A DISTRAUGHT Jackie Kennedy told her confessor that she wanted to commit suicide after JFK’s assassination, a new book has claimed.
The former first lady is said to have spoken openly about her profound loneliness and that she did not feel she could go on without her husband, even for the sake of her two children, John and Caroline.
"It is so hard to bear," she told Father Ri
chard McSorley, just months after John F Kennedy was killed in 1963.
"I feel as if I am going out of my mind at times. Wouldn’t God understand if I just wanted to be with him?"
And she confessed she was racked with guilt over not shielding her husband during the shooting in Dallas and remorseful over the state of their marriage.
She said: "I could have made his life so much happier, especially for the last few weeks. I could have tried harder."
She even said she understood why her love rival, Marilyn Monroe, had opted to kill herself, saying: "I was glad that Marilyn Monroe got out of her misery."
Fr McSorley, a Jesuit priest who was a longtime friend of Robert and Ethel Kennedy, was brought in by the family to help Mrs Kennedy to cope with her grief. Concerned over her deteriorating mental health, they persuaded her to talk to him under the guise of giving her tennis lessons.
He kept her secrets until shortly before his death last year, when he agreed to be interviewed for Edward Maier’s book The Kennedys: America’s Emerald Kings, which concentrates on the family’s Irish-Catholic heritage.
He also granted the author, an investigative reporter with Newsday, exclusive access to his diaries, which detail his long talks with Mrs Kennedy and letters from her.
In one letter, she describes how lonely she was and how she worried that it would be much worse "when the children go away to school".
At one point, she asks Fr McSorley if John and Caroline would not be better off being looked after by Ethel.
"I’m no good to them," she said. "I’m so bleeding inside."
Maier writes: "McSorley gently chastised her for worrying about the future ... ‘It’s the devil’s work. Today’s problem is just to live through today, and to do the best you can today’."
When Mrs Kennedy asked him: "Will you pray that I die?", the priest "looked Jackie in the eyes. He felt compelled to dissuade her from thoughts of suicide, but he would not try to stop her from wishing for death itself".
And he reiterated that "for Catholics, committing suicide meant God’s eternal damnation".
In the book, Maier says Fr McSorley was a useful contact because the Kennedys, like many Catholics at that time, preferred "to seek out priests rather than psychiatrists to solve their problems".
Fr McSorley, who died last year at the age of 88, was a prominent Jesuit priest who for many years taught at the prestigious Georgetown University in Washington. He became a peace activist after being a Japanese prisoner of war for three years following his capture while working as a teacher in the Philippines in the Second World War.
He became friendly with the president-to-be, Bill Clinton, during the Vietnam war when they protested outside the United States Embassy in London.
Mr Clinton then joined him on a trip to Oslo to visit other peace activists.
The 704-page book goes on sale next month.
While JFK was alive, Jackie Kennedy’s relationship with him was always portrayed as a fairy-tale romance. Even after he was assassinated, she insisted that their lives be portrayed as from a modern-day Camelot.
However, the reality was that the pair spent little time together, and she was well aware of his reckless and philandering behaviour.
It was only her wish to avoid confrontation with JFK that allowed her to feign ignorance about his actions.
In the wake of the shooting, she insisted that Life magazine should present a chronicle of their marriage, in which she sought to rescue her husband’s reputation from all the "bitter people" whom she claimed would tarnish his image.
Instead, she undertook her own act of myth-making by presenting him as a "a man of magic" and portraying his presidency as a "brief shining moment".
But many considered the article was just as much about saving her own reputation and taking hold of the reins of her own future.
Her decision to remarry - to the Greek shipping magnate, Aristotle Onassis, who was investigated by several governments - became a scandal.
But by then she had already secured her almost saint-like image in history.
