“I WILL NEVER ALLOW MYSELF TO BE VANQUISHED OR ANNIHILATED. I have always enjoyed living and working, and I believe I have had a great life,” Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy declared as she neared eighty. Citing British theologian John Cardinal Newman, she believed that God had created her to perform “some definite service.… I may never know it in this life, but I shall be told it in the next.”1 If such an afterlife exists, Rose Kennedy arrived there on January 22, 1995, at age 104. At the pearly gates she would have reviewed her life’s stunning intersection with the twentieth century’s most historic events and told Saint Peter her version of life as a Boston belle, devoted wife, award-winning mother, devout Irish Catholic, indefatigable campaigner, charitable fund-raiser, and stoic heroine. She would have asked for the most stylish heavenly gown for the reunion with her husband and four children, who had preceded her in death. If they had not yet achieved beatific perfection, Rose would surely have offered advice about how to do so. On Earth she had been absent for more than a decade from the public stage she occupied most of her life. Usually a supporting actor, Rose relished portraying the leading lady. Yet she also embraced less glamorous theatrical duties: stage manager, playwright, dresser, makeup artist, and casting director for her family’s successful political productions. Often upstaged by her father, husband, and sons, she outlived all but one and fashioned a family mythology that endures.
Debilitated by strokes in her final years, Rose couldn’t plan her funeral, but she surely would have approved the tasteful familial service, filled with ritualistic Catholic liturgy. Three Kennedy generations had gathered for a traditional Irish wake at their storied Cape Cod compound. Then they accompanied Rose’s remains to Boston’s historic North End, site of her 1890 birth. A few blocks from her birthplace stands St. Stephen’s, its edifice purchased from Congregationalists by Boston’s Catholic diocese in 1862 to serve the waves of Irish Catholic immigrants flooding into surrounding tenements. Restored in 1964, under Kennedy prelate Richard Cardinal Cushing’s direction, the church’s red-brick facade, decorated with white pilasters and crowned by a clock tower and belfry, epitomizes classic Federal-era architecture.
On a chilly, gray January morning, the black hearse carrying Rose Kennedy’s elegant mahogany casket approached the church’s front entrance. Baby Rose had crossed the same threshold for her 1890 christening, as had her legendary father, John F. (Honey Fitz) Fitzgerald, in 1863. Across the narrow street, with its old-world ambience, stood respectful spectators, bundled against the biting New England cold, hoping to glimpse the celebrated Kennedys.
Rose’s final act didn’t disappoint them or C-SPAN viewers watching the two-hour Mass of Resurrection. As funeral directors slipped a white shroud over her coffin, the matriarch’s children and their progeny gathered around. The oldest grandchildren served as pallbearers, accompanying Grandma Kennedy’s casket up the church’s center aisle. Their names recalled her “agony and ecstasy,” as Rose had labeled life’s dramas. Kathleen, assassinated Senator Robert F. Kennedy’s eldest, bears the name of Rose’s beloved daughter, nicknamed Kick, whose love life broke her mother’s heart. Kick perished in a 1948 plane crash on her way to the south of France with her married boyfriend. (Kick’s first husband, a Protestant British nobleman, died from a Nazi sniper’s bullet in 1944. Only a few weeks before, Rose’s cherished oldest child, Joseph P. [Joe] Kennedy Jr., a Navy pilot, died when his plane exploded over the English countryside.) Caroline, daughter of murdered President John F. Kennedy, was still overcoming the 1994 cancer death of her mother, First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Christopher, the tall, handsome son of Patricia Kennedy Lawford and her former husband, the late Hollywood actor Peter Lawford, struggled with another of the family’s curses—substance abuse, which had also hastened his father’s death.
Robert S. (Bobby) Shriver III hailed from the most stable family in the Kennedy clan, led by his mother, Eunice, named for Rose’s sister (a tuberculosis victim at age twenty-three) and founder of the Special Olympics, and her husband, R. Sargent (Sarge) Shriver Jr., first director of JFK’s Peace Corps and former ambassador to France. Yet they had been embarrassed over Bobby’s 1970 drug bust for pot possession. Police had arrested him, along with his cousin, Robert Kennedy Jr. Kara, Senator Edward M. (Teddy) Kennedy’s eldest, represented him and his former wife, Joan, who both suffered from public bouts of alcoholism, as would their youngest son, Congressman Patrick Kennedy (D-RI). Kara’s brother, Teddy Jr., limped into Rose’s funeral on a prosthetic leg, resulting from his battle with cancer as a twelve-year-old.
Steve Smith Jr.’s mother, Jean Kennedy Smith, bore the title of US ambassador to Ireland, following in the footsteps of her late father, Joseph P. (Joe) Kennedy Sr., ambassador to the Court of St. James’s at the start of World War II. In 1969 Joe had succumbed to the aftereffects of a devastating stroke suffered eight years before. Steve’s father, Steve Smith Sr., had served as the business manager of the Kennedys’ campaigns and Kennedy Foundation. Steve Sr. had died of cancer in 1990 before his younger son, William Kennedy Smith, faced 1991 rape charges after Good Friday barhopping in Palm Beach with uncle Teddy and cousin Patrick. Having admitted in court that he had displayed poor judgment in carousing with his son and nephew on one of the Catholic Church’s most solemn nights, Teddy was relieved when the jury acquitted young Willie, then a medical student. Forever tied to Chappaquiddick, where his car careened off a rustic bridge in 1969 and drowned Mary Jo Kopechne, Teddy had begun to reform his dissolute private life. After a public confession of past mistakes, he married Victoria Reggie in 1992. By all accounts, their happy union set him on a straighter path and made him an even more effective legislator as well as family patriarch.
Before the 1990s gave way to the twenty-first century, two more of Rose’s grandchildren would join in death their cousin David Kennedy, Robert’s son, who fell victim to a 1984 drug overdose at a seedy Palm Beach motel. David’s brother, Michael, ran head-on into a tree on an Aspen ski slope while playing “ice football” with his siblings on New Year’s Eve 1997. Two years later, John F. Kennedy Jr. crashed his private plane off Martha’s Vineyard on a hazy July 1999 evening, killing himself, his wife, and her sister.
At St. Stephen’s the bright interior and happy remembrances of Rose’s full life lifted the gloom of the leaden skies and grieving family. Boston’s Bernard Cardinal Law delivered Pope John Paul II’s condolences. Rose would have savored that honor. In 1964 she had told a journalist that among the most meaningful events in her life were a 1939 audience with Pope Pius XII and a 1936 meeting with the future pontiff and President Franklin Roosevelt at Hyde Park.2 Robert Kennedy’s widow, Ethel, mother of their eleven children, gave the first reading. As early as 1983, when her mother-in-law’s health began to deteriorate, the family had chosen a passage from the book of Proverbs to summarize Rose’s life:
Strength and dignity are her clothing, and she laughs at the time to come. She opens her mouth with wisdom, and the teaching of kindness is on her tongue. She looks well to the ways of her household, and does not eat the bread of idleness. Her children rise up and call her happy; her husband too, and he praises her; “Many women have done excellently but you surpass them all.” Charm is deceitful, and beauty is vain, but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised. Give her a share in the fruit of her hands, and let her works praise her in the city gates.3
Rose’s son-in-law Sargent Shriver followed Ethel at the pulpit to read a passage from the First Letter of Peter. The scripture perfectly encapsulated Rose’s faith that had buffered the unfathomable tragedies befalling her family. “You may for [a] time have to suffer the distress of many trials,” declared Apostle Peter, “but this is so that your faith, which is more precious than the passing splendor of fire-tried gold, may by its genuineness lead to … your salvation.”4 Within a few years, ebullient Sarge would begin to exhibit Alzheimer’s symptoms and ultimately fall prey to the disease.
Six of Rose’s twenty-nine grandchildren delivered the Prayers of the Faithful, petitions citing “Grandma’s own words and wishes” for preventing mental retardation, strengthening faith, increasing public service, and embracing life’s simple pleasures of love, laughter, flowers, music, and dancing. Television correspondent Maria Shriver prayed for “joy in heaven,” where Rose was now reunited with her deceased children—Joe, Kathleen, Jack, and Bobby.
After Communion for hundreds of mourners, Rose’s children eulogized her. Although she was survived by five of her nine, only four—Eunice, Patricia, Jean, and Teddy—could attend. Her oldest daughter, Rosemary, resided in a Wisconsin institution for the developmentally disabled, the victim of a failed lobotomy in 1941. Eunice Shriver recalled her mother as a loving teacher. “The mother’s heart is the child’s schoolroom,” Eunice quoted Henry Ward Beecher. Rose would ask, “Now, Eunice, where is Pakistan; where is Wales?” as they studied a wall map. “She taught us to listen to Dad’s dinner-table conversations about politics,” even though they “seemed boring to a young child.” Yet those political dialogues around the family table “became the basis for our life’s work.” Rose had “sparked her daughter’s imagination with bedtime stories—excerpts from Little Women… and, of course, the Gospel.” “But as smart as she was,” Mrs. Shriver recalled, “she would never let us forget our special sister, Rosemary.… Mother’s acts of intelligence, inclusion, respect, and love of motherhood created unbreakable bonds of love and support between my brothers and sisters. Her acts of goodness were this child’s schoolroom. They were my mother’s heart,” Eunice concluded, “and I loved her.”5 Rose’s empathy for Rosemary inspired Eunice to embrace the least gifted Kennedy and, ultimately, a life’s passion for serving the mentally retarded.
Fulfilling the role practiced all too often in his star-crossed family, Teddy delivered the perfect eulogy. As he had done after brother Bobby’s 1968 assassination, Joe and Rose Kennedy’s sole surviving son captured his mother’s essence in poetic phrases, with a tender, occasionally quavering voice. Beginning with a self-deprecating anecdote about Rose’s ubiquitous grammar lessons, Teddy revealed, “On my office wall, there is a note from Mother, reacting to a comment I once made in an interview. ‘Dear Teddy,’ she wrote in the note, ‘I just saw a story in which you said: ‘If I was President.…’ You should have said, ‘if I were President.…’ which is correct because it is a condition contrary to fact.’”6 Throughout his life, Teddy understood and appreciated his mother. In letters and visits, he appeared to know just how far his teasing of her could go. She adored his attentiveness and patience with her maternal guidance.
Again poking fun at Rose’s punctilious nature, Teddy eulogized, “Mother always thought her children should strive for the highest place. But inside the family, with love and laughter, she knew how to put each of us in our place. She was ambitious not only for our success, but for our souls. From our youth, we remember how, with effortless ease, she could bandage a cut, dry a tear, recite from memory ‘The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere,’ and spot a hole in a sock from a hundred yards away.” Turning more serious, his voice breaking, the Massachusetts senator recalled, “She sustained us in our saddest times by her faith in God, which was the greatest gift she gave us—and by the strength of her character, which was the combination of the sweetest gentleness and the most tempered steel.… What any of us has done—whatever contribution we have made—begins and ends with Rose and Joe Kennedy. For all of us, Dad was the spark. Mother was the light of our lives. He was our greatest fan. She was our greatest teacher.” Teddy looked to the future when Rose would “welcome the rest of us home [to heaven].” Until then, Teddy concluded, “Mother’s prayers will continue to be more than enough to see us through.” Returning to his pew, the sixty-two-year-old senator reached toward Rose’s coffin and whispered, “I love you, Mother.”
To Handel’s “Hallelujah” chorus, the family followed Rose’s casket out of St. Stephen’s. Clouds had broken and sun shone, bathing the hearse in soft winter light. Still hobbled by the effects of his broken back, suffered in a 1964 plane crash that killed his pilot and Senate aide, Teddy gingerly folded his ample body into the lead limousine’s front seat. Before he departed for Brookline’s Holyhood Cemetery, where Rose would be interred next to her husband, the senator spied several veteran Senate colleagues exiting from the church. He left the car’s warmth to shake hands, clasp them on the shoulder, and thank them for coming. Close friends, like Democratic senator Christopher Dodd of Connecticut and Republican senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, merited special attention, and he led them to the limousine’s open door to speak with his sisters. There Teddy stood on the sidewalk, with the funeral procession idling, until he had shaken the hand of every mourner departing the church. Just like Rose’s father, Honey Fitz, born in a nearby Irish tenement and destined to become a North End ward boss, state senator, US congressman, and mayor, Senator Kennedy never missed an opportunity to press the flesh, especially now that he was locked in a tough reelection campaign with Mitt Romney. It was a simple and fitting coda for the celebrated Irish American matriarch who had given birth to the most influential political dynasty of the twentieth century.