These Few Precious Days

by Christopher Andersen

  But she knew why. Four days earlier, National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy had rushed to the residence at 8 a.m. to show the president aerial photos taken by a U‑2 spy plane the night before. The images showed the clear presence of offensive nuclear weapons in Cuba—intermediate-range Soviet missiles capable of striking the United States capital.

  For the next week, the president maintained what appeared to be a normal schedule while top-secret meetings went on at the White House. JFK went ahead with planned trips to Connecticut and the Midwest, then returned to meet with members of the Executive Committee of the National Security Council—the ExComm—to devise a strategy for coping with this newest threat to world peace.

  This business-as-usual ruse worked so well that even White House staffers were unaware that key ExComm members were secretly camping out at the Executive Mansion, some sleeping on cots and couches. Jack let his wife know that the situation was serious, and that for the moment the best thing to do was keep everyone—including the Soviets—in the dark. “We can’t let them know that we know what they’re up to—not yet,” he said. “We don’t want to tip our hand.”

  It quickly became apparent that JFK’s options were few. The United States could take out the missiles with an air strike, invade Cuba, negotiate a settlement through the United Nations, or enforce a naval blockade of the island. Jack’s first impulse was decisive military action, preferably an air strike to take the missiles out before they were fully operational.

  From the outset, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara strongly disagreed, arguing for a blockade. Positions seesawed back and forth until Bundy, backed by the Joint Chiefs, surprised everyone by calling for an air strike. It was then that Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell Gilpatric, who happened to be one of Jackie’s closest friends, made a case for caution that was elegant in its simplicity. “Essentially, Mr. President,” he said, “this is a choice between limited action and unlimited action, and most of us think that it’s better to start with limited action.”

  Early on, Secret Service agent Clint Hill had tried to gently broach the subject of what might happen in the event things spiraled out of control. J. B. West had already given the first lady a tour of the bomb shelter beneath the White House, and that, said Hill, was where she and the children would be taken if there weren’t time to evacuate.

  “Mr. Hill,” Jackie stated flatly, “if the situation develops, I will take Caroline and John, and we will walk hand in hand out onto the south grounds. We will stand there like brave soldiers, and face the fate of every other American.”

  Jack knew Jackie too well to solemnly confront her with the worst-case scenario. He was far too cool even in such times of crisis, Jackie explained, “to say, ‘Sit down, I have something to tell you.’” But when she heard of contingency plans to evacuate her and the children to the underground facility at Camp David, the presidential retreat high atop Maryland’s Catoctin Mountains, Jackie protested. “Please don’t send me away to Camp David,” she pleaded with Jack, who presumably would have stayed behind with his top advisers in the crowded White House bomb shelter in the event of a nuclear attack. “Please don’t send me anywhere if anything happens, we’re all going to stay right here with you.”

  “But Jackie …”

  “Even if there’s no room in the bomb shelter in the White House …,” she went on. “Please, then I just want to be on the lawn when it happens. I want to be with you, I want to die with you, and the children do too—rather than live without you.”

  Jack looked deep into her eyes. “All right,” he said, “then I promise, I won’t send you and the children away.” Jackie detected a sense of relief in her husband’s voice. “He didn’t really want to send me away, either,” she said of that moment. Later, Jackie was shocked to learn how many wives of top government officials did depart Washington, leaving their husbands behind. “My God,” she said. “I don’t think that shows you love your husband very much!”

  Now that she was being summoned back to the White House from Glen Ora, Jackie knew things had taken a turn for the worse. New photos of the missile sites in Cuba showed that the Soviets were now assembling SS‑5 missiles capable of striking any target in the United States. The president would soon have to take action that would inevitably bring the world closer to nuclear war than it had ever been. He wanted his wife and children close at hand.

  At Glen Ora on October 20, Jackie woke Caroline and John from their naps and asked Clint Hill to call for a helicopter to take them all back to the Washington. Early the next morning, J. B. West was awakened at home by an urgent call from the first lady. Minutes later, he was entering the family quarters of the White House through a side door, so as not to arouse suspicion.

  “Thank you so much for coming, Mr. West,” she said matter-of-factly. “There’s something brewing that might turn out to be a big catastrophe—which means we might have to cancel the dinner and dance for the Maharaja and Maharani of Jaipur Tuesday night.” As it happened, the Kennedys would still entertain the visiting Indian dignitaries that Tuesday with a small dinner party. In fact, they would entertain virtually every night during the crisis, partly to keep up their own morale and particularly to maintain the illusion of business as usual.

  Jackie would describe the rest of the thirteen-day crisis as “a time when there was no day or night”—just round-the-clock meetings, cables, briefings, and phone calls interspersed with catnaps and the rare two hours of uninterrupted sleep. At one point, Bobby donned riding clothes and drove to the White House in a convertible—all part of ongoing attempts to fool the press.

  One night, Jackie drifted over to Jack’s bedroom wearing a diaphanous nightgown and saw her husband lying on the bed and talking—or so she thought—on the phone. “I’d been in and out of there all evening,” recalled Jackie, who ran toward her husband’s bed only to have him wave her away. “Get out! Get out!” JFK shouted. When she turned, Jackie realized that owlish, stiff-collared McGeorge Bundy was standing there. “Poor puritan Bundy,” she laughed, “to see a woman running in her nightgown. He threw both hands over his eyes.” Another night, the president and first lady awoke to see a sheepish Bundy standing at the foot of the bed with an urgent cable.

  “That’s the time I’ve been closest to him,” said Jackie, who stayed close at hand and made a point of sleeping with him “even if it was only for a nap.” At times, she waited outside the Oval Office or eavesdropped at the door of the Treaty Room, where ExComm members thrashed out opposing views.

  Jackie was surprised when, on the spur of the moment, Jack asked her to join him for a walk around the grounds. “It’s funny,” she said. “You know, he didn’t very often do that. We just sort of walked quietly, then we’d go back in. It was just this … vigil.”

  Even Jackie, a master at concealing her emotions, was impressed by Jack’s ability not to surrender to despair. But as he pondered the very real possibility of a global thermonuclear war, JFK’s mask of confidence slipped as they took one of their strolls on the South Lawn. “We’ve already had a chance,” he told Jackie, “but what about all the children?”

  On Monday evening, October 22, JFK sat at his desk in the Oval Office and spoke to the nation. In his seventeen-minute address, he outlined the dimensions of the Soviet military buildup just ninety miles off the coast of Florida, and demanded that the Soviet Union “halt and eliminate this clandestine, reckless, and provocative threat to world peace.”

  He then warned both Cuba and the Soviets that he had “directed the armed forces to prepare for any eventualities,” and spelled out the immediate steps the United States was taking—most notably, a naval blockade of Cuba aimed at halting Soviet ships with cargo that included offensive weapons.

  “My fellow citizens,” JFK concluded, “let no one doubt that this is a difficult and dangerous effort on which we have set out … The cost of freedom is always high—and Americans have always paid it. And one path we shall never choose, and that is the path of surrend
er and submission.”

  Now they played a waiting game. Would the unrepentantly bellicose Khrushchev up the ante, pushing the world ever closer to nuclear Armageddon? Or would the Soviets, fearing the consequences of a direct military confrontation, simply back down?

  In the meantime, Jack explained to his wife that, contrary to her dramatic statement, no one was going to go standing on the White House lawn if war was imminent. He did, however, have the unenviable task of deciding who would be joining his immediate family in the emergency national headquarters carved out of Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains, thirty miles outside Washington. “I’m afraid,” JFK later told Ben and Tony Bradlee over dinner, “neither of you made it.”

  Understandably, Jackie was now smoking up a storm, and both she and Jack were leaning more heavily than ever on the good services of Dr. Feelgood. Now Max Jacobson, who had been greatly influenced by Swiss rejuvenation pioneer Dr. Paul Niehans, was adding animal cells to his injections—including placenta, bone, and liver cells. He did not volunteer the information to either the president or the first lady and, he later said, “they never asked.”

  Indeed, by mid-1962 the Kennedys had become so dependent on Jacobson’s pick-me-ups that Jack, concerned that the press would eventually find out what the shady Dr. Feelgood was up to, repeatedly invited him to move into the White House. That way, the president reasoned, Jacobson could merely be described as a member of JFK’s medical team and be more easily shielded from the press by the Secret Service.

  Dr. Max declined to leave New York, where he numbered among his patients some four hundred multiple sclerosis sufferers. “I could never abandon them,” explained Jacobson, who nevertheless continued to make himself available to JFK and Jackie virtually around the clock. Jacobson also refused the president’s periodic attempts to pay him, claiming this was merely his way to pay back the adopted country he loved. After Dr. Max discovered several hundred-dollar bills a Secret Service agent had surreptitiously planted in his coat pocket, the doctor mailed the money back to JFK.

  “They both had remarkable stores of energy,” Chuck Spalding said, “but I doubt if they could have functioned at the level they did without Max’s help. He was a crazy guy, and even then I worried about what he was doing. Max was also indispensable. They needed him.”

  Jack also needed close friends to confide in during this tense period, and Spalding was called more frequently than most. “He’d find me, wherever I was,” Chuck said, “and call me up in the middle of the night. Just to relieve his tension, I guess. He would talk about anything from Voltaire to girls, always warm and funny.”

  While millions of frightened Americans emptied out supermarkets, practiced air raid drills, and flocked to churches to pray, Jackie tried to bolster her husband’s spirits. Toward that end, she quickly threw together a small dinner party to take place immediately after Jack’s ominous-sounding address to the nation.

  “Jackie tried to be upbeat,” said Oleg Cassini, one of the half-dozen guests. “But it was a tense evening.” McGeorge Bundy drifted in several times, and when Jack got up to take a call, Cassini followed him. The president’s mood was “detached, fatalistic.” Yet Cassini was impressed with how his friend “refused to seem depressed or overwhelmed by the immensity of the moment.”

  Cassini was also among the guests at a dinner party the next evening, this one thrown together to substitute for a dinner dance that had originally been planned for the Maharaja and Maharani of Jaipur. This time, Jackie shuttled between her guests in the State Dining Room and the West Hall on the second floor, where JFK and David Ormsby-Gore, British ambassador to the United States, squatted on the floor, going over the latest missile photographs.

  Once again, Cassini was impressed with Jack’s air of “elegant fatalism. He believed, ‘I’ll do my best, in my style, and leave the rest to God.’ Jack could be serious, even solemn, yet never defeated or deflated. He always had that spark, for want of a better word. This was equally true of Jackie.”

  The next morning—Wednesday, October 24—JFK was meeting with ExComm members when word came that Soviet cargo ships carrying missiles were turning back. “We’re eyeball to eyeball,” Secretary of State Dean Rusk said, “and I think the other fellow just blinked.”

  Jack remained cautious. The United States still had to find a way to remove the Soviet missiles already on the ground in Cuba. “Well,” he said after one long puff on his cigar, “we still have twenty chances out of a hundred to still be at war with Russia.”

  Later, Oleg Cassini managed to get JFK alone for a few moments. “Mr. President,” he asked, “are you saying war is still possible?”

  “Oh yes,” JFK replied without hesitation. “It’s possible, all right.”

  Nevertheless, the world breathed a giant sigh of relief. Spalding was driving from Connecticut to his office in Manhattan when he heard the news on his car radio. He pulled over and called the White House from the first phone booth he could find. “You did it! You did it!” Spalding told Jack.

  “So I trust,” JFK said nonchalantly, “the boys on Wall Street are pleased as well.” Spalding, like most of his countrymen, had been “sweating bullets” about the outcome. Yet “here the world had been pulled back from the brink of nuclear destruction, and he was calm enough to make that kind of casual, witty remark.”

  With events apparently still moving in the right direction, Jackie headed off for Glen Ora that Saturday to ride in the opening meet of the Orange County Hunt. Within hours of Jackie’s departure, Mimi Beardsley arrived with her overnight bag—just in time for the crisis to take another dark turn.

  That evening, she waited upstairs while JFK met with ExComm members. He managed to come up to the residence for a quick drink but “his expression was grave … Even his quips had a half-hearted, funereal tone.” After returning from one meeting, he told the college sophomore, “I’d rather my children be red than dead.” She concluded that “these were the words of a father who adored his children and couldn’t bear them being hurt.”

  That night, Jack did not join Mimi upstairs. Instead, he and Dave Powers unwound that night in the White House theater watching one of JFK’s favorite films, 1953’s Roman Holiday. Given Jack’s fondness for action movies and westerns, the romantic comedy starring Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn seemed out of character. Kennedy had briefly dated Hepburn before he was married, but apparently that wasn’t the main reason he screened Roman Holiday again and again. In her Oscar-winning American screen debut, the saucer-eyed, winsome Hepburn played a headstrong young princess who falls for an American reporter (Peck) during her one day of freedom in Rome. During another screening of the movie, Jack leaned over to Cassini and whispered, “Doesn’t she remind you of Jackie?”

  ONCE THE CRISIS WAS OVER, Jack searched for a way to thank the ExComm members and other advisers—Bundy, McNamara, Rusk, Gilpatric, Salinger, and so on—for going without sleep for days on end as they searched for a solution. He wanted them to know “how much it meant to have them stick by me.” He decided on a sterling silver calendar showing the month of October with the recipient’s initials and “J.F.K.” in script at the top. The thirteen perilous days—October 16 through October 28—were highlighted.

  Tish Baldrige took JFK’s hand-drawn design to her old boss, Tiffany chairman Walter Hoving, who then went ahead and produced forty of the calendars. However, he refused JFK’s request for a discount. “Never!” Hoving protested. “Abraham Lincoln tried to get a discount from Tiffany on a pearl necklace for his wife and we wouldn’t do it. We never give discounts to presidents.”

  After the predictable blowup (“What? You tell that bastard Hoving …”), Jack paid for the calendars out of his own pocket. On the day they arrived Jackie discovered Jack had ordered one for her as well. Completely taken by surprise, she unwrapped it, placed it on the desk she had inherited from her father—and burst into tears.

  In the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Jack’s popularity soared to an impressive 76 p
ercent in the polls—enough to ensure a solid showing for the Democrats in the 1962 midterm elections. Among the six new Democratic senators: thirty-four-year-old Teddy Kennedy, who despite having no political experience and a tarnished past (he was expelled from Harvard for cheating) sailed to a lopsided two-to-one victory in Massachusetts.

  With one son in the White House, another serving as U.S. attorney general, and now another in the U.S. Senate, Papa Joe’s dreams of dynastic glory were being realized. Yet at the series of small get-togethers the Kennedys hosted to celebrate JFK’s triumphs on both the world and domestic stages, Kennedy himself refused to gloat. Over dinner with the Bradlees, Jack downplayed the significance of his so‑called victory over the Soviets. He predicted that a misstep between the two superpowers would inevitably lead to a war that would “wipe out all of us at this table and our children.”

  “Jack could make these grim statements with a twinkle in his eye,” the Kennedys’ friend George Plimpton said. “He meant what he was saying, but he also wasn’t going to let it get in the way of his enjoyment of life.”

  Not even when it came to predicting the possible circumstances of his own death, which he did frequently. JFK believed assassination was “not unlikely,” and that if it were to happen he would be shot “while riding in an open car through a downtown street, with all the people and the noise.”

  One Sunday JFK’s Hyannis Port neighbor Larry Newman was sitting next to the president at Mass. Gesturing to the people sitting around him, Kennedy leaned to Newsman and asked nonchalantly, “Do you think if somebody tried to take a shot at me, they’d get one of you first?”

  Newman swallowed hard. “No, Mr. President,” he replied. “But now that I think of it, I won’t be sitting with you next Sunday!”

  “That’s okay,” JFK said with a grin, turning to look at the reporters seated just a few rows behind him. “I still have the press right behind me for protection.”