Jackie, Ethel, Joan: Women of Camelot (3 page)

“God gave her very good gifts,” intoned President Bill Clinton at the graveside, “and imposed upon her great bur- dens. She bore them all with dignity and grace and uncom- mon common sense. . . . May the flame she lit so long ago burn ever brighter here and always brighter in our hearts.” The President concluded, “God bless you, friend, and farewell.”

For Jackie Kennedy Onassis it had been a life of joy, laughter, and fairy-tale endings, as well as despair, sadness, and tragedy—much of it shared in common experience with her sisters-in-law, Ethel Skakel Kennedy and Joan Bennett Kennedy.

There is much to remember of a time that was like no other. Indeed, even after all these years, we still look back with wonder.

P A R T O N E

Joan . . .

Y
oung Joan Bennett Kennedy gazed out upon a cold but clear Cape Cod morning from the veranda of the large three- story clapboard house owned by her in-laws, Rose and Joseph P. Kennedy. Ignoring the many friends, family mem- bers, photographers, and Secret Service agents coming and going, rushing in and out of the house and slamming the screen door behind them, she quietly slipped into a knee- length wool coat before wrapping a silk scarf around her head. As she walked down the porch’s few wooden steps, she tied the scarf below her chin to keep her blonde hair from being mussed by unpredictable ocean breezes. After a stroll across an expansive, well-manicured lawn, and then down a wood-chipped pathway, she found herself on the sandy coves where the Kennedys went to seek rare moments of privacy and reflection. Joan walked along the shore of wild dune grass and sand, and slowly headed for the break- water.

It was November 9, 1960. In what would turn out to be the closest election race in American history once all the votes were tabulated, Joan’s brother-in-law John Fitzgerald

Kennedy had been elected thirty-fifth President of the United States. In fact, he had received only about 100,000 more popular votes than Richard M. Nixon, out of some 103 million cast, the equivalent of about one vote per precinct. This close call would find Jack ensconced in the most pow- erful office in the world—a lot to take in for any member of Kennedy’s close-knit family but especially for Joan, the least politically inclined of them all.

As Joan walked along the beach, other family members celebrated Jack’s victory in a fashion so typical of the Kennedys: by playing a raucous game of touch football in Rose and Joseph’s sprawling, beach-front yard. William Walton, an old friend of the family who had assisted Jack in the campaign and who was now his and Jackie’s house guest, was on one of the teams. He recalled, “That family had the meanest football players ever put together. The girls were worse than the men; they’d claw, scratch, and bite when they played touch football. Playing to win was a fam- ily characteristic. Jack, Bobby, Teddy, Peter Lawford, Eu- nice and Ethel . . . tough players, all.”

“That’s my brother Jack,” Bobby said with a laugh as the new President fumbled the ball. “All guts, no brains.” The President-elect, dressed in a heavy sweater over a sport shirt, tan slacks, and loafers, took a tumble. As he raised himself from the soft ground, his shock of auburn hair mussed and his blue eyes twinkling, he looked more like a high school student than the next leader of the Free World. The only reminder of his age—forty-three—and his aching back was the groan he let out as he got to his feet.

Joan, the youngest Kennedy wife at twenty-four, had ar- rived the night before from her home in Boston, without her boyishly handsome husband, Ted. He showed up in the

Joan . . .
9

morning by plane from the West Coast where, as the cam- paign’s Rocky Mountain coordinator, he had been given charge of thirteen states—ten of which had been lost, in- cluding the most important, California. Joan had been up late. At midnight, she was still at Ethel and Bobby’s with the rest of the family, monitoring election results. Exhausted, Jackie and Jack had already retired to their own home, though Jack kept popping over to his brother’s throughout the early morning hours to get updates. When it looked as though a win was probable for her brother-in-law, Joan be- came caught up in the excitement and started calling Repub- lican friends on the telephone to collect election bets. “Pay up,” she told one chum in Boston. “I told you he’d win.” (Later that morning it wouldn’t look quite as promising for the Kennedys when Jack’s lead began to dwindle, but even- tually the slim margin would be decided in his favor.)

Joan and Ted were parents of a baby daughter, Kara, born in February of that year. They had been married for a little over two years and were about to move from their first home—a modest town house in Louisburg Square, the most exclusive part of Beacon Hill—into a three-story, ivy- covered, redbrick house, one of fifteen others in a horse- shoe-shaped enclave in nearby Charles River Square. Ted had actually wanted to move to California to get out of his brothers’ shadow and away from the overwhelming Kennedy family influence. In fact, when he and Joan went there to look for a home, Joan enjoyed the West Coast so much she began to anticipate a contented life there, with the large family she hoped to one day raise in year-round Cali- fornia sunshine. However, much to her dismay, the Kennedy patriarch, Joseph, wouldn’t hear of such a move. He sug- gested—insisted, actually—that the newlyweds return to the

Washington area. As Joan would tell it, “And that was the end of
that
.” She expressed amazement at Ted’s compliance and the way he changed their plans without another word being spoken about it, even to his own wife.

A year and a half earlier, the family and its advisers sat down at Joseph Kennedy’s dining-room table in his Palm Beach estate and, over a lunch of roast turkey and stuffing, decided that Jack would run for highest office. (Joan, who had just one sibling, once wondered aloud, “Why is it that large families always make big decisions while eating lots of food?”) It was then that Ted abandoned any long-range goals for himself, at least for the foreseeable future. Though he had graduated from Harvard, had received his law degree from the University of Virginia Law School, and had been admitted to the Massachusetts bar, he and his father decided that he would not practice law. Rather, he would devote himself to active political work on behalf of his brother’s presidential campaign. A month after their daughter Kara was born, a still-weak Joan joined Ted on the campaign trail, probably not because she wanted to but because she had no choice. Still recovering from a difficult pregnancy, she couldn’t possibly have found the idea of dragging herself and her infant from one state to the next the least bit appeal- ing. In fact, she would confide to certain friends of hers that she thought it was “unfair of the family to expect me to go.” Joan didn’t last very long on the campaign trail with Ted— and then, later, with Ethel—but certainly not for lack of try- ing.

The election of John Kennedy was an exciting milestone for the family, and of course, Joan joined in their enthusi- asm. However, she must have had certain reservations. From the day she became engaged to Ted, her life was not

her own. He and his family had overpowered her, from dic- tating the kind of wedding she would have to deciding where she would live—and that was before Jack had be- come President. Now that he had won the election and the family was even more influential, the Kennedys had more ambitious plans for Ted. So what would the future hold for her and her family? As she later put it, “I wondered if I would ever be who I really wanted to be, who I was inside, or would I have to conform in some unnatural way. With that family, I found out fast that if you didn’t join in . . . you were just left out.”

Jackie . . .

O
ut in the distant vista of space and sea, Joan saw a slender female figure standing on the beach, facing the rolling ocean. Long arms wrapped around herself and slim shoul- ders hunched forward, she appeared to be trying to keep the Nantucket Sound chill at bay. It was Joan’s thirty-one-year- old sister-in-law, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy.

Wearing a beige raincoat, flat-heeled walking shoes, and a scarf around her hair, Jackie, too, had slipped away while the others played touch football. She rarely, if ever, partici- pated in such family roughhousing. Luckily for her, she was nearly eight months pregnant and not expected to play sports, even by the always competitive, game-loving Kennedys. “She seemed completely dazed as people kept coming over to her to congratulate her, to talk about what

had happened, to just share in the joy of it all,” recalls Jacques Lowe, the family’s photographer, who documented official as well as candid moments on that day. “It was too much to take. She needed to get away.”

Jackie Kennedy was the kind of woman who lived her life fully, getting as much from each day’s experiences as possi- ble and savoring every moment along the way. While being the wife of a senator had obviously afforded her a certain amount of respect and prestige in which she had delighted, becoming the country’s First Lady promised an even head- ier adventure. However, Jackie was known for her paradox- ical personality. As would later become well known, she enjoyed recognition yet abhorred publicity. While she sa- vored her celebrity, she expected her privacy and that of her family to be respected. True, she enjoyed money, power, and status, but she placed equal importance on practical female concerns of the day, such as raising her family and being a good wife.

By this time, November 1960, Jackie had one child, two- year-old Caroline. That morning, she prompted the tot to greet her father at breakfast by saying “Good morning, Mr. President.” In seventeen days, Jackie would give premature birth to a boy at Georgetown University Hospital, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Jr., nicknamed “John-John” by the press. The baby would be so sickly at birth, it would be thought that he wouldn’t survive. However, in time, he would grow to be strong and healthy, like most Kennedy stock. Just after his birth, Jackie would move from her home in Georgetown to a new one in Washington, the White House.

Jackie’s greatest concern about becoming First Lady had to do with the scrutiny her new position was sure to guaran-

tee her and her family. She had become aware of her duty to be accessible to the press—or at least appear to be that way—early on in her husband’s campaign. When she watched Jack’s historic debate against his opponent, Richard Nixon, on television in her Hyannis Port living room, she was joined by twenty-five reporters and photog- raphers. They sat with her and took note of her every “oooh” and “aaah,” in the hope of divining her opinion of his per- formance. “It was so dreary,” she later recalled, using a fa- vorite phrase.

Meeting with some of the female members of the Wash- ington press corps in her Georgetown home was undoubt- edly another memorable event for Jackie. A few had intimated that if she didn’t invite them to her home, they might not be kind to Jack in their reporting. Jackie probably knew that once they had a chance to become more familiar with her, they would become allies. However, the prospect of their trooping through her private residence must have been repugnant to her. Like her sister-in-law, Joan, Jackie was obviously not happy doing things she didn’t want to do, just to benefit her husband’s political future, but for Jack and his family she would often be asked to subordinate her own desires. So Jackie had some of the more important female reporters over for tea and, true to form, proceeded to dazzle each one of them.

The media’s euphoria about Jackie would not last long. Soon the press would be criticizing everything she did, from how much money she spent on clothing to how much time she spent away from the White House. Throughout her life she would engage in a love-hate relationship with the press, seemingly reveling in the fact that everywhere she went she was recognized and photographed, yet also acting as if she

detested the attention, never revealing more of herself than absolutely necessary. After Jack was elected, Bess Truman said of Jackie, “I think she will be a perfect First Lady. But she drops a curtain in front of you. No one will ever get to know her.” When Jackie brought her new German Shepherd puppy, Clipper, on a flight from Hyannis Port to Washing- ton, a journalist sent her a note asking what she intended to feed the dog. She responded with one word: “Reporters.”