Twelve Books
“He clearly felt very deeply about her,” Ginsberg says. “I think she felt deeply about him. They have both suffered grievous losses and he feels like the salve to that is to get married to her. She takes a different view, which is we can’t be married because there’s just too much pain between us and if we’re going to find happiness we have to do it outside of these worlds that we inhabit.”
Of her decision to instead marry the shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis in 1968, Jackie wrote, “If ever I can find some healing and some comfort — it has to be with somebody who is not part of all my world of past and pain. I can find that now — if the world will let us.”
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Their story is just one of the book’s nine portraits of U.S. presidents and the friendships supporting them.
“A ‘first friend’ has the ability to talk to the president in a way that no one else can,” says Ginberg. “It’s not necessarily the person with the title or the official post.”
“If you look at each president, most of them have somebody in their life who played this kind of unsung role or in some cases was hiding in plain sight,” the author tells PEOPLE. “Some were quite public, such as Bebe Rebozo and Richard Nixon; Vernon Jordan and Bill Clinton.”
“And with others — such as FDR and Daisy Suckley and Franklin Pierce and Nathaniel Hawthorne — you had to dig for it,” Ginsberg says, “and that was the fun of it.”
First Friendsis on sale now.
source: people.com
