The mere fact that First Lady Jackie Kennedy became a widow at 34 years old is tragic enough. But, as longtime Kennedy biographer J. Randy Taraborrelli writes in his new book JFK: Public, Private, Secret, it becomes somehow even more devastating to learn that the assassination of Jackie’s husband President John F. Kennedy came at a moment in their relationship when they finally, after 10 years of marriage, were deeply in love.
When the two married on September 12, 1953, “it really was an arranged marriage, even though they didn’t actually use that language,” Taraborrelli tells me. “I mean, JFK needed a wife. He was single and he was in his thirties, and his father knew that, without a wife, he was never going to be able to be president. You needed a First Lady, so he needed a wife—and Jackie ticked off all the boxes. She’s beautiful, she’s cultured, she’s smart, she’s educated, she’s charismatic, she’s everything that you would want in a wife.”
From Jackie’s side, her mother Janet Auchincloss worried that her daughter—a ripe old 24 years old at the time of her marriage—needed to get settled, to marry and have children. Jack fit the bill for a suitable spouse. The problem? The two, as Taraborrelli put it, lacked chemistry. Today, he says, the relationship just wouldn’t continue past the early dating stage, but at that time, these were two people who looked great on paper, and “love was not in the equation.” These were two people who “made the calculated decision that they were going to take a chance,” Taraborrelli says. “Hopefully he would be faithful, but maybe he won’t be—but at least you will be settled with somebody who has money and power. And that was really what the mandate was.”
As Jackie prepared to marry Jack, Janet asked her eldest daughter if she loved him. “And Jackie kind of waffled on it,” Taraborrelli says, before she told her mother, “I enjoy him”—which Taraborelli says “tells you everything you need to know. What also tells you everything you need to know is that Janet was okay with that answer.”
Their 10-year marriage was not smooth sailing. To reference an earlier point, Jack was decidedly not faithful (more on that in a moment). In 1956, the couple’s first child, Arabella, was stillborn; Jack was away at the time of her birth, on vacation without his wife, and he didn’t return from said vacation to be with Jackie even after such a crushing loss. It took him almost a week to get back to her, and only did so after a friend told JFK that “if you don’t get back to your wife, no woman in this country is ever going to vote for you,” Taraborrelli says. “And that’s what brought him back.”
“He was so screwed up in his mind at that time,” he adds. “And that was the beginning of everybody sort of realizing, we’ve got a big problem here with this guy. He’s got no empathy. He’s got no emotion. He’s hard as a rock, and you can’t get through to him.”
The problems persisted. According to JFK: Public, Private, Secret, in 1958—two years later—one of Jack’s affairs, this one with Joan Lundberg, resulted in an unplanned pregnancy. Jack began his affair with Joan in the aftermath of Arabella’s death, “and nobody wanted anything to do with him,” Taraborrelli explains. “This isn’t to excuse it—I’m not defending him, but I’m explaining him. That’s how it started with him and Joan. She was there. She was open. She didn’t take his bullshit.”
“He’s trying to figure it out, and he’s doing it in a reckless way,” he continues. “He’s fallible and he’s messed up and he’s screwed up beyond belief, but he’s trying to figure it out. And Joan was a conduit to that.”
Taraborrelli tells me that, because JFK was opening up to Joan, he also began to open up more to Jackie. “She was helping him become a better person,” he says of Joan. After the birth of Jack and Jackie’s daughter Caroline in 1957, Jack began to fall for Jackie in a different way. “And before Joan realized it, he was in love with his wife, and not with her,” Taraborrelli says. “So it’s such a crazy story, but man, it’s exactly what happened.”
Even though Joan’s pregnancy—which was ultimately terminated—was a wakeup call for Jack, his affairs didn’t end in 1958. Though the dalliances were plentiful, one affair Taraborrelli refutes? The famous one with Marilyn Monroe—which Taraborrelli says “we’ve gotten all of it wrong.”
“I now don’t think that there was a relationship at all,” he says. “I just don’t believe it. And I think that you have to be willing as a historian like I am to change your opinion based on the current state of research.” He tells me, “As sources come forward and give you new information, it’s incumbent upon you to then change your story. You can’t be that guy who’s going to be wedded to a thing that you believed 30 years ago.”
The book details Jack’s relationships—his romantic ones, yes, but also his familial ones, like with his parents, Joseph P. Kennedy and Rose Kennedy, and his sister Rosemary, whose institutionalization deeply scarred Jack. “I think what really surprised me, which I really didn’t understand, was his torment and his conscience,” Taraborrelli says of JFK. “For me, that was the surprise—the torment that he went through in his own psychology and trying to be a better person, and then the work he put into trying to be a better person.”
Three years after winning the presidency in 1960, by the end of 1963, that work was beginning to pay dividends. Jack and Jackie were never closer after the 1963 death of their fourth child, Patrick, who died that August and whose loss “cut him to the bone,” Taraborrelli wrote of JFK. Seven years had passed between the loss of their first child and the loss of their last, and the change in Jack was starkly evident. “He was going through this transition, this big change, and when Patrick died, it was like the floodgates opened and he realized how wrong he had been,” Taraborrelli tells me. “He wished that he could apologize to Arabella. There’s a point in the book where he tells somebody ‘I wish that I could meet her to apologize for the way that I treated her and her mother.’ So he was taking full accountability for his actions, and for not just Arabella, but for everything that had happened in the last seven years. And it’s really an incredible story of an incredible journey.”
Those last three months of their marriage were their best. Jack had actually never proposed marriage to Jackie; when they became engaged, “it was just more like an agreement that they made in an airport lounge,” Taraborrelli says. He finally proposed—getting down on one knee and all—and they agreed to renew their wedding vows for their 11th wedding anniversary in 1964 at Hammersmith Farm, where they’d married in 1953. For their 10th anniversary in September 1963, Jack and Jackie returned to Hammersmith and were walking on the beach when Jackie’s mother Janet spotted the couple, holding hands as they walked and lost in their own little world together. Janet turned to her husband (and Jackie’s stepfather) Hugh Auchincloss and “it was clear that their feelings for each other had grown,” Taraborrelli tells me. “And Janet turned to Hugh and she said, ‘My, my, it’s finally happened.’” Ten years later, Jack and Jackie fell in love—and two months later, Jack was killed by an assassin’s bullet in Dallas, Texas.
As Jackie and Janet planned the vow renewal, Janet turned to Jackie and said, “My gosh, after everything that you’ve been through, you really do love him, don’t you?” Taraborrelli tells me he was incredibly moved by Jackie’s response: “Mummy, it’s we who made him.”
“In other words, she’s taking accountability, too,” he tells me. “I mean, the book is really about taking accountability. It’s about not blaming people for our messed up lives. I mean, Jackie had a bad marriage and she took accountability. My interpretation of this is that she’s saying, ‘I allowed him to have these other women, and you allowed me to marry him, and we allowed him to do all of this because he is JFK. And we loved him so much that we let him get away with a lot.’”
“I think that she [Jackie] would never have been able to take this next step with him if she was going to hold onto anger and blame and the past,” Taraborrelli says of the planned vow renewal. “They really wanted to let it all go. They wanted to not hold his past behavior against him for the rest of their lives. Janet says at one point in the book, ‘We are a family, and families endure. And that’s what we do. We endure.’”
Their renewed commitment to one another was why Jackie was there in Dallas with him on that fateful November 22, 1963. “I think they were on such a great track, and that’s why it is so tragic,” Taraborrelli says.
In writing JFK: Public, Private, Secret, Taraborrelli tells me he didn’t want to just write a presidential biography of JFK—that has been done. “I wanted to give people not just the history, but the human emotions attached,” he says. After a journey through such emotional upheaval, as Jack arrives in Dallas, he truly seems a man on the precipice of real change—which makes what happened on that day in November even more painful.
“This is a story of a man who realized that he could be a better person and then worked toward that,” Taraborrelli says. “This is a story of a person who was lacking in empathy, lacking in emotion—and finally figured it out. With the help of a good woman at his side, he did figure it out.” Taking accountability “changed him, not only as a man, but as a leader—the kind of accountability we want in our leaders, too,” Taraborrelli says.
Who would JFK have been in 1964? No one will ever know for sure. “What I would love to have happened would be that he would serve a second term, he would be a great president,” Taraborrelli says. “Toward the end of his life, he and Jackie would’ve been happy because now he had the coping skills in place and he understood who he was, and he would’ve spent the rest of his life trying to make it up to his wife, and they would’ve had more children, and it would’ve been great. That’s what I would love to think. But the devil’s advocate version of it is do people change? Really, we don’t know if Jack would have reverted back to his former self. We don’t know the rest of the story because he’s cut off at the redemption. And sometimes, like they say, a leopard doesn’t change his spots.”
“My feeling is that we can only know what we know, and what we know is the journey to get to this point was hard-earned,” he continues. “And that at the end of the book, there is redemption. And I like to think, just because I grew to love these characters so much in telling their stories, I like to think that they would’ve lived happily ever after. But life is hard, and marriage is hard. So who knows what was going to happen in the years to come, but I would love to think that they would have just continued to be happy together.”
Taraborrelli tells me that someone recently told him that JFK: Public, Private, Secret reads like fiction—but adds that, if it were fiction, the ending would be different. In the fictional version of Jack and Jackie’s story, he says, they would renew their wedding vows, have a second term in office and, after that term ended, move to New York City, where he would be a statesman and she would begin working for a publishing company. There would be a happily ever after. “That’s fiction,” he says. “Real life is what really happened, which was just when he was figuring out who he was as a man, and just when she had forgiven him for all of his transgressions in the past and took accountability for them, for her participation in it, for her culpability in their bad marriage—just when they had really figured all this out, his life was taken. And it’s such a terrible, terrible ending.”
Beyond the Kennedys, Taraborrelli tells me that he hopes his latest book—which came out on July 15—can be a larger message for all of us still here. “I guess what I want people to take from this book is that it’s not too late to change,” he says. “It’s not too late to forgive, and it’s not too late to take responsibility for your own life. And I hope that’s the message that people take away from this book.”