by Thomas Maier
In Ireland, the entire nation collapsed into remorse at the news of Kennedy’s death.“Ah, they cried the rain down that night,” said a Fitzgerald relative to an American magazine journalist, who described how “the wakes lasted three days all over the country, with the mourners falling silent every time the television people showed scenes from the other three days in June.” Kennedy’s visit had raised hopes of a new future, and now his death reminded them once again of the past, of having so many Irish dreams dashed.
A similar sad refrain could be heard in the United States among Irish- Americans, particularly those who recognized Kennedy’s fatalism in their own outlook. “I don’t think there’s any point in being Irish if you don’t know that the world is going to break your heart eventually,” said Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Kennedy’s assistant secretary of labor, who had his own keen eye for the Irish experience in America. “I guess that we thought we had a little more time. . . . [Newspaper columnist] Mary McGrory said to me that we’ll never laugh again. And I said, ‘Heavens Mary. We’ll laugh again. It’s just that we’ll never be young again.’”
Such romantic pathos, though, obscures the genuine significance of Kennedy’s presidency. Because he was the first and only minority president, John Kennedy came to symbolize, regardless of his Brahmin erudition or Harvard pedigree, the long struggle for acceptance—not only for generations of Irish Catholic immigrants and their descendants but for all those considered estranged in American society. Only from a distance, viewing America with its hot-boiled brew of bigotry and violence from a continent away, could his achievement be appreciated fully.“John Fitzgerald Kennedy was a miracle,” writer Frank O’Connor declared in the Sunday Independent of Dublin, two days after JFK’s death. “In three different ways, he broke through age-old American prejudices against Catholics, against Irishmen and against intellectuals, and you have to have lived in America to realize how strong these prejudices are.”
In life, President Kennedy managed to remain true to his promise of keeping a separation between church and state; and he changed the old stereotypes about big-city Irish politicians while still remaining true to himself and his own family background. He didn’t preach or display much about his religion or his ethnicity, yet the difference between his cultural identity and that of the thirty-four presidents before him was repeatedly made clear for all those who took notice. At the very end, Kennedy broke one last barrier with the rites and rituals surrounding his death. On the day after the president’s battered body was brought back to Washington, a Catholic Mass was said in his memory—as Sorensen noted, the first time a Catholic service was ever celebrated inside the White House. “To me, the least explicable religious objection encountered during the entire campaign was the fear that a Roman Catholic Mass might be held in the White House,” Sorensen noted. “To those who expressed this worry, I can give assurance that it happened only once—on November 23, 1963.”
It was fittingly symbolic. Kennedy’s presence in the White House altered the nation for Catholics and non-Catholics alike. During the campaign, Kennedy “had for the first time more fully and explicitly than any other thinker of his faith defined the personal doctrine of a modern Catholic in a democratic society,” as Theodore H. White put it. Because of Kennedy, Irish Catholics would no longer consider themselves outsiders again. For those millions of Americans who remained on the periphery of American society, his example remained a lasting inspiration. Even his critics sensed that Kennedy had opened doors for minorities that could no longer be shut again. “The Kennedy years saw great forces in America and in the world take on new impetus, new directions. We can still only dimly perceive the full import of these changes; it is all the harder, therefore, to estimate how accurately John F. Kennedy appraised them, to what extent he guided events and to what degree they governed him,” eulogized the New York Herald Tribune, the eloquent but fading voice of New York Republicanism. “His attitudes during the campaign of 1960 and after assured that the tradition against a Catholic in the White House need never again trouble the conscience and the politics of the United States.”
Forty years after his death, that achievement—a member of a minority group elected to the White House—has yet to be matched.
Part V
The Emerald Thread
“To whom much is given, much will be expected, and to whom more dignity is ascribed, more service will be exacted.”
—ST. LUKE,12:48
“Our mother taught us we should never forget where we came from.”
—JEAN KENNEDY SMITH
Chapter Thirty-Three
A Living Wound
ON A MILD SPRING DAY in April 1964, Richard McSorley, a Jesuit theology teacher at Georgetown University, sauntered out to the tennis court on Bobby Kennedy’s Hickory Hill estate, his new tennis partner, Jacqueline Kennedy, following close behind. As they neared the nets, three-year-old John Kennedy Jr., his unruly brown hair messed, ran up to them.
“Father, I cut my lip—look,” the little boy insisted. He’d been playing in the backyard, near the slate patio and white garden furniture, and now he stuck out his bruised lip for inspection.
McSorley, a friendly middle-aged priest with grayish hair and a backhand respectable enough to become Georgetown’s tennis coach, feigned great concern as he eyed John’s wound.
“You must have kissed the ground,” McSorley teased him.
Little John Kennedy gave a quizzical look. “Did I kiss the ground, Mommy?” he asked.
Jackie Kennedy, dressed in tennis whites and holding a racket, smiled at her son’s innocent question.“Father is so nice to you,” she replied, wistfully.
As the priest and the president’s widow continued toward the tennis court, McSorley reminded Jackie that since the assassination, on the twenty-second of each month, inside a small chapel on the Georgetown campus, he offered a Mass for her husband’s eternal soul. Jackie seemed surprised.
“Do you think that does any good?” she asked.
“Of course it does,” the priest insisted. “It does him good and it does good for us.”
Wracked by her own pain and doubts, Jackie’s pace slowed to a halt, as if weighed down by her own disbelief.“I don’t know how God could take him away,” she sighed. “It’s so hard to believe.”
With these words, Jackie’s dark expressive eyes filled with emotion and she began to cry, as McSorley later recorded in his personal diary. After providing such a brave front in public for her family and the nation, the long, lonely months since her husband’s death had left Jacqueline Kennedy feeling isolated and deeply depressed.
“When I awoke this morning, I thought he was still there,” Jackie explained to the priest, who would become her confessor and her confidant.“ You know how it is before you know where you are when you wake up? I thought he was in the room with me. It’s just so hard to believe.”
IN THE WAKE of her husband’s death, Jacqueline Kennedy’s struggle to believe in anything, including herself, caused alarm among her family and friends. Six months after the assassination, she remained despondent, far more so than an admiring public realized. During the daytime, she tended her children and worked on the initial plans for a Kennedy presidential library; at night, though, like a lost soul, she often stayed up well past midnight, reading about her husband and sorting through his effects. “I am a living wound,” she told one journalist friend.“Nearly every religion teaches there’s an afterlife, and I cling to that hope.”
During this difficult period, Jackie often relied on Bobby Kennedy for help and counsel, and his advice was characteristically sympathetic but stoic. “Sorrow is a form of self-pity,” Bobby said.“We have to go on.”Concerned with her mental health, Bobby decided his brother’s grieving widow should see McSorley, one of the Kennedy family’s favorite priests, for counseling under the guise of giving her tennis lessons. Catholics of their generation, regardless of their social strata, were far more inclined to seek out priests than psychiatrists to hel
p with their problems. As McSorley recalls, there was even talk that the obsessions and loss of mental stability that afflicted Mary Todd Lincoln after her husband’s assassination could hold the same fate for Kennedy’s widow.“She was advised by Ethel and Bob to get out of the doldrums,” McSorley remembered decades afterward.“She really struggled with the death of her husband. The newspapers were making remarks of how well she was getting along. She didn’t need the tennis. She knew more than I showed her. It was an excuse not to mope around and get out of the house.”
Father McSorley was a fixture in the Kennedys’ lives. Often during their White House years, Bobby attended 7:30 A.M. Mass with McSorley at the Georgetown chapel, sometimes assisting the priest as a server, before going off to work at the Justice Department. A Jesuit with his own liberal bent, McSorley sometimes talked about racism with Bobby. Each agreed the Catholic Church needed to do more to ease tensions and promote integration in the South. McSorley was different from the conservative Jesuits who, before Vatican II, had espoused defensive, often reactionary views. As a young priest in a Maryland parish, McSorley tried to end the segregated dispensing of Communion, where whites came up to the altar before blacks. During the civil rights movement, he drove a carload of Georgetown students to march with Martin Luther King in Selma and Montgomery, Alabama, and helped in voter registration drives in Mississippi. McSorley’s students remember that he wore a protest sign asking, “Would you want your sister to marry Gov. Wallace?”Years later, during the Vietnam years, he joined in an antiwar protest in London with a recent Georgetown alumnus, Bill Clinton, who recognized McSorley and asked him to say a prayer at an interdenominational service. McSorley, a thin, nimble man with gentle eyes and smile, had seen the brutality of war up close. As a seminarian, he spent three years in a Japanese prison of war camp where he ate worms to keep from starving. Washington Post columnist Colman McCarthy, a friend of many years, later called McSorley “a priest of courage and one of the most loved professors at Georgetown in the past 30 years.”
With the Kennedys, McSorley tended to the family’s private needs. He understood the deeply engrained concept of family among Irish Catholics. McSorley himself grew up as one of fifteen children, several of whom became priests and nuns. In 1963, he sent Rose Kennedy a copy of his book about growing up in such a large clan, aptly titled, The More the Merrier. In a thank-you note, Rose wrote that she was particularly interested in a section called “Family Philosophy” and made a fleeting comparison to their families.“How blessed were your parents to have given so many sons and daughters to the Church,” wrote Rose, “I always hoped that at least one of our children might have had a vocation for the religious life, but God had other designs.” Rose signed her letter “your respectful child” as she, a Child of Mary, sometimes addressed clergy.
During 1963, McSorley came often to Hickory Hill to tutor Bobby and Ethel’s oldest sons, Joseph II and Robert Kennedy Jr., whose school performances were lacking. Like most Catholic parents, Robert and Ethel Kennedy were deferential to clergymen such as McSorley; yet, at other times, they treated him as an unpaid servant in their employ. As a kind of reward, Ethel invited him once to the White House where he met the president. When Bobby Kennedy thanked him for his sons’ tutorials,McSorley—who believed strongly in the progressive politics of the New Frontier—replied that the favor was returned with all the good work Bobby did for the nation. Bobby knew that Father McSorley, who had been to his house so many times, could be trusted. The family secrets would be safe with him, especially the little-known cracks in the former first lady’s shattered psyche.
When Jackie called to ask about tennis lessons, McSorley immediately grasped the subtext of her request. A beautiful young woman in her mid-thirties, Jackie desperately needed a lifeline, a place of solace she could find within her religion. She needed someone whom she could trust like a family member but was not part of the Kennedy clan—someone like Father McSorley, the teacher who could use his theological skills to help her sort out the inexplicable tragedies in her life. In the coming days, their talks on the tennis court became a dialogue about fate, God, belief in an afterlife— the essence of Catholicism. McSorley found their exchanges so remarkable that he kept a diary of their conversations, which he later preserved in the Georgetown University Library along with some of Jackie’s letters.
“DO YOU THINK GOD would separate me from my husband if I killed myself?”
Jackie’s question, lobbed over the net like one of her casual volleys, left McSorley dumbfounded. He just stared as the former first lady poured out her feelings.
“It is so hard to bear,” Jackie exclaimed, in her little girl voice. “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?”
McSorley didn’t realize the full depths of Jackie Kennedy’s despair until their second tennis session together at Bobby’s house. The previous afternoon, they had talked about the assassination and Jackie’s regrets at not being able to save her husband with some last-minute heroics before the bullets struck him. “I would have been able to pull him down, or throw myself in front of him, or do something, if I had only known,” she said, full of remorse. McSorley ended their initial round together by comparing Jack’s death to Christ’s death on the cross—a comparison that McSorley acknowledged was “almost blasphemous,” but it seemed to please his widow.
The following day on the tennis court, Jackie showed an even greater sense of trust in McSorley. She eventually shared her thoughts about suicide.
“Do you think I will ever see him again?” she asked.
McSorley proceeded gingerly. The priest, well aware that for Catholics committing suicide meant God’s eternal damnation, immediately turned to the canons of faith.“Yes, the resurrection of the body is part of our faith,” he replied.
Jackie shook her head.“Oh, that’s just one of those myths,” she retorted. “It never really happened. Nobody ever really came back from the dead.”
They slapped the tennis ball back and forth.
“Yes,Our Lord came back from the dead,” McSorley maintained.“It’s no myth—it’s part of our faith.”
“You mean it’s part of our faith that the body will come alive again?” she asked, half incredulously, half longing that it was true.
McSorley explained that the Catholic Church viewed death as a separation of the body from the soul but that God would eventually bring them together again someday. He felt the Catholic beliefs in the transformation of the soul could give hope to a bereaved first lady, particularly the vision of being reunited someday with her dead husband. Yet the priest’s explanations did little to ease the pain of the current moment.
“But it’s so lonely,” Jackie said after McSorley’s explanation of Catholic doctrine.“I don’t want to marry. I don’t want to live with some of these old men friends some ten or fifteen years from now. It’ll be so lonely when the children go away to school in about ten years.”
McSorley gently chastised her for worrying about things so far into the future. It was too much of a burden. “It’s the devil’s work,” as he called it, to concern herself with fifteen years of problems.“Today’s problem is just to live through today, and to do the best you can today.”After all, McSorley added, she might not even be alive in fifteen years.
Jackie, in her white tennis outfit, seemed intent on her decision.
“Will you pray that I die?” she asked.
By now, the tennis playing had stopped. Father McSorley looked Jackie in the eyes with total honesty. He felt compelled to dissuade her from thoughts of suicide, but he would not try to stop her from wishing for death itself.
“Yes, if you want that,” McSorley said. “It’s not wrong to pray to die.”
Jackie, such a radiant presence in the White House, was now, in her brother-in-law’s backyard, a picture of dejection and near hopelessness. She no longer felt adequate even as a mother to Caroline and John Jr.“The children would be bette
r off here anyhow,” she stated. “I’m no good to them. I’m so bleeding inside.”
Jackie’s pain was etched in her face and impossible to hide in her tender, widely spaced eyes. It was so overwhelming that others might have left her alone in her sorrow. But McSorley, having spent many hours in the busy, sometimes frenetic Hickory Hill homestead, knew that Jackie’s suggestion was untenable. He argued against the logic of her plan. “They wouldn’t be better off here,” McSorley scolded.“Ethel Kennedy can’t give the personal attention to the children—to her own children—she has so much pressure from public life and so many children. Nobody can do for them except you.”
Their conversation wandered off onto a comparison of Jack with FDR, and how Eleanor Roosevelt had treated her husband during their White House years. McSorley emphasized the need for Jackie to keep on moving ahead, to get on with her life and to look forward to a day when she might be reunited with her husband in eternity. The Irish priest even suggested that someone might write a novel in which God brought President Kennedy back to life, and he wondered aloud what would happen if Jack walked into the White House.
“They’d never let him in the gate,” Jackie interjected, sounding almost like Bobby.
“They wouldn’t be able to keep him out,” McSorley insisted.“I wonder what Johnson would say?” McSorley, ever a Kennedy partisan, was already appalled by Johnson’s actions as president.
Jackie smiled, briefly.
OVER THE NEXT several weeks, McSorley met regularly on the hard court at Hickory Hill with Jackie. Sometimes, Ethel joined her sister-in-law as a doubles partner against McSorley, and together they made an earnest attempt at carefree moments. But most of the time, Jackie and the priest played alone, sharing a conversation over the netting so that Jackie could alleviate herself of the terrible pain inside. The loss of a baby and her husband in less than a year was more than she thought she could bear.