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Kennedy’s bishop tells of weeks after assassination
Bruce Nolan, Jul 30, 2010
By Bruce Nolan Religion News Service
Retired Catholic Archbishop Philip Hannan has produced a new memoir that casts light on parts of his 71-year career—including a rare look into Jackie Kennedy’s private grief in the first weeks after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
The Archbishop Wore Combat Boots (Our Sunday Visitor Publishing) includes a handwritten personal note addressed to the author from the widowed first lady less than a month after the president’s death.
Archbishop Hannan, then an auxiliary bishop in Washington, D.C., had already delivered the eulogy at Jackie Kennedy’s request. Ten days later he had presided over a second Kennedy interment at Arlington National Cemetery, in which two of the couple’s children were quietly reburied next to their father: a daughter who had been stillborn in 1956 and their son Patrick, who had lived only three days after his birth in the summer of 1963.
“If only I could believe that he could look down and see how he is missed and how nobody will ever be the same without him,” Kennedy wrote of her husband on Dec. 20, 1963, a few days after the burial of the children. “But I haven’t believed in the child’s vision of heaven for a long time. There is no way now to commune with him. It will be so long before I am dead and even then I don’t know if I will be reunited with him. . . . Please forgive all this—and please don’t try to convince me just yet—I shouldn’t be writing this way.”
Archbishop Hannan, now 97, said he included the Kennedy note “after much soul-searching” to contest the post-Camelot view that the president’s infidelities had made their union a loveless marriage of convenience. He believes the Kennedys had “a relationship grounded in deep, emotional conviction until the very end.”
He also noted that it is “one of the greatest regrets of my priesthood” that he did not reach out to Jackie Kennedy on a sustained basis in the weeks and months after the assassination.
Two years later, he was transferred from his native Washington D.C., to the Louisiana Gulf Coast, then reeling from damage by Hurricane Betsy. He remained the archbishop in New Orleans from 1965 until 1989, when he was succeeded by Archbishop Francis Schulte.
This article first appeared in the New Orleans Times-Picayune.
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