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

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  In fact, Jackie’s secretary, Nancy Tuckerman, once revealed that Jackie made it a point to transfer all of the birthday dates of the many different Kennedys from one calendar to the next every year so that she would remember either to send a card or make a call—especially to the women in the family. Perhaps that was because Jackie was usually estranged from her own sister, Lee Radziwill. The two saw each other only occasionally. Therefore it may have been all the more important to Jackie that she maintain her ties to her Kennedy “sisters.”*

  It’s not known what Jackie said to Ethel on the occasion of her sixty-fifth birthday, but Ethel’s response was simple and to the point: “Thank you for calling me, kiddo. God bless you, Jackie.”

  Marian Ronan will never forget the last time she saw her employer. It was at the end of the summer 1993 at the Red Gate Farm on the Vineyard. “As we stood saying goodbye in the kitchen, she shook my hand and looked at me with those wonderful eyes. She said softly, ‘Thank you so much, Marian, for all you’ve done this summer. Have a good winter. Take good care of yourself and I will see you next year.’ Little did we know that we were saying goodbye for the last time.”

  Jackie’s “Bad News”

  In November 1993, the nation commemorated the thirtieth anniversary of the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy. For Jackie, November 22 was still a day shrouded in a lot of pain and trauma. Of course, she had gone on with her life, but she had never really gotten over the ordeal of witnessing the brutal killing of her husband, the father of her two children. “I think about that day every November and it takes me right back to Dallas,” she once told Joan Braden. “But I also think, in a sense, that it’s a good thing, as painful as it is. I think we should never forget. We should forge ahead. But we should never forget.”

  This particular year, Jackie, still an enthusiastic equestrian, decided to retreat to Middleburg, Virginia, to observe the anniversary and to enjoy some horseback riding. However, a terrible accident occurred one day when she somehow took a tumble off her favorite horse, Clown. Though she had taken many such falls over the years, this one was particularly nasty. She was knocked out cold for almost half an hour. “Everyone was quite concerned,” said Margorie Maitland, who witnessed the event. “It was terrifying. The ambulance came and they worked on her for about thirty frightful minutes. Then she got up as if nothing had happened. I remember her just rising like a phoenix, standing straight up and looking quite fit despite what had just happened. ‘I’m totally fine,’ she kept saying. ‘Please don’t fuss over me.’ ”

  Despite Jackie’s nonchalance, the unfortunate accident was the first in a chain of calamitous events that would forever change the course of her life. First, when Jackie was taken to Loudon Hospital Center for treatment immediately after the fall, the examining doctor noticed what he thought was a swollen lymph node on her right groin. Believing it to be nothing more than an infection, he gave her an antibiotic and sent her home. A few weeks later, as Jackie spent Christmas with Maurice and her family at her New Jersey country retreat, she seemed fine. But then, during a Caribbean vacation with Maurice a short time later, she began to experience painful swelling of the lymph nodes in her neck, as well as a persistent cough and terrible stomach pain. Now she was concerned. Cutting the vacation short, she went back to New York to consult with a head and neck surgeon at the New York Hospital–Cornell Medical Center. The news was anything but good. A CAT scan detected swollen lymph nodes in Jackie’s chest and stomach, a biopsy of which then revealed that she was suffering from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Stunned, Jackie didn’t know how she would ever be able to break the news to John and Caroline, but with Maurice at her side, she was somehow able to get through her talk with them. Of course, they were both distraught and in shock, as was Maurice.

  The first person in the Kennedy family that Jackie told the stunning news to was Eunice Kennedy Shriver. “I have what I’m afraid may be bad news,” she reportedly told her. “But I don’t want to worry you. I just want to inform you.”

  It was interesting that Jackie decided Eunice should be the first of the Kennedys other than her own children to know the news. It was as if she felt that of all the women in the family, Eunice was the most resourceful, the most formidable, and perhaps Jackie felt a need for Eunice’s special brand of strength and resolve at such a worrisome time. The specifics of what the two women discussed remained known only to themselves. However, it is known that Eunice was so upset that she was barely able to get through the conversation without betraying her true feelings of great worry and concern. She wanted to be strong for Jackie, but as she would later tell it, it was very difficult. For Eunice Kennedy Shriver to not be able to rally when necessary suggests that she really was shaken right to the core by Jackie’s news. As soon as she ended the conversation with Jackie, Eunice called Ted, who within fifteen minutes telephoned Jackie to remind her that she was well loved and to assure her that he had no doubt she would be just fine. Fifty percent of such cases are curable, he reminded her, and he said he was certain that she would beat the odds. “We Kennedys always beat the odds,” he told her. It was an optimistic way of looking at things and very much like Ted and the rest of the Kennedys. Sadly, in this case, it wouldn’t prove to be true.

  No Words

  Jackie, how are you feeling?” Ted wanted to know. It was January 1994. Ted, Vicki, and two of his grown children were standing in the living room of the Big House—where Ted and Vicki now spent much of their time—greeting Jackie, who had flown in from New York City. “Oh, I’m just fine, Teddy,” Jackie said as she walked in looking thin and elegant. She embraced him. She then greeted everyone else in the room with warm hugs.

  “I felt I needed to see Grandma,” Jackie said finally. “I don’t know why. I just thought it was important.”

  “Well, she’s on the porch,” Ted said.

  “And how’s she doing?” Jackie asked.

  “She has her good days and her bad days,” he answered. “Today is a bad day.”

  By this time, Rose Kennedy was 103. Confined to a wheelchair, she was now blind and deaf, the ravages of old age having taken their terrible toll on her. “They would wheel her out every now and then,” Cape Cod Times photographer Steve Heaslip would later recall, “and she was so wasted away behind blankets and so many different layers of clothing, it felt like an invasion of privacy to even photograph her. So we [media photographers] started backing off.”

  Almost every year, the Kennedys used to host a big birthday party for Rose and invite the media to the gathering. But by the end of the 1980s, Rose was no longer well enough to even go outside to meet the press who had shown up for the festivities. Therefore, Ted would invite them into the Big House. Karen Jeffrey, a reporter for the Cape Cod Times, remembered one of those occasions:

  “The room Rose was sitting in was a den, maybe a TV room,” she recalled. “The walls were covered with pictures of her boys and herself with international leaders, the Pope, etc…. I noticed that there were no pictures of her daughters on the walls! The rugs were very worn and the furniture old—not antique, just very old. The television had to be at least thirty years old, one of those giant wood consoles. Ted stood on one side of Rose, who was seated, and Eunice was on the other. Jean was nearby and Pat was, as well. Ted’s twinkle and the way he interacted with Rose was very genuine. It certainly didn’t feel put on for the press. He would say, ‘Mother, look here,’ or ‘Look there,’ or ‘Smile for the camera,’ and she would do as she was told as everyone shot pictures and took frantic notes. It was a little sad, I suppose. But endlessly fascinating.”

  Jackie walked through the living room and out to the porch where Rose Kennedy sat, all bundled up in a wheelchair. The Kennedy matriarch had a colorful scarf on her head and was wearing a down vest over a sweater with a wool blanket draped around her legs. She was also wearing large sunglasses. She looked very tiny, unbelievably frail at about eighty pounds. Only she knew what she was thinking these days; since she s
eldom said a word, one couldn’t help but wonder if she thought of the past or, indeed, if she now lived in the past. “It has been said that time heals all wounds,” she had written in her memoir. “I don’t agree. The wounds remain. Time—the mind, protecting its sanity—covers them with some scar tissue and the pain lessens, but it is never gone.”

  Sitting at Rose’s side in an Adirondack chair was a nurse in a crisp white uniform saying the prayers of the rosary. When she noticed Jackie approaching, she rose. The two women nodded at each other, and Jackie took the nurse’s place in the chair. As the nurse walked away, Jackie held Rose’s hand. The two then sat in silence as the waves from Nantucket Sound crashed upon the deserted beach before them.

  There were just no words.

  One Regret

  I have a terrible feeling I brought this onto myself,” Jackie said. It was April 13, 1994, and she was lunching with fashion designer Oleg Cassini, an old friend who had designed many of her spectacular gowns during her White House years, and with whom she was now interested in doing a book. Cassini would recall that on this afternoon, she was wearing an obvious wig and had a Band-Aid on her cheek. Other than that, he would recall, she seemed fine. She had no appetite, though, as evidenced by the way she just picked at her Chinese chicken salad.

  “What do you mean, Jackie?” he asked her.

  “The smoking,” she said.

  “Oh no, Jackie,” he exclaimed. “Please tell me you don’t still smoke.”

  Jackie shook her head sadly. “Oleg, my one regret is that I do—at least up until a couple months ago when they made me stop. In fact, I’d been smoking three packs a day for more than forty years.”

  Oleg would recall being stunned by her admission. “Why, I don’t think I have ever even seen a picture of you smoking,” he said.

  “I guess you could say it’s my dirty little secret,” she said. “I never wanted to encourage anyone else to start by being seen doing it myself. So I have been exceedingly careful in public.” Jackie said that she had tried to quit “at least ten times” over the years, but to no avail. “And now here I am, stuck with this damned cancer. I can’t help but wonder.”

  “You have taken such good care of yourself otherwise,” Oleg said. “Yoga, your diet… I just don’t think…”

  “I know… and all of that deprivation of sweets I would have so loved over the years,” Jackie added with a wry smile, “and for what?”

  The two just looked at each other.

  “I suppose when faced with one’s own mortality,” Jackie finally said, “the first thing one does is wonder what she did to hasten things. I would just feel so stupid if I did this to myself,” she remarked sadly.

  Again, Oleg didn’t know what to say.

  “Oh my,” Jackie finally said with a smile obviously intended to lighten the mood, “let’s just have dessert. Something chocolatey and decadent. Shall we share one?”

  “But Jackie, you never eat dessert,” he said.

  “Oh yes I do, Oleg,” she responded with a wicked smile. “Believe me, these days I most certainly do eat dessert.”

  Too Young to Die

  By the winter of 1994, Jackie had been undergoing chemotherapy for a couple of months, and as is often the case, the treatment seemed much worse than the disease itself. Immediately her hair began to thin, she lost weight, and in just a short time she seemed to age at least ten years. Lady Bird Johnson sent Jackie a letter at this time expressing her concern for her health and wishing her all the best. The two women had been corresponding for the better part of forty years, good friends since before their White House days. Jackie’s letter of reply is interesting in that one can detect a change in her handwriting. Whereas it had always been quite legible, her penmanship neat, in this letter to Mrs. Johnson, which is undated but appears to have been written in the winter of 1994, her handwriting seems shaky. “Everything is going wonderfully,” Jackie wrote, being as optimistic as possible, “and I hope to see you on the Vineyard again next summer. Much love, Jackie.” This would be the last letter she would ever write to Lady Bird Johnson.*

  Jackie had also actively begun getting in touch with old friends, which suggested that perhaps she sensed she was now facing her own mortality. One of those people was the architect John Carl Warnecke—the designer of JFK’s gravesite at Arlington National Cemetery—whom she hadn’t seen or talked to in some time. By 1994, Warnecke was retired and living in the San Francisco area. There had been some disenchantment on Jackie’s part when she learned that Ted had apparently been using Warnecke’s telephone to call his mistresses in order that Joan not see the numbers. However, because Jackie was never sure about what was going on, she decided to ignore the evidence and just chalk it up to more examples of Ted’s bad behavior.

  “She called in March to tell me that she had a special project at Doubleday that I might be interested in,” Warnecke recalled in an interview many years later. “She said it was a book of architecture. We made an appointment to talk more in-depth on the phone in a week’s time. But on the appointed day, her secretary called to tell me that Jackie wouldn’t be in the office, would I mind calling her at her home instead? Of course, I agreed.”

  “Why, John, how are you?” came the familiar voice on the other end of the phone when John called Jackie’s apartment.

  As the two began to talk, it wasn’t long before the conversation turned to Jackie’s illness. “They thought it was in remission,” Jackie said of the cancer. “But then they found out that apparently it has spread to my brain. So they have this marvelous therapy,” she continued, “where they actually put a stent into your head and pour the chemotherapy into your brain. Doesn’t that sound just ghastly?”

  John was too stunned to comment. That Jackie could so easily describe such a treatment was a little more than he could bear. “I don’t know what to say,” he told her.

  “Oh, John, I know it’s hard,” Jackie told him, her voice well modulated and controlled. She said that perhaps she should be more careful about the way she doled out such startling information to her friends. “It’s a bit of a shock, I know,” she added. “But you mustn’t worry. I am too young to die. Why, I’m only sixty-four, and I refuse to go,” she concluded. “Believe me, they will have to drag me kicking and screaming from this earth, because I will not go of my own accord.”

  The two old friends laughed.

  “Do you know that my son John plays the guitar?” Jackie asked at another point in the conversation. She said that John had recently visited her and, while sitting in her living room, “played the guitar and sang the most lovely Spanish songs to me. It was marvelous,” she said. “I didn’t know he had such a wonderful singing voice. Funny what you don’t know about your kids, isn’t it?”

  The two spoke for about half an hour more. Though John Carl Warnecke wished to keep private the details of what they discussed, he did share one moving memory. “How are you dealing with it all?” he asked Jackie.

  “I’m fine,” she said, predictably enough. “One must remain strong,” she said. But then, after a pause, she added in a low voice, “However, I do cry from time to time. In the shower. Where no one can hear me. I think that’s best.”

  John hung up the phone after wishing Jackie “all the luck in the world” with her continued treatment. Ten minutes later, he realized that they had never discussed the architecture project she had in mind. He thought about calling her back. But he decided against it. Perhaps there had never been a project anyway, he thought. Maybe she just wished to reconnect with him. Instead of calling her back, he sat at his desk and remembered a note he had written to her many years earlier. In it, he had explained his concept for JFK’s gravesite at Arlington on a grassy slope overlooking the Potomac, and the incorporation into it of the Eternal Flame, which Jackie had lit at JFK’s funeral. Somehow, on this day, John Carl Warnecke’s words in that note reminded him more of her than they did of the memorial he had created for her late husband. “The total design and compo
sition must be simple,” he had written, “and out of its simplicity and dignity… will come its beauty.”

  Vigil

  It was Thursday, May 19, 1994. About a month earlier, Jackie Kennedy Onassis’s health had taken a dramatic turn for the worse when she collapsed with perforated ulcers in her stomach. Terrified, she was convinced that this was to be the end for her. “I’m dying,” she whispered to Maurice as she lay on the floor, according to someone close to him. The ulcers were caused by a reaction to prednisone, the steroid she was taking as part of her treatment. Indeed, she could have bled to death if the condition had not been taken care of immediately. Doctors removed a portion of her stomach that had been bleeding. Upon her release from the hospital a couple of days later, her attitude changed. Whereas she had once been unfailingly optimistic, now she was just exceedingly quiet. The chemotherapy had taken its toll on her, not only physically but emotionally. She stopped taking calls from friends and loved ones, staying close to Maurice and her children. It was as if she sensed that the end was near and she simply didn’t have the energy to console all of those who would be devastated by her death. Always with an eye toward how she wanted to be remembered—and with consideration to the privacy of some of her friends—she went through the many years of correspondence she had saved. With her friend and longtime assistant, Nancy Tuckerman, at her side, she read each letter aloud. Some, she saved. Others, she tossed into a roaring fireplace.

  Days later, Jackie came down with pneumonia and ended up back in the hospital. There, she was told that the cancer had spread to her liver. Though no one said as much, Jackie seemed to know that all hope was lost. When offered additional chemotherapy treatments, she declined them. In fact, she said she didn’t even want to be treated for the pneumonia. “Just take me home,” she told John and Caroline. “I want to go home. It’s okay,” she told her distraught children. “In my heart, I know it’s okay.”