November 24, 1960
Aboard the Kennedy campaign plane Caroline
The president-elect was in an upbeat mood, nursing a cocktail and talking about the makeup of his administration, when word came from the cockpit that his pregnant wife had collapsed at their Georgetown home. He was devastated—“stricken with remorse,” his aide Kenneth O’Donnell recalled, “because he was not with his wife.”
John F. Kennedy had reason to feel guilty. Although Caroline’s birth in 1957 had been an easy one, Jackie had already endured a miscarriage and a stillbirth that nearly killed her. In the closing weeks of the 1960 presidential campaign, Jack had pressured Jackie to join him on the campaign trail.
She defied her doctors and reluctantly agreed, pushing herself to the edge. This final campaign surge ended with a ticker-tape parade through New York’s fabled “Canyon of Heroes”—a frenzied blur of mass hysteria during which the candidate and his wife perched precariously on the back of an open car. Several times, they were both nearly yanked from the car by overzealous fans tugging at their sleeves.
After taking such risks to ensure her husband’s narrow victory margin—less than one-fifth of one percent—Jackie might have expected that Jack could make more time for her and for Caroline, the daughter he called “Buttons.” Instead, their redbrick townhouse on Georgetown’s narrow N Street became “transition central,” overrun with both hard-boiled rank-and-file members of Kennedy’s Irish “Murphia” as well as the youthful and energetic Ivy Leaguers who made up JFK’s personal brain trust.
The scene was no less chaotic outside, where reporters and onlookers pressed against police barricades across the street. Several times a day, Jack, still determined to accommodate the faithful whenever possible, strode across the street to shake hands and parry with the press.
Jackie, sensing that all was not right with her pregnancy, was now determined to obey her obstetrician’s orders not to leave the house. Holed up upstairs, she begged Jack to spend time with her and Caroline. Instead, he began shuttling between Georgetown and La Guerida (roughly “Spoils of War” in Spanish), Joseph Kennedy’s sprawling oceanfront estate in Palm Beach, Florida. There JFK and his father, tended to by a household staff of twelve, sunbathed in the nude while discussing possible cabinet appointments.
Jack did agree to fly back to Georgetown to share a quiet Thanksgiving dinner with his wife and daughter, but only as long as he could fly back to Palm Beach that same night. Understandably apprehensive now that the due date was only three weeks away, Jackie pleaded with him to stay. “Why can’t you stay here until I have the baby,” she asked, “and then we can go down together.”
Jack refused. Caroline had been born right on schedule, and Jack had no reason to think the next baby would be any different. Besides, three weeks “might as well have been six months to him,” their friend Bill Walton said. “He was not about to put everything on hold just because Jackie was a little nervous. He had a country to run.”
As soon as he finished his pumpkin pie, Jack departed for Palm Beach, leaving a crestfallen Jackie behind. The president-elect’s plane had only been in the air a matter of minutes when Caroline’s nanny, Maud Shaw, heard Jackie’s screams. Rushed by ambulance to Georgetown University Hospital, Jackie was immediately prepped for an emergency caesarean.
Once he touched down in Florida, Jack commandeered the fastest aircraft available—the DC-6 press plane that trailed the Caroline—and headed straight back to Washington. En route, he put on the cockpit headphones and waited for any news. It wasn’t until shortly before l a.m. on November 25, 1960, that passengers and crew could breathe a sigh of relief. When Press Secretary Pierre Salinger announced over the intercom that Mrs. Kennedy had just given birth by caesarean section to a healthy six-pound, three-ounce boy, the reporters cheered and JFK, smiling broadly, took a deep bow.
While the press was spoon-fed glowing reports that mother and child were “doing well and resting comfortably,” both Jackie and her baby remained in guarded condition. Once the anesthesia wore off, Jackie, still in considerable pain from her ordeal, demanded to see her son. She could see her baby, but was forbidden to hold him; the infant, suffering from what would turn out to be an undiagnosed respiratory ailment, spent the first six days of his life in an incubator. Jackie’s condition, meanwhile, was also problematic. It would take months for Jackie and her baby to fully recover, but only after each suffered setbacks severe enough to take them to the brink of death.
Chastened, Jack rushed to his wife’s third-floor suite at the hospital and then popped into the nursery to visit his son. “Now, that’s the most beautiful boy I’ve seen,” the president-elect gushed. “Maybe I’ll name him Abraham Lincoln.” To make up for the worry he had cause her, Jack visited Jackie and the baby three times a day.
For now, a carnival atmosphere prevailed at the hospital—“buoyant and joyous” were the words Life magazine’s Gail Wescott used to describe it. “It was innocent and exhilarating. It did not seem that anything could ever go wrong.” One of the stars of the show was Buttons, eager to see the baby brother born just two days before she turned three—her “birthday present,” she was told by her parents, and she believed it. “Caroline thought for a long time,” Nanny Shaw said, “that he belonged to her.”
Determined to keep John’s christening a low-key affair, Jackie convinced her husband that it should take place at the hospital and away from the press. But when the president-elect wheeled his wife and their week-old son outside her room toward the hospital chapel, a cadre of photographers were poised for action at the far end of the corridor. “Oh, God,” Jackie said. “Don’t stop, Jack. Just keep going.” But Jack was not about to disappoint the Washington press corps—or the public that had voted him into office. He stopped pushing Jackie’s wheelchair for a moment to allow a few shots to be taken of the infant, who was dressed for the occasion in his father’s forty-three-year-old silk-and-lace baptismal gown.
When the closed-door christening was over thirty minutes later, a noticeably more relaxed Jackie emerged. “Look at those pretty eyes,” she said as she looked down at her son. “Isn’t he sweet?” Jack nodded in agreement, but his mind was clearly elsewhere.
On December 9, just hours after an exhausted Jackie was led on a punishing White House tour by outgoing first lady Mamie Eisenhower, America’s new first family departed for Palm Beach aboard the Caroline. Settling in, JFK lit a cigar and chatted animatedly with his advisers. They had been aloft only a matter of minutes when Jackie, who for years had encouraged Jack’s cigar smoking to disguise her own cigarette habit, noticed that a cloud of smoke was encircling the baby’s bassinet. This time, Jackie called a halt to the conversation and directed Jack and his stogie-chomping cronies to the far end of the cabin.
Jackie spent the next two weeks in bed, trying to recover from her emergency caesarean as well as her grueling trek through the Executive Mansion with a clueless Mamie Eisenhower. Her baby, meanwhile, was losing weight, crying nonstop, and—most disturbingly—at times struggling for breath. “John’s health really wasn’t doing so well,” she later said. “There was, thank God, this brilliant pediatrician in Palm Beach who really saved his life, as he was going downhill.”
John was, in fact, suffering from an inflammation of the lung’s hyaline membrane, a condition not uncommon among premature infants. Sadly, this was the same respiratory problem that would later kill his infant brother, Patrick.
“Jackie came perilously close to dying after John’s birth—and so did the baby,” said JFK’s physician Janet Travell, who added that the press corps was kept “entirely in the dark.” Jackie’s own health suffered because she was “consumed with worry” over the baby. “Jackie was very emotional about losing her son,” Travell said. “It was the thing she feared more than losing her own life.”
John was not even three weeks old, but he had already come close to death twice and was about to again. On the morning of December 11, 1960, would-be suicide bomber Richard Pavlick was parked outside the Kennedys’ Palm Beach mansion waiting for the president-elect to head out for Sunday Mass at St. Edward’s Church just a few blocks away. Pavlick planned to crash his 1950 Buick, packed with seven sticks of dynamite, into the Kennedys’ car as it pulled away from the house.
Pavlick was about to floor his car when Jackie and Caroline suddenly appeared in the doorway to wave goodbye to Daddy. Behind them was the Kennedy family’s private nurse, Luella Hennessey, holding Baby John in her arms. Touched by this warm family tableau, Pavlick did not go through with his gruesome plan.
It was only after he was arrested for drunk driving a few days later that Pavlick’s weird assassination plot was uncovered. For his part, Pavlick was unrepentant. He told police he did not wish to harm Jackie or the Kennedy children, but that he still planned to “get” JFK. Pavlick was charged with attempted murder and later sent to prison.
Jack, who suffered from a variety of life-threatening illnesses and narrowly escaped death during World War II combat in the Pacific, barely blinked when he was told the news. His own experiences, coupled with the tragic early deaths of his brother Joe and sister Kathleen, had convinced Jack that he would die young—“and that there was nothing he or anyone else could do about it,” said his longtime friend Senator George Smathers of Florida. Another Kennedy intimate, fashion designer Oleg Cassini, called this Jack’s “sublime streak of elegant fatalism.”
Jackie, on the other hand, was anything but stoic. She had blithely assumed that bodyguards and Secret Service agents would provide them with all the protection they needed, and was outwardly distraught when she was told how close she and her children had come to being blown to pieces. “We’re nothing,” she said, “but sitting ducks in a shooting gallery.”
“I don’t think it ever really occurred to Jackie that somebody could get past all those people who constantly surrounded Jack,” said Letitia “Tish” Baldrige, Jackie’s classmate from Miss Porter’s School and the woman she hired to be her White House social secretary. “Jackie always worried about people violating her family’s privacy. I never heard her say a peep about somebody wanting to do them harm.”
There were only a few weeks left until inauguration day, and Jack had no time to think about anything beyond putting his administration together. The frenetic pace he set back in Georgetown continued beneath Florida’s swaying palms.
While Jackie tried to rest upstairs, bow-tied Harvard intellectuals, polished Washington operatives, and grizzled Boston pols all vied for her husband’s attention. If she wanted to make her way from her bedroom to the upstairs bathroom, a nightgown-clad Jackie risked bumping into a stranger on her way there. Making matters worse was the added presence of her noisy Kennedy in-laws, whose frat house antics had always annoyed Jack’s decidedly more civilized bride. “Ethel and Bobby are here. Mayhem,” she complained to Baldrige. “Complete and utter chaos.”
By comparison, John, even with his health issues, was no trouble at all. Like millions of mothers in the 1960s, Jackie had no interest in breastfeeding. It was left to Luella Hennessey to heat up the baby’s bottle, change his diapers, and get up several times during the course of the night to feed John and then rock him back to sleep. Shaw happily took care of Caroline, who periodically upstaged her father during press conferences by teetering around the room in her mother’s stiletto heels.
Shutting herself upstairs with the drapes drawn, Jackie refused to join Jack’s boisterous relatives for dinner on the main floor. “I couldn’t hold food down,” she recalled. “I guess I was just in physical and nervous exhaustion because the month after the baby’s birth had been the opposite of recuperation.”
Nevertheless, Jackie, who had her own plans for the White House, made the most of those hours alone in her bedroom. “It’s the worst place in the world,” she had told a friend after her long march with Mamie. “So cold and dreary. A dungeon like the Lubyanka . . . I can’t bear the thought of moving in. I hate it, hate it, hate it.” Unable to sleep, she pored over blueprints and photographs of the Executive Mansion, laying the groundwork for what she already envisioned as a historic restoration.
Still shaky, Jackie returned to Georgetown alone on January 14, less than a week before the inauguration. She explained to Jack that she wanted to go ahead of the rest of the family because there was no way she could unpack and introduce the children to their new home at the same time. So John and his big sister remained behind with their father, Maud Shaw, and Elsie Philips, the new nanny hired to take care of John.
At exactly noon on January 20, 1961, Jackie appeared impervious to the teeth-chattering twenty-degree cold as she watched her husband being sworn in by Chief Justice Earl Warren. Jack was the country’s first Roman Catholic president, the first born in the twentieth century, and at forty-three the youngest ever elected to office—although Jackie, just thirty-one, had always viewed him as a much older and wiser man.
He proved it with his inaugural address, which called the younger generation to action with its enduring “Ask not what your country can do for you” message. But Jackie had no opportunity to congratulate him; Jack, who had always resisted public displays of affection, did not follow tradition by kissing his wife after he took the oath. And once Marian Anderson had closed the ceremonies with a stirring rendition of the national anthem, JFK bounded off the platform without his wife.
Bravely weathering the icy conditions, the new first couple kicked off the inaugural parade, riding in an open car from the Capitol to the White House. Jackie climbed onto the reviewing stand but could stay for only an hour. Bone-weary and freezing, she now dreaded the long night of inaugural balls that stretched before her. “I’m exhausted, Jack,” she said, excusing herself from the parade festivities. “I’ll see you at home.” She would later acknowledge that it took a moment for it all to sink in. She was not heading back to their “sweet little house that leans slightly to one side” on N Street; home was now 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Trying to recover her strength, Jackie went straight to the Queen’s Bedroom (so named because five queens had slept there) and refused to budge—not even to greet family members at a private reception in the State Dining Room. Instead of dining that night with her husband and members of his cabinet, she had dinner on a tray in bed.
None of it worked. Jackie was unable to summon the strength to get out of bed. “I can’t do it,” Jackie told Dr. Travell. “I just can’t move.” In the weeks leading up to the election, the infamous “Dr. Feelgood,” Max Jacobson, had been injecting the candidate, his wife, and several members of the Kennedy inner circle with amphetamines. Now Dr. Travell was handing Jackie a little orange pill—Dexedrine—to give her the energy boost needed to make it through the rest of the evening.
An hour later, the nation’s glamorous first lady felt strong enough to accompany her dashing husband to the first three of five inaugural balls they were scheduled to attend. The reaction at each was the same: As the orchestra struck up “Hail to the Chief” and the first couple—he in white tie and tails, she in a dramatic floor-length white silk cape—made their entrance, a collective gasp went up from the throng, which then exploded in cheers and applause.
By the fourth ball, however, Jackie’s Dexedrine-fueled high had worn off. “It was like Cinderella and the clock striking midnight. I just crumbled,” she said. “All my strength was finally gone.” She excused herself, sending her husband along to attend the final two balls solo.
“I always wish I could have participated more in those first shining hours with Jack,” Jackie later said. “But at least I thought I had given him our John, the son he had longed for so much.”
WITH THE INAUGURAL festivities behind them, Jackie now felt free to fly the children up from Palm Beach—something Jack had been urging her to do for weeks. To the surprise of everyone who knew him, Caroline’s arrival in 1957 had transformed the notoriously libidinous JFK into a doting and devoted dad. “He wanted the children around all the time,” said Jacques Lowe, Kennedy’s longtime official photographer and friend. “Like a lot of fathers who are smitten with their kids, he couldn’t keep his hands off them. But Jackie called the shots when it came to Caroline and John.”
Jackie’s excuse for keeping the children in Palm Beach was credible enough: their rooms in the family quarters of the White House were being painted, and she didn’t want them exposed to the noxious fumes. Just as important, she wanted to shield them at least for a little while longer from the pomp and circumstance that from now on would be an inescapable part of their lives. “I want my children to be brought up in more personal surroundings,” she told Baldrige. And, while everyone in the family had a code name—the president was “Lancer,” Jackie was “Lace,” Caroline “Lyric,” and John “Lark”—Jackie made it abundantly clear to everyone working at the White House that she would be a hands-on mom. “I don’t want them to be raised by nurses and Secret Service agents,” she told Baldrige.
Flying in the face of reality—and the inescapable fact that her children would always be cared for by nannies and governesses—Jackie vowed that John and Caroline would have something approaching a normal childhood. “It isn’t fair to children in the limelight to leave them in the care of others and then expect that they will turn out all right,” she said. “They need their mother’s affection and guidance and long periods of time alone with her. That is what gives them security in an often confusing world.”
The first lady was pleased to learn that John’s and Caroline’s toys had been stashed away in the closet of White House Chief Usher J. B. West. “We’ll bring them out as soon as the children’s room are ready,” she had instructed him. The toys were, in fact, the first things to arrive from the N Street house, covertly smuggled in while the Eisenhowers were still very much in residence.
Before she took on the daunting task of restoring the long-neglected public rooms of the White House to their former glory, Jackie first tackled the upstairs living quarters. “Sometimes I wondered, ‘How are we going to live as a family in this enormous place?’ ” she later recalled. “I’m afraid it will always be a little impossible for the people who live here. It’s an office building.”
Jackie quickly set about to purge the place of the motel modern décor favored by her predecessors. Her own chandeliered French provincial bedroom was done up in hues of green and blue, with leopard-skin throws draped here and there for drama. The president’s bedroom, connected to his wife’s by a walk-in closet that contained a stereo system, was decorated in blue and white. On one wall, Jackie hung Childe Hassam’s American impressionist masterpiece Flag Day.
The children’s rooms were just across from the Yellow Oval Room. Jackie decided to make John’s spacious nursery a reflection of his father’s room. The walls were white, and the crown molding a vivid blue. Caroline’s room, not surprisingly, was all done in shades of pink and white, with rosebud-patterned drapes that matched the linens, and a country scene by Grandma Moses hanging opposite the white-canopied bed.
The nanny slept in her own small room positioned right between John and Caroline. “Maud Shaw won’t need much,” Jackie wrote in a memo to J. B. West. “Just find a wicker wastebasket for her banana peels and a little table for her false teeth at night.”
Those first few nights in the White House, Nanny Shaw was getting little sleep. Jackie was upset that her infant cried constantly and didn’t seem to be gaining any weight. “John had been in such delicate health,” Baldrige said, “that naturally any little sign of something going wrong was cause for alarm.”
Shaw doubled the amount of formula the baby was getting and switched his morning meal of beef extract to lunchtime. Within six weeks, John was no longer crying incessantly, and had developed a healthy appetite for cereals, soup, strained fruit, vegetables, and meats.
By that time, Jackie’s makeover of the upstairs living quarters of the White House was complete. “She wanted to cozy things up with flowers and family photographs and the paintings that she liked,” Baldrige said. “She turned this drafty, cold old place into a warm environment for a young family overnight.”
As an adult, John conceded that he could not actually distinguish between his firsthand recollections and what he learned from newsreels, photographs, and the endless stream of Camelot tales spun by relatives and family friends. In the end he believed that his earliest memories were of playing with his father on the floor of the president’s bedroom, part of the daily routine that seldom varied during their thousand days in the White House.
By design, the president and first lady seldom saw each other in the morning. “That time,” Baldrige said, “was the children’s time.” By the time Shaw brought them into their father’s bedroom, he had already spent thirty minutes going over cables and scanning the morning newspapers while soaking in the tub.
After the kids kissed their father, he went to the dressing room to change while they sat on the floor watching cartoons. At 9 a.m. they switched to TV exercise pioneer Jack LaLanne, and the president clapped along as Caroline followed LaLanne’s signature regime of jumping jacks and stretches. At first, Shaw sat in a corner chair tending to Baby John while father and daughter enjoyed this time together.
Later, when John was a toddler, Jack spent less time clapping and more time actually rolling around on the floor with both children. “He was absolutely crazy about Caroline. He adored her,” their old friend Chuck Spalding said. “But there was a special connection with John. Even before John was able to walk, Jack threw him in the air, tossed him around, tickled him—things he did with Caroline, but to a greater extent with John.”
That he could do any of these things at all was remarkable in itself. In addition to his often incapacitating allergies and a medical history that included scarlet fever, anemia, an underactive thyroid, colitis, and a cholesterol level of 350, JFK had long been secretly battling Addison’s disease, a degeneration of the adrenal glands that—like AIDS—destroys the immune system. He also endured crippling back pain—pain so severe that he spent most of his time hobbling around on crutches.
As a result, the president risked a visit to the emergency room every time he roughhoused with his kids. “You’d see that look on his face that told you the pain was terrible,” Jacques Lowe said, “but he never complained. To see the sheer joy on his face when he was playing with John—obviously to him it was all worth it.”
Once the president was dressed, John was handed off to Maud Shaw and Caroline walked hand in hand with her father to the Oval Office. When he was old enough, John joined them. “It was very touching to see the president walking down the corridor holding hands with the children,” JFK’s longtime secretary Evelyn Lincoln said. “He was always talking to them, asking them questions. He never talked baby talk to them. Both the president and Mrs. Kennedy always spoke to Caroline and John as if they were little adults.”
Not that it was always easy to comprehend what John was trying to say. At her father’s behest, Caroline sometimes acted as interpreter, often appending commentary of her own. When John toddled into the Oval Office in the middle of a meeting between JFK and his uncle Bobby, the attorney general, everything stopped while the most powerful man in the world strained to understand his son’s gibberish. “He’s saying he wants a cookie,” Caroline explained authoritatively. “But he shouldn’t have one because he’s been a very naughty boy.”
Unlike other children who saw little of their parents during working hours, John and his sister encountered theirs several times throughout the day. Caroline spent the rest of the morning at the school Jackie set up on the third floor for the president’s children and the sixteen or so offspring of several White House staffers and a few close friends. During the school’s morning recess, JFK stepped out into the garden and clapped his hands to summon Caroline and her classmates. The first ones to make it to the president were rewarded with a piece of candy—something that did not go over well with Caroline’s teachers.
JFK summoned John in much the same way—calling the boy’s name repeatedly (“John. John!”) while he clapped his hands. It usually took a few tries before the easily distracted toddler actually showed up, prompting staffers to start calling the president’s son “John-John.” It was a nickname neither parent embraced. “Jackie hated the whole ‘John-John’ thing and would cast a withering glance in the direction of anyone who used it,” Baldrige said. “To her and to the president, he was always just John.”
At noon, Jackie joined John and Caroline as they ate lunch in the “High Chair Room,” the small dining area for the children she had set up off the kitchen. Then Caroline returned to class and John, under the watchful eyes of two Secret Service agents and nannies Shaw and Phillips, headed for the play area his mother had designed for the children just outside the president’s office window. The space included a tree house with a slide, a leather swing, a barrel tunnel, and a small trampoline.
Adding to the general mayhem was the first family’s growing menagerie. The Kennedys arrived at the White House with just one dog, their Welsh terrier Charlie. But soon Pushinka, a gift from Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, would arrive. “We trained that dog to slide down the slide we had in the back of the White House,” John later said. Pushing Pushinka down the slide, he added wistfully, “is probably my first memory.”
Charlie and Pushinka were joined by Wolf, an aptly named Irish wolfhound that had been given to the family by a Dublin priest. Joe Kennedy then gave Jackie a German shepherd, Clipper. The most celebrated Kennedy pet, Caroline’s pony Macaroni, had a stable all his own. Few people were aware of the existence of John’s pony Leprechaun. The boy did not share his father’s allergic reaction to dogs and cats, but horses were another matter.
Jackie simply turned a blind eye to the boy’s discomfort. An accomplished equestrienne, the first lady was thrilled that Caroline had turned out to be “an absolute natural” on horseback. She saw no reason why her son couldn’t be as well. “The poor kid’s eyes would water and he’d be sneezing away,” Chuck Spalding said, “but Jackie just figured he’d get over it.”
John’s earliest childhood memories also included Caroline’s cat Tom Kitten, who eventually had to be given away because of their father’s allergies; a beer-drinking rabbit named Zsa Zsa (after the actress Zsa Zsa Gabor, a friend of Jack); and a rotating cast of lambs, ducks, and guinea pigs. Aside from the dogs, the Kennedy children spent the most time playing with the few animals allowed to be kept in cages in Caroline’s room: Bluebell and Marybell the hamsters, and Caroline’s favorite pet, a canary she insisted on naming Robin.
Whenever she could spare even a minutes away from her first lady duties, Jackie would run down to the play area and push John on the swing or guide him down the slide. She also managed to squeeze in a little relaxation time for herself, watching the children play as she bounced on the trampoline.
“Everyone thought Jackie was this very aristocratic personality,” Baldrige said, “and she certainly could be absolutely regal when she wanted to be. She also took the job of being a mother very seriously—actually more seriously than most women of her generation, I think.” Around the children, however, she was “a very different, more lighthearted person. There was this marvelous little girl inside of her that came out when she was around Caroline and John.”
Jackie may have been a more earnest mother than most because of her own unhappy childhood. Growing up in Manhattan and in the moneyed Long Island enclave of East Hampton in the 1930s, Jackie and her little sister, Lee, were caught in the crossfire between their domineering mother, Janet, and their swashbuckling playboy father, “Black Jack” Bouvier. The marriage ended in divorce, and soon after the Bouvier girls went to live with Janet and their new stepfather, the wealthy Hugh D. Auchincloss II. Jackie called him “Uncle Hughdie.”
With their mother’s remarriage, Jackie and Lee suddenly found themselves adjusting to life with a new set of stepsiblings. One of them was Gore Vidal, Hugh Auchincloss’s stepson by a former marriage. According to Vidal, Janet had rushed Auchincloss into marriage “because she had to. She was a financially desperate social climber with two small daughters to raise.”
Jackie’s privileged upbringing continued without interruption at Merrywood, the Auchinclosses’ palatial forty-six-acre estate outside Washington, and at Hammersmith Farm, the family’s lavish, twenty-eight-room “summer cottage” in Newport, Rhode Island. Jackie grew particularly fond of her stepbrother Hugh “Yusha” Auchincloss, and the two children her mother had with Hugh Auchincloss—her stepsiblings Janet and Jamie.
At fifteen, Jackie was shipped off to Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, Connecticut, one of the finest finishing schools in New England. Yet even then she was never allowed to forget that she was only a poor step-relation of the rich and influential Auchincloss clan. “Jackie and I were in the same boat,” Gore Vidal explained. “We were brought up in style, allowed to live in their very comfortable, rather Jamesian world. But the money was theirs. We—Jackie, Lee, and I—were penniless, and were made painfully aware of the fact.”
Even as first lady, Jackie was plagued by feelings of insecurity and inadequacy—feelings that, her Bouvier cousin John Davis once suggested, “stemmed from her parents’ terribly bitter, unhappy marriage. And then to never quite know where she stood with her stepfather . . . it left her feeling abandoned emotionally at a very young age.”
Of course nothing compared to the pressures brought to bear on the wife of the American president. Public expectations were high, and Jackie admitted she was “panic-stricken” at the thought of disappointing her husband. Behind the scenes, John’s parents were also dealing with their own medical issues—and the mounting tensions in their relationship caused by his flagrant infidelity.
Still, there was a general consensus among their friends and those working in the White House that Jackie went to great lengths to shield John and Caroline from the strains in their parents’ marriage. In the end, Jack and Jackie “enjoyed each other,” insisted Jackie’s stepbrother Yusha. “That’s what John grew up with. He was born into a house filled with love and fun and laughter, just like millions of other children.”
Well, obviously not exactly like millions of other children. The public could not get enough of the adorable tots who inhabited the Executive Mansion, and no one understood the political value of that better than the president. He made sure national publications like Newsweek, Life, Look, and Time were filled with heart-melting photos of John playing with his toy helicopter; Caroline astride Macaroni; Jackie helping her son into his pajamas; the two Kennedy children merrily dancing in the Oval Office while Daddy looked on; and John and Caroline cavorting with their cousins at the Kennedy family compound in Hyannis Port.
To satisfy her husband’s need to placate the Washington press corps, Jackie grudgingly signed off on a handful of these carefully circumscribed photo shoots. But for the most part, she made it her mission to block access to the children. “She didn’t want them exploited in that way,” Pierre Salinger said, “and the president did. That always left me holding the bag, because as soon as Jackie’s back was turned, he told me to invite the photographers in.” It was understood that, once the photos ran, Salinger would take the rap. “It was a part of my job,” he said, “that I could easily have done without.”
“Jackie Kennedy was the most warm and delightful woman you could ever imagine,” said legendary Life photojournalist Alfred Eisenstaedt, echoing the sentiments of his colleagues. “But if you even pointed a camera at John or Caroline without her permission, it was over. You could not cross her when it came to the children. If you did you were done, out.”
Jack still had ample opportunity to work his magic, particularly since Jackie spent long stretches of time at Glen Ora, the family’s retreat in the heart of Virginia’s horse country. What photographers often found themselves treated to was a glimpse of the growing bond between the young president and his little boy.
JFK delighted in tickling his son, leaning down at staff meetings so that the boy could babble in his ear, or tossing him into the air—regardless of the often painful consequences. John famously hid under his father’s desk while the president teased, “Is there a rabbit in there?” But the game father and son played most frequently was “Going Through the Tunnel,” which simply involved scampering between the president’s legs and back again. At some point, JFK would gently spank John’s behind or playfully grab the boy as he tried to make it through.
All the while, the president took obvious delight in simply touching the boy—a connection that Jackie and others called “sensual” in nature. “He would nuzzle John the way a bear nuzzles its cub,” Baldrige observed, “pausing for a moment to inhale his smell and feel his skin. It was really very moving, because President Kennedy was very reserved otherwise. You never saw him hugging or kissing anyone in public, not even his wife.” The children gave JFK a “chance to behave just like any other loving, affectionate American dad,” Baldrige added. “It began with Caroline, but it was really John who opened up the president’s heart.”
Stanley Tretick, the Look magazine photographer who took some of the most memorable White House shots of JFK and his children, remembered that JFK’s “interest in the boy was incredible . . . And you know, it was a genuine thing between the two of them. The boy also sensed his father. I think it would have really grown . . .”
No one was more delighted than Jackie, who often watched silently on the sidelines as her husband tumbled around on the floor with their son. “You could tell how thrilled she was,” said Baldrige, who on more than one occasion caught Jackie spying on the two Kennedy men. “Jackie got such a kick out of watching them enjoy each other. The weight of the world was on this man’s shoulders. He was trying to keep us from getting into a nuclear war with the Russians, among other things. But for a few moments he could roll around with John and forget all that. Jackie was proud she could provide him with a happy family life. She felt it was the most important part of her job as his wife.”
From the very beginning, there was also the palpable sense that John, not his big sister Caroline, would someday be the Kennedy standard-bearer. “No question about it,” said writer George Plimpton, an old friend of Jackie. “Everyone loved Caroline and we all knew she was exceptional, but great things were expected of John. I think Jackie in particular believed the world of politics was a man’s world.”
Given the fact that JFK was the first president to be born in the twentieth century, expectations regarding John’s future—not Caroline’s—made sense in the context of the times. “The Kennedys were already a dynasty, so the sky was the limit for John,” veteran Washington journalist Helen Thomas said. “Back then, every boy was told he could grow up to be president. Well, John-John was no ordinary American boy.”
“People forget that Jackie detested politics,” Gore Vidal observed, “but she loved being in close proximity to power. Daughters were raised for the express purpose of marrying rich and powerful men, which is what Jackie did—spectacularly. Sons carried the torch.”
For the time being, aviation—not politics—was foremost on the mind of young John Kennedy Jr. At thirteen months, he took his first public steps at the Palm Beach airport, seeing his father off to Washington. Less than a month later John was scampering up and down the center aisle of Air Force One, playing peekaboo with members of the White House press corps.
Soon newsreels and photos captured John jumping up and down with anticipation as his father’s helicopter set down on the South Lawn of the White House. “Nothing got him more excited than that helicopter,” Salinger said. “President Kennedy would get off and lean down to scoop John-John up, and the boy would run right past him with his toy helicopter in his hand. As much as he missed his father, John-John really wanted a ride in that chopper.”
When a real helicopter wasn’t around, John simply became one, spinning around in circles with his arms outstretched until he collapsed on the ground. “The president thought this was hysterical,” Chuck Spalding said. “He even came up with a new nickname name for John. He started calling him ‘Helicopter Head.’ ”
“He was absolutely determined to spoil John from the beginning,” George Smathers said. “He could not deny that boy anything. If the President was talking to a cabinet member or some head of state, it didn’t matter—he’d stop everything if John came skipping into the Oval Office.”
If JFK had one concern about his son, it was that John was being seduced by the trappings of war—the marching bands, the wreath layings at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, not to mention the twenty-one-gun salutes and flyovers that often greeted visiting dignitaries. John was “right there,” the president said, whenever “guns, swords, or anyone wearing a uniform” were involved.
White House photographer Cecil Stoughton had a simple enough solution: stop letting the boy watch the parades and ceremonies that seemed to take place there several times a week. That wasn’t going to be easy. Jackie, whose father had served as an Army major during World War I, had always been fascinated with the military. “A man in uniform always seemed to get to her,” said Baldrige. “She had immense respect for soldiers and was terribly kind to the Marine guards and the military aides at the White House. They loved her.”
It was the first lady who actively encouraged John’s interest in military pageantry, making sure he had an unobstructed view whenever a marching band or honor guard was on the premises. “John loved it because she loved it,” Baldrige said. “And don’t all little boys love that sort of thing anyway?”
By October 1962, when U.S. intelligence discovered the presence of offensive Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba, Jack was, according to Oleg Cassini, “in many ways a changed man. Caroline and John had really opened him up emotionally. He was worried about all children, and what might happen if he made the wrong decision. Can you imagine carrying that kind of burden?”
Over those perilous thirteen days in October, JFK was consumed with the task of pulling the world back from the brink of nuclear war. For a full week, top State Department and Pentagon officials secretly met around the clock with the president to hammer out a response to the Soviets’ blatantly provocative act. Even White House staff members were kept in the dark. So as not to arouse suspicion, key advisers were smuggled in through service entrances and slept behind closed doors on couches and cots.
Somehow, JFK still managed to eke out some time to spend with Caroline and John, who had taken ill and was now in bed with a 104-degree temperature. Jackie reassured her husband that Dr. Travell had already seen the boy, and that it was a run-of-the-mill case of the flu.
“Jackie didn’t want anything adding to his burden,” Salinger said. “She loved the fact that he was a devoted father, but she was also a very smart woman who respected the fact that he was doing the world’s toughest job. She was a real team player in that sense—and never more so than during the Cuban Missile Crisis.”
For her part, Jackie had refused to be sent off to a bomb shelter with the wives of other top administration officials, vowing instead to perish along with her husband on the lawn of the White House if that’s what it came to. In the meantime, she arranged a number of small dinner parties at the White House to lighten her husband’s mood.
“Jack was reflective, even melancholy,” recalled Cassini, one of those invited by Jackie to cheer up her husband. “He felt a nuclear war with the Soviets was inevitable, whether now or later.” The first couple took several quiet strolls on the White House grounds during this period, and at one point JFK confessed his fears to Jackie. “We’ve already had a chance,” he said. “But what about all the children?”
Hours later, JFK addressed the nation. He had ordered a naval blockade of Cuba, and now it was up to the notoriously belligerent, saber-rattling Soviet premier, Nikita Khrushchev, to make the next move. After thirteen tension-filled days, Soviet ships carrying missiles bound for Cuba turned back on October 24, 1962. “We’re eyeball-to-eyeball,” said Secretary of State Dean Rusk, uttering the most memorable phrase to come out of the Cuban Missile Crisis, “and I think the other guy just blinked.”
That same day, John’s fever broke. Within twenty-four hours, he was peering from behind pillars, scampering down hallways, and twirling like a helicopter. “Overnight, things were back to normal,” Baldrige said. “It’s hard to describe the sense of relief everyone felt. I mean, just hours before people were heading for the fallout shelters and saying goodbye to loved ones. We really thought it could be the end—Armageddon. Then suddenly, everything was going to be OK. We were getting a new chance at life. The president had saved the day.”
Now that John was feeling better, Jackie started making plans for the children to go trick-or-treating—the first time John would be permitted to accompany his sister on her appointed rounds. On Halloween night, Arthur Schlesinger opened the door of his Georgetown house to find several goblins hopping up and down. “After a moment a masked mother in the background called out that it was time to go to their next house.” The voice was unmistakably Jackie’s. They had already stopped at the homes of former New York governor Averell Harriman and noted columnist Joseph Alsop. Former secretary of state Dean Acheson was next.
“The children must never feel vulnerable or frightened,” Jackie later told another friend, Kitty Carlisle Hart. “It’s a mother’s job to make them feel secure, no matter what’s going on in the larger world.” With things now somewhat back to normal, the first family celebrated Thanksgiving with the rest of the raucous Kennedy clan at Hyannis Port. As usual, John careened wildly about the living room, at one point bumping into the wheelchair of Grandpa Joe Kennedy, who by this time had suffered a debilitating stroke. The elder Kennedy took it all in stride, never happier than when he was surrounded by his tribe of children and grandchildren.
Only days later, Jackie oversaw a joint party celebrating her children’s birthdays—Caroline’s fifth and John’s second. Creamed chicken, cake, and ice cream were served, and then Jackie helped them blow out the candles on each of their birthday cakes.
The Marine Band provided the entertainment, and at one point John grabbed a pair of maracas and joined in. Once they finished opening their presents, Caroline and John led their guests to the White House movie theater for an afternoon of cartoons. “Too bad Daddy isn’t here,” Caroline said of the kids-only affair. “Cartoons and cowboy movies are his favorites.”
With JFK’s popularity still soaring in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis, a sense of euphoria permeated the air that Christmas of 1962. At the Kennedy mansion in Palm Beach, Jack and Jackie fully embraced the holiday spirit by surrounding themselves with family and friends.
Certainly no one was the wiser on January 8, 1963, when the most famous painting in the world, Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, was unveiled at Washington’s National Gallery of Art. Almost solely because of his deep personal affection for Jackie, French minister of culture André Malraux agreed to have the masterpiece taken down from its wall in the Louvre and lent personally to the president of the United States. Wearing a bejeweled, strapless mauve gown to the opening, Jackie caused a bigger sensation than the painting itself.
A week later, Jackie announced to Tish Baldrige that she was “taking the veil”—cutting back drastically on her official schedule and, for the foreseeable future at least, devoting herself to her family. She did not tell them the real reason for her decision, but they guessed it just the same. Jackie was pregnant.
As much as JFK adored Caroline, John had awakened something in the president that surprised Jackie. Jack now seemed more committed to his family—and to his marriage—than he had ever been. “What he wants more than anything else in the world,” Jackie told her friend Roswell Gilpatric, “is another wonderful little boy.”
This time, Jack and Jackie were not about to take any unnecessary risks. With a miscarriage, a stillbirth, and two difficult pregnancies behind her, Jackie decided to take the advice of her obstetrician, Dr. John Walsh, and stick close to home.
Jack did his part, as well. To spare his wife any unnecessary emotional distress that might trigger problems with her pregnancy, the president systematically put an end to his extramarital affairs—several of which he had been carrying on for years right under his wife’s nose. One of those women, White House intern Mimi Beardsley, realized that the president was “winding things down” by January 1963. Jack told Mary Meyer, the sister-in-law of his longtime journalist pal Ben Bradlee, that their clandestine affair was over during a dinner dance at the White House on March 8.
Jackie confided to United Nations ambassador Adlai Stevenson, the two-time Democratic presidential nominee, that she appreciated what her husband was doing. “The new baby was going to be a turning point for them,” Smathers said. “She was absolutely convinced of that.” Although there was no way of determining the child’s sex—this was decades before the use of ultrasound for that purpose—Jackie was also convinced she was carrying another son. “She called the unborn baby ‘he’ all the time,” Salinger said. “With a wink, of course, but she believed it.”
The son they already had was proving himself to be quite the handful. Celebrating the Easter holiday in Palm Beach, Jackie and Maud Shaw exhausted themselves trying to corral John as he scampered across the neighbor’s lawn in search of colored eggs. He later threw a full-fledged tantrum at a White House reception for Luxembourg’s Grand Duchess Charlotte, and nearly clobbered Yugoslavian president Marshal Tito when he accidentally dropped his toy gun from the Truman Balcony while Tito and JFK stood below.
That summer, Jackie and the children settled into the Kennedys’ rented beach house on Squaw Island, just a stone’s throw from the Hyannis Port compound, and she devoted herself to nothing more strenuous than reading, painting, and napping. “She wanted that baby more than anything,” Jack later told George Smathers. “We wanted him . . .”
On the morning of August 7, 1963—halfway through her seventh month—Jackie took Caroline to her riding lesson at a local stable when she suddenly began to experience labor pains. Within twenty minutes a helicopter was carrying her to the hospital at nearby Otis Air Force Base. “Please hurry!” she begged Dr. Walsh. “This baby mustn’t be born dead.”
At 12:52, Jackie gave birth by caesarean section to the boy she had prayed for. Weighing just four pounds, ten ounces, the baby was immediately placed in an incubator. In 1963, few babies of this size survived. To further complicate matters, he suffered from the same lung disorder—hyaline membrane disease—that afflicted their stillborn daughter Arabella and had nearly killed John.
The base chaplain was summoned immediately to baptize the boy Patrick Bouvier Kennedy, after Jack’s paternal grandfather and Black Jack Bouvier. Patrick was forty minutes old when his father arrived from Washington. Although the press was being told only that Jackie and the baby were in “good condition,” the decision was quickly made to transport Patrick by ambulance to Children’s Hospital in Boston.
Jack spent some time with his wife, whose postoperative condition was serious enough to require multiple blood transfusions, then joined John and Caroline at Squaw Island to reassure them that everything was going to be fine.
But it wasn’t. Soon the nation was holding its collective breath, and praying for the child’s recovery. By the next day, Patrick’s condition had deteriorated to the point where he was moved to a hyperbaric chamber in the adjacent Harvard School of Public Health. Using a suite at Boston’s Ritz-Carlton hotel as his base, JFK visited his son four times, then helicoptered to Otis Air Force Base to check in on Jackie.
While reporters swarmed outside, the president decided to spend the night at the Boston hospital where Patrick was undergoing treatment. Jack was holding his son when the baby died at 4:04 a.m. on Friday, August 9. “He put up quite a fight,” the president told his closest aide, Dave Powers. “He was a beautiful baby.”
The president rushed to his wife’s side. Once at Otis Air Force Hospital, he strode purposely past rows of red-eyed medical personnel toward the first lady’s room. “Oh, Jack, oh, Jack,” Jackie sobbed as they broke down in each other’s arms. “There’s only one thing I could not bear now—if I ever lost you.”