The Kennedys

by Thomas Maier

  The opportunity for such a discussion soon presented itself. As they traveled through Manhattan with their Secret Service escort, McSorley and the little boy passed Grant’s Tomb, prompting John’s curiosity.

  “Who lives it?” he asked.

  “Grant” came the reply.

  “Can we visit him?” John asked.

  “No, because only his body is there. His spirit went to meet God.”

  “Does everybody here go to meet God when they die?”

  “No,” said the priest, “only those who are good meet God.” He didn’t use the word “hell” but explained to John that people who are bad are in pain after they die, sort of like stubbing his toe.

  John seemed satisfied with the exchange for a few minutes, and McSorley went on to talk about the virtues of Ulysses Grant.

  “Did General Grant see Daddy?” the little boy interrupted.

  McSorley said he didn’t know.

  “If we visit Daddy’s grave, can we see him?” John persisted.

  “No, only his body is there and his body has turned to dust,” McSorley explained. He proceeded to answer further questions about where God could be found, and all the people with Him. What adult Catholics believed as a matter of faith—that the body and spirit would someday be united by God in a general resurrection—was far beyond the little boy’s comprehension. At one point, he asked innocently,“How can you go to the bathroom if you don’t have a body?”

  McSorley realized that Jackie, too, was puzzled by the church’s belief in resurrection. When McSorley recounted his conversations with her son, she asked some more specifics—wondering if the body would shrink back to its youthfulness when reunited with the soul. As any loving widow would, Jackie seemed to hope beyond measure that someday she might see her husband again. McSorley admitted his own shortcomings in providing a definitive theological answer. “All these thoughts are speculative and seem quite out of place in the context of grief and tragedy in which the Kennedys talk about the question,” McSorley later explained. A simpler effort to stay connected with the spirit of Jack Kennedy could be found in the children’s bedrooms, in the photographs on their walls. Images of them playing with their father—out on the White House lawn bending over to pick up John, with Caroline seated on her daddy’s lap—were captured and framed in these pictures, some bearing their father’s inscriptions to them. “By these family pictures right above their beds,” McSorley observed,“it is clear that their mother wants the children to understand something about their father.”

  JACKIE’S EFFORTS for her children to understand more about their father extended to Ireland as well. She found that her husband’s joyous Irish trip, shortly before his death,was remembered again and again by his friends and associates in her conversations with them. As Jack had wanted, she renamed their “Atoka” country home near the Blue Ridge Mountains in western Virginia, the place of many pleasant family memories, and instead called it “Wexford,” to commemorate the county where the Kennedys had originated and honor the place where her husband found such delight. She kept many gifts and mementos of Jack’s trip to Ireland inside Wexford’s airy cabins. Outside on the grounds, the pony that Sean Lemass, the Irish prime minister, had given to little John was stabled there. Jackie was far too sophisticated to revel in ethnic customs during her White House years, certainly not the sentimental warbling of Irish songs enjoyed in private by some Kennedys, including her husband. But in her grief and suffering, Jackie seemed better to understand the Irish side of her lost husband’s nature. Echoing a favorite line of poetry from Yeats, she wrote that “I should have known that it was asking too much to dream that I might have grown old with him.”

  In preparing selections of her husband’s favorite readings for a ceremonial opening of the Kennedy library, she made sure to include the Irish poets among selections from Shakespeare,American history and the Greeks.“President Kennedy was of Irish heritage and Irish poetry was close to his heart,” Jackie wrote as an aside to these offerings. “Not the sentimental verse people often think of as Irish, but the poetry of their struggle for freedom, full of bitterness and despair.” She recalled how her husband, long before his election to the presidency, had quoted lines from the Thomas Davis poem about Irish patriot Owen Roe O’Neill, especially the last two lines about sheep without a shepherd. “Now, that is the way we all feel about him,” Jackie added. In her own attempts to use imagery and poetry to fashion a lasting memorial to her husband’s memory, she wrote her own verse about Jack that underlined his roots.

  Jack Kennedy heard the wind in the skies

  And the look of eagles was in his eyes.

  He could call New England his place and his creed

  But part he was of alien breed

  Of a breed that had laughed on Irish hills

  And heard the voices in Irish rills

  The lilt of that green land danced in his blood

  Tara, Killarney, a magical flood

  Surged in the depths of his too proud heart

  And spiked the punch of New England so tart.

  Eventually, Jackie determined that she must go to Ireland with her children to retrace many of the steps taken by President Kennedy. They left in the summer of 1967 and spent several weeks on holiday, staying mostly at a rented twenty-room mansion near Waterford, a bit west of County Wexford. One night with friends, she dropped in at an Irish pub in a tiny fishing village about four miles away. The startled fishermen sang “The Boys of Wexford” for her, and she requested that they sing “Danny Boy” as well. She began most mornings riding on horseback, her long black hair flowing in the breezes, or walking alone on the rocky beaches. Because the widowed first lady’s visit initially drew a rush of press attention, she waited for things to settle down before visiting the Kennedy Homestead in Dunganstown. In a note to her husband’s relative, Jackie attempted to arrange a convenient time for all. “Dear Mrs. Ryan—At last we really are in Ireland—and the children and I are looking forward so much to coming over to see you and to meeting all our cousins,” she wrote. “I would have asked to come much sooner but there have been so many newspapermen and television cameras around—I did not want them all to follow us and spoil a happy family meeting. The children have been looking forward to Dunganstown for such a long time—they both have pictures of your house in their room at home—and I thought for little children, all the impressions at seeing the place their family came from, might be ruined if we were surrounded by photographers.”

  None of the hoopla, none of the crowds that marked her husband’s visit followed Jackie’s quiet, unassuming arrival in a rented car with her two children. The old Kennedy Homestead, stretched across the hillside and its cows and chickens and horses milling about in the fields, evoked the raw and simple quietude of rural life. The stone buildings and artifacts of another time, such as the coopering tools and wooden barrels in the barn, were reminders of what the farm must have looked like more than a hundred years earlier, before Patrick Kennedy left for America. Though they had never met, Mrs. Ryan embraced Jackie like a long-lost relative. “It was an easier visit because there weren’t any crowds,” recalled her daughter, Mary Ann Ryan, in 2001. “It was all family. We had tea and she walked around the garden and the yard. The children played around the yard and found a pair of kittens and wanted to take them home.”

  Nevertheless, there was a sense of melancholy about Jackie Kennedy’s trip, nearly four years after her husband’s assassination. In her chats with these Kennedy cousins, she recalled her husband’s enthusiasm for Ireland, the tremendous response he received from its people and the small but grand discoveries from the 1963 trip.“She talked a lot about his [JFK’s] visit and she wanted to go over everything again,” remembered Mary Ann.“She seemed to know more about that visit than we did, because he had told her so much about it. She said she wanted her kids to get the sense of farm life,to absorb the atmosphere.” It was agreed that while Jackie took care of some business in Waterford, Caroline and Joh
n would be allowed to return the next day to the Kennedy Homestead simply to play and frolic on this ancestral land, still very much a working farm. Mrs. Ryan’s other daughter, Josie, by then married and living on the farm with her own family, tended to the two Kennedy cousins from the United States.“They played with the baby pigs and she [Josie] had to wash them up before they left,” recalls Mary Ann. “She didn’t treat them any differently.” Jumping around in the high grass of the farm, John swore there was electricity in the sting of the nettles from the underbrush. Everyone had a good laugh at the little boy’s expense. He was a living reminder of the delight that his father brought them during his own visit. Jackie’s appreciativeness and regard toward these Irish cousins only served to underline the intrinsic sadness surrounding her visit. Mrs. Ryan was deeply touched by the widowed first lady.“My mother loved her,” recalls Mary Ann.“She really hit the spot in everyone’s heart.”

  The trip to Ireland was all part of the healing process for Jackie, a woman who a few years before had described herself as a living wound. In the darkest moments after her husband’s death, she found that the church’s sacraments and the Kennedy family’s sense of Irish Catholic identity could be of comfort to her, perhaps more than she ever realized while Jack was alive. Though Father McSorley didn’t have all the answers to eternity, he did lend a kindly ear within the trust of the confessional in allowing a very private person to sort out her problems. More so, the poetry and prayers—such as the sad laments for brave men killed in their prime—gave a poignant voice to her grief and became part of the legacy left to her children. The Kennedy children were acutely aware of their father’s absence. They mentioned him in holiday cards written to their grandmother Rose and other relatives, and his memory was sometimes reflected in their school work and small personal decisions. As a student enrolled with the same order of nuns that had taught her grandmother, Caroline chose the confirmation name of Joan, after seeing a portrait of Joan of Arc, the valiant French girl burned at the stake and eventually canonized. “I took her name in confirmation because she was killed like my father,” Caroline explained.

  These icons of faith, these rituals of belief seemed to bolster Jackie Kennedy’s courage when she most needed it, such as on the rainy day in March 1967, shortly before her trip to Ireland, when she again went to Arlington National Cemetery. There in prayerful silence, she witnessed her husband’s body being reinterred with the tiny bodies of Patrick Kennedy and her previously stillborn daughter. Both their remains had been transferred from Holyhood Cemetery in Brookline. Cardinal Cushing flew down from Boston to oversee the short, private service at the gravesite. In the drizzle, Cushing watched Bobby staring into the open grave at his brother’s coffin, and the cardinal felt sure that Bobby “relived every moment of his past life, the tragedy of the assassination and the years since.” During the brief prayers, Jackie stood in the downpour, somberly and with great composure, just as she had acted with so much silent dignity at Jack’s funeral. Only a few knew how much she truly suffered.

  Watching Jackie and the rest of the Kennedys slowly walk back to their cars from the graves, Cushing later described the scene as one of the saddest moments of his life. As he admitted,“I don’t know how they can stand it.”

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  The Awful Grace of God

  IN THE MIRROR, Robert Kennedy practiced, time and again, until he felt confident he could recite the poem without crying. He didn’t want to be seen as weak or maudlin in public. As his father had always told him, Kennedys don’t cry. Yet each time he read from Thomas Davis’s poem about Owen Roe O’Neill, he couldn’t help but lose his composure. The lines that cried, “Oh! why did you leave us, Owen? Why did you die?” were like a stab to the heart. This same verse stuck in the mind of writer William Manchester, who once confided to Bobby, while relaxing at poolside, how often he had thought of the poem since Dallas. Bobby gave “one of his upward, swift looks,” Manchester remembered,“said he had the same problem, and quickly changed the subject.”

  For his first public speech since his brother’s death, Kennedy accepted the invitation of the Friendly Sons of Ireland in Scranton, Pennsylvania, to be their featured speaker at the annual St. Patrick’s Day celebration. An early version of his speech, resembling the same talks Jack had dispensed on past St. Patrick’s Days, included the sad poem about Owen Roe O’Neill. But these lines were edited out of the final draft given to Bobby for his approval. When Kennedy spotted the cut, he turned to Ed Guthman, his press aide. “Why did you do that?” he demanded.

  “You’ll never get through it,” Guthman replied.“You don’t have to put yourself through that.”

  The omission seemed merciful. Caught in his own remorse and painful memories, Bobby still wasn’t sure that he wanted to stay in public life. He was not only the father of a large brood, but his father’s stroke and his brother’s assassination mandated that Bobby effectively become the head of the Kennedy clan; with those responsibilities, he had taken on the great duty of helping Jackie and her two children recover from their tragedy. Bobby wore these burdens visibly. His face no longer had the shiny, youthful tone of his early years in Washington but was now weathered and puffy with lines of fatigue around his blue eyes.

  “I’ve been practicing,” he said of the poem. Though he appreciated Guthman’s kindness, he couldn’t relieve himself of this self-imposed duty.“I can’t get through it yet . . . but I will.”

  Bobby Kennedy would need every ounce of will to get through this St. Patrick’s Day 1964. In the brilliant daylight of a chilly morning, he escorted Jackie to Arlington National Cemetery, where she pulled a sprig of shamrock from her coat’s pocket and placed it on Jack’s grave. Jackie was dressed in black and her mood was even darker. She stared down at the ground intently where Jack’s body was buried, lost in her own thoughts. Next to them Thomas Kiernan, the Irish ambassador to the United States, whose joyous White House visit for St. Patrick’s Day 1963 was relished by President Kennedy, knelt down and planted a cross of shamrock and a green clump of sod from Ireland.

  Afterward, Bobby went with journalist Mary McGrory to Jackie’s temporary residence, where McGrory remembered an “excruciating” conversation took place, two Kennedy spirits crushed by gloom. As they left, McGrory tried to assure Bobby that things in his own life would soon get better. Instead, he sobbed.

  DESPITE SOME misgivings, Kennedy flew that afternoon to Scranton- Wilkes-Barre Airport, where a crowd of two thousand well-wishers greeted him. Most were young people who jumped through the police lines to sneak a peek and perhaps touch him—the living Kennedy who most reminded them of his brother. Yet there was some cause to wonder whether President Kennedy’s legacy was still alive.

  That same evening in New York, Lyndon Johnson, who considered himself Kennedy’s political inheritor as well as his successor, addressed a wealthy, influential and conservative crowd of Irish-Americans at the Waldorf-Astoria. The new chief executive rattled off the names of half a dozen persons of Irish descent who had served Kennedy and who were still in his administration. With his huge grin, Johnson declared himself “an Irishman by osmosis.” In Massachusetts, more ominous repudiations of Kennedy’s legacy were on display. During the St. Patrick Day parade in South Boston, the city’s schism between whites and blacks erupted in racist violence. A float sponsored by the NAACP was bombarded with beer bottles, rocks, cherry bombs and garbage. The float bore a large-sized picture of President Kennedy and a sign urging the crowd to remember: “From the fight for Irish freedom, we must fight for American equality.”Walking in the same parade, about ten minutes ahead of the float,Ted Kennedy was unaware of the crowd’s response, which quickly became ugly. At some points in the parade, men leapt into the street to shout,“Nigger go home.”

  Miles away, and increasingly distant from the center of power in the White House, Bobby Kennedy sloshed through the snow in Scranton. He stopped at a ground-breaking ceremony for a new elementary school named for his brother.
He shook hands with hundreds of ordinary folk, who stood with umbrellas in the downpour. Irish immigrants first came to Lackawanna County in the mid-1800s, mostly to work in the coal mines, and their children wound up slowly rising to prominence in politics, local business, law, medicine and religion. Seeing Robert Kennedy reminded them a little bit of their own heritage. The overwhelmingly emotional response from the crowds, as Guthman later wrote, helped convince Bobby to remain in public life.

  At the Hotel Casey, before the Friendly Sons, Bobby gave a rousing tour of Irish history that would have done Honey Fitz proud. He reminded them of the British indifference to the Great Famine and its haunting epitaph in the words of Joyce.“As the first of the racial minorities, our forefathers were subject to every discrimination found wherever discrimination is known,”Kennedy declared.“The Irish have survived persecution in their own land and discrimination in ours.” He recalled President Kennedy’s trip the previous summer to Ireland and likened the Irish struggle for basic liberties during the time of the penal laws to the struggles for civil rights by African-Americans in modern-day America. The Irish were an inspiration in the fight against the “tyranny of communism” in Vietnam. The entire speech, like its presenter, was still very much beholden to John Kennedy’s memory.

  “I like to think—as did President Kennedy—that the emerald thread runs in the cloth we weave today, that these policies in which he believed so strongly and which President Johnson is advancing, are the current flowering of the Irish tradition,” Bobby declared.“And I like to think that these policies will survive and continue as the cause of Irish freedom survived the death of . . .Owen Roe O’Neill.”With this introduction, Bobby Kennedy began to read the closing lines of the poem. The audience in the grand ballroom watched as this man vilified as ruthless, a tough Irish mick like his father nearly melted into tears. Among this generation of Irish-Americans,the loss of their young president was every bit as rueful as the fallen hero in the old poem.