Jackie, Ethel, Joan: Women of Camelot (43 page)

After Ethel left, Joan arrived with Eunice and Pat. Eunice and Pat immediately walked over to Jackie, who was still sitting at the table alone, and began talking quietly with her. Joan, however, stood in a corner watching her children Kara, four, and Teddy Jr., two, who were playing with the other children.

When Jackie noticed Joan standing awkwardly alone, she excused herself from Pat and Eunice and went to her. The two embraced and, almost immediately, Joan began to sob.

Jackie, who had just been through her own crying jag fol- lowing Ethel’s, appeared strong and tearless.

“It’s all right, Joan,” Jackie whispered. “Let it all out. Let every bit of it out.”

Then, still embracing her sister-in-law, Jackie gently pat- ted Joan on the back as Joan cried softly.

Aftermath

A
fter the funeral for John Fitzgerald Kennedy, while the nation continued to mourn its slain President, the govern- ment began to resume its normal operations. It had been the idea of Secretary of State Dean Rusk and Secretary of De- fense Robert McNamara to move Johnson into the Oval Of- fice quickly in order to get down to the business of running the country. However, Bobby asked LBJ to stay out of the Oval Office until at least three days after the funeral. “And there was Jack’s rocking chair,” Ethel later recalled ruefully, “upside down in the hallway, ready to be moved out.”

Jackie had no interest in any of the inner-office workings of the Presidency at this time. In the months following the tragedy, her moods swung wildly from anger to hopeless- ness to resolve and back to anger. Whereas she once chose her words with care, now they tumbled out indiscriminately. “I never had or wanted a life of my own,” Jackie said pub- licly at the time, a statement that really was not true but did demonstrate her level of confusion.

She had grown so accustomed to being First Lady that

having to relinquish that life so unexpectedly left Jackie feeling utterly lost and without direction. Always a contem- plative person, though, she instinctively knew that she had to get a grip on herself and think about her future, if only for the sake of her children. But in the silence of her heart, she must have also realized that her life as a president’s wife had left her unprepared for her desolate existence as his widow and single mother of his children. Also, the tremendous guilt she felt at having lived through the Dallas experience, while her husband died, was almost overwhelming.

“Why, oh why, did I survive?” she asked Kenny O’Don- nell. “Why Jack instead of me? Why wasn’t I killed?”

As Jackie Kennedy struggled with memories of her hus- band’s brutal murder, she worried she would now be doomed to spend her life in the public eye as a living, per- petual reminder of the nightmare—a tragic symbol of a na- tion’s inconsolable grief. She might have been able to accept that fate, but would her children ever be able to exist with such a shroud of death over their lives? Jackie wanted them to have as normal a life as possible, and she would do what she could to shield them from public scrutiny and curiosity, yet she knew that circumstances would probably make this an impossible task. “Everywhere I go, I am his wife,” she said. “With his kids. Seeing us in person somehow brings him back to life for them.”

While John was too young to fully comprehend what had happened in Dallas—he just knew that Daddy was “in heaven”—six-year-old Caroline not only understood it fully but was also deeply affected by it. She would vehemently spit out the word “assassinated” with great, and very adult, anger. Whereas she was once a happy, carefree, and preco- cious child, Caroline became withdrawn, sullen, and trou-

bled in the weeks after her father’s murder. Jackie, horrified to find her daughter walking about with her fists clenched, decided to consult Erik Erikson, a celebrated child psycho- analyst and author of the then-popular book
Childhood and Society.

After the scholarly, gray-haired Erikson, a Harvard pro- fessor, counseled the two children on several occasions, Jackie was happy with their progress. It would take years, though, for Caroline to accept the fact that her father had been senselessly murdered.

So distraught was Jackie at this time that she actually con- sidered giving John Jr. and Caroline to Bobby and Ethel to raise for a short time. What kind of mother could she be, she reasoned, under the circumstances? She couldn’t even care for her own emotional needs, she reasoned, how would she care for her children’s? She felt inadequate as a parent. The thought that she would probably be alone for many years to come made her feel even more helpless and desperate.

It had actually been specified in Jackie’s 1960 will that if anything happened to her and Jack, their children should be raised by Joan and Ted (further testimony of Jackie’s strong feelings for Joan because she certainly didn’t seem to have much of a rapport with Ted at this time). However, after the President’s assassination Jackie perhaps realized that Joan was in no shape to care for Caroline and John Jr., even if just for a short time.

Jackie and Ethel had a number of conversations about the possibility of John Jr. and Caroline moving into Hickory Hill, if only for a year. After that time, if she was able to do so, Jackie would take her children back and they would at- tempt to start a new life together without Jack. But then Jackie changed her mind.

The reality of the chaos that was Hickory Hill—no order, no discipline, a lot of people coming and going, children screaming and hollering from morning to night—came flooding back to her. She had never felt comfortable with the way Ethel reared her family, a rowdy fend-for-yourself kind of environment. In the end, with Jackie’s unyielding sense of propriety, she could not envision her children being raised at Hickory Hill as part of what she viewed as practically a platoon from a guerrilla army.

Besides, she now saw herself as the chief protector of what used to be called “the sanctity of the home.” After carefully considering the idea, she realized it was unthink- able to give her children away, even for a year. She loved them too much.

Of course, Jackie Kennedy wasn’t the only one torn apart by the President’s assassination. Jack had been the center of the family, adored by everyone. His career had been their life’s work. Now that he was gone, none of the Kennedys— sisters-in-law Ethel and Joan included—would ever be the same. As well as the overwhelming sense of grief they felt, for they loved Jack dearly, there was also an aching for something they all knew they would miss: the joy of the White House experience in the way Jack and Jackie had cre- ated it. They might try to have joy in the future—and they would have plenty of good times elsewhere—but it would never be exactly the same as it was during the Kennedy ad- ministration. Jack and Jackie had been at the center of a crazy, golden time for everyone. But it was behind them now. As a result, the family’s infrastructure was knocked off-kilter. Joan’s and Ethel’s husbands, Jack’s brothers Ted and Bobby, found themselves trapped in their own private

hells because of their older brother’s murder, and their wives were powerless to assist them in any way.

Ted’s deep sorrow seemed to find its outlet in promiscu- ity. More than ever, he also found solace in the bottle, drowning his misery in alcohol.

Unfortunately, Joan’s grief also plummeted her into a deep, dark depression. She had great affection for Jack and could not comprehend such violence. She was also con- cerned about Jackie, her niece Caroline, and nephew John Jr. Soon she also found herself relying on alcohol to get through her long days and endless nights. Kennedy inti- mates were concerned that Joan often seemed to be a bit dazed at social gatherings—even those during the day—and whisperings began to be heard that she was drinking too much. “It was true,” said her good friend John Braden. “I do believe that the assassination pushed Joan over the edge in terms of her drinking. That was the turning point. Ted be- came more difficult, she was wracked with grief and sorrow, and she began to drink.”

While there was enough suffering to go around, perhaps nobody felt the agony as deeply as Bobby Kennedy. He feared that one of his campaigns—whether against orga- nized crime, union racketeers, Castro, or other dark forces—had brought about the assassination by retaliation. “I thought they would get one of us,” Bobby had said on the afternoon of the assassination. “But I thought it would be me.”

Bobby’s aide, John Seigenthaler, recalled that his emo- tional torment was so deep that he took on the look of a man in physical pain, “almost as if he were on the rack or that he had a toothache or that he had a heart attack . . . it was pain and it showed itself as being pain.”

“He was virtually nonfunctioning,” said Pierre Salinger. “He would walk for hours by himself.”

Jackie’s cousin, John Davis, concurs. “On the day of the funeral, I had never seen such a destroyed man in my entire life as Bobby Kennedy. He could hardly hold out his hand to shake another.”

Ethel didn’t know how to deal with Bobby as the silent, brooding, and moody man he had become since Dallas and, as she would always do in times of crisis, she decided to rely on God to get her and her husband through this time. “If he only prayed more,” she said of Bobby, “he would find solace in God’s healing power.”

Ethel did what she could. On a trip to New York, she would take him to see
Hello Dolly!
in hopes of cheering him up. “That did more for Bobby than anything else,” she would tell writer Bill Davidson. “As he entered the theater, the sophisticated, blasé New York audience rose to its feet and applauded. The only other time I ever saw an audience do that was when Jack Kennedy went to the theater. I try to expose Bobby to that sort of thing as much as possible, but it doesn’t always work.”

It’s interesting that Ethel would choose to have Bobby bask in public attention as a way to help him get over his grief. When he was with his sister-in-law Jackie, it was a different story. Jackie was more contemplative, shunning the public eye and encouraging Bobby to do the same thing. She and Bobby were in perfect understanding about their mutual torment and how they wanted to deal with it. As a re- sult, the two reached out to each other for comfort and formed a special bond during this dark time. Jackie shared the loss of Jack with his brother, and he with her, in a way that didn’t involve Ethel. Bobby would often visit Jackie at

her Georgetown home, and the two would sit in front of her drawing room fireplace, reading poetry, sharing tears, and feeling their mutual pain and sense of loneliness. Together they would visit Jack’s grave, leave flowers, and weep. He was beginning to fill a role as substitute father for Jackie’s children as well.

At Easter that year, Jackie and her children vacationed in Stowe, Vermont, with Bobby.

“It was on that trip, I believe, that Bobby suggested Jackie leave Washington,” said Kennedy intimate Chuck Spalding. “He felt that she was unhappy in that Georgetown fishbowl, and that she would be better off in New York. She could get lost in the city, he told her. She would find a measure of pri- vacy there. She took his advice.

“At this time, she was concerned about her financial fu- ture. The public assumed she was rich, but she was far from it. Jack had left her about $70,000 in cash, plus all of his per- sonal effects. There was also the interest income from two trusts, which I believe were valued at something like ten million. In all, she would have about $200,000 a year to live on. For Jackie, that wasn’t much. Bobby was trying to arrange for her to receive roughly $50,000 a year from the Kennedys, but the whole thing was absurd. Jackie on a bud- get?”

A few weeks later, while house-hunting in New York, Jackie, Ethel, Bobby, Nancy Tuckerman (Jackie’s good friend and secretary), and a large group of friends enjoyed dinner at Le Pavilion, an elegant Manhattan restaurant. The evening began with champagne, served as an aperitif, and with the first course, caviar with dry toast. The main course was
navarin d’agneau
(lamb stew), with which a red wine was served. Dessert was a
chocolat soufflé,
followed by
café

filtre,
and then more champagne. The subject of Jackie’s fu- ture came up.

“Well, I need to do
something,
” she reasoned as she held her cup of
café filtre,
her pinkie finger extended delicately. “The Kennedys aren’t going to support me forever. I have to face facts. But what can I do? Get a job? Me?”

Everybody laughed, knowing a good joke when they heard one.