These Few Precious Days

by Christopher Andersen

  No matter. Just hours after leaving Germany, JFK was given an equally hearty welcome in Ireland. Sixteen years earlier he had his ancestral homestead in County Wexford’s Dunganstown, and now his distant cousins welcomed the world’s most famous Irishman back with tea, cookies, hugs, and smiles. Here, in particular, people wanted to know how Jackie was doing, and they congratulated the president on their coming new addition to the family.

  JFK was exuberant, bounding up the stairs at the U.S. Embassy in Dublin and shouting, “They love me in Ireland!” JFK was still in a jovial mood when he stopped over in England to compare notes on the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty with Harold Macmillan. The British prime minister later wrote that the president’s disposition was “puckish”—due partly to the resounding success of his “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech but also to improved conditions on the home front, mainly Jackie’s pregnancy.

  From London, Jack flew on to Rome, where the Vatican was still reeling from the death of the beloved reformist pope John XXIII. “The two Johns” were often linked in praise for ushering in a new era of change, but ironically they had never met. Instead, Jack met with John XXIII’s successor, Pope Paul VI, whose coronation had taken place less than twenty-four hours earlier. Back home, the press held its collective breath to see if America’s first Catholic president would kneel before the new pope and kiss the ring of St. Peter. As the two men came together for the first time, Jack smiled broadly, reached out, and firmly shook the pontiff’s hand.

  BACK AT HYANNIS PORT, JACKIE was reminded of her own precarious position when Joan suffered a miscarriage in June, just six weeks before her baby was due. She and Teddy already had a daughter and a son, but he was in a race to outdo Bobby, and Joan felt “under pressure” to reproduce. Jackie understood completely. When Ethel gave birth to her eighth child—the second of her sons to be born on the Fourth of July—Jackie invited Joan to Squaw Island. “Jackie was so wonderful,” Joan said of her sister-in-law’s efforts to console her. “So wonderful.”

  That summer, Mimi Beardsley had returned to the White House for a second internship, although now her services were largely restricted to supervising the staged photo shoots inside the Oval Office. When Mimi told the president that she was dating a young Williams College student, Jack the Harvard man reacted with mock indignation. “Williams!” he gasped. “How could you?” But now that Jackie was pregnant, JFK seemed more than willing to curtail his extracurricular activities. He was intent on spending every free moment with his family at Hyannis Port, and that was fine with Mimi.

  Jack’s customary blasé attitude about such matters was much in evidence when he returned to Washington from Europe. Mimi had invited her roommates, fellow Miss Porters alumni Wendy Taylor and Marnie Stuart, for a swim in the White House pool when JFK suddenly walked in. After putting on his trunks and joining Mimi and her dumbstruck friends in the pool, Jack called for someone to bring down a large box and set it by the pool. Inside the box were animal pelts—fox, rabbit, squirrel, and mink—and Jack asked the three bewildered coeds to pick them up and examine them carefully. Before they could get too excited, he told the young women that he was picking out a present for Jackie. “He was planning to give Mrs. Kennedy a fur throw for Christmas,” Mimi said, “and wanted the opinion of three fellow Farmington girls about which fur was the softest.”

  Jackie spent most of July on Squaw Island painting on her second-floor sunporch, reading Kipling, and drawing up plans to convert a small guest room in the White House into a nursery. She was also planning for her return to public life later that year. Mary Gallagher, imported for the months of July and August, met with Jackie nearly every weekday to cope with the hundreds of letters she received each day from around the world. In addition to ironing out the details of her various preservation projects (should the new guard boxes outside the White House be green or white?) Jackie bombarded J. B. West with notes on a wide range of household issues and peppered Oleg Cassini with her latest fashion ideas.

  “Jackie never specifically wore maternity clothes,” Cassini recalled, “and I never created anything that was a maternity dress.” Jackie did, however, wear Cassini’s clothes throughout her last pregnancy. “Some clothes just lent themselves to being used in that way, especially the A‑line or princess-line dresses. We sent quite a few air freight packages to Squaw Island that summer.”

  During these lazy weekdays without Jack, Jackie often walked from Brambletyde to the main Kennedy compound to spend time with her father-in-law. She read the newspapers to him, brought him up to date on what was going on in the children’s lives, and shared tidbits of gossip gleaned from friends and the scandal sheets she devoured. (Throughout her life Jackie was an avid tabloid reader, and circled in red ink all the items that were written about her.)

  “Jackie and Joe were closer than ever that summer,” said Secret Service agent Ham Brown. “After the stroke, she went right on talking to him as if nothing had changed. She never talked down to him the way some people do. He really loved her like a daughter. You could see it in his eyes.”

  Late each Friday, Jack would arrive for the weekend with the usual fanfare. As soon as the presidential helicopter landed in the front yard of Joe Kennedy’s Hyannis Port residence, a dozen or more Kennedy cousins came running with Caroline in the lead. Then Jack would jump behind the wheel of a waiting golf cart, shout “Anyone for ice cream?!” and wait for all twelve kids to climb aboard. With everyone hanging on for dear life, the president then zoomed the few blocks to the tiny news store that served ice cream and candy. “The grin on his face,” Brown said, “was a mile wide.”

  The president was also delighted by Jackie’s reaction when she opened the gift he brought back from Europe: a small, two-thousand-year-old bust of a young boy. She was equally impressed with what he picked up for the Oval Office—a small rendering of Herakles (Hercules) circa 500 B.C. After Jackie teased him for having such exquisite taste, Jack confessed that he had dispatched Lem Billings to pick out the antiquities while he chatted up the new pope.

  For the two or three days a week the president managed to carve out for Hyannis Port, everyone followed the usual summer routine: noontime lunch cruises aboard the Honey Fitz, touch football on the lawn, golf at Hyannis Country Club, maybe a short sail on his twenty-six-footer, Victura, or dinner with Joe when it was possible.

  There was no question that the new baby was continuing to pull Jack and Jackie closer together. Squaw Island house guest Red Fay went looking for his friend and found him—lying on the bed in room with Jackie in his arms. After a red-faced Red sputtered his apologies, Jack just laughed. “Don’t worry about it,” he told his mortified buddy. “We’re just lying here chatting.”

  There were tense moments, as well. If the baby arrived on schedule in early September, Jackie intended to have it delivered by caesarean section at Walter Reed Army Hospital. But there was also a backup plan if the baby came early. In that event, she would be taken to Otis Air Force Base Hospital, just twenty miles from Hyannis Port. JFK also asked Jackie’s obstetrician, Dr. John Walsh, to spend the rest of the summer at Hyannis Port, just in case.

  The third week in July, Jackie awoke feeling queasy and faint. Jack immediately sent for the doctor and then stayed by Jackie’s side, holding her hand and offering words of comfort and reassurance. It was a side of Jack that their friend Jim Reed, who stayed with them that week, had seldom witnessed.

  As a desperate search went on for Dr. Walsh, a more familiar side of the president emerged. Out of Jackie’s earshot so as not to upset her, he demanded to know “where the hell is that Goddamned doctor? He is here for emergencies just like this. Why in the hell does he think he’s up here?” Soon Walsh did appear, explaining that he had been taking a brief walk along the beach. The doctor quickly determined that it was a false alarm and Jackie was fine, and Jack’s mood understandably lightened. “In the future, Dr. Walsh,” he said politely, “always tell someone where you are and how you can be reached immediately.�
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  Jack was anything but polite when he picked up the Washington Post on July 25 and saw a photo of a young officer proudly posing next to an expensive new U.S. Navy project: a bedroom at Otis Air Force Base Hospital specially furnished for the first lady. According to the article, the bed, dresser, nightstand, and lamp cost a then-astounding five thousand dollars.

  Angry at the expense, not to mention the potential for negative publicity, JFK promptly called Assistant Secretary of Defense Arthur Sylvester. “Five thousand for that?” he shouted into the phone before threatening to cut the Air Force budget. A follow-up call to his Air Force aide, General Godfrey McHugh, was even more heated. Again threatening to cut the budget “another billion dollars,” the president railed against the “silly bastard” smiling in the photo. “Silly bastard!” he shouted again and again. “I wouldn’t have him running a cathouse!” In the end, he also demanded that the officer “have his ass transferred out of there in about a month”—to Alaska. Searching for more expletives, JFK concluded that the whole episode was “obviously a fuckup.”

  ONCE HER HUSBAND AND HIS entourage departed each Monday, Jackie breathed a sigh of relief. “She loved having him there of course,” Cassini said. “She missed him. But she was determined to have that baby, and she needed for things to be calm.”

  As she had during her previous pregnancies, Jackie continued to smoke. The surgeon general’s report outlining the dangers of smoking in clinical detail had not yet been released, but the obvious deleterious effects of smoking cigarettes had been known for well over a century.

  The general public was also aware that smoking was believed to cause low birth weight. In fact, many expectant mothers in the 1960s smoked for just that purpose—to keep the baby’s weight down, and theoretically make delivery easier. Some mothers also saw it as a way to keep their own weight under control. Jackie had dieted to regain her figure almost immediately after the birth of Caroline and John, and this time she was planning on doing the same. Looking ahead to life after the birth of her third child, Jackie asked J. B. West if a vibrating-belt weight-loss machine could be installed for her in the White House exercise room.

  In light of her previous obstetrical difficulties, Dr. Walsh strongly urged the first lady to quit smoking. So did Dr. Janet Travell, Jack’s omnipresent back doctor. Jackie was so adept at concealing her nicotine habit from the world—and she would do this for the rest of her life—that perhaps they thought she did quit, or at the very least cut back.

  In stark contrast to Jack’s boozy Sequoia bash two months earlier, Jackie quietly celebrated her thirty-fourth birthday on July 28 smoking and reading aboard the Honey Fitz, then dining with Jack and the children at Brambletyde.

  On August 5, 1963, Secretary of State Dean Rusk signed the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in Moscow—a crowning foreign policy achievement for the Kennedy administration. That night, while Jackie remained at Squaw Island, Jack dined with Mary Meyer upstairs at the White House. Their sexual relationship apparently over, JFK and Meyer nevertheless remained friends. “The test ban treaty was a major victory for President Kennedy,” Pierre Salinger said, adding that at such times JFK “hated to be alone.”

  Two days later, at eleven in the morning, Jackie took Caroline to her riding lesson at nearby Osterville stables. They had just arrived and were walking toward the ring when Jackie turned to Secret Service agent Paul Landis and asked him to drive her back to the house—“Right now, Mr. Landis.”

  One of the agents assigned to the Kiddie Detail stayed behind at the stables while Landis helped her into the rear seat. The agent then floored the accelerator, and the car sped off down the narrow, winding country road back toward Squaw Island. With Jackie pleading with him to hurry, Landis radioed headquarters to have Dr. Walsh come to the house and ready the helicopter. Clint Hill, who was enjoying his day off, was also called. “Oh God,” Hill remembered thinking. “The baby isn’t due for another five weeks. She can’t have the baby now, it’s too early.”

  DR. WALSH DROVE UP TO BRAMBLETYDE just as Landis was helping Jackie out of the car. “I think I’m going to have that baby,” she told him flatly. After a quick examination, Walsh confirmed she was in labor and had to be transported to the hospital immediately.

  Shortly after 11 a.m., Agent Landis was walking Jackie toward the helicopter that would take her to the hospital when Dr. Travell, who was also staying at Hyannis Port that summer, arrived at the scene. “Should I notify the President?” Travell asked.

  “No!” Jackie shouted as she climbed into the chopper bound for Otis Air Force Base with Dr. Walsh and Mary Gallagher at her side. Though surprised at the time, Travell believed Jackie was on some level “holding onto the slim hope” that this was another false alarm.

  Clearly, that hope was fading fast. “Dr. Walsh,” Jackie pleaded, “you’ve just got to get me to the hospital on time! I don’t want anything to happen to this baby.”

  “We’ll have you there in plenty of time,” Walsh reassured her, but Jackie was far from certain. “Please hurry,” she begged. “This baby mustn’t be born dead!”

  Nothing must happen to Patrick. I just can’t bear to think of the effect it might have on Jackie.

  —JACK, TO JACKIE’S MOTHER, JANET AUCHINCLOSS

  There had always been this wall between them, but their shared grief tore that wall down. At long last, they were truly coming closer together. But it would prove to be too late.

  —THEODORE WHITE

  There was a growing tenderness. I think their marriage was really beginning to work at the end.

  —ROSWELL GILPATRIC, FRIEND

  We were about to have a real life together.

  —JACKIE

  10

  “If I Ever Lost You”

  After ten minutes in the air, the helicopter landed at Otis Air Force Base and Jackie was whisked to the special presidential wing that had been set up to handle just such a medical emergency. Clint Hill, who had separately radioed the Secret Service Command Center and told them to notify the president, arrived at Otis by car and rushed to Jackie’s side. Hill touched Jackie’s arm and reassured her that everything was going to be okay, but there was no escaping the worry in her eyes.

  At 12:52 p.m., Wednesday, August 7, 1963, Jackie gave birth by caesarean section to a four-pound, ten-and-a-half-ounce boy who was immediately placed in an oxygen-fed Isolette incubator. Despite Jackie’s insistence that her husband not be notified, JFK was in the air and headed for the hospital even before the baby’s delivery. To further complicate matters, the president was not able to fly aboard one of the large planes that usually served as Air Force One. Since he wasn’t scheduled to travel until Friday, one plane was in the air on a flight check and the other was undergoing routine maintenance. Once at Andrews, JFK and his party commandeered one of the slower, eight-passenger JetStars sitting on the tarmac.

  “It was obviously a tense flight,” recalled Pierre Salinger, who along with Nancy Tuckerman and Pamela Turnure “dropped everything” to accompany JFK on the flight to Otis. “Nobody knew what to say, and President Kennedy spent most of the fight staring out the window, lost in his own thoughts.”

  The president’s plane touched down at Otis at 1:35 p.m. and ten minutes later he walked into the hospital. Before leaving Washington, Jack had called his Hyannis Port friend and neighbor Larry Newman from the Oval Office and asked him to drive over to the hospital “just to be there for Jackie.” Newman was sitting in the lobby when JFK walked in.

  “He almost threw his arms around me, but then his natural reserve kicked in and he grabbed my hand,” Newman recalled.

  “Thanks for being here, Larry,” he said. “It make me feel so much better just knowing you were here.”

  Newman was struck by “the emotion in his eyes. We’d known each other for so long, but I’d never seen this depth of feeling before. He was very emotional, and deeply worried about Jackie.”

  Jackie was still in surgery when he arrived, but as soon as she regain
ed consciousness he went in to see her, and then the baby. In the hallway outside, he conferred with Dr. Walsh. The news was not good. The baby was born with hyaline membrane disease, a severe respiratory disorder not uncommon among premature infants. It was, in fact, the same condition shared by John and his stillborn sister, Arabella. A specialist from Boston, Dr. James E. Drorbaugh, was being flown in to help decide the best course of action.

  In the meantime, JFK approached Clint Hill and asked him to find the base chaplain so that the baby could be baptized immediately. Less than twenty minutes later, the baby was christened Patrick Bouvier Kennedy, after Jack’s paternal grandfather and Black Jack Bouvier.

  For the moment, no mention would be made of the baby’s medical problems. In announcing Patrick’s birth to reporters waiting outside the hospital, Salinger would only say that he was five and a half weeks premature and that “the baby’s condition is described by the doctors as good, and Mrs. Kennedy’s condition is described as good.” In fact, Jackie was also in a weakened condition, having undergone two major blood transfusions following her caesarean.

  It was agreed that Patrick should immediately be transported by ambulance to Children’s Hospital in Boston, where he would get better treatment. Jack broke the news to Jackie. “Oh no, Jack,” she said. “Does he have to go? I want to be with him, Jack.”

  “It’s just a precaution, Jackie,” he explained. “Apparently he’s got the same lung problem John had. The doctors think it’s best just to play it safe. Everything will be okay.”