Sailing in a Sea of Words

Book: Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis: The Untold Story

Author: Barbara Leaming

Genre: Non-Fiction/Biography

Summary: Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis: The Untold Story is the first book to document Jackie's thirty-one-year struggle with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Here is the woman as she has never been seen before. Barbara Leaming explores the seemingly magical world of Jackie's youth, her fairy-tale marriage to a wealthy and handsome senator and presidential candidate and her astonishing transformation into a deft political wife and unique First Lady. This spirited young woman's rejection of the idea of a "safe marriage" as the wife of some socially prominent but utterly predictable man led her to JFK and, in time, international fame. But the trauma of her husband's murder would damage her far more than has been known. Until now. While the life of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis has been examined and scrutinized countless times, it is only now that we can truly understand the woman behind the facade, the untold story of this iconic woman. -Thomas Dunne Books, 2015.

Having read a good deal (and more to come) about JFK, I thought it would be equally fruitful to read about Jackie. As a famous First Lady and fashion icon, I wanted to learn her life story as well.

This book might not have been the best one to start with. The book reads more like a thesis or term paper than a biography, simply because of the lens Leaming has chosen to write with when writing about Jackie. She rushes very notably over Jackie's childhood and blossoming into adulthood in order to get to JFK and the assassination. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if her editor told her that she had to in order to call it a biography. Perhaps there isn't a lot of pre-JFK material (something I tend to doubt since I think Jackie had a diary, but don't hold me to that; again, first book about her that I'm reading), but I feel like I was better off reading a different Jackie biography before reading this book. Because of the rushing, I felt like I didn't get a full picture of Jackie.

I also found some odd errors. First Lady is a title, so it should always be capitalized. Yet, it wasn't. It would alternate between being capitalized and not capitalized. Leaming refers to Bobby Kennedy as Bobby, but then suddenly refers to him as RFK without explaining that it stood for Robert Francis Kennedy. It took me a minute to realize who she was referring to and found the sudden, unexplained change to be poor editing. While most people may know what RFK stands for, there are a good many people who don't. Anyone reading this that's unfamiliar with the Kennedy family wouldn't recognize that.

But the biggest sin for me came about a third of the way into the book. Leaming brings up the fact that after Patrick's death, Jackie and JFK were closer and acted more like a married couple. In other JFK biographies I've read, as well as Mrs. Kennedy and Me, people in the couple's social and political circles had noticed this as well. But then Leaming goes on to say that what Jackie told others was a delusion and that JFK, in actuality, had gone back to his prior sexual habits. That made me raise an eyebrow, so I went to the Notes section to see what source she had for this declaration. There wasn't one. I found it very strange that an author would frame her narrative in this fashion. While it is true that JFK wasn't the least bit affected by Arabella's death and stayed with the girls on his yacht in Europe, Patrick's death seemed to significantly affect him to the point of not having any sexual relations with his mistresses (he met with one of them, I think, but just talked about Patrick, nothing else). To say or otherwise imply that Jackie was lying when, by the accounts of others, that wasn't the case, came off as disingenuous and deceptive to me. As a result, I lost the trust and benefit of the doubt I had previously placed in Leaming.

Other than those errors, I found the book to be good. Leaming proves her point effectively without beating the reader over the head with her hypothesis. I appreciated the insight into Jackie's psyche and left the book with more sympathetic feelings towards her than I already had.

If you focus on the book as one trying to prove a theory about Jackie, rather than a biography, you'll enjoy it more.

I give Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis: The Untold Story an A-.

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