Nineteen-year-old Kathy McKeon had just moved from Ireland to New York when she was hired as the personal assistant to former first lady Jackie Kennedy. In her new memoir Jackie's Girl, out now, McKeon recalls the highlights of 13 years spent in service of Jackie, whom she called Madam, and her children, Caroline and John Jr. The following excerpt from McKeon's book picks up in 1964:
With the assassination not yet a year behind her, Madam was still in widow's black when she went out, and more given to intimate gatherings of friends and family in her red-brocade dining room than big, splashy parties at home. I never saw her crying or outwardly morose, but she never had much of an appetite, and the toll of the horror she had survived was plain to see on her painfully thin frame. Family was never far away, and both her sister, Lee, and various Kennedy in-laws visited frequently. Lee had an apartment a few blocks away, as did Bobby and Ethel Kennedy. Jean Kennedy Smith lived within walking distance, too, and her sons, William and Stephen, were favorite playmates of John. Their Irish governess, Bridey Sullivan, quickly became my best friend, and we spent hours chatting together in Central Park while watching the boys.
Bobby Kennedy had established residency in New York after stepping down as attorney general to launch his 1964 bid to become the state's Democratic representative in the U.S. Senate. The president's younger brother visited 1040 regularly, usually showing up once a week to have supper with the family. John and Caroline would run and fling themselves at their uncle as soon as he stepped inside the door, clamoring for his attention. Bobby would toss John into the air and catch him, then get down on the floor to play.
He wasn't imposing at all for such an important man, I thought. Very skinny and not broad shouldered like the president had been. The first time he saw me, he had asked my name and flashed a big smile when I told him. "We have a Kathleen in our family, too," he said, referring to his oldest daughter. With eight kids of his own under the age of thirteen, Bobby stepped easily into the role of surrogate father for John and Caroline, and they worshipped him. Madam clearly leaned on him, too. Threatening to tell Uncle Bobby about any misbehavior was like telling the kids Santa Claus was going to find out.
In addition to his Manhattan apartment, which was close to his campaign headquarters in Midtown, Bobby had leased a twenty-five-room hilltop mansion as a weekend retreat in Glen Cove, on the northern shore of Long Island. It was like having a private hotel, with a built-in swimming pool and lovely manicured lawns with plenty of room for the kids to blow off steam with their cousins. Madam liked Glen Cove for all the woodsy trails where she could go horseback riding, and she rented a modest weekend home near Bobby's, a one-level fieldstone house with a stream out back where I showed John how to make paper sailboats to race under a small bridge.
It was a great place for the kids to play with all their cousins on the weekend, and Madam enjoyed riding horses there. It was her solitary pursuit. Ethel was that way with sailing, and Joan Kennedy, Ted's wife, had the piano. On the surface, at least, Madam struck me as more like her brother-in-law than her sisters-in-law, though. Bobby and Madam had similar flip sides. Both had magnetic personalities, but then you would come to find out they were actually shy by nature. They were big on being outdoors and loved their sports, especially the ones that called for self-discipline or personal strength. Bobby and Madam were the Kennedys you were most likely to spot swimming farthest out in the ocean, no matter how cold the water was or how strong the tide. They were probably the biggest bookworms, too. Bobby was famous for being able to quote classic verse off the top of his head, and it was Madam who knew the perfect line for him to cite from Romeo and Juliet when Bobby paid tribute to Jack as he accepted the nomination for senator that summer:
"When he shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he shall make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night,
And pay no worship to the garish sun."
There was no denying that Madam and her brother-in-law were close. Loss is a terrible love. No matter how much sympathy you have, it's a kind of pain that can only be felt, not imagined. And when it happens in a swift, horrific instant, there is no such thing as healing. Tragedy leaves you with an open wound, not a scar. I never told Madam that I understood these things, or how, but I could see plain as day that this awful shared knowledge was what made the president's widow and younger brother care for each other the way they did.
From JACKIE'S GIRL by Kathy McKeon. Copyright © 2017 by Catherine McKeon. Reprinted by permission of Gallery Books, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
