The Kennedy compound at Hyannis Port is plunged into chaos. “It seemed impossible that the same kind of disaster could befall our family twice in five years,” Rose later writes in her memoir. Joe Kennedy Sr.’s nurse, Rita Dallas, observes the matriarch grappling with a deeply personal pain. “With Jack, it was the death of the president,” Dallas reflects. “With Bobby, it was the death of a son.” There are unfounded rumors that the news of Bobby’s death has killed Joe Sr.; it has not. He watches the live television coverage along with the rest of the nation.
When Air Force One arrives in Los Angeles to retrieve Bobby’s body, the NBC News reporter Sander Vanocur observes, “It somehow seems ironic that on afternoons very much like this, Air Force jets bear the bodies of male Kennedys out of the west back to their resting places in the east.” Though the flight manifest was not made public, on the night of June 6, David Brinkley reports on the pathos of the journey taken “in one airplane [by] three widows of three American public figures murdered by assassins”—Jackie, Coretta Scott King, and now Ethel—seen by the Secret Service agent Paul Sweeney “consoling one another.”
Bobby lies in state at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, a site chosen by Stephen Smith to differentiate Bobby’s funeral from Jack’s in Washington, DC, and also as a symbolic homecoming for the New York senator. After a private family service on June 7, nearly one hundred and fifty thousand mourners line twenty-five blocks as they wait to file past Bobby’s casket.
On June 8, hundreds of Washington notables headed by President Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson, plus Hollywood stars and civil rights dignitaries, join the Kennedys for the funeral. Cardinal Richard Cushing says the televised High Requiem Mass, just as he did for Jack.
Ted steps to the flag-draped coffin and delivers a roll call of Kennedy siblings lost. “Joe and Kathleen, Jack” he intones, his voice breaking with emotion. And now Bobby. All three of his brothers are dead. All killed while serving their country.
To break the hold of unbearable grief, friends try to summon up some of Bobby’s mischievous spirit. Of the solemn but lengthy service, one of them says to Richard Harwood of the Washington Post, “If it had gone on much longer, Bobby would have started kicking the box.”
But the day of mourning has barely begun. In a nod to Abraham Lincoln’s historic funeral train, the Kennedys and seven hundred guests fill twenty-one train cars and embark from New York’s Pennsylvania Station. The 226-mile route runs through New Jersey, Baltimore, and into Washington’s Union Station.
Over a million people of all colors line the route, waving, saluting, and holding up signs as the train passes by. “So long Bobby”; “We love you.” The outpouring for Bobby prompts Life magazine reporter Sylvia Wright to ask herself, What did he have that he could do this to people?
Whatever it was Bobby possessed, Ethel is heartened to see the spark of it in her eldest son as the sixteen-year-old greets those on board the train, dressed in his father’s suit and exuding that same charisma. “I’m Joe Kennedy, thank you for coming,” he tells fellow passengers.
“He’s got it! He’s got it!” his mother crows.
When they arrive in DC, the family draws deep on their well of strength as they disembark at nine in the evening for the final procession toward Arlington National Cemetery.
As Bobby’s casket travels along the National Mall near the Lincoln Memorial, it passes among the peaceful demonstrators whose presence he inspired. The march that he had suggested Marian Wright bring to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had coalesced into the “Poor People’s Campaign,” which had marched on Washington on Mother’s Day, May 12, about five weeks after King’s own assassination. The demonstrators had set up a makeshift encampment called “Resurrection City” on the National Mall ever since. Jesse Jackson, who acted as mayor of the encampment, recalls, “We were still traumatized by Dr. King’s assassination. Then while in Resurrection City, Robert Kennedy was killed.”
At Arlington, Lady Bird Johnson looks up at “a great white moon riding high in the sky.” On the ground, the cemetery is dark, lit only by mourners’ candles and television cameras. The pallbearers lose their way to the gravesite, thirty yards from Jack’s. In accordance with Bobby’s wishes, it will be marked with a plain white cross.
“Somehow the Kennedys draw the lightning,” the New York Times columnist James Reston writes as the world mourns. “They seem to be able to save everything but themselves.”
Chapter 34
The Kennedys do go on to Chicago that summer, though not to the Democratic national convention. On July 20, 1968, Eunice Kennedy Shriver launches the first Special Olympics Games at Chicago’s Soldier Field.
The newest Olympians are all disabled young people, coached by professional athletes in events broadcast on national television. “When she [Eunice] told me what she wanted, I thought, ‘Nobody is going to watch this, a bunch of crippled kids running around,’” recalls sports host Frank Gifford, whose daughter Victoria would go on to marry Bobby’s son Michael in 1981. But the former New York Giants running back quickly came around. “We captured it all on film, and it was one of the most moving things I have ever done. It took away the despair and the fear. They were just kids having fun. After we put it on television, we picked up crowds all over the country. No one could tell her it wouldn’t work.” Coverage expands in 1979 with a two-hour ABC special, and in 1987 on Wide World of Sports.
U.S. News & World Report later pronounces in a 1993 cover story, “When the full judgment of the Kennedy legacy is made—including JFK’s Peace Corps and Alliance for Progress, Robert Kennedy’s passion for civil rights and Ted Kennedy’s efforts on health care, workplace reform and refugees—the changes wrought by Eunice [Kennedy] Shriver may well be seen as the most consequential.”
The success of the Special Olympics is a bright spot in an otherwise dark time in the Kennedy family. Less than three months after Bobby’s death, in the last week of August 1968, party leaders callously pit a deceased brother against a grieving one on the floor of the Democratic national convention. Johnson has long openly preferred Ted to Bobby (“I like Teddy. He’s good”), but it’s a low blow when Eugene McCarthy declares to Ted via his brother-in-law Stephen Smith, “I wouldn’t support your brother.”
Many whose lives Bobby touched are struggling in his absence.
When asked to name a favorite among her nine children, Rose always gives the same answer. “I do not have a favorite,” Jean remembers her mother insisting. “Every one of you brings your own unique quality to this family and I love you all the same.”
But Bobby is the only one Rose calls “my little pet,” the one whose bond with children and animals draw comparisons to Saint Francis of Assisi. “It is so very difficult to speak of him,” Rose tearfully tells Look magazine not long after his death.
Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who ultimately becomes the 1968 Democratic presidential nominee but loses the election to Richard Nixon, senses that Bobby’s death brought down the entire party. “I said it and I meant it that the bullet that shot and killed Bobby Kennedy fatally wounded me…Had Bobby lived I think there’d have been a Democrat in the White House.”