The First Mother
Jack presented his mother with a map. There were forty-six pins in it, one for every spot where she’d campaigned, and an inscription: “To Mother—With Thanks.” In Palm Beach, as the president-elect prepared for his term and Jackie recovered from the Caesarean delivery of her second child, John Jr., Rose adjusted grudgingly to the constant presence of Secret Service, press, and, anytime she went beyond the perimeter of the estate, gawking tourists and well-wishers.
On January 5, photographer Richard Avedon arrived to capture the next first family. Rose’s diary entry captures how disorienting and irritating the interregnum must have been for her, and how, in the midst of it, she coped by attending to details:
After my hair had been set and combed out I had to walk back through the living room in my long blue bathrobe. I nodded to one of photographer’s assistants and warned her about the loose neckline on Jackie’s half-finished velvet dress. I looked out the window to the front lawn and saw someone swinging Caroline, of which I disapproved, as I thought she would be too tired for the photographers. Then I took a quick look at John F. Jr., wrapped in blankets and awaiting his turn to be photographed. And I caught a glimpse of the Secret Service men on the beach outside on the oceanfront.
The security left Rose baffled about where to enter and exit her own home. Sneaking through the servants’ quarters the previous night, she’d surprised a hungry hairdresser apparently helping herself to a salad left on the maids’ dining table. “She just threw up her hands and I gave a laugh and she gave a laugh and out I went.”
In the days before the inauguration, Washington, DC, disappeared beneath eight inches of snow. Early on the morning of the inauguration, Rose bundled up and walked from the Georgetown home she was renting with Joe, Ann Gargan, Ted, and Joan, to attend mass at Holy Trinity Church. She was delighted to see that Jack, independent of her plans, was attending the service as well. Jack, she thought, “wanted to start his four years in the presidency by offering his mind and heart, with all his hopes and fears, to Almighty God.” She didn’t approach Jack, staying anonymous and out of sight in the pews. Ever image conscious, she didn’t want to risk being photographed in her informal winter bundling.
She and Joe attended the inauguration ceremony, where they were seated in the front row, but at the far end; as a result, “we were left out of everything except the panoramic pictures. . . . Some friends asked me later where I had been during the ceremonies.” Still, she was moved by his inaugural address, the weight of the occasion, this culmination of her and Joe’s hard work.
That night, for the inaugural balls, she appeared in the same Molyneux gown she’d worn for her presentation at the Court of St. James in 1938. More than twenty years later, she was proud she could easily fit into it, proud her taste was so timeless.
“I was overwhelmed with the joy, the wonder, the glory of it all,” she’d say that fall in a speech to the Guild of the Infant Saviour, a Catholic social services organization. “The climax of my life as I approached my 71st birthday.”
Rose enjoyed her position as America’s Queen Mother, even sleeping in the Queens’ Bedroom when visiting the White House. Still, Jack generally found her presence stressful. She joined Jack and Jackie when they visited France at the end of May en route to JFK’s disappointing summit with a belligerent, chest-beating Khrushchev in Vienna, but only after she invited herself. “He really didn’t want her around much,” remembered Lem Billings. “In particular, he didn’t want her around on the trip he and Jackie took to Paris and Vienna, but she asked to go and he let her.”
Whether Jack wanted her there or not, she was treated as royalty when they arrived in Paris. She chatted with Mme. de Gaulle about their children, though neither mentioned that both had developmentally disabled daughters. The state dinner welcoming the Kennedys was held at Versailles; the pageantry and protocol must have reminded Rose of the salad days of 1938, when she and Joe were fresh to London and spending weekends with royalty. And Vienna, so rattling an experience for her son, nevertheless also reminded her of her 1911 visit. “I wonder to myself,” she wrote in her diary, “if the young man with whom I danced has ever come back and if he too remembered the night in 1911 when, young and gay and carefree, we danced the hours away.”*
* The young man to whom she is referring was Hugh Nawn, another Irish Catholic Bostonian. Honey Fitz had hoped that Rose would marry Nawn rather than Joe.
The president and first lady departed Vienna, and Rose went on to Florence before visiting Pope John Paul XXIII—successor to her friend Pope Pius XII—in Rome. Afterward, she joined Joe for two months at a resort on the Riviera.
The Kennedys gathered for their traditional Hyannis Port Thanksgiving, with dinner for thirty-three. It was a merry scene. “Jack gets a great kick out of seeing Ted dance,” Rose wrote, “as Ted has [a] great sense of rhythm, but he is so big and has such a big derriere it is funny to see him throw himself around.” Joan played the piano, and Jackie demonstrated the Twist for the assembled mothers, fathers, children, and grandchildren. Rose was happy, despite Joe’s insistence on serving squash and sweet potatoes at the meal. (She objected to there being two vegetables of the same color.) Joe carved the turkey, held court, and played with the grandchildren.
The loveliness of the holiday would take on a bittersweet quality in retrospect. Ten days prior to Thanksgiving, Joe had suffered “an attack,” as Rose would put it in her diary. He “is not at all himself but quiet, complains about a lack of taste in his mouth and feels blah, he says. For the first time—I have noticed he has grown old.” Others at the Thanksgiving dinner noticed he was not quite himself, but Joe, whether out of denial or Kennedy grit, insisted that there was nothing wrong.
The family gathered again in Palm Beach the next month for Christmas. Presidential business called Jack back to Washington on December 19, though, and Joe took Caroline and saw him off at the airport, where father and son chatted briefly before Jack boarded Air Force One. After dropping Caroline at home, he and niece Ann Gargan went to play nine holes at the Palm Beach Country Club. While on the course, Joe felt faint and disoriented; seeing that his balance was compromised, Ann took him home. He reported feeling better and went upstairs under his own power, where he fell asleep.
Waking just five minutes later, he was unable to speak or move on his right side. He had suffered a massive stroke.
Jackie and Ann rushed with him to the hospital. By the time other Kennedy children started arriving later in the day, he had developed pneumonia, sunk into a coma, and received last rites. Rose could only pace his room and pray. Against the odds, though, Joe survived. He woke the next day and seemed to recognize Rose and the children. By Christmas Eve the doctors declared him out of danger, and by December 29 he was able to sit up. Though he’d never regain movement on his right side or the ability to communicate in words, he was otherwise healthy: His vital signs were good and his heart was strong. After several weeks, he returned to Palm Beach, where niece Gargan, the reenlisted Luella Hennessey, and nurse Rita Dallas would see to his daily care.
Rose resumed her speaking engagements, raising money and helping with Teddy’s senatorial bid throughout the state in 1962. The following spring she was with Joe when, entire Kennedy retinue in tow, he was flown north to begin further treatment at the Institute of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation in New York. She stayed with him at Horizon House, a bungalow on the hospital grounds, specially fitted for wheelchair-bound patients. Every evening, they quietly ate dinner and then watched television together.
Joe’s case was overseen by Dr. Henry Betts, who was impressed with the closeness of the Kennedy family, their relentless positivity, and the complete absence of any pity toward their father. He saw a great warmth between Rose and Joe. “My impression was that she adored him,” he’d later say. It seemed to him that Joe “was very content” in her presence. Luella Hennessey saw the devotion, but not the warmth: “She was awfully good to him when he had his stroke,” she said. “It wasn’t what one would call a normal relationship between a husband and wife. . . . Rose took care of him but there was very little feeling left. It had gone so many years ago.”
Months of rehab did little to improve Joe; he could feed himself, and his caregivers became more adept at interpreting his attempts at communication, but he never regained his speech or mobility. Rose’s response was complicated. On one hand, she seemed freed by her husband’s descent into infantilism—she was able to travel on behalf of Teddy’s campaign at her own discretion and was in charge of her own life to a greater extent. On the other, his difficulties upset and depressed her. Letters from that time, though they don’t address Joe directly, generally became more irritated, nitpicky, and exasperated.
Frustrated at the tendency of cars to disappear at Hyannis Port, Rose sent a long description of who was allowed to use which car and when. “This is the way [the cars] are to be used,” she concluded. “I do not want to be bothered this way at my age, and I do not think it is fair. Please give this to Ethel to read, so every one will understand.” In another letter, Rose advised Ethel and Jackie to close the blinds in their homes to avoid the sun fading the furniture. She was both compelled to write such niggling letters, and, simultaneously, exhausted by her compulsion. “I am trying to rest my brain,” she wrote wearily.
Later in the summer of 1962, Joe was brought back to Hyannis for what was to be a few weeks of vacation before returning to Horizon House. He never did. Thereafter he was shuttled back and forth between Hyannis and Palm Beach, always in the care of niece Ann Gargan and the staff of nurses. Rose came and went as she saw fit. “Mrs. Kennedy changed a great deal after her husband left Horizon House,” remembered nurse Rita Dallas. “Perhaps because a decision had been reached that not only relieved her, but also left her conscience intact.” Joe was home, and cared for. Rose was free to live her life.
As an image-maker, she became more involved in Jack, Bobby, and Teddy’s political lives than she had been prior to Joe’s stroke. Her hectoring letters, throughout 1963, became less about Hyannis household rules and more about how the young men—and their wives—presented themselves to the media and the public at large. “I do not think it is necessary to emphasize the fact that you are both tone deaf or that cultural things do not play such a large part in your life,” she wrote to Bobby in April 1963. She also discouraged their publicizing the raucous life of their large family at Hickory Hill, or relying too much on the Kennedys’ touch-football games as an anecdotal crutch.
She also stepped into the role of White House hostess on a couple of occasions. The last would be at the state dinner for Ethiopian king Haile Selassie in late August 1963. Earlier in the month, Jackie had given birth to Patrick Bouvier Kennedy five weeks prematurely. The boy had lived only three days, and both parents were devastated. Finally Jack decided that a trip abroad might lift Jackie out of her depression, and he sent her with her sister for a vacation in Greece. Jackie left the day of Selassie’s arrival, and Rose happily took over.
Summer became autumn in Hyannis Port. On a beautiful November morning, Rose got up early, attended mass, had breakfast with her husband, and played nine holes of golf. In the early afternoon, she’d been napping when Ann Gargan’s blaring TV woke her up. She shuffled to Ann’s room to ask her to turn it down.
Ann sat horrified in front of the flickering screen. The news bulletin was reporting that Jack had been shot while riding in a presidential motorcade in Dallas.
Rose’s hands trembled and she sank into a chair. “Don’t worry,” she told Ann. “We’ll be all right. You’ll see.”
The phone rang.