“I suppose I was in a state of shock, packing up [in the White House],” Jackie said. “But President Johnson made you feel that you and the children [could stay], a great courtesy to a woman in distress…. It’s funny what you do in a state of shock. I remember going over to the Oval Office to ask [President Johnson] to name the space center in Florida Cape Kennedy. Now that I think back on it, that was wrong, and if I’d known [Cape Canaveral] was the name from the time of Columbus, it would be the last thing that Jack would have wanted.
“The reason I asked was, I can remember this first speech Jack made in Texas … that there would be a rocket one day that would go to the moon. I kept thinking, That’s going to be forgotten, and his dreams are going to be forgotten. I had this terrible fear then that he’d be forgotten.”
Ever since Jack’s murder, Jackie had been searching for ways to secure his place in history. She had asked her old friend Teddy White to write the authorized account of the death of the President. But White had respectfully declined, as had another Kennedy family favorite, Walter Lord, the author of A Night to Remember, the story of the sinking of the Titanic, and Day of Infamy, an account of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Jackie finally settled on William Manchester, who had won her trust with a fawning book on JFK, Portrait of a President. Unlike White and Lord, Manchester was willing to sign an agreement ceding to Jackie and Bobby Kennedy the right to approve his manuscript before it was published. He gave every sign of being a malleable author.
But Jackie’s desire to art-direct her husband’s death had begun even earlier. It was on the flight back from Dallas that a picture had formed in her mind—a beautiful, brave picture of what Jack’s funeral should look like. She recalled seeing an old woodcut in a bound copy of Harper’s Weekly in the White House library that showed the East Room during Lincoln’s funeral.
She observed parallels between her husband and the assassinated Civil War President. Both were inspiring leaders; both had died victims of hate. She sent instructions to Angier Biddle Duke that she wanted the President “laid out as Lincoln had been,” with the same black cambric fabric. Jack’s funeral was to be a carbon copy of Lincoln’s.
In the course of his research, Duke learned that before Lincoln became president, he had lost a child, just as Jack had lost a child when he was a senator. While in the White House, Lincoln had lost a second child, just as Jack had lost Patrick Bouvier. And when Lincoln died, he was buried next to his children at Oak Ridge Cemetery in Springfield, Illinois.
As Jackie packed away Jack’s things, she decided to follow Lincoln’s example one more time. She made two telephone calls—one to her mother, in Georgetown, and the other to Richard Cardinal Cushing, in Boston.
Exhume the bodies of my dead children from their graves in New England, she instructed them, and have them reburied beside their father at Arlington National Cemetery.
“WHY, GOD? WHY?”
Janet Auchincloss was met at Washington National Airport the next morning by Ed Zimny, a veteran World War II aviator. Zimny was used to flying charters for wealthy people, but he was unprepared for Janet, a woman with lovely pink-and-white skin and dark eyes, her face framed by a thick head of hair. She was wearing a pair of white kidskin gloves, and looked as though she was on her way to a lady’s tea rather than to a grisly exhumation.
Janet was not squeamish. She had spent many nights cleaning up Black Jack’s mess. But the idea of digging up the bodies of dead children was too grotesque for words. Janet told Zimny that she had tried to talk her daughter out of her bizarre scheme, but nothing she said could change her mind.
Zimny was flying an Aero Commander 600, a small twin-engine six-seater, and it took him less than two hours to reach Newport, Rhode Island. There Janet was greeted by John F. Hayes Jr., the director of the Hayes-O’Neill Funeral Home. They drove in his hearse to St. Columba’s Cemetery, overlooking Narragansett Bay.
At the entrance, a few stubborn leaves still clung to the branches of the maple trees. The cemetery looked gray against the gray sky. The hearse made its way along a winding drive to Section 40, a gentle hillside where Jackie’s stillborn girl had been buried on August 25, 1956, by Father Murphy, a priest from St. Augustine’s Church, in the presence of Bobby Kennedy and Kenny O’Donnell, Jack’s right-hand man.
Two gravediggers were waiting in front of the marker, an upright headstone, about thirty inches high. Jackie had picked out a name, Arabella, for her stillborn daughter, but the gravestone simply read “Baby Girl Kennedy.”
At a signal from Hayes, the gravediggers shoved their spades into the ground, and earth began flying over their shoulders. While they dug away, Hayes removed a brand-new infant’s casket from the back of his hearse and placed it near the hole that was appearing in the ground.
It was a shallow grave, and the workmen quickly reached the lid of the coffin. They dug around its sides, creating a trench, then tried to lift it out of the ground. The moldy wood crumbled in their hands. Inside, maggots and beetles crawled over what remained of Arabella—a few muddy shards of bone, and tiny bits of soft tissue. The decomposed body was so thoroughly leached by water and bacteria that it was hard to identify any part of the skeleton.
Piece by piece, the gravediggers dragged out whatever they could. Everything went into
