“And most of all, Mr. President,” she continued, “thank you for the way you have always treated me. The way you and Lady Bird have always been to me before, when Jack was alive, and now, as President.”
Jackie then mentioned that she had gleaned from the history that she’d read since first going into the White House that the relationship between the President and vice-presidential families was often a strained one. She was grateful that, in her view, this had never been the case between the Kennedys and the Johnsons. She considered the four of them—herself, Jack, Lyndon, and Lady Bird—to be close friends, she wrote. Before signing off, Jackie Kennedy reiterated her admiration for Lady Bird Johnson, the new First Lady. In her estimation, she wrote, “I always thought… that Lady Bird should be First Lady,” and then she cited Mrs. Johnson’s dependability, loyalty, and eagerness to take on new challenges. “I love her very much,” Jackie concluded.
Thanksgiving, 1963
Wednesday, November 27, 1963—it was just three days after the funeral and tomorrow would be Thanksgiving. How could anyone think of being thankful at a time such as this?
“It was as if such a thing was unthinkable,” Joan Kennedy would say. “Thankful? For what? Jack was dead. There was nothing to be thankful for, or at least that’s how we felt.”
Ethel agreed. In an interview, she once remembered, “That was the worst Thanksgiving of all. We had always been a grateful family with so much to be thankful for, but that year it was impossible to find gratitude.”
Rose Kennedy had returned to the Hyannis Port compound two days after the funeral to be with Joe. Ted and Joan arrived shortly thereafter. Then Pat, Jean, the then-pregnant Eunice, and their husbands showed up. Somehow, they decided, they would have Thanksgiving dinner together, even though a darkness that was almost palpable seemed to envelope the entire household. It was as if Joseph and Rose’s home had been enfolded by a shroud of death.
Where there had once been optimism and hope, now there was hopelessness and despair. This kind of negativity seemed incongruous in the Kennedy home, a place where high spirits and “vig-ah” had always been the dominating forces, but things were different now. Jack was gone. The presidential flag, which was always illuminated by floodlights at night, was flying at half-mast in front of Joseph and Rose’s white clapboard home.
Inside, everyone was emotionally exhausted and seemed deflated. Joan remembered, “We wanted to pull it together, somehow. Ted tried to be jovial. People tried to laugh. The Kennedys always tried to rise above the worst of circumstances. I don’t know if it was healthy though. In fact, I think maybe it wasn’t. I know I had so many feelings bottled up, afraid to let them go, let them out, because I didn’t want to be the only blithering idiot in the bunch, you know?”
As the Kennedys tried to talk among themselves, the servants gossiped about the funeral in order to ease the tension. Chauffeur Frank Saunders marveled to Rita Dallas about the fact that Rose had worn the black dress she had been saving for Joseph’s funeral. “Not only did she expect him to die,” Frank said of Rose, his voice a hushed whisper, “she even bought the dress. How awful that she had to wear it for her son’s funeral.”
Bobby couldn’t manage to make it home for this holiday. He was so distraught that he took his family to Hobe Sound, Florida. Ethel was concerned because he would go for hours without speaking to her; rather, he would stare straight ahead and burst into tears unexpectedly. Ethel and Joan agreed that Bobby and Ted needed to spend more time together after these morbid holidays. “They’re all they have left now,” Ethel said, ignoring the fact that there were other family members, but perhaps referring to the fact that two Kennedy brothers were now gone, leaving only two more.
No one expected Jackie to be at the compound for this holiday, so when the telephone rang and Rose was told that Jackie had just landed at the airport, she couldn’t believe her ears. “Jackie’s here!” she exclaimed. “Oh my God! What will we say to her?”
The room became quiet as all the Kennedys silently wondered how they would ever be able to comfort Jackie and how she would react to them. She had been through an ordeal that was more than any of them could imagine, and that she still wanted to be with them for Thanksgiving dinner demonstrated her continued allegiance to the family.
“It’s family,” Ted reminded everyone. “She is family, still. Thank God she’s coming.”
Joan agreed. “Yes,” she said. “Thank God for that, at least.”
Kennedy intimate Chuck Spalding, who went to Harvard with Jack, sank into one of the comfortable stuffed chairs. “Oh, man,” he said, sighing. “Jesus Christ almighty.”
It was thought that Jackie would probably go straight to her and Jack’s home on Squaw Island and not be seen until Thursday, if even then.
But there was a knock on the door at about 8 P.M. Ted answered it. It was Jackie. She looked frail in tight black Capri slacks and a gray pullover sweater. Her hair was combed back behind her ears.
Jackie’s dark eyes widened when she saw Ted. “Oh, Teddy,” she said, her voice faltering. The two of them pressed each other close. Then Jackie turned and hugged Joan tightly.
“Joan,” she began. “I want to tell you everything. I must tell you…. It was awful, just awful…. We haven’t had a chance to talk…. In all of this time, we haven’t even had a single chance to talk.”
“No, you mustn’t say a single word about it,” Joan said, tears falling from her eyes. “You must try to forget it all now. Come in and sit down, now.”
“My heart went out to her, standing there, surrounded by people but still seeming so alone,” Joan once recalled. “I wanted to be there for her but I didn’t know how. I felt a desperation about it, an inadequacy, I guess. I felt that if the tables had been turned, Jackie would have known just what to do. And I wanted to kick myself because I didn’t.”
“Where’s Grandpa?” Jackie wanted to know. “I have to see him.”
Rose entered the room at that point and rushed over to Jackie, hugging her warmly. She suggested that Jackie not see Joe at that moment, perhaps feeling that Joseph was not strong enough to see her—or maybe even suspecting that Jackie would break into pieces at the sight of him. However, Jackie was adamant, so much so that she became upset when Rose, Ted, and Joan began to insist that she not see Joe.
“But I must,” she said, displaying a slight show of temper. “I’ll rest after I see Grandpa. Now, please!”
Eunice and Jean took Jackie by her arms and tried to guide her into the living room.
“You poor, poor dear, you must rest,” Eunice told her.
Jackie broke free, explaining that she had told Maud Shaw to take John Jr. and Caroline to her home specifically so that she could be alone with Joe. “And I’m going upstairs,” she said. “Enough of this.”
“The scene downstairs got so loud that Mr. Kennedy again motioned for me to find out what was actually happening,” said Rita Dallas who was upstairs with Joe during the fracas. “Reluctantly, I went out into the hall and stood there for a moment, trying to decide what I should do. Just then, the First Lady came running up the stairs, alone. I suppose I felt she would carry a horrible and visible mark of her tragedy, but there were no changes in her at first glance.”
Jackie ran down the hall toward the nurse, saying that she needed to see Joe. Jackie stood before Rita, holding a furled flag. She hugged the flag and, with tears in her eyes, she gave it to the nurse, telling her that her intention was for Joe to have the flag.
“It was Jack’s,” she said, explaining that she wanted Rita to give it to Joe after she was gone. “I can’t do it,” Jackie said. “I just can’t.”
Jackie and Rita then went into Joe’s room, and as Jackie approached Joe’s bed, Rita put the flag on the dresser, behind some papers and books. Jackie sat down on a footstool next to Joe, and took his hand.
“Jack is gone,” she told the old man, “and things will never be the same, Grandpa. Never.”
Caressing his deforme
d hand, Jackie asked Joe if he wanted to hear what had occurred. He nodded. She then unfolded the entire story, from the time she and Jack arrived in Dallas, through the grisly murder, all the way to the funeral. The telling of this story may have been therapeutic to her; Rita Dallas said that Jackie didn’t leave out a single, painful, even gruesome detail.
After she finished, Jackie kissed Joe on the forehead and explained that she was exhausted and needed to rest. Joe stared at the ceiling, tears in his eyes.
“You know how I feel,” Jackie said, “and how I’ll always feel. Don’t you?”
She squeezed his hand, pulled his covers up to his chin, and turned away. Then she left the room and walked down the hallway as Rita Dallas watched, “and I have never seen a woman who looked so alone,” said the nurse. (In the middle of the night, Joseph’s niece, Ann Gargan, decided to cover the old man with the flag. When he woke up and found that his dead son’s honorary flag was draped over him, Joseph screamed out so loudly the family thought he was having a seizure. It took hours to calm him down.)
When she got downstairs, Jackie hugged everyone warmly. As she stood talking to Rose and Joan, she noticed Jack’s favorite chair in its usual place in his mom’s home, a large bath towel wrapped around its ladder rungs so that they might ease the pain in his back. Jackie went over to the chair and touched it, gently. Then, her eyes brimming with tears, she left as quickly as possible.
Jackie spent the night at her home with her children and their nanny, Maud Shaw. The next day she did not emerge for Thanksgiving dinner. Instead, Maud Shaw arrived at Rose’s home with John Jr. and Caroline in tow, explaining that Jackie would not be coming. “She can’t bear it,” the nanny explained. “She is just much too distraught. She didn’t sleep a wink. Instead, she cried all night.”
After dinner, Joan drove to Jackie’s Squaw Island house with a plate of turkey, cranberries, stuffing, and sweet potatoes that had been fixed by Rose. A strong, cool wind blew in from Nantucket Sound; a roll of thunder signaled an approaching storm.
Ten Secret Service agents stood guard on Jackie’s property—the first time a President’s widow was given round-the-clock protection. There was a checkpoint set up at the bottom of the hill that led up to the house, which in itself was not unusual, as well as agents roaming the area. It still wasn’t known, after all, if Jack’s assassination had been a communist plot, or some other conspiracy, and whether or not the lives of Jackie and her children were in danger. After identifying herself to a guard who shone a blinding flashlight in her face, Joan was let through an opening in a barricade. She proceeded up the driveway, got out of the car, and walked to Jackie’s front door. She rang. She knocked. She rang again. But Jackie never answered the door.
Jackie’s Camelot
The former First Lady spent Thanksgiving evening alone in a melancholy mood, writing letters and making telephone calls to people she felt particularly close to as a result of the tragedy. The murder of her husband would define a new Jackie in many ways, one of which would be the emergence of her true vulnerability. Prior to the assassination, most people really didn’t know what she was thinking. If she had problems—and she obviously did—she handled them in her solitude, in her own very discreet way. She wasn’t the type to whine, complain, or cry on the shoulders of friends and relatives during difficult times. But after the shock of Jack’s death, it was as if a reservoir holding back Jackie’s raw emotions was unleashed. From it came forth hurt, pain, and anguish, as well as feelings of love and appreciation. It was a different Jackie who would allow all of her friends to bear witness to her emotional turmoil.
To Nellie Connally, who was sitting in the front seat of the car that carried John and Jackie on that fateful day, she wrote, “The thing I’m glad about is that on that awful ride to the hospital we were two women who really loved their husbands, those two brave men.”
She telephoned the new President Johnson and Lady Bird.
“I’m so sad,” she told Lyndon. “But I’m here with all of Jack’s things. And it’s helping. In an odd way.”
LBJ asked if she planned to join the family for dinner.
“It’s best for me to be alone now,” she said.
The Johnsons were moved to hear from Jackie on this sad Thanksgiving. In a letter he wrote to her [on December 1], which he had delivered by messenger from the White House, LBJ would marvel at her strength.
“How could you possibly find that extra ounce of strength to call us Thanksgiving evening?” he asked her. “You have been magnificent and have won a warm place in the heart of history. I only wish things could be different,” he wrote. “That I didn’t have to be here. But the almighty has willed differently, and now Lady Bird and I need your help. You have for now and for always our warm, warm love.”
Although it seemed that Jack at times had treated Jackie callously during their marriage, it was by marrying this man that many of her dreams and ambitions came true. It was through her marriage to Jack that she became the woman she had always dreamed of being. In fact, it was as if by marrying, these two ambitious people coming together created one whole. With his political savvy and her class, style, and culture, they were the perfect match. Both had created images of themselves that they projected to the world, and those images would have impact on our culture even after both were gone. Without Jack, it was as if Jackie was only half a person, or at least that’s how it felt to her once she realized she had to face life alone.
Although in the years following Jack’s death, Jackie sometimes may have had a tendency to romanticize their relationship, she was always aware of his infidelities, particularly his affair with Marilyn Monroe. However, she had long before accepted this flaw as part of his character and continued to love him in spite of it. She knew only too well that she too had her flaws, and he had accepted her despite them.
With an eye on Jack’s place in history, Jackie granted an interview with writer Theodore White to put her relationship with her husband, and what they had achieved together, in a glowing, warm light. The journalist, who was working on a story about the assassination for Life magazine, was driven by limousine from New York to Hyannis Port the day after Thanksgiving. To White, she said she envisioned Jack as a little boy, reading about the Knights of the Round Table, reading Marlborough, molding himself into a great hero to whom, one hoped, other young boys would one day look for inspiration. She told White that she wished to “rescue” Jack’s memory from the “bitter people” who would one day write about him. Some skeptics would later feel that what she really wanted was to ensure that the inevitable revelations of Jack’s many secrets would seem sacrilegious upon their discovery, and that one way to do that would be to mythologize him. “Jack’s life had more to do with myth, magic, legend, saga, and story than with political theory or political science,” she added. She also told him that “men are such a combination of good and bad.”
Spinning a golden mythology, Jackie carefully laid out her Camelot tale to the rapt writer. To Jackie—as to many people back then and, certainly, to a lot more in years to come when this Camelot analogy took hold—the image of her husband was youth, glamour, vigor, and idealism personified. “I want to say this one thing,” she told White. “It’s been almost an obsession with me. All I keep thinking about is this line from a musical comedy. At night before we’d go to sleep, Jack liked to play some records. His back hurt, the floor was so cold, so I’d get out of bed at night and play it for him, when it was so cold. And the song he loved most came at the very end of this record, the last scene of Camelot. Sad Camelot. ‘Don’t let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot.’ ”
Jack did enjoy the original cast recording of Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe’s show. (Starring Richard Burton as King Arthur and Julie Andrews as Guenevere, the Broadway show Camelot opened at the Majestic Theater on December 3, 1960, about a month after Jack was elected. The reviewer for the Wall Street Journal said that costar Rob
ert Goulet as Lancelot had a “Kennedy-like mop of hair.”) Jack had gone to prep school and college with lyricist Alan Jay Lerner, and Jackie thought it would be interesting if her husband had the opportunity to meet composer Frederick Loewe. So she invited Loewe to the White House for an informal dinner. After the meal, and much to Jackie’s delight, Loewe sat at the piano and played selections from his and Lerner’s shows My Fair Lady, Gigi, Brigadoon, Paint Your Wagon, and, finally, at Jack’s special request, Camelot.
“There’ll never be another Camelot again,” Jackie told White, wistfully. Her choice for an analogy was actually a good one, for the Camelot story is a fable about how idealism and right can endure in spite of human frailty and envy, even after the flawed heroes of the story are destroyed. White didn’t mind Jackie’s wanting him to incorporate the Camelot analogy in his story, considering what she’d been through. However, during a telephone call White placed to the Life magazine editorial offices, the editors balked at what they saw as a trivialization of presidential history. Jackie stood her ground, though, and insisted that the Camelot references remain. “So the epitaph of the Kennedy administration became Camelot,” Theodore White would write, “a magic moment in American history when gallant men danced with beautiful women, when great deeds were done, when artists, writers and poets met at the White House, and the barbarians behind the walls were held back.”
The Camelot mystique would actually live on long after Jack’s death. In fact, the romantic notion of Camelot would go on to encompass the full Kennedy experience in the 1960s, the family’s greatest time of power and influence—and high drama—when it seemed that every waking moment of those who were a part of the house of Kennedy was of the most potent interest to the world at large.
Jackie, Ethel, Joan: Women of Camelot Page 28