These Few Precious Days Read online

  On November 25, Jack returned to Georgetown for a quiet Thanksgiving dinner with his wife and daughter at their house on N Street—“my sweet little house,” Jackie liked to say, “that leans slightly to one side.” Midway through dinner, Jack informed Jackie that he intended to return to Palm Beach that night.

  Jackie was crestfallen. Worried that this delivery might not be as easy as Caroline’s turned out to be, she begged Jack to postpone his trip to Florida just a few weeks—until the baby was born. “Why can’t you stay here until I have the baby?” she asked. “Then we can all go down together.”

  Jack refused. “Caroline had arrived on time,” Jack’s friend Bill Walton said, “and he saw no reason to think anything would be different this time around.” Instead of remaining by his wife’s side, JFK departed right after dessert.

  Just one hour later, Maud Shaw heard a scream and rushed upstairs. Jackie was crumpled over on the edge of her bed, clutching her stomach. The bedspread, Shaw noted with horror, was stained with blood. Shaw grabbed the phone and called Dr. Walsh. Within minutes, Jackie was being rushed by ambulance to Georgetown Hospital. Sheet-white by the time it arrived, Jackie summoned enough strength to ask the emergency room doctors once question: “Will I lose my baby?”

  Meanwhile the president-elect was in high spirits aboard the Caroline, puffing on a cigar and chatting about his plans for the transition. It was then that the news of Jackie’s condition crackled over the radio. This time Jack was “stricken with remorse,” Kenny O’Donnell said, “because he was not with his wife.” Jack muttered to O’Donnell, “I’m never there when she needs me.”

  As soon as the Caroline touched down in Palm Beach, Jack called Georgetown Hospital and was told that Jackie was being prepped for an emergency caesarean. To get back to Jackie’s side as quickly as possible, Jack commandeered the fastest plane available—the DC‑6 press plane that trailed the Caroline to Florida.

  As the press plane sped back to Washington, Jack clamped on the cockpit headphones and waited for news. It came a little after 1:00 a.m.: Jackie had given birth by caesarean section to a six-pound, three-ounce boy. Mother and child were healthy and resting comfortably. From the cockpit, Pierre Salinger announced the birth of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Jr., and the reporters cheered. It was only then that Jack, who only moments before worried that this time he might lose both his wife and their child, lit a cigar, faced the press—and took a sweeping bow.

  The glowing statement to the press aside, Jackie and her son were not out of the woods—far from it. John Jr. would spend the first six days of his life in an incubator. It would be months before both would fully recover, and along the way both would suffer near-fatal setbacks.

  John Jr. was less than a day old when Kennedy family nurse Luella Hennessey, flanked by Secret Service agents, wheeled Jackie in to see him in his incubator. Halfway there, a photographer lunged out of a storage closet and popped off a half-dozen flashbulbs before the agents confiscated his film.

  Jackie was not prepared for this. “I feel,” she said, “as though I’ve turned into a piece of public property.”

  Jack, meanwhile, made up for not being there for John’s birth by visiting his wife and son three times a day. The mood at the hospital, Life magazine writer Gail Wescott said, was “almost carnival-like—innocent and exhilarating. It did not seem that anything could ever go wrong.”

  With Mommy in the hospital, JFK was less likely to rein in his high-spirited daughter—certainly not when there were cameras around. As for the baby, Caroline proudly claimed ownership; since she turned three just two days after John’s arrival, she was told that he was her “birthday present.” Caroline, according to Maud Shaw, “thought for a long time after that he belonged to her.”

  For the time being, Jack was perfectly happy to watch his little girl charm the press corps. While he conferred with political operatives and leaders from the top echelons of government, Caroline slid down bannisters, raced around the room, stuck her tongue out behind Daddy’s back, pedaled her tricycle between reporters’ legs, or—as she did during an important news conference—tottered around in her pajamas and Mommy’s size-ten-and-a-half stiletto heels.

  John Jr. was baptized on December 8 wearing JFK’s forty-three-year-old christening gown. Because Jackie was still recuperating, the ceremony took place in the Georgetown University chapel. Asked who the baby looked like, all the Kennedys agreed John was the spitting image of his father. Janet Auchincloss insisted that the baby looked more like Jackie. When asked her opinion, Jackie replied, “I don’t think he looks like anybody.”

  The day she was scheduled to leave the hospital, Jackie defied her doctor’s orders and reluctantly accepted departing first lady Mamie Eisenhower’s invitation to show her around the Executive Mansion. She didn’t want to do it, but Jack insisted. “For God’s sake, Jackie,” he said, “you don’t want to insult Mrs. Eisenhower. You’ve got to go.” Family nurse Luella Hennessey was one of the few with the courage to speak up. “If you get on your feet now, you might die,” she pleaded. “I don’t care if he is the new president, he has no right to ask you to risk your life.”

  Jackie wished she had listened to the nurse. A promised wheelchair never materialized. Trailing Mamie, she schlepped through room after room, climbed up and down staircases—all the while grinning for photographers. Not once was she even offered a chance to sit down.

  Once it was over and she was back home in Georgetown, Jackie collapsed. “I really had a weeping fit and I couldn’t stop crying,” recalled Jackie, who then flew down to the Kennedy estate in Palm Beach to recover. “It was something that takes away your last strength when you don’t have any left. So that wasn’t very nice of Mrs. Eisenhower.”

  Around this time, the baby suffered an even more distressing setback. Aboard the Caroline en route to Florida, Jackie was sufficiently alarmed about the baby’s labored breathing to order Jack and his cronies to smoke their cigars at the opposite end of the cabin, away from John’s bassinet.

  At the Palm Beach mansion, things only got worse. It turned out that he suffered from an inflammation of the lung’s hyaline membrane—the same problem that would later prove fatal for another Kennedy child. “There was, thank God, this brilliant pediatrician in Palm Beach,” Jackie said, “who really saved his life, as he was going downhill.”

  Just forty-eight hours after his son was pulled back from the brink of death a second time, Jack headed off as he did every Sunday in Palm Beach to Mass at nearby St. Edward’s Church. No one had noticed that just outside, would-be suicide bomber Richard P. Pavlick waited on the street in his car packed with seven sticks of dynamite. Pavlick’s plan: to crash into JFK’s limousine as it pulled out of the driveway and onto North Ocean Boulevard.

  Just as he was about to slam his foot on the accelerator, Jackie and Caroline stepped out to say goodbye. Then nurse Luella Hennessey emerged from the house with the baby in her arms. Unexpectedly overcome by the sight of the Kennedy children, Pavlick turned and drove away. His bizarre plot to kill President-elect Kennedy only came to light several days later, when Pavlick was pulled over for drunk driving. He was eventually convicted of attempted murder and sent to prison.

  The ever-fatalistic Jack merely shrugged when told how close Pavlick came to murdering not only him but his family. Jackie, on the other hand, was petrified. “We’re nothing,” she told Tish Baldrige, “but sitting ducks in a shooting gallery.”

  Still weak, unable to hold food down, and suffering what she described simply as “complete physical and nervous exhaustion,” Jackie returned to Georgetown on January 14 to start packing for the big move. The children stayed behind in Palm Beach with their father, Maud Shaw, and the new nanny hired to take care of John, Elsie Phillips.

  Determined to leave her mark on the White House, Jackie had already hired old school chum Tish Baldrige, who was previously employed as publicity director for Tiffany & Company, to be her social secretary. “The world’s greatest monument to
bad taste” is how Jackie described the White House to Baldrige. “And the furniture—positively atrocious!”

  To help fix the problem, Jackie hired New York interior designer Sister Parish, who promptly assembled a battalion of experts whose sole mission was to carry out the first lady’s wishes. “Let’s have lots of chintz,” Jackie told Parish, “and gay up this old dump.”

  Surrounded by towering piles of packing boxes marked “Nursery,” “Yellow Oval Room,” “Queens’ Room,” and “Children’s Playroom/Solarium,” Jackie and Parish spent hours going over the paint samples, wallpaper, drapery, and carpet swatches spread out on the dining room table. Jackie told Parish that she wanted to “restore” the White House, not simply “redecorate” it. “Everything must have a reason for being there, and that is a question of scholarship.”

  On January 18, Jack returned to Washington—but not home. Jackie became unraveled at the notion of Jack and his boisterous transition invading her territory again; at her request, Jack instead moved in with his friend and neighbor Bill Walton.

  The next day, waist-high snow blanketed the nation’s capital, tying up traffic and throwing Frank Sinatra, producer of that evening’s star-studded Inaugural Gala at the National Armory, into a panic. He needn’t have worried. Crowds still huddled along the streets to catch a passing glimpse of their exciting new first couple, buoyed by what gala performer Leonard Bernstein called a “special blizzard festival mood.”

  The show itself came off without a hitch, although Jackie took offense at stand-up legend Alan King’s skewering of marriage, and wives in particular. “So awful, all these horrible jokes about marriage,” she later told Arthur Schlesinger. “I mean, the wife is a shrew, and the—I just thought that’s so sad when comedians do that …”

  IF SHE WAS CONCERNED THAT Jack would take note, he was having too much fun toying with his Secret Service detail, vanishing down the service stairs, or darting off to greet someone he’d spotted in the crowd. Halfway through the program, Jackie realized she was simply too tired to go on. She slipped out during intermission and returned to Georgetown to collapse in her bed.

  The irrepressible president-elect was not about to call it a night. At a party thrown by his father at Paul Young’s Restaurant, Jack took Red Fay aside to ask, “Have you ever seen so many attractive people in one room?” He then marveled at the fact that his father was flirting with every young woman there—“one of the smoothest operations,” JFK sighed to his friend, “I’ve ever seen.”

  Back on N Street, Jackie quickly discovered that, as exhausted as she was, there was no way she could sleep. She was, she said, like a child “waiting for Christmas … I couldn’t go to sleep.” More to the point, she didn’t want to fall asleep before Jack came home, not on their last night before moving into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. “It was such a night to share together,” she said, “because that night, you know, we were in the same bed.”

  Actually, they were in bed together less than two hours; Jack didn’t straggle in until shortly after 6 a.m., and he departed alone for early morning mass at eight. Back by nine, he practiced his inaugural address in the ground-floor library while Jackie dressed upstairs. “Come on, Jackie,” he yelled up the stairs after she’d kept him waiting past their scheduled departure for pre-inauguration coffee with the Eisenhowers. “For God’s sake!”

  America’s next first lady appeared moments later looking like a character from Tolstoy in a beige coat with sable collar, matching muff, and the pillbox hat that would become her trademark. That, and the bouffant hairdo that was already being copied by millions of women around the world.

  PRECISELY AT NOON ON JANUARY 20, 1961, Jackie seemed unfazed by the numbing 20-degree cold as she proudly watched Jack place his hand on the Fitzgerald family Bible and take the oath of office from Chief Justice Earl Warren. At that instant Jack became the first president born in the twentieth century, the first Roman Catholic president, and, at forty-three, the youngest person ever elected to the office.

  Jack’s inaugural address, with its bold “Ask not what your country can do for you” message, electrified the nation. But Jackie was prevented from following tradition and congratulating her husband on the dais with a kiss. “Everyone says,” she recalled of that moment, “‘Why didn’t you kiss Jack after?’” But knowing all too well his aversion to showing emotion of any kind in public, she refrained. Kissing, even after being sworn in as president, was something that “of course, he would never do.”

  Stuck far behind her husband with the other spouses, Jackie watched in frustration as Jack walked briskly up the red-carpeted steps and off the platform. “I so badly wanted to see him,” she remembered, “just to see him alone.” Finally, she caught up with him in the Capitol Rotunda as he was making his way to the traditional inaugural lunch with congressional leaders. As Jack turned toward her, she put her gloved hand on his cheek. “There was so much I wanted to say, but I could scarcely embrace him in front of all those people,” she recalled. So she just looked into his eyes and said, “Jack, you were so wonderful!” She was startled by the way he looked at her with tears in his eyes. “He was smiling in the most touching and vulnerable way,” she said. “He looked so happy.”

  It was then that a photographer emerged from behind a pillar and captured the moment on film. “In the papers it said, ‘Wife chucks him under chin.’ I mean that was so much more emotional than any kiss because his eyes really did fill with tears.” She wanted to rewrite the newspaper caption to simply read “Oh, Jack. What a day.”

  Braving the frigid temperatures, the new president and his first lady rode in an open car from the Capitol Building to the White House. “I had absolutely no idea,” she said, “about how to wave until Jack showed me.”

  The president seemed impervious to the cold as marching bands, military units, and floats—including one that carried members of his old PT‑109 crew—paraded before him for three and a half hours. But after one hour on the reviewing stand, Jackie—shivering, fatigued, and looking ahead to the onerous prospect of having to dance at five scheduled inaugural balls—excused herself. “I’m exhausted, Jack,” she said. “I’ll see you at home.”

  Of course, “home” for Jack and Jackie was now the White House, where painters worked feverishly to complete the Kennedys’ bedrooms, the newly configured family dining room (Jackie actually designed her own kitchen and dining room within steps of the West Siting Hall, where the family congregated), and John’s blue-and-white nursery. In the meantime, since Jackie was still recuperating from John’s difficult delivery, it was agreed that Jackie would sleep alone at the opposite end of the hall in the Queens’ Bedroom (so named because five queens had slept there). Jack would sleep separately from her their first night in the White House, across the East Hall in the Lincoln Bedroom.

  That afternoon she did not budge from her quarters—not even to greet scores of Kennedy, Bouvier, and Auchincloss family members bused in for a private reception in the State Dining Room. By the time he returned from the parade shortly after nightfall to discover that Jackie was still in bed, Jack was livid. That changed when he went upstairs and discovered his wife ashen-faced and motionless under the covers.

  Realizing how tired and sick his wife really was, JFK went off for a dinner with new cabinet members, leaving staff with instructions to serve Jackie her dinner on a tray in bed. At 9 p.m., it was time to get dressed for the first ball. “I can’t do it,” she told “Provi” Providencia, her longtime personal maid. “I can’t get out of bed. I just can’t move.”

  “I was frantic,” remembered Jackie, who immediately called Dr. Travell. Within minutes the president’s personal physician was at Jackie’s bedside. “She had two pills,” Jackie said, “a green one and an orange one. She told me to take the orange one.” The orange one, Travell told her as she swallowed the pill, just happened to be Max Jacobson’s favorite drug: Dexedrine. “Thank God,” said Jackie, who jumped out of bed and was dressed in half the time she usually
took, “it really did the trick.” She never found out what the green pill was, although Jackie conceded that she would always wonder.

  It was the president’s turn to gaze adoringly when Jackie appeared wearing a white silk crepe gown with a bodice embroidered in silver thread, all beneath a floor-length cape with a high mandarin collar. Diamond pendant earrings on loan from Tiffany’s and white opera gloves completed the look. Jack escorted her down to the Red Room, where a small group of friends were waiting. “Darling,” Jack said as he lifted his champagne glass, “you’ve never looked lovelier.”

  That evening, Jackie was radiant. At each of the first three inaugural balls they were scheduled to attend, a gasp went up from the crowd as the dazzling Jackie and Jack, in white and tails, made their entrance accompanied by “Hail to the Chief.”

  BUT AS THEY HEADED TO the fourth ball, said Jackie, “it was like Cinderella and the clock striking midnight, because that pill wore off and I just couldn’t get out of the car. I just crumpled. All of my strength was finally gone.”

  She urged him to go on without her, but that was hardly necessary. Daily doses of cortisone were giving Jack the stamina of a twenty-year-old athlete. He quickly met up with Red Fay and Fay’s date for the evening, Angie Dickinson. It was not JFK’s first encounter with the striking, blond, twenty-eight-year-old actress; they had reportedly gone skinny-dipping in Peter Lawford’s pool the night Jack secured his party’s nomination. “He was the killer type,” Dickinson said of their relationship, “the kind your mother hoped you wouldn’t marry.” As for the sex: “It was,” Angie allegedly said, “the most exciting seven minutes of my life.”