The House of Kennedy(42)
Morgenthau, with whom Bobby had served in the navy, can immediately see the “shock and horror” on his face. After about a minute, Bobby repeats Hoover’s message to his guests. Bobby has calls to make upstairs, but, Morgenthau says, “We didn’t want to leave him.”
Bobby remembers talking to Secret Service agent Clint Hill: “I asked if they’d gotten a priest, and they said they had.” He waits by the phone in his home office. “Clint Hill called me back, and I think it was about thirty minutes after I talked to Hoover…and he said, ‘The President’s dead.’”
Bobby rejoins his guests in the television room. “Jack is dead,” he tells Morgenthau. “We were just in shock,” the US attorney recalls. “We just couldn’t believe what we were hearing. Then he got up and walked out and left us.”
Bobby’s aides pour into Hickory Hill, where US marshals set up security detail. With his black Newfoundland dog, Brumus, trailing behind, Bobby walks the grounds with Edwin Guthman, the public information director for the Justice Department, confiding his fears that his relentless crusades against crime or Communism could have brought this violence on Jack. “There’s so much bitterness,” Bobby says to Guthman. “I thought they would get one of us, but Jack, after all he’s been through, never worried about it…I thought it would be me.”
“Did the CIA kill my brother?” Bobby demands of the agency’s director, John McCone, not long after the assassination. He is never satisfied with McCone’s answer of no.
“He had the most wonderful life,” Bobby assures his children of their uncle. But his composure is cracking. Ethel hands her husband a pair of dark glasses. Soon he must prepare to meet Air Force One at Andrews Field.
Once the plane lands, newly sworn in President Lyndon Johnson will take possession of the Oval Office—and all the secrets of the Kennedy administration contained within. Bobby orders national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy to change the combinations to Jack’s locked file cabinets and to remove the recording equipment installed there and in the Cabinet Room.
After he dispatches Ted and Eunice to Hyannis Port to tell Joe and Rose the news, settles Jean and Jackie in the White House residence, and consults with Sargent Shriver on the funeral arrangements, Bobby tries to rest. Chuck Spalding walks him to the Lincoln Bedroom, offering a sleeping pill, which Bobby accepts. “God, it’s so awful. Everything was really beginning to run so well,” Bobby tells Spalding, keeping control of his emotions until his friend closes the door.
“Then I just heard him break down…I heard him say, “Why, God?”
Chapter 27
Bobby grapples with his grief by means of a striking physicality.
In Hobe Sound, Florida, not long after the funeral, Kennedy aides take up a brutal game of touch football. “People were smashing into each other to try and forget that John Kennedy was dead,” Pierre Salinger observes, “and Bobby was one of the toughest guys in the game.”
Even so, Bobby tells Washington friends, “I don’t think there is much left for me in this town.” The friends are alarmed at the sight of his gaunt figure dressed in his brother’s clothes—Jack’s leather bomber jacket with the presidential seal, or his tweed overcoat, or his navy sea coat. Bobby, a nonsmoker, holds the silver cigarette case that commemorates Jack’s defeat of Nixon. The inscription reads: “When I’m through, how about you?”
Adults attempt to comfort Bobby, but one child dares to confront him with the truth. “Your brother’s dead! Your brother’s dead!” journalist Peter Maas recalls a boy of around seven shouting at Bobby during a Christmas party for orphans. The event is Bobby’s first public outing since the funeral, and everyone in the room is aghast. “The little boy knew he had done something wrong, but he didn’t know what; so he started to cry,” Maas reports. “Bobby stepped forward and picked him up, in kind of one motion, and held him very close for a moment, and he said, ‘That’s all right. I have another brother.’”
And he has eight children. The day before Jack’s funeral, he writes each of them a letter and instructs his siblings to do the same with their children. “It was natural for Bobby to take charge,” Ted recalls. “He’s been sort of a second father to us.” To Joe, Jack’s godson and Bobby’s oldest son, Bobby writes, “Remember all the things that Jack started—be kind to others that are less fortunate than we—and love our country.”
Of his work at the Justice Department, Bobby says, “I don’t have the heart for it right now,” and through the end of 1963 he remains at Hickory Hill.
The naturally bright atmosphere at Hickory Hill turns somber. “At this breakfast, not long after my uncle’s death,” Bobby’s son Michael remembers, “my father had the discipline to tell the older children to write down the significance of Jack’s death to the United States.” Although Michael was only five years old at the time, he says, “I remember that incident very, very well. I remember thinking, Oh, I’m glad I don’t have to do that yet.”
Kathleen Kennedy Townsend (the eldest of Bobby and Ethel’s children) remembers the typical ambiance of Hickory Hill as a “wild, informal mixture of a children’s playground, upbeat discotheque, and a humming political headquarters.” Her childhood home bustled with “lots of kids. There were plenty of horses, many dogs, chickens, geese, goats. It was a menagerie…my brother Bobby collected reptiles. And actually the turtle was in the laundry room. The sea lion was in the swimming pool.”