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Jackie thoughts of suicide after jfk murder { November 13 2003 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A34119-2003Nov12.htmlhttp://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A34119-2003Nov12.html
Jackie Kennedy's Spiritual Crisis
Diary of Priest Reveals Widow's Thoughts of Suicide
By Caryle Murphy
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, November 13, 2003; Page C01
A few months after President John F. Kennedy's assassination, a grief-stricken Jacqueline Kennedy told a Catholic priest that she had thought about suicide as a way to escape her desolation and rejoin her husband, according to excerpts from the priest's diary made available yesterday by Georgetown University.
The diary was kept by the Rev. Richard T. McSorley, a theology professor at Georgetown who died last year and gave his papers to the university's main library.
McSorley briefly counseled Kennedy in early 1964 at the request of Robert F. Kennedy, the president's brother. The Jesuit priest is the main source for a recounting of Jacqueline Kennedy's spiritual crisis in a new book on the Kennedy family by Newsday reporter Thomas Maier.
At Maier's suggestion, the university permitted the diary excerpts and four letters from Jacqueline Kennedy to McSorley to be viewed by reporters yesterday.
In his diary, McSorley describes how the widowed first lady questioned him about the spiritual implications of committing suicide.
"Do you think that God would separate me from my husband if I killed myself?" McSorley recalls Kennedy asking, according to his diary entry of April 28, 1964. "I feel as though I am going out of my mind at times. Wouldn't God understand that I just want to be with him?"
McSorley wrote that he told Kennedy her children needed her and that he reminded her of the Catholic faith's belief in resurrection, which meant that she eventually would be reunited with the slain president.
A month later, according to McSorley's diary entry on May 20, 1964, Kennedy assured him that she was not really contemplating suicide. "I know I'll never do it. I know it's wrong. It's just a way out," he recalled her saying.
Another Jesuit priest said yesterday that McSorley should not have written down Jacqueline Kennedy's confidences or revealed them to anyone, and her former chief of staff, Letitia Baldrige, criticized the release of the diary excerpts.
Baldrige, who was a close friend of Kennedy, said that the former first lady's comments about suicide were understandable for a grieving widow and that it was "ridiculous" and "in such poor taste" to "bring it out at this point."
"Every widow I've ever known has expressed thoughts like that," Baldrige said. "It's a perfectly natural thing for women in trauma to say, especially to a priest."
Baldrige added that she never heard Kennedy express suicidal thoughts. "I'm sure there was no possible thought of her ever doing it," Baldrige said. "She was a good mother. She did look forward to raising those children."
The typewritten diary also contains McSorley's recollection of Kennedy's regret that she had not been able to say goodbye to her husband and not done more to make him happy.
"I was melancholy after the death of our baby and I stayed away . . . longer than I needed to," the priest's diary quotes Kennedy as saying, referring to the August 1963 death of the couple's prematurely born son, Patrick. "I could have made his life so much happier, especially for the last few weeks. I could have tried harder to get over my melancholy."
For a time, she also felt unable to help her children because of her despondency, according to the diary. "I'm so bleeding inside," McSorley recalls Kennedy saying.
Georgetown University spokeswoman Laura Cavender, asked whether Kennedy's family had been contacted about the papers' release, replied that Maier "dealt with the legal aspect of the papers and I would refer you to him."
Maier, whose book "The Kennedys: America's Emerald Kings" was published last month, said McSorley had given him permission to view the diary and in a taped interview had elaborated on his conversations with Jacqueline Kennedy, most of which took place at Hickory Hill, Robert and Ethel Kennedy's home in McLean.
One ethics scholar, the Rev. John Paris, said McSorley should not have told anyone about his counseling sessions with Jacqueline Kennedy.
"The disclosure of this was wrong, absolutely wrong," said Paris, who is Walsh Professor of Bioethics at Boston College, a Catholic institution. "You would have the same sort of confidence here as you would have with a physician. Everything that is said is said in confidence because the individual comes to you precisely because he trusts you to keep it secret, and these are committed secrets. You've made the commitment prior to hearing it."
McSorley should not have written down his conversations with Kennedy, Paris added, because "you don't have absolute control over what is written."
Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) had no comment on the university's decision to display the papers, his spokeswoman Melody Miller said yesterday.
Esther Newberg, who has been Caroline Kennedy's book agent, reacted angrily when contacted about the diary. "You should be embarrassed to make these phone calls," Newberg told a reporter, adding that Kennedy would have no comment on the disclosure of her mother's talk with the priest.
In an interview, Maier said McSorley kept a diary because he "clearly had an eye toward history," but he noted that the priest "didn't reveal any of these confidences until Jacqueline Kennedy had passed away" in 1994.
McSorley told Maier that Robert Kennedy was concerned about Jacqueline Kennedy's mental health after the Nov. 22, 1963, assassination. He asked the priest -- a close friend and frequent Hickory Hill visitor -- to approach her by asking her to play tennis. Several of their conversations took place on the court.
McSorley said Kennedy asked him to pray that she would die and he replied that he would "if you want that. It's not wrong to pray to die."
But the priest was clearly concerned. "Yesterday she had me scared that she was really thinking of suicide," he wrote May 20, 1964, noting that she had said, "Death is great." McSorley also wrote that she had told him the day before that "she would be glad if her taking her life set off a wave of suicides because she was glad to see people get out of their misery. 'I was glad that Marilyn Monroe got out of her misery,' she said."
Kennedy also said she did not want to remarry. "I don't want to live with someone of these old men friends some ten or fifteen years from now," McSorley quotes her as saying. "It'll be so lonely when the children go away to school."
McSorley's papers also include four letters from Kennedy. In one, dated July 15, 1964, she thanked him "for all you did for me this spring."
"If you want to know what my religious convictions are . . . they are to keep busy and to keep healthy -- so that you can do all you should for your children. And to get to bed very early at night so that you don't have time to think," she wrote.
Referring to a question from McSorley about whether she felt guilty about getting over her grief, she wrote: "I wish I had that problem, because I know now I won't ever get over it. But I am getting better at hiding it from my children."
Staff researcher Bobbye Pratt contributed to this article.
© 2003 The Washington Post Company
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