There are Kennedy household loyalists, after which there was Melody Miller.
As a school intern, she helped Jacqueline Kennedy deal with the never-ending baggage of condolence letters and presents that poured in after the assassination of her husband, President John F. Kennedy, in 1963. Five years later, as an aide to Robert F. Kennedy, she was the final individual to end up the lights in his Senate workplace after he, too, was assassinated.
She then spent practically 40 years working for the youngest Kennedy brother, Edward M. Kennedy, referred to as Ted, with a brief listing of official titles and an limitless run of unofficial duties: Senate speechwriter, presidential marketing campaign adviser, private confidante and gatekeeper. Once, when a person known as threatening to kill the senator, she stored him on the cellphone for 45 minutes, till the F.B.I. might hint the line.
She helped manage the one centesimal birthday for Rose Kennedy, the household matriarch, and dealt with the press at Jackie Kennedy Onassis’s funeral in New York. She crammed out the touch-football groups at Hickory Hill, the Kennedy enclave in Northern (*77*), and assembled presents for the Kennedy kids on Christmas Eve.
She knew secrets and techniques and intimate particulars. She knew about plans for John F. Kennedy Jr.’s 1996 wedding ceremony to Carolyn Bessette, information stored from even many relations. She knew that Ted Kennedy had supplied a confidential again channel between Soviet leaders and the Reagan White House. She additionally knew that the senator was one in every of the few people who Elizabeth Taylor allowed to name her Liz.
Ms. Miller, who was discovered lifeless on Nov. 8 at her house in Washington, spent her total profession working for the Kennedys, turning into an unofficial member of America’s most storied political clan. She was 77.
Her brother, Rockley Miller, confirmed the demise, from a coronary heart assault.
Ms. Miller’s first encounter with the Kennedys got here throughout her senior yr in highschool, in Arlington, Va. She was a self-professed jock, largely focused on basketball, however turned to politics after listening to John Kennedy’s hovering rhetoric about service and sacrifice. Inspired, she made a ceramic bust of the president, solely to have it explode in the kiln.
She was interning on the weekends for a New Mexico Democrat, Representative Joseph Montoya, whose workplace handed alongside the story of her enthusiasm to the White House. President Kennedy himself requested to meet her.
“The door opened and there was President Kennedy,” Ms. Miller recalled in a 2008 interview for the Miller Center at the University of Virginia. “Incandescent was the only word I could use for him. There was a glow all around him, the summer tan, the chestnut hair, the wonderful gliding way he moved.”
They chatted about her sculpture — she had remade it and introduced it to the assembly — and about her need to work on his forthcoming marketing campaign. He signed her copy of his e-book “Profiles in Courage” and gave her a bracelet commemorating his service on the PT-109 torpedo boat throughout World War II.
“That was one of the most treasured 20 minutes of my life,” she advised the Miller Center.
After the president was killed, she labored for his widow, after which for his youthful brother Robert’s 1964 Senate marketing campaign. Following his victory, she interned in his workplace on Capitol Hill.
By then she was in faculty, at Penn State, however she was already marking territory as a Kennedy diehard. Whenever she got here house on trip, even for just some days, she would be sure that to put in time, if solely to run just a few errands or deal with some mail. Or she would possibly head to Hickory Hill to spherical up a few of Robert Kennedy’s many younger kids.
It was the 37 years she spent working for Ted — first as a press and legislative aide, and later as a deputy press secretary — that made her a Kennedy in all however identify. Always completely coifed and immaculately dressed, Ms. Miller radiated the straightforward grace so lengthy related to the household, not to point out their straightforward, assured competence.
Anything might occur in Senator Kennedy’s workplace, and anybody would possibly drop by for a go to. Ms. Miller dealt with all of it throughout her first decade on the job, when she ran the reception. A drop-in as soon as slapped her arduous throughout the face, for no clear motive. Another time the actor Paul Newman swung by to say howdy to the senator and ended up chatting with Ms. Miller.
“I don’t mean to be tooting my own horn,” she advised the Miller Center, “but I did know how to defend him on the issues, explain his issues, juggle 628 phone calls a day coming through, and put people on hold and get back to them and pick up on the conversation where I had been before.”
All the whereas, her unofficial duties expanded. Senator Kennedy listened to her, and took to coronary heart her issues about his intention to run for president in 1980. In a method, the presidency had killed two of his older brothers, she argued.
During one dialog, he appeared misplaced in thought, she recalled.
“Where are you?” she requested him. “What are you thinking?”
“I’m somewhere between happiness and sadness,” he replied, “and life and death.”
He ran in the primaries towards President Jimmy Carter. When he misplaced, Ms. Miller stated, she was quietly relieved.
Melody Jean Miller was born on Feb. 19, 1945, in Seattle. Her father, Peter Miller, served in the Navy throughout World War II and later moved the household to the Washington, D.C., space, the place he labored for the Veterans Administration. Her mom, Dorothy Jean (Chittenden) Miller, was a nurse.
Not lengthy after Melody’s first assembly with President Kennedy, she went off to Pennsylvania State University with plans to work for his re-election marketing campaign over the following summer season.
She was in her dorm room on Nov. 22, 1963, getting ready for historical past class, when she discovered that the president had been shot. She placed on a black gown and went to watch the news on TV.
“His loss was the greatest grief I have ever known,” she told The New York Times in 2013, “even more so than the loss of family members with whom I had a long goodbye.”
She studied training and political science, and after graduating in 1967 went to work instantly for Robert Kennedy as a press aide, first in his Senate workplace after which on his presidential marketing campaign.
Her first two marriages, to Paul McElligott and James Rogers, led to divorce. In 1997, she married William P. Wilson, a former aide to John Kennedy who had negotiated the phrases of Kennedy’s historic first televised debate with Richard M. Nixon in 1960. He died in 2014.
Along along with her brother, she is survived by her stepdaughter, Eliza Wilson Ingle, and three step-granddaughters.
When Ms. Miller retired from Ted Kennedy’s workplace in 2005, a reception passed off in the Russell Senate Office Building Caucus Room, the identical room the place John Kennedy had introduced his presidential bid in 1960 and the place Robert Kennedy introduced his personal eight years later. After Ted Kennedy’s demise, the room was renamed in the brothers’ honor.
“That room is very special for me,” Ms. Miller told the Washington newspaper Roll Call, her eyes dewy with tears. “I can think of no more special room from which to depart.”