True Compass (22 page)

"How the hell," I asked Jack when he'd hung up, "did you know that Richard Russell was going to be in his Senate office on Christmas Eve?" Jack just smiled.

In summers, we'd often transport our get-togethers to the Cape. Our father especially enjoyed these times. On weekends, we would all go over to the house that Jack and Jackie had leased on the nearby section of oceanfront known as Squaw Island. (Joan and I had purchased a house there in 1961.) The early evenings were devoted to Caroline and John, who in 1963 were five and two. No matter who his guests were, Jack reserved that time of day for his children. He would tell them stories and listen to theirs. They liked to hear about his experiences flying in airplanes and traveling on boats, and about their favorite animals.

Our father got great satisfaction out of seeing Jack play with his children. It touched something deep in him. How deep, we learned not long before he suffered his first stroke. This was on a misty day in the spring of 1961, just before Jack flew off to Vienna for his summit with Khrushchev.

We were at Jack's house next door to our parents'. McGeorge Bundy, who had helped plan the invasion of Europe in World War II and now was Jack's adviser on national security affairs, had come along with us, probably to give the president last-minute advice and preparation for the consequential summit with Khrushchev.

Tradition held that we would show up for cocktails at the big house at 7 p.m. Dad would serve us daiquiris. (After all, we were grown men, and Jack was president!) If it was a Friday night, we could have two daiquiris; on Saturdays, we got one apiece; and on Sundays, none--we had to be at work the next day.

On this evening, while Mac Bundy worked the telephones next door, and Joan and Jackie chatted with Mother and Dad, Jack challenged me to a game of checkers--a chance for us to be alone for a while. There was something wonderful, something so characteristic, about the way Jack played checkers. He was good at the game: decisive, precise. He moved very quickly. And he peppered the conversation with humor, to sort of throw you off. Jack got a lift from checkers as from so much else. He played the game with a joyous frivolity.

We played and talked until my brother looked at his watch and said, "Well, it's five to seven. Let's go on over to Dad's." We walked across the lawn in the heavy mist. Caroline--she would have been three--spotted us from her grandparents' kitchen. She came running out and grabbed her father's arms. As Jack walked his toddling daughter around to the front porch, Bundy opened the screen door and said, "Mr. President, they need you on the phone. Something's come up." Jack turned to me: "Will you walk Caroline in?" I took her small hand and we headed inside the house.

Our father had been watching all this through the window. Instead of preparing the daiquiris for us, he strode alone into the dining room, half an hour early, and stiffly sat down. Jack entered the room shortly afterward and sat down next to him. None of us had ever seen this happen before. As our father sat in grim silence, Jackie, Joan, and Mother drifted in and took their seats, along with Jack. Bundy remained in the living room.

As we sat there perplexed, Dad finally broke the silence. "Jack," he said, "I know you're worried about Khrushchev. But let me tell you something. Nothing is going to be more important in your life than how your daughter turns out. And don't ever forget it."

There was an awkward silence at first, but then Jack said, "You're absolutely right, Dad." In fact, Jack was a kind and doting father, and Dad knew it; but Joe Kennedy never expected anything less than the best.

Soon the two of them were joking. Jack confided to Dad: "I have this nice boat model. If you read in the papers that I've given the model to Khrushchev, it'll mean that the talks are going well. If they don't go well, I won't give it to him. And frankly I'd rather keep that model for myself anyway. It's pretty nice."

In the end, President Kennedy kept the boat model. And Caroline turned out pretty well, too.

On September 9, 1963, Jack sat for an interview on Squaw Island with Walter Cronkite that inaugurated the expansion of the
CBS Evening News
from fifteen minutes to half an hour.

Four days after that, I sat at a luncheon table in Belgrade next to one of the fiercest figures of the embattled Diem regime. The occasion was a conference of the Inter-Parliamentary Union, which I attended along with Joan and a small American congressional delegation. Unbeknownst to us, the leader of the American delegation, Mrs. Katharine St. George, a Republican from New York, had invited the controversial head of the Vietnam delegation, Mrs. Ngo Dinh Nhu, to join us. Madame Nhu, who served as political adviser and unofficial first lady to her unmarried brotherin-law, Ngo Dinh Diem, wound up as my luncheon partner, and my conversation with her marked my first real public--albeit accidentally public--involvement with the situation in Vietnam.

My notes describe her as a woman of about five feet five inches tall, dressed entirely in white and green--green dress, bracelets, earrings, and pin; white pants and shoes. She wore deep red lipstick, rouge, nail polish, and a lot of eye makeup. She had small, delicate hands, which she moved with grace and expression, and spoke directly in a quiet but firm voice.

Madame Nhu was not the most conventional of luncheon conversation partners. When I politely asked her how long she planned to stay in Belgrade, she replied that she was often called a dragon lady, but that actually she was just a dragonfly, and that she remained in one place as long as she enjoyed it. Then the pleasantries ended.

She launched into a ninety-minute tirade, giving her spin on the current situation in South Vietnam. Propaganda is probably a more accurate description of what was essentially her monologue. She complained that the United States supported the Buddhists, who'd been stirred up by the communists at any rate. South Vietnam was a democratic country that elected its own officials; the press was free; in fact, hers was the most tolerant of all the Asian countries. I understood that she viewed me as more than just a member of the American delegation to the Inter-Parliamentary Union meeting--I was, after all, the president's brother--so she barely paused to take a breath as she continued her diatribe. She spoke of her conversations with the pope--he supposedly called her "too, too, too, too poetic" as she told him that they needed women priests to deliver the sacraments in her country--and she declared that people are only Buddhists because they are casual about their religion, and that the government is betrayed by the press. I wondered more than once how in the world I had ended up in this lunch and with this woman sitting next to me. I found it amusing when the State Department later sent a message that I should steer clear of Madame Nhu. I needed no convincing.

One of the last ceremonial events Jack participated in was an All New England Salute Dinner in his honor on Saturday, October 19. Seven thousand people paid one hundred dollars apiece to attend the event at the Commonwealth Armory near Kenmore Square in Boston. It was the most profitable Democratic fund-raising dinner of its time. Jack had attended the Harvard-Columbia football game that afternoon with Kenneth O'Donnell, Dave Powers, and Lawrence O'Brien. He was delighted at the success of the evening and with the money that had been raised.

He had noted that the 1964 campaign "may be among the most interesting as well as pleasurable campaigns that have taken place in a long time." And he made a special point of recognizing me in his speech, with his usual wit: "Teddy has been down in Washington and he came to see me the other day, and he said he was really tired of being referred to as the younger brother of the president, and being another Kennedy, and it is crowded in Washington, and that he was going to break loose and change his name. He was going out on his own. Instead of being Teddy Kennedy now, he is changing his name to Teddy Roosevelt."

The next day, Jack went to Hyannis Port for a quick visit with our parents. On Monday, October 21, 1963, the president headed back to Washington. Before liftoff, he kissed our father goodbye, then walked to the chopper that awaited him in front of my parents' house. As he was about to board, he paused, turned to look at Dad watching him, and retraced his steps to kiss Dad again, gently, on the forehead. It was the last time the two of them saw one another.

On November 1, the South Vietnamese generals staged a coup, assassinating Diem and his brother-adviser Ngo Dinh Nhu, the husband of my Belgrade luncheon companion.

Jack had been traveling about the country: a five-day tour of eleven western states in September to talk about conservation and assess his political standing; speeches in Tampa and Miami Beach on November 18. He made a quick trip back to Washington to take care of certain executive duties; and then, commencing on Thursday, fund-raising appearances in San Antonio, Fort Worth, and, on Friday, Dallas.

My memory of the last time I saw Jack is elusive after all the years. It filters through to me in wisps and echoes.

I think I saw him in Florida. It seems as though I was planning to fly out to Michigan to give a speech on his behalf, and I planned to needle Barry Goldwater a little. Jack was interested in what my theme would be. I showed him my prop, a little bottle with some water in it, colored gold. I planned to build a funny little story around it. "I don't think that's all that good," I dimly recall him saying. "You better get another story. Let me hear when you've come up with another story." I remember that I was somewhat taken aback by this, because I thought it was really a pretty good story.

Friday, November 22, was a dull day in the Senate. I was presiding, a duty that was passed around among freshman senators. A routine debate had begun on the topic of federal aid to public libraries; I was signing correspondence.

At about twenty minutes to two in the afternoon, I heard a shout from the lobby. I glanced over to see the Senate's press liaison officer, Richard Riedel, striding through the door to investigate. Then I saw Riedel reemerge, a strange expression on his face. He was hurrying directly toward me. The shout had come from someone who'd paused to read an Associated Press teletype machine.

"You'd better come over," Riedel told me. He meant to the AP printer.

I followed him out of the chamber. I knew something had happened, something bad, but I had no idea what it was. We reached the machine and I watched the bulletin clatter onto the tape. The president had been shot and grievously wounded. My first overwhelming sense was disbelief. How could it be true? And then horror, as I stood there listening to the
tick, tick, tick
of the teletype machine. I couldn't hear anything or anyone else. Gradually, I became aware of the voices around me. I heard someone say the president was dead.

The Senate chamber turned to bedlam. I rushed from the floor, ran down the Capitol steps, and made for my office in the Senate Building. I needed to call Bobby, who was at Hickory Hill, the house that he and Ethel had purchased in 1957.

But the line was dead. The lines all over Washington were dead. The onslaught of calls coming in and going out had disrupted telephone service. The lines were dead.

My next thought was of Joan. She adored Jack. She would be devastated by the news. I asked Milt Gwirtzman, my Harvard classmate and an adviser to Jack, to drive me to our Georgetown house. My old Texan friend Claude Hooton, in town to join weekend festivities, rode with us as we sped through traffic lights. Claude, in shock like the rest of us, brooded aloud that the president had been shot, and in his home state.

Bobby received the news by phone from J. Edgar Hoover while lunching at Hickory Hill with Ethel and the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, Robert M. Morgenthau. The two had been holding meetings on the subject of organized crime. As the small party sat outside eating sandwiches, one of the men working on the house, who'd been listening to a transistor radio, began to run toward them. At the same moment, an outside telephone rang.

We located Joan at her hairdresser getting ready for a weekend with our friends. I finally reached Bobby at Hickory Hill. He confirmed what I had dared not believe: Jack was dead.

In that moment, the world lurched apart from me. I felt unmoored. But I knew that I had to keep moving. I had to put one foot in front of the other. People were depending on me. And I needed to reach out to my parents. I needed to comfort them.

I asked Gwirtzman to drive me to the White House. There, I made myself instruct an aide to telephone Hyannis Port, and waited the terrible few seconds before the ordeal of speaking the unspeakable.

My mother came on the line. She had heard. My father, in bed on the second floor, had not. Someone had to tell him face-to-face. I told Mother that I would do it.

I contacted Eunice, and together we rushed home by helicopter and jet. By the time we arrived, the anticipation of what lay ahead had burned through any numbness and replaced it with dread. I fought it by launching myself out of the plane, through the front doorway, and up the stairs to Dad's bedroom. His eyes were closed. I would let him have this last peaceful sleep. The television set near his bed caught my eye. I lunged at the connecting wires and ripped them from the wall.

The house filled with relatives through the evening. I passed a hellish night, and the following morning, I told Dad. To this day, the memory of that conversation brings me to tears.

Eunice and I brought our mother to Washington on Sunday, November 24, and prayed beside Jack's body in the Rotunda as a crowd three miles long made its way past. Jack's funeral mass was held the next day at St. Matthew's Cathedral. In recent years, Vicki and I often attend mass at St. Matthew's and walk to the spot at the foot of the altar to read the marker in the marble floor: "Here rested the remains of President Kennedy at the Requiem Mass, November 25, 1963, before their removal to Arlington where they lie in expectation of a heavenly resurrection."

I think often of Bobby's grief over the loss of Jack. It veered close to being a tragedy within the tragedy. Ethel and my mother feared for his own survival; his psychic survival at least. His friend and chronicler Arthur Schlesinger has recorded how Bobby spent the night before Jack's funeral alone in the Lincoln Bedroom, and how his longtime friend Charles Spaulding, upon leaving Bobby there and closing the door, heard him dissolve into sobs and cry out, "
Why, God?!
" He seemed to age physically. He would spend hours without speaking a word.