Jackie, Ethel, Joan: Women of Camelot

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  Bobby blanched. “What?… Oh. I… Is it serious?… I…”

  “I think it is serious,” Hoover responded without emotion. “I’m endeavoring to get details. I’ll call you back when I find out more.”

  At that precise moment the others finally understood what the workman was shouting: “They’re saying the President’s been shot.”

  Ethel rushed to Bobby and put her arms around him. Bobby stumbled forward, clasped a hand over his mouth and, echoing the housepainter, screamed out, “Jack’s been shot! It may be fatal.”

  Joan Kennedy sat at her kitchen table in her home on 28th Street in Georgetown, and over a steaming cup of coffee planned her day’s activities with her social secretary. A full day awaited.

  First, Joan had to take Kara, almost four, and Teddy Jr., two, to the kindergarten Jackie had organized at the White House for her children and for those of any family members, special friends, and government officials who wished to have their youngsters close by. The school was another project Jackie was proud of, and Joan agreed that having all the children learning together was a plus. “I want them to know their cousins,” Joan said at the time. “And you know that if Jackie had anything to do with it, the teachers are the best in the world.”

  After dropping the children off, Joan would take a taxicab to the posh, seven-story Elizabeth Arden salon at 1147 Connecticut Avenue to have her hair styled. A big evening was planned. She would be hosting a fifth anniversary party for herself and Ted. Joan’s sister, Candy, and her husband, Robert McMurray, would be flying in for the occasion. The celebration was to be a week early because all the Kennedys would be going to Hyannis Port for the Thanksgiving holidays.

  The next morning, Ted, Joan, her sister and brother-in-law, and some other friends planned to attend the Harvard-Yale football game and then remain at the Cape for the weekend.

  It was while Joan was having her hair done in a cubicle on the fourth floor that the salon’s manager, Barbara Brown, heard the terrible news on the radio: The President had been shot.

  Barbara took an elevator to the fourth floor, found Joan’s hairstylist, Marguerite Muguet, and pulled her aside while Muguet’s assistant extracted curlers from Joan’s long blonde hair. The two women wondered how to tell Joan the news—or whether to tell her at all. Joan had recently told them of how distraught Jack had been over the loss of Patrick, and how close the two of them had become while at Squaw Island.

  The two women didn’t want Joan to hear the tragic news on the radio, but at the same time they didn’t feel that it was appropriate for her to hear such important, life-altering information from them. As they tried to determine a course of action, Joan’s secretary, who was back at the Georgetown house with a shaken Ted, called to tell them she was sending Ted’s aide, Milton Gwirtzman, to pick up Joan and take her home.

  Barbara Brown instructed Marguerite Muguet to finish Joan’s hair as quickly as possible and get her downstairs quickly to meet Gwirtzman. Once finished with Joan, they quickly escorted her to the elevator, and then took her down to the ground floor without telling her why they were in such a hurry.

  “Don’t tell Joan a thing,” said the manager. “Let’s just get her out of here.”

  Holy Mary, Mother of God

  Once inside Trauma Room One, Jackie Kennedy saw her husband lying on the table. She approached him cautiously, perhaps with the realization that this was only the beginning of a hurt that would not lessen but would spread and deepen over time. She watched as they worked on Jack, stuffing a tube into a hole dug into his lower neck. Another tube had been thrust up his nose, others protruded from his chest. Blood seemed to be spurting from everywhere.

  A doctor pounded on Jack’s chest. Again and again he pounded, as Jackie looked on, helplessly. Whatever the doctor was trying to do wasn’t working. Jack’s eyes were fixed and staring up at the ceiling. His frozen expression was one of stunned dismay. His mouth was agape.

  As everyone in the room watched, breaths held—doctors, nurses, Jackie—a thin green line moved straight across the screen of a monitor. The room was in dead silence except for the muffled sounds of weeping.

  Dr. Crenshaw looked down into a nearby bucket, and lost his composure. There, mingled with the President’s brain tissue and his lifeblood, were a few of Jackie’s long-stemmed red roses.

  A terrible stillness came over Jackie’s face. Then, in an instant she was overcome and fell to her knees in despair, paying no attention to the pool of blood into which she sank.

  Another doctor turned to Jackie. Brushing the tears from her cheeks, she rose as he approached.

  “Mrs. Kennedy, your husband has sustained a fatal wound,” he said.

  “I know,” she whispered, the words barely escaping from her lips. Later she would say her very life ended on that warm day, November 22, 1963, at one o’clock in the afternoon.

  Dr. Burkley came over to her, his face inches from hers. “The President is dead,” he said, his voice choked with emotion. Jackie looked at him and, noticing his great and obvious despair, touched her cheek to his. The doctor openly wept.

  Jackie approached her dead husband and stood by his shoulders. The would was hidden from her, but Jack’s face was visible and still so handsome. She was completely transfixed. How could this man’s expression be so peaceful after experiencing such violence? A priest’s presence shook her from the spell under which she seemed to have fallen as he murmured his condolences and then began the Last Rites, followed by the Lord’s Prayer and then the Hail Mary.

  “Holy Mary, Mother of God,” Jackie spoke the words. “Pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.”

  Another priest had entered the room. He blessed himself and said, “Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord.”

  “And let perpetual light shine upon him,” Jackie intoned, the words rising from her by rote.

  The second priest approached Jackie to quell any fear she may have had about the legitimacy of the Last Rites having been performed on the President so clearly after he was dead. “I am convinced that his soul has not left his body,” the priest said, as Jackie nodded. “This is a valid last sacrament.”

  Jackie seemed faint. She was about to pass out when a nurse approached her with a cold towel. She held it to her forehead while the wave passed over her. Then she left the room.

  Emerging from the madness of humanity rushing in and out of Trauma Room One was Jackie’s friend Lady Bird Johnson. She had just been informed of Jack’s death. “You always think of someone like her as being insulated, protected,” Lady Bird recalled of Jackie. “She was quite alone. I don’t think I ever saw anyone so much alone in my life.”

  “Jackie, I wish to God there was something I could do,” she said as she embraced her. Jackie stared straight ahead, her face a frozen mask.

  Meanwhile, inside the emergency room, nurses washed down Jack’s body as janitors mopped up the blood before Jackie was allowed back into the room for a few final moments with Jack. When Jackie reentered, she noticed her husband’s white foot sticking out from under the hospital sheet. Shockingly white. She bent down and kissed it.

  Then, Jackie slowly pulled away the sheet, revealing his face, his still-perfect face. The staring blue eyes—she kissed his eyebrows. The open mouth—she kissed his mouth.

  Several other doctors entered the room. Like most of the times during their life together, this sacred moment would not be a private one. Perhaps last night had been her last truly private time with her husband. After a busy day, she had turned in for the night but couldn’t sleep. Later, she would remember, something didn’t feel right to her. Something was very wrong, in fact. She needed Jack, she wanted him to hold her in his arms. She didn’t feel safe and she didn’t know why. So, as she would later remember it, she let herself into her husband’s room at about 2 A.M., slipped into his bed, and roused him from a sound sleep. Then, after making love, husband and wife fell asleep in each other’s arms.

  Now he was dead. In full
view of the doctors and nurses, Jackie took her husband’s hand and pressed it to her cheek. She kissed his fingers.

  Then Jackie took off her blood-soaked gloves and removed her wedding ring, also stained with blood. She was remembering her own father, the first man she had ever seen dead, at his viewing. Black Jack had given her a bracelet when she graduated, a gift she treasured. At his funeral, she took it off and placed it in his hand. Now Jackie wanted to slip her wedding ring on Jack’s finger. An orderly managed to get it over Jack’s knuckle, using cream.

  She stood at his side and gazed down at her husband. He was so handsome.

  “The Party’s Been Canceled—The President’s Dead”

  Mother Odeide Mouton of the Stone Ridge County Day School was getting a world scoop. Ethel Kennedy was on the phone with her and she had just told the principal that the President was dead.

  “The announcement hasn’t been made yet to the country,” Ethel informed the nun in a hushed but controlled voice. Then she added, “Please tell Kathleen and Courtney. I’ll come to pick them up.”

  Mother Mouton choked back tears. “But you needn’t come,” she managed to tell Ethel. “Couldn’t I make some arrangement for someone else to take the children home?”

  “No,” Ethel replied. “It’s my day for the car pool.” And then, remembering the grieving Eunice, she added, “And will you please tell my niece Maria [Shriver], I’ll pick her up too so that her mother won’t have to come out.” Ethel did not want the children to hear the terrible news from strangers, and began to compose herself as best she could for the task at hand.

  The nuns at the school had heard on the radio that the President had been shot during the motorcade and had been rushed to Parkland Memorial, but no one knew how seriously he had been wounded. They had already taken the students to the chapel to pray for his recovery. When Ethel arrived to pick up the children, they were still in the chapel praying. Ethel herself knelt down in the back, deep in prayer. In actuality she was still in a state of near hysteria.

  Just a short time earlier, Bobby had been dressing hurriedly for the flight to Dallas when the phone rang and he was given the news. “Oh my God. He’s dead,” Bobby exclaimed as Ethel burst into tears. “Oh those poor children,” she cried, referring to her young niece and nephew.

  “My brother had the most wonderful life,” Bobby had said.

  Now, in the chapel, Ethel prayed for her slain brother-in-law and the premature end to his wonderful, tragic, history-changing life. It didn’t seem possible he could be gone. She slowly rose and walked to the front pews where the children were praying. She walked her two daughters out to the car and told them that their uncle had been killed. As she was hugging them, Maria was led to her aunt, and Ethel put her arms around her and told her niece the news as well.

  Less than an hour after hearing of her brother-in-law’s murder, Ethel had been able to hide her suffering behind a shield of take-charge composure. As she drove away, Mother Mouton, who had been watching the scene, marveled at the strength and self-control of this religious woman in the face of such tragedy.

  As Joan Kennedy was rushed to the lobby of the Elizabeth Arden hair salon, Ted Kennedy’s aide, Milton Gwirtzman, arrived to take her to her husband. In the car heading back to her home, Joan was told the news that Jack had been shot. By the time Gwirtzman pulled up to her home, Ted was waiting at the front door with tears in his eyes. He had been trying to call the White House, he said, but couldn’t get through. The lines were dead. No dial tones, no operators. Nothing. It was as frightening as it was unprecedented, and seemed to have some ominous connection to what had happened to the President.

  “What is going on?” Joan said, frightened. “Is there some kind of national reason the lines are down?”

  “They’re not down,” Ted said, reassuring her. “The circuits are busy.”

  “He’s not dead, is he? Please, God…” Joan said, crying. “Oh my God! Oh no. Poor Jackie. Not Jack. Not Jack.”

  “I don’t know what’s going on,” Ted said. It was decided that Milton Gwirtzman would stay with Joan while Ted and another friend of the family’s, Claude Hooten, ran around the neighborhood looking for an active phone line. The breakdown of the Chesapeake and Potomac telephone system was not due to any national crisis, but rather just a result of overloaded circuits caused by the unprecedented demands upon them. Finally, going door to door, Ted found someone whose phone, mysteriously enough, did work. He immediately telephoned Bobby at Hickory Hill. “He’s dead,” Bobby said, succinctly. Bobby was too busy at that moment to provide details. “Better call Mother and our sisters,” he said before abruptly hanging up, leaving Ted with a dial tone. Then, mercilessly, the tone was suddenly gone and this phone, too, was dead—before Ted even had a chance to call Rose. Perhaps there was a sense of relief about that, though, for what would he have told Rose? She would have had a thousand questions, and he had no answers.

  By the time Ted got back to his and Joan’s home, Joan and Milton Gwirtzman had heard the news on television that Jack was dead. As soon as Joan saw Ted, she ran to him sobbing uncontrollably. Chalk white, her eyes wide and blank with shock, she went limp in his arms. Ted caught her just in time. “Oh my God, not Jack,” she said. “Poor Jackie. Poor Jackie.”

  “Not now, Joan,” Ted said, seemingly frustrated with what he may have viewed as nothing but histrionics. He guided her back to the couch. Ted, perhaps feeling completely isolated from the tragic events taking place, desperately sought more details of what had happened. Leaving Joan with Claude Hooten, Ted and Milton took off in Milton’s Mercedes, again looking for a working telephone, first at Gwirtzman’s home and then, unsuccessful there, finally driving to the White House. Once there, he used a private White House line in Dr. Janet Travell’s office that went through the Army’s Signal Corps rather than the civilian telephone system, to call Rose at Hyannis Port. Rose had already heard the news; with nothing else to do about it, she was going for a walk on the beach to pray for her son. Soon Eunice showed up at the White House and, exasperated with Ted for not forcing more information from Bobby, called Bobby herself. The two then decided that she and Ted should take a private plane to Hyannis Port to be with Rose and the rest of the family. Ted called Joan from the White House to tell her he was headed for Connecticut.

  To Joan, this was upsetting news. Of course, she wanted to accompany him. However, he wouldn’t hear of it. He apparently didn’t want to deal with what he viewed as Joan’s overwrought emotionalism at this time. “Let me help,” she begged him. “I know there’s something I can do.” There wasn’t, Ted assured her. “You’re too weak,” he told her. “Just go to bed,” he told her. “Take a pill, or something.” Cruelly, at least for now, Joan would be completely shut out—from his grief and the family’s.

  Of course, the other Kennedy women were busy and involved. Ethel, seemingly in complete control, tended to Bobby’s needs and those of her children, and also telephoned different Kennedy aides and associates around the world, giving them details of the terrible news and assisting in making arrangements for them to get to Washington. Eunice Shriver had knelt in prayer in her husband’s Washington office at Peace Corps headquarters and then gone to the White House, where she consoled members of Jack’s staff before heading to Hyannis Port with Ted. Pat Lawford, who was in Los Angeles, took the first flight to Washington, where she would join Jean and the rest of the family in making the dreaded funeral arrangements. Rose walked the sands in front of the Hyannis Port compound, determined not to buckle under the pressure, perhaps more certain than ever that God’s will—as difficult as it was to fathom—would prevail. Jackie, of course, was doing her best to hold up, though she was clearly traumatized. Joan, left alone, was the only one who took to her bed.

  In her solitude, perhaps Joan’s mind drifted back to a happier time, just two years earlier in November 1961, a couple of days after Thanksgiving when the family had an impromptu gathering at Joe and Rose’s. As well as the senior Ke
nnedys and Jackie and Jack, present were the Kennedy sisters, Eunice, Pat, and Jean, and their husbands, Sargent, Peter, and Steve; Ethel and Bobby; Ted and Joan; and Paul “Red” Fay and his wife, Anita.

  “We ended up playing one of those Kennedy living room games, but did it kind of like a variety show,” Joan would recall. “I played some Chopin. Jackie read a poem, probably Edna St. Vincent Millay.”

  After Jackie’s reading, Jack suggested that Paul Fay sing his campy, bombastic rendition of “Hooray for Hollywood,” always a family favorite. Joan accompanied Fay during his number, which received a wild ovation, as it always did. Then it was Ted’s turn. As Joan played, he sang his favorite, “Heart of My Heart,” just as off-pitch as ever, and to everyone’s delight. After Eunice performed a little number, everyone began insisting that the President offer up a performance. Smiling, Jack rose and walked over to Joan.

  “Joansie, do you know ‘September Song’?” he asked her. Of course she did. She scooted over to allow room for Jack to sit on the bench next to her. He sat facing the family. Then, as she played, the President of the United States sang his song gently, almost ethereally, its poignant lyrics about the inevitable passage of time.

  “The earlier performances had been greeted with boisterous, friendly clapping,” Red Fay would recall, “but now, we were all silent. Suddenly, I realized as I never had before that these days were rushing past, that we were living in a time that could never be regained.”

  As Joan continued to play, Jack suddenly stopped singing and, turning serious, began reciting melancholy lyrics having to do with the dwindling down of days, “to a precious few.” The Kennedy family was held in rapt attention by Jack’s sensitive, heartfelt delivery. When he was done, there was a moment of contemplative silence before everyone broke out into rousing applause. Joan sat at the piano, dabbing her eyes.

  It was a wonderful moment, but Jack was obviously a better orator than singer. “I managed to follow his voice,” Joan would recall years later with a smile, “but Jackie knew what I was doing. She came over to me afterward and said, ‘Joan you are a terrific musician. You even made Jack sound good!’ ”