Nemesis by Peter Evans

Author:Peter Evans [Peter Evans]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: 20th Century, Rich & Famous, Biography & Autobiography, Non-Fiction, History, Politics, Biography
ISBN: 9780061760518
Google: ICas0tbQJUIC
Amazon: B0074ALVYI
Goodreads: 10367459
Publisher: Harper Collins
Published: 2004-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Onassis heard the news at about ten o’clock on the morning of Wednesday, June 5, 1968, while having breakfast in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Bobby wasn’t dead but it looked bad. Meyer told him from New York.

“Somebody was going to fix the little bastard sooner or later,” Onassis said.17 He wasn’t a hypocrite, and the callousness of his reaction did not surprise Meyer. Onassis told him to call as soon as Kennedy was dead—“as if he wanted to know the result of the four o’clock race at Santa Anita,” Meyer later said.18

Thring remembers the impassiveness with which Onassis took the news. “Hearing something like that when you are so removed from reality made it even more shocking for me. I didn’t expect Ari to be upset; I knew that Bobby’s death was vastly convenient for him; but his reaction was…it was as if he’d been told something he already knew.”19

Rationalizing her remark later, Thring wondered whether the reason for his equanimity at the news was because Jackie had been convinced that Bobby was going to be killed. The night before she left the Christina, she had told them that Bobby would die if he didn’t pull out of the campaign. “She was quite fatalistic about it. She didn’t say he might be killed, or he could be killed. She said he would be killed,” Thring recalled.20 It was more like a prophecy than a premonition.

Onassis and Thring called Jackie in New York.

“Bobby was still hanging in there at that point, but she talked about his death and about Jack’s death, and the two seemed to merge in her mind: Bobby became Jack, Jack was Bobby, she was reliving Dallas and crying for Bobby in Los Angeles. She was very distraught. It seemed to her that her country as well as her family was falling apart…she was very scared,” Thring recalled.21

Onassis called Meyer, who was monitoring the news from California at the Pierre Hotel in New York. “He ain’t gonna make it, Ari,” Meyer told him again. “Call me the minute he don’t,” Onassis growled.

“I didn’t get the impression he wanted to send flowers,” Meyer later wryly told friends.22

When Bobby’s press secretary Frank Mankiewicz announced in California in the early hours of June 6 that Bobby was dead, Onassis called Costa Gratsos. “She’s free of the Kennedys. The last link just broke,” he said. He still showed no hint of regret, no trace of surprise, merely “a sort of satisfaction that his biggest headache had been eliminated,” said a London aide, who had also been called by Onassis that morning.

“Ari had always taken what he wanted, and for the first time in his life he had come up against a young man who was as tough, competitive, and determined as he was. And now that man was dead,” Gratsos encapsulated their relationship and the meaning of Bobby’s death to Ari when I asked him about it while working on my biography of Onassis.

The night they buried Bobby by candlelight

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