The Good Son_JFK Jr. and the Mother He Loved

by Christopher Andersen

  John ripped into his presents—puzzles, books, a toy truck, and a model plane, of course—with the kind of unfettered abandon that reminded Jackie of his father. Then the birthday boy and his twenty-five guests, mostly cousins and a smattering of friends, joined in a spirited game of musical chairs, followed by pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey.

  As she watched her son and his sister laughing with their little friends, Jackie turned to one of the other mothers. “My John is such a happy little boy, you know,” she said. “I think sometimes I worry about him too much. But every mother worries about her children, of course.”

  Inviting children—even total strangers—over to the apartment was part of Jackie’s overall strategy to keep John and Caroline grounded. “Quite often we invited children we met in the park home to the Fifth Avenue apartment for dinner,” Maud Shaw recalled. “Mrs. Kennedy was very good about that. I always used to ask her beforehand, of course, but her reply was always the same. ‘Certainly they can come,’ she would say. ‘I leave it to you. I like the children to have new friends. It’s good for them.’ ”

  Still, John’s mood was inevitably tethered to that of his mother, and her mental state remained precarious. It was clear to both children that Mummy, as they now called her, was happiest when she was in the company of one person—Uncle Bobby.

  Even Ros Gilpatric, who competed with RFK for Jackie’s affections, conceded that after Dallas Jackie clung to her brother-in-law for emotional support—and vice versa. “Bobby,” Gilpatric said, “was the only one who could pull her out of her depression.”

  By the time Jackie and the children joined the Radziwills for Christmas in Palm Beach, Jackie and Bobby were lovers. Rightly believing that the press would never dare to report the story—the fallen president’s family was still sacrosanct—Bobby and Jackie did little to conceal their feelings for each other. They still openly held hands, embraced, even kissed.

  “Jackie and Bobby were definitely having an affair,” Nancy Dickerson said. “You must remember this was years before anyone wrote about Jack’s infidelities. When the stories about JFK and Marilyn Monroe started to surface, they were dismissed as preposterous. After Dallas, no one would have believed St. Jackie and St. Bobby were sleeping together, no matter how obvious it was. It would have been considered sacrilege.”

  Gore Vidal also believed that Jackie was now in love with Bobby. “There was always something oddly intense in her voice,” he said, “when she mentioned him to me.” Clare Boothe Luce, one of Joe’s closest friends, was also convinced. “Well, of course everybody knew Jackie and Bobby were ‘involved.’ . . . At least everyone who knew them knew what was going on.”

  A favorite trysting place was the bar of the Sherry-Netherland Hotel on Fifth Avenue, where Kennedy brother-in-law Peter Lawford shared an apartment with flamboyant Greek-born journalist Taki Theodoracopulos, better known simply as “Taki.” As it happened, Taki was having an affair with Jackie’s sister, Lee. “Lawford was telling me at the time,” Theodoracopulos said, “that Jackie was sleeping with Bobby.” Lawford also told his wife that Bobby was filling in for Jack “in all departments.”

  Indeed, for the next three years Bobby and Jackie would be spotted cozying up in the early-morning hours at various out-of-the-way New York nightspots. On Long Island, where Jackie leased a country house near Bobby’s, locals spoke of seeing them nearly every weekend, cuddling in the rear booth of a quiet restaurant or walking arm in arm along the beach. According to Bruce Balding, who owned the stable where Jackie boarded her horses, “many people often saw Jackie and Bobby off by themselves, heads together, or looking fondly at each other in various hotels in the area, so they got the idea.”

  Ethel, who like other Kennedy wives was accustomed to such behavior, receded into the background. She even remained behind at Hyannis Port and Hickory Hill, caring for the children, while her husband and Jackie vacationed together, openly sharing a bedroom at the Montego Bay, Jamaica, villa owned by a mutual friend.

  Not only was the attorney general’s office rife with speculation about RFK and Jackie—she frequently called, asking for him—but even the Kennedy faithful confessed to the distinct probability that Bobby and his brother’s widow had become romantically entangled. JFK’s close friend Paul “Red” Fay remembered that after Dallas she “went into hibernation and Bobby was over there practically every day with her. She’s a fascinating woman. If she’d throw her charm at you, why, you’d be emotionally swayed.” By the same token, Fay noted that RFK was a “controlling individual, and I think that probably if Bobby felt something, why, she was going to go along.”

  * * *

  WITH RFK ENSCONCED as New York’s junior senator, John saw more of his uncle than ever before. Caroline certainly was aware that Uncle Bobby and their mother enjoyed a warm and tender relationship—a relationship that was looking more and more like the one their parents enjoyed. “Caroline was very, very intuitive for a seven-year-old,” Plimpton said. “She got the signals Bobby and Jackie were sending to each other, and I’m sure she encouraged John in thinking that her mother and Bobby were in love.”

  By the holidays, the beguiling, assertive Jackie of old was back. The day after Christmas she packed the kids up and joined Bobby and his Hickory Hill gang for a ski holiday, this time in Aspen, Colorado. There was no escaping the press, which breathlessly chronicled every moment—from furious snowball fights between John and his Kennedy cousins to Jackie’s frustration as she tried to fasten her son’s ski boots.

  There were two more ski trips in early 1965—one to the Catskills and the other aboard a Pepsi corporate jet to Keene, New Hampshire. In Keene, photographers again had a field day snapping JFK’s son as he tried unsuccessfully to make it down the bunny slope without taking a tumble.

  On one ski trip, Jackie and her friend Joan Braden were watching John and Caroline zip down a hill on a sled when, out of the blue, Jackie turned to Braden and said, “You know, there’ll never be another Jack.” There were “escorts, companions, and another husband,” Braden mused later, “but there was never another Jack for her.”

  Nor was Jackie really ready to see another man take the oath of office on the Capitol steps—not when she believed it was her husband who should have been standing there. She was still in a state of shock and had not even changed out of her blood-spattered Chanel suit when she agreed to stand by Lyndon Johnson while he was sworn in the first time aboard Air Force One. Now, viewing Johnson as little more than a placeholder for Bobby, she refused to be moved by LBJ’s phone calls beseeching her to attend his inauguration in January 1965.

  Jackie chose instead to fill up her calendar with nights at the theater, parties, and trips. Leaving John and Caroline in the care of Maud Shaw, she took in a Greenwich Village production of Tartuffe and, wrapped in sable, turned heads at a Metropolitan Opera gala performance of Tosca. Afterward, Aristotle Onassis’s future bride went backstage to meet the Greek tycoon’s longtime mistress, the fabulously temperamental Maria Callas.

  Her deceptively carefree existence notwithstanding, Jackie spent every spare moment with Bobby. The fact remained that neither JFK’s wife nor his brother had fully come to terms with what the family obtusely referred to as “the events in Dallas.”

  “Jackie and Bobby were joined at the hip,” Salinger said, “and to have him be such a large part of their lives was obviously a huge comfort to John and Caroline—John in particular, because he needed a strong male figure around.” Bobby made no attempt to conceal his devotion to his brother’s widow, and Jackie fully reciprocated. In early 1965, her old friend Frank Conniff asked Jackie to describe her feelings for Bobby. “I would,” she said in deadly earnest, “jump out of the window for him.”

  John, well, he’s something else.

  —JACKIE

  John was never a brat, but he was all boy.

  —GEORGE PLIMPTON, FAMILY FRIEND

  5.

  “I Want to Help Him Go Back and Find His Father”

 
; * * *

  She was absolutely devoted to her children,” George Plimpton said of Jackie. “And even with all that had happened, she made sure they had a happy life.” It wasn’t easy. An important first step was making sure that the very agency assigned to protect her children didn’t unintentionally make them fearful and dependent. Secret Service agents guarding the family would simply have to curb their enthusiasm.

  Jackie was very precise about what she expected of the family’s security detail, and complained bitterly when she believed they were going too far. “Mrs. Kennedy feels very strongly,” wrote the head of the Kiddie Detail in a confidential Secret Service memo to the agency chief, “that though there are two children to protect, it is ‘bad’ to see two agents ‘hovering around.’ ” For example, Jackie demanded that, whenever she was behind the wheel, the follow-up car not be seen by the children. “The agent must drift into the background quickly when arriving at a specific location,” the memo continued, “and remain aloof and invisible until moment of departure.”

  Beyond mastering the art of hiding in plain sight, Secret Service agents were ordered point-blank not to spoil John and Caroline. “It’s bad for the children to see grown men waiting on them,” Jackie said. “I want you to tell Caroline to pick up her clothes, shoes, toys, and so on. The same goes for John.”

  “Mrs. Kennedy is adamant in her contention that agents must not perform special favors for John Jr. and Caroline or wait on them as servants,” the confidential Secret Service memo continued. “Agents are not to carry clothes, beach articles, sand buckets, baby carriages, strollers, handbags, suitcases, etc., for Caroline and John Jr. and the children must carry their own clothing items, toys etc. . . .”

  At the beach in particular, Jackie stressed that the Secret Service should back off. “Drowning is my responsibility,” Jackie insisted, driving home her point that the agency “is not responsible for any accident sustained by the children in the usual and normal play sessions.” These were to be, the memo added, “the sole responsibility of Mrs. Kennedy.”

  Secret Service agents did tag along when Jackie escorted John to his first day at St. David’s School, at 12 East Eighty-ninth Street. Once Jackie left, one agent remained on Eighty-ninth Street while another waited in a hallway outside the classroom. There was little the agents could do to safeguard John, but it soon became clear that JFK’s son could stand up for himself—and then some. His first morning at St. David’s, John got into a tiff with another boy who tauntingly called him John-John. The other boy wound up with a bloody nose.

  There would be other fights with other students, which one faculty member chalked up to John’s “naturally high spirits.” It also had something to do with the fact that, for all his mother’s efforts to keep him grounded, John was used to getting his way. “He had a will of steel,” the teacher said, “no doubt about it. It wasn’t that he was arrogant or bratty, just determined to exhaust the opposition until they finally gave in.”

  It was equally true that nearly all of John’s classmates seemed genuinely fond of him. “John makes friends with everybody,” Jackie observed. “Immediately.” It helped that his own cousin, William Kennedy Smith, also attended St. David’s. The bond John and Willie Smith formed would be one of the strongest and most important in John’s life, lasting well into adulthood.

  * * *

  IN THE SPRING of 1965, Jackie seized on another opportunity to spurn LBJ. This time the White House Rose Garden was being dedicated in her honor, and the president once again bombarded her with pleading phone calls. Jackie refused, but she did agree to send her mother in her place. Johnson did not give up easily. For the next four years, Jackie received an official invitation to every state dinner and countless other White House affairs. She did not deign to respond to a single one.

  She did, however, slip into a flowing Yves St. Laurent gown and dance the night away at a party thrown by Lee simply to “brighten Jackie’s day.” Jackie’s date for the night was Averell Harriman, and sprinkled among the hundred guests that night were the celebrated likes of Maurice Chevalier, Leonard Bernstein, Sammy Davis Jr., Leopold Stokowski, and Mike Nichols. One commanded more of Jackie’s attention than the others: RFK, who was there sans Ethel. Bobby, said Bernstein, “hovered around Jackie like he owned her.” Another guest spotted the couple huddled in a corner and sidled over to eavesdrop. “They were talking about a fistfight John had just been in at his school,” she said. “Jackie sounded a little concerned, but all Bobby cared about was that John won the fight.”

  John was urged to be on his very best behavior when he made his first trip abroad, accompanying his mother and Caroline to England in May 1965. At Runnymede, in the meadow beside the Thames where the Magna Carta was signed in 1215, Queen Elizabeth dedicated Great Britain’s memorial to JFK in a moving ceremony that ended with Jackie brushing away tears.

  When it was time for the children to meet the queen, Maud Shaw held her breath; she had spent hours couching them on royal etiquette. During the lengthy ceremony, Caroline had tried to stifle a yawn but failed. However, when the time came to meet the queen, Uncles Teddy and Bobby looked on proudly as she pulled off the perfect curtsy.

  Then it was John’s turn to take center stage. When the queen walked up to Jack’s son and smiled broadly, the little boy bowed deeply at the waist and said in a clear voice, “Pleased to meet you, Your Majesty.” Nanny Shaw was relieved; all morning John had been insisting England’s reigning monarch was not “Your Majesty” at all, but “My Majesty.”

  The ceremony at Runnymede was followed by tea with the queen at Windsor Castle. At one point, Jackie took aside Lord Harlech (David Ormsby-Gore, British ambassador to the United States during the Kennedy years) to thank him for the kindness he and his wife Sissie had shown her in the dark days immediately following the assassination. Maud Shaw, meanwhile, kept a wary eye on her charges. In the end, she was just happy that John managed to get through the afternoon “without spilling tea on Her Majesty or otherwise causing an international incident.”

  Straight from Windsor Castle, Jackie and the children moved into Aunt Lee’s house in Regent’s Park and started acting like any other tourists. They watched the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace, took turns holding an executioner’s ax at the Tower of London, and had their pictures taken mugging alongside Whitehall’s stone-faced cavalry guards. Still obsessed with all things military, John snapped off one of his now-famous salutes to practically anything in uniform.

  While Caroline and their mother took in the crown jewels, John prevailed on his Secret Service detail to help crawl inside the grimy barrel of an ancient cannon. For John, none of it compared to sharing a boat ride on Regent’s Park Lake with his Radziwill cousins Tony and Tina.

  Even more than their American counterparts, British reporters pursued JFK’s children with dogged determination. Wily photographers surprised John and Caroline as they tried to escape out a rear door of the Radziwill house with Maud Shaw, and were on hand when John tripped and skinned his knee while running down a path in Regent’s Park. When John burst into tears, Shaw tried to comfort him. Caroline was less charitable. To the delight of the press, she called her brother a “crybaby.” John balled up his fist and was just about to take a swing at his sister when the nanny swept him off his feet.

  Before leaving England, Jackie took John and Caroline to pose for the celebrated illustrator, designer, photographer, and artist Cecil Beaton. But obviously it was Jackie who made the greatest impression on Beaton, who scribbled in his diaries that she was “an over-life-size caricature of herself. Huge baseball players’ shoulders and haunches, big boyish hands and feet . . .” Still, like everyone who ever met her, the chronically acerbic Beaton could not deny that Jackie’s “very dark, beautiful, receptive” eyes were “mesmerizing.”

  At home and abroad, Maud Shaw was always a vigilant, caring presence in the children’s lives. She made sure they were fed, dressed, and bathed, supervised their play, packed their bag
s, held their hands as they crossed the street, mediated their frequent disputes, read bedtime stories to them, tucked them in, and woke them in the morning. For seven years, she was as much a mother to John and Caroline as Jackie had ever been, and both the late president and his wife viewed Nanny Shaw as an indispensable part of their tight-knit family.

  Yet no one, it turned out, was truly indispensable. Just as she had worried that John was growing too close to certain members of his Secret Service detail, Jackie now felt that the children had grown too emotionally dependent on Maud Shaw. Jackie told the children that Mrs. Shaw would not be returning to the United States with the family because she wanted to spend time in Sheerness, England, visiting her own relatives.

  In truth, the children’s beloved nanny had been sacked. Even before they left for England, Jackie had presented Miss Shaw with a leather-bound photo album commemorating her years with the family and suggested that once the trip was over she remain behind. “I loved Caroline and John very dearly, and I loved them for a very, very long time,” said Mrs. Shaw, who told Evelyn Lincoln that her abrupt dismissal “came as a bit of a shock. When I came home [to her family home in England], I wept a great deal . . .”

  Over lunch in London with Evangeline Bruce, the wife of U.S. ambassador to Great Britain David E. K. Bruce, Jackie explained that Miss Shaw was “good with young children” but that John and Caroline had “outgrown” her. “I want someone,” Jackie said, “more attuned to their present needs.”

  There was another, more compelling reason, which Jackie chose not to share with her luncheon companion. In violation of the confidentiality agreement all of Jackie’s employees were required to sign, Shaw had secretly signed book deals with publishers in both the United States and Britain to write a tell-all about her years of service as nanny to both Caroline and John. (Although she threatened to sue, Jackie decided not to go through with it when Shaw agreed to give her final approval of the manuscript. The book, White House Nannie, was released the following year and became an instant bestseller.)