The untold story of how one woman's life was changed forever in a matter of seconds by a horrific trauma.

Barbara Leaming's extraordinary and deeply sensitive biography is the first book to document Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis' brutal, lonely and valiant thirty-one year struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) that followed JFK's assassination.

Here is the woman as she has never been seen before. In heartrending detail, we witness a struggle that unfolded at times before our own eyes, but which we failed to understand.

Leaming's biography also makes clear the pattern of Jackie's life as a whole. We see how a spirited young woman's rejection of a predictable life led her to John F. Kennedy and the White House, how she sought to reconcile the conflicts of her marriage and the role she was to play, and how the trauma of her husband's murder which left her soaked in his blood and brains led her to seek a very different kind of life from the one she'd previously sought.

A life story that has been scrutinized countless times, seen here for the first time as the serious and important story that it is. A story for our times at a moment when we as a nation need more than ever to understand the impact of trauma.

From the Author:

PTSD & JACKIE KENNEDY by Barbara Leaming

Our country is in the midst of a national crisis over PTSD. Great numbers of veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have returned suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Yet our society still understands very little about what PTSD is and the suffering it causes to those who live with it. Jackie Kennedy's experience of PTSD is at the heart of my new biography, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis: The Untold Story. It is the reason I decided to write the book.

The story of Jackie's 31 year struggle with PTSD that I was able to detail and document--much of it seen from Jackie's own perspective, often in her own heartbreaking words--affords us an important chance to see up close and in vivid detail just what PTSD means to someone who has had a traumatic experience. It is also in a real sense a remarkable story of survival, the story of someone fighting for her sanity when no one understood what was wrong, when she was repeatedly under assault by society, and when the trauma was repeated.

Importantly, this is also a story which puts a name and face we know to the overwhelming reality of the suffering of someone afflicted with post-traumatic stress disorder. Moreover, her trauma was also a national trauma, a trauma we all witnessed--the assassination of JFK in which Jackie was soaked in her husband's blood and brains.

Jackie Kennedy spent decades in the public eye, but it now becomes frighteningly clear how little we understood of what we saw. It is time to set the record straight. Jackie's story is both important history and a history for our time.

Of all the books I've written none has meant more to me in emotional terms and none has made me feel more acutely the responsibility I have in writing it--a responsibility not just to my subject herself but to those who are suffering from PTSD.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.

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