The White House was filled to capacity. Bobby first occupied the Lincoln Bedroom, then moved to another room when Rose arrived. Pat Lawford stayed in the Queen’s Room, and Lee and Stas were assigned Jack’s room. Occupying third-floor guest rooms were Peter Lawford, his agent Milt Ebbins, Lem Billings, Chuck and Betty Spalding, Steve and Jean Smith, Larry O’Brien, and Kenny O’Donnell.
“The whole family was like a bunch of shipwreck survivors,” said Billings. “I don’t think they could have made it at all without Bobby. He seemed to be everywhere. He always had an arm around a friend or family member and was telling them it was okay, that it was time to move ahead.” At one point on Saturday everyone sat in Bobby’s room in a state of paralysis. Jack “had the most wonderful life,” said Bobby. Pat Lawford was in the worst shape, her emotions already frayed by the disintegration of her marriage. Schlesinger observed that “Pat drank too much,” and Bradlee noticed that Peter walked “as though he was being held up by the back of a coat.”
Rose, a model of fortitude and deep faith, required less support from Bobby than the others. Janet Auchincloss thought Rose was “extraordinary,” but also “felt how separate Rose was. I thought of first one son, then daughter, then husband, and of all people Jack. I had a terrible feeling Rose was alone that day, and how much faith Rose had.” When Sarge Shriver remarked on Rose’s admirable poise, she snapped, “What do people expect you to do? You can’t just weep in a corner.”
The Kennedy circle attended a mass by the East Room bier on Saturday morning. Walton clasped Pam Turnure, who was making “choking sounds.” Ben Bradlee sobbed in spasms before retreating to the Green Room to compose himself. Red Fay hid his grief behind curtains in a corner of the East Room. “Jackie held up the longest,” said David Gore. “By the time I talked to her, she was in a state of collapse,” her voice a barely audible whisper. She told David and Sissie that if Patrick had lived, Sissie would have been named his godmother.
Janet and Hughdie picked up Lee at the airport on Saturday afternoon, along with Stas’s sister and brother-in-law. Told of her assignment to Jack’s room, Lee said, “I can’t. I can just see him walking around and shouting for George in that strong voice.” Replied Janet, “Yes you can. We did.” Stas, who had been entertaining a shooting party in England, decided to wait one more day, “not wishing to intrude on the first meetings of the sisters.”
Bunny Mellon arrived at the White House past midnight on Saturday morning after flying from Antigua through violent thunderstorms. J. B. West, tears streaming down his face, told Mellon that Jackie wanted her to arrange flowers for the Capitol, the church, and grave site. Mellon sat by Kennedy’s bier in the East Room. Walton’s arrangement of the room met with Mellon’s discerning approval: “most dignified and not sentimental. It all went back to the simplicity, youth and dignity of Jack Kennedy.” For more than an hour, “my tears would not stop,” she recalled.
Mellon knew instinctively that Jackie wouldn’t want “funereal” flowers, so on Saturday morning she decorated the Capitol rotunda with palm plants from the Washington Botanic Gardens. She took all the donated flower arrangements and placed them in the hallways leading to the rotunda, which remained unsullied and dignified for the arrival of Kennedy’s casket to lie in state.
On Saturday afternoon, Mellon met with Jackie about flowers for the service at St. Matthew’s Cathedral, a nineteenth-century landmark on Rhode Island Avenue near Eighteenth Street. “I don’t want the church to look like a funeral,” Jackie said. “I want it like spring. I want it not sad because Jack was not a sad man. He was a simple man. . . . He hated the funeral look of the flowers sent to Patrick. He doesn’t want a funeral look, because he loved flowers.” Mellon wanted to use “two simple urns,” and Pam Turnure suggested blue vases from the White House that had been a gift from France.
Walking through the White House basement, Mellon encountered J. B. West, frantic because he couldn’t find a full mourning veil requested by Jackie. “I racked my brain,” Mellon recalled, “but I had no idea. Later he had a colored maid make it.”
The Dillons also came to call on Saturday, carrying a gold basket of small white flowers that Phyllis had arranged. As they entered the White House, they spotted Larry O’Brien in the hall, sobbing. “A big man in tears,” thought Doug. As she had done with others the night before at Bethesda, Jackie told them both in detail about Dallas.
Charley Bartlett busied himself with the sort of self-appointed tasks he had done so often for JFK. He combed the Library of Congress for accounts of the Lincoln funeral, and on Sunday he met Tish Baldrige, who had flown in at Sarge Shriver’s request to help plan the grave site. With JFK’s military aides, they mapped out where the Irish Guards would stand and the timing of a military flyover.
Sorensen broke down twice, once when he watched JFK’s casket being carried off Air Force One at Andrews and again when he first used the phrase “Mr. President” with Johnson: “I hung up and wept.” Sorensen’s most important task was assembling remarks to be read at the funeral and graveside. Bundy did what he could to help Sorensen. “He was hit hardest,” Bundy recalled. Since Johnson decided to stay away from the Oval Office until after the funeral, Bundy had many tasks to get ready for his new boss. “I was grateful for the work,” said Bundy. “It kept me busy.” Schlesinger observed that Bundy had “everything under iron control.” As Bundy later noted, “Friday and Saturday I cried at home—after that not.”
Schlesinger consulted with Bobby, Sarge, and Steve Smith about collecting Kennedy administration papers for the presidential library and promised to keep Jackie up to date. When Franklin Roosevelt Jr. comforted him, Schlesinger was touched by his “great kindness and sweetness.” The historian spent the weekend drinking, although “it had no effect, except to keep me stable.” Mostly Schlesinger sat in his East Wing office writing compulsively in his journal—the first deliberate words of A Thousand Days. He composed a eulogy for the Saturday Evening Post, which he sent with a note to “dearest Jackie, who was the full and inseparable partner in the most brilliant and gay and passionate adventure I shall ever know.”
Jackie had dinner upstairs on Saturday. For the second night in a row, Dr. John Walsh, her personal physician, administered the tranquilizer sodium amytal to help her sleep; at Bethesda he had also injected her with Vistaril, a powerful tranquilizer, and had been amazed that she remained awake. Lee had received a tranquilizer shot from her doctor for the transatlantic trip, and she needed her own dose from Walsh of what she called blue “anti-crying pills.” But composure was inbred in the Bouvier women, as it was in their mother. “I have learned to shut off something and go through it,” Jackie told her friend Jessie Wood.
Down on the state floor, a dozen mourners gathered in the Family Dining Room: the Dillons, McNamaras, Shrivers, Lawfords, Bobby Kennedys, and Smiths. “Everyone was trying not to talk about what happened and succeeded quite well,” said Dillon. “It was not serious. It sounds awful but it wasn’t.” In a moment of horseplay, Ethel took off her wig (which she wore when she didn’t have time for a hairdresser) and passed it around the table, where it landed improbably on McNamara’s head. “Jack would have enjoyed it,” Dillon said. Afterwards, the Dillons went again to the East Room, knelt by the bier, and Dillon thought, “Goodbye Mr. President.”
In the Capitol rotunda on Sunday, Mike Mansfield, Chief Justice Earl Warren, and Speaker of the House John McCormack gave eulogies. Mansfield’s was the most emotional, with a repeated refrain—“And so she took a ring from her finger and placed it in his hands”—that recalled her agony at Parkland Hospital. “Bad poetry,” Janet Auchincloss said to herself. “I thought if he said that once more I would scream.” David Gore considered Mansfield’s excesses “absolutely appalling.” Afterwards, Joe Alsop penned a note on Senate Press Gallery paper to Jackie. “I love you as I loved him,” he wrote. “There is only one thing I can send. . . . My thanks and congratulations. To play a high role perfectly in a great episode of history
—to be always warm, always true, always yourself under the glare of history—is not an easy thing to do, to put it mildly indeed.”
Charley Bartlett hastily scribbled his condolence on White House letterhead: “We had a hero for a friend. . . . He had uncommon courage, unfailing humor, a penetrating ear, curious intelligence and overall a matchless grace. He was our best. He will not be replaced, nor will he be forgotten. . . . We will remember him always, with love and sometimes as the years pass and a story is retold, with a little wonder.”
Lem Billings blended into the woodwork as usual, his ebullient laugh silent, an unobtrusive participant in family decisions. When Lee arrived he provoked her ire by telling her it was nice of her to come. “How can you say that?” she exclaimed. “Do you think that I wouldn’t?”
Bobby had asked Red Fay and Jim Reed to “be around, be helpful,” and they did what they could at the White House on Sunday after attending mass. That evening Reed went out to McLean to have dinner with Vivian Crespi at Red and Anita Fay’s house. After supper they walked and reminisced.
When Stas arrived on Sunday afternoon, he greeted Bunny Mellon with a kiss. “It was like Versailles, when the King died, when the King departed for good,” he thought. Stas declined the offer to stay in Jack’s bed, preferring instead to use an army cot set up in a corner. “Poor Stas,” Jackie later said. As William Manchester wrote, “With his old-fashioned European dignity he stiffly insisted he would be quite comfortable there. He even refused to use the bathroom [and] wandered through the mansion for ablutions elsewhere.” Stas asked only that a Parisian rosary from his childhood be included among the treasured objects with Jack. Jackie picked a red carnation that Stas wound the rosary around. A Secret Service man placed it inside the casket.
Lyndon Johnson “looked carved in bronze those hours,” Lady Bird recalled. “Very stern and very grave.” He was “a different Johnson,” observed Orville Freeman. “The frustration seemed gone, he seemed relaxed. The power, the confidence, the assurance of Majority Leader Johnson seemed to be there.” Sorensen noted that LBJ “couldn’t have been more humble and discreet in the early days of the Administration.”
Yet Johnson’s insecurities continued to dog him. As LBJ and Lady Bird climbed into bed on the eve of Kennedy’s funeral, Johnson commanded his longtime aide Horace Busby to “stay right there till I go to sleep.” Each time Busby rose, Johnson made him sit back down. It wasn’t until past two in the morning that Johnson finally fell asleep and Busby extricated himself.
The word went out to selected friends on Sunday that Jackie needed their company after the midday ceremony at the rotunda. David and Sissie Gore found Jackie, Lee, and Bobby in the West Sitting Hall. Gore took Jackie aside and offered two large rooms at the British Embassy on Massachusetts Avenue for the White House school to use. She agreed it would be a perfect haven, with its beautiful enclosed grounds offering privacy to the twenty-two children. Gore later apologized to Jackie for being “weak and selfish” in showing his own sorrow. “It was more than my flesh and blood would stand to see you made to suffer so.” He told Jackie that he had loved Jack “beyond words.”
Chuck Spalding wandered down from his third-floor guest room, followed by Ken Galbraith, who was staying with Katharine Graham. Jackie offered Galbraith a drink, which he accepted, although he had abstained from alcohol for many months. He found her determined to uphold the “sense of pageantry” that Jack would have wanted. Jackie insisted that mourners walk in the funeral cortege because she didn’t want “everybody rushed off in fat black Cadillacs.”
Inspired by the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at the Arc de Triomphe, she also asked for an eternal flame at the grave. With only one other such flame in the United States, at Gettysburg, it seemed at first an extravagant idea. Walton objected that it would be “aesthetically unfortunate,” but Jackie overruled him. The Washington Gas Company supplied a propane-fed torch that could be safely lit at the burial and used until a permanent burner could be installed.
When Jackie mentioned that her parents’ house in Georgetown was too small for her family, Galbraith realized she had nowhere to go after leaving the White House. He immediately asked Averell Harriman to lend Jackie his home—a large and gracious red-brick Federal-style townhouse at 3038 N Street in Georgetown that had “the particular advantage of some of the best Impressionist paintings in the world.” Harriman readily agreed to move to a hotel to accommodate her.
During a discussion of funeral plans, Jackie was “very well composed,” said Gore. She proposed that instead of a standard eulogy, the service include brief remarks with quotes from Jack’s speeches and favorite passages from the Bible. She ruled out the 23d Psalm as “obvious” and “banal,” and requested instead Ecclesiastes 3:1–8: “To everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven. . . .” (It would be two more years before “Turn, Turn, Turn,” the hit song by The Byrds, would popularize those verses as a call for world peace.) “Do you think there is an English priest in Washington to read in a proper voice?” she joked to Gore. Sorensen couldn’t help being amused by Jackie’s Ecclesiastes request. He remembered when Jack had read the verses to her with the coda, “and a time to fish and a time to cut bait.”
On Sunday night there was another boisterous gathering downstairs in the Family Dining Room, this time for Eunice, Bob McNamara, the Spaldings, Phyllis Dillon, and Dave Powers. The most incongruous presence was Aristotle Onassis, who had followed Lee to Washington. The group teased Onassis about cadging time on his yacht the following summer when he wasn’t using it. (The next morning, James Ketchum, who only recently had been named White House curator, was stunned to find the Greek billionaire sleeping on a sofa in the Yellow Oval Room.)
Up on the second floor, Stas ate with Rose in the dining room while Jackie, Lee, Bobby, and Teddy dined in the West Sitting Hall. Bunny Mellon had a private visit with Jackie early in the evening and was startled to hear the grim facts of Jack’s death. “Jackie told me how she couldn’t believe when the thing hit,” Mellon recalled. “She said it wasn’t disgusting. . . . It was horrifying and not disgusting.” “I wanted so much to hide, protect, take care of him,” Jackie told Mellon. Clutching the mass card with Jack’s picture, Jackie talked of heaven. “I believe in clouds and fields,” she said. “I really believe in God, I believe in heaven, but where has God gone?”
Jackie’s instructions to Mellon for Arlington were even more specific than for St. Matthew’s. “Please fix a basket for Arlington, like the one you sent to the hospital when Patrick died,” she said, “all from the Rose Garden.” In the bottom of the basket, she told Mellon, “somewhere scrunched down, put in your own note to Jack. Stick it in with the moss and the wet.” It was a brisk November evening, and Mellon doubted she would find much. She figured she would have to rely on the duplicates in her greenhouse of all the flowers she had planted during her redesign.
She went into the Rose Garden with a basket and scissors. “What was remarkable,” Mellon recalled, “was there were dozens of white roses in bloom in November. It was almost pitch dark.” She picked all the flowers she could find—blue salvia, chrysanthemums, and roses—as well as berries from the hawthorn and crab apple trees. From her greenhouse she added nicotiana, red geraniums, blue cornflowers, and carnations. She assembled everything at home in a fifteen-inch-long willow basket from Martinique and inserted her note: “Thank you Mr. President for your confidence and inspiration. Love, Bunny.”
Bunny Mellon took her basket to Arlington on Monday morning. She had already seen to having the profusion of floral arrangements moved away from the grave site to be spread on a nearby hillside “like an enormous blanket.” Bunny and Paul Mellon were among the last to arrive at the church. Only Nancy Tuckerman missed the service and burial. On duty in her East Wing office, she watched the proceedings on TV.
Before the funeral cortege departed from the White House for the eight-block walk to St. Matthew’s, friends assembled in the State Dining Ro
om. “It was 100 percent male,” Walton noticed. “Not a woman there.” Clustered in the southwest corner were Fay, Billings, Spalding, and Bartlett, as well as JFK’s school friends Ben Smith and Rip Horton, along with David Gore, who had chosen not to walk with the diplomatic corps. Red Fay caught up with Dave Powers, who imagined Kennedy looking down and saying, “Damn it, Powers, you beat me out of a few more drinks.”
Her face covered by her newly made long black veil, Jackie led the funeral procession, flanked by Teddy and Bobby, with Sarge Shriver and Steve Smith directly behind. Lem Billings walked next to Ken Galbraith, and David Gore lined up with Red Fay. Eunice, who was pregnant, had agreed to ride in a limousine, a decision she instantly regretted. Directly behind the horse-drawn caisson, a black riderless steed symbolizing the lost leader pranced and snorted along the route. He was a sixteen-year-old gelding called Black Jack—a spooky coincidence of names Jackie did not know about at the time. The Irish guards performed complex military drills as they marched, and four drummers beat out a steady cadence on eighteenth-century-style drums.
Inside the church, Bunny Mellon had created simple and elegant arrangements of daisies, white chrysanthemums, and stephanotis. Soldiers and Kennedy friends including Ben Bradlee and Hugh Sidey seated the mourners, who included sixty-two heads of state. Jackie entered, majestic and solemn, holding the hands of her two children. “She was raised correctly,” Charles de Gaulle whispered to Nicole Alphand. After everyone was settled, the noon service began with the skirl of bagpipers from the Black Watch outside the open doors of the Cathedral. Richard Cardinal Cushing, a tall craggy-faced figure who had presided over so much Kennedy family celebration and sadness, said the pontifical requiem mass in traditional Latin.
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