“How well I remember my own wedding,” Ethel said wistfully, not responding to the woman’s question. “We Kennedys are known for our great weddings, as you know,” she added. “Mine and Bobby’s was so beautiful.” According to the maid’s later recollection, Ethel then spoke of the formal white satin gown she wore on that special day so many years earlier when she and Robert Kennedy were wed. She also spoke of the long, diaphanous veil trimmed with delicate orange blossoms. And the elegant, dainty gloves. “But we called them mitts in those days,” she remembered. “They were satin and had pearls on them,” she added. “People don’t wear gloves so much anymore,” she mused as she reached into her pocket and pulled out large black sunglasses. She put them on. “I wonder why that is,” she continued, seeming distracted. “Gloves are so nice. Don’t you agree?” Her maid nodded.
Over the years, Kennedy weddings have been more than mere events, they’ve been the subject of national curiosity all the way back to the family patriarch Joseph’s, who wed Rose in 1914, through to Bobby and Ethel’s in 1950, Eunice’s to Sargent Shriver in 1953, and Jack’s to Jackie Bouvier, also in 1953. And there were so many more—Kennedy sisters Pat’s to actor Peter Lawford in 1954 and Jean’s to Stephen Smith two years later. Then there was Ted’s to Joan Bennett in 1958… The list goes on and on, especially as the next generation took their own spouses. Who could forget the elegant wedding of Jackie’s daughter, Caroline, to Ed Schlossberg in 1986? Wedding guest Robert Rauschenberg once said it felt as if there had been “seventy-five thousand Kennedys present.” It probably felt to those in attendance that there were at least that many. But then Caroline’s brother, John Fitzgerald Kennedy Jr.—only son of the slain President Kennedy—broke the tradition of big family weddings with a more intimate affair when he married the lovely Carolyn Bessette in 1996. It was a surprise not only to the media but also to many of Kennedy’s friends and even family members. How he was ever able to pull it off remained a mystery to many, but John wed Carolyn privately on Cumberland Island, Georgia, with just a few close friends and relatives present. Unfortunately, the wedding ceremony planned for this day—Saturday, July 17, 1999—between Ethel’s daughter Rory and her beau Mark Bailey now hung in the balance because John Kennedy Jr., his wife Carolyn Bessette, and her sister Lauren were missing.
John and Carolyn had been on their way from Essex County Airport in Fairfield, New Jersey, to Hyannis Airport on Cape Cod in order to attend Rory’s wedding at the Kennedy compound. Although the houses that comprised the compound were summer homes for the Kennedys, the Hyannis Port residences seemed to symbolize their unity, serving as headquarters for observances and celebrations, for funerals and wakes, for auspicious announcements, commemorative rites, and family holidays like the Fourth of July, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. First, though, John and Carolyn were scheduled to stop at Martha’s Vineyard to drop off Lauren, a vice president at Morgan Stanley Dean Witter. However, something apparently happened to their plane. The small, single-engine, red-and-white Piper Saratoga hadn’t been seen on radar since 9:30 p.m. Friday night, half an hour before it should have landed on Martha’s Vineyard. There was nothing anyone could do except to pray.
“Will the Mass be served at my house or at Senator Kennedy’s?” Ethel asked. She attended Mass almost every single day, either at her Catholic church or, quite often, in her own home where a priest would come to perform it. Of course, she would also walk out if the sermon hit her the wrong way, or if she didn’t like the priest. But everyone knew that about Ethel.
“Whichever you prefer,” answered Ethel’s maid.
“I think maybe my house would be best,” Ethel decided. “Yes, we’ll have it on my porch. And will Father O’Byrne say Mass?” she asked.
“Yes.”
Ethel shook her head sadly. “He married John and Carolyn just a few years ago,” she recalled. “And now here we are today. Oh, my poor Johnny,” she added, looking out at the gray sea and merging skyline. She hadn’t used the pet name since John was a tot, at least not that anyone could remember. “Oh, dear Lord,” she said, as if just hit with a revelation. “If Jackie was alive, I don’t know how she would handle this. In fact, I don’t think she could bear it. Do you?”
Ethel’s maid didn’t comment.
“I love all my boys,” Ethel continued. “You know I love my girls, too. But my boys, they have given me the most trouble, and for some reason, I just love my boys so much. And Johnny, I always thought of him as one of my own,” she concluded sadly.
It had been just before midnight on Friday night—not long after the family and guests retired after the rehearsal dinner—that Senator Ted Kennedy learned of John’s missing plane. He wasn’t that concerned, at least not at first. After all, John was nothing if not unpredictable. Perhaps he had changed his plans, Ted reasoned, and just hadn’t informed anyone. However, after a few calls, Ted began to fear the worst. He spent the rest of the night on the telephone talking to the FAA and the Coast Guard, as well as to any of John’s friends he knew to find out if they had any information. Finally, at about 5 a.m., he had no choice but to telephone Ethel to tell her the gut-wrenching news that John’s plane had gone missing. He and Ethel—whom he lovingly called “Ethie”—had been through so much over the years that this seemed like just one more awful moment they would have to share. After speaking to Ted, Ethel tearfully gathered those family members present in the house to tell them what was going on. The rest of the day would be a waiting game. Even though it was obvious that the plane had gone down somewhere, no one in the family was willing to give up hope, least of all Ethel Kennedy. “I don’t give up easily,” she said, “at least not on something I believe in. I have no doubts,” she said. “Not a one.” It would be just like her nephew, she said, to simply show up a day later than planned and have the most wildly entertaining story to tell about his delay.
The phone hadn’t stopped ringing at Ethel’s all morning. She would jump every time it rang, hoping it was good news. One of the calls was from Holly Safford, whose company was catering Rory’s wedding. She had just heard on television that John was missing. “I am so sorry, Mrs. Kennedy,” she said, according to her memory of the conversation. “This is just so devastating. I don’t know what to say.”
“Holly, my dear, there is no need to be sorry, because they are going to find him,” Ethel said, her tone strong and reassuring. “We are going to have a wedding today, I guarantee it.”
“Is there anything I can do for you, Mrs. Kennedy?”
“Yes,” she answered, “please tell your staff to stand by and wait for further instructions. The wedding is not canceled. They will find John, I know it.”
Three long hours passed, and still no word. As Ethel made her way back to her home from the shoreline, two of her grandchildren—Kate and Kerry Kennedy—joined her. She held their hands, and as they passed a flagpole with an American flag flapping in the wind, the three stopped for a second and looked up at it. It was not at half-mast. Not yet, anyway. “Go, go, go!” Ethel was then heard calling out to the children. “Run! Run! Run! It’s a beautiful day. Go have fun!” With that, the two children raced across the white sand beach and down to the shore.
Ethel continued walking, still limping and showing signs of the hip replacement surgery she’d undergone earlier in the year. Slowly, she made her way past billowing white tents that had just been erected for the wedding ceremony and subsequent party. The site was bustling with activity as people carried elaborate flower arrangements onto the property—roses, for the most part, of every size, every variety, and, it seemed, most every color under the sun. Meanwhile, caterers with large trays of desserts unloaded their goods from a massive truck in Ethel’s driveway. One caterer almost tripped as she tried to navigate over a tangle of power cords while carrying a towering tray of cookies. “Careful,” Ethel said, laughing. “Don’t hurt yourself!”
Also scurrying about the premises were reporters and photographers from People magazine who had somehow gotte
n into the Kennedy compound. “Inform them that Mrs. Kennedy said they are not allowed on these premises,” Ethel was overheard telling one of the many uniformed policemen patrolling the property. “There should be no press here at all,” she said, now seeming quite annoyed. In her hand was a white linen napkin, folded and tied at the top with a delicate gold ribbon. “This is our home,” Ethel declared, “it is not a park.” She then looked at the napkin in her hands and untied the ribbon around it. It had Rory’s initials on it, and Mark’s. Then—who knows why she did it, whether it was because of some deeply buried sense of the inevitable—she crumpled the napkin and tossed it into a nearby trash can.
Eventually, Ethel walked up the floral-lined pathway to her house. An empty hammock swung on the porch, and the home’s windows were shuttered like those of all of the other white clapboard homes in the compound. Standing on her porch and looking out at the waves crashing on the beach in the distance, she tilted her head and allowed the ocean breeze to cool her face. She seemed to be trying to ignore the bedlam swirling around her when, out of the corner of her eye, she must have seen Ted Kennedy approaching from the direction of his own home in the compound. Family members, household staff, and those responsible for the wedding preparations looked on as Ethel extended her arms to the oft-troubled man she’d always considered more a brother than just a brother-in-law. He’d been in the hospital delivery room holding her hand in place of his deceased brother when she gave birth to Rory. How could she ever forget that?
Unfortunately, Ted had bad news for Ethel. He’d just heard from the Coast Guard that a person standing on the shore near Gay Head—less than a mile from Jackie’s vacation home—had spotted something black floating in the water. She’d thought it was a trash bag. But then one of her friends jumped into the surf to investigate and moments later returned with a suitcase. The two beachgoers gazed at the luggage for a long moment before finally lifting the identification flap. There they found a business card from Morgan Stanley. On it was the name “Lauren Bessette—Vice President.” It would get worse. A prescription bottle made out to Carolyn Bessette would emerge from the waves; a bag of kayaking gear; a piece of an airplane seat; a headrest; an aircraft wheel—all stomach-turning flotsam of a flight gone deadly wrong, now washing ashore and seeming to seal forever the fate of its passengers. Ted had said he didn’t know how he would tell Ethel such terrible news, but he knew that it should come from him.
While the visibly shaken senator relayed the news to her, Ethel Kennedy nodded solemnly as if trying to take it in, as if trying to fathom the unfathomable. When he finished speaking, she seemed stunned as she stood in place, just staring at him in disbelief. She’d been so strong all day, as was usually her fashion in times of crisis. But this was just too much to take. This was more than even she could bear. She began to cry. And as she did so, she seemed to become unsteady on her feet. So he reached out for her and held her close. For a long time, he held her close.
PART ONE
Jackie
Trying to Let Go of the Past
Had it all been just a terrible dream? Was he really gone?
Certainly there were moments, though fleeting, when it felt as if it had never happened. She would awaken in the morning and, for just a few seconds, everything in her life seemed fine. But then a bleakness would begin to set in, and in no time it would all come back to her: Yes, it had happened. He was dead. Why him? Why not her? Was there anything she could have done, should have done? And then she would cry, sometimes just a few tears, but often racking sobs. It had been that way for years, and she feared it would remain so for as long as she would draw breath. Of course, sometimes she would have good days, but the bad days were just awful. She wasn’t even thirty-nine yet. Was this to be her fate? Would she ever recover? Indeed, these thoughts still consumed Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis in 1968, almost five years after the murder of her husband, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the thirty-fifth president of the United States.
She was born Jacqueline Lee Bouvier in Southhampton, New York, on July 28, 1929, to Janet Lee and John Vernou Bouvier III. If not to the manor born, Jackie was certainly never lacking in the accommodations that the very wealthy people of her time took for granted: socially prominent parents, a private school education, instruction in the equestrian arts, ballet lessons, travel abroad. When one considers photographs of the twenty-something Jacqueline Bouvier, a number of descriptive words and phrases spring to mind—uncommon grace, flawless taste, culture, great style, unerring charm, a sense of serenity, refinement that comes with excellent breeding.
By the standards of today, perhaps she would not have been considered a great beauty. Her thin lips when stretched into a smile revealed teeth that were anything but perfectly aligned. Her eyes appeared a bit too wide apart. She was definitely the daughter of aristocratic Black Jack Bouvier, as her features attested, and while her father was considered rakishly handsome, Jackie would have to wait for the allure of falling in love with Jack Kennedy for her beauty to come into full force. By contrast, Jackie’s younger sister (by four years) Lee inherited the looks of her mother’s family, the Lees: aquiline nose, porcelain skin, high cheekbones, fair hair and eyes. Jackie even acknowledged this and was quoted as saying of her younger sister, “Lee was the pretty one. So I guess I had to be the intelligent one.”
Arguably, the most famous years of the Kennedy dynasty started with JFK and Jackie’s fabled time in the White House. It had been in November 1960 that Democratic nominee John Fitzgerald Kennedy was narrowly elected to the office of the president over the Republican Richard M. Nixon, ushering in a new and exciting era of promise and hope for the country. In many ways, JFK’s victory may have had less to do with his political platform than with his star quality and his youth—at forty-three, the youngest man ever elected president and the second youngest to hold that office, that distinction belonging to Ted Roosevelt, the vice president who at forty-two became president after William McKinley was assassinated. It was Jackie Bouvier Kennedy’s great good fortune—and ours—that she would become First Lady and one of America’s most memorable, echoing the tenure of Dolley Madison some 150 years previously. Like twenty-four-year-old Dolley, Jackie was, at thirty-one, one of the youngest of presidential wives. The public was quickly captivated by her charm and grace and, yes, her beauty. Indeed, with the addition of two lively, photogenic children, Caroline and “John-John,” the First Family became everyone’s ideal and captured the hearts of all Americans. But then tragedy struck in November 1963 when President Kennedy was brutally assassinated in Dallas. “Take your glasses off, Jackie,” he had said to his wife, referring to her large shades, “they want to see your face.” It would be his last request of her. Soon after, he would be shot dead at her side, his blood and brains splattered all over her lovely pink dress suit. She would find the loss impossible to reconcile, even after leaving the White House and moving to New York City with her children. Crushed and disillusioned, in November 1964—the one-year anniversary of the assassination—Jackie wrote of Jack, “I should have known that he was magic… I should have guessed it could not last. I should have known that it was asking too much to dream that I might have grown old with him and see our children grow up together. So now he is a legend when he would have preferred to be a man.” All around her, life continued to unfold after Jack’s death, but certainly not in ways that would help ease her grief, because it just seemed like one calamity after another.
For instance, Jack’s youngest brother, Ted, broke his back in a plane crash in 1964, causing some in the family to wonder if perhaps there was a Kennedy curse hanging over them, especially given that two of Ted’s siblings—Joe and Kathleen—had also been killed in plane crashes. Then, unbelievably enough, another Kennedy brother was murdered—this time Bobby, on June 6, 1968. Jackie was determined to continue to live her life, though, if only for the sake of her children—and she had decided that she was going to do it with a new man at her side, Aristotle Onassis.
On
assis was a bona fide force of nature born not in Greece but in what is now Turkey, in 1906, the same year as another force of nature, the San Francisco earthquake. The proverbial spoon with which he was born was not silver. It was platinum: His father, Socrates, was a prosperous shipping owner with ten ships in his fleet and extensive real estate holdings, enabling him to provide Ari with a classical education at prestigious schools.
Though there would always be questions about Aristotle Onassis’s business modus operandi, they seemed to do little to hurt his reputation as a globetrotting bon vivant. He would entertain potentates in politics and consort with criminal figures with equal vigor and with no apparent damage to his standing in either community. He continued to grow his worldwide shipping business by a method he once described as OPM (other people’s money), forging simultaneous long-term alliances at fixed prices with such competing oil companies as Mobil, Socony, and Texaco. Sailing under the duty-free flag of Panama, he turned a profit even as he charged the lowest prices in the merchant marine market. As his coffers grew, so did his holdings—shares that guaranteed his control of ninety-five multinational businesses on five continents: gold processing, airlines, and real estate investments in South America; a chemical company in Persia; a castle, apartments, a skyscraper in Manhattan; Olympic Airways, the airline he founded; ownership of Greek islands in the Aegean, such as his prized isle of Skorpios; the luxury yacht Christina; and seventeen banks throughout the world. There was one acquisition he had not yet attained, however, but he was fully determined to do so. That was America’s onetime First Lady.
After Camelot: A Personal History of the Kennedy Family--1968 to the Present Page 2