The timing could not have been more perfect, as the beginning of the 1960s witnessed the merger between “humanitarian” photography and human interest. Magazines including Life, Look, Time, Paris Match, and a host of women’s glossies started combining serious news stories with the “human face” of public figures. Over the next four years, Stoughton captured more than eight thousand pictures. His photos helped create the public image of a vibrant young family and forge an enduring emotional bond between the president and the public. John, who was never camera shy, used to plead, “Take my picture, Taptain Toughton.” Stoughton’s favorite set of images, taken in October 1962, depicted John and Caroline dancing around the Oval Office while their father clapped and sang. After reviewing one of the photos, JFK asked Stoughton, “Why can’t we give this one to the press for the birthday picture which they are always demanding?” These photos communicated so powerfully that Barbara Baker Burrows—who later became the photography editor at Life in 1966—reflected that they “helped create the aura that later came to be called Camelot.”
Although both the first lady and the president proved adept at exploiting the new power of television, they disagreed about how much exposure the children should have to the camera. JFK was convinced that he “couldn’t survive without TV” and saw his children as central to the image he wished to project to the nation. “Memories of the Kennedy days are memories of television,” recalled a prominent television producer. Kennedy was the first president to allow live broadcasts of his press conferences. By May 1961, nearly 75 percent of the public had seen one, and the vast majority—more than 91 percent—gave him high marks for his performances. The first lady received similar praise when, on Valentine’s Day in 1962, she gave a CBS News correspondent the first-ever televised tour of the White House. The broadcast, carried live by all three networks, reached more than eighty million people. But while Jackie was willing to use the cameras to highlight her restoration of the White House, she did not want the children appearing too often on television screens in the homes of millions of Americans.
Given this ongoing conflict between the president and first lady, the rules governing how the press could cover the children changed every day. “It depended on who was making the ground rules, whether it was going to be the president or Mrs. Kennedy,” recalled Assistant Press Secretary Christine Camp. When Mrs. Kennedy was in the White House, “there was an absolute rule of divine right that no photographer ever would photograph the children.”
The struggle affected issues as small as landscaping. In March 1961 Mrs. Kennedy tried to block tourists and the press from seeing the children’s playground by planting thirty-six-foot-tall rhododendrons around the southwest gate. These plants would cut off the view of the White House grounds from the South Lawn, a favorite spot for tourists. The president, who had not been informed of the decision, looked out from his office one morning and saw National Park Service gardeners installing the large bushes. “What’s that army doing out there?” he asked J. B. West. “Shielding your children,” the chief usher answered. The president shook his head. “I hope it doesn’t obstruct the tourists’ view of the house,” he responded. The bushes stayed.
The scuffle over image also led to clashes over matters as simple as John’s hairstyle. The president and first lady gave John’s nanny, Maud Shaw, different instructions. Mrs. Kennedy wanted to grow it long, while the president preferred a shorter cut. One Easter at Palm Beach, Mrs. Shaw groomed John’s hair in the style that Jackie liked. When they posed for a family picture, the wind blew John’s hair and left it unruly. The president proceeded to request that Shaw cut John’s hair. Reluctant to tell him that Mrs. Kennedy preferred it long, she promised to fix it the next day, but she ended up not cutting it as short as the president wanted. When JFK entered the nursery and saw that John’s hair was still too long by his standards, he asked, “Mrs. Shaw, when are you going to cut John’s hair?” Frustrated, the nanny blurted out that she had cut it, “but Mrs. Kennedy—” She caught herself before finishing, but JFK got the message and told her to cut it shorter. “If anyone asks you,” he said, tell them “it was an order from the president.”
Like his wife, JFK had a favorite photographer, Stanley Tretick, who covered the Democratic nominee as the United Press International (UPI) pool photographer. According to photojournalist Dirck Halstead, Stanley and the candidate shared a unique bond. They had a system arranged so that if Kennedy spotted a “jumper”—an attractive woman who jumped up and down with excitement at seeing him—he would subtly signal Stanley, who would then invite her back to Kennedy’s hotel room for drinks.
That bond of trust did not go unrewarded. After the election, Tretick asked UPI to make him its full-time White House photographer, but his editor insisted that he share the assignment on a rotating basis with other photographers. When he informed the president, JFK told Tretick to search for another publication and to tell them that the president would guarantee him regular and exclusive access to the White House. Look magazine took the president up on his offer and gave Stanley the plum Washington assignment.
From that moment on, Tretick practically served as an official White House photographer, creating an ideal relationship between the two men. He promised the president “complete control” over which pictures would be used, assuring him that any negatives JFK rejected would be turned over to the White House to be destroyed. He even told the president that he would not report anything negative that could potentially harm his image. At the same time, Tretick was a respected photographer who was theoretically independent of the White House, which gave his pictures more credibility than those of an official photographer.
JFK worked with Tretick behind the scenes to capture some of the most iconic pictures of the Kennedy children. But the photographer soon clashed with Mrs. Kennedy when he took a photo spread of Caroline arguing with her cousins over the July 4, 1961, weekend in Hyannis. Jackie insisted that the photos not be published. Tretick, however, took his orders from JFK, not her. Initially, he agreed, but after Jackie allowed her favorite photographer, Mark Shaw, to publish his photos of Caroline in Life, Tretick’s editors overruled him and included the photos as part of an August 1962 cover story, “Caroline’s Wonderful Summer.” The president feigned anger, most likely to placate his wife, but White House aide Kenneth O’Donnell told the photographer that JFK liked the pictures. “Oh, come on, the president’s not upset,” he confided. “The president loves those pictures.”
The timing of this conflict over Caroline’s photos could not have been worse. In late 1962 Tretick was angling to be the first to publish exclusive pictures of John, ideally for his second birthday in November. But the photo spread of Caroline had angered the first lady and complicated his plans. JFK now kept putting Tretick off, not wanting to risk a confrontation with his wife. Mrs. Kennedy did not oppose having John’s photo taken, but she insisted that only her photographer, Mark Shaw, do so. On August 6, 1963, she sent a memo to Pierre Salinger asking if her husband would pursue the possibility of getting Shaw to do the photo shoot of John. “The excuse you could give to Look,” she told him, “is that Mrs. Kennedy prefers to have only one photographer shoot her children so that they are not made self-conscious by being photographed often, and that they know Mark Shaw now and pay no attention to him when he is around.” She said she had nothing against Tretick but saw “no reason why he should ever come near my children again.”
The president clearly wanted Tretick to take the pictures, but he needed to find a time when Jackie was away from the White House. “Why don’t you ask me the next time Mrs. Kennedy goes out of town?” he told him. A few weeks before she was scheduled to visit Greece in October 1963, Tretick called the president’s secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, to set up an appointment. “You better call me a little later,” she told him. “You mean, like, Friday after eleven o’clock or something?” he asked, referring to the time Jackie would leave the White House. “Well,” s
he responded, “I didn’t say that, but it might be a good idea.”
On October 9, after Jackie had departed the White House, Stanley sat in a chair outside Mrs. Lincoln’s office waiting for John to show up. Even though the first lady would be away for weeks, JFK was nervous. “Now, you know we better get this out of the way pretty quick,” the president told him. “Things get kind of sticky when Jackie’s around.”
John showed up that evening at 7:10 wearing his pajamas and robe. “I’m going to my secret house!” he yelled as he ran toward the president’s desk. He crawled under the carved oak and timbers of the British ship HMS Resolute. (The ship had been trapped in the Arctic in 1854 and was later recovered by the United States and returned to Queen Victoria, who had a desk constructed from its timbers.) Seconds later, the front panel suddenly flew open and John looked up as Stanley snapped pictures. John jumped out, scampered around the president’s feet, skipped about the Oval Office, and then dove under the desk again, giving Stanley a series of juicy photo opportunities. “I almost fainted,” Tretick recalled about the scene. “You know instinctively that that’s a hell of a picture. When JFK saw the pictures of John under the desk he said, ‘You can’t miss with these, can you, Stan?’”
The photos captured the genuine loving and playful relationship that JFK shared with his son. Whenever the president opened his office door and saw John and Caroline outside, he would act surprised, which inevitably produced giggles. “Hello there, Sam, how are you?” he would say to John. “I am not Sam,” came the response, “I’m John. Daddy, I’m John.” Washington Post editor and Kennedy family friend Ben Bradlee recalled how John would walk up to his father and whisper gibberish into his ear. When the president threw his head back in mock surprise and asked, “Is that so?” John would laugh until he drooled. JFK would ask Ben to pick up John and toss him in the air because John loved it so much and the president could not do it because of his bad back. “He doesn’t know it yet,” JFK said, “but he’s going to carry me before I carry him.” According to Bradlee, JFK could get down on his knees and shout, “I’m going to get you!” while tickling John until “he wets his pants with uncontrolled delight.”
Tretick was not the first to witness John playing under his father’s desk, but he was the first to record the moment. (Stoughton was in the room later and took pictures as well, but it was Tretick’s photos that graced the cover of Look.) Journalist and socialite Katherine Murphy Halle remembered being in the office with her close friend Randolph Churchill, the only son of Sir Winston Churchill, when they “saw a strange movement under the president’s desk, and then the door opened and out popped John’s head.” White House military aide Chester Clifton Jr. recalled how John would hide inside the desk. Sometimes staff meetings would continue despite the obvious sound of a child playing under the furniture.
Along with the photo of John saluting his father’s casket following his assassination, the picture of him playing in the Oval Office became part of America’s photo album. John did not speak often about his memories of living in the White House. Later in life, when he was promoting George magazine, he sat down for a series of interviews in which he gave away snippets of his past. He shared some with me as well. The one I remember most vividly was his explanation of why he liked to play under the desk. He told me that he hid there because his mom would not allow him to chew gum anywhere in the White House. Often when he came into that room, his dad would hand him a stick of gum, which he would then chew under the desk so that he would not get caught.
Mrs. Kennedy was furious when she returned home and found that Jack had ignored her wishes and allowed Tretick to take the photos. “All hell broke loose,” recalled Camp. “You tell Look magazine to never publish a picture!” she demanded. “Stan and Jack were like two sneaky little boys,” she told a Look editor. “The minute I left town, they would let you in to do these things that I didn’t particularly want done.” Despite Mrs. Kennedy’s objections, Look scheduled the photos for its December 3 issue. It hit the newsstands a few days after the president and first lady traveled to Dallas.
Whether Life or Look published a photo, the result was the same: the images contributed to crafting a mythical portrait of the Kennedy family. A new generation of baby boomers, the seventy-six million people born between 1945 and 1964, had been raised to embrace the idealized image of the American family portrayed on television sitcoms such as Leave It to Beaver and Father Knows Best. The steady stream of sanitized images flowing from the White House depicted the Kennedys as the embodiment of that very ideal. Just like the families portrayed on television, the Kennedys—the dedicated and handsome president, the stunning first lady, and their two adorable children—were wholesome and caring, healthy and happy, their relationships devoid of conflict.
We now know that much of that image belonged to a myth manufactured by the While House, disguising the ugly reality that JFK was sickly and unfaithful. Although information about JFK’s private life started leaking in the 1970s, it was not until Robert Dallek’s masterful 2003 biography, An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917–1963, that the public learned the full story. While JFK sought to project youthful energy, he suffered from a variety of debilitating ailments, from Addison’s disease—an adrenal gland deficiency that required regular injections of corticosteroids—to colitis, to degenerative back problems. For relief from pain, he often turned to Dr. Max Jacobson, the infamous “Dr. Feelgood,” who regularly administered amphetamines and painkillers. When questioned about the injections, JFK snapped, “I don’t care if it’s horse piss. It works.”
Kennedy was also a serial womanizer who would sometimes leave Jackie at events while he slipped away to have sex with a young woman. He even seduced a nineteen-year-old Wheaton College student named Mimi Beardsley, luring her into his bedroom and also encouraging her to engage in oral sex during nude swims in the White House pool. Jackie tolerated his antics. Once, while giving a Paris Match reporter a tour of the White House, she passed the desk of a staffer with whom the president was having an affair. “This is the girl who supposedly is sleeping with my husband,” she said to the stunned journalist.
The public saw a distorted picture of the Kennedy family, and these images helped forge the expectations that would shape the way the nation viewed John. Pictures of John and Caroline romping around the Oval Office, along with another showing them horse riding with their mother in Glen Ora, appeared on the front page of newspapers around the country on November 25, 1962. These photos would become part of the nation’s scrapbook, allowing the public to feel it shared a personal connection with John. Ironically, John had no specific recollection of any of them. After all, he was only three years old when he left the White House. Years later, John confessed that he had seen the images so many times that they blended in with his real memories, the two becoming indistinguishable.
Over time the public would see John as an innocent embodiment of a mythical past. JFK Jr. triggered a nostalgic response in people he encountered, especially those who had been old enough to remember the family’s years in the White House. Strangers who approached him on the street always felt compelled to tell him how much they loved his mother and father and still recalled the pictures of him as a child. Those photos reminded them of an allegedly simpler time, not only in their own lives but also in the life of the nation. The public struggled to separate the idealized image of the past that John represented from the flesh-and-blood man that he became.
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Clearly, privacy remained Mrs. Kennedy’s paramount worry, but not just from the prying eyes of reporters. Of more immediate concern was the Secret Service detail assigned to her and her children. While John was an infant, two agents served as part of the “kiddie detail”: Bob Foster and Lynn Meredith. Once John could walk and he and Caroline began engaging in separate activities, the Secret Service added a third agent, Paul Landis. The agents developed code names for the first fam
ily, all beginning with the letter L. JFK was Lancer, Mrs. Kennedy was Lace, Caroline was Lyric, and John was Lark. Maud Shaw said the agents were so close to the children that they became “a trio of uncles.”
While recuperating at Palm Beach after John’s birth, Mrs. Kennedy spoke to Clint Hill about her privacy and the role that the Secret Service would play in their lives. At one point, she asked him to join her by the pool. “I’m worried, Mr. Hill,” she said, “about losing all semblance of privacy.” As she looked at the agents surrounding the property, she asked, “Are these Secret Servicemen and other agents going to be around us constantly? Even in the White House?” Hill reassured her that there would be no agents in the private residence of the White House, but she remained unconvinced. “Well, that is good to know,” she said. “I’m just so worried about Caroline and John growing up in such a restricted environment. I want them to have as normal a childhood as possible.” Hill knew that her children would never enjoy such a luxury, but he kept his thoughts to himself.
Congress originally created the Secret Service in 1865 to investigate counterfeiting, but expanded its mandate to provide protection to the president following the assassination of President William McKinley in 1901. At the time, there were only two men assigned to the White House detail. Over the next few decades, the service saw its budget grow and its responsibilities expand. In 1950, after a failed assassination attempt against President Harry Truman, Congress enacted legislation that permanently authorized Secret Service protection for the president, his immediate family, and the president-elect. But the Kennedys provided the agency with a new challenge because it had never before protected two young children.
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