Jackie, Ethel, Joan: Women of Camelot

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  Though she had been in the public eye for some time now, this reception was unlike anything Joan Kennedy had ever experienced. Perhaps she thought, “So this is what it’s like to be Jackie,” as she shook the sweaty hands of hundreds of excited fans and was offered so many bouquets of flowers that she was forced to leave them on the ground at her feet. Eventually, she was hip-high in colorful bouquets.

  There was such a turnout, in fact, that the exhibit would be forced to stay open long after the scheduled closing hour of 9 P.M. Inside, the crowd turned reverential once the people were in the presence of all that displayed history.

  Joan later recalled, “It was almost as if they were in church, the way they were hushed and the way they examined each of the objects.”

  The next day, Joan and Candy drove south to Dunganstown, where they had the opportunity to meet Mary Kennedy Ryan and other relatives. “She was lovely,” one reporter said of Joan. “She and the Kennedy relations sat down, stared at one another for a moment, and then they burst into tears. ‘I can’t believe he’s gone, and I can’t believe I’m here,’ Joan said, weeping. They gave her a wonderful reception, made her feel like a queen. They said, ‘Look at how much they love you here,’ to which Joan responded, ‘It’s not me they love. It’s Jack.’ When she left, everyone was all smiles. People were saying, ‘Why don’t we see more of Joan Kennedy?’ ”

  The next stop for Joan and the JFK exhibit was London, then Paris, Frankfurt, and finally Berlin, where she would be appearing on November 21 at Congress Hall the night before the first anniversary of Jack’s death. That evening, the Berlin hall was packed with devotees all anxious to be in the presence of any Kennedy. Many had actually seen the President in person when, in June of the last year of his life, more than half of West Berlin’s population came to hear him speak.

  Now, a year and five months later, it was Joan’s turn to be the Kennedy of choice. The Berliners would not let her down.

  There was such enthusiasm for Joan Kennedy’s appearance that overly enthusiastic officials almost caused a riot when they decided to open the doors to everyone—those with tickets as well as those who weren’t able to purchase any because they were sold out. Everywhere Joan looked from the platform on which she stood, she saw people were smiling up at her, cheering her, loving her. It was surreal, she would later admit.

  Under a bright spotlight, Joan stood in front of a microphone on the platform of Congress Hall before the shadowy silhouettes of thousands of figures. She hesitated a moment as the crowd hushed itself.

  In a small, trembling voice that was amplified so loudly she was startled at the sound, Joan thanked the throng for its devotion to Jack. “Your love for him is so clear to me, to all of us,” she said. A woman interpreter translated her remarks, and after only a few sentences, Joan had to stop and wait once again for the applause to die down. Her sister, Candy, sitting on the side of the platform, looked at her in amazement.

  For a moment, Joan seemed helpless in the face of such overwhelming adulation, but then she must have called upon some hidden resolve because she managed to continue. Suppressing her nervousness, she rose to the occasion.

  “I am so proud of John F. Kennedy,” she said, her voice echoing louder and stronger, “and all that he stood for, and all that he was to America, and to the world—the great, truly great, man he was.”

  At the end of her brief speech, Joan Bennett Kennedy spoke the words that had caused such a torrent of emotion when last heard spoken by her brother-in-law, the President: “Ich bin ein Berliner,” she declared, her voice clear and authoritative, her arms outstretched to the cheering throng.

  The audience rose to its feet in a standing ovation. Flashbulbs popped all about as Joan Kennedy, tears streaming down her face, stood on the stage and let the crowd’s adoration wash over her, a tidal wave of love, respect, and admiration.

  Joan’s Continuing Struggle

  The week following Teddy’s accident, Bobby appeared on the cover of Life magazine and was quoted as saying that Teddy’s accident had convinced him not to run for the Senate, that his priority should be his family. In truth, Bobby had already decided he was going to run for the Senate if LBJ did not choose him as a running mate. The Life story was actually a calculated attempt to force Johnson’s hand.

  Bobby didn’t hold out much hope for a position on the LBJ ticket, though, and he really didn’t want the job, anyway. However, he would waffle on the matter for some time, strategizing what to do if asked, and how to proceed if not asked. For his part, Johnson became so determined to avoid having Bobby on the ticket that he soon announced his intention to bypass all members of his cabinet for the position. Richard Goodwin, speechwriter for LBJ, told Bobby, “If Johnson had to choose between you and Ho Chi Minh as a running mate, he’d go with Ho Chi Minh.”

  Two days after Johnson chose Minnesota Senator Hubert Humphrey as a running mate, Bobby announced his Senate candidacy. It was a difficult campaign, however, and Bobby was worn down by comparisons to his late brother. Also, long a Massachusetts resident (although he spent his boyhood in New York), Bobby’s decision to take a residence in New York and seek public office there was resented by many who accused him of being a “carpetbagger,” insisting that a senator should represent the state where he lived and knew its problems.

  He considered leaving the race after just a month, until he received an encouraging letter from Jackie. “It was a most feeling letter, in which she implored him not to give up, not to quit,” said Lem Billings. “She told him she needed him and that the children, especially John Jr., needed him as a surrogate father, somebody they could turn to, now that their own father was gone.

  “Jackie also wrote that the country needed Bobby, and that the time had come to honor Jack’s memory rather than continue to mourn it.”

  Partly emboldened by Jackie’s missive and also by his desire to be of public service and continue Jack’s work, Bobby continued in politics by resigning as Attorney General, turning down the Cabinet position offered him by LBJ (which he never really wanted), and running for the Senate, representing New York.

  Jackie was enthusiastic about Bobby’s decision. She gave interviews about him, appeared at his campaign office, was photographed with him, and made her support of him clear. Her willingness to make public appearances for him was not surprising to those who knew of their relationship. Of him she had said, “Bobby is a man for whom I’d put my hand in a fire.”

  Jackie met for tea with New York Post publisher Dorothy Schiff to promote her brother-in-law’s ideals and, she hoped, to win an important endorsement from that publication. “He must win,” she told her, “he will win. Or maybe it is just because one wants it so much that one thinks that. People say he is ruthless and cold,” Jackie observed. “He isn’t like the others. I think it was his place in the family, with four girls and being younger than two brothers and so much smaller. He hasn’t got the graciousness they had. He is really very shy, but he has the kindest heart in the world.” (Bobby did win the Post’s endorsement, though it’s doubtful that it was solely because of Jackie’s intervention.)

  Bobby’s New York campaign against incumbent Republican Kenneth Keating was an uproarious one, with wild crowds everywhere he went in New York just wanting to glimpse him and his wife, Ethel. When he went on to win the election to the Senate, there was no doubt that Jackie’s quiet assistance helped him win many votes that would have otherwise gone to his opponent.

  On January 4, 1965, Bobby Kennedy took the oath of office alongside Ted. “What’s it like to have a wife who is becoming so much a part of history?” a reporter for the Boston Globe asked Ted. The writer was obviously referring to Joan’s successful campaign on Ted’s behalf, and also her triumph in Europe. As Joan smiled broadly by his side, Ted shrugged. “She’s a good girl,” he said, dismissively. “Don’tcha think?”

  With those words, Joan seemed to shrink, the sadness on her face clear to any observer.

  By mid-1965, some in t
he Kennedy camp thought of Joan Kennedy as a diamond in the rough. Though she had always maintained that she didn’t want to be a public person, even she—with all her doubts and insecurities—had to admit that much of what she set out to do in front of an audience she seemed to do well, whether it was campaigning for her husband in Massachusetts or talking about her deceased brother-in-law’s personal effects in Europe.

  Later, in the spring, Joan would have an opportunity to distinguish herself as more than another Kennedy wife when asked to do something she enjoyed that had little to do with politics: narrate Peter and the Wolf, by the Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev, for a fund-raiser. With her background in music, perhaps Joan had an advantage over most narrators; her work in this regard was touted by some Washington critics. She would be so successful at this new endeavor—at a lectern at the front of a stage with an eighty-member orchestra playing behind her—that she would be asked to narrate Peter and the Wolf several more times over the years.

  Still, Joan was conflicted. While she may have appeared to be comfortable with crowds, it was all an act. The truth was that, except in fleeting moments, whenever she put herself in the public forum she was doing something she didn’t enjoy.

  “You need to bring her out more, like Ethel,” Bobby told Ted at a New York charity event in front of a group of Kennedy aides. “She’s too shy, too quiet. No one knows what to make of her.”

  “I’m lucky to get her out of the house,” Ted replied.

  “But why?” Bobby asked. “She was great when you were flat on your back, she was great in Europe. She needs to continue in that vein, like a Kennedy.”

  It seemed as if almost everyone around her—Jackie, Ethel, Bobby, Rose, and even the Kennedy sisters, Pat, Jean, and Eunice—saw the great potential in Joan Kennedy to do anything to which she set her mind. However, it seemed that because she could not win her husband’s approval, nothing she accomplished meant anything to her. So, rather than be energized by those accomplishments, she appeared exhausted by them, possibly because they did nothing to ingratiate her to Ted. Perhaps she saw each achievement as really just another failure.

  During one cocktail meeting with political allies in New York at the 21 Club, Joan and Ethel seemed to be the focus of attention of every person in the club. In typically sixties’ outfits, the two sisters-in-law were a sight: Ethel was in a vinyl dress with large black-and-white squares and spaghetti shoulder straps made of rhinestones, and Joan was in a short miniskirt of a silver fabric, with enormous plastic bubble earrings. Recalls Jerry Summers, one of the security guards on duty that night at the club, “Everyone wanted to stare. It was like having major movie stars in the place.”

  At one point, the two Kennedy wives got up to go to the ladies’ room. Suddenly at least thirty women rose to follow them, all headed to the small bathroom. As soon as they saw the stampede, Bobby’s security men leapt up to run interference, attempting to pull the fans away from the Kennedy women. Ethel helped by screaming at the women, “Get back right now. Can’t a woman even go to the bathroom? What’s the matter with you people? My God, you’re animals.”

  Joan, who had enjoyed a few drinks, looked terrorized. Her hair was mussed, and mascara tears ran down her face as she spun about in the same spot, being pushed and pulled from all directions. She was a Raggedy Ann doll in a bad miniskirt. One of the guards grabbed her by the arm and practically dragged her to safety. When she finally got back to her table, she broke down crying. She and Ted left, quickly. Ethel and Bobby stayed behind, however, signing autographs, smiling, and shaking hands.

  PART NINE

  The Rumor Mill

  Was Camelot’s Guenevere having an affair with Lancelot now that King Arthur was dead and buried?

  As soon as Jackie Kennedy had settled in Manhattan, rumors began anew about the nature of her relationship with her dead husband’s brother Bobby, giving the East Coast gossip columnists something new upon which to focus in welcoming Jackie to town. Throughout the years, and in many biographies of the two Kennedys, just such a “romance” has been confirmed by people who claim to have had intimate knowledge of it.

  Kenny O’Donnell once told of an instance in the spring of 1965 when Jackie called Bobby in tears. “She was in her apartment with her kids, and the police were scouring the place with the bomb squad,” said O’Donnell. “Someone had apparently phoned in a bomb threat. Jackie was frantic, Bobby said, crying on the phone that she was going to be blown to bits with her kids, and asking what she had done to deserve this fate. It was a terrible thing.

  “She was a prisoner in that place. They were afraid to get her out of there because the caller said there was a sniper waiting for her to leave the building. She was going to be picked off as soon as she walked out. It was a night of terror; she was trapped like a caged animal. Bobby took the next plane to New York and was there in a few hours. By the time he arrived, though, the scare was over… no bomb was found. Jackie was so upset, Bobby spent the night at her place.

  “That’s where rumors got started,” said O’Donnell. “If he had been seen leaving there, then there would have been stories.” O’Donnell, who knew both Bobby and Jackie well, doesn’t believe the stories. “How could anyone be romantic after a hysterical scene like that one? She needed him, he was there for her. But as a close friend, a protector, which is what she needed, believe me.”

  The rumor of an affair between Jackie and Bobby has also been fanned by people whose relationship with both parties had been somewhat strained over the years. Gore Vidal wrote derogatorily in his memoirs, Palimpsest, that “the one person she [Jackie] ever loved, if indeed she was capable of such an emotion, was Bobby Kennedy.” However, Vidal’s animus for Bobby was well known.

  Another writer of note, Truman Capote, was quoted as having said that he was surprised “that the Jackie-Bobby love affair remained under wraps as long as it did.”*

  “Such a hurtful rumor,” observed Joan Braden, “but so typical of the kinds of stories that floated around about the Kennedy women, started up by people who didn’t think of them as real, flesh-and-blood human beings. Besides the obvious fact that Jackie was so devastated and would never be able to have a man in her life at that time, look at how bereaved Bobby was! People can’t just push all of that hurt and anger aside and jump into bed together. Maybe on a TV soap opera they can, but not in real life. It was so demeaning a rumor, to everyone concerned.”

  “Rubbish,” concurs Bobby Kennedy’s former spokesman, Frank Mankiewicz. “In people’s fantasy world of what the Kennedys were like, yes. In the real world, no.”

  Rose Kennedy’s secretary, Barbara Gibson, adds, “It’s just absurd and the kind of thing that people whispered about because it was such a juicy bit of speculation. Untrue, I am sure of it.”

  Also underscoring the rumors over the years has been the slow release of classified Secret Service documents that have indicated that Jackie and Bobby were in each other’s constant company throughout the last six months of 1964. “Considering the way J. Edgar Hoover felt about Bobby Kennedy, is it any wonder that he would attempt to turn his relationship with Jackie into something tawdry?” said Frank Mankiewicz.

  However, one person who apparently did believe the stories was Ethel. According to George Smathers, “Though there was no affair, I believe Bobby’s wife thought there was one.”

  Ethel seemed to find it difficult to accept that her husband was spending so much time with his attractive sister-in-law. It is interesting to note that in the early fifties, Bobby first fell in love with Ethel’s older sister, Pat Skakel. After his first few dates with Ethel, the shy and moody Bobby had slowly drifted to her sister, who better matched his temperament. Soon, Pat and Bobby were seriously involved. “They fell in love and dated for two years,” Ethel admitted some two decades later, but added that she didn’t like to talk about that “terrible period.”

  It was Pat whom Bobby first seriously considered marrying. However, Pat wasn’t in love with Bobby and, in ti
me, broke it off with him. Bobby, on the rebound, began dating an alluring young actress named Joan Winmill.

  But the ambitious Kennedy boys, with their sights set on politics, were brought up to be practical in their decision-making. Every move they made, from the schools they attended, to the wives they chose, was a choice made with a careful eye to the future marks they would leave in the political arena. The women they married would have to be exceptional in many ways and provide more than just temporary infatuation. The athletic, competitive Ethel, with her deeply held Catholic beliefs, fitted in perfectly with the Kennedy clan. Ethel, like Bobby and his mother Rose, attended Mass every day; she was intelligent and loyal, and what she lacked in glamour she made up for in devotion. Her offbeat humor and boisterous behavior also melded in effortlessly with the rowdy Kennedy clan; she made the perfect Kennedy wife.

  At the time of her great concern about her Bobby’s alleged affair with Jackie, Ethel subscribed to a magazine called Photoplay, a movie fan magazine that was a popular monthly at the time. Jackie and Ethel enjoyed reading about themselves in such silly fan magazines, even though much of what they read was completely untrue. Says Leah Mason, who worked at Hickory Hill as an assistant to Ethel, “Ethel always had a huge stack of these magazines, and one of my jobs was to clip out the articles about her and the other Kennedys, and keep them for posterity.”

  The three Kennedy wives were written about more than any other political wives of the sixties and seventies, sharing covers with Hollywood stars such as Elizabeth Taylor and Frank Sinatra. While reading about themselves in such magazines, the women would privately marvel at how journalists would create pure fiction around innocent photographs. Ethel, however, was prone to believe that the stories about other family members were true.