisfying life for herself as an editor for Viking and Doubleday, which ended with her death at age 64 from non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. VERDICT Readers intrigued with the Kennedys will find much to admire here. See Greg Lawrence's Jackie As Editor for a current work about Kennedy's years in publishing. [See Prepub Alert, 5/4/14.]-Karl Helicher, Upper Merion Twp. Lib., King of Prussia, PA (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A best-selling biographer chronicles the fabled life of Jackie Kennedy (1929-1994) and advances the claim that the former first lady spent the bulk of her post-Camelot life battling PTSD.Jacqueline Bouvier seemed to have it all: an upper-crust upbringing and personal and social connections to the most elite families in America. Yet when the time came for her to wed, she was determined to escape "the bland predictability" of a high-society marriage that would require little else of her but to cater to the needs of a well-heeled husband. She met her match in "bad boy" John Kennedy, who she believed was her ticket to all the excitement she could ever want. JFK's larger-than-life ambition brought the young couple international fame, but it also forced an essentially private woman to endure the brutal glare of the media spotlight and gradually transformed a dream into a nightmare long before JFK's murder. Beset by personal difficulties, including two infant deaths and a foundering marriage, the assassinationto which she bore bloody witnesswas the final straw. Leaming (Churchill Defiant: Fighting On 1945-1955, 2010, etc.) reveals that Jackie suffered from all the hallmarks of PTSD: sleep disturbances, obsessive ruminations about her husband's murder and even thoughts of suicide. The assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and her beloved brother-in-law, Robert, in 1968 became triggers for even more psychological instability and led her to wed Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, who she falsely believed would provide her the safety and distance she craved. Hounded by paparazzi and reviled by an American public eager to forget the historical traumas of the 1960s, Jackie nevertheless managed to build a life for herself on her own termsrather than those dictated to her by her classand emerge from tragedy, permanently wounded but "comparatively sane." An intimate and revealing look at one of the 20th century's most remarkableand misunderstoodwomen. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
