These Few Precious Days

by Christopher Andersen

  AS THE PRESIDENT’S LIMOUSINE LEFT Love Field at 11:55 a.m., Secret Service agent Roy Kellerman radioed to all units “Lancer and Lace departing.” With them were Governor Connally, who sat on the pull-out jumpseat in front of Jack while Nellie Connally sat in front of Jackie. The motorcade was bound downtown for the Dallas Trade Mart, where 2,600 people were waiting to have lunch with the president and his wife.

  To everyone’s surprise, the reception in Dallas was the friendliest yet. Thousands of cheering, placard-waving Texans lined the streets, in some spots thirteen people deep. Elated, the president stopped the motorcade twice—first to shake hands with a group of awestruck schoolchildren and then to say hello to a group of nuns.

  Making small talk along the route, Jack asked Nellie Connally how she would respond if someone booed her husband. “If I’d get close,” Nellie answered, “I’d scratch their eyes out.” Kennedy laughed but kept right on waving. “Mr. President,” she said as the car made a hard left turn from Houston Street onto Elm Street, “you certainly can’t say Dallas doesn’t love you.”

  “No,” he replied, “you certainly can’t.”

  Sweltering in her wool suit and squinting in the brilliant sun—Jack had asked her not to wear sunglasses so the crowd could see her face—Jackie prayed they would reach their destination soon.

  Nellie Connally pointed to an overpass ahead.

  “We’re almost through,” she said. “The Trade Mart’s beyond that.”

  “Good,” Jackie thought to herself as she and Jack exchanged a fleeting glance. “It will be so cool in that tunnel …”

  What happened next was said to be the catalyst for an era of turmoil, discord, and bloodshed. Vietnam, campus unrest, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, race riots, the rise of the counterculture and a surge in drug abuse, even the toxic political climate that gave rise to Watergate—all seemed to flow from the wellspring of shock and despair that was tapped in Dallas on November 22, l963.

  Serious historians and conspiracy theory crackpots alike have spent a half-century dissecting the events of that day and analyzing how an assassin’s bullets changed the trajectory of history. Along the way, dark secrets were unearthed and the Camelot myth that Jackie had so painstakingly nurtured shattered beyond repair. For all this, we seem no closer to the truth about JFK’s murder (Was it a lone gunman? The Mafia? Fidel Castro? The CIA?) or what Kennedy might have done—particularly whether he would have sent American troops to fight in Vietnam.

  One simple fact, however, has never been disputed—that Jackie’s strength and natural sense of dignity in the days following her husband’s death was the glue that held a stunned nation together. Only those closest to her knew that for months after the assassination Jackie was consumed with grief.

  “I cry all day and all night until I’m so exhausted I can’t function,” she told her friend Kitty Carlisle Hart. “Then I drink.” Jackie wrote Ben and Tony Bradlee telling them that there was “one thing you must know. I consider that my life is over, and I will spend the rest of it waiting for it really to be over.” She confessed to her friend Roswell Gilpatric that, for a time, she had even contemplated suicide. “I have enough sleeping pills to do it,” she told him. “But of course she wouldn’t,” Gilpatric said, “because of the children.”

  On her own, Jackie would for decades continue her reign as one of the most talked-about, written-about, and speculated-about people in the world—the most celebrated American woman of the Twentieth Century. Not even her decision to marry Aristotle Onassis just months after Bobby Kennedy’s assassination—so shocking to a world more comfortable thinking of her as the beloved widow of a martyred president—would tarnish Jackie’s image for long. “She would have preferred to be herself,” her brother-in-law Ted Kennedy remarked, paraphrasing a remark she had made about Jack. “But the world insisted that she be a legend, too.”

  When Jackie succumbed to lymphoma on May 19, 1994 at the age of 64 with John Jr., Caroline, and her longtime companion Maurice Tempelsman at her bedside, there was a spontaneous outpouring of emotion from world leaders and common folk alike. Many Americans, taken by surprise, were both stunned and saddened by the passing of someone who had been part of the national landscape for more than thirty years. They contemplated what their world would be like without this living, breathing reminder of a man and an era of political idealism that—for all its shortcomings—seemed at one time to hold so much promise.

  In the end, it all came back to the electrifying young couple in the White House that held the world spellbound for a thousand days. Was their marriage deeply flawed? Without a doubt. Complicated, even frustratingly so? No question. Infidelity, recklessness, and deceit were part of their imperfect union. But so, too, were courage, loyalty, wit, faith, fortitude, and a true, abiding affection.

  After a decade of tragedies, triumphs, betrayals and reconciliations, the president and his wife were dealt the most devastating blow any couple could endure—the loss of a child. In that brief period time between Patrick’s death and Dallas—not quite four months—Jackie and Jack grew closer together than they had ever been. Too late to make up for all the pain that had gone before? Perhaps. But not too late for Jack to fulfill the promise to Jackie he made every time he got up to sing “September Song”:

  And these few precious days I’ll spend with you

  These precious days, I’ll spend with you.

  Acknowledgments

  They wanted to talk. No, they needed to talk, to set the record straight, to tell the story of these two remarkable people as they knew it—and before it was too late. Some of their names instantly conjure up images of John F. Kennedy’s bold New Frontier and of the Camelot myth Jackie so carefully nurtured: Theodore Sorensen, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Pierre Salinger, John Kenneth Galbraith, Evelyn Lincoln, Letitia Baldrige, to name but a few. Other noted personalities like Gore Vidal, Oleg Cassini, Clare Boothe Luce, Leonard Bernstein, and George Plimpton had no official role but veered in and out of the Kennedys’ orbit. Then there were the confidants virtually unknown to the public—people like Chuck and Betty Spalding, Charles and Martha Bartlett, Bill Walton, and Lem Billings—whom Jack and Jackie turned to more than anyone for solace, advice, and companionship.

  In the course of writing four bestselling books on JFK’s tight-knit little family over the past twenty years, I was honored to interview not only the people above—all but two of whom have since died—but hundreds of others: family members, friends, classmates, colleagues, neighbors, political allies and enemies, doctors, servants, staff members, Jack’s former girlfriends, Jackie’s ex‑fiancé, and the journalists and photographers who covered the Kennedy White House. Only a few of these asked not to be identified, and I respected their wishes.

  It should come as no surprise that so many of these people as well are no longer with us. It has, after all, been a half century since that fateful day in Dallas. But as I played the tapes and combed through the notes of my interviews with these eyewitnesses to history, the story of Jackie and Jack’s last few precious days as man and wife struck me as more compelling, heartbreaking, and inspiring than ever.

  Once again, I am indebted to my editor, Mitchell Ivers, for his talent, insight, and commitment to bringing this bittersweet tale to life on the page. Mitchell is just one of the many fine people at Simon & Schuster and Gallery Books to whom I owe a debt of gratitude, most notably Louise Burke, Jen Bergstrom, Carolyn Reidy, Jennifer Robinson, Natasha Simons, Paul O’Halloran, Kelly Roberts, Lisa Rivlin, Eric Rayman, Felice Javit, Tom Pitoniak, Carly Sommerstein, Ruth Lee-Mui, and Janet Perr.

  My agent, Ellen Levine, will be tired of hearing this for the thirtieth time in as many years and as many books, but she is simply the best agent and advocate an author could ever hope to have—and, more important, a treasured friend. I am also grateful to all of Ellen’s talented colleagues at Trident Media Group, particularly Claire Roberts, Monika Woods, Alexa Stark, Alexander Slater, and Meredith M
iller.

  My wife, Valerie, who has put up with me for more than forty-one years, knows there are no words to express how I feel about her. Our beautiful and gifted daughters, Kate and Kelly, have always contributed much to the process, joined now by Kate’s husband, Brooke Brower, and the newest member of our team to whom this book is dedicated, Graham Andersen Brower.

  Historian Michael Foster was my original guide in tapping the vast store of information available at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, and I must also thank author Laurence Leamer and Northeastern University professor Ray Robinson for introducing me to him. My thanks as well to the library’s Maryrose Grossman, James Hill, Maura Porter, Megan Desnoyers, William Johnson, Ron Whealen, and June Payne. My continued thanks to noted British television producer Charles Furneaux and American documentary filmmaker Robert Drew for their kindness and generous assistance when I first began writing about this complicated, fascinating couple nearly twenty years ago.

  My thanks again to Pierre Salinger, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Theodore Sorensen, Letitia Baldrige, John Kenneth Galbraith, Oleg Cassini, Gore Vidal, Paul “Red” Fay, George Plimpton, Roswell Gilpatric, Nancy Dickerson Whitehead, George Smathers, Evelyn Lincoln, Jacques Lowe, Hugh D. “Yusha” Auchincloss, Jamie Auchincloss, Chuck Spalding, Charles Bartlett, Theodore H. White, John Husted, Ham Brown, Helen Thomas, Angier Biddle Duke, Godfrey McHugh, Betty Beale, Clare Boothe Luce, Peter Duchin, Larry Newman, Robert Drew, Priscilla Johnson McMillan, Sister Joanne Frey, Drew Middleton, Martha Bartlett, David Halberstam, John Davis, Cecil Stoughton, Charles Collingwood, Patricia Lawford, Tony Bradlee, Dr. Janet Travell, William vanden Heuvel, Jack Anderson, Gloria Swanson, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Dorothy Schoenbrun, Aileen Mehle, Dorothy Oliger, Marta Sgubin, Bette Davis, Vincent Russo, James E. O’Neal, Charles Whitehouse, Kitty Carlisle Hart, Charles Damore, Jack Valenti, Bertram S. Brown, Terry L. Birdwhistell, Otto Fuerbringer, Cleveland Amory, Henry Grunwald, John Bryson, Charles Furneaux, Roy Cohn, Wendy Leigh, Linus Pauling, Fred Friendly, Doris Lilly, Stephen Corsaro, Jesse Birnbaum, Richard Clurman, Richard B. Stolley, Ronald Grele, Barry Schenck, Rosemary McClure, Cranston Jones, Halston, Steve Michaud, David McGough, Paula Dranov, James Hill, John Marion, Dale Sider, Diane Tucker, Earl Blackwell, Tom Freeman, Perri Peltz, Jeanette Peterson, William S. Paley, Albert V. Concordia, the Countess of Romanones, James Bacon, Willard K. Rice, Dudley Freeman, John Perry Barlow, John Sargent, Marta Sgubin, Laurence Leamer, Anne Vanderhoop, Betsy Loth, Bob Thomas, Larry Lorenzo, Brad Darrach, Maryrose Grossman, Shirley Clurman, Sandy Richardson, Farris L. Rookstool III, Janet Lizop, Yvette Reyes, Marybeth Whelan, and Corrie Novak.

  Thanks to the staffs of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, the Houghton Library at Harvard University, the Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library at Princeton University, the Columbia University Oral History Project, the Butler Library at Columbia University and Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the Robert Drew Archive, the Boston University Library, the Stanford University Archives, the University of Kentucky Library, the Library of Congress, the United States Secret Service, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library, the Choate School Archives, the Redwood Library and Athenaeum of Newport, Rhode Island, the Barnstable Public Library, Miss Porter’s School, the Boston Public Library, the Archdiocese of Boston, the New Bedford Standard Times, the Georgetown University Library, Vassar College Library, Winterthur Museum, the Gunn Memorial Library, the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, the Silas Bronson Library, the Carlyle Hotel, the Associated Press, Reuters, Globe Photos, and Corbis.

  Sources and Chapter Notes

  The following chapter notes have been compiled to give an overview of the sources drawn upon in preparing These Few Precious Days, but they are by no means all-inclusive. I have respected the wishes of those few interview subjects who asked to remain anonymous, and accordingly I have not listed them here or elsewhere in the text. The archives and oral history collections of many institutions—including but not limited to the John F.Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library, the Oral History Project of Columbia University, the Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library at Princeton University, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, and the Houghton Library at Harvard University—yielded a wealth of information, much of it emerging gradually since the death of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis in 1994.

  Most significant, perhaps, has been the gradual release between 1993 and 2012 of more than 260 hours of taped conversations conducted in the Oval Office and in the Cabinet Room during the Kennedy administration—all part of a system the president had installed in an apparent attempt to capture history being made in real time. In 2011, Caroline Kennedy added to the excitement by authorizing the release of Arthur Schlesinger’s historic series of conversations with Jackie that took place in 1964 but had remained under lock and key ever since. In my own series of interviews with Schlesinger, he made reference to the contents of these tapes and predicted that they would not be released until 2044 if at all. Fortunately for us, he was wrong. The eight and a half hours of conversation between Schlesinger and Jackie sheds important new light on life in the Kennedy White House and, more specifically, her life with JFK.

  The thousands upon thousands of articles and news reports about the Kennedys that have been published over the past half century also served as source material for this and my earlier books, including press accounts in the New York Times, Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, Life, Vanity Fair, Look, Saturday Evening Post, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, and New Yorker as well as carried on the Associated Press, United Press International, and Reuters wires.

  Chapters 1 and 2

  Interview subjects included Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Pierre Salinger, Theodore Sorensen, Letitia Baldrige, Chuck Spalding, George Plimpton, Godfrey McHugh, Jacques Lowe, Hugh D. “Yusha” Auchincloss III, Charles Bartlett, Jack Valenti, Jamie Auchincloss, Ham Brown, Richard B. Stolley, Willard K. Rice, Jack Anderson, and Dr. Janet Travell. The author also drew on numerous oral histories, including those given by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Robert F. Kennedy, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, Dean Rusk, Admiral George G. Burkley, Dave Powers, Robert McNamara, Pamela Turnure, Kenneth O’Donnell, Maud Shaw, Nancy Tuckerman, Janet Auchincloss, J. B. West, Lawrence O’Brien, Douglas Dillon, Walt Rostow, Peter Lawford, Paul “Red” Fay, Ted Sorensen, Hugh Sidey, Richard Cardinal Cushing, Peter Lisagor, William Walton, John Galvin, Liz Carpenter, Torbert MacDonald, Tazewell Shepard, Jacqueline Hirsh, Sarah McClendon, Isaac Avery, Cordelia Thaxton, Dorothy Tubridy, Father John C. Cavanaugh, and Arthur Krock.

  National Security Agency, Secret Service, and Federal Bureau of Investigation files released through the Freedom of Information Act shed considerable light on the events of November 22, 1963, as did the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis papers, the John Fitzgerald Kennedy papers (Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, John F. Kennedy, Containing the Public Messages, Statements, and Speeches of the President (1961–1963), the Robert F. Kennedy papers, and the papers of Dave Powers, Kenneth O’Donnell, John Kenneth Galbraith, Theodore H. White, Kirk LeMoyne “Lem” Billings, Godfrey McHugh, Paul “Red” Fay, Dean Rusk, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, Lawrence O’Brien, Dr. Janet Travell, Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, and Joseph P. Kennedy. Teddy White’s historic “Camelot” interview conducted shortly after the assassination was released in full only in 1995, one year after Jackie’s death. Other published sources consulted: William Manchester, The Death of a President (New York: Harper & Row, 1967); The Warren Commission Report (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1964); Arthur Schlesinger Jr., A Thousand Days (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965); Jim Bishop, The Day Kennedy Was Shot (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1968); Kenneth P. O’Donnell and David F. Powers with Joe McCarthy, Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970); Theodore Sorensen, Kennedy (New York: Harper & Row, 1965); “The Assassination of President Kennedy,” L
ife, November 29, 1963; J. B. West, Upstairs at the White House (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1973); Ben Bradlee, A Good Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995); Mary Barelli Gallagher, My Life with Jacqueline Kennedy (New York: David McKay, 1969); Maud Shaw, White House Nanny: My Years with Caroline and John Kennedy, Jr. (New York: New American Library, 1965); Lady Bird Johnson, A White House Diary (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1970); Clint Hill with Lisa McCubbin, Mrs. Kennedy and Me (New York: Gallery Books, 2012); Robert Sam Anson, They’ve Killed the President! the Search for the Murderers of John F. Kennedy (New York: Bantam, 1975); Ben Bradlee, Conversations with Kennedy (New York: Norton, 1975).

  Chapters 3–5

  These chapters were based in part on conversations with Theodore Sorensen, Jacques Lowe, Pierre Salinger, Gore Vidal, Letitia Baldrige, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Chuck Spalding, Charles Bartlett, John Husted, Larry Newman, Nancy Dickerson Whitehead, Martha Bartlett, Hugh D. “Yusha” Auchincloss; William S. Paley, Priscilla Johnson MacMillan, Robert Drew, Jamie Auchincloss, Clare Boothe Luce, Shirley MacLaine, Bette Davis, Evelyn Lincoln.

  The Laura Bergquist Knebel Papers at Boston University, oral histories: Claiborne Pell, Leverett Saltonstall, Sargent Shriver, Thomas “Tip” O’Neill, John W. McCormack, John F. Dempsey, Hale Boggs, Dean Acheson, John Sherman Cooper, James MacGregor Burns, Leonard Bernstein, Mark Shaw, Peter Lawford, Sister Parish, Patrick Mulkern, Dory Shary, Torbert MacDonald, J. B. West, Fletcher Knebel, Ralph Horton, Patrick Munroe, Joseph Alsop, Harold S. Ulen, James Farrell, William O. Douglas, Edward M. Gallagher, Francis X. Morrissey, Foster Furcolo, John Kelso, Helen Lempart, Jean McGonigle Mannix, Joanne Barbosa, Peter Cloherty, Mark Dalton, Joseph Casey, William F. Kelly, Harold Tinker, John J. Droney, Hugh Fraser, Howard Fitzpatrick, Joseph Russo, Garrett Byrne, Anthony Gallucio, Andrew Dazzi, James M. Murphy, Joseph Degugliemo, Mary Colbert, William DeMarco, Maurice Donahue, Roland Evans Jr. Some material regarding Max Jacobson’s relationship with the Kennedys comes from Jacobson’s unpublished memoir. Father John C. Cavanaugh’s oral history can be found in the Andrew Mellon Library Oral History Collection of the Choate School and in the JFK Library’s oral history collection.