The Good Son_JFK Jr. and the Mother He Loved Read online

  “Eastward . . .”

  Had he known about his new plane’s many remarkable capabilities, John could simply have pushed two buttons to activate the Piper Saratoga’s automatic pilot feature and it would have flown him all the way from New Jersey to Massachusetts. Once there, it would have even executed a perfect three-point landing at Martha’s Vineyard Airport.

  If he was even aware that he could put his plane on automatic pilot, John gave no hint of it. “The Piper was his shiny new toy, and he was thrilled with it,” a friend said. “But it was an awful lot of plane to handle, and John was still learning the ropes.”

  As it climbed at a speed of 104 miles per hour toward its cruising altitude of 5,600 feet, the plane crossed over the Hudson and headed toward Long Island Sound. It had been in the air only a matter of minutes when an air traffic controller on Long Island spotted an unexpected blip on his radar screen. A small plane of unknown origin—since John hadn’t filed a flight plan there was no way for anyone to know precisely who he was or where he was heading—seemed to be edging perilously close to an American Airlines passenger jet.

  Alerted to the danger, the pilot of the airliner was taken aback by the sight of the Piper Saratoga emerging from the mist just off the tip of his right wing. Careful not to upset his 160 passengers, he made a subtle maneuver to put distance between his airliner and the smaller craft—and avert the midair collision that otherwise would have been inevitable.

  Inside the Piper, everyone was blissfully unaware of how they had just cheated death—at least for the time being. To protect their ears from the earsplitting whine of the engines, John and the Bessette sisters wore headphones that made it possible for them to talk about their weekend plans and trade gossip about their wide circle of friends in New York as they leafed through fashion magazines spread out on the small foldout table between them.

  John must have thought he was playing it safe at that point—never straying far from the Connecticut coastline, ticking off the names of the cities and towns as they appeared one by one just over his left shoulder: Greenwich, Bridgeport, New Haven, Old Saybrook, New London, Mystic.

  He could make them out—just barely. But after forty minutes in the air, nothing was visible. The murk was now so dense that neither the comforting sight of the city lights below nor the stars above were available to help guide John on his way.

  At any time, John could have pushed those two lifesaving buttons to turn on the automatic pilot. Dr. Bob Arnot, flying just twenty minutes ahead of Kennedy, considered doing just that. When he approached the Vineyard and searched for the lights of Oak Bluffs, Edgartown, and Vineyard Haven, Arnot saw nothing. “It’s as if someone put you in a closet and shut the door.” Arnot wondered if the island had suffered a power failure.

  “There was no horizon and no light,” he said. “The night could best be described as inky black.”

  At 9:24, John still had the option of simply pushing the two buttons that put his plane on autopilot. Now, forty-six minutes into his planned flight, John instead scanned the coastline for familiar landmarks as he flew over Westerly, Rhode Island.

  Nothing.

  Looking to the right, he searched for the hatchet-shaped outline of Block Island, but there was only darkness below.

  Anyone flying strictly by visual flight rules and not relying solely on instruments would normally have borne left once he reached Point Judith and clung to the coastline until he reached Buzzards Bay. Then he could make a right turn and fly straight out to Martha’s Vineyard over eight miles of open water. Instead, John decided to maintain his course straight ahead to the Vineyard over thirty-five miles of ocean. This final leg of the trip would take only six minutes, but it meant that John would have no visual reference points, lights, or landmarks. Without them, local pilot Tom Freeman observed, “you are totally, completely in the dark—literally as well as figuratively—if you don’t know how to rely on your instruments. It’s a sickening, scary feeling.”

  By this point, other pilots in the region were either radioing for assistance or asking for permission to put down at alternate airports inland until the fog lifted.

  John, however, pressed on.

  His first instinct, understandably, was to try to drop below the cloud layer. Fifty-six minutes after takeoff, at precisely 9:34 p.m., John pushed the yoke forward and with the airspeed indicator reading 150 knots (173 miles per hour), swiftly descended at the rate of 700 feet per minute. Leveling off at 2,300 feet, he was at last below the haze and could see Gay Head Lighthouse and, not far beyond, the lights of Jackie’s beloved Red Gate Farm.

  But within five minutes, John was back to flying blind. Another pilot in the area that night describes the sensation as being in a room with the windows painted white. John’s instructors had warned him about spatial disorientation, and how, deprived of visual cues, the human brain can quickly confuse down with up and up with down. Even the most experienced pilots, he remembered being told, developed debilitating vertigo—and that was why, under these conditions, the only way to safely arrive at his destination was to rely solely on his instruments and ignore what his body was telling him.

  In the cockpit, John tried to square what his body seemed to be saying with the readings on the gauges and dials directly in front of him. The off-kilter reading on the directional gyro in the lower center of the instrument panel would have contradicted whatever it was he was feeling. A quick glance at the turn-and-bank indicator in the lower left-hand corner would have shown that the red ball was not centered and that his wings were not level—no matter what his own senses were telling him.

  His head swimming, John made a sharp right turn and took the plane back up three hundred feet—a last, frantic maneuver to somehow get above the haze. By this point John’s body was, in the words of veteran military pilot Edward Francis, “undoubtedly playing all sorts of tricks on him. You can be upside down and turning to the left and your body is telling you you’re right side up and turning right.” Add to this confusion the mounting panic of the two women behind him. “By now they would have been bounced around enough to know something was seriously wrong,” Francis speculated. “They may have been screaming. They certainly would have been asking John what was happening.”

  Unfortunately, John had not yet gone through the phase of instrument training that might have helped him cope with pandemonium in the cockpit. In the air, instructors simulate an emergency and then try to rattle a novice any way they can—by yelling, grabbing at the controls, or even popping a paper bag—all to reinforce the pilot’s ability to ignore distractions and focus on the problem at hand. “They train you,” Kyle Bailey said, “to have nerves of steel.”

  Still, John managed to level off at 2,600 feet and steer the plane straight for Martha’s Vineyard Airport, now just twenty miles ahead. He maintained this course for a full minute before he must have again begun listening to the mixed messages his senses and the instruments were sending him. At 9:40 p.m., John, clearly disoriented, turned south, away from the island. He then began to bring the plane down, descending gradually until the plane reached 2,200 feet. It was then that the Piper Saratoga suddenly surged downward at an alarming 5,000 feet per minute—ten times the normal airspeed.

  Yet the situation was not hopeless—not yet. If he could just have maintained the presence of mind to level his wings before pulling up on the yoke, he could have regained altitude and saved the plane. To accomplish this, the notoriously absentminded John would have had to bring to bear all his powers of concentration, and he would have had to rely solely on his instruments. Instead, he made a classic—and fatal—mistake: pulling up on the yoke without bothering to level the plane. As a result, the Piper Saratoga started to turn clockwise in a corkscrew fashion, picking up speed as it headed downward in what aviators refer to as a “graveyard spiral.”

  Inside the cabin, John, Carolyn, and Lauren were pressed back into their leather seats as the plane spun wildly toward the ocean’s surface at a rate of ninety-nin
e feet per second. They would no longer be able to scream; the G-forces pressing against their chests would have already forced the air out of their lungs. All they would have been able to do was listen in terror to the wail of the engine and the wind shrieking past the windows.

  Listen, and wait.

  Now my wife and I prepare for a new administration, and a new baby.

  —JFK’S VICTORY SPEECH, NOVEMBER 9, 1960

  It was clear that John was the light of his life.

  —JOHN’S UNCLE JAMIE AUCHINCLOSS, ON JFK

  Sometimes I can’t remember what really happened, and what I saw in pictures.

  —JOHN

  2.

  The Son He Had Longed For

  * * *

  November 24, 1960

  Aboard the Kennedy campaign plane Caroline

  The president-elect was in an upbeat mood, nursing a cocktail and talking about the makeup of his administration, when word came from the cockpit that his pregnant wife had collapsed at their Georgetown home. He was devastated—“stricken with remorse,” his aide Kenneth O’Donnell recalled, “because he was not with his wife.”

  John F. Kennedy had reason to feel guilty. Although Caroline’s birth in 1957 had been an easy one, Jackie had already endured a miscarriage and a stillbirth that nearly killed her. In the closing weeks of the 1960 presidential campaign, Jack had pressured Jackie to join him on the campaign trail.

  She defied her doctors and reluctantly agreed, pushing herself to the edge. This final campaign surge ended with a ticker-tape parade through New York’s fabled “Canyon of Heroes”—a frenzied blur of mass hysteria during which the candidate and his wife perched precariously on the back of an open car. Several times, they were both nearly yanked from the car by overzealous fans tugging at their sleeves.

  After taking such risks to ensure her husband’s narrow victory margin—less than one-fifth of one percent—Jackie might have expected that Jack could make more time for her and for Caroline, the daughter he called “Buttons.” Instead, their redbrick townhouse on Georgetown’s narrow N Street became “transition central,” overrun with both hard-boiled rank-and-file members of Kennedy’s Irish “Murphia” as well as the youthful and energetic Ivy Leaguers who made up JFK’s personal brain trust.

  The scene was no less chaotic outside, where reporters and onlookers pressed against police barricades across the street. Several times a day, Jack, still determined to accommodate the faithful whenever possible, strode across the street to shake hands and parry with the press.

  Jackie, sensing that all was not right with her pregnancy, was now determined to obey her obstetrician’s orders not to leave the house. Holed up upstairs, she begged Jack to spend time with her and Caroline. Instead, he began shuttling between Georgetown and La Guerida (roughly “Spoils of War” in Spanish), Joseph Kennedy’s sprawling oceanfront estate in Palm Beach, Florida. There JFK and his father, tended to by a household staff of twelve, sunbathed in the nude while discussing possible cabinet appointments.

  Jack did agree to fly back to Georgetown to share a quiet Thanksgiving dinner with his wife and daughter, but only as long as he could fly back to Palm Beach that same night. Understandably apprehensive now that the due date was only three weeks away, Jackie pleaded with him to stay. “Why can’t you stay here until I have the baby,” she asked, “and then we can go down together.”

  Jack refused. Caroline had been born right on schedule, and Jack had no reason to think the next baby would be any different. Besides, three weeks “might as well have been six months to him,” their friend Bill Walton said. “He was not about to put everything on hold just because Jackie was a little nervous. He had a country to run.”

  As soon as he finished his pumpkin pie, Jack departed for Palm Beach, leaving a crestfallen Jackie behind. The president-elect’s plane had only been in the air a matter of minutes when Caroline’s nanny, Maud Shaw, heard Jackie’s screams. Rushed by ambulance to Georgetown University Hospital, Jackie was immediately prepped for an emergency caesarean.

  Once he touched down in Florida, Jack commandeered the fastest aircraft available—the DC-6 press plane that trailed the Caroline—and headed straight back to Washington. En route, he put on the cockpit headphones and waited for any news. It wasn’t until shortly before l a.m. on November 25, 1960, that passengers and crew could breathe a sigh of relief. When Press Secretary Pierre Salinger announced over the intercom that Mrs. Kennedy had just given birth by caesarean section to a healthy six-pound, three-ounce boy, the reporters cheered and JFK, smiling broadly, took a deep bow.

  While the press was spoon-fed glowing reports that mother and child were “doing well and resting comfortably,” both Jackie and her baby remained in guarded condition. Once the anesthesia wore off, Jackie, still in considerable pain from her ordeal, demanded to see her son. She could see her baby, but was forbidden to hold him; the infant, suffering from what would turn out to be an undiagnosed respiratory ailment, spent the first six days of his life in an incubator. Jackie’s condition, meanwhile, was also problematic. It would take months for Jackie and her baby to fully recover, but only after each suffered setbacks severe enough to take them to the brink of death.

  Chastened, Jack rushed to his wife’s third-floor suite at the hospital and then popped into the nursery to visit his son. “Now, that’s the most beautiful boy I’ve seen,” the president-elect gushed. “Maybe I’ll name him Abraham Lincoln.” To make up for the worry he had cause her, Jack visited Jackie and the baby three times a day.

  For now, a carnival atmosphere prevailed at the hospital—“buoyant and joyous” were the words Life magazine’s Gail Wescott used to describe it. “It was innocent and exhilarating. It did not seem that anything could ever go wrong.” One of the stars of the show was Buttons, eager to see the baby brother born just two days before she turned three—her “birthday present,” she was told by her parents, and she believed it. “Caroline thought for a long time,” Nanny Shaw said, “that he belonged to her.”

  Determined to keep John’s christening a low-key affair, Jackie convinced her husband that it should take place at the hospital and away from the press. But when the president-elect wheeled his wife and their week-old son outside her room toward the hospital chapel, a cadre of photographers were poised for action at the far end of the corridor. “Oh, God,” Jackie said. “Don’t stop, Jack. Just keep going.” But Jack was not about to disappoint the Washington press corps—or the public that had voted him into office. He stopped pushing Jackie’s wheelchair for a moment to allow a few shots to be taken of the infant, who was dressed for the occasion in his father’s forty-three-year-old silk-and-lace baptismal gown.

  When the closed-door christening was over thirty minutes later, a noticeably more relaxed Jackie emerged. “Look at those pretty eyes,” she said as she looked down at her son. “Isn’t he sweet?” Jack nodded in agreement, but his mind was clearly elsewhere.

  On December 9, just hours after an exhausted Jackie was led on a punishing White House tour by outgoing first lady Mamie Eisenhower, America’s new first family departed for Palm Beach aboard the Caroline. Settling in, JFK lit a cigar and chatted animatedly with his advisers. They had been aloft only a matter of minutes when Jackie, who for years had encouraged Jack’s cigar smoking to disguise her own cigarette habit, noticed that a cloud of smoke was encircling the baby’s bassinet. This time, Jackie called a halt to the conversation and directed Jack and his stogie-chomping cronies to the far end of the cabin.

  Jackie spent the next two weeks in bed, trying to recover from her emergency caesarean as well as her grueling trek through the Executive Mansion with a clueless Mamie Eisenhower. Her baby, meanwhile, was losing weight, crying nonstop, and—most disturbingly—at times struggling for breath. “John’s health really wasn’t doing so well,” she later said. “There was, thank God, this brilliant pediatrician in Palm Beach who really saved his life, as he was going downhill.”

  John was, in fact, suffering f
rom an inflammation of the lung’s hyaline membrane, a condition not uncommon among premature infants. Sadly, this was the same respiratory problem that would later kill his infant brother, Patrick.

  “Jackie came perilously close to dying after John’s birth—and so did the baby,” said JFK’s physician Janet Travell, who added that the press corps was kept “entirely in the dark.” Jackie’s own health suffered because she was “consumed with worry” over the baby. “Jackie was very emotional about losing her son,” Travell said. “It was the thing she feared more than losing her own life.”

  John was not even three weeks old, but he had already come close to death twice and was about to again. On the morning of December 11, 1960, would-be suicide bomber Richard Pavlick was parked outside the Kennedys’ Palm Beach mansion waiting for the president-elect to head out for Sunday Mass at St. Edward’s Church just a few blocks away. Pavlick planned to crash his 1950 Buick, packed with seven sticks of dynamite, into the Kennedys’ car as it pulled away from the house.

  Pavlick was about to floor his car when Jackie and Caroline suddenly appeared in the doorway to wave goodbye to Daddy. Behind them was the Kennedy family’s private nurse, Luella Hennessey, holding Baby John in her arms. Touched by this warm family tableau, Pavlick did not go through with his gruesome plan.

  It was only after he was arrested for drunk driving a few days later that Pavlick’s weird assassination plot was uncovered. For his part, Pavlick was unrepentant. He told police he did not wish to harm Jackie or the Kennedy children, but that he still planned to “get” JFK. Pavlick was charged with attempted murder and later sent to prison.

  Jack, who suffered from a variety of life-threatening illnesses and narrowly escaped death during World War II combat in the Pacific, barely blinked when he was told the news. His own experiences, coupled with the tragic early deaths of his brother Joe and sister Kathleen, had convinced Jack that he would die young—“and that there was nothing he or anyone else could do about it,” said his longtime friend Senator George Smathers of Florida. Another Kennedy intimate, fashion designer Oleg Cassini, called this Jack’s “sublime streak of elegant fatalism.”