After Camelot: A Personal History of the Kennedy Family--1968 to the Present

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  “When Jackie excused herself, Rose and I had a few words about Aristotle Onassis,” Edward Larrabee Barnes recalled. “She said that her daughter Eunice disliked Onassis but that she thought Eunice’s opinion was unfair since she had never even met Onassis. Her mind was made up, though, she said. ‘Personally, I like him,’ she told me. ‘True, he’s not Jack, but really, who is?’ As she sipped her mint julep, she also said that she was the one who first told Jackie to marry Onassis. She said that back when Jackie first brought Onassis to the Cape, she came to Rose as if she was her daughter and asked what she should do. Rose told her, ‘Jackie, I think you should marry him. Be happy. That’s what Jack would want!’ Then she said to me, ‘It’s so sad the way the years pass us by and force us to continue to live, isn’t it?’ Definitely the evening’s mood had changed from very gay to very downhearted, and Rose realized it. ‘Funny the way a happy moment always has a sad one just under the surface, isn’t it?’ she observed.”

  Rose Kennedy then wistfully spoke to Barnes about her own life, and about aging. She would turn eighty in a year. “You know, I still feel that I am young and quite attractive,” she said. “When I look in the mirror, I see a young woman looking back at me. But then someone shouts out, ‘Grandma! Grandma!’ and while I know I should love to hear that, I must tell you, I really don’t,” she confessed. “It makes me feel old. I don’t want to feel that way. Can you understand that?” After Rose’s comments, the two just sat staring at each other until Jackie finally returned. Jackie sat down and smiled softly. “I’m so sorry,” she said, reaching out to hold Rose’s hand. “I know you hate it when I get this way about Jack.” Rose nodded with a sad expression, but without saying anything.

  Remembering JFK

  John Fitzgerald Kennedy, a third-generation Irish American, was born into a life of privilege in the Boston suburb of Brookline, Massachusetts, on May 29, 1917. Referred to as Jack by friends and family, he was the second of nine children born to Joseph Patrick Kennedy and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy.

  As president, JFK dedicated himself to his campaign pledges to improve the country’s economy and saw the nation through one of its longest periods of financial stability. He was also a champion of civil rights and called for new legislation that would see fulfilled his family’s longtime quest for the equality of all Americans. As earlier stated, he established the Alliance for Progress and the Peace Corps in an effort to extend America’s idealism to developing nations, all of this against a backdrop of fear and paranoia as communism became a real threat. He maintained that both the United States and Russia had good reason to pull back on the development of nuclear weapons.

  Putting aside Kennedy’s tangible accomplishments, his fame as the young, dynamic president, and his and Jackie’s and their children’s image as the storybook family, there has long been a question about JFK’s character in regard to his marriage to Jackie. They were wed on September 12, 1953. A great deal is now known about his philandering—especially since his Secret Service agents have spoken openly about it in the last twenty years. Obviously, he wasn’t the ideal husband. Jackie did her best to cope with the unhappy situation, all the while making it clear to him that she was aware of his infidelities and that she had made the specific choice to live with them. It would seem that she loved her husband unconditionally, so much so that after his death she couldn’t help but romanticize him and his thousand days in office with her myth-making allusions to the Kennedy administration as having been a sort of modern-day Camelot—romantic, victorious, and, of course, also very troubled.

  Clinging to Each Other After Camelot

  About a week after Jackie Kennedy Onassis, Rose Kennedy, and Edward Larrabee Barnes went to see the Broadway show 40 Carats in May 1969, Jackie and Edward had lunch at Jackie’s home. Jackie found Barnes absolutely fascinating. A Harvard graduate, he had founded Edward Larrabee Barnes Associates in Manhattan and went on to a long career designing office buildings, museums, botanical gardens, and college campuses. Among his most famous projects would be the Dallas Museum of Art and the IBM Building in Manhattan. In 1969, construction was being completed on two of his pet projects, 28 State Street in Boston and the Indianapolis Museum of Art. Like John Carl Warnecke, the architect who designed JFK’s memorial for Jackie and whom she dated off and on before Onassis, Barnes was someone Jackie could talk to for hours. And she did. They had a long friendship, though it never turned romantic. He was very happily married. In fact, Jackie did have many male friends who were married and with whom she shared a great many common interests. She always thought it reductive of the human condition that there were people who believed that the opposite sexes could not have platonic relationships.

  “Are you happy these days, Jackie?” Edward asked as they waited for Jackie’s maid to serve lunch. The two were seated in the parlor on a couch in front of a coffee table, upon which an elegant tea setting had been prepared. Jackie smiled. “My goodness, Ed,” she said, while pouring him a cup, “do you know how many people ask me that question? Almost every day someone asks me that question. Why is that, I wonder?”

  Edward laughed. He told Jackie that it was likely because she was “loved by the world” and that it was widely hoped that she was finally happy and at peace, considering what she had been through in her life. “The whole world wants that for you, Jackie,” he said. She nodded. “Well, that’s not so bad, then, is it?” she decided. In answer to the question, she said that she now had “a new life” and that she was just trying her best to throw herself into it. “But do you know what I miss?” she asked. “I really miss politics.” Edward was surprised to hear this, he said, because he never thought of Jackie as being a particularly political person. She responded by saying that when she and JFK were married, she did hate politics. But now, looking back on those days, she realized that what she really hated was “politics as a blood sport,” she said. “Not the way the Kennedys played it, but the way others played it,” she clarified. “Like Nixon. Oh, I am not a fan of his, I must say,” she remarked with a shiver. “You know who I admire most?” she asked. “Sargent Shriver,” she said, answering her own question. She then explained that Sarge and Eunice inspired her “because they believe that the way to fix our country is to fix ourselves. I think that’s what politics is supposed to be about, don’t you? Fixing things.”

  Edward nodded. “Do you miss being a Kennedy?” he asked. At that, Jackie flashed her infectious smile. “Oh, but I still am a Kennedy,” she said brightly. She added that she was “absolutely surrounded by Kennedys. You saw how Rose was the other night at the show. She’s like a mother to me, and I know she thinks of me as a daughter.”

  As Jackie’s maid served the meal of lemon chicken, the two talked a bit more about Jack and Bobby and what both had meant to America. “They were men who honored their principles and values,” Jackie said, adding that “you don’t see that a lot these days. They were connected to the pulse of America in a way that I fear we may not see again.” There was a long pause while Jackie gazed into the distance as if she’d suddenly been hit by a flood of memories. “At times it seems so sad, doesn’t it?” she asked. “Here we Kennedys are, all these many years later, trying to pick up the pieces of our lives. Trying to survive after Camelot. Clinging to each other with the fear that what little that remains of our kingdom will come crashing down around us, leaving us with nothing but the memory of what was once so great. But the truth is this can never happen,” she concluded, “because the family is the kingdom. And it can never fall, Ed. Not ever.”

  In the telling of this story, Edward Larrabee would recall years later that he didn’t know how to respond to Jackie’s observation, it had been so poignant. However, before he had a chance to do so, she did it herself. “Listen, if I go on like this for even one more minute, I will be depressed for the next two weeks,” she said, maybe only half joking. “So, enough of this! Let’s eat.”

  Onassis—Father Figure?

  Prior to 1968, John Kennedy
Jr.’s greatest male influence had been Secret Service agent Jack Walsh. A funny story has it that once when John was being taunted by some school chums—“John-John wears short-shorts!”—he hauled off and punched one kid right in the nose. When someone asked how he learned to fight like that, he answered, “The Secret Service!” Ham Brown, executive secretary of the Former Agents Association of the Secret Service, said, “Jack automatically became a father figure to John. It’s a shame that’s how things had to be, but Jack is a good man and he was happy to do it. He drove John to school and picked him up every day, just like a father would. At home, the only people around were women—Mrs. Onassis and all the maids and servants. Jack was the only man around those children until Onassis came along.”

  Both John and Caroline seemed to take to Aristotle Onassis when he came into their lives—John more so than Caroline. To Jackie, John had always seemed scattered and unfocused in his day-to-day activities. Though she told him not to worry about his poor spelling—his father’s had been atrocious as well—she was concerned. His leg was always jiggling, he seemed nervous, hyperactive. When she looked into it, the diagnosis from doctors came back as a “learning/behavioral disability.” She was very concerned about that language until it was explained to her that the phrase merely meant the boy was hyperactive and was having trouble concentrating and organizing. Some reporters over the years have said that John was diagnosed with ADD—attention deficit disorder—at the age of five, and some have even said the age of three. However, that term wasn’t really used until 1980. The first edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) in which it appears is the third edition, published in 1980. It wouldn’t be until John was twenty-three in 1983 that a doctor actually diagnosed him with ADD. It was then that he started taking Ritalin, but on an experimental basis, not consistently. Sometimes the drug made him feel nauseous, and so he often took a break from the medication, only to go back on it later to see if the effects would be the same. When John was a youngster, Onassis was very patient with him, reading him stories, forcing him to slow down, to think before he acted, or as he put it to one of his staff members, “The boy just has too much energy. He needs to stop for a minute and figure out what he wants to do, not just do everything there is to do in a day.”

  “I think Caroline was a little more ambivalent than John was about their stepfather,” recalled Secret Service agent Clint Hill. “It was understandable. After all, she had known her real father much better than John and her memories of him were still so vivid. She missed him very much.” Still, Caroline seemed to genuinely try with Onassis. He made her mother happy, and as little Caroline had said, “It’s nice to see her smile so much rather than cry so much,” perhaps recalling having observed her mother’s abject sadness in the months after her father was buried. “All she does all day long is lie in bed and cry,” Caroline said at the time. Jackie trusted her new husband implicitly with her children and was very pleased that he became a pivotal person in their lives. In fact, Ari had an easy way with children, and though he was more like a grandfather to them than a father, he would definitely be a strong presence in their lives. Onassis worked hard to win their trust. He promised the children that he was in no way trying to replace their father, and they took him at his word. He found, though, that John’s biggest concern was that he was trying to take Jack Walsh’s place! There was definitely an adjustment period where Onassis had to sometimes defer to Walsh when it came to spending time with the young Kennedy. “Sometimes John just wanted to be with Jack,” said another agent who was a friend of Walsh’s. “Onassis would say, ‘Let’s go and do something,’ and John would say, ‘No, I’m fine with Mr. Walsh.’ It could get a little touchy, but they worked their way through it.”

  Their nanny at the time, Greta Nilsen, recalled, “Prior to Onassis coming into their lives, John and Caroline seemed to live in a golden jail, and I think they knew it. You never heard them bursting with laughter or running in the street or fighting with a friend. I had the impression they were rather melancholic. They seemed happy with Mr. Walsh when they knew they were going out with him, especially John. John did have a little sense of entitlement, though. Once when I was in the pantry preparing dinner, he suddenly came at me with a toy water gun and splashed me on my blue uniform. I ran after him and found him in the back hall and gave him a good spank. ‘You are not allowed to do that,’ he shouted at me. ‘My mother will be very upset with you. That is not allowed in this household.’ He would never treat Mr. Onassis that way, though. He had a lot of respect for him. Onassis was a big personality and he told great stories to John and explained Greek myths to him in a way I think John would never forget. I remember John doing something naughty once, and Mr. Onassis swatting him on the side of the head, and John just looked at him and said, ‘I’m sorry, sir.’ ”

  The Kennedy children—who were still being schooled in New York—thoroughly enjoyed it when they vacationed on Onassis’s private isle of Skorpios, and Jackie made sure they had a busy schedule whenever they were in residence, whether it be waterskiing or other sports or even time in the local museums. “Because he knew that John and Caroline loved to fish, Onassis bought them their own twenty-eight-foot red sailboat, which Caroline christened the Caroline,” recalled the Kennedy family photographer Jacques Lowe. (So that he would not feel left out, Onassis purchased a red speedboat for John and had his name stenciled on the stern.) “He also put at their disposal his employee Captain Anastassiadis, reputedly one of the best sailors in Greece. Since there was little chance of the children actually catching anything, Onassis ordered the sailor to keep a supply of fresh fish on board so the children could fool their mom into thinking they had caught their own dinners.”

  As a special surprise for Caroline and John, Onassis had a tree house built on the estate of his private villa at Glyfada. It was actually bigger than most family homes in America. When she saw it, Jackie said, “We could move in here and bring all of Ethel’s kids with us, and still have plenty of room!” Onassis then had it stocked with every kind of toy imaginable, including stuffed animals. He also bought the children Shetland ponies. There seemed no end to the gifts he would lavish upon them, or the strange ways he would indulge them. When John was worried about how his pet rabbit would make the trip from America to Greece, Onassis put the animal in the care of one of his Olympic Airways pilots and instructed him to keep it on the flight deck with him, just to make sure it would reach its destination safely. John told his cousin Ted, who was Ted and Joan’s son, “My mom’s new husband is the king of the whole world! You oughta see the stuff he gives me! I just got my own Jeep! He’s the greatest!”

  One day in the spring of 1969, one Secret Service agent who asked for anonymity accompanied Aristotle Onassis, John, and Caroline on a walk through Central Park. “All of the money in the world can’t buy a simple moment like this,” Onassis told the agent. “I never had this with my own children,” he said. “We have never had this kind of closeness. There’ve always been problems. So, for me, having this time with Jackie’s children is vitally important.” Onassis had John to his left and was holding his hand. Caroline was to his right and he was holding her hand as well. The children had never seemed more content, or so the agent would recall many years later.

  “Aristotle, when I grow up, I want to be rich, like you,” John said, looking up at his stepfather with great adoration. He and his sister always referred to Onassis by his first name “That’s not much of a goal for you,” Onassis told the boy. “You come from a family who helps people. All of your aunts and uncles help people. You should help people, too.” John nodded and asked, “Like my aunt Eunice?” Onassis nodded. “But that’s why I want to be rich,” John said. “So I can have lots and lots of money to help people with.” Aristotle Onassis patted young John Kennedy Jr. on the top of the head. “That’s my boy,” he concluded. “That’s my boy.”

  Jackie and the Secret Service

  She was a wonderful lady, a r
eal inspiration to me in many ways,” recalled Secret Service agent Clint Hill of Jackie Kennedy Onassis. Hill was the agent who pulled Jackie from the trunk lid of the car that awful day in Dallas after she had scrambled from her seat to retrieve part of JFK’s skull that had been blown away by the assassin’s bullet. For many years, he blamed himself for JFK’s death, saying that if he had reacted a little more quickly he would have taken the third bullet—the most devastating of the three that hit Kennedy, “and that would have been fine with me,” he said. “It’s something I have had to learn to live with,” he says. “I’m fine now. It took some time, though.” He retired in 1975.