Sept 08: A despairing Jacqueline Kennedy spoke repeatedly to a priest about suicide in the months following her husband's assassination, according to a new book about the Kennedy family. "It is so hard to bear," she told Father Richard McSorley about five months after President John F. Kennedy was shot and killed in Dallas in November 1963.
"I feel as though I am going out of my mind at times. Wouldn't God understand if I just wanted to be with him?" Her frank talk about suicide with the Jesuit theology teacher from Georgetown University is revealed in author Thomas Maier's The Kennedys: America's Emerald Kings (Basic Books), which is excerpted in the October issue of Redbook magazine.

The 600-page book, which looks at the Kennedy clan through their religious heritage, is subtitled "A Five-Generation History of the Ultimate Irish-Catholic Family" and slated to be published next month.
Jacqueline Kennedy opened up to McSorley during tennis lessons from the priest, arranged by her brother-in-law Robert Kennedy, who thought she could benefit from some counseling.
In her first meeting with him at Robert Kennedy's estate in Virginia, McSorley told Maier that she expressed remorse over not being able to save her husband.
The next day she shared her thoughts about suicide, asking if he would "pray that I die" and wondering aloud whether her children would benefit.
"The children would be better off here anyhow," she told him. "I'm no good to them. I'm so bleeding inside."

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Jacqueline Kennedy became depressed a few weeks later, before what would have been her husband's 47th birthday, and again raised the subject of suicide, telling the priest she would be glad if her death "set off a wave of suicides, because she was glad to see people get out of their misery."

Maier interviewed McSorley, who died last year, and also saw his diary of talks with Jackie and letters from the former first lady.
Maier, who has also written biographies of publisher SI Newhouse and baby expert Dr. Benjamin Spock, writes of how McSorley offered comfort and helped her, noting, "Catholics of their generation, regardless of social strata, were more inclined to seek out priests rather than psychiatrists to solve their problems."
Bureau Report