Kennedy Wives: Triumph and Tragedy in America's Most Public Family (6 page)

Summer became autumn in Hyannis Port. On a beautiful November morning, Rose got up early, attended mass, had breakfast with her husband, and played nine holes of golf. In the early afternoon, she’d been napping when Ann Gargan’s blaring TV woke her up. She shuffled to Ann’s room to ask her to turn it down.

Ann sat horrified in front of the flickering screen. The news bulletin was reporting that Jack had been shot while riding in a presidential motorcade in Dallas.

Rose’s hands trembled and she sank into a chair. “Don’t worry,” she told Ann. “We’ll be all right. You’ll see.”

The phone rang.

10

“We All Shall Be Happy Together”

After Rose received the phone call from Bobby confirming her
son’s death, she told the household staff that Joe, himself napping, was not to be told of the assassination. She put on a coat and walked along the chilly Hyannis beach alone, praying, asking “Why?”

Teddy and Eunice arrived at the Cape that evening. It was decided that Joe would be told in the morning. When, after dinner, he wanted to watch TV, he was told that his bedroom television was broken, as was the one downstairs.

Rose walked again on the beach, this time with Eunice. “We talked about Jack as if he were still alive,” Eunice would remember.

Rose attended mass the next morning, escorted in her black veil past onlookers waiting outside St. Francis Xavier Church. After mass, she returned to the house but couldn’t bear to be present when Teddy, with Eunice standing next to him, told Joe that his son was dead. Joe sobbed.

The next morning—Sunday, November 24—Rose, Teddy, Eunice, and nurse Rita Dallas flew to Washington. Joe stayed behind, in the care of his nursing staff and Father John Cavanaugh. The White House was filled with family, friends, and administration officials. Jackie’s mother, Janet Auchincloss, noticed that Rose stayed off to the side, the picture of lonely fortitude. Eunice’s husband, Sarge Shriver, remarked to Rose that she was holding up admirably.

“What do people expect you to do?” she snapped at him. “You can’t just weep in a corner.”

On Monday morning, Rose did not feel well enough to walk with the funeral procession from the White House to St. Matthew’s Basilica. Instead, she rode behind, in a limousine.

After the burial, she met at the White House with some foreign dignitaries and Kick’s in-laws, the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire. She never once, in public, lost her composure.

She flew back to Hyannis Port that night.

In the aftermath of the assassination, Rose had trouble sleeping and would pace in her Hyannis room late at night. Damane and Librium, powerful (and at the time, very popular) antianxiety drugs, helped her sleep, but they were so potent that the night nurses were tasked with making sure she was awake on time for mass. Still, Rose declared, “I am not going to be licked by tragedy, as life is a challenge, and we must carry on and work for the living as well as mourn for the dead.”

Though she tried to busy herself in the first six months after her son’s death by gathering materials for her autobiography, she generally turned down invitations during that time; it wasn’t until March of 1964 that she accepted an invitation to a ceremony marking the renaming of a Paris street in honor of JFK, the Avenue du Président Kennedy. Paris mourned the loss of JFK acutely, and “every place I went the French people were most sympathetic . . .” Rose wrote. “These circumstances made it more difficult for me, as constant reminders often released floods of tears again.”

It seems important to point out that Rose—that all the Kennedys—
did
cry. The famous family edict, “Kennedys don’t cry,” was certainly a command to be tough, no matter what life threw their way. But it was also a dictate meant to protect the Kennedys from the depth of their own feeling, from the combustibility of their own hearts. “I think all of the Kennedys have a great deep feeling for one another,” said Father John Cavanaugh. “It’s so deep that they do not care much about sharing it with anybody else. They all understand it. They take for granted that the others will understand it. So they’re not demonstrative with one another. In fact, they withhold any kind of demonstration because they’re afraid, I think, of it getting out of hand.” Rose’s Victorian formality, coupled with that famous Kennedy admonition, have left the mistaken impression that
Rose was an unfeeling woman. Nothing could be further from the truth. She loved her family and she grieved for them.

It is a sign of Rose’s strength that she began to attend more of the hundreds and thousands of dedications taking place across the country for her fallen son, something that could not have been easy. She spoke in several parts of the country after JFK’s death, as a way of commemorating him, allowing the public to participate in her grief, and as a way of raising money for the planned John F. Kennedy Presidential Library.

In June, though, her progress out of the valley of grief was nearly halted when a small airplane carrying Teddy crashed in Massachusetts. The pilot and one of Teddy’s aides were killed. Teddy narrowly escaped death, and he would spend months in a hospital bed, just as Jack had in 1955. “I guess the only reason we’ve survived,” Bobby said at the hospital, “is that there are too many of us. There are more of us than there is trouble.” A rattled Joan marshaled her strength to campaign for her bedridden husband; Rose was all too happy to campaign for Teddy as well, taking her as it did, in the summer of 1964, out of a glum, reflective atmosphere at Hyannis Port. Bobby was running too, that year, for a Senate seat in New York, and Rose spoke frequently on his behalf. In the end, both Ted and Bobby handily won their contests.

Rose also kept a sense of meaning and purpose during this time by speaking more often and with greater candor about Rosemary. Her acknowledgment of her eldest daughter had really begun before the assassination. In 1962, Rose began visiting Rosemary at St. Coletta’s. Joe’s stroke had immobilized him and had made it easier for Rose to make travel plans without his knowledge. Eunice began visiting, too, and the pair lobbied JFK to make research on mental retardation a major priority of his administration. On October 11, 1961, Jack announced a national initiative on mental retardation, establishing a commission on how to treat and prevent developmental disabilities. Eunice published an article, “Hope for Retarded Children,” in the
Saturday Evening Post
, in which she candidly discussed the heartbreak and frustration her mother had faced in trying to find help for Rosemary. The lobotomy was not revealed, but it represented a huge step forward in the family’s recovery of their connection to Rosemary.

In a 1963 interview, Rose finally revealed why the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation had turned its focus to issues facing the mentally handicapped. “Well, you see the answer to that question is a very simple one,” Rose said. “We had a retarded child . . .”

This work continued after JFK’s death and throughout the sixties. That included the summer camp that Eunice started in 1961 at her rented Maryland estate. It was a camp exclusively for those with mental retardation; they were children of little means, bussed from institutions in Washington. Resourceful Eunice recruited volunteer counselors from elite Washington prep schools. This summer camp grew throughout the sixties and eventually would expand into the Special Olympics.

Rose became a vocal advocate for persons with intellectual disabilities, raising awareness and money through the media and her speaking engagements. St. Joseph’s College gave her an honorary degree in 1965 for bringing funds to research on retardation and serving as an inspiration to the parents of retarded children. The Canadian Association for Retarded Children chose Rose to receive its International Award of Merit for her inspiring example.

In 1966 she and Bobby wielded shovels to break ground on the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Center for Research in Mental Retardation and Human Development at the Yeshiva University Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. The Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation contributed $1.45 million toward its construction.

The 1968 campaign season would be the most important for the Kennedy family since Jack’s presidential run in 1960. LBJ had decided not to seek reelection, and the conflict in Vietnam was deeply unpopular, leading to regular protests and demonstrations across the country. In March of 1968, urged by the public and driven by his own passionately antiwar stance, Bobby announced that he would seek the Democratic nomination for the presidency.

Rose rolled up her sleeves and hit the campaign trail. Eight days in Indiana followed by three in Nebraska and, after a few days at Lake Tahoe to rest up, on to California and Oregon. The tea party coziness of previous campaigns was less effective in 1968; the issues in this election were war, race, and inequality, vital questions that were creating unrest on
campuses and in cities all over the country. But Rose, at seventy-seven, could still win over a crowd telling stories about the boyhood of tousle-haired Bobby. She was, alone among the Kennedy campaigners, immune to the prevailing seriousness.

Bobby carried the primaries in Indiana and Nebraska but shocked himself, his family, and his supporters when he lost the Oregon primary. It was the first time a Kennedy had ever lost an election, and the Kennedys were thunderstruck. Nevertheless, he vowed to fight on in California. By this time, an exhausted Rose was back in Hyannis Port. She waited there for the results of the June 4 California primary.

By the time the results were in—Bobby won California by a wide margin—Rose was fast asleep. It wasn’t until early the next morning that the night nurse woke her and told her to turn on the TV.

A televised news bulletin informed Rose Kennedy that Bobby had been shot.

It had happened in a crowded hallway at the Ambassador Hotel, only moments after Bobby left the podium where he’d celebrated his victory in the California primary. The assassin, a confused, unemployed, mentally unstable drifter named Sirhan Sirhan, stepped forward and fired a revolver point blank at the senator’s head.

In Hyannis Port, a shocked Rose shouted at the television, “It’s Bobby! It’s Bobby!” Not knowing what else to do, she went to mass at St. Francis Xavier. At home she struggled to keep her composure and busy herself while she waited for news from California. Bobby was still alive, but brain dead. He was not expected to last much longer.

The next morning she received word that Bobby had died during the night, Ethel and Jackie, along with Teddy, Jean, Pat, and some of his older children at the bedside.

Rose took on the burden of informing Joe that they’d lost a fourth child. Where they’d hidden their feelings in the past, no such effort was made that morning. With no children present to be strong for, Joe moaned and sobbed, and Rose repeated “My son, my son,” over and over.

Later that morning, a photographer saw Rose in the driveway of the Hyannis Port house. She was bouncing a ball, like a child, lost in thought.

“It seemed impossible to believe that the same kind of disaster could fall on our family twice in five years,” she remembered thinking.

It was impossible for God to leave ten or eleven fatherless children. Why take Bobby when my husband was paralysed, helpless, suffering, satiated with the world’s pleasures and responsibilities and ready, almost eager, to go to the Great Unknown. And how could Bobby, so devoted to his children, so absorbed in their fun and frolics and in their sports and studies, be happy in Heaven and away from Ethel who was always with him at home or on his trips . . .

Rose was a Roman Catholic to the bone. She believed in a loving and merciful God, but also a God whose love and mercy were intimately bound up with the mystery of suffering. As she struggled to make sense of the tragedies in her own life, it was through the framework of her Catholicism.

Rose composed herself for RFK’s funeral, where she stood stolidly in black, and on the train bearing his body from New York to Washington, where he’d be buried near his brother at Arlington. Thousands of people lined the tracks in observance of Bobby’s passing. Rose and Ethel, easily the most devout in the Kennedy crew, gave strength to each other and the family with their conviction that Bobby was now with Jack, Kick, and Joe Jr. Rose would later write, “I take renewed strength and courage in the thought that as Jesus Christ rose from the dead, my husband and I and our sons and daughters will one day rise again and we all shall be happy together, never more to be separated.”

A few days later, Rose and Teddy appeared on television from the yard in Hyannis Port. Rose, her voice strong, her posture ramrod straight, and not a hair out of place, thanked “all of you who offered your prayers, affection and condolences at the time of our recent bereavement.”

“His death will not discourage or lessen our resolve,” she continued. “The thought of his tragedy will not weaken or crush us . . . rather it will strengthen and fortify us.”

An AP photo from the occasion is evocative. On the left side of the frame sits Teddy, in a flawless black suit, eyes downcast, the worries of the
world heavy on his brow. At the right of the frame is Joe, a shell of a man, his suit hanging loosely, his face an involuntary scowl. At the dead center of the frame is Rose. She looks directly into the lens. In her eyes there is a sadness and a weariness, but more than that, a strength, a steeliness, a defiance. There’s no shame in her gaze, no self-pity, and no apology.

11

On Destiny

Bobby’s death did not weaken Rose’s resolve, but it did prompt
much reflection and even philosophizing on her part. Approaching her eighties, Rose was trying to make sense of her life, and age provided her the solitude and stillness that allowed her to do so with a new depth.

Preparing for a speech in the fall of 1968, she wrote that God

has taken three stalwart sons equipped and eager to do his work here on earth, and left me a retarded child who can contribute nothing but must receive benefits rather than bestow. And Joe, who is so helpless—now he cannot feed himself the greater part of the time, requires so much attention. He has done his work nobly and now can contribute nothing—still God leaves him here suffering minor annoyances of ill health daily . . .

“Our family was the perfect family,” she continued, “boys brilliant, girls attractive and intelligent, money, prestige . . . But God or ‘destiny’ just does not allow a family to exist, which has all these star studded adornments.”

If acceptance of God’s mysterious will was Rose’s conclusion, it was not arrived at easily. Her faith, far from being rigid and simplistic, made room for questioning and lamentation, and Rose struggled repeatedly to come to grips with the tragedies of her life. Her conjectures about God—the calculus of suffering, how many “adornments” God can allow—are less theological pronouncements than they are signs of a process, evidence of a vibrant and dynamic faith. Faith was a comfort to Rose; but it also
provided a powerful vocabulary for her own struggle to reconcile herself to the capriciousness of fate. The solace that she found in her religion is important, but it was not a solace that faith automatically granted—it was a solace that faith allowed her to
arrive at
via much struggle and questioning. The year of 1969, with its own fresh tragedies, would call upon that faith more than once.

Late on the night of July 18, 1969, Teddy left a party on the tiny island of Chappaquiddick, just across a small channel from Martha’s Vineyard, with Mary Jo Kopechne, one of the aides from Bobby’s presidential campaign. The circumstances surrounding the accident remain murky, but it’s not disputed that, driving over a narrow bridge with no guardrails, Teddy’s Oldsmobile went over the side and into the inlet below. The car landed, submerged, upside down. Teddy sustained a concussion and other injuries, and perhaps it was because of his disorientation that he could not free Mary Jo from the car. Perhaps this—or panic—also factored into his otherwise inexplicable failure to report the accident until the next morning. Mary Jo Kopechne drowned inside the Oldsmobile he left behind.

The media entered a sustained frenzy. That Sunday, the Chappaquiddick incident got more space in the
Boston Globe
than the first moon land
ing, which was to take place that afternoon. Rose stood by her son, whom she described as “unlike himself . . . disturbed, confused, and deeply distracted” the day after the accident. She wrote condolence letters to Mary Jo’s parents and met with them in the Kennedys’ New York apartment, where she shared her experience of losing children tragically. She otherwise remained behind the scenes, diplomatic and circumspect in interviews. Ted himself, taking responsibility for the accident and his actions (while never, the Kopechnes insisted, personally apologizing to them), asked the residents of Massachusetts to determine if he should resign. In 1970 he managed to be reelected. While Ted’s presidential aspirations had been a question mark since Bobby’s death, conventional wisdom now held them moot—the incident had, most felt, permanently ended his chances.

Ted had informed Joe of the accident himself. Sitting down across from Joe in his wheelchair, he took his father’s hand. “Dad,” he said, “I’m
in some trouble. There’s been an accident, and you’re going to hear all sorts of things about me from now on . . .”

Ted would always hold himself somehow responsible for the fact that, just four months later, Joseph P. Kennedy suffered another series of strokes, fell into a coma, and on November 18, died. Rose, Teddy, Joan, Eunice, Pat, Steve, Jean, Jackie, Ethel, and Ann Gargan were all with him. The funeral was held at St. Francis Xavier in Hyannis, attended by four of Joe and Rose’s children and twenty-seven of their grandchildren. Joseph Patrick Kennedy Sr., Rose’s husband of fifty-five years, was buried in Brookline, Massachusetts, not far from the Beals Street home he bought in 1915 when he and Rose were young and newly wed.

Condolence letters poured in by the thousands, many containing cash donations for Rose to use at her discretion, whether it be for the Kennedy Library, a memorial for Bobby, or the work of the Kennedy Foundation. “Several people enclosed a dollar bill in an envelope which moved me deeply,” she wrote. “One man sent $3.00 and said, ‘The poor have so little time. Let us help them.’ ” For so many the Kennedys stood as examples of service and generosity, rather than only wealth.

Rose escaped the United States for the holidays in 1969: She spent Christmas in Paris with Eunice and Sargent Shriver, who had just been named ambassador to France. Then on to Greece for New Year’s with Jackie, Caroline, and John Jr., not to mention Jackie’s new husband, Aristotle Onassis. While much of the Kennedy clan (and no small portion of the US public) considered Jackie’s 1968 wedding to the Greek shipping tycoon a betrayal, there’s little evidence that it bothered Rose terribly much. Or, if it did, she came to peace with it soon enough. Rose’s February 1969 diary mentions the happy “lilt” that had come into Jackie’s voice since her marriage to Onassis, and her diary in February of 1970 indicated both how much the Christmas in Greece meant to Rose, and how Jackie and Rose’s relationship had grown warmer in the years since Jack’s death.

“She sent a letter which quite overwhelmed me,” Rose wrote,

with her really heartwarming expressions of the pleasure all of them shared in my last visit . . . and how utterly unexpected was life’s chain of events—that she and I . . . should now start to share new experiences in an extremely different environment and atmosphere. . . . I am thrilled, because in this way I shall always be able to contact the children, to know they all enjoy having me with them.

Rose also suspected that her presence brought the comfort of familiarity to Caroline and John Jr. “Otherwise,” she wrote, “they were more or less surrounded by Greeks.” She would meet Ari and Jackie again in Paris that spring.

Rose’s wanderlust did not wane as she became an octogenarian. In July 1970 she flew to Switzerland, then to Greece for some time on Onassis’s yacht, the
Christina
, before celebrating her eightieth birthday in Ethiopia with Jean and Haile Selassie, whose state dinner she’d hosted at the White House so soon before Jack’s death.

Earlier in the year, Rose had cut the ribbon on the newly completed Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Center for Research in Mental Retardation and Human Development at Yeshiva University, an occasion she called “one of the proudest and happiest of my life.” Her work for the intellectually disabled included her usual speaking engagements and talk-show appearances, but as the 1970s continued, she devoted more of her attention to the care of her own developmentally disabled daughter, Rosemary. Her periodic visits to St. Coletta’s in Wisconsin continued, and her correspondence with the nuns at the facility reflect how much she cared about the minutiae of Rosemary’s life. The nuns’ side of the correspondence paints a picture of a quiet, simple, and not unhappy life in the rolling hills of the Midwest.

“It seems the longer [Rosemary] is off medication the more vocal and expressive she becomes. She at times amazes us with a complete and correct sentence,” Sister Mary Charles wrote to Rose in 1971. “We got her a little yellow canary named Skippy. He sings his heart out the whole day. I know she likes him as she often says, ‘Skippy, Skippy!’ ”

In June of 1973, Sister Mary wrote, “I try to give her little attentions during the day; do the little things for her I know she likes—putting a
rose in her hair, talking to her, singing ‘My Wild Irish Rose,’ which she loves to hear. . . . The three sisters all love Rosemary and each of us do whatever we can to keep her happy. Above all we bear with her moods and emotional upsets with care and concern.” The last comment indicates that Rosemary’s mood swings were still present, though perhaps less frequent and severe.

One note from Rose to Father Robert Kroll during this period is illuminating. Describing Rosemary, Rose says that “she was progressing quite satisfactorily but circumstances developed by which she was further retarded, and so it is very difficult at times to become reconciled to her present state. However, I try to accept God’s will.” Though euphemized, it was an acknowledgement of her sense of loss; more than thirty years later, she still had trouble “becoming reconciled.”

But she found her peace with Rosemary’s condition in her faith. “I do sense and I do believe,” Rose wrote, “that Rosemary’s gift to me is equal to the gifts of my other children. By her presence I feel that she, too has asked something terribly important of us. With her life itself she too has shown us direction, given us purpose and a way to serve. That has been her gift.”

Rose would find the precise limits of her candor when she finally got down to work on her memoirs. In 1972 she received a $1.525 million advance from Doubleday (until then, the biggest advance ever given for a single book) and set to work with ghostwriter Robert Coughlan. To build a narrative of her life, Coughlan interviewed Rose and members of the family at length and went through Rose’s archived papers, no small task for a woman who rarely seems to have thrown anything away. Though Coughlan produced the initial manuscript, Rose went through it with a fine-toothed comb, erasing any elements she found untoward, upsetting, or unflattering. The result is her final bit of image making, the crafting of the Kennedy narrative as she wanted it seen. Published in 1974,
Times to Remember
became an instant best-seller. All of the proceeds went to the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation.

As Rose got well into her eighties, she could not campaign with the same vigor that she had before. Still, she helped where she could, and she enjoyed the attention. She campaigned in 1970 for Teddy’s reelection, his
first since Chappaquiddick, and for Sargent Shriver when he was nominated as George McGovern’s running mate in the 1972 presidential contest. Exhausted by years of campaigning and worried for Teddy’s safety, she was relieved when he decided not to run.

In the second half of the 1970s, Rose’s energy diminished markedly. She still took her swims in the Atlantic Ocean off Hyannis, but she had to be helped into and out of the water. Soon she needed nursing help. More and more of her time was spent alone at Hyannis Port and in Palm Beach.

But her life wasn’t over. She was at Faneuil Hall in Boston when, on November 7, 1979, Teddy launched his ultimately unsuccessful bid to steal the Democratic presidential nomination from beleaguered incumbent Jimmy Carter. And she visited the Oval Office with Teddy in 1981 for the last time—and the first time since Jack’s death—to watch as Ted presented an award for bipartisanship to Ronald Reagan.

On Good Friday, 1984, Rose collapsed at the Palm Beach house and nearly died from a severe stroke. She spent the rest of her days like Joe, confined to a wheelchair. Only speaking with great difficulty, she still said the rosary with Teddy when he stayed with her in Hyannis every weekend.

Rose died from pneumonia on January 22, 1995, at the age of 104, having lived through nineteen presidential administrations, including her own son’s; having witnessed the rise of radio, the automobile, the airplane, film, television, and manned spaceflight; having lived at the center of US history during the middle of the twentieth century; having survived two world wars; having traveled to every continent save Antarctica; having associated with kings, queens, popes, and presidents; having outlived her husband and four of her nine children.

She was buried next to Joe in Brookline. Her gravestone, fittingly simple for a woman whose name had come to represent motherhood, philanthropy, and faith, read only “Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy 1890–1995.”