The Good Son_JFK Jr. and the Mother He Loved

by Christopher Andersen

  * * *

  THE DAY BEFORE the big move, John spotted a cardboard box marked “John’s Toys—N Street” and began to cry, convinced that his toys were leaving without him. After assuring John that he and his toys would soon be reunited, Maud Shaw suggested he put on his new Marine uniform and then pick out a few select items they could hand-carry to their new house. John sat on the floor and dipped into the packing carton to retrieve some toy swords, a cowboy gun, and a helicopter.

  On December 6, the White House staff lined up to say goodbye to Jackie and the children. “It was very sad, of course,” J. B. West said. “Everyone was very, very emotional, but Mrs. Kennedy couldn’t have been more gracious.” Secret Service agent Bob Foster decided to distract John by taking his hand and leading the boy on a quick stroll around the grounds.

  It wasn’t long before John declared he was thirsty, and as Foster lifted him up to drink from a water fountain, a White House photographer suddenly appeared. John stopped and glared at the man. “What are you taking my picture for?” the boy asked. “My daddy’s dead.” The photographer and Foster both broke down in tears.

  An hour later, a White House limousine pulled up in front of the Harriman house. Caroline stepped out, then her mother and brother. John carried a small box containing his father’s posthumously bestowed Presidential Medal of Freedom in one hand and waved a small American flag in the other. Uncle Bobby and Aunt Ethel were close behind, chased by photographers.

  That afternoon, John and Caroline managed to duck out for some play time at a local park. While they bobbed up and down on teeter-totters, two Secret Service agents stood guard. The law in 1963 stipulated that Jackie and her children were entitled to government protection for only two more years. That period was later extended to cover the children of ex-presidents until age sixteen, and a presidential widow until remarriage or death.

  Unfortunately, it quickly became evident that the Secret Service was virtually powerless to shield JFK’s young family from the prying eyes of an insatiable public. Gawkers pressed up against police barricades on both sides of the street just outside the Harriman house, and traffic was at a standstill as drivers and their passengers craned their necks to catch a glimpse of the world’s most famous family.

  Uncle Bobby and Dave Powers came to visit every day, much of that time spent playing games with John and Caroline, trying to fill the void left by their father. Uncles Teddy Kennedy and Jamie Auchincloss, the Radziwills, Jackie’s half sister Janet, and old friends like Oleg Cassini, Chuck Spalding, and his wife, Betty, and Galbraith—all made the effort to come at least once or twice a week. Stuck behind locked doors, her drapes drawn, Jackie complained to everyone who dropped in that she felt like “a carnival freak.”

  It didn’t help that, almost as soon as they set foot in the Harriman house, John and Caroline both came down with the chicken pox. Caroline followed orders and stayed in bed. But John? Once outside the door to his room, Maud Shaw knew “full well what he was going to do. I would hear his little feet padding across the bedroom carpet, the door would open ever so slowly, then his head popped ’round the door, his face bright with mischief.”

  Not even John’s antics could brighten Jackie’s mood, or keep her from replaying what happened that day in Dallas over and over again in her mind. “She was just flattened, lost,” Chuck Spalding said.” You’d try to change the subject but she kept coming back to Jack.” During one weekend at Wexford, the country home she and Jack had built in Atoka, Virginia, Jackie tearfully confessed to Betty Spalding that she had no idea how she was going to manage raising Caroline and John alone, or even where she was going to live. “No one knows what it’s like,” Jackie said, staring blankly. “No one knows what it’s like.”

  When Robert McNamara took Jackie out for lunch at a small Washington restaurant, the rude stares and loud mutterings from the other diners became so unbearable that they picked up and left halfway through their meal. “There was no possibility of her forgetting who she was or the terrible thing that happened,” McNamara said. “Not even for a moment.”

  Before he returned to his practice in New York the first week in December, Max Jacobson made sure to leave behind an array of potent sedatives and sleeping pills for Jackie to take. Nothing seemed to work. A few days before Christmas, she summoned Jacobson to Georgetown. “My life is over, Max,” she said as she rolled up her sleeve for another of Jacobson’s injections. “Just empty, meaningless.”

  Jacobson spent nearly an hour trying to convince Jackie that she had much to live for, and that she had an “obligation” to her children. “I tried my best to impress upon her that life would go on, eventually, and the sooner she realized it, the better it would be.”

  From her “lifeless stare,” Jacobson concluded that his words had had little impact. Once back in Manhattan, Dr. Max prepared one of his “C.A.R.E. packages” to send to Jackie. Each package contained ten disposable syringes and a vial of Dr. Max’s powerful amphetamine-steroid “cocktail.” Before leaving her that day in Georgetown, Jacobson carefully taught Jackie how to administer the injections herself.

  Shortly before Christmas, Jackie paid $175,000 for a three-story, fourteen-room, beige brick colonial townhouse at 3017 N Street, not far from the Harrimans’. Unfortunately, it was only after they moved in that Jackie realized she had made a serious miscalculation. In contrast to the Harriman house, all the rooms at 3017 N Street faced the front—including the living room, study, dining room, and even several bedrooms—and were completely exposed to anyone who happened to be passing by.

  One morning, a fusillade of flashbulbs went off when John pulled back the curtains to peek out the living room window at the noisy mob in the street. “What,” he asked Maud Shaw, “are all these silly people taking my picture for?”

  “Outside the crowd of spectators grew and grew,” said decorator Billy Baldwin, whom Jackie had hired to design the interior of her new home. “There was bumper-to-bumper traffic.”

  “I can’t even change my clothes in private because they look in my bedroom window,” Jackie complained. If she felt like a “carnival freak” at the Harriman house, observed Jacques Lowe, JFK’s widow now likened herself to a “caged animal.”

  One afternoon during a violent winter storm, Baldwin and Jackie were unpacking boxes at the new house when she suddenly got up and wandered over to window. For a few moments, she gazed at the gawkers huddled outside in the subfreezing temperatures, then returned to Baldwin—this time with tears streaming down her face. “I’m afraid I’m going to embarrass you,” she said as she collapsed on the sofa, burying her face in her hands as she wept.

  Once she composed herself, Jackie told Baldwin that her biggest concern was for her children’s emotional well-being. Hysterical women were breaking through police lines to hug and kiss Caroline and John. “The world is pouring terrible adoration at their feet,” she said, “and I fear for them.”

  More than anything, Jackie wanted John and Caroline to experience the carefree joys of something akin to a normal childhood. To make their move to a new house less jarring, she showed Baldwin photographs of the children’s bedrooms at the White House and asked him to furnish their new rooms identically. “She wanted their lives to be disrupted as little as possible,” he said. “She was trying for some semblance of constancy, of continuity. Sadly, this was impossible.”

  At least the familiar presence of Nanny Shaw, the family’s longtime maid Providencia “Provi” Paredes, Jackie’s personal secretary Mary Gallagher, and a few others was clearly making the transition easier for John and his sister. But one grown-up face was missing, and it belonged to Daddy’s loyal secretary. Evelyn Lincoln and John had developed a strong bond, based in part on the fact that she often doled out candy to him whenever he dropped by the Oval Office to visit his father. Transferred to a small office in the Executive Office Building, Evelyn Lincoln now faced the monumental task of organizing her late boss’s belongings and papers.

  John asked i
f he could call Mrs. Lincoln to let her know they would soon be paying her a visit. Nanny Shaw held the phone up to John’s ear.

  “Hello, Mrs. Lincoln,” John said. “This is John.”

  “Why, John,” she answered, “what a wonderful surprise.”

  “I’m going to visit you with Mrs. Shaw soon.”

  “That would be lovely, John,” Lincoln said. “I’m looking forward to seeing you.”

  “Me, too.”

  Lincoln waited for John to go on, but there was only silence on the line. The boy, she concluded, “was obviously thinking.”

  “Mrs. Lincoln?” he asked tentatively.

  “Yes, John?” This time, there was an even longer pause.

  “Is Daddy there?”

  It was going to be a melancholy Christmas. No phone calls to the North Pole—Daddy was no longer there to tell the White House switchboard operators to imitate Mrs. Claus. Nor was Daddy there to hang up the stockings on the mantel, as he did every year. But Caroline had been allowed to continue classes at the little White House school Jackie had established until the end of the year, and that meant that she could still play an angel in the annual children’s Christmas pageant. The Kennedys, the Auchinclosses, and family friends clapped and cheered and sang carols, but John and Caroline knew holidays would never be the same. “No one could forget,” Sister Joanne Frey said, “that someone was missing.”

  Jackie and the children joined the rest of the Kennedys in Palm Beach for Christmas, and while they were decorating the tree Caroline blurted out a question about Daddy. “Will Patrick be looking after him in heaven?” she wanted to know.

  Before anyone could speak, John, who had been trying to guess the contents of wrapped packages beneath the tree, piped up, “Is there fish chowder in heaven?” Everyone laughed, including Jackie. JFK, as his family and friends knew so well, was a certified fish chowder fanatic.

  Such lighthearted moments were few and far between.

  Even for the sake of her children, Jackie found it impossible to pull out of her deep depression. “I’m a living wound,” she said. “My life is over. I’m dried up—I have nothing more to give and some days I can’t even get out of bed. I cry all day and all night until I’m so exhausted I can’t function. Then I drink.”

  There were touching reminders that Jackie wasn’t the only one in the immediate family who was grieving. During one family dinner, Caroline pulled one end of a wishbone as Jackie’s teenage half sister, Janet Auchincloss, held the other. “Can I wish for anything I want?” she asked.

  “Anything,” Aunt Janet promised.

  “I want,” Caroline said without hesitating, “to see my daddy.”

  Her own pain notwithstanding, Caroline took it upon herself to comfort her mother. “After my daddy died, my mommy is always crying,” she told Sister Joanne in the middle of a catechism class. Caroline described how she would crawl into bed with her mother and “tell her everything is all right and tell her to stop crying. But she doesn’t. My mommy is always crying. My mommy is always crying . . .”

  Perhaps only one other adult could fully fathom the depth of Jackie’s grief. “Bobby was very tough—in many ways tougher than JFK,” Pierre Salinger said. “But he worshiped his brother, just idolized him. Everything he did he did for the president, and in a terrible instant it was all gone.” Chuck Spalding agreed that RFK was now “one of the walking wounded. As sad as Jackie looked, Bobby looked even worse.”

  David Halberstam, who wrote extensively about the Kennedy White House in his landmark book The Best and the Brightest and whose own brother was a murder victim, understood how both Bobby and Jackie must have felt. “You ask yourself over and over again if there was something you could have done or said that might have changed things,” Halberstam said. “The feelings of rage, despair, and even guilt—guilt over being here when your brother isn’t anymore—you know, ‘Why him and not me?’ It all just eats away at you.”

  Like his sister-in-law, Bobby found it all but impossible to sleep. He would get out of bed at Hickory Hill, his historic Virginia estate in McLean, Virginia, and drive aimlessly around Washington and its suburbs. “If you’ve ever lost a loved one under circumstances like that,” Halberstam observed, “you know that it is just too painful to keep reliving the moment. You want to put the horror behind you as quickly as you can and move on with your life. But it’s not that easy if no one around you understands what you’re feeling.”

  Jackie understood. During his nocturnal wanderings, Bobby sometimes turned up at her house in Georgetown. There they talked until dawn, taking comfort in their shared grief. “I think he is the most compassionate person I know,” Jackie said, acknowledging that, away from family and friends, Bobby was “too shy and too proud” to let that side of his character show.

  Indeed, compassion was not one of RFK’s better-known attributes; a ruthless competitor in politics and in life, he took pride in his reputation as the president’s enforcer. Within and without his own party, Bobby was feared more than respected.

  At the same time, Bobby’s bona fides as a family man were impeccable. All of which made him the perfect surrogate father to his brother’s children—a role he undertook with enthusiasm. “Let’s face it,” Chuck Spalding said, “Bobby was in every way the logical choice to be a surrogate father to those kids.” For both John and Caroline, it “must have been very comfortable having him around, reminding them of their father,” Spalding continued. “The way he sounded, the body language, the hair, those teeth!”

  Over the next six months, Jackie took her children to Hickory Hill almost daily to play with Bobby and Ethel’s brood of eight.

  “They think of Hickory Hill as their own home,” Jackie said. If there were any Father’s Day activities at school, Bobby showed up for Caroline. She, in turn, showed her report cards to RFK. Her artwork during this period was invariably marked “To Uncle Bobby,” and brought to him for his approval.

  RFK was equally hands-on in his treatment of his nephew, picking John up early each morning and driving him to his Justice Department office, where he played with his cousins Michael and Kerry. To re-create the child-friendly atmosphere that had prevailed in the Oval Office, Bobby periodically stopped conferences and staff meetings so he could play leapfrog or hide-and-seek—or simply toss a squealing John in the air.

  When Uncle Bobby wasn’t around, John had no qualms about approaching others to perform this important service. On one of several trips to New York that February, John was playing with the children of Deputy Peace Corps Director Bill Haddad when he suddenly asked his host, “Are you a daddy?” When Haddad said yes, John brightened. “Then, will you throw me up in the air?” he asked. Haddad, trying hard to contain his emotions, obliged.

  Jackie welcomed the influence of such positive male figures in her little boy’s life—to a point. Not surprisingly, John became attached to several of the men whose job it was to protect him. Foremost among these was Agent Foster, who tried in vain to keep John from calling him “Daddy.” Understandably concerned that her son had perhaps grown too close to Foster, Jackie made the painful decision to request that he be reassigned. “Jackie was consumed with the fear that the world was going to forget Jack,” Teddy White said. “She certainly didn’t want their son to forget him.” To show their gratitude, Jackie and the children gave Foster their Welsh terrier Charlie.

  What Jackie did want was for the Secret Service to serve as a bulwark against intrusions on her family’s privacy. One morning she dropped into a newsstand in Hyannis Port with John, attracting what one Secret Service agent described in his official report as a small crowd of “harmless onlookers”—mostly “elderly ladies with cameras” trying to snap a few photos. “Mrs. Kennedy turned a cold shoulder and refused to permit any photographs,” the agent recalled. Later, she scolded him for not taking action. “Do something,” she said, “when there are people around like that!”

  In truth, there was really only one person Jackie trusted to pr
otect her family—the same man her husband had leaned on heavily both in the Senate and throughout his presidency. It was a decision that, in a sense, had been made long before Jack’s death. Jackie and JFK had stipulated in their wills that if anything ever happened to both of them, John and Caroline would be raised by Bobby and Ethel. “Now I want them [Caroline and John] to be part of that family,” Jackie said. “Bobby wants to look after his brother’s children. There’s John, with his brother’s name. He’s going to make sure John turns out as he should.”

  If you bungle raising your children, I don’t think whatever else you do well matters very much.

  —JACKIE

  Not being a Kennedy, my mother could recognize the perils and the positive aspects.

  —JOHN

  Jackie worried more about John than she did about Caroline, who matured quickly and was very influenced by her father. Jackie paid special attention to John.

  —YUSHA AUCHINCLOSS, JACKIE’S STEPBROTHER

  4.

  “A Kennedy Never Gives Up”

  * * *

  It was not long before Jackie, convinced that only Bobby could replace Jack in her children’s lives, asked RFK to legally adopt them—a move that would have given Jackie and Bobby equal status as guardians. Ethel, who had never been particularly fond of her idolized sister-in-law, vetoed the plan.

  Adoption notwithstanding, John was soon learning what it meant to be a Kennedy—the hard way. At Hickory Hill, RFK spent the better part of one afternoon trying to teach his nephew how to kick a football. John’s approach was to kick at the ball, watch it roll a few feet in front of him, and then fall on the ground.

  “Get up, try again,” Bobby told the boy. John did, kicking at the ball until it rolled away from him—and then collapsing.