The Observer Magazine of 10 March 1974 featured a very moving account by Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy of some of the tragedies that befell the Kennedys, serialised from her memoir Times to Remember.
After her husband Joe’s debilitating stroke, she recalled a lunch between him and Herbert Hoover – ‘Joe, who cannot speak, and Mr Hoover, who cannot hear’ – in New York, 1962. ‘And so poignant, inexpressibly sad, when each of them from time to time through the meal wept silently.’
In 1957, Joe had predicted ‘that some day one of our sons would be president, another would be attorney general, and another would be a US senator – all this simultaneously’. Prescient yes, but it spoke more to ‘the grand design he had for his sons’.
In retrospect, wrote Rose, ‘we entered a golden time’ – until that fateful day in Dallas. ‘Friday 22 November 1963 began as one of those perfect late autumn days at the Cape,’ she recalled, and had headed off to the golf course after breakfast. She was having a nap after lunch when she heard her niece Ann’s radio ‘blaring so loudly in her room down the hall that I got up and went to tell her to please to tune it down’. But it was to hear a news bulletin ‘that along the route in Dallas someone had taken some shots at the president and he had been wounded… And then soon the news came through that Jack was gone’.
The family kept his death from Joe until the next day. ‘Joe not only took the tragic news bravely, but seemed to want to comfort their children. The doctor had already given him a sedative, and soon he went back to sleep.’
In 1968, Rose’s son Bobby was assassinated, too. ‘It seemed impossible that the same kind of disaster could befall our family twice in five years,’ she wrote. ‘If I had read anything of the sort in fiction I would have put it aside as incredible.’
