These Few Precious Days

by Christopher Andersen

  Not exactly Jackie’s style, to be sure. But then, even the first lady had not been pampered to quite this extent. As a black-sweatered crew of sixty (not counting the dance band) catered to the passengers’ every need, the Dom Perignon flowed freely and no fewer than eight varieties of caviar were served. When Jackie wasn’t exploring the cobblestone streets of Crete, Ithaca, and Lesbos, she and her fellow guests were dining on lobster and foie gras or cutting loose to bouzouki music on the yacht’s mosaic-tiled dance floor.

  As they island-hopped across the Aegean, Jackie kept in touch with JFK by ship-to-shore phone, and more than once dashed off a flowery letter saying how much she wished he could have come along. Yet she clearly seemed happier than she had been in months. With Lee giggling in the background, Jackie called to report that the Christina was now in the hands of pirates. “I told you so,” Jack deadpanned.

  Stateside, newspapers were soon filled with pictures of Jackie sunbathing on board the Christina in a bikini. When the yacht docked in Istanbul so that Jackie could visit the Blue Mosque and see the magnificent jewels housed in the Topkapi Palace, tourists pressed in to catch a glimpse of her. To Jack, it was all beginning to look like a replay of Jackie’s la dolce vita romp with Gianni Agnelli.

  Jack, meanwhile, was planning a trip of his own, although he doubted Jackie would be willing to tag along. Texas governor John Connally invited JFK to visit Texas at the end of November. An ongoing feud between liberal senator Ralph Yarborough and conservative Connally, an LBJ ally, threatened to cleave the state’s party right down the middle. If JFK wanted to hold on to the Lone Star State in 1964—not to mention bolster his flagging popularity with white voters in the South—then some serious fence-mending was in order, Connally warned.

  The two-day swing through Texas was to include fund-raising events in San Antonio, Houston, Fort Worth, and Dallas. Then the Kennedys were invited to spend the weekend at Lyndon Johnson’s ranch on the Pedernales River. Jackie hadn’t campaigned for her husband since the 1960 primaries, and she wasn’t scheduled to resume her duties as first lady until January 1964. It seemed unlikely that she’d be willing to visit Texas, but Connally was adamant. “Well,” JFK told the governor, “we’ll just have to wait to see what she says when she gets back.” With Salinger, he felt free to say what he really thought. “There’s no way in hell,” he told his press secretary, “that Jackie is going to agree to go to Texas.”

  As the Aegean cruise progressed, Onassis started to lavish more and more attention on Jackie. By the time they reached Ari’s private island of Skorpios, Lee was seething. When Onassis gave Jackie a spectacular ruby-and-diamond necklace, Lee wrote to Jack in mock indignation, “All I’ve got is three dinky little bracelets that Caroline wouldn’t wear to her own birthday party!”

  Inevitably, tongues began to wag about the nature of Jackie’s relationship with the swarthy Greek tycoon. Their shipmates, however, insisted nothing inappropriate was going on between Onassis and the first lady at the time. There was “definitely a relationship between Lee and Ari,” FDR Jr. said. But Jackie “was there simply for the rest.” Moreover, Onassis was “very conscious of his image. He didn’t want to do anything to embarrass the President’s wife.”

  No one back home dared suggest that the first lady was cheating on her husband. But once again stories about high-living Jackie and her jet-set pals filled the papers, providing Jack’s critics with plenty of ammunition. “Does this sort of behavior,” asked the Boston Globe, “seem fitting for a woman in mourning?”

  Jackie may have had a “twinge” or two of guilt, Roosevelt conceded, but certainly not enough to make her suddenly turn around and fly home. Indeed, instead of cutting her trip short, Jackie extended it to so she could visit Morocco. Earlier, she had teased Jack that if given a choice between Morocco and Ireland, she’d much rather spend time in Morocco. Besides, King Hassan II was eager to repay the Kennedys for the hospitality they had shown him seven months earlier.

  Desert tribeswomen greeted Jackie with their shrill, warbling call as she and Lee were driven to Hassan’s Bahia Palace, overlooking the Atlas Mountains. Coincidentally, King Hassan II’s firstborn son, Prince Mohammed, had been born on August 21. In keeping with Muslim tradition, the entire country was celebrating his first forty days of life. Everyone was concerned that this might bring back painful memories for Jackie, but her attitude remained upbeat. She told Clint Hill that she felt it was “wonderful” that they could celebrate their infant son’s future. “The President and I,” she said, “had similar hopes and dreams for Patrick.”

  As part of the national celebration, Berber warriors put on a dazzling display of their prowess on horseback, firing rifles into the air and whooping as they galloped across a field. Jackie cover her eyes with both hands to avoid seeing Secret Service agent Paul Landis, who was on the field taking snapshots, from nearly being trampled to death.

  While Jackie seemed to be climbing out of her depression, Jack appeared to be diving deeper into his. “Everyone was so concerned about Jackie,” Cassini said, “they seemed to forget that Jack was suffering too.” Pierre Salinger noted that his boss “seemed a little deflated, a little distracted.” Instead of pounding on his desk and shouting down the phone lines about the negative press Jackie’s trip was generating, the president “more or less shrugged it off. He wasn’t happy about it, but he was more disappointed than angry.”

  Arthur Schlesinger had a fairly simple explanation for JFK’s solemn mood, beyond the heavy burden of his office: “They had just lost a child. They were still feeling it … He missed her.”

  The state dinner for Irish prime minister Seán Lemass on October 15 certainly did help matters. With his sister Jean Smith substituting for Jackie, JFK presided over what Gene Kelly dubbed a “four handkerchief evening” of groaning bagpipes, Irish fiddlers, and melancholy Irish tunes.

  After the dinner, fifteen guests were invited upstairs for more of the same. Everyone laughed and clapped as Kelly danced an Irish jig, then brushed away a tear while Teddy belted out “An Irish Lullaby” (“Too-ra-loo-ra-loo-ra”) and family friend Dorothy Tubridy sang the mournful “Boys of Wexford.”

  Through it all, Jim Reed couldn’t take his eyes off Jack. “The President had the sweetest and saddest kind of look on his face,” Reed recalled. “He was standing by himself, leaning against the doorway, and just seemed transported.”

  The Kennedy children, however, could still be counted on to provide comic relief. One of John’s bigger faux pas occurred while he stood on the Truman Balcony watching a welcoming parade for Yugoslavia’s president, Marshal Tito. As the Marine Band played, John stood waving two toy pistols and shouting “We want Kennedy! We want Kennedy!” One of the guns went flying over the railing, landing at Tito’s feet. “John has grown up,” the president sighed to Kenny O’Donnell, “to develop a colorful personality.”

  The same day her son was threatening to cause an international incident, Jackie prepared to leave Marrakech aboard the king’s private plane, bound for Paris. She hadn’t realized that, when she first arrived, Hassan II had instructed his minions to acquire any object in the kingdom that seemed to catch her fancy. Once she got to the airport, Jackie was surprised to see uniformed guards loading three carloads of gifts onto her plane.

  Jack, Caroline, and John-John were at Dulles International Airport to greet Jackie when she finally returned on October 17, 1963. “Oh, Jack,” she said, throwing her arms around him, “I’m so glad to be home!” On the ride to the White House, Caroline squeezed between her parents while John nuzzled up to Mommy. Jackie, still wearing her white gloves, tickled John until he was squealing with laughter.

  “Be careful, Mommy,” Caroline said. “He just had something to drink.”

  For all the homecoming hugs and kids, Mommy and Daddy went their separate ways the next day. Jackie headed to Wexford for a weekend of riding, and Jack to Boston for a football game and a fund-raiser.

  Neither, it quickly became clear,
had fully come to terms with Patrick’s death. Bronzed and healthy-looking but emotionally spent, Jackie finally found the release she needed riding Sardar through the fields and valleys surrounding Wexford.

  In Boston, the president was watching a Harvard-Columbia football game when he suddenly turned to Kenny O’Donnell and Dave Powers. “I want to visit Patrick’s grave,” he said. “Right now. Alone.”

  The president’s party somehow managed to duck out, elude the press, and drive to Holyhood Cemetery in Brookline without being followed. With Powers, O’Donnell, and his Secret Service detail keeping a respectful distance, the president walked slowly up to the headstone marked, simply, KENNEDY. “He seems,” Jack said, “so alone here.”

  JACKIE HAD BEEN HOME LESS than a week when JFK sprang the Texas trip on her over dinner with the Bradlees. Jackie was feeling “a little remorseful,” Ben Bradlee recalled, “about all the publicity” generated by her cruise with Onassis, “including a Newsweek story she felt went a little heavy on the hijinks.” But, she said, “Jack is being really nice and understanding about everything.”

  “So Jackie’s guilt feelings may work to my advantage,” JFK said with a smile. “Maybe now you’ll come with us to Texas next month.”

  “Sure I will, Jack,” she answered. JFK was right—Jackie was feeling guilty. She knew Jack had desperately wanted another son. “He felt the loss of the baby in the house,” she said, “as much as I did.” Jackie also knew that her ongoing depression over Patrick only made it that much harder on Jack. “I was melancholy after the death of our baby,” she confessed to Catholic priest Richard T. McSorley after Dallas, “and I stayed away longer than I needed to.”

  Jack’s advisers were amazed to hear that the first lady was willing to hit the campaign trail. “I almost fell over when he told me Jackie was coming with us,” O’Donnell said.

  “You know how I hate that sort of thing,” she told friends. “But if he wants me there, then that’s all that matters. It’s a tiny sacrifice on my part for something he feels is very important to him.”

  Caught up in the moment, Jackie instructed Pam Turnure to issue a press release stating that this was only the first of many campaign trips she intended to make on her husband’s behalf. She intended to let the American people know that she would do whatever she could to ensure Jack’s reelection.

  Before the White House could make a formal announcement, however, an ugly incident was already giving Jackie second thoughts. On October 24, an angry anti–United Nations mob attacked Adlai Stevenson after he gave a speech celebrating world peace in Dallas. The illustrious UN ambassador was jeered, spat upon, pelted with eggs, and struck in the head with a placard. City fathers were mortified, issuing an immediate apology, but the episode left Stevenson shaken and Jackie wondering if going was such a good idea.

  Over dinner at the White House the following night, FDR Jr. and his wife, Sue, expressed their misgivings. The next morning, Jackie told her husband that she had changed her mind; she would bow out on the advice of her doctors. When he got wind of this, Connally exploded. The first lady was well liked in Texas—more popular than several politicians who came to mind—and she simply had to be there.

  Jackie stayed on the fence for days. Right after the dinner with the Roosevelts, she sought the advice of Clint Hill. The first lady trusted her loyal Secret Service agent implicitly; he was her friend as well as her guardian. When he told her she should feel “perfectly safe going to Texas with the President,” Jackie understandably felt reassured. “You always know exactly the right thing to say,” she told him.

  On November 7, Salinger made the official announcement: “Mrs. Kennedy will accompany the President on the entire Texas trip.” Asked if, as in the past, ill health might force Jackie to cancel at the last minute, Salinger hedged. “She will help in every way she can,” he said, “consistent with other obligations and continuing good health.”

  Even after the official announcement, Bobby and Senator J. William Fulbright, a longtime Kennedy ally, stepped forward to voice concern. They understood that the president felt he had to go, but they saw no reason for Jackie to subject herself to jeers and catcalls. But by mid-November, Jackie was committed. “If Jack wants me,” she said, “I’ll go anywhere.”

  Ben and Tony Bradlee were the Kennedys’ most frequent guests and at one point were invited over for dinner followed by a movie in the White House theater. During the cocktail hour, Jackie put on records of Moroccan music and demonstrated some of the hip-swiveling belly-dance moves she had observed on her trip, before dissolving in laughter.

  That night’s movie was the latest James Bond offering, From Russia with Love, and Bradlee felt Jack “seemed to enjoy the cool and the sex and the brutality of it.” Jackie, meantime, had just done her new weekly stint as one of the mother-helpers at the White House School and allowed that she was “appalled” at having to help the little boys go to the bathroom.

  On November 10, the Kennedys invited the Bradlees to join them for the weekend at Wexford. The four friends perched on the stone wall surrounding the main house, sipping Bloody Marys while they took in the last of Virginia’s brilliant fall foliage. John ran around playing soldier in a plastic army helmet, and Jackie and Caroline both showed off their skills on horseback.

  The weekend’s most memorable moment came while Tony and JFK were sitting on the ground chatting. As Jackie and Ben looked on, Macaroni walked up to JFK and began nibbling his head. Tony’s attempts to pull the horse away failed, and Kennedy rolled on the ground laughing. “Keep shooting, Captain,” he told White House photographer Cecil Stoughton, who captured the scene on film. “You are about to see a president being eaten by a horse.”

  The last time the Bradlees saw JFK was the next day, Veterans Day, as he helicoptered off to Arlington to lay a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. At the cemetery, with hundreds of spectators watching, John managed to bolt from the Kiddie Detail and join his grinning father in the parade. The president’s left-handed son loved to salute, but it had taken the combined efforts of the Secret Service and the U.S. Army to get John to switch hands. This time, as soon as the president placed the wreath on the tomb, John joined the color guard in saluting his father on cue—this time the proper way, with his right hand.

  It was only a matter of time before John, hypnotized by the fluttering flags and the colorful uniforms, drifted away again. The president looked out over the thousands of headstones and markers rolling up and down the hillsides. “Go get John,” he ordered a Secret Service agent. “I think he’ll be lonely out there.”

  On November 13, 1963, General Maxwell Taylor stood in full dress uniform on the White House balcony with the children, waiting for the president and first lady to arrive. Bundled up against the cold, Caroline and John sipped tea poured for them by White House butlers. Once Jack and Jackie appeared, the 1,700 underprivileged children and their families who had gathered on the South Lawn to hear the kilted Black Watch pipers burst into applause.

  John squirmed in his mother’s lap, then jumped up to peer over the wrought-iron railing. Caroline, meantime, was content to snuggle up against her father, her arms around him.

  JFK had always loved the plaintive wail of bagpipes, and of all the pipers, Scotland’s famous Black Watch Regiment was his favorite. “They’re wonderful, aren’t they, Buttons?” he asked.

  “Yes, Daddy,” she answered, “and very loud.”

  This was the last time the Kennedys and their children—America’s most celebrated first family—would be seen together in public.

  Dinner that night at the White House had the touch of the surreal, with Greta Garbo as the guest of honor. Garbo brought along her lover, George Schlee, and her best friend—Schlee’s wife, Valentina. The president seemed less interested in Garbo’s storied film career than he was in her open arrangement with the Schlees.

  Also among the guests was Lem Billings, who had become friendly with Garbo the previous summer while they both cruised th
e Mediterranean aboard movie producer Sam Spiegel’s yacht. Jack decided to play a trick on his friend, and asked Garbo to pretend she didn’t know him. When Garbo walked into the dining room with Jackie, Billings rushed up to greet her. “Greta!” he said.

  The Great Garbo held him at arm’s length. “I have never seen this man before,” she insisted. For the next hour—straight through to the second course—everyone managed to keep up the charade, and no one was enjoying Billings’s pained reaction more than the president. “I just don’t understand it. Are you sure, Lem? Maybe it was just someone who looked like Garbo.”

  “It was a lovely, intimate dinner,” Garbo recalled. “President Kennedy did not smoke and drank only water. I felt like one of the damned when I lit a cigarette.” After dinner, Garbo was given a tour of the White House by her hosts, and at one point took off her shoes to climb onto Lincoln’s bed.

  The tour moved on to the Oval Office. When Garbo commented on his scrimshaw collection, Jack impulsively gave her a prized piece—one with a tall ship carved on it. It had been, he neglected to mention, a birthday gift from his wife. “He never gave me a whale’s tooth,” Jackie joked, although it was obvious to Billings and the others that her feelings were hurt.

  Jack invited Garbo to stay the night, but by this time she felt she may have overstayed her welcome. “I must go,” she announced. “I think I am getting intoxicated.”