Never-before-seen private letters from Jackie Kennedy have revealed her despair over JFK’s wandering eye.
In missives sent to Joseph Leonard, a Vincentian priest in Dublin, between 1950 and 1964, she likens her husband’s womanizing to that of her father, John ‘Black Jack’ Vernou Bouvier.
In one of her earlier letters to Leonard in 1952, she said of JFK: ‘He’s like my father in a way – loves the chase and is bored with the conquest – and once married needs proof he’s still attractive, so flirts with other women and resents you. I saw how that nearly killed Mummy.’
The letters, all handwritten on personalized stationery, also offer fascinating insight into her early days among Washington D.C.’s smart set and even before.
In on she described her breakup after a brief engagement to John Husted, the man she was supposed to marry in 1952.
‘I’m ashamed that we both went into it so quickly and gaily but I think the suffering it brought us both for awhile afterwards was the best thing,’ she wrote.
‘We both needed something of shock to make us grow up.’
In 1953, the year she married JFK, she wrote: ‘Maybe I’m just dazzled and picture myself in a glittering world of crowned heads and Men of Destiny – and not just a sad little housewife . . .
‘That world can be very glamorous from the outside – but if you’re in it – and you’re lonely – it could be a Hell.’
She says that her relationship with JFK had given her ‘an amazing insight on politicians – they really are a breed apart,’ and admitted that he was consumed by ambition ‘like Macbeth.’
But despite her fears over JFK’s womanizing ways, Jackie tells Leonard in 1954: ‘I love being married much more than I did even in the beginning.’
At one point she describes her mother-in-law Rose Kennedy, ‘I don’t think Jack’s mother is too bright – and she would rather say a rosary than read a book.’ Letters following JFK’s tragic assassination in 1963 reveal the extent of her heartbreak, to the extent that she even questioned her Catholic faith.
She admitted to Leonard that she had become ‘bitter against God,’ although, she added, ‘I have to think there is a God – or I have no hope of finding Jack again.’
‘I think God must have taken Jack to show the world how lost we would be without him,’ she wrote, even injecting a note of humor.
‘But that is a strange way of thinking to me – and god will have a bit of explaining to do to me if I ever see him.’
Jackie met Leonard in 1950, when she was 21 and he was 73. She and her step-brother, Hugh Dudley Auchincloss III, toured Europe during the summer and her step uncle, W.S. Lewis, who had met Leonard in the 1920s, recommended they meet up with the priest.
They would only meet in person once more, when she and JFK (then a U.S. senator) travelled to Dublin in 1955.
Over the years he wrote her back and would send her books.
‘It seems to me you know everything and from all you’ve read and learned you can pick and choose the most lovely things for me,’ she wrote.
‘Does it give you a sense of power to think you’re molding someone else mind and taste? I hope it does and certainly no one ever had a more willing piece of putty to work with’, Daily Mail informs.
