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“Of all Monday’s images, nothing approaches the force of John’s salute,” wrote William Manchester in The Death of a President, a masterful account of the day’s overwhelming events. Millions of Americans had watched the funeral live. But I was not one of them. I spent most of the day outside exploring the woods near our home in Darby, Pennsylvania. My best friend could not join me because his mother made him stay home and watch the ceremony. Even then, it was impossible to escape the image. The television in our house stayed on all weekend. That evening, I saw the shot of John for the first time in a news summary, and it was plastered on the front page of the local newspaper the next day. But somehow it did not resonate with me. I suspect that until I saw the picture, I was not aware that the president even had a son.
Over time that image has branded itself on our public consciousness. Before that moment, John had been a cute little boy who romped around the White House, hid under his father’s desk, and danced to his father’s claps. But with that single gesture, he became identified with so much more. As the heir apparent, all the unfulfilled hopes and expectations of his father’s presidency transferred to him. In the short run, while John was still a child and young adult, his uncles Robert and Teddy would seek to fulfill their slain brother’s legacy, but John was always the prince in waiting.
JFK’s hold on the public imagination actually exceeded his modest accomplishments in office. In death, Kennedy was transformed into a martyr for causes he championed reluctantly as president. Only after intense pressure from civil rights activists did JFK agree to submit a watered-down civil rights bill to Congress. Many of his campaign promises to stimulate the economy remained bottled up in Congress. He skillfully guided the nation through the Cuban Missile Crisis, but his administration’s obsession with ousting Fidel Castro, often by extralegal means, helped set the stage for the confrontation in the first place. Furthermore, JFK expanded America’s involvement in Vietnam and showed little inclination to avoid a wider war.
Indeed, his legacy has largely been defined by his sudden death. By the mid-1970s, the tragic series of events that followed the assassination—a lost war in Vietnam, racial violence, student protests, and the Watergate scandal that brought down JFK’s onetime political foe Richard Nixon, who’d ascended to the White House after all—made America nostalgic for the bright idealism of the Kennedy years. Citizens overlooked his limited achievements and turned him into a symbol of a time when the United States apparently stood strong in the world and felt united; when life seemed simpler. As the American Dream slipped further from the grasp of most people and as faith in government diminished, Americans clung ever more tenaciously to a mythic view of Kennedy.
Mrs. Kennedy played a vital role in manufacturing that myth. Similar to how she sought to control media access to her children, she grew determined to shape the public’s perception of her husband’s presidency. A few days after the assassination, she sat down with the journalist Theodore White to detail her view of JFK’s administration as resembling the fictitious kingdom of Camelot. “Don’t let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment, that was known as Camelot,” she told White, quoting the lyrics to the song “Camelot,” from one of JFK’s favorite Broadway musicals.
Ultimately, John would spend his life burdened by the expectations of that myth. It did not seem to matter that John had no memory of that weekend, let alone his salute. The millions of people who did remember no longer saw him as John-John (though many continued to call him by that name) but as John Fitzgerald Kennedy Jr., a living embodiment of his illustrious father. Years later, John was having lunch with his friend and future business partner Michael Berman. “It must be interesting being you,” Berman noted. “We are sitting in a restaurant, I don’t know a soul here, and no one knows me. You don’t know a soul here, but they all know who you are.”
John paused for a moment before responding.
“That’s not the odd part,” he said. “The weird part is that they remember, and I don’t. They look at me, and they know me because of what they remember. And they remember more than I do. It’s uncomfortable for me.”
John’s observation captured the central dilemma of his life. The public viewed him as a symbol of a different time in the nation’s history and, perhaps, in their own lives. John learned to gracefully acknowledge and respect those deep feelings. But in order to live a fulfilling life, he needed to define himself separately from his father and beyond the expectations that he had inherited. After November 22, 1963, he confronted that challenge every day of his life.
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“Honey, you stay as long as you want,” a gracious LBJ assured Mrs. Kennedy, but Jackie was eager to leave the White House. Staying a few extra weeks, however, allowed John to maintain his routine in the only home he knew. On December 2 he wandered into Mary Gallagher’s office. “Do you have some gum for me?” he asked. He was disappointed when she said no. “But I’ll bet I have something else that you’ll like even more!” John approached her desk to see what she planned to give him. “Oh, not here,” she told him. “It’s something that doesn’t even fit into my desk drawers.” John went gleefully around the room, looking under furniture to find his mystery gift. Finally, he confronted a closet door, slowly turned the knob, and let out a shriek when he discovered that his gift was a toy airplane. “Look, Miss Shaw!” he shouted with excitement. “I have a new airplane!”
On December 7 Jackie accepted an offer from diplomat and family friend Averell Harriman and his wife to move into their eleven-room, three-story home on N Street, which was just a few blocks from where Jack and Jackie had lived before taking up residence in the White House. It would be a temporary move until she could purchase her own house. Jackie’s room was located on the second floor, and the children and Miss Shaw occupied the third floor. The first floor brimmed with activity. A navy cook made meals, the Secret Service monitored phone calls and searched unknown packages, and Mary Gallagher frantically tried to keep up with correspondence.
The children made the best of their new home. They brought with them their favorite toys: for Caroline, a doll named Mary and her Raggedy Ann; for John, an armory of military equipment—guns, rifles, toy soldiers, and swords for hand-to-hand combat. He had also received a military uniform for his birthday and wore it all the time around the house. Unfortunately, the Harriman house lacked some of the comforts that John had enjoyed while living in the White House. He was not happy that the house had no elevator, which meant that he had to climb three flights of stairs to get to his room.
By all accounts, Mrs. Kennedy was suffering from severe depression and was emotionally unavailable to her children. She rarely left her bedroom on the second floor. “After the busy days moving from the White House, her depression set in,” observed Gallagher. She confided in friends that she was drowning in grief. “Sometimes I become so bitter—only alone—I don’t tell anyone,” she wrote former British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan in January 1964. Robert Kennedy, concerned about her mental state, began brokering meetings between her and a Jesuit priest, Rev. Richard T. McSorley. That spring, she told McSorley that she was contemplating suicide. The priest recorded some of their conversations in his diary.
“Do you think that God would separate me from my husband if I killed myself?” she asked on April 28, 1964. “I feel as though I am going out of my mind at times. Wouldn’t God understand that I just want to be with him?” In a letter that summer, she thanked McSorley for his assistance. “If you want to know what my religious convictions are,” she wrote on July 15, “they are to keep busy and to keep healthy—so that you can do all you should for your children. And to get to bed very early at night so that you don’t have time to think.”
As part of her intent to “keep busy,” Mrs. Kennedy made sure that the children remembered their father and Irish heritage and that John had plenty of male role mode
ls. In addition to his responsibilities as attorney general, RFK consoled Jackie and spent time playing with John. Like clockwork, Dave Powers came every day at noon to entertain John and regale him with stories, often about his father. John would sit for long periods listening raptly as Powers told him about everything from his father’s bravery during World War II to his victory over Khrushchev during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
I got a taste of Powers’s storytelling prowess in the 1980s. For my dissertation, I needed to spend countless hours at the newly opened JFK Presidential Library in Boston. Since no cafeteria existed at the time, researchers had to buy sandwiches from a food truck outside and bring them back to a small, spartan room, with only a handful of tables, off the main reading area. I must have made a dozen trips to the library, and every day at noon, there was Dave Powers, who held the title of museum curator, sitting in the lunchroom and captivating us with stories about JFK and his time in the White House. What was most impressive was that he repeated the stories exactly the same way each time—the same pauses, inflections, and tone. By then, he was so well rehearsed that he appeared to be on autopilot. He had started practicing his stories back in 1963 with two young children as his audience. And like John, I never grew tired of listening to those tales.
Despite their new surroundings, the children maintained much of their same routine. LBJ allowed Caroline to finish the school year at the same White House school that she’d attended before the assassination, riding back and forth with a Secret Service escort. John played with Maud Shaw as usual, though the British nanny did discern something different about him. “I could not help noticing his bright little face clouding over sometimes as he struggled to understand what had happened to him,” she reflected. John had trouble comprehending why they no longer lived in the “big White House” in Washington. Whenever he saw a picture of the White House, he would turn to Shaw and query, “That’s where we live, isn’t it, Miss Shaw?” Shaw would then remind him again that they didn’t live there anymore. Eventually she overheard him comment to his sister as they looked at a picture of the White House, “That’s where we used to live, Caroline.”
John still struggled with the whole idea of death as well. In the White House, he had begun most mornings in Evelyn Lincoln’s office, crawling on the floor and playing with the typewriter. Naturally he missed her. One day John asked Mary Gallagher, “Where’s Mrs. Lincoln?” He continued to interrogate her about Lincoln’s whereabouts until Shaw intervened, deciding it would be best if John spoke with Lincoln on the phone. That conversation started a daily habit of phone calls. One day John stated that he planned to visit her.
“That would be lovely, John. I’m looking forward to seeing you.”
“Me too. Mrs. Lincoln?”
“Yes, John.”
“Is Daddy there?”
Lincoln was too overcome with emotion to respond.
As they had done for the past few years, Jackie took the children to Palm Beach to celebrate Christmas with their grandparents Joe and Rose Kennedy and the extended Kennedy clan. Joe, who suffered a massive stroke in December 1961, was now confined to a wheelchair and unable to speak. Caroline hung lights on the Christmas tree while John tossed tinsel “over everything and everyone.” Afterward, John, Caroline, and a few cousins performed a Nativity play for the adults. The occasion brought back memories of past Christmases they had celebrated with their father. “Will Patrick be looking after him in heaven?” Caroline asked. Before anyone could answer, John piped up, “Do they have fish chowder in heaven?” Everyone knew that fish chowder was the president’s favorite dish.
The Secret Service took elaborate precautions to protect the family during their stay, which lasted until January 5. Agents were no doubt still on edge about losing the president the previous month, and it did not help matters that two days after the family arrived, the West Palm Beach Police Department received an anonymous call from a man saying that he “planned to kill the rest of the Kennedy family that night.” Jackie and the kids were spending the vacation at the home of Colonel Michael Paul, who lived just up the street from the Kennedy compound. In order to make the Paul residence more secure, the Secret Service established a security room in the main garage, installed a new telephone system that connected to each of the security checkpoints, and created four security posts outside and two inside the property.
The added layers of security did little to dampen spirits on Christmas morning at the compound. The children seemed to have forgotten about recent events as they ripped open their gifts, cluttering the living room with wrapping paper and boxes. “There were hugs and kisses and thank-yous and a great deal of shouting and laughter,” Shaw recalled, “which became so infectious that the grown-ups temporarily forgot the grief of a month before and joined in.”
But reality soon greeted them again. On January 6 the family returned to the Harriman house only to find more than four hundred spectators camped outside hoping to get a glimpse of the grieving widow and her children. They planned to stay there only a few days, since Mrs. Kennedy had purchased a new house just down the street: a three-story, fourteen-room brick Colonial with two large magnolias in front. The first few weeks were difficult for Mrs. Kennedy as she waded through boxes of pictures and other mementos reminding her of her husband. At one point, she walked into Gallagher’s office with an envelope full of material related to JFK. She insisted that the secretary remain in the room while she sorted through the contents. “It’s so much easier doing it while you’re here than at night when I’m alone,” she confided. “I just drown my sorrows in vodka.”
Despite the presence of two lively children, Gallagher found the house eerily quiet. “During the hours that I was there, I saw few people,” she recalled. John was relieved that this house had an elevator to take him up to his room, and he continued receiving noontime visits from Dave Powers. “They would lunch together,” recalled Gallagher, “tell stories, march through the rooms, or do just anything to occupy the time happily.” There was also a paved backyard so that John could ride his tricycle. “President Kennedy’s son is described these days as all boy,” wrote The Washington Post in May 1964. “A tricycle terror in his own backyard, he sometimes corners on two wheels around the flagstone-paved area. He has a delightful time tumbling with Shannon, the family’s cocker spaniel. He tangles with the living room draperies. And he scrambles with his uncle, Attorney General [Robert] Kennedy, who dropped by almost every day to see him.”
RFK and Jackie had bonded in their grief. They made almost daily trips to Arlington, where they prayed at President Kennedy’s grave. Along with Dave Powers, Bobby became the other central male figure in John’s life in the year following the assassination. He observed a clear difference in the way John and Caroline dealt with their anguish. John, always an energetic child, seemed to grow even more rambunctious. After one hectic morning, an exacerbated Mrs. Shaw complained, “You know, he’s a boy and a half!” But while RFK described John as mischievous, he noted that his sister became more withdrawn, saying, “Caroline doesn’t let people get close to her.”
Robert did his best to fill the void in John’s life left by his father’s death. He roughhoused with him, just like his dad had done. They played games, especially John’s favorite, hide-and-seek. “Where’s John?” he’d ask as he searched for his nephew, who was usually hiding in plain sight. By the spring of 1964, Robert would pick up John most mornings and let him spend several hours with him at the US Justice Department, where he was usually joined by two of RFK’s children, his cousins Kerry and Michael.
Just when people thought that John did not understand that his father was dead, he would say something surprising. One morning, an Associated Press photographer was hanging around John as he played at a Georgetown playground under the watchful eye of the Secret Service. “We knew him,” recalled Tom Wells, “and did not consider him a security risk, but Bob Foster warned him to keep his distance.” Never
theless, the photographer kept pursuing John. At one point, as Agent Foster picked up John so he could drink from a water fountain, the photographer kept moving toward him. John, seeing what was happening, turned toward the man and demanded, “Why do you want to take my picture? My daddy is dead.” Hill reflected that John’s outburst represented the “first real recognition the agents who worked with him had that he was fully aware of his father’s death and that it was affecting him.”
The crowds of tourists became too much for Mrs. Kennedy, and Washington contained too many bad memories, so she decided to relocate her family permanently to New York. Situated right on the street, their Georgetown house practically welcomed tourists to approach and peek into the windows. Jackie felt like a prisoner. Packed tourist buses pulled up and unloaded their passengers directly in front of the residence. “I do wish they would go away,” Mrs. Kennedy lamented. “I know they mean well, but I can’t stand being stared at like that every time I go out on the street.” The scrutiny also annoyed John. “What are the silly people taking my picture for?” he would complain. Jackie started spending more time away from Washington. She took the kids skiing in Stowe, Vermont, and made frequent trips to New York City, where they stayed at the Carlyle hotel while she considered their future in the city.
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You could fill a small library with the many books and articles that have been written about the way the assassination impacted the adults who surrounded the president, especially Jackie and Robert. But nothing has been written about how John processed the trauma of not only suddenly losing his father but also of moving three times in less than a year. John F. Kennedy’s only son would grow into a remarkably well-adjusted adult, which no doubt owes a great deal to his attending therapy continuously his entire life. But John also possessed two qualities that separated him from others: his profound restlessness and his willingness to take risks.
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