Vanity Fair - Jacqueline Kennedy's Struggle After J.F.K.'s Assassination: The Winter of Her Despair --- A symbol of strength for a traumatized nation in the winter of 1963–64, Jacqueline Kennedy was in fact falling apart—grieving and endlessly reliving her husband’s assassination, afflicted with what we’d now call post-traumatic stress disorder. Barbara Leaming, adapting her new biography, uncovers what was known to few outside the former First Lady’s inner circle: the nightmares, the drinking, the suicidal thoughts, but also the unexpected gesture that helped save her sanity. -- During the long winter of 1963, during the lonely nights that seemed to never end, the wakeful nights that no quantity of vodka could assuage, Jackie Kennedy would relive the sliver of time between the first gunshot, which had missed the car, and the second, which hit both the president and Texas governor John Connally. Those three and a half seconds became of cardinal importance to her. In the course of her marriage, she had constructed herself as Jack Kennedy’s one-woman Praetorian Guard—against the doctors, against the political antagonists, against the journalists, even against anyone in his own circle who, to her perception, would do him harm. So, again and again that winter of 1963-64, she rehearsed the same brief sequence. If only she had been looking to the right, she told herself, she might have saved her husband. If only she had recognized the sound of the first shot, she could have pulled him down in time. -- It was Monday, December 2, and she and the children had returned from Cape Cod the night before in anticipation of moving out of the White House family quarters at the end of the week so that Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson could move in. Jackie had initially hoped to be ready to go on Tuesday, but the move had had to be put off until Friday. She was to move temporarily to a borrowed house on N Street in Georgetown, three blocks from the house where the John F. Kennedys had lived at the time he was elected president. Packing had begun in her absence, but in the course of the next few days she planned to pick through her husband’s wardrobe herself in order to determine which items to keep and which to disperse. Helpers laid out the president’s clothes on sofas and racks for her to inspect. Seeming to connect the irrational death of her young husband and the loss of the two babies, Arabella (who was stillborn in 1956) and Patrick (who died at two days old in August 1963), Jackie also planned to immediately transfer the remains of both of them from Holyhood Cemetery, in Brookline, Massachusetts, to beside their father’s grave, in Arlington. As far as she was concerned, there was not a moment to be lost. The secret burial was set to take place that week under the auspices of Bishop Philip Hannan, who, at Jackie’s request, had given the eulogy for President Kennedy at St. Matthew’s Cathedral. It remained only for Teddy Kennedy, youngest of the Kennedy brothers, to fly in the remains of both children on the family jet. - More, Vanity Fair, http://www.vanityfair.com/society/2014/10/jacqueline-kennedy-jfk-assassination-depression