Barbara Leaming

Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis Barbara Leaming

Barbara Leamings extraordinary and deeply sensitive biography is the first book to document Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis brutal, lonely and valiant thirty-one year struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) that followed JFKs assassination. Here is the woman as she has never been seen before. In heartrending detail, we witness a struggle that unfolded at times before our own eyes, but which we failed to understand. Leamings biography also makes clear the pattern of Jackies life as a whole. We see how a spirited young womans rejection of a predictable life led her to John F. Kennedy and the White House, how she sought to reconcile the conflicts of her marriage and the role she was to play, and how the trauma of her husbands murder which left her soaked in his blood and brains led her to seek a very different kind of life from the one shed previously sought. A life story that has been scrutinized countless times, seen here for the first time as the serious and important story that it is. A story for our times at a moment when we as a nation need more than ever to understand the impact of trauma.