by Sam Kashner
Zapruder protested, saying, “I’m too short. I probably wouldn’t even get close.” But he ran home and twenty minutes later returned to his office at the Dal-Tex Building on Elm Street, across from the Texas School Book Depository building with his new Bell & Howell Zoomatic home-movie camera. He wanted to record the glamorous young president and First Lady on their visit to Dallas for his children and grandchildren to treasure. Instead he found himself caught up in a horrific moment in American history.
It has become the most studied piece of film in history, and the most famous home movie, known as the Zapruder film: a 26.6-second strip of silent, grainy color film that just happened to capture the crime of the century.
After the first shot rang out, Zapruder continued to film, while others—some of them professional photographers—ran for safety or were so frozen with fear they were unable to capture the event. Zapruder immediately returned to his office and locked his camera in a safe. A reporter for the Dallas Morning News contacted the Secret Service to inform them that someone had possibly filmed the assassination, and before the terrible day was over, Life magazine contacted Zapruder and began their race with the Secret Service and the FBI to gain access to the film. By that evening, the footage was developed and three copies were made: two were handed over to the Secret Service. It was the first time in American history that a piece of film would become crucial evidence in a murder case.
While other news agencies and everyone from William Paley to Edward R. Murrow clamored for Zapruder’s home movie, Life’s regional editor Richard Stolley craftily negotiated to pay $50,000 for the print rights and managed to slip out a back door with the original film. The Warren Commission then subpoenaed the film from Life. Life published thirty frames in black-and-white in the November 29, 1963, issue, and later in color, in a December 6, 1964, special JFK memorial issue.
In the first days after the assassination, the country was plunged into shock and grief. The slain president was flown to Washington, where his casket was laid in state in the Capitol Rotunda before the funeral Mass at St. Matthew’s Cathedral and burial in Arlington National Cemetery. The line of grieving citizens filing by the catafalque reached five miles as it snaked through the streets of Washington, DC.
In the aftershock of her grief, Jackie’s deep engagement with history helped her make decisions about the funeral. She modeled her husband’s procession after Abraham Lincoln’s, with a horse-drawn casket that wound its way through the chilled streets of the city, a riderless horse accompanying the casket. Jackie refused to ride in the government-issued black Cadillac. She chose to walk behind the casket, leading a delegation from ninety-two nations which included Charles de Gaulle. A White House aide, Larry O’Brien, commented, “We were supposed to be the tough ones, but this frail girl turned out to have more strength than any one of us.” For America, the assassination of John Kennedy stood alone, but for Jackie, the assassination and the death of Patrick just a few months earlier became entwined as an inseparable tragedy.
In London, it was 6:21 p.m.—1:21 p.m. Eastern time—on November 22, 1963, when Lee received the call. She was at home at 4 Buckingham Place, and Stas was at the St. James’s Club. Lee took the first available plane to Washington to be with her grieving sister. Stas, who had loved Jack Kennedy, followed the day after.
Lee was met at Dulles Airport in a driving rain by Janet and Hughdie. When she arrived at the White House, Lem Billings told her it was nice of her to come. Lee turned on him and shouted, “How can you say that? Do you think that I wouldn’t?”
Before departing for Washington, however, Lee had called Onassis in Hamburg, Germany, where his newest tanker was being launched, and asked him to attend the funeral. She invited him to stay at the White House—one of only six invitations issued. Onassis reminded her that he had been warned to stay out of America until after the election, a year away.
“I don’t think that matters very much now,” Lee whispered.
Some have speculated that Lee extended the invitation out of gratitude for Onassis’s role in helping restore Jackie to better spirits after the death of Patrick. A less charitable interpretation was that she’d hoped that by inviting Onassis to an intimate family setting at such a vulnerable moment, she might rekindle his interest in her. Truman Capote, who would enjoy an intense but short-lived friendship with Lee, told his Random House editor, Joe Fox:
The invitation had actually been Jackie’s idea. The First Lady knew that she could not invite “The Greek” herself . . . but by having Lee include him in her personal party, he automatically got one of the family’s invitations to stay at the White House. Lee was deeply in love with the Golden Greek . . . but she played right into Jackie’s hands.
Whatever the origins of his invitation, Onassis arrived at the White House and indeed proved himself a useful and diverting guest.
Not accustomed to an old-fashioned Irish wake, Onassis was surprised at the somewhat rollicking atmosphere when he arrived; it was all very different from how Greeks mourned their dead. The Kennedys, still in shock and in a forgiving mood, teased him about his yacht, and Bobby Kennedy wrote up a mock will for the shipping magnate to sign, pledging to give half his fortune to the poor of Latin America. Aristotle Socrates Onassis gallantly signed his full name to the document, in Greek. His presence introduced an element of levity in those somber days. Even Jackie was seen walking arm in arm with him down White House corridors.
Lee and Stas were supposed to sleep in the president’s executive suite, but Stas was so devastated by Kennedy’s death that he couldn’t bring himself to sleep in the president’s vacated bed in the most intimate room in the White House. The very sight of the four-poster bed, Kennedy’s medicine bottles on the side table next to it, and the toy boats and bath toys that he used when bathing John-John in the adjacent bathroom all filled him with sadness. A cot was ordered from the White House staff, to be set up at the foot of the bed.
“Poor Stas,” Jackie said when she entered the room and saw the cot.
The next morning, Stas couldn’t bring himself to shave and wash in the president’s bathroom, so he was found wandering the halls, his toothbrush and razor in hand, looking lost.
* * *
“MY SISTER SHOWED so much courage, but it was the courage of a great actress,” Lee recalled fifty years after the tragedy. “In private, alone with her children, it was unbearable. And there was no one really with whom she could share the true horror of it.” Lee had been moved by her sister’s public stance, “her self-composure in the face of all that pity,” as she remembered. “It’s interesting to see in many of the published diaries of the time, by people in so many different walks of life, what has been written about that day.”
But even the noted writers of the day were often unable to fully grasp what had happened on November 22, 1963. Noël Coward wrote in his diary from Philadelphia during the tryouts for his musical Sail Away:
The whole country is in a state of deep shock. Mrs. Kennedy . . . has behaved throughout with dignity, grace and magnificent self-control. I watched her today on television accompanying the President’s body from the White House to the Capitol and was moved to tears . . . Hardly conducive to writing frivolous lyrics and music . . . I feel that I am living through too much history.
Joe Alsop expressed his grief and shock over Kennedy’s assassination in his memoir:
I can only say that it was a shattering sensation to discover quite abruptly that one had lived the best years of one’s life between the ages of forty-eight and fifty-three. I had never known I loved the President . . . until I felt the impact of his death . . . Why I should so irrationally mind the President’s loss, and it much more than the loss of my own father, I cannot say. But, clearly, after that bright, blustery November day, nothing would be quite the same in my life again or . . . in the life of this country.
Schlesinger heard the news in New York while sipping cocktails with Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham, economist John K
enneth Galbraith, and several editors of Newsweek. He wrote in his journal: “A man entered in his shirtsleeves and said, a little tentatively, ‘I think you should know that the President has been shot in the head in Texas.’ It took a few seconds for this to register. Then we rushed for the radio . . .”
Schlesinger flew to Washington later that day. He recalled,
Everyone is stunned. Fortunately the practical details of the funeral engage everyone’s attention and sidetrack us from the terrible reality. I still cannot believe this splendid man, this man of such intelligence and gaiety and strength, is dead. The wages of hate are fearful . . . It will be a long time before this nation is as nobly led as it has been in these last three years.
Before the funeral, Schlesinger wandered around the White House, and at 2 a.m. observed workmen draping black crepe over the windows and pillars of the grand portico. He watched as Kennedy’s casket, wrapped in an American flag, was carried into the East Room and placed on a catafalque. “Jackie followed,” he recorded in his journals:
. . . a boy appeared to light the tapers around the bier. The third taper took a painfully long time to light . . . A priest said a few words. Then Bobby whispered something to Jackie. She approached the bier, knelt in front of it and buried her head in the flag. Then she walked away. The rest of us followed.
Jackie retreated to her upstairs rooms, along with Bobby and Ethel Kennedy and Jean Kennedy Smith. A few minutes later, Bobby came down and went into the East Room with Robert McNamara. He came out, and asked Schlesinger and Nancy Tuckerman to help them decide if the casket should remain open.
“I went in,” Schlesinger recorded,
with the candles fitfully burning, three priests on their knees praying in the background, and took a last look at my beloved President, my beloved friend. For a moment, I was shattered. But it was not a good job; probably it could not have been with half his head blasted away. It was too waxen, too made up. It did not really look like him.
Reminding Bobby that Franklin D. Roosevelt’s casket had remained closed for his funeral, he and Tuckerman advised Bobby and Jackie to do the same.
Some Kennedy aides tried to talk Jackie out of leading the funeral parade of dignitaries, which included Charles de Gaulle, Prince Philip, and the new president, Lyndon Johnson, in the long procession up Connecticut Avenue toward St. Matthew’s Cathedral. They were afraid that her athletic vigor would show up the older heads of state, but Lee encouraged her to walk in the procession.
Whether by choice or by coincidence, the symbolic riderless horse following the caisson bearing the president’s body was named Black Jack. If Jackie noticed, she did not remark on it; her somber dignity left an indelible impression on the American psyche, elevating her in the eyes of the world to not just America’s First Lady, but America’s First Widow, nothing less than a living saint.
Like the girls and women of their class, Jackie and Lee were taught from a young age that there was one way to be in public and another in private. The public face was the one that mattered. Jackie’s stoicism and composure during those terrible days in November were real, but they masked the crushing grief and hopelessness she felt in the days and months that followed. Each woman could walk through a public storm with a book still perfectly balanced on her head.
Later, near the grave site, Air Force One soared over Arlington in a final salute to the president. Jackie missed it, but when Lee saw it pass overhead, her tears fell.
* * *
IT WAS LEE to whom her sister turned during the days and weeks following the assassination. Lee had been the first of the two sisters to discover Edith Hamilton’s The Greek Way, and Jackie gave a copy of the book to Robert Kennedy soon after his brother’s death. Written in 1934 by the Bryn Mawr classicist, it was a distillation of history and tragedy in fifth-century Greece and it resonated with Bobby Kennedy. Lee knew her history as well as anyone. Bobby, Jackie, and Lee would take to heart the cry of the herald in Prometheus Bound: “In agony learn wisdom.”
Lee stayed on in the White House to comfort her sister, and for a time she provided the only respite for Jackie’s grief. They were again the closest of sisters, brought together by tragedy. One night, Lee crept into Jackie’s bedroom and left a note on her pillow, addressed “To Jacks, from Pekes.” It read: “Good night my darling Jacks—the bravest and noblest of all. L.”
Jackie made plans to leave the White House, a bitter move not only because of the terrible circumstances, but also because she felt a close bond to the home she had so lovingly and diligently restored to its historic glory. She bid good-bye to the White House staff, and then hand wrote the following text for a plaque to be placed in the Lincoln Bedroom:
In this room lived John Fitzgerald Kennedy with his wife Jacqueline during the two years, ten months, and two days he was President of the United States.
It was placed just beneath the inscription, “In this room, Abraham Lincoln slept during his occupancy of the White House. March 4, 1861–April 13, 1865.”
Eleven days later, Jackie, accompanied by Lee, moved into a Georgetown house at 3038 N Street Northwest, temporarily lent to her by former New York governor Averell Harriman. Once out of the public eye, as Lee had observed, Jackie gave in to her sense of loss and despair, holing up in her bedroom, weeping to her secretary, Mary Gallagher, and asking her, “Why did Jack have to die so young?”
She and her children managed to join Lee and Stas for a brief getaway at the Kennedy compound in Palm Beach before returning to Georgetown and buying a house at 3017 N Street, on the same block as the Harriman house.
She brought Lee with her while she unpacked cartons and worked with decorator Billy Baldwin, but her activity and Lee’s presence did little to assuage her sorrow. She asked Gallagher to help her go through a file of clippings about Jack, admitting to her, “At night when I’m alone . . . I just drown my sorrows in vodka.”
Throughout the winter, Lee stayed by her sister’s side and became concerned at how unhinged and bitter Jackie had become. Jackie lacerated herself that she had not done enough to save her husband’s life. Lee confided in Cecil Beaton that she “had gone through hell” trying to help her sister. “She’s really more than half round the bend! She can’t sleep at night—she can’t stop thinking about herself and never feeling anything but sorry for herself!”
At one point, after Lee had challenged her to get on with her life, Jackie slapped her across the face. Lee told Beaton that Jackie was “so jealous of me, but I don’t know if it’s because I have Stas and two children, and I’ve gone my own way to become independent. But she goads me to the extent that I yell back at her and say, ‘Thank heavens, at last I’ve broken away from my parents and from you and everything of that former life.’”
Jackie spent the next several months trying to put her life back together, protecting her children and working to burnish the legend of her husband’s brief presidency by summoning the image of Camelot, inspired by the Columbia Records soundtrack of the musical which she and Kennedy had listened to countless times in the White House.
What Lee didn’t realize at the time was just how deep an impression Jackie’s somber dignity left on the American psyche. If she had been merely famous before Kennedy’s death, she was now an icon. For five years in a row, before and after the assassination, Jackie was named “the most admired woman in America” by a Gallup poll. During her brief time as First Lady, she had captured the world’s imagination to an astonishing degree. As Carl Sferrazza Anthony, author of As We Remember Her, noted:
Composer Rudolf Friml wrote an operetta in her honor . . . Her face was carved in a one-thousand-foot portrait in the snow of Mount Jaillet at Megève, France, by artist Rene Cazassus . . . Louis Foy in the Paris Press thought Congress should replace all images of George Washington with Jackie . . . Movie magazines offered scurrilous covers, with no story inside. One magazine gave advice on “How to Be Your Town’s Jackie Kennedy” . . . There were Jackie dress-up dolls, cutout dolls, and B
arbie dolls . . .
If Jackie did indeed envy Lee’s marriage and intact family—and her relative freedom and privacy—Lee knew there was no way she could compete with an icon.
* * *
IN THE WEEKS following the assassination, Jackie was besieged by journalists clamoring for interviews and information. Sphinxlike, she kept her silence, until it became clear she would need to cooperate with a writer to tell the whole story as she had lived it. A Hearst newspaper columnist and writer of popular histories named Jim Bishop, she learned, was already researching a book on the subject, without her cooperation. Bishop’s 1955 book, The Day Lincoln Was Shot, was a bestseller, and he was already at work on a book titled A Day in the Life of President Kennedy, which the president had cooperated with ten days before the assassination, and which Bishop would publish the following year, with the inevitable title change.
Jackie hated the idea. She would have preferred that no book be written, but as that was not likely, she decided to choose an author whom she knew and liked and felt she could work with. Her first choice was Theodore H. White (The Making of the President), whom she trusted and to whom she gave her first interview, a week after the cataclysmic events in Dallas. With Theodore White, she began to describe the Kennedy years as a kind of now-vanished Camelot, and she mused on what life might be like for her and her children, with Jack gone. What she revealed was her struggle with “a downward spiral of depression or isolation.” She felt sure that she would reject a public life now that she was on her own.
I’m not going to be the Widow Kennedy—and make speeches like some people who talk about the family. When this is over I’m going to crawl into the deepest retirement . . . I’m going to live in the place I lived with Jack . . . That was the first thing I thought that night . . . Then I thought—how can I go back there to that bedroom?