But if Mrs. Kennedy’s life was strong, it was punctuated by tragedy, as was the larger story of the Kennedy clan. In his late 20s, he lost his parents in a plane crash. Eleven years later, another plane crash claimed the life of a brother; After that, the brother’s wife died of suffocation. The assassinations of her husband and brother-in-law were of course, and her two sons, David and Michael, later died young.
Strongly inclined to her Roman Catholic faith, Mrs. Kennedy tried to make sense of things that were often terrifying.
His brother-in-law, Senator Edward M. Kennedy wrote a letter to the Kobechne family after a 1969 car accident in Chappaquiddick, Mass., in which Mary Jo Kobechne, a former campaign worker for Robert Kennedy, drowned. . Mrs. Kennedy was adamant that their daughter was “happy in the golden streets of heaven.” Copegness read and reread the letter, trying to make sense of it, Susan Sheehan wrote in The New York Times Magazine.
In 1972, Alabama’s segregationist governor, George C. After Wallace was shot, Mrs. Kennedy took him to the hospital on crutches while he was recovering from a skiing accident.
After her husband’s murder, she publicly expressed the family policy that “the Kennedys don’t cry.”
On the plane that carried her husband’s body from Los Angeles to New York, Mrs. Kennedy walked the aisle to make sure everyone had a blanket or pillow. On the long train ride to Washington for the funeral, he spoke to many of the 1,100 passengers and waved to thousands of onlookers along the line from a window next to the casket. One passenger was Coretta Scott King, whose own husband, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated just two months earlier.
