The change in Washington’s mood was startling. The Ivy League army which had occupied the city four years earlier was rapidly disintegrating. One by one its field marshals and enlisted men deserted or were picked off. Ken O’Donnell, Douglas Dillon, Ted Clifton, Mike Feldman, Dick Goodwin, Jack McNally, Colonel McNally, Dave Powers, Pat Moynihan, Cecil Stoughton—once they had all been familiar figures in the west lobby, and now they belonged to history. Larry O’Brien was appointed Postmaster General. O’Donnell ran for public office in Massachusetts and was defeated. Mac Bundy became president of the Ford Foundation. He was the last of Kennedy’s special assistants to go. Only one Cabinet member who had been close to Kennedy was left. As Vietnam loomed larger and redder, the Secretary of Defense became Washington’s No. 2 man, or, in Texasese, Número Dos. Both Uno and Dos surged with vitality. Nevertheless, they presided over a city which couldn’t seem to stop looking over its shoulder. For two centuries the capital had been blasé toward changes in administrations, but this one was different. The shot from the sixth floor of Roy Truly’s warehouse had turned back the clock. The new men had first come to Washington in the heyday of the New Deal. Toward the end of a farewell dinner for two New Frontiersmen at Hickory Hill, a guest said thoughtfully, “You know, we’re too young to be holding reunions.”
Jacqueline Kennedy attended no reunions in Washington. The autumn after the assassination she took up temporary residence in New York’s Carlyle Hotel and then bought a $200,000 apartment at 1040 Fifth Avenue, near others owned by her sister and her husband’s relatives. Her life came to revolve around Manhattan, Hyannis Port, Palm Beach, and her mother’s summer home in Newport—a world of elegance and a culture which, in the eyes of most of her countrymen, was more European than American. Perhaps the move was inevitable. She had been a child of the East. Had she not met the young Massachusetts Senator with his eyes on the stars, the Brahmin establishment would probably have been the background of her middle years. It was familiar to her, sparkled with wit, was inhabited by celebrated members of the Democratic patriciate, and it was an environment in which she was accepted as a human being, not a museum piece.
Yet it was not what she had had in mind when she buried her husband in Arlington. The early years of her marriage had been spent in Georgetown, and there, she then thought, she would raise Caroline and John. Their future was her new focus. She had no illusions: growing up without a father could not be the same for them. But her husband’s brothers and friends would provide a vigorous masculine influence, and the capital, with all its historical associations, appeared to be the natural setting in which to raise the President’s daughter and son.
Despite their two moves in Washington—first to the Harriman home and then, five weeks later, to a fawn-colored, three-story brick house she bought diagonally across N Street, at No. 3017—the rituals of their young lives were scrupulously observed. The joint birthday party was held the day before they left the White House. The men guests were Dave Powers, Godfrey McHugh, and Taz Shepard; Godfrey brought John a model of Air Force One, and from Nancy Tuckerman Taz acquired a huge soft bear for Caroline. Caroline had returned to first grade the morning after the state funeral. Miss Grimes kept the class occupied with rehearsals for a simple nativity play; they learned Christmas carols and recited Biblical verses. The season, so sad in other ways, was useful here. Caught up in its excitement, the small girl laboriously printed an envelope “To Santa from Caroline” and dictated to her mother a plea for a Nancy Nurse set and a puppy.
She had, Maude Shaw thought, inherited Jacqueline Kennedy’s flair for the fitting touch. Miss Shaw escorted her out for the selection of the presents she herself would give. Caroline went straight to a display of Van Gogh prints and studied them at length, picking an appropriate gift for each person—a woman and child for her mother, sailboats for her brother, and, for her nurse, a painting of a room much like the one that had been Miss Shaw’s in the executive mansion. The girl’s air of reserve had become more apparent. She had something of that remote look which was so pronounced in Robert Kennedy during those months. John was easier to reach. All he needed was Dave Powers. Each morning Dave left the White House and rode to 3017 N Street for two hours of romping. John would be Davy Crockett, his playmate a bear. During the most solemn conference on the first floor one could hear the hapless bear frantically fleeing among the zoo of stuffed toys, begging in his Boston accent, “Have a haaht, Davy, a haaht!”
Mrs. Kennedy drove Caroline to the hill in Arlington first. “We’re going to visit Daddy’s grave,” she told her, “and we won’t take John.” Because of the vast crowds the visit had to be at night, after the gates were closed. As Clint Hill arrived with a station wagon the girl asked, “Couldn’t we take the dogs? Because Daddy loved them so much.” Taking all five would be impractical, but her mother and Clint loaded three in the back of the station wagon: Clipper and Wolf and little Shannon, their Irish cocker spaniel. On Sheridan Drive Mrs. Kennedy paused to leash the two big dogs while Shannon scampered ahead. It was cold and wet; they trudged up through slush. Suddenly they heard a menacing growl ahead, and a furious yelping. Clipper and Wolf strained on their rein. There was some sort of row in front of the picket fence.
It was almost a dogfight—given a few more seconds, it would have been one. A soldier had been posted by the gate with a massive police dog. Shannon was barking away, and the soldier was hard put to keep them apart. Clint took the leash from Mrs. Kennedy while she scooped up the Irish cocker and put him back into the car. Caroline said, “Well, Daddy always loved Shannon the best because he was so brave.” It was true. Her father had been allergic to dogs; they made him sneeze. But the cocker had arrived from Ireland at the right time. Patrick had just died, and the sight of the scrappy little puppy challenging all the mastiffs and boxers in Hyannis Port had diverted the President. Shannon would fight in the fields, he would fight on the beaches, he would never surrender; even when driven into the ocean he would yip defiance from the waves, and the President would cheer him on. So the near clash in the cemetery wasn’t as upsetting as a stranger might have thought. The soldier, being a stranger, assumed it was a catastrophe. Here was the President’s daughter visiting the grave for the first time, and his dog had spoiled it. He withdrew to one side, crying.
Mrs. Kennedy had brought another bunch of lilies of the valley; Caroline had a mixed nosegay plucked from various vases at home. Mother and daughter knelt in the cold mud. They prayed, they crossed themselves, they laid their flowers beneath the eternal flame. Then they saw the soldier. If young John’s salute outside St. Matthew’s had left an indelible picture on the memories of millions, his sister’s compassion here would never be forgotten by one man. It was really a little thing. Seeing him weeping and understanding why, she walked over and patted his dog. Looking up she asked, “What’s his name?” He said, “I call him Baron, Caroline.” “Baron,” she repeated, stroking the smooth fur. Back in the station wagon she sat close to her mother. All the way home they held hands, gripping tight and saying nothing until they were nearly there. Then Caroline remembered that at the birthday party she had been given a cardboard dollhouse with punch-out figures. One was of a big dog—a police dog, she recalled excitedly. She said, “Oh, Mummy, I’m going to name him Baron, after the dog who’s watching Daddy.”
In her six-year-old way she had found a simple peace that adults struggled toward in vain. Men and women often suffered when with the President’s children, but the suffering lay within themselves. The son and the daughter had accepted their loss with the enviable resignation of small boys and girls. They never meant to cause pain in grownups. Nevertheless certain moments could be shattering. “Davy Crockett had a rifle,” Dave Powers casually told John. “A bad man shot my daddy in the head with a rifle,” John replied, and Dave didn’t sleep that night. In Montrose Park a newspaper photographer recognized the boy, stepped around Agent Wells, and raised his camera. Hearing the click, John glanced up from a water fountain. “What
are you doing?” he asked. “I’m taking your picture, John,” the man said. The boy stared. “What are you taking my picture for? My daddy’s dead,” he said, and Wells saw the man’s shoulders heave as he ran off. On O Street, young Janet Auchincloss offered to split a wishbone with Caroline. “Can I have any wish I want?” asked Caroline. “Any one,” said Janet, not seeing the trap. The little girl said, “I want to see my daddy.”
That could have happened anywhere. What made Washington different for them and, in the end, impossible for their mother was the character of the Kennedy legend. During the funeral none of the people directly involved in it had thought much about the national audience. They had been too weary and too busy. The fact that a million people had been standing vigil on the curbs had been startling enough once it had registered. It was weeks before they realized that for every spectator in the District that Monday a hundred others had been watching in the fifty states, and it was months before the implications of this sank in. The pilgrims to Arlington were appreciated. The tourists were another matter. It happened to be a big tourist year; there was a world’s fair in New York. Families from other parts of the country detoured south to include the N Street house on their itineraries. In dismaying numbers they stood across the street and gawked. They accosted friends of the widow who came calling. They took snapshots of one another on her steps, and rode by in buses which now included N Street in the capital’s Points of Interest. The mansion became unlivable. Mrs. Kennedy apologized to her neighbors and fled across the river with the children to Ethel’s backyard.
She had asked Fort Myer for Black Jack’s boots and saddle. Indeed, any sign that the President’s sacrifice would not be forgotten was cherished. That was why she had held herself together for three days after Dallas. She had not counted on the fact that she herself, by her performance then, had become unforgettable. At the age of thirty-four she was a national institution. Archibald MacLeish epitomized her new position. Asked to write a dedication for the new cultural center he forwarded, instead, a paean to “Jacqueline Kennedy, wife of the thirty-fifth President of the United States, who shared the ardor of his life and the moment of his death and made the darkest days the American people have known in a hundred years the deepest revelation of their inward strength.” Everyone wanted to honor her. She was proposed as ambassador to France, designated a life member of the National Geographic Society, and was swamped with flags; John McCormack alone presented six which had flown over the capital that weekend. At Runnymede the common people of Britain referred to their guest as “her American majesty.” The Senate passed a resolution of admiration and sent it, framed. She became the first widow of a President to receive Secret Service protection and a secretarial staff—which she needed, because bales of letters addressed to her were arriving in Washington. Nancy Tuckerman and Pam Turnure struggled to see that each was acknowledged. The file marked “Especially Touching” grew to encyclopedic thickness, and only a few were beyond the pale. One was from Dallas. A committee of businessmen, concerned about their sagging out-of-state trade, wanted her to sign a testimonial to Dallas hospitality. She passed it along to Robert Kennedy, who managed to forget what he did with it.
Each step she took, it seemed, was being preserved for history. On St. Patrick’s day she left shamrocks on her husband’s grave. The cemetery planted them there and was immediately deluged with requests for transplants. On what would have been her husband’s forty-seventh birthday she took the children to St. Matthew’s. It was November 25 all over again: the Choir sang the Navy hymn, and outside a horde of tourists made Rhode Island Avenue impassable. She couldn’t even take her daughter into a drugstore, because every issue of every movie magazine carried her photograph outside. The captions were inexcusable: “THE MAN IN JACKIE’S LIFE” (the story inside identified him as John F. Kennedy), “THE MAN JACKIE CHOSE” (he was, it developed, the author of this book), “IS JACKIE SEEING TOO MUCH OF BOBBY?,” “HOW LADY BIRD HURT JACKIE AND DIDN’T MEAN IT,” “THE SECRET IN JACKIE’S LIFE”—so it went, month after month. Salinger begged the pulps to stop, but they kept rolling, knowing she would never sue because that would merely bring more detested publicity. Even slick periodicals behaved questionably. Anything about her was news. A Hyannis Port stringer reported that she was considering attending the Democratic National Convention to stampede the delegates into nominating Robert Kennedy for Vice President. It was absurd. She had been reluctant enough to attend conventions when her husband was alive. All the same, it went out on the wire—and was taken seriously in the White House.
On N Street Mrs. Kennedy reached the depths of grief. By spring she could no longer take refuge in work; Nancy and Pam were handling that efficiently. She was tormented by ifs: if only she had insisted on a bubbletop that morning, if she had just turned to her right sooner, if the Secret Service had put two men on the back of the car…if, if, if. Brooding was pointless now. Nevertheless she couldn’t cut it off. She would nap afternoons and lie awake throughout the night, turning things over and over in her mind. She considered Oswald and hoped he had been part of a conspiracy, for then there would be an air of inevitability about the tragedy; then she could persuade herself that if the plotters had missed on Elm Street they would have eventually succeeded elsewhere. What was so terrible was the thought that it had been an accident, a freak, that an inch or two here, a moment or two there would have reversed history. “I should have known that it was asking too much to dream that I might have grown old with him and see our children grow up together… so now he is a legend when he would have preferred to be a man,” she wrote later in the year.
I must believe that he does not share our suffering now. I think for him—at least he will never know whatever sadness might have lain ahead. He knew such a share of it in his life that it always made you so happy whenever you saw him enjoying himself. But now he will never know more—not age, nor stagnation, nor despair, nor crippling illness, nor loss of any more people he loved. His high noon kept all the freshness of the morning—and he died then, never knowing disillusionment.
Her own disillusion with the life she had tried to piece together on N Street was complete. She would receive her husband’s political friends and wish his brothers every success, but she took no interest in the Presidential campaign that should have been John Kennedy’s. Although she was too recent a resident of Manhattan to vote there, she was still registered in Boston, and she could have flown there on November 3 or mailed an absentee ballot. She did neither, nor did she send President Johnson a congratulatory telegram. She had said good-bye to all that. Her adventure in national politics had begun with young Senator Kennedy. Now it was forever finished; the burden had fallen on the two Senators Kennedy. Henceforth the public would read of her at the Cape, on the Adriatic, in Rome, or—her preference—not at all. Only in obscurity could she heal. She, too, had known high noon. She wanted to forget that sun.
Unknown to her, the clothes Mrs. Kennedy wore into the bright midday glare of Dallas lie in an attic not far from 3017 N Street. In Bethesda that night those closest to her had vowed that from the moment she shed them she should never see them again. She hasn’t. Yet they are still there, in one of two long brown paper cartons thrust between roof rafters. The first is marked “September 12, 1953,” the date of her marriage; it contains her wedding gown. The block-printed label on the other is “Worn by Jackie, November 22, 1963.” Inside, neatly arranged, are the pink wool suit, the black shift, the low-heeled shoes, and, wrapped in a white towel, the stockings. Were the box to be opened by an intruder from some land so remote that the name, the date, and photographs of the ensemble had not been published and republished until they had been graven upon his memory, he might conclude that these were merely stylish garments which had passed out of fashion and which, because they were associated with some pleasant occasion, had not been discarded.
If the trespasser looked closer, however, he would be momentarily baffled. The memento of a happy time would be cleaned
before storing. Obviously this costume has not been. There are ugly splotches along the front and hem of the skirt. The handbag’s leather and the inside of each shoe are caked dark red. And the stockings are quite odd. Once the same substance streaked them in mad scribbly patterns, but time and the sheerness of the fabric have altered it. The rusty clots have flaked off; they lie in tiny brittle grains on the nap of the towel. Examining them closely, the intruder would see his error. This clothing, he would perceive, had not been kept out of sentiment. He would realize that it had been worn by a slender young woman who had met with some dreadful accident. He might ponder whether she had survived. He might even wonder who had been to blame.
About the Author
William Manchester (1922–2004) was a hugely successful popular historian and bestselling biographer whose books include The Last Lion, a three-volume biography of Winston Churchill; Goodbye, Darkness; A World Lit Only by Fire; The Glory and the Dream; The Arms of Krupp; and American Caesar. He received the National Humanities Medal and the Abraham Lincoln Literary Award.
Books by William Manchester