The House of Kennedy(89)
Yet the latest pieces of the Kennedy story are emerging in fragments.
In a hangar at the U.S. Coast Guard Air Station on Cape Cod, investigators for the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) recover pieces of John’s Piper Saratoga II, assembling them in an approximation of the aircraft’s pre-crash configuration. The propeller shows “rotational damage” indicative of hitting the water while turning.
On July 6, 2000, the NTSB issues its Aviation Accident Final Report, citing pilot failure as the cause of the accident, and further explaining that “spatial disorientation as a result of continued VFR flight into adverse weather conditions is regularly near the top of the cause/factor list in annual statistics on fatal aircraft accidents.”
John “made a stupid mistake,” says Andrew Ferguson, president of Air Bound Aviation that operates out of Essex County Airport. “Like going through a stop sign. But when a Kennedy goes through a stop sign, there always seems to be an 18-wheeler truck coming from the other side.”
CODA
By November 1969, lingering complications from Joe Kennedy Sr.’s 1961 stroke have turned end-stage. He’s lost his appetite, his eyesight, his ability to breathe without the assistance of an oxygen tank.
“My poor Joe. How cruel, how cruel,” Rose murmurs as she sits by her eighty-one-year-old husband’s bedside. They have been married for fifty-five years.
On November 15, Jackie arrives with kind words for her beloved “Grandpa.”
“I know he could sense the tears in her eyes,” Joe’s nurse, Rita Dallas, says.
Pat and Jean are next to arrive, then Eunice and Sargent Shriver. “Now,” Dallas says, “Mr. Kennedy seemed to exist for only one thing—the sound of Teddy’s footsteps.”
Not four months have passed since Ted delivered his televised speech on Chappaquiddick from his father’s house. “Dad, I’ve done the best I can,” he said to Joe that night. “I’m sorry.”
On November 16, Joe fails to recognize the sound of Ted’s voice.
“Please answer me,” Ted says, but Joe cannot. His father is dying, and Ted is convinced that his actions have pushed Joe toward his grave. “The pain of the burden was almost unbearable,” he says.
On November 18, Rose brings a rosary to her husband’s lips, then wraps it around his clasped hands resting on his chest.
The children are gathered in a semicircle around his bed. Eunice begins to recite the Lord’s Prayer: “Our Father, who art in Heaven / Hallowed be thy name.”
In turn, each sibling speaks a line. “Thy Kingdom come / Thy will be done / On earth, as it is in Heaven.”
“Amen,” Rose says, in blessing on the creator of the House of Kennedy.
He is dead.
*
Joe is buried in the Kennedy family plot at the Hollyhood Cemetery in Brookline, Massachusetts.
“As the twenty funeral cars moved away,” the Boston Herald reports, “a woman in black, appearing to be in her sixties, knelt alone in front of the grave. She remained there for several minutes. The woman, who was well-dressed, walked alone and declined to give her name.”
*
“I wonder if the true story of Joe Kennedy will ever be known,” Rose Kennedy once said, according to an essay by Gore Vidal for the New York Review of Books. The same question is asked of any and all Kennedys, as the family story continues to be written—and lived.
In 2010, Juan Romero, the busboy who comforted Bobby Kennedy on the night he was shot, has more to say to Kennedy, and in person. Dressed in the first suit he ever owned, he travels to Arlington National Cemetery and stands at Kennedy’s grave, marked with a plain white cross.
“I felt like I needed to ask Kennedy to forgive me for not being able to stop those bullets from harming him. When I wore the suit and I stood in front of his grave, I felt a little bit like that first day I met him. I felt important. I felt American. And I felt good.”
As JFK himself predicted on October 26, 1963, days before his death, “A nation reveals itself not only by the men it produces but also by the men it honors, the men it remembers.”
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Photos
Twenty-six-year-old Joseph P. Kennedy and Twenty-four-year-old Rose Fitzgerald on their wedding day in Boston, October 7, 1914. (Photo by Morgan Collection/Getty Images)
Rose and Joe Sr. at their beloved family vacation home, “La Guerida,” in Palm Beach, bought at a bargain price during the Depression. It’s later nicknamed the “Kennedy Winter White House” once Jack begins using it as a presidential retreat. (Photo above by Morgan Collection/Getty Images. Photo left by Donald Uhrbrock/The LIFE Images Collection via Getty Images/Getty Images)
Rose and Joe Sr. at their beloved family vacation home, “La Guerida,” in Palm Beach, bought at a bargain price during the Depression. It’s later nicknamed the “Kennedy Winter White House” once Jack begins using it as a presidential retreat. (Photo above by Morgan Collection/Getty Images. Photo left by Donald Uhrbrock/The LIFE Images Collection via Getty Images/Getty Images)