The Kennedy Men: 1901-1963 (134 page)

Bobby called Walter Sheridan, who was down in Nashville prosecuting Jimmy Hoffa for jury tampering, and asked the Justice Department lawyer to check out Hoffa. The labor leader was another man of evil intent, his fury honed on Bobby’s own obsessive, vengeful justice. Then he called Julius Draznin, a labor lawyer in Chicago with knowledge of the mob, and asked him about the Mafia, and in particular Sam Giancana.

One way or another all these calls led back to Cuba, though the one possibility Bobby did not consider was that Castro himself might feel he had a right to kill the man who had tried to kill him. “Castro could have made a very strong case that what he did was justified,” said former Secretary of State Alexander Haig, then working on the Cuban Coordinating Committee. “We were attacking his country, and he was fighting an enemy. That’s different from an assassination in a pure sense of the word.” Everywhere Bobby looked, everywhere he turned, whatever he thought, he found more enemies, and every potential assassin he looked at this day was an enemy he himself had made, or had helped to make.

Bobby ran away from the deadly prospect of contemplation. He listened instead of talking, and talked instead of remembering, trying to give solace to the inconsolable. He was there when
Air Force One
flew into Andrews Air Force Base carrying his brother’s body, the president’s widow, and Lyndon Baines Johnson, the thirty-sixth president of the United States. He was there riding in the hearse, with Jackie still in her blood stained dress, hearing her tortured retelling of the murderous assault. He was there at Bethesda Naval Hospital that evening, talking endlessly on the phone, beginning to plan the details of the state funeral. He was there late in the evening at the White House trying to gently nudge the others off to bed.

Bobby finally lay down on the bed in the Lincoln Room, but his eyes would not close and sleep would not come, and he asked Spalding to join him there. “Listen, you ought to take a sleeping pill,” the president’s friend said, and left to seek the sedative. When he returned, the attorney general was still haunted with sleeplessness. “It’s such an awful shame,” Bobby said without a hint of emotion. “The country was going so well. We really had it going.”

Spalding said good night, shut the door, and turned to walk down the corridor. It was then that he heard sobs of sorrow. He thought that Bobby was saying, “Why, God, why? What possible reason could there be in this?” Bobby cried until finally the pill took hold and he fell silent.

O
n the day John F. Kennedy was buried, the skies were dark. The leaders of America and the world walked in solemn procession the five blocks from the White House to St. Matthew’s Cathedral. Along the route tens of thousands stood paying their homage, while millions watched on black-and-white television sets.

The president’s flag-draped coffin sat on a caisson drawn by six gray horses. Then came a riderless horse. Behind walked Jackie, with Bobby on her right arm and Teddy on her left, and behind them world leaders who were nothing but a shuffling mass of mourners. There were mourners too throughout the world. Millions knew his name as a symbol of hope, not because of anything he had promised or could promise, but because he had become emblematic of a new spirit celebrating human aspiration and challenge.

Bobby walked beside Jackie to steady his brother’s widow in her time of need. But who would steady him as he plodded onward? “May Joe find solace in the unexampled triumphs of his son in the assurance that Bobby will repeat Jack’s career,” Lord Beaverbrook had cabled Rose, as if life was a grand football game: when one player was hurt, another grabbed a helmet and loped onto the field to take his place. Bobby had hardly begun the terrible contemplation of what inadvertent role he might have played in his brother’s death, and already his name was being called.

Bobby had incalculable burdens to bear, and one of them, Jackie, was walking beside him. He would be responsible for his brother’s widow and her two children. The president’s life had justified so much of all that the Kennedys had suffered. Joe Jr. had died a hero’s death in a ball of flame, and the president had carried on with his brother’s bold dreams. Bobby’s father had taught him that he was supposed to pick up the burden, but how could any man lift what was set out before Bobby this day?

Teddy had decked himself out in his brothers’ lives, and now as he marched forward to the funeral dirge, he wore the pants that the president had worn for his inauguration and a pair of his gloves. Teddy’s rental suit of a morning coat and striped trousers had arrived incomplete, and Kennedy’s valet had let out the president’s pants and pressed a pair of the president’s gloves into Teddy’s oversized hands. There had been no hat to fit his large head, and so he wore none, and neither did Bobby. And when the kings and prime ministers and others heads of states and world and American leaders walked on that gray day, they too marched hatless in the thirty-degree weather, their heads slightly bowed as if in prayer.

As the pallbearers carried the body into the church, there was silence across the land. Joe sat watching on his television. In Times Square traffic stopped, and New Yorkers stood, heads bowed, while high from the
marquee of the Astor Hotel “Taps” echoed across the stilled and empty square.

Jackie thought of her husband as being Greek in that “the Greeks fought the gods” and had a “desperate defiance of fate.” Americans had never been imbued with a Greek sense of tragedy, but they had it now as they buried their martyred president with the most profound dignity and reverence.

Bishop Philip Hannon read passages from the Bible that Jackie had chosen. “Your old men shall dream dreams,” he said. “Your young men shall see visions. And where there is no vision the people perish.”

Then the bishop read what he called “the final expression of his ideals and aspirations, his inaugural address.” The phrases that the prelate spoke did not sound like mere political perorations. In its power and depth, the passage had a biblical resonance. “Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans.” Hannon intoned words that a little less than three years before a young president had spoken in a strong voice, standing coatless on a frigid day, looking out with anticipation at the challenges of a dangerous time. “And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” That was the most famous sentence Kennedy had ever spoken. Whatever Kennedy’s faults, he believed that Americans must reach out beyond their narrow self-interest to each other and to the world. “With a good conscience our own sure reward, with history the final judge of our deeds, let us go forth to lead the land we love, asking His blessing and His help, but knowing that here on earth God’s work must truly be our own.”

As the coffin was brought out after the low pontifical mass and placed back on the caisson, Jackie whispered to her son: “John, you can salute Daddy now and say good-bye to him.” Her son raised his right hand in a salute to his father. As he held his hand up, the picture that tens of millions watched on television shimmied slightly.

The gun carriage carrying the coffin set out to Arlington National Cemetery, its way announced by the sound of muffled drums, followed by the dignitaries in a series of limousines. The procession moved slowly past the spire of the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial.

And so they buried him that day. He was a hero of war if not yet of peace, and he was buried among rows upon rows of men who had, many of them, given up their lives for their country. He had followed his father’s laws of manhood, and they had led him to the most exalted position in the land, and to Dallas on a November afternoon, and to his burial here among the brave and true.

As the mourners stood silent on this darkest of afternoons, a thunder of
noise erupted in the midst of the stillness. Fifty low-flying Air Force F-105s roared across the sky, disappearing as soon as they arrived. Behind them flew
Air Force One,
so low that it was not like a plane in the sky, but a great bird that had come to pay its last homage. As the plane that had flown Kennedy around the world and carried his body back from Dallas moved across the cemetery plot, its wings dipped, and then the plane was gone. There were those at the gravesite who had stayed strong until this moment, but now they broke down.

As the burial ended, the president’s widow walked to the grave holding a lit taper in her hands. She reached forward with the rod and a flame burst into life. She gave the taper to Bobby, and he touched it against the flame, as did Teddy. From now on, the Kennedys would come here and look at the eternal flame and seek the light they had lost.

Source Abbreviations

AAML: Archives of the Andrew Mellon Library, Choate AKP: Arthur Krock Papers, Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton University

ASP: Arthur Schlesinger Jr. Papers, JFKPL

ASPU: Adlai Stevenson Papers, Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton University

ATD: Arthur Schlesinger Jr.,
A Thousand Days
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965)

AWRH: Carl Sferrazza Anthony,
As We Remember Her: Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis in the Words of Her Friends and Family
(New York: HarperCollins, 1997)

AWRJ: John F. Kennedy, ed.,
As We Remember Joe
(Cambridge, Mass.: privately printed, 1945)

BP: Joan and Clay Blair Jr. Papers, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming

BPL: Boston Public Library

CUOH: Columbia University oral history, New York

CY: Michael R. Beschloss,
The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev, 1960-1963
(New York: HarperCollins, 1991)

DHP: C. David Heymann Papers, State University of New York at Stonybrook

DP: William Manchester,
The Death of a President: November 20—November 25, 1963
(New York: Harper & Row, 1967)

DPP: David Powers Papers, JFKPL

FBIFOI: Federal Bureau of Investigation Freedom of Information Act request.

FMC:
Forbes
Magazine Collection

FRUS:
Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961-1963
(Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of State, 1988), many of the documents also available on the Department of State web site, www.state.gov/www/about_state/history/frusken.html.

HSCA: House Select Committee on Assassinations

HTF: Amanda Smith, ed.,
Hostage to Fortune: The Letters of Joseph P. Kennedy
(New York: Viking, 2000); many of these documents also available at JFRPL and other archives.

HUA: Harvard University Archives, Cambridge, Massachusetts

IR:
Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders: An Interim Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities
(Washington, D.C.: U.S. Senate, 1975)

JEP: Judith Exner Papers accessed as part of lawsuit
Judith Exner
vs.
Random House,
et al.

JFKMM: Victor Lasky,
JFK: The Man and the Myth
(New York: Macmillan, 1963)

JFKOA: Richard D. Mahoney,

JFK:
Ordeal in Africa
(New York, Oxford, 1983)

JFKPL: John F. Kennedy Presidential Library

JFKPP: John F. Kennedy Personal Papers, JFKPL

JMBP: James MacGregor Burns Papers, NHP. Courtesy James MacGregor Burns

JPKP: Joseph P. Kennedy Papers, JFKPL.

K: Theodore C. Sorensen,
Kennedy
(New York: Harper & Row, 1965)

KLOH: JFKPL oral history

KMPK: Kerry McCarthy, “P. J. Kennedy: The First Senator Kennedy,” unpublished manuscript, courtesy Kerry McCarthy

KP: Koskoff Papers, JFKPL

KR: Michael R. Beschloss,
Kennedy and Roosevelt: The Uneasy Alliance
(New York: Norton, 1980)

LC: Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

LL: Laurence Leamer

LM: David Cecil,
Lord M, or the Later Life of Lord Melbourne
(London: Constable and Co., 1954)

MP 1960: Theodore H. White,
The Making of the President 1960
(New York: Atheneum, 1961)

NA: National Archives

NHP: Nigel Hamilton Papers,

NPSOH: National Park Service oral history

OTR: off the record

PC: Personal Collection

PFP: Paul Fay Papers, Stanford University

PIC: John F. Kennedy,
Profiles in Courage
(New York: Harper, 1955; memorial edition, 1964)

PJFK: Herbert S. Parmet,
JFK: The Presidency of John F. Kennedy
(New York: Dial, 1983)

PRIUM: Presidential Recordings, “Integration of the University of Mississippi,” JFKPL

PS: Pierre Salinger,
P.S.: A Memoir
(New York: St. Martin’s, 1995)

RCP: Robert Coughlin Papers, in author’s, possession

RFK: Victor Lasky,
Robert F. Kennedy: The Myth and the Man
(New York: Trident Press, 1968)

RFKCB: C. David Heymann,
RFK: A Candid Biography of Robert F. Kennedy
(New York: Dutton, 1998)

RKHT: Arthur Schlesinger Jr.,
Robert Kennedy and His Times
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1978)