Jackie, Ethel, Joan: Women of Camelot (65 page)

“But I don’t know how you will be able to stop an adop- tion,” Ellen Deiner said, hesitatingly.

“We’ll just see about that, now won’t we?” Rose said con- fidently. “I am certain we could at the very least get a deci- sion that the adoption and name change would not be recognized in America.”

Deiner was surprised by Rose’s observation. It sounded as if she had already begun to look into the legalities of the matter.

“This kind of discussion went on and on throughout the

two-week cruise,” said Deiner. “As we went to Nassau, then the Virgin Islands, the children were the subject of ongoing discussions between Rose and I [
sic
]. I am sure that she brought up all of these points to Jackie as well, which is what I suggested she do.”

On the last day of the cruise, Rose told Ellen Deiner that, as a result of her discussions with her former daughter-in- law, Jackie not only had agreed to let the children continue their educations in New York, she also would not allow Onassis to adopt the Kennedy children. She would not re- move the children from either their national or family her- itage.

“My daughter-in-law is not a foolish woman. I can’t imagine why you ever thought she would have allowed an adoption,” Rose said, pointing an accusatory finger at Ellen Deiner.

“But I
never
said that,” Deiner countered in her defense, her face by now reddened. “You asked me if . . .”

Rose placed her finger on her lips for silence, cutting off the mortified Deiner. “Well, I believe you did say just that, and I have told Jacqueline as much,” Rose countered. Then, before taking her leave, she concluded, “Jacqueline told me to tell you that
some
people should learn to mind their own business.”

At the time when Jackie got the telephone call from Ted about the Chappaquiddick tragedy, she was on the Isle of Scorpios with her husband, her children, their cousin Victo- ria Lawford, and a playmate of John’s, Eric von Huguley. She immediately decided that she wanted to be in Hyannis Port to support the family, but she didn’t want the media to know of her presence there.

“But why must you go?” Aristotle asked. “That is their problem, not ours.”

“You’re right. It’s not our problem,” Jackie agreed, “it’s
my
problem,” she added, underscoring the separate nature of their lives. “I have to be there. I have to know what is going on.”

Nicholas Stamosis, who worked in the travel department of Olympic Airways, which was owned by Ari, also knew Jackie well. He recalls, “Ted’s call came at a convenient time because Mrs. Onassis already had business in New York—meetings to arrange for the children’s schooling. So she was planning to go to America anyway. We just sched- uled her trip a week early when she got the call.”

“I don’t want anyone to even know I’m in Hyannis Port,” Jackie told Stamosis. “This trip has to be done very care- fully. No photographers. Is that understood?” Presumably, Jackie didn’t want it to appear that Ted was using her and the memory of her husband in a bid for sympathy.

“I can guarantee you that I will at least try, Mrs. Onassis,” Stamosis said.

“Well, you will have to do better than that,” Jackie snapped.
“Just do it.”

“I will, Mrs. Onassis,” he said, finally.

“We got her out of Greece and into Hyannis, and nobody was the wiser,” recalls Stamosis, “at least as far as I know.” A couple of days later Nicholas Stamosis ran into Jackie’s disgruntled husband in Athens at the Architectoniki Bar. “He was drunk and talking about how angry he was that Jackie

went to be with the Kennedys,” he recalls of Onassis. “Those damn Kennedys, they have some kind of dirty

hold on her,” Onassis said, exasperated. “Just look at what has happened. Ted Kennedy drives a girl off a bridge, she

drowns, then my wife flies around the world just to pat him on the back and tell him it’s all right.”

“Well, she is a very caring woman,” said Stamosis in Jackie’s defense.

Onassis slammed his fist down on the bar, his mouth turned down at the corners. “She just wants to make sure the Kennedy kingdom doesn’t come tumbling down, for if it does, what will that do to her children’s inheritances and trust funds?” As he tossed back another vodka and soda, Onassis concluded, “
That’s
what she cares about.”

Joan Accuses: “All You Care about Is How It
Looks
?”

I
n the days after the death of Mary Jo Kopechne, the Kennedy family closed ranks as it always had in times of trouble. Maria Shriver, Eunice’s daughter and Ted’s niece, speaks of the Kennedy credo that was at work at that time and which, she says, still exists today. “My grandparents [Rose and Joseph] emphasized family loyalty, which my parents then emphasized in turn,” she explains. “ ‘This is your family and you stand by it no matter what,’ they told their children, and their children then instilled it in us, and I have handed it down to mine. ‘If you have something nega- tive to say, you say it in the house. You don’t say it out there. These people are family. You may not like them sometimes, but they are the most important people in your life, and don’t you forget it.’ ”

Soon the Hyannis Port home was filled with concerned Kennedys, many of whom, perhaps, didn’t have particularly fond feelings for Ted at this time but who would stand by him just the same. “There was rage, horror, and anger,” re- called Joseph’s nurse, Rita Dallas, “a lot of anger. Not at any particular person, not at Teddy, but I really think at fate.”

When Jackie Onassis arrived, she greeted all of the fam- ily members, and then quickly departed for her own home next door to Joseph and Rose’s. Something had changed, and it was painfully clear to everyone. “She didn’t really be- long there,” said John Davis. “Things were different now. She wasn’t really a Kennedy anymore, and they knew it, and they treated her like it.”

The last time Jackie was at Rose and Joseph’s was during Bobby’s campaign. She had run off in tears after Ethel re- minded her that “we” would never again be in the White House. Since that time, Bobby had been killed and she had married Onassis, much to Ethel’s dismay and, it would seem, many other people’s as well.

“The sisters—Jean, Eunice, and Pat—never treated Jackie the same after she married Onassis,” said another relative of Jackie’s. “No one really knew how to deal with her. There were those who felt she was so far above them, they couldn’t relate. And there were those who felt she was just an out- sider now. She could feel it in the air, and didn’t want to be around it. Even Joan seemed as though she couldn’t relate to Jackie anymore. So Jackie retreated to her own home and stayed there, almost in a ‘wait and see’ position.”

Ted’s explanation of what had occurred on the tiny island was relayed to Jackie by others. In fact, she and Ted had no discussion about the events in question, or about anything at all, at least not in anyone’s memory.

“Her emotions were mixed, I believe,” said the late author Leo Damore, who wrote a book about the Chappaquiddick tragedy titled
Senatorial Privilege: The Chappaquiddick Cover-Up.
“She was there because she had a stake in what happened to the family, because of her children. My re- search indicated that she was reluctant even to be there, that she wanted her presence to be a secret, and didn’t want a public show of support. I believe she felt that Ted was guilty of something, even if she didn’t know what it was.”

Her friend Roswell Gilpatric once said that he believed that Jackie was “probably very angry at Ted, and perhaps even feeling guilty because of her very human reaction to his obvious lack of judgment. I’m sure she was confused, trying to sort it all out. One thing she did say sticks out in my mind as being amazingly perceptive. ‘I believe Ted has an unconscious drive to self-destruct,’ she told me. ‘I think it comes from the fact that he knows he’ll never live up to what people expect of him. He’s not Jack. He’s not Bobby. And he believes that what he is, is just not enough.’ ”

Jackie knew that with the Chappaquiddick tragedy, the Kennedys’ chances of ever getting into the White House again were killed along with Mary Jo Kopechne. “Never will he be President now.
Never,
” Jackie told Roswell Gilpatric. “He would never allow it for himself, anyway. And now, with this tragedy, it’s over. We should just face it.” After meeting with Ted and with Kennedy adviser Burke Marshall, Ethel would volunteer to call upon some influen- tial people in Washington, the first being former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, to help with strategy. At Ethel’s

urging, McNamara arrived quickly.

More “troops” were summoned from far and wide. Soon, an army of Jack’s loyalists (a court that was, at least to some

extent, in exile and still dreaming of Washington) had de- scended upon Cape Cod. There were fifteen in all staying at Ted and Joan’s ten-room home on Squaw Island, and at Ethel’s, Jackie’s, and Rose’s homes in the compound as well.

“Mrs. Onassis was asked if they could use her home—the President’s home—as a headquarters, and she agreed,” re- calls Rita Dallas. “She then became deeply involved in see- ing to it that the meetings went smoothly. These men were all dear friends of hers, so she was a big part of what was being decided. However, she spent her time with them, not with the family. There were a lot of questions to be ad- dressed.”

Most troubling was the fact that Kennedy had failed to re- port the accident for almost ten hours, choosing instead to return to the hotel in which he was staying in Edgartown and spend the night there before returning to Chappaquiddick and then going to the Edgartown police. Why had he waited so long? Of course, there was also speculation about Ted’s relationship with Mary Jo Kopechne. Had they been lovers?

These meetings were not about what had occurred as much as they were about what to
do
about it.

The first order of business was to have Joan Kennedy place what some aides referred to as “the call.” Prior to this time, Joan had been secreted away in a bedroom, concerned about her husband and anxious about whatever was being plotted downstairs. While Ethel and Jackie had been the in- volved, “important” Kennedy wives, busy discussing strat- egy with aides, Joan was thought of as the weak, fragile wife locked away upstairs. Now, though, she had a role to fill.

Joan was asked to telephone the Kopechnes to extend the Kennedy family’s condolences. Strategically it was decided

that the way the Kopechnes felt about the Kennedys could make a huge difference in what they would seek from Ted. The Kopechnes had to be persuaded that the Kennedys were also grieving the loss of young Mary Jo, that they were a caring, sensitive family. In fact, Ted had already telephoned Mary Jo’s parents, Joseph and Gwen Kopechne, in Berkeley Heights, New Jersey, to tell them personally the awful news about their daughter. However, Ted’s call did little to ingra- tiate him to the Kopechnes because he failed to mention that he had been driving the car or that he had even been in it.

“We must align ourselves with the Kopechnes,” Joan was told by one senior adviser. “And it starts with you, Mrs. Kennedy.”

The senior adviser, who would only speak off the record, remembered that Joan became incensed, lashing out at him in a manner uncharacteristic of her. “There’s a dead girl, and all you care about is how it
looks
?” she said to him, angrily. Joan sat motionless in front of the rotary telephone. A slip of paper with the Kopechnes’ number on it was slid across the table toward her. By now, Ted was standing at his wife’s side. “But what if they ask me questions?” Joan asked her

husband. “What if they want details?”

“Well, you don’t
have
any details,” Ted said, speaking softly to placate her. “That’s not what this call is about, Joansie. Just be nice, be sympathetic . . . and get the hell off the line. Do you understand?”

As Ted dialed the phone, Joan seemed to choke the re- ceiver in silent protest.

“Now just make the call, and maybe later I’ll take you to Mildred’s,” he told her, referring to a nearby restaurant, Mil- dred’s House of Chowder.

“Hello, Mrs. Kopechne?” Joan began when the connec-

tion was made. “Yes. Why, this is Joan Kennedy, Ted’s wife.”

As Ted listened to every word she said, Joan told the dead girl’s mother how terribly sorry she and “the whole Kennedy family” were about what had happened. “We have had tragedy in our own family, as you know,” Joan said, her voice small and miserable, “and so we empathize with you, and I am . . . I mean, we, are so, so sorry.”*

Ted patted her on the arm and walked away while his wife completed the brief call. As twilight deepened into darkness, a cool wind blew in from Nantucket Sound through an open window in the living room. Shivering, a pregnant Joan Kennedy hugged herself.