On Nov. 11, 1963, President Kennedy laid a Veterans Day wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington National Cemetery.
He would be buried at the cemetery exactly two weeks later.
Jacqueline Kennedy rarely traveled with her husband on political trips but decided to fly with him to Texas on Nov. 21. On Nov. 22, the couple attended a breakfast in Fort Worth.
Just a short while after breakfast, Jacqueline Kennedy was thrown, on November 22, 1963, into a violent turmoil.
Texas Governor John Connally Jr. also received multiple gunshot wounds.
The presidential open-top limousine had been flown in from D.C. and would remain in use for several years after the assassination.
A 14-year-old boy reported watching JFK’s face go blank around 12:30 p.m. on Nov. 22 and heard Jacqueline Kennedy shout, “God, oh God, no!”
A priest administered last rites to the first Roman Catholic U.S. president.
This was the 4th presidential assassination in a nation that was less than 200 years old- the first since the Secret Service began protecting presidents.
The Texas School Book Depository’s sixth floor, where assassin Lee Harvey Oswald (Oswald was a self-described Marxist, who tried to defect to Russia in 1959) positioned himself for the shooting, today it is a museum dedicated to JFK’s assassination.
The murder weapon was a 6.5 mm Italian carbine rifle that Oswald had bought for $19.95. At the time, assassination of a president was not a federal offense; Oswald would have been tried in Texas, so the Secret Service scuffled with Dallas police for control of the president’s casket.
Dallas Police were able to apprehend Oswald pretty quickly during his attempt to escape.
At the Police station, Oswald’s murder by Jack Ruby on Nov. 24 was the first homicide caught on live television.
A police detective at the shooting called out to Jack Ruby after Oswald was shot – “Jack, you son of a bitch!”
Then Jack was wrestled to the ground by police, Ruby cried out, “I’m Jack Ruby, you all know me!”
Oswald died at the same hospital as Kennedy, 2 days and 7 minutes after the president.
Lyndon B. Johnson took the oath of office aboard Air Force One and became president 99 minutes after Kennedy’s death.
The first two letters that Lyndon Johnson wrote as president were to Caroline and John Jr.
Judge Sarah Hughes wept as she administered the oath of office. Kennedy’s body was also aboard for the return flight to Washington.
Jackie Kennedy refused to take off her pink Chanel suit, stained with her husband’s blood.
She told Lady Bird Johnson, “I want them to see what they have done to Jack!”
She, however, removed her wedding ring and put it on her husband’s finger to be buried with him, but later, sent an aide retrieve it.
To this day, Jackie’s suit has never been cleaned and lies in the National Archives.
Per the Kennedy family wishes it was not be seen in public until at least 2103.
Attorney General and presidential brother Robert F. Kennedy met Air Force One at Andrews Air Force Base upon its return.
With help from Bobby Kennedy and Robert McNamara, Jackie chose the burial site at Arlington National Cemetery.
Jackie requested an eternal flame be put by the grave.
Although she would remarry, today she is buried next to the president.
Two of the Kennedys’ children (Arabella and Patrick), an infant son and daughter, are also buried with their parents.
Jackie Kennedy modeled her husband’s funeral ceremonies after Abraham Lincoln’s.
The New York Times reported that JFK’s 98-year-old grandmother, Mary Josephine Fitzgerald, was not told of the assassination.
In Washington, dignitaries from more than 100 countries arrived for Kennedy’s funeral. At the time, it was the largest gathering of its kind on U.S. soil.
An unexpected 250,000 people paid their respects to the former president as he lay in state in the Capitol Rotunda.
Tens of thousands were turned away, some having waited throughout a near-freezing night in a line that stretched for more than 2 miles.
A taxi driver reported that the funeral crowds were oddly quiet: “… you could hear a pin drop.”
An Irish military guard paid its respects graveside, following commands shouted in Gaelic.
After the funeral, Jackie Kennedy met privately with three heads of state: Charles de Gaulle of France, Eamon de Valera of Ireland and Haile Selassie of Ethiopia.
Near midnight that night, she and Bobby Kennedy paid an unplanned visit to Kennedy’s grave. 5 years later, Bobby Kennedy would also be assassinated.
Not only did her young husband die; he was murdered—and murdered in her presence, within inches of her face, so that she was literally showered in his blood .
Subsequently she had to explain this appalling tragedy to two very small children who had just lost their father, and she had to grieve in the most public way possible.
Accordingly, she became a sort of twentieth-century icon of innocent suffering.
The funeral day, Nov. 25, was also John Jr.’s 3rd birthday. Caroline would turn 6 two days later.
During the days immediately following the assassination, she was, understandably enough, bewildered, angry, and deeply sad, even to the point of asking God to take her life.
Seeing the pain Jackie was enduring, her brother-in-law, Bobby Kennedy, recommended that she speak to a priest.
Prior to her marriage to Pres JF Kennedy, Jackie had visited Ireland and met a priest named , Fr. Leonard. He was a friend of Jackie’s step-uncle, W.S. Lewis, since the 1920s.
Father Joseph Leonard was a father figure to the First Lady
Lewis had suggested that Jackie and his own friend meet when she had visited Ireland in 1950. At the time, Jackie was a 21-year-old socialite and the Irish priest was 73-years-old and semi-retired.
Jackie Kennedy, loved Ireland and wrote emotional letters to Fr Leonard, for 14 years after first meeting the priest in Dublin in 1950.
“She had a wonderful series of conversations with [Father Leonard] and then came back to America and got into a correspondence.”
She wrote: “It’s so good in a way to write all this down and get it off your chest – because I never do really talk about it with anyone – but poor you has to read it!”
In July 1952, Jackie wrote to her Dublin confidante telling him that she had fallen in love with John F. Kennedy.
She wrote: “I think I’m in love with – and I think it would interest you – John Kennedy – he’s the son of the ambassador to England – the second son – the oldest was killed.
He’s 35 and a congressman.
“Maybe it will end very happily – or maybe, since he’s this old and set in his ways and cares so desperately about his career, he just won’t want to give up that much time to extracurricular things like marrying.’’
And, in turn, Leonard wrote teasing his American pen pal calling her a “girouette” (a French expression, meaning a fickle person).
After the harrowing death of her husband, Jackie poured out her heart to Fr Leonard saying, “I am so bitter against God…then goes on to say:
33 letters were discovered in an old safe at All Hallows College in Dublin where the priest had taught.
Jackie and Fr. Leonard met in person only one other time, but she continued corresponding with Leonard until his death a yr after Jack’s, in 1964.
He was then 87 years old.
The depicted conversation.
Priest :
Jackie:
Priest: of course.
In the course of their first exchange, Jackie tells the priest that she thinks God is cruel.
The priest says, “Now you’re getting into trouble.
God is love. And God is everywhere.”
Jackie retorts angrily, “Was he in the bullet that killed Jack?”
Priest: “Absolutely.”
Jackie goes on, “Is he inside me right now,” and the priest says, “Yes, of course he is.”
Her anger brimming over, Jackie retorts, “Then it’s a funny game he plays, hiding all the time,”
The priest patiently explains, “The fact that we don’t understand him isn’t funny at all.”
Jackie: staring the priest down :”If there’s a heaven, then there is your God, with all his empty promises. ” What kind of God, takes a father from his two little children.
Priest: Thy Lord sacrificed his only son.
Jackie still angry: and my two babies. Arabella in the womb, and Patrick after his only 39 hrs on this earth…. Just long enough to fall in love with him. What did I do to deserve that?
Priest shakes his head: nothing.
Jackie: Jack and I hardly spent a night together.
Not even that last night in Ft. Worth.
Priest: Your husband loved you , Mrs Kennedy , I’m sure of it
Jackie: I seem to remember there being more to our vows…. Don’t look at me like that. I was the First Lady of the United States.
Women have endured for far worse, with far less.
There are two types of women those who want power in the world and those who want power in bed, and now what am I left with?
When men see me now, what do you think they feel.
Priest: sadness, compassion…desire, maybe… You’re still a young woman Mrs Kennedy
Jackie: I used to make them smile. No one understands the pain he was in and how loyal he was to some of his…. [Hard break] just some of his friends were so crude. Jack wasn’t of course, but he could get caught up in it.
Still , he was a great father…I picture him in that rocking chair in his office. .. Caroline and John at his feet.
How could i hate him?
Priest: take comfort in those memories.
Jackie shaking: I can’t …they’re mixed up with all the others. I lie awake at night…..
and all I can think is, ….I should have been a shop girl or stenographer.
She laments thinking she should have married “a lazy, ordinary, ugly man.”
Considering the depth of her suffering, the priest says, “Let me tell you a parable.”
He then unfolds the story of Jesus’ healing of the man born blind, recounted in the Gospel of John 9:1-3.
Jesus once passed a blind beggar on the road, and his disciples asked, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”
“Neither,” Jesus answered. “Rather, he was made blind that the works of God might be revealed in him.”
Then, gazing intently at the former First Lady, the priest says, “Right now, you are blind.
Not because you’ve sinned, but because you’ve been chosen—that the works of God might be revealed in you.”
The priest is handling himself very deftly here indeed.
He is carefully navigating between the shoals of denying that God is really involved with the world and affirming that the ways of God’s providence are clear to us.
He is quietly insisting that though we don’t know precisely how God’s purposes are being worked out, we do know that he is intimately present to us—and that all of this is taking place under the aegis of the divine love.
All the great heroes of the Scriptural narrative—Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Joshua, Samuel, David, Solomon, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Peter, and Paul—are elected for a special mission, and every single one of them suffered on account of that mission.
God worked through them, and that working was painful— without exception.