Jackie Kennedy’s HONEYMOON Was Much Nastier Than You Thought

Jackie Kennedy’s HONEYMOON Was Much Nastier Than You Thought In July 1952, a twenty-two-year-old woman in Washington sat down and wrote a letter to a Catholic priest in Dublin. She was in love, she told him, with the son of the former American ambassador to London. And then she described him. He was like her father in a way, she wrote. He “loves the chase and is bored with the conquest.” And she added one more line, about her own parents: “I saw how that nearly killed Mummy.” About two years later, she wrote to the same priest again. By then she was Mrs John F. Kennedy. And this time she said that she loved being married even more than she had at the beginning. Both of those letters were written by Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy. Both of them went to the same man. And only one of them sounds like a warning. That is what this episode is about. Not the dress, which has its own story, and not Camelot, which came later. The weeks in between. A wedding that was taken out of the bride’s hands. A father who never made it to the church. Two weeks in a pink villa on the cliffs above Acapulco. A mansion in Beverly Hills with a history no one mentioned at the time. And a husband who, if one account is true, asked his new wife to fly home without him.