He had noted that the 1964 campaign "may be among the most interesting as well as pleasurable campaigns that have taken place in a long time." And he made a special point of recognizing me in his speech, with his usual wit: "Teddy has been down in Washington and he came to see me the other day, and he said he was really tired of being referred to as the younger brother of the president, and being another Kennedy, and it is crowded in Washington, and that he was going to break loose and change his name. He was going out on his own. Instead of being Teddy Kennedy now, he is changing his name to Teddy Roosevelt."
The next day, Jack went to Hyannis Port for a quick visit with our parents. On Monday, October 21, 1963, the president headed back to Washington. Before liftoff, he kissed our father goodbye, then walked to the chopper that awaited him in front of my parents' house. As he was about to board, he paused, turned to look at Dad watching him, and retraced his steps to kiss Dad again, gently, on the forehead. It was the last time the two of them saw one another.
On November 1, the South Vietnamese generals staged a coup, assassinating Diem and his brother-adviser Ngo Dinh Nhu, the husband of my Belgrade luncheon companion.
Jack had been traveling about the country: a five-day tour of eleven western states in September to talk about conservation and assess his political standing; speeches in Tampa and Miami Beach on November 18. He made a quick trip back to Washington to take care of certain executive duties; and then, commencing on Thursday, fund-raising appearances in San Antonio, Fort Worth, and, on Friday, Dallas.
My memory of the last time I saw Jack is elusive after all the years. It filters through to me in wisps and echoes.
I think I saw him in Florida. It seems as though I was planning to fly out to Michigan to give a speech on his behalf, and I planned to needle Barry Goldwater a little. Jack was interested in what my theme would be. I showed him my prop, a little bottle with some water in it, colored gold. I planned to build a funny little story around it. "I don't think that's all that good," I dimly recall him saying. "You better get another story. Let me hear when you've come up with another story." I remember that I was somewhat taken aback by this, because I thought it was really a pretty good story.
Friday, November 22, was a dull day in the Senate. I was presiding, a duty that was passed around among freshman senators. A routine debate had begun on the topic of federal aid to public libraries; I was signing correspondence.
At about twenty minutes to two in the afternoon, I heard a shout from the lobby. I glanced over to see the Senate's press liaison officer, Richard Riedel, striding through the door to investigate. Then I saw Riedel reemerge, a strange expression on his face. He was hurrying directly toward me. The shout had come from someone who'd paused to read an Associated Press teletype machine.
"You'd better come over," Riedel told me. He meant to the AP printer.
I followed him out of the chamber. I knew something had happened, something bad, but I had no idea what it was. We reached the machine and I watched the bulletin clatter onto the tape. The president had been shot and grievously wounded. My first overwhelming sense was disbelief. How could it be true? And then horror, as I stood there listening to the tick, tick, tick of the teletype machine. I couldn't hear anything or anyone else. Gradually, I became aware of the voices around me. I heard someone say the president was dead.
The Senate chamber turned to bedlam. I rushed from the floor, ran down the Capitol steps, and made for my office in the Senate Building. I needed to call Bobby, who was at Hickory Hill, the house that he and Ethel had purchased in 1957.
But the line was dead. The lines all over Washington were dead. The onslaught of calls coming in and going out had disrupted telephone service. The lines were dead.
My next thought was of Joan. She adored Jack. She would be devastated by the news. I asked Milt Gwirtzman, my Harvard classmate and an adviser to Jack, to drive me to our Georgetown house. My old Texan friend Claude Hooton, in town to join weekend festivities, rode with us as we sped through traffic lights. Claude, in shock like the rest of us, brooded aloud that the president had been shot, and in his home state.
Bobby received the news by phone from J. Edgar Hoover while lunching at Hickory Hill with Ethel and the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, Robert M. Morgenthau. The two had been holding meetings on the subject of organized crime. As the small party sat outside eating sandwiches, one of the men working on the house, who'd been listening to a transistor radio, began to run toward them. At the same moment, an outside telephone rang.
We located Joan at her hairdresser getting ready for a weekend with our friends. I finally reached Bobby at Hickory Hill. He confirmed what I had dared not believe: Jack was dead.
In that moment, the world lurched apart from me. I felt unmoored. But I knew that I had to keep moving. I had to put one foot in front of the other. People were depending on me. And I needed to reach out to my parents. I needed to comfort them.
I asked Gwirtzman to drive me to the White House. There, I made myself instruct an aide to telephone Hyannis Port, and waited the terrible few seconds before the ordeal of speaking the unspeakable.
My mother came on the line. She had heard. My father, in bed on the second floor, had not. Someone had to tell him face-to-face. I told Mother that I would do it.
I contacted Eunice, and together we rushed home by helicopter and jet. By the time we arrived, the anticipation of what lay ahead had burned through any numbness and replaced it with dread. I fought it by launching myself out of the plane, through the front doorway, and up the stairs to Dad's bedroom. His eyes were closed. I would let him have this last peaceful sleep. The television set near his bed caught my eye. I lunged at the connecting wires and ripped them from the wall.
The house filled with relatives through the evening. I passed a hellish night, and the following morning, I told Dad. To this day, the memory of that conversation brings me to tears.
Eunice and I brought our mother to Washington on Sunday, November 24, and prayed beside Jack's body in the Rotunda as a crowd three miles long made its way past. Jack's funeral mass was held the next day at St. Matthew's Cathedral. In recent years, Vicki and I often attend mass at St. Matthew's and walk to the spot at the foot of the altar to read the marker in the marble floor: "Here rested the remains of President Kennedy at the Requiem Mass, November 25, 1963, before their removal to Arlington where they lie in expectation of a heavenly resurrection."
I think often of Bobby's grief over the loss of Jack. It veered close to being a tragedy within the tragedy. Ethel and my mother feared for his own survival; his psychic survival at least. His friend and chronicler Arthur Schlesinger has recorded how Bobby spent the night before Jack's funeral alone in the Lincoln Bedroom, and how his longtime friend Charles Spaulding, upon leaving Bobby there and closing the door, heard him dissolve into sobs and cry out, "Why, God?! " He seemed to age physically. He would spend hours without speaking a word.
He delayed returning to his duties as attorney general; he found it difficult to concentrate on anything or do substantive work. Hope seemed to have died within him, and there followed months of unrelenting melancholia. He went through the motions of everyday life, but he carried the burden of his grief with him always.
I was so worried about Bobby that I tried to suppress my own grief. I felt that I had to be strong for my parents and the family. Maybe it's more accurate to say that I was afraid to allow grief to swallow me up. So I just pushed it down further and further inside.
In mid-January 1964, while Bobby was still attorney general and before he made up his mind to resign and run for the Senate from New York, President Johnson asked him to visit the Far East to negotiate a cease-fire between Indonesia and Malaysia. He was to meet in Japan with Sukarno, the enlightened but volatile Indonesian president who had helped his country win its independence from the Netherlands. Now Sukarno, suspicious at Malaysia's recent federation agreement with Great Britain, had launched a guerrilla war against
the neighboring state. Bobby's official mission was to act as peacemaker; but Johnson also hoped that the assignment would lift his spirits.
Johnson, so often perceived by Bobby as an adversary, had on this occasion performed a valuable act of compassion. Bobby invited Ethel along, and her companionship, along with the trip itself, broke my brother's cycle of depression. In Japan, Bobby and Ethel witnessed a tumultuous outpouring of friendship from the people, who wanted to show their respect and love for John Kennedy through Bobby's presence. I believe that that reception restored his faith that life was worth living after all, and that President Kennedy had achieved something lasting and worthwhile.
Late in 1964, Bobby asked me to review the Warren Commission's newly released report on the assassination because emotionally he couldn't do it. The commission had been established by President Johnson seven days after Jack was killed in Dallas, and was charged with determining who had shot Jack, and why. Johnson appointed Earl Warren, the former California governor and chief justice, to chair the commission. Its conclusion, made public in an 888-page document released in September, was that Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone in killing Jack and wounding the Texas governor John Connally, who was riding in the open limousine with my brother and the wives of both men.
When I reached him by telephone, Warren told me he would be glad to give me a briefing and go over the parts of the report that were particularly contentious and likely to generate the most questions from the press and public. I remember the commission's office as large but spare, about half the size of the attorney general's office. I believe that Warren had one aide, perhaps a law clerk, present at the meeting. I almost certainly brought an aide along with me.
Warren gave me a full briefing, as I'd requested. I asked many questions. The whole process took about four hours. Afterward, I reported to Bobby that I accepted the commission's report and thought he should too.
Bobby agreed readily. He did not want to continue to investigate Jack's death. Earl Warren, moreover, was a strong advocate for the accuracy of the report. He told me quite persuasively that he'd felt a responsibility to the nation to get it right. He personally made the case to me, showing me its weaknesses and walking me through the thinking of the commission members.
I am well aware that many scholars and others have questioned the findings ever since they were released. There have been hundreds of socalled conspiracy theories. I was satisfied that the Warren Commission got it right: satisfied then, and satisfied now. I'm always reluctant to speak for my brother, but I know how strongly Bobby felt that it was imperative that this inquiry be thorough and accurate. In all my subsequent conversations with him, when all was said and done, I believe that Bobby accepted the Warren Commission findings too.
I must speak of what I believe to be another tragic outcome of the bullets fired in Dallas that November. Toward midsummer 1963, I was aware that my brother had qualms about Vietnam. He felt that we needed a new and different direction. He had a growing understanding that the conflict could not be resolved militarily, and I feel very strongly that he certainly would not have escalated it. I witnessed elements of this process unfolding, and Jack affirmed it to me himself in private conversations. The situation troubled him. He said that Vietnam must belong to the Vietnamese. He had spoken with McNamara about a plan for withdrawal within two or three years.
Jack's antenna was set up to find a way out. And I am convinced that he was on his way to finding that way out. He just never got the chance.
In the days and weeks following Jack's death, I sought to keep the grief from disabling me. After the funeral, I returned to the Cape to look after my parents. In fact, this time with my father proved a tremendous source of comfort to me. Even though he was disabled, Dad could find ways to communicate his thoughts, and I was there to hear them. My father had reserves of strength that I could draw upon.
I felt that I was needed by my parents now more than ever. And so I would say to myself in moments of despair, There might be a time when you can give way to your own feelings, but not now, not in front of Dad. And so, hour by hour, I learned to contain my grief, to not give way to it.
I drew from my parents both strength and inspiration. I would say to myself, Mother is holding up. The last thing she needs is for me to break down or give way to a flood of tears.
I took long walks on the beach. I was still filled with such disbelief that Jack was gone. And then the truth of it would burn through this illusion. It was in those moments, when I was out of sight of anyone else, just the sea on one side of me and the sand on the other, that I would let go of my self-control.
It never occurred to me to seek professional help or grief counseling of any kind. The times were different then. But I prayed and I thought and I prayed some more.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Falling to Earth
1964-1965
In the end, the best way to honor Jack's memory was to take up his unfinished work.
His great dreams had included sending an American to the moon, nuclear disarmament, and the passage of a landmark civil rights bill. A lunar quest was years from feasibility. The checkered progress of disarmament was to be measured across decades.
The civil rights bill, by contrast, virtually cried for enactment. President Johnson supported it. A majority of Congress, including several Republicans, seemed to recognize that its time had come. Its main provisions would strike down restraints imposed in an agrarian age when most living Americans had witnessed slavery as a sanctioned practice. The affection that most Americans still harbored for the late President Kennedy and his dreams lent a timely backdrop for the effort to topple segregation in schools, employment, and public places.
Yet passage in the Senate remained far from a sure thing. No important civil rights legislation since Reconstruction had ever made it past the stone wall of southern resistance. Generations of senators from the old Confederacy, although a minority, had even managed to torpedo an antilynching bill. No signal existed that 1964 would be any different.
The southerners' weapon of choice on civil rights bills was the filibuster, that time-honored tradition of preventing a vote on legislation by holding the Senate floor and orating on any subject until silenced by a "cloture" vote--or, more commonly, until a compromise is forged or the opposition gives up. In the early 1960s, cloture required assent by at least sixty-seven of the Senate's one hundred members. Sixty-seven Senators were Democrats in 1964; but of these, twenty-one were from the "solid South." Among the current Republicans, only twelve of the thirty-three were moderates; the rest were conservative. A filibuster against the bill was inevitable, and we knew that the math was against us: we were nine votes short of cloture, which by all previous indicators was a hopeless gap.
The math did not in any way impede the determination and tactical shrewdness of President Lyndon Johnson, abetted by Senators Hubert Humphrey and Mike Mansfield.
Johnson sought to bolster public acceptance of the civil rights bill with speeches, appeals to the clergy, and by jawboning newspaper editors and publishers to call for its passage. He worked through Mansfield, the majority leader, to name Humphrey as manager of the bill. Humphrey homed in on the bill's most powerful adversary outside the South, Senator Everett Dirksen of Illinois, the Republican minority leader. Playing to Dirksen's aspirations to be recalled as a great man of the Senate, Hubert flattered the senator publicly, claiming in broadcast interviews that as a great man, he would naturally do the right thing on civil rights. Dirksen voted for the bill.
The House of Representatives passed a strong version of the bill in February 1964. Mansfield fielded it and adroitly steered it around its natural Senate starting place, the Judiciary Committee, where Richard B. Russell of Georgia awaited with the intention of shoving it into limbo. Mansfield found a creative pretext for rushing the bill directly to the Senate floor for debate. When it arrived there on March 10, Russell and his fellow Dixie Democrats launched their filibuster.
Rus
sell was anything but subtle about his aims. He and his allies clung to the spirit of a speech he made in 1946 while filibustering a bill that would have permanently created the Fair Employment Practices Commission: he would resist "to the bitter end" any measure that would bring about "social equality and intermingling and amalgamation of the races" in the southern states.
The end this time would indeed be bitter for them. Over fifty-seven days of argument, arm-twisting, pressure, and persuasion in April, May, and June of that year--"the longest debate," as it came to be called--we virtually willed the bill to passage.
When I first entered the Senate, new members usually did not make floor speeches for at least two years. Today, they all speak almost immediately. But not in 1964. And when they finally did take the podium, members usually spoke on issues of local concern. So it was something of a break with tradition when I decided to make my maiden speech on April 9, 1964, and use it to advocate for the passage of the Civil Rights Act. But it seemed to me that civil rights was the issue and this was the time. I was increasingly involved in both the substance of the discussion and the debate and felt it was very important to speak out.
I began with a note of homage to the time-honored protocols of the Senate: "It is with some hesitation that I rise to speak.... A freshman senator should be seen, not heard; should learn and not teach. This is especially true when the Senate is engaged in a truly momentous debate."
I voiced my respect for the quality of debate thus far and noted that I'd planned to focus my initial Senate speech on issues affecting my home state. But "I could not... [watch] this issue envelop the emotions and the conscience of the nation without changing my mind. To limit myself to local issues in the face of this great national question would be to demean the seat in which I sit, which has been occupied by some of the most distinguished champions in the cause of freedom. I feel I can better represent the people of Massachusetts at this time by bringing the experience of their history to bear on this problem."
True Compass: A Memoir Page 22
