by Thomas Maier
Over the next three days, the rituals, both sacred and secular, continued for the dead president, his family and a stunned nation. In Dallas, a group of fourth-grade children at a local public school reportedly clapped and cheered when their teacher told them of the assassination, but most adults were thunderstruck by the tragedy and sought out religious leaders to help them make sense of it. “In the name of God, what kind of city have we become?” asked the Reverend William Holmes, pastor of the city’s Northaven Methodist Church, before a national television audience. In grim black-and-white images, television brought home Kennedy’s death to millions watching around the world; there was a shared communal feeling of grief not felt in America since FDR’s death. But this felt far worse. Kennedy’s youth and robust appearance, the memories of him frolicking with his children and escorting his beautiful wife only made his death more agonizing for the country, as if someone they had barely gotten to know had been stolen away.
While the nation mourned publicly, the Kennedys dealt with the tragedy in their own private, distinctly Catholic ways. Hearing the news at the Peace Corps office, Eunice and Sargent Shriver both took to their knees, praying Hail Marys—a simple, almost childlike prayer that ends by beseeching Christ’s mother to “pray for us, sinners, now and at the hour of our death, Amen.” Then they headed to the White House to comfort other family members. In California, a priest, two nuns and other friends helped Patricia Lawford with her grief. In Hyannis Port, the last Kennedy to learn of the assassination was the man who made Jack’s rise to the presidency possible, who had envisioned an Irish Catholic breaking such a cultural barrier long before his son had. Ted and Eunice flew up to tell their father,who had never recovered from his stroke and spent most of his time convalescing in his second-floor room. “Jack was in an accident, Daddy,” Eunice cried. “Oh Daddy, Jack’s dead. He’s dead. But he’s up in heaven. He’s in heaven.” Rose Kennedy had learned already in a telephone call from Bobby that Jack’s wounds were fatal. Stoically, she went for a wistful walk along the cold beach with her nephew, Joe Gargan, telling him how they “must go on living,” to be strong for others who needed them.
In these dark days, the most singular profile in courage—what Kennedy defined as grace under pressure—was his widow. As Air Force One carried JFK’s body back to Washington, Jackie sat near his casket, still wearing her pink suit stained with her husband’s blood. She witnessed Lyndon Johnson’s impromptu swearing in aboard the plane. On the plane ride, Jackie reminisced with Dave Powers and Kenny O’Donnell, who had been with her husband so often when she was not. “How I envied you being in Ireland with him,” she admitted, recalling how much Jack was moved by the drill performance at Arbour Hill in Dublin. Then turning to the business at hand, she added,“I must have the Irish cadets at his funeral.”
On the night before the funeral, the Kennedys of Jack’s generation and his dearest friends told stories spiked with laughter at the impromptu wake they held for him. “It’s a very Irish thing,” explained Jack’s old friend, Chuck Spalding, who recalled Jackie’s brave attempt to participate. “Jackie was a completely different type, but she understood the whole Irish thing and tried to be part of it.” At one point,Teddy began to sing “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling,” joined by much of the crowd, while Bobby wept in the hallway. The legendary Kennedy stoicism—the admonition to keep moving forward despite adversity and tragedies—was so much in keeping with the Irish relationship with death. Maybe an Irish wake, if not to revive the dead, could at least ease their pain by savoring the best times of John Kennedy’s life.“Not being Irish, I tried to get into the swing of things, but I was thoroughly destroyed,” recalled the president’s brother-in-law, Peter Lawford. “But it really was the best way to handle it.”
Once more, the Kennedys relied on their priests for advice. At the White House, on the night when she returned with her husband’s body, Jackie Kennedy consulted Father Cavanaugh, the Kennedy family’s old friend from Notre Dame, about the funeral service. “I wish you would make the Mass as fast as you can,” she requested. Despite her overwhelming grief, Jacqueline Kennedy tried to oversee nearly every aspect of the public and private tributes as a final gift to her husband. Bobby asked Sargent Shriver to ensure that each of her requests happened as planned. Cardinal Cushing, sensitive to Jackie’s wishes, presided over a Low Mass spoken aloud, rather than a High Mass with its chants and longer prayers, which would be more befitting for the occasion but take nearly twice as long. When the Apostolic Delegate, the Pope’s representative in Washington, insisted on five absolutions at the end of the Mass, Cushing brushed aside the idea as too much of a “hassle” that would only further burden the Kennedy family. The hierarchy also wanted the Capitol’s huge Romanesque Shrine of the Immaculate Conception used for the Mass to the fallen president. But Cushing sided with Jackie’s wishes for the smaller St. Matthew’s Cathedral, where she had fond memories of attending Mass with her husband and children. “I don’t care—they can all stand in the streets,” Jackie said when Bobby tried to broach the issue. “I just know that’s the right place for it.” Cushing prevailed over one of the Kennedy family wishes. They had wanted the late president buried in Brookline, next to the body of his son Patrick. The cardinal dissuaded them, underlining that the Boston neighborhood cemetery was far too small for what would become a national shrine. Instead, Arlington National Cemetery was chosen, visible across the Potomac River from Washington.
On that terrible first night after arriving home from Dallas, Bobby tried to calm Jackie, his mother, Rose, Jackie’s mother, Janet Auchincloss, and other distraught family members gathered upstairs at the White House. Though physically and emotionally drained, they could not bring themselves to sleep. Because of the lateness of the hour, Bobby gently urged them to get some rest. After everybody went off to their rooms, he still appeared tense but under control and lingered for a few minutes with Jack’s old friend, Chuck Spalding, who suggested that he take a sleeping pill. When Spalding returned with one, Bobby appeared calm and under control and began talking.“It’s such an awful shame,” he said with fatigue, as if he’d had the stuffing knocked out. “The country was going so well. We really had it going.”
Spalding listened, bid him goodnight and closed the door to Bobby’s room. As he started to walk down the hall, Spalding could hear the attorney general cry out in pain. “He just gave way completely, and he was just racked with sobs and the only person he could address himself to was ‘Why, God, why? What possible reason could there be in this?’” Spalding recalled. “I mean just the terrible injustice of it, the senselessness of it all hit him, and he just collapsed. . . . He sobbed by himself in the night and slept.”
By Monday, November 25, three days after the assassination, a solemn pilgrimage of 220 world leaders—including France’s Charles de Gaulle, Ethiopia’s Haile Selassie and Ireland’s Eamon De Valera—arrived for Kennedy’s funeral, an expression of the worldwide grief for the dead president. Over the weekend, his body rested in state inside the Capitol’s Rotunda, where thousands of mourners waited in line for hours to pay their last respects, a procession lasting throughout the night. For three days, the entire nation came to a halt, transfixed by images on television, each of the networks devoted exclusively to bearing witness to the president’s funeral and the investigation of the assassination. The networks aired the running commentary of the Reverend Leonard Hurley, director of communications for the New York archdiocese, who explained each part of the president’s funeral Mass, as if to share the religious experience with a polite but unfamiliar audience at home. Many newspapers, including the New York Times, also published a transcript of Hurley’s comments. Aware of the symbolism of American history as well as the rituals of her church, Jackie asked Kennedy aides Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and Richard Goodwin to research the rites for Abraham Lincoln, with instructions to make her husband’s funeral “as Lincolnesque as possible.” She’d always found a sense of solace and strength in the Lincoln bedro
om of the White House, and the similarities between the two assassinations resonated with her. (Apotheosizing presidents has a long history in America. Because Lincoln was killed on a Good Friday, symbolically the same day of Christ’s death on a cross, many Americans in 1865 agreed with a minister that Easter Sunday who proclaimed, “Jesus Christ died for the world; Abraham Lincoln died for his country.”) Jackie asked an artist friend to pull another book inside the White House library—she knew exactly where it was—about Lincoln’s White House lying-in-state, and made sure everything was replicated down to the dark draping. At Arlington Cemetery, the president’s widow stopped by to review her husband’s gravesite. She asked that his remains be placed on a direct line between the flagpole at the Robert E. Lee mansion and the august Lincoln Memorial.
On the morning of the funeral, nine soldiers placed Kennedy’s flag-draped coffin upon the same caisson that had carried FDR’s body and, as with Lincoln’s affair, the president’s casket was led away by a caparisoned, riderless horse. The skittish chestnut-haired gelding, named Black Jack, carried a sword and a pair of shiny black boots, reversed in the stirrups, to signify the loss of its commander. In another act of symbolism, Jackie saw to it that the Irish military cadets performed their drills at his funeral; she also invited Mrs. Ryan’s daughter, Mary Ann, to represent the Dunganstown Kennedys at the funeral.
As the caisson left the White House, several of Kennedy’s favorites were played, including “Come Back to Erin” and “The Boys of Wexford.” Another subtle reminder of the Kennedy family’s history was a hymn played during the funeral procession called “The Cross and the Flag,”written by the late Cardinal William O’Connell. The song was an Irish Catholic answer to the nativism of the 1920s, a proud and insistent statement that these immigrants and their children loved their country as much as any American. So much of Honey Fitz’s politics—and even his own father’s career—seemed intent on proving the worthiness of Irish Catholics in the eyes of their fellow Americans, of removing the second-class status they felt in society. During Jack’s youth, the newspapers reported, he’d probably sung its defiant verses, familiar to many Catholics in Massachusetts. His family’s inclusion of Cardinal O’Connell’s hymn with its martial air was an intriguing, almost provocative, selection to be played with his death:
All o’er the land, the hearts of men are crying,
Chilled by the storms of grief and strife.
All o’ver the land, the rebellion’s flag is flying,
Threatening our altars—and the nation’s life . . .
As mourners entered the cathedral, they received memorial cards composed by Jackie with the inscription:“Dear God—Please take care of your servant—John Fitzgerald Kennedy.” In another personal touch, Jackie asked Luigi Vena to sing “Ave Maria” at the funeral Mass, just as Vena had sung the same sonorous hymn on their wedding day. Aware of her husband’s own preferences in the church, she asked that Auxiliary Bishop Philip N. Hannan—“sort of a Jack in the church”—read five passages she’d selected from Scriptures along with an excerpt from his inaugural address, rather than Archbishop Patrick A. O’Boyle, the ranking churchman in Washington. “There is an appointed time for everything . . . a time to be born, a time to die,” Hannan read from the third chapter of Ecclesiastes, one of Jack’s favorite Bible passages, “a time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.”
During the Communion, several other priests assisted Cushing at the altar, including the Reverend John F. Fitzgerald, who left his Massachusetts parish to attend his cousin’s funeral. The Kennedys first came to the altar rail, Jackie raising her black veil to receive the thin pale-white wafer representing the risen Christ. At the end of the Mass, Cushing walked toward the coffin placed in the heart of the church, circled three times while sprinkling holy water and intoned words of prayer in Latin. The day before, at a memorial Mass telecast by the Boston diocese, Cushing gave an emotional eulogy that, in almost Christ-like imagery, painted his friend as one who had been killed trying to help others. There was no formal eulogy at the president’s funeral Mass, but in the final prayer at the end, Cushing suddenly broke out in his own impromptu prayer.“May God, dear Jack, lead you into Paradise,” Cushing suddenly declared in English, his words coming directly from within.“May the martyrs receive you at your coming. May the spirit of God increase and mayest thou, for all who made the supreme sacrifice of dying for others, receive eternal rest in peace. Amen.”
Then he slowly made his way toward the Kennedys and gave Caroline a kiss on the cheek. Fighting back tears, Jackie whispered, “Thanks for calling him dear Jack.” She’d later give the cardinal, as a lasting memento, Jack’s metal navy dog tags, inscribed with his name, his “Commander in Chief ” title, his “O” blood type and his religion—“Roman Catholic.”
Outside the church, Jackie and her two children stood with the rest of the Kennedy family on the cathedral steps while the presidential funeral procession began its trek to Arlington Cemetery. As the casket moved away, she leaned down to her young son and instructed, “John, you can salute Daddy now and say good-bye to him.” Some of his father’s friends had shown him how to salute like a soldier. And now, he made good use of it, leaving an indelible image in the minds of millions of a little boy bidding farewell to his father. This sad day happened to mark John Jr.’s third birthday, and later, not to disappoint him, the family held a small party for him. “It must have been the saddest ‘Happy Birthday’ ever sung,”Powers remembered.“ We all put on an act.”
At the cemetery, Kennedy was laid to rest. The Irish Guards and a U.S. Marines detachment performed a military salute, and the presidential plane, Air Force One, flew overhead with a roar. Bagpipes wailed another Kennedy favorite, “The Mist Covered the Mountain,” and then a bugler played taps. The stars and stripes draped over Kennedy’s coffin was lifted, tightly folded into a triangle and presented to his widow. Unlike the honor guard at Kennedy’s inaugural, this one included African-Americans, a quiet reminder of the changes Kennedy had brought about during his presidency. With television cameras parked at a respectful distance, the whole nation watched as Jackie and the president’s two brothers, Bobby and Ted, took a taper and ignited a blue flame—“an eternal flame”—at his gravesite. Before leaving, Cushing embraced Rose Kennedy, the only equal to her daughter-in- law in dealing with tragedy with such grace. “Good-bye my dear,” the cardinal whispered.“God be with you.”
In the struggle to make sense of John Kennedy’s death, the majesty of the Catholic requiem Mass—as well as a nation’s secular rituals for honoring its most venerated dead—were combined in potent union. Quite deliberately, the Kennedys melded the rites of their Irish Catholic culture almost seamlessly into the traditions of the broader American society. The power of these rituals, from the martyr images to the allusions of Lincoln’s funeral,were powerfully drawn by Jacqueline Kennedy, enough to touch the soul of a nation. “Mrs. John F. Kennedy and the White House staff who had served the President so well in life were determined that his spirit would be served in death,” Newsweek observed. “She chose to make the ritual a consummate gesture of adoration—up to the ultimate touch (unprecedented in the U.S., except at the Gettysburg battlefield): the eternal light she lit at his grave.”
Kennedy’s loss was felt in a remarkably personal way by the public. After three years in Washington, many of the Kennedys were known on a first-name basis to Americans—not only Jack the president, but his brothers, Bobby and Teddy, his wife, Jackie, mother Rose, and children Caroline and John-John. Their private grief was transformed into a communal agony, beyond the constitutional replacement of one elected official with another. The Kennedys were treated like extended family members by every American deeply affected by the president’s death.
To many minority citizens—those who believed Kennedy could make a significant improvement in American life—the assassination was a cutting blow. “His last speech on race relations was the most earnest, human an
d profound appeal for understanding and justice that any President has uttered since the first days of the Republic,” expressed the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. after Kennedy’s death.“The unmistakable cause of the sincere grief expressed by so many millions was more than simple emotion. It revealed that President Kennedy had become a symbol of people’s yearnings for justice, economic well-being and peace.”
The Irish felt his loss most keenly. After attending the funeral, Eamon De Valera met briefly with Jacqueline Kennedy, paying his respects in the upstairs private chambers of the White House. Then he came down to the Cabinet Room, tears filling the old warrior’s eyes. With poetic license, De Valera likened the killing of Kennedy in Dallas to another assassination in Irish history, the fall of a king-like leader who had resisted Cromwell centuries earlier.“He said, in Ireland, historians would compare the tragic death of John Kennedy to one of Ireland’s own great liberators, Owen Roe O’Neill, and he quoted a poem that Thomas Davis wrote, something about a sheep without a shepherd, ‘why did you leave us, why did you die?’” recalled Powers. “And he sobbed.” In his grief, De Valera realized that any hope of seeing the reunification of his partitioned nation, at least in his lifetime, was now probably gone.