Jackie After O by Tina Cassidy Page B

definitely not for her. Jackie was not the kind of person who would punch a clock at a specific hour every day. But maybe Jackie would like a job in the nonprofit sector? Something where you could keep your own hours? At the time, Jackie was being deluged with requests from people asking to lend her name to committees, especially ones involved in preservation, as well as from endorsements, particularly in fashion. To Jackie, most of those requests were about what a cause could get out of her, rather than what she could get out of it.
    Years before, in 1964, Dorothy Schiff, the longtime owner and publisher of the New York Post , had met with Jackie in Manhattan. It was one week after the release of the Warren Report, which declared that Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone in the assassination. Jackie was very emotional with Schiff, her eyes brimming with tears when she explained that she had forgotten to cancel her newspaper and magazine subscriptions that week and had been forced to see the coverage of the report when the shooting was still so fresh.
    â€œThere is only one thing to do,” Schiff told her. “And that is to find a substitute in work that is all-absorbing. It will never be the same thing, but you can lose yourself that way.”
    Jackie told her that she knew that was true and would like to do it.
    â€œI don’t want to be Ambassador to France or Mexico,” she told Schiff. “President Johnson said I could have anything I wanted. I would like to work for somebody, but the list is … One is expecting someone to come home every weekend, but no one …”
    Schiff was sympathetic and admitted that a job was a poor replacement for the void in her life.
    â€œYou know, you are the most famous and admired woman in the world,” Schiff said. “It is quite a responsibility.”
    Being a political wife, that had been her job, a job that left her tired and hoarse at the end of the day. After a pause in her conversation with Schiff, her mind wandered back to the White House.
    â€œAll that furniture …”
    Before she left, Schiff offered Jackie a job as a columnist.
    â€œYou could just write about things you go to and anything you like,” said Schiff, who had been a columnist herself.
    â€œOh, I can’t write,” Jackie said, reflexively reverting to her old-fashioned demure ways. But she also huffed that she had received lots of requests from magazines to write about what one might expect—gracious living or fashion—not about the space race or civil rights or global affairs. After all, she said, her voice growing indignant, “I am interested in the same things Jack was interested in!” 5
    As Jackie finally entered the room at the Sulgrave Club—eleven years after that conversation with Schiff-—Baldrige was struck by how impeccably dressed her friend was and how depressed she looked and sounded. Even her voice was “drooping.” After settling in and ordering lunch, Baldrige was blunt, as old friends can be.
    â€œYou’re so smart and so bright and you’ve hidden all that under a bushel,” Baldrige said. “It’s time to step out with it. Go to work and get a job.”
    â€œWho, me—work?” Jackie asked. “And do what?”
    They discussed foundation work but that didn’t seem right.
    â€œWell, you care about publishing, you’ve been doing things, advising people on their books, you should get a job as a publisher.” 6
    Publishing was not the nonprofit world, but it was close. Baldrige, who was in the process of completing a manuscript called Juggling , about balancing work, marriage, and motherhood, suggested her publisher, Viking Press.
    â€œLook,” Baldrige encouraged, “you know Tommy Guinzburg. Why don’t you talk to him?”
    Thomas Henry Guinzburg was president of Viking, the distinguished New York publishing house. He had known Jackie’s stepbrother in