Jackie, Ethel, Joan: Women of Camelot

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  That evening Ted appeared on all three television networks to plead his case not only to his constituents in Massachusetts, but also to all of America, to try to explain what had happened, to appear contrite, to ask for forgiveness.

  However, anyone expecting certain questions to be answered during Ted’s speech had to have been sorely disappointed. In the speech, written by Ted Sorenson, the lack of specificity only served to underscore the growing public suspicion that a massive cover-up was taking place.

  The reaction to Ted’s speech was sharply divided. Many Americans found his explanation inadequate, his speech mawkish. Even some Kennedy loyalists had to admit that, as he gave the speech, Kennedy looked and sounded guilty.

  While the nation’s opinion of Ted was divided, Massachusetts still seemed to want him. In the end, Massachusetts would rally to the last of the Kennedy brothers and Ted would be re-elected—with Ethel’s help and unequivocal support—to another Senate term in November 1970.

  The Chappaquiddick matter would not end with Ted’s explanation of it, however. District Attorney Edmund Dinis soon reopened an investigation into the circumstances of Mary Jo Kopechne’s death. At a hearing that took place in January 1970, Ted gave evidence, as did the five “Boiler Room Girls” and other witnesses, but Judge James Boyle was not convinced of the veracity of Ted’s story. In his inquest report, Judge Boyle concluded that Ted Kennedy was probably guilty of operating his automobile in a negligent manner and that, if so, his recklessness had contributed to the death of Mary Jo Kopechne. Despite this outcome, the Kopechnes chose not to file a civil suit against Ted saying, as Joseph Kopechne later explained, “We figured people would think we were looking for blood money.” Instead, they received a settlement of $140,904—$90,904 from Kennedy and $50,000 from his insurance company.

  With Ted’s probable guilt now recognized by the courts, Joan began looking at her husband in a different light. First of all, he never apologized to her for any of what had occurred. Investor Bill Masterson, a friend of Ted’s from Boston, said, “Ted—all of the Kennedy men for that matter—were not the kind of men who apologized for anything. As far as he was concerned, it was over, and Joan just had to get past it. He didn’t ask for her forgiveness, as he had his constituency.”

  After Joan had ample time to get over the shock of what had occurred—that Ted had almost died in the accident—she began to feel a deep sense of betrayal. Those closest to her say that she was now more certain than ever that Ted had planned a romantic liaison with Mary Jo. “It was terrible,” Joan recalls of the months following the accident, “one of the worst times of my life. And it was the beginning of the end for Ted and me.”

  The reality of Ted’s extramarital affairs had been difficult to take in the past, but the situation with Mary Jo Kopechne felt vastly different to Joan Kennedy. From all Joan could gather, Mary Jo was not like the others. She was the star daughter of Catholic parents, a respectable member of society.

  Not surprisingly, Joan began to see Mary Jo as a victim—and not just a victim of a horrifying accident, but still yet another victim of the Kennedy men. In that regard, Joan would identify with Mary Jo, feeling that she and the deceased were kindred spirits. Joan even felt compelled to reach out to the Kopechnes after the judge’s final word on the case had been delivered. “She phoned us on several occasions asking us for forgiveness for what had happened,” said Mary Jo’s mother, Gwen. “What could we say to her? Not much. She was in pain, but so were we.”

  The few close friends Joan Kennedy had in her life all echoed the same refrain: “Divorce Ted, now!” However, as Joan told Joan Braden, she believed she could never do it: “My whole life is tied up with this person [Ted]. Why would people think it’s so easy to end it with him? To think of my children as being upset and distraught because of our mistake. I couldn’t do it.”

  Moreover, even after Chappaquiddick, Joan believed that she was more to blame than Ted for their unhappy marriage. While she was just married to an irresponsible philanderer who may have contributed to someone’s death, Ted was married to an even sorrier sight: a drunk. At night, she would lie alone in her room and ponder her situation while waiting for Ted to come home from wherever he had been. When he finally got home, she would listen in the dark as he stumbled into the kitchen. His routine there was always the same. She wouldn’t hear the refrigerator open, but she would hear it slam closed. Then, silence as Ted ate leftovers. He always got hungry after having sex.

  “It wasn’t my personality to make a lot of noise,” Joan would later explain. “Or to yell, or scream, or do anything. My personality was more shy and retiring. And so rather than get mad, or ask questions concerning the rumors about Ted and his girlfriends, or really stand up for myself at all, it was easier for me to just go and have a few drinks and calm myself down as if I weren’t hurt or angry. I didn’t know how else to deal with it. And, unfortunately, I found out that alcohol could sedate me. So I didn’t care as much. And things didn’t hurt as much.”

  After Jackie returned to Greece, she tried to stay apprised of Ted’s situation. One woman who worked in the office of Ted’s press secretary, Richard Drayne, recalls, “The day after the speech, we got a call from Mrs. Onassis…. Jackie asked, ‘So, how did the speech go?’ Before I had a chance to answer, she quickly asked, ‘And how’s Mrs. Kennedy?’ ”

  The woman reported that Jackie went on to say, “You know what Mrs. Kennedy needs. She needs a good temper tantrum. She should wave her arms, stamp her feet, kick, scream, gnash her teeth, and get furious at Ted. She would get it out of her system, feel so much better and then start working on herself,” she concluded. “She should cause a scene, make a spectacle of herself.”

  In the weeks after Ted’s speech, a public outcry rose against the way matters were handled at Chappaquiddick. The controversy monopolized the news to such a degree that Joan didn’t even want to turn on the television. She was ill-equipped to deal with the campaign of whispers and innuendo that had mounted against her husband and her marriage. “You just have to ride with it,” Luella Hennessey suggested to Joan. “We won’t bother listening to the news. You can’t do anything to stop it, so we’ll talk about something else.”

  Joan recalled, “It seemed to drag on and on. It went on for months.”

  “The stress was overwhelming,” recalled Luella Hennessey. “Under ordinary circumstances, this would have been a difficult pregnancy for Joan. But with all that was going on, and the sleepless nights and anxiety… it was difficult.”

  No doubt making matters worse for Joan were the death threats constantly being made against Ted. One, received at his office, was made on a day that Ted was set to go to the Justice Department to attend a ceremony honoring his slain brother, Bobby. Because the FBI viewed the threat as “serious,” the police were directed to maintain surveillance on Ted and Joan’s home. Their presence outside her windows did not calm Joan but, rather, served only to make her more anxious and afraid.

  “Can it get any worse?” Luella Hennessey asked one night before she and Joan retired for the evening. (Hennessey would often stay with whichever Kennedy family needed her assistance.)

  “Sure it can,” Joan told her. “You betcha it can. Just wait and see.”

  The two women laughed, as Luella recalled it, and couldn’t stop giggling for ten minutes. “Be sure your hair’s dry before you go to bed,” the nurse finally said as she hugged Joan good night.

  Joan’s joking answer to Luella’s “can it get any worse?” turned out to be prophetic: It got worse. Much worse.

  Joan Loses the Baby

  On the evening of Thursday, August 28, 1969, Joan Kennedy—who would turn thirty-three in a week—found herself alone at home. Ted had two of their children, Kara and Teddy, on a camping trip to Nantucket with Jackie’s son, John Jr.

  Shortly after nightfall, Joan felt a sharp abdominal pain, the kind all pregnant women fear. Joan stumbled to a phone and called Ethel, who rushed to Joan’s side with the Kenne
dy family nurse, Luella Hennessey. Both women knew the seriousness of Joan’s condition and quickly prepared her for the drive to Cape Cod Hospital in Hyannis. After spending agonizing hours in admissions there, Joan came to terms with the fact that she had lost her baby.

  She was completely shattered and, as she would later say, now believed that Chappaquiddick not only robbed her of her self-esteem and perhaps her marriage, but her baby as well. Ted arrived the day after the miscarriage, but Joan didn’t want him with her. “I just wanted to be alone,” she recalled, years later.

  Almost as unbearable as the miscarriage was the fact that all of this personal drama in her life had been played out in the public’s view. Joan loathed being perceived by outsiders as weak, as a victim, even if that was truly how she often felt.

  “I’d get mad at people for making little comments like, ‘Oh, poor Joan,’ or ‘You poor thing.’ You know how people love to think that you love sympathy: [mimicking] ‘Oh, you poor thing, you must have gone through hell.’ And I’d say to them, ‘You know, I don’t need, I don’t want, your sympathy. Don’t feel sorry for me. Don’t feel sorry for us.’ ”

  As Joan made plans to leave the hospital two days later, it was Ethel who insisted that she stay with her family at Hickory Hill. Ethel and Joan had grown closer in recent months, and their new relationship was one that surprised some members of the family. “It was as if they had found something in each other that served to make them truly sisters,” Lem Billings once recalled. “They were older. Things changed. Ethel was the one Joan called when she thought she was going to have a miscarriage. And Ethel was the one she began to depend on. Ethel liked being depended on, as everyone knew. She was sorry that Jackie was out of her life, I think. She filled the void—if there was a void—with Joan.”

  Joan had plans of her own, however. She wanted to visit her mother, Ginny, who had just been released from a sanitarium a week earlier, where she had been battling her own alcoholism. Ethel objected strongly, arguing that Ginny was going through a difficult time herself, and that Joan needed to concentrate on her own health. Yet all the objections were halted by a simple statement from Joan: “I want to be with my mother.” Ethel surrendered.

  In her mother’s convalescence Joan had found a safe harbor. Only a short explanation about Ginny’s own fragile health was enough to keep well-meaning visitors away. Most of her mother’s day was spent in her room under a shawl, quietly dozing away the hours, which left Joan plenty of solitude. Unfortunately, it may have been that same solitude which laid the groundwork for the deep depression to which Joan was headed.

  While alone, Joan probably couldn’t help but study the events of the previous few months: Ted’s affair with Helga, the mystery of his relationship with Mary Jo, the truth of Chappaquiddick. She would later admit that she began once again mulling over the genetic predisposition that may have contributed to her own alcoholism, and reaffirmed that there was no way out, no matter what she did. After a few days of this kind of torturous self-examination and self-delusion, Joan sent for Ethel.

  During her visit with Joan, Ethel suggested to Joan that she continue her recuperation at Hickory Hill. “It’s time for you to start living your life again,” Ethel told her and, because she was persistent, Joan agreed. She also arranged for Teddy, Kara, and Patrick to be there, which seemed to lift Joan’s spirits. She had missed her children, who were not with her while she was at her mother’s.

  At Hickory Hill, dynamic Ethel would be in absolute charge, and for the first time in weeks, Joan would feel the beginnings of some sense of security, the smallest stirrings of contentment. Two good months followed, filled with the sounds of playing children, the smells of savory and nourishing food, the brightness of country sunlight. But, from time to time, a shadow would fall over Joan’s happiness—in the form of her husband, Ted.

  Ted was a frequent visitor at Hickory Hill, and his somber face after a day of meetings with his aides reminded Joan of how serious the Chappaquiddick situation still was for him, and for her as well.

  A Final Gathering for Joseph

  In the weeks after Ted Kennedy’s mea culpa speech, his father, Joseph, fell into a deep depression. After he lost his appetite, it was clear to his family that he was giving up on his life, such as it had been for the last eight long, difficult years.

  One evening, Joe suffered a cardiac arrest at the Hyannis Port home while he was getting ready for bed. Hearing a ruckus, Jackie, Joan, Ted, Ethel, Rose, Eunice, Pat, and some other family members rushed to Joe’s room to find Rita Dallas pounding frantically on the old man’s chest, trying to bring him back to life. Ted, in particular, was horrified by the sight; Joan held on to him, tightly. Ethel stood transfixed, while Jackie kept repeating, “He’ll be fine, he’ll be fine, he’ll be fine” in a hypnotic litany.

  Finally, Joe began breathing. Though he pulled through, the family was reminded of the sad fact that this was a very sick man. Next time, Rita warned them, he might not be as lucky.

  After the incident, Joan found Rita Dallas in the kitchen, having a cup of coffee with the Norwegian cook, Matilda.

  “I’m glad I found you,” Joan said. “The senator has been wanting to speak to you, but he’s still with his father. He wants to tell you how glad he is that you saved his dad’s life tonight.” (Just as Ted always referred to his brother as “the President,” Joan referred to her husband as “the senator.”)

  As Rita Dallas said that no thanks were necessary, Joan crumpled into a chair. “How much more of that can any of us take?” Joan wondered wearily, her hands shaking. “No wonder Kennedys don’t cry. They’re always too traumatized.”

  During recent times, Joseph Kennedy had spent most of his days in bed watching television, his eyes fixed on the daily news broadcasts. However, that small luxury was taken from him when he began going blind. Shortly after losing his sight, his vocal chords began to atrophy. Joseph hadn’t actually spoken in years, but now he could no longer make the guttural sounds he had used for years to communicate with others. When he could no longer swallow, doctors realized that it was just a matter of time before he would die. Rose Kennedy, emotionally drained by having to witness the daily deterioration of a husband who was once so strong and vital, sat in a chair next to his bed and wept quietly for hours before deciding that the time had come to summon the family.

  On November 15, the first to arrive was Jackie from Greece. She and Joseph had always been close, and when she came from his room after visiting him, her face was drawn and her eyes red-rimmed. “It’s really time for him to go now,” she told Rose, who sadly agreed. “This isn’t the way he would want it. He’s ready. Why must life be so hard?” Jackie wondered. “The slow decay of body, mind, and spirit—all the money we have, and we can do nothing.”

  Joseph’s daughters arrived the next day. Eunice was first, with her husband Sargent Shriver, from Paris. Then came Pat and Jean.

  Soon after his sisters, Ted arrived with Joan. Then Ethel. She had the flu and, after a short visit with Joseph, was forced to go to her own bed next door. “In some ways, I think she’s been sick ever since Bobby died,” Rose remarked.

  The ongoing death vigil became unbearable for all the Kennedys, especially by November 17, when Joseph fell into a deep coma. That night Jackie stayed with him, sleeping in a straight-backed chair in his room. Early in the morning, she went downstairs and found Ted sitting by a weak fire. He, too, had been up all night, while a distraught and exhausted Joan had gone to their home on Squaw Island for some rest. Jackie and Ted spent the next few hours together sitting in front of the hearth, engaged in a calm, private conversation, the details of which are unknown.

  The next morning, Luella Hennessey telephoned Rita Dallas to tell her that the end was near. By the time Dallas got to the house from where she lived nearby, Joseph’s pulse was so weak she was afraid he would expire without having any of his family members around him, as all had retired to their own homes to shower and prepare for the day. So Dallas
sounded an alarm in Joseph’s room, the awful clanging noise of which alerted everyone in the compound that the time had come.

  Jackie came running out of her home next door in her bare feet, wearing just a pair of blue slacks and a short-sleeved white blouse, never considering the frigid temperature. Ethel, still very ill, met her in the backyard, and the two women raced upstairs, Ethel first. Joan and Ted arrived moments later, as did the Kennedy sisters, their husbands, and Joseph’s niece, Ann Gargan, who had cared for him for years. Soon, Joseph’s room was filled with his immediate family.

  Almost as a matter of protocol, his children encircled his bed, while the wives (Jackie, Ethel, and Joan) and the husbands (Steve Smith and Sargent Shriver) took a few steps back. It was decided not to allow Rose into the room until the last possible moment, just in case Joseph should begin to convulse in his final moments. Finally, when Rita Dallas and Luella Hennessey decided it was safe to do so, Ted left the room and returned in a couple of minutes with his elderly mother, stooped and sobbing.

  At the first sight of her barely breathing husband, Rose fell to her knees at the side of his bed and put her head down upon his deformed hand. She stayed in that position for about ten minutes, crying all the while, as the others looked on, each lost in his or her own moment of grief.

  Rita Dallas thought it might be best if Rose, always a woman of great faith, had her rosary with her at this time, and so she asked that someone fetch it. Jackie, who had noticed the beads on a dresser in the room, brought them to Rose. Rose then put them gently to her husband’s lips and into his open hand, which she closed around them. Tears washed down Jackie’s face, but not Ethel’s; she remained stoic. Joan, standing next to them, was unable to speak.