Those Rubber Ducks!

The other article in the new issue of The Atlantic:

She lived her life dependent on the kindness of sadists — first Black Jack Bouvier, who got too drunk to walk her down the aisle on her wedding day; then John Kennedy, whose lasting gift to her was a bimbo eruption that won’t quit half a century on; then Aristotle Onassis, who covered his yacht’s bar stools with the skin of whale testicles and hardballed her on the prenup — but she could hold her own, Jackie Kennedy. She never played all her aces. Even in the recently released tape recordings of her conversations with Arthur Schlesinger Jr. — talks that occurred less than four months after her husband’s murder — you realize that she was never playing a short game, that she wasn’t a person who could be crushed by a day or a month or a year of bad news or bad press. She was playing a long game, and against all odds she’s still winning it.