by Thomas Maier
When the storms break for him
May the trees shake for him
Their blossoms down;
And in the night that he is troubled
May a friend wake for him
So that his time may be doubled;
And at the end of all loving and love
May the Man above
Give him a crown.
The poem served as a prayer of safekeeping for Kennedy’s newborn son, a prayer that he would be spared from an untimely death. After Kiernan finished his lines, Kennedy stepped up to the microphone and motioned toward him.
“I wish that was for me,” he whispered.
Years later, Sorensen wrote that Kennedy’s exchange with the Irish ambassador was indicative of the sense of awaiting tragedy in his soul, when “perhaps he came closest to revealing his inner thoughts” about his fate. Though he was accepting of the possibility of his own death, Kennedy was unprepared for the tragedy that befell his family in August 1963.
Images of the young president smiling and playing with his young children are timeless reminders of the Kennedy emphasis on family and its allure to the American public. One particularly memorable set of photographs show Caroline, at age five, and her two-year-old brother, dubbed “John-John” by the press, romping in the Oval Office to their father’s delight. Journalists lionized Kennedy as a family man. “I sensed a tribal quality about him that wasn’t evident when I first met him,” recalled Laura Bergquist Knebel, who wrote several pieces about the Kennedys for Look magazine.“Once he had kids of his own, he became a patriarch, he was fascinated by not only his own children but other kids.” In reality, though, Kennedy’s marriage had suffered considerably from his long absences, the persistent rumors of his infidelities and at times his callous insensitivity to his wife. In the mid–1950s, when Jackie suffered a miscarriage followed a year later by a stillborn baby by cesarian section, Jack barely stopped his whirlwind schedule to comfort her. At times, her husband’s constant political campaigning made her feel more like a constituent than a participant in his life. For Jackie Kennedy, like so many Catholic women of her generation— and like her mother-in-law before her—divorce seemed out of the question. The obligations of church law and family life took precedence over any unhappiness she might feel, regardless of wealth or social status. “The most important thing for a successful marriage is for a husband to do what he likes best and does well,” she advised readers of Redbook magazine during the 1960 campaign. “The wife’s satisfactions will follow.” To a friendly journalist, Fletcher Knebel, Jackie conceded that she and her husband were like two icebergs, “the public life above the water—the private life is submerged.” Sometimes, their two lives converged. In April 1963, the news of her fifth pregnancy was greeted with a special press briefing. When a reporter asked whether the news conference was being called to announce Kennedy’s plans to go to Ireland,Teddy Kennedy shook his head. “No,” he replied, with a vulpine grin. “It’s sexier than that.”
Not since the days of Grover Cleveland had a baby been born to a president living in the White House. Under a headline “Big Year for the Clan,” Time magazine proclaimed:“Every year is family year in the Kennedy clan, but 1963 figures to be really outstanding.” Not only was Jackie Kennedy pregnant, but so were her sisters-in-law, Ethel (expecting her eighth child), and Teddy’s wife, Joan (carrying her third). As if keeping track of stock prices or electoral college votes, the press pointed out the new presidential baby would be the twenty-third grandchild for Joe and Rose Kennedy. The first lady’s doctors, aware of her past history of troubled pregnancies, advised that she give up all official duties until her baby was born late that summer.
Up at a horse farm in Cape Cod with her children, five weeks before her intended due date, Jackie felt premature cramps and slipped into labor. At the time, she was in a car driven by a Secret Service agent. Her two children, on their way to a Wednesday morning horse ride, had already dashed out the door. Jackie never left the vehicle. The driver called her doctor and then sped to the Kennedys’ rented summer house on Squaw Island, not far from Joe and Rose’s home in Hyannis Port. A helicopter flew the first lady to Otis Air Force Base’s hospital twenty miles away while the president was notified. Jack flew immediately from Washington in a small airplane. He was still in the air when his wife gave birth to a tiny, premature baby boy. He weighed only four pounds, ten ounces—barely enough to sustain himself. Jackie’s obstetrician, Dr. John Walsh, called for a Catholic priest and Father John Cahill, an air force chaplain, baptized the infant shortly after birth. His parents decided there would be another Patrick added to the Kennedy lineage— Patrick Bouvier Kennedy. He would spend the rest of his life in a glass-enclosed incubator.
Later that afternoon, President Kennedy viewed his brown-haired infant son for the first time, lying in a special private nursery set up for the occasion. By evening, he wheeled the incubator up to Jackie’s bed. Outside, reporters were informed that mother and child were doing fine, but inside the hospital, doctors feared the newest Kennedy might not survive. He suffered from hyaline membrane disease, an often fatal ailment common among premature babies. In an ambulance, they rushed the infant, wrapped in a blue blanket, to Children’s Medical Center in Boston. Little Patrick was accompanied by his worried father while Jackie convalesced at the Otis Air Force Base hospital. At one point, the president flew to Cape Cod to visit his wife, and then returned promptly to the Boston hospital. Over the next day and a half, the president hoped for a miracle, willing to try anything to save his dying son. As a desperate measure, the doctors recommended putting Patrick into a huge hyperbaric pressure chamber to force-feed oxygen to his starving lungs—a radical move that had not been tried before for such an ailment. By Thursday afternoon, the weary president called his wife at Otis and let her know of the serious turn in their baby’s condition. He dined alone that evening, lost in a reverie of thoughts. When he returned to the hospital once more, Bobby and Dave Powers were there at his side to buoy his spirits. The baby’s frail body wasn’t responding to treatment. Jack decided to spend the night near his son. He napped in a doctor’s lounge until early Friday morning, around 2:00 A.M., when he awoke with word that his son’s breathing was nearly at collapse. He hurried again to his son’s bedside and watched a team of five doctors, a nurse and a technician tend to his son; at four o’clock that morning, Patrick Bouvier Kennedy’s short life slipped away.
Against the glass wall of the oxygen chamber, Kennedy slammed his fist in anguish. “He put up quite a fight,” the president said, remorsefully.“He was a beautiful baby.”
Then Kennedy returned to the doctor’s lounge and wept.
THE SACRAMENT of baptism for young Patrick was soon followed by his burial Mass. The service was held at Cardinal Cushing’s residence, in a tiny, private chapel with just eighteen seats. Only the Kennedy family members were invited, Jackie’s sister and mother and a small circle of family inti mates. Jackie remained in the hospital, not to be released for another four days. Surprisingly, Frank Morrissey accompanied Cardinal Spellman, whose presence at the service was accepted as a gracious gesture to the grief-stricken family. Spellman knelt in the back. Wearing white vestments rather than the customary black for the requiem, Cushing sprinkled the baby’s flower-filled coffin with holy water and began the Mass of the Angels.“As soon as they leave this world,You give everlasting life to all little children reborn in the font of baptism, and we believe You have given it today to the soul of this little child,” Cushing prayed in his croaking voice. Kennedy could be seen weeping in the front row.
After the Mass, family members slowly exited in silence, broken only by muffled sobs on their way to the cemetery. The president, visibly upset, stayed inside the chapel until nearly everyone had left but the cardinal. Cushing watched as his friend stretched his arm across the white coffin and then placed inside it a gold St. Christopher’s medal Jackie once gave him as a gift. Kennedy, wracked with tears, appeared as though he co
uldn’t bear to leave his lost son.
“My dear Jack, let’s go,” Cushing finally urged him. “Let’s go, nothing more can be done.”
Cushing assured him that “God is good,” though the pain of the moment surely blunted his ability to envision it. The cardinal had presided over the marriage of Jack and Jackie, and now he was being called to bury their baby. “At the end of the Mass, I read a prayer I wrote that I thought would be a source of consolation to the mother, for she had now lost three children,” he later recalled. As they left the chapel, Cushing could not help weeping with his friend.
After the funeral,Kennedy returned to Squaw Island to care for Caroline and John while Jackie recuperated. The fragility of life, the strains on a marriage, and the sometimes brutal, inexplicable twists determined by a supposedly loving God were all exposed in this child’s death. “The loss of Patrick affected the President and Jackie more deeply than anybody but their closest friends realized,” Dave Powers recalled. Sorensen commented that the president “seemed even more broken than Jacqueline” by the infant’s death. For several weeks, Jackie stayed away from the White House, deciding to accept her sister’s arrangement of a Greek cruise aboard the giant yacht Christina, owned by shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis. Though Jack disliked Onassis, he didn’t stand in his wife’s way.“Jackie has my blessing to go anywhere that will make her feel better,” he explained. Jackie later told author Theodore H. White that, in their shared grief following the baby’s death, she and Jack were never closer, realizing their love for each other and commitment to their family.
Throughout the fall,Kennedy’s fatalistic apparitions persisted. When they chatted in October 1963, author Jim Bishop said Kennedy “seemed fascinated, in a melancholy way” about his book on Lincoln’s assassination. He confided to a friend that he, too, preferred to die by gunshot. Friendly historians such as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. dressed up Kennedy’s darker moments by saying the president was “possessed by a fatalism which drove him against the odds to meet his destiny,” just as others ignored his philandering. Less charitable chroniclers noted that the cortisone shots Kennedy injected to combat his Addison’s disease had invigorated his body, perhaps fueling his various trysts with women other than his wife. Kennedy’s Irish Catholicism didn’t hinder this behavior and may have been as much responsible for it as any part of his character. Let the Puritans and the ascetic priests be damned, his actions seemed to say, with all their dry restrictions. As Garry Wills observed about the Kennedys, “There was no hint of Jansenist views on sex.” His Irish fatalism and illicit sex were two parts of the same psyche, far from the one that Americans ever saw. The urges of life and death seemed to consume him like some Celtic king of old who knew he was not long for this world. With his own ironic, bittersweet humor, Jack Kennedy understood how quickly everything fades, how life is gone in a flicker, as he witnessed with his own son.
Several weeks after Patrick was buried inside a family plot at Holyhood Cemetery in Brookline, the president returned to Boston for a Harvard football game. During the game he appeared lost in his own private thoughts. Near halftime, the president’s gaze suddenly snapped to attention. He instructed his aides to bring him to the cemetery for an unannounced visit. “I want to go to Patrick’s grave,” he told them. At the gravesite, he looked at the stone face he had designed for his son, and the large “KENNEDY” inscribed in its granite. “He seems so alone here,” Kennedy sighed.
SINCE HIS ELECTION to the American presidency, the city of Dallas’s hatred for Kennedy remained thick and oppressive—just like the midday atmosphere of November 22, 1963, as Jackie Kennedy remembered it. (“Hot, wild. . . . The sun was so strong in our faces,” she recalled of their open-air limousine ride from Love Field airport.) Throughout the 1960 campaign, Dallas was an epicenter of hate, the home of numerous anti- Catholic bigots where pastors preached on the radio against Kennedy and Roman Catholicism in general.
Three years of John Kennedy in the White House had transformed so much of American life, had altered the flow of some of its deepest undercurrents. The country’s long-time nativist view toward Catholics, pervasive for most of the twentieth century,was beginning to dissipate. A Gallup poll taken in the early fall of 1963 showed that Kennedy’s conduct in office had significantly reduced the old stereotypes and biases. The percentage of Americans who agreed they’d vote for a qualified Catholic running for president had moved up from 70 percent in 1960 to 84 percent. Only 13 percent of the national sample said they refused to vote for a Catholic under any circumstance, and most of these were older voters and living in the South.
Over time,Kennedy gained credit for living up to his promise on church and state. By the fall of 1963, JFK accepted an invitation to appear that December as the main speaker before a once largely hostile Protestant group, the General Assemblies of God. The Reverend Eugene Carson Blake of the United Presbyterian Church would later say the invitation “clearly symbolized the beginning of a new era of hope for Christian cooperation in the United States.”Though Kennedy’s tenure was short, Blake added,“it was long enough to make abundantly clear that those who had feared, for any reason, a Roman Catholic President had misunderstood both the man and his church.” During this era, ecumenical actions between Protestants, Catholics and Jews emerged to support Kennedy’s nuclear test ban treaty, discuss birth control in impoverished lands and combat racism in the South. Kennedy’s tenure not only helped ease religious tensions but expanded the national dialogue to include immigrant and minority groups.
But his presidency didn’t seem to do much to change things in Dallas. On the morning of his arrival in 1963, a full-page ad in the Morning News, paid for by H. L. Hunt and other right-wing businessmen who abhorred Kennedy’s election, greeted the president with a frontal attack accusing him of all sorts of alleged misdeeds. “Why have you ordered . . . the Attorney General to go soft on Communism?” it screamed, in one of its more coherent charges. The ad was given a funereal black border, like a death announcement. Plastered around the city were placards with pictures of Kennedy and the slogan “Wanted for Treason.” A Morning News sports columnist instructed Kennedy to make sure his speech in Dallas was about something other than politics, such as sailing. “If it is about Cuber, civil rights, taxes or Vietnam,” the columnist lectured,“there will sure as shootin’ be some who heave to and let go with a broadside of grape shot in the presidential rigging.” When he saw the newspaper ad, Kennedy acted with revulsion and informed his wife,“We’re really in ‘nut country’ now.”
On the brief plane ride from an earlier stop in Fort Worth,Kennedy discussed the problem of political fanaticism in Dallas with the state’s Democratic U.S. senator, Ralph Yarborough, a liberal Democrat like himself. Texas was expected to be a key state in his 1964 reelection effort, and there were many fences to mend in the state’s Democratic Party. Rather than shy away, Kennedy hoped to bring the factions together. In Dallas, there seemed something in the air, the kinetic energy of impending violence that everyone in the presidential party seemed to sense, including his wife. “Jackie, if somebody wants to shoot me from a window with a rifle, nobody can stop it, so why worry about it?” he said to his wife before leaving that morning.
THE KENNEDYS were nearing their downtown destination, delighted by the long lines of friendly crowds along the motorcade route, when a cry rang out in the limousine.“Oh, no, no. . . .Oh my God, they have shot my husband!” Jackie screamed, as her husband clutched his throat and then, with another shot, his shattered head slumped toward her. Jack’s blood and bits of brain matter rushed into her lap, smearing her elegant pink suit. For years to come, the kaleidoscope of Zapruder film images and conspiracy theories surrounding Kennedy’s assassination would haunt America, as though some great truth might be revealed by its constant repetition. No one was ever sure why Kennedy was killed. The Warren Commission examining his death for an aggrieved nation concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald, with his own murky allegiance to communism, was a lone ass
assin— a contention thoroughly disputed for the next several decades. (The Warren report noted, in a small aside, that a Dallas police detective asked Lee Harvey Oswald whether some form of anti-Catholicism might be at play in his actions. Oswald denied any animus toward Catholics.)
In her own agony and grief, Jackie Kennedy made sure that concerns about her husband’s eternal soul were addressed. At Parkland Memorial Hospital, a Catholic priest, the Reverend Oscar Huber, administered the last rites to the president, who was lying on an emergency table, his face covered with a white sheet. Father Huber had been eating lunch at a nearby parish, heard the news and rushed to the hospital. When he gained entrance into the emergency room, Huber anointed the president’s body and began his prayers. Jackie stood beside her husband, sometimes kneeling on the bloody floor. She was dazed by all she’d witnessed, but joined in the prayers. The priest gave Kennedy conditional absolution in the belief that the president was sorry for his sins and was ready for death. “I see no reason why he wouldn’t be of the mind that death would probably come every time he entered into a large room of people,” Huber later explained. “In fact, it seems to me someone stated that he said,‘If they want to get you, they can get you no matter how many Secret Service men you might have surrounding you.’That would show he must have felt that death could come at anytime.”