The Good Son_JFK Jr. and the Mother He Loved

by Christopher Andersen

  A surprising last-minute addition that night was the notorious Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis, whose dubious business dealings had made him the target of several criminal investigations. Following Patrick’s death, Lee had been searching for ways to lift her sister’s spirits, and Onassis had generously invited them both on an Aegean cruise aboard his magnificent 325-foot yacht, Christina. The legendary opera diva Maria Callas had been Onassis’s mistress for years, and now Lee was rumored to be intent on replacing her. But when the cruise was over, it was Jackie who accepted a ruby-and-diamond necklace from her host, leaving Lee to grouse about her gift from Onassis—three “dinky little bracelets Caroline wouldn’t even wear to her own birthday party.”

  That trip had generated such negative press that Jackie pledged to make it up to Jack. Her first step toward making amends: Jackie agreed to accompany her husband during his reelection campaign, starting with Dallas. Bobby and the rest of the Kennedy camp regarded the man they simply called “The Greek” as little more than a corrupt, uncouth social climber. But that didn’t stop Jackie from summoning Onassis to her side.

  Party-loving Onassis was well aware that Irish wakes could be raucous affairs, but the lighthearted mood that prevailed that night in the White House surprised even him. As soon as Ari arrived, Jack’s close friend Lem Billings recalled, “we all piled into a sports car and raced to Arlington to the spot where Jack was going to be buried. Later we all laughed and sang and carried on with great hilarity back to the White House.”

  Incredibly, while the rest of the world was still in a state of shock, Dave Powers was cracking Jackie and the others up with stories of the early days campaigning in Boston. “You’d never know there was a funeral,” said family friend Milt Ebbins, who dined in the White House on November 23, 24, and 25. “Jokes were being told at the table. Ethel was very funny. I tried to tell Pat [Lawford] about seeing Bobby crying in the East Room and she curtly cut me off—‘We don’t want to hear about that.’ ”

  As the evening wore on, the crowd became increasingly soused. As Jackie watched, someone snatched the blond wig off Ethel’s head and tossed it around the room. Soon the junior senator from Massachusetts, Ted Kennedy, was leading the group in boozy renditions of “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling” and “That Old Gang of Mine.”

  “People were shrieking with laughter, crying with laughter,” JFK’s brother-in-law Peter Lawford said. “Everybody was up, drinking and smiling and trying to make the best of it. Not being Irish, I tried to get in the swing of it, but I was thoroughly destroyed.”

  Later over coffee and brandy, Bobby began ribbing Onassis about his questionable business dealings. At one point RFK pointed out that Onassis had made his first million dollars in Argentina. The attorney general then dashed out the door and returned minutes later with a document stipulating that Onassis would give half his estimated $500 million fortune (then second only to the fortunes of Howard Hughes and oilman J. Paul Getty) to the poor people of Latin America. Happy to play along, Onassis signed the bogus contract and toasted the deal with champagne.

  There were times that evening, Ben Bradlee remembered, that Jackie seemed “completely detached, as if she were someone else watching the ceremony of that other person’s grief. Sometimes she was silent, obviously torn. Often she would turn to a friend and reminisce, and everyone would join in with their remembrance of things forever past.”

  Jack’s close friend Chuck Spalding, who slept over at the White House that night, was at first taken aback by the Kennedy clan’s hijinks—although he knew Jack would have approved. “It’s a very Irish thing,” Spalding explained. “They make bad jokes and drink too much just to keep from going crazy. It’s how they cope.” Jackie, however, “was a completely different type. It didn’t come naturally to her, but she understood the whole Irish thing and tried to be a part of it.”

  * * *

  WHAT IMPACT ALL this manic behavior had on her children remained to be seen. John and Caroline ate that night, as usual, in their little High Chair Room off the kitchen. Maud Shaw bathed and dressed them in their pajamas and then, as she always did when the Kennedys had company in the family quarters, brought them in to say good night to the grown-ups. The merriment “obviously confused Caroline,” Shaw conceded, although John was “probably too young to really understand.”

  Once she realized John and Caroline were standing in the room in their pajamas, Jackie pulled them toward her, kissed them, and then sent them off to bed. “Everyone saw the children,” Spalding said, “but they just kept whooping it up. Nobody seemed to care, which struck me as very sad.”

  It was only as she began walking the children to their rooms that it occurred to Maud Shaw that Monday, November 25, was more than the day of JFK’s funeral. It was John’s third birthday. As in previous years, it was understood that the children would have a joint party halfway between John’s birthday and Caroline’s—this year she was turning six—on November 27. But what, the nanny pondered, was the right thing to do on John’s actual birthday, the day his father was to be laid to rest before a television audience of millions?

  Over breakfast that morning, Miss Shaw and Caroline sang “Happy Birthday” to John over breakfast. Then he unwrapped two gifts—yet another toy helicopter from Caroline and a book about planes from his nanny.

  Barely an hour after he opened his presents, John was sitting alongside his sister in a limousine bound for St. Matthew’s Cathedral. They were to wait for their mother to join them there. In the meantime, to the eerie, unforgettable cadence of muffled drums, Jackie—flanked by Bobby, Teddy and the rest of the Kennedy family—walked behind the horse-drawn caisson bearing the president’s body from the White House to St. Matthew’s. The same caisson that had carried Franklin Roosevelt’s coffin was pulled by three pairs of perfectly matched gray horses, and following close behind was the traditional “riderless horse” named, coincidentally, “Black Jack.”

  The cortege that followed on foot behind Jackie and the family included 220 representatives from 102 nations, including such historic figures as Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie, Great Britain’s Prince Philip, French President Charles De Gaulle, Israel’s Foreign Minister Golda Meir, and German Chancellor Ludwig Erhard.

  Inside the cathedral, Jackie sat between her children as Boston’s raspy-voiced Richard Cardinal Cushing began reciting the Latin Mass. Midway through, the cardinal switched to English: “May the angels, dear Jack, lead you into paradise . . .”

  No longer able to maintain the façade, Jackie broke down. “You’ll be all right, Mommy,” Caroline whispered as she reached up with a handkerchief to wipe away her mother’s tears. “Don’t cry, I’ll take care of you.”

  Later, Jackie would praise her daughter for holding her hand “like a soldier. She’s my helper. She’s mine now.” But she doubted she would have the same influence over her son—certainly not in the patriarchal world of the Kennedys. “John,” she predicted, “is going to belong to the men now.”

  As he squirmed in this seat at the cathedral, it seemed clear that, regardless of whom he “belonged” to, JFK’s inexhaustibly frisky son was going to be a handful. Jackie asked Bob Foster, a member of the Secret Service Kiddie Detail, to take her son to a small room at the rear of the cathedral. Among the many officers standing near the door to the room was an Army colonel with a chest full of medals. He knelt down and, by way of entertaining the bored little boy, patiently explained what each medallion, cross, star, battle ribbon, and leaf cluster meant.

  After a few minutes, Agent Foster whispered that it was time to go back inside the church. John turned to salute the colonel, but with his left hand. “Oh, no, John,” the colonel said, “that’s not the right way to salute. You salute with your right hand.” After a few practice tries, the officer was satisfied John had gotten the hang of it.

  Only a few weeks earlier, John had marched noisily into his catechism class with his make-believe rifle—a stick—over his shoulder. “He thinks he’
s a soldier,” Caroline sighed to their teacher, Sister Joanne Frey, “and he doesn’t even know how to salute.”

  Now he was about to prove his sister wrong. As everyone gathered outside the cathedral to watch the flag-draped coffin leave for the final journey to Arlington National Cemetery, John took his place at his mother’s side. Jackie’s tearstained face, only partially concealed behind a fluttering veil of black lace, leaned down to her son and said quietly, “John, you can salute Daddy now and say goodbye to him.”

  John snapped to attention, lifted up his right hand, and snapped off the salute that came to symbolize a nation’s grief. It may have been the moment that secured John’s place in the hearts of his countrymen, but once again he would find it difficult to separate his own memories from what he had seen and read over the years. “I’ve seen that photograph so many times, and I’d like to say I remember that moment,” he mused thirty years later. “But I don’t.”

  Just forty-five minutes after lighting the Eternal Flame atop her husband’s grave at Arlington, Jackie shook hands with more than two hundred dignitaries as she stood in a White House receiving line. Maud Shaw spirited John upstairs for his afternoon nap. No one was quite sure what to do with Caroline, who long ago had outgrown the need for a nap. Just to take her mind off things, one of the Secret Service agents assigned to protect Lyric offered to take her for a ride.

  After driving around aimlessly for half an hour, they finally wound up at Georgetown Visitation Academy, where Sister Joanne Frey was preparing to teach another catechism class. Suddenly Caroline appeared in the doorway looking, the nun said, “so lost and alone.”

  “Oh, I’m glad you’re here,” Frey said brightly. “I have so many things to do to get the class ready—you can help me!”

  That afternoon, there was a small birthday party for John in the family dining room. Jackie had decided that, while they would still have a joint celebration for the children later in the week, her son deserved to be happy on his special day. “John knows today is his birthday,” she said, “and I did not want to disappoint him.” Besides, she added, “we need a party on this day more than any other, don’t you think?”

  After blowing out the three candles on his cake with a little help from Caroline, John wasted no time tearing through the wrapping paper on his gifts. Not everyone was in a festive mood. Emotions, said Jamie Auchincloss, were in fact “strained to the very limit.” When Dave Powers burst into “Heart of My Heart,” a favorite tune of Jack’s, Uncle Bobby again began weeping and darted from the room.

  There was one more sorrowful duty for JFK’s young widow to perform. She had wanted her stillborn daughter Arabella and son Patrick reburied next to their father. In a top-secret mission directed by Bobby, the children’s bodies were disinterred and flown to Arlington aboard the Caroline. Late that night, Jamie Auchincloss joined Bobby, Teddy, and Jackie at JFK’s grave site for a brief, clandestine burial—the second in only a matter of hours. “It was incredibly touching, but Jackie had that look of resolve,” said Auchincloss, who remembered that the ceremony took place in almost total darkness, with JFK’s “eerie, flickering” Eternal Flame as the sole source of light. “Jackie wanted to bring them all together again, and she did.”

  Jackie and the children flew to Hyannis Port to spend Thanksgiving with the rest of the Kennedy clan. While John and Caroline played with their unruly cousins, their mother spent an hour consoling her wheelchair-bound father-in-law behind closed doors. The mere presence of Jack’s wife and children unleashed a torrent of emotion among the staff. “Tears everywhere,” said Secret Service agent Ham Brown. “Secretaries, nurses, Secret Service. We were all a mess.”

  Mirroring the scenes played out in millions of homes that Thanksgiving, John and Caroline sat at the children’s table while Bobby’s undisciplined tribe made rude faces and threw food at each other. “Even at the age of three, John was a complete gentleman compared to that bunch,” Jackie’s friend George Plimpton said. “He and Caroline were spirited, but they weren’t spoiled brats. They knew how to behave because their mother drilled it into them.”

  Just one week after the assassination, Jackie sat down with veteran Life magazine journalist Theodore White, a longtime friend of Jack’s. Worried that somehow JFK would be forgotten, she set out to create a new American myth that would guarantee her husband’s place in history.

  With John and Caroline tucked in bed upstairs, Jackie, wearing black slacks and a beige pullover sweater, curled up on the sofa with a cigarette and began to talk. Pudgy, bespectacled White then began to scribble frantically while Jackie described Jack’s murder in riveting, often grisly detail—the puzzled expression on JFK’s face when the first bullet tore through his windpipe, how the final bullet seemed to tear off a piece of her husband’s skull in slow motion, how his brain matter sprayed over her, how she cradled his head as they raced to Parkland Memorial Hospital.

  More important, over the next three and a half hours Jackie carefully sowed the seeds of a new American myth that would guarantee her husband’s place in history. To help him cope with his back pain, she told White, Jackie often played what she claimed was Jack’s favorite record—the cast album from the Lerner and Lowe musical Camelot. It was the title song, which wistfully recalled the mythical realm’s “one brief shining moment,” that Jackie felt best summed up her husband’s legacy.

  “There will be great presidents again,” she told White, speaking, he said, as if she were in a trance. “But there’ll never be another Camelot again.” As White used a phone in the kitchen to dictate his story to Life’s editors in New York, Jackie hovered over him, insisting he resist any efforts by his bosses to downplay the Camelot analogy.

  “She had always been described as a fairy-tale princess,” White later said, “and now she wanted Jack to take his place in history as a modern King Arthur.” She had “obviously thought long and hard about how she wanted her handsome, heroic young husband remembered,” White said. But did she consider the burden this placed on her children? “By extension,” White mused, “John was cast as a prince of the realm, and heir apparent to the throne.”

  Their last night in the White House as a family, Jackie threw the promised joint birthday party for John and Caroline. There was another cake—a big one this time—and more presents, which the children took turns opening. Caroline’s favorite gift was a large pink teddy bear to add to her growing collection of stuffed animals. This time John had two favorites: a model of Air Force One, and a one-of-a-kind authentic Marine uniform custom-made by military tailors for the only son of the late commander in chief.

  Although at parties she had lampooned her husband’s vice president and his wife, Lady Bird, as “Colonel Cornpone and his little pork chop,” Jackie now publicly praised Lyndon Johnson for his kindnesses to her. Nevertheless, LBJ was eager to move into his home. Jackie stayed in the White House eleven days after her husband’s murder, compared to the one day Eleanor Roosevelt took to pack up and leave after FDR suddenly died.

  No matter. Now that fate had chosen him to head the Democratic ticket in the coming election, LBJ wanted Jackie in his corner. With a little nudging, he reasoned, she might even be willing to campaign for him. The day before Jackie and her children left the White House, LBJ, aware of Jackie’s Bouvier heritage and her fondness for all things French, took Pierre Salinger aside. “I want to do something nice for Jackie,” Johnson told Salinger. “I’ll name her ambassador to France.” Salinger passed along the offer to Jackie, who promptly rejected it.

  LBJ knew that Jackie, who had charmed the residents of New York’s Spanish Harlem as well as thousands of Cuban exiles in Florida, spoke fluent Spanish as well as flawless French. She had also been a huge hit when, as first lady, she visited Mexico City. “Ambassador to Mexico, then?” Lyndon asked her. But Jackie turned that offer down, as well.

  True to his reputation for getting his way as the longtime leader of the Democrats in the U.S. Senate, Johnson persevered. JFK and Jackie we
re also extremely popular in the United Kingdom, despite the fact that Joe Kennedy had been a disaster during this tenure as the ambassador to the Court of St. James’s in the years leading up to World War II.

  One of Jackie’s closest friends, in fact, was David Ormsby-Gore, who was serving as Britain’s ambassador to the United States at the time. “The British Invasion was just starting,” Oleg Cassini said. “They were about to change everything in music, fashion, the arts. They were the future. At least from that standpoint, Jackie and the British would not have been a bad fit.”

  Just weeks before the Beatles made their U.S. debut, Johnson asked Jackie to be his ambassador to Great Britain. Again the answer was no. Exasperated, LBJ put all his cards on the table. “President Johnson said I could have anything I wanted,” Jackie told her longtime friend Charlie Bartlett. “But I’m just not interested.”

  What Jackie wanted was a familiar environment for her children, and that precluded a foreign posting. “I’m never going to live in Europe. I’m not going to ‘travel extensively abroad,’ ” she protested, pooh-poohing the rumors that she intended to move to France. “That’s a desecration. I’m going to live in the places I lived with Jack. In Georgetown, and with the Kennedys at the Cape. They’re my family. I’m going to bring up my children. I want John to grow up to be a good boy.”

  However, Jackie was in no position to simply pick up and move into a new home. John Kenneth Galbraith, the Harvard economist then serving as the U.S. ambassador to India, convinced another old Washington hand to offer his Georgetown residence as a temporary home for the displaced first lady. While Jackie hunted for a new place to live, she would move into Undersecretary of State Averell Harriman’s palatial redbrick mansion on N Street, just three blocks down from the modest house where she and JFK had lived before his election as president. By contrast, the Harriman house featured seven bedrooms, a dining room that comfortably sat eighteen, its own swimming pool, and one of the finest private collections of Impressionist paintings in the world.