Groundbreaking of the Kennedy Center on December 2, 1965. A photographer snapped a picture of the profiles of Jean Ann Kennedy Smith, me, Robert Kennedy, and President Lyndon B. Johnson dubbing it “Profiles in Courage.”
Though Jackie never talked to me about her second marriage to Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis in October 1968, I viewed it strictly as one of convenience. Of course, I totally disagreed with her decision (as did most of the world) which no doubt she sensed — perhaps why I wasn’t consulted. As a result, I was both surprised and deeply honored when Caroline asked that I preside over her mother’s burial following her death from cancer on May 19, 1994, at the age of sixty-four.
After her Funeral Mass at St. Ignatius Loyola Church in New York, Jackie was laid to rest next to her husband, her children, and the Eternal Flame in the Kennedy burial plot in Arlington Cemetery. (On that brutally hot day, I was the only priest in attendance.) Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg, coordinator of her mother’s last good-bye, was determined to keep reporters and photographers as far away as possible and did so — a half mile away, to be exact. Like her mother at her father’s funeral, Caroline wanted things kept short. Before we started, I noticed her looking at the interment service’s first draft, indicating that President Clinton would “address” the mourners. Scratching out “address,” she penciled in “remarks.” The last thing Caroline needed was Bill Clinton on a verbal tear. As a result, the grave-side ceremony lasted just over ten minutes: Handsome, young John Jr. read from the fourth chapter of St. Paul’s First Letter to the Thessalonians: “We would not have you ignorant, brethren, concerning those who are asleep,” he said, his voice strong, “that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope. For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep” (verses 13-14). Caroline then followed with Psalm 121: “The Lord will keep you from all evil; he will keep your life. The Lord will keep your coming out and your coming in from this time forth and for evermore” (verses 7-8).
When Jackie’s beloved children had finished, I offered my own few words, that Jackie, “so dearly beloved, would be so sorely missed” … concluding with the prayer of committal: “O, God, the author of the unbought grace of life, you are our promised home. Lead your servant Jacqueline to that home bright with the presence of your everlasting life and love, there to join the other members of the family. Console also those who have suffered the loss of her mortal presence. Give them the grace that will strengthen the bonds of the family and of the national community. May we bear your peace to others until the day we join you and all the saints in your life of endless love and light. We ask this through Christ our Lord. Amen.”
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis is laid to rest in 1994 (Reuters photo)
Across the Potomac, a bell tolled sixty-four times, once for each year of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis’s extraordinary life. The most famous woman in the world was then laid in her final resting place, attended by fewer than a hundred close family and friends — exactly what this private, enigmatic soul would have wished.
CHAPTER 2
In the Beginning
The bed I sleep in today is that in which I was born — as were my sister and six brothers — on May 20, 1913, at 1501 17th Street in Washington, D.C. In those days babies didn’t enter the world for free — but almost, as the doctor charged my parents, Lilian and Patrick Hannan, a mere ten bucks for this momentous, in their opinion, house call. Undoubtedly, it was the same fee they forked over for the arrival of each of their other children: my oldest sister Mary as well as my brothers John, Frank, Bill, Tom, Denis, and Jerry. I came along fifth. Given its familial pedigree, our communal birthing bed hardly needed anything further for me to cherish it as I do. However, in 1987 even that sentimental game got upped when Pope John Paul II slept in it for two nights on his historic visit to New Orleans. (In case anyone gets the urge to have a garage sale one day, I put a plaque on the headboard making that clear.) And though I love my bed, I never spent more time in it than my necessary five or six hours of sleep a night.
Like many of the Irish, we were immigrants. My father, Patrick Francis Hannan — P.F. or “the Boss” — was born on March 8, 1870, to an impoverished family in Kilfinny, County Limerick, a village so small it’s not even on the map. Since his father was sickly, Patrick attended the local school, a thatched building with a sod floor, for only three years before going to work at the nearby estate of the English Lord Adair where future prospects were slim. Indeed, thanks to the area’s English, viciously anti-Catholic landowners, the Irish were legally prohibited from even buying any property — no doubt a driving force prompting my father, at 18, to strike out for America where he subsequently snapped up every piece of land he could lay his hands on.
Patrick Hannan set foot in America on February 29, 1888, just in time for the famously paralyzing blizzard of 1888 (as a result detesting snow for the rest of his life) and signed on as an apprentice plumber for $2.50 per week. Foregoing even streetcar fare by walking three miles to and from work every day, he supported his family on Capitol Hill as well as Ireland on his weekly salary. When he had saved up a modest stake, he went into business on his own — a great success thanks in large part to his philosophy of working hard and saving money.
My mother, Lilian Louise Keefe, born in Washington on August 16, 1881, was the daughter of an Irish immigrant, John Keefe, and a German-descent Lutheran, Louise Kaufman. Three weeks after giving birth, Louise died. Consequently, my mother’s father, a successful saloon owner, agreed to have his new daughter raised by her late mother’s Lutheran family. Their agreement, a written contract, stipulated that though John Keefe would never seek to regain custody of Lilian, even if he remarried, she was nevertheless to be raised a Catholic. As a result, my mother matriculated at the The Immaculate Conception Academy, ate fish every Friday, attended Mass every First Friday, showed up at Mass every Sunday and attended all the parish missions.
The man who raised her — Uncle Charlie Smithson — was the chief mechanic of the Navy Yard who prided himself, even if forced to arise at two, on making it to work by eight, never having been late to work a day in his life. Growing up we were equally devoted to our relatives, both Catholic and Protestant, with whom we shared many similar values. (Citing moral lessons learned from her Lutheran relatives on sexual morality, for instance, my mother remarked: “I was told that it was better to have ten children on your pillow,” she said referring to abortion, “than one on your conscience.”)
My parents were married on June 22, 1905, in Washington’s Immaculate Conception Church. Considering the early 1900s, the Hannans were a typical Irish Catholic family: our parents were devoted to God, each other, and their eight children, stressing the importance of faith, sacrifice, love, and hard work. Mary, the eldest, and only girl, was the family darling. (According to the Boss, Mary’s brilliance, talent, and patience with her unruly brothers were worth at least three boys!) Born on February 25, 1906, Mary weighed only one pound, fourteen ounces. Two months premature, the doctor said there was faint hope that she would survive. But he didn’t know the Boss. Refusing to accept his daughter’s death sentence without a fight, my father, like the plumber he was, rigged up a radiator heating system in her room to serve as an incubator, raising the temperature to eighty degrees. Bringing in goat’s milk to supplement that of my mother, he proved the doctor wrong as Mary got bigger and stronger. A few months later, she was completely out of the woods.
Mary was always a supremely gifted student — beginning in the second grade when