But even if Mrs. Kennedy’s life was solid, it was also punctuated by tragedy, as was the larger story of the Kennedy family. In his late 20s, his parents died in a plane crash. Eleven years later, another plane crash claimed the brothers’ lives. Shortly after, my brother’s wife died of suffocation. Of course, there was also the assassination of her husband and brother-in-law, and her two sons, David and Michael, later died young.
Mrs. Kennedy was strongly committed to her Roman Catholic faith and often sought to make sense of horrific situations.
After her brother-in-law, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, was involved in a car accident in Chappaquiddick, Massachusetts, in 1969, and Mary Jo Kopechne, a former Robert Kennedy campaign worker, drowned, Mrs. Kennedy moved into the Kopechne family. I wrote a letter. . Mrs. Kennedy said she was sure her daughter was “happy on the golden streets of heaven.” The Kopeknes read the letter multiple times, trying to understand it, Susan Sheehan wrote in The New York Times Magazine.
After racist Alabama Governor George C. Wallace was shot in 1972, Mrs. Kennedy visited him as he arrived at the hospital on crutches while recovering from a skiing accident.
And after her husband’s murder, she publicly put into practice the family maxim, “Kennedys don’t cry.”
On the plane transporting her husband’s body from Los Angeles to New York, Mrs. Kennedy walked down the aisle, making sure everyone had a blanket or pillow. On the long train ride to Washington for the burial, she spoke to many of the 1,100 passengers and waved to the thousands of roadside onlookers from the window next to the casket. One of the passengers was Coretta Scott King, whose husband, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., had been assassinated just two months earlier.
