JFK applauded his wife’s record as first lady in an interview with Hearst reporter Marianne Means, pointing to Jackie’s “emphasis on creative fields, her concentration on giving historical meaning to White House furnishings, her success as an ambassador on trips she has made with me abroad.” Although a year earlier Kennedy had bemoaned the inability of Radcliffe graduates to use their talents sufficiently in the working world, now he said that “by carrying out her primary responsibility to back up her husband and care for her children well, [Jackie] is doing her real job as a woman.”
Their friends observed more intimacy between Jack and Jackie as her delivery date approached. When Jim Reed was visiting Brambletyde in mid-July, Jackie awoke feeling unwell, prompting a frantic search for her obstetrician, John Walsh. Jack was “extremely solicitous” of Jackie and “very very upset” over the doctor’s absence, Reed recalled. Walsh had been out on a walk, and when he turned up, Kennedy calmed himself to ask in a “kind and gentle” way that the doctor “always tell someone where you are, how you can be reached immediately.”
Two weeks later, Red Fay wandered into Jack and Jackie’s bedroom to find them “lying there in each other’s arms. I said, ‘Oh my God,’ and apologized. Jack said, ‘Don’t worry about it. We’re just lying here chatting.’” That weekend Jack and Jackie were making the final selections from the trove of sculpture Lem Billings had collected in Rome. Kennedy was drawn to the five-inch-high Herakles statuette, and Fay was skeptical that the piece was nearly two thousand years old. Kennedy instructed Fay to ask Jackie “any question you can think of dealing with Roman or Greek history. Ask her about the authenticity of this figurine.” Fay posed the questions. “It was an amazing performance,” Fay recalled. “She answered every question with ease.” Afterwards, Kennedy told Fay that of all the attractive women he had known, “there was only one I could have married—and I married her.”
During the summer of 1963, Jack also connected more deeply with the Kennedy brother who was fifteen years his junior. When Teddy first took his seat in the Senate the previous January, he kept his distance, at least publicly. Joan committed a faux pas in an interview with Look in which she revealed that Jackie sometimes wore wigs and that JFK’s bad back prevented him from lifting John Jr. “They thought I should be a little more politically correct,” said Joan. “They didn’t get cross with me. These things were well known among everyone, but I simply said them.”
The youngest Kennedy couple was “invited a lot” to the White House, Joan recalled. “Teddy thought it was better not to go. He wanted to be his own person. He didn’t think politically it was a good idea. We went to only a couple of big parties, but spent a lot of time in the family quarters, having dinner, hanging out, watching movies.” They visited Camp David and accompanied Jack on his tour of the Civil War battlefield at Antietam in April.
Jackie and Joan were both expecting in August, but Joan lost her baby boy at “almost full term” in June—her second miscarriage in two years. Out on Squaw Island, Jackie helped console Joan, particularly when Ethel gave birth to her eighth child on July 4. “Jackie was so wonderful,” Joan recalled. “I went to her and said I felt under pressure about having more family, and she was wonderful about that.” Joan and Teddy already had a three-year-old daughter and eighteen-month-old son. It would be four more years before the birth of their second son.
As “summer bachelors,” Teddy and Jack would often get together at the White House. “We really enjoyed each other,” Teddy told biographer Ralph Martin. “. . . What I did was to stop by on the way home from the Senate and go into the Oval Office by the back door at the end of his working day. Then we’d have a daiquiri, take a swim together, then just sit around and talk about everything. Sure I’d make him laugh. We’d gossip about the Senate. . . . The two of us would go upstairs and have dinner alone and sometimes spend the whole evening just talking and laughing.”
The Shrivers had become more prominent as well. With other favored Kennedy administration initiatives stalled in Congress, Sarge’s Peace Corps was the most visible program hatched by the President. Eunice used her influential position to be a persistent advocate of research into mental retardation and federal support for the mentally handicapped. In May 1963 she had the temerity to launch a “blistering attack” on the government’s employment policy regarding mentally retarded workers. Speaking to the Women’s Committee for the President’s Committee on Employment of the Handicapped, Eunice called for a jobs program to redress the federal government’s “frustrating and dismal” record. The committee itself, she said, had given “virtually no attention” to the mentally retarded while focusing on such handicaps as deafness.
“Nothing Eunice did was official,” said White House aide Myer Feldman, JFK’s West Wing liaison with his sister. “She was the only person who called him Jack in public. Even Bobby called him Mr. President in public.” JFK knew that “when she set out to accomplish something, nothing would stand in her way,” said Feldman. “She would simply overpower her opponents.”
In September 1962, Eunice had written an article for the Saturday Evening Post revealing the congenital mental retardation of forty-four-year-old Rosemary Kennedy—the first time the family had disclosed she had not been a “childhood victim of spinal meningitis.” The lobotomy ordered by Joe Kennedy, however, remained a secret. Because of Rosemary, Jack Kennedy had a natural interest in mental retardation, but Eunice educated him and pushed him to launch an array of federal programs—conferences, commissions, a new research institute—and to mention the issue prominently in speeches. “It was the beginning of treating the mentally retarded as humans and not warehousing them,” said Feldman.
For the Kennedys, Saturday, August 3, began as a typically jolly Cape Cod day in what would become one of the saddest weeks of the Kennedy presidency. Red and Anita Fay were visiting for the weekend, and Ken Galbraith had come down from Cambridge for the afternoon. But during their cruise in Nantucket Sound on the Honey Fitz, Kennedy was alerted by radio telephone that Phil Graham had committed suicide. Kennedy quickly issued a statement of condolence, calling the death of the forty-eight-year-old publisher “a serious loss to all who knew and admired his integrity and ability.”
“Jack was as upset as everyone else, but we couldn’t dwell on it,” Red Fay recalled. Jackie sat down and wrote an emotional eight-page letter that Katharine Graham described as “the most understanding and comforting of any I got.” Bill Walton told Kennedy that Jackie’s letter “knocked [the Graham family] for a loop . . . in a good sense, I mean,” helping them cope with their sorrow.
In Washington on Monday the fifth, Jack spent the evening with Mary Meyer. By then Meyer was “a friendly familiar diversion,” said Anne Truitt. Although with Helen Chavchavadze Kennedy had “never mentioned” his back problems, he had grown accustomed to telling Meyer about his physical pain. “He was not shy about it when he was with someone who knew him,” said Anne Truitt. “He was a factual man. It is what he lived with, the root of his life. He coped in the most gallant fashion.” Meyer never viewed JFK as vulnerable, but “she was very surprised by the extent of his pain. It did change her view of him, it absolutely did. It turned the relationship from what it might have been in terms of sexuality into friendship.”
That day delegations from the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union signed the test-ban treaty in Moscow. Kennedy had pressed de Gaulle to join the signatories but he had predictably refused. JFK could never dispel his disappointment over France’s position. One month before his death, he would tell Hervé Alphand over dinner at the White House that he resented de Gaulle’s “desire to maintain between France and the United States a relationship full of acrimony and bitterness.”
On arriving at the Osterville stables with Caroline and John at 11 a.m. Wednesday morning, Jackie felt the first stabs of labor pain. Her Secret Service agent sped her back to Squaw Island where she told John Walsh, “I think I’m going to have that baby”—three weeks
before the due date of August 27. They climbed into a helicopter at 11:28 and landed at the Otis Air Force Base hospital twenty minutes later. At 12:52 p.m., Patrick Bouvier Kennedy was born by cesarean section and was immediately placed in an oxygen-fed incubator. Weighing only 4 pounds, 10 1/2 ounces, he was suffering from hyaline membrane disease, a lung condition that blocked the supply of oxygen to the bloodstream.
Seventeen minutes after he was alerted about Jackie’s condition, Kennedy was en route to the Cape with Nancy Tuckerman, Pamela Turnure, and Pierre Salinger. Nobody even had time to grab a toothbrush. Kennedy “was completely withdrawn,” Turnure recalled. “He just kept sitting and staring out of the window, and obviously his thoughts were completely with her.” Kennedy arrived at the hospital at 1:30 p.m. while Jackie was still in surgery. Following a conference with doctors, he agreed to send Patrick to Children’s Hospital in Boston for treatment. Jackie was never permitted to hold her brown-haired baby. She only glimpsed him as JFK wheeled the incubator to her bedside before the ambulance departed. When Jack told her Patrick had to be taken away, she was “deeply distressed.”
In Boston, Kennedy shuttled between a suite at the Ritz Carlton Hotel and the hospital, where Patrick was attended by a team of Harvard doctors. “He wanted to know what we would be doing with the baby,” said Dr. Judson Randolph, then a young resident who cared for Patrick on his arrival. When Randolph said he needed to perform a tracheostomy—inserting a metal tube in the infant’s throat to keep the chest pressure stabilized and prevent the lungs from collapsing—Kennedy drilled him with questions. “He wanted to know what material the tube was made of, how I could put a tube in such a small baby’s trachea,” Randolph recalled. “It dawned on me that he didn’t care what the tube was. He was measuring me. I was thirty-four years old, and he wanted to know does this guy know what he is doing.”
Kennedy flew in Dr. Sam Levine, a specialist from Cornell Medical College in New York who had successfully treated Lee Radziwill’s premature daughter, Christina, two years earlier. Bobby arrived as well and called a physician in Michigan who had been his Harvard classmate. “Bobby was a little nettling, running roughshod to find information from maybe not the best sources,” said Randolph. “The President was a little steadier, taking the larger view, and Bobby subsided.”
On Thursday afternoon the physicians decided to place Patrick in a hyperbaric chamber in the basement of an adjacent Harvard Medical School building. Thirty-one feet long and eight feet in diameter, the pressurized (44 to 55 pounds per square inch compared to 14.7 pounds at sea level) and oxygenated white steel chamber had been used during surgery more than two dozen times to help patients by forcing oxygen into their lungs. “It was a desperate move,” Randolph recalled.
Kennedy and Dave Powers stayed in a fourth-floor waiting room converted into a presidential suite with a bed, rocking chair, carpet, and telephones. At 2 a.m., the doctors told the President that Patrick was in critical condition. He and Powers hurried to the basement, where Kennedy donned a white surgical gown and cap, and sat in a wooden chair outside the chamber. Periodically he stood up to peer through a small porthole at the floodlit chamber where attendants wearing spaceman-style pressurized suits hovered around the little plastic incubator on wheels.
When it was clear that Patrick was failing, the team brought him out of the chamber to be with his father. The infant died of cardiac arrest at 4:04 a.m. on Friday, August 9, after a life of 39 hours and 12 minutes. “He put up quite a fight,” Kennedy said to Powers. “He was a beautiful baby.” Upstairs in his temporary quarters Kennedy “sat on the bed and wept,” Powers recalled. “He didn’t want anybody to see him crying, so he asked me to go outside and telephone Teddy.”
Dr. Walsh broke the news to Jackie at 6:25 a.m., and JFK joined her three hours later. With Mary Gallagher’s help, she dried her tears and freshened up to look “as presentable as possible.” She was already in a weakened condition, having had a double blood transfusion after her surgery. Telling Jackie about the ordeal in Boston, Jack wept again. When Patrick was still struggling, Jack had said to Janet Auchincloss, “I just can’t bear the effect [the infant’s death] might have on Jackie.” Over the next four days, he visited Jackie in her hospital room at least twice a day. Caroline came as well, clutching a bouquet of freshly picked larkspur, black-eyed susans, and pink trumpet flowers. Jackie was also consoled by her mother and Lee, who arrived on Friday after JFK located her in Greece. Lem Billings offered to cancel his vacation, saying he “couldn’t care less about going to Europe,” but Jack insisted he leave as planned.
On Saturday, Richard Cardinal Cushing celebrated a “Mass of the Angels” for Patrick in the chapel at his Boston residence. Joining the President were his siblings and their spouses, Lee, and a quartet of Auchinclosses: Janet, Hughdie, and their two children, Jamie and Janet. Rose Kennedy was on a holiday in Paris, and Jackie was too ill to attend.
JFK took a gold St. Christopher’s medal coin clip that Jackie had given him as a wedding present and put it inside the little white casket as a relic representing them both. After the service, Kennedy wept “copious tears,” and was so “overwhelmed with grief that he literally put his arm around that casket as though he was carrying it out,” Cushing said. The burial took place at Holyhood Cemetery in Brookline, the first in the large family plot purchased by Joe Kennedy.
Back in Washington, Kennedy called Enüd Sztanko and asked her to come to the White House. “He was very depressed,” she recalled. “I thought very hard about going, but I didn’t think it was appropriate. I felt enormous empathy. We talked a long time on the phone, about why God would let a child die, and I didn’t go.”
Looking wan and wobbly, Jackie left the hospital hand in hand with Jack exactly a week after Patrick’s birth. Before leaving she gave each of her nurses and doctors an autographed framed lithograph of the White House. She later told Ken Galbraith that she had been upset that the press had turned their tragedy into a “theatrical production.” Lee stayed with her for two days at Brambletyde, Joan offered quiet sympathy deepened by her own recent loss, and Bunny Mellon sent over an exquisite basket of flowers. From afar, Harold Macmillan wrote “in the midst of all [his] troubles,” Jackie recalled, to say that “private griefs are so much worse than public ones.”
The rest of the month Kennedy spent more time than usual in Hyannis, making midweek overnight trips as well as his customary long weekend visits. Each time he would bring a special gift. Kennedy’s “anguish for his wife and their dead son,” wrote Schlesinger, “gave August a melancholy cast.”
The first non-family visitor was Chuck Spalding, who diverted Jack with an early evening golf game. Bill Walton arrived the following weekend to find the house “full of sadness. . . . Jack and Jackie were very close. . . . She hung onto him and he held her in his arms.” The Fays were on hand for Labor Day weekend. “It is so hard for Jackie,” Kennedy told Fay. “After all the difficulties she has in bearing a child, to lose him is doubly hard. . . . It would have been nice to have another son.”
During Walton’s visit Jackie received a cable from Lee, who was cruising the Aegean with Aristotle Onassis and his longtime lover, the opera diva Maria Callas. Lee’s affair with Onassis had begun several months earlier, and she had come aboard the Christina, the opulent 325-foot Onassis yacht, immediately on her return from Washington. “I was astonished she hadn’t stayed with her sister,” Maria Callas confided to a friend. “She repeatedly told us how undone Jackie was by the death of her baby. Both Aristo and I felt badly about it, so he extended an open invitation to the president and Mrs. Kennedy to join us on a cruise.”
Kennedy clearly could not go, and he had deep misgivings about letting Jackie keep company with Onassis. As the majority owner of the Casino in Monte Carlo, the multimillionaire Greek shipowner had been a familiar figure to the Kennedy family. Writing to her children in 1955, Rose had mentioned turning down an invitation to dine on the Onassis yacht because “your Papa” mistrusted �
��the Greeks and the way they do not pay any taxes.” Five years later, after Rose rebuffed an attempt by Onassis to be photographed with her at a gala, he sent her four dozen red roses and an apologetic note.
When the invitation came from Lee, Kennedy “remembered something hanging over Onassis on some court case, and I was instinctively dead set against it,” said Walton. Onassis had bought a fleet of ships from the U.S. government that he had illegally operated under a foreign flag; when the federal government indicted him, he paid a $7 million fine. “Onassis is a pirate. He’s a crook,” Kennedy said to Evelyn Lincoln.
Jackie, however, was adamant. She couldn’t yet face Washington, and “she just wanted to get away.” Although Walton thought that Kennedy had yielded to her wishes that weekend, the matter was far from settled. To avoid embarrassing the Kennedys, Onassis offered to stay out of the picture entirely. But Jackie said she would not accept his hospitality and then not let him come along. Her insistence, she said, was “an act of kindness.”
On Labor Day, Jackie coaxed her husband into calling Franklin Roosevelt at his farm in upstate New York. “Lee wants Jackie to be her beard,” Kennedy told Roosevelt. But Jack needed “someone from Washington to provide cover,” said Justin Feldman, who was with the Roosevelts that weekend. “You are the only one she has agreed to have come along,” Kennedy told his friend. The Roosevelts would “give an air of respect,” recalled Sue Roosevelt. “I don’t think Jack wanted Jackie to go. I think he was appalled by it, so he arranged for us to make it look less like the jet set.”
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