Jackie would never get to hold her infant son in her arms, or even touch him. But she would at least be allowed to see him once—if only for a few fleeting minutes. Jack wheeled tiny Patrick’s incubator into Jackie’s room so that she could say goodbye, then accompanied him to the ambulance. Mary Gallagher was standing in the hallway and got a glimpse of Patrick as he was wheeled past. “His hair was dark,” she said, “his features well-formed.”
At 5:55 p.m., the ambulance carrying Patrick departed for Boston with a full police escort. Jack spent a few more minutes with Jackie, then rushed to Squaw Island to spend time with Caroline and John.
AT MAUD SHAW’S URGING, CAROLINE had been praying for her mother and new baby brother. Now she and John lit up as their father walked through the front door. “Patrick has a little problem breathing and has to go to a hospital in Boston where they can make him better,” he explained patiently. “Mommy is fine, everything is going to be okay.”
An hour later, JFK returned to Otis to check on Jackie before flying on to Boston. He was pleased to find Louella Hennessey, the Kennedy family private nurse who had cared for Jackie after John’s birth, sitting at the first lady’s bedside.
At 8:45 p.m., JFK’s helicopter, emblazoned with the presidential seal, lifted off from Otis. It landed at Boston’s Logan Airport twenty minutes later. As his motorcade made its way through downtown Boston, crowds lining the streets waved and cheered.
JFK was soon shuttling between a suite at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel and Children’s Hospital, where a team of Harvard-trained specialists worked feverishly to keep the president’s son alive. Jack also flew in an expert of his own—Dr. Sam Levine from New York’s Cornell Medical Center, the doctor who had treated Lee Radziwill’s daughter just two years earlier.
After ninety minutes quizzing doctors and watching his tiny son struggle for every breath, Jack returned to the Ritz-Carlton. The crowds this time were even larger and more enthusiastic, and larger still when he made the short trip back to Children’s Hospital the next day. At 10:40 a.m. on Thursday, with thousands of cheering people lining the roadways in both directions, the president flew back to Otis Air Force Base to bolster Jackie’s spirits.
He planned to check in on Caroline and John as well, but at 1:14 p.m. the doctors in Boston called with disturbing news. In a last-ditch effort to keep Patrick breathing, they were moving him to the adjacent Harvard School of Public Health and placing the newborn in a thirty-one-foot-long hyperbaric chamber.
“After consulting with the doctors,” a grim-faced Salinger announced, “the President is returning to Boston immediately.” This time when his motorcade sped toward the hospital, the people were still there, and in even greater numbers than before, but they were solemn. Now America and the world, transfixed by the unfolding drama, prayed for tiny Patrick’s recovery.
Jackie, meanwhile, drifted in and out of consciousness. The president and her doctors agreed that, in the interest of her recovery, she not be told everything. “What’s the point?” Jack asked Hennessey rhetorically. “I don’t see the point …”
JFK wound up checking on the baby four times that day, and was joined at one point by Janet, the baby’s grandmother. “Nothing must happen to Patrick,” he told her. “I just can’t bear to think of the effect it might have on Jackie.” Reporters swarmed around Jackie’s mother when she left the hospital, peppering with questions about Patrick’s condition. “He’s doing very well,” she replied unconvincingly. “Although maintaining her poise,” one paper reported, “Mrs. Auchincloss appeared somewhat distressed.”
That night, Jack refused to leave the hospital. Instead, he and Dave Powers moved into a vacant room five floors above the basement oxygen chamber where Patrick battled for his life. To make the modest room more suitable for their important guest, the hospital furnished it with a desk, multiple phone lines—and a padded rocker.
At 2 a.m. Friday, Powers awakened the president to tell him Patrick had taken a turn for the worse. He was now in critical condition. On the way to the elevator that would take them downstairs, JFK and Powers passed the room of a severely burned child. Jack stopped the night nurse and asked about the child, then dashed off a heartfelt note of encouragement to the mother. “There he was, with his own baby dying downstairs,” Powers said, “but he had to take the time to write a note to that poor woman, asking her to keep her courage up.”
Just outside the door to the chamber, JFK and Powers were given surgical gowns, masks, and caps. They would not be allowed inside the chamber—that required a far more elaborate pressurized body suit and helmet—but they could observe what was happening through a small window in the door. For the next ninety minutes, JFK paced in the corridor, stopping every now and then to look inside at the doctors in their Buck Rogers outfits bending over Patrick’s incubator.
It was no use. There was nothing more the elite medical team could do. The door opened, and the baby was wheeled out into the hallway. One of the doctors lifted Patrick out of the incubator, and, after telling Jack the baby had only a few more minutes to live, they gently placed him in the president’s arms.
At 4:04 on Friday morning, April 9, Patrick Bouvier Kennedy died of cardiac arrest in his father’s arms. He had lived thirty-nine hours and twelve minutes. Back at Otis Air Force Base, Jackie had been restless all night long, tossing and turning and unable to find a moment’s peace. At the same moment Patrick passed away, the night nurse noticed something strange. As if a switch had been flipped, Jackie abruptly stopped stirring and fell into a deep, peaceful sleep.
“He put up quite a fight,” Jack told Powers. “He was a beautiful baby.” Then the president returned to the vacant room upstairs, closed the door behind him, sat on the edge of the bed, and wept. Jack was too proud to let anyone see him crying, “so,” Powers said, “he asked me to go outside and telephone Teddy.”
JFK felt John Walsh was best equipped to break the news to Jackie. When the doctor arrived to tell her the tragic news at 6:25 a.m., he tried to avoid the red-rimmed eyes of nurses, orderlies, Secret Service agents, and Air Force officers. “It was a national tragedy,” Salinger said. “Did I cry? You bet I did. Anybody with a pulse cried, especially if you knew them. It was just terribly, terribly sad.”
After Dr. Walsh left, Jackie’s quiet sobs were nonetheless audible in the hallway. “If you weren’t weeping before,” Dr. Travell said, “you were now.” It took more than an hour for Jackie to pull herself together with tissues, some makeup, and Mary Gallagher’s help. She knew Jack was as devastated as she was, but she was determined to put on a brave face for him. “How terrible Jack must feel,” said Jackie, who seemed to focus on the pain of others as a way of coping with her own. “This is such a heartbreak for him.”
But when Jack walked in the door of her hospital room, they broke down together. “Oh, Jack, oh, Jack,” she sobbed. “There’s only one thing I could not bear now—if I ever lost you.”
At the house on Squaw Island, Maud Shaw was handed the unenviable task of telling the children. She was crushed by the news of Patrick’s death, and asked that someone less emotional—one of the Secret Service agents, perhaps—break the news to Caroline and John.
After hours of hemming and hawing, Shaw finally screwed up her courage and asked the children to sit down at the kitchen table. This was not going to be easy. The arrival of a baby brother had been eagerly anticipated by both children, but especially by Caroline. In her bossy big-sister way, she had taken care to lecture John on the care, feeding, and sleeping habits of infants.
“I have some bad news, children,” Shaw said. “Do you remember what your daddy said about Patrick not being able to breathe? Well, the doctors tried to help little Patrick, but it was just too hard for him. He’s with the angels now.”
Caroline thought for a moment. “Miss Shaw,” she said, “Patrick is still my baby brother, right?”
“Yes,” the nanny answered. “He is still your baby brother.”
“Then I think
,” she said, folding her hands in prayer, “we should ask God to take care of him in heaven.”
Shaw was in awe of the little girl JFK called Buttons. “Caroline was so quiet, so composed,” Shaw said. “And the rest of us all had red eyes from crying.”
Jackie spent a full week recovering from her ordeal, and was too exhausted to attend Patrick’s funeral. She did have one special request, however—that the tiny coffin be completely covered in flowers as her father’s had been.
On Saturday, JFK, New York’s Francis Cardinal Spellman, Bobby and Ethel, Teddy and Joan, Lee Radziwill, and Jamie and Janet Auchincloss were among the few who heard Richard Cardinal Cushing celebrate a “Mass of the Angels” at the chapel inside his Boston residence. Once it was over, Jack stepped forward and placed the gold St. Christopher medal Jackie had given him as a wedding present inside the tiny white casket.
As the family filed out of the chapel, Jack was crying “copious tears,” Cushing recalled. The president was the last of the mourners to leave, with Cushing following right behind. The casket was in a white marble case, and at one point, the cardinal recalled, “the President was so overwhelmed with grief that he literally put his arms around that casket as though he was carrying it out.”
“Come on, Jack,” Cushing said, putting his arm around JFK. “Let’s go. God is good.”
The burial took place at Holyhood Cemetery in Brookline, not far from JFK’s birthplace; sadly, baby Patrick was the first Kennedy laid to rest in the large family plot purchased by Joe Kennedy. A grief-stricken Jack reached out to touch the tiny coffin as it was lowered into the ground. “Goodbye,” said Patrick’s father, tears streaming down his cheeks. “It’s awfully lonely down there.”
After the funeral, JFK went straight to the hospital to check on Jackie. He reported to her that the service was beautiful, and that Patrick’s casket had been covered with a blanket of flowers as she requested. Within minutes, Dave Powers recalled, they were both crying.
Powers returned to the Squaw Island house to keep Jack company the night of the funeral, and shortly after dinner the two men were joined by Joan. Having just suffered a late-term miscarriage, JFK’s sister-in-law understood the pain they were going through.
“Why would God let a child die? An innocent child?” It was a question he began asking when Patrick was still alive, and for the moment he felt compelled to pose it again and again. Joan answered that she didn’t know if things happened for a reason, as Cardinal Cushing had said. But she knew that bad things happen, and that “when they happen we just have to go on somehow, and know that we have the strength to carry on.” More than anyone she knew, Joan told him, Jack had the courage and the strength to cope with tragedy—even the loss of a child.
According to Powers, Jack was “deeply moved” by what Joan had to say. “She was there the next night and the next, and the President was grateful.”
JACK WAS NO LONGER THE kind of husband who could happily cruise the Mediterranean while his wife coped with the loss of a child. This time his grief was palpable, and his concern for Jackie paramount. He visited her at least twice a day, and just two days after Patrick’s death brought Caroline along. Jackie lit up when she saw Caroline holding on tightly to a bouquet of black-eyed Susans. She wore a paisley sundress and sneakers, and her blond hair was pulled back in a ponytail.
Still, Jack worried that Jackie might sink deeper into a well of depression. “The President was very concerned about her,” Arthur Schlesinger said. “He tried to think of ways to cheer her up.”
Knowing how fond she was of Adlai Stevenson, he wanted Schlesinger to ask if Adlai would drop her a note at the hospital. “It would mean a lot to her,” JFK said. Jackie was, Schlesinger said, “deeply touched” when Stevenson’s letter arrived. Jackie never suspected that her husband was behind it. “He was just happy to see her smile.”
The White House was swamped with thousands of phone calls and letters of condolence—touching expressions of sympathy from common people and world leaders alike. Later, at Squaw Island, the president showed several to Bill Walton. “He’d read them and then pass them over to me to look at,” Walton recalled, “and he’d say, ‘Look at what the pope said,’ or ‘How am I going to answer that one?’”
Back in Washington, Jack gave Mimi Beardsley her first “real lesson in grief” when he asked her to sit with him on the Truman Balcony while he pored over the heartfelt notes of sympathy from both friends and strangers. Tears “rolling down his cheeks,” JFK would periodically scrawl a reply in the margin. “But mostly he just read them and cried,” Mimi said. “I did too.”
Patrick’s death was also a “crucial signpost” in her relationship with the president, filling him “not only with grief but with an aggrieved sense of responsibility to his wife and family.” Looking back, it dawned on Beardsley that even though they saw each other countless times in the Oval Office that summer of 1963, the president had been “winding down” the physical part of their relationship for some time. Now, even when she accompanied him on trips, there was no hanky-panky. She believed he was finally “obeying some private code that trumped his reckless desire for sex” and “shutting down our sexual relationship”—just as he had done with Mary Meyer.
Jackie put up a brave front when she left the hospital, presenting each doctor and nurse with a framed lithograph of the White House that she had signed. “You’ve been so wonderful to me,” she told the nurses, “that I’m coming back here next year to have another baby.”
As they walked outside, the president and first lady held hands—a rare open display of their affection for one another. Both somehow managed a smile for the cameras. Behind the façade, the first lady was “destroyed. To lose another child that way,” Schlesinger said, “was bad enough. But for it to be such a public spectacle magnified the pain a thousand fold.”
As Jackie became more depressed, Janet Auchincloss confided in Jack that she feared for his wife’s mental health. “I’m afraid Jackie will have a nervous breakdown,” she told him. Jack worried, too, but he also understood. “It is so hard for Jackie,” he told Red Fay. “After all the difficulties she has in bearing a child, to lose him is doubly hard.”
JFK did not only have Jackie to be anxious about. “He knew how sad Caroline was going to be,” Jamie said, “and he wanted to try and offset that in some way.” So, before their mother returned home from the hospital, Jack showed up with a cocker spaniel puppy.
The day JFK escorted their mother home from the hospital, the kids ran outside to greet her. “Look, Mommy!” Caroline shouted, holding up the newest member of their canine family. “The puppy’s name is Shannon!” The others—Clipper, Charlie, and Pushinka’s puppies White Tips, Blackie, Streaker, and Butterfly—barked and wagged for attention.
For the rest of summer Jack tried to be there for his wife as much as he could, adding quick midweek overnights to Cape Cod along with the usual long weekends. While Jackie recuperated, JFK swam off the Honey Fitz with the children, drove Caroline to her riding lessons, and, when it was time to depart for Washington, let them both ride with him to Otis Air Force Base in the presidential chopper.
During this period Jackie also counted on her sister for moral support. Only days before, Lee Radziwill had boarded a Boston-bound flight in Athens thinking Patrick was going to be just fine. Now she was on Squaw Island doing whatever she could to help Jackie get over the death of her son.
“It was obviously tough, very tough,” said Chuck Spalding, the first person outside the family to visit. “We golfed late in the day—I thought it would be good to get Jack’s mind off things—but it didn’t matter. He and Jackie were just crushed, and there was no way of getting around it.”
Spalding, like the others, witnessed a heightened intimacy between his hosts. “They folded into each other on the couch,” he said. “You couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began.” Once Spalding saw Jackie beginning to get emotional. Before Spalding could do or say anything, Jack
was “at her side with a tissue, wiping her tears and holding her. They didn’t seem interested in hiding their feelings anymore.” At private moments like this, “you almost felt you were intruding. There were times when I had to look away.”
“She hung on to him and he held her in his arms,” said Bill Walton, who also spent the weekend with them. This was “something nobody ever saw at any other time because they were very private people.” It was Jack, Theodore White said, who finally saw the light. “They were both shattered by Patrick’s death,” White observed, “and for the first time, Jack reached out to her as he had never done before, had never been capable of doing before.”
Caroline noticed the difference. “There was a tenderness between her parents that she really hadn’t seen before,” Salinger said. “It made an impression on her.” As she watched her parents embrace in front of others “you could see the little gears in her head turning.”
Lee Radziwill’s gears were turning as well. After spending time with Jackie at Squaw Island, she returned to Europe in mid-August convinced that her sister was headed for a nervous collapse if something wasn’t done—and soon. The two Bouvier women had always been close. They both adored their father, Black Jack, who called Jackie “Jacks” and Lee “Pekes,” and barely tolerated their social-climbing mother. At social events, Jackie and Lee could invariably be spotted gossiping in a far corner—a scene that was repeated so often Truman Capote dubbed them the “Whispering Sisters.”
Cruising the Aegean with Aristotle Onassis and his longtime mistress, the opera diva Maria Callas, Lee talked movingly of her sister’s anguish. “If only there was some way I could help cheer her up,” Lee said. “She really needs to just get away for a while …” Onassis took the bait, inviting both the president and Jackie to join them aboard the Christina.
Lee’s own affair with the notorious Greek shipping tycoon had been going on for months, and there were rumors that Lee intended to divorce Stas Radziwill and marry Onassis. Knowing that Jack and her sister were now more deeply in love than ever, she certainly did not see Jackie as potential competition for Onassis’s affections—or his millions. She jumped at the chance to invite them both.
These Few Precious Days Page 24