Letters to Jackie (25 page)
Authors: Ellen Fitzpatrick
JANUARY 16, 1964
Dear Mrs. Kennedy,
Fifty-five unbelievable days have passed since that dastardly act was performed that took the life of your husband, our president.
For the majority of us it has been a mechanical existence, never forgetting all the deep grief and pain you are undergoing. As you stated on your heart breaking telecast “All that bright light gone from the world.”
Speaking for my family I can say a part of our hearts are buried with him.
I can remember standing for four hours in the rain back in 1961, when his motorcade was going through our town. When the motorcade finally passed it was worth every second of the wait. Our youngest son was then 3 mo. old, he was kept dry under my husband’s coat. We both were so certain at the time that John F Kennedy would be the only president he would remember, as we did Pres. Roosevelt. On another occasion—July 4th, when Pres. Kennedy honored Philadelphia by appearing at Independence Hall—My husband and our seven children and I went down town again to get another glimse of your wonderful husband. This time we saw him in the sun, a sight we all hold sacred in our memories.
In my own husband’s words “I haven’t felt a sorrow so great since my father’s death.
It may be five or ten years from now that this letter will be in your hands, but the feelings expressed will be the same. Surely this generation has a deep scar on our hearts which we will carry to our graves.
Your cross is very heavy. I wish we all could help you bear it, but I know words are such an inadequate means, yet our only way. May God bless and help you, Caroline and Jon-Jon.
Lovingly,
Mrs. Paul F. Smith
RIEF AND
L
OSS
“The Burden of His Death”
R. R. Louk to Mrs. John F. Kennedy, February 14, 1964, Adult Letters, box 20, folder 161, Condolence Mail, John F. Kennedy Library. Reprinted with permission of Linda Ross.
T
he four days of televised coverage after President Kennedy’s death in November 1963 constituted for Americans a unique experience. The country had grieved for and buried other Presidents, of course. But the shared and simultaneous national mourning that was made possible by television on this tragic occasion was unprecedented. Still, after thirty days the formal period of national mourning ended. And the American people, like a bereaved family, went back to their lives and forward into the 1960s, leaving John F. Kennedy to the pages of history. He would live on in memory, but the shape of those memories would shift and turn along with the country itself over the ensuing nearly half century.
Meanwhile, a private but sharp sense of loss persisted among many Americans for some time after the assassination. It is hard to recall today that the culture of self-revelation and public confession that is so much a part of contemporary America did not exist in that period. The early 1960s, in this respect, seems closer to the Victorian era than to modern America. The world of manners then stressed propriety, decorum, and deference. Many considered rectitude, reserve, and reticence as virtues rather than regrettable vestiges of repression one ought to strive to overcome. In 1963 public outpourings of grief and mourning were uncommon—reserved for funeral rites and Memorial Day. The wreaths and flowers laid in Dealey Plaza to denote the spot where President Kennedy was assassinated marked a rare, spontaneous collective grief response. More common were
private expressions of sorrow, shared in conversation with friends, coworkers, priests, ministers, rabbis, family members.
In this sense, the letters many Americans sent to Jacqueline Kennedy seem paradoxical—a fact the writers themselves were acutely aware of at the time. For they revealed deep emotion to a public figure with whom they lacked a close personal relationship. Many began their letters by mentioning the contradiction, admitting they felt awkward in writing. Some politely noted Mrs. Kennedy’s enormous volume of mail, disclaiming any wish to increase her burdens. Others puzzled over their impulse to reveal themselves to the First Lady, given, as one man from Alabama noted, “that I am a stranger to you.” “The fact of the matter,” a Californian pointed out, “is that both you and your late husband grew very dear to us (me and my family) during the all too few years we had to get acquainted with you through the media of television, radio, magazines, and newspapers. Yet I feel that I knew you both very well.” Another young wife confessed, “At first, I thought it wouldn’t be right for me to write to you since you never heard of me or my family…I started thinking of the many things we had shared with you in these brief years…This is my reason for writing to you, even though we aren’t important except, We are Americans.”
Expressions of grief and loss inevitably form the core of condolence letters, whoever the bereaved and correspondent. The letters written after the assassination of President Kennedy are no exception. Those who had suffered the premature loss of a husband or a parent particularly identified with Mrs. Kennedy. But in conveying the nature of their loss, their sense of connection to JFK, and their desire to console his widow, Americans also revealed much about how they perceived their own lives and the historical upheaval they had experienced. “I feel his loss just like a mother to her child,” wrote an eighty-six-year-old Ohioan. But there was also this, she added: the President had died for his country by “a most disgracefull hand.” Those who had endured violent and catastrophic losses saw their own tragedies revisited. One young mother who lost her husband and four out of five young children in a fire wrote several months after Kennedy’s assassination: “Our lives and way of living are very different—still we have
suffered the same losses.” She recalled the letters she had received from “relatives, friends and strangers” who were “all anxious to help in every way they could.” It seems, she concluded, “no matter what we lose…someone has lost more.” Some of those who sought to comfort Mrs. Kennedy confessed a sense of helplessness and guilt—echoing a common response to death that was magnified, in this instance, by both the distance and closeness many felt to the slain President. “It is terribly difficult for this American to try to console you on the death of our President,” admitted one woman “because I am still unconsolable.” Like many, this writer felt implicated in the assassination. “Mine was one of the many votes,” she noted, “that helped speed him to his ghastly death.”
The texture of Americans’ grief and loss in the aftermath of November 22 reflects, then, familiar human responses to bereavement. But it also gives evidence of the extraordinary historical realities that had deprived the country of its President. This final collection of letters reveals the eloquence, sincerity, and generosity of spirit that characterized much of the American response to the death of President Kennedy. In trying to come to terms with his assassination, many citizens drew upon their own deep reservoirs of life experience to find meaning and affirmation in a tragedy they felt had changed their own lives as well as the history of the nation. Writing the letters itself provided some catharsis. “Maybe I didn’t do the proper thing writting to a great lady like you,” one African American housewife in Chicago fretted. “I had to take the chance. You see sometime you start hurting and can’t seem to stop.”
No group among those who wrote condolence letters identified more with Mrs. Kennedy than those who had lost a spouse—the majority of them widows. The following messages, arranged chronologically, come from those who saw in the untimely death of John F. Kennedy a loss with which they felt all too familiar. They offered solace, reassurance, and often praise to Mrs. Kennedy in equal measure as they attempted to draw upon their own hard-won wisdom in comforting the former First Lady.
FRIDAY
EAST LANSING, MICHIGAN
My dear Mrs. Kennedy,
With full realization that this will be but one of hundreds of expressions that you will receive, and the possibility you may not personally read this, I feel compelled to compose this letter to you.
It was only last May that my children and myself received a letter of sympathy sent by you and your husband. My husband, who was 26, had been killed while on a routine Air Force mission as an electronic warfare officer. Suddenly, without warning or realistic preparation I found myself alone and my children—Jackie Lynn, 41/2, Rodney, 31/2, and Bradley, 1,—fatherless. We had been married five years; two of which were spent in college, three more in advanced training in the Air Force. We had lost our third child shortly after a premature birth. Just as we seemed on the threshold of rewards of preparation, it was ended.
Now I must write this letter to you and extend my sympathy to you and your children. But it is more than sympathy; I extend to you deep and sincere empathy. I know nothing that I nor anyone can now say has any meaning or comfort for you. I know the anguish and heartache your whole being is experiencing, and the bewilderment and disbelief that yet crowds your mind. Senseless acts! Why do they happen?
I have no words of wisdom nor no words of comfort. All I can tell you is for the first time since my husband’s death can I feel for someone else. Though unimportant and of modest means, I feel so akin to you and wish that I could put out my arms to you and embrace you and somehow help. I pray that the traditional and trite comments from those around you will not hurt you too much. People who care somehow never know really how to express their love in a meaningful way. I pray that the national aspect involved will not disgust and embitter you. The whole world has truly lost.
No more can I say, only to repeat myself. Please accept my inadequately expressed emotions. My whole self goes out to you.
Sincerely,
Sue Ann Andersen
(Mrs. Einer E.)
SPRINGFIELD, ILLINOIS
NOV 23, 1963
Dear Mrs. Kennedy:
Here I sit at 4 a.m crying my heart out. Just how you feel at this time I know and words cannot express my feelings. On Sept. 2, 1963—Labor Day a tragedy such as this came to me—my husband drowned at our Lake Springfield so I am sharing your sorrow more than anyone but God knows.
I know you will never see the letter as there will be so many it would be impossible for you to read them all but maybe somehow you will hear about it.
I’m not a catholic but my prayers for you & your family are sincere. Have faith and the Good Lord will truly see you thru this ordeal—I know. It’s not easy—believe me. Please excuse the looks of this paper but the tears won’t stop & I feel like I have to write this even tho you’ll never see it.
As I go to the cemetery this morning which I do every Sat or Sun my thoughts & prayers will be with you & your family also.
I find so much comfort in the words of John 14, 1-6 and the 23rd Psalm.
Please accept our expression of sympathy in our poor but truly sincere way.
Sincerely & sorrowfully,
Mrs. Elizabeth Pucka & Becky
P.S. I heard over the radio that the President’s casket is bronze. We buried our poor Leo in a bronze casket too.
TELEGRAM
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MRS JOHN F KENNEDY
WASHDC
MAY I ADD MY SYMPATHY TO THAT OF PEOPLE ALL OVER THE WORLD. MY PERSONAL LOSS IN THIS GREAT TRAGEDY PREPARES ME TO SYMPATHIZE MORE DEEPLY WITH YOU
MRS J D TIPPIT DALLAS TEX
(34).
EDITOR’S NOTE:
Mrs. Tippit’s husband, J. D. Tippit, was a Dallas police officer who was murdered by Lee Harvey Oswald on November 22, 1963, forty-five minutes after the assassination of President Kennedy. Officer Tippit, having heard a police description of the suspect radioed to his cruiser, attempted to detain Oswald who was on foot. Oswald pulled out a handgun and shot Tippit point-blank four times in broad daylight, in front of several witnesses.
NOVEMBER 24TH, 1963
WASHINGTON, D.C.
Dear Mrs. Kennedy:
I write you not as an important person but as a widow who was left twenty years ago, after twenty-two years of blissful and exciting marriage, with two small children. And I want to say that you must not fear for them. With such a heritage of courage and conviction, and enshrined in the hearts of the American people as they are, they will go far.
And for you, with a bleakness ahead that the presence of princes and emperors can do nothing to assuage, you are relieved of the one intolerable burden when we lose someone we love, remorse. You made your husband happy—and as an American I thank God that both of you were allowed to lead our nation even these few years.
With deepfelt sympathy,
Katharine Stanley-Brown
SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS
NOVEMBER 29, 1963
Dear Mrs. Kennedy,
You and President Kennedy were in my office a week ago yesterday.
I am secretary to General Bedwell at Brooks Air Force Base, and I will forever be haunted by how handsome and healthy and happy you two looked—and how gracious you were to me. We loved you here at Brooks and feel your loss especially deeply.
You have every reason to be consumed with bitterness, but I hope you can find it in your heart not to be. I have learned through the years that you can live with sadness but you cannot live with bitterness. It destroys you and those dear to you. My husband, a B-29 pilot, was killed during World War II when I was three months pregnant with our first baby.
Everyone marvels at your courage. You are indeed worthy of being a President’s wife—and President Kennedy’s wife in particular. You make us all proud to be Americans.
May God be with you, my dear Mrs. Kennedy.
Very Sincerely,
Claudine R. Skeats
(Mrs. A. E. Skeats)