To the Grave
And so the days became weeks and the weeks became months and the months became what those first doctors could have never predicted: a year. Vicki knew those precious extra days together were a gift, and, even as her husband slowly began to lose his strength, she felt blessed. They had the resources to move their boat to Florida and transition there in the winter so Ted could recuperate in warmth. He’d set his sights on a new goal: attending Barack Obama’s inauguration in January 2009. In true Ted fashion, he began planning in earnest, having a staffer map out exactly how many steps it would take to walk to the Capitol on his own.
While in Florida, he and Vicki adopted a third Portuguese water dog. Captain Courageous, nicknamed “Cappy,” joined Splash and Sunny. One day, one of the dogs made a mess inside the house, and Vicki’s stoicism eroded. She crumbled into tears. Ted pulled her head to his shoulder and soothed her. “There I was caring for him, and the roles were totally reversed,” she told a reporter. “And there he was comforting me. . . . And this was going to be OK. It was all going to be OK.”
Ted powered through to the inauguration in January and celebrated his February birthday a couple of weeks late at the Kennedy Center in Washington. Bill Cosby hosted the star-studded event, with guests such as Lauren Bacall, Bernadette Peters, James Taylor, and John Williams. Even President Obama joined in, appearing on stage at the end of the gala to lead the crowd in “Happy Birthday.” Ted even threw out the first pitch at opening day for the Boston Red Sox. He flubbed on his first attempt, grounding the ball before it reached Hall of Famer Jim Rice. Ted, of course, asked for another throw. This time, the ball reached Rice before it kissed the ground. (Afterward, Ted beamed to his grandsons: “I was gonna stay out there all day until Jim Rice caught it without a hop. That’s what we Kennedys do—we stay at it until we get it right!”) And throughout it all, Ted kept sailing into the summer. He’d grab Splash and board Mya and hit the waters, the wind in his hair. “Sailing, for me, has always been a metaphor for life,” he later said. That became truer than ever during his illness: If he could still sail, he knew he was not yet beaten.
But Ted had one final project to finish. In the early 2000s he’d embarked on a five-year oral-history project that had stirred up a lot of memories, both from his political and personal lives. With those recollections fresh in mind, he decided to write his memoirs. Vicki again was his sounding board. She was amazed by the meticulous notes and journals he had kept for more than fifty years of his life. He even had a diary from his First Communion—which was with the pope—which he had dictated to his nanny. Ted’s sensitively written family history, called True Compass, would be his final word to the world, though he would never see a finished copy. His publisher’s delivery of manuscripts came to the doorstep August 25, 2009, the same day Ted would take his last breath, with much of his family by his side in the beautiful, twenty-one-room home that Joe and Rose had bought in 1926—eighty-three years, nine children, thirty grandchildren, and three presidential campaigns prior.
Cancer ravages the body; it’s a difficult death to witness, which Vicki alluded to when speaking in 2013 to a gathering at the University of California-San Francisco. But she refused to dwell on the ugly side. The fifteen months she had with Ted after his diagnosis were nothing short of a blessing, she said. “That was the greatest gift of my life. It was the greatest privilege of my life,” she said. “Don’t get me wrong, no one wishes for a diagnosis of a glioblastoma. But once I knew that was the hand we were dealt, I would have chosen to live life exactly, in every single way, the way we lived it.”
Ted was laid to rest August 30, 2009, in a solemn Roman Catholic mass led by President Obama. The two days prior, an estimated fifty thousand people had crowded the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Dorchester, where Ted’s body lay in repose. The morning of the mass, Obama visited Vicki privately, walking across the street from his hotel to offer condolences. More than fifteen hundred people attended the formal service, including three former presidents—Presidents George W. Bush, Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton—at the towering and ornate Basilica of Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Boston. Reporters with the Washington Post painted the somber scene: “Bells began to toll at 10:45 a.m.as the motorcade arrived and, a few minutes later, Kennedy’s casket was taken from the hearse. Vicki Kennedy and other family members stood vigil, water rolling off their umbrellas, as the casket was carried up the steep steps into the church.”
There was a day in 1963 when Jackie Kennedy faced the world without Jack. And there was a day in 1968 when Ethel had ten children, an eleventh on the way, and had to walk forward without Bobby by her side. The next year, Rose returned to an empty house in Hyannis Port after burying her husband near their first home in Brookline. Even Joan had to go about the task of inventing a new life in Boston after her marriage to Teddy ended. Now Vicki found herself where each of the others had stood: staring into the future, her husband gone, memories to fortify her, and their shared ideals to carry forward.
These five women—The Kennedy Wives—lived twentieth-century US history. Their experiences of wealth and power, love, loss, and tragedy occurred at such a heightened level that it’s tempting to see them as mythic, almost archetypal creatures. But Rose, Ethel, Jackie, Joan, and Vicki were and are stubbornly fleshy in their humanity, and they give all of us, men and women, powerful examples of what everyday strength, resilience, and grace can look like. It’s because of their refusal to ossify into sterile sainthood that they will always fascinate—and always inspire.