Aftermath
A week after the assassination, a stunned Jackie summoned journalist Theodore White to Hyannis Port, where she was marking a stunned Thanksgiving with her stunned in-laws.
“She and I spoke for nearly four hours,” he told C. David Heymann.
She regurgitated many of the details of the assassination. She remembered the pink-rose rings on the inside of the President’s skull after the top had been blown off. ‘The inside of his head was so beautiful,’ she said. ‘I tried to hold the top of his head down, so more brains wouldn’t spill out. But I knew that he was dead.’ . . . From the moment of the assassination, people were trying to get her to change her clothes, eradicate all signs of the crime. She didn’t want them to forget. Her only solace was that he hadn’t suffered. He had a ‘very neat’ expression on his face after he was hit . . .
Jackie hadn’t asked White to Hyannis Port so she could go over details of the assassination, though she would go over the details—with White and with many others—compulsively in the hours, days, and months after JFK’s death. She called White to the Kennedy compound to further the burnishing of Jack’s mythology, a project she’d begun within hours of his death. It was as if there were two levels of Jackie’s consciousness in play simultaneously: a traumatized woman, thunderstruck after witnessing the murder of her husband, stumbling through the denial phase of grief; and a canny image-maker, carefully orchestrating the way the country would remember the tragedy, her husband, and, to a large degree, herself.
She refused to change her clothes. She wanted the world to see the pink suit, stained with her husband’s blood and brain matter. “I saw myself in the mirror; my whole face was spattered with blood and hair,” she told Theodore White. “I wiped it off with Kleenex . . . then one second later I thought, why did I wash the blood off? I should have left it there, to let them see what they’ve done. . . . If I’d just had the blood and caked hair when they took the picture . . . I should have kept the blood on.”
Sitting in the back of Air Force One by the hastily purchased casket, guarded by Kenneth O’Donnell, Dave Powers, and Lawrence O’Brien, Jackie talked about Abraham Lincoln’s funeral, and her need to find “the book” on it. In the face of her horror and disbelief, Jackie oversaw nearly every element of the next few days. “I’m not going to cry until the next three or four days are over,” she told Charlie Bartlett.
She gathered tokens to be placed in Jack’s coffin, from her first anniversary gift to him of gold cuff links to a sapphire bracelet from Lee to a rosary from Ethel and Bobby. She added three letters to him, as well: from Caroline, John Jr., and herself, expressing, as best they were able, how much they would miss him.
The children had been told, at Jackie’s direction, on the night of his assassination. The task fell to Maud Shaw, who told the children that their father had gone to watch over baby Patrick in heaven. Too young to even begin to comprehend what he was being told, John Jr. asked if his father would be taking his airplane with him. Caroline cried and cried.
While the nation—indeed, the world—reeled from JFK’s senseless death, the White House filled with mourners. Jack and Jackie’s families, the White House staff, friends of the first couple: Many of them would help to carry out her wishes and see that the funeral and surrounding events would be correct. Sargent Shriver, Eunice Kennedy’s husband, handled most of the logistics.
Jackie wanted the Black Watch Highlander Regiment, which had performed at the White House the previous week and which Jack had so enjoyed. She also requested an honor guard of thirty cadets from the Military College of Ireland, whom Jack had been impressed with on his recent trip to Ireland. Jackie requested that Bunny Mellon, who had designed the White House rose garden, arrange flowers for the Capitol, the church, and the gravesite. “I don’t want the church to look like a funeral,” Jackie told her. “I want it like spring. I want it not sad because Jack was not a sad man.” Robert McNamara convinced her that the hillside in Arlington National Cemetery would be an appropriate resting place, and it was Jackie’s idea that an eternal flame burn at his gravesite.
It was Jackie’s idea, too, that the funeral procession should walk the eight blocks from the White House to St. Matthew’s Church that Monday morning. “Her face covered by her newly made long black veil, Jackie led the funeral procession, flanked by Teddy and Bobby, with Sarge Shriver and Steve Smith directly behind,” wrote Sally Bedell Smith. “Directly behind the horse-drawn caisson, a black riderless steed symbolizing the lost leader pranced and snorted along the route. He was a sixteen-year-old gelding called Black Jack—a spooky coincidence of names Jackie did not know about at the time.”
Inside the church, Cardinal Cushing intoned the pontifical requiem mass in Latin. In lieu of a traditional eulogy, and at Jackie’s direction, the Reverend Philip Hannan read a collection of Bible verses interspersed with quotations from Jack’s speeches. When Hannan read passages from JFK’s inaugural address, Jackie broke down and sobbed for the first time in public. Lee gave her a “blue pill” and Clint Hill handed her his handkerchief.
In Arlington, “fifty air force and navy jets (one for each state of the Union) flew overhead in formation, followed by Air Force One, which paid tribute by dipping one wing.” Jackie and Bobby together lit the eternal flame. They would return alone together that night near midnight, after receiving heads of state who had come from around the world to mourn, to spend some quiet time at the gravesite. Jackie soon had the caskets of her stillborn daughter and Patrick brought from Newport and Brookline, respectively, and buried next to their father.
While in Hyannis Port, Jackie added the masterstroke in the mythification of her dead husband.
“Only bitter old men write history,” she told Theodore White. “Jack’s life had more to do with myth, magic, legend, saga, and story than with political theory or political science.”
“That’s when she came out with her Camelot theory,” White later said. “She didn’t want Jack to be forgotten, or have his accomplishments cast in an unfavorable light. She wanted him to be remembered as a hero. She reported how at night he would often listen to Camelot on their phonograph, and how he personally identified with the words of the last song: ‘Don’t let it be forgot, that there once was a spot, for one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot.’ ”
White recognized at the time that the Camelot myth “was a misreading of history, but I was taken with Jackie’s ability to frame the tragedy in such human and romantic terms. . . . At that moment she could have sold me anything from an Edsel to the Brooklyn Bridge. Yet all she wanted was for me to hang this Life epilogue on the Camelot conceit. It didn’t seem like a hell of a lot to ask.”
The myth she created would prove remarkably durable.