“We All Shall Be Happy Together”
After Rose received the phone call from Bobby confirming her son’s death, she told the household staff that Joe, himself napping, was not to be told of the assassination. She put on a coat and walked along the chilly Hyannis beach alone, praying, asking “Why?”
Teddy and Eunice arrived at the Cape that evening. It was decided that Joe would be told in the morning. When, after dinner, he wanted to watch TV, he was told that his bedroom television was broken, as was the one downstairs.
Rose walked again on the beach, this time with Eunice. “We talked about Jack as if he were still alive,” Eunice would remember.
Rose attended mass the next morning, escorted in her black veil past onlookers waiting outside St. Francis Xavier Church. After mass, she returned to the house but couldn’t bear to be present when Teddy, with Eunice standing next to him, told Joe that his son was dead. Joe sobbed.
The next morning—Sunday, November 24—Rose, Teddy, Eunice, and nurse Rita Dallas flew to Washington. Joe stayed behind, in the care of his nursing staff and Father John Cavanaugh. The White House was filled with family, friends, and administration officials. Jackie’s mother, Janet Auchincloss, noticed that Rose stayed off to the side, the picture of lonely fortitude. Eunice’s husband, Sarge Shriver, remarked to Rose that she was holding up admirably.
“What do people expect you to do?” she snapped at him. “You can’t just weep in a corner.”
On Monday morning, Rose did not feel well enough to walk with the funeral procession from the White House to St. Matthew’s Basilica. Instead, she rode behind, in a limousine.
After the burial, she met at the White House with some foreign dignitaries and Kick’s in-laws, the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire. She never once, in public, lost her composure.
She flew back to Hyannis Port that night.
In the aftermath of the assassination, Rose had trouble sleeping and would pace in her Hyannis room late at night. Damane and Librium, powerful (and at the time, very popular) antianxiety drugs, helped her sleep, but they were so potent that the night nurses were tasked with making sure she was awake on time for mass. Still, Rose declared, “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.”
Though she tried to busy herself in the first six months after her son’s death by gathering materials for her autobiography, she generally turned down invitations during that time; it wasn’t until March of 1964 that she accepted an invitation to a ceremony marking the renaming of a Paris street in honor of JFK, the Avenue du Président Kennedy. Paris mourned the loss of JFK acutely, and “every place I went the French people were most sympathetic . . .” Rose wrote. “These circumstances made it more difficult for me, as constant reminders often released floods of tears again.”
It seems important to point out that Rose—that all the Kennedys—did cry. The famous family edict, “Kennedys don’t cry,” was certainly a command to be tough, no matter what life threw their way. But it was also a dictate meant to protect the Kennedys from the depth of their own feeling, from the combustibility of their own hearts. “I think all of the Kennedys have a great deep feeling for one another,” said Father John Cavanaugh. “It’s so deep that they do not care much about sharing it with anybody else. They all understand it. They take for granted that the others will understand it. So they’re not demonstrative with one another. In fact, they withhold any kind of demonstration because they’re afraid, I think, of it getting out of hand.” Rose’s Victorian formality, coupled with that famous Kennedy admonition, have left the mistaken impression that Rose was an unfeeling woman. Nothing could be further from the truth. She loved her family and she grieved for them.
It is a sign of Rose’s strength that she began to attend more of the hundreds and thousands of dedications taking place across the country for her fallen son, something that could not have been easy. She spoke in several parts of the country after JFK’s death, as a way of commemorating him, allowing the public to participate in her grief, and as a way of raising money for the planned John F. Kennedy Presidential Library.
In June, though, her progress out of the valley of grief was nearly halted when a small airplane carrying Teddy crashed in Massachusetts. The pilot and one of Teddy’s aides were killed. Teddy narrowly escaped death, and he would spend months in a hospital bed, just as Jack had in 1955. “I guess the only reason we’ve survived,” Bobby said at the hospital, “is that there are too many of us. There are more of us than there is trouble.” A rattled Joan marshaled her strength to campaign for her bedridden husband; Rose was all too happy to campaign for Teddy as well, taking her as it did, in the summer of 1964, out of a glum, reflective atmosphere at Hyannis Port. Bobby was running too, that year, for a Senate seat in New York, and Rose spoke frequently on his behalf. In the end, both Ted and Bobby handily won their contests.
Rose also kept a sense of meaning and purpose during this time by speaking more often and with greater candor about Rosemary. Her acknowledgment of her eldest daughter had really begun before the assassination. In 1962, Rose began visiting Rosemary at St. Coletta’s. Joe’s stroke had immobilized him and had made it easier for Rose to make travel plans without his knowledge. Eunice began visiting, too, and the pair lobbied JFK to make research on mental retardation a major priority of his administration. On October 11, 1961, Jack announced a national initiative on mental retardation, establishing a commission on how to treat and prevent developmental disabilities. Eunice published an article, “Hope for Retarded Children,” in the Saturday Evening Post, in which she candidly discussed the heartbreak and frustration her mother had faced in trying to find help for Rosemary. The lobotomy was not revealed, but it represented a huge step forward in the family’s recovery of their connection to Rosemary.
In a 1963 interview, Rose finally revealed why the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation had turned its focus to issues facing the mentally handicapped. “Well, you see the answer to that question is a very simple one,” Rose said. “We had a retarded child . . .”
This work continued after JFK’s death and throughout the sixties. That included the summer camp that Eunice started in 1961 at her rented Maryland estate. It was a camp exclusively for those with mental retardation; they were children of little means, bussed from institutions in Washington. Resourceful Eunice recruited volunteer counselors from elite Washington prep schools. This summer camp grew throughout the sixties and eventually would expand into the Special Olympics.
Rose became a vocal advocate for persons with intellectual disabilities, raising awareness and money through the media and her speaking engagements. St. Joseph’s College gave her an honorary degree in 1965 for bringing funds to research on retardation and serving as an inspiration to the parents of retarded children. The Canadian Association for Retarded Children chose Rose to receive its International Award of Merit for her inspiring example.
In 1966 she and Bobby wielded shovels to break ground on the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Center for Research in Mental Retardation and Human Development at the Yeshiva University Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. The Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation contributed $1.45 million toward its construction.
The 1968 campaign season would be the most important for the Kennedy family since Jack’s presidential run in 1960. LBJ had decided not to seek reelection, and the conflict in Vietnam was deeply unpopular, leading to regular protests and demonstrations across the country. In March of 1968, urged by the public and driven by his own passionately antiwar stance, Bobby announced that he would seek the Democratic nomination for the presidency.
Rose rolled up her sleeves and hit the campaign trail. Eight days in Indiana followed by three in Nebraska and, after a few days at Lake Tahoe to rest up, on to California and Oregon. The tea party coziness of previous campaigns was less effective in 1968; the issues in this election were war, race, and inequality, vital questions that were creating unrest on campuses and in cities all over the country. But Rose, at seventy-seven, could still win over a crowd telling stories about the boyhood of tousle-haired Bobby. She was, alone among the Kennedy campaigners, immune to the prevailing seriousness.
Bobby carried the primaries in Indiana and Nebraska but shocked himself, his family, and his supporters when he lost the Oregon primary. It was the first time a Kennedy had ever lost an election, and the Kennedys were thunderstruck. Nevertheless, he vowed to fight on in California. By this time, an exhausted Rose was back in Hyannis Port. She waited there for the results of the June 4 California primary.
By the time the results were in—Bobby won California by a wide margin—Rose was fast asleep. It wasn’t until early the next morning that the night nurse woke her and told her to turn on the TV.
A televised news bulletin informed Rose Kennedy that Bobby had been shot.
It had happened in a crowded hallway at the Ambassador Hotel, only moments after Bobby left the podium where he’d celebrated his victory in the California primary. The assassin, a confused, unemployed, mentally unstable drifter named Sirhan Sirhan, stepped forward and fired a revolver point blank at the senator’s head.
In Hyannis Port, a shocked Rose shouted at the television, “It’s Bobby! It’s Bobby!” Not knowing what else to do, she went to mass at St. Francis Xavier. At home she struggled to keep her composure and busy herself while she waited for news from California. Bobby was still alive, but brain dead. He was not expected to last much longer.
The next morning she received word that Bobby had died during the night, Ethel and Jackie, along with Teddy, Jean, Pat, and some of his older children at the bedside.
Rose took on the burden of informing Joe that they’d lost a fourth child. Where they’d hidden their feelings in the past, no such effort was made that morning. With no children present to be strong for, Joe moaned and sobbed, and Rose repeated “My son, my son,” over and over.
Later that morning, a photographer saw Rose in the driveway of the Hyannis Port house. She was bouncing a ball, like a child, lost in thought.
“It seemed impossible to believe that the same kind of disaster could fall on our family twice in five years,” she remembered thinking.
It was impossible for God to leave ten or eleven fatherless children. Why take Bobby when my husband was paralysed, helpless, suffering, satiated with the world’s pleasures and responsibilities and ready, almost eager, to go to the Great Unknown. And how could Bobby, so devoted to his children, so absorbed in their fun and frolics and in their sports and studies, be happy in Heaven and away from Ethel who was always with him at home or on his trips . . .
Rose was a Roman Catholic to the bone. She believed in a loving and merciful God, but also a God whose love and mercy were intimately bound up with the mystery of suffering. As she struggled to make sense of the tragedies in her own life, it was through the framework of her Catholicism.
Rose composed herself for RFK’s funeral, where she stood stolidly in black, and on the train bearing his body from New York to Washington, where he’d be buried near his brother at Arlington. Thousands of people lined the tracks in observance of Bobby’s passing. Rose and Ethel, easily the most devout in the Kennedy crew, gave strength to each other and the family with their conviction that Bobby was now with Jack, Kick, and Joe Jr. Rose would later write, “I take renewed strength and courage in the thought that as Jesus Christ rose from the dead, my husband and I and our sons and daughters will one day rise again and we all shall be happy together, never more to be separated.”
A few days later, Rose and Teddy appeared on television from the yard in Hyannis Port. Rose, her voice strong, her posture ramrod straight, and not a hair out of place, thanked “all of you who offered your prayers, affection and condolences at the time of our recent bereavement.”
“His death will not discourage or lessen our resolve,” she continued. “The thought of his tragedy will not weaken or crush us . . . rather it will strengthen and fortify us.”
An AP photo from the occasion is evocative. On the left side of the frame sits Teddy, in a flawless black suit, eyes downcast, the worries of the world heavy on his brow. At the right of the frame is Joe, a shell of a man, his suit hanging loosely, his face an involuntary scowl. At the dead center of the frame is Rose. She looks directly into the lens. In her eyes there is a sadness and a weariness, but more than that, a strength, a steeliness, a defiance. There’s no shame in her gaze, no self-pity, and no apology.