Roberta Bernstein

USA TODAY

The facts are well known: President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, and the bullet that blew his head open splattered blood, bone and brains onto his wife, Jacqueline Kennedy, who then cradled his head in an attempt to keep more from spilling out.

In her newest book, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis: The Untold Story, Barbara Leaming writes that in the following days, months and years, Jackie would recount the horrific incident in hyper-realistic detail to anyone who would listen. This obsessive remembering — plus her trouble sleeping, feelings of helplessness and guilt, angry outbursts, crippling fears that she, too, would be a target, and thoughts of suicide — underlies the argument around this provocative book: that Jackie Kennedy suffered from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Leaming, whose earlier Jackie book, 2001's Mrs. Kennedy: The Missing History of the Kennedy Years, is not a psychiatrist. But she offers ample, if not necessarily conclusive, support for her case.

A chief symptom of PTSD (a diagnostic label that didn't even exist until 1980) is that the trauma becomes an organizing principle in one's life. So recast in this light, Jackie's post-1963 actions make a new kind of sense. Her restless globetrotting, her inability to focus for long on any one endeavor, her dependent relationships with strong, sympathetic men like former defense secretary Robert McNamara and her second marriage to Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis — all these, in Leaming's telling, can be seen as attempts to deal with the unbearable memories of that tragic day in Dallas.

With a diagnosis of PTSD in mind, incidents once criticized as selfish or at least self-indulgent can be reassessed.

For instance, Jackie's sister, Lee Radziwill, according to Cecil Beaton's diaries, said Jackie, five years after JFK's death, was still "more than half round the bend! ... She gets so that she hits me across the face, apropos of nothing." Such behavior interpreted as a clinical symptom of unrelenting pain is easier to understand, if even harder to read about.

It's a great relief to get to Kennedy's later life when, after much therapy, she herself said how good it felt to be "relatively sane." Her publishing career and her contented relationship with financier Maurice Tempelsman speak highly of a woman who fought demons even more implacable than her contemporaries — and the rest of us — realized.

Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis: The Untold Story

By Barbara Leaming

St. Martin's Press

3 stars out of four