Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis: The Untold Story Read Online Free PDF

parties and dances frequented by the sort of young men she had previously ruled out. She was also soon looking for a job in the capital. A position at the CIA was in play for a time, but before long another possibility materialized. On her behalf, Hughdie approached a journalist friend, Arthur Krock of The New York Times, who had a history of placing “little girls,” as he called them, at the Times-Herald, a conservative, colorful, and often controversial Washington paper that had been among the national publications to tout Jackie as Queen Deb. Its editor, Frank Waldrop, had made journalistic history when his paper was first in the nation to report the attack on Pearl Harbor. The Times-Herald looked to inexperienced girls like Jackie, many of them finishing-school graduates, as a source of fresh, unconventional points of view, not to mention cheap labor. Initially, Waldrop used certain of these girls as gofers in his office, both to assess what they were capable of and to give them a chance to see if the rowdy atmosphere at the Times-Herald suited them. If the new hires survived, he sent them on to other jobs at the paper. When Jackie came to see him shortly before Christmas, he demanded to know whether she intended merely to “hang around” until she got married. In this respect, he exhibited the same skepticism about her that the Vogue editor had shown. Eager to be hired, Jackie assured him she wanted a career in journalism. Waldrop told her to go home for the holidays and report to work after the first of the year. In parting, he warned her not to come to him in six months with the news that she was engaged.
    Hardly had Jackie had that conversation when she met John G. W. Husted Jr. at a seasonal party for which he had driven down from New York. The twenty-four-year-old stockbroker, who had powerful shoulders, a high, slightly protruding forehead, and bright, clear, expectant eyes, was unmistakably of the milieu she had been in flight from since she was nineteen. He had been to prep school and to Yale, he worked at a prominent Wall Street firm, he belonged to exclusive clubs, his family was listed in the Social Register and had homes in Bedford Hills and Nantucket. Nevertheless, at this point John Husted appealed to the romantic element in Jackie. For him, their initial encounter was a coup de foudre. When he first saw her, Jackie had recently cut off her shoulder-length hair in favor of a feather cut that gave her a distinctly gamine look. Taken by what he perceived to be her sensitivity and vulnerability, he compared her to a deer that has just come out of the woods and beheld its first human being. The suddenness of Husted’s feelings for her, and the swiftness with which he acted on them, harmonized with her bookish notions of romantic love. In the days that followed, he called her often, and soon she was traveling to New York to see him. On a snowy December day on Madison Avenue, she who tended to be so cautious and so fastidious acted impulsively, agreeing to marry this young man she had not even known the month before. Later, she wrote Bev Corbin suggesting that, given the speed with which she had become engaged, this time it really must be love.
    “What I hope for you,” she grandly told her spurned former boyfriend, “is for the same thing to happen as quickly and as surely as it did with me. It will when you least expect it.” No sooner had Jackie assured Bev of all this than she was overcome by doubt. A meeting with her intended’s mother proved to be a debacle. A former Farmington girl herself, Helen Armstrong Husted had had a debutante’s pattern career. She had been presented to society twenty-eight years previously, had married a banker shortly after that, and had long been active in volunteer work. Everything about her background was intensely familiar, but for Jackie that was very much the problem. The sweet, shy, elfin child John Husted had fallen in love with seems to have been scarcely in