Priest's notes reveal depth of Kennedy agony

Jackie Kennedy considered asking her husband’s brother Robert to bring up their young children following the American president’s assassination in 1963, it was claimed today.

“I’m no good to them,” she told her counsellor, the Rev Richard McSorley, as they traded tennis strokes at Robert Kennedy’s Hickory Hill estate. “I’m so bleeding inside.”

McSorley, a Jesuit priest and Georgetown University theologian who died last year, urged her not to give in to the grief. He told her to take comfort in Catholic teachings of resurrection and eternal life.

He also counselled her against suicide, as she wondered if God would separate her from her husband if she killed herself.

The release of McSorley’s typewritten diary is raising questions about the propriety of a priest keeping notes on private discussions. The university’s main library made the diary available this week, eliciting a response from the Kennedy family patriarch.

“I am deeply disappointed that the privacy of communications such as these - between a member of the clergy and his parishioner – would not be respected,” said Senator Edward Kennedy, the late president’s brother.

McSorley’s recollections also are part of a new book on the Kennedy family by Newsday reporter Thomas Maier.

McSorley left 59 boxes of private papers, manuscripts and other material to Georgetown, where they are now housed in a special archival collection at the library.

With bold and sweeping script, written on White House notecards and her own stationery, Mrs Kennedy told McSorley in June 1964 that she “won’t ever get over it.”

But she said her move to New York City with daughter, Caroline, and son, John Jr, “will be good for me and stop me brooding”.

It is the voluminous diary kept by McSorley that reveals the depth of her pain.

“I don’t know how God could take him away,” McSorley recalled her telling him during a tennis lesson in April 1964, six months after the assassination.

The tennis lessons, arranged by Robert Kennedy, provided the backdrop for long spiritual conversations about eternal life. She is portrayed as lonely but doubtful she could ever marry again. She married Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis in 1968.

She told McSorley she knew she could never take her own life but also acknowledged she was simply getting better at hiding her grief from her children.

McSorley also recounts her description of the November day in 1963 when JFK was shot in Dallas.

“I didn’t know he was hit by the first bullet. His head was turned away from me,” McSorley recalled her telling him. “By the time I looked toward the president, he was already being hit for the second time.”

“If I only had a minute to say goodbye,” she told McSorley. “It was so hard not to say goodbye, not to be able to say goodbye.”