On Destiny
Bobby’s death did not weaken Rose’s resolve, but it did prompt much reflection and even philosophizing on her part. Approaching her eighties, Rose was trying to make sense of her life, and age provided her the solitude and stillness that allowed her to do so with a new depth.
Preparing for a speech in the fall of 1968, she wrote that God
has taken three stalwart sons equipped and eager to do his work here on earth, and left me a retarded child who can contribute nothing but must receive benefits rather than bestow. And Joe, who is so helpless—now he cannot feed himself the greater part of the time, requires so much attention. He has done his work nobly and now can contribute nothing—still God leaves him here suffering minor annoyances of ill health daily . . .
“Our family was the perfect family,” she continued, “boys brilliant, girls attractive and intelligent, money, prestige . . . But God or ‘destiny’ just does not allow a family to exist, which has all these star studded adornments.”
If acceptance of God’s mysterious will was Rose’s conclusion, it was not arrived at easily. Her faith, far from being rigid and simplistic, made room for questioning and lamentation, and Rose struggled repeatedly to come to grips with the tragedies of her life. Her conjectures about God—the calculus of suffering, how many “adornments” God can allow—are less theological pronouncements than they are signs of a process, evidence of a vibrant and dynamic faith. Faith was a comfort to Rose; but it also provided a powerful vocabulary for her own struggle to reconcile herself to the capriciousness of fate. The solace that she found in her religion is important, but it was not a solace that faith automatically granted—it was a solace that faith allowed her to arrive at via much struggle and questioning. The year of 1969, with its own fresh tragedies, would call upon that faith more than once.
Late on the night of July 18, 1969, Teddy left a party on the tiny island of Chappaquiddick, just across a small channel from Martha’s Vineyard, with Mary Jo Kopechne, one of the aides from Bobby’s presidential campaign. The circumstances surrounding the accident remain murky, but it’s not disputed that, driving over a narrow bridge with no guardrails, Teddy’s Oldsmobile went over the side and into the inlet below. The car landed, submerged, upside down. Teddy sustained a concussion and other injuries, and perhaps it was because of his disorientation that he could not free Mary Jo from the car. Perhaps this—or panic—also factored into his otherwise inexplicable failure to report the accident until the next morning. Mary Jo Kopechne drowned inside the Oldsmobile he left behind.
The media entered a sustained frenzy. That Sunday, the Chappaquiddick incident got more space in the Boston Globe than the first moon landing, which was to take place that afternoon. Rose stood by her son, whom she described as “unlike himself . . . disturbed, confused, and deeply distracted” the day after the accident. She wrote condolence letters to Mary Jo’s parents and met with them in the Kennedys’ New York apartment, where she shared her experience of losing children tragically. She otherwise remained behind the scenes, diplomatic and circumspect in interviews. Ted himself, taking responsibility for the accident and his actions (while never, the Kopechnes insisted, personally apologizing to them), asked the residents of Massachusetts to determine if he should resign. In 1970 he managed to be reelected. While Ted’s presidential aspirations had been a question mark since Bobby’s death, conventional wisdom now held them moot—the incident had, most felt, permanently ended his chances.
Ted had informed Joe of the accident himself. Sitting down across from Joe in his wheelchair, he took his father’s hand. “Dad,” he said, “I’m in some trouble. There’s been an accident, and you’re going to hear all sorts of things about me from now on . . .”
Ted would always hold himself somehow responsible for the fact that, just four months later, Joseph P. Kennedy suffered another series of strokes, fell into a coma, and on November 18, died. Rose, Teddy, Joan, Eunice, Pat, Steve, Jean, Jackie, Ethel, and Ann Gargan were all with him. The funeral was held at St. Francis Xavier in Hyannis, attended by four of Joe and Rose’s children and twenty-seven of their grandchildren. Joseph Patrick Kennedy Sr., Rose’s husband of fifty-five years, was buried in Brookline, Massachusetts, not far from the Beals Street home he bought in 1915 when he and Rose were young and newly wed.
Condolence letters poured in by the thousands, many containing cash donations for Rose to use at her discretion, whether it be for the Kennedy Library, a memorial for Bobby, or the work of the Kennedy Foundation. “Several people enclosed a dollar bill in an envelope which moved me deeply,” she wrote. “One man sent $3.00 and said, ‘The poor have so little time. Let us help them.’ ” For so many the Kennedys stood as examples of service and generosity, rather than only wealth.
Rose escaped the United States for the holidays in 1969: She spent Christmas in Paris with Eunice and Sargent Shriver, who had just been named ambassador to France. Then on to Greece for New Year’s with Jackie, Caroline, and John Jr., not to mention Jackie’s new husband, Aristotle Onassis. While much of the Kennedy clan (and no small portion of the US public) considered Jackie’s 1968 wedding to the Greek shipping tycoon a betrayal, there’s little evidence that it bothered Rose terribly much. Or, if it did, she came to peace with it soon enough. Rose’s February 1969 diary mentions the happy “lilt” that had come into Jackie’s voice since her marriage to Onassis, and her diary in February of 1970 indicated both how much the Christmas in Greece meant to Rose, and how Jackie and Rose’s relationship had grown warmer in the years since Jack’s death.
“She sent a letter which quite overwhelmed me,” Rose wrote,
with her really heartwarming expressions of the pleasure all of them shared in my last visit . . . and how utterly unexpected was life’s chain of events—that she and I . . . should now start to share new experiences in an extremely different environment and atmosphere. . . . I am thrilled, because in this way I shall always be able to contact the children, to know they all enjoy having me with them.
Rose also suspected that her presence brought the comfort of familiarity to Caroline and John Jr. “Otherwise,” she wrote, “they were more or less surrounded by Greeks.” She would meet Ari and Jackie again in Paris that spring.
Rose’s wanderlust did not wane as she became an octogenarian. In July 1970 she flew to Switzerland, then to Greece for some time on Onassis’s yacht, the Christina, before celebrating her eightieth birthday in Ethiopia with Jean and Haile Selassie, whose state dinner she’d hosted at the White House so soon before Jack’s death.
Earlier in the year, Rose had cut the ribbon on the newly completed Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Center for Research in Mental Retardation and Human Development at Yeshiva University, an occasion she called “one of the proudest and happiest of my life.” Her work for the intellectually disabled included her usual speaking engagements and talk-show appearances, but as the 1970s continued, she devoted more of her attention to the care of her own developmentally disabled daughter, Rosemary. Her periodic visits to St. Coletta’s in Wisconsin continued, and her correspondence with the nuns at the facility reflect how much she cared about the minutiae of Rosemary’s life. The nuns’ side of the correspondence paints a picture of a quiet, simple, and not unhappy life in the rolling hills of the Midwest.
“It seems the longer [Rosemary] is off medication the more vocal and expressive she becomes. She at times amazes us with a complete and correct sentence,” Sister Mary Charles wrote to Rose in 1971. “We got her a little yellow canary named Skippy. He sings his heart out the whole day. I know she likes him as she often says, ‘Skippy, Skippy!’ ”
In June of 1973, Sister Mary wrote, “I try to give her little attentions during the day; do the little things for her I know she likes—putting a rose in her hair, talking to her, singing ‘My Wild Irish Rose,’ which she loves to hear. . . . The three sisters all love Rosemary and each of us do whatever we can to keep her happy. Above all we bear with her moods and emotional upsets with care and concern.” The last comment indicates that Rosemary’s mood swings were still present, though perhaps less frequent and severe.
One note from Rose to Father Robert Kroll during this period is illuminating. Describing Rosemary, Rose says that “she was progressing quite satisfactorily but circumstances developed by which she was further retarded, and so it is very difficult at times to become reconciled to her present state. However, I try to accept God’s will.” Though euphemized, it was an acknowledgement of her sense of loss; more than thirty years later, she still had trouble “becoming reconciled.”
But she found her peace with Rosemary’s condition in her faith. “I do sense and I do believe,” Rose wrote, “that Rosemary’s gift to me is equal to the gifts of my other children. By her presence I feel that she, too has asked something terribly important of us. With her life itself she too has shown us direction, given us purpose and a way to serve. That has been her gift.”
Rose would find the precise limits of her candor when she finally got down to work on her memoirs. In 1972 she received a $1.525 million advance from Doubleday (until then, the biggest advance ever given for a single book) and set to work with ghostwriter Robert Coughlan. To build a narrative of her life, Coughlan interviewed Rose and members of the family at length and went through Rose’s archived papers, no small task for a woman who rarely seems to have thrown anything away. Though Coughlan produced the initial manuscript, Rose went through it with a fine-toothed comb, erasing any elements she found untoward, upsetting, or unflattering. The result is her final bit of image making, the crafting of the Kennedy narrative as she wanted it seen. Published in 1974, Times to Remember became an instant best-seller. All of the proceeds went to the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation.
As Rose got well into her eighties, she could not campaign with the same vigor that she had before. Still, she helped where she could, and she enjoyed the attention. She campaigned in 1970 for Teddy’s reelection, his first since Chappaquiddick, and for Sargent Shriver when he was nominated as George McGovern’s running mate in the 1972 presidential contest. Exhausted by years of campaigning and worried for Teddy’s safety, she was relieved when he decided not to run.
In the second half of the 1970s, Rose’s energy diminished markedly. She still took her swims in the Atlantic Ocean off Hyannis, but she had to be helped into and out of the water. Soon she needed nursing help. More and more of her time was spent alone at Hyannis Port and in Palm Beach.
But her life wasn’t over. She was at Faneuil Hall in Boston when, on November 7, 1979, Teddy launched his ultimately unsuccessful bid to steal the Democratic presidential nomination from beleaguered incumbent Jimmy Carter. And she visited the Oval Office with Teddy in 1981 for the last time—and the first time since Jack’s death—to watch as Ted presented an award for bipartisanship to Ronald Reagan.
On Good Friday, 1984, Rose collapsed at the Palm Beach house and nearly died from a severe stroke. She spent the rest of her days like Joe, confined to a wheelchair. Only speaking with great difficulty, she still said the rosary with Teddy when he stayed with her in Hyannis every weekend.
Rose died from pneumonia on January 22, 1995, at the age of 104, having lived through nineteen presidential administrations, including her own son’s; having witnessed the rise of radio, the automobile, the airplane, film, television, and manned spaceflight; having lived at the center of US history during the middle of the twentieth century; having survived two world wars; having traveled to every continent save Antarctica; having associated with kings, queens, popes, and presidents; having outlived her husband and four of her nine children.
She was buried next to Joe in Brookline. Her gravestone, fittingly simple for a woman whose name had come to represent motherhood, philanthropy, and faith, read only “Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy 1890–1995.”