America's Reluctant Prince

by Steven M. Gillon

  “What on earth did you do that for?” Shaw scolded as she escorted him out of the room. John informed her that they did not give him his cookie. He would perform at these events only after having a cookie and ginger ale, but when neither arrived, John decided to let his displeasure be known.

  While the first lady tried her best to insulate the children from outside pressure, she could not shield them from a tragedy closer to home. In the summer of 1963, the whole family learned excitedly that Mrs. Kennedy was pregnant again. They agreed that if it were a boy, he would be named Patrick, and if it were a girl, Caroline insisted, her name would be Susan. On August 7 Jackie went into labor while at their home in Hyannis Port. She was rushed by helicopter to Otis Air Force Base Hospital in Falmouth, where she gave birth to Patrick Bouvier Kennedy. He was born at thirty-seven weeks and weighed only 4 pounds, 10 ½ ounces. The infant was quickly diagnosed with hyaline membrane disease, the same lung ailment as John. As his condition worsened, Patrick was transferred to Children’s Hospital in Boston but died after only thirty-six hours. The president broke the news to Caroline, who was visibly upset. He simply told John the baby wasn’t coming home, but John was not old enough to understand the meaning of death.

  Nevertheless, Patrick’s memory stayed alive, either by Jackie’s choice or John’s own. Even when I knew him, John would often refer to his “brother Patrick.” I remember being stumped at first because he seemed to speak about him in the present tense. I knew my Kennedy family history was rusty, but I probably would have known if John had a brother walking around. Only after asking a friend did I learn the sad truth. Often John would bring up Patrick out of the blue. Once, when a friend told him that his birthday was in August, John did not miss a beat. “Oh,” he responded, “that’s my brother Patrick’s birthday.”

  Patrick’s death appeared to signal a turning point in the president’s relationship not only with his wife but also with his children. Clint Hill noticed that after the death JFK grew more affectionate with Jackie and spent more time with both John and Caroline. When he returned to the Cape, JFK went swimming with his brother Teddy and John, and Teddy noticed a change in his attitude. “Jack was absorbed in everything that his small son was doing,” Teddy wrote in his memoir. “In the few months left to him, my brother showed an even greater preoccupation with the activities of his son and daughter than I had seen before.”

  Walter Heller, who served as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, offered a rare insight into how John added to the informality of a typically formal White House. A detailed notetaker, the economist recorded two encounters with John in the final months of the Kennedy presidency. In October 1963 the president walked into a breakfast meeting with John in tow. The meeting started with John circling the table to shake hands with all those in the room, bowing as he did so. John then climbed into an empty seat. When his father asked him to leave, John answered loudly, “No, Daddy, I want to stay here.” The president proceeded with his usual opening statement: “What have we got today?” Before anyone could respond, John declared, “I’ve got a glass of ice water.” When Mrs. Shaw came in to retrieve him, John protested, “I want to stay with Daddy.” She eventually managed to hustle him out of the meeting by promising that he could play with Caroline and return to the office later in the day. The president, Heller pointed out, “suggested that we all take note of the nurse’s technique,” adding that “if she or I had ordered him out, he would’ve cried and said ‘no.’”

  Two days before JFK and the first lady left for their fateful trip to Texas, Heller went to see the president in the evening to discuss “the status of his thinking on the assault on poverty.” When he arrived in Evelyn Lincoln’s office, “[T]here were Caroline, drawing pictures at one side of the office, and John-John, with a mighty bruise and scratched nose, playing with the children’s tea set at the other end of the room.” Caroline was showing Heller some of her drawings when John came over with a little aluminum plate, saying he was serving “terry-manilla pie,” which Heller quickly realized was childspeak for cherry vanilla. John then handed him a spoon, and Heller ate a piece. As he finished, National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy exited the president’s office, and he, too, tasted John’s concoction before leaving.

  * * *

  —

  By all accounts, John was a normal, highly energetic child. Clint Hill described him as “a typical little boy; he loved to climb and jump, and as soon as he learned to walk, he rarely walked—he ran.” In her oral history for the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, Shaw reflected that “John is one hundred percent boy. He was a boy that every man would be proud of. There was no silly nonsense that you have with a child. No matter where he went, he showed off his best. He has very good manners, and his father was always very proud of him.”

  John was fascinated by helicopters, and he enjoyed watching military rituals. “Helicopters and his dad were like two lollipops in his life,” observed Agent Thomas Wells. John loved traveling by helicopter with his father to Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington, DC. “Any time the president was leaving and John was aware of it, he wanted to ride the helicopter out to Andrews,” Wells recalled. “If he didn’t make that trip, he was put out.” Famous footage shows John rushing toward the president after his helicopter landed at the White House. Most people interpreted it as John rushing to embrace his father. But John once confessed to me that he was actually running to get on the helicopter. It just so happened that his father was in the way.

  Shaw remembered when John accompanied his father for a helicopter ride from the White House to Andrews, the home base of Air Force One. Everyone on the specially equipped presidential jet was ready to take off, but the president spent extra time with John. “Everybody was very impatient, tearing their hair out,” Shaw reflected in an oral history, but the “president was taking his time,” allowing John to walk up the ramp to the plane even though he was not going on the trip. He let John get seated and strapped in before telling him that he needed to return home to the White House. Not surprisingly, John let loose a torrent of tears as he was led off the plane.”

  John also preferred to fly by helicopter to Camp David. Clint Hill recalled the boy’s excitement as he stood waiting for Marine One to land in the back to transport them to their official getaway. “He was bouncing around the room, so excited he could hardly contain himself.” Once on board, John sat on his mother’s lap with his nose pressed against the window as the helicopter maneuvered past the Washington Monument. Hill noted that John “could barely sit still.”

  At Camp David, if John arrived before his father, he would stand by the landing pad, waiting patiently to hear the whirling sound of the helicopter’s blades. On one occasion, John traveled to the retreat on Friday afternoon, and the president wasn’t scheduled to arrive until the next day. John spent most of Friday hanging out by the landing patch, gazing up at the sky. When he finally heard the copter approaching, he started dancing with excitement. “The chopper’s coming, Mrs. Shaw! The chopper’s coming!” Sometimes he referred to Marine One as “Daddy’s hebrecop.”

  But landing the helicopter was just the beginning. John would drag his father into the hangar just so they could sit at the controls. Whenever John went missing, Mrs. Shaw knew where to find him. John would put on a helmet and bark orders to his father, telling him which buttons to push and which lever to pull. The commander in chief followed instructions dutifully, and John would start mimicking the sound of the helicopter lifting from the ground.

  John’s fascination with flying also extended beyond helicopters. The president kept copies of aviation magazines in his office, and John would flip through the pages and admire the pictures. Noticing John’s excitement after a flight on the Goodyear blimp, Mrs. Kennedy made a prediction about his future. “You know how much John loves airplanes and flying,” she said. “I think someday he is going to be a pilot.”

  John’s love of flying wa
s matched only by his fascination with the military. Whenever a formal ceremony occurred for a head of state, Mrs. Kennedy would take John to the South Lawn to watch the marching bands and the soldiers in uniform with shiny medals covering their chests. In October 1962 Prime Minister Ahmed Ben Bella of Algeria visited the White House and was given an official ceremony, including a military review. Mrs. Kennedy and Maud Shaw brought John down to the Rose Garden to observe the ceremony. “Come, John,” Jackie said as she lifted him into her arms. “Let’s go watch the ceremony. You can see all the military men in their uniforms.” They positioned themselves out of sight behind a hedge, where she held him up high enough so that he could have a clear view. He peppered her with questions. “What’s that?” he asked eagerly. “Why are they doing that? What are all those flags?”

  Like many young boys, John enjoyed playing with imaginary guns and rifles and pretended to be in the army. At both Camp David and Wexford, while Jackie and Caroline rode horses, John explored the woods wearing cowboy boots and an army helmet. At Camp David, the Secret Service set up a tent in the woods for John, and he spent hours marching around with his toy guns, giving orders to the agents and other imaginary friends.

  Yet as much as he loved the pomp of military ceremonies and tried to imitate the way the soldiers marched, John struggled with one important gesture: the salute. When “General John” issued orders, the Secret Service agents would salute. He would always salute back with his left hand. “No matter how many times we told him to use his right hand,” Hill recalled, “his instinct always seemed to be to use his left hand.”

  Family friend Dave Powers, who spent part of his day entertaining John, took it upon himself to teach John the proper way to salute. After considerable practice, the two-year-old seemed to have mastered the gesture. On October 25, 1963, Powers had John show off his salute to a friend, William F. Connors, the New England regional manager of the Veterans Administration, as they waited outside the president’s office. “What do you do when you see the soldiers?” Powers asked John. According to Connors, John “whipped up his arm in a right-hand salute.”

  A few weeks later, Mrs. Kennedy tried to prepare John for the Veterans Day ceremony held at Arlington National Ceremony. She told him that since his father was the commander in chief, all of the soldiers were going to salute him. “Now, John,” she said, “when you see the other soldiers salute Daddy, you can salute him, too.” On November 8, 1963, as his father placed a wreath on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, the uniformed color guard saluted. On cue, John raised his right hand and saluted his father. “I was proud of the little guy,” Agent Bob Foster said.

  CHAPTER 2

  “PLEASE, MAY I HAVE ONE FOR DADDY?”

  The Kennedy family considered November to be a month of celebration. In addition to gathering at Thanksgiving, the family held birthday parties for John and Caroline, and they observed the anniversary of JFK’s election to the presidency. November 1963 appeared no different from the past two in the White House. John’s mother and father were already preparing for John’s third birthday on November 25, but first they needed to make a trip to Texas to shore up support for the upcoming 1964 presidential election.

  * * *

  —

  Thursday, November 21, began like most other days at the White House. John, dressed in plaid short pants, and Caroline, wearing a blue velvet dress, joined their father while he was eating breakfast. Maud Shaw had told them that their parents would be leaving soon for Dallas. What mattered most to John, however, was that his father had invited him to fly on the helicopter to Andrews Air Force Base. (In bad weather, they traveled by motorcade.) While the children played and Mrs. Kennedy combed her hair in the other room, JFK waded through newspapers and made phone calls. At nine fifteen Caroline hugged her father and whispered, “Bye, Daddy,” before making her way up to the third-floor school. John accompanied his father to the West Wing and kept himself occupied with toy planes while the president prepared for his trip.

  The visit to Texas carried special importance for JFK. As he geared up for his 1964 reelection campaign, Kennedy wanted to keep the state’s twenty-five electoral votes in the Democratic column. That feat would be difficult: the state Democratic Party had split into rival liberal and conservative factions, and the president’s recent support for a civil rights bill banning segregation in public facilities made him wildly unpopular in the South.

  To help soften his image, he asked Jackie to join him. It was her first political event since losing Patrick in August, just three months earlier. The public had missed Jackie, who had become only more popular over the past three years. JFK had always worried that her sophisticated style, along with her elegant and expensive taste in fashion, would be a political liability. But the opposite happened. She added to the luster of the Kennedy White House, underscoring that the dowdy Eisenhower days had come to an end and been replaced by a new sense of panache and elegance. Her regal style, both pre- and post-motherhood, and refined taste had transformed her into a cultural icon, making her the most admired woman in America.

  John brimmed with excitement as he walked with his parents to the South Lawn to board Marine One. When they landed at Andrews Air Force Base a few minutes later, his mother and father hugged him and said good-bye inside the helicopter. “It’s just a few days, darling,” Jackie said to console him. “And when we come back, it will be your birthday.” A few photographers had already assembled nearby, so JFK decided not to give them shots of John having a meltdown on the tarmac. “I want to come!” John protested. “You can’t,” the president said gently. JFK kissed his sobbing son and then turned to Secret Service agent Bob Foster. “You take care of John, Mr. Foster,” he said. John sat on Foster’s lap as his parents boarded the plane, letting out a sigh as the majestic Air Force One lifted into the clouds.

  Mrs. Shaw and the members of the kiddie detail managed to keep John and Caroline occupied for the remainder of the day. Caroline spent the afternoon at a birthday party while Shaw struggled to persuade John to take a nap. She felt relieved when Foster offered to escort him to a toy store on Wisconsin Avenue. “Mommy and Daddy will be back soon,” the agent assured John as they walked through the aisles. “Just in time for your birthday.”

  After dinner, the children played games with the agents. Shaw then bathed them and readied them for bed by reading stories. John slept that night surrounded by toy trucks and helicopters; Caroline preferred stuffed animals. Before Shaw turned off the light, Caroline reminded her brother that tonight was the first time they would be sleeping without relatives in the house, so they needed to be on their best behavior. They had spent nights without their parents, but always with a relative in the house, usually Jackie’s mother.

  The next morning, November 22, John and Caroline strolled into Maud Shaw’s tiny room at seven o’clock and chorused politely, “Good morning, Miss Shaw. May we get up now?” Usually, after getting washed and dressed, they would rush to their father’s bedroom. Instead, Shaw escorted them into the family dining room for breakfast. Afterward, Caroline headed to school while Shaw took John outside for a short walk. At noon, after Caroline’s class ended, they shared lunch together with Ted Kennedy’s children, Edward Jr., two, and three-year-old Kara. Much of their conversation that day revolved around birthdays. John was about to turn three on Monday, and Caroline, six, on Wednesday.

  Meanwhile, after successful events in San Antonio and Houston on Thursday, the president and first lady started the morning in Fort Worth. There President Kennedy; Vice President Lyndon Johnson, a native Texan; and a handful of Texas politicians stood in misty rain in a parking lot across from their hotel to speak to a large crowd of well-wishers. Although the two most powerful political figures in the country had come to the Lone Star State, it was the first lady who seemed to attract the most interest. When the president appeared at the rally without Jackie, the crowd conveyed disappointment. “Mrs. Kennedy is organizing hers
elf,” JFK joked. “It takes longer, but, of course, she looks better than we do when she does it.”

  Afterward, they moved inside for the main event: a breakfast meeting at the Hotel Texas for 2,500 guests sponsored by the chamber of commerce. Mrs. Kennedy entered the room late. “Two years ago, I introduced myself in Paris by saying that I was the man who had accompanied Mrs. Kennedy to Paris. I am getting somewhat that same sensation as I travel around Texas,” JFK observed. “Nobody wonders what Lyndon and I wear.”

  At 10:35 A.M. the presidential party left the hotel for the short trip to Carswell Air Force Base and the eight-minute flight to Dallas’s Love Field. The president’s political advisors decided to fly the thirty miles to Dallas so they could arrive in time for a midday motorcade through downtown to attract the largest possible crowds. According to presidential aide Dave Powers, when the president and first lady stepped off the plane “a great roar went up from thousands of throats.” They “looked like Mr. and Mrs. America,” he said. Jackie wore her now-iconic outfit: a pink wool suit with a matching pillbox hat.

  At 11:55 A.M. JFK took his seat in the back of a specially designed 1961 Lincoln convertible. Jackie positioned herself on his left. Texas governor John Connally and his wife, Nellie, sat on the jump seats directly in front of the first couple. To guarantee maximum exposure, Kennedy aides chose a circuitous path through the most populated parts of the city en route to the Dallas Trade Mart, where he was scheduled to speak at a luncheon for local businessmen. It took the motorcade eight minutes to travel down Main Street. At 12:29 the car passed the Old Court House and turned right onto Houston Street. As they approached Dealey Plaza, the presidential limousine made a sharp left turn onto Elm Street and proceeded down a slope, leading to an underpass and a highway ramp that would take them to the Trade Mart. Jackie had been uncomfortable all morning sitting under the bright sunlight, but her husband insisted that she not put on her sunglasses. Now she hoped the shade from the underpass would provide a brief reprieve from the sun. “I thought it would be cool in the tunnel,” she recalled.