Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [174]
The other commemoration she requested was quite different. She’d clearly given it careful thought. NASA’s Apollo 5 mission was set for takeoff in January 1964. The president had mentioned the launch in recent speeches. She asked that her husband’s initials be placed on a tiny corner of the great Saturn rocket where no one would even see them.
To White, she also talked about Jack’s last look at life, that instant when the end came, out of nowhere during that Dallas motorcade. “You know when he was shot, he had such a wonderful expression on his face,” she told him. “You know that wonderful expression he had when they’d ask him a question about one of the ten million gadgets they have on a rocket, just before he answered? He looked puzzled.”
I think we know that expression. It was a look he gave when he’d conjured up a witty answer at a press conference. It was the startled but pleased expression of a guy who’s just figured something out. His friends as far back as Choate knew it well and remembered it.
Jacqueline Kennedy had come a long way that week. A short piece of film recently unearthed shows us a slender, dark-haired young woman—seemingly no more than a girl—racing to catch up to a gurney. She is a woman chasing after her love.
Within hours she’d assumed the reins of command, designing and staging a magnificent funeral. It was Lincolnesque with its horseless rider, the boots of the lost hero turned backward. There were the drums, relentless, insistent, hammering their bleak reality. Soldiers die to the sound of drums.
“Jackie was extraordinary,” Ben Bradlee would write after watching her from close up that weekend. “Sometimes she seemed completely detached, as if she were someone else watching the ceremony of that other person’s grief.” Still at the age Jack had been when he married her, she was observing the whole scene as if, really, she weren’t a part of it.
Jack had, as Arthur Schlesinger described it, “to an exceptional degree, the gift of friendship.” As Jim Reed, his navy friend, put it: “each of us had a certain role we were cast into, whether we knew it or not.” The night they lost their leader, Ken O’Donnell, Dave Powers, and Larry O’Brien had headed up Wisconsin Avenue to Gawler’s Funeral Home to pick out a coffin. The Irish mafia, the men Jack loved, were doing what their people do. The Irish are good with death. That Saturday night—the day after the horror—Dave delighted Jackie with stories of her husband before she knew him, of his endless climbs up the stairs of those wooden “three-deckers” in the old 11th Congressional District. Dave said he’d hoped that Jack would have one day come to his wake up in Charlestown.
Ken O’Donnell would be haunted by what he saw as his role in the tragedy. Before Jack had given anyone else a job, he’d handed him his: to protect him. It was impossible to forget that he, Ken O’Donnell, had been in charge of the Secret Service covering his friend, and he’d been the one urging Jack to make the trip to Texas.
I would get to know some of these men who’d been part of Jack’s story. Billy Sutton was one, the first guy hired, just off the train from the army. One day in the 1980s, I walked into a back room in Speaker Tip O’Neill’s suite of offices up in Boston. There was this little fellow sitting at a table. Moment by moment he would transform himself. One instant, he’d be Adlai Stevenson, gravely addressing the General Assembly. Next, he’d be Rose Kennedy, her voice high and churchy. It was as if she were standing there before me. No wonder Jack had called Billy his “firecracker.”
Tip O’Neill, as you can tell from this book, was rich in stories, each shining with a love of the game that bonded him and Kennedy.
Jack’s closest friends have helped me answer that question he himself gave for the reason people read biography. What was he like? Once, when I got Charlie Bartlett remembering his friend, he took his glasses off to dry his eyes as he thought