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This is not to say the books are interchangeable. Klein, a contributor to Vanity Fair, uses that magazine's patented "I was there" narrative style to great effect. An acquaintance of Jackie's in the 1980s, Klein offers a reader vivid glimpses of her, as well as poignant descriptions of how she would ask Kennedy allies, such as former Connecticut Governor Abraham Ribicoff and press secretary Pierre Salinger, to talk to John and Caroline about their father.
Somehow, through the accretion of such details, the arc of a relationship does begin dimly to emerge. A marriage that may not have been for love alone, nor for money, nor for political expediency grew to have a measure of each. "He did not object to marrying Jackie because it would put a crimp in his sex life," Klein writes,"...but he knew that marriage would bring certain wrenching changes. For one thing, he would have to trust Jackie with his deepest secrets." Both authors believe that ultimately he did so, and that the bond deepened as Kennedy realized how much the public loved his wife, and how much he loved their children. At the time of Kennedy's assassination, their friends agree, Jack and Jackie were as close as they had ever been. Klein describes how, after the death of their infant son Patrick in 1963, "she hung onto him and he held her in his arms--something nobody ever saw at any other time because they were very private people."
Jack and Jackie, themselves inveterate gossipers and image tenders, would probably not be surprised to see how hard these writers have worked to shatter that privacy. But as Jackie said to journalist Theodore H. White during their famous Camelot interview, "When something is written down, does that make it history? The things they say!"