Killing Kennedy

the death of her son Patrick. The paparazzi dubbed her “Jackie O,” and hounded her constantly, a practice they would continue for the rest of her life. Sadly, the sixty-nine-year-old Onassis died of respiratory failure just seven years after their marriage, making Jackie a widow for the second time at the young age of forty-six. After Onassis’s death, Jackie retreated from the public eye, eventually securing a job with Viking Press as a book editor in New York City. She quit that job three years later, angry and embarrassed that the company had published a work of fiction in which Ted Kennedy was the president of the United States and there was an assassination plot against his life. She then moved on to work for Doubleday for the remainder of her nearly two decades in publishing, editing the books of people as diverse as Michael Jackson, Carly Simon, and Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz, a Nobel laureate. In the early 1990s, Jackie’s lifetime smoking habit finally caught up with her. She died on May 19, 1994, from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma at the age of sixty-four.
    Caroline Kennedy grew up to attend Radcliffe College and later earn her Juris Doctor from Columbia University. She married Edwin Schlossberg, bore three children, and pretty much stays out of the public eye. In December 2011, singer Neil Diamond admitted that Caroline was the inspiration for his multimillion-selling song “Sweet Caroline.”
    John F. Kennedy Jr. became a symbol for the tragic history of the Kennedy family. The image of him on his third birthday saluting his father’s coffin broke hearts worldwide. Erroneously thought to be nicknamed “John-John”—that name was fabricated by the press—John Jr. attended college at Brown and then went on to the New York University School of Law, which eventually led to a short stint in the Manhattan district attorney’s office. In 1988, People magazine named John Jr. “The Sexiest Man Alive.” Like his mother, he was the subject of intense media scrutiny. On July 16, 1999, he was piloting a small plane when it crashed into the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard. The accident killed John Kennedy Jr., his wife, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, and her sister, Lauren. He was thirty-eight years old. His ashes, and those of his wife, were scattered at sea.
    Lyndon Johnson inherited no small amount of unfinished business from the Kennedy administration, most notably the Vietnam War. He masterfully cobbled together coalitions within Congress to help pass the historic Civil Rights Act of 1964. Johnson, working closely with Martin Luther King Jr., framed the issue in terms of JFK’s legacy in order to gather support for the act. However, Vietnam was an inherited headache that proved to be his undoing. The Diem assassination was America’s point of no return in terms of involvement, and while there are many who debate whether or not the United States had a hand in his death, there’s no disputing that the situation only got worse from there. After winning the 1964 election in a landslide over Arizona’s Barry Goldwater (a Republican defeat JFK had predicted), Johnson began to mismanage the war in Southeast Asia. As the antiwar movement gained traction, LBJ, fearing defeat, chose not to run again in 1968. Upon leaving Washington, Lyndon Baines Johnson returned to his Texas ranch, where he died of a heart attack at the age of sixty-four on January 22, 1973.
    As with the death of John Kennedy, it was Walter Cronkite who broke the news of LBJ’s death to the nation. Cronkite himself remained a news broadcaster at CBS until 1980. In 2009 he died at the age of ninety-two, still bitter about being replaced by Dan Rather as the anchor of the CBS Evening News.
    The man who took most advantage of Lyndon Johnson’s decision not to run for the presidency in 1968 was Bobby Kennedy . The former attorney general had been devastated by his brother’s assassination, but overcame his grief to mount a very successful campaign. However, like his brother, Bobby Kennedy was assassinated by a disturbed lone gunman, Sirhan Sirhan, who shot Bobby in a Los Angeles hotel just moments after he had claimed victory in the California primary. He lived for twenty-six hours before dying on June 6, 1968, at the age of forty-two.
    Lee Harvey Oswald was buried in Shannon Rose Hill Cemetery in Fort Worth, Texas, on November 25, 1963, the same day that John F. Kennedy was interred at Arlington. In 1967, on the fourth