Jackie, Ethel, Joan: Women of Camelot (58 page)

“It was terrible,” recalls Claudine Longet. Just two days earlier, Bobby had joined her husband Andy Williams in an off-key chorus of “Moon River” during a rally at the very same Ambassador Hotel in which he would be slain.

“Bobby loved to sing,” said Andy Williams, “and, boy, what a voice! It was terrible! He always sang loudly and off- key. I used to kid him about it.”

Those happy days with Bobby seemed over now as he lay in a coma. “Bobby never recognized us, never saw us,” Longet recalls of that night at the hospital. “It was the longest night of my life. We kept thinking he was going to make it, because if anybody could make it, he could. We were just pacing back and forth, drinking coffee, and feeling empty. It was like another world.”

However, no one, even Ethel, was more on edge than Jackie. As the evening wore on, it was as though an already- taut wire was being drawn one final notch tighter around Jackie’s sanity. Suddenly, it snapped. “Get away from me,” she ordered her Secret Service agent. “I don’t ever want to see you around me again. I mean it.” Before astonished wit- nesses, she began to cry. “What good are you, anyway?” she asked the agent through her tears.

Frank Mankiewicz recalled, “Jackie had a wild, hunted- animal look in her eyes, and she just wanted to escape, to lash out and reject an intolerable situation.”

After turning on her Secret Service agent, Jackie lashed out at Ethel. “How dare God do this to us?” she said, her voice filled with raw emotion. “If there is a God in heaven, Ethel, he is a cruel God,” Jackie concluded, her voice seem- ing slurred, her manner a bit medicated. “He is an unfeeling God, a heartless God, and no God of mine.”

Jackie Kennedy then turned and walked toward the hospi-

tal room of her dead husband’s younger brother for one final visit.

Senator Robert Francis Kennedy Is Dead

A
t 1:44
A
.
M
., on June 6, 1968, about twenty-five hours after he had been shot, Senator Robert Francis Kennedy died a few minutes after being taken off life support and without ever having regained consciousness. With him at the time of his death were Ethel; his brother, Ted; sisters Jean and Pat; Jean’s husband, Stephen; and Jackie. He was just forty-two years old.

“When the President was assassinated, the family be- came very stoic,” remembered Rita Dallas, Joseph Kennedy’s nurse. “But when Bobby was shot, the whole house crumbled. Mrs. Kennedy fell apart and she kept say- ing, ‘My son, my son.’ Mr. Kennedy cried. I cried. It was too much.”

Roger Wilkins, Assistant Attorney General, put it best when he encapsulated the feelings of the family and per- haps of the entire country, exhausted by a decade of tur- moil: “It was over. The whole thing was over. The whole period of lift and hope and struggle. It was all over. It was just over.”

It would fall upon Ethel’s family—including Jackie—and friends, in particular Joan Braden, Sarah Davis, Sue Markham, Kay Evans, and Ann Buchwald, to support Ethel

emotionally during this awful time. While Jackie was at Ethel’s side, Joan couldn’t be because she was in Paris with Eunice. Joan had been visiting the Shrivers in France after opening a Kennedy Memorial Library exhibition in London. (In recent years, Joan had continued touring the world with exhibits of JFK memorabilia, an active and effective Kennedy ambassador.)

One of Ethel’s friends remembers having taken three tele- phone calls from Joan at the hospital, wanting to speak to Ethel. Ethel would not get on the line, but Ted did speak to his wife. Slumping over, he began to sob. “Bobby’s gone, Joansie,” he said. “He’s gone.”

Jackie and Ethel sat together on the Air Force One flight that the Kennedys and their friends and coworkers—includ- ing Rafer Johnson, Rosey Grier, Frank Mankiewicz, Pierre Salinger, Jesse Unruh, and others—took from Los Angeles to LaGuardia, which had been sent by Lyndon Johnson to carry Bobby’s body home. Three of Ethel’s children, Bobby Jr., Joe, and Kathleen, were also aboard. Accompanied by Lem Billings and a Secret Service agent, they had flown to be with their mother in Los Angeles after the shooting. Of course, a deeply upset Ted was aboard, along with his sisters Jean and Pat, Jean’s husband, Steve Smith, and Lee Radzi- will and her husband, Stas.

Jackie and Ethel both cried on the flight, though the tears flowed more easily for Jackie. She was still raw with grief over Jack, even after five years. She had even hesitated to get aboard the plane because she thought it was the same one that had carried Jack from Dallas back to Washington, “and I could never get on that plane again, ever. Is it the same one?” she demanded to know. “Because if so, I must know.” Crewmen assured Jackie that, while both planes

were blue and silvery-white, this 707 was not the same air- craft.

Ethel tried to maintain her composure throughout the flight, sometimes falling into a fitful sleep lying next to Bobby’s coffin. At other times, she would bound up the aisle telling everyone to “cheer up.”

Sander Vanocur, one of the few reporters on the flight, re- calls, “Ethel tried to cheer up everyone. She tried to lift everyone’s spirits in that moment of great sadness and grief for herself. People would come up to her and offer their con- dolences and she’d say, ‘But are
you
all right?’ ”

“There was a doctor on that flight [Dr. Blake Watson, Ethel’s obstetrician, present because Ethel was pregnant with Rory, her and Bobby’s eleventh child] who tried to give Ethel sedatives,” Lem Billings once remembered. “Jackie took all the pills from him, except for one, which she gave to Ethel. ‘I think you should feel as much of the pain and mis- ery now as you can stand,’ Jackie told Ethel. ‘Better now than later, believe me.’ ”

Also on that flight was Coretta Scott King, widow of the slain Martin Luther King, Jr., who had flown to Los Angeles to be at the hospital with Ethel. Ethel and Jackie, along with Bobby and Ted (but not Joan), had attended Martin Luther King’s funeral, and Bobby had arranged for the plane that would take King’s body back to Atlanta from Memphis, where he was killed.

“On the flight, I looked up at one point,” Lem Billings re- called, “and there they were, three of the bravest women in the country, Jackie, Ethel, and Coretta, speaking to one an- other about their mutual despair. It was very touching. Very touching.”

“I witnessed a lot of love between Jackie Kennedy and

Ethel Kennedy,” recalled Coretta Scott King. “I felt that I was in the midst of true family. Jackie cared for Ethel, tried to be there for her. There were a lot of special, mem- orable moments on that flight, which I would never discuss publicly for fear of invading the privacy of these great women.

“Ethel Kennedy was so brave, such a truly heroic per- son,” Mrs. King continued. “Having already gone through what she and Jackie went through, one would think I could relate entirely to their experiences. But the truth is that every woman’s relationship with her husband is special and unique. No outsider can completely understand the intense loss suffered by a wife when her husband is taken from her . . . it’s just that personal to their relationship.”

“What can I do for you, Ethel?” Jackie wanted to know about an hour into the flight. “Please, tell me how I can help you.”

Ethel looked at her sister-in-law with sad, lost eyes. “Help me with the funeral,” she said, finally. “The way you did Jack’s, it was so perfect. It’s what Bobby should have. It’s what Bobby would want.”

“Well, I arranged Jack’s funeral the way
I
wanted it done,” Jackie said. “They’re for us, really, these terrible cer- emonies. They’re for the living, for the heartbroken who’ve been left behind. So you tell me what you want, Ethel, and I’ll take care of it.”

Ethel said that she wanted the service to take place at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and that she wanted Leonard Bernstein, a friend of the family’s since Jack’s presidential campaign, to help select the music. She wanted the nuns who had taught her at Manhattanville to sing during the mass. She also wanted Andy Williams to sing “Ave Maria.” (Williams

and his French wife, Claudine Longet, were also aboard the plane.) Bobby should be buried next to his brother, Ethel concluded, at Arlington National Cemetery.

Jackie raised her eyebrows. Leonard Bernstein? The nuns from Manhattanville? Andy Williams singing “Ave Maria”? To Jackie, it sounded like a network television special. But these were Ethel’s wishes just the same, so Jackie would see to it that they be honored.

“Immediately, she began making telephone calls,” Lem Billings remembers. “As I recall it, Bernstein told Jackie that women were not allowed to sing in the cathedral. ‘So what?’ was Jackie’s response. ‘This is special. This is Bobby. They will make an exception.’ She was determined to see to it that Ethel get everything she wanted.”

Jackie asked Bernstein to make the necessary arrange- ments and keep her apprised of his progress. After the plane landed at LaGuardia, where a thousand Kennedy friends, celebrities, politicians, and other supporters waited, a mo- torized lift slowly lowered Bobby’s coffin to the ground. Noticing that Ethel suddenly seemed ready to faint, Jackie rushed to her side and put her arm around Ethel’s shoulder. As the coffin was lifted into the waiting hearse, Jackie whis- pered words of comfort in her ear. Ethel stood limply at Jackie’s side, seemingly dazed, as the two women stared at the completely unfathomable sight of Bobby Kennedy’s ma- roon-draped, African mahogany casket being sprinkled with holy water by Terence J. Cooke, Archbishop of New York. The family and friends would take the body to St. Patrick’s at Fifth Avenue and East Fifty-First Street, and then go to Bobby and Ethel’s three-bedroom apartment at 860 United Nations Plaza. Rose Kennedy, dressed in black, was already at St. Patrick’s when everyone arrived.

“Oh Grandma,” Jackie said when she saw her. “I’m so sorry.” Jackie collapsed in tears as the stoic old woman held her firmly, her eyes lifted to the heavens in a blank stare. “If I ever feel sorry for myself, which is the most fatal thing, I think of Rose,” Jackie would say later. “I’ve seen her cry just twice. Once, her voice began to sort of break up and she had to stop talking. Then she took my hand and squeezed it and said, ‘Nobody’s ever to feel sorry for me.’ ” (Rose’s personal secretary, Barbara Gibson, recalls the day that the priest who gave JFK his Last Rites passed away. Barbara was reluctant to show the obituary to Rose for fear that it would upset her. It did. Rose began to sob in a display that was completely un- characteristic of her. Barbara was so moved, she too began to cry. Suddenly, Rose stiffened. “You must be tired, or coming down with something, to break down like that,” she said firmly as she quickly dabbed at her eyes.)

Jackie didn’t have Rose’s or Ethel’s faith, but even if she had, some felt it wouldn’t have eradicated the great despair she felt over Bobby’s death. Not concerned with what peo- ple thought of her, Jackie knelt in front of his coffin and broke down in deep, wracking sobs. Clearly, this repeating nightmare was more than she could bear.

When Rose found Ethel, the Kennedy matriarch walked over to her and hugged her, warmly. The two women shared a moment of silence, but no tears.

John Glenn, the astronaut and a close friend of the fam- ily’s, had arranged for all of Bobby’s clothing to be taken to another apartment in the building, owned by Truman Capote. But another friend of the family convinced him that Ethel would be distraught to find Bobby’s possessions al- ready gone, so they were put back into place before Ethel ar- rived.

Later, Jackie and Ethel stood together in front of one of the floor-to-ceiling windows and gazed out at the twinkling lights of Manhattan—a thousand-mile stare out to nowhere—lost in their thoughts, saying not a word to one another, the twin tragedies of Texas and California merging into one: Ethel in Los Angeles, pushing away the pressing crowd while trying to give Bobby room to breathe; Jackie in Dallas, jumping onto the trunk of a car hoping somehow to retrieve fragments of Jack’s skull; Ethel kneeling over Bobby’s bullet-riddled body, cradling his head in her lap; Jackie in Dallas, holding Jack’s ruined head to her bosom. Each had known so much anguish and loss, and there were no words to express any of it.