CHAPTER TEN
I badly wanted to add my voice to the issues in the headlines, but I knew it was too soon. I first needed to establish my legitimacy as a lawmaker worthy of this office, and erase the perception that I was merely the president's little brother. Building a record of independent achievement and judgment would require time and patience. My core obligation was to Massachusetts, its people, and their interests. I would focus on this obligation while I continued to study the Senate as an institution and learn its folkways.
My interest in Massachusetts is not simply or even primarily strategic. The state and the city of my birth are extensions of myself and my family. From my Boston office on the twenty-fourth floor of the John F. Kennedy Federal Building, I can look out the window next to my desk and see the lines wending across space and time. I can see where my grandfather was born, and the house where my mother was born on Garden Court Street. But for a few buildings I could see where my father was born on Meridian Street in East Boston. And as I look out at Boston Harbor, I see where all eight of my great-grandparents arrived from Ireland and walked up the Golden Steps and into the hope and promise that is America.
When I arrived in Washington, I studied the Senate. I read its history. I worked hard to keep abreast of concerns that would make a difference in the lives of everyday people, like those back home.
So many of the events of 1963, both grave and trivial, are burned into my memory. For the exact dates of some of them, I have needed to consult the records. Taken as a whole, they contribute to the mosaic of America in the year that everything changed.
The issue of civil rights for African Americans was continuing to press forward. Yet some, like Governor George Wallace of Alabama, were determined to fight against it for as long as possible. Upon being sworn in at the State House in Montgomery, where Jefferson Davis had been inaugurated president of the Confederacy 102 years earlier, Wallace declared, "Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!"
On April 3, the Reverend Dr. King began his campaign of nonviolent protests in Birmingham with peaceful "sit-ins" at segregated restaurants. Nine days later, on Good Friday, Police Chief Bull Connor arrested King, the latter knowing full well he was violating an injunction against protests. Shortly thereafter, Connor unleashed his Dobermans and electric cattle prods on the demonstrators in the streets, escalating the brutality again in early May by knocking Negro schoolchildren off their feet with spray from fire hoses. Firebombings began, as well as rioting.
On June 11, my brother had to federalize National Guard troops, which in turn had to push aside Governor Wallace from an entrance to the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa to permit the lawful entry of two Negro students. In the evening, Jack gave a nationally televised speech in which he set out his views on the crisis. His speech was historic and went further than any president before him in laying out the moral issues at stake, and it laid the groundwork for the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
"We are confronted primarily with a moral issue. It is as old as the Scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution... whether we are going to treat our fellow Americans as we want to be treated."
He asked citizens to search their consciences: "If an American, because his skin is dark, cannot eat lunch in a restaurant open to the public, if he cannot send his children to the best public school available, if he cannot vote for the public officials who will represent him... who among us would then be content with the counsels of patience and delay?"
He pledged that he would ask Congress to make a commitment to "the proposition that race has no place in American life or law." It was the most powerful statement my brother had yet given on civil rights.
A little over two weeks later, on June 26, 1963, after a visit to the wall that the Soviets had erected to pen in those who would flee from communist control, President Kennedy stood in the Rudolph Wilde Platz in West Berlin to address a cheering crowd of at least 150,000. A fortnight earlier, he had told the American people in a different context that "this nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free." Echoing those sentiments, he told the people of Berlin, "Freedom is indivisible, and when one man is enslaved, all are not free."
He continued:
When all are free, then we can look forward to that day when this city will be joined as one and this country and this great Continent of Europe in a peaceful and hopeful globe. When that day finally comes, as it will, the people of West Berlin can take sober satisfaction in the fact that they were in the front lines for almost two decades.
All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin, and, therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words "Ich bin ein Berliner."
I believe it was one of the finest speeches my brother ever gave. He inspired hope in an oppressed people. He delivered a message about the need for all men to be free that was consistent at home and abroad. And although he was a realist about the time it would take and the work that had to be done to achieve his vision of freedom and equality, he understood the importance of building alliances, challenging the best in people, and sowing goodwill.
On that same trip, President Kennedy made his first and last visit to Ireland, a time he often described as the happiest of his presidency. Jean, the future ambassador to Ireland, and Eunice accompanied him, along with Dave Powers and Larry O'Brien. He said on one of his stops, "When my great-grandfather left here to become a cooper in East Boston, he carried nothing with him except two things: a strong religious faith and a strong desire for liberty. I am glad to say that all of his great-grandchildren have valued that inheritance." As in so many things, I agree with my brother completely.
When he left Ireland, so moved by the reception and filled with love of his ancestral home, he told the Irish people, "I certainly will come back in the springtime."
On August 7, not quite eight months pregnant and feeling unexpected labor pains, Jackie telephoned for medical help from the Hyannis Port house and was rushed by helicopter to the Otis Air Force Base hospital in Falmouth. There, shortly after noon, Patrick Bouvier Kennedy was born via cesarean section. Bobby telephoned me the following night to report that the infant was in critical condition and that I had better get to Otis. At around four the next morning, before I was able to leave, Dave Powers called me with the news that Patrick had died. The cause was hyaline membrane disease, better known today as respiratory distress syndrome.
Jack met me at the hospital. On our way to Jackie's room, he emphasized the importance of keeping his wife's spirits up. I stayed with the two of them for an hour. It was evident that each was trying to bolster the spirits of the other.
Jack kept stoic about his loss, but those of us closest to him could see how he suffered. When he and Jackie returned to the Cape, Jack invited me over for a swim. He had John Jr. with him, and as we swam and then walked on the beach, Jack was absorbed in everything that his small son was doing. In the few months left to him, my brother showed an even greater preoccupation with the activities of his son and daughter than I had seen before. And he was concerned for Jackie, who took this loss as a tremendous blow. Over these months of diplomatic crisis, pivotal legislation, and cross-country travel, Jack's greatest concern was for his wife's and children's welfare.
On August 9, the day of the infant Patrick's death, President Kennedy set aside his anguish long enough to confer honorary U.S. citizenship on Winston Churchill. My brother honored the British statesman, absent from the ceremony because of infirmities, with his stirring remarks: "In the dark days and darker nights, when England stood alone, and all save Englishmen despaired of England's life, he mobilized the English language and sent it into battle."
Late August brought the March on Washington, nearly three hundred thousand demonstrators, mostly but not exclusively black, from across the United States. The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom had been organized by the most illustrious civil rights leaders of that era. A. Philip Randolph, president of the International Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, who had nearly brought off a similar event in 1941, conceived the idea. The planners included Dr. King; the elder statesman of the movement Bayard Rustin; John Lewis of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; Roy Wilkins of the NAACP; James Farmer of CORE; and Whitney Young of the National Urban League.
The general purpose of the march was to promote racial equality, but that message did not mean the same thing to all people. Most of the marchers supported the president's proposed civil rights legislation, but some were angry that it didn't go far enough. Malcolm X had declared the entire thing a farce and threatened to kick out any member of the Nation of Islam who attended. And to top it all off, the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party were expected to show up.
I had talked to the president about going down for it, but Jack thought that my presence might be counterproductive. I didn't want to be the catalyst that set things off between those who supported the legislation and those who thought it didn't go far enough. Violence was a concern, and Jack advised me to wait and see how things developed.
I still wanted to attend, however, and wrestled with the decision up until August 28, the day of the march. Jack thought that I should be in my office to greet any of the people who might come there, and in the end that's what I did. Still, I managed to slip out of the Capitol at one point, unnoticed and alone, and make my way to the Reflecting Pool, which seemed to be surrounded by thousands of people. It was an awesome sight. I walked back to my office and watched the speeches on television. That is where I saw Dr. King rise to deliver his prepared remarks about Negro suffering and aspirations for freedom. (As I learned later, leaders of the march had agreed with law enforcement officials that a longer speech with passionate rhetoric could conceivably trigger a riot in the nation's capital.)
I listened to those remarks and watched as Dr. King finished and turned to sit down and then abruptly turned back to the crowd. Although I could not distinguish her, and her voice was not picked up by the microphones, the great gospel singer Mahalia Jackson had blurted out to Dr. King from behind him, "Tell them about your dream, Martin! Tell them about the dream!" And Martin Luther King did. In a decade in which cataclysmic events inspired lasting oratory, the Georgia-born minister spontaneously delivered the great aria of the civil rights movement.
I was riveted, listening to the amplified cadences that echoed into my ears and into history. And if I hadn't been before, from Grampa's lessons of discrimination, from my own awakening to the plight of African Americans in our own nation, I was, that day in Washington, D.C., fully baptized into the civil rights movement. The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had spoken of his dream that had become my own.
Through all the turmoil of 1963, the swelling crises in South Vietnam and the American South, and through his own and Jackie's deep sorrows over the loss of Patrick Bouvier Kennedy, Jack kept touch with his capacity for playfulness and laughter. His laughter was a gift--to him, but also to all of us around him. His laughter is among the things I miss the most about him to this day.
He enjoyed guiding me through my initial months in the Senate, and his enjoyment continued through that summer. He knew all of my colleagues very well; he understood them, and when he heard reactions and reports from them about me, he would let me know what they said. On some evenings he would call me at my Senate office, often on short notice, and say he was going down for a swim; would I like to join him? We'd wind up our swim at around 8 p.m., and then talk until perhaps nine. Afterward, we'd go up to the small dining room in his living quarters and there would be a dinner prepared in the oven, and not another soul present. The table would be set, and then maybe Dave Powers or another of his friends would drop by and we'd dine. Jack would continue the conversation until ten or ten-thirty, when he'd retire to his room and start to read through reports before going to sleep.
Other times, Jack would call me just to come over and smoke a cigar with him on the balcony. He'd sit in his rocking chair, holding a cigar that he didn't pay much attention to after it was lit, and ask me questions about my colleagues. He, of course, knew them much better than I did, and I learned a lot from his queries. But mostly I just enjoyed the camaraderie of being with my brother.
When I say that the president knew and understood my colleagues very well, I am understating the case. Jack's perception of senators and congressmen, especially the key ones, was extraordinary. One Christmas Eve, before I was in the Senate, the two of us had been together in Palm Beach. We'd just been for a swim, and as we were changing clothes we fell into a discussion about one of Jack's favorite topics, the Civil War. We were trying to recall the name of a famous battle fought in 1863, in which the Confederate forces halted a Union advance into Georgia at a terrible cost of lives on both sides. The battle's name was an Indian one, and Jack, for the life of him, couldn't recall it. Neither could I.
"Dick Russell will know the answer," Jack said. He meant of course Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, who was then chairman of the Armed Services Committee. "You're going to call up Richard Russell on Christmas Eve and ask him about a Civil War battle?" I asked. Jack nodded.
"Where are you even going to find him?"
"In his office," Jack answered matter-of-factly. He called the Capitol operator and asked to be put through to Senator Russell's office. "It's Christmas Eve, sir. Shouldn't I try him at home first?" No, my brother assured her, he really did mean the office. Of course, he was right.
Russell came on the line. "That's Chickamauga you're talkin' about," he told Jack. And proceeded to give him a detailed account of the threeday battle. There was some friendly dispute between them over which side actually won.
"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.
He delayed returning to his duties as attorney general; he found it difficult to concentrate on anything or do substantive work. Hope seemed to have died within him, and there followed months of unrelenting melancholia. He went through the motions of everyday life, but he carried the burden of his grief with him always.
I was so worried about Bobby that I tried to suppress my own grief. I felt that I had to be strong for my parents and the family. Maybe it's more accurate to say that I was afraid to allow grief to swallow me up. So I just pushed it down further and further inside.
In mid-January 1964, while Bobby was still attorney general and before he made up his mind to resign and run for the Senate from New York, President Johnson asked him to visit the Far East to negotiate a cease-fire between Indonesia and Malaysia. He was to meet in Japan with Sukarno, the enlightened but volatile Indonesian president who had helped his country win its independence from the Netherlands. Now Sukarno, suspicious at Malaysia's recent federation agreement with Great Britain, had launched a guerrilla war against the neighboring state. Bobby's official mission was to act as peacemaker; but Johnson also hoped that the assignment would lift his spirits.
Johnson, so often perceived by Bobby as an adversary, had on this occasion performed a valuable act of compassion. Bobby invited Ethel along, and her companionship, along with the trip itself, broke my brother's cycle of depression. In Japan, Bobby and Ethel witnessed a tumultuous outpouring of friendship from the people, who wanted to show their respect and love for John Kennedy through Bobby's presence. I believe that that reception restored his faith that life was worth living after all, and that President Kennedy had achieved something lasting and worthwhile.
Late in 1964, Bobby asked me to review the Warren Commission's newly released report on the assassination because emotionally he couldn't do it. The commission had been established by President Johnson seven days after Jack was killed in Dallas, and was charged with determining who had shot Jack, and why. Johnson appointed Earl Warren, the former California governor and chief justice, to chair the commission. Its conclusion, made public in an 888-page document released in September, was that Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone in killing Jack and wounding the Texas governor John Connally, who was riding in the open limousine with my brother and the wives of both men.
When I reached him by telephone, Warren told me he would be glad to give me a briefing and go over the parts of the report that were particularly contentious and likely to generate the most questions from the press and public. I remember the commission's office as large but spare, about half the size of the attorney general's office. I believe that Warren had one aide, perhaps a law clerk, present at the meeting. I almost certainly brought an aide along with me.
Warren gave me a full briefing, as I'd requested. I asked many questions. The whole process took about four hours. Afterward, I reported to Bobby that I accepted the commission's report and thought he should too.
Bobby agreed readily. He did not want to continue to investigate Jack's death. Earl Warren, moreover, was a strong advocate for the accuracy of the report. He told me quite persuasively that he'd felt a responsibility to the nation to get it right. He personally made the case to me, showing me its weaknesses and walking me through the thinking of the commission members.
I am well aware that many scholars and others have questioned the findings ever since they were released. There have been hundreds of socalled conspiracy theories. I was satisfied that the Warren Commission got it right: satisfied then, and satisfied now. I'm always reluctant to speak for my brother, but I know how strongly Bobby felt that it was imperative that this inquiry be thorough and accurate. In all my subsequent conversations with him, when all was said and done, I believe that Bobby accepted the Warren Commission findings too.
I must speak of what I believe to be another tragic outcome of the bullets fired in Dallas that November. Toward midsummer 1963, I was aware that my brother had qualms about Vietnam. He felt that we needed a new and different direction. He had a growing understanding that the conflict could not be resolved militarily, and I feel very strongly that he certainly would not have escalated it. I witnessed elements of this process unfolding, and Jack affirmed it to me himself in private conversations. The situation troubled him. He said that Vietnam must belong to the Vietnamese. He had spoken with McNamara about a plan for withdrawal within two or three years.
Jack's antenna was set up to find a way out. And I am convinced that he was on his way to finding that way out. He just never got the chance.
In the days and weeks following Jack's death, I sought to keep the grief from disabling me. After the funeral, I returned to the Cape to look after my parents. In fact, this time with my father proved a tremendous source of comfort to me. Even though he was disabled, Dad could find ways to communicate his thoughts, and I was there to hear them. My father had reserves of strength that I could draw upon.
I felt that I was needed by my parents now more than ever. And so I would say to myself in moments of despair, There might be a time when you can give way to your own feelings, but not now, not in front of Dad. And so, hour by hour, I learned to contain my grief, to not give way to it.
I drew from my parents both strength and inspiration. I would say to myself, Mother is holding up. The last thing she needs is for me to break down or give way to a flood of tears.
I took long walks on the beach. I was still filled with such disbelief that Jack was gone. And then the truth of it would burn through this illusion. It was in those moments, when I was out of sight of anyone else, just the sea on one side of me and the sand on the other, that I would let go of my self-control.
It never occurred to me to seek professional help or grief counseling of any kind. The times were different then. But I prayed and I thought and I prayed some more.