She was absolutely devoted to her children,” George Plimpton said of Jackie. “And even with all that had happened, she made sure they had a happy life.” It wasn’t easy. An important first step was making sure that the very agency assigned to protect her children didn’t unintentionally make them fearful and dependent. Secret Service agents guarding the family would simply have to curb their enthusiasm.
Jackie was very precise about what she expected of the family’s security detail, and complained bitterly when she believed they were going too far. “Mrs. Kennedy feels very strongly,” wrote the head of the Kiddie Detail in a confidential Secret Service memo to the agency chief, “that though there are two children to protect, it is ‘bad’ to see two agents ‘hovering around.’ ” For example, Jackie demanded that, whenever she was behind the wheel, the follow-up car not be seen by the children. “The agent must drift into the background quickly when arriving at a specific location,” the memo continued, “and remain aloof and invisible until moment of departure.”
Beyond mastering the art of hiding in plain sight, Secret Service agents were ordered point-blank not to spoil John and Caroline. “It’s bad for the children to see grown men waiting on them,” Jackie said. “I want you to tell Caroline to pick up her clothes, shoes, toys, and so on. The same goes for John.”
“Mrs. Kennedy is adamant in her contention that agents must not perform special favors for John Jr. and Caroline or wait on them as servants,” the confidential Secret Service memo continued. “Agents are not to carry clothes, beach articles, sand buckets, baby carriages, strollers, handbags, suitcases, etc., for Caroline and John Jr. and the children must carry their own clothing items, toys etc. . . .”
At the beach in particular, Jackie stressed that the Secret Service should back off. “Drowning is my responsibility,” Jackie insisted, driving home her point that the agency “is not responsible for any accident sustained by the children in the usual and normal play sessions.” These were to be, the memo added, “the sole responsibility of Mrs. Kennedy.”
Secret Service agents did tag along when Jackie escorted John to his first day at St. David’s School, at 12 East Eighty-ninth Street. Once Jackie left, one agent remained on Eighty-ninth Street while another waited in a hallway outside the classroom. There was little the agents could do to safeguard John, but it soon became clear that JFK’s son could stand up for himself—and then some. His first morning at St. David’s, John got into a tiff with another boy who tauntingly called him John-John. The other boy wound up with a bloody nose.
There would be other fights with other students, which one faculty member chalked up to John’s “naturally high spirits.” It also had something to do with the fact that, for all his mother’s efforts to keep him grounded, John was used to getting his way. “He had a will of steel,” the teacher said, “no doubt about it. It wasn’t that he was arrogant or bratty, just determined to exhaust the opposition until they finally gave in.”
It was equally true that nearly all of John’s classmates seemed genuinely fond of him. “John makes friends with everybody,” Jackie observed. “Immediately.” It helped that his own cousin, William Kennedy Smith, also attended St. David’s. The bond John and Willie Smith formed would be one of the strongest and most important in John’s life, lasting well into adulthood.
IN THE SPRING of 1965, Jackie seized on another opportunity to spurn LBJ. This time the White House Rose Garden was being dedicated in her honor, and the president once again bombarded her with pleading phone calls. Jackie refused, but she did agree to send her mother in her place. Johnson did not give up easily. For the next four years, Jackie received an official invitation to every state dinner and countless other White House affairs. She did not deign to respond to a single one.
She did, however, slip into a flowing Yves St. Laurent gown and dance the night away at a party thrown by Lee simply to “brighten Jackie’s day.” Jackie’s date for the night was Averell Harriman, and sprinkled among the hundred guests that night were the celebrated likes of Maurice Chevalier, Leonard Bernstein, Sammy Davis Jr., Leopold Stokowski, and Mike Nichols. One commanded more of Jackie’s attention than the others: RFK, who was there sans Ethel. Bobby, said Bernstein, “hovered around Jackie like he owned her.” Another guest spotted the couple huddled in a corner and sidled over to eavesdrop. “They were talking about a fistfight John had just been in at his school,” she said. “Jackie sounded a little concerned, but all Bobby cared about was that John won the fight.”
John was urged to be on his very best behavior when he made his first trip abroad, accompanying his mother and Caroline to England in May 1965. At Runnymede, in the meadow beside the Thames where the Magna Carta was signed in 1215, Queen Elizabeth dedicated Great Britain’s memorial to JFK in a moving ceremony that ended with Jackie brushing away tears.
When it was time for the children to meet the queen, Maud Shaw held her breath; she had spent hours couching them on royal etiquette. During the lengthy ceremony, Caroline had tried to stifle a yawn but failed. However, when the time came to meet the queen, Uncles Teddy and Bobby looked on proudly as she pulled off the perfect curtsy.
Then it was John’s turn to take center stage. When the queen walked up to Jack’s son and smiled broadly, the little boy bowed deeply at the waist and said in a clear voice, “Pleased to meet you, Your Majesty.” Nanny Shaw was relieved; all morning John had been insisting England’s reigning monarch was not “Your Majesty” at all, but “My Majesty.”
The ceremony at Runnymede was followed by tea with the queen at Windsor Castle. At one point, Jackie took aside Lord Harlech (David Ormsby-Gore, British ambassador to the United States during the Kennedy years) to thank him for the kindness he and his wife Sissie had shown her in the dark days immediately following the assassination. Maud Shaw, meanwhile, kept a wary eye on her charges. In the end, she was just happy that John managed to get through the afternoon “without spilling tea on Her Majesty or otherwise causing an international incident.”
Straight from Windsor Castle, Jackie and the children moved into Aunt Lee’s house in Regent’s Park and started acting like any other tourists. They watched the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace, took turns holding an executioner’s ax at the Tower of London, and had their pictures taken mugging alongside Whitehall’s stone-faced cavalry guards. Still obsessed with all things military, John snapped off one of his now-famous salutes to practically anything in uniform.
While Caroline and their mother took in the crown jewels, John prevailed on his Secret Service detail to help crawl inside the grimy barrel of an ancient cannon. For John, none of it compared to sharing a boat ride on Regent’s Park Lake with his Radziwill cousins Tony and Tina.
Even more than their American counterparts, British reporters pursued JFK’s children with dogged determination. Wily photographers surprised John and Caroline as they tried to escape out a rear door of the Radziwill house with Maud Shaw, and were on hand when John tripped and skinned his knee while running down a path in Regent’s Park. When John burst into tears, Shaw tried to comfort him. Caroline was less charitable. To the delight of the press, she called her brother a “crybaby.” John balled up his fist and was just about to take a swing at his sister when the nanny swept him off his feet.
Before leaving England, Jackie took John and Caroline to pose for the celebrated illustrator, designer, photographer, and artist Cecil Beaton. But obviously it was Jackie who made the greatest impression on Beaton, who scribbled in his diaries that she was “an over-life-size caricature of herself. Huge baseball players’ shoulders and haunches, big boyish hands and feet . . .” Still, like everyone who ever met her, the chronically acerbic Beaton could not deny that Jackie’s “very dark, beautiful, receptive” eyes were “mesmerizing.”
At home and abroad, Maud Shaw was always a vigilant, caring presence in the children’s lives. She made sure they were fed, dressed, and bathed, supervised their play, packed their bags, held their hands as they crossed the street, mediated their frequent disputes, read bedtime stories to them, tucked them in, and woke them in the morning. For seven years, she was as much a mother to John and Caroline as Jackie had ever been, and both the late president and his wife viewed Nanny Shaw as an indispensable part of their tight-knit family.
Yet no one, it turned out, was truly indispensable. Just as she had worried that John was growing too close to certain members of his Secret Service detail, Jackie now felt that the children had grown too emotionally dependent on Maud Shaw. Jackie told the children that Mrs. Shaw would not be returning to the United States with the family because she wanted to spend time in Sheerness, England, visiting her own relatives.
In truth, the children’s beloved nanny had been sacked. Even before they left for England, Jackie had presented Miss Shaw with a leather-bound photo album commemorating her years with the family and suggested that once the trip was over she remain behind. “I loved Caroline and John very dearly, and I loved them for a very, very long time,” said Mrs. Shaw, who told Evelyn Lincoln that her abrupt dismissal “came as a bit of a shock. When I came home [to her family home in England], I wept a great deal . . .”
Over lunch in London with Evangeline Bruce, the wife of U.S. ambassador to Great Britain David E. K. Bruce, Jackie explained that Miss Shaw was “good with young children” but that John and Caroline had “outgrown” her. “I want someone,” Jackie said, “more attuned to their present needs.”
There was another, more compelling reason, which Jackie chose not to share with her luncheon companion. In violation of the confidentiality agreement all of Jackie’s employees were required to sign, Shaw had secretly signed book deals with publishers in both the United States and Britain to write a tell-all about her years of service as nanny to both Caroline and John. (Although she threatened to sue, Jackie decided not to go through with it when Shaw agreed to give her final approval of the manuscript. The book, White House Nannie, was released the following year and became an instant bestseller.)
In the coming months and years, Jackie made sure that John maintained a long-distance relationship with the woman who had been a mother figure to him. At first, Jackie wrote notes to Miss Shaw as if John were the author, painstakingly printing each word in her version of a child’s awkward scrawl. Later, Jackie made certain that John jotted off a note to his former nanny at least once a month, updating her on what was going on in his life.
For the time being, however, the children were told only that Nanny Shaw was postponing her return to the States, and that she would be back in New York to care for them in a matter of weeks. Jackie shrewdly made sure that other familiar faces—her maid, Provi Paredes, as well as members of the Kiddie Detail, the cook, and the family’s longtime driver, to name a few—filled at least some of the void left by Shaw’s absence. “Caroline cried a little when she heard Mrs. Shaw wasn’t coming back,” said Plimpton, who had developed a special fondness for Caroline. “John was too young for any of it to mean much to him. He just kept dashing about and getting into tons of mischief—a typical four-year-old boy.”
Jackie also did whatever she could to take up any slack in the aftermath of Shaw’s firing. She left no doubt as to what role she intended to play in her own children’s lives. “They are the center of my universe,” Jackie said, “and I hope I am the center of theirs. I intend to always be there for them.”
As soon as they returned to New York, Jackie resumed her morning routine of walking Caroline the six blocks up Fifth Avenue to Sacred Heart, then returning to the apartment to meet up with John and walk him four blocks to St. David’s on East Eighty-ninth Street. When she could, Jackie also made the effort to meet John at his school and walk him home. “Caroline is an old hand at school,” Jackie explained to her friend Charles Addams. “But it’s all terribly new for John. I think he feels reassured when he sees me there waiting for him.”
Evenings, however, were reserved for Mommy. That spring, Jackie became a glittering fixture on Manhattan’s social scene. No longer sobbing night after night in her room, JFK’s widow now seemed to be everywhere—at concerts, plays, fashion shows, museum openings, and benefits. Night after night, John and Caroline peeked in to see what Mommy was wearing before she headed off into the night. When Addams, one of her frequent escorts during this period, told Jackie she looked like a queen in her white evening gown and diamonds, Caroline and John laughed. “I’ve seen a queen,” said Caroline, recalling their recent encounter with Queen Elizabeth, “and my mommy looks better. Lots.”
Jackie’s frenetic social schedule now meant that she was in the papers more than at any time since she left the White House, and the public’s thirst for gossip about her and the children remained unslakable. John was once again the target of photographers who lurked in the shadows outside his apartment building, hoping to snap a shot of the little boy as he and his mother departed for school.
Jackie’s first instinct was to come down hard on her staff, threatening to fire anyone who divulged even the most innocuous-seeming detail of her life to the outside world. “That went double for the kids,” said Addams, who noted that Jackie became “blind with rage” anytime there was a story about John or Caroline in the press.
When the family cook let slip to a reporter she knew that Jackie had lost twenty-five pounds, she was fired the next day. Jackie learned that the cook’s successor planned to write a cookbook, and she met the same fate. Caroline’s piano teacher made a passing comment to someone who turned out to be a reporter that she was working for the Kennedys, and was gone in a matter of hours.
This purging of anyone suspected of disloyalty did not stop there. Limousine drivers—all instructed not to speak to either John or Caroline—were replaced on a weekly basis so that none of them would become too familiar with the family’s coming and goings. For entirely different reasons, Jackie was also replacing Secret Service agents more frequently; she still harbored the fear that John in particular would become too attached to them as father figures—a role that Jackie strongly felt only Uncle Bobby was qualified to fill.
“I’ve never known anyone who cut people off with such ease,” Jamie Auchincloss said of his sister. “The phrase ‘out of sight, out of mind’ was invented for Jackie.” Jackie’s abiding distrust of those who worked for her had the unintended result of chipping away at her children’s sense of security. “The way her mother dispensed with people,” he went on, the children “must have found it all bewildering—and more than a little scary.”
Yet Jackie’s growing paranoia hadn’t extinguished her sense of fun and whimsy—particularly when it came to the children. That summer, she enlisted George Plimpton to help her put together a special “treasure hunt” for John and Caroline at Hammersmith Farm. Once the children found the wooden treasure chest Jackie had filled with fake doubloons and trinkets, a Coast Guard longboat carrying angry, eye-patch-wearing “pirates”—Plimpton and a few locals—showed up to reclaim it. Taken by surprise, the other forty children who had been invited to the party—including several Kennedy cousins—ran screaming for their nannies. John, however, advanced toward the scary-looking buccaneers. “John was so not afraid,” Plimpton recalled, “that he asked for the rubber sword I had tucked in my belt and began waving it above his head.”
Jackie, watching the whole chaotic scene unfold, was “apoplectic” with laughter. “Jackie had such a great sense of mischief,” Plimpton said, “and I think she thought it was absolutely hilarious that John, the youngest child there, was completely unfazed while the older children were absolutely terrified.”
At one point, however, John did become upset—when, after capturing one of the pirates, the older children made the man walk the plank. When he realized the buccaneer was John Walsh, one of the substitute dads in his life, John burst into tears. “You can’t die!” he sobbed. “You can’t die!”
Just a few weeks after the infamous treasure hunt, John and Caroline joined the rest of the Kennedy clan at a party in Boston marking Richard Cardinal Cushing’s seventieth birthday. A family friend and confidant to the family for years, Cardinal Cushing had officiated at every significant event in the lives of the Kennedys—including Jack and Jackie’s marriage, the burial of Patrick, the christening of both John and Caroline, and of course, Jack’s state funeral. As a young man, JFK admitted to being intimidated by the prelate’s gruff demeanor and reverberating growl—but not John. “You,” the boy proclaimed to the cardinal, “sound like a bear.”
Caroline and John joined their Kennedy cousins again that Halloween, when everybody went trick-or-treating in Hyannis Port. This time, Caroline was dressed as a Dutch girl in wooden shoes and pigtails. Jackie shredded John’s pants, found an old pair of men’s shoes with holes in the bottom, and smudged some fireplace ash on the boy’s cheeks so he could go door-to-door pretending to be a dirty-faced hobo.
Behind the scenes, John’s mother was battling what she viewed as attempts by others to cash in on her private anguish. In addition to Maud Shaw, Jackie came down hard on Paul “Red” Fay when she learned he had written an account of his twenty-five-year friendship with Jack, titled The Pleasure of His Company. She demanded—and got—final approval.
Jackie directed the full force of her wrath at professional journalists like Jim Bishop, author of the hugely successful The Day Lincoln Was Shot. Jackie tried to get Random House to pull the plug on Bishop’s JFK book, The Day Kennedy Was Shot, and when that failed she approached historian William Manchester to write the full, authorized account of the assassination. In the end, Bishop’s book would become a major critical and commercial success, and Jackie would become embroiled in a protracted war with Manchester over the content of his magnum opus, Death of a President.
For now, Jackie coped with stress the best she knew how—by jumping astride a horse and tearing through the countryside. She traded in her weekend rental on Long Island for a farmhouse in Bernardsville, New Jersey, and joined the exclusive Essex Hunt Club. Already an accomplished rider, Caroline was soon sailing over fences and water hazards along with her equestrienne mom. Jackie strapped a helmet on John as well, and put him through his paces with Leprechaun, the pony given to the Kennedys after JFK’s triumphant visit to Ireland in the summer of 1963. Despite Jackie’s best efforts and John’s own fearless nature, his allergy to horses remained a serious impediment to John’s chances of ever becoming a first-class horseman.
The children were scarcely wanting for excitement. That winter and into the spring of 1965, there were trips to Antigua—where John splashed around in the crystalline waters of the Caribbean while his sister learned to snorkel—as well as skiing holidays in Sun Valley, Stowe, and Gstaad. On the way back from Switzerland, Jackie and the children stopped in Rome for a private audience with Pope Paul VI, then jetted off to the Argentine pampas so John could meet some real caballeros working on the ranch of longtime Kennedy family acquaintance Miguel Carcona.
John and Caroline stayed behind that May 1966 when their mother traveled to Spain to catch Seville’s famous feria. Still, they had no trouble charting her progress; newspapers and magazines were flooded with photographs of the “Radiant Conquistador”—looking regal in a high comb and white lace mantilla as she rode through Seville in an open carriage, sidestepping through the city streets on a white stallion, gazing down from her seat at the bullfights as three famous matadors dedicated their first kill to her while Princess Grace of Monaco sulked nearby.
Back home at 1040 Fifth, Provi showed John the latest copy of Life with Mommy on the cover. The photo of Jackie astride a stallion, in full Andalusian riding regalia—broad-brimmed hat, ruffled shirt, scarlet jacket, and chaps—made it clear to her countrymen that JFK’s young widow had moved on with her life. While Caroline wondered aloud who owned the horse her mother was riding on, John was struck by how much she looked like the cowboys he had seen in South America. “Wow!” he told one member of the Secret Service Kiddie Detail. “Mommy looks just like a groucho!”
As soon as she got back to the United States, Jackie—named the world’s most admired woman for the sixth year in a row—wasted no time making good on promises she had made to the children. On Memorial Day weekend 1966 she teamed up with Caroline to compete in a horse show in New Vernon, New Jersey, and wound up with a trophy for second place.
The next day in Hyannis Port, on what would have been Jack’s forty-ninth birthday, Jackie fulfilled a promise to John that the president had made shortly before his death. She gave John a reconditioned Piper Cub observation plane. “Jack always said he was going to give John a real plane when he grew up,” Jackie told JFK’s friend Chuck Spalding. “Well, it’s a little early, but now he has it—a real airplane.” The World War II–vintage aircraft had no propeller and no engine, but that did not prevent John from climbing into the cockpit and taking off on a thrilling, make-believe aerial dogfight in the skies over Cape Cod.
Less than a month after returning from Spain, Jackie took off again—this time bringing along John and Caroline for a vacation in Hawaii with ex-Kennedy brother-in-law Peter Lawford and his children. The trip merely exacerbated tensions between Jackie and the other Kennedy women, who now referred to her contemptuously as “the Widder.”
Choosing to remain behind at the Lawfords’ Santa Monica, California, beach house, Pat Kennedy Lawford only learned that Jackie was going on the Hawaiian trip with her ex-husband when she read about it in the newspapers. Pat, who had officially divorced Peter just three months earlier, wasted no time ringing up his manager, Milt Ebbins.
According to Ebbins, the former Mrs. Peter Lawford was “so angry that she just kind of growled. She was livid.”
Then Pat called Peter directly. “I won’t put up with this!” she shrieked into the phone, pointing out to her ex-husband that their honeymoon had taken place in Hawaii. “How dare you go away with this woman!”
For the next seven weeks, Jackie and the children stayed in an oceanfront house near the base of Diamond Head, which they rented for three thousand dollars a month. Peter and the Lawford cousins were encamped down the beach at the Kahala Hilton.
It turned out that Pat Kennedy Lawford’s suspicions—fanned by Eunice and Ethel, who now left the room anytime Jackie walked in—were warranted. Jackie and Peter had more in common than the fact that they both spoke impeccable French. Like Jackie, Lawford was an aristocrat, and often felt overwhelmed by the noisy, boisterous Kennedy clan. They also had their individual crosses to bear when it came to their Kennedy marriages. Jackie suffered though Jack’s countless infidelities, while Peter confided to a friend that Pat crossed herself whenever they were about to make love.
Lawford had also suffered other indignities because of his status as “Brother-in-Lawford” to the Kennedys. After JFK decided to stay at Bing Crosby’s estate instead of Frank Sinatra’s when he visited Palm Springs, California, Ol’ Blue Eyes blamed the perceived snub on Lawford. Shunned from that point on by one of the most powerful and feared men in the entertainment industry, Lawford would never quite regain his footing in Hollywood.
Now Jackie and the debonair British actor walked hand in hand on the beach, laughed over daiquiris at the Hilton piano bar, and exchanged knowing glances when they weren’t in a quiet corner murmuring to each other in French. Things had gotten familiar enough for Peter to start lighting two cigarettes in his mouth and then handing one to Jackie à la Paul Henreid and Bette Davis in the film Now, Voyager.
Lawford would later admit that he and Jackie had had a brief fling during the Hawaiian trip.
Oblivious to the intrigue that invariably swirled around his bewitchingly glamorous mother, John was having the time of his life—thanks in large part to three local boys he and Caroline met at the beach. The Miske brothers—eleven-year-old Tommy, thirteen-year-old Michael, and fourteen-year-old Gary—were dubious at first. But soon John was dashing into the surf at Wailea Beach (“John had no fear of the ocean,” Gary Miske said), sliding down mud-covered hills in Nuuanu, and clambering over boulders at Sacred Falls. “You would think that we would get annoyed with a little five-year-old tagging along,” said Tommy, who remembered that he and his brothers cracked up every time John pretended to be a sea captain squinting through a pretend spyglass. “But we found him to be a fun and adventuresome little kid.”
John’s fearless streak almost proved to be his undoing. Toward the end of their Hawaiian sojourn, one of Jackie’s post-Dallas escorts, noted San Francisco architect John Warnecke, invited the children along on an overnight camping trip to the big island of Hawaii. The highlight of the evening was to be a luau, and John couldn’t resist peering down into the smoldering pit where traditional dishes like Kalua pig and lomi lomi salmon were slowly cooking on hot embers.
Suddenly, Caroline let out a scream as John tumbled into the pit. The Miske brothers came running, and Secret Service agent Jack Walsh sprang into action. By the time Walsh managed to yank John to safety, Jackie’s little boy had suffered severe burns to his hands, arms, and buttocks. He was rushed to the local hospital, given a battery of tests, then treated, bandaged, and released after a few hours.
To everyone’s surprise, the normally vocal John remained calm and quiet throughout the whole ordeal. “That brave little kid,” Tommy Miske said, “never once complained.” At least John returned to New York with an unconventional souvenir—a white glove doctors in Hawaii gave him to protect the second-degree burns on his right hand—and a dramatic tale to share with his friends at St. David’s.
That July, John was dolled up in a ruffled shirt, periwinkle blue shorts, and blue velvet sash for his role as a pageboy at the Newport wedding of his aunt Janet, Jackie’s half sister. While he fidgeted and glowered through most of the ceremony (at one point John had to be restrained by Secret Service agents when another boy made fun of his getup), Caroline solemnly fulfilled her duties as a flower girl.
Incredibly, it had been only thirteen years since thousands of people clogged the streets of Newport to catch a glimpse of Senator Jack Kennedy and his stunning young bride as they emerged from St. Mary’s Church. The crowds and the photographers had descended on Newport again, but this time to see the thirty-seven-year-old widow of the martyred president. The bride, elbowed aside by reporters and onlookers in their zeal to catch a glimpse of Jackie, turned to Lee Radziwill and wept.
After the service, Jackie and the children managed to wade through the sea of humanity to a waiting limousine—only to have paparazzi cram so tightly against the car doors that at first they couldn’t be opened. Once inside the vehicle, a terrified Caroline started crying. John, however, pressed his face against the window and glowered at the photographers.
Later during the reception at Hammersmith Farm, John was able to let off steam with his equally scrappy cousins, darting in between tables and nearly knocking over an ice sculpture. His plan to surprise Jackie by letting two of Hugh Auchincloss’s prize ponies into the crowded reception tent was foiled at the last minute by the father of the bride.
This playful streak notwithstanding, John was already impressing everyone with his even-tempered demeanor. “There was no one sweeter than John,” St. David’s assistant headmaster, Peter Clifton, remarked years later. “He had no guile in him. He’s still like that. I have to give Jackie a lot of credit for that.”
Even when John took a swing at another boy, it was invariably because he was being teased. “Some of the other children were jealous of all the attention that John got,” the mother of another student said. “It wasn’t John’s fault, of course. He never struck any of the other parents as anything but a very polite, well-behaved little boy. He was not spoiled—not at all. I couldn’t say that about some of the others.”
Jackie was, said St. David’s headmaster David Hume, “a sensible, affectionate mom who had a straight relationship with her son.” Some people, he continued, “coo over their children.” Jackie didn’t coo. “When they reach out a hand, you should hold it. When they want to let go, you should let go. Jackie understood that.”
Jackie also understood that, no matter how wonderful she was as a parent, there was little she could do to protect either of her children from those who were mentally unhinged. “I’m nerve-racked about the safety of the children,” she told one of John’s teachers. “There are so many nutcases about.”
Jackie and Caroline were leaving St. Thomas More Church on East Eighty-ninth Street one Sunday when a woman ran up to Caroline and grabbed her by the arm. “Your mother is a wicked woman who has killed three people!” she shrieked as Jackie stood there, horrified. “And your father is still alive!”
With the help of the Secret Service, Jackie succeeded in pulling the deranged woman off, and she was taken to Bellevue Hospital for observation. “It was terrible, prying her loose,” Jackie recalled years later. “I still haven’t gotten over that strange woman.”
Jackie always tried to walk her son home from school each day, and she was more determined than ever that November 22, 1966—the third anniversary of her husband’s assassination—not be any different. As they left the school, however, Jackie realized that several students were trailing them. They were less than halfway down the block when one of the children yelled, “Your father’s dead! Your father’s dead!” The others quickly joined in the chant.
The cruel words were all too familiar to John’s mother. “You know how children are,” said Jackie. “They’ve even said it to me when I’ve run into them at school, as if . . . Well, this day John listened to them saying it over and over, and he didn’t say a word.”
What John did do was take his mother’s hand and squeeze it firmly—without ever pausing to look back at their tormentors. Jackie later said it was “as if he was trying to reassure me that things were all right. And so we walked home together, with the children following us.”
JOHN WAS ONLY six years old and already exhibiting a keen awareness of other people’s feelings—especially his mother’s. “He surprises me in so many ways,” Jackie said. “He seems so much more than one would expect of a child of six. Sometimes it almost seems as if he is trying to protect me instead of just the other way around.”
To be sure, Jackie was finding it impossible to shield her children from the front-page headlines being generated by her ongoing feud with William Manchester over his book The Death of a President. She claimed to have spoken to Manchester “in the evening and alone, and it’s rather hard to stop when the floodgates open.” What she feared most was exposing her children to the gory details of their father’s death.
“We didn’t talk about it, of course,” Jackie said. “But children pick things up . . . There was no way to keep them from passing newsstands going to and from school. It was natural for them to look at the magazines and the headlines. Or be told something in school or on the street. It isn’t always easy for the children.”
“Jackie worried endlessly about Caroline and John,” Plimpton said. “But I think she focused even more attention on John because she worried that Jack’s memory would be overshadowed by her fame. Caroline was older, and she would never forget her father—Jackie was confident of that. She wasn’t so sure about John.”
“He’ll never remember his father. He was too young,” Jackie admitted saying to herself. “But now,” she decided in early 1967, “I think he will.” True to her nature, Jackie was not about to leave anything to chance. “I want to help him go back and find his father,” she stated flatly. “It can be done . . .”
From this point on, Jackie made sure that John was constantly exposed to the people who knew John best—from longtime pals like Red Fay, Chuck Spalding, Oleg Cassini, Bill Walton, and his ubiquitous sidekick Dave Powers to such New Frontier stalwarts as Pierre Salinger, Theodore Sorensen, and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. These were the folks “who knew Jack well and the things Jack liked to do.” As long as they were around, she reasoned, “each day John will be getting to know his father.”
Powers did more than just regale John with tales of his father’s wartime heroism and political good deeds. Although Jack cared little about professional athletics—an uncommon trait in a politician—Powers was an avid sports fan. “There will always be a Dave Powers to talk sports with him,” Jackie said, admitting that she drew a blank when John brought up the names of sports figures like Cassius Clay and Bubba Smith. “John,” she sighed, “seems to know an awful lot about sports . . .”
Jackie claimed her main contribution was to fill her son in on “the little things, like ‘Oh, don’t worry about your spelling. Your father couldn’t spell very well, either.’ That pleases him, you can bet.” She also walked John across the street from their first Fifth Avenue apartment to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which housed one of the world’s greatest collections of medieval armor. While the little boy gazed up in wonder at helmeted knights on horseback and the banners and flags unfurled on the Gothic stone walls, Jackie regaled him with tales of King Arthur’s Round Table—and made sure he understood these were the same Camelot stories that his father loved when he was a boy.
No one did more to keep JFK’s memory alive than John’s uncles. At Hyannis Port, Bobby playfully tossed John in the surf and roughhoused with him on the lawn of the Kennedy compound while Teddy took his nephew out in Nantucket Sound aboard Jack’s twenty-six-foot sailboat Victura. There were other, “even smaller things” that Jackie felt brought John “closer to Jack. The school insists that children even as young as John must wear neckties. That was all right with him. It gave him a chance to wear one of his father’s PT-boat tie pins.”
That summer of 1967, John and Caroline went along with Jackie on their first trip to Ireland. Despite attempts to hold the press at bay—they spent much of their time behind closed gates at Woodstown House, a sixty-room Georgian manor house rented for them by their wealthy New Jersey friends Murray and Peggy McDonnell—busloads of reporters following them everywhere.
One morning John was sprinting through a field when he abruptly stopped and turned back to his mother. “There’s electricity in the grass,” he yelled. “I got a shock! Electricity!” It didn’t take long for Jackie to figure out that this was the first time John, who was used to running across the meticulously trimmed lawns at Hyannis Port, Palm Beach, and Hammersmith Farm, had ever encountered nettles.
During an afternoon jaunt to Woodstown Beach, Caroline frolicked with a group of local children in the chilly waters of Waterford Harbor and a grim-faced John built sand castles—all while dozens of photographers encircled them, snapping away. Clearly unhappy with all the attention, John broke away and, with his Secret Service detail shadowing him, headed straight for a nearby candy store.
“What do you want, dear?” the lady behind the counter asked while reporters streamed inside and began taking notes.
“Everything,” John replied.
The salesclerk smiled. “Now,” she said, “you know you can’t have everything.”
“I can, too!” John shouted back before his chagrined mom appeared to take him away.
Spending time in the ancestral home of Duganstown, John impressed his distant Kennedy cousins by singing “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling” straight through—all thanks to Uncle Teddy, who taught John all the words to the song and then rehearsed with him until he mastered it.
Their Irish escapade nearly turned to tragedy when Jackie sneaked off to a local beach and, caught in the undertow, came perilously close to being swept out to sea. “The tide was rushing in with such force,” she later recalled, “that if I did not make the end spit of land opposite, I would be swept into a bay twelve miles long.”
Jackie searched the coastline, but “there was no one in sight to yell to. I was becoming exhausted, swallowing water and slipping past the spit of land,” she said. It was then that she “felt a great porpoise at my side.” The porpoise was Jack Walsh, the same Secret Service agent who had rescued John in Hawaii. Jackie hadn’t realized that Walsh, fearing for her safety but honoring her desire for privacy, had secretly followed her that night. “He set his shoulder against mine and together we made it to the spit. Then I sat on the beach coughing up seawater for half an hour while he found a poor itinerant and borrowed a blanket for me.” With no idea where the sea had deposited them, Jackie and Walsh walked more than a mile before finally coming to a dirt road.
It had been the narrowest of escapes, and Jackie knew it. Although she would describe the incident in chilling detail years later, Jackie asked that the children not be told what happened. “They have suffered so much already,” she explained. “Can you imagine how upsetting it would be for them to think they almost lost their mother, too?” In the meantime, she recommended that Walsh be cited for valor, and that he head up her detail in New York.
That fall, John settled back into his school routine, taking his place among the other first-graders at St. David’s. Jackie was proud of both of her children’s academic accomplishments—Caroline was more deserving, perhaps—but she fretted that they might become “just two kids living on Fifth Avenue and going to nice schools.”
Uncle Bobby, for one, was not about to let that happen. He told them “about the rats and about terrible living conditions that exist right here in the midst of a rich city,” Jackie said, and when he described “broken windows letting in the cold,” John “was so touched by that that he said he’d go to work and use the money he made to put windows in those houses.”
Both Kennedy children were also shocked to learn that countless thousands of children their age never had or likely would receive Christmas presents. That Christmas of 1967, John and Caroline gathered up most of their toys and asked Jackie to give them “to the poor children in Harlem.”
The irrepressibly adventurous Jackie was also intent on exploring the world beyond the doorman-guarded doors of 1040 Fifth Avenue. Before she struck out on solo excursions to Southeast Asia and Mexico, Jackie made sure the children’s new nanny had matters well in hand. Dark-haired, slender Marta Sgubin was a devout Roman Catholic who spoke French, Italian, Spanish, and German as well as English. Although decidedly more reserved than Maud Shaw, Sgubin made sure they did their homework on time, and that John, in particular, behaved. She also ate dinner with the children, played games with them, tucked them into bed, and then woke them up at seven the next morning. Sgubin took turns with Jackie walking the children to school. It soon became obvious, said Plimpton, “that they both adored her.”
Secure in the knowledge that John and Caroline would be safe in the new governess’s capable hands, Jackie jetted off to Cambodia, ostensibly to tour the fabled ruins of Angkor Wat. In truth, Jackie was being sent on a delicate diplomatic mission to charm Cambodia’s ruler, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, who in 1965 had severed relations with the United States over its growing involvement in Vietnam.
From the very beginning, Jackie’s trip to Southeast Asia had all the hallmarks of a state visit. Once again following their mother’s progress in the papers, John and Caroline were shown pictures of Jackie being greeted in Phnom Penh by two hundred schoolgirls in bright green sampots, the traditional Cambodian dress, and walking barefoot among the ancient ruins of Angkor Wat. John was particularly impressed by photos of Jackie feeding bananas to Prince Sihanouk’s sacred white elephants, peels and all.
John and Caroline also came across newspaper and magazine stories linking their mother to a man—in this case, Lord Harlech. In the dark days following Dallas, Jackie leaned heavily on the former David Ormsby-Gore and his wife, Sissie, for emotional support. When Sissie was killed in a car crash in Wales just two weeks before Jackie’s planned trip to Ireland, Jackie rushed to comfort her grieving friend. (Ironically, Lord Harlech himself would be killed in an automobile accident in 1985.)
Rampant speculation about a blossoming romance between Jackie, then thirty-seven, and the forty-nine-year-old British peer eventually compelled Lord Harlech to issue a formal statement. Of rumors that there was anything other than friendship between them, he could only say, “I deny it flatly.”
Jackie’s trip to the ancient Mayan ruins on Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula in March 1968 also proved grist for the gossip mill, only this time speculation centered on another old friend serving as her escort—Ros Gilpatric. In truth, Gilpatric, still married to the third of his five wives, was besotted with Jackie. “At that point, we were very much in love, yes,” said Gilpatric, who planned to get a divorce and ask Jackie to marry him. “The trip to Mexico was very romantic, and Jackie surprised me by being so free and open about us.”
He also found something else surprising—the number of times Jackie brought up the name of yet another man. “Even at the most romantic moments,” Gilpatric said, “she kept mentioning Aristotle Onassis’s name—what did I think of him? Was he as rich as they said he was? Was he, as some people said, a ‘pirate’? She also said she felt he was very protective toward her, and that he cared about the children and their welfare. She was weighing the pros and cons, and it became very clear very fast that Onassis was the man who most intrigued her. Not me, not even Bobby.”
NEITHER JOHN NOR Caroline was old enough to fathom what all the commotion was about. They had both met Lord Harlech and Gilpatric several times, and were not at all surprised to see newspaper photos of the two gray-haired gentlemen escorting their mother on her foreign trips. But the man who pursued Jackie more relentlessly than anyone else during this period was never even mentioned in the papers as a potential love interest for the former first lady.
John and Caroline were certainly unaware of how serious things had become between their mother and Onassis. By taking an apartment in Jackie’s Upper East Side neighborhood and then showering her with flowers, gifts, and heartfelt love notes, the cigar-chomping Greek had managed to charm his way into Jackie’s bed. Short (five feet four to Jackie’s five feet nine), squat, swarthy, and far from handsome, Onassis had something more than looks to recommend him. He boasted his own fleet of supertankers, his own airline (Olympic Airways), one of the world’s most lavishly appointed yachts, mansions in Paris and Athens, and his own private island, Skorpios.
A relentless social climber, he used every conceivable ruse to insinuate himself into international society. Conversant in Spanish, French, German, and English as well as his native Greek, he spoke knowledgeably about every subject from British history and opera to ballet, art, and polo.
RFK viewed Onassis as “a complete rogue on the grand scale,” and with good reason. It was only by ruthlessly pursuing a series of blatantly crooked business deals that Onassis was able to parlay an initial stake of only sixty dollars into a half-billion-dollar empire. In the process, he also seduced some of the twentieth century’s most intriguing women—including Argentina’s Evita Perón and Joe Kennedy’s longtime mistress, silent screen legend Gloria Swanson of Sunset Boulevard fame.
To shore up an alliance with fellow shipping magnate Stavros Livanos, forty-six-year-old Onassis then married Livanos’s daughter Athina (“Tina”), who was just seventeen at the time. That marriage, which produced two children, Alexander and Christina, imploded in 1959, when Tina decided to take a midnight stroll on the deck of the Christina and caught her husband and prima donna assoluta Maria Callas making love in the yacht’s mirrored bar.
The ruthless tycoon and the outrageously temperamental opera star were perfectly suited for each other. Through a combination of grit, ambition, talent, and no small amount of ruthlessness, both had managed to claw their way to the peak of their chosen fields. Callas would have become Mrs. Onassis as early as 1960 had it not been for the opposition of the Onassis children. According to Ari’s aide Johnny Meyer, Alexandra and Christina “hated” Callas. They called her, simply and contemptuously, “the Singer.”
Now that Ari (“Aristo” to his closest friends) was making his intentions clear to Jackie, she was torn between the prospect of marrying the wealthy and powerful foreigner and her emotionally satisfying but ultimately dead-end extramarital relationship with Bobby. “She was always thinking of what was best for the children,” Tish Baldrige said, “and as far as she was concerned, Bobby was always best.”
That changed when Bobby decided to challenge Lyndon Johnson for his party’s nomination in 1968. Jackie and Ros Gilpatric were exploring the ruins at Chichen Itza in Mexico when the news reached them that Bobby was running for president. Not long after, LBJ shocked the nation by announcing that he would not seek reelection for a second full term.
As far as Jackie was concerned, with Johnson out of the way Bobby had a clear path to the White House. “Do you know what will happen to Bobby?” she later asked Arthur Schlesinger. “The same thing that happened to Jack. There is so much hatred in this country, and more people hate Bobby than hated Jack . . . I’ve told Bobby this, but he isn’t fatalistic, like me.”
Bobby shrugged off Jackie’s prophecies of doom. What troubled him now was the fact that she was seriously mulling over the idea of marrying Onassis. The mere thought of JFK’s sainted widow carrying on with a shadowy foreigner would inevitably leave a sour taste in voters’ mouths. But marriage? “For God’s sake, Jackie,” Bobby pleaded, “this could cost me five states.”
For his part, Onassis was thrilled that Bobby had decided to run. He knew that his chief rival for Jackie’s affections would now be too preoccupied with his presidential campaign to cater to Jackie’s needs or, equally important, to fulfill his duties as a surrogate dad to John and Caroline. “Now,” Ari told Johnny Meyer, “the kid has other fish to fry.”
“The Greek” was angling for the biggest prize of all. According to one of Ari’s friends, the New York Post columnist Doris Lilly, “everything was a contest . . . who had the most money, the biggest yacht, the grandest houses. It was no different with women, and Ari was accustomed to winning.”
Onassis, whose shady business dealings made him the target of numerous Justice Department investigations over the years, had other reasons for wooing Jackie so aggressively. “Onassis knows that Jackie is an icon,” Meyer said, “and he feels that if he marries her the U.S. government will get off his back.” Onassis also told Meyer that by marrying Jackie he could remove all obstacles that stood in the way of the giant “super port” he had long envisioned for his tankers at Durham Point, New Hampshire.
JFK’s children were also an important part of the equation. “Onassis knew that the world was in love with Caroline and John,” Lilly said, “and he figured no one would want to upset them by going after their stepfather, no matter who he was.” John was especially important to Onassis because “he embodied the future of the Kennedy dynasty. Ari couldn’t resist the idea of shaping a future president, of having that kind of power and influence stretching into the next century.”
Bobby was so appalled at the thought of Onassis becoming his brother-in-law that he dispatched Ethel and Teddy’s wife, Joan, to New York to try to bring Jackie back to her senses. But it was only after Cardinal Cushing intervened that Jackie agreed to postpone her decision until after the election—ostensibly for Bobby’s sake. Cushing pointed out that, over and above Onassis’s checkered past, the Vatican might not look kindly on President Kennedy’s widow marrying a divorced man.
Second-grader John was sitting in his class at St. David’s on April 4, 1968, when an older student came into room and whispered the news in his teacher’s ear: Martin Luther King had been gunned down outside his Memphis motel room. JFK had introduced his children to the Nobel Peace Prize winner in the Oval Office, and Jackie again found herself in the position of having to explain to John and Caroline why anyone would want to kill a great man like Dr. King.
In truth, Jackie loathed the civil rights leader. Bobby and Jack both learned from FBI tapes of King’s private conversations that he had planned and conducted an “orgy” that took place in his hotel room after delivering his famous “I Have a Dream” speech in August 1963. “Oh, but, Jack,” she said at the time, “that’s so terrible. I mean, that man is, you know, such a phony, then.”
Although JFK cautioned her not to be “too judgmental” about King’s sexual escapades—a stance that hardly seemed surprising, given Kennedy’s own track record in this area—Jackie’s doubts about King were confirmed by tapes Bobby played for her following the assassination. In them, King ridiculed Cardinal Cushing’s behavior at the funeral, claiming the elderly cleric was drunk. In her own taped conversations with Arthur Schlesinger, she also pointed out that King could be heard on the FBI tapes laughing about “how they almost dropped the coffin. Well, I mean,” Jackie continued to fume, “Martin Luther King is really a tricky person . . . I just can’t see a picture of Martin Luther King without thinking, ‘That man’s terrible!’ ”
Her opinion of King was not about to change overnight. But now that King had joined her husband in America’s pantheon of martyred leaders, Jackie did feel a kinship of sorts with his widow. Reluctant to overshadow Coretta Scott King, Jackie initially planned to meet with her at some unspecified place after the funeral, and in private. When Bobby called Mrs. King the next day to offer his condolences, however, she asked if he might arrange for Jackie to accompany him to the funeral in Atlanta. Appreciating the symbolic value of having Jackie photographed alongside King’s grieving widow, RFK was all too happy to oblige.
The Roman Catholic Church, Jackie later told key RFK adviser Frank Mankiewicz, “is at its best only at the time of death. The rest of the time it’s often rather silly little men running around in their black suits. I’ll tell you who else understand death are the black churches.” At King’s funeral, she said, “I was looking at those faces, and I realized that they know death. They see it all the time and they’re ready for it . . . We know death . . . As a matter of fact,” she confided in this unguarded moment, “if it weren’t for the children, we’d welcome it.”
Always conscious of posterity, Jackie decided that now was the time to preserve her children on canvas. She commissioned New York artist Aaron Shikler to paint portraits of ten-year-old Caroline and seven-year-old John at the New York apartment. “They look just right to me now,” she told Shikler. “I would like to remember them at this age, as they are, just now.”
“John was all boy—restless, impatient, all elbows and knees,” the artist recalled. Despite the fact that he had his pet guinea pig to keep him company, he was “monumentally bored with the whole business. The sooner he could get out of the room,” Shikler added, “the better. He hates to pose.” The dreamlike portraits—of Jackie lounging on a sofa with both children and of John immersed in a book—so impressed Jackie that she asked Shikler to paint JFK’s official White House portrait as well as her own.
Jackie was determined that someday Bobby’s portrait would hang at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue as well. She was, according to Arthur Schlesinger Jr., “quite simply Bobby’s single most important asset in the campaign. She said she was willing to swallow her pride and do anything for him, and she did.” Yet not everyone was particularly appreciative of Jackie’s slavish devotion to the candidate. When polls showed Bobby pulling ahead of his principal rival for the nomination, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, there was jubilation at the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port. “Oh, Bobby,” Jackie said, “won’t it be wonderful when we get back in the White House?”
“What do you mean we?” Ethel barked.
Stricken, Jackie fled the room. She wanted John and Caroline to remain close to their Kennedy relatives—to share in their father’s legacy—but she also knew that she needed to chart a separate course for herself and the children. It didn’t help that the United States of the late 1960s seemed to be descending into chaos; wherever he looked, John saw gruesome photos of Vietnam casualties, violent antiwar street protests, and bloody race riots that swept the nation in the wake of King’s assassination.
“I don’t want them growing up afraid,” Jackie said of her children. “They have a right to a carefree life, to the extent that I can make one for them.” There were few men in the world who could provide a level of physical, financial, and emotional security befitting the children of President Kennedy. Aristotle Onassis, Jackie had to conclude, was certainly one of them.
The sheer size of Onassis’s fortune was a major factor, to be sure. “As far as Jackie was concerned,” Gore Vidal said, “the only thing better than a rich man was an obscenely rich man.” Then there was the matter of Ari’s undeniable charm. “He was short, ugly, but he had far more presence than far better-looking men,” Taki Theodoracopulos observed. “He wasn’t awed by women. He was extremely generous, and he was a great flatterer. Everything about him was bigger than life. He was a real-life Zorba the Greek.”
Still, Jackie felt that before she committed herself to anything, the children would have to get to know this larger-than-life Zorba. That Easter, Onassis flew Jackie and John to Palm Beach on his private jet while Caroline stayed behind. Onassis made an overt effort to win the boy over with hugs and gifts; John warmed to the genial, panda-like grandfather figure immediately.
In May 1968, Jackie again left John and Caroline in their nanny’s care and embarked on a four-day Virgin Islands cruise with Ari aboard the Christina. Torn between Bobby and Onassis, spent both physically and emotionally, Jackie crumbled. For most of the cruise she was locked in her cabin, trying not to succumb to seasickness.
Once back on home turf, Jackie did her best to throw the press off Onassis’s scent by attending a series of high-profile functions with old standby escorts like Ros Gilpatric and Lord Harlech. On June 4, 1968—the day of the crucial winner-take-all California primary—Jackie made two afternoon campaign appearances for Bobby in New York, had a late dinner with Gilpatric at her apartment, and then waited for word from Los Angeles.
When Bobby got to his fifth-floor suite at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, he found flowers and a magnum of Dom Perignon waiting for him. “The flowers are for your room, and the champagne is for you after you win the primary. Jackie.” Around 11 p.m. Eastern Time, George Plimpton, who had been with RFK on the campaign trail in California, called with the news: Bobby had won by a wide margin. “That’s wonderful, George,” Jackie said. “Tell Bobby I love him.” Plimpton would later regret that, amid all the excitement, he never managed to convey Jackie’s final message to Bobby.
JACKIE STAYED UP watching the returns on television for another four hours, and finally turned in around 3:15 a.m. A half hour later, the phone rang. Stas and Lee Radziwill were calling from London, where the BBC was reporting breaking news from the United States.
“Jackie, how’s Bobby?” Stas asked.
“He’s fine. He’s terrific,” Jackie replied. “You heard that he won California by fifty-three percent, didn’t you?”
“But, Jackie,” Radziwill said, “he’s been shot. It happened just a few minutes ago.”
They waited for what seemed like an eternity for Jackie to react. “No!” Jackie cried. “It can’t have happened. No! It can’t have happened!”
John and Caroline, tucked in their beds at the other end of the sprawling apartment, somehow managed to sleep through their mother’s screams.
The most dire of Jackie’s warnings had come true: After thanking supporters in the Ambassador ballroom, Bobby was leaving through the hotel’s pantry when shots rang out. A young Palestinian named Sirhan Sirhan, angered over the defeat of the Arabs in the recent Six-Day War with U.S.-supported ally Israel, had lunged from the shadows and fired six shots at Bobby. Within seconds, Jack’s little brother was lying on the floor in a pool of blood, his eyes open, while Olympic decathlon champion Rafer Johnson and pro football legend Roosevelt Grier pried the pistol from Sirhan’s hand. Ethel knelt next to him, whispering, “Oh my God, oh my God,” while a busboy pressed a rosary in Bobby’s hand and cradled his head.
Jackie prepared to get on the first available flight to Los Angeles, but first she had to decide how to break the news to the children. She had relied on grandmotherly Maud Shaw to tell them when Patrick and Jack had died, but this time she could not bring herself to burden Marta Sgubin or anyone else with the responsibility.
Before leaving for the airport, Jackie woke the children up gently and brought them into her room. “Something has happened to Uncle Bobby,” she told them, “and I have to fly out to California to be with him.”
“What happened to Uncle Bobby?” Caroline asked as John wiped the sleep from his eyes.
“A very bad man shot him,” Jackie answered. “The doctors are doing everything they can for Uncle Bobby right now . . .” Before she could finish her sentence, Caroline burst into tears and John quickly followed suit. At seven, he could comprehend the enormity of what had happened—and experience the loss in a way he had been unable to following his own father’s assassination in Dallas.
John would spend the rest of his life wondering if he really remembered his father at all, but Uncle Bobby and this horrible day—those things would haunt him for the rest of his life.
Chuck Spalding was waiting for Jackie when she stepped off the plane in Los Angeles. “She got off the plane wearing those dark glasses,” he said, “but she seemed very calm, very much in control.” At this point, Jackie only knew what the rest of the world knew—that Robert F. Kennedy had been shot in the head, neck, and right side, and that he had undergone four hours of surgery at Good Samaritan Hospital.
“How is he doing, Chuck?” she asked. “Give it to me straight.”
“He’s dying, Jackie,” Spalding replied. “He’s dying.”
At the hospital, Jackie joined Ethel, Ted Kennedy, Spalding, Plimpton, Pierre Salinger, longtime Kennedy advisor Richard Goodwin, and several other members of RFK’s inner circle in keeping vigil outside his hospital room. They were brought into the room two by two to visit him as he lingered for hours, kept alive on a respirator. In remembering this grim scene, Plimpton recalled that he was most impressed by the fact that “Bobby looked huge. He was on this very high bed, and he was up at an angle. His head was in this big white bandage. He looked like a medieval knight. It was like visiting a tomb at Westminster Abbey.”
Eventually told by doctors that there was no hope for recovery, no one present was willing to make the hard decision and pull the plug. Ethel, in particular, refused. “I won’t kill Bobby,” she protested. “I won’t.” Taking control of the situation, Jackie signed the consent form authorizing doctors to turn off Bobby’s respirator. “Nobody else,” Goodwin said, “had the nerve to do it.” With Ethel holding his hand, Bobby died on June 6 at 1:44 a.m. Pacific Time. He was forty-two.
Five minutes after Bobby’s death was announced, Onassis called his closest friend, Costa Gratsos, in Athens. “She’s free of the Kennedys,” Onassis gloated. “The last link broke.” Gratsos was not surprised at his friend’s callous reaction. “As far as Aristo was concerned,” Gratsos said, “his biggest headache had been eliminated.”
Lyndon Johnson was no fan of Bobby, either, but out of respect for the Kennedy family and all that Bobby represented to the nation, he promptly dispatched Air Force One to pick up RFK’s body and fly it back to New York. Just four and a half years after Dallas, Jackie was once again accompanying home the body of the man she loved.
Two days later, President Johnson led the two thousand mourners who crammed into New York City’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral to pay their last respects. Ethel, pregnant with Bobby’s eleventh child, maintained her composure while the sole surviving Kennedy brother delivered his moving eulogy just feet from RFK’s flag-draped coffin. “My brother need not be idealized,” Teddy said, struggling to control his emotions, “or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life, to be remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it . . .”
Wearing a black lace mantilla, her face etched with grief, Jackie was, said Salinger, “in a trance, just completely in shock. It just defied belief that she—that we—would be reliving this nightmare.”
John, proudly wearing his PT-109 tie clasp, took part in the requiem Mass with his sister and the other Kennedy children. While Caroline had cried when Mommy called with the terrible news that Uncle Bobby had died, John was clearly most worried about the obvious change in his mother. Throughout the funeral, he could be seen leaning forward in his pew and checking on Jackie.
As everyone filed out of the cathedral, Lady Bird Johnson reached out her hand to comfort her fellow first lady and even called out Jackie’s name. “She looked at me as if from a great distance,” Lady Bird recalled, “as though I were an apparition.”
“It was just too much for her. Jackie was out of it—a zombie,” said Spalding, who could see that John was now concerned for his mother’s mental well-being. “John really was too young to see how Jack’s death had really just flattened her, but now he got it. I felt so sorry for him, and for Caroline, too, of course.”
Later, John joined his mother and sister aboard the twenty-one-car funeral train that carried Bobby’s body to Washington for burial at Arlington. More than two million people—some with their hands on their hearts, others applauding or singing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” many weeping openly—lined the 226-mile route as the train slowly made its way to the capital. As if to lend credence to the increasingly popular notion of a “Kennedy Curse,” a passing train killed two of the spectators who had come to say farewell to Bobby, and badly injured six others. Later, as the funeral train rolled slowly through Trenton, New Jersey, a teenager watching from atop a freight car accidentally brushed against a power line and was critically burned. Before the train reached its destination, John heard all the grisly details from older cousins who witnessed both accidents.
It was dark by the time the train arrived in Washington, and the fifteen-minute graveside service at Arlington would be illuminated only by long, tapered candles handed out to the mourners. John, along with his aunts, uncles, and cousins, knelt to kiss the coffin before it was lowered into the ground.
When it was over, Ethel left alone, clutching to her breast the folded American flag that had covered her husband’s coffin. Jackie remained behind with John and Caroline, all three bowing their heads in prayer beside the freshly dug grave. After a few minutes, Jackie took one of the floral pieces that had covered the casket—a small bunch of daisies—and led the children to their father’s grave just twenty yards away. John and Caroline knelt there, too, and looked on as their mother lovingly placed Bobby’s daisies on Jack’s grave. “Oh Jack,” John heard his mother whisper. “Oh Bobby . . .”