America's Reluctant Prince

by Steven M. Gillon

  Perhaps because he was so sickly and unwilling to play competitive sports, Mrs. Kennedy felt even more strongly that John needed dependable male figures in his life. Although no longer seeking counseling from Father Richard T. McSorley, she invited him to New York to spend time with John. In the fall of 1964, John greeted Father McSorley at the door, begging the priest to take him to the World’s Fair. Jackie handed him a list of places that she thought would interest John. Later that day, McSorley also took John to the Central Park Zoo to observe the animals. When they returned after their long outing, Jackie asked the priest to say a few prayers with her son. They knelt together beside the bed, and the priest watched as John blessed himself and uttered prayers for his father, mother, and other family members.

  When they finished, Jackie came in and tucked John into bed. “Maybe Father will sing you a song,” she said. “His daddy used to sing him ‘Danny Boy.’ Could you sing that, Father?” Although he did not know all the words, the priest did his best. “As I sang through it, John listened with complete attention and Mrs. Kennedy’s eyes filled with tears,” McSorley noted in his diary. Jackie kissed John on the forehead and wished him good night, but John asked his mother to sing one more song: “America the Beautiful.”

  When the priest returned after the Christmas holiday in January 1965, Jackie asked him a very difficult question. “Maybe, sometime, you will get the chance to answer the question that comes to John: ‘Why did they kill him?’” Jackie stated. She explained that John was learning about his father’s death by watching television or hearing from friends. “I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what’s a good answer, and I feel inadequate about saying anything.”

  Sure enough, the topic came up when the priest and John went driving through Manhattan and passed Grant’s Tomb.

  “Who lives there?” John asked.

  “Grant.”

  “Can we visit him?”

  “No, because only his body is there. His spirit went to meet God.”

  “Does everybody here go to meet God when they died?”

  “No, only those who are good meet God.”

  “Did General Grant see Daddy? If we visit Daddy’s grave, can we see him?”

  The priest explained to John that the grave contained only his father’s body, which would turn to dust. But the idea of a separate soul and body confused John. “How can you go to the bathroom if you don’t have a body?” he asked innocently.

  * * *

  —

  Mrs. Kennedy traveled a great deal on her own, leaving John and Caroline in the care of staff members. John told me once that in the years after his father died, his mom became a different person. She drank a lot and was absent for long periods. When she was at home, she appeared emotionally distant, clearly consumed by her own grief. He said cryptically that it was “a difficult time” for him, although he did not elaborate further, and I did not probe.

  Jackie did, however, organize extended family trips during the summer. In 1965 she took John and Caroline out of school early so they could travel to England. When the teacher called attendance at St. David’s on May 12, one of John’s friends stood up and announced, “John’s not here. He’s gone to London to see the Queen.”

  John and Caroline journeyed to England accompanied by their uncles and cousins. There Queen Elizabeth granted three acres of land for a JFK monument in Runnymede, the site where, in 1215, British barons forced King John to sign the Magna Carta—“the Great Charter of the Liberties”—which established limits on kingly power and remains one the most sacred documents in the birthplace of Western freedom.

  In the weeks leading up to the May 14 ceremony, Shaw rehearsed John and Caroline for their meeting with the Queen. Playing the role of Elizabeth, Shaw watched as Caroline curtsied and said politely, “Good afternoon, Your Majesty.” “Perfect,” the British governess thought. But John, a few years younger and with a short attention span, struggled to get it right, marching up to Shaw and barking, “Good afternoon, My Majesty.” Shaw corrected him. “No, John, that’s not quite right. We have to call the Queen ‘Your Majesty.’” John walked to the back of the room, collected his thoughts, and gave it another try: “Good afternoon, My Majesty.” The four-year-old grew increasingly frustrated as Caroline laughed hysterically at her brother’s ineptitude. After a few more tries, he finally got it right, but no one knew what would happen at the actual event.

  Since Secretary of State Dean Rusk was leading the delegation on behalf of the United States, President Johnson offered to fly the family on Air Force One, but Mrs. Kennedy asked for a different plane to avoid the painful memories of her trip back from Dallas in November 1963. Still, the plane LBJ sent was one the family had used many times on excursions to Palm Beach and Hyannis. John immediately recognized it. “Look!” he shouted. “Daddy’s airplane!” Shaw recalled that “the atmosphere onboard the plane was that of a holiday trip.” Mrs. Kennedy remarked, “This brings back some wonderful memories, doesn’t it?” Then she added, “There’s only one person missing.”

  They arrived in London early on Friday morning, May 14, and headed directly to the ceremony. The extended Kennedy family walked through the trees and grassy slopes to the memorial. John knew that he was meeting the Queen, but it was not clear whether his cousins Anthony and Tina Radziwill, the young son and daughter of Jackie’s sister, Lee, and her second husband, Prince Stanislas “Stash” Radziwill of Poland, would have the same honor. “We knew the Queen was going to be there, but I wasn’t sure if I was going to get to meet her,” Tina recalled. “Don’t worry,” John reassured her, “maybe she will give you a crown.” Only John and Caroline were introduced to the Queen, and all of their practice paid off. Even John did not flub his lines.

  The Kennedy Memorial, made of Portland stone—a limestone that dated back to the Jurassic period and is found on the Isle of Portland, Dorset—bore the words from JFK’s inaugural address: “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend or oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and success of liberty.” As the ceremony began, John sat in a silver chair, holding hands with both his mother and Prince Philip. “With all their hearts, my people shared his triumphs, grieved at his reverses, and wept at his death,” declared the Queen. Dean Rusk rose to accept the memorial on behalf of the United States.

  Once the ceremony ended, the family joined the ranks of thousands of other American tourists in London. They turned down an invitation to stay at the US embassy and instead lived with Lee, now a princess, and the prince. Since they planned to spend six weeks there, Mrs. Kennedy enrolled John in school with his cousin Tina. “I was only a year older than John, but he was quite a bit smaller,” reflected Tina, who, like her mother, was also a princess. “I felt very protective of my little cousin who had come all the way from New York. So I kept my arm around him until a nice, very British teacher said, ‘You don’t have to put your arm around your cousin. He’s absolutely safe as he is.’”

  After school, Jackie took John and Caroline, along with Tina and Anthony, to sightsee. She tried slipping out the back door of the Radziwill residence, but the British press caught on to this maneuver and followed the family everywhere they went. For John, the highlight of the trip was visiting the Tower of London, where he kept interrupting the guide with detailed questions about executions. Somehow he managed to touch the suits of armor and play with the swords. He even stuck his head inside one of the cannons and crawled in as far as he could until only his feet were dangling outside. John was also mesmerized by the changing of the guards and made sure to show off his well-rehearsed right-hand salute.

  John’s fascination with the swords and gory side of the Tower of London only reaffirmed Shaw’s belief that he was “bloodthirsty,” a description that McKeon echoed after watching John feed a mouse to his snake. One time, Shaw took John to a movie t
hat included a character who threatened to chop off people’s heads with an axe but who always found an excuse not to actually use his weapon. John grew impatient, nudging Shaw throughout the movie and asking, “Why doesn’t he chop someone’s head off?” When the film ended, John was disappointed that all the characters still had their heads.

  By the fourth day in London, Mrs. Kennedy had grown tired of the flock of reporters trailing her children and issued a plea for privacy. “In view of the full coverage given to the children already,” she said, “it is very much hoped that the remainder of the visit here can be kept private.” But the storyline—American royalty meets real British royalty—was simply too good to pass up, and the reporters continued to stalk them for the rest of the trip.

  Near the end of the trip, Maud Shaw brought John and Caroline with her to see the modest house in which she grew up. Upon entering, John announced, “I like this dumpy little house.” He was especially pleased that it had only two stories. At the Radziwill home, John, still a fan of elevators, had to walk up four flights of steps to get to his bedroom. “I’m tired of stairs,” he declared. But some luxuries he clearly missed. As he looked around, he asked, “Where’s the cook and butler?”

  As the family packed for their return to the United States, they left their beloved nanny behind. Mrs. Kennedy was well aware of how attached the children were to Shaw, who had been with the Kennedys since Caroline was eleven days old. To ease the transition, Mrs. Kennedy told John and Caroline that Miss Shaw was taking a short sabbatical but would be back in New York in a few months. Shaw never returned, but she kept in touch with the children for years afterward.

  After returning to New York, Mrs. Kennedy continued her correspondence with Harold Macmillan, which had started after the assassination. While in London, Jackie managed to spend time with the former prime minister, who had delivered eloquent words of praise for President Kennedy at Runnymede. The two were kindred spirits, bound not only by their mutual affection for JFK but also by their own suffering. Macmillan had been seriously wounded during the First World War and, just shy of his seventieth birthday, grieved for all the friends he had lost. He asked many of the same questions that Jackie now pondered: “How can we accept it? Why did God allow it?” She confided to him that she had decided to move past the tragedy by focusing on raising John and Caroline. “I have consciously tried to put him out of my mind—since I moved to New York—because of his two children. . . . I can make his children what he would have wanted them to be. They are such little things who bear so much upon their shoulders—never to disgrace him is a burden when you are four and seven.” What she did not (and could not) appreciate was that JFK’s legacy would remain a burden for the rest of their lives.

  Mrs. Kennedy penned Macmillan another letter on her distinctive blue stationery on September 14, 1965, the last day of their visit to Janet and Hugh Auchincloss’s Victorian mansion and three-hundred-acre estate in Newport, Rhode Island, where Jackie had grown up. Hammersmith Farm was also the site of her and Jack’s wedding reception in 1953. She and the children would be returning to Manhattan for the start of school. It was, she wrote, a “wonderful” summer, as they kept themselves occupied by playing in the sun, gathering shells, and eating lobster and blueberries. It was like past summers, except that her husband did not fly out to meet them on weekends. Jackie was proud that she had pulled herself “together enough to be helpful to my children.” She referred to John as “the boy with the quicksilver curiosity and intelligence of Jack covered by a warm four-year-old body but waiting to burst out.” Finally, she reflected that if John and Caroline “grow up to be all right—that will be my vengeance on the world.”

  Back at St. David’s, John provoked varying emotions among his peers, as he would throughout his life. There would always be groupies who used their access to him as a status symbol. A friend told the author Wendy Leigh that when John invited classmates to his mom’s apartment, some used to steal family photos on display. Then there were others who were intimidated by him and kept their distance, refusing to invite either John or Caroline to parties they threw for other classmates. Jackie gently intervened, writing notes to all the parents, reminding them that her children were no different from their own.

  The anniversary of the assassination was always challenging. “You have no idea how difficult November 22 is in my house,” John told me once. On the second anniversary, while Jackie was walking him home from school, a group of boys, including one from St. David’s, followed them, taunting cruelly, “Your father’s dead, your father’s dead!” John, though only four years old, never lost his composure. Instead, Jackie said, “He just came closer to me, took my hand, and squeezed it as if he were trying to reassure me that things were all right.”

  As soon as the school year ended, the family traveled to Hyannis. On May 29, 1966, on what would have been his father’s forty-ninth birthday, John received a classic Piper Cub observation plane, minus the engine and propeller, that sat on the grass of the Hyannis estate. In doing so, Jackie was fulfilling a promise made to him by his late father. As she explained to JFK’s longtime friend Chuck Spalding, “Jack always said he was going to give John a real plane when he grew up. Well, it’s a little early, but now he has it: a real airplane.” According to McKeon, John “loved to sit in the pilot seat and fiddle with all the levers, making engine noises as he pretended to take off. The rest of the Kennedys may have felt the pull of the sea, but John always belonged to the sky.”

  Jackie also organized a game for John, Caroline, and all the other Kennedy cousins at her mother’s estate at Hammersmith Farm. She hid a wooden treasure chest, and once they discovered it, a boat showed up with parents, including Secret Service agent Jack Walsh, pretending to be pirates and demanding back their loot. As the ship approached, the cousins scurried to the house, but John remained unfazed. “John was so not afraid,” writer George Plimpton, a family friend, told the journalist Christopher Andersen. Instead, he grabbed a rubber sword and started waving it above his head. Revealingly, the only time John became upset was when the cousins decided that the pirates needed to walk the plank. Realizing that Walsh was one of the buccaneers, he burst into tears. “You can’t die!” John sobbed. “You can’t die!”

  Later that summer, the family packed its bags for a seven-week vacation to Hawaii. The trip got off to an inauspicious start. On June 9, 1966, just four days after their arrival, Caroline cut her foot on jagged coral and required stitches. She spent the next few days hobbling around on crutches. Then, on July 1, John had a serious accident that made national news. According to the Secret Service agent on duty, John was on an overnight camping expedition with his mother and sister. Upon waking up at seven in the morning, he started pulling his sleeping bag across the ground “when he lost his grasp on the sleeping bag and fell backwards into a lighted campfire.” At the time, the five-year-old was wearing only a bathing suit.

  The agents rushed John to a local clinic, where he was treated for burns on his right arm, hand, and buttocks. Dr. K. E. Nesting, who treated John in the emergency room, characterized the injury as “significant enough to be concerned” but stopped short of calling it serious. “It is not life threatening,” he told reporters. Shortly after noon, Mrs. Kennedy flew with John to Honolulu, where burn specialists told her he had suffered second-degree burns. While he would not require skin grafts or special surgery, some of the burned skin had to be cut away.

  Four days after returning from Hawaii, John attended the wedding of Jackie’s half sister, Janet Jennings Auchincloss, at St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Church in Newport, Rhode Island, where his rough behavior was again on display. Perhaps it was the thousands of spectators, some of whom had climbed poles and roofs to get a glimpse of his famous family. It also did not help that as a page boy with many of his other cousins, John was required to wear a ruffled shirt, a blue cummerbund, and white shorts. As Secret Service agents formed a phalanx around the family and forc
ed their way through the crowd, a spectator called John a sissy. Later during the wedding reception, John got into a fight with another page, and the two ended up rolling around in mud, ruining their clothes. A relative disapproved of his conduct, grumbling, “That boy travels ninety miles an hour, at right angles to everyone else.” John even chased ponies into the reception tent and, the next day, threw sand on bathers at the exclusive Bailey’s Beach.

  During the summer of 1967, the Kennedys traveled to Ireland for a month. In preparation for the trip, John brushed up on his Irish geography by holding mock debates with the Irish members of his mother’s staff. “Which is better: Monaghan or Sligo?” he would ask Kathy and May, an Irish maid, while he sat at the kitchen table with his cookies and milk after school. “Monaghan’s farmland is more fertile,” Kathy responded. “Sligo was the home of William Butler Yeats!” May answered. “Point to Kathy!” John shouted. But May refused to concede the point. “Sligo was much prettier,” she insisted, but Kathy pointed out that they were “still working the fields with donkeys in Sligo.” “Two points Kathy!” John shouted as he slapped his hand on the table for emphasis.

  According to McKeon, with the exception of the family’s public tours, the Irish press was much more respectful than the British reporters had been two years earlier. In fact, she claimed they had more privacy than they had at home in New York. One of the few American headlines to emerge from the trip came when John went into a small candy store. “What do you want, dear?” the shopkeeper asked. “I want everything,” John declared. “Now, John,” his nanny chided gently, “you know you can’t have everything.”