The Good Son_JFK Jr. and the Mother He Loved

by Christopher Andersen

  The son they already had was proving himself to be quite the handful. Celebrating the Easter holiday in Palm Beach, Jackie and Maud Shaw exhausted themselves trying to corral John as he scampered across the neighbor’s lawn in search of colored eggs. He later threw a full-fledged tantrum at a White House reception for Luxembourg’s Grand Duchess Charlotte, and nearly clobbered Yugoslavian president Marshal Tito when he accidentally dropped his toy gun from the Truman Balcony while Tito and JFK stood below.

  That summer, Jackie and the children settled into the Kennedys’ rented beach house on Squaw Island, just a stone’s throw from the Hyannis Port compound, and she devoted herself to nothing more strenuous than reading, painting, and napping. “She wanted that baby more than anything,” Jack later told George Smathers. “We wanted him . . .”

  On the morning of August 7, 1963—halfway through her seventh month—Jackie took Caroline to her riding lesson at a local stable when she suddenly began to experience labor pains. Within twenty minutes a helicopter was carrying her to the hospital at nearby Otis Air Force Base. “Please hurry!” she begged Dr. Walsh. “This baby mustn’t be born dead.”

  At 12:52, Jackie gave birth by caesarean section to the boy she had prayed for. Weighing just four pounds, ten ounces, the baby was immediately placed in an incubator. In 1963, few babies of this size survived. To further complicate matters, he suffered from the same lung disorder—hyaline membrane disease—that afflicted their stillborn daughter Arabella and had nearly killed John.

  The base chaplain was summoned immediately to baptize the boy Patrick Bouvier Kennedy, after Jack’s paternal grandfather and Black Jack Bouvier. Patrick was forty minutes old when his father arrived from Washington. Although the press was being told only that Jackie and the baby were in “good condition,” the decision was quickly made to transport Patrick by ambulance to Children’s Hospital in Boston.

  Jack spent some time with his wife, whose postoperative condition was serious enough to require multiple blood transfusions, then joined John and Caroline at Squaw Island to reassure them that everything was going to be fine.

  But it wasn’t. Soon the nation was holding its collective breath, and praying for the child’s recovery. By the next day, Patrick’s condition had deteriorated to the point where he was moved to a hyperbaric chamber in the adjacent Harvard School of Public Health. Using a suite at Boston’s Ritz-Carlton hotel as his base, JFK visited his son four times, then helicoptered to Otis Air Force Base to check in on Jackie.

  While reporters swarmed outside, the president decided to spend the night at the Boston hospital where Patrick was undergoing treatment. Jack was holding his son when the baby died at 4:04 a.m. on Friday, August 9. “He put up quite a fight,” the president told his closest aide, Dave Powers. “He was a beautiful baby.”

  The president rushed to his wife’s side. Once at Otis Air Force Hospital, he strode purposely past rows of red-eyed medical personnel toward the first lady’s room. “Oh, Jack, oh, Jack,” Jackie sobbed as they broke down in each other’s arms. “There’s only one thing I could not bear now—if I ever lost you.”

  Jack made John the mischievous, independent boy he is. Bobby is keeping that alive.

  —JACKIE

  John, from the earliest age, was a natural politician, a diplomat, a person who lit up a room.

  —JAMIE AUCHINCLOSS

  3.

  “John, You Can Salute Daddy Now”

  * * *

  November 22, 1963

  Washington, D.C.

  Someone would have to tell them. But not Jackie. She could not bear the thought of facing John and Caroline and trying to explain that they would never see their father again. It had been only hours since she held her husband’s brains in her hand. Now she had so much to deal with—the funeral, leaving the White House, finding a way to go on without him—and it seemed only fair that someone else should shoulder this particular burden. It had to be someone who wouldn’t collapse from the strain of performing it, as Jackie feared she would.

  “I think Miss Shaw should do exactly what she feels she should do,” Jackie told her mother, Janet Auchincloss. “Miss Shaw will have to judge how much the children have seen or heard, or whether they are wondering. She will just have to use her own judgment.”

  From the moment she heard that shots had rung out in Dallas, Maud Shaw feared that Jackie would ask her to break the news to the children. Less than four months earlier, the no-nonsense, resolutely dependable Shaw had broken the news of Patrick’s death to John and Caroline.

  But this! She was close—perhaps too close—to the children. It would break Miss Shaw’s heart to tell them that their father had been killed by an assassin’s bullet, every bit as much as it would break their mother’s heart.

  Family and friends had been gathering at the White House, and Shaw approached them all—as well as members of the Secret Service “Kiddie Detail”—pleading for someone else, anyone else, to volunteer. “I haven’t the heart to tell them,” she said. “Why can’t someone else do this? I can’t . . . I can’t . . .”

  Ben Bradlee had almost taken care of the job for her. Before leaving the White House to join Jackie at Bethesda Navy Hospital in Maryland, where the president’s autopsy was being conducted, Jack’s journalist friend declared “I’m going to tell them myself” before his wife, Tony, pulled him back. Instead, he wound up doing his best to distract the children.

  “Tell me a story!” John demanded. “Tell me a story!” Bradlee did—again and again, until it was obvious he’d have to come up with something else. “Chase me around the house!” Bradlee commanded, and John happily obliged, squealing with delight as he chased Bradlee down the hall into the West Sitting Room, through the family dining room, and into the Yellow Oval Room.

  Miss Shaw only felt worse as she watched John play, oblivious to the monumental events swirling around him. High-ranking government officials were arriving throughout the night, some by helicopter. Every time a chopper touched down on the lawn, John stopped whatever he was doing and screamed, “Daddy’s home! Daddy’s home!”

  Shaw put John to bed without saying anything. He was too young to understand, she reasoned, and there was certainly no harm in waiting until morning. The nanny decided Caroline required an entirely different approach. “It’s better for children Caroline’s age to get a sadness and a shock before they go to sleep at night,” Shaw later explained to Jackie. “That way it won’t hit them hard when they wake up in the morning.”

  Shaw waited until Caroline had changed into her pink pajamas and brushed her teeth before tucking her in. The nanny sat on the edge of the bed, and Caroline snuggled with her favorite pink teddy bear. As Shaw took Caroline’s hand in hers, the little girl could see her eyes welling up with tears.

  “What’s wrong, Miss Shaw?” she asked. “Why are you crying?”

  “I can’t help crying, Caroline, because I have some very sad news to tell you,” Shaw said. “Your father has been shot. They took him to a hospital, but they couldn’t make him better. He’s gone to look after Patrick. Patrick was so lonely in heaven. He didn’t know anyone there. Now he has the best friend anyone could have. And your father will be so very glad to see Patrick.”

  Caroline instantly burst into tears. “But what will Daddy do in heaven?” she wanted to know.

  “I am sure God is giving him enough things to do, because he was always such a busy man,” Shaw tried to explain. “God has made your daddy a guardian angel for you and for Mommy and for John.”

  Shaw remained with Caroline for more than an hour, stroking her hair gently as the little girl buried her head in her pillow and sobbed herself to sleep. There would be no sleep for the nanny; her heartbreaking assignment was only half done.

  At 8:30 the following morning, Nanny Shaw went into John’s room and gently woke him. “John, your father has gone to heaven to take care of Patrick,” she said.

  “Did Daddy take his big plane with him?” the boy asked.

>   “Yes,” she answered.

  “I wonder,” John said, “when he’s coming back.”

  Father John C. Cavanaugh, a former president of the University of Notre Dame, arrived at the White House that morning to say Mass in the East Room for a small gathering of family and friends. Miss Shaw, in the meantime, dressed the children and brought them to their mother’s bedroom. Until this moment, Jackie had not been able to face them since returning from Dallas. Without shedding a tear, she embraced them both, silently took their hands, and led them downstairs.

  John and Caroline were too young to attend the Mass, but they were allowed to peer through the door from the adjacent Green Room. Afterward, while the adults milled about the East Room where JFK lay in state, Jamie and Janet Auchincloss (Jackie’s half siblings), hatched a plan to—if only for a moment—take the children’s mind off their father’s brutal murder. With the German shepherd and Grandma Janet’s French poodle in tow, they asked a member of the Kiddie Detail to drive them the thirty miles to Manassas Battlefield.

  Caroline and her little brother took turns walking the dogs—John shrieking with joy as he tried to hold on to the leash, his sister hot on his heels. “We let them walk the dogs for a while,” Jamie said, “and then took the leashes off so they could run.” Within minutes, they were spotted by a National Park Service ranger. “Hey! No dogs allowed,” he shouted angrily. Walking closer, the burly ranger suddenly realized he was yelling at the children of the slain president—and, suddenly overcome with emotion, began to sob.

  “I felt sorry for the ranger,” Auchincloss said. “It was a reminder that this wasn’t just a tragedy that was happening to us. Everyone in the world was dealing with the same feelings of shock and grief.” As for Caroline and John: “Everyone really looked at my niece and nephew the way they looked at their own children,” he added. “They felt they knew John and Caroline. I think for all Americans it really felt like a death in the family.”

  After the Mass, J. B. West accompanied Jackie over to the Oval Office for one last look before her husband’s things were packed up. With “eyes like saucers,” as West put it, she memorized everything in the room—right down to the embossed white-and-gold leatherette frame that held photos of herself and the children. Jack had placed the triptych on his desk at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis to remind him of what was at stake.

  “My children,” Jackie said, “they’re good children, aren’t they, Mr. West?”

  “They’re not spoiled?”

  “No, indeed.”

  That night, Jackie opened notes the new president had written to each of the children just hours after their father was killed. “It will be many years before you understand fully what a great man your father was,” Lyndon Johnson wrote to John. “His loss is a deep personal tragedy for all of us, but I wanted you to know particularly that I share your grief—you can always be proud of him.”

  In his handwritten note to Caroline, LBJ wrote, “Your father’s death has been a great tragedy for the nation, as well as for you, and I wanted you to know how much my thoughts are of you at this time. He was a wise and devoted man. You can always be proud of what he did for his country.”

  Jackie read the notes aloud to John and Caroline, then asked Maud Shaw to bring pencils and paper for the children.

  “You must write a letter to Daddy now,” she told Caroline, “and tell him how much you love him.”

  Caroline covered the page with large block print. “DEAR DADDY,” her letter read, “WE ARE ALL GOING TO MISS YOU. DADDY, I LOVE YOU VERY MUCH, CAROLINE.” Jackie then told her son to add something of his own, and John, who was not yet three, scribbled a large X on the page.

  Jackie stayed up until dawn writing her own rambling, five-page letter to Jack. It was drenched in tears by the time she was finished.

  Jackie was physically and emotionally drained. Fearing that she would crumble under the strain of what lay ahead, she turned once again to Dr. Max Jacobson. She was changing into her black mourning dress when “Dr. Feelgood” was ushered into the White House, as usual, through a side entrance. Once upstairs, he greeted Jackie warmly and was soon digging through his battered black medical bag for vials and syringes.

  The president and the first lady had long relied on Jacobson’s injections—amphetamines (mostly Dexedrine) mixed with steroids—for the energy boost they needed to make it through their frantically busy day. Dr. Max’s potent “cocktails” were perfectly legal at the time. Although Dr. Travell and the rest of the White House medical team urged caution, the official position of the Food and Drug Administration at the time was that amphetamines and steroids were neither harmful nor habit-forming.

  No one disputed that, without a little pharmaceutical assistance from Dr. Max, Jackie would have fallen apart. Over the next few days, Jacobson remained in the shadows but always close at hand. “I was there when she needed me,” he later said. “And she needed me quite a lot.”

  Soon the president’s body would be moved to the Capitol Rotunda, where more than a quarter million mourners would stand in line for hours to pay their last respects. Jackie and Jack’s brother Bobby, described by Bradlee as “catatonic” with grief, walked down to the East Room to see JFK one last time. The lid was gently opened, and Jackie placed the two letters—the children’s and the one Jackie had written—inside, along with a pair of gold cufflinks and a favorite piece of scrimshaw, a whale’s tooth carved with the presidential seal. Bobby put in a clip of his own hair, a silver rosary, and the gold PT-109 clip Jack had given him.

  Jackie had offered words of comfort to Jack’s devoted personal secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, and now dropped into Pierre Salinger’s office looking, in Salinger’s words, “almost ghostly.” As she began to speak, JFK’s longtime press secretary and friend struggled to contain his own emotions. “Pierre,” she said, “I have nothing else to do in life but help my children deal with this terrible problem, the effect of their father’s assassination, to bring them up well, and see that they become decent, caring, and intelligent people. I have to make sure they survive.”

  As Jackie spoke, in Dallas a nightclub owner named Jack Ruby lunged from the shadows and shot accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald—another shocking scene broadcast live into millions of homes across the nation. Although conspiracy theorists would speculate for decades on Ruby’s true motive, he claimed he shot Oswald to both spare Jackie the ordeal of a trial and avenge her children.

  * * *

  ELEVEN MINUTES AFTER Oswald was pronounced dead, Jackie and her children were in the Capital Rotunda, leading a nation in mourning. Unlike their Kennedy cousins who were dressed in black, Caroline and John wore powder blue jackets and red shoes. Now more than ever, Jackie had told Maud Shaw, she wanted her children to look like children, not like miniature adults.

  Cabinet members, senators, bemedaled members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Supreme Court justices alike fought back tears as the president’s young widow took their daughter by the hand and led her to the coffin. But first Jackie leaned down and whispered, “We’re going to say goodbye to Daddy now, and we’re going to kiss him goodbye and tell Daddy how much we love him and how much we’ll always miss him.” Then they walked up to the bier, knelt, took the flag that covered the coffin in their gloved hands, and pressed it tenderly to their lips.

  More than anyone, Jackie understood how important such moments were in shaping history. Her triumphant tours of Europe and the Indian subcontinent, her painstaking restoration of the White House and its unveiling before what was then the largest television audience in history, the glittering state dinners and gala evenings for the arts that had transformed the White House into an American Versailles, her own unique sense of style—all were reflections of Jackie’s love of symbolism and spectacle.

  To ensure that Jack would have a funeral befitting his place in history, Jackie focused on even the most minute detail—from the black bunting in the East Room (“Find out how Lincoln was buried,” she had told
Bobby Kennedy) to the design of the Mass cards to the number of horses that would pull the caisson carrying her husband’s casket. “I think it was also her coping mechanism,” Salinger said. “As long as she put one foot in front of the other, going through the motions of lying in state and the funeral, she didn’t have to dwell on the horror of what happened in Dallas. That came later.”

  She had planned for John to join her and Caroline in the Capitol Rotunda, but things didn’t quite work out that way. John had managed to follow his father’s casket up the Capitol’s thirty-five steps alongside Caroline and his mother, but once at the top, he began to squirm. Maud Shaw instantly whisked the boy off to an office down the hall. He was instantly drawn to a bulletin board covered with dozens of tiny American flags.

  “Would you like one?” asked a congressional aide.

  “Yes, please,” John responded, “and one for my sister, please.” The man plucked two flags off the bulletin board and bent down to hand them to the toddler. John turned to leave, but then realized he had forgotten something. “Oh,” he said, “and may I have one for my daddy?” Startled, the aide handed him a third flag, and John scampered off to proudly present it to his mother.

  The night before Jack’s state funeral, the president’s widow dined in the West Sitting Room with Bobby and Ethel Kennedy, as well as her sister Lee and Lee’s husband, Prince Stanislaw (“Stas”) Radziwill. Down the corridor, Jackie’s shell-shocked Kennedy in-laws, Eunice and Sargent Shriver and Pat and Peter Lawford, ate with Dave Powers, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, and a few others in the family dining room.