The Enemy Within

If no man is a hero to his valet, no woman--not even one of the most elegant First Ladies in American history--is a heroine to her secretary. This month, as Jacqueline Kennedy turns 40, her public face has acquired a few wrinkles from a sensational book by Mary Barelli Gallagher, Jackie's former personal secretary.

The first installment of My Life with Jacqueline Kennedy appeared in the July Ladies' Home Journal and caused an immediate furor. Based on Jackie's private memos, letters and financial records, it pictures the Queen of Camelot as vain, petty, self-indulgent, ill-tem pered and neglectful of her husband. According to Mrs. Gallagher, Jackie spent $40,000 in one year for clothes but tried to economize by serving White House guests leftover drinks, hoarding gifts of food customarily turned over to charities and selling her used clothes.

She spent her mornings abed while J.F.K. breakfasted alone, and threw a tantrum when Mrs. Gallagher asked for a raise in her $4,830 salary. The Journal article immediately be came an obsessive topic in Washington.

Jackie was abroad and Mrs. Gallagher, an attractive mother of two in her mid-40s, quickly went into hiding with her husband, a retired colonel who now sells insurance. Meanwhile, controversy swirls over Mrs. Gallagher's tactics and motives.

Nauseating. Certainly money was a major reason for Mrs. Gallagher's venture; her husband recently boasted of plans to add a room to their modest house "after we get some loot." Few, however, could understand why she was quite so vindictive. One friend of the author discounts a story that Mrs. Galagher was smarting over a dressing down, and maintains that she adored J.F.K. and resented Jackie's self-indulgence and seeming lack of concern for the President.

One motive, suggested by another of Jackie's White House staffers, was that Mrs. Gallagher had never been accepted as a key member of the staff or as a close friend of Jackie's, and resented it.

As that staff member put it: "All this nauseating stuff she writes about Jackie putting her arm around Mary's shoulder--Jackie was never like that." One theory holds that Mrs. Gallagher decided to tell all after Jackie married Aristotle Onassis last fall. But TIME Washington Correspondent Bonnie Angelo reports that Mary Gallagher was looking for a ghostwriter more than two years ago. Air Force Brigadier General C. J. Mara, the Gallaghers' neighbor, offered Washington Freelancer Angele Gingras $350 to look over the material.

Miss Gingras wrote some sample chapters but quit, evidently because Mrs. Gallagher found her too sympathetic to Jackie. She was replaced by Frances Spatz Leighton. According to press reports, Mrs. Leighton sent a memo to a New York literary agent last November, calling the Gallagher information "the hottest property currently in the U.S.A. and possibly the world." She added confidently: "You needn't waste your time with any publisher who doesn't see this as earning several millions."

Few acquaintances of Jackie's would quibble with the general thrust of My Life. Her acquisitive bent was well known, and since John Kennedy's death she has spent much time shopping, partying, lunching at chic restaurants and roaming the world in search of pleasure. But the Gallagher article was overdrawn and one-sided. "There isn't a secretary in the world who couldn't do this to her boss," complains one of the old Kennedy inner circle. The problem is finally whether or not to betray good taste and personal ethics, especially since Mrs. Gallagher signed a routine pledge to maintain secrecy about her White House days. "Mary never had much of a sense of history," said her husband, explaining that otherwise she would have kept a lot more White House memorabilia. To her former employer, it must seem that Mrs. Gallagher's sense of history was all too keen. In any event, the lesson for men and women of Jackie's eminence is quite clear. Never write memos. Never keep accounts. And above all, never bawl out a secretary.

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