Just Jackie by Edward Klein (web based ebook reader txt) 📗

learns must suffer. And even in our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.

Bobby exhibited all the classic symptoms of a severe depression. He had trouble sleeping at night, and was preoccupied with thoughts of death. He appeared physically diminished by his brother’s assassination, as though he had actually shrunk. He was forever wearing Jack’s old garments, as if he was trying to grow into his brother’s clothes.

Deep creases were etched across his forehead and down the sides of his mouth. His thick mop of hair was suddenly splashed with gray. His blue eyes, which had once seemed so bright and steely, were now dimmed by sadness. There was a tentative quality to the way he talked. He groped for words, unable to express the things he felt.

“[A] large part of Robert Kennedy’s agony stemmed from his fear that one of his campaigns—whether organized crime, union racketeers, Castro, or white supremacists, or right-wing forces within the government itself—had invited retaliation upon his brother,” writes James W. Hilty, a Bobby biographer.

“I thought they would get one of us,” Bobby confessed to a friend on the afternoon of the assassination. “But Jack, after all he’d been through, never worried about it. … I thought it would be me.”

Guilt weighed heavily on Bobby, and he lost his old vigor and zest for life. He had trouble keeping up with Jackie on the beach, because he had recently injured a leg in a touch football game at the Florida home of Treasury Secretary C. Douglas Dillon.

“It was the roughest, wildest game I have ever seen,” Pierre Salinger, JFK’s press secretary, recalled. “Everybody was trying to get the hate and the anger out of their system. There had never been anything like it at Hyannis Port, Hickory Hill, or anywhere else. Bobby was absolutely relentless. He attacked the man with the ball like a tiger, slamming, bruising, and crushing, and so did everyone else. One guy broke a leg, and you couldn’t count the bloody noses and contusions. It was murder. I was never so battered in a game before. For a week I could hardly walk. Every bone in my body hurt.”

Bobby’s adjustment to life after Jack was eased by the attention he showered on Jackie and her children. It helped him get out of himself. He talked to Caroline and John about the greatness of their father. He took Jackie with him wherever he went. In February, she had accompanied him to the Waldorf Towers in New York City for a visit with ex-President Herbert Hoover.

“Bobby bossed his sister-in-law around, and said, ‘Jackie, sit there,’ ‘Jackie, do this,’ ‘Jackie, do that,’ “ Hoover’s nurse said.

Bobby had always been a commanding presence in Jackie’s life. He was the best man at her wedding in 1953. He was at her side three years later when Jackie had a stillbirth, and Jack could not be found on the yacht he had chartered in the Mediterranean. Bobby was at Andrews Air Force Base in Washington in November when Jackie brought Jack’s body back from Dallas. He put an arm around her and said quietly, “I’m here, Jackie.”

“Bobby’s the one I’d most gladly put my hand in the fire for,” Jackie said. “I wish Bobby were an amoeba, so he could divide in two…. He’s always there—helpful, willing … a blessing.”

All the sympathy, guilt, and hope that people felt for the dead President were now focused on Bobby. He was the repository of the Kennedy mystique, what Jackie called Camelot. High public office was available to him, though not the one he wanted the most, the vice presidency. Lyndon Johnson made sure of that. In order to avoid having Bobby on his ticket in 1964, the new President announced his intention to bypass all the members of his cabinet for the position.

Richard Goodwin, who was now writing speeches for LBJ, told Bobby, “If Johnson had to choose between you and Ho Chi Minh as a running mate, he’d go with Ho Chi Minh.”

Aloof, shy, and a poor public speaker, Bobby was not a natural politician. He was once described as “the least poised, the least articulate, and the least extroverted of the Kennedy brothers.” His high-strung personality, with its flashes of ruthlessness, seemed better suited to dark, smoke-filled rooms than to the bright lights of television. In Antigua, he talked with Jackie about retiring from the public arena.

She begged him not to quit, arguing that the country needed him now more than ever. As they talked, Bobby slowly came around to Jackie’s way of thinking. He told her that there was an opening for a Senate seat from New York. But he would have to establish his legal residence in the state. Jackie could not imagine living away from Bobby, and he urged her to follow him to New York if he made the move.

There were many who thought that Jackie secretly wished to replace Jack with Bobby. And it was true that if Bobby could have been divided in two, Jackie might have considered marrying the half that was allotted to her. But Bobby was not divisible; he was singularly devoted to his wife Ethel, who had just received the news that she was pregnant with number nine—tying Rose Kennedy’s record for childbearing.

Until the assassination, it was Ethel, not Jackie, who was the center of Bobby’s emotional life. But Ethel had stayed behind in Stowe, Vermont, skiing with her children, while Bobby flew down to Antigua to be with Jackie.

“Well, what are you going to do about it?” Bobby’s sister Eunice asked Ethel. “He’s spending an awful lot of time with the widder.”

A small court of friends gathered around Ethel to lend support. It was composed of such Washington social stalwarts as Martha Bartlett and Joan Braden, who resented Jackie’s husband-stealing ways. The Bobby-Jackie-Ethel triangle became the talk of the nation’s capital.

“I was aware