by Sally Quinn
When I think of it, I imagine that my time in the hospital in Tokyo and on the plane ride back had so scarred me that I couldn’t bear the idea of death or the thought of any kind of ritual surrounding it. Let people die and be buried quietly alone was my view. Why did we all have to be dragged into this prolonged suffering? I didn’t yet understand the importance of ceremony for those left behind.
I watched every second of Kennedy’s funeral on television at least a hundred times. Every perfect detail, every meaningful gesture, every heartbreaking moment has stayed with me until this very day and always will. Surprisingly, it gave me great comfort and enormous pride. I am so grateful I was able to see it all. For the first time I understood how important ritual was—in the case of JFK, how important it was for those who were immediate family as well as for those of us who felt we knew him, and for our country. It was another example of how binding and transcendent ritual can be, how visceral and fundamental it is to us as humans but also to us as a community. The religious part of it was as crucial to the funeral as anything else. In fact, without that, it would not have been as meaningful.
Jack Kennedy’s funeral changed my views about ritual and religion in more ways than I will ever know.
What I couldn’t know at the time was that my future husband, my beloved Ben, was involved with the Kennedys the whole time, meeting Jackie at Bethesda Naval Hospital on the night of the assassination, being part of the funeral planning, and participating as an usher.
* * *
Shortly before the funeral, my father had received orders for Germany again. He was to be the Seventh Army commander, stationed in Stuttgart. I didn’t want to miss the opportunity of living in Europe once more. We left in January of 1964 and found ourselves for the second time in the same part of Germany. This time, however, we lived in a huge house up on a hill overlooking the city—high on the hog, as my father noted. Next door was the residence of the chancellor of Germany. My father had his own private train, plane, helicopter, and limousine, and we had a huge household staff. It was a far cry from the good ole days when, as my mother liked to say, “in the army, we always travel on our stomachs.”
My sister and I hadn’t spent much time in Germany the first posting we lived there because we were away at school in Switzerland for most of the year that my parents were there. We did, however—soon after we had arrived at that first posting in Germany—visit Dachau.
Just walking through those arched gates with ARBEIT MACHT FREI (“Work makes you free”) inscribed on them was horrifying enough, but touring Dachau with my father describing what he had seen that day so many years earlier—the trenches full of bodies, the skeletal living humans with glazed eyes—brought back so many memories of those photographs I had seen as a child. I was filled with rage—rage at what and who, I didn’t know at first. It couldn’t be at God because I didn’t believe in the existence of God. How could anyone come to Dachau and ever believe in a loving, personal God again? Reading the plaque that was displayed on a large stone that stood where the crematorium had operated—DENKET DARAN WIE WIR HIER STARBEN (“Remember how we died here”)—I was sure that I was an angry, confirmed atheist.
Coming back to Germany for the second time, I went back to see Dachau, and again, I was filled with rage. This time, though, I was angry at myself. I felt as though I had somehow been brainwashed in the ensuing years. How could I possibly have mellowed so that I thought the religious rituals of the Kennedy funeral were meaningful? What a sham it all seemed, worshipping a God who would let this obscenity happen. I was convinced that I would always feel the same way and never have a breakthrough to an understanding of any alternative meaning.
It wouldn’t be until much later, when I read Viktor Frankl’s brilliant book Man’s Search for Meaning, that I realized that even within these houses of horror one could find meaning and one could find the good in others. Finding meaning in one’s life didn’t necessarily require religious faith, but that comprehension would be a long time coming.
* * *
I began dating a handsome lieutenant in the German army, the son of social friends of my parents. He was so good-looking that the army used his picture on its official recruitment poster all over the country. He was not a career officer but had graduated from the University at Tübingen and was now serving only for two years.
Joachim (the “J” is pronounced like a “Y”; everyone called him Yo) and I spent many weekends in Baden-Baden, about an hour and a half from Stuttgart on the French border. It had been a resort spa for the kings of Europe in the old days, who went there for the salt spring baths to take the cure, or Kur. The place became known as “the playground of kings.”
Yo’s father was Direktor der Kur overseeing the casino and spa, but the town was filled with nightclubs and fabulous restaurants as well. Yo had access to all the facilities for free so it was great fun. We stayed with his parents at their spacious apartment where we had separate rooms.
Joachim’s father and mother, whom I liked very much, were both German Protestants. His father was bald and portly with a red face and a big smile. He had impeccable Old World manners. His mother was pretty and petite, a very graceful figure. Both of them were intelligent and had good senses of humor, but there was an air of sadness about them and a certain posture of defeat. I couldn’t understand why. They had a wonderful glamorous life and seemed to have a great marriage.
One Sunday night when the maid was off, Yo’s mother invited us to stay home with them and she would cook. We would eat in the kitchen. She made a delicious roast chicken with vegetables and we had plenty of good wine. It was after several glasses that the conversation took an ominous turn.
One interesting thing I had noticed was that since I had been in Germany that year, nobody had talked about the Holocaust. It was as if it had never happened, so eerily similar to the Japanese and their seeming denial that the war had happened. My parents’ official German friends, their social German friends, my German friends, the men I dated, my coworkers—not a soul mentioned the war or its aftereffects. Several of the men I dated were older and had fought in the war. I did ask them about their experiences and to a man they were reluctant to discuss the war at all and would only say vaguely that they had fought on the Russian front. In fact, I never met a German who hadn’t fought on the Russian front. Nobody had fought the Americans and nobody had ever been near a concentration camp, and interestingly, I don’t recall anybody ever saying the word Jew or Jewish.
So it was in this kind of silent environment that night at Joachim’s parents’ apartment that the conversation about the Holocaust finally arose. Yo brought it up. “Why don’t we ever talk about the war?” he asked. There was an anguished silence.
“We don’t ever talk about it,” he said a bit more forcefully. His voice was accusatory. His father asked if anyone wanted more wine and poured another round. We all drank. His mother began to clear the dishes.
“I want to talk about it,” he said.
Both of his parents started talking at once. Flustered and nervous, they explained that the reason they had left for London in the late 1930s was because they realized what was happening. They had witnessed the rise of Hitler and realized that he couldn’t be stopped. Besides, what was there to say? It was all so horrible. Best to forget.
Yo pounded his fist on the table. “No, it is not best to forget,” he yelled. “We must never forget. If we forget, it will happen all over again.”
I wanted to get up and disappear, but there was something so compelling about the conversation that I was riveted. Clearly distraught, they were wriggling like bugs pinned to a mat.
“Why did you run away?” Yo finally demanded, his face flushed with anger. “Why didn’t you stay and try to do something or stop Hitler? If people had stood up to Hitler, if people had not run away like cowards, this may never have happened.”
His mother started to cry. “You don’t understand what it was like,” she quietly replied.
His father began to weep as well. He talked about how powerful Hitler was, how a tidal wave of hate and power took over the country, how people, even some of their closest friends, had gone mad. He said how terrifying it was for those who opposed Hitler even if they weren’t Jewish. He said they knew they were not strong enough to deter him and if they tried, they would be punished as well. They had a choice of either leaving or going along with Hitler’s crazy schemes. He begged his son to understand.
At that point, Yo started to cry, and so did I. His parents were crying out of shame and guilt and remorse and possibly from recognizing their own helplessness at the time. Yo was crying because he was seeing his parents as human, weak and flawed. I was crying because I was a witness to such a painful exchange. Their suffering was palpable.
All of us sat weeping at the kitchen table, the dirty dishes still in front of us, and the half-drunk wineglasses still glistening in the candlelight.
Finally Yo’s father spoke. “You have no idea,” he said, as much to himself as to us, “what it is to look into the face of evil.”
The only thing I could think about was all the unanswered prayers—the same thought I’d had as a child when I first saw the photos from Dachau.
* * *
I was twenty-three at this time and still a virgin. Yo and I had indulged in many passionate make-out sessions, but I simply wasn’t ready. An older friend of mine had once told me that I should not just fall into bed with anyone. I must elect my first lover. It would be better not to be in love with him. That way I wouldn’t be hurt. Yo was my age but had had a lot of experience with women. He had just broken off an affair with a Frenchwoman in her early thirties. I absolutely adored him and was wildly attracted to him, but I was not in love. He was perfect.
It was summer and we decided to go to Spain for a vacation. My father, the general, was not too happy about my going off with this good-looking German lieutenant. He suspected Yo might have ulterior motives, but my mother convinced him it would be totally innocent. Ha! Yo, who had the most beautiful manners of anyone I had ever met (the Verbindungen, university fraternities, taught manners as did the army), was so polite and correct with my father when he came to fetch me in his Volkswagen that Daddy was too charmed to object. Yo assured him he would take very good care of me. And off we went.
We made it to Switzerland the first night. We found a cozy bed-and-breakfast run by a nice German-speaking woman who served us Wiener schnitzel and showed us to our room, very utilitarian, sparsely furnished with a double bed, a lamp, a chair, and a dresser. The bed was made up, as were most European beds, with a duvet and no top sheet. We were both tired and crawled in as soon as we finished dinner, only to find that when one of us moved, the duvet would be pulled over to the side or fall off the bed. For some reason we were not in the mood for love and though we did attempt to be a bit amorous, the atmosphere simply wasn’t conducive to seduction. Not only that, we couldn’t stop laughing every time the duvet slid off the bed. Neither one of us slept well that night and we got up early, anxious to be on our way to a more romantic climate. Barcelona was our next stop. Perfect.
We drove straight through and arrived late afternoon, found a charming pension in the heart of old Barcelona, and settled in. We were tired from the long drive and immediately fell asleep. We woke at dusk. The temperature was hot and sultry, through the open windows. The city was just coming alive. Sounds of people laughing outside, smells of restaurants grilling meats wafted in the air, the churning of mopeds peeling down the streets—all portended excitement and anticipation. We began kissing, and soon it became clear to me that something important was about to happen. This time I didn’t protest, didn’t remove a wayward hand, didn’t back away when he came to me. I wanted him to make love to me. No, I wanted to make love to him. He did. I did. We did. It was everything I could have imagined and more. He was skillful, adept, practiced, and loving. His every move was meant to please me and he succeeded. He showed me things about my body that I could not have known. I was enthralled, overwhelmed with disbelief.
So this is what it was about. How could I have ever known? Why had I ever waited? How could anyone possibly think that what we were doing was wrong, sinful, unacceptable? I never wanted to stop. And we didn’t for days.
He was in love with me, and though I was not in love with him, I did love him. I finally understood the meaning of ecstasy. It’s not exactly that I thought then of God. Yo was not religious and neither was I. But I had seen the painting of St. Teresa of Avila, the rapturous expression on her face when she thought of Christ. That expression had always seemed slightly unrealistic to me, a bit over the top. Now I could see what she was feeling. There was something sacred, holy to me about what we were doing, the merging of two bodies in an intimacy I could never have thought possible. Somehow it had to be the work, the creation of the divine. It was only when I first made love to Ben that I understood what the divine truly was. It began to dawn on me that as delightful and satisfying as sex can be, there was another dimension to it that I hadn’t expected. It was a powerful spiritual experience.
* * *
Daddy was resigning from the army. He had had a disagreement with President Lyndon Johnson, and Johnson reneged on his promise to make my father chief of staff of the army and give him his fourth star. He was devastated. However, Daddy was never one to look back. He got a job at Martin Marietta and marched home to the lucrative work of a member of the military industrial complex. We had been in Germany a little over a year and a half, and my parents were ready to leave, as was I.
Yo and I had ended our relationship by this time. He realized I wasn’t in love with him, and he had too much pride to stick around. It was painful but we remained friends and I adored him and understood why he had to make this move.
It was soon after that, but before we returned to the States, that I met someone new. He was a young lieutenant, having been in ROTC at Harvard, now stationed at Seventh Army headquarters in Stuttgart. We invited him for dinner, and he and I immediately hit it off. He was smart, charming, and handsome. We had many of the same friends, and we were interested in the same things. His parents were divorced. His father lived in New York, and his mother was married to a French business owner and lived in an hôtel particulier on the Left Bank in Paris. We began seeing each other exclusively and spent a lot of time in Paris. His mother’s dining room had a mural painted by Fragonard. We dressed for dinner every night, and the house was so big his mother would bring her evening bag downstairs in case she needed to freshen up.
He had a Ferrari, and we spent weekends trying out three-star restaurants around Europe. The problem was that my father was leaving Germany soon, and my friend had nearly a year before he got out of the army. He asked me to marry him and I said yes. I cared about him a great deal, but I wasn’t in love with him. I was twenty-five by then—in those days dangerously close to being an old maid; I was in love with being in love and in love with the idea of being married. Being engaged gave me a sense of security. This was not particularly noble, but I felt it was the best thing for me, and my parents liked him a great deal. They were also thrilled that I would be taken care of. It was all very old-fashioned. If it were today, I would have stayed with him in Germany when they left, but it seemed inappropriate if not impossible at the time. Actually, if it were today, I would not have gotten engaged.
I didn’t get an engagement ring right away. We decided to wait until he got out of the army and pick one out together. He did give me his Porcellian pig, an emblem of the club he belonged to at Harvard. He was a fifth-generation Porcellian member and had a tiny solid gold pig with emerald eyes that had been passed down through the years. I had a thin gold bracelet and wore the pig on that as a single charm. I was happy with that.
* * *
I had had a fabulous time in Germany, working as a translator and tour guide at Daimler Benz, traveling constantly, meeting fascinating people, acting in the Kleines Theater in Stuttgart and on the army post, s
tudying languages. However, as our time to head back to Washington drew near, I began to feel lost. I had no idea what I was going to do or where I was going to live until my fiancé arrived back in the States.
After a very emotional retirement ceremony for my father, I moved back to Washington with my parents and continued living with them, trying to plan my upcoming wedding. I was looking for a job, but was agitated much of the time, bored and depressed. Marriage seemed to be the only thing I had to look forward to. I viewed it as my escape.
Then I met Warren Hoge and immediately fell in love. Good-looking, sexy, and smart, he had a great personality and was a brilliant journalist. He had graduated from Yale the same year I had graduated from Smith, but we had never met. I was head over heels. It was mutual.
Unfortunately, my fiancé was on his way back for home leave and was coming down to Washington to stay with me. What was I going to do?
It had been a while since I had relied on occultism, but it had always been my fallback. With that in mind, I devised a plan. I knew that I would have to break my engagement. I couldn’t marry him when I was so passionately in love with someone else. Also, I really cared about him and didn’t want to hurt him.
He arrived, and it was clear that things were uncomfortable. I put him in the guest room and he took me to dinner that night at the famed Sans Souci restaurant, across from the White House. The conversation was strained, fraught, actually, and tense. I couldn’t think of a thing to say. We ate quickly and went back to the house. All I really wanted to do was go to bed, alone, but I had to tell him. I fixed him a nightcap. Then I exclaimed, excitedly, “Why don’t I get out the Ouija board.” My mother and sister and my aunts in Georgia had always relied heavily on the Ouija board for advice.
He looked at me as if I were crazy. “What are you talking about?” he asked. He had no idea about this side of me. I knew he would never understand it so I had simply not bothered to tell him that I led a “life of the spirits.” Besides, that area of my life had been relatively dormant since I left college.