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“He knew that’s what Jackie was contemplating, and he did not approve of it. I don’t know why he felt that way, but obviously he thought Warnecke wasn’t the right guy.”

Warnecke’s chartered helicopter touched down on the front lawn of the Kaisers’ main house. He reached out a hand and pulled Jackie on board. Moments later, they lifted off and disappeared into a perfect blue sky. Jackie’s infuriated Secret Service men were left behind.

That day they visited Maui, where they lunched at Lahaina’s Pioneer Inn. Another time, they hopped over to the island of Hawaii, which was sometimes called the Big Island, where they enjoyed the privacy of Laurance Rockefeller’s guest cottage on the Parker Ranch. Once, they went trekking in the mountains of Kauai, where they hunted goats and wild boar.

“Sometimes we would just go off alone to a remote beach and swim,” Warnecke said. “We had endless conversations about JFK. His memory was the thing that had bound us together in the first place. The John F. Kennedy Memorial Grave was nearing completion. I knew that despite the monument, his reputation wasn’t inviolable. Stories about his womanizing would be coming out sooner or later.

“I told Jackie about some of those stories involving Jack and other women. I did it so she wouldn’t be shocked when she read about them later. She was prepared for the worst when it came.

“I told her stories about my own personal experiences with women, too,” he went on. “One story took place when I was in Thailand, designing the American embassy, and one of my Harvard classmates, a Thai, invited me to dinner at his home in the mountains of northern Thailand. At dinner I was told that I would be given twelve beautiful women for dessert, and that I could choose any of them I desired.

“ ‘Oh,’ Jackie said, ‘to think you had your choice!’

“And I said, ‘Well, it was all very proper. It was arranged by the family. After all, I had to be polite.’

“She loved that, and broke into gales of laughter.

“She teased me with her own stories, except that she didn’t have many sexual experiences to talk about. She told me about her first love, John Marquand Jr., the son of the famous novelist, whom she had met during her junior year abroad in Paris.

“ ‘Were you seduced by Marquand before you married Jack?’ I asked her.

“ ‘Well, just let’s say I came very close,’ she said.

“I thought maybe she said ‘very close’ because she couldn’t bring herself to admit to me that she had gone all the way when she was so young.

“And we talked about getting married. I had a beautiful five-bedroom house on Black Point off Diamond Head Road. Jackie decided that a room off the living room, a nice soft den, needed remodeling. She did a watercolor-and-ink sketch, and set to work redecorating the room with fabric. She did the whole thing in no time flat. But we talked about starting out fresh, and buying another house after we got married.

“ ‘I wonder,’ she said, ‘if we could live in a house on a hill overlooking the harbor?’

“I was a good Presbyterian with a grandmother who had been a Christian Science practitioner, but Jackie was pleased when she found out that I could not remember having been baptized as a child. She thought I could be baptized as a Catholic. She was exultant over the idea.

“ ‘I’m going to turn you into a Catholic to make you more suitable as a husband,’ she said.

“All this time, the Secret Service guys were looking after the kids, and leaving Jackie and me pretty much alone. Our summer together in Hawaii was a fairy tale.”

When it was time for Jackie to return to the mainland, she wrote a farewell thank-you letter to the editors of the Honolulu Advertiser and the Star-Bulletin.

I had forgotten, and my children have never known what it was like to discover a new place, unwatched and unnoticed. It was your papers that made this possible for us, by deciding at the beginning not to follow our activities. … I truly appreciate the extraordinary gesture you made.

But as she prepared to leave Hawaii, Jackie had to face some hard questions. Did she truly want to be unwatched and unnoticed, and pull a disappearing act like Greta Garbo? And even if she could somehow vanish from public view, would she be satisfied by such a life?

She was less sure of the answers to these questions than she sounded in her letter to the editors. No one, perhaps not even Jackie herself, knew exactly what was in her heart. But before she left Hawaii she had a conversation with Mrs. Kaiser in which she alluded to her future.

“My mother told me later about that conversation,” said Michael Kaiser. “Jackie made it clear to my mother that she had no present intention of marrying Jack Warnecke.”

Of course, Warnecke did not know that.

“Before she left,” Warnecke said, “I told her that my goal was to get her back to a normal life. A private life, not a public one. I wanted to let her be her own person. Away from the press. Away from prying eyes. Away from all that pressure. And I was a little surprised by her response.

“ ‘One of the biggest forces of all between two human beings is the search for power,’ she told me. Tower is a strong force and motivation in people. I don’t want to wield power myself, but I’ve observed that the ultimate motive in humankind is power.’ ”

EIGHT

TARNISHED

HALO

July 1966–August 1967

“OUT OF CONTROL”

Soon after Jackie returned from Hawaii, she learned that Look magazine had bought the serial rights to William Manchester’s book, The Death of a President, for the astounding sum of $665,000. It was the biggest deal in magazine history (the equivalent in today’s money of more than $5 million). Jackie did not think that Manchester had any