Book says Jackie intended her dying days to be like her life: A class act

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’ 10th death anniversary passed by without much fanfare – a stark contrast to the way the world mourned her death and celebrated her life after she took her last breath on May 19, 1994. For such is life – after every tragedy, people mourn, dry their tears, move on and just buy coffee mugs and coffee-table books about their departed idols, leaving it to HBO and Hallmark to perpetuate their memory.

Which is just as well. But though grieving and adulation fade, curiosity and fascination about legends and legendary figures – especially those cut down in the prime of their lives – deepen through the years. Some, because a new trove of material is discovered or released (memoirs of a former butler, lover or, in the case of Jackie – horrors – a Jesuit priest who counseled her after JFK’s assassination) and the public can’t wait to devour it.

To date, about 600 books have already been written about Jackie, whom a 2003 Harris poll reveals, is the most admired US first lady of the 20th century. This, despite the fact that her projects didn’t include such heart-tugging causes as African refugees or cancer-stricken children, unlike another icon of the century, Princess Diana, who was an angel of mercy for landmine and AIDS victims.

Still, Jackie is widely regarded to have had an admirable life – because fate had dealt her some of its hardest blows and she taught the world how to survive pain with grace, dignity and sanity.

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Of the latest wave of books about Jackie – some of course revealing nothing new about her at all – at least two stand out. One, Farewell, Jackie: A Portrait of Her Final Days by Edward Klein (published by the Penguin Group) chronicles her final months (which no one has ever done before) and looks back at her interesting days. All of 210 pages, the last 13 of which were devoted to a listing of the author’s sources and references, the book could have been easily condensed into a magazine article if you cut out the flashbacks, most of which have been published before, anyway.

But probably realizing that people would be willing to pay $23.95 (I got my copy at Powerbooks in Greenbelt for P1,119 and have no regrets, but hey, I’m a Kennedy fanatic!) for yet another hardbound book on Jackie, Edward Klein (former foreign editor of Newsweek and editor-in-chief of the New York Times Magazine) must have told himself: This is another one for the books!

The second book, Grace and Power (published by Random House), by Vanity Fair contributing editor Sally Bedell Smith, is more comprehensive (472 pages, excluding source notes) and takes a deeper look into the "private world of the Kennedy White House." This book (it is selling fast in Powerbooks, even at P1,429) is "big on details" – including what the Kennedys liked to eat, how their daily routine was like, how their parties were like, the people they flirted with and were attracted to, etc. It is spiced up with revelations about the Kennedys’ sexual relationship, which were revealed to the author by one of Jackie’s confidantes – a doctor.

But Bedell Smith also portrays Jackie as a woman in love. She includes a letter that Jackie wrote to a friend, in which she said that Jack Kennedy could have had a "worthwhile life" without being married to her; but her own life would have been "all a wasteland, and I would have known it every step of the way."

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The reason people (like me, and Jackie was not even my first lady, just the mother-in-law I wanted to have when I was a JFK Jr.-smitten teenager) devour every new book (gee, even the pictures I’ve already seen ad infinitum, but I can’t stop looking) about Jackie is that she has remained an enigma. Diana gave TV interviews where she bared all. Hillary wrote a book and Bill is in the process of completing his. Jackie never kept a journal ("Life is to be lived, not recorded," she once said.) and hardly gave press interviews in her life. So when people close to her start to reminisce about her extraordinary life (friends who talked about her when she was alive were exiled to emotional Siberia), it makes good copy. The enigma is unraveled.

Jackie, according to Klein, kept and stored everything – letters, furniture, souvenirs. In her final days, Jackie took out a stack of love letters from some of the world’s most powerful men (married and not) and threw them one by one into the fire in a fireplace in her library. She was taking no chances. The scene was related to Klein by an anonymous source who was in the room at the time.

In the book, Klein reveals that just as she had choreographed her own husband’s funeral so beautifully, Jackie planned her last days with the same eye for detail as a wedding planner. She did not want to die in a hospital room. She wanted to "go home and die." She chose the sheets that she was going to put on the bed (floral), the music that was going to be played (Gregorian chants) as she lay on her deathbed, the people who would be allowed into her inner sanctum to say goodbye. Aside from her children, it was Sen. Ted Kennedy who saw her last before she slipped into a final coma. She also asked that it be Ted who would deliver the eulogy at her wake.

Klein also reveals that Jackie, in life and as she was nearing death, drew strength from her Catholic faith. Just like Filipinos, she would seek solace inside a church and would draw strength from prayer. She prayed the rosary a lot in the final days of her life.