These Few Precious Days Read online

  Jackie’s eyes widened as she began tugging at the white kid gloves that were now caked with her husband’s blood. Finally, one of the policemen there stepped forward to help her pull them off. JFK never wore a wedding ring, so Jackie slipped hers over the bare finger on his left hand. The ring was also smeared with blood, and a nurse stepped forward to quickly sponge off it and the president’s hand. “It’s the right thing to do,” O’Donnell reassured her. (Almost immediately Jackie began doubting whether she could bear parting with the simple gold band she had worn for a decade. Later that night at Bethesda Naval Hospital, O’Donnell instructed Admiral Burkley to remove the ring from Jack’s finger and return it to Jackie.)

  Before the casket was closed, Burkley handed Jackie two blood-soaked red roses that had fallen inside the president’ shirt after the bullets struck. She handed one of the bloody stems back to Burkley. “This,” he told her as he held up the rose, “is the greatest treasure of my life.”

  It would not be until Air Force One was winging its way back to Washington with Lyndon Baines Johnson sworn in as the new president that she finally began to unravel. She was seated next to Kenny O’Donnell at the rear of the plane, just opposite the casket, when Burkley came back and asked yet again if Jackie didn’t want to change out of her bloody clothes.

  “No!” she insisted. “I want them to see what they’ve done. I want them to see what they’ve done.”

  Once Burkley had slunk back to the front of the cabin, Jackie and O’Donnell looked at each other and, O’Donnell said, “she finally lost it. For the very first time that day, she allowed herself to cry.”

  Jackie sobbed for a full ten minutes, her poignant cries audible to the other passengers over the whine of the jet engines. Regaining her composure, she turned to O’Donnell. “Oh, it’s happened,” Jackie said.

  “It’s happened,” answered O’Donnell, who with Powers was a leading member of Kennedy’s fabled “Irish Mafia” of political cronies. Powers had already broken down several times in front of Jackie, but O’Donnell, whose eyes were red-rimmed from crying in private, struggled to hold it together.

  “Oh, Kenny,” Jackie said, choking back her tears, “what’s going to happen?”

  “You want to know something, Jackie?” O’Donnell answered. “I don’t give a damn.”

  “Oh, you’re right, you know,” she said. “You’re right. Just nothing matters but what you’ve lost.”

  “Well, I know what I’m going to do,” O’Donnell said. “I’m having a Scotch, and I think you would have one, too.”

  Jackie’s drink of choice was champagne; as the daughter of an alcoholic with a special fondness for hard drink, she had always been wary of whiskey. She remembered that Jack preferred beer—Heinekens—but when he did drink Scotch he always asked for Ballantines. “I’ve never even tasted Scotch before,” she told O’Donnell. “Now,” she added, “is as good a time as any to start.” Staring at what she later described as “that long, long coffin,” Jackie and O’Donnell both downed one triple, then another. “A lot of people were drinking,” LBJ aide Jack Valenti recalled. “But honestly, everyone on that plane was in such a state of profound shock and disbelief the alcohol seemed to have no effect.”

  Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy was having lunch with guests at Hickory Hill, his Virginia estate, when FBI director J. Edgar Hoover called with the news that the president had been shot. Thirty minutes later, Clint Hill called Bobby to confirm that his brother was dead. “Those poor children!” Bobby’s wife, Ethel, cried when Bobby told her that Jack and Jackie’s children, Caroline and John, were now fatherless.

  That afternoon five-year-old “Lyric” (Caroline’s code name; the president was “Lancer,” Jackie “Lace,” and John, “Lark”) sat beaming in the backseat of a family friend’s station wagon, headed for her very first sleepover. Behind the wheel was the mother of Caroline’s best friend. As soon as the terrible news blared over the radio she pulled to the side of the road. “We have a news bulletin,” the announcer said. “This just in—President Kennedy has been shot.” The driver switched off the radio and checked out her daughter and Caroline in the rearview mirror.

  Caroline, her small suitcase at her feet and her favorite pink teddy bear in her lap, was still chatting excitedly with her friend. Maybe she hadn’t heard, the driver thought. But she had.

  A black Ford sedan driven by a member of the Secret Service “Kiddie Detail”—those agents assigned to protect the president’s children—pulled up behind the station wagon, and soon Caroline was heading back to the White House (code name Chateau) in their car. The little girl gave the agent a quizzical look, grabbed her suitcase, and said goodbye to her bewildered friend. As the Secret Service car headed for 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, a passing driver spotted Caroline in the unmarked car and, having heard what had happened in Dallas, apparently assumed JFK’s daughter was being abducted. After a wild chase through congested rush hour traffic, Caroline arrived safely back at the White House.

  Neither she nor her brother, John, would be there for long. As soon as Bobby called Janet Auchincloss with the horrible news, Jackie’s famously meddlesome mother (Jack thought it hilarious that Janet’s children called her, or anyone, “Mummy”) made the unilateral decision to have Caroline and John brought to the Auchincloss house in Georgetown to spend the night.

  Joined by their British nanny, Maud Shaw, John and Caroline were playing in the living room of their grandmother’s house when Jackie’s sixteen-year-old half brother, Jamie Auchincloss, bounded in. “Uncle Jamie! Uncle Jamie!” John yelled as he dashed about the room playing with his toy helicopter. Jamie assumed his mother or someone had told them what had happened, but it quickly became obvious no one had. “I thought, ‘Why tell her now?’” recalled Jamie, who got down on the floor and began playing with his niece and nephew. “Why not let her have a few more hours of blissful innocence?”

  At one point, Caroline leapt to her feet and dashed into the kitchen for a cookie. What she saw was several Secret Service agents glued to the television set in the kitchen. One of the agents blocked the screen, but too late. When she came back into the living room, said Jamie, “Caroline’s mood had changed. She turned very quiet.”

  On the ground at Andrews Air Force Base, Jackie was met by Jack’s brother Bobby. It had been up to Bobby to break the news to all the family members, with the exception of Caroline and John. Jackie, overwhelmed with the day’s events and obviously still in a state of shock, had said nothing about the children yet. Right now she was focused on staying at her husband’s side. After Jack’s coffin was loaded into a waiting hearse, she and Bobby slid in the back.

  During the forty-minute ride from Andrews to Bethesda, Jackie recounted in vivid detail the events of the day. Once they arrived, she repeated the story for the small group of friends who had come to offer her comfort: old friends Nancy Tuckerman, Martha and Charlie Bartlett, and Tony and Ben Bradlee, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, Jackie’s mother, and her stepfather, Hugh D. (“Uncle Hughdie”) Auchincloss II.

  Making what Ben Bradlee called a “strangely graceful arc” with her right hand as she described how “that part of the president’s head had been blown away by one bullet,” Jackie moved trance-like from one stunned person to the next. All the while, Bradlee said, Jackie’s eyes were “still wide open with horror.” All listened in numb shock as Jackie, still “amazingly calm,” as Bradlee put it, relived the day’s events over and over again. “Even if you didn’t want to hear it,” Charlie Bartlett said, “you knew she had to tell it.”

  Perhaps even more startling was the manner in which Jackie turned the tables on those who had come to console her. Instead, she insisted on comforting them. “Oh Dave, you have been with Jack all these years,” she had already told Powers on the plane. “What will you do now?” She asked the same question of her secretary, Pamela Turnure, the Jackie look-alike who had once been her husband’s lover. And to her girlhood chum Nancy Tuckerman, just hired to
be Jackie’s social secretary: “Poor Tucky. You came all the way down from New York to take this job and now it’s all over. It’s so sad.”

  All the while, Jackie resisted any effort to get her to change out of her blood-spattered suit. She had often joked with her friends about her compulsive need to change out of her clothes if she saw even the tiniest spot. Now she wore her stained Chanel proudly. Martha Bartlett took her husband aside. “It’s as though,” she told him as they watched Jackie talk, “she doesn’t want the day to end.”

  Janet Auchincloss was surprised, then, when her daughter suddenly turned to her and asked, “Where are the children?”

  “They are with Jamie at our house,” she answered.

  “What,” Jackie wanted to know, “are they doing there?”

  Janet, who was used to making executive decisions on her own, nevertheless claimed Jackie had sent her a message from Air Force One saying she wanted the children taken to their grandparents’ home.

  There was no question in Jackie’s mind that her mother was making it all up. “But,” she said, “I never sent such a message.” In fact, Jackie was anything but pleased that her mother had interfered with the children’s normal routine.

  “The best thing for them,” Jackie said, “would be to stay in their own rooms with their own things so their lives can be as normal as possible.” Janet realized she had made a terrible mistake. “Mummy, my God,” Jackie added, her voice rising in anger, “those poor children. Their lives shouldn’t be disrupted now, of all times!”

  Jackie’s remarks sent Janet scurrying for the nearest phone. Within minutes, Maud Shaw was bundling Caroline and John into a White House limousine for the ride back home. “I knew their lives had changed forever,” said Uncle Jamie, who waved goodbye as the car pulled away from the Auchincloss mansion. “But then so had everyone’s.”

  WHAT JACKIE WANTED FOR HER children that one last fateful night was something that she had struggled against formidable odds to achieve throughout her marriage: a happy, normal family life—or at least a convincing imitation of it.

  This was not something either Jack or Jackie had known they were capable of achieving, or even wanted. In his scramble to the summit of power, Jack had scarcely proven himself to be a model husband. Jackie, living out her girlhood desire to be “part of a great man’s life,” had been willing to put up with Jack’s faithlessness so long as she was not the object of public humiliation—and in the abiding belief that she was the only woman he really loved.

  When she first set foot in the White House as America’s first lady, Jackie could not have dreamed that this is where she and Jack would come closest to fulfilling her dream of a happy marriage. “I said to myself, ‘It will be such a goldfish bowl. With the Secret Service and everybody here, I’ll never see my husband. It will ruin our marriage.’”

  Soon she realized the opposite was true. “I remember thinking, ‘What was the matter with me?’ It was when we were the closest,” she said. “I hadn’t realized the physical closeness of having his office in the same building and seeing him so many times a day.” For all the soaring triumphs, soul-testing trials, and crushing tragedies that would befall them during this historic time, Jack and Jackie would finally bridge the yawning emotional chasm between them only within the walls of the White House.

  “It was,” Jackie said without hesitation, “the happiest time of my life.”

  When they got to the White House, they fell in love all over again.

  —OLEG CASSINI, LONGTIME FRIEND OF BOTH JACK AND JACKIE

  Jackie loved him. Jack loved her. Maybe for different reasons …

  —JACQUES LOWE, JFK’S PERSONAL PHOTOGRAPHER AND FRIEND

  2

  “The President Says if You

  Don’t Hurry, He’ll Fall Asleep”

  THE WHITE HOUSE

  ALMOST ANY DAY JACK AND JACKIE

  WERE IN RESIDENCE

  “Okay, George,” the president said as his longtime valet George Thomas rapped four times on the door of the first lady’s bedroom. Jackie stirred beside him. “We hear you. We’re awake.” Their last day in the White House was beginning as nearly every day there began, with the soft-spoken, gray-haired Thomas waking the president promptly at 7:45 a.m. It was a routine the family quickly settled into, and it seldom varied during their thousand days in the White House.

  Although Jack and Jackie slept together in her bedroom most nights, the president maintained his own quarters as well—a particularly practical arrangement in the Kennedys’ case, since Jack’s persistent back problems often made it necessary for him to sleep on a special rock-hard mattress prescribed by his physician. An electric heating pad was never far from reach on the nightstand.

  The first couple’s bedrooms said much about their personalities—and the nature of their relationship. Jackie’s chandeliered French provincial bedroom was decorated in hues of powder blue and green, with a leopard-skin throw tossed in for drama. A couch upholstered in beige silk faced the fireplace, and large windows draped in silk framed the South Lawn. The first lady’s king-sized canopy bed was actually two beds pushed together—a soft mattress for the Jackie and a firm one better suited to Jack’s problematic back.

  Separated from the first lady’s boudoir by a walk-in closet that also contained their stereo system—“the old Victrola” they brought with them from their first home in Georgetown—the president’s white-walled bedroom was dominated by Harry Truman’s immense mahogany four-poster. Jackie selected a simple blue-and-white design for the linens and drapes, and picked a single painting to adorn the wall: Childe Hassam’s iconic Flag Day. Tucked off in one corner of the room was Jack’s favorite Carolina rocker, which the first lady had padded and upholstered for maximum comfort.

  While Jackie remained curled up under the blankets, her husband crawled out of bed, shed his pajamas, wrapped a towel around his waist, and ambled across the hall toward his bedroom and the warm bath that Thomas was already drawing for him. “He was the most unselfconscious man I’ve ever seen,” Jackie once said of her husband’s penchant for walking around in various states of undress within the confines of home. “He would walk around with just a towel on, and if it fell off or something, he’d just put it back on. So was just always so natural … Poor Nixon,” Jackie would add about her husband’s presidential rival, “he had such a disadvantage, you know, he would sweat and everything.”

  Oddly, in the morning hours Jack and Jackie rarely saw each other. His first conversation of the day was always with his valet. “Good Morning, George,” Jack said as he began rifling through the four morning newspapers Thomas always spread out at the foot of his bed.

  A native of Berryville, Virginia, and a grandson of slaves, Thomas was still in his thirties and working for Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times columnist Arthur Krock when Jack first ran for Congress in 1946. Krock’s longtime friend, Joseph P. Kennedy, casually remarked to the esteemed journalist that his bachelor son was accustomed to being cared for by family servants and probably could use one of his own. Krock, who also owed Joe a not unsubstantial sum of money, jumped at the chance to repay his debt to the powerful patriarch by “giving” his valet to the young Kennedy. For the next sixteen years, George Thomas was a constant presence in Jack’s life—and an eyewitness to some of the most intimate moments in the Kennedy marriage.

  For the next half hour, the president shaved in the tub to shave time, then settled back in the soapy water and pored over the morning newspapers and classified documents. “It was not at all unusual,” said White House Press Secretary Pierre Salinger, “to get a sheet of paper from him that was soaking wet.

  THOMAS, MEANWHILE, LAID OUT JACK’S first suit of the day. Over the course of an average day, JFK would change all of his clothes—from underwear on out—at least four times, often wearing as many as six shirts in a single twenty-four-hour period. Jack owned eighteen suits, all purchased by his father from Brooks Brothers. His underwear—JFK preferred white boxers�
�were also from Brooks Brothers, made exclusively for the store by D. & G. Anderson of Scotland. Jack’s shirts were custom made by Charles Dillon shirtmakers of 444 Park Avenue, New York, his ties by Christian Dior and Givenchy, his hand-sewn size-ten-and-a-half shoes and his size-thirty-four black belt by Farnsworth-Reed. Thomas placed the president’s gold Cartier watch with black leather band on the nightstand, alongside the three-foot-long custom-made shoehorn that enabled JFK to slip into his shoes—without having to bend down.

  From the first day he went to work for Jack, then a first-time candidate for Massachusetts’s Eleventh Congressional District, Thomas realized his duties would far transcend those of an ordinary valet. Suffering from the second in what would be a long series botched back surgeries, Jack was emaciated and drawn as he hobbled from one campaign event to another. After a particularly grueling day, he collapsed—but only after he had managed to shake thousands of hands while marching in Boston’s annual Bunker Hill Day Parade.

  One campaign worker, Robert Lee, remembered that Jack “turned yellow and blue. He appeared to me as a man who had probably had a heart attack.” Lee and Thomas scooped Jack up, carried him to a second-floor apartment, stripped off his clothes, and sponged him down. An ambulance was called, and George Thomas rode with Jack to the hospital. There would be countless such incidents over the years, and there were still times when Jack’s pain was so intense that Thomas, now fifty-five, had to help the younger man—Jack was just forty-three when he became the youngest man ever elected president—into his clothes.

  At 8:15 a.m., while the president still soaked in the tub, Maud Shaw knocked tentatively on the outer door to his president’s bedroom. More Mrs. Doubtfire than Mary Poppins, the Kennedys’ very British nanny had been caring for Caroline since she was eleven days old and still in the hospital. Breastfeeding, not particularly in vogue in the 1950s, was something that few society moms practiced, and Jackie was no exception. Like her mother before her, Jackie also felt that giving the baby her bottle or changing a diaper were tasks best left to the professionals. “If one of them was holding the baby and that smell began wafting up,” recalled close Kennedy friend Chuck Spalding, “well, it was, ‘Maud … oh, MAUD!’ and they held that kid at arm’s length until they could hand her over. But that was the way they’d been brought up—with servants always sort of appearing out of nowhere to clean things up. They weren’t your average people, and they weren’t your average parents either.”