Jackie, Ethel, Joan: Women of Camelot

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  “What can I do for you, Ethel?” Jackie wanted to know about an hour into the flight. “Please, tell me how I can help you.”

  Ethel looked at her sister-in-law with sad, lost eyes. “Help me with the funeral,” she said, finally. “The way you did Jack’s, it was so perfect. It’s what Bobby should have. It’s what Bobby would want.”

  “Well, I arranged Jack’s funeral the way I wanted it done,” Jackie said. “They’re for us, really, these terrible ceremonies. They’re for the living, for the heartbroken who’ve been left behind. So you tell me what you want, Ethel, and I’ll take care of it.”

  Ethel said that she wanted the service to take place at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and that she wanted Leonard Bernstein, a friend of the family’s since Jack’s presidential campaign, to help select the music. She wanted the nuns who had taught her at Manhattanville to sing during the mass. She also wanted Andy Williams to sing “Ave Maria.” (Williams and his French wife, Claudine Longet, were also aboard the plane.) Bobby should be buried next to his brother, Ethel concluded, at Arlington National Cemetery.

  Jackie raised her eyebrows. Leonard Bernstein? The nuns from Manhattanville? Andy Williams singing “Ave Maria”? To Jackie, it sounded like a network television special. But these were Ethel’s wishes just the same, so Jackie would see to it that they be honored.

  “Immediately, she began making telephone calls,” Lem Billings remembers. “As I recall it, Bernstein told Jackie that women were not allowed to sing in the cathedral. ‘So what?’ was Jackie’s response. ‘This is special. This is Bobby. They will make an exception.’ She was determined to see to it that Ethel get everything she wanted.”

  Jackie asked Bernstein to make the necessary arrangements and keep her apprised of his progress. After the plane landed at LaGuardia, where a thousand Kennedy friends, celebrities, politicians, and other supporters waited, a motorized lift slowly lowered Bobby’s coffin to the ground. Noticing that Ethel suddenly seemed ready to faint, Jackie rushed to her side and put her arm around Ethel’s shoulder. As the coffin was lifted into the waiting hearse, Jackie whispered words of comfort in her ear. Ethel stood limply at Jackie’s side, seemingly dazed, as the two women stared at the completely unfathomable sight of Bobby Kennedy’s maroon-draped, African mahogany casket being sprinkled with holy water by Terence J. Cooke, Archbishop of New York. The family and friends would take the body to St. Patrick’s Fifth Avenue and East Fifty-First Street, and then go to Bobby and Ethel’s three-bedroom apartment at 860 United Nations Plaza. Rose Kennedy, dressed in black, was already at St. Patrick’s when everyone arrived.

  “Oh Grandma,” Jackie said when she saw her. “I’m so sorry.” Jackie collapsed in tears as the stoic old woman held her firmly, her eyes lifted to the heavens in a blank stare. “If I ever feel sorry for myself, which is the most fatal thing, I think of Rose,” Jackie would say later. “I’ve seen her cry just twice. Once, her voice began to sort of break up and she had to stop talking. Then she took my hand and squeezed it and said, ‘Nobody’s ever to feel sorry for me.’ ” (Rose’s personal secretary, Barbara Gibson, recalls the day that the priest who gave JFK his Last Rites passed away. Barbara was reluctant to show the obituary to Rose for fear that it would upset her. It did. Rose began to sob in a display that was completely uncharacteristic of her. Barbara was so moved, she too began to cry. Suddenly, Rose stiffened. “You must be tired, or coming down with something, to break down like that,” she said firmly as she quickly dabbed at her eyes.)

  Jackie didn’t have Rose’s or Ethel’s faith, but even if she had, some felt it wouldn’t have eradicated the great despair she felt over Bobby’s death. Not concerned with what people thought of her, Jackie knelt in front of his coffin and broke down in deep, wracking sobs. Clearly, this repeating nightmare was more than she could bear.

  When Rose found Ethel, the Kennedy matriarch walked over to her and hugged her, warmly. The two women shared a moment of silence, but no tears.

  John Glenn, the astronaut and a close friend of the family’s, had arranged for all of Bobby’s clothing to be taken to another apartment in the building, owned by Truman Capote. But another friend of the family convinced him that Ethel would be distraught to find Bobby’s possessions already gone, so they were put back into place before Ethel arrived.

  Later, Jackie and Ethel stood together in front of one of the floor-to-ceiling windows and gazed out at the twinkling lights of Manhattan—a thousand-mile stare out to nowhere—lost in their thoughts, saying not a word to one another, the twin tragedies of Texas and California merging into one: Ethel in Los Angeles, pushing away the pressing crowd while trying to give Bobby room to breathe; Jackie in Dallas, jumping onto the trunk of a car hoping somehow to retrieve fragments of Jack’s skull; Ethel kneeling over Bobby’s bullet-riddled body, cradling his head in her lap; Jackie in Dallas, holding Jack’s ruined head to her bosom. Each had known so much anguish and loss, and there were no words to express any of it.

  Bobby’s Funeral

  “The flight to New York, six hours to think, that was the worst thing,” said Joan Kennedy, describing her return from Paris to attend Bobby’s funeral. Some family members had felt that it was probably best that Joan had been in Paris when she heard the news about Bobby. The separation from Ted gave her the chance to bring under tight control her own grief for Bobby and her concern for Ted. “I thought of Ted more than anyone else, and his family burdens,” Joan remembers. “None of us cried,” she said of herself and the Shrivers upon hearing of Bobby’s death. “We were just so numb.”

  The delivery of a eulogy for his brother would be Ted’s first public act as the effective head of the family. Ted’s former law school roommate, Senator John Tunney, remembered Ted and Joan huddling over the eulogy, discussing it in great detail, “trying to help Ted get it right. He had gone fifty hours without sleep and then was only getting two hours a night. He was in terrible pain because his back injury from the plane crash still made it impossible for him to be on his feet for long periods of time. Joan was there if he needed her, but she never flitted around the way some women would, saying ‘Please get some rest.’ She knows what motivates him, how he expects her to behave: no tears, never any tears… I’ve never known him to cry. Joan had to bottle it all up, just as she always did when she was around him.”

  On June 8, the morning of the funeral, more than a hundred television cameras invaded St. Patrick’s Cathedral, capturing for generations to come the agonies of the bereaved and pregnant widow and her ten fatherless children. Wires and lights were strewn about the floor. Reporters and photographers huddled among those seated in the pews. The solemnity of the funeral service was punctured again and again by the popping of flashbulbs and the momentary electric brilliance of dozens of lights.

  Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson led the two thousand invited mourners as a hundred million people in the United States alone watched transfixed. Tears were shed, prayers were offered. The sentiment was just as it had been for Jackie. Perhaps the only differences were the month and the year. In November, the air was chilled and a cool breeze blew. In June, humidity hung heavy, forming a visible blanket of mist. Otherwise, the coverage and the circumstances were practically identical as the cameras zoomed in to catch Ethel’s tears, just as they did for Jackie’s five years earlier. Jackie was in a daze through much of the service for Jack’s brother, so much so that when her good friend Lady Bird Johnson approached to offer her condolences, Jackie barely seemed to recognize her.

  Rather than “Ave Maria,” as Ethel had originally requested, Andy Williams sang “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” the marching song of the Union forces during the Civil War. The number was listed in the program as “Glory, Glory, Hallelujah,” because Ethel refused to have the word “Battle” associated with Bobby on the day of his funeral. Williams sang the song a cappella, and using cue cards. “All the while, I was wondering what I would do in that big cathedral if I tried to sing and no sound came out,” he recalls.
“Here, I drew strength from Ethel Kennedy, a truly magnificent person.”

  Soft but clear, Andy Williams’s voice surrounded the mourners as they filed out of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. He sang the song not in triumph, but tenderly, as if it were a mother’s prayer, and he touched the emotions of thousands present, many of whom now began to sob after having remained reverentially stoic throughout most of the service. Gaunt, drawn, purposely without expression, and completely oblivious to the television cameras, this was an Andy Williams completely different from the cheerful one Americans had, for years, welcomed into their homes on various television programs. Ethel had certainly been right in her selection of Andy, who had also escorted her to and from St. Patrick’s on this sad day. He barely recalls the entire week, saying he was “in a fog the whole time. They needed a tie for Bobby,” he remembers. “I got a tie from my closet, and, to my knowledge, that is the tie they put on his body for the flight back to New York. I think it was in my tie that he was buried.”

  For Ted, the eulogy for his brother Bobby would be one of his finest moments. “We loved him as a brother, as a father, and as a son,” Ted said, his voice cracking with emotion as he spoke just a few feet from his brother’s flag-draped coffin. “He gave us strength in time of trouble, wisdom in time of uncertainty, and sharing in time of happiness. He will always be by our side.”

  Ted, who had held up admirably through the service, finally broke down on the funeral train that carried Bobby’s body from New York to Washington for burial at Arlington National Cemetery. Two million people solemnly lined the 226-mile route, waiting for the train to pass. Overcome by grief, Ted sobbed through much of the trip, barely able to stumble through the railway car. At one point, he tried to lock himself in a private compartment to use as a hiding place where he could get away from the sight of the mourners at the side of the tracks along the train route. Rose said later that she could “see it coming over him” even before Ted cracked. As she explained later, “I watched his face drop and I could see him slipping. There wasn’t anybody on that train that I was worried about—except Teddy.”

  Rose insisted that Teddy pull himself together, get back to his window seat and conduct himself “the way Bobby would have” if it had been Ted’s last journey. Ted straightened up immediately, as if hypnotized by his mother’s edict. Observing her instructions, he returned to his seat at the window, although he never once lifted his head to even look up at anyone, much less glance out. He sat motionless until the train came to its last stop. Joan was powerless to help him. Distraught, she sat alone and quietly stared out the window.

  Thirty years later, Jack Newfield, Bobby’s biographer who had been in Los Angeles with him the night he was shot, and who was on the train after the funeral afternoon, recalled in the New York Post, “It was heartbreaking. There were eight hundred people on the twenty-one-car train: his closest friends and supporters, family, all the people who’d been in his brother’s Cabinet, who worked in his campaign, a lot of celebrities—Shirley MacLaine, Harry Belafonte, Warren Beatty. It was like a rolling Irish wake. But what was most amazing was to see the numbers of African-Americans along the poor side of the railroad tracks through New Jersey into Baltimore and Washington, D.C. That was just one of the most depressing, heartbreaking scenes.”

  Jackie wandered about, speaking to relatives, friends, and campaign workers, while Ethel, who appeared cheery, consoled others. Recalls Claudine Longet, “Andy and I were so sick on that train, inconsolable, really. Me, I died a little when Bobby died, knowing that life would never be the same. She [Ethel] came and comforted us. She gave us strength and asked if we were all right, instead of us doing it to her. Her courage was unbelievable. She was like Jackie Kennedy that way—the same qualities.”

  But this afternoon, Jackie was not the same strong, stoic woman she had been at her own husband’s funeral. Today, she was coming apart. When finally she sat down in her Pullman car about thirty minutes into the trip, she seemed dazed and disoriented. One high-ranking Cabinet member under JFK who paid Jackie a visit reported that she said, “The first thing I intend to do when this goddamn thing is over is get me and my kids the hell out of this country. If anyone expects to see me this time next year, they’d better forget it, because I won’t be found.”

  By the time the funeral train arrived in Washington, night had fallen. The mourners, carrying thin, lit candles, followed the coffin into Arlington National Cemetery. In this wavering, trembling light, the assembled priests spoke their last solemn words, and Bobby was laid to rest. Joan, too distraught to handle any more emotion, would not be at Ted’s side for this ceremony.

  The American flag was lifted from the coffin and folded, just as the flag on Jack’s coffin had been folded, and passed from brother, to son, to widow. Ethel, tears streaming down her face, took it. Holding it tightly to her breast, she walked the few steps to Bobby’s coffin and knelt beside it. She pressed her lips to the wood in one last kiss, one final farewell to her husband of eighteen years. Then, alone, she turned and walked away toward the waiting limousine. Behind her, Jackie knelt at the coffin, bowed her head, and said a silent prayer. She rose and, bending over, picked up a delicate spray of daisies at the foot of the casket. With her children, Caroline and John Jr., at her side, Jackie walked slowly to the quiet place nearby where, beneath stone and eternal light, her own husband lay at rest. There, as Ethel watched, Jackie placed the flowers, Bobby’s flowers, tenderly on his brother’s grave.

  “We Shall Carry on with Courage”

  One week after Bobby’s funeral, Ted Kennedy appeared on national television with his father and mother, his eyes dark-rimmed from sleepless nights. His voice occasionally threatened to break, as it had in St. Patrick’s Cathedral. It was Rose who appeared strong and Kennedy-like. “We cannot always understand the way of Almighty God, the crises which He sends us, the sacrifices which He demands of us, but we know His great goodness and His love,” said Rose, her demeanor composed, her voice almost robotic. “And we go on our way with no regrets of the past, not looking backwards to the past, but we shall carry on with courage.”

  “This was like a gruesome nightmare replayed, and there was only darkness and terrible feelings of emotional anxiety and depression,” said Ted’s friend John Tunney. “I remember walking with Teddy after Bobby died and saying to him, ‘You know, you have got to get away. You must not allow yourself ever to think about you being next in line for this terrible treatment.’ ”

  At this time Jackie became concerned that Joan would be obsessed with her husband’s safety because of what had happened to his brothers, “and that’s no way to live,” she said. When she called Joan to ask how she was, Joan said she was worried that the Secret Service protection that had been afforded Ted after Bobby’s assassination would end before any danger was over. “We’re getting threats,” Joan said, “and I’m scared to death. Who lives like this?”

  “Sadly, we do,” answered Jackie, according to what Joan later told Joan Braden.

  Jackie immediately telephoned Secret Service official Joe Barr to request that the protection be in place for as long as possible. (Ethel was under temporary Secret Service protection as well.) When Barr telephoned Ted to ask if he wanted the protection to continue, he said that it wasn’t necessary. The agents’ presence only served to remind Ted of the tragedy that had befallen his family, he said. Declining protection so soon after Bobby’s murder seemed foolhardy to most observers, and when Joan found out about it, she became angry. Oddly, though, she didn’t discuss the matter with Ted. Instead, she told Jackie about Ted’s decision, who then telephoned Ted and spoke to him of Joan’s fears. She encouraged him to continue with Secret Service protection. “You must do it for all of us,” Jackie said. “My God. We don’t want to lose you, too. Think of the children, mine, Ethel’s, and your own.” So Ted agreed to Secret Service protection for another few months, after which the FBI would be called in should a problem arise.

  Two weeks later, Joan
was musing to a friend about the Kennedy dynasty, about all that had happened in recent years and what it all meant to the family and to the nation. It was difficult not to be bitter. So many had invested so much, and for what? “What is that ‘monolith’ of Kennedy power now?” Joan asked, disgusted. “Just Teddy and me,” she answered. “All of the others are either dead… or old.” Or too young to answer the call.

  After Bobby’s death, a friend of Joan’s noted, “She seemed to be a shell of herself. She acted oddly, so much so that even Ethel—who had her own grief to deal with—said that she thought Joan was on the verge of a breakdown.”

  Her assistant, Marcia Chellis, recalls that Joan “just disappeared” rather than attend Bobby’s burial. Joan later told friends that she watched news reports on the television, never feeling more removed and isolated, and all by her own doing.

  Despite the fact that Ted received hundreds of letters saying he should retire for the sake of his own safety, he decided that he must continue in politics. All of his life he had been a cheerful, open, and optimistic person, but suddenly, with the deaths of his brothers, he had to become the holder of the dreams, frustrations, and hopes of millions of Americans who had supported the Kennedys. Could Ted go on and be the happy-go-lucky guy he had always been, or would he now have to become something different, someone more serious—a real politician? “If it were up to me, he’d get out now while he still can,” Joan told a reporter. “But,” she added sadly, “it’s not up to me, now is it?”

  When one reporter wondered if perhaps Joan was exaggerating the danger of being a Kennedy in politics, she blew up. Very uncharacteristically for her, she ripped into the journalist, saying, “Exaggerate? Exaggerate? How can you say that? Let’s get in my car and I’ll drive you down the road just a mile to Hickory Hill where Ethel lives. Let’s go there and you can look at a house filled with children without a father, and then tell me if I exaggerate the dangers of being a Senator Kennedy.”