“The Greek” was angling for the biggest prize of all. According to one of Ari’s friends, the New York Post columnist Doris Lilly, “everything was a contest . . . who had the most money, the biggest yacht, the grandest houses. It was no different with women, and Ari was accustomed to winning.”
Onassis, whose shady business dealings made him the target of numerous Justice Department investigations over the years, had other reasons for wooing Jackie so aggressively. “Onassis knows that Jackie is an icon,” Meyer said, “and he feels that if he marries her the U.S. government will get off his back.” Onassis also told Meyer that by marrying Jackie he could remove all obstacles that stood in the way of the giant “super port” he had long envisioned for his tankers at Durham Point, New Hampshire.
JFK’s children were also an important part of the equation. “Onassis knew that the world was in love with Caroline and John,” Lilly said, “and he figured no one would want to upset them by going after their stepfather, no matter who he was.” John was especially important to Onassis because “he embodied the future of the Kennedy dynasty. Ari couldn’t resist the idea of shaping a future president, of having that kind of power and influence stretching into the next century.”
Bobby was so appalled at the thought of Onassis becoming his brother-in-law that he dispatched Ethel and Teddy’s wife, Joan, to New York to try to bring Jackie back to her senses. But it was only after Cardinal Cushing intervened that Jackie agreed to postpone her decision until after the election—ostensibly for Bobby’s sake. Cushing pointed out that, over and above Onassis’s checkered past, the Vatican might not look kindly on President Kennedy’s widow marrying a divorced man.
Second-grader John was sitting in his class at St. David’s on April 4, 1968, when an older student came into room and whispered the news in his teacher’s ear: Martin Luther King had been gunned down outside his Memphis motel room. JFK had introduced his children to the Nobel Peace Prize winner in the Oval Office, and Jackie again found herself in the position of having to explain to John and Caroline why anyone would want to kill a great man like Dr. King.
In truth, Jackie loathed the civil rights leader. Bobby and Jack both learned from FBI tapes of King’s private conversations that he had planned and conducted an “orgy” that took place in his hotel room after delivering his famous “I Have a Dream” speech in August 1963. “Oh, but, Jack,” she said at the time, “that’s so terrible. I mean, that man is, you know, such a phony, then.”
Although JFK cautioned her not to be “too judgmental” about King’s sexual escapades—a stance that hardly seemed surprising, given Kennedy’s own track record in this area—Jackie’s doubts about King were confirmed by tapes Bobby played for her following the assassination. In them, King ridiculed Cardinal Cushing’s behavior at the funeral, claiming the elderly cleric was drunk. In her own taped conversations with Arthur Schlesinger, she also pointed out that King could be heard on the FBI tapes laughing about “how they almost dropped the coffin. Well, I mean,” Jackie continued to fume, “Martin Luther King is really a tricky person . . . I just can’t see a picture of Martin Luther King without thinking, ‘That man’s terrible!’ ”
Her opinion of King was not about to change overnight. But now that King had joined her husband in America’s pantheon of martyred leaders, Jackie did feel a kinship of sorts with his widow. Reluctant to overshadow Coretta Scott King, Jackie initially planned to meet with her at some unspecified place after the funeral, and in private. When Bobby called Mrs. King the next day to offer his condolences, however, she asked if he might arrange for Jackie to accompany him to the funeral in Atlanta. Appreciating the symbolic value of having Jackie photographed alongside King’s grieving widow, RFK was all too happy to oblige.
The Roman Catholic Church, Jackie later told key RFK adviser Frank Mankiewicz, “is at its best only at the time of death. The rest of the time it’s often rather silly little men running around in their black suits. I’ll tell you who else understand death are the black churches.” At King’s funeral, she said, “I was looking at those faces, and I realized that they know death. They see it all the time and they’re ready for it . . . We know death . . . As a matter of fact,” she confided in this unguarded moment, “if it weren’t for the children, we’d welcome it.”
Always conscious of posterity, Jackie decided that now was the time to preserve her children on canvas. She commissioned New York artist Aaron Shikler to paint portraits of ten-year-old Caroline and seven-year-old John at the New York apartment. “They look just right to me now,” she told Shikler. “I would like to remember them at this age, as they are, just now.”
“John was all boy—restless, impatient, all elbows and knees,” the artist recalled. Despite the fact that he had his pet guinea pig to keep him company, he was “monumentally bored with the whole business. The sooner he could get out of the room,” Shikler added, “the better. He hates to pose.” The dreamlike portraits—of Jackie lounging on a sofa with both children and of John immersed in a book—so impressed Jackie that she asked Shikler to paint JFK’s official White House portrait as well as her own.
Jackie was determined that someday Bobby’s portrait would hang at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue as well. She was, according to Arthur Schlesinger Jr., “quite simply Bobby’s single most important asset in the campaign. She said she was willing to swallow her pride and do anything for him, and she did.” Yet not everyone was particularly appreciative of Jackie’s slavish devotion to the candidate. When polls showed Bobby pulling ahead of his principal rival for the nomination, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, there was jubilation at the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port. “Oh, Bobby,” Jackie said, “won’t it be wonderful when we get back in the White House?”
“What do you mean we?” Ethel barked.
Stricken, Jackie fled the room. She wanted John and Caroline to remain close to their Kennedy relatives—to share in their father’s legacy—but she also knew that she needed to chart a separate course for herself and the children. It didn’t help that the United States of the late 1960s seemed to be descending into chaos; wherever he looked, John saw gruesome photos of Vietnam casualties, violent antiwar street protests, and bloody race riots that swept the nation in the wake of King’s assassination.
“I don’t want them growing up afraid,” Jackie said of her children. “They have a right to a carefree life, to the extent that I can make one for them.” There were few men in the world who could provide a level of physical, financial, and emotional security befitting the children of President Kennedy. Aristotle Onassis, Jackie had to conclude, was certainly one of them.
The sheer size of Onassis’s fortune was a major factor, to be sure. “As far as Jackie was concerned,” Gore Vidal said, “the only thing better than a rich man was an obscenely rich man.” Then there was the matter of Ari’s undeniable charm. “He was short, ugly, but he had far more presence than far better-looking men,” Taki Theodoracopulos observed. “He wasn’t awed by women. He was extremely generous, and he was a great flatterer. Everything about him was bigger than life. He was a real-life Zorba the Greek.”
Still, Jackie felt that before she committed herself to anything, the children would have to get to know this larger-than-life Zorba. That Easter, Onassis flew Jackie and John to Palm Beach on his private jet while Caroline stayed behind. Onassis made an overt effort to win the boy over with hugs and gifts; John warmed to the genial, panda-like grandfather figure immediately.
In May 1968, Jackie again left John and Caroline in their nanny’s care and embarked on a four-day Virgin Islands cruise with Ari aboard the Christina. Torn between Bobby and Onassis, spent both physically and emotionally, Jackie crumbled. For most of the cruise she was locked in her cabin, trying not to succumb to seasickness.
Once back on home turf, Jackie did her best to throw the press off Onassis’s scent by attending a series of high-profile functions with old standby escorts like Ros Gilpatric and Lord Harlech. On June 4, 1968—the day of
the crucial winner-take-all California primary—Jackie made two afternoon campaign appearances for Bobby in New York, had a late dinner with Gilpatric at her apartment, and then waited for word from Los Angeles.
When Bobby got to his fifth-floor suite at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, he found flowers and a magnum of Dom Perignon waiting for him. “The flowers are for your room, and the champagne is for you after you win the primary. Jackie.” Around 11 p.m. Eastern Time, George Plimpton, who had been with RFK on the campaign trail in California, called with the news: Bobby had won by a wide margin. “That’s wonderful, George,” Jackie said. “Tell Bobby I love him.” Plimpton would later regret that, amid all the excitement, he never managed to convey Jackie’s final message to Bobby.
* * *
JACKIE STAYED UP watching the returns on television for another four hours, and finally turned in around 3:15 a.m. A half hour later, the phone rang. Stas and Lee Radziwill were calling from London, where the BBC was reporting breaking news from the United States.
“Jackie, how’s Bobby?” Stas asked.
“He’s fine. He’s terrific,” Jackie replied. “You heard that he won California by fifty-three percent, didn’t you?”
“But, Jackie,” Radziwill said, “he’s been shot. It happened just a few minutes ago.”
They waited for what seemed like an eternity for Jackie to react. “No!” Jackie cried. “It can’t have happened. No! It can’t have happened!”
John and Caroline, tucked in their beds at the other end of the sprawling apartment, somehow managed to sleep through their mother’s screams.
The most dire of Jackie’s warnings had come true: After thanking supporters in the Ambassador ballroom, Bobby was leaving through the hotel’s pantry when shots rang out. A young Palestinian named Sirhan Sirhan, angered over the defeat of the Arabs in the recent Six-Day War with U.S.-supported ally Israel, had lunged from the shadows and fired six shots at Bobby. Within seconds, Jack’s little brother was lying on the floor in a pool of blood, his eyes open, while Olympic decathlon champion Rafer Johnson and pro football legend Roosevelt Grier pried the pistol from Sirhan’s hand. Ethel knelt next to him, whispering, “Oh my God, oh my God,” while a busboy pressed a rosary in Bobby’s hand and cradled his head.
Jackie prepared to get on the first available flight to Los Angeles, but first she had to decide how to break the news to the children. She had relied on grandmotherly Maud Shaw to tell them when Patrick and Jack had died, but this time she could not bring herself to burden Marta Sgubin or anyone else with the responsibility.
Before leaving for the airport, Jackie woke the children up gently and brought them into her room. “Something has happened to Uncle Bobby,” she told them, “and I have to fly out to California to be with him.”
“What happened to Uncle Bobby?” Caroline asked as John wiped the sleep from his eyes.
“A very bad man shot him,” Jackie answered. “The doctors are doing everything they can for Uncle Bobby right now . . .” Before she could finish her sentence, Caroline burst into tears and John quickly followed suit. At seven, he could comprehend the enormity of what had happened—and experience the loss in a way he had been unable to following his own father’s assassination in Dallas.
John would spend the rest of his life wondering if he really remembered his father at all, but Uncle Bobby and this horrible day—those things would haunt him for the rest of his life.
Chuck Spalding was waiting for Jackie when she stepped off the plane in Los Angeles. “She got off the plane wearing those dark glasses,” he said, “but she seemed very calm, very much in control.” At this point, Jackie only knew what the rest of the world knew—that Robert F. Kennedy had been shot in the head, neck, and right side, and that he had undergone four hours of surgery at Good Samaritan Hospital.
“How is he doing, Chuck?” she asked. “Give it to me straight.”
“He’s dying, Jackie,” Spalding replied. “He’s dying.”
At the hospital, Jackie joined Ethel, Ted Kennedy, Spalding, Plimpton, Pierre Salinger, longtime Kennedy advisor Richard Goodwin, and several other members of RFK’s inner circle in keeping vigil outside his hospital room. They were brought into the room two by two to visit him as he lingered for hours, kept alive on a respirator. In remembering this grim scene, Plimpton recalled that he was most impressed by the fact that “Bobby looked huge. He was on this very high bed, and he was up at an angle. His head was in this big white bandage. He looked like a medieval knight. It was like visiting a tomb at Westminster Abbey.”
Eventually told by doctors that there was no hope for recovery, no one present was willing to make the hard decision and pull the plug. Ethel, in particular, refused. “I won’t kill Bobby,” she protested. “I won’t.” Taking control of the situation, Jackie signed the consent form authorizing doctors to turn off Bobby’s respirator. “Nobody else,” Goodwin said, “had the nerve to do it.” With Ethel holding his hand, Bobby died on June 6 at 1:44 a.m. Pacific Time. He was forty-two.
Five minutes after Bobby’s death was announced, Onassis called his closest friend, Costa Gratsos, in Athens. “She’s free of the Kennedys,” Onassis gloated. “The last link broke.” Gratsos was not surprised at his friend’s callous reaction. “As far as Aristo was concerned,” Gratsos said, “his biggest headache had been eliminated.”
Lyndon Johnson was no fan of Bobby, either, but out of respect for the Kennedy family and all that Bobby represented to the nation, he promptly dispatched Air Force One to pick up RFK’s body and fly it back to New York. Just four and a half years after Dallas, Jackie was once again accompanying home the body of the man she loved.
Two days later, President Johnson led the two thousand mourners who crammed into New York City’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral to pay their last respects. Ethel, pregnant with Bobby’s eleventh child, maintained her composure while the sole surviving Kennedy brother delivered his moving eulogy just feet from RFK’s flag-draped coffin. “My brother need not be idealized,” Teddy said, struggling to control his emotions, “or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life, to be remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it . . .”
Wearing a black lace mantilla, her face etched with grief, Jackie was, said Salinger, “in a trance, just completely in shock. It just defied belief that she—that we—would be reliving this nightmare.”
John, proudly wearing his PT-109 tie clasp, took part in the requiem Mass with his sister and the other Kennedy children. While Caroline had cried when Mommy called with the terrible news that Uncle Bobby had died, John was clearly most worried about the obvious change in his mother. Throughout the funeral, he could be seen leaning forward in his pew and checking on Jackie.
As everyone filed out of the cathedral, Lady Bird Johnson reached out her hand to comfort her fellow first lady and even called out Jackie’s name. “She looked at me as if from a great distance,” Lady Bird recalled, “as though I were an apparition.”
“It was just too much for her. Jackie was out of it—a zombie,” said Spalding, who could see that John was now concerned for his mother’s mental well-being. “John really was too young to see how Jack’s death had really just flattened her, but now he got it. I felt so sorry for him, and for Caroline, too, of course.”
Later, John joined his mother and sister aboard the twenty-one-car funeral train that carried Bobby’s body to Washington for burial at Arlington. More than two million people—some with their hands on their hearts, others applauding or singing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” many weeping openly—lined the 226-mile route as the train slowly made its way to the capital. As if to lend credence to the increasingly popular notion of a “Kennedy Curse,” a passing train killed two of the spectators who had come to say farewell to Bobby, and badly injured six others. Later, as the funeral train rolled slowly through Trenton, New Jersey, a teenager watching from atop a freight car accid
entally brushed against a power line and was critically burned. Before the train reached its destination, John heard all the grisly details from older cousins who witnessed both accidents.
It was dark by the time the train arrived in Washington, and the fifteen-minute graveside service at Arlington would be illuminated only by long, tapered candles handed out to the mourners. John, along with his aunts, uncles, and cousins, knelt to kiss the coffin before it was lowered into the ground.
When it was over, Ethel left alone, clutching to her breast the folded American flag that had covered her husband’s coffin. Jackie remained behind with John and Caroline, all three bowing their heads in prayer beside the freshly dug grave. After a few minutes, Jackie took one of the floral pieces that had covered the casket—a small bunch of daisies—and led the children to their father’s grave just twenty yards away. John and Caroline knelt there, too, and looked on as their mother lovingly placed Bobby’s daisies on Jack’s grave. “Oh Jack,” John heard his mother whisper. “Oh Bobby . . .”
John’s mother explained to him why she’s marrying a frog instead of a prince. Because when he croaks, we’ll all be rich!
—CLASSMATE TO JOHN BEFORE JACKIE’S MARRIAGE TO ARISTOTLE ONASSIS (RESULTING IN JOHN’S GIVING THE CLASSMATE A BLOODY LIP)
He comes spitting in my room, jabbing left and right, Shouting, OK, Caroline, ready for a fight? He is trying to blow us up with his chemistry set. He has killed all the plants but we’ve escaped as yet.
—CAROLINE’S POEM ABOUT HER BROTHER, A CHRISTMAS PRESENT TO THEIR GRANDMOTHER ROSE KENNEDY
I don’t want John to grow up to be some “Screw you, Charlie” guy.
—JACKIE
6.
A Shoe Box Full of Diamonds
* * *
I hate this country,” Jackie told Pierre Salinger the day after Bobby’s funeral. “I despise America, and I don’t want my children to live here anymore. If they are killing Kennedys, my kids are the number one targets. I have the two main targets. I want to get out of this country!”
The Good Son_JFK Jr. and the Mother He Loved Page 13