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.
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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 dea
d.” 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, th
e 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.
JFK's Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President Page 3