by Thomas Maier
“Does God know everything?” she inquired one afternoon. “Why did He take my son Patrick if He knew my husband was going to die?”
In these moments, Jackie gave a glimpse of her anger and frustration, what writer Murray Kempton called “the rage at God” in her ordeal.“Rage moved Mrs. Kennedy to her grandest gestures—the refusal to change her suit with her husband’s blood on it (‘Let them see what they have done’), her insistence against all suggestions that she and the coffin make their exit at Andrews Field from the starboard side (‘I want them to see what they have done!’),” wrote Kempton.
More often than not, however, Jackie seemed curious with McSorley. She posed thoughtful questions about her Catholic faith rather than express some existential anger or estrangement from God. If there was a divine plan in this bloody mess, she was determined to try to understand it. When McSorley further explained the Catholic belief of general resurrection, of uniting the body with the soul for eternity, she wanted to know whether Jack would be the same age—forty-six—as when he had died. She wondered “how old will I be if I see him again” in heaven? She fretted over whether Jack had gone to Communion before he died, and whether the church considered him to be in a state of grace. “If he isn’t in heaven or in the state of grace or whatever you call it,” she vowed at one point, “then I would never go back inside a church.” She ruminated aloud about getting married again.“Would it be looked on as adultery if I married someone else?” she asked McSorley, without mentioning names.“I don’t really want to get married. It would be awful to be with someone else. But yet it’s so lonely.”
These exercises in apologetics were accompanied by McSorley’s uplifting words, his urging her to focus on her children and live up to the hopeful ideals set forth in Jack’s inaugural address.“It is not disloyal to look forward to grief being lessened by time,” McSorley insisted. “Holding on to grief will not help the children, it will not help the friends of President Kennedy.”
After several weeks, Jackie appeared better, as if she had turned a corner, only to fall further into an abyss of despondency and gloom. In May 1964, a few days before what would have been Jack’s forty-seventh birthday, she again brought up the idea of killing herself. Jackie even suggested she’d be glad if her death, as she told McSorley, “set off a wave of suicides because she was glad to see people get out of their misery.”The priest was startled to hear her say that “death is great” and talk about other suicides.“I was glad that Marilyn Monroe got out of her misery,” she told the priest. “If God is going to make such a to-do about judging people because they take their own lives, than someone ought to punish Him.” Jackie’s adamancy left McSorley deeply disturbed, so much so that he worried throughout the night about what she might do next.“Yesterday she had me scared that she was really thinking of suicide,” McSorley recorded in his notes.
The following afternoon, McSorley came prepared with an argument against suicide. In his best Jesuitical manner, he pointed to her previous day’s contention that those who committed suicide were “off their head so they weren’t responsible” for their actions in God’s judgment. Perhaps so, he conceded, but the opposite might be equally true. “Suicide is taking one’s own life, so let’s compare it to a person who takes someone else’s life for a moment—consider Oswald taking President Kennedy’s life,” he began, in an audacious comparison.“Are you willing to say that he was so completely off his head that he was innocent of doing anything wrong? Are you willing to say that he was not responsible for all the previous acts, the previous decisions he made that brought him to this state of mind where he might have been crazy enough to shoot the President? Well, a person who commits suicide may be off their head at the moment of it, but there is a long train of things leading up to it, and they’re responsible for not doing something about those decisions.”
Jackie had listened to enough. She interrupted McSorley’s monologue with an assurance that she wasn’t serious about committing suicide.
“I know I’ll never do it,” she conceded.“I know it’s wrong. It’s just a way out. It’s so hard to think about facing every day, the many days ahead.”
As she spoke, Jackie blamed herself for a litany of things. Caught in a fog of depression, she found getting up in the morning difficult; often an hour and a half would pass before she was fully awake and able to rise. None of the Kennedy fires burned in her, none of their Irish Catholic stoicism in confronting the world’s harsh realities. She was not a fighter, certainly not in her current state. “I guess I’m lazy,” she brooded. “I’m too lazy even to play tennis. I just can’t get excited about it. I don’t have any competitive spirit. I can’t be like Bob and Ethel, trying to win. . . . I just don’t want to exert myself.” She didn’t possess the Kennedy clannishness, their outward-looking spirit and ability to find redemption in numbers.“I’m not the kind of person that can work with children or with the poor or with a crowd,” she explained. She preferred to be by herself. “That’s why I like horseback riding and the solo sports,” she said simply. “I always like to be alone.”
Her rambling self-recriminations extended to what she admitted were her own failures in her marriage to Jack. According to McSorley’s notes, she consistently blamed herself for their problems together, never hinting at her husband’s constant absences, the rumors of adultery or the obsessive commitment to politics and public life. Unlike her husband, she confessed that she wasn’t a very diligent Catholic, either.“He never complained about me not getting up and going to Mass, but he always went,” she recalled.“I could have gone and made things so much better for him.”Their last few months together left her with so many regrets.“I was melancholy after the death of our baby and I stayed away last fall longer than I needed to,” she explained. “And then when I came back he was trying to get me out of my grief and maybe I was a bit snappish; but I could have made his life so much happier, especially for the last few weeks. I could have tried harder to get over my melancholy.”
After several tumultuous years together, she and Jack finally arrived at a mutual understanding, a greater love for each other. Whatever thoughts there may have been about divorce were forbidden by the church, which taught that the bonds of marriage lasted forever. Jackie made so many sacrifices for her husband’s career and desires that his sudden loss left an awful void in her existence.“I had worked so hard at the marriage,” she explained. “I had made an effort and succeeded and he had really come to love me and to congratulate me on what I did for him. And, then, just when we had it all settled, I had the rug pulled out from under me without any power to do anything about it.”
These matters were all discussed while McSorley and his partner battered tennis balls around the court, emptying one bucket after another. Before their several sessions ended that spring, the priest prepared a list of questions for her to contemplate, to help her overcome her grief. Jackie assured him that she would think about each one. After an hour’s session on the court, they were usually interrupted when John Jr. sought his mother’s attention, or when the normal exuberance of life overflowing on the Hickory Hill estate, filled with Kennedy nieces and nephews, encroached upon them. As they packed up, readying to leave, the former first lady thanked McSorley and often left him with a lingering thought or two.
“If I only had a minute to say good-bye,” Jackie sighed after one session, thinking aloud about her lost husband.“It was so hard not to say good-bye, not to be able to say good-bye. But I guess he knew that I loved him.”
BY SUMMER 1964, Jackie decided that she could no longer stay in Washington. The elegant house she rented from family friend Averell Harriman immediately after the assassination had become like a prison. Hordes of passersby, some well-meaning and others morbidly curious, had turned her home into a tourist attraction, a roadside freak show, forcing her to keep all the shades drawn to maintain her privacy. Washington had become too painful, filled with people and places that reminded her of Jack. She needed a new beginni
ng, just as she had discussed with Father McSorley. She decided to move to New York City and stay temporarily at the Carlyle Hotel on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Before she left town in July 1964, Jackie wrote to McSorley and told him that she’d never forget all his kindness and compassion.“A priest gives so much to other people, and sometimes you must wonder if you do truly help them,” her letter stated. “Well, I just want to tell you that you did to me when I needed it the most. To be able to come out to Ethel’s to make an attempt at getting strong again—to bring John and Caroline and see how much you meant to them—and then to talk to you, helped me through an awful time.”
Her correspondence with the priest continued through the summer; on light blue stationary she dashed off heartfelt letters in her distinctive handwriting, her sentences punctuated with her customary dash marks.“You are right,” she wrote in July, “it is so much the best thing for all of us to move to New York—Just the effort of adapting to a new place and creating new lives for my children there—will be good for me and stop brooding—But we will miss you so much—especially John and I.” She urged McSorley to come to Manhattan for a visit; he could stay either at her apartment or perhaps at the rectory near Caroline’s new school, the Sacred Heart Convent on 91st Street, run by the same order of nuns who taught and trained three generations of Kennedy women. Toward the end of this note, Jackie addressed her frame of mind. She assured McSorley that she was following his advice.
“I am trying to make all the efforts you said I should make—It doesn’t get one bit easier—If you want to know what my religious convictions are now—they are = [sic] to keep busy and to keep healthy—so that you can do all you should for your children—and to get to bed very early at night so that you don’t have time to think,” she wrote. Jackie had no intention of misleading her priest-confessor and sympathetic tennis partner by denying the hurt and pain she still harbored. “You wrote me that list of things to think about—‘Do I feel guilty about getting over my grief?’—Well, I wish I had that problem, because I know now I won’t ever get over it—but I am getting better at hiding it from my children—I am able to do more things with them now,” she ended.
After Labor Day, McSorley wrote back to Jackie, applauding her intentions of keeping busy and healthy with her children. Her efforts at getting better, he suggested,were “certainly what God wants you to do.” McSorley urged her not to give up her tennis exercise which, he wrote, seemed “a successful part of your struggle to fight your way through sorrow.” McSorley’s advice, deeply rooted as it was in the Catholic theological view of transformation, was given in the hope that with enough love and forgiveness she could convert her grief into a transcendent commitment to help others. As he explained in the letter:
“I agree that you will never get over it in the sense that the grief will disappear. But you may be able to transform your grief into a source of energy which will be beneficial to you, your children, and to many others. Transformation does not mean that grief will disappear but that it can have new and even beneficial aspects in it that you did not see at first. This has happened with human grief before and it can happen with you.”
EARLIER THAT SUMMER, McSorley bestowed similar advice on Bobby Kennedy, very much a victim himself of the same spiritual agonies that Jackie was suffering. Though he felt protective of his sister-in-law, Bobby nursed his own wounds, coped with his own vulnerabilities after his brother’s death. Immediately after the assassination, Bobby seemed determined to appear strong, to keep others from the same deep anguish he undoubtedly masked. “Cheer up, Cheer UP,” he repeatedly told his young associates at the Justice Department, though no one believed him. The Georgetown priest recognized Bobby’s pain through his tough demeanor. McSorley knew how much he missed Jack, and his letter addressed the overwhelming grief felt by Bobby. “I look at you as his twin spirit,” wrote the priest. “Your grief goes as deep as your love. But that is only half the picture. Because you were close to him, you received the impact of his rare personality more fully than others. Yours was the inspiration of constant, daily, personal contact. God knew that you would need this as a counter-balance against your grief. The very weight of grief is a measure of the treasure which God gave to you in the close friendship of a brother gifted with so many rare qualities.”
Father McSorley urged Bobby, then considering a run for the U.S. Senate from New York, to remain in public life as a tribute to his fallen brother. The priest was well aware of the thousands of young people— many of them Catholics he knew at Georgetown—whose idealism was inspired by President Kennedy, who came of age imbibing his lofty words of public commitment. McSorley didn’t want to see that spirit die. Instead of wondering whether Bobby should tend to the private needs of his family after such a crisis—a problem that McSorley was well aware of—he urged him to assume an even greater public role. He quoted JFK’s inaugural address and suggested that Bobby carry out its mission.“When he [Jack] said,‘In your hands,my fellow citizens, more than in mine, will rest the final success or failure of our course,’ the words have special significance for you,” McSorley implored. “No one is in a better position to lead those whose hearts have caught fire from his flame than you.” In his pastoral pep talks with both Jackie and Bobby, McSorley reminded them that Jack would not want them to languish in grief over his passing. Appealing to Bobby’s strong Catholicism, McSorley cast this duty to his brother’s memory in distinctly religious terms. “Just as the believers in Christ looked to His close companions for leadership in making those beatitudes known to the world, so the world that believes in President Kennedy’s ideals looks to you, as his brother and chief associate in public life, to help us understand and put into practice the ideals contained in that address.”
In McSorley’s view, Bobby needed to transform his grief into action. How much the attorney general listened and put into the practice the old priest’s advice is uncertain. But there is no doubt of the gift of comfort and confession he provided to Jackie Kennedy at an excruciating time in her life. That fall in New York, she and her children were delighted when McSorley came to visit again.
As he entered Jackie’s apartment, Father McSorley was greeted by John Jr., who almost immediately asked the priest to take him to the recently opened World’s Fair. His sister, Caroline, had left already for class at the nearby Sacred Heart school. Jackie came into the living room dressed in black, and provided a list of places that she thought might interest little John. She was anxious for her son to have some male role models in his life now that Jack was gone. As had often happened at Hickory Hill, McSorley acted as a surrogate guardian for the day, escorted in this case by two Secret Service agents.
McSorley departed with little Kennedy, off to the fair in the outlying borough of Queens. At lunch and while taking in the various attractions, John made sure to address the priest always as “Father McSorley.” He thoroughly enjoyed their adventure together. All the newspapers the next day carried stories about their escapades. In photos, a smiling, mop-topped little John Kennedy held McSorley’s hand while playing with a toy. McSorley was pictured in his black priestly suit and white Roman collar, a slight, gentle grin on the handsome Jesuit’s face. During his short stay in New York, McSorley also went with John to the Central Park playground to look at the animals. When they returned late that day, Jackie asked the priest to say a few prayers with her son. They both knelt beside his bed. McSorley watched the little boy bless himself correctly before saying a prayer for his father, mother and other family members. Jackie came inside the room as they finished. She lifted up John and tucked him into bed.
“Maybe Father will sing you a song,” Jackie told her son, while she looked at McSorley. “His daddy used to sing him ‘Danny Boy.’ Could you sing that, Father?”
McSorley did his Irish best with the song, though he forgot the words to a few verses. He knew the familiar melody well enough, however, to touch some of the former first lady’s emotions. “As I sang through it, John listened
with complete attention and Mrs. Kennedy’s eyes filled with tears,” McSorley recalled in his diary. Tenderly, Jackie kissed her son on the forehead and said good-night. But the little boy wasn’t ready, and insisted that his mother also sing him a song.
“Well, I don’t have a very good voice John,” Jackie explained.“What do you want me to sing?”
“‘America the Beautiful,’” the little boy replied.
McSorley watched as the former first lady sang for her son; he noticed that Caroline was standing in the bedroom’s doorway, seemingly amazed at the sight.
“America,America, God shed his grace on thee / And crown thy good with brotherhood / From sea to shining sea,” Jackie sang as best she could. McSorley smiled and would never forget the sadness and poignancy of this family trying to mend.
AFTER THE CHRISTMAS holiday, McSorley returned to New York in January 1965 and visited Jackie and her children at their new apartment on Fifth Avenue. It was agreed that McSorley would take John to the New York City Museum on 103rd Street. Then Jackie asked her priest friend for a particularly difficult favor. Jackie’s face was somber. It was a request involving her four-year-old son, something that she could probably ask only of Father McSorley.
“Maybe, sometime, you will get the chance to answer the question that comes to John—‘Why did they kill him?’” Jackie suggested.
McSorley stared and just listened without reply. He could see Jackie’s eyes filling with tears as she offered a further explanation. “This question comes from television or hearing about it,” she explained. “I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what’s a good answer and I feel inadequate about saying anything.” Her futility and grief rose to the surface together, overwhelming her. She began to weep. McSorley waited in silence, patiently, until Jackie composed herself.“Just a word of explanation,” she added,“and then moving on to some other subject will be enough.”
