Free Kennedy Wives: Triumph and Tragedy in America's Most Public Family by David Batcher Amber Hunt, David Batcher Page A

arrived at the Cape that evening. It was decided that Joe would be told in the morning. When, after dinner, he wanted to watch TV, he was told that his bedroom television was broken, as was the one downstairs.
    Rose walked again on the beach, this time with Eunice. “We talked about Jack as if he were still alive,” Eunice would remember.
    Rose attended mass the next morning, escorted in her black veil past onlookers waiting outside St. Francis Xavier Church. After mass, she returned to the house but couldn’t bear to be present when Teddy, with Eunice standing next to him, told Joe that his son was dead. Joe sobbed.
    The next morning—Sunday, November 24—Rose, Teddy, Eunice, and nurse Rita Dallas flew to Washington. Joe stayed behind, in the care of his nursing staff and Father John Cavanaugh. The White House was filled with family, friends, and administration officials. Jackie’s mother, Janet Auchincloss, noticed that Rose stayed off to the side, the picture of lonely fortitude. Eunice’s husband, Sarge Shriver, remarked to Rose that she was holding up admirably.
    “What do people expect you to do?” she snapped at him. “You can’t just weep in a corner.”
    On Monday morning, Rose did not feel well enough to walk with the funeral procession from the White House to St. Matthew’s Basilica. Instead, she rode behind, in a limousine.
    After the burial, she met at the White House with some foreign dignitaries and Kick’s in-laws, the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire. She never once, in public, lost her composure.
    She flew back to Hyannis Port that night.
    In the aftermath of the assassination, Rose had trouble sleeping and would pace in her Hyannis room late at night. Damane and Librium, powerful (and at the time, very popular) antianxiety drugs, helped her sleep, but they were so potent that the night nurses were tasked with making sure she was awake on time for mass. Still, Rose declared, “I am not going to be licked by tragedy, as life is a challenge, and we must carry on and work for the living as well as mourn for the dead.”
    Though she tried to busy herself in the first six months after her son’s death by gathering materials for her autobiography, she generally turned down invitations during that time; it wasn’t until March of 1964 that she accepted an invitation to a ceremony marking the renaming of a Paris street in honor of JFK, the Avenue du Président Kennedy. Paris mourned the loss of JFK acutely, and “every place I went the French people were most sympathetic . . .” Rose wrote. “These circumstances made it more difficult for me, as constant reminders often released floods of tears again.”
    It seems important to point out that Rose—that all the Kennedys— did cry. The famous family edict, “Kennedys don’t cry,” was certainly a command to be tough, no matter what life threw their way. But it was also a dictate meant to protect the Kennedys from the depth of their own feeling, from the combustibility of their own hearts. “I think all of the Kennedys have a great deep feeling for one another,” said Father John Cavanaugh. “It’s so deep that they do not care much about sharing it with anybody else. They all understand it. They take for granted that the others will understand it. So they’re not demonstrative with one another. In fact, they withhold any kind of demonstration because they’re afraid, I think, of it getting out of hand.” Rose’s Victorian formality, coupled with that famous Kennedy admonition, have left the mistaken impression thatRose was an unfeeling woman. Nothing could be further from the truth. She loved her family and she grieved for them.
    It is a sign of Rose’s strength that she began to attend more of the hundreds and thousands of dedications taking place across the country for her fallen son, something that could not have been easy. She spoke in several parts of the country after JFK’s death, as a way of commemorating him, allowing the public