“Let It All Out”
In the midst of all the postassassination turmoil in her life, Jackie Kennedy had gone ahead with plans for the birthday parties of her children. Since they were born in the same week three years apart, it was decided that it would be easier to combine their celebrations. John’s earlier party (the evening of the funeral) had been marked by so much sadness that Jackie thought it only fair for him to have another with his sister. Concentrating on the planning of such a party would be a much-needed distraction for Jackie, but more important, she wanted the children to be as happy as possible during this dark time. Already the loss of their father had robbed them of so much; both children were emotionally devastated, reacting to the news in their own way.
At the direction of Jackie’s mother, Maud Shaw was given the unhappy and difficult task of telling the children that their father had died. It was feared that they would hear the news from elsewhere before Jackie’s return from Dallas if Shaw didn’t act quickly.
“I can’t help crying, Caroline, because I have some very sad news to tell you,” the nanny began. “Your father has gone to look after Patrick. Patrick was so lonely in heaven. He didn’t know anyone there. Now he has the best friend anyone could have.”
On hearing the news, Caroline cried so violently that the nanny feared she might choke. Later when Shaw told John Jr. that his father had gone to heaven, the uncomprehending three-year-old asked, “Did he take his big plane with him?”
Shaw couldn’t help smiling. “Yes, John,” she replied. “He probably did.”
“I wonder when he’s coming back,” the bewildered child then asked.
The party was held in the kindergarten that Jackie had instituted in the White House solarium for her daughter and her friends. “The first year, it had been a cooperative nursery school with mothers, and Mrs. Kennedy included, taking turns as teacher,” recalled Jackie’s secretary, Pam Turnure, of Jackie’s “schoolhouse.” “Their school life would be integrated into what was going on in the White House. If there was going to be a ceremony on the lawn, then part of the day’s activities would be to watch from the balcony.”
John and Caroline had eight childhood friends each—including a few of their cousins—seated at two tables, with two separate birthday cakes.
Jackie showed up at the noisy little affair dressed simply in a black cocktail dress, without jewelry. She appeared thinner, her shoulders, though, seemed somehow broader.
Maud Shaw remembered: “She still looked pale and drawn, but smiled for the first time since the tragedy hit her. She chuckled aloud when John took a huge breath to blow out his three candles, but the sadness was still heavy in her eyes.”
Later, Ethel, just back from her trip with Bobby, stopped by the party to give each child a wrapped gift and to pick up two of her children who were in attendance. In spite of Jackie’s smile, Ethel immediately recognized the pain on her face, so clearly visible in the newly etched lines on her forehead. With some trepidation, Ethel approached her.
There had obviously always been a certain uneasiness between the two Kennedy wives. The boisterous, wisecracking Ethel had watched Jackie follow her in marriage into the family, and stood aside as she was eclipsed by the reserved and elegant younger woman. But Ethel saw her now not as a woman to envy but rather as one to pity because of the tragic turn of events in her life. In years gone by, Ethel had been stoic in her reaction to tragedy. Jackie recalled that even when her parents were killed, she seemed unaffected, until Jackie made a point of telling her how sorry she was for her loss. But the enormity of the tragedy that had befallen the Kennedy family was enough to break even the unflappable Ethel.
“Oh, Jackie, I don’t know what to say to you,” Ethel emotionally told her, in front of Maud Shaw and the others, including the kindergarten teacher, Jacqueline Hirsh. “I just wish I knew what to say, or how to help you. You know that Jack is with God, don’t you?”
Ethel realized that Jackie didn’t have her faith. Jackie was a Roman Catholic who felt that religion was really at its best with rituals. She had gone to confession after Jack’s murder, but didn’t know what to confess. All she wanted to know from the priest was why God would have done “something so terrible as to take my husband from me.” Perhaps Ethel asked that question because she was at a loss for anything else to say that might bring her grieving sister-in-law some comfort.
“I know,” Jackie murmured back. She smiled genuinely at the other Mrs. Kennedy, visibly touched that Ethel would want to pass on to her the one thing that had never failed to help her through her own troubles—her unwavering faith. She told Ethel that they would “always be family,” even if they did have their differences.
Upon hearing Jackie’s reaffirmation of familial ties, Ethel let loose a torrent of words and tears so uncharacteristic of her it stunned everyone in the room. It was all “too terrible,” she cried. She didn’t know how she was going to go on with her life, and feared that Bobby couldn’t go on, either. “Everything has changed,” she said.
Ethel allowed herself to go on for several minutes before taking a deep breath of resolve. “But we just have to be strong, Jackie. We have no choice but to be strong, do we?”
Jackie nodded. “For them,” she agreed, motioning toward the table of laughing tots.
The two women embraced, with Ethel burying her head in Jackie’s shoulder. Then she fled from the room, so upset that she forgot to take her two children with her.
Jackie, left alone in the corner, began to cry. She looked around for her purse, but before long Maud Shaw approached with a handkerchief. “I was doing fine until Ethel came,” Jackie said with an embarrassed smile. “Now look at me. What a sight.” Both women began laughing.
After Ethel left, Joan arrived with Eunice and Pat. Eunice and Pat immediately walked over to Jackie, who was still sitting at the table alone, and began talking quietly with her. Joan, however, stood in a corner watching her children Kara, four, and Teddy Jr., two, who were playing with the other children.
When Jackie noticed Joan standing awkwardly alone, she excused herself from Pat and Eunice and went to her. The two embraced and, almost immediately, Joan began to sob. Jackie, who had just been through her own crying jag following Ethel’s, appeared strong and tearless.
“It’s all right, Joan,” Jackie whispered. “Let it all out. Let every bit of it out.”
Then, still embracing her sister-in-law, Jackie gently patted Joan on the back as Joan cried softly.
Aftermath
After the funeral for John Fitzgerald Kennedy, while the nation continued to mourn its slain President, the government began to resume its normal operations. It had been the idea of Secretary of State Dean Rusk and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara to move Johnson into the Oval Office quickly in order to get down to the business of running the country. However, Bobby asked LBJ to stay out of the Oval Office until at least three days after the funeral. “And there was Jack’s rocking chair,” Ethel later recalled ruefully, “upside down in the hallway, ready to be moved out.”
Jackie had no interest in any of the inner-office workings of the Presidency at this time. In the months following the tragedy, her moods swung wildly from anger to hopelessness to resolve and back to anger. Whereas she once chose her words with care, now they tumbled out indiscriminately. “I never had or wanted a life of my own,” Jackie said publicly at the time, a statement that really was not true but did demonstrate her level of confusion.
She had grown so accustomed to being First Lady that having to relinquish that life so unexpectedly left Jackie feeling utterly lost and without direction. Always a contemplative person, though, she instinctively knew that she had to get a grip on herself and think about her future, if only for the sake of her children. But in the silence of her heart, she must have also realized that her life as a president’s wife had left her unprepared for her desolate existence as his widow and single mother of his children. Also, the tremendous guilt she felt at having lived t
hrough the Dallas experience, while her husband died, was almost overwhelming.
“Why, oh why, did I survive?” she asked Kenny O’Donnell. “Why Jack instead of me? Why wasn’t I killed?”
As Jackie Kennedy struggled with memories of her husband’s brutal murder, she worried she would now be doomed to spend her life in the public eye as a living, perpetual reminder of the nightmare—a tragic symbol of a nation’s inconsolable grief. She might have been able to accept that fate, but would her children ever be able to exist with such a shroud of death over their lives? Jackie wanted them to have as normal a life as possible, and she would do what she could to shield them from public scrutiny and curiosity, yet she knew that circumstances would probably make this an impossible task. “Everywhere I go, I am his wife,” she said. “With his kids. Seeing us in person somehow brings him back to life for them.”
While John was too young to fully comprehend what had happened in Dallas—he just knew that Daddy was “in heaven”—six-year-old Caroline not only understood it fully but was also deeply affected by it. She would vehemently spit out the word “assassinated” with great, and very adult, anger. Whereas she was once a happy, carefree, and precocious child, Caroline became withdrawn, sullen, and troubled in the weeks after her father’s murder. Jackie, horrified to find her daughter walking about with her fists clenched, decided to consult Erik Erikson, a celebrated child psychoanalyst and author of the then-popular book Childhood and Society.
After the scholarly, gray-haired Erikson, a Harvard professor, counseled the two children on several occasions, Jackie was happy with their progress. It would take years, though, for Caroline to accept the fact that her father had been senselessly murdered.
So distraught was Jackie at this time that she actually considered giving John Jr. and Caroline to Bobby and Ethel to raise for a short time. What kind of mother could she be, she reasoned, under the circumstances? She couldn’t even care for her own emotional needs, she reasoned, how would she care for her children’s? She felt inadequate as a parent. The thought that she would probably be alone for many years to come made her feel even more helpless and desperate.
It had actually been specified in Jackie’s 1960 will that if anything happened to her and Jack, their children should be raised by Joan and Ted (further testimony of Jackie’s strong feelings for Joan because she certainly didn’t seem to have much of a rapport with Ted at this time). However, after the President’s assassination Jackie perhaps realized that Joan was in no shape to care for Caroline and John Jr., even if just for a short time.
Jackie and Ethel had a number of conversations about the possibility of John Jr. and Caroline moving into Hickory Hill, if only for a year. After that time, if she was able to do so, Jackie would take her children back and they would attempt to start a new life together without Jack. But then Jackie changed her mind.
The reality of the chaos that was Hickory Hill—no order, no discipline, a lot of people coming and going, children screaming and hollering from morning to night—came flooding back to her. She had never felt comfortable with the way Ethel reared her family, a rowdy fend-for-yourself kind of environment. In the end, with Jackie’s unyielding sense of propriety, she could not envision her children being raised at Hickory Hill as part of what she viewed as practically a platoon from a guerrilla army.
Besides, she now saw herself as the chief protector of what used to be called “the sanctity of the home.” After carefully considering the idea, she realized it was unthinkable to give her children away, even for a year. She loved them too much.
Of course, Jackie Kennedy wasn’t the only one torn apart by the President’s assassination. Jack had been the center of the family, adored by everyone. His career had been their life’s work. Now that he was gone, none of the Kennedys—sisters-in-law Ethel and Joan included—would ever be the same. As well as the overwhelming sense of grief they felt, for they loved Jack dearly, there was also an aching for something they all knew they would miss: the joy of the White House experience in the way Jack and Jackie had created it. They might try to have joy in the future—and they would have plenty of good times elsewhere—but it would never be exactly the same as it was during the Kennedy administration. Jack and Jackie had been at the center of a crazy, golden time for everyone. But it was behind them now. As a result, the family’s infrastructure was knocked off-kilter. Joan’s and Ethel’s husbands, Jack’s brothers Ted and Bobby, found themselves trapped in their own private hells because of their older brother’s murder, and their wives were powerless to assist them in any way.
Ted’s deep sorrow seemed to find its outlet in promiscuity. More than ever, he also found solace in the bottle, drowning his misery in alcohol.
Unfortunately, Joan’s grief also plummeted her into a deep, dark depression. She had great affection for Jack and could not comprehend such violence. She was also concerned about Jackie, her niece Caroline, and nephew John Jr. Soon she also found herself relying on alcohol to get through her long days and endless nights. Kennedy intimates were concerned that Joan often seemed to be a bit dazed at social gatherings—even those during the day—and whisperings began to be heard that she was drinking too much. “It was true,” said her good friend John Braden. “I do believe that the assassination pushed Joan over the edge in terms of her drinking. That was the turning point. Ted became more difficult, she was wracked with grief and sorrow, and she began to drink.”
While there was enough suffering to go around, perhaps nobody felt the agony as deeply as Bobby Kennedy. He feared that one of his campaigns—whether against organized crime, union racketeers, Castro, or other dark forces—had brought about the assassination by retaliation. “I thought they would get one of us,” Bobby had said on the afternoon of the assassination. “But I thought it would be me.”
Bobby’s aide, John Seigenthaler, recalled that his emotional torment was so deep that he took on the look of a man in physical pain, “almost as if he were on the rack or that he had a toothache or that he had a heart attack… it was pain and it showed itself as being pain.”
“He was virtually nonfunctioning,” said Pierre Salinger. “He would walk for hours by himself.”
Jackie’s cousin, John Davis, concurs. “On the day of the funeral, I had never seen such a destroyed man in my entire life as Bobby Kennedy. He could hardly hold out his hand to shake another.”
Ethel didn’t know how to deal with Bobby as the silent, brooding, and moody man he had become since Dallas and, as she would always do in times of crisis, she decided to rely on God to get her and her husband through this time. “If he only prayed more,” she said of Bobby, “he would find solace in God’s healing power.”
Ethel did what she could. On a trip to New York, she would take him to see Hello Dolly! in hopes of cheering him up. “That did more for Bobby than anything else,” she would tell writer Bill Davidson. “As he entered the theater, the sophisticated, blasé New York audience rose to its feet and applauded. The only other time I ever saw an audience do that was when Jack Kennedy went to the theater. I try to expose Bobby to that sort of thing as much as possible, but it doesn’t always work.”
It’s interesting that Ethel would choose to have Bobby bask in public attention as a way to help him get over his grief. When he was with his sister-in-law Jackie, it was a different story. Jackie was more contemplative, shunning the public eye and encouraging Bobby to do the same thing. She and Bobby were in perfect understanding about their mutual torment and how they wanted to deal with it. As a result, the two reached out to each other for comfort and formed a special bond during this dark time. Jackie shared the loss of Jack with his brother, and he with her, in a way that didn’t involve Ethel. Bobby would often visit Jackie at her Georgetown home, and the two would sit in front of her drawing room fireplace, reading poetry, sharing tears, and feeling their mutual pain and sense of loneliness. Together they would visit Jack’s grave, leave flowers, and weep. He was beginning to fill a role as substitute fa
ther for Jackie’s children as well.
At Easter that year, Jackie and her children vacationed in Stowe, Vermont, with Bobby.
“It was on that trip, I believe, that Bobby suggested Jackie leave Washington,” said Kennedy intimate Chuck Spalding. “He felt that she was unhappy in that Georgetown fishbowl, and that she would be better off in New York. She could get lost in the city, he told her. She would find a measure of privacy there. She took his advice.
“At this time, she was concerned about her financial future. The public assumed she was rich, but she was far from it. Jack had left her about $70,000 in cash, plus all of his personal effects. There was also the interest income from two trusts, which I believe were valued at something like ten million. In all, she would have about $200,000 a year to live on. For Jackie, that wasn’t much. Bobby was trying to arrange for her to receive roughly $50,000 a year from the Kennedys, but the whole thing was absurd. Jackie on a budget?”
A few weeks later, while house-hunting in New York, Jackie, Ethel, Bobby, Nancy Tuckerman (Jackie’s good friend and secretary), and a large group of friends enjoyed dinner at Le Pavilion, an elegant Manhattan restaurant. The evening began with champagne, served as an aperitif, and with the first course, caviar with dry toast. The main course was navarin d’agneau (lamb stew), with which a red wine was served. Dessert was a chocolat soufflé, followed by café filtre, and then more champagne. The subject of Jackie’s future came up.
“Well, I need to do something,” she reasoned as she held her cup of café filtre, her pinkie finger extended delicately. “The Kennedys aren’t going to support me forever. I have to face facts. But what can I do? Get a job? Me?”
Everybody laughed, knowing a good joke when they heard one.
PART SEVEN
Moving Out of the White House
Jackie, Ethel, Joan: Women of Camelot Page 29
