Helpers laid out the president’s clothes on sofas and racks for her to inspect. 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. Kennedys had lived at the time he was elected president. She was to move temporarily to a borrowed house on N Street in Georgetown, three blocks from the house where the John F. Jackie had initially hoped to be ready to go on Tuesday, but the move had had to be put off until Friday. 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. If only she had recognized the sound of the first shot, she could have pulled him down in time. If only she had been looking to the right, she told herself, she might have saved her husband. So, again and again that winter of 1963-64, she rehearsed the same brief sequence. 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. Those three and a half seconds became of cardinal importance to her. 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.
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