These Few Precious Days Read online

  For my grandson,

  Graham Andersen Brower

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Preface

  CHAPTER 1

  Jack, Jack, Jack! Can You Hear Me?

  CHAPTER 2

  “The President Says if You Don’t Hurry, He’ll Fall Asleep”

  CHAPTER 3

  “An Electrical Current Between Them”

  CHAPTER 4

  “I Hate It, I Hate It, I Hate It!”

  CHAPTER 5

  “Our Strange Little Life”

  CHAPTER 6

  “Keeping Her Riding”

  CHAPTER 7

  “It Was a Real Look of Love”

  CHAPTER 8

  “But What About All the Children?”

  CHAPTER 9

  “You’re My Ideal, Jacqueline”

  CHAPTER 10

  “If I Ever Lost You …”

  CHAPTER 11

  “They Had Been Through So Much Together”

  Acknowledgments

  Sources and chapter Notes

  Selected Bibliography

  Plates

  Copyright

  Preface

  THEY WERE, BY ANY DEFINITION, one of history’s most remarkable couples: he the handsome, dynamic young president whose wit, charm, and idealistic fervor captured the world’s imagination; she the young wife and mother whose beauty, style, and elegance made her one of the most admired first ladies in American history. By the time it all ended with gunshots in Texas on November 22, 1963, Jack and Jackie Kennedy were irrefutably the First Couple of the World.

  In the immediate aftermath of Dallas, Jackie’s quiet strength and natural dignity—her gallantry, historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called it—were the glue that held the nation together. What did not endure, however, was the glittering fairy tale conjured up by Jackie as a way to preserve her husband’s legacy. By the turn of the new century, the flood of revelations concerning JFK’s reckless private life washed away what little remained of the Camelot myth.

  The ultimate question remains: On that day in Dallas fifty years ago when Jack was shot to death with Jackie at his side, did they truly love each other? After the affairs, the humiliations, the triumphs, and tragedies both known and unknown to the public, had they finally come together?

  Together, they had survived his life-threatening illnesses, his unfettered infidelity, the death of one parent and the crippling stroke of another, a miscarriage, a stillbirth, a difficult delivery that nearly killed both mother and child, and the loss of their son Patrick. Incredibly, over the course of their marriage, either the president or his first lady were administered the last rites at least six times—a little-known statistic that spoke volumes about what they had suffered through, and triumphed over, in private.

  It is no wonder we are still fascinated by them. They were impossibly attractive, outlandishly rich, brilliant, passionate, exciting—and deliciously complicated. Power, sex, mystique, money, and glamour—not to mention the dreams and aspirations of an entire generation—were embodied in the charismatic young couple who occupied the White House for a thousand days. Yet it is the bittersweet account of how they came together in their final year as a couple that really makes theirs a love story for the ages.

  IT WAS A SCENE REPLAYED on more than a dozen occasions—at Hyannis Port, in the White House, wherever President Kennedy gathered with family and friends to unwind.

  “Red,” he asked his old Navy buddy Paul “Red” Fay, “sing ‘Hooray for Hollywood.’”

  And with that, Fay burst into a slightly off-key, window-rattling version of the song while the boisterous crowd laughed and clapped. Afterward, Jack’s youngest brother, Ted, led everyone in singing “Heart of My Heart.”

  Until that moment, the President had been silent. “Do you know ‘September Song’?” JFK asked Ted’s wife, Joan, who was at the piano. She played the chorus twice, and then Jack began to sing the melancholy standard that tells the bittersweet story of a middle-aged man facing his own mortality.

  This night, the normally crowd fell silent as Jack looked over at Jackie with tears welling in his eyes and sang the final lines:

  Oh, the days dwindle down to a precious few.

  September, November!

  And these few precious days I’ll spend with you …

  Jack was the love of my life. No one will ever know a big part of me died with him.

  —JACKIE

  Of all the women I’ve ever known, there was only one I could have married—and I married her.

  —JACK

  1

  Jack, Jack, Jack! Can You Hear Me?

  DALLAS

  NOVEMBER 22, 1963

  12:30 PM.

  She would always remember the roses. Three times that day before they got to Dallas, she feigned delight as someone presented her with the yellow roses for which Texas was so famous. “Only in Dallas,” Jackie said, “I was given red roses. How funny, I thought—red roses for me.” Soon, the backseat of their car would be strewn with blood-soaked rose petals—a surreal image she would never be able to erase from her mind. But for now, as they basked in the noonday sunlight and cheers from the crowds that lined the streets, Jack and Jackie seemed happier—and closer—than they had ever been.

  The forty-six-year-old president and his thirty-four-year-old first lady exchanged one final glance. And then, in an instant, it all ended.

  The look on Jack’s still-boyish face the moment the first bullet struck him in the back of the neck, severing his windpipe and exiting his throat, would haunt Jackie’s dreams for the rest of her life. “He looked puzzled,” she later said. “I remember he looked as if he just had a slight headache.”

  For a split second, Jackie thought the crack she had heard was the sound of a motorcycle backfiring—until she realized she was watching, as if in slow motion, the president’s head begin to pull apart. “I could see a piece of his skull coming off,” she recalled. “It was flesh-colored, not white. I can see this perfectly clean piece detaching itself from his head. Then he slumped in my lap.”

  Texas governor John Connally, riding in the jumpseat in front of the president, had also been seriously wounded. “Oh no, no, no,” he yelled, “they’re going to kill us all!” Connally’s wife, Nellie, who with her husband was now covered with blood and bits of brain matter from JFK’s head wound, looked back at the first lady. “I have his brains,” Jackie said as she sat staring for a full seven seconds, “in my hands!”

  The driver of the presidential limousine floored the accelerator, and the “sensation of enormous speed” gave Jackie a sudden jolt of adrenaline. It also nearly dislodged Secret Service agent Clint Hill from his tenuous perch on the rear step; ever since the first shot rang out, Hill, who had been riding in the backup car, had sprinted to catch up. He finally reached the president’s Lincoln just as the third shot struck, spraying Hill as well with bits of bone and brain matter.

  What Hill then witnessed along with a breathless nation was something Jackie herself would not remember. Numb with shock and panic, Jackie clambered onto the slippery trunk of the Lincoln. To many, it appeared that she was trying to reach out to Agent Hill and pull him onto the car. In fact, she was grasping for a large chunk of the president’s skull. Terrified that the first lady would now tumble off the back of the speeding vehicle, Hill pushed her back into her seat as the shard from JFK’s skull flew into the street.

  With the 190-pound Hill now sprawled over her, trying to act as a human shield for both the president and the first lady, Jackie cradled her husband’s shattered head in her lap. She pressed down on the top with her white-gloved hands, she said later, “to keep the brains
in.”

  Jackie’s head was down, her face only inches from the president’s. She was struck by the “pink-rose ridges” inside his broken skull, she later said, and the fact that despite everything, from the hairline down, “his head was so beautiful. I tried to hold the top of his head down, maybe I could keep it in … but I knew he was dead.” So did the crowds that lined the street. “He’s dead! He’s dead!” she could hear people shouting as the motorcade sped to Parkland Memorial Hospital.

  Jackie clung to the slimmest hope that maybe there was life there still, a latent if quickly ebbing consciousness. “Jack, Jack, Jack, can you hear me?” she whispered over and over into his ear. The president’s blue eyes were wide open in a fixed stare. “I love you, Jack,” Jackie said. “I love you.”

  Although she later said it “seemed liked an eternity,” it took just seven minutes before the car screech to a halt outside the emergency room entrance at Parkland. Hill, a fellow Secret Service agent named Roy Kellerman, and JFK’s longtime aide Dave Powers were about to lift the president onto a waiting stretcher, but Jackie, still cradling Jack’s head, refused.

  “Please, Mrs. Kennedy,” Hill said. “We must get the president to a doctor.”

  “I’m not letting him go, Mr. Hill,” she said. “You know he’s dead. Leave me alone.” Hill understood what was happening: Jackie did not want the world to see the gaping crater in her husband’s skull. Struggling to control his own emotions, Hill whipped off the jacket of his black suit and wrapped it around the president’s head.

  Jackie ran alongside the gurney as her husband was wheeled into the hospital; she held Hill’s jacket in place so that it wouldn’t slip to reveal the gruesome truth. “It wasn’t repulsive to me for one moment,” she said. “Nothing was repulsive to me, and I was running behind with the coat covering it …”

  Incredibly, Jack had a faint pulse and was still breathing when he was admitted to Parkland Hospital, simply as “Case 24740, white male, gunshot wound.” Inside Trauma Room 1 a team of doctors, soon joined by White House physician Admiral George Burkley, immediately began administering massive blood transfusions.

  Suddenly two burley men in scrubs blocked Jackie’s path and began trying to pull her away. “Mrs. Kennedy,” one of them said, “you come with us.” But Jackie had other ideas. Nine years earlier, she had been kept away from Jack when he nearly died following one of his back surgeries. “They’re never going to keep me away from him again,” she told herself then.

  This time, Jackie was standing her ground. The “big Texas interns wanted to take me away from him,” she later said. “They kept trying to get me, they kept trying to grab me.” This time things would be different. “I’m not leaving him,” she declared, softly at first. Then she raised her voice only slightly—but just enough to make the interns back away. “I am not leaving,” she told them.

  No one seemed to notice that during all this time, Jackie had her left hand cupped over something she held in her right. As Parkland’s chief anesthesiologist, Dr. Marion Jenkins, stood outside Trauma Room 1, the first lady nudged him with her left elbow. Then, carefully, she handed Jenkins what the doctor could only describe as “a good-sized chunk of the president’s brain. She didn’t say a word. I handed it to the nurse.”

  One of the uniformed Dallas police officers who had escorted the motorcade handed Jackie a cigarette. She had always managed to conceal her heavy smoking habit from the press and never smoked in public, but none of that mattered now.

  Ten minutes later, the same patrolman fetched folding chairs for the first lady and Nellie Connally, whose husband was being treated for his nonfatal bullet wounds in Trauma Room 2. The two women sat in total silence while Powers and White House Chief of Staff Kenneth P. O’Donnell paced the floor.

  The night before as they were going to bed, Jackie told her husband that she “hated” John Connally because he had been bragging about how he was more popular in Texas than the president. “I just can’t bear his soft, weak mouth and his sitting there saying all these great thing about himself. It seems so rude. I really hate him.” But Jack, who unlike Jackie never held a grudge, rubbed her back and tried to calm her down. “You mustn’t say that,” he told her. “If you start to say or think that you hate someone, then the next day you’ll act as if you hate him. You mustn’t say that about people.” What struck Jackie about that moment, she recalled, was that he “said it so kindly … Jack never stayed mad at someone. Never!”

  Powers, “too numb” to say anything himself, choked back tears at the sight of Jackie sitting in her gore-splattered pink wool suit. Staring straight ahead, she periodically brought the cigarette to her mouth, revealing that the president’s blood had stained her white kid gloves a deep crimson.

  Suddenly she was gripped by the possibility that Jack might survive. “Maybe he isn’t dead,” she thought. “He’s going to live!” After all, Jack had cheated death at least three times during their marriage. Of course, if he survived this time, he would be severely brain-damaged. When a stroke left his father, Joseph P. Kennedy, partially paralyzed and unable to speak, Jack let Jackie know in no uncertain terms where he stood. “Don’t ever,” he told her, “let that happen to me,” he told her. Now faced with options that were far worse, Jackie began bargaining with the Almighty: “Please, don’t let him die. I’ll take care of him every day of his life. I’ll make him happy.”

  The moment of self-delusion passed as swiftly as it came. She didn’t want to be sitting in a corridor waiting; Jackie wanted to be at her husband’s side. She got up and headed for Trauma l, only to encounter the hulking presence of head nurse Doris Nelson standing in the doorway. Nelson grabbed Jackie by both shoulders. “You can’t come in here,” she said.

  “I’m going to get in that room,” Jackie replied firmly. Admiral Burkley came out of the room and offered her a sedative. “No,” she said without hesitation. “I want to be in there when he dies.”

  Burkley relented. As they pushed through the swinging door into the trauma room, Jackie witnessed the medical team’s final, futile effort to revive the president. The floor was covered with Jack’s blood. Looking up from the operating table, chief surgeon Dr. Malcolm Perry shouted, “Get her out of here!”

  “It’s her prerogative,” Burkley argued. “It’s her prerogative.”

  “No,” Perry shot back. “She has got to leave. Mrs. Kennedy, you must leave.”

  For the first time that day, the preternaturally cool Mrs. Kennedy lost her temper. “I will not leave,” she said. “It’s my husband. His blood, his brains, are all over me.” Then, as Perry returned to his work, Jackie dropped down on one knee and said a brief, silent prayer. When she got back up, the front of her skirt was drenched with blood from the floor.

  At 1 p.m., Dr. Jenkins pulled a white sheet over Jack’s face while another member of the medical team, Dr. Kemp Clark, was given the onerous task of informing Jackie that the president was dead. “Your husband,” he told her, “has sustained a fatal wound.”

  Unable to speak, Jackie mouthed two words in response: “I know.”

  The room fell silent as Jackie walked up to Jack’s body. She scanned the length of the operating table, and noticed one of his feet was sticking out, looking “whiter than the sheet.” Instinctively, she took the exposed foot in her hand, knelt down, and gently kissed it.

  What happened next stunned everyone in the room. Jackie pulled the sheet back to expose Jack’s face and shoulders. His eyes were open, she later said, “and his mouth was so beautiful.” According to Dr. Jenkins, Jackie then started kissing Jack again—starting with his exposed foot and then, through the sheet, slowly, deliberately, working her way up. “She kissed his foot, his leg, thigh, chest, and then his lips.” During this entire process, Jenkins recalled, “she didn’t say a word.” The process had left everyone in the room “feeling as if the wind had been knocked out of us. It was the most moving thing,” Jenkins said, “any of us had ever seen.”

  Father Oscar
Huber had rushed to the hospital from nearby Holy Trinity Church and now feared he might pass out at any moment. Steeling himself, Huber stepped up to perform the last rites. Another physician guided Jackie’s hand to her husband’s under the sheet, and she held it while Father Huber dabbed holy oil on the slain president’s forehead and bestowed the Apostolic Blessing in Latin. When he was finished, the priest dabbed the oil with cotton, then tried to conceal it from Jackie when he realized the swab was drenched in the president’s blood.

  She returned to the hallway and settled back into her little folding chair with a cigarette while orderlies washed Jack’s body so it could be placed in a bronze coffin for the trip back to Washington, D.C., aboard Air Force One. A nurse materialized with a cold towel, and Jackie held it to her forehead to keep from passing out. “You must make sure,” she told O’Donnell, “that I get in there before they close the coffin. I must see him.”

  O’Donnell led Jackie back into Trauma Room 1 just a few minutes later. There was still blood on the floor, but Jack’s pale skin had been wiped completely clean. Four orderlies carefully lifted the president’s naked body off the table and slowly lowered it into the coffin lined with white satin.

  She was struck by how Jack, who had always seemed so much larger than life, now seemed “so small and fragile.” She also noticed that, as one of his longtime physicians had pointed out, the left side of his body was smaller than the right. “The left side of his face was smaller,” said back specialist Dr. Janet Travell. “His left shoulder was lower, and his left leg appreciably shorter”—a congenital condition that may have been the root cause of his lifelong back trouble.