It was a wonderful life, or so it seemed. One day Lombardi and his son were in the car together and Vince said, 'You think I've made a big mistake, don't you?'

	Vince Lombardi with Marie, their daughter, Susan, and Vincent in the '60s. (Art Shay - Time Inc.)

Lombardi was still at training camp when his son, Vincent, recently graduated from law school in St. Paul, came out to begin a new life in Washington. He and his two young sons flew out first, while his wife, Jill, stayed with baby Gina until the movers loaded their furniture. By the middle of August they were all staying in Marie’s dream house on Stanmore Drive in Potomac Falls. In his few public comments, Vincent politely made it seem that he wanted to move to Washington, that it was his idea, or at least that he understood and agreed with his father’s expressed desire to have the family close together. In fact, he did not feel especially close to his parents then, and from the moment he arrived was uncertain about what he was doing here. Was this going to be another time when he could not meet his father’s expectations? Lombardi had mentioned helping Vincent get a job at the Justice Department, but the talk seemed to evaporate when he finally got to town, and there were few contacts for Vincent to pursue. The Old Man was unavoidably too busy with the football team to spend much time with family. Vincent understood this. He did not blame his father, but merely felt awkward about it. He took his boys to Carlisle for a few days, and Lombardi enjoyed his limited time with his grandchildren, tooting them around in his golf cart. Then what?

Lombardi had good intentions, he wanted to create one big happy family, but it never quite seemed to work. Little John banged his head on the bathtub of the Potomac Falls house and had to be taken to the hospital. Jill suffered a miscarriage, losing a troubled early pregnancy. She and Vincent decided to rent the house Marie had found for them rather than buy it, and Vincent finally found a job in a downtown law firm, but during the long drive into town every morning he asked himself, "Do I need this commute? I could be working for a law firm in Minnesota and life would be easier." The season had started and Lombardi was back from training camp, preoccupied with his players and the next game. Marie seemed to love her house and the social whirl. She spent much of her time shopping in Georgetown with her friend Jackie Anderson. There were catered postgame parties at Stanmore Drive, the family room filled with celebrities: Joe DiMaggio, Martha Wright, Frank Gifford, Nancy Dickerson, Ethel Kennedy.

It was a wonderful life, or so it seemed. One day Lombardi and his son were in the car together and Vince said, "You think I’ve made a big mistake coming back, don’t you?" Vincent took this remark as an indirect way for his father to express his own misgivings, and the implication surprised him. He never considered the possibility that his father doubted himself. It was he, not his dad, who had made the mistake in coming to Washington, he thought. A few weeks later he and Jill decided to move back to St. Paul. When Vincent broke the news to his parents, not much was said. Vince was preoccupied; Marie expressed herself largely through body language, according to Jill, who could sense that her mother-in-law was "extremely upset."

The full measure of Marie’s anxiety came pouring out in a letter to Vincent that arrived in St. Paul shortly after his return. She was "absolutely frantic" about her husband’s health. He had been bleeding "from his kidney, bladder, prostate, who knows," she wrote, and though a hospital check could find nothing wrong, she feared it was cancer. She had a premonition that he would die. "Believe me, son, if anything happens to him I will fold up my tent and go with him 'cause there is no way I could live without him. I suddenly realized what a price I had paid for fame and fortune ... It was always enough that Dad and I loved each other so much that everything else I had missed was all right, but the thought that I could lose him staggered me. So now I am going to get tough and try to protect him from anyone or anything that might pressure him – no speaking or public appearances, no books or anything. It’s just Dad and I ’cause in the end that’s all we have."

Lombardi’s football team knew nothing about his deteriorating health. The Redskins were winning again that fall, never easily or impressively, but enough to maintain the coach’s status as the ultimate winner. Just having him there raised the public expectations, perhaps unreasonably, but there was a growing sense in Washington that Lombardi was creating another dynasty. After they defeated the Giants, 20-14, at RFK in the fifth game, the Redskins’ record stood at 3-1-1, in second place in the division behind the Dallas Cowboys, and the postgame party on Stanmore Drive was especially festive. A band of Izzo cousins (his mother’s side of the family) came down from New York and Baltimore, mixing with the Washington elite. A few days later, Ethel Kennedy wrote Lombardi a note on her Hickory Hill stationery.

Dear Coach,
Many thanks for an exciting afternoon watching our favorite team. And also for the after game victory celebration in your delightful home. I didn’t think anybody had as many relatives as the Kennedys. I guess you know the greatest asset to the team is living right in the house with you. Basically you realize it isn’t Sonny’s arm but Marie’s Hail Marys that pull us through every Sunday. The children and I are grateful to you both for sharing your box with us. With continued admiration and affection,
Ethel Kennedy
P.S.– Is it true you fired up the team at halftime by telling them it’s only a game!

For a year after Robert Kennedy’s death, Ethel Kennedy had been in mourning, staying away from Washington’s social life. When she had begun appearing in public again that June, a year after the assassination, she immediately found comfort in Lombardi’s presence. She first sat next to him at a party at Ben and Tony Bradlee’s house, and though he made her nervous at first, he quickly put her at ease, talking about his friendships with Jack Kennedy and her husband and how they both had the qualities of great athletes. "His presence was so overwhelming," she said later, "that I forgot who else was in the room." Over time, she saw more of the coach and in her prayers thanked Bobby for sending Vince Lombardi to Washington to look after her. He was invariably polite in her presence, as was Marie, though in private Marie could be dismissive of the Kennedys. As a conservative Republican, she found President Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew more to her taste.

Lombardi was moving that way himself, pushed away from his Democratic roots by what he saw as the excesses of the counterculture, and pulled toward conservative Republicans by their growing hero worship of him. The Lombardi Credo on discipline, respect for authority and the American zeal to win had become the anthem of the business world. His "Second Effort" motivational film was then the best-selling film of its kind, promoted by insurance companies and corporations as the positive capitalist answer to Arthur Miller’s dark "Death of a Salesman." Patriotic groups reprinted his speeches and recruited him to join their causes. William O’Hara, a friend and classmate from Fordham, persuaded him to join a list of conservative figures supporting the Nixon administration’s policies in Vietnam and development of the ABM defense system. O’Hara considered Lombardi by then "very much to the right." In fact, he was not so much to the right as disturbed and confused by the cultural choices.

During his years in Green Bay, as he developed his strong rhetoric challenging the behavior of young antiwar protesters, Lombardi was speaking from a removed perspective. Green Bay, with its heavily Catholic working-class population, was largely isolated from the ’60s, its sons more likely to fight in Vietnam than to march in the streets of Madison or Washington. During his years there, he later acknowledged, he knew little about the antiwar movement, the student protests, hippies, sex, drugs and rock-and-roll, and he tended to think of them all as a single entity that challenged what he believed in and what he had accomplished. Now that he was in Washington, he could see it firsthand. Hundreds of thousands of antiwar protesters flooded into the city twice that fall, first for an October 15 demonstration sponsored by the Vietnam Moratorium Committee, then a month later for the Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam – "the Mobe." The November 15 event, organized by a more confrontational wing of the peace movement, drew an enormous crowd, estimated by police at 250,000 and by others at twice that number. When the speeches ended at the Washington Monument, a few thousand young militants scrambled over to the Justice Department and incited a rocks-and-bottles-versus-tear-gas melee with police. Attorney General John N. Mitchell looked down on the confrontation from his office and seized on the opportunity to portray the antiwar movement as anarchistic, even though all but a small fraction of the demonstrators were peaceful.

Lombardi’s reaction was not precisely like Mitchell’s, but he also worried about anarchy. Before and after the demonstrations, thousands of peace marchers had filled the sidewalks of Connecticut Avenue on their way to and from the Mall, and the coach had watched them out his office window, lamenting the sight – the long hair, the seeming disregard for authority. What kind of courage did it take to be a college rebel? he wondered aloud. "It’s easy to break the law if there’s impunity. I’d like to go out there and throw a rock through that window, if I knew the only thing I’m going to have is a reprimand." As a band of protesters passed below, he shook his head and said, "Look at that!" George Dickson, his backfield assistant, snarled sarcastically that he would like to turn a machine gun on the crowd. "God damn it, that’s your generation!" Lombardi responded. In fact, Dickson was only eight years younger than Lombardi, and unlike the coach, had served in the military. He had been a paratrooper in World War II and still had his helmet with a bullet hole in it. But Dickson knew better than to argue with Lombardi when he thought he was right.

The Sunday before the Mobe, Lombardi staged a patriotic counterdemonstration of sorts, a ceremony at halftime of the Redskins-Eagles game called "The Flag Story." It was much like the patriotic show he had put on at Lambeau Field the previous December. This one brought a letter of thanks from President Nixon. After first offering condolences that "the game didn’t turn out better for you and your Redskins" (it was a 28-28 tie; the would-be coach in the White House was down on the defense), Nixon wrote: "You have always demonstrated on the field and off the qualities of faith and determination which are at the heart of true patriotism. I am very happy to know that the fans got to see such a wonderful and inspiring show of this kind at a time when it can do the most good."

	Vince Lombardi watches his Redskins in 1969. (Associated Press)

Lombardi did not slow his schedule despite Marie’s vows to protect him from outside interests. He gave speeches, accepted awards, made frequent jaunts up to New York, and continued his coaching duties without showing a hint of trouble to his assistants. Not long after Marie wrote the foreboding letter to her son, Vince called two of his favorite old Packers, Paul Hornung and Max McGee, and asked them to come to Washington and hang out with his team. "I want these guys to see some winners," he told McGee. He invited them to stay at his house, and McGee almost accepted until Hornung talked him out of it. "No, no, no, Max, we’re not gonna stay three nights at Lombardi’s. Hell, no way! Get us a suite." The trip probably meant more to Lombardi than to his players. McGee and Hornung visited the dressing room, but stood around joshing with a few friends, nothing more than that. Vince and Marie took them to dinner, and when they walked into Duke’s the patrons again gave Lombardi a standing ovation. "He pretended he was embarrassed as hell, but down deep he loved it," Hornung recalled. When it reached 11 o’clock, McGee started checking his watch, and Lombardi knew what that meant. "McGee, you guys haven’t changed a bit. You want to get the hell out of here, don’t you. Get the hell out of here."

Perhaps Max and the Golden Boy made no difference, but the Redskins won that week, defeating Pittsburgh. Their offense, led by Jurgensen’s accurate passing (completing 62 percent) and Larry Brown’s toughness (gaining 888 yards), was explosive all year, but the defense remained inconsistent. In the final home game against New Orleans, the Redskins broke out to a quick 17-0 lead, then held on to win, 17-14, and the players gave Lombardi the game ball. The club went on to finish with a 7-5-2 record, and the years of losing were done and gone. It was the same winning percentage that Lombardi had during his first year in Green Bay, but he was disappointed. "I thought we could have had a better won-lost record," he said. "I hope we can find some better people. That’s what we’re going to have to do – find them." In Green Bay, the talent was already there, and by his second year he was taking the Packers to the championship game. That seemed less likely now, it was a more competitive league, with smarter coaches, better scouting, and 26 teams instead of the old dozen.

He went to Super Bowl IV in New Orleans that year, watching in the stands as the Kansas City Chiefs beat the Minnesota Vikings, the second straight loss for old NFL teams. It would be the last meaningful game he ever attended. His wife’s fear that he was dying turned out to be hauntingly prescient – by the next September, after a ferocious struggle with colon cancer, he was gone. But on the afternoon of the Super Bowl, Vince Lombardi’s fate was still unknown.

Sonny Jurgensen was also in the stands that day, and the connection between the coach and the quarterback seemed almost mystical. Sonny was his boy now, his new golden boy, and even though the season had been Jurgensen’s best ever, it was only the beginning. There would be no stopping them now that Sonny knew the system, no reason for him not to complete 70 percent of his passes next year. Yes, the culture was changing and the game was changing, but Lombardi thought he had it figured out. Even this newfangled defense that the AFL teams were winning with, the 3-4, with four linebackers. There was a way to beat it, Lombardi reasoned: read the key of the weak-side linebacker and flood the zone and there it was – the passing game of the ’70s! Vince and Sonny sat too far apart to consult during the game, but every now and then they looked at each other, catching eyes the same way they would from the huddle to the sideline, with the crowd roaring, and they made hand gestures indicating what play they would have run against the Chiefs, nodding in agreement, both certain that soon enough they would be down on the field, playing for a championship, and winning.

David Maraniss is an associate editor of The Post. This article is adapted from When Pride Still Mattered, to be published in October by Simon & Schuster.