The House of Kennedy Read online

  * * *

  On the day of Kennedy’s assassination, Special Agent Mike Howard searches Lee Harvey Oswald’s Dallas apartment. He discovers a green address book—since disappeared from evidence—but records that on page seventeen, under the heading “I WILL KILL,” Oswald has written the names of four men: conservative anti-Communist Edwin Walker; former vice president Richard Nixon; FBI agent James Hosty; and—at the top of the list—Texas governor John Connally. Oswald has already taken a shot at Walker, and Nixon, it turns out, is also in Dallas in November 1963 at the same time as JFK.

  Yet although Governor John Connally, who denied Oswald an adjustment to his “undesirable” military discharge, is first on Oswald’s kill list, it is President John F. Kennedy who is first to take a bullet from him.

  * * *

  By Sunday, November 24, a transfer is in process. Due to death threats against Oswald, who has now been connected to Kennedy’s assassination, police are on guard. At 11:20 a.m. they lead the prisoner—handcuffed to Detective James R. Leavelle—through the basement of the Dallas city jail and into an armored truck bound for the Dallas county jail. There Oswald will await a Monday court hearing.

  Dozens of print and television reporters have been waiting all morning to cover the perp walk, and millions of viewers have tuned in to the live broadcast.

  “All of a sudden someone steps out, two quick steps,” Dallas Times Herald photographer Bob Jackson recalls. The someone is local nightclub owner Jacob Leon Rubenstein, known as Jack Ruby. “He fired, and I hit the shutter…My big concern was did I get it before the bullet entered [Oswald’s] body.”

  Jackson succeeds in snapping the exact moment Ruby’s bullet hits Oswald in the abdomen, his mouth agape in pain, his eyes squeezed tight, his shackled hands slightly raised, as if bracing for the next bullet.

  Ruby’s “right hand was contracting as though he was trying to fire another shot,” Detective Leavelle later testifies at Ruby’s 1964 trial. Ruby’s defense? Not murder, but spasms of “psychomotor epilepsy.”

  Perhaps. Though Levealle testifies to hearing Ruby say, “I hope the sonof-a-bitch [sic] dies” as he pulls the trigger. “I saw Jack Ruby before he made his move toward Oswald,” Levealle recalls. “I jerked back and tried to pull Oswald behind me. I did manage to turn his body and he was hit about three-four inches left of the navel.”

  Asked to explain Ruby’s motivation, Levealle theorizes that the man wanted “to do something spectacular.”

  Chapter 22

  In the East Room of the White House, Jackie and her brother-in-law Bobby Kennedy stand before Jack’s casket.

  The Marsellus Casket Company’s Model 710, “The President,” is closed, in accordance with Jack’s wishes. “I want you to make sure they close the casket when I die,” family aide Frank Morissey remembers Jack saying to him. “He seemed to have a premonition about it, and he asked that eight or nine times.”

  A century earlier, another fallen leader lay in state in this very room, the chandeliers identically draped for mourning with black crepe. At Jackie’s request, the White House has modeled the mourning for her husband on what was done for Abraham Lincoln. “Jack really looks, acts, and sounds like young Lincoln,” Rose had once said, proudly describing her son’s performance in his October 1960 debate against Nixon. Now the thirty-fifth and sixteenth presidents have in common their deaths by extremist assassin’s bullet.

  Jackie asks Secret Service agent Clint Hill to bring her a pair of scissors so that she can snip a lock of Jack’s hair. When a pair is in her hand, Hill and Brigadier General Godfrey McHugh fold back the American flag that covers the casket—made of five-hundred-year-old solid African mahogany—and raise its heavy lid.

  “When I saw President Kennedy lying there, confined in that narrow casket, with his eyes closed so peacefully just like he was sleeping, it was all I could do to keep from breaking down,” Hill recalls. “Mrs. Kennedy and the president’s brother walked over to view the man they had so loved. I heard the sound of the scissors, beneath the painful cries, as she clipped a few locks of her husband’s hair.”

  The president is wearing Jackie’s wedding ring. A Parkland Memorial Hospital orderly had helped her slip it on his finger moments after doctors had declared him dead.

  George E. Thomas has dressed the president with extra care. The man Thomas calls Jack F. will be buried in his favorite blue suit.

  When the somber, private moment is complete, Bobby carefully closes the casket lid. Hand in hand, he and Jackie exit the East Room. The honor guard resumes its vigil around the president.

  * * *

  The night before, Jackie’s mother, Janet Auchincloss, decides it’s too much to expect Jackie to break the news of their father’s death to her children. She delegates the task to British nanny Maud Shaw, instructing her to tell the children individually, starting with five-year-old Caroline.

  Shaw protests, not wanting to be responsible for taking “a child’s last happiness,” but at Auchinchloss’s insistence, she manages a comforting story for Caroline, telling her that her father has gone to look after her baby brother. “Patrick was so lonely in heaven. He didn’t know anybody there. Now he has the best friend anyone could have.”

  Caroline and John Jr. know what a fun friend their dad could be, too. Jackie later reminisces how he played with them in the Oval Office, moving along with fitness instructor Jack LaLanne on television. How he “loved those children tumbling around him in this sort of—sensual is the only way I can think of it,” she says.

  Before they close the casket, Jackie instructs the children, “You must write a letter to Daddy now and tell him how much you love him.” Caroline dutifully does just that, and John Jr., not yet three, scribbles him a pretend note as well.

  * * *

  Opinion writer Jimmy Breslin famously reports from Arlington National Cemetery for the New York Herald Tribune, describing the exchange between gravedigger Clifton Pollard and superintendent John Metzler as they worked on Sunday, November 24, the day before the burial.

  “He was a good man,” Pollard said. “Yes, he was,” Metzler said. “Now they’re going to come and put him right here in this grave I’m making up,” Pollard said. “You know, it’s an honor just for me to do this.”

  That same day, a detail of navy enlisted pallbearers carries the president’s body from the White House to the Capitol Rotunda in preparation for the lying-in-state ceremony. President Johnson lays an honorary wreath at the casket, then Jackie and Caroline kneel there together. Their departure, with Bobby, is the public’s invitation to enter. People form two lines, blocks long. Even with the visitation extended overnight, each mourner is allowed only a glimpse.

  In one of the first acts of Lyndon Johnson’s fledgling presidency, he declares a national day of mourning in Jack’s remembrance on November 25, 1963.

  John Jr.’s third birthday will forever be the same day as his father’s funeral. Caroline will turn six before the month is out.

  Military body bearers place the president’s remains on the same caisson that had carried FDR and the Unknown Soldier. It’s drawn by seven gray horses and Black Jack, a riderless horse fitted with the saddle, stirrups, and backward-turned boots that symbolize a fallen leader. Twelve hundred troops cordon the route to St. Michael’s Cathedral, eight blocks distant.

  The temperature hovers at just over forty degrees, yet a crowd of one million people gathers in the open air. Private Arthur Carlson, Black Jack’s handler, recalls, “I’ve never seen that many people be that quiet. It must have been eight or ten people deep, the whole way, and they were all as still as statues.”

  The silent crowd watches a procession of international leaders and dignitaries who, despite intense security concerns, walk nearly a mile from the White House to St. Michael’s, where Cardinal Richard Cushing prepares to perform yet another Catholic rite for the Kennedy family. He married Jack and Jackie, said the funeral Mass for their son Patrick, and will now say Jack’s as well.<
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  Assembled in the pews are prime ministers and presidents—de Gaulle, Eisenhower, Truman—alongside generals and royalty. All listen as Bishop Philip Hannan recites Kennedy’s 1961 inaugural address with the solemnity of scripture.

  When Mass ends, Jackie stands with Caroline and John Jr. on the steps of the cathedral. The honor guard carries the coffin past them as a military band plays “Hail to the Chief.” Jackie bends down and whispers in her son’s ear, “John, you can salute Daddy now and say goodbye to him.”

  A photo of the salute the small boy gives his fallen father stands among some of the most indelible images ever taken.

  The procession continues along the three-mile route from St. Matthew’s Cathedral to Arlington National Cemetery. Jackie walks between Bobby and Ted, her sisters-in-law Ethel and Joan protectively shadowing them. The Kennedy sisters—Eunice, Jean, and Patricia—walk three abreast, holding a place for Rosemary in their hearts. The fatherless children, Caroline and John, ride in the motorcade.

  Rose alone represents the senior Kennedys. Joe is too frail to leave Hyannis Port. His health has been so poor following his stroke nearly two years earlier, Rose has long thought her husband near death already. “Not only did she expect him to die,” Kennedy chauffeur Frank Saunders says, “she even bought the dress. How awful that she had to wear it for her son’s funeral.”

  Joe’s nurse, Rita Dallas, says the rosary for him. “So it was,” she recalls, “while a nation watched their President laid to rest with fitting pomp and ceremony, his father prayed alone.”

  As the pallbearers carry the casket from the caisson to the grave, the United States Air Force Pipe Band plays “Mist Covered Mountain.”

  Fifty military fighters, thirty Air Force F-105s, and twenty Navy F4Bs pass overhead in three V formations, with one missing from the last V in tribute. Air Force One makes an honorary flyover, piloted by Colonel James B. Swindal, who only days before flew the president’s body home from Dallas.

  Swindal speaks for many in the military when he recalls the shock surrounding the loss of the president who had so memorably served among them. “I didn’t belong to the Johnson team. My President was in that box.”

  “Those drumbeats, I’ll tell you,” recalls the US Army specialist Douglas Mayfield of the funereal walk down Pennsylvania Avenue. “That presidential drumbeat was so different and haunting. For days, I could hear those drums.”

  Sergeant Jim Felder, one of two black pallbearers, held an upper corner of the president’s flag-draped casket. “At the time, I was so intent on doing my job that I refused to feel any emotion,” he recalls in an interview with South Carolina’s newspaper the State. “It must have been about two weeks later that I was standing at my locker and it hit me. I realized that I had lost someone I respected, admired and loved. I sat down on my bunk and cried.”

  In addition to the million mourners there in person, millions more watched on TV.

  David Bianculli, a radio host, recalls being among the unprecedented television audience of 175 million as a ten-year-old schoolboy. “I locked the TV in my room, turned it on, and watched. Alone. And kept changing channels and watching some more, until my dad and sister came home. Then we all watched, for days, and grieved together. When Ruby shot Oswald, we were watching; when John-John saluted his father’s coffin, we were watching—just like, at that point, almost everyone else in the country.”

  * * *

  Down in Texas, there is another funeral occurring. President Kennedy and Officer Tippit are buried on the same day, November 25, 1963. The words of the Baptist pastor C. D. Tipps Jr., who leads Tippit’s funeral service, describe the shared sacrifice of the World War II heroes. “He was doing his duty when he was taken by the lethal bullet of a poor, confused, misguided, ungodly assassin.”

  Marie Tippit and Jackie Kennedy are strangers brought together by tragic circumstance, two women widowed on the same day—by the same killer.

  “This great tragedy prepares me to sympathize more deeply with you,” Marie Tippit telegrams the White House, to which Jackie replies by letter, “You and I share another bond—reminding our children all their lives what brave men their fathers were.”

  * * *

  Just before midnight, an exhausted Bobby and Jackie are alone in the White House residence. The family has dispersed, following a subdued birthday party for John Jr.

  Bobby, whose own birthday was only five days before, on November 20, asks, “Shall we go visit our friend?”

  Agent Hill escorts them by light of the eternal flame specially constructed by military engineers at the head of Jack’s grave, the flame that Jackie lit for the first time only hours before, and that will never be extinguished.

  On bended knee, they pray together.

  * * *

  “During those four endless days,” between Jack Kennedy’s assassination and his burial, Jackie “held us together as a family and as a country,” her brother-in-law Ted Kennedy later declares. “In large part because of her, we could grieve and then go on.”

  Part of what Jackie ensures, too, is “to make certain that Jack was not forgotten by history.”

  To that end, on Friday, November 29, in the midst of a nor’easter, Jackie summons a writer to Hyannis Port. He is Theodore H. White, whose political chronicle The Making of the President 1960 won the 1962 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction.

  In a congratulatory note to White, President Kennedy had written, “It pleases me that I could at least provide a little of the scenario.”

  Now he is the entire scenario.

  White later recalls the directness of Jackie’s instruction. “There was something she wanted Life magazine to say to the country, and that I must do it.” Foremost in Jackie’s mind are the “bitter people” intent on negatively defining the Kennedy presidency, as had happened at a July 1963 press conference. “The Republican National Committee recently adopted a resolution saying you were pretty much of a failure,” a reporter stated, then asked, “How do you feel about that?”

  At the time, Jack humorously claimed the label of failure, saying, “I presume it passed unanimously.” But even—or especially—in these raw, vulnerable days, Jackie understands that failure is unacceptable. She has never been more Joe Kennedy’s daughter-in-law than now.

  White, who likes to call himself “a storyteller of elections,” is about to expand his role on a grand scale.

  Crafting a president’s legacy takes time. But there isn’t any time. White’s editors at Life are holding the presses for the December 6, 1963, issue, at the cost of thirty thousand dollars an hour.

  Over the next three and a half hours, White takes notes by hand as the thirty-four-year-old widow relives the events of the week that changed the world, but that only she experienced firsthand.

  She has “an obsession,” she confesses. Jackie is fixated on Camelot, a Broadway musical based on the Arthurian legend and cowritten by Frederick Lowe and Alan Jay Lerner, Jack’s Choate and Harvard classmate. The show’s record-breaking Broadway run, from December 3, 1960, to January 5, 1963, has roughly paralleled the Kennedy presidency, and was beloved by Jack.

  “The lines he loved to hear,” Jackie confides, were “Don’t let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot.” With Jack dead, “There’ll never be another Camelot again,” she tells White.

  “For President Kennedy: An Epilogue,” reads White’s story in Life later that week. The byline atop the two-page spread is “Theodore H. White,” but the enduring vision it puts forth is Jackie’s alone.

  PART FIVE

  The Prophet

  Robert Francis Kennedy

  Chapter 23

  Bobby Kennedy’s just another lawyer now,” Jimmy Hoffa says in January 1964 of his longtime adversary, stripped by tragedy of his powerful position of attorney general in the JFK administration.

  Comparisons between Bobby and Jack are never-ending, but only their Harvard swimming coach could accu
rately measure Jack’s “floatability” against Bobby’s “heav[iness] in the water…He would sink, sink quite easily.”

  Since JFK’s November 1963 assassination, Bobby has been deeply sunk. “It was like Daddy lost both arms,” his wife, Ethel, later describes it to their daughter Rory. “It was just six months of blackness.”

  * * *

  In March 1965, Bobby finally rises back into the air—up the highest unscaled peak in North America. “I was concentrating not so much on reaching the top as on getting one foot up ahead of the other,” Bobby writes in his first-person account for Life magazine. “I don’t like heights, and as we struggled over the 500-foot comb that guarded the summit with a drop of 6,000 feet, I tried to avoid looking down.”

  The joint expedition of the National Geographic Society and the Boston Museum of Science begins as a survey of unexplored mountains in the Saint Elias Range in Canada’s Yukon Territory—and becomes a hurried secret, the original April or May climb dates accelerated to late March to prevent two known rival groups from summiting first.

  “Good luck, Daddy. You’ll need it,” Bobby’s twelve-year-old son, Joe (named for his late uncle Joe Jr.), wishes him on a telephone call to Seattle, where the press meets Bobby’s incoming flight—Bobby wryly notes of one reporter, “His paper had just completed my obituary.”

  Any obituary would include at least two notable new changes in Bobby’s life: As of January 1965, he is now a father of nine (Matthew Maxwell Taylor Kennedy was born on January 11) and he’s recently been sworn in as a US senator alongside his brother Ted, for New York and Massachusetts, respectively.

  Bobby’s in good climbing company, led by Jim Whittaker and Barry Prather, honored by JFK for their roles on the first American team ever to summit Everest.

  Though Ted was also invited on the climb, he’s not among the team of eight mountaineers. Lengthy recuperation from injuries sustained in a plane crash the previous June have sidelined him, but Ted can’t resist reminding reporters which brother is the superior mountaineer. “I wish to point out for the record he is not the first Kennedy to climb a mountain. I climbed Matterhorn in 1957, which is higher.”