CHAPTER 6 )

Jack

God doesn’t care who wins this race

And neither do you or I.

There are bigger things to care about

Like the wind and the sea and the sky.

~ From “Windy Song,” a poem about sailing by Jacqueline Bouvier, age fourteen. Written in 1943, the year of the sinking of PT-109, the original is today on public display at the JFK Library and Museum with her margin illustrations of anchors, lighthouses, and gaff-rigged sailboats. Ten years after writing it she married John F. Kennedy.

 “Well, after I came home and was released from the navy, I went to work for a newspaper, the Chicago Herald American”, Jack said, recounting his career after entering national politics. “And then I came home to Boston. I had an older brother who I thought would be a politician, but he was killed as a flyer in Europe. I never wanted to be in politics until really almost the time I ran. I was always interested in writing. I wanted to teach for a while. So that, really, the war changed my life, and I suppose if it hadn’t been for that and what happened then, I would have went on with my original plans.”1

The transformation of Jack Kennedy from cerebral second son to family political standard-bearer was not immediate or assumed. His father said Jack was “altogether different” from his older brother. Joe Jr. was “more dynamic, more sociable and easy going,” said their father. “Jack in those days . . . was rather shy, withdrawn and quiet. His mother and I couldn’t picture him as a politician. We were sure he’d be a teacher or a writer.”²

Jack’s career in journalism was brief but eventful, lasting from May to August 1945. Jack’s father helped him win an assignment as a reporter for William Randolph Hearst’s Chicago newspaper, which led to articles being published in other Hearst papers. He wrote from San Francisco about the formation of the United Nations and from London about parliamentary elections, where he showed better-than-average prescience for an American by predicting Winston Churchill’s possible electoral defeat. He was exposed to, and in some cases met, numerous great political leaders of the era.

Jack soon came to believe that those who did great things were summoned to a higher calling than those who wrote about those who did great things. Reporting was not sufficiently satisfying.3 Jack entered Harvard Law School.

When the incumbent occupant of a Boston congressional district forfeited that seat to run for mayor of Boston, Joe and Jack saw an opportunity for the son to try politics. In a district so overwhelmingly Democratic, the party primary mattered much more than November’s general election. Joe poured money into the campaign, making a particularly noteworthy investment in advertising and public relations, politically innovative in its time, according to historian Michael O’Brien.⁴ Though Jack had not lived in Boston since early childhood, his grandfather had been mayor and his father was rich and famous, so the Kennedy name was a strong asset.

He ran as a war hero and the story of PT-109 became a campaign narrative that would be repeated then and at every future step up in office. Copies of the condensed version of the John Hersey New Yorker article were sent to homes throughout the district. Advertising echoed the narrative, and a PT-109 crewmate issued an endorsement for the campaign.

His discomfort and avoidance of traditional Irish political glad-handing and back slapping conjured an image more dignified and less old-school. His skills and self-confidence at public speaking improved. With nine opponents, Jack received 42 percent of the vote in the primary and, effectively, the seat. A friend visiting at Hyannis Port looked out over the Sound and wondered aloud how a presidential yacht might look there.

The race was exhausting, and Jack retreated to Hyannis Port to rest. He still had campaigning to do for the general election and on behalf of other Massachusetts Democrats, but with the June primary behind him he could get in some sailing and reflect on where life circumstances were taking him. For that he had the help of a new friend, a recently ordained Catholic priest named Edward C. Duffy. They met at the unveiling of a new main altar at St. Francis Xavier Church in Hyannis, built with Kennedy family money and dedicated to the memory of Lt. Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Several times that summer Jack invited Father Duffy to sail on Victura, just the two of them, cruising and talking. Jack confided more than once to the priest his insecurities about living a life in politics originally intended for his older brother.5

~ The Kennedys had servers when they dined at home, and a new one who started that summer was Joanna Barboza, age sixteen. She recalls Joe Sr. was not around much and when he was the children talked to him as though they were “reporting”:

These are the yachts that are in, these are the yachts that are out, and here’s what people, and we, did, and so on and so on, and that kind of thing. There was a lot of that kind of conversation.

There was nothing that told me that this thin man [Jack] with this huge mop of hair . . . would ever be president of the United States, would leave a mark on the lives of people around the world. . . . All I saw was this kind of blonde kid who raced around and was a very fine sailor. No, nothing. There was nothing there.

The following summer Barboza saw a change in Jack. Where the first summer he was reflective and had an intensity about him, “like smoke, you couldn’t hold,” the second summer after going to Congress he was more open and warm. “He personally had moved to another place emotionally.”⁶

As Jack made his strong start in public life, and was enjoying it, across the Atlantic his sister Kick was recovering from her loss of Billy and starting a new life of her own. She had discovered a new love, Lord Peter Fitz-william. Peter was something of a composite of the three male Kennedys who were most important in her life—her father and brothers Joe and Jack. For his service in the war he was a recipient of the Distinguished Service Cross, Britain’s second-highest honor, putting him on par with Jack and Joe Jr. for bravery. He was of a wealthy family, nine years older than Kathleen, roguish and an aggressive businessman, like her father. He was also loaded with charm. She was deeply in love and her happiness showed to those who knew of the relationship. Sadly, however, it was a happiness she could not share with her parents. He was a Protestant and married, working on a divorce. Though she confided in Jack, she knew her parents would deeply object.

Rose and Jack visited Kathleen in London, and then Rose accompanied her daughter on a shopping trip to Paris, leaving Jack behind in London. There Jack again took seriously ill. Finally he received the accurate diagnosis that had for so many years eluded his other doctors. The news he had Addison’s disease was an awful blow because until the 1930s, victims tended to die within months of diagnosis. The good news was that by 1947 treatments were being found that prolonged life by replacing the hormonal deficiencies caused by the disease’s diminishment of adrenal function. Life expectancy could be extended by a few years. It was still considered a death sentence, however.

He returned to the United States on the Queen Mary, borne off the ship on a stretcher. Reporters and supporters were told he was suffering from a recurrence of malaria, a tale that fit a pattern. When reporters described Jack’s back problems as a consequence of the trauma of the PT-109 collision, they were not corrected, though the back problems long preceded his war service. Now the symptoms of Addison’s disease were misrepresented as another consequence of his service to his country. For a time, Jack missed votes in the House and, some thought, showed less ambition.

In England Kathleen’s relationship with Peter intensified, and after a few months she could wait no longer to tell her parents. Rose was appalled. If she married Peter, Rose said, Kick would be disowned by the family, dead to them. Kick’s father, by his silence, assented.

Perhaps it was Joe’s silence that convinced Kick he was persuadable. A few months later Joe made plans to travel to Paris on business. Hoping her father could be won over, Kathleen and Peter decided to travel there to meet him. They first flew to Cannes, with plans to spend a couple of days in the Riviera before going to Paris. Their eight-passenger plane encountered weather problems, and the pilot lost control. On May 13, 1948, the plane crashed into a mountainside and killed them all.7

~ Of the Golden Trio, Jack was now alone. He was the one who was always sick. The other two who were most healthy, vibrant, and alive, the two with personalities that lit rooms, who had the greatest potential, were gone. The family gathered at the house in Hyannis Port. Joe, in Paris, traveled to see her body, but then did not know what to do about her burial. Billy’s family convinced Joe to have her buried in Chatsworth with her late husband, Billy.

The effect on Jack was profound. He had loved his older brother, but they kept their emotional distance. Not so with Kick. His friend Lem said Jack asked again and again, “why?” He could not sleep, kept awake by memories of the many nights he and Kick stayed awake into the night in long conversation. Growing up, practically every boy who met Kick fell in love with her, and even though Jack’s was a brotherly love, he was charmed by the same traits the boys always saw in her personality and wit. Nobody else fell into such perfect intellectual and emotional sync with Jack.

~ The loss of a brother, sister, and brother-in-law, and the looming presence of his own mortality, made for a dark, dark time. Said Lem Billings, “He just figured there was no sense in planning ahead anymore.” He lived for the moment, “treating each day as if it were his last, demanding of life constant intensity, adventure and pleasure.”8

He might have asked himself, “what’s the point of it all?” Instead, Jack was newly motivated. He would make the most of the time he had. Jack’s enthusiasm for politics returned, and the way he articulated positions on issues and his speeches struck many as more bold and thoughtful. He even flirted with a run for governor of Massachusetts. His supporters circulated nominating petitions that demonstrated his potential for garnering support outside his congressional district. Though he withdrew his candidacy and stayed on in Congress, he had sent a signal of intent and capability for higher political office.

~ In a summer during those early years of Jack’s service in Congress, sometime in the late 1940s before Ted finished boarding school and headed off to Harvard, Ted received a phone call from Jack. It was July, Ted was at the Cape house, and the Edgartown Regatta was to be the following weekend. It was a race the Kennedys did not miss. Ted and his cousin Joey Gargan had signed on to enter Victura in the race. Jack told Ted he wanted to be aboard too but told him not to wait if he was running late.

Ted was thrilled at the prospect of racing with his navy war-hero big brother, now a member of Congress. Before the day of the race Ted sailed Victura over the 16.5-nautical-mile (19-statute-mile) distance from Hyannis Port across Nantucket Sound to Martha’s Vineyard. On race day Ted and Joe got the boat ready and criss-crossed Edgartown harbor waiting for Jack, happy to risk a late start if it meant getting Jack on Victura. Only a few minutes remained before the race’s start. Ted and Joe, looking for some sight of Jack’s plane in the overcast sky, made out a single-engine plane. As it descended toward the grass landing strip nearby, they studied it more closely and there they saw Jack with a big smile waving at them. He must have quickly spotted his sail #94 among all the other boats.9

The Edgartown Regatta is the highlight of Cape Cod’s sailing season, as big a social event as a sport, and the pier area that year was crowded with friends and families of sailors. Jack had his taxi driver speed from the island’s grass landing strip to the pier. On this day there were two classes of sailboats racing, twenty in each. The races were well organized, and the rules clearly stated and enforced. To join a crew, racers needed the official red tag to identify them as entrants. Jack had none. Wearing his blue suit and tie and carrying his briefcase, Jack made his way quickly through the crowd as Ted steered his boat to the end of the pier. When a race official realized what was going on, he cried, “Hey! You can’t just pick people up here!” Jack jumped in anyway, just as the sound of the starting gun could be heard. The starting line was off in the distance, but they pointed Victura and trimmed sails. Jack went into the tiny cabin, made a quick change of clothes; then Ted handed him the tiller.¹⁰

It was drizzling as they crossed the starting line, and over the long course the mist made it hard to see the position of the other boats. Throwing the dice, Jack chose a route the other sailors had not. Some points of sail in relation to the wind are faster than others. A beam reach, for example, where the wind hits the boat at a ninety-degree angle to the boat’s direction, is usually fastest. Before long, the wind shifted and suddenly Victura had the advantage. Maybe the others had to tack an extra time, slowing to turn through the wind. Perhaps the new point-of-sail helped. Whatever the reason, the gamble paid and Jack, Ted, and Joe won their division.

It was easy to get a soaking in a Wianno Senior, and Jack was drenched. He went below to change back into his suit, jumped off at the pier, and Ted soon saw his small plane climbing against the gray sky, the engine noise getting faint as it grew smaller in the distance.11

~ In 1948 the first clinical medical trials of cortisone were completed. Cortisone proved effective at first for rheumatoid arthritis, and its discoverers won a Nobel Prize for medicine in 1950. It soon became a key treatment for Addison’s disease, and Jack began taking it orally by around 1951. The result was a dramatic improvement in his health. It is hard to imagine how he could have run for president in 1960, or perhaps even lived long enough, had cortisone not freed him from the recurring illnesses he had experienced in all his years prior to the new medicine’s availability.

In October 1951, to beef up his foreign policy bona fides, Jack went on a tour of the Middle East and Eastern countries and brought along Bobby and Patricia. Bobby had just earned his law degree from the University of Virginia. The eight-year difference in age between Jack and Bobby meant that they really had not formed an adult relationship, but twenty-five thousand miles on the road changed that. The following year Jack asked Bobby to manage his campaign for the U.S. Senate against the incumbent, Henry Cabot Lodge, a product of Boston Brahmin upbringing. Jack won and thus began a tradition in which Kennedy siblings and close relatives graduated from racing sailboats together to racing for public office together. Many a future Kennedy campaign manager would be directly related to their candidate.

Jack ran for political office five times beginning in 1946 and made frequent use of aircraft in his campaigns, most famously in the 1960 presidential race, when a twin-engine Convair campaign airplane was called Caroline, after his daughter. It was the first use of a private plane in a presidential race. It was more common in those years to give airplanes names, just as we name boats, and according to the yachting writer Julius Fanta, before Caroline’s birth in 1957, Jack flew in a campaign plane called Victura.¹²

~ For decades the Kennedys and the press had a relationship that was—depending on the circumstances—symbiotic, antagonistic, serendipitous, chummy, cloaked, calculated, complicated, and mutually admiring.

Under the category of “serendipitous” falls the Washington Times-Herald. The Times-Herald, which outsold the Washington Post in the postwar years, had a habit of hiring attractive young female reporters close to Jack. Kick was writing for it after her college years, while Jack was in Washington working for Naval Intelligence. There Kick met Inga Arvad, a fellow Times-Herald staff member, and introduced her to Jack, leading to one of Jack’s most intense romantic relationships. In 1951 Arthur Krock, who had years earlier helped Jack publish Why England Slept, was at the Washington bureau of the New York Times. Krock, also a friend of the Auchincloss family, called the editor of the Times-Herald to recommend for employment an inexperienced Auchincloss step-daughter. “She’s round-eyed, clever and wants to go into journalism.” Her name was Jacqueline Bouvier.13

Jack and Jacqueline met in May 1951 at a Georgetown dinner party. After that, Jacqueline and her sister, Lee, went to Europe for six months. She returned in the fall, took the job as “Inquiring Photographer” at the Times-Herald, and began dating Jack with more seriousness.

“It was all spasmodic,” Jacqueline said, “because he spent half of each week in Massachusetts. He’d call me from some oyster bar up there, with a great clinking of coins, to ask me out to the movies the following Wednesday in Washington. . . . He was not the candy-and-flowers type, so every now and then he’d give me a book.”¹⁴

As they entered into 1952, they managed somehow to maintain their courtship while Jack campaigned for the Senate. That summer she started showing up at Jack’s campaign speeches and teas. As it was summer, the couple paid visits to the Cape house at Hyannis Port.

Bobby’s wife, Ethel, was the first to marry into the family, and she fit in remarkably well, sharing in common with the Kennedy sisters all their athleticism, informality, and assertive nature. While Ethel blended in, Jacqueline brought culture change. The Kennedy men enjoyed Jackie’s presence, and she shrewdly charmed them, but the women were less than charitable toward her. The sisters referred to Jacqueline as “the deb” and noted that she preferred her name be pronounced “jack-leen.” “Rhymes with ‘queen ’” Ethel noted. For her part, Jacqueline confidentially referred to the sisters as the “toothy girls” or the “rah-rah girls.”15 In time, the shared experience, the extreme highs and lows of being a Kennedy, would bring them all close.

Jacqueline held her own, in her own style. Dinah Bridge, a British friend of the Kennedy family, visiting Cape Cod that summer, said, “I think I was probably one of the first people to see her in the Kennedy household.” Bridge was with Bobby at his and Ethel’s house.

We were all sitting around having breakfast, and Jack was there, and Jean. And around the corner of the front door came this beautiful girl in riding clothes to pick up Jean to go riding . . . . And very shortly after that . . . she was invited to supper, and lots of games were played, and she was sort of put through her paces, I should think you would say. And she stood up extremely well to the Kennedy barrage of questions. ... It was quite a barrage. You had to sort of know the form to keep up, you know, because the jokes went so fast, and the chitter chat. But she did extremely well, as I remember.¹⁶

The family for years had played “The Game,” similar to charades, and to the extent it was a demonstration of intellect and cleverness, Jackie proved hard to beat. She was athletic enough to play touch football with the family, even if she did not know the rules at first, but once she proved to the family she was fit and sporting, she afterward could avoid Kennedy sports that were excessively physical.

The Kennedy sisters understood why Jackie had won Jack’s heart but must have been taken aback by the speed at which Joe warmed to her. In an interview Doris Kearns Goodwin said Jackie, “told me that at the beginning she identified more with Old Joe, that she’d sit with Joe and listen to classical music, and he’d tell her not to worry about touch football and that he’d rather talk to her anyway. He really did love classical music and he was an interesting fellow, and probably he was much more interesting to talk to at that stage of her life than Rose would have been. He was worldly, he had adventures, he was a flirt. I can see that she would have liked him.”¹⁷

Jack successfully ran statewide in November 1952, and Bobby as manager got a crash course in the higher-level politics of a U.S. Senate campaign. Soon after taking his new office he told the family of his intent to marry. Joe was delighted. The engagement was announced on June 24, 1953, robbing American women of “the golden boy, the most eligible bachelor in New England,” as one female journalist described him, herself a target of his preengagement romantic advances.18

As had happened before, and would happen again, a media opportunity was not to be overlooked, and the engagement was a perfect opportunity. Once again Life magazine was the willing collaborator. Another talented photographer, Hy Peskin, whose work for Sports Illustrated included some of that magazine’s most memorable early images, was dispatched by Life to Hyannis Port.

In 1953 only about half of American households had televisions. Radio, newspapers, and movie newsreels were major sources of news. So were magazines, and in the decade before TV images of any quality were broadcast, Life was one of the most popular ways to visually witness world events. Life hired the best photographers in the world and printed their pictures in a ten-by-fourteen-inch format, fully 50 percent larger than typical magazines, above which Life towered on the newsstand. By 1950 Life reached one American in five and it doubled that reach by 1960.

Published photos of the newly engaged couple inside the magazine showed Jackie on the Hyannis Port lawn doing an “end run” with a football and swinging a bat as Jack played catcher, her ambivalence for such sports set aside for the photo opportunity. One caption stated that Jackie “displays unorthodox but vigorous batter’s style on broad, well-kept lawn of estate.” Another caption beneath a group on the lawn read, “Kennedy sisters Jean and Eunice question Jackie, ‘How did he propose?’” Jackie was given a full-page photo, sitting on the big house porch rail, legs swinging playfully upward, a big sun bonnet on her head, with the sweeping view of whitecaps on Nantucket Sound behind her. The caption stated that she “studied at Vassar, George Washington University and the Sorbonne in Paris. Her last assignment for her newspaper, the Washington Times-Herald, was the coronation last month of Queen Elizabeth II.” It is hard to believe that men who remembered her just a year or two earlier found her looks unremarkable. By 1953, cameras loved her, and Life said she was smart and cultured too.¹⁹

But it was the cover of Life that was most striking. To the extent the Kennedys intended it, it was an early masterpiece of twentieth-century political image making. Just as the family had done with Life’s Alfred Eisenstaedt thirteen years earlier, when his 1940 photograph showed Joe Jr. at the tiller with Jack not even in sight, now Jack and Jackie took Peskin out for sail, again on Victura. The resulting cover photo showed Jack and Jackie with beautiful smiles, forward on the bow, sails full of sunlight and air, the picture of youthful promise. Victura is heeling leeward about twenty-five degrees. Jack is handsome and relaxed, bare feet on the rail, shorts wet with seawater. He’s in his element, confident on his boat. In no need of a handgrip, his hands drape casually over his knees. Jackie’s short kinky hair is windblown, her collar flapping upward, her figure thin and girlish. Her legs are bent away from the rail and one hand tightly grips the mast while her other is apparently holding Jack. She’s less accustomed to sailing, and she betrays perhaps just a hint of insecurity about the heel of the boat. “SENATOR KENNEDY GOES A-COURTING,” says the cover blurb.

Jack Kennedy was new enough on the national scene that the article still needed to identify him as the son of the ambassador. If ever there was a single moment when the Kennedy brand was newly defined, it was on July 20, 1953, the date on the cover of Life. Journalists writing about Jack would soon no longer need to call him the son of an ambassador. Nothing could make Joe happier.

Later, after seeing the Life cover, a friend told Jackie that she must be quite a sailing enthusiast. “No, my husband is,” she responded. “They just shoved me into that boat long enough to take the picture.”20

~ Jack and Jackie married on September 12, 1953, with Bobby as best man, Jackie’s sister, Lee, as matron of honor, and Ted as an usher. Jackie’s parents would have preferred a smaller private wedding, but Joe insisted on a media event and he got his wish. While on their honeymoon, she wrote a poem about her new husband that her daughter, Caroline, many years later included in a published collection of Jackie’s favorite poems, “although I know my mother would have felt slightly embarrassed to have her own poems included with the ones in this book that she so admired.”²¹ The volume included works by Homer, Shakespeare, Shelley, Keats, and Langston Hughes.

Jackie’s 370-word poem, inspired by Stephen Vincent Benet’s “John Brown’s Body,” was called “Meanwhile in Massachusetts” and spoke of Jack’s New England upbringing, Irish heritage, and his calling to serve. She wrote of the family’s main house, “There his brothers and sisters have laughed and played / And thrown themselves to rest in the shade.” And she wrote of Jack’s promising destiny: “All of the things he was going to be. / All of the things in the wind and the sea.22

Ted Sorensen, a political adviser and speechwriter who began working for Jack the year he married Jackie, said, “After their marriage, she interested him slightly in art and he interested her slightly in politics.”²³

Jackie loved poetry and read Proust and other French writers in their original language. She not only wrote but illustrated her own poetry. Jack loved books probably as much as any politician ever born, so here they found common interest. By the 1950s Jackie’s influence, combined with the Harvard education that Jack, Bobby, and Ted had acquired, began to generate in the men a growing taste for poetry and literature. At Hyannis Port Jack and Jackie read poetry aloud to each other. Jackie later helped Bobby refine his knowledge of the classics, and he too grew fond of reading literature aloud. As Jack rose to national prominence, allusions to poetry and literature began appearing in more of his speeches.

Early in Jack’s political career his speeches made reference to historic figures, and if there were quotes they might come from Jefferson, Madison, Lincoln, Churchill, or Clausewitz, noted Edward Klein, writing about the relationship between Jack and Jackie. Sorensen described the couple sprawled out on a rug at home, surrounded by piles of books. “Oh listen to this Jack,” he recalled her saying. “This fits right into what you’re trying to say.” Sorensen said, “Jackie wasn’t so much a researcher as she was this remarkable font of knowledge about literary matters.”²⁴

One of Jack’s Senate staffers recalled, “What she would do is make suggestions to Jack—ideas on positions he might take, poetry he might recite, historical references.... And he would always incorporate her ideas into what he would say.” Added another aide, Charlie Bartlett, “They were doing a hell of a lot of reading together and Jackie, who was very, very bright, would pick out quotes. ... It was she who dug up a lot of the quotes that Jack started dropping in his speeches in the course of the [presidential] campaign.”25

The imagery of the sea and sailing was a favorite, and Jackie, perhaps knowing Jack’s fondness for the topic, fed his interest. “One poem that was special to both of them was Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Ulysses,” said Jack and Jackie’s daughter, Caroline. “My mother had memorized it with her grandfather when she was ten years old. She introduced it to my father who often quoted from it in his speeches, and later the poem became identified with my uncle Bobby as well.”²⁶ Ted also.

She showed Jack the poem shortly after they were married. It tells of an aging mariner king, known to the Greeks as Odysseus of Homeric legend, who as a young man rose to greatness through epic sea voyages and naval escapades. Older and not content with a king’s idle life on a throne, Ulysses implores his aging comrades to reclaim their glorious past and seek greatness anew. He longs to journey out to sea again. It is fascinating to picture the young Jackie, all of twenty-five, sitting near the shore of Cape Cod, looking out across the Sound with Jack, so delighting him with this gem of a poem that he would use it in future speeches, as would his two brothers after him. The closing lines were their favorites:

          Come, my friends,

’Tis not too late to seek a newer world.

Push off, and sitting well in order smite

The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds

To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

Of all the western stars, until I die.

It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:

It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,

And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

~ During the 1950s the sisters—Eunice, Patricia, and Jean—were coming into their own too. In the thirteen-month period that started in May 1953, Jack and two of his four surviving sisters all married. Jean married in 1956. All the men thus brought into the Kennedy fold through marriage would have important roles to play in both the personal and political lives of Kennedys.

The first of those sisters to marry was Eunice. Her husband was R. Sargent Shriver, whom she met through her father. Like Jack, Shriver had been a navy lieutenant who saw action in the Solomon Islands, specifically Guadalcanal. After the war he was hired by Joe to manage the Merchandise Mart in Chicago. He would go on to play crucial roles in the Kennedy administration and would even run for president himself.

The Kennedy sisters are commonly thought to have arrived at lives in public service as a result of Jack’s elevation to the presidency. In fact, Eunice was headed there with greater alacrity than Jack at first. Nor did Patricia need Jack’s help to get places. Patricia’s 1954 wedding to the Hollywood actor Peter Lawford was as big a social event as Jack and Jackie’s. Both weddings drew similar-sized crowds of more than three thousand spectators.27 Lawford was more famous than Jack at that time, having been a Hollywood leading man since the 1940s. At the height of his career he received thousands of fan mail letters weekly. In 1953 he starred in roles on the TV anthology, General Electric Theater, hosted by Ronald Reagan. By 1959 he was a full member of Frank Sinatra’s “Rat Pack.” Sinatra became an important Kennedy backer, a part of a Kennedy process of blurring the lines between celebrity and politics, something impossible to imagine from Ike or Harry Truman before him, or Richard Nixon after.

Jean kept a lower profile for many years, but her marriage to Stephen Edward Smith brought to the clan his financial acumen and skills as a political strategist. He managed Kennedy family finances for many years, was managing Jack’s reelection campaign until the assassination in 1963, and then managed Bobby’s 1968 campaign for the presidency until that too was stopped by an assassin.

~ In 1954 Jack’s back gave him so much trouble that for weeks he needed crutches to walk. The advice he sought from a team of doctors came without unanimity about the advisability of surgery, particularly because his Addison’s disease exposed him to risk of potentially fatal infections. He became convinced that his choice was between a life in pain on crutches or a chance at fixing the back that had been failing him since childhood. “I’d rather die than spend the rest of my life on these things,” he said, punching his crutches with a fist.28

The surgical option was to involve a double fusion of spinal disks. He went through it in October 1954. Just as his Addison’s disease was kept secret, so too was the outcome of the surgery, which very nearly killed him, according to various accounts. The Kennedy family had another seaside home in Palm Beach, Florida, where Jack went for convalescence, but he was confined to bed and in constant pain. In February 1955 he returned to New York for yet another spinal operation, then returned to Palm Beach to resume his recovery. Jackie spent many days nursing him, and she and friends read to him to take his mind off the pain. Finally, on March 1 he walked without crutches for the first time in weeks. The next day he put on shorts and a baseball cap and, with help from Jackie and a longtime friend and aide, Dave Powers, made his way to the beach. “He stood there feeling the warm salt water on his bare feet and broke into a big smile,” Powers said.²⁹

Before his surgeries he and his aide Ted Sorensen had discussed an idea for a book that would collect the stories of a small number of American politicians who had in common the bravery to put politics and popularity aside to take a bold stand on an issue. Knowing his convalescence would be a long one, he and Sorensen had time to begin work on what would be called Profiles in Courage. As he increasingly could get up and move around, Jack sat by the Palm Beach oceanfront to work on the book and on Senate office matters.

His mother, Rose, remembered seeing him at work:

There is a little promontory, about the size of a big bay window and shaped like one, that protrudes from the wall, with beach and ocean on three sides. On calm sunny days this was an office and studio for him. ... I remember looking out from the house across our sturdy green lawn and past the tall royal palms toward the tropical sea, the aquamarine white-capped ocean and blue sky and passing clouds and ships in the distance, and here was Jack in his sea-wall alcove with his writing board and thick writing pad clamped to it, and a folding table or two piled with books and notebooks and file folders—paperweights or perhaps some rocks from the beach to hold things down against the sea breezes—and his head would be forward and he would be writing away on that book. From full heart, mind and spirit.³⁰

Profiles in Courage was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1956, and the journalists who covered Jack’s career must have envied him for that more than just about anything else Jack did. For Profiles in Courage Jack had a lot of help—so much that the true extent of his authorship has been a subject of debate. Skeptics claimed it was really Sorensen’s work. In his preface Kennedy credited many with advising him, but none more than Sorenson, to whom he said, “the greatest debt is owed.” He meant that almost literally because Sorensen even received a share of the royalties. At a minimum surely Jack closely supervised the project, and the quality of the resulting book far surpasses that of the thousands of other books politicians have written over the years with considerable assistance from ghostwriters, editors, and researchers. Jack had experience with courage, and as he sat on his windswept promontory looking out across the sea, he had plenty of time to contemplate the meaning of political courage.

~ Despite having the financial means to live on their own, Jack and Jackie spent the early months of their marriage living with family, much of the time at Hyannis Port. In 1955 they acquired Hickory Hill, a Virginia mansion across the Potomac from Washington.

Jack, fully recovered and looking healthier than ever, fell onto Adlai Stevenson’s short list for a running mate in his 1956 run for the White House. Meanwhile, Jack and Jackie were trying to have a baby. Jackie had a miscarriage during their first year of marriage and was pregnant again that summer of 1956 when they traveled to Chicago, where she carried out the demanding schedule of a wife of a rising star at a national political convention.

Stevenson had an early lock on the nomination to be the Democratic Party’s choice to run against President Eisenhower, so much attention was focused on the competition to be his running mate. Kennedy, despite his youth and inexperience, showed surprising levels of convention delegate support for that role. But the choice of a running mate was Stevenson’s to make and, by chance, Eunice’s husband, Sargent Shriver, found himself on a plane with Stevenson just weeks before the convention. Shriver no doubt knew Stevenson of Illinois from both his Merchandise Mart role as well as his Kennedy family membership. They talked. Stevenson expressed considerable misgivings concerning Jack’s health and had, perhaps, heard rumors about Addison’s disease, though he did not bring that particular ailment up. He asked Shriver about Jack’s war injuries, his malaria, and his back surgery.

Jack was invited to narrate a film to be shown at the convention. Telling the history of the Democratic Party, it concluded with an excerpt from a Franklin Roosevelt speech with a Kennedyesque ring to it: “I propose to sail ahead. For to reach port we must sail, sail, not lie at anchor—sail, not drift!”31

At the convention Stevenson introduced drama to an otherwise undramatic convention by forfeiting his right to handpick a running mate. Instead, he let the delegates put it to a vote. When the first ballot was cast, votes were split among five candidates, with Jack coming in second to Estes Kefauver of Tennessee. Jack showed surprising support in states like Georgia and Texas, where conventional wisdom held a Catholic could not compete. Jack ultimately lost, but his near victory on a national level, and his graceful concession speech from the convention floor, positioned him for a future run nationwide. Ultimately, Stevenson-Kefauver was trounced by Eisenhower-Nixon.

Jack lost the nomination, but he won over the party. Showing such surprising strength in all regions of the nation, he now personified his party’s future. He also avoided being half of a losing ticket and perhaps getting a share of the blame. Ironically, given Stevenson’s concerns about Jack’s health, in August 1963 Kefauver suffered a heart attack on the Senate floor and died three months before Jack’s death by assassination.

~ In August after the 1956 convention, Jack wanted a vacation. Jackie, expecting in October, and having had one miscarriage already, stayed behind with her mother and stepfather at her childhood home, Hammersmith Farm, in Newport, Rhode Island. Taking brother Ted and Harvard roommate Torby Macdonald along, Jack chartered a forty-foot sailboat and crew for a Mediterranean cruise, setting out from Cannes. Jack always enjoyed sailing and male companionship, and there were reports of women aboard, not the first such evidence of infidelity, nor the last. Jack’s choice of timing proved awful. On August 23, back at Hammersmith Farm, Jackie began hemorrhaging and was rushed to a hospital. After an emergency cesarean, their daughter was stillborn. Bobby Kennedy raced to be with Jackie, while Eunice went to work trying to get word to Jack. It took three days to finally reach him at sea.

It is well known, based on the tireless investigations of people who trade in such matters, that some Kennedy men have been less than good husbands at various times in their lives. Here Jack set a particularly low standard. Given that Jackie was out of danger, he thought he would continue on with sailing. What difference would it make if he canceled the rest of the cruise? Ultimately, he was convinced that his wife needed him, and the Boston Herald headline, “Sen. Kennedy at Sea, Lacks News of Wife,” gave him practical political reasons for exhibiting concern. Jackie’s grief was profoundly deep and she needed support, particularly when women around her had so little trouble bearing children. Two days after the baby was lost, Patricia Lawford gave birth to their second child. A few days later Ethel and Robert had their fifth child. Both newborns were girls. Thousands of condolence letters poured in to Jack and Jackie, making Jack’s initial insensitivity all the more apparent.32

Jack and Jackie were reunited and had time together, but it was not long before he was called to duty for the Stevenson campaign. Jack’s newfound popularity with voters was not lost on the presidential candidate, and they were happy to have Jack on the road speaking for the top of the ticket. Jack was in high demand and receiving ovations everywhere. Bobby meanwhile traveled with the Stevenson campaign and used the experience to learn organizing strategies.

~ Jackie, who had busied herself readying Hickory Hill for a child, now could not stand the thought of living there. After only a year there they sold it to Bobby and Ethel. Jack and Jackie later renovated and moved into an early eighteenth-century three-story home in Georgetown. Also in 1956 they bought a house at Hyannis Port adjacent to the main house in which Jack and his siblings grew up. In the years that followed Bobby and Ethel bought another neighboring house there, thus establishing the “Kennedy Compound.” Eunice and her husband bought another nearby house, and so did Ted. No matter how much the Kennedy universe expanded, it still revolved around Hyannis Port and continued to do so for decades to come.

As in-laws were added and families grew, there were more people to crew on sailboats and help out in races. In the years before Jack was commander in chief, he did not always command the respect he thought he deserved from the new crew. In one regatta off Martha’s Vineyard, Ethel’s colorful and independent-minded brother, George, worked the jib and main sheets while Jack steered. Jack’s dictates as skipper were not well received.

“Look, Jack, are you going to keep screaming at me how to trim this sail when I know damned well better than you how it ought to be trimmed?” George said.

Jack, former navy commander and Olympic sailing aspirant, gave George a hard, hard look. “Shut the hell up and do as you’re told!” he ordered. George, red-faced, raised his fist and gave Jack the finger. Then he stood, leaped into the water, and swam two miles to shore, leaving Kennedy infuriated and crewless.33

~ After two failed pregnancies, Jackie became pregnant a third time. It was 1957 and Jack was busy with travel, building grassroots support for an anticipated presidential campaign. Jackie’s obstetrician recommended a cesarean section, and because they could schedule it in advance, Jack was at the hospital when their daughter, Caroline Bouvier Kennedy, was born on November 27, 1957. After all the insecurities of being unable to have a child, particularly in comparison to Bobby and Ethel, the event was an especially happy one for mother and father alike.

~ After Stevenson’s loss the popular press became obsessed with the Kennedy story: first Jack, then Jack and Jackie, and then the Kennedy family as a whole, as it became apparent that they were all not only exceptionally accomplished individually but strongly committed to helping Jack’s campaigns and one another.

The nature of fame and celebrity in American culture was transforming in those years as more media achieved national reach, fed off one another, and achieved self-perpetuating cycles, print feeding radio, feeding TV, introducing topics that went “viral” before that word took its current meaning in the Internet age. The Saturday Evening Post published “The Amazing Kennedys.” American Mercury, Catholic Digest, McCall’s, and Redbook published articles about Jack, the family, and Jackie. Jack was on the cover of Time and, once again, Life.34 Patti Page’s song “Old Cape Cod” shot to the top ten on radio and recording sales lists in the summer of 1957.

“I don’t know how he does it,” complained Senator Hubert Humphrey, a Democratic presidential aspirant. “I get into Photoplay and he gets into Life.”³⁵

Some were alarmed that a political leader was being marketed like a consumer product. New York Post columnist William V. Shannon wrote, “Month after month, from the glossy pages of Life to the multicolored cover of Redbook, Jack and Jackie Kennedy smile out at millions of readers; he with his tousled hair and winning smile, she with her dark eyes and beautiful face. We hear of her pregnancy, of his wartime heroism, of their fondness for sailing. But what has all this to do with statesmanship?”³⁶ As Kennedy biographer Michael O’Brien noted, it wasn’t the Kennedys who emphasized charm and style over substance; it was the media.³⁷

Jackie, image conscious as anyone, wanted to manage reputation too. Asked at a Georgetown gathering if Jack was becoming too much of a “glamour boy,” she replied, “Nonsense, Jack has almost no time anymore for sailboats and silly things. He has this curious, inquiring mind that is always at work. If I were drawing him, I would draw a tiny body and an enormous head.”³⁸ They kept on sailing, of course, and continued to invite photographers along. Jack and Jackie must have feared they were riding a media tiger, one that brought welcomed attention and even adulation, but one that could never be tamed. Celebrity was getting confused with leadership, glamour with governing.

The May 1957 announcement of Jack’s Pulitzer Prize burnished his reputation for gravitas. But they kept feeding the tiger’s hunger for lighter news, and in early 1958 allowed Life in for more photos, these of baby Caroline in the nursery. In just seven years’ time, Andy Warhol began a series of paintings of Jackie that explored the workings of the media and popular culture on public perception of the Kennedys.

~ Throughout their younger years the Kennedys cultivated friendships by inviting classmates and others for weekends at Hyannis Port. As Jack looked toward running for president, he invited intellectuals and political figures to the compound. One was Arthur Schlesinger. A professor of history, Schlesinger for years was a pendulum swinging between the worlds of academia and politics, writing a speech for a candidate, then a book on American history, sometimes about a figure for whom he had worked. He had been active in both of Stevenson’s presidential campaigns and would become a lifelong friend of Jack, Jackie, Bobby, and other Kennedys. In July 1959 he was just getting to know the Kennedys and was invited to dinner at the Cape with Jack and Jackie. Schlesinger’s wife could not join them, so it was just the three of them. Schlesinger recalled,

We all drank and talked from about eight to 12:30. I only brought two cigars, one of which Jack took, having (typically) no cigars in the house . . . . [Jackie] was lovely but seemed excessively flighty on politics, asking with wide-eyed naïveté questions like, “Jack, why don’t you just tell them that you won’t go into any of those old primaries?” Jack was in a benign frame of mind and did not blink; but clearly such remarks could, in another context, be irritating. This is all the more so since Jackie, on other subjects, is intelligent and articulate. She was reading Proust when I arrived; she talked very well about [composer/author] Nicolas Nabokov, [journalist] Joe Alsop and other personalities; and one feels that out of some perversity she pretends an ignorance about politics larger even than life.

Jack’s opponents were spreading rumors about Jack’s Addison’s disease, which he always denied having. Schlesinger asked him about it, and the response was again less than honest. Referring again to his wartime malaria as the problem that was now beat, Jack claimed to have none of the symptoms of Addison’s, adding, “no one who has Addison’s disease ought to run for President; but I do not have it and have never had it.”39

Whatever Jackie’s political acumen, her love of literature was becoming distinctly visible in some of the most memorable passages of Jack’s speeches. Just the month before the dinner with Schlesinger, at a speech in Yakima, Washington, Jack arrived with a prepared text in which he planned to quote, as he had so often before, from historical figures. His draft speech quoted three U.S. presidents, the historian Vernon Louis Parrington, Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, and British statesman David Lloyd George. His speeches were now drawing from literature too, and the prepared text also quoted Shakespeare’s King Lear and the American playwright Robert Sherwood. Jack continued refining his Yakima speech right up until the final moments. He wanted a better ending than the one he held in his hands.

Sitting next to Jackie on the dais, Jack handed Jackie a note he wrote on the back of the speech draft. “Give me last lines from Ulysses beginning, ‘Come my friends.’” On the surviving copy at the Kennedy Library you can see that after Jack’s handwritten word “friends,” Jackie’s pen fills in the rest. “ ’tis not too late to seek a newer world . . .” Jack knew she had it memorized since childhood and Jackie did not disappoint, writing ten more lines, ending as the poem does with, “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”

A year later, in July 1960, Jack arrived in Los Angeles for the Democratic National Convention. He had several rivals for the nomination, including two late entrants, Lyndon Johnson and Adlai Stevenson. Johnson, the powerful Senate majority leader, had a strong following, but not as strong as Jack’s. Stevenson made a weak showing after having lost both previous presidential races to Eisenhower. Jack Kennedy won on the first ballot and Johnson accepted the second spot as running mate. The choice of Johnson came only after bitter behind-the-scenes maneuvering that left Bobby and Johnson with a dislike for each other so deep it never truly dissipated.

The Republican Party convention came just days afterward, diverting attention from Jack and allowing him another trip to Hyannis Port for a short rest and meetings before returning to the campaign trail as his party’s presidential nominee. There he would rejoin Jackie, pregnant with John Jr. She did not attend the Democratic convention, staying back at Hyannis Port and watching the proceedings on a seventeen-inch rented television. She spent some of her time alone working on a painting to give to Jack upon his return.

Leaving the Hyannis airport for their home, Jack saw along the route scenes of increasing commotion the closer he got to his Cape house. Crowds of Cape Cod neighbors were along the streets, some with banners. At his house neighbors were at his lawn’s edge and on a stone boundary wall. Getting out of the car, Jack looked out over to the beach and the Sound. “I’d like to take a swim, but I want to get in the house before Caroline gets to sleep,” he said. To the onlookers he added, “I believe you know how you have made me feel by coming to see me tonight. You are my neighbors. I know you understand what is in my heart. I would like to talk to you all for a while, but I have to get inside before my daughter goes to sleep. Good night. May God bless you and thanks again.”40

Inside, two-and-half-year-old Caroline presented her father with the homecoming present Jackie had made. It was a painting of Jack on Victura, wearing a tricorn hat, striking a pose like Washington crossing the Potomac, except that he was returning to a pier at Hyannis Port, filled with children, grandmothers, pets, and a marching band. On the hat were the words “El Senatore” and on a banner, “WELCOME BACK, MR. JACK.” Jack picked up Caroline and returned to the front door with his daughter. Referring to the painting, he said, “I wonder where she ever got the idea I had a commander-in-chief complex.”

Over the next two days, with Bobby and Ethel, they went sailing on Victura and picnicked on the Marlin, the family’s motor cruiser. Over the few days that followed, time Jack might have preferred spending on Victura was instead given to a steady stream of important visitors. Adlai Stevenson needed his time—he could still command support from liberal activists and his state of Illinois would be important in the general election. Plus he wanted a role in a Kennedy administration if the campaign succeeded. They spent time with Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson. President Eisenhower, acknowledging the possibility that his vice president, Richard Nixon, might not win, arranged for Jack to get national security briefings from CIA director Allen Dulles. On one occasion, however, press secretary Pierre Salinger cancelled a session with press photographers at the last minute. It was a beautiful day for sailing, and Jack set out on Victura instead.

Among his visitors was Norman Mailer, famous then for his novel, The Naked and the Dead. Like John Hersey, who had written in the New Yorker about PT-109, Mailer was experimenting with similar new forms of nonfiction writing, ones that applied a novelist’s techniques to reporting news. Mailer was writing a piece for Esquire that would profile Jack and his victorious Democratic convention. Titled, “Superman Comes to the Supermarket,” the article is still considered a groundbreaking work of New Journalism.

As the two sat down, “Kennedy smiled politely and said that he had read my books,” wrote Mailer. Then Jack paused ever so briefly, not immediately recalling a title, before saying, “I’ve read The Deer Park and . . . the others.”

This startled Mailer. “It was the first time in a hundred similar situations, talking to someone whose knowledge of my work was casual, that the sentence did not come out, ‘I’ve read The Naked and the Dead . . . and the others.’ If one is to take the worst and assume that Kennedy was briefed for this interview (which is most doubtful), it still speaks well for the striking instincts of his advisers.”

Mailer continued,

What was retained later, is an impression of Kennedy’s manners which were excellent, even artful, better than the formal good manners of Choate and Harvard, almost as if what was creative in the man had been given to the manners. . . . His personal quality had a subtle, not quite describable intensity, a suggestion of dry pent heat perhaps, his eyes large, the pupils grey, the whites prominent, almost shocking, his most forceful feature: he had the eyes of a mountaineer. His appearance changed with his mood, strikingly so, and this made him always more interesting than what he was saying. He would seem at one moment older than his age, forty-eight or fifty, a tall, slim, sunburned professor with a pleasant weathered face, not even particularly handsome; five minutes later, talking to a press conference on his lawn, three microphones before him, a television camera turning, his appearance would have gone through a metamorphosis, he would look again like a movie star, his coloring vivid, his manner rich, his gestures strong and quick, alive with that concentration of vitality a successful actor always seems to radiate. Kennedy had a dozen faces.

Mailer mused about Jack’s past near-death experiences, all the illness he had survived, the heroism after the sinking of PT-109, and the fearlessness he exhibited on PT boat missions after that:

It is the wisdom of a man who senses death within him and gambles that he can cure it by risking his life. It is the therapy of the instinct, and who is so wise as to call it irrational? . . . His trials suggest the self-hatred of a man whose resentment and ambition are too large for his body. Not everyone can discharge their furies on an analyst’s couch, for some angers can be relaxed only by winning power, some rages are sufficiently monumental to demand that one try to become a hero or else fall back into that death which is already within the cells. But if one succeeds, the energy aroused can be exceptional.

Mailer talked to a man who saw Kennedy at Hyannis Port and thought he showed “deep fatigue.”

“Well, he didn’t look tired at the convention.” Mailer said.

“Oh, he had three days of rest. Three days of rest for him is like six months to us.”41

Jackie made a strong impression on Mailer too. Mailer was invited to visit a second day and brought his wife. After Mailer interviewed Jack further, Jack and Jackie headed out toward the pier for a sail on Victura with Jack’s brother Ted. Turning to Adele Mailer, Jackie said, “I wish that I didn’t have to go on this corny sail, because I would like very much to talk to you.”⁴²

~ At around that time Sports Illustrated sent a photographer for a cover story that included a beautiful two-page color image of Jack at the helm of Victura. Asked about his sailing experience, Jack happily obliged. “I’ll write it down for you,” he said, and a photo shows him in the cabin of Marlin with pen and pad of paper recording his sailing resume as one might when applying to crew a serious race:

Victura (about to conquer)

31 years

______________________________

raced on Nantucket

Sound 20 years

______________________________

(Edgartown

Nantucket

______________________________

Star Boats

Nantucket Sound

Champion

Competed in Atlantic

Coast Championship

With brother Joe

sailing other boat

won McMillan Trophy

(Eastern Intercollegiate Championship)

Sailed for Harvard43

______________________________

Jack returned to the campaign trail for the final stretch, and Jackie was happy to have a good reason to stay home—her pregnancy. She did, however, accompany him to certain major events. Wisconsin was a key swing state in the November general election against Richard Nixon. Jack spoke in Milwaukee just days before election day and concluded by quoting Carl Schurz, a German immigrant who was active in Wisconsin politics and abolitionism, went on to represent Minnesota in the U.S. Senate, and then gave a historic speech at Faneuil Hall in Kennedy’s city of Boston. Jack, straying slightly from the original quotation, said, “Ideals are like stars. You will not succeed in touching them with your hands. But the seafaring man who follows the waters follows the stars. And, if you choose them as your guides, you can reach your destiny.”⁴⁴

Another earlier Milwaukee campaign stop was at the Badger Home for the Blind, where residents planned to surprise him with a tribute to his World War II naval career. As he entered the door, a man at a piano started playing “Anchors Aweigh,” and several stood to sing him the words:

Anchors Aweigh my boys.

Anchors Aweigh.

Farewell to college joys, we sail at break of day ’ay ’ay ’ay

Through our last night ashore, drink to the foam,

Until we meet once more:

Here’s wishing you a happy voyage home!”45

As he watched and listened, Jack’s eyes moistened and as he left, he tried not to let anyone see that he needed a handkerchief to wipe away tears.⁴⁶

Speaking in his home state the day before the election, he said, “I am very sure if we do not continue to drift and lie at anchor, only seeing the beginning of our difficulties, but if this country goes back to work again, if it moves with purpose, if it moves with perseverance, there is nothing it cannot do, nothing.”⁴⁷

On election day, the Kennedy family converged from all points, reuniting at Hyannis Port to await results of what became the closest presidential race of the twentieth century. On the way from the airport to their home, Jack and Jackie passed the harbor where, “one sailboat flaunted its white canvas against the cold blue sky.”⁴⁸ Jack had breakfast with his father and other members of the family, tossed a football with his brothers on the lawn, then visited Bobby and Ethel’s house, which had been transformed into an election night command post. Tables were aligned in a T-formation and fourteen women monitored phones, collecting reports from the field. The pollster Lou Harris used a child’s bedroom, painted pink, to analyze data as it streamed off teletypes, which Peter Lawford oversaw. Still more phones were in another child’s bedroom, where Ted and Stephen Smith were on duty.

News media predictions of the election’s outcome seesawed between the two, until the early morning hours when it looked near-certain that Jack was elected. Nixon went on camera and made a statement admitting it appeared that Kennedy won but not fully conceding, unnerving all those who wanted finality. Jack went to bed and urged others to do the same. When he awoke, he learned he had carried Nixon’s home state of California. They had breakfast and Jack took Caroline for a walk along the beach, holding hands. He invited Ted to join. Then other members of the family joined, as did Ted Sorensen, and they made a processional across the dune grass above the beach. The secret service, whose presence had increased that morning, followed at a short distance.

Shortly after noon Minnesota’s returns came in and gave Jack the necessary electoral college votes. Nixon, declining to personally make a statement, had his press secretary read a concession instead. Jack walked to Bobby’s command center and opened the door. “When Jack came into the room he was no longer Jack,” said one witness. “He was the President of the United States. We all stood up—even his brother Bobby. It was just an instinctive thing.”49

There were plans for a family portrait to record the moment, so photographer Jacques Lowe tried to corral the Kennedys. Jackie was hardest to find; when no one was looking she grabbed her coat and left the house. “Through a window, I caught a glimpse of her rushing down to the sea” for a solitary walk, said Lowe. “That Wednesday morning when the rest of the family was jubilant and embracing each other and laughing it up, Jackie was deeply shaken. She was clearly in a state of shock. I felt sorry for her.”⁵⁰

“It’s okay,” Jack told Lowe. “I’ll go get her.” He caught up with her on the beach, put his arm around her, and they returned. She went upstairs and returned in a red scoop-neck dress and a triple strand of pearls. Jack moved to her side, took her arm, and faced the family. They all rose to their feet—the surviving brothers and sisters, Joe and Rose, the in-laws—and gave the couple a standing ovation.⁵¹

During his presidency, Jack and Jackie returned to Hyannis Port from time to time. They still sailed the Victura, cruised on the Marlin, and rented a nearby house that became known as the Summer White House. The Cape would never be the same while he was president. The crowds, the gawkers, the tour boats pointing out the Kennedy Compound, secret service in nearby boats, reporters in another boat—all confirmed that you can’t go home again. What must they have thought that day, knowing their lives were transformed, gazing out over the waters where as children the Kennedys raced their sailboats and then looking across the sea grass and dunes of Cape Cod? Some sense of normalcy would in time return for the rest of the family, but never for Jack and Jackie. Did they feel a sense of loss?

~ Thoreau described what the Cape dunes looked like at that time of year, late fall:

I never saw an autumnal landscape so beautifully painted as this was. It was like the richest rug imaginable, spread over an uneven surface; no damask nor velvet, nor Tyrian dye or stuffs, nor the work of any loom, could ever match it. There was the incredibly bright red of the Huckleberry, and the reddish brown of the Bayberry, mingled with the bright and living green of small Pitch-Pines, and also the duller green of the Bayberry, Boxberry and Plum, the yellowish green of the Shrub-Oaks, and the various golden and yellow and fawn-colored tins of the Birch and Maple and Aspen,—each making its own figure, and in the midst, the few yellow sandslides on the sides of the hills looked like the white floor seen through rents in the rug.52

Jackie expected her baby to arrive in mid-December. That would give her a month to recuperate before inauguration day. None of Jackie’s pregnancies went according to plan, however, and an ambulance was called to their Georgetown residence on November 27. John F. Kennedy Jr. was born premature, but healthy.