44. Sister Kathleen “Kick” Kennedy
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CHAPTER SIXTEEN
LEGACY
He was acutely responsive to the romance of history in the making, to the drama of great events; and to national sentiment.
—David Cecil, Young Melbourne
On a cold Friday night in late November 1963, Teddy White of Life magazine traveled through a driving rainstorm from New York to Cape Cod. When he arrived at Hyannis Port, he was received at the main house, Joseph P. Kennedy’s. He found the president’s widow fully composed despite the horror of the week before. Chuck Spalding was there, Dave Powers and a few others, but they quickly left the guest alone with the woman who had so earnestly invited him.
White would remember her appearance vividly. She wore trim slacks and a beige pullover sweater. Yet it was her eyes he most recalled. “They were wider than pools.” She was, of course, beautiful. Her voice, as she spoke to him, was low, and what she said seemed to offer almost total recall.
Jacqueline talked and talked for nearly four hours. Her companion was mesmerized and could barely write fast enough. The story that ran in Life was a careful selection from what she told him. He’d been summoned in a situation of the utmost distress as a respected journalist. But he was also a friend, and his instinct was to protect this woman whom he cared about when he dictated on deadline during those first hours of Saturday morning. She was listening to his every word as he called it in, he would confess years later, and she’d pushed hard for the idea of Jack Kennedy’s presidency being like Camelot.
Not surprisingly, what was left out of White’s story was far more fascinating than the narrative she’d designed. Her monologue had been simultaneously art and accident, and White was an expert assembler of information. But when you see his actual notes, the raw material, what you find is telling.
The piece quotes her as saying to White that “men are a combination of good and bad.” Yet it isn’t, in fact, how she’d phrased it. “Comb. of bad and good” is what sits there in White’s scribbled notes. Why would he transpose it for the magazine? Why did he transcribe it correctly later on? “His mother never really loved him,” she said, and that, too, is in the typescript of the handwritten interview, but again, not in the article. “She likes to go around talking about being the daughter of the mayor of Boston, of how she’s the ambassador’s wife. She didn’t love him,” Jackie had repeated.
She wanted to explain Jack Kennedy, not as a president, not as a husband, but as a man. It may not have been what she thought she intended, but it was what gripped her. “History made him what he was. He sat and read history.” She mentioned his scarlet fever. “This little boy in bed, so much of the time. All the time he was in bed, this little boy was reading history, was reading Marlborough. He devoured the Knights of the Round Table. And he just loved that last song.”
She was talking about Camelot now, the musical that was a hit on Broadway. The final song was the reprise of “Camelot,” and in it was the image that soon came to haunt a nation: “Don’t let it be forgot that once there was a spot / for one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot.”
Here are more of White’s raw notes, jotted quickly as he tried to keep up with her: “History is what made Jack. He was such a simple man. He was complex, too. He had that hero, idealistic side, but then he had that other side, the pragmatic side. His friends were all his old friends. He loved his Irish mafia.” She knew his compartmentalized way of living better than anyone.
She also said this: “And then I thought, I mustn’t think that bad way. If history made Jack that way, made him see heroes, then other little boys will see.” In the shock of tragedy, she was telling her husband’s story, as she put it, both the “bad and good.”
Aided and abetted by Jackie Kennedy, White produced a thrilling evocation of the fallen president, bringing home the immense loss. Around the world, everyone old enough to this day remembers exactly where they were when they heard the news of the assassination. When the story ran, the readers of Life, and then millions more, accepted his widow’s vision; they took to their hearts the notion of Camelot—that vanished, shining place presided over by a noble, merry hero.
It was her gift to him. She’d wanted only two monuments to her husband. First, there would be an eternal flame to mark his grave at Arlington National Cemetery. She told White about how, driving across Memorial Bridge to Virginia at night, you can see the Lee Mansion lit up on the side of the hill from “miles and miles away.” When Caroline was little, she said, that immense white building had been one of the first things she recognized. Now, below it, there would be the small twinkling light for her father.
The other commemoration she requested was quite different. She’d clearly given it careful thought. NASA’s Apollo 5 mission was set for takeoff in January 1964. The president had mentioned the launch in recent speeches. She asked that her husband’s initials be placed on a tiny corner of the great Saturn rocket where no one would even see them.
To White, she also talked about Jack’s last look at life, that instant when the end came, out of nowhere during that Dallas motorcade. “You know when he was shot, he had such a wonderful expression on his face,” she told him. “You know that wonderful expression he had when they’d ask him a question about one of the ten million gadgets they have on a rocket, just before he answered? He looked puzzled.”
I think we know that expression. It was a look he gave when he’d conjured up a witty answer at a press conference. It was the startled but pleased expression of a guy who’s just figured something out. His friends as far back as Choate knew it well and remembered it.
Jacqueline Kennedy had come a long way that week. A short piece of film recently unearthed shows us a slender, dark-haired young woman—seemingly no more than a girl—racing to catch up to a gurney. She is a woman chasing after her love.
Within hours she’d assumed the reins of command, designing and staging a magnificent funeral. It was Lincolnesque with its horseless rider, the boots of the lost hero turned backward. There were the drums, relentless, insistent, hammering their bleak reality. Soldiers die to the sound of drums.
“Jackie was extraordinary,” Ben Bradlee would write after watching her from close up that weekend. “Sometimes she seemed completely detached, as if she were someone else watching the ceremony of that other person’s grief.” Still at the age Jack had been when he first saw her, she was observing the whole scene as if, really, she weren’t a part of it.
Jack had, as Arthur Schlesinger described it, “to an exceptional degree, the gift of friendship.” As Jim Reed, his navy friend, put it: “each of us had a certain role we were cast into, whether we knew it or not.” The night they lost their leader, Ken O’Donnell, Dave Powers, and Larry O’Brien had headed up Wisconsin Avenue to Gawler’s Funeral Home to pick out a coffin. The Irish mafia, the men Jack loved, were doing what their people do. The Irish are good with death. That Saturday night—the day after the horror—Dave delighted Jackie with stories of her husband before she knew him, of his endless climbs up the stairs of those wooden “three-deckers” in the old 11th Congressional District. Dave said he’d hoped that Jack would have one day come to his wake up in Charlestown.
Ken O’Donnell would be haunted by what he saw as his role in the tragedy. Before Jack had given anyone else a job, he’d handed him his: to protect him. It was impossible to forget that he, Ken O’Donnell, had been in charge of the Secret Service covering his friend, and he’d been the one urging Jack to make the trip to Texas.
I would get to know some of these men who’d been part of Jack’s story. Billy Sutton was one, the first guy hired, just off the train from the army. One day in the 1980s, I walked into a back room in Speaker Tip O’Neill’s suite of offices up in Boston. There was this little fellow sitting at a table. Moment by moment he would transform himself. One instant, he’d be Adlai Stevenson, gravely addressing the General Assembly. Next, he’d be Rose Kennedy, her voice high and churchy. It w
as as if she were standing there before me. No wonder Jack had called Billy his “firecracker.”
Tip O’Neill, as you can tell from this book, was rich in stories, each shining with a love of the game that bonded him and Kennedy.
Jack’s closest friends have helped me answer that question he himself gave for the reason people read biography. What was he like? Once, when I got Charlie Bartlett remembering his friend, he took his glasses off to dry his eyes as he thought back. Here’s what Charlie himself wrote in November 1963, upon first hearing the news:
“We had a hero for a friend—and we mourn his loss. Anyone, and fortunately there were so many, who knew him briefly or over long periods, felt that a bright and quickening impulse had come into their life. He had uncommon courage, unfailing humor, a penetrating, ever-curious intelligence, and over all a matchless grace. He was our best. We will remember him always with love and sometimes, as the years pass and the story is retold, with a little wonder.”
Chuck Spalding and Jack had been buddies since the year before the war. It was a matter of “chemistry,” Chuck said. When I asked him my question, “What was he like?” he said he’d answer by way of a story. It was back when he and his then-wife, Betty, were getting ready to go through divorce, not a good time for them. Still together, though, they were out on the dock one day when Jack joined them for a sail. Spotting their two faces, he said, “Ah, the agony and the ecstasy.” That’s what one of his closest lifetime pals said Jack Kennedy was like.
I loved hearing Sally Fay, Red’s daughter, speak of the joy in her house each time the phone rang and it was Jack Kennedy. “The most charming man I ever knew,” George Smathers told me. His old Senate pal was thrilled when I told him how Jack explained liking him, saying the reason was because “he doesn’t give a damn.” Ben Bradlee, a good friend of mine as well, described Jack as having an “aura of royalty about him.”
Robert Kennedy carried on, we know, never stopped trying to keep his brother’s spirit alive, until he, too, was stopped. Teddy surprised everyone. Jack had said his kid brother wanted to spend his life “chasing girls in the South of France.” But it didn’t happen that way. Jack was once asked to pick the greatest senators in history. Of course, he could only look backward. Had he been able to look forward, he might well have included his youngest brother.
• • •
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who served Kennedy as assistant secretary of labor, was the one who said, “There’s no point in being Irish if you don’t know the world’s going to someday break your heart.” He carried on Jack’s plan to make Pennsylvania Avenue, the presidential inaugural route, a corridor of grandeur. “Make it like Paris,” he’d said. Pat once remarked to me, in a very personal way, his feeling about the events of November 1963: “We’ve never gotten over it.” Then, looking at me with generous appreciation, he added, “You’ve never gotten over it.” I saw it as a kind of benediction, an acceptance into something warm and Irish and splendid, a knighthood of the soulful.
In a 2009 national poll, people were asked to say which American president deserves to be added to Mount Rushmore. It’s a good question, because it really gets to heroic stature. Who should be there with Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and, especially the old “Rough Rider” himself, Teddy Roosevelt? They chose John F. Kennedy.
In July 1969, a fellow volunteer of mine sat on a hillside in Swaziland with a group of local villagers looking at the night sky. He wanted them to sit and watch with him. Finally it arrived overhead, what they were looking for: a small light moving in the distance. It was his countrymen heading to the moon. That Saturn rocket Jack so loved had done its job; so had his Peace Corps.
Twenty years later, the Berlin Wall came down. I was there on a drizzly night that November with the beaten-down East Germans, waiting for the Brandenburg Gate to open. When I asked what “freedom” meant to him, a young man answered, “talking to you.” Jack Kennedy would like to have heard that, deserved to, I think. The Iron Curtain was being ripped aside. Communism was in its death throes. The Cold War was ending without the nuclear war we so feared. We had gotten through it alive, those of us who once hid under those little desks of ours.
Thanks to him, I’d say. He’d come a long way from the kid who caused trouble at boarding school, from being Joe Kennedy’s son. In the time of our greatest peril, at the moment of ultimate judgment, an American president kept us from the brink, saved us really, kept the smile from being stricken from the planet.
He did that. He, Jack Kennedy.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The person I owe most for this book’s completion is my son Michael Matthews. At a critical juncture, he transformed a mountain of historic material—chapter themes, interview transcripts, oral histories and citations from other sources—into coherent notes. He has a beautiful historic sense.
I want to thank Michele Slung for an editing and literary craft that gave shape and life to my narrative.
I owe my TV producer Tina Urbanski for her role at every stage of Jack Kennedy. Taking on this project amid the schedule of six television programs a week is a chore no one can accomplish alone.
I want to thank Helen O’Donnell for providing me with the vast oral history recorded by her father with correspondent Sander Vanocur. Kenneth O’Donnell was at Jack Kennedy’s side from that first senate race in 1952 to the end. His sharp political mind is well on display here. It took a reporter of Vanocur’s moxie to ask him just the right questions, and ask them he did.
I want to thank the inimitable Vincent Virga for the design and selection of the photographs that give this book its artistic completion. He is a visual choreographer. I want to thank U.S. Congressman Edward Markey of Massachusetts and Mark Johnson, a teacher of history, for reviewing my manuscript with sharpness and intelligence.
In an important way, this book emerges from my decades of real-time interest in Jack Kennedy. It benefits, of course, from the foundation of research I did for Kennedy & Nixon. Two other books have provided sturdy scaffoldings: Nigel Hamilton’s JFK: Reckless Youth, the best-ever work on Kennedy’s early life, and Robert Dallek’s An Unfinished Life, which reveals for the first time his full medical history.
I need to credit Jon Meacham, author of Franklin and Winston, for the inspiration on how to craft this biography from the perspectives of those around him.
Jack Kennedy lived his life in a golden circle of friends and close associates. By bringing together their firsthand memories, I’ve sought to bring to life the man at their center. For the first-person accounts in this book I interviewed many witnesses to the life of Jack Kennedy: Letitia Baldridge, Charles Bartlett, Benjamin Bradlee, Mark Dalton, Fred and Nancy Dutton, Red Fay, Paul Ferber, John Glenn, Lester Hyman, Peter Kaplan, Patrick Lucey, Rachel “Bunny” Mellon, Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill, Jr., Dave Powers, Terri Robinson, Tazewell Shepard, George Smathers, Ted Sorensen, Chuck Spalding, Billy Sutton, Bill Wilson, Christopher Lawford, and, especially, Ambassador Jean Kennedy Smith.
For those I could not interview—Torbert Macdonald, James Reed, and Rip Horton—I depended on the oral histories archived at the John F. Kennedy Library. I owe the personal accounts of Lemoyne Billings to the excellent Jack and Lem: The Untold Story of an Extraordinary Friendship by David Pitts, as well as the wonderful chapter on the Jack-Lem relationship in Best of Friends by David Michaelis.
I benefitted greatly from Thomas P. O’Neill’s Man of the House, Lawrence F. O’Brien’s No Final Victories, Red Fay’s The Pleasure of His Company, Ben Bradlee’s Conversations with Kennedy, Ted Sorensen’s Counselor, Deirdre Henderson’s Prelude to Leadership: The European Diary of John F. Kennedy: Summer 1945, and Arthur Schlesinger’s Journals.
Other books on John F. Kennedy are essential to any understanding of him. Jack: The Struggles of John F. Kennedy by Herbert Parmet, Kennedy by Theodore Sorensen, President Kennedy: Profile of Power by Richard Reeves, Mrs. Kennedy by Barbara Leaming, and A Thousand Days and Robert F. Kennedy and His Times by Ar
thur Schlesinger.
I need to thank Lorraine Connelly and Judy Donald of Choate Rosemary Hall for the great help in understanding Jack’s early years; David McKean, Tom Putnam, Laurie Austin and Maryrose Grossman of the John F. Kennedy Library and Christopher Peleo-Lazar who did the excellent research there for me.
I also want to thank Phil Griffin, President of MSNBC; Hardball executive producer John Reiss; Nancy Nathan, executive producer of The Chris Matthews Show; and the committed production teams of both programs.
I want to express my strong gratitude to Jennifer Walsh of William Morris Endeavor for her tremendous professional talent in bringing this project to completion. At Simon & Schuster, I want to thank Nicholas Greene, Jonathan Evans, Nancy Singer, Alexis Welby, Emer Flounders, Rachelle Andujar, Jackie Seow, Elisa Rivlin and Richard Rhorer. Most vital of all, I want to express my esteem for Editor-in-chief Jonathan Karp as editor, friend, pathfinder.
For Jack Kennedy, like all the projects and hopes before, I thank Kathleen, to whom this book is dedicated, for forming the loving world in which this project was undertaken and completed.
ALSO BY CHRIS MATTHEWS
Kennedy & Nixon
Hardball
Now, Let Me Tell You What I Really Think
American
Life’s a Campaign
NOTES
The sources for this book include my interviews for Kennedy & Nixon, published in 1996 (Simon & Schuster). In a number of cases—Charlie Bartlett, Ben Bradlee, Ted Sorensen—I returned to the same people for fresh interviews that centered on Jack Kennedy himself. With the passage of time, many of those I interviewed earlier—Billy Sutton, Dave Powers, Mark Dalton, Paul “Red” Fay, George Smathers, and the warmhearted Tip O’Neill—have died. I treasured the opportunity to know them and benefit from their generous accounts of life with Jack. I was able to add to their memories with new interviews with Jean Kennedy Smith, John Glenn, Rachel Mellon, and others.
Chris Matthews Complete Library E-book Box Set: Tip and the Gipper, Jack Kennedy, Hardball, Kennedy & Nixon, Now, Let Me Tell You What I Really Think, and American Page 78