Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis: The Untold Story - Softcover

PTSD & JACKIE KENNEDY by Barbara Leaming

Our country is in the midst of a national crisis over PTSD. Great numbers of veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have returned suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.  Yet our society still understands very little about what PTSD is and the suffering it causes to those who live with it.  Jackie Kennedy's experience of PTSD is at the heart of my new biography, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis: The Untold Story.  It is the reason I decided to write the book.

The story of Jackie's 31 year struggle with PTSD that I was able to detail and document--much of it seen from Jackie's own perspective, often in her own heartbreaking words--affords us an important chance to see up close and in vivid detail just what PTSD means to someone who has had a traumatic experience.  It is also in a real sense a remarkable story of survival, the story of someone fighting for her sanity when no one understood what was wrong, when she was repeatedly under assault by society, and when the trauma was repeated.  

Importantly, this is also a story which puts a name and face we know to the overwhelming reality of the suffering of someone afflicted with post-traumatic stress disorder.  Moreover, her trauma was also a national trauma, a trauma we all witnessed--the assassination of JFK in which Jackie was soaked in her husband's blood and brains.

Jackie Kennedy spent decades in the public eye, but it now becomes frighteningly clear how little we understood of what we saw.  It is time to set the record straight. Jackie's story is both important history and a history for our time.

Of all the books I've written none has meant more to me in emotional terms and none has made me feel more acutely the responsibility I have in writing it--a responsibility not just to my subject herself but to those who are suffering from PTSD.

BARBARA LEAMING is a New York Times bestselling author. Three of her biographies have been New York Times Notable Books of the Year. Her recent book, Churchill Defiant, received the Emery Reves Award from The Churchill Centre. Leaming's articles have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, London's The Times, and other publications. She lives in Connecticut.