Jackie, Ethel, Joan: Women of Camelot (48 page)

A day earlier, the Senate had voted on the civil rights bill, which was approved by a wide margin. Because JFK had in- troduced the bill (which Lyndon Johnson then championed), Ted had understandable sentimental attachment to remain- ing on the Senate floor until its passage. So Joan would go ahead to West Springfield alone, with Ted intending to join her there as soon as the final vote was tallied.

Because the Senate was, as usual, running over schedule, Ted would be late in arriving in Springfield. Before even getting on the plane, he wanted to go to Arlington to visit Jack’s grave. Head bowed, he would kneel alone at the eter- nal flame, spending just a moment with his brother and telling him of the passage of the bill—the final tally was 73 to 27—that had meant so much to him.

In a telephone hookup to the Massachusetts delegates, Ted’s voice crackled through the loud speakers at 7:30
P
.
M
., just ten minutes before that final vote. “I want everybody to know that I am a candidate this year,” he announced. “We are now fifteen minutes away from the vote for civil rights.”

At that announcement, a loud cheer erupted from the floor. Ted added that he would join them all as soon as possible. “And I ask you,” he concluded, “not to get so impatient that you decide to nominate Joan instead.” (This was in refer- ence to the strong reaction Joan received earlier when she gave a brief speech to the delegates.)

Joan wasn’t at the hall, however. She was in bed, at least until she was awakened by Jack Crimmins, who had driven Joan from Washington, with the horrifying news that he had heard on the car radio.

The plan was that Ted would land at the Barnes Airport in Westfield and then be whisked to the Coliseum in West Springfield, where Joan would meet him. There he would accept his nomination, and the two would share his victory with the nearly two thousand delegates. She hadn’t planned to sleep, just to rest her eyes. Somehow she drifted off.

Flying through a heavy fog and drizzling rain, the twin- engined, six-seat Aero Commander plane carrying Ted and his party crashed into an apple orchard. Ted was taken to Cooley Dickinson Hospital in Northampton. Crimmins had gone to Bradley Field, the commercial airport that served Springfield, to meet Ted’s plane, but when he heard the news, he turned around and headed back to the house where Joan was staying. Once he was sure there was no mistake, he knew that he had to tell Ted’s wife what had happened.

When an announcement of the accident was made from the platform of the Coliseum in West Springfield, delegates reacted in shock and horror. There were audible gasps and female screams at the mind-numbing news. Surely, it was not possible that God would take another Kennedy brother, and at the young age of thirty-two! The chairman asked for a moment of silent prayers.

Gerry Doherty, Ted’s campaign chairman, would later re- call that he knew in his heart that Ted was probably dead. “How to tell Joan?” he wondered. He knew he had to get her to the hospital, “but I didn’t know what she would find there. My mind raced through all the possibilities, and the most likely was that Ted was dead. After what happened to Jack, we were all pretty fatalistic.” Doherty found Phoebe Dowd in the crowd and sent her to pick up Joan and take her to the hospital. Phoebe’s husband, Don, followed shortly after in his own car. By the time the Dowds got to Joan, though, she had already been told the news by Jack Crim- mins.

Joan dressed quickly. Looking drawn and pale, she quickly walked downstairs, outside and into Don Dowd’s car. She saw Phoebe on the way. “Isn’t this terrible?” Joan said. Phoebe would recall that her voice was almost inaudi- ble.

It was a foggy, difficult, twenty-six-mile ride to the hospi- tal known as Cooley Dick, a drive during which Don could barely see the road ahead. Joan sat in the front seat with him; Phoebe sat in the back with Jack Crimmins. She remem- bered that Joan kept chattering to herself. “I hope everyone is okay,” she said. “Ted, [Senator] Birch Bayh [who was to deliver the keynote speech], and [his wife] Marvella, and Ed [Moss, Kennedy’s administrative aide]. Sometimes they say a plane has crashed, when really it’s just landed. Isn’t that true?” Joan asked, her eyes hopeful. Phoebe agreed. “Sure, that happens all the time.”

Don didn’t say a word. Later, he would remember that he truly felt that the worst had occurred, and he didn’t want Joan to read his fatalistic attitude into anything he would say.

When Joan and Don finally arrived at the hospital, re- porters were already there, waiting. Jack Crimmins was so rattled that when he got out of the car, he slammed the door in Phoebe’s face, bruising her badly. “Oh, my God,” Joan exclaimed. “What’s next?” After tending to Phoebe for a few moments, the four headed to the hospital.

Without showing any emotion whatsoever, and very much like her sister-in-law Jackie in her impassive de- meanor during a crisis, Joan hurried past the waiting re- porters without looking directly at any of them, only straight ahead. “He’s going to be fine,” she said to one writer who shouted out a question at her. “He’s going to be fine.”

Joan was taken directly to the emergency room to see Ted; she was horrified by what she saw before her: her bat- tered husband lying on a bed inside an oxygen tent with tubes sticking out of his nostrils, one coming from his chest, and blood flowing into his body by transfusion. He looked up at her and tried to force a weak smile. Saying her name seemed to sap him of any strength he had left. “I’m okay,” he said. “I’ll be fine.” Then he drifted off.

After the plane hit the ground, its wings sheared off by tree branches, it cartwheeled in a death roll, its roof torn off. At the moment of impact, Ted had been half standing, look- ing at the control panel and trying, in his panic, to assist the pilot in some way. He was thrown about the cabin like a rub- ber ball. Birch and Marvella Bayh were miraculously unin- jured. The pilot of the plane, forty-eight-year-old Ed Zimny, was killed instantly. (A year and a half earlier, Zimny had flown Jackie’s mother, Janet Auchincloss, to Rhode Island to accompany baby Arabella Kennedy’s body after it was exhumed to be reburied next to her father, JFK.) Ted’s aide,

forty-one-year-old Ed Moss, died seven hours later after brain surgery.

Ted was not expected to live through the night. With his back broken in three places, he had no feeling in his legs and was bleeding internally. His left lung had partially col- lapsed, he had two broken ribs, and his blood pressure read- ing was erratic and dangerously low. It was feared that if he did survive, he would be a paraplegic. The doctors decided not to tell Joan of the gravity of Ted’s condition, however, because they sensed that she would not be able to take the news. In fact, Joan was so shaken that she had to be helped from the room. Hospital officials suggested she get immedi- ate rest.

After Phoebe helped her undress, Joan climbed into the bed in the room that was reserved for Ted should he ever be well enough to leave the emergency ward. Later, the Dowds and some other visitors swarmed around Joan in her hospi- tal bed. The hospital sent in coffee.

“Call Cardinal Cushing,” Joan said. “He should know what has happened. He should pray. Tell him I spoke to Ted,” she said, weakly. “He looked terrible. Oh, my God. What if he can’t walk? He’ll be in a wheelchair for the rest of his life. Oh, my God, poor Ted.” By the time Bobby ar- rived at four in the morning, Joan was asleep. When she awakened at eight, she and Bobby began a vigil at Ted’s bedside.

On Saturday afternoon the other Kennedys began arriv- ing, while Bobby held an impromptu press conference. Eu- nice, Jean, and Pat joined Joan at Ted’s bedside. Ethel stayed behind at Hickory Hill with the children. When Jackie ar- rived later in the day, the scene outside the hospital was one of sheer pandemonium. She looked at the reporters with dis-

dain and hurried into the hospital, muttering under her breath.

“Where’s Joan?” she asked as soon as she saw Pat. “I have to see her.”

When Jackie found Joan at Ted’s bedside, the two women walked into the hallway and embraced tightly.

“Thank God he’s alive,” Jackie told her as doctors and nurses gawked at her. “We just have to thank God he’s alive.”

“What would I do if he had died?” Joan asked.

With no answer to that question, Jackie just shook her head.

“It’s a curse,” Joan said, as members of the medical staff listened in on the conversation. “I know now that it’s a curse.”

Joan told Jackie she had once heard that a gypsy had put a curse on the entire Kennedy family in the late twenties after having been evicted from a housing project owned by Joseph Kennedy.

“This woman spat in Grandpa’s face and gave him the evil eye,” Joan told Jackie. “And now we’re supposedly all doomed.”

“Oh, my God,” Jackie exclaimed. “Do you believe that, Joan?”

“What if this is true?” Joan said, anxiously. “I mean, can we just discount it? Look at the things that have happened. Can we chalk it up to coincidence?”

Jackie was speechless. “I . . . I . . .” she began. “I suppose anything is possible.” Jackie urged Joan to relax; she was concerned about her sister-in-law because she was well aware of the emotional and physical strain that could result from a miscarriage, and Joan’s was so recent.

Meanwhile, Bobby reaffirmed to the reporters who had congregated in a conference room that this latest tragedy would not force the family out of politics—even though, pri- vately, he wasn’t so sure about that.

“The Kennedys intend to stay in public life,” he said. “Good luck is something you make. Bad luck is something you endure.”

Afterward, Bobby pulled columnist Jimmy Breslin aside and said, “I was just thinking—if my mother hadn’t had any more children after the first four, she would have nothing now. I guess the only reason we’ve survived is that there are more of us than there is trouble.”

By Saturday evening, Ted’s condition began to stabilize and it had become clear that his spinal cord had not been severed. In time he would walk again, but his recovery would be a slow and painful one. Joan was relieved, though still extremely shaken by the deaths of the two men who were also aboard. That night she asked to be shown the hos- pital’s chapel. She went inside and knelt at the altar for ten minutes, perhaps thanking God for sparing her husband, perhaps praying for the immortal souls of the two men who died in the crash. Soon after, Jackie followed her into the chapel and the two women knelt together, not saying a word. How far they had come in such a short time, from the dis- cussion of Jack’s victory on a Hyannis Port beach three and a half years earlier to a chapel in a strange hospital, thanking God for not taking Ted the way He had so violently taken his brother. The three Kennedy sisters joined them, and together the five women prayed in silence.

The next morning, Joan had three dozen red roses deliv- ered to the chapel in honor of the deceased. (On Sunday, truckloads of candy and flowers would arrive for Ted, which

Joan then graciously sent on to cheer other hospital pa- tients.)

After his press conference, Jackie cornered Bobby in the cafeteria.

“Oh, Bobby, we have such rotten luck, don’t we?” she said as soon as she saw him. The two embraced tightly.

“It’s going to be okay, Jackie,” Bobby said. “Don’t worry about Teddy. Nothing can stop him.”

“I’m just so . . .” Jackie began.

“Tired?” Bobby said, looking at her with a smile.

“Yes, tired. I wonder how much more are we expected to take.”

“Hopefully, not much,” he responded. “Hopefully, not much.”

At 6:45
P
.
M
., after Jackie and Bobby had enjoyed a light snack together, they were summoned to a telephone. It was President Johnson calling from the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Los Angeles. Johnson had sent four Walter Reed Army Hos- pital specialists to Cooley Dickinson Hospital to assist in Ted’s treatment, and was calling to express his concern. Of course he was taping the conversation.

“He’s got a lot of broken bones and his back is in bad shape, but he’s not paralyzed,” Bobby told Lyndon. “It’s going to take anywhere from six months to a year, but he’s going to be fine.”

“Looks like you have more than you can bear,” LBJ said. “But you’re a mighty brave fellow and you have my sympa- thy and all your family, and any way in the world I can help, I’m just as close as the phone. . . .”

“Jackie just wants to say hello to you, too,” Bobby said, handing her the phone. Drained, Jackie leaned up against a wall, the phone in one hand, a cigarette in the other.

“Mr. President?”

“My dear, it looks like you have more than you can bear,” LBJ told her.

“Yeah, oh boy . . . for a day,” Jackie said. “I just wanted to say, you were so nice to call.”

Johnson then told Jackie that he had spoken to Dr. Thomas Corriden, one of Ted’s doctors, and that he had as- sured him that Ted would live. “Yes, everything’ll be all right,” Jackie agreed.

“Give Joan a hug for me,” Lyndon told Jackie. “I will,” she said as she tried to rush off the line. “Thank you, Jackie.”

“Thank you, Mr. President.”