WASHINGTON, CAPE COD, AND BOSTON
John F. Kennedy’s second son was born twenty years to the day after the Navy rescued Kennedy from the group of Pacific islands where he had been marooned for five days after a Japanese destroyer rammed his torpedo boat, PT 109, slamming him against the cockpit wall and killing two crewmen. The medal that he won for “courage, endurance, and excellent leadership” and “extremely heroic conduct” during these five days, and John Hersey’s account of his heroics in The New Yorker, became the early engines of his political career. He answered questions about his exploits with a self-deprecating “It was involuntary, they sank my boat,” but he arranged things so that seldom a moment passed without his eyes resting on some reminder of PT 109. When he looked across the Oval Office he saw a scale model of the boat on a shelf, and when he looked up from his papers he saw on his desk the coconut shell onto which he had carved his SOS: “Nauro Isl Commander—Native knows Pos’it—He can pilot 11 alive—Need small boat—Kennedy.” When he emerged from his helicopter at the family compound in Hyannis Port he heard his nieces and nephews chanting, “In ’forty-three, they went to sea! / Thirteen men and Kennedy! / To seek the blazing enemy!” and saw on the beach the dinghy he had christened PT 109½. Twice a day he swam the breaststroke in the White House pool, the same stroke he had used while towing a badly burned crewman through shark-infested waters for five hours, gripping the strap of his life preserver in his teeth. Every morning he fastened his tie with a metal clasp shaped like a torpedo boat with “PT 109” stamped on its bow, and because he had given copies of this clasp to his friends and aides, he saw it whenever they walked into his office. All of which may explain why Kennedy’s friend and fellow World War II naval veteran Ben Bradlee is certain that when Evelyn Lincoln hurried into the Oval Office at 11:43 a.m. on August 7, 1963, to report that Jackie had gone into premature labor on Cape Cod, there was “no way on God’s earth” that he did not think, My child is being born twenty years to the day after I was rescued, a coincidence providing an additional emotional dimension to a day that would be among his most traumatic.
Jackie had been scheduled for a cesarean section at Washington’s Walter Reed Army Hospital in September, but because John Kennedy, Jr., had arrived prematurely almost three years earlier, the Air Force had prepared a suite for her at the Otis Air Force Base Hospital. Kennedy had asked her obstetrician, John Walsh, and her White House physician, Janet Travell, to vacation on the Cape that summer. He called Travell before flying to Otis, and she reported that Walsh had taken Jackie to the hospital and was preparing to perform an emergency cesarean. Jackie would be fine, she said, but a baby born six weeks prematurely had only a fifty/fifty chance of surviving.
If there was ever a time when Kennedy could imagine beating these odds, it was the summer of 1963, a splendid season that his brother Bobby recalled being “the happiest time of his administration.” On June 28 he had given his Ich bin ein Berliner oration, a stirring summation of the difference between democratic and totalitarian states (and probably the finest speech delivered by an American president on foreign soil), to a quarter of a million Germans filling the future John F. Kennedy Platz. After Air Force One took off for Dublin he told Ted Sorensen, “We’ll never have another day like this one as long as we live,” but he was soon describing his visit to his ancestral villages in Ireland as the three happiest days of his life. The day after returning from Europe he went to Hyannis Port for a Fourth of July he called “the greatest weekend of my life.” After disembarking from his helicopter he had embraced Jackie, surprising reporters who had never seen them hug or walk arm in arm. The weather had been superb, three sparkling summer days. He felt healthier than he had in years, “bursting with vigor,” according to Dr. Travell. He took long swims, flew kites with John off the back of the Honey Fitz, the presidential cabin cruiser, and because his chronic back pain had largely vanished, played golf for the first time since 1961. He screened a film of his Irish trip on three straight evenings, and when he could not persuade anyone but his brother Ted to sit through it again they watched it alone, prompting his former Navy buddy Paul (“Red”) Fay to complain, “All we are getting here still is his Irish visit. . . . Jack brings the conversation back round to it and invariably shows the film which I have now seen for the sixth time.”
He had been a detached father when John and Caroline were infants, telling Fay, “I don’t understand how you can get such a big kick out of your children. . . . Certainly nothing they are going to say is going to stimulate you.” But once Caroline began talking, they forged a closer relationship, and by the summer of 1963 John had become a rambunctious and personable little boy. When Kennedy arrived at Hyannis Port he would shout, “It’s time for Father and Son to get to know each other.” John would dash into his arms and they would fall onto the lawn so he could hold the boy in the air, tickling him and saying, “John, aren’t you lucky to have a dad who plays with you like this?” His newfound rapport with his children had increased his excitement for his next one, and as he passed Lincoln’s desk he often told her, “Soon you’ll have three coming over to get candy from your candy dish.”
There had been rocky periods in his marriage, but Jackie’s pregnancy had brought them closer. Fay and his wife, Anita, had been their houseguests the weekend before Jackie went into labor. When Kennedy failed to appear for an excursion, Fay went upstairs and found them lying in bed, arms wrapped around each other, more intimate than he had ever seen them. Later that weekend Kennedy told Fay, “I’d known a lot of attractive women in my lifetime before I got married, but of all of them there was only one I could have married—and I married her.”
After returning to Washington from these summer weekends, he told his friend Dave Powers how much he was enjoying his children and how great everything was. Powers was a puckish, middle-aged Irish American who had been with him since his first campaign. His principal duties involved ushering distinguished visitors into the Oval Office (he had once famously told the Shah of Iran, “You’re my kind of shah”), entertaining the president with jokes, reminiscing about earlier campaigns, swimming alongside him in the White House pool, and keeping him company when his family was away, because he was a man, Powers said, who “could not bear to be alone, ever.” During the summer of 1963 they often sat together on the Truman Balcony, eating dinner off trays and listening to songs from Kennedy’s youth, such as “Stormy Weather” and “The Very Thought of You.” The spotlights came on, illuminating the White House fountain and the Washington Monument, and Kennedy invariably said, “It gets better every night” or “This is the best White House I’ve ever lived in.” When he became sleepy, Powers went upstairs with him, sitting by his bed and talking until he mumbled, “Good night, pal,” the signal that Powers could extinguish his light and return to his own family.
The summer of 1963 was also a high point in Kennedy’s presidency, “a remarkably intensive but productive period,” according to Sorensen. The Wall Street Journal reported in its front-page “Washington Wire” on August 9 that “White House optimism grows, little restrained by Washington’s summer doldrums. The Kennedy team feels the tide of events runs his way, at home and abroad. The President sees a chance for new accords to ease the cold war. The nation’s civil rights crisis seems to come under control. . . . Republican squabbling on issues and candidates pleases him as an omen for 1964.”
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Maxwell Taylor, had known what he called “many President Kennedys.” They included the masterful leader of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, the “supremely confident” man who emerged during the summer of 1963, and the president shaken by the “Bay of Pigs,” shorthand for the bungled attempt of CIA-trained Cuban exiles to overthrow the Communist regime of President Fidel Castro in April 1961. The Eisenhower administration had planned the operation, Kennedy’s civilian and military advisers had endorsed it, and he had approved what amounted to an amphibious landing on a hostile shore attempted by amateur Cuban soldiers overseen by American amateurs. He shouldered the blame but was furious with the Pentagon and CIA for a fiasco that he feared had mortally wounded his presidency.
As he and a friend drove out of the White House a few weeks after the catastrophe, he smiled and waved at a group of cheering supporters while muttering, “If they think they’re going to get me to run for this job again, they’re out of their minds.” He told his best friend and former prep school roommate Lem Billings that the presidency was “the most unpleasant job in existence,” and that he doubted anyone would want to build a library for what was promising to be “a rather tragic administration.” He remained pessimistic well into the fall. When the NBC correspondent Elie Abel asked him to cooperate on a book about his first term, he said, “Why would anyone write a book about an administration that has nothing to show for itself but a string of disasters?” But by the summer of 1963, following his successful resolution of the Cuban missile crisis, a strong showing by Democrats in the 1962 elections, and healthy economic growth, he had become almost as happy and confident as President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Like Roosevelt, who had faced the Depression and the Second World War, he was contending with two grave threats to the nation’s survival, a nuclear war and a racial conflict. On two successive days in June 1963 he delivered speeches addressing each one that represented a sharp departure from the caution marking his first two years in office.
Contrary to his public image as a dashing and decisive chief executive, Kennedy was, in fact, in the words of his economic adviser Paul Samuelson, “an extremely hesitant person who checked the ice in front of him all the time.” Winning the White House by about 113,000 votes out of the 69 million cast, the narrowest margin in almost a century, had encouraged his caution and pragmatism. There had been much ice checking during his first two years in office, leading the columnist Joseph Kraft to say that his motto could have been “no enemies to the right.”
At first, Kennedy had avoided challenging the hard-line cold warriors in either party and resisted engaging the Soviet Union in serious disarmament talks. He changed his mind after the Cuban missile crisis demonstrated how easily a misjudgment by either side could start a nuclear war. The crisis had started in October 1962, when Kennedy learned that the Soviet Union was installing missiles armed with nuclear warheads in Cuba capable of attacking the U.S. mainland. He ordered a naval blockade of the island to prevent the arrival of more Soviet arms, and demanded that the Soviets remove the missiles and bases. For almost a week the two nations teetered on the brink of a nuclear war. The crisis was averted by a deal in which the Soviets agreed to dismantle the missiles and close the bases in exchange for a secret undertaking by Kennedy to do the same with U.S. missiles in Turkey. Kennedy’s friend David Ormsby-Gore, who was serving as Britain’s ambassador, observed that after the crisis, “he finally realized that the decision for a nuclear holocaust was his. And he saw it in terms of children—his children and everybody else’s children. And then that’s where his passion came in, that’s when his emotions came in.” The risk of radioactive fallout had worried him since 1961, when the Soviet Union unilaterally decided to resume atmospheric nuclear tests, forcing him to do the same. When he asked his science adviser Jerome Wiesner how fallout returned to the earth from the upper atmosphere, Wiesner explained that it came down in the rain. Staring at the rain falling in the Rose Garden, Kennedy said, “You mean there might be radioactive contamination in that rain out there right now?”
He used a June 10, 1963, commencement address at American University to announce his own unilateral suspension of atmospheric nuclear tests and to propose negotiations in Moscow aimed at drafting a treaty banning nuclear testing in the atmosphere, underground, underneath the oceans, and in outer space. The speech was a dramatic break from eighteen years of cold war rhetoric by Presidents Truman and Eisenhower, and himself. He blamed both sides for the arms race, called on Americans to “reexamine our own attitude—as individuals and as a Nation,” acknowledged Russia’s wartime sacrifices, declared that “no government or social system is so evil that its people must be considered as lacking in virtue,” and reminded Americans that they and the Soviet people “breathe the same air,” “cherish our children’s future,” and “are all mortal,” expressing these truths so eloquently that one British newspaper called the address “one of the greatest state papers of American history.” Soviet newspapers reprinted its entire text and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev praised it as the best speech by any American president since Roosevelt.
The next day Kennedy delivered a nationally televised address on civil rights that James Farmer of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) lauded as the “strongest civil rights speech made by any president, Lincoln included.” After saying that “race has no place in American life or law,” he announced that he was sending Congress a comprehensive civil rights bill guaranteeing all citizens the right to be served in hotels, restaurants, retail stores, and other public facilities. If passed, it would represent the most dramatic advance in civil rights since the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education declared separate public schools for black and white students to be unconstitutional. As in his American University speech, he asked Americans to exercise their moral imaginations. After reminding whites that black citizens could not eat in public restaurants, send their children to the best public schools, or vote for their representatives, he asked, “Who among us would be content to have the color of his skin changed and stand in his place?” When he finished, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., told a companion, “Can you believe that white man not only stepped up to the plate, he hit it over the fence!” The next day King sent him a telegram praising the speech as “eloquent, passionate and unequivocal . . . a hallmark in the annals of American history.” King and Farmer would have been even more impressed had they known that all of Kennedy’s senior advisers except his brother Bobby had opposed him delivering a speech framing the issue in moral terms, and submitting a civil rights bill to Congress.
In Profiles in Courage, his Pulitzer Prize–winning biography of eight U.S. senators who had chosen principle over political expediency, he had written about men who, much like himself until 1963, had “sailed with the wind until the decisive moment when their conscience, and events, propelled them into the center of the storm.” His two June speeches represented just that moment, and some of the remarks he made after delivering them sounded as if he were nominating himself for a chapter in his own book. After the test ban treaty was initialed in Moscow, he told Sorensen he would “gladly” forfeit reelection to win the sixty-seven votes needed to ratify it in the Senate. After a Gallup poll reported that 50 percent of Americans believed he was moving “too fast” on civil rights, he told a reporter at a press conference, “Great historical events cannot be judged by taking the national temperature every few weeks. . . . I think we will stand after a period of time has gone by,” and said to his secretary of commerce, Luther Hodges, a former Southern governor, “There comes a time when a man has to take a stand and history will record that he has to meet these tough situations and ultimately make a decision.” During a White House meeting with civil rights leaders he pulled a scrap of paper from his pocket containing the results of a poll showing his approval ratings falling from 60 to 47 percent since his speech and said grandiloquently, “I may lose the next election because of this. I don’t care.”
His June speeches had been a decisive break from the past: one offered the first concrete proposals for limiting the spread and testing of atomic weapons since the beginning of the cold war; the other represented the first time an American president had identified civil rights as a moral issue. They condemned racial discrimination and nuclear war as immoral, stressed the common humanity of whites and blacks, and Americans and Russians, and were profoundly optimistic. At American University he had said, “Our problems are man-made; therefore they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings.” The following evening, he declared that passage of his civil rights bill would enable America “to fulfill its promise.” The author and peace activist Norman Cousins, who had been serving as a clandestine intermediary between Kennedy and Khrushchev, spoke of “a new spirit of hopefulness” abroad in the world that summer, writing, “Nothing is more powerful than an individual acting out of his conscience, thus helping to bring the collective conscience to life.”
The political scientist James MacGregor Burns had concluded his 1960 biography of Kennedy by writing, “Kennedy could bring bravery and wisdom [to the presidency]; whether he would bring passion and power would depend on his making a commitment not only of mind, but of heart, that until now he has never been required to make.” Kennedy’s two speeches answered Burns’s criticism and honored a pledge he had made to the poet Robert Frost. During a visit to the White House two days after the inauguration, Frost had presented him with a signed and handwritten copy of the poem that he had composed for the ceremony but could not read because of the glare from a dazzling winter sun. As Frost watched, Kennedy read the poem, which amounted to a challenge to display the kind of courage that he had celebrated in Profiles in Courage and concluded by predicting,
A golden age of poetry and power
Of which this noonday’s the beginning hour.
“Be more Irish than Harvard,” Frost said as they parted. “Poetry and power is the formula for another Augustan age. Don’t be afraid of power.” At the bottom of a typed thank-you note to Frost, Kennedy scrawled, “It’s poetry and power all the way!”
There had been poetry in his early speeches. In November 1961, he warned students at the University of Washington that “the United States is neither omnipotent nor omniscient. . . . We cannot right every wrong or reverse each adversity.” During the Cuban missile crisis he spoke of a nuclear war “in which even the fruits of victory would be ashes in our mouths,” and said, “Our goal is not the victory of might, but the vindication of right.” But it was not until June 1963 that he finally began to be more Irish than Harvard, governing from the heart as well as the head, harnessing poetry to the power of the presidency without checking the thickness of the political ice, promising in his American University speech, “Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave . . . not merely peace for Americans, but peace for all men and women—not merely peace in our time but peace in all time,” and the next day calling civil rights a moral issue “as old as the scriptures and . . . as clear as the American Constitution.”
• • •
JACKIE GAVE BIRTH to their son while Kennedy was in the air. He sat silently during the flight, staring out a window. Another passenger remembered seeing the same stricken expression on his face on November 25, 1960, when he had flown back to Washington from Palm Beach after learning that Jackie had gone into premature labor with John. He had been tense and perspiring then, and was overheard muttering, “I’m never there when she needs me.”
Jackie had suffered a miscarriage in 1955 and had become pregnant again the following year. Her physician had urged her to skip the 1956 Democratic Convention, but she felt obliged to attend because her husband was a candidate for the vice presidency. She went to her mother and stepfather’s estate in Newport afterward while he flew to Europe for a holiday. While he was cruising off Capri with what one newspaper called “several young women,” she went into labor and gave birth to a stillborn baby girl they planned to name Arabella, after the tiny ship that had accompanied the Mayflower. He did not hear about the tragedy until three days later and decided to continue the cruise, leaving Bobby to comfort Jackie and bury Arabella. He flew home after one of his best friends in the Senate, George Smathers of Florida, told him during a transatlantic call, “You’d better haul your ass back to your wife if you want to run for president.”
Jackie spent most of the autumn of 1956 in Newport and London, avoiding Hyannis Port and telling her sister, Lee Radziwill, that her marriage was probably over. But when she gave birth to Caroline a year later he arrived at the hospital carrying a bouquet of her favorite flowers, periwinkle-blue irises, and was the first to lay their daughter in her arms. He boasted of her being the prettiest baby in the nursery, and his voice broke when he described her to Lem Billings, who had never seen him happier or more emotional. Caroline had repaired some of the post-Arabella damage, and John’s birth would also bring them closer, but neither ended his philandering.
Before flying to Otis he had called Larry Newman, a journalist and friend who lived across the street from the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port, and asked him to drive to the base hospital and wait for him in the lobby. When he arrived, he began to throw an arm over Newman’s shoulder but stopped in midair and shook his hand instead. “Thanks for being here,” he said in a voice so choked with emotion that Newman almost burst into tears.
Dr. Walsh reported that his son, whom he and Jackie had decided to name Patrick, was suffering from “hyaline membrane disease” (now known as respiratory distress syndrome), a common ailment among premature infants in which a film covering the air sacs of the lungs hinders their ability to supply oxygen to the bloodstream. The chances that a five-and-a-half-week-premature infant weighing 4 pounds 10½ ounces with this ailment would survive in 1963 were, as Travell had warned, only fifty/fifty. (The chances have since improved dramatically.) Kennedy flew in a pediatric specialist who recommended sending Patrick to Children’s Hospital in Boston, the premier medical center in the world for childhood diseases. Before an ambulance took the infant away he wheeled him into Jackie’s room in an isolette, a pressurized incubator simulating the oxygen and temperature conditions of the womb. The boy lay motionless on his back, a name band hanging loosely around his tiny wrist. Hospital personnel described him as “beautifully formed” and “a cute little monkey with light brown hair.” Jackie was not permitted to hold him and became upset after learning that he was going to Boston.
She had suffered months of postpartum depression following John’s birth, and Kennedy feared it might happen again. He pulled aside an Air Force medic, Richard Petrie, and asked what he knew about television. Puzzled by the question, Petrie said, “Well, I can turn one on and off.” Kennedy explained that if Patrick died he did not want Jackie hearing the news on television, and to prevent this happening he wanted Petrie to disable her set. The medic slipped back into her room, pried off the back of her television, and smashed a tube.
“Nothing must happen to Patrick,” Kennedy told his mother-in-law, Janet Auchincloss, before flying to Boston, “because I just can’t bear to think of the effect it might have on Jackie.”
A jubilant crowd at Logan Airport, either unaware of Patrick’s condition or unable to believe that anything bad could happen to such a charmed family, greeted him with cheers and applause. Flashbulbs popped and girls screamed and held out autograph books. He offered a tight smile and a halfhearted wave.
There was no cure for hyaline membrane disease in 1963, and an infant survived only if its normal bodily functions dissolved the membrane coating the lungs within forty-eight hours. Kennedy had consulted the best physicians and sent his son to the best hospital. Now all he could do was wait. He spent the night at his family’s apartment in the Ritz Hotel. Before returning to Children’s Hospital the next morning, he called Ted Sorensen to review his formal statement accompanying the presentation of the test ban treaty to Congress. It called the agreement “the finest concrete result of eighteen years of effort by the United States to impose limits on the nuclear arms race” and said it embodied “the hopes of the world.” Sorensen remembered him reading these sentences out loud in “a downcast but factual manner.”
Patrick’s breathing stabilized, and Kennedy returned to Otis to deliver the news to Jackie. She was so encouraged that she spent the afternoon choosing lipsticks and arranging for a ballet company to entertain Emperor Haile Selassie during his state visit in October. Kennedy returned to their rented house on Squaw Island—a spit of land connected to Hyannis Port by a causeway—and lunched on the terrace with Janet Auchincloss and her eighteen-year-old daughter, also named Janet. Young Janet was supposed to have her society debut in Newport the next weekend but wanted to cancel it because of Patrick. Hearing this, Kennedy said, “This is the kind of thing that has to go on. You can’t let all those people down.” Knowing she was self-conscious about her weight, he added, “You know, Janet, you really are a very beautiful girl.” Her face lit up and she said, “Oh, Mr. President, I don’t know what you mean.” Her mother believed that this last-minute flattery gave her the confidence to have the party.
Patrick’s condition suddenly deteriorated, and Kennedy rushed back to Children’s Hospital by helicopter, landing on the grass of a nearby stadium. The boy’s physicians had decided to force oxygen into his lungs by placing him in a hyperbaric chamber, a thirty-one-foot-long steel cylinder resembling a small submarine, with portholes and air locks between its compartments. It was the only one in the country and had been used for infants undergoing cardiac surgery and victims of carbon monoxide poisoning. Patrick would be the first hyaline membrane baby placed inside it.
Upon returning to the Ritz, Kennedy asked Evelyn Lincoln to bring him some White House stationery. She found him sitting on his bed, staring into space. After a full minute of silence he wrote on a sheet of paper, “Please find enclosed a contribution to the O’Leary fund. I hope it is a success.” He enclosed a check for $250 (worth about $1,800 today), sealed the envelope, and told her to have the Secret Service deliver it. Weeks later, an accountant handling his personal finances informed Lincoln that a bank was questioning the validity of his signature on an August 8 check to the James B. O’Leary Fund. She recalled reading about a Boston policeman named O’Leary who had been killed in the line of duty. Kennedy had been so distraught about Patrick that his handwriting on the check was even more indecipherable than usual.
• • •
KENNEDY HAD ALMOST DIED from scarlet fever when he was two years old. His temperature rose to 105, blisters covered his body, and he was quarantined in a Boston hospital. His father attended Mass every morning for three weeks and promised God to donate half his wealth to charity if his son survived. He kept his word, up to a point, sending a check for $3,750 to the Guild of Apollonia, an organization of Catholic dentists providing free dental care to needy children. It was a generous sum for the time but could have represented only half the money in his personal bank account, not half his net worth. It would be surprising if Kennedy, like his father and most other parents in his situation, had not bargained with God. Perhaps the O’Leary check was part of the deal. If it was, and the Almighty was keeping score, He could have added it to a long list of acts of thoughtfulness and compassion on Kennedy’s part, some trivial but nevertheless part of a pattern.
While serving in the Pacific he had torn the PT 109 patch off his shirt and mailed it to a cousin who was homesick at boarding school along with a note saying, “I’m not so crazy about where I’m at either, kiddo. Be brave. Wear my patch, and we’ll get through this.” While staying with Paul Fay in California during leave from the Navy he was so charmed by Margaret (“Miggie”) McMahon, the Irish nursemaid who had raised Fay, that he began calling her every year on her birthday, a tradition he continued throughout his life, making his last call from the White House in 1963. While rushing to grab a quick lunch, he had noticed a group of spastic children touring the White House grounds in wheelchairs and insisted on engaging each child in a lengthy conversation. When a boy mentioned that his father had also served in a PT boat squadron, he darted back into his office, found his PT boat skipper’s hat, and placed it on the boy’s head. “His father was in PT boats, too,” he explained to a Secret Service agent who was wiping away tears. “His father is dead.” He studied photographs of the agents so he could address each by his first name. One brutally cold winter evening, he asked the agent on duty outside the French doors leading to the garden to come inside. After the man explained that he could not leave his post, he returned with his own fleece-lined coat and insisted he wear it, then reappeared with two mugs of hot chocolate that they drank while sitting on the icy steps.
His practice of moving those who disappointed him to other jobs rather than dismissing them led Undersecretary of State George Ball to conclude that he was “deeply concerned with other people’s feelings and sensitivities to the point of being almost physically upset by having to fire anyone.” David Ormsby-Gore, who made his acquaintance in London when he was a young man, was struck by his “beautiful manners” and courtesy to the elderly. These attributes had helped him win over Eleanor Roosevelt, who nursed a long-standing grudge against the Kennedy family and had criticized him for failing to censure Senator Joseph McCarthy, declaring that she was reluctant to support “someone who understands what courage is and admires it, but has not quite the independence to have it.” After he won the nomination, they had scheduled a meeting during which he hoped to persuade her to campaign for him. Her favorite granddaughter had died in a riding accident the day before, but she insisted on proceeding anyway. Several weeks later, she told the staff of Citizens for Kennedy in Cleveland, “That young man behaved with such sensitivity and compassion throughout that whole day, he gave me more comfort than almost anyone around me: the manner in which he treated me . . . won me as did many things he told me he believed in.”
Sorensen described Kennedy as “a good and decent man with a conscience that told him what was right and a heart that cared about the well-being of those around him.” But he was unaware of Kennedy’s compulsive womanizing. A friend who knew the truth offered a more realistic assessment, saying, “For a man who was very kind to people, and was very concerned about how he treated people, Jack was not very conscious about how much he hurt his wife.”
After writing his check to the O’Leary fund, Kennedy went to Children’s Hospital and stood outside the hyperbaric chamber, watching through a porthole as physicians labored over Patrick. At 6:30 p.m., Salinger told reporters that the boy’s “downward spiral” had stopped but his condition remained serious. Kennedy returned to the Ritz, but an hour later Patrick was struggling and he rushed back to the hospital. Bobby Kennedy and Dave Powers flew up from Washington and joined him outside the chamber. Patrick’s breathing improved and his physicians urged Kennedy to get some sleep. Reluctant as ever to be alone, he asked Powers to share his hospital room. Powers lay down on a spare cot in his suit while Kennedy changed into his pajamas and knelt by the bed, hands clasped in prayer. Powers and Lem Billings had probably watched Kennedy fall asleep more often than anyone except Jackie. Neither could recall him ever retiring without first praying on his knees. No one can know what he prayed that evening, but it is unlikely that a man who prayed every day, attended Mass every Sunday, and had turned to religion at other emotional moments in his life would not have beseeched God to spare his son, and in the coming weeks and months there would be clues as to what he may have offered Him in return.
Few presidents have been as religiously observant as Kennedy yet reluctant to discuss their faith. He never raised the subject with Sorensen, leaving him wondering if his attendance at Mass was motivated by “political necessity.” But he would banter about religion with Jackie’s dressmaker Oleg Cassini, telling him, “I’d better keep my nose clean, just in case He’s up there,” and scolding him for questioning papal infallibility, saying, “The weakness of man should not weaken the image of God.” Jackie insisted that he had not been an atheist or an agnostic, and “did believe in God,” but sometimes wondered if his bedtime prayers and faithful attendance at Mass were ways of hedging his bets. “If it [the afterlife] was that way,” she said, “he wanted to have that [his adherence to Catholic ritual] on his side.”
Sometimes one could glimpse his faith. During his first congressional campaign he had astonished his aide Mark Dalton by impulsively ducking back into a church where they had just attended Mass so he could light a candle for his deceased brother. He was sensitive about being the first Catholic president and avoided public displays of piety, but when he attended Mass at the Basilica of the Virgin of Guadalupe during a 1962 visit to Mexico City his emotions trumped his political caution. As Jackie brought a bouquet of red roses to the altar he was so overcome that he crossed himself, causing the congregation to burst into applause. While recuperating in Palm Beach from a 1955 back operation that had almost killed him, he jotted down some ideas for Profiles in Courage, including this passage from Job: “Oh that one would hear me! Behold, my desire is that the Almighty would answer me.” A tense 1961 summit with Premier Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna left him so shaken that on the plane returning to Washington he scribbled, “I know there is a God—and I see a storm coming; If He has a place for me, I believe I am ready,” a quotation he often used in campaign speeches and attributed to Abraham Lincoln. (Evelyn Lincoln found the paper on the floor of Air Force One and squirreled it away with the other notes and doodles that she was constantly rescuing from wastebaskets.) That fall, after the Berlin crisis had cooled, he had slipped out of the White House on National Prayer Day and sat alone in a rear pew at Washington’s St. Matthew’s Cathedral, leading Hugh Sidey of Time to note, “To many who had watched him [Kennedy] through nine months of crisis, it seemed that his church attendance and the reference in his talks to prayer had become less mechanical and more meaningful.”
A Secret Service agent woke him at 2:00 a.m. to report that Patrick was struggling. As he hurried to the elevators the nurses in the corridor looked away. He saw a severely burned infant in one of the wards and stopped to ask a nurse for the name of the child’s mother so he could send her a note. Holding a piece of paper against the ward window, he wrote, “Keep up your courage. John F. Kennedy.”
For several hours he sat on a wooden chair outside the hyperbaric chamber, wearing a surgical cap and gown and communicating with the medical team by speakerphone. Near the end they wheeled Patrick into the corridor so he could be with his father. When the boy died at 4:19 a.m. Kennedy was clutching his little fingers. After saying in a quiet voice, “He put up quite a fight. He was a beautiful baby,” he ducked into a boiler room and wept loudly for ten minutes. After returning to his room he sent Powers on an errand so he could cry some more. He broke down outside the hospital and asked an aide to beg a photographer who had captured his grief not to publish the picture.
His eyes were red and his face swollen when he arrived at Otis that morning. As he described Patrick’s death to Jackie, he fell to his knees and sobbed.
“There’s just one thing I couldn’t stand,” she said in a faint voice. “If I ever lost you . . .”
“I know . . . I know . . . ,” he whispered.
Lincoln called Patrick’s death “one of the hardest blows” he had ever experienced. Sorensen thought he was “even more broken” than his wife. Jackie said, “He felt the loss of the baby in the house as much as I did,” and noticed him tearing up when he held John. His tears were all the more astonishing given that Joe Kennedy had frequently told his children, “There’ll be no crying in this house.” They shortened it to “Kennedys don’t cry,” repeated it to their children, and according to Ted Kennedy, “All of us absorbed its impact and molded our behavior to honor it. We have wept only rarely in public.”
Kennedy’s friends believed that he grappled with such powerful feelings that he was afraid of having them surface. Laura Bergquist sensed “a reservoir of emotion” under his “cool cat exterior.” Ormsby-Gore detected “deep emotions and strong passions underneath,” adding that “when his friends were hurt or a tragedy occurred or his child died, I think he felt it very deeply. But somehow public display was anathema to him.” Ormsby-Gore compared him to Raymond Asquith, the brilliant son of Prime Minister Herbert Asquith who was killed in the First World War. In Pilgrim’s Way, one of Kennedy’s favorite books, John Buchan wrote about Asquith, “He disliked emotion, not because he felt lightly but because he felt deeply.”
Children, family, and heroism could unlock his emotions. His first words to the crew of the PT boat rescuing him in the Pacific had been “Where the hell have you been?” And when someone shouted, “We’ve got some food for you,” he shot back, “Thanks. I’ve just had a coconut.” But the bravado ended at the base, where a friend found him sitting on his cot, tears streaming down his face, saying between sobs, “If only they’d come over to help me, maybe I might have been able to save those other two.” While delivering a Veterans Day address in Boston several years after the war, he broke down after saying, “No greater love has a man than he who gives up his life for his brother.” (He was probably thinking of his older brother, Joe, who had been killed in the war.) At a Memorial Day event in Brookline he choked up after proclaiming, “The memory of these young men will abide as long as men are found who will set honor and country above all else.” Moments after his inauguration Jackie gently touched his cheek and said, “Oh, Jack—what a day!” and saw his eyes fill with tears. After John’s birth, Ireland’s ambassador, Thomas Kiernan, had recited an Irish poem in the boy’s honor that began, “We wish to a new child / a heart that can be beguiled by a flower.” Kennedy was so moved that he remained silent for several minutes, not trusting himself to speak without crying. He finally said in a soft voice, “I wish it had been written for me.” During the Cuban missile crisis he wept in front of Bobby while speaking about the millions of children who would perish in a nuclear war, and after the Bay of Pigs invasion Jackie saw him put his head in his hands and cry upon learning that hundreds of Cuban exiles had died on the beach. He cried again while discussing the Bay of Pigs casualties with Cardinal Cushing, who would be presiding at Patrick’s funeral.
Kennedy asked Judge Francis Morrissey, a close family friend, to arrange the service. Morrissey chose a white gown for Patrick and a small white casket. He ordered it closed because he recalled Kennedy telling him, “Frank, I want you to make sure they close the coffin when I die.”
Cushing celebrated the Mass in the chapel of his Boston residence on the morning of August 10. There were thirteen mourners, all members of the Kennedy and Auchincloss families except for Morrissey, Cushing, and Cardinal Spellman of New York. According to Catholic doctrine, baptized children who die before the age of reason go directly to heaven (Patrick had been baptized at the hospital), and the Mass of Angels is designed to be a comforting ceremony emphasizing their purity and eternal life. Kennedy wept throughout. When it ended, he took the money clip fashioned from a gold St. Christopher medal that Jackie had given him at their wedding and slipped it into Patrick’s coffin. Then he threw his arms around the coffin, as if planning to carry it away. “Come on, dear Jack, Let’s go . . . Let’s go,” Cushing murmured. “God is good. Nothing more can be done. Death is not the end of it all, but the beginning.”
Joseph Kennedy had recently purchased a family plot at Holyhood Cemetery, and Patrick would be the first Kennedy interred there. As Cushing spoke at the grave, John Kennedy’s shoulders began heaving. Putting a hand on the coffin, the president said, “Good-bye,” then touched the ground and whispered, “It’s awfully lonely here.” Seeing him bent over the grave, alone and vulnerable, a Secret Service agent asked Cushing, “How do you protect this man?”
Back at Otis, he wept in Jackie’s arms while describing the funeral. After recovering his composure he said, “You know, Jackie, we must not create an atmosphere of sadness in the White House, because this would not be good for anyone—not for the country and not for the work we have to do.” His reference to “the work we have to do” stressed their partnership in a way that Jackie had to find gratifying, and promising. According to her mother, it made a “profound impression” on her.