My Mother's Reflections on JFK's Memorial

My mother left behind this unfinished piece of writing that appears to have started as a letter to Jackie Kennedy after her husband's assassination. It describes in detail the impact his death had on our family and the powerful experience we had going to Washington DC for his memorial. I was nine at the time, and although it is one my most vivid childhood memories, her words fill in the picture in ways I could only recall viscerally.

Tonight, long after our two-year-old David should have been asleep, he called over and over again from his bed, “See Mr. Kennedy. See Mr. Kennedy— please!” What he wanted to see was the memorial album eleven-year-old Chris had asked for, and gotten, for Christmas. David looked at the picture on the front, then pointed out Mr. Kennedy in all the small photographs on the back, then lay down and went to sleep.

I have never been given to writing letters to public figures, but I have so often in this last month been struck by the poignancy of the remote corners into which this tragedy reached. And so, I add one more to the many condolences sent to you, But I want to add, in addition to the always inadequate expressions of grief and sympathy, a fleeting description of the way in which your personal loss seemed also more than a public loss to us, a family in some ways not unlike your own. Perhaps I do this not so much for you as for me. They are the sort of things I would like to know.

We felt the political affinity from the first, when my husband and I campaigned for you in Grinnell, Iowa, where he teaches drama at Grinnell College. We viewed the activities of you both in education and the arts with surprised enthusiasm and genuine relief — that we, and those like us, finally had a champion. But our interest in President Kennedy went farther than politics. My husband is also one of a large, Catholic family that has not only played touch football as long as I’ve known them but were also their own best friends as well as brothers. We never sat down and cited the similarities. But we were both aware that conversations which centered around politics and the President sometimes ended up as personal discussions without either of us being aware of the exact moment of transition.

My husband had seen your husband, (then Senator Kennedy) when he received an award at Notre Dame, where he was on the faculty in 1956. He had admired his wit and sensibilities and quoted him often during the campaign. But for the most part, Iowa is a long way from Washington and, his official capacity of President, John Kennedy still was an abstraction although a cherished one.

But our reaction this November was heightened because we have just begun a sabbatical leave in New York City. Our sensitivities were already sharp with this new experience of seeing performances instead of reviews, of listening to conversations, not interviews,. For two months we had been frantically groping to absorb as much as possible during our given time— of theatre, of New York life, of international affairs which seem so real here, We had walked around like open sores, wanting no insignificant contact to be lost and it was this state of vulnerability which undoubtedly made the shattering news so devastating. We wanted exhilaration, excitement. We did not want things to be this real.

In contrast to the detachment we might have felt last year, Dick who is doing a study of the Lincoln Center Repertory Theatre’s first year, heard of the event in the company of Elia Kazan and Arthur Miller, people whose despair was personal as well as public. At the first word of the shooting, Gadg (Kazan) called off rehearsal and the group adjourned to a room with a television set, where they waited out the woeful hour. Gadg had talked with Adlai Stevenson only two nights before and had heard Stevenson say that he feared the horrible thing that had showed itself in Dallas and that he thanked heaven for a strong president to deal with it. Gadg also recalled his personal contacts with President Kennedy and others of the Kennedy family. He so admires your zest for life, your ability to throw yourselves into both monumental tasks and good times with total involvement. When the last sad news came, the next rehearsal was cancelled and they left. (You have undoubtedly heard that Gadg has since suffered even more private loss when Mollie (his wife) died suddenly of a stroke on the very eve of the premiere of America, America.

We sat before the television set, like all Americans, from sign on to sign off for three days. Although there was no more to be learned, I think we believed that if we heard the initial fact often enough, perhaps we would comprehend it. Ours is not a television watching family, and neither six-year-old Beth or David are accustomed to being quieted for an hour of television, much less three days. But Beth watched with the same dazed persistence as Chris and nine-year-old Jenni, and even David seemed to catch the unhappy spirit enough to entertain himself without demands upon us.  The older children had earlier taught him to identify John John. (Dick and I had, in fact, been admittedly pleased when strangers, including a waitress in Jack Delaney’s only the day before, had commented that he looked just like John John) But it was during these days that he learned to identify President Kennedy, which he has been doing ever since with a trace of solemnity that suggests that he somehow recognizes a significance attached here even if he doesn’t understand it.

On Sunday evening we decided to go to Washington. I think the truth was simply that we wanted to be part of this thing that touched us so but in the logical arguments which we always feel essential to justify our impulses we agreed that this was a rare moment to show these midwestern children, for the most part far-removed from the scene of current events, that there is a difference between the fiction and the facts that they see on the television screen. We wanted them to know that this was real and now, and that it affected them. But it was not all our decision. As soon as it occurred to them that we were actually within a reasonable distance of Washington, they pleaded to go.

Caught without cash and still too new to New York City to find check-cashing on a Sunday night possible, I made everything in the house into sandwiches to last us for thirty hours. We took the gasoline credit card and the jarful of small change labelled “World’s Fair”,  which the children eagerly turned over to tollroad costs, we started out. As soon as we entered the New Jersey Turnpike at about ten o’clock, we knew that we were one of many. The road was full, and the sprinkling of diplomatic cars, still unfamiliar to us, lent an urgency to the pilgrimage which the most effective reporting could not have conveyed. You could tell even the private cars were heading for Washington. They were not occupied by single men or couples or families who usually travel at night, but they carried two couples or were crowded with six of seven people, without luggage. The licenses were from New York and Connecticut and New Hampshire, and the people in them were expressionless, probably listening to their radios as we were. We were aware of the unusual numbers of automobile breakdowns along the road and of the crowds in the service centers, probably attesting to the fact that we were not the only ones traveling on impulse, forgetting the preparations usually made before a journey.

We arrived in Washington at 3 a.m. We had wakened the children as we approached. It was for them as well as for me, an awesome and unforgettable first view of the city. The traffic was like midday, and the sidewalks near the Capitol were filled with people of all ages. We were overwhelmed by the stillness, like staring at an action film with the sound turned off. We noticed that even the young children we saw, taken from their beds at this hour walking for blocks in the biting cold, did not cry. I could not help but feel that right then, in that city, must have been the closest to peace the world has come in a long time.

We had known from the outset that a visit to the rotunda was unlikely. We drove around, following the endless line confirming it. The older children begged to try, but we convinced them that we would do better to find a vantage point from which they might see the cortege, for its route was already lined with people. For an hour we drove around just seeing the town we had only heard about. The Capitol did not seem at all the center of politics that night, but the heart of something a great deal more basic. The White House was not a public building but a home, and one that contained emotions we could understand.

At 4:30 a.m. we found place in a parking lot half block from the White House. For the first time, David cried, but he soon found a comfortable spot and went to sleep, as we all did until 7:00. Beth slept holding her Caroline doll which she received for her fifth birthday. She had long ago identified herself with Caroline. In fact her concern with the First Family had surprised and amused us when at three, soon after the inauguration, she had asked after watching the news that day, “Mother, who owns this country—God or Kennedy?”

At eight o’clock we left the car to claim a spot closer to the curb, for the crowd was already becoming dense. It was a long wait for the children but they knew that if they left their place it would not be fair to squeeze in again.  Beth was hungry and Jenni cried because her feet were cold, but they waited. And none of us will ever regret it, although we all agreed that it was the air of the city and the reaction of people everywhere that impressed us most. The important thing was the event and not the mourning of it. It was a moment of facing reality when we saw that in spite of the immensity of the emotions involved, the people and horses of the cortege were only life-size and the drums were not stereophonic. Someday I may regret that I neglected to point out to the children Johnson or DeGaulle or Prince Phillip, but I did not think of it at the moment.

We left Washington soon after. Instead of sleeping, the children exchanged their impressions for an hour or more. Later they lay back, quiet and resting, and we again listened to the radio reports and tributes. The road was crowded again, and in most of the cars only the driver was awake. It had been a long night for everyone.

While Dick and I continued during the following days to live in that awful daze that afflicted all Americans, the children took action in little ways. Jenni began to make a scrapbook, going through old magazines for all the pictures of President Kennedy that she could find. On the desk one day I found a drawing of half a dozen people, each standing in a pool of tears and each one with a little bubble that contained the laboriously printed words, “I love John F. Kennedy.” Another day I found a large seashell, treasured since the first visit to a real beach, inscribe with a magic marker, “John F. Kennedy, Assassinated November 22, 1963.” Our apartment is across the street from the Augustinian Academy on Staten Island and in the night I look

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