by David Nasaw
He sought closure that month on what had been one of his—and the family’s—more contentious and embarrassing real estate deals, the sale of a twelve-story apartment building on Columbus Avenue between Sixty-second and Sixty-third streets in New York City.
Time and age had not softened the old man’s anger at those he thought had dealt unfairly with the Kennedys. John D. Rockefeller III had fallen into this category when, as president of Lincoln Center, he had agreed two years earlier to pay the grossly inflated price of $2.5 million for the Kennedy property that was located on the future site of Lincoln Center. Regrettably, as both men later learned, Rockefeller had no right to set the price, as the property was owned by the city, which had condemned it. The price was reset by the courts at $2,403,000, which though a bit lower than Rockefeller’s first offer was a third higher than the assessed valuation. To square himself with Kennedy, Rockefeller sent the foundation a check for $100,000 to make up the difference. Joseph Kennedy returned it. He had been embarrassed by the wrangling over the final sales price and, unfairly, blamed Rockefeller for it. “My real annoyance was that I thought that when I made a deal with John D. Rockefeller, it was a deal, but instead of this I was put in the position of trying to get money from the city unreasonably, and my family was showered with abuse. . . . For me to accept $100,000 for the Foundation might make it appear that my ‘annoyances and worries’ are a matter of dollars and cents. They are not.”48
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Thanksgiving, with dinner for thirty-three, was celebrated at Hyannis Port that year. The night before, Kennedy served the oysters and lobster tails Carroll Rosenbloom had sent from Maryland. On Thanksgiving Day, there were oysters again in the sunroom, then a full-course meal with squash, which Kennedy insisted, though his wife frowned on it, be served with the sweet potatoes. (Rose objected to serving two vegetables of the same color.) On Friday night and Saturday night, the family gathered again for dinner, with lobsters the central part of the menu.
Ten days earlier, Joseph Kennedy had had what Rose referred to in her diary as an “attack,” probably one of his periodic but prolonged stomach upsets. He “is not at all himself but quiet,” Rose wrote in her diary, “complains about a lack of taste in his mouth & feels blah—he says— For first time—I have noticed he has grown old— Sargent noticed & said was plain he was not himself. Doctor [Janet] Travell here with Jack & says cold wind & air bad for Joe but he keeps going out.” Kennedy tried to behave as if nothing were the matter. He presided over the festivities, carved the turkey, and, as always, dispensed advice to his children, suggesting to Bob that “he should move to Maryland & become governor—then President 1968.” But something was wrong. Jack had noticed it, too, and “expressed his concern” to Ted Sorensen when he returned to Washington.49
Kennedy flew back to Florida in the second week of December, as was his habit. He was delighted to be in Palm Beach again and supervised the details incumbent on getting the residence in order, the phones hooked up, the newspapers ordered, the accounts with shopkeepers reinstated. On December 11, he turned down yet another request for an article, this one from a Life magazine Washington correspondent.
“As far as I am concerned, I have had it. The future reputation of the Kennedys will be made by the President, the Attorney General, and I am very hopeful, by Ted. They and their families will furnish all the interesting facts that the public should be asked to read.”50
Forty
“NO!”
On the morning of December 19, 1961, we were again on the move,” recalled Ann Gargan, Rose’s niece, in her contribution to Ted Kennedy’s unpublished collection of reminiscences of his father. “We generally played golf about 8:30, but Jack was down in Palm Beach and leaving for Washington that morning. Your father rode to the airport with him. I followed in another car so that I could bring Caroline and ‘Grandpa’ back from the airport. We dropped Caroline off at home and went directly to the Palm Beach Country Club to play nine holes. Being later than usual the front nine was crowded so we played the back nine and not very well. We finished the sixteenth and as your Dad picked up his ball he said he felt rather faint, but for me to tee-off the seventeenth as there were people waiting behind us. I did. He was sitting on the bench, I asked if he wanted his ball tee’d up; he said no. He would just walk along. So we started out—his balance was all off so I asked his Caddy ‘Red’ to run and get a cart. Then though with some difficulty your father asked if we had gotten Caroline home alright. I assured him we had. This seemed to ease his mind. The golf cart arrived. I got the car and we drove home. Upon reaching the house he felt better and was delighted to find Jackie and Caroline waiting to have a swim with him. . . . He went upstairs under his own power and wanted to change right away for his swim. I persuaded him to rest and have something to eat as he didn’t have any breakfast. He fell fast asleep, then awoke in about five minutes coughing and unable to speak or move on the right side.”1
Ann Gargan called the doctor, who took one look at Kennedy and summoned an ambulance to take him to St. Mary’s Hospital. Jackie and Ann went with him, Jackie shielding his contorted body—and face—from onlookers as he was wheeled into the hospital. Because Jack was still in the air, on his flight back to Washington, Bobby was called first. When Jack returned to the White House, his “hot line” was flashing amber.
The president and the attorney general flew in Air Force One to Palm Beach; Ted Kennedy took a military jet from Boston with a vascular specialist; Eunice flew in from Boston; Pat from California; Jean was already in Palm Beach. By the time his sons and daughters gathered at his bedside, pneumonia had set in and the last rites had been performed. There was nothing to do but wait and hope and, if you were so inclined, pray.
Joseph P. Kennedy had suffered an “intracranial thrombosis,” a blood clot in the artery in the brain, which had triggered a massive stroke. The clot was inoperable. It left Kennedy paralyzed on his right side and unable to speak.
He woke from his coma the next day and appeared to recognize his children. By Christmas Eve, four days after the stroke, the doctors reported that he was out of any immediate danger, but the degree of recovery was unpredictable. By December 29, he was able to sit up. On January 8, three weeks after he had been felled, he was discharged from the hospital. The fact that he was alive—his vital signs good, with no fever, no pneumonia, his heart strong—was near miraculous. But there had been no improvement in his paralysis. He remained in a wheelchair. He had lost the use of language: he could not speak or write or communicate in words. And he never would be able to.
He returned to his Palm Beach home, which had been refitted, restaffed, reconfigured. A wheelchair ramp had been installed so that he could use the pool, with a plastic roof put over it to shield him from the sun. A nurse’s station was set up outside his bedroom and an intercom installed inside. He was watched over twenty-four hours a day by teams of rotating nurses; by Luella Hennessey, who having cared for his children now cared for him; and by several men large enough to lift him into and out of bed. Ann Gargan, who had moved in with the Kennedys when she was taken ill with what was thought to be multiple sclerosis, took on the role of chief caregiver.
The family’s first concern was to protect “Grandpa’s” dignity, to encourage him and cheer him on, as he had them. For sixty years, Joseph P. Kennedy had imposed himself and his will on family members, friends, and acquaintances, on those he worked for or with, on political associates, business colleagues, and the hundreds of topside and not so topside men and women he came into contact with. Now, suddenly, on day 322 of his son’s presidential term, three months into his seventy-fourth year, he was in an instant transformed from the most vital, the smartest, the dominant one in the room to a gnarled, crippled, drooling, speechless, wheelchair-bound, utterly dependent shell of a man. His right arm and leg were paralyzed, his right hand had frozen into a clawlike appendage curled up at the wrist; the right side of his face droop
ed; he could not dress himself, feed himself, shave or shower, or communicate his thoughts, desires, fears, or hopes in spoken or written language. Yet he appeared to understand everything that was said to him, everything he read or heard or saw.
He learned to feed himself, with some help, and to make his wishes known. He was not mute: he could growl, shout, scream, bellow—and he did. But the words did not come. Except, that is, for “No!” That, he could say easily and clearly. He would bellow, “No!” until the question came he could answer yes, and then he would change his tone of voice and signal with a smile, his blue eyes blazing, and say, “No,” again but in such a way that everyone who heard him knew it meant yes. “He never could speak,” Rose recalled in a difficult interview with Robert Coughlin. “I don’t think he improved very much. . . . Something disturbed him . . . and then you’d give him a drink of water and he’d shake his head and then [you would] put on the radio and then he was happy so you’d conclude he wanted you to put on the radio. . . . Sometimes you couldn’t understand and sometimes Ann couldn’t understand and that of course irritated him, was very depressing for us.”2
In April 1962, the Palm Beach season at an end, it was time to move north again, as he did every year. Dr. Howard Rusk, who had become a friend and adviser to the family and whose work the Kennedy foundation had generously supported, invited Kennedy to get further treatment at his Institute of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation in New York and live in Horizon House, the bungalow, outfitted for disabled, wheelchair-confined patients that he had commissioned builder Sam LeFrak to construct on the hospital grounds. On April 30, with Dr. Rusk at his side, Joseph P. Kennedy was driven from North Ocean Avenue in Palm Beach to the airport, lifted and strapped into the Caroline, and flown to LaGuardia.
On landing, he looked out the window, and when he saw the parade of dignitaries waiting to greet him, refused to leave the plane. He had always had a temper but had learned to keep it under control, to turn it on and off as he chose. Now, without the ability to speak, he descended into rages when he feared he would be made to do something he did not want to do. He stormed, shouted, grunted, and lashed out with his strong arm at anyone who came to unstrap him. Only when Dr. Rusk told him he could wait no longer and had to get back to his patients did Kennedy allow himself to be removed from the plane. As he was carried down the ramp, he held his head high and greeted those who had come to meet him. “He did not try to speak but acknowledged each person with a nod of his head.” He was put into a limousine and, accompanied by a full motorcade, driven to the institute.3
The scene at Horizon House was one of controlled chaos. With Kennedy were Dr. Rusk and his staff, Rose, Ann Gargan, Luella Hennessey, Rita Dallas, who had become his primary nurse in Palm Beach, his Hyannis Port cook and waitress, Jean, Eunice, Pat, Bobby, son-in-law Peter Lawford, and daughter-in-law Ethel. Bemused but delighted to see his family, Kennedy let them flutter about him, and then, when he was ready to settle in, he signaled by stamping his foot that it was time for them to go. Later that afternoon, Jackie arrived, and then the president.
Dr. Henry Betts, whom Dr. Rusk had assigned to the case, was impressed from the first by the way Kennedy’s sons and daughters communicated with their father, the frequency of their visits, and their “constructiveness.” They spoke rapidly. Their talk was “direct,” “fresh.” They smiled, laughed, and joked. There was no pity in their voices, no mourning—and that was precisely, Dr. Betts believed, what a patient in Kennedy’s condition required. Rose stayed with him at the bungalow—and, like an old married couple, they ate their dinner, then quietly watched television every evening. His daughters visited every day. Pat Kennedy, Dr. Betts recalled, was particularly good with her father, quieter than the others, gentle and sweet. Eunice never failed to get full progress reports from the doctors—and she pushed her father hard. Jean filled him in on her day’s activities. Ted, who was busy running for the Senate, could not visit as often as he wanted. The attorney general and the president made time for weekly visits. Jackie came more often. Of all the family, she was the only one who dared to acknowledge in her eyes and gestures that something had happened. “While the others pretended not to notice the side of his body that was affected by the paralysis, she always held his deformed hand and kissed the affected side of his face.”4
Joseph P. Kennedy had come to the institute to learn to walk again—and to speak. He was, Dr. Betts recalled, a “tragic figure—very disabled, very affected.” He tried his best and made good progress at first, but it was difficult for him to find his way as one among many patients. It was even more difficult for the doctors, nurses, and staff; he was, after all, the father of the president of the United States and the only patient in the facility who was accompanied wherever he went by two Secret Service agents and whose meals arrived from La Caravelle with a waiter to serve them.
Every morning he was given his schedule of activities and told what would occur that day and why. As he had all his life, he made sure he was on time for every appointment, “following his schedule by his own Timex to the minute. . . . He also would refuse therapy or a visit from anyone except his own family who was even one minute late and, when any of his children did not arrive on schedule, he would be irritated and show obvious displeasure to them in the first stage of their visit.” The most difficult part of the day was the trip from his bungalow to the main building, up and down the elevators, through the long corridors. Joseph P. Kennedy was used to having things his own way, to giving the commands, to setting the schedule. On several occasions early in his stay, he abruptly canceled therapy sessions or refused to follow directions or leave his bungalow. The effect of his outbursts, his mood changes, his tantrums, reverberated through the halls, upsetting staff and patients to the point where Dr. Betts confronted him in person and informed him that he had to follow orders. If he felt disinclined to do this, he should so indicate and leave the institute. Dr. Betts acknowledged that it might be difficult for Kennedy to follow the instructions of a doctor who was only thirty-one years of age, but he insisted there was no alternative. As he spoke, Kennedy’s eyes gleamed “with a most ferocious hate I have ever seen and he wheeled out of the room.” By the next morning, however, he was fully agreeable and prepared to follow instructions. Dr. Betts never again had any trouble with his patient, leading him to conclude that Kennedy understood everything he had said and had that night made up his mind to go forward. He worked hard over the next month or so and got to the point where he could stand and, with a heavy brace on his leg and a cumbersome surgical shoe, walk a bit. There was no improvement in his speech.5
Kennedy returned to Hyannis Port for the July 4 weekend. Contractors built a pool in the backyard (probably the most expensive of its kind ever built, Dr. Betts later joked) with a walkway from the house and a wheelchair ramp. Another wheelchair ramp was constructed off the pier where the Marlin was moored.
At Hyannis Port, Kennedy was surrounded not only by sons, daughters, and in-laws, but by his twenty grandchildren, each of whom, Ethel Kennedy recalled, he treated as an individual. Kathleen Kennedy and Joe Kennedy II, ten and nine years old, respectively, when their grandfather suffered his stroke, were struck by the hole in their lives. Grandpa could no longer take them riding three times a week at 7:15 in the morning or for picnics on the boat or read them stories, answer their questions, correct their grammar, and watch them when they went swimming. “It’s a lot of fun to see him,” Kathleen recalled four years after the stroke, “but not like before when we played with him all the time.” He could no longer speak to them, but they were encouraged to speak to him. Every morning, they would troop into his bedroom to say good morning and then, when their day was done, return in their pajamas and one after another approach the old man in his bed, report on what they had done that day, and give him a kiss good night. Bobby Jr., who was seven when his grandfather had his stroke, remembered that his arm was “twisted grotesquely,” but the kids got used t
o it. They knew that all he could say was “no,” but they learned from his intonation when he meant yes. He could, Bobby Jr. recalled, express “happiness” or “anger” with his eyes. “The grown-ups were all scared of him and asked each other on entering the house, ‘How’s his mood.’ Or told the kids and one another, ‘Don’t get him cross.’” But if he got cross, it was not with his grandchildren. When he saw them, his face lit up in a smile and he would reach out to hug or pat them.6
He had to have been lonely when, after September, the children and the grandchildren left Hyannis Port. He watched television, looked at the newspapers, watched baseball games with the Secret Service agents, and made ten-cent bets on the outcome. “He had more fun collecting a dime from me than anything else,” Secret Service agent Hamilton Brown recalled later. “The funny part of it, he seldom lost. I only won a few bets in two years. The Chief [Kennedy] had a bank beside his bed that held my dimes and as soon as I won we made a big thing of it. He would take the dime out of the bank, look it over to see if anything was wrong with it (I accused him of slipping me counterfeits), and then with a great deal of reluctance, he would give me my dime back.”7
He said nothing at all now, though Dr. Betts remembered him joining in an “automatic speech” happy birthday song to one of the grandchildren, and several family members recalled a curse or two coming from his lips. And yet, it was never difficult to discern his mood. When he was pleased, his eyes shone and his face opened in a twisted grin. He was happiest hearing from his children, in person or on the phone. “He looks for phone calls and feels rather hurt if no one calls him,” Rose wrote her children from Hyannis Port in September 1962. “The best time to call is during the cocktail hour—between 5:15 and 6:45, as we have dinner now at 7:00. I might suggest that the boys telephone Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, and the girls Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, although this is optional.”8