The Reverend Philip Hannan, auxiliary bishop of Washington, delivered the eleven-minute talk deftly linking biblical passages to some of Kennedy’s speeches, including his address only days earlier to a Houston audience: “Your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions, and where there is no vision the people perish.” There were citations from the Proverbs, the prophecies of Joel, Joshua, and Isaiah, as well as the passage from Ecclesiastes Jackie had designated. Hannan ended with excerpts from the inaugural address. For the first time, Jackie lost control in public, shaking with sobs. To calm herself, she asked Clint Hill to “get me a blue pill from Lee.” Hill also gave her his handkerchief because “she was having troubles.”
For Eunice, the ceremony was “sad instead of hopeful . . . sadder than it should have been.” She could “never remember Jack being sad in his life.” Mary Meyer and Tony Bradlee sat together, and Tony was struck that her sister “didn’t seem very upset. It puzzled me.”
It took an hour for the motorcade to reach Arlington. When the caisson neared the graveside, fifty air force and navy jets (one for each state of the Union) flew overhead in formation, followed by Air Force One, which paid tribute by dipping one wing. At that moment, Lee burst into tears. Arthur Schlesinger would always remember “the wildly twittering birds . . . while the statesmen of the world looked on.”
Following Cardinal Cushing’s burial prayer to “this wonderful man, Jack Kennedy,” a twenty-one-gun salute, and the folding of the American flag, Jackie and Bobby lit the eternal flame, and Jackie received the flag. Bobby and Teddy had prepared remarks in their pockets to read after the bugler had played taps, but as Cardinal Cushing started to introduce Teddy, he balked. “This great hunk of a man couldn’t go on,” said Joan Kennedy. The end of the Arlington service struck Mac Bundy as “the fall of a curtain, or the snapping of taut strings.”
Jackie received the heads of state and other dignitaries back at the White House with great dignity, “like a Roman queen, a stone statue,” observed Nicole Alphand, whose face still peered from newsstands on the previous week’s cover of Time, which had inopportunely featured an article on Washington social life. A few high-level guests came up to the Yellow Oval Room, where Jackie had replaced the four Cézanne paintings with giant aquatints of American cities in the early nineteenth century. “I want it to be an American setting,” she explained to Jim Ketchum.
Jackie spent fifteen minutes with Charles de Gaulle, who said, “He died like a soldier under fire.” Echoing what she had heard her husband tell Hervé Alphand a month earlier, Jackie told the French president how much Jack wanted to be “such a good friend of France’s and yours, and you never allowed it, and now it’s too late.” She added, however, that “Jack was never bitter.” According to Jean Smith, Jackie also informed de Gaulle that “only three could be trusted—Bobby, McNamara and Mac Bundy.” Jackie showed the French leader the chest of drawers he had given the Kennedys after their visit to Paris. On top was a vase filled with oxeye daisies. She took one blossom and gave it to him as “a last souvenir of President Kennedy.” De Gaulle put the daisy “very tenderly, carefully,” inside the pocket of his tunic.
After the funeral reception, Vivian Crespi went upstairs to find Jackie in a state of exhaustion. John, Caroline, and their cousins were in the dining room for a small celebration to mark John’s birthday. “Jackie said, ‘I couldn’t disappoint little John,’” recalled Crespi. “There was a party with balloons and horns. It was such a shock going from a funeral to a children’s party—after seeing Haile Selassie and the queen of Greece and Charles de Gaulle, then to go up and see the children hopping around. It was a macabre scene.”
In the evening Jackie held an informal wake in the West Sitting Hall to reminisce and watch the funeral replayed on TV. “A Kennedy trait,” Bradlee remarked. “He loved to watch himself.” At times Jackie “seemed completely detached,” Bradlee recalled, “as if she were someone else watching the ceremony of [another] person’s grief. Sometimes she was silent, obviously torn. Often she would turn to a friend and reminisce.”
Powers and Teddy sang “Heart of My Heart,” and Bobby was “so choked up he had to leave the room,” said Ethel. To shift the mood, Powers spun hoary tales of early campaign days for the family and intimates who lingered. In what William Manchester described as a “reedy, hearty voice . . . Dave entertained without intruding, gently reminding them that Kennedy, too, had known how to laugh when there had seemed to be no laughter left in the world.” The atmosphere became “cheerful,” Bradlee observed, “except Jackie, who was red eyed.” As the group dispersed, Tony couldn’t resist looking into Jack’s room, where so many parties had wound down. Her glance caught Stas on his army cot, sound asleep.
Around midnight, Jackie said to Bobby, “Should we go visit our friend?” They drove to Arlington and stood before the grave as Jackie gently lay a bouquet of lilies of the valley on top of the boughs covering the freshly turned soil. When Jackie went to bed that night, she found a note on her pillow addressed to “Jacks” from “Pekes.” It said, “Goodnight my Darling Jacks—the bravest and noblest of all. L.”
Jackie lived in the White House for eleven more days until the Harriman home could be readied. Ken Galbraith visited her at midday on Tuesday and found her “rather more distraught” now that she was faced with “the barrenness of life.” He encouraged her to write, and to spend time with friends. “I am like a wounded animal, I want to stay in a corner,” she told Nicole Alphand. Lee and Pat remained with Jackie as she prepared for her departure. Jackie called Dr. Finnerty periodically, her words punctuated by sighs, a common signal of anxiety and depression. She fretted about living a private life and keeping the press at bay, and she spent one conversation worrying about how to dispose of Jack’s clothing.
Several days after the funeral, Jackie sent her mother and Teddy Kennedy to retrieve Patrick’s casket from Holyhood in Brookline, and her stillborn daughter’s from a cemetery in Newport. On December 4 the remains of the infants were buried at Arlington with their father.
With her customary discipline, Jackie sat at her West Sitting Hall desk and composed thank-you notes. She told Nellie Connally that she was glad Jack had “died in the company of a man like John Connally. We could have been riding with some little mayor from somewhere—and then his death would not have been so noble.” Jackie’s most significant letter was to Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev. Her handwritten message was modified by the State Department and forwarded by Mac Bundy through diplomatic channels.
She told the Russian leader that she was moved to write because Jack cared about peace. She believed that he and the Soviet premier had become allies in trying to prevent the world from being destroyed and had developed mutual respect. The danger, she wrote, was “that war might be started not so much by the big men as by the little ones.” It was up to the “big men” to promote diplomacy and prevent conflict.
The excised portions added little of substance, but offered some insights into Jackie’s state of mind and view of her role. She apologized for seeming “presumptuous . . . I never meddled in politics when my husband was alive. Why should I dare to write to you now that he is dead?” She worried specifically about the “next time a convoy is stopped on the autobahn, and if one of our soldiers shoots, and yours shoot back, and some general there gives an order, why there could be a war within minutes.” Poignantly she added, “I don’t care for myself because I don’t have much to live for—but for my husband’s dreams.”
When Teddy White arrived at Hyannis Port on Thanksgiving weekend, he found Jackie surrounded by “the good-willed comforters”: Dave Powers, Chuck Spalding, Pat Lawford, and Franklin Roosevelt Jr. “I realized that I was going to hear more than I wanted to,” White wrote later.
Moving-out day was Friday, December 6 (“Don’t worry,” Jackie told Lady Bird, “not Pearl Harbor Day”). “Jack and I did a lot in two years, 10 months and 2 days—so I can surely move out for you in 4 1/2 days,”
Jackie wrote on December 1. She gave her successor detailed instructions about the White House restoration (“Each room has all the historic pictures and furniture it can hold”) and tips on living in the Executive Mansion. “You will be remembered as the one who PRESERVED it,” Jackie wrote to Lady Bird. She emphasized the importance of the White House Historical Association and the continued need for the Smithsonian Institution to employ the White House curator, lest “some future president’s wife, who didn’t care about history like you do, might appoint her Aunt Nellie as curator, who ran a little curio shop on Elm Street.”
The day before the move, Jackie had a joint birthday party for Caroline and John. Janet Auchincloss was there, along with Jack’s three military aides and Dave Powers. The U.S. Marine Band, resplendent in red tunics, “were playing with unusual zeal to hide their sorrow,” wrote Molly Thayer. Jackie wanted her children “to leave the White House in gay remembrance.”
To welcome the Johnsons on Friday, Jackie left them a vase of her favorite lilies of the valley. She shook hands with the household staff in the West Sitting Hall and presented each of them with a copy of a painting of the Green Room as “a continual reminder of the President.” Jackie wore a simple black dress and jacket, and the children were attired in the same powder blue coats they had worn to their father’s funeral. Accompanied by Lee, Bobby, and Ethel, they walked through the Diplomatic Reception Room, out the doors under the South Portico and into a waiting limousine.
Jackie’s Camelot interview, published in Life in the first week of December, had already begun reverberating, but even she didn’t grasp its full impact. While Teddy White later regretted being a conduit for such romantic imagery, he had felt a need to comply with nearly everything Jackie wanted. Jack Kennedy had held the most powerful office in the world, but his thirty-four-year-old widow held the power of his memory. “She took the man she loved and made him unforgettable,” said Washington diarist Katie Louchheim. “It was Jackie who created Jack Kennedy’s legacy.”
EPILOGUE
“The Washington landscape seemed to me to be littered with male widows,” Joseph Alsop wrote. Jack Kennedy’s assassination affected Alsop more profoundly than the death of his own father. Bob McNamara, Mac Bundy, and Doug Dillon confided to Alsop that they never got over losing JFK. Even CIA director John McCone, “a hard-bitten objective Republican,” told Walt Rostow that he had not seen anyone in public life inspire greater affection from his closest associates. “The fact is that Jack Kennedy had an extraordinary knack for capturing people and changing them,” Alsop wrote. “To me this was his most inexplicable quality.”
The men and women of JFK’s inner circle moved on with varying degrees of success. A few remained on close terms—Sorensen and Schlesinger, for example—and some periodically came together for academic symposiums that perpetuated the mystique of Kennedy and his administration. But most spun off in different directions. “Since he left, the glue that held us together was gone,” said Sorensen.
They were touched forever by their association with Kennedy, and most believed that his violent death marked a turning point for the United States. On the Saturday night before the Kennedy funeral, journalist Mary McGrory gave a dinner for a group of friends. “We’ll never laugh again,” she said to Daniel Patrick Moynihan. “We will,” answered the future Democratic senator from New York, “but we’ll never be young again.”
Jacqueline Kennedy stayed in the Harriman home for a month before buying a large brick house across the street. At one point Bobby Kennedy was so alarmed about Jackie’s psychological fragility that he asked the Reverend Richard T. McSorley, a Jesuit priest who was a close friend, to give her private counseling. During their sessions in the spring and summer of 1964, Jackie confessed to suicidal thoughts, wondering, “Do you think God would separate me from my husband if I killed myself? Wouldn’t God understand that I just want to be with him?” By July she had found some equilibrium, vowing to McSorley that she intended to “keep busy and to keep healthy” and devote herself to her children.
That summer she fled Washington and the hordes of tourists who crowded her sidewalk and stripped the bark off her magnolia trees for souvenirs. She moved to 1040 Fifth Avenue at Eighty-fifth Street in Manhattan, where she lived in a fifteen-room book-filled apartment reminiscent of her childhood homes before her parents divorced.
Eighteen months after her husband’s assassination, Jackie told Harold Macmillan that she was determined to make Caroline and John “what he would have wanted them to be. . . . You have to have something that makes you want to live—and now I have them.” She did not return to the White House until February 1971 during the presidency of Richard Nixon, when she, Caroline, and John came to see her newly unveiled official portrait by Aaron Shikler.
She shocked the world by marrying Aristotle Onassis within months of Bobby Kennedy’s assassination in 1968. It was a misalliance that gave her wealth but tarnished her reputation. After several years, the marriage unraveled and they began spending more time apart. In 1975, Onassis died of the degenerative disease myasthenia gravis. Jackie resumed a quiet life in Manhattan as a respected book editor and advocate for historic preservation. Her constant companion was wealthy diamond merchant Maurice Tempelsman. Although he was a month younger than Jackie, he appeared older, and he was the married father of three children. He expertly managed Jackie’s $26 million inheritance from Onassis and shared her interests in literature and French culture.
On May 19, 1994—the birthday of Black Jack Bouvier—Jackie died of cancer at age sixty-four surrounded by her closest friends and family. Seven years later, the Metropolitan Museum of Art erased her Onassis identity by naming its exhibit on her indelible style Jacqueline Kennedy: The White House Years.
Lyndon Johnson was solicitous and comically flirtatious with Jackie in the first months of his presidency, phoning her frequently and calling her “sweetie” and “dear” and “honey.” “You just come over here and put your arm around me. . . . Let’s walk around the back yard,” he implored. Jackie responded coquettishly, humoring him with flattery and girlish giggles: “You’re so nice to call me, Mr. President. You must be out of your mind with work piled up.” But she deflected all his entreaties to return to the White House. “I’m so scared I’ll start to cry again,” she said. “I’ll do anything I can for you, but don’t make me come down there.”
Johnson was forever insecure and uneasy with the Kennedy team. His friction with Bobby deepened into a “mutual contempt.” “He looks at me like he’s going to look a hole through me,” LBJ told John Connally. But Johnson tried to placate Bobby. “I do not want to get into a fight with the family, and the aura of Kennedy is important to all of us,” said LBJ.
Buoyed by a landslide victory in 1964, Johnson made history by pushing through Kennedy’s agenda of tax reduction, civil rights, Medicare, and aid to education. Tapping Walter Heller on his chest, Johnson announced, “I want you to know and your liberal friends that I’m no conservative—I am a New Deal Democrat.” True to his word, Johnson vastly expanded the federal role in helping the dispossessed with his Great Society program. He was ultimately crushed by America’s failure in Vietnam. Johnson declined to run for reelection in 1968 after Bobby Kennedy challenged his candidacy with a stinging anti-war campaign. Afflicted by heart disease, LBJ died five years later at age sixty-four. Jackie counted Lady Bird as a friend and spent time with her during summers on Martha’s Vineyard.
Robert F. Kennedy remained as attorney general until September 1964, when he ran successfully for the U.S. Senate from New York. He became Jackie’s closest confidant and protector—a “passionate and unconquerable soul,” she described him to Harold Macmillan. At Jackie’s suggestion, Bobby studied the Greek tragedies in his quest for meaning. “They had a touching need for each other,” said Tish Baldrige. “It was pure friendship.” As Jackie herself said to William Manchester, “My adored brother in law could do no wrong in my eyes ever.”
Bobby obsessi
vely viewed Lyndon Johnson as his brother’s usurper—“as though a ruling family had been displaced by unjust fortune,” Joe Alsop said. In his upstart campaign for the presidency in 1968, RFK scored a crucial win in the California primary on June 5. Leaving a hotel ballroom after his victory speech, he was shot in the head by Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian immigrant. Bobby Kennedy died the next day at age forty-two. To Jackie, Bobby’s death brought “a great suffocating fog.” She told Joe Alsop that grief had become “an element one lives in—like sea or sky or earth.” Ethel remained at Hickory Hill, and gave birth to their eleventh child, Rory, on December 12, 1968—six months after her father’s assassination.
Joseph P. Kennedy declined steadily in the years after JFK’s death. On hearing of Bobby’s assassination, Joe Kennedy “wept uncontrollably.” Jackie remained devoted to her father-in law, visiting him often at Hyannis Port. He died at age eighty-one in November 1969, after eight years of spending his waking hours in a wheelchair, unable to speak.
Rose Kennedy kept up her routines well into her eighties—daily three-mile walks rain or shine, swimming in the cold surf, mass each morning. In addition to summers on the Cape and winters in Palm Beach, she remained an intrepid traveler. She also grew closer to Jackie, who treated her to dinner at Maxim’s during Rose’s twice yearly visits to the Parisian couture houses. “There was a natural affection between Jackie and Rose,” said Jessie Wood, who dined with them in Paris. On Easter Sunday in 1983, Rose had a massive stroke at age ninety-three. Speechless and confined to a wheelchair, Rose survived another decade before dying in 1995 at age 104.
Edward M. Kennedy took over as the head of the Kennedy family after Bobby’s assassination, and barely a year later caused a scandal when he drove a car off a bridge in Martha’s Vineyard into a pond, killing his passenger, a young woman who had been with him at a party that evening. He failed in a run for the presidency in 1980, and the following year was divorced from Joan, who had coped with his womanizing by finding refuge in drinking. With the help of Alcoholics Anonymous, she managed her addiction, and she went on to earn a master’s degree in education. Teddy later remarried and redeemed his reputation as a hard-working and effective U.S. senator.
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