End of Days

by James L. Swanson

  But Jackie had nowhere to go. She longed to return to her former neighborhood in Georgetown, but she and the president had sold the house at 3307 N Street NW after the election. On the night of November 22, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara had offered to get it for her. “That first night [he] said he’d buy back our old house in Georgetown. That was the first thing I thought that night—where will I go? I wanted my old house back.” But she chose not to take advantage of his heartfelt gesture. “I thought—how can I go back to that bedroom? I said to myself—you must never forget Jack, but you musn’t be morbid.” W. Averell Harriman, the famous American diplomat and elder statesman who had held several posts in the Kennedy administration, offered her the use of his elegant residence at 3038 N Street NW, a few blocks from the old Kennedy place. She accepted the offer.

  But before she left the White House, there were several things she wanted to do. On December 3, just eleven days after the assassination, Jackie attended a Department of the Treasury ceremony honoring Secret Service agent Clint Hill with the Exceptional Service Award for his bravery on November 22. She had insisted that he be recognized. Her memories were fresh and painful, and it was difficult to relive that day, but she had grown close to Hill, and she wanted to show by her presence that she did not blame her trusted guardian for her husband’s assassination. She also informed the Secret Service that she wanted Hill to stay on as her personal agent.

  Jackie packed her children’s toys, books, and clothing in cardboard boxes that she labeled herself with marking pens. She instructed artisans to carve an inscription in the marble mantel above the fireplace in the president’s bedroom: “In this room lived John Fitzgerald Kennedy with his wife Jacqueline during the two years, ten months, and two days he was President of the United States.”

  She also handwrote thank-you notes to members of the White House staff.

  Jackie Kennedy’s self-imposed two-week deadline for leaving the White House—Friday, December 6—coincided with the Presidential Medal of Freedom ceremony, which had been scheduled long before the assassination. The printed program included some of the words President Kennedy had intended to say that day. Jackie chose not to attend, but President Johnson presented the medals, and his opening remarks acknowledged the tragedy:

  Over the past two weeks, our Nation has known moments of the utmost sorrow, of anguish and shame. This day, however, is a moment of great pride. In the shattering sequence of events that began 14 days ago, we encountered in its full horror man’s capacity for hatred and destruction. There is little we do not now know of evil, but it is time to turn once more to the pursuits of honor and excellence and achievement that have always marked the true direction of the American people. . . . I want particularly to thank you for reminding us that whatever evil moments may pass by, we are and we shall continue to be a people touched with greatness called to high destiny to serve great purposes.

  Then LBJ read the citations aloud and awarded thirty-one medals. The honorees included: singer Marian Anderson, cellist Pablo Casals, architect Mies van der Rohe, photographer Edward Steichen, critic Edmund Wilson, playwright Thornton Wilder, artist Andrew Wyeth, and U.S. Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter.

  President Johnson remembered the man in whose place he stood: “John Kennedy is gone. Each of us will know that we are the lesser for his death. But each of us is somehow larger because he lived. A sadness has settled on the world which will never leave it while we who knew him are still here.” Then the president made a surprise announcement: “As a simple gesture, but one which I know he would not have counted small, it is my privilege at this moment to award the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously to John Fitzgerald Kennedy on behalf of the great Republic for which he lived and died.”

  The citation read:

  John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 35th President of the United States, soldier, scholar, statesman, defender of freedom, pioneer for peace, author of hope—combining courage with reason, and combatting hate with compassion, he led the land he loved toward new frontiers of opportunity for all men and peace for all time. Beloved in a life of selfless service, mourned by all in a death of senseless crime, the energy, faith and devotion he brought to his extraordinarily successful though tragically brief endeavors will hereafter “light our country and all who serve it—and the glow from that fire can truly light the world.”

  No one attending the event knew it, but Jackie had watched the ceremony from a spot where she was hidden from view. It was a bittersweet honor to watch another president award the medals her husband had looked forward to presenting.

  On the day she left the White House, Jackie left a note and flowers for the new First Lady, Lady Bird Johnson. She and John Jr. paid a farewell call on White House usher B. C. West. They posed with him in his office for a photograph. John sat on his desk while Jackie, putting on a brave front for the camera, smiled. But she wore a black dress. In other photos taken of her that day, she did not smile.

  Then Jacqueline Kennedy left the White House, returning to her beloved Georgetown, where her life with Jack had begun. She vowed never to set foot in the presidential mansion again. Now she was back on familiar ground and took comfort in it. She enjoyed private visits from her most intimate friends. Her brother-in-law Robert Kennedy was a regular caller.

  On December 11, 1963, the McNamaras sent over a gift to Jackie at the Harriman house. It was an oil painting of the president by the artist Charles Fox. When Jackie unwrapped it, she was shocked. She did not want it. It was not an issue of whether or not she liked it. She could not bear to look at it. It was too painful. She sent a handwritten note asking forgiveness for declining a gift “from the man in his cabinet who gave the most (as much as Jack’s own brother Bobby gave)” to JFK.

  Jackie explained: “I am in a strange locking of horns where I am sure the Secretary of Defense and his wife can outwit me. PLEASE I don’t want you to give anything more for Jack—you gave him all—and my consolation is that he will be remembered as great—because of Bob McNamara.”

  Jackie confided that she could not even bear to display photographs of her husband. “The only photograph I have here of Jack is where his back is turned.” She did not hang the oil painting. The picture was on the floor, “propped up against the wall at the little study outside my bedroom. Tonight John came out of my bedroom with a lollipop in his mouth. The picture I love was right in his way—and he took the lollipop out and kissed the picture and said Goodnight Daddy.”

  That broke her heart. Jackie warned the secretary of defense, “Mr. Fox may find sugary imprints he never painted in, on that picture, but you see why we could never bear to have it near us—it brings to the surface too many things.”

  Jackie suggested that the McNamaras take back the painting and donate it to the Kennedy Library several years down the road, after the institution was built. “So if you wish to give it to the Library and keep it till then, it would be such an honor—but what I would love most of all—is if both of you who have given so much would give nothing more—except your friendship always.”

  ON DECEMBER 22, three days before Christmas and a month after the assassination, President Johnson went to the Lincoln Memorial and spoke at a now forgotten candlelight tribute for John Kennedy: “Thirty days and a few hours ago, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 35th President of the United States, died a martyr’s death. The world will not forget what he did here. He will live on in our hearts, which will be his shrine. Throughout his life, he had malice toward none; he had charity for all. But a senseless act of mindless malice struck down this man of charity, and we shall never be the same.”

  Johnson echoed the words of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address. “One hundred years ago . . . the 16th President of the United States made a few appropriate remarks at Gettysburg. . . . He lives on in this memorial, which is his tabernacle. As it was 100 years ago, so it is now. We have been bent in sorrow, but not in purpose. We buried Abraham Lincoln and John Kennedy, but we did not bury their dream
s or their visions. They are our dreams and our visions today, for President Lincoln and John Kennedy moved toward those nobler dreams and visions where the needs of the people dwell. On this eve of Christmas, in this time of grief and unity, of sadness and continuity, let there be for all people in need the light of an era of new hope and a time of new resolve. Let the light shine and let this Christmas be our Thanksgiving and our dedication. . . . So let us here on this Christmas night determine that John Kennedy did not live or die in vain. . . .”

  FOR JACQUELINE Kennedy, it was a quiet, sad, and lonely Christmas. It was the beginning of a long, dark time for her. She should have been supervising the decoration of the White House tree and the historic rooms and hosting festive receptions. Now, after only two Christmases there, she was living in a strange and empty house. But she had not forgotten the handful of people who had meant the most to her and the president.

  So she selected special gifts—books, photos, personal mementos—for her intimates. To the secretary of defense, she gave a specially bound copy of Inaugural Addresses of the Presidents of the United States from George Washington 1789 to John F. Kennedy 1961. Jackie had the plain Government Printing Office edition custom-bound in maroon leather and the cover gilt-embossed with the presidential seal and the recipient’s initials below. It was one of eighty-five copies that were bound this way.

  Jackie inscribed it “To Robert McNamara—The President was going to give you this for Christmas—Please accept it now from me—With my devotion always for all you did for Jack. Jackie, December 1963.”

  To Dave Powers, she inscribed another copy of that book: “With my devotion always for all you did to give Jack so many happy hours—You and I will miss him most. Jackie.”

  She also gave him a framed set of three black-and-white photographs of Powers playing with John Jr. She inscribed the mat “For Dave Powers—Who gave the president so many of his happiest hours—and who will now do the same for his son, John Jr. With my devotion always—for your devotion to Jack. Jackie, Christmas 1963.”

  In January 1964, Jacqueline Kennedy went to the imposing, fortresslike headquarters of the Department of Justice, which occupied an entire city block of the south side of Pennsylvania Avenue between Ninth and Tenth streets. She rode an elevator to the fifth floor and stepped into a hallway decorated with huge, vintage WPA-style hand-painted murals depicting scenes from 1930s America. This was the executive-management floor of the department. She proceeded to a doorway marked by a wood sign painted with gold letters. It was the office of the attorney general, her brother-in-law Robert Kennedy. The film crew was waiting. She took her seat in a leather club chair placed near a fireplace hearth. The homey setting and crackling fire made it look as though she was anywhere but in a government office building.

  The crew switched on the lights and aimed the cameras at Jackie, and she began to speak. It was for a short film—less than three minutes long—to thank the American people for their condolences and expressions of love for her husband. She thanked them for their letters, promised they would be archived at the Kennedy Library, and said all the usual niceties one might expect a widow in her position to say. Then she caught viewers off guard with an emotional remark that revealed how much she missed him.

  In the middle of her statement, she paused and said, “All his bright light gone from the world.”

  In the finished film, shown at movie theaters throughout the nation, audiences read a superimposed title on the screen: “Mrs. Kennedy Speaks. Thanks 800,000 Who Sent Sympathy.” Then Jackie spoke. “I want to take this opportunity to express my appreciation for the thousands of messages, nearly 800,000 in all, which my children and I have received over the past few weeks. The knowledge of the affection in which my husband was held by all of you has sustained me, and the warmth of these tributes is something I shall never forget. Whenever I can bear to, I read them. . . . All of you who have written to me know how much we all loved him, and that he returned that love in full measure.”

  Jackie promised to write back to her sympathizers. “It is my greatest wish that all of these letters be acknowledged. They will be, but it will take a long time to do so. But I know you will understand. Each and every message is to be treasured, not only for my children, but so that future generations will know how much our country and people in other nations thought of him. Your letters will be placed with his papers, in the library to be erected in his memory along the Charles River, in Boston Massachusetts. I hope that in years to come many of you and your children will be able to visit the Kennedy Library. It will be, we hope, not only a memorial to President Kennedy but a living center, of study of the times in which he lived, and a center for young people and for scholars from all over the world. May I thank you again, on behalf of my children, and of the president’s family, for the comfort that your letters have brought to us all. Thank you.”

  Jackie had decided to make Georgetown her permanent home, and in February 1964 she bought a house of her own at 3017 N Street NW, near the Harriman place. She wanted to live a quiet life. But she could not find the peace she craved to heal her wounds. Both of her Georgetown homes became instant tourist attractions. Indeed, on the day she had moved into the Harriman house, news photographers and filmmakers were waiting outside to snap pictures and make movies of her. A sad image from that day shows her in a black mourning dress, her head held high as she tried to put on a brave smile, while she led her children into their new home and their new lives.

  It was only the beginning. The home she purchased became another tourist attraction. In the days ahead, people stopped on the sidewalk and gaped, hoping to peek through the windows or, better yet, to glimpse Jackie entering or leaving the premises. Tour buses clogged the street and unloaded leering passengers. Photographers staked out the house day and night, hoping to take a salable photograph of the widow and her children. Some photographers even snapped images of other photographers photographing the house. Photojournalists not only stalked her at her home, but began following her wherever she went.

  She had become an American heroine. People continued to mail condolence letters to her. Magazines would not stop publishing articles about her. She had become a public obsession. Jackie could not leave her home without taking the risk that intrusive—and possibly dangerous—strangers might accost her in the street. It happened all over again when she moved from the Harriman place to her new house across the street.

  THE TRIBUTES continued through the rest of 1964. To raise support for the future Kennedy Library, Jackie helped organize a traveling exhibition of JFK’s favorite mementos. She wrote the foreword to the promotional catalog brochure: “My husband had looked forward to retiring to his library at the end of his time in Washington. Now he will not see the building to be erected in his name.”

  Once again, Life magazine, just as it did so many times when the Kennedys were in the White House, put her picture on the cover and published her essay about the exhibition.

  There were more tributes to come. In March 1964, National Geographic published a special issue devoted to the assassination. The magazine was a monthly with a long lead time, so it came out much later than the weekly December 1963 and January 1964 issues of Life, Look, and the Saturday Evening Post.

  The Geographic’s esteemed president and editor, Melville Bell Grosvenor, wrote, “His life was such—the radiance he shed—that if we live to be a hundred, we will remember how he graced this earth, and how he left it. Only the future can assign to John Fitzgerald Kennedy his true place in history. When men now boys are old, in distant time beyond the year 2000, they will say, ‘I remember, I remember when they brought him home, the murdered President, from Dallas.’ . . . Again and again the story will be told—just as I recall my Grandfather Grosvenor, at 92, telling me graphically of how, as a young student at Amherst College in Massachusetts, he traveled by horse and train to the bier of the martyred Lincoln.”

  IN JULY 1964, Jacqueline Kennedy announced that she was selling her Geo
rgetown house. She had moved in just five months ago. Not only that. She was leaving Washington. Her decision shocked the political and social elites of the nation’s capital. The assassination had transformed Jackie Kennedy into a national obsession. Yes, she had enjoyed great popularity as First Lady, but this was something more.

  It was irrational, pathological, and even ominous. She hoped that people’s fascination with her would die down. She had hoped that one day soon she could stroll the streets of Georgetown, visiting her favorite bookshops, florists, antique shops, and grocery stores as she did in the old days when Jack was a senator. But the harassment got worse every month, until she could no longer endure it. To escape, Jackie left the capital city she once loved and moved to New York City in 1964. So less than a year after the assassination, in an effort to reclaim her private life, Jacqueline Kennedy abandoned the capital. She said good-bye to her Washington days and moved to Manhattan, where she had spent many happy times before her marriage. She promised herself to honor the vow she had made when she had moved out of the White House—she would never set foot there again.

  The move did not end the obsession. One relentless photographer specialized in stalking her and made a career out of taking pictures at unguarded moments. For the rest of her life, Jackie Kennedy remained an iconic figure, forever an unwilling star in the spotlight on the American stage.

  FOR FOURTEEN months, between November 22, 1963, and January 20, 1965, America did not have a vice president. The Constitution made no provision to create a new one when Lyndon Johnson was elevated to the presidency. Johnson was uncontested as the Democratic nominee for president in 1964, and speculation over whom Johnson might choose as his running mate became one of the most popular guessing games in political circles. He was expected to make the announcement at the Democratic convention in late August 1964.