ROSE KENNEDY

“MY REACTION TO GRIEF IS A CERTAIN KIND OF NERVOUS action. I just keep moving, walking, pulling away at things, praying to myself while I move, and making up my mind that it is not going to get me. I am not going to be licked by tragedy, as life is a challenge, and we must carry on and work for the living as well as mourn for the dead,” wrote Rose after Jack’s death.¹

Family nurse Rita Dallas, whose surname Rose could not utter after November 22, 1963, recalled that Rose “had trouble sleeping” after the assassination. “She would experience bad nights, during which we could hear her pacing the floor. When she finally did doze off, she was always worried she would oversleep and miss Mass. Consequently, one of the night nurse’s duties was to be certain Mrs. Kennedy arose in time to go to church.”² We know from her travel lists that Rose packed sleeping pills. Dalmane and Librium were among her prescriptions, both popular sedatives/antianxiety medicines in the 1960s and ’70s. Not barbiturates like Seconal, they are benzodiazepines, similar to Valium, which appeared on the market in 1963. Dalmane is particularly long-acting when taken at night, producing sedation well into the next day.³ Rose may well have required a nurse to wake her from a deep, medicine-induced slumber. Who could blame her for turning to pharmaceuticals to reduce stress-induced insomnia in the wake of her son’s horrific murder?

Trying to distract herself further, she began gathering materials for an autobiography. From Joe’s New York secretary she received a shipment containing diary notes, materials she had produced about her children, correspondence with her mother, newspaper clippings, and her speeches. “It should be a wonderful book, and I am sure every woman in this country will want to read it,” the secretary told her. “The potential audience is tremendous.…”⁴ Yet nearly another decade would pass before Rose began writing her life story.

She could have rejoined Washington’s social whirl. President and Mrs. Johnson invited her to attend a February 1964 dinner for new British prime minister Alec Douglas-Home. Rose declined. “It was too soon,” she wrote on the invitation.⁵ No doubt a White House visit would have been too painful. Only a few months earlier, she and Jack had hosted Haile Selassie there. She appreciated the Johnsons’ kindness “after the tragedy,” as Rose referred to Jack’s death. In late February LBJ and Lady Bird visited the Kennedys at Palm Beach. “Strange to say, I was a little excited and a little sad,” wrote Rose.⁶ The president “seems anxious to do what he can do to assuage our grief. But whatever he does, the pro-Kennedyites say he is doing it for publicity, to get the Catholic Democratic votes.” She thought that “Mrs. Johnson has always seemed to be thoughtful and eager to do the right thing and the kind thing, ever since I went campaigning with her in 1960. She is an attractive looking, well-groomed woman, but, of course, anybody who followed Jackie would be handicapped. So exceptional were Jackie’s qualifications in looks and intellectual attainment.”⁷

Once again a European trip would provide escape and solace. Stopping in Boston before flying to Paris, Rose visited her ninety-eight-year-old mother. Mrs. Fitzgerald was so frail that the family had kept from her the horrifying details of Jack’s death. Rose expressed concern over Josie’s care: “I put my head in her room in the morning, and I saw a shaft of light directly across her face where it crept in through the tiny space between the wall and the curtain.” And when Rose visited at lunchtime, she discovered Josie’s scrambled eggs “ice cold on an ice cold plate.” Why weren’t the nurses more attuned to such things? This syndrome wasn’t new. Rose always kept a vigilant eye on her children’s caretakers. More than once she had walked to the beach only to discover the governess “flirting with the swim instructor, while the children sat around in wet bathing suits,” subjecting them to colds. Rose remembered that she “was always present during the children’s meals” so that the cook varied menus.⁸ As Rose’s adult children passed from her life in one violent tragedy after another, she became more determined than ever to convince herself that she had done everything possible to care for them as children. Her memory of “always” being present at family meals, however, failed to account for her many trips away from home.

Rose’s 1964 visit to Paris coincided with the dedication of Avenue du Président Kennedy. Only three years before, he and Jackie had been the toast of Paris; now France mourned his loss. “Every place I went the French people were most sympathetic. Mr. Zembrzuski at the Ritz Hotel said that he really dreaded to see me because his grief was so deep. These circumstances made it more difficult for me, as constant reminders often released floods of tears again. All the people at the French ceremony looked grim and solemn and sympathetic. There are many streets of the villages named after Jack.”⁹

Back home, Rose began to attend tributes to her late son, especially those to raise funds for the planned John F. Kennedy Library. She now had a new charitable cause for which to attract paying fans. North Carolina’s program drew so many people, at $10 per seat, that it was held in UNC’s football stadium. Although Billy Graham had supported Nixon in 1960, he nonetheless gave the featured address. Rose accepted North Carolina’s JFK Library contribution, and Senator Edward Kennedy spoke about Jack. Moved by the audience, Rose wrote afterward to Democratic governor Terry Sanford, “Until my arrival in North Carolina, I had not realized the great affection, admiration, and respect which the people of your state felt towards my son, and my heart was filled with gratitude and appreciation toward them.”¹⁰ Likewise, at least one audience member adored her, writing, “Dear Mrs. Kennedy, I want you to know how thrilled our family was when we realized you were sitting in front of us at St. Thomas More Church on Sunday. My husband and I so greatly admire you and your family. We strive to imitate the family spirit that you all possess among our own six children.” Rose’s family image resonated with this Catholic mother. “Three of my teenage children and I were honored to attend the ceremonies in Kenan Stadium yesterday. We were deeply moved by your speech. Our family has grieved with you since the death of President Kennedy. He was able to project himself in such a manner that we could identify ourselves with all of his noble ideas. We hope not to falter,” the writer assured the president’s mother.¹¹

One month later, on June 19, 1964, yet another disaster struck the Kennedys. Traveling to a state political convention in Springfield, Massachusetts, Teddy’s private plane crashed in a thick fog, killing the pilot and the senator’s political aide. Kennedy’s friend and colleague, Indiana senator Birch Bayh and his wife, also on the flight, dragged Teddy from the wreckage. He had suffered three fractured vertebrae, several broken ribs, and a punctured lung. Bobby could not believe the misfortune that once again befell the clan. Arriving at the hospital, he noted that if his mother had produced only her first four children, “she would have nothing now,” with Joe, Jack, and Kathleen deceased and Rosemary “in a nursing home.” “I guess the only reason we’ve survived is that there are too many of us. There are more of us than there is trouble.”¹²

Teddy spent six months bedridden. Following her own lifelong habit, Rose encouraged him to use his immobility for self-improvement. “When you are lying in bed, you can read a paragraph and then try to rewrite it or resay it,” she suggested. “Then notice the difference between succinct, dramatic impressions of the author and your (verbose) discursive, dull recital of the same events.”¹³ Well, that must have cheered Teddy.

With Bobby in Europe and Teddy hospitalized, Rose agreed to appear at a Philadelphia ceremony honoring President Kennedy. On July 4, 1962, JFK had made a triumphant visit there: he viewed the Liberty Bell and delivered a Cold War speech at Independence Hall about the interdependence of nations. “We in Philadelphia hold especially dear the memory of President John F. Kennedy,” the city’s Democratic mayor told Rose. “In order that future generations may gain some measure of our love for this man, we plan to dedicate a bronze plaque to his memory at the birthplace of American independence.… It will be similar and adjacent to one which commemorates a visit to our nation’s birthplace by President-elect Abraham Lincoln in 1861.”¹⁴ Rose could continue her comparisons of Jack to another martyred president.

Standing in front of the shrine to America’s founding, Rose spoke briefly about JFK’s love of history, rooted in his Boston boyhood and Honey Fitz’s compelling tales of revolutionary America. “Seventy-three-year-old Mrs. Rose Kennedy appears to have triumphed over tragedy,” proclaimed the Philadelphia Bulletin, launching an updated theme about her. Though she would have settled for a secondary position if “my son Jack, the late president,” had lived, Rose now embraced center stage in his absence. “Smiling, chatting, sometimes laughing,… [s]he doesn’t act like a woman in mourning—nor does she look or act like a woman of 73. Straight, slim, with a sprightly walk, she seems smaller than one imagines a Kennedy to be, and actually is only 5'3" tall.” Ducking questions on coping with tragedy, and her late son’s national contributions, Rose promoted the Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr. Foundation and stressed the importance of prenatal care to prevent mental retardation. Instead of wearing funereal black, she chose all white, from her broad-brimmed hat to her leather pumps. “Mrs. Kennedy … credits some of her chic to her husband,” the newspaper reported. “He always steered me away from bouffant skirts—he likes simple clothes that make me look—ah, slim,” explained Rose.¹⁵ Wearing dark glasses against bright sunlight, she gazed solemnly at the plaque placed where her son had stood two years earlier. Then she left for Allentown to dedicate one of Eunice’s twenty new camps for retarded children.

Rose maintained a brave public face, but that summer at Hyannis Port resurrected painful memories. Recalling the excitement President Kennedy created during visits to the compound only saddened her. “We are all at the Cape again in 1964, but it is different from other summers,” she explained. Gone were helicopters signaling the president’s arrival and the delight of his two children racing toward him. “Caroline and John would run and jump into his arms. He would lean over ever so affectionately and hug and embrace them. I always realized he was a little wary as to how he bent, so as not to hurt his back, and, of course, he never lifted John up into his arms,” Rose explained. “Bobby is here but seems distracted by the confusion and uncertainty surrounding his own plans.… Ted, of course, is in the hospital, Joan with him. And if she is not there, Jean and Pat try to go up. I have not been because the day I had planned it, I had to make a speech in Philadelphia instead of Teddy. Then I had to go to Mary Moore’s funeral another day.” Rose tried to stay active, “as it is the only way I can keep normal and not think about the time when we were said to be the most powerful family in the world. I read and study French continually although at times I think it is foolish, as in Paris everyone in the hotel and at the couturier speaks English, and I know few French people socially.” The Kennedys attempted to remain stoic, even in the confines of the Hyannis retreat, but sometimes memories overtook them. “Once or twice we gathered around the piano here at our house while Joan played and sang songs, but we hit on one of Jack’s old favorites, and all dissolved into tears and left abruptly.”¹⁶

Rather than share their grief, they hid tears until they regained their composure. Teddy remembered, “I would say to myself, ‘Mother is holding up. The last thing she needs is for me to break down or give way to a flood of tears.’” “It never occurred to me to seek professional help or grief counseling of any kind. The times were different then.” Before his plane crash, the young senator would take solitary beach walks and only then let the desolation over Jack’s death engulf him.¹⁷

STILL, LIFE WENT ON. Rose slipped off to Paris to buy clothes for the fall campaigns. Bobby had decided to run for the US Senate from New York. Teddy had to contend again for the Massachusetts seat he had won by special election two years earlier. While Rose was abroad, her mother died. As with Honey Fitz, who had also passed away while Rose vacationed in France, she didn’t return for the funeral. Instead, she lunched with Marc Chagall in the south of France. Writing in French, Rose described his clear blue eyes, twinkling like those of a laughing child. He kindly inscribed books for family members, a request Rose made when meeting celebrated authors. She also bestowed her own token mementos—newly minted silver Kennedy half-dollars—as tips to elevator operators and concierges, whose gratitude for receiving the coins touched her.¹⁸

Rose returned to the campaign trail, wearing her Paris fashions at events for Teddy and Bobby. Her mid-October 1964 schedule re-created frenetic days spent stumping for Jack in Wisconsin. At a New York reception an atypical audience of more than a hundred independent and Republican voters turned out to see her, most signing on as Kennedy campaign volunteers. Ten women joined her in a TV studio “to give the appearance of a tea” as part of a campaign commercial. The next afternoon she attended another reception and returned to her apartment for a rest before leaving for an evening gathering of supporters. At the Hotel Astor Rose appeared at a luncheon for the Johnson-Humphrey-Kennedy campaigns, and, a day later, spoke for Bobby at the Hotel Commodore’s Grand Ballroom, then joined him in a receiving line. “She’s been campaigning for something like 72 years,” Bobby quipped about his seventy-four-year-old mother. “Was it in Grover Cleveland’s administration or maybe Lincoln’s that you began, Mother?”¹⁹ A day later Rose was off to a Staten Island luncheon, followed by a reception the next day in Queens. Her energy was astounding. At a lunch for Democratic women, she stood in a receiving line for nearly an hour, shaking hands with over three thousand guests. She took one day off (her golden wedding anniversary) before traveling to Boston, where she and Joan substituted for still-convalescing Teddy.²⁰ At “Coffee with the Kennedys,” twenty-five hundred voters, mostly women, came to meet Rose and Joan. Teddy’s spouse updated the throng on his condition, noting that he hoped to walk out of New England Baptist Hospital under his own power by Christmas. After saying a few words, Rose traveled to two more campaign events for Bobby, in Troy and Schenectady, where thirty-five hundred Kennedy supporters turned out for a tea in her honor.²¹ She assured them that Bobby would carry on President Kennedy’s legacy, especially in civil rights.

Bobby faced two main problems in his New York candidacy. Some labeled him a carpetbagger from Massachusetts, and many viewed him as ruthless from his days fighting Jimmy Hoffa as a Senate Rackets Committee staffer, running Jack’s campaigns, and battling the Mafia while attorney general. “Bob was a year old when we came here,” Rose testified, “and has lived in New York longer than he has any place else.” Without a doubt, she assured audiences, he considered himself a New Yorker. Rose humanized Bobby, telling stories about his childhood, even of those times when she “used to spank him with a rulaaa!” Bobby was approaching forty, but in some ways Rose was still in charge. After one introduction of her “seventh child, Robert Francis Kennedy,” Rose took a seat behind him, and Bobby sheepishly stepped to the mike. Before he could start his speech, Rose was back at his side, stage whispering, “Tell them about your experience.…” “I’m going to tell them,” Bobby obeyed, with a touch of faux exasperation. Smiling, he turned back to his mother, who had resumed her seat. “Why don’t you give your own speech?” The crowd roared, and Rose giggled. “See, that’s it!” Bobby exclaimed. “The reason she’s never introduced us before is that we never go on the same platform with her.” Gesturing back toward his mother, the seasoned pol, he declared, “We couldn’t possibly compete with that!”²² The dialogue was vintage Kennedy: warm banter, with a touch of reality about Rose’s attempts to control her children. “Their presence together reminded crowds that the Kennedys were kind of an American royal family, an institution worth preserving,” Evan Thomas has noted.²³

The press embraced Rose’s campaign persona. “Her Sunday audiences found her without an iota of self-pity, which is the way it has always been with the daughter of Honey Fitz,” wrote Hearst reporter Bob Considine. “Mrs. Kennedy is a remarkable campaigner, tireless, cheerful, interested and with a delightful smidgeon of blarney.” While campaigning for thirty-year-old Teddy in his first run for Senate, she had joshed about critics who thought he was too young. “I wanted Teddy to go into the Church. But the trouble was that he wanted to start out as bishop,” Rose joked.²⁴ “I’d rather meet you than any queen,” gushed a woman in Rochester.²⁵

As the first anniversary of JFK’s death approached, Joe and Rose Kennedy’s two surviving sons swept to victories in their Senate campaigns. Bobby won by seven hundred thousand votes over Republican incumbent Kenneth Keating, and Teddy, still confined to a Boston hospital, trounced his opponent, earning 75 percent of the votes. A few days after the election, Rose instructed Bobby, “[You should] know that the Balfour Resolution established the Jewish home in Jerusalem, but did not make it a Jewish state.” She assumed that he knew this history, “but some don’t. If you don’t it should be explained to you.”²⁶

Soon Rose departed for Europe to promote the Kennedy Library and speak about mental retardation. She appeared at a traveling exhibition of Kennedy memorabilia, including Jack’s famous SOS coconut that she had urged him to preserve two decades before. He had displayed it on his desks from Capitol Hill to the Oval Office. The JFK exhibit toured fifteen cities, several behind the Iron Curtain, covering eight thousand miles. Using her French and German, Rose spoke at the Paris, Bonn, and Copenhagen venues, her message always the same: “If you have a retarded child, don’t let that stop you from having more babies. If we felt that way [after Rosemary] … we wouldn’t have two United States senators in our family today.”²⁷

In Copenhagen Rose laid a wreath at the graves of Resistance fighters. Marie Bruce remembered Rose’s perfect instincts on this “very cold dark December day [with] heavy rain” casting a pall over the “small group of old people, shabby survivors of the Resistance.” “Suddenly Mrs. Kennedy emerged from under the umbrella where the two of us stood, walked to the graves, knelt on the wet grass and began to pray quietly. The little crowd, moved, crept nearer. [The] French have an expression, ‘Le mot juste.’ They followed her right to the car; there were tears.”²⁸

BY THE MID-1960S Rose was quite comfortable using modern media to spread her message about preventing mental retardation. She did radio interviews, made public-service announcements, and began appearing on nationally syndicated talk shows to discuss her campaign and promote products made by handicapped workers. In July 1967, wearing a pink dress and her signature pearls, Rose confidently strode onto the set of Mike Douglas’s syndicated TV show in Philadelphia. Describing Rosemary without mentioning her name, she observed that after two healthy sons, “we had this little girl … my oldest daughter, and she was mentally retarded, and I tried to get help” from family doctors, child psychiatrists, and Harvard. None offered any hope or help for Rosemary’s mental deficiencies. “I was very discouraged and really heartbroken because I didn’t know what to do to help the child.” She then moved on to the work of the Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr. Foundation and to research indicating that viewers should vaccinate their children against measles, a major cause of retardation. The vaccinations were “not expensive,” she assured them.

Douglas departed from the script Rose had prepared for him. Did parents still try to hide their retarded children? “That used to happen but not so much anymore,” Rose observed. A bit dismissively, she added, “No reason now to hide them or think you have to keep them at home.” Douglas wanted to know how Rose’s older children reacted to their sister’s affliction. “Well, there wasn’t any great to-do about it. When you have a large family, some of them are brilliant and some are not so brilliant.” Rosemary “was a fairly good swimmer, and we used to compliment her on her swimming or her hairdo after we’d congratulate the boys on their mental capacity.” This gave her an opportunity to talk about Eunice’s day camp for retarded children. Not knowing the painful truth of Rosemary’s disappearance from the Kennedy family, kindly Mike Douglas wondered aloud why she was “finally institutionalized.” Rose ducked that question, generalizing, “It depends on personal circumstances.” If there is a good school near the family, the child could attend it and make friends, but if she must be tutored at home, as the Kennedys had tried, then the child has no friends. “So she’s better sent away to boarding school,” reported Rose. When had Rosemary left the family for school? Douglas inquired. “I suppose she was probably fourteen or fifteen,” Rose responded, shifting uneasily in her chair. Retarded adults can become productive citizens, she asserted. For example, “Flame of Hope Candles” had been produced by the mentally retarded. Reminiscing about past campaigns, Rose recalled how Bobby had raised her age to make Jack seem older. “I said that was the greatest sacrifice a woman can make!” she quipped.²⁹ Four years after Jack’s death, she had rediscovered her equilibrium, wit, and life’s work.

The world now began to recognize Rose not only for her large family and for overcoming President Kennedy’s assassination, but also for her contributions in mental retardation. Connecticut’s Saint Joseph College awarded her an honorary degree in 1965 for “womanly leadership” in encouraging the mothers of retarded children and “hastening the advent of an era of greater attack on the problems of mental retardation.”³⁰ From Hyannis to Harvard, she presided over memorial dedications “to my beloved son, Jack, the late president.” The Canadian Association for Retarded Children presented its International Award of Merit “for her personal courage which has been a source of inspiration and hope to afflicted families everywhere.” She visited a Toronto school for retarded children. One child embraced her, and Rose threw her arms around him. She was particularly moved by a Canadian gift—a painting of Mount Kennedy, the Yukon peak named for JFK. She reminded her audience that Bobby had scaled its treacherous summit in tribute to his slain brother.³¹

Farther afield, Rose was invited to speak about mental retardation and support fund-raising for retarded children by the Swedish boy and girl scouts. She eagerly accepted. “Mamma Kennedy,” the Swedish newspapers dubbed her. That trip’s highlight was lunch at Drottningholm Castle with King Gustaf VI Adolf, who later sent her an autographed photo of himself with her, taken on the castle’s balcony. Rose appreciated the kindly king’s gesture but complained to the American ambassador’s wife in Stockholm, “I am sorry my coat was not buttoned properly [causing it to bulge]; but, as you recall, we were rather rushed from the inside of the castle out of doors for the picture, and I could not keep His Majesty waiting.”³² She would never relinquish her desire for flawless public images.

Rose’s proudest moment in her fight against mental retardation came when she lifted a spadeful of earth at a 1966 groundbreaking for the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Center for Research in Mental Retardation and Human Development at Yeshiva University’s Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. Holding the ceremonial shovel, Bobby at her side, Rose radiated pride to have, for the first time, something named for her. The Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr. Foundation donated $1.45 million for its construction.³³ The foundation also provided up-to-date research, statistics, and policies on mental retardation for Rose’s speeches, and she added personal anecdotes about Rosemary. Through all of these efforts, she raised a curtain hiding those afflicted with developmental disabilities and gradually revealed her own internal struggles: “I remember what prayers I said, what sacrifices I offered, what tears I shed—all through my lifetime.… My anguished heart would again utter the eternal question, ‘Dear God, why did you create my innocent child this way? What can I do to help her? What will happen to her if I die?’”³⁴

Rose worried about her husband, who was racked by small strokes bringing him near death several times. In February 1967 she declined attendance at a New York fund-raising event for the foundation: “Mr. Kennedy is not very well, and all my time and efforts are centered around him here at Palm Beach.”³⁵ Recalling Rose’s devotion, John Ryan, Joe’s caretaker in later years, observed, “[S]he would have breakfast with Mr. Kennedy, lunch with him or read to him and tell him what was going on. She was constantly there and constantly around him.”³⁶

But some events were simply too meaningful for her to miss. Commemorations of Jack’s life attracted Rose and other family members. At Choate School’s Mothers’ Day celebration, Rose spoke before the dedication of Robert Berks’s JFK bust. (A larger rendition of the modern sculpture would eventually tower over the grand foyer of Washington’s John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.) Rose reminded the audience that she and Joe selected Choate for its proximity to New York “so that we might visit the boys once in a while.” In her speech, Joe Jr. earned her usual approval for studying “diligently.” On the other hand, “Jack’s studies were fair, his athletic participation was rather weak on account of his poor health, and he had a bit of difficulty with his masters. I say this quite frankly because, if any of you mothers have had children who have any difficulties at school, you may become discouraged. With the proper moral support, those youngsters will snap back and become exemplary students.” She hailed Choate for increasing Jack’s “awareness of his responsibilities” in later life—high praise indeed from Rose.³⁷

During this period an old Kennedy friend, Cardinal Cushing, spoke movingly at the dedication of Boston’s John F. Kennedy Federal Building: “For our generation, and the one that follows us, his memory will be a living thing—we talked to him, laughed with him, followed him, prayed with him, and finally wept over him.… But there will be other generations here for whom his name must be immortalized, and in this steel and stone we make his monument.… May the Lord, with Whom he lives today, bless all of us who loved him, and make this city, which he loved, always worthy of his memory.” Boston’s Catholic newspaper sent Mrs. Kennedy a photo of her and Cushing. Streaks of gray hair and facial wrinkles now revealed her age (seventy-six). She couldn’t refrain from commenting, “I knew the Cardinal was younger than I, but I thought with the help of Elizabeth Arden that I could hold my own. After looking at the photo, I doubt it; so please do not show it to any of my fans.”³⁸

Rose needn’t have worried about her appearance, vitality, or relevance as the years accumulated. Approaching seventy-eight, she still had one more national political campaign in her future. On March 16, 1968, Robert F. Kennedy announced his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination. Back to work went Rose, outlining speeches to deliver for Bobby in key primary states—Indiana, Nebraska, Oregon, and California. (Democrats held only seventeen primaries in 1968, but they accounted for nearly 40 percent of the delegates. Winning early contests could attract party leaders’ support.)³⁹ Rose emphasized Bobby’s childhood, steeped in history and politics, a tack that had worked during his 1964 Senate campaign. The carpetbagger issue had disappeared, of course, but Bobby’s alleged “ruthlessness” remained. “I resent” such an “epithet,” Rose declared. As only a loyal mother could, she defended her son’s tenacious record as attorney general, fighting “the gangsters who threatened him and his children.”⁴⁰ And she did her homework. Professor Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Jack’s White House historian, ran an ad in the New York Times, “Why I Am for Kennedy.” Rose read it carefully, underlining the most convincing sections.⁴¹

In late April she undertook a grueling eight-day swing through Indiana, with a detour to Chicago for Kennedy Foundation events. On one-day visits to Indianapolis, Gary, La Porte, Kendallville, Fort Wayne, South Bend, and Elkhart, she wooed Hoosier voters. Rose met with the press and pressed the flesh at receptions. Teddy was at her side once; otherwise, she campaigned alone. “[I] did not campaign with Bob at all as I can get a crowd on my own,” Rose asserted.⁴² It was like old times. Polly Fitzgerald, the wife of Rose’s nephew and organizer of the famous Kennedy teas for Jack in the 1950s, again coordinated receptions, where a new generation was eager to meet Rose. “‘Bobby’s Not Ruthless,’ Says Rose,” blared the Gary, Indiana, headlines.⁴³ Her message was hitting the mark.

Bobby had demonstrated true compassion in Indianapolis two weeks earlier when speaking of Martin Luther King’s assassination. Only a few hours after the murder, Bobby had gently revealed the “sad news” to an audience of black supporters in words as tender and eloquent as any in American political history. Quoting from memory his favorite poet, Aeschylus, he said, “Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.” Although Jackie had introduced Bobby to the Greek poets as salve for their grief after Jack’s death, Bobby’s simple plea for prayer reflects Rose’s influence: “So I ask you tonight to return home, to say a prayer for the family of Martin Luther King … but more importantly to say a prayer for our own country, which all of us love—a prayer for understanding and that compassion of which I spoke.”⁴⁴ Unlike other riot-torn US cities, Indianapolis remained calm that night. Rose and her mother had worried that Bobby, surrounded by five sisters, would be a “sissy.” Instead, he had developed a tough political persona that only grief and despair could penetrate, revealing his vulnerability, softening his spirit. Perhaps Kick had been right when she told Marie Bruce, “[I]t is Mother who gave us our characters.”⁴⁵ Bobby won Indiana with 42 percent of the votes.

After a few days at home to catch her breath, Rose was back on the trail, this time a three-day weekend in Nebraska. She spent Mother’s Day appearing at two receptions (attended by three thousand voters) in Omaha. Then she was off to Girls Town (part of Father Flanagan’s Boys Town) to meet with students and nuns, before visiting a nearby school for retarded children. Two days later Bobby took 51 percent of Nebraska’s primary votes.

On her way to California—a crucial state, where Bobby had to defeat the other anti–Vietnam War candidate, Minnesota senator Eugene McCarthy—Rose stopped at Lake Tahoe for a few days. Her pattern of campaigning, followed by a spa visit to recharge, remained unchanged. She needed her endurance for an exhausting tour of West Coast cities. Starting in Sacramento, she held a press conference, followed by brunch and a speech for five hundred women. From the capital she flew by private plane to Fresno, spoke to a thousand senior citizens (her newest constituency), and then drove to a park to address a thousand picnickers. Day’s end found her in San Francisco. The next afternoon she spoke at a reception for two thousand. Diminutive Rose kicked off her shoes and climbed onto a chair in order to be seen throughout the large ballroom.⁴⁶ The receiving line included “nuns, hippies and a topless dancer wearing nothing but 3,000 blue Kennedy buttons.” Clearly, this wasn’t Buckingham Palace. “Some kissed her, some gave her gifts … and everyone marveled at her trim figure, firm chin line, and glossy dark hair.”⁴⁷ “A charmer,” one newspaper labeled her.⁴⁸ Another wrote, “Clan matriarch, Mrs. Rose Kennedy, as vigorous as any of her daughters, was deployed to Northern California to talk with the sophisticated San Francisco and Sacramento sectors.…”⁴⁹

Daughter Jean and her husband, Steve Smith, Bobby’s campaign manager, carried the Kennedy banner throughout the state. Pat Lawford, now divorced from Peter and living in New York, returned to Hollywood and reconnected with old friends. Teddy took time from the Senate to stump for his brother; his wife Joan was assigned to Mexican-American communities because of her Spanish-language skills. Eunice couldn’t join the campaign. Her husband, Sargent Shriver, had just been named US ambassador to France. Jackie, desperately trying to maintain her family’s privacy in New York, avoided the campaign trail. Bobby’s wife, Ethel, with ten children and another on the way, maintained speaking engagements back east but came west when she could.⁵⁰ Rose marveled at Ethel’s steadfastness: “I had never been able to be with Joe to the extent that she [Ethel] had been with Bobby.…” She blamed long distances, slow transportation, and a need to stay with her children in case they fell ill. “[S]o when my husband worked and went to California, I went with him only once … in 1927.…”⁵¹ Yet Bobby and Ethel, unlike Rose and Joe, had a paradigmatic Catholic marriage, grounded on fidelity.

After a brief rest in San Francisco, Rose headed north to Oregon; its primary would be one week before California’s. She held a press conference in Eugene and presided over the dedication of a school for retarded children, named for Pearl Buck, the American author, who, like Rose, was the mother of a retarded daughter. Senior citizens greeted Rose at a reception the next day, and then, in Portland, she plunged into a blur of more press conferences and receptions. This time her efforts were for naught. Bobby would become the first Kennedy to lose an election. McCarthy won 44 percent of the vote to Bobby’s 38.⁵²

Before the Oregon loss, Rose was back in southern California for three days of press conferences and rallies, the last one to be held in the Ambassador Hotel’s ballroom. Rose flew north again for a two-day visit to Monterrey. In nearby Salinas, she presided over a reception for “Spanish and Filipinos” and was told of “great jealousy and dissension between [the] two factions … but we had a big crowd.”⁵³ Leaving California for home, she waited in Hyannis for the returns from the June 4 primary.

No other American mother had faced such a prospect: that a second of her sons could be president. This would boost the concept of “republican motherhood” to its apogee. “It is wonderful to think that people have that much confidence in a member of your family. The possibility of it happening again—it’s overwhelming,” Rose admitted. “For one mother to have this experience twice …! You almost begin to think that some other mother should have it.”⁵⁴

What Rose was about to experience, however, no one could have wished on another. Bobby had achieved his goal, defeating McCarthy, 49 to 41 percent, in the California balloting. Speaking to an ecstatic crowd of young supporters in the Ambassador Hotel ballroom, where Rose had recently appeared, Bobby thanked his sisters, mother, campaign volunteers, and “not in the order of importance,” Ethel, who beamed at his side. It was the dead of night on the East Coast, and Rose didn’t see or hear her son’s victory speech. Calling for a win at the upcoming Democratic convention, Bobby left the podium and exited through the hotel’s crowded pantry. Waiting for him was a Palestinian émigré, Sirhan Sirhan. He aimed a pistol at the senator’s head and pulled the trigger. Bleeding profusely from a bullet wound behind his right ear, Kennedy lay on the floor, clutching a rosary that had been placed on his chest. An ambulance rushed him to a nearby hospital, where surgeons performed brain surgery, but Bobby remained comatose.

Back in Hyannis Port, a night nurse knocked on Rose’s bedroom door. Instead of awakening her for Mass, however, she told her to turn on the television. “It’s Bobby! It’s Bobby!” an incredulous Rose exclaimed as the news bulletins flashed. Her niece, Ann, reported that the senator was unlikely to recover. “It seemed impossible that the same kind of disaster could befall our family twice in five years,” Rose thought.⁵⁵ “If I had read it in fiction, I would have said it was incredible.”⁵⁶

Rose sought refuge at St. Francis Xavier Church, once again praying for a son felled in the prime of life while serving his country. Returning to the compound, she retreated to her room to regain her composure. This time Rose accepted the burden of informing Joe, telling him of Bobby’s critical condition. Then she followed her too-familiar regimen of nervous activity, arranging and rearranging her room. By next morning, the dreaded news arrived. Bobby had died overnight, with Ethel, Teddy, Jean, Pat, Jackie, and his older children standing vigil. Rose went to her husband’s room, closed the door, and told him that their third son was gone.⁵⁷ “The house was stoic after the president’s death,” remembered Nurse Rita Dallas, “but in chaos” when Bobby died. “My son. My son,” she heard Rose repeat over and over.⁵⁸

By the time she arrived in New York City to gather with her family before Bobby’s funeral Mass, to be held at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Rose’s resolve had returned. At Ethel’s apartment Rose appeared “infinitely composed,” Arthur Schlesinger recorded. Ethel’s and Rose’s certainty that “Bobby is now happier than he has ever been, that he has been reunited with Jack, that soon all will be together again,” was utterly unshakable. When Jean and Eunice, who had flown in from Paris, said good-night to their mother, she responded, “I’m so glad all you children are home again.”⁵⁹ At Bobby’s funeral Rose meditated on Jesus’s mother: “I think of the Blessed Virgin Mary. I thought of her at the crucifixion when I saw Jack [lying in state] in Washington in the Rotunda and Bobby[’s coffin] again in New York. [Mary] trusted in God and bore [her pain] patiently.”⁶⁰ As the medieval Catholic hymn “Stabat Mater” proclaims, “At the cross her station keeping, stood the mournful mother weeping, close to her Son to the last.”⁶¹

With a heartbreaking quaver, Teddy delivered an eloquent eulogy summing up Bobby 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.”⁶² What a credit to his family, Rose thought of her last son’s tribute. A twenty-one-car train bore Bobby’s casket, along with his family, friends, and associates, from New York to Washington, DC, where he would be buried near Jack at Arlington National Cemetery. On the 226-mile route, through cities, towns, and countryside, thousands of mourners lined the tracks. From her seat, Rose gazed at the signs: “God Bless the Kennedys” read a young black girl’s hand-lettered placard. Wanting to let people know that she saw and appreciated them, Rose occasionally waved and encouraged her children and grandchildren to do the same. She later worried that some thought her gesture “inappropriate.”⁶³

A few days later Teddy and Rose appeared on TV, offering their gratitude for the many condolences they had received. Wheelchair-bound, Joe sat at their side, the ravages of his stroke and grief contorting his mouth. Considering her remarks “one of the best things she had ever done,” Rose provided a spiritual explanation of the latest family tragedy.⁶⁴ It reflected her essence: “We cannot always understand the ways of Almighty God. The crosses which He sends us, the sacrifices which He demands of us.… But we accept with faith and resignation His Holy Will, with no looking back to what might have been, and we are at peace. We have courage, we are undaunted and steadfast, and we shall carry on the principles for which Bobby stood.…”⁶⁵

Despite her faith, Rose grieved for Bobby. Daughter Pat, continuing a tradition started by Jack after Joe Jr. had perished, gathered family essays for a book about Bobby. Rose’s tribute expressed her desolation: “How sad are our hearts when we realize that we shall never see Bobby again, with his tousled, windblown hair, his big affectionate smile, carrying one child piggyback and holding another by the hand—his dog close behind. What joy he brought us. What an aching void he has left behind, which nothing in the world can ever fill. We admired him, we loved him, and our lives are indeed bleak without him.”⁶⁶ In her public tributes to Bobby, she sometimes added this sorrowful coda: “A devoted husband, beloved son, admired brother. I know I shall not look upon his like again.”⁶⁷

OUTWARDLY, ROSE WAS the soul of fortitude and steadiness. Yet her sparkle dimmed. She had recovered from Jack’s passing, but the blow of a second assassination—the death of her fourth child—paired with Joe’s decline had taken its toll. Correspondent Robert MacNeil inquired whether she was “glad” Jack had been president, “even though his life was cut short.” “I couldn’t answer that,” Rose finally responded, seemingly stunned that anyone would pose such a question. “Oh, no. Oh, yes,” she stumbled momentarily, processing the equation, then found her voice: “We’d much rather have him living. Oh, yes,” she repeated softly. “His children and Bobby’s children. Eleven children without a father. No!”⁶⁸

Wounded she might be, but Rose’s grasp on imagery remained as tight as ever. Merv Griffin persuaded her to appear on his talk show, but, as he soon discovered, she would be no ordinary guest. In fact, she immediately took charge. “I’m sending you a piece of cloth of my dress, put it in on camera and tell me how it looks,” she wrote to Griffin several weeks in advance of her appearance. Arriving at the studio well ahead of taping time, she inquired, “Where do I sit?” Griffin replied, “Well, in three hours you’ll be sitting right there.” “OK, have your director show me the pictures he’s going to take of me,” Rose demanded. The director trained his camera on her, but she objected, “No, no, no, that’s too close. I can’t take that shot. Back up.” He did, and Rose announced, “That will be fine, OK, I’m going to rest.”

When the cameras rolled and Griffin asked what sustained her through incomprehensible tragedy, she replied that God “has given us, as I say, triumphs as well as ordeals.” Citing Irving Stone’s 1961 best-selling novel about Michelangelo, The Agony and the Ecstasy, she observed, “We’ve had great ecstatic moments, and we’ve had these tragedies, but the ecstasies or the triumphs are greater than the tragedies.”

Rose’s conversations with Griffin continued after her appearance on his talk show. She phoned periodically to tutor him about Catholicism, quizzing him about saints’ feast days, as she did her children. When he fell short, Rose admonished, “You should learn about your religion!” Hearing of his mother’s antics, Teddy told Griffin, “That’s how she treated us. You’re a Kennedy boy.” Merv concluded, “Boy, she knew exactly where she was going and what she wanted for her family and what she wanted the Kennedy name to be.”⁶⁹