Jackie, Ethel, Joan: Women of Camelot (57 page)

As the banshee sirens of the ambulance wailed and its red lights flashed, an emotional Ethel, seemingly out of control, continued to rage, at one point becoming so angry at Behrman she threw his logbook out the window. “I tried to check his wounds and she told me to keep my hands off him,” Behrman later said. “I tried to put bandages on him and she wouldn’t let me.” When Bobby’s breathing became very heavy, however, Ethel relented and let Behrman put an oxygen mask on Bobby.

Dr. Vasilius Bazilauskas, the emergency doctor on call at Central Receiving Hospital, had been alerted that Bobby Kennedy had been shot and that he might be on his way to that hospital. As Bazilauskas waited on the ramp leading to the emergency room, he could hear the blaring sirens. The ambulance turned a corner, pulled in, and backed up to the platform. “Somebody ripped the back door open, and there was Ethel,” recalled Bazilauskas. “She looked frightened, and her eyes were very wide.”

Ethel focused on the doctor. “Please help him. Please help him,” she moaned. But when hands reached out to pull the stretcher out of the ambulance Ethel, panicked and frightened, began inexplicably slapping at the hands.

“Somehow she didn’t want hands reaching out to handle him,” recalled Dr. Bazilauskas. “Maybe it was because one of those clawing hands that she had seen in the past few months of the campaign had held a gun that shot her hus- band.”

By the time they reached the hospital, Ethel was panic- stricken and acting out of sheer terror. “Please don’t hurt him, please don’t hurt him,” she kept repeating in a frantic litany. When she saw a lone photographer near the emer- gency entrance, she screamed at him and pushed him with her shoulder, sending him reeling backward.

“When he [Bobby] was on the platform I could see that he was like a blob of Jell-O that you took out of the refrigera- tor,” recalled Bazilauskas. “I immediately realized that he was probably gone, but of course I couldn’t be sure of it. There was an oxygen mask on his face, put there in the am- bulance. I put my hand underneath his shirt, which had been partially opened, to feel his chest for warmth and it was halfway to the coldness of death.”

“The Hand of a Dead Man”

T
he tiny hospital emergency room was crowded with peo- ple. A team of nurses cut off Bobby’s clothes while others tried to clear the area, though they weren’t having much suc- cess. The doctor, not hearing a heartbeat in Bobby, started massaging his chest. When Ethel complained, thinking that he was hurting her husband, the physician patiently ex-

plained to her what he was doing. Earlier, when the doctor had repeatedly slapped Bobby’s face to see if he reacted to pain stimulus, Ethel had asked him not to be so rough. The doctor ignored her.

When Dr. Bazilauskas injected adrenaline into Bobby’s arm muscle, his heart started beating on its own.

“Why did you stop massaging him?” Ethel now wanted to know.

“His heart is going now,” the doctor replied, “and we have some hope.”

“I don’t believe you,” Ethel said quietly, drained of emo- tion. “He’s dead. I know he’s dead.”

Placing the stethoscope’s diaphragm over Bobby’s heart, the doctor then handed Ethel the ear portion. She leaned for- ward, listening. “Her face lit up,” Bazilauskas later recalled. “She looked like a mother who had just heard the heartbeat of a child she thought was gone.”

Ethel’s joy was short lived, however. She heard a scuffle outside the emergency room and rushed out to see what was happening. Two policemen were guarding the door, refusing entrance to Father Mundell, a family friend who had been with them at the hotel but who had gotten lost in the crowd. He had finally found his way to the hospital. Ethel rushed out and pushed one of the officers aside. The startled police- man then shoved her back, sending her reeling. When others surrounded the officer and broke up the shoving match, Ethel was able to usher the priest into the room, where he gave Bobby Absolution. Shortly thereafter another priest from a nearby parish, Father Thomas Peacha, was also al- lowed to enter the room. He had heard of the shooting on his car radio and rushed over to the hospital, where he per- formed the Last Rites.

The decision was made that Bobby should be transferred to the nearby Good Samaritan Hospital, which was better equipped for delicate brain surgery. Wearing an oxygen mask, and with tubes sticking out of his body, Bobby was transferred to Good Samaritan. Because a crowd of a thou- sand or more had gathered outside the hospital, they were forced to sneak the stretcher out of a side door.

“Will he live?” Ethel asked the doctor before they took off in the ambulance.

“Right now he’s doing all right,” Dr. Bazilauskas replied. “Let’s hope, let’s just hope.”

Privately, the doctor knew the worst. “I had seen the sen- ator’s legs go into convulsions,” he said later, “which meant that the damage to the ‘switchboard’ [nerve center] was just too much. He could not survive. But of course I didn’t want to tell her that, and there was always hope.”

Ethel rode with Bobby in the ambulance, and when they arrived at the hospital she was joined by all the members of the Kennedy entourage, including his sisters Pat and Jean, all there to keep vigil.

At 2:45
A
.
M
. a team of surgeons—brain and chest special- ists—started a last-ditch effort to save Bobby Kennedy’s life. The doctors discovered that one of the bullets had passed through Bobby’s brain, but didn’t have the firepower to escape. Instead it hit the skull opposite the entry wound, splitting into many particles and ricocheting back, ripping into the brain tissue. The doctors’ mission was to clean out as much of the debris from the brain as they could without destroying more tissue, and then repair as much damage as possible. Meanwhile Police Detective Sergeant Dan Stewart was ordered to Good Samaritan to help take charge of secu- rity.

Nurses had tried to get Ethel to lie down, but she refused, opting instead to pace the floor and pray in a tiny room near the operating room, where two policemen kept guard. Three hours and forty minutes later, when the double doors swung open, Ethel was still there, waiting. When Bobby was wheeled into the recovery room, Ethel, still in her orange and white minidress, climbed onto the bed and lay next to him.

At 7:20
A
.
M
. Frank Mankiewicz emerged outside, ex- hausted and grim, to talk to reporters and to tell them that Ted Kennedy had recently arrived. In fact, just hours earlier, Ted had turned on the television in his hotel room in San Francisco to see a surreal scene of people screaming and panicking. Someone had been shot. Ted and his friends had somehow misunderstood what was happening and thought the madness was occurring at a victory rally for Bobby they had just attended in San Francisco. Had the shots been a near miss at Ted? Suddenly, the reality hit him: It was Bobby who had been shot, and the nightmare being broadcast was from Los Angeles. Stunned, Ted took the next plane to the City of Angels.

Mankiewicz admitted that Bobby’s condition was “ex- tremely critical” and that “the next twelve to thirty-six hours are crucial. He’s living. He’s not conscious. He’s breathing on his own.”

What Mankiewicz did not tell the reporters is that Bobby’s situation was hopeless. He was going to die. Shortly after surgery, head surgeon Dr. Henry Cuneo had told Mankiewicz as much, though Mankiewicz says today that that’s not what he heard. “What I heard was that Bobby was in critical shape and that there was always a chance he could live,” he says. “I don’t care what they told me. I only

know what I heard. There was a sense among us, somehow, that he would pull through. It was hard to imagine that he couldn’t, and harder to imagine that this terrible thing could happen twice in the same family. I don’t think we were lis- tening to what we were being told, as much as we were lis- tening to our hearts.”

Dr. Cuneo called John Miner, Deputy District Attorney of Los Angeles, to inform him of what was happening. “He’s on life support, but he’s dead,” Dr. Cuneo reported to Miner on the telephone. “Oh, my dear God,” Miner said. “His poor wife, all those children. How could this have happened?”

Miner rushed to the hospital. “I went to the room where he was,” Miner now recalls. “It was very sad. I noticed that the door was ajar and I peeked in. There was Ethel sitting beside his bed, holding his hand. ‘It’s all right, Bobby,’ she was telling him. ‘We’re going to take you back home where they have the best doctors and you’ll be all right. You’ll see, you’ll be just fine. I promise.’

“She didn’t know that she was really holding the hand of a dead man.”

“No God of Mine”

“
H
ow’s Bobby?” Jackie wanted to know as soon as she got off the plane that had taken her from New York to Los Angeles. Large sunglasses covered her reddened, puffy eyes as she looked at Chuck Spalding, who had picked her

up at the airport. “I need to know. Please give it to me straight.”

“Jackie,” said Spalding, “he’s dying.”

Visibly stunned, Jackie took three steps backward, closed her eyes and dropped her head to her chin as if mortally wounded. “Oh, dear God,” she said. “My dear God in heaven above . . . why?”

Earlier that day, at 3:45
A
.
M
. New York time, the ring of her telephone had awakened Jackie. Just hours earlier, she had paid a brief late-night visit to Bobby’s campaign headquarters in New York, where the mood was jubilant. “I feel just wonderful. I’m delighted,” she exclaimed with a broad smile when asked how she felt about Bobby’s success. She was escorted back to her apartment at about midnight; after just a few hours’ sleep, Prince Stas Radzi- will awakened her, calling from Europe to ask about Bobby’s condition. But Jackie didn’t even know he’d been shot. In an instant, the shocking news caused her reluctant memory to go reeling back to that November afternoon in Dallas. “Oh, no,” she exclaimed. “It can’t have happened again.”

“I got there at about five in the morning,” Roswell Gilpatric recalled. “It was a bad time, she was very, very emotionally distraught, but it was the way Jackie got upset. Very internally. But she thought Bobby might make it, or at least that’s what she had been told, by Teddy I think. She needed a private plane, so I called Tom Watson, head of IBM, a personal friend. I knew he had a number of planes at his disposal.”

After meeting Stas Radziwill at Kennedy Airport, Jackie, Roswell Gilpatric, and Tom Watson all left for Los Angeles, where they were met by Chuck Spalding. He describes

Jackie as “slowly withering away from the inside. You could just feel it.”

Jackie immediately went to the hospital, where she joined Jean, Pat, and Ted in their awful vigil in the Board of Direc- tors’ room. Jackie seemed to be sedated, almost in a zombie- like state. She had been fortified by pills from Dr. Max Jacobson, the infamous doctor who had kept her husband drugged through much of his time at the White House and who continued to supply her with “downers” from time to time in moments of great stress. Soon Ethel joined the sad group while finally taking a break from her bedside vigil. Jackie and Ethel hugged, a desperate embrace with no tears, just stunned silence between them.

Everyone milled about, trying to think of what to do, what to say. Jackie walked over to Frank Mankiewicz. “The church is at its best only at the time of death,” she said, for no apparent reason. “The rest of the time it’s often rather silly little men running around in little suits. We know death. As a matter of fact, if it weren’t for the children, we’d wel- come it.”

Mankiewicz now recalls, “I don’t believe that she was speaking of the Kennedy family in particular, which is how it has been reported in the past. She was speaking about she and I when she said ‘we.’ We were having a private conver- sation, which some must have overheard, and it’s been mis- construed for years. I don’t know why. She was in shock. It was an awful night.”

Two by two, they visited Bobby, whose head was heavily wrapped in white bandages. George Plimpton, a friend of the Kennedys who had been just a few feet from Bobby when he was shot, has recalled, “It was a horrifying death- watch, like visiting a tomb at Westminster Abbey.”