Ethel focused on the doctor. “Please help him. Please help him,” she moaned. But when hands reached out to pull the stretcher out of the ambulance Ethel, panicked and frightened, began inexplicably slapping at the hands. “Somehow she didn’t want hands reaching out to handle him,” recalled Dr. Bazilauskas. “Maybe it was because one of those clawing hands that she had seen in the past few months of the campaign had held a gun that shot her husband.”
By the time they reached the hospital, Ethel was panic-stricken and acting out of sheer terror. “Please don’t hurt him, please don’t hurt him,” she kept repeating in a frantic litany. When she saw a lone photographer near the emergency entrance, she screamed at him and pushed him with her shoulder, sending him reeling backward.
“When he [Bobby] was on the platform I could see that he was like a blob of Jell-O that you took out of the refrigerator,” recalled Bazilauskas. “I immediately realized that he was probably gone, but of course I couldn’t be sure of it. There was an oxygen mask on his face, put there in the ambulance. I put my hand underneath his shirt, which had been partially opened, to feel his chest for warmth and it was halfway to the coldness of death.”
“The Hand of a Dead Man”
The tiny hospital emergency room was crowded with people. A team of nurses cut off Bobby’s clothes while others tried to clear the area, though they weren’t having much success. The doctor, not hearing a heartbeat in Bobby, started massaging his chest. When Ethel complained, thinking that he was hurting her husband, the physician patiently explained to her what he was doing. Earlier, when the doctor had repeatedly slapped Bobby’s face to see if he reacted to pain stimulus, Ethel had asked him not to be so rough. The doctor ignored her.
When Dr. Bazilauskas injected adrenaline into Bobby’s arm muscle, his heart started beating on its own.
“Why did you stop massaging him?” Ethel now wanted to know.
“His heart is going now,” the doctor replied, “and we have some hope.”
“I don’t believe you,” Ethel said quietly, drained of emotion. “He’s dead. I know he’s dead.”
Placing the stethoscope’s diaphragm over Bobby’s heart, the doctor then handed Ethel the ear portion. She leaned forward, listening. “Her face lit up,” Bazilauskas later recalled. “She looked like a mother who had just heard the heartbeat of a child she thought was gone.”
Ethel’s joy was short lived, however. She heard a scuffle outside the emergency room and rushed out to see what was happening. Two policemen were guarding the door, refusing entrance to Father Mundell, a family friend who had been with them at the hotel but who had gotten lost in the crowd. He had finally found his way to the hospital. Ethel rushed out and pushed one of the officers aside. The startled policeman then shoved her back, sending her reeling. When others surrounded the officer and broke up the shoving match, Ethel was able to usher the priest into the room, where he gave Bobby Absolution. Shortly thereafter another priest from a nearby parish, Father Thomas Peacha, was also allowed to enter the room. He had heard of the shooting on his car radio and rushed over to the hospital, where he performed the Last Rites.
The decision was made that Bobby should be transferred to the nearby Good Samaritan Hospital, which was better equipped for delicate brain surgery. Wearing an oxygen mask, and with tubes sticking out of his body, Bobby was transferred to Good Samaritan. Because a crowd of a thousand or more had gathered outside the hospital, they were forced to sneak the stretcher out of a side door.
“Will he live?” Ethel asked the doctor before they took off in the ambulance.
“Right now he’s doing all right,” Dr. Bazilauskas replied. “Let’s hope, let’s just hope.”
Privately, the doctor knew the worst. “I had seen the senator’s legs go into convulsions,” he said later, “which meant that the damage to the ‘switchboard’ [nerve center] was just too much. He could not survive. But of course I didn’t want to tell her that, and there was always hope.”
Ethel rode with Bobby in the ambulance, and when they arrived at the hospital she was joined by all the members of the Kennedy entourage, including his sisters Pat and Jean, all there to keep vigil.
At 2:45 A.M. a team of surgeons—brain and chest specialists—started a last-ditch effort to save Bobby Kennedy’s life. The doctors discovered that one of the bullets had passed through Bobby’s brain, but didn’t have the firepower to escape. Instead it hit the skull opposite the entry wound, splitting into many particles and ricocheting back, ripping into the brain tissue. The doctors’ mission was to clean out as much of the debris from the brain as they could without destroying more tissue, and then repair as much damage as possible. Meanwhile Police Detective Sergeant Dan Stewart was ordered to Good Samaritan to help take charge of security.
Nurses had tried to get Ethel to lie down, but she refused, opting instead to pace the floor and pray in a tiny room near the operating room, where two policemen kept guard. Three hours and forty minutes later, when the double doors swung open, Ethel was still there, waiting. When Bobby was wheeled into the recovery room, Ethel, still in her orange and white minidress, climbed onto the bed and lay next to him.
At 7:20 A.M. Frank Mankiewicz emerged outside, exhausted and grim, to talk to reporters and to tell them that Ted Kennedy had recently arrived. In fact, just hours earlier, Ted had turned on the television in his hotel room in San Francisco to see a surreal scene of people screaming and panicking. Someone had been shot. Ted and his friends had somehow misunderstood what was happening and thought the madness was occurring at a victory rally for Bobby they had just attended in San Francisco. Had the shots been a near miss at Ted? Suddenly, the reality hit him: It was Bobby who had been shot, and the nightmare being broadcast was from Los Angeles. Stunned, Ted took the next plane to the City of Angels.
Mankiewicz admitted that Bobby’s condition was “extremely critical” and that “the next twelve to thirty-six hours are crucial. He’s living. He’s not conscious. He’s breathing on his own.”
What Mankiewicz did not tell the reporters is that Bobby’s situation was hopeless. He was going to die. Shortly after surgery, head surgeon Dr. Henry Cuneo had told Mankiewicz as much, though Mankiewicz says today that that’s not what he heard. “What I heard was that Bobby was in critical shape and that there was always a chance he could live,” he says. “I don’t care what they told me. I only know what I heard. There was a sense among us, somehow, that he would pull through. It was hard to imagine that he couldn’t, and harder to imagine that this terrible thing could happen twice in the same family. I don’t think we were listening to what we were being told, as much as we were listening to our hearts.”
Dr. Cuneo called John Miner, Deputy District Attorney of Los Angeles, to inform him of what was happening. “He’s on life support, but he’s dead,” Dr. Cuneo reported to Miner on the telephone. “Oh, my dear God,” Miner said. “His poor wife, all those children. How could this have happened?”
Miner rushed to the hospital. “I went to the room where he was,” Miner now recalls. “It was very sad. I noticed that the door was ajar and I peeked in. There was Ethel sitting beside his bed, holding his hand. ‘It’s all right, Bobby,’ she was telling him. ‘We’re going to take you back home where they have the best doctors and you’ll be all right. You’ll see, you’ll be just fine. I promise.’
“She didn’t know that she was really holding the hand of a dead man.”
“No God of Mine”
“How’s Bobby?” Jackie wanted to know as soon as she got off the plane that had taken her from New York to Los Angeles. Large sunglasses covered her reddened, puffy eyes as she looked at Chuck Spalding, who had picked her up at the airport. “I need to know. Please give it to me straight.”
“Jackie,” said Spalding, “he’s dying.”
Visibly stunned, Jackie took three steps backward, closed her eyes and dropped her head to her chin as if mortally wounded. “Oh, dear God,” she said. “My dear God in heaven above…
why?”
Earlier that day, at 3:45 A.M. New York time, the ring of her telephone had awakened Jackie. Just hours earlier, she had paid a brief late-night visit to Bobby’s campaign headquarters in New York, where the mood was jubilant. “I feel just wonderful. I’m delighted,” she exclaimed with a broad smile when asked how she felt about Bobby’s success. She was escorted back to her apartment at about midnight; after just a few hours’ sleep, Prince Stas Radziwill awakened her, calling from Europe to ask about Bobby’s condition. But Jackie didn’t even know he’d been shot. In an instant, the shocking news caused her reluctant memory to go reeling back to that November afternoon in Dallas. “Oh, no,” she exclaimed. “It can’t have happened again.”
“I got there at about five in the morning,” Roswell Gilpatric recalled. “It was a bad time, she was very, very emotionally distraught, but it was the way Jackie got upset. Very internally. But she thought Bobby might make it, or at least that’s what she had been told, by Teddy I think. She needed a private plane, so I called Tom Watson, head of IBM, a personal friend. I knew he had a number of planes at his disposal.”
After meeting Stas Radziwill at Kennedy Airport, Jackie, Roswell Gilpatric, and Tom Watson all left for Los Angeles, where they were met by Chuck Spalding. He describes Jackie as “slowly withering away from the inside. You could just feel it.”
Jackie immediately went to the hospital, where she joined Jean, Pat, and Ted in their awful vigil in the Board of Directors’ room. Jackie seemed to be sedated, almost in a zombie-like state. She had been fortified by pills from Dr. Max Jacobson, the infamous doctor who had kept her husband drugged through much of his time at the White House and who continued to supply her with “downers” from time to time in moments of great stress. Soon Ethel joined the sad group while finally taking a break from her bedside vigil. Jackie and Ethel hugged, a desperate embrace with no tears, just stunned silence between them.
Everyone milled about, trying to think of what to do, what to say. Jackie walked over to Frank Mankiewicz. “The church is at its best only at the time of death,” she said, for no apparent reason. “The rest of the time it’s often rather silly little men running around in little suits. We know death. As a matter of fact, if it weren’t for the children, we’d welcome it.”
Mankiewicz now recalls, “I don’t believe that she was speaking of the Kennedy family in particular, which is how it has been reported in the past. She was speaking about she and I when she said ‘we.’ We were having a private conversation, which some must have overheard, and it’s been misconstrued for years. I don’t know why. She was in shock. It was an awful night.”
Two by two, they visited Bobby, whose head was heavily wrapped in white bandages. George Plimpton, a friend of the Kennedys who had been just a few feet from Bobby when he was shot, has recalled, “It was a horrifying deathwatch, like visiting a tomb at Westminster Abbey.”
“It was terrible,” recalls Claudine Longet. Just two days earlier, Bobby had joined her husband Andy Williams in an off-key chorus of “Moon River” during a rally at the very same Ambassador Hotel in which he would be slain.
“Bobby loved to sing,” said Andy Williams, “and, boy, what a voice! It was terrible! He always sang loudly and off-key. I used to kid him about it.”
Those happy days with Bobby seemed over now as he lay in a coma. “Bobby never recognized us, never saw us,” Longet recalls of that night at the hospital. “It was the longest night of my life. We kept thinking he was going to make it, because if anybody could make it, he could. We were just pacing back and forth, drinking coffee, and feeling empty. It was like another world.”
However, no one, even Ethel, was more on edge than Jackie. As the evening wore on, it was as though an already-taut wire was being drawn one final notch tighter around Jackie’s sanity. Suddenly, it snapped. “Get away from me,” she ordered her Secret Service agent. “I don’t ever want to see you around me again. I mean it.” Before astonished witnesses, she began to cry. “What good are you, anyway?” she asked the agent through her tears.
Frank Mankiewicz recalled, “Jackie had a wild, hunted-animal look in her eyes, and she just wanted to escape, to lash out and reject an intolerable situation.”
After turning on her Secret Service agent, Jackie lashed out at Ethel. “How dare God do this to us?” she said, her voice filled with raw emotion. “If there is a God in heaven, Ethel, he is a cruel God,” Jackie concluded, her voice seeming slurred, her manner a bit medicated. “He is an unfeeling God, a heartless God, and no God of mine.”
Jackie Kennedy then turned and walked toward the hospital room of her dead husband’s younger brother for one final visit.
Senator Robert Francis Kennedy Is Dead
At 1:44 A.M., on June 6, 1968, about twenty-five hours after he had been shot, Senator Robert Francis Kennedy died a few minutes after being taken off life support and without ever having regained consciousness. With him at the time of his death were Ethel; his brother, Ted; sisters Jean and Pat; Jean’s husband, Stephen; and Jackie. He was just forty-two years old.
“When the President was assassinated, the family became very stoic,” remembered Rita Dallas, Joseph Kennedy’s nurse. “But when Bobby was shot, the whole house crumbled. Mrs. Kennedy fell apart and she kept saying, ‘My son, my son.’ Mr. Kennedy cried. I cried. It was too much.”
Roger Wilkins, Assistant Attorney General, put it best when he encapsulated the feelings of the family and perhaps of the entire country, exhausted by a decade of turmoil: “It was over. The whole thing was over. The whole period of lift and hope and struggle. It was all over. It was just over.”
It would fall upon Ethel’s family—including Jackie—and friends, in particular Joan Braden, Sarah Davis, Sue Markham, Kay Evans, and Ann Buchwald, to support Ethel emotionally during this awful time. While Jackie was at Ethel’s side, Joan couldn’t be because she was in Paris with Eunice. Joan had been visiting the Shrivers in France after opening a Kennedy Memorial Library exhibition in London. (In recent years, Joan had continued touring the world with exhibits of JFK memorabilia, an active and effective Kennedy ambassador.)
One of Ethel’s friends remembers having taken three telephone calls from Joan at the hospital, wanting to speak to Ethel. Ethel would not get on the line, but Ted did speak to his wife. Slumping over, he began to sob. “Bobby’s gone, Joansie,” he said. “He’s gone.”
Jackie and Ethel sat together on the Air Force One flight that the Kennedys and their friends and coworkers—including Rafer Johnson, Rosey Grier, Frank Mankiewicz, Pierre Salinger, Jesse Unruh, and others—took from Los Angeles to LaGuardia, which had been sent by Lyndon Johnson to carry Bobby’s body home. Three of Ethel’s children, Bobby Jr., Joe, and Kathleen, were also aboard. Accompanied by Lem Billings and a Secret Service agent, they had flown to be with their mother in Los Angeles after the shooting. Of course, a deeply upset Ted was aboard, along with his sisters Jean and Pat, Jean’s husband, Steve Smith, and Lee Radziwill and her husband, Stas.
Jackie and Ethel both cried on the flight, though the tears flowed more easily for Jackie. She was still raw with grief over Jack, even after five years. She had even hesitated to get aboard the plane because she thought it was the same one that had carried Jack from Dallas back to Washington, “and I could never get on that plane again, ever. Is it the same one?” she demanded to know. “Because if so, I must know.” Crewmen assured Jackie that, while both planes were blue and silvery-white, this 707 was not the same aircraft.
Ethel tried to maintain her composure throughout the flight, sometimes falling into a fitful sleep lying next to Bobby’s coffin. At other times, she would bound up the aisle telling everyone to “cheer up.”
Sander Vanocur, one of the few reporters on the flight, recalls, “Ethel tried to cheer up everyone. She tried to lift everyone’s spirits in that moment of great sadness and grief for herself. People would come up to her and offer their condolences and she’d say, ‘But are you all right?’ ”
<
br /> “There was a doctor on that flight [Dr. Blake Watson, Ethel’s obstetrician, present because Ethel was pregnant with Rory, her and Bobby’s eleventh child] who tried to give Ethel sedatives,” Lem Billings once remembered. “Jackie took all the pills from him, except for one, which she gave to Ethel. ‘I think you should feel as much of the pain and misery now as you can stand,’ Jackie told Ethel. ‘Better now than later, believe me.’ ”
Also on that flight was Coretta Scott King, widow of the slain Martin Luther King, Jr., who had flown to Los Angeles to be at the hospital with Ethel. Ethel and Jackie, along with Bobby and Ted (but not Joan), had attended Martin Luther King’s funeral, and Bobby had arranged for the plane that would take King’s body back to Atlanta from Memphis, where he was killed.
“On the flight, I looked up at one point,” Lem Billings recalled, “and there they were, three of the bravest women in the country, Jackie, Ethel, and Coretta, speaking to one another about their mutual despair. It was very touching. Very touching.”
“I witnessed a lot of love between Jackie Kennedy and Ethel Kennedy,” recalled Coretta Scott King. “I felt that I was in the midst of true family. Jackie cared for Ethel, tried to be there for her. There were a lot of special, memorable moments on that flight, which I would never discuss publicly for fear of invading the privacy of these great women.
“Ethel Kennedy was so brave, such a truly heroic person,” Mrs. King continued. “Having already gone through what she and Jackie went through, one would think I could relate entirely to their experiences. But the truth is that every woman’s relationship with her husband is special and unique. No outsider can completely understand the intense loss suffered by a wife when her husband is taken from her… it’s just that personal to their relationship.”
Jackie, Ethel, Joan: Women of Camelot Page 39
