These Few Precious Days Read online

  At least Jack tried. During Shaw’s first week on the job, he told her he wanted to give Caroline her bottle. “He asked me to stand quite near him,” she said, “in case he dropped her.” Within five minutes, the president grew bored. “Miss Shaw,” he said, handing the baby back to her nanny, “how have you got the patience to feed the child all this bottle?”

  Yet no one, least of all Miss Shaw, doubted Jack’s total devotion to Caroline. When the Kennedys lived in a narrow brick townhouse on Georgetown’s N Street, Jack wasted no time bounding upstairs to the nursery as soon as he came home. “That child always smiled for him when she never did for anybody else,” the nanny said. “Right from the very beginning, he loved her and she adored him.”

  During the 1960 presidential campaign and long summer weekends spent at the Kennedy family compound in Hyannis Port, all Daddy had to do was clap his hands twice to summon his daughter. “As soon as Caroline heard that first clap,” said presidential press secretary Pierre Salinger, “she took off like a rocket.” The memory of her father’s sharp hand clap would linger in Caroline’s memory for the rest of her life, as would the sound of Jack’s voice as he called out the pet name he and only he had for her: Buttons.

  Of course, Caroline wasn’t the only child in the Kennedy White House. Each morning Nanny Shaw awoke in her small room strategically situated between Caroline and the room occupied by John Jr., who was three years his sister’s junior. The children’s suite of rooms was just opposite the Yellow Oval Room, with its doors opening onto the Truman Balcony, and Jackie had gone to great pains to erase all traces of the drab, dated hotel décor favored by the Eisenhowers and the Trumans before them.

  John’s spacious nursery was white—like his fathers’—with blue crown molding, while Caroline’s was done in white and pink, with matching rosebud drapes and linens, a white canopy bed, stuffed animals, rocking horses, an ornate doll house (a gift from French president Charles de Gaulle), and a Grandma Moses hanging on one wall. Their nanny’s room had all the charm of a hall closet. “Maud Shaw won’t need much,” Jackie had written chief White House usher J. B. West before moving in. “Just find a wicker wastebasket for her banana peels and a little table for her false teeth at night.”

  Once she had made sure the children had brushed their teeth and were bathed and dressed, Shaw brought them over to say good morning to their father. After knocking on the president’s door—by this time JFK had finished shaving, something he did while in the tub to save time—Shaw waited in the hallway while Caroline and John dashed past Harry Truman’s four-poster and into the bathroom.

  “Daddy! Daddy!” Caroline and John shouted in unison as they ran up to the tub. Jack exuberantly greeted each with a kiss, oblivious that ink from soaked State Department cables was running down his arm and into the bathwater.

  In preparation for their arrival, Jack always kept a dozen yellow rubber duckies lined up on the edge of the tub. “Here you are, John,” the president said, plucking a duck from the lineup and handing it to his wide-eyed son. “Let’s see if this little guy floats upside down!”

  Caroline, meantime, ran back into her father’s room and turned the television on full blast. “You could hear it booming right down the hall,” recalled Nanny Shaw, “and it always made the Secret Service agents laugh. The president grew up in the middle of a big, noisy family, and he just loved the commotion—you could see the delight on his face.”

  Ten minutes later, JFK, now wearing a dress shirt and boxer shorts, sat down in front of a tray and tore into his usual hearty breakfast: two soft-boiled eggs prepared to his specifications in a double-boiler, bacon, toast, and orange juice. Thomas poured the president’s coffee, which he took with cream and at least three teaspoons of sugar. “Nauseating,” Jackie once said of the concoction, “but Jack had an enormous sweet tooth.”

  While their daddy went over his schedule for the day, Caroline and John were sprawled on the floor, transfixed by the morning cartoons—Rocky and His Friends, Huckleberry Hound, Yogi Bear—that blared from the bulky black-and-white television set.

  At 9 a.m. they switched to TV exercise pioneer Jack LaLanne, and then Jack would clap and count out the repetitions as Caroline and John imitated LaLanne’s spirited repertoire of squats, push-ups, lunges, and jumping jacks. Depending on how bad his back was that day, the president would join John and Caroline in stretches and attempts to touch his toes, but for the most part he simply reveled in rolling around on the floor with his children.

  On rare occasions Jackie, who seldom rose before nine, came over to watch. “He loved those children tumbling around with him,” she said, “in this sort of—sensual is the only way I can think of it … He needed that time with them, he was just so completely crazy about them.”

  The children were just winding down their exercise routine as Daddy slipped into one of the two-button, European-cut suits picked out for him by George Thomas. He then took Caroline and John by the hand and asked them to walk him to the Oval Office. On their way, they popped in to see Mommy, who by this time was usually eating her breakfast of white toast and coffee on a tray in her bedroom.

  Once the president was seated behind his desk, Miss Shaw whisked John away for a morning nap and Caroline headed for the little school Jackie had set up in the third-floor solarium for her children as well as the sixteen offspring of White House staffers and several close friends. The invitation-only White House School boasted two teachers and a kindergarten and first-grade curricula that included American history, hygiene, arithmetic, and French. Jackie had no trouble coming up with the colors for the school uniforms: red, white, and blue.

  Ninety minutes later, the children were scampering about the White House grounds during morning recess—all under the watchful eye of two Secret Service agents, Nanny Shaw, and White House schoolteachers Alice Grimes and Elizabeth Boyd. As soon as he heard the sound of the children’s voices, the president stopped whatever he was doing and stepped out into the garden. “He’d clap his hands,” Jackie recalled, “and all the little things from school would come running.”

  Not even the president, however, could trump the teachers’ authority. When JFK kept reaching into his pocket and doling out candy to Caroline and her best friend, Mary Warner, Grimes complained that he was being unfair to the other children. From that point on Kennedy’s devoted secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, always kept a glass jar filled with pink and blue rock candy on her desk as well as an entire box of Barricini chocolates in a drawer. This was more than enough for all of Caroline’s classmates and for John, who invariably toddled in with Miss Shaw to bang on Mrs. Lincoln’s typewriter for a few minutes before heading off for lunch at 12:30.

  For her part, Jackie chose to remain in her room for most of the morning, going over the newspapers before summoning her personal secretary, Mary Gallagher, to her bedside with steno pad in hand. For the next hour, Jackie dictated letters and memos in a no‑nonsense, rapid-fire style that belied her breathy, ethereal persona.

  Once she was finished with the day’s correspondence, Jackie took a brisk hour-long stroll alone around the White House grounds before sitting down to work at what she described as her most prized possession: the Empire-style, ormolu-mounted, slant-front desk that had belonged to her late father, the flamboyant “Black Jack” Bouvier.

  Sometimes, Jackie joined Caroline and John in the “High Chair Room”—the small informal dining area for the children she had set up off the kitchen—and watched while they gobbled hot dogs or hamburgers prepared by the White House chef and served to them by a butler on a silver tray.

  Jack, in the meantime, headed for the White House pool promptly at 1:30. Once there, he usually stripped off his clothes poolside and eased himself into the 80-degree water. These brief, twice-daily swims were initially prescribed by Kennedy’s doctors both as a form of low-impact exercise and as therapy for his back.

  When he arrived at the White House, Jackie noted that Jack was in “the best physical condition he was
ever in in his life”—the result of unwinding at La Guerida, Joe Kennedy’s white-walled oceanfront villa in Palm Beach, Florida, between winning the 1960 presidential election and the inauguration nearly three months later.

  “He never really needed to exercise,” Jackie said. “The campaign—jumping in and out of cars, walking, you know, kept him fit.” After the election, he swam in the ocean, walked on the beach, and played golf three times a week. “He had muscles and everything,” Jackie marveled. “It was wonderful.”

  Landing at the White House, Jack “sat at his desk, without moving, for six weeks. He didn’t walk around the driveway, he didn’t swim, and suddenly his back went bad. He’d lost all the muscle tone.”

  Getting “pumped full of Novocain” by the physician who had always treated his back, Dr. Janet Travell, no longer worked. Instead, Jack managed to find at least some relief in the White House pool.

  The president’s daily swims served another purpose as well. He looked forward to this time in the water as a chance to unwind with friends and escape the pressures of office.

  “He hated to swim alone,” said the Kennedys’ photographer and friend Jacques Lowe, “so he was always grabbing people by the collar to swim with him.” Jack’s longtime political aide and storytelling buddy, Dave Powers, could always be counted on to take the plunge—literally—with the president.

  A half hour later, the president pulled on a terry-cloth robe and ducked out a back door through the White House flower shop and the exercise room to elevators that took him upstairs to the family living quarters. By this time, Maud Shaw had tucked the children in for their afternoon naps, and Jackie was waiting for Jack in the living room.

  “Mrs. Kennedy dropped everything, no matter how important, to join her husband,” chief White House usher J. B. West said. “If she had visitors in tow, they would be left for me to entertain.” The next two hours were, in fact, sacrosanct for the first couple. All staff and visitors were barred from the second floor, and the White House switchboard was directed to hold all calls short of anything alerting the president to a national emergency.

  Jack, still clad only in his robe, joined the first lady for lunch served on trays—always a grilled cheese sandwich for Jackie and usually a medium-rare hamburger for her husband, although at times the weight-conscious Jack opted for a glass of the diet drink Metrecal. Jackie was equally mindful of her weight. If she gained as little as one pound, she fasted for a day and stepped up her exercise regimen—walking ten times around the South Lawn, or bouncing on a canvas trampoline she ostensibly installed for the children. “It’s not only terrific exercise,” she told Pierre Salinger, “but a marvelous way to reduce stress.”

  Jack’s vanity extended beyond his waistline and his wardrobe. Periodically, he would use part of his nap time to have Jackie massage a special tonic from a New York firm called Frances Fox into his hair. Later in the day, he would have someone—sometimes Jackie but just as often one of the attractive young female aides assigned to the West Wing—add a few drops of another Frances Fox concoction and then put the finishing touches on his famously tousled coif. Whoever was assigned this task knew that it must be done with a brush, never a comb. “My God, Jack, everyone keeps talking about copying my hairstyle,” said Jackie, whose own bedtime routine involved sprinkling cologne on a brush and then stroking her hair one hundred times. “If they only knew the real expert about hair is you!”

  (According to Jackie’s half brother Jamie Auchincloss, what made JFK’s hair so striking was its “odd color—or rather colors. Once I counted fifteen distinctly different colors in his hair, ranging from silver to orange.” Although JFK’s secret hair treatments may have also been at least partly responsible, Auchincloss learned that this was one of the peculiar symptoms of Jack’s Addison’s disease, a degeneration of the adrenal glands that destroys the immune system. Another symptom of Addison’s: the deceptively healthy-looking orange glow that was often mistaken for a Palm Beach tan.)

  When they were finished, Jackie, who joked that “the only song Jack really likes is ‘Hail to the Chief,’” walked over to the stereo system between their two rooms and piled the turntable high with his favorite albums. Soon music—jazz, show tunes, songs by Peggy Lee, Frank Sinatra, and even Elvis—was drifting through the eerily empty corridors. It was then that they each retired to their separate rooms.

  Or not. George Thomas had been instructed to always wake the president precisely at 3:30 p.m., but there were many times when JFK’s bed was empty. On those occasions, he quietly slipped into Jackie’s bedroom and whispered into the president’s ear so as not to wake the first lady, sleeping beside him.

  “They had a very close, very romantic relationship,” Jackie’s stepbrother Hugh “Yusha” Auchincloss observed. “Technically they had separate bedrooms, but they slept together. There was a lot of laughter. They enjoyed each other. They had fun.”

  Indeed, one lunchtime Jackie got so wrapped up in her paperwork that she forgot her husband was waiting for her. At Jack’s behest, Thomas tracked her down. “Miz Kennedy,” the valet said, “the President says if you don’t hurry, he’ll fall asleep.” Jackie put down her pen, jumped up from her desk, and headed straight for her bedroom.

  The entire concept of taking a nap in the middle of the day struck Jackie as peculiar at first. “Jack never took a nap before,” she said, “but in the White House I think he made up his mind he would because it was good for his health.” Jack insisted that he was merely following the example of his idol, Winston Churchill. “It gave him so much more staying power, so much more stamina,” Jack explained. “I need every ounce of strength to do this job.”

  Jack’s habit of changing in and out of clothes several times a day also struck his wife as “extremely odd. I used to think,” she later confided, “for a forty-five-minute nap, would you bother to take off all your clothes? It would take me forty-five minutes to just snuggle down and start to doze off.” Again, Jack said it was necessary to copy Sir Winston’s approach exactly. “If I’m going to do this,” the president told Pierre Salinger when his press secretary asked why he felt it necessary for so many changes of wardrobe, “then I’m going to do it right. Otherwise, what’s the point? Lying down and getting up in wrinkled clothes?”

  Knowing how much he liked to sleep with fresh air blowing through the room, Jackie often closed the curtains and then threw open the large windows herself. Jackie did not share Jack’s talent for napping (“I just can’t shut my mind off like that”), so she often tiptoed into her room, read one of her magazines, then came back to wake him before Thomas “officially sounded the alarm.”

  Jack took his third shower of the day after his afternoon nap, put on a fresh suit, and returned to work. More than any other president, Jack had crammed the Oval Office with photographs and cherished mementos. His first week in office, JFK personally carried photos of Jackie and the children as well as a favorite watercolor painting over from the family quarters in the East Wing. As might have been expected, the room took on a seafaring motif as Jack decorated it with naval paintings and seascapes, ship models, pieces of scrimshaw, semaphore flags, and a plaque with an old fisherman’s prayer: “O God, Thy sea is great and my boat is so small.”

  From the windows of the Oval Office, Jack could watch Jackie and the children in the play area she had specially designed for them. There was the small trampoline concealed by evergreens, a rabbit hutch, a leather swing, a barrel tunnel, and a tree house with a slide. When they first moved into the White House, Jackie often had to keep Caroline from trying to push her infant brother down the tree house slide, “carriage and all.”

  Soon Jackie returned to her mounting pile of correspondence, returning to the High Chair Room at 5:30 to sit with the children as they ate dinner. Caroline would later remember how her mother would make a point of asking them what they had learned in school that day.

  “Caroline is already reading at three,” Jackie boasted to family friend Chuck Spald
ing, “and over dinner she bubbles with excitement about what happened that day in her little class in the solarium.” Already able to properly pronounce the tongue-twisting names of such world leaders as Konrad Adenauer, Nikita Khrushchev, and Jawaharlal Nehru, Caroline had no use for baby talk. When Pierre Salinger pointed out a “moo cow” standing in a field, Caroline replied, “No, that’s a Hereford.” (Nor did she brook any misbehavior on the part of her little brother. When John spit out food or banged his spoon on the table, Caroline’s reaction was swift. Rolling her eyes and shaking her head, she sighed, “There he goes again.”)

  Jack was seldom privy to his children’s dinnertime chitchat. Out of the office by 5:30, he repeated his morning ritual—into the pool with Powers, O’Donnell, or whoever else happened to be around for a half-hour dip, then back upstairs to shave, shower, and change into yet another suit—his third full wardrobe change of the day. (Jack was dumbfounded when, during a visit to the White House, his longtime journalist-friend Ben Bradlee informed him that he and a lot of other men saw nothing wrong with wearing the same shirt two days in a row.)

  There were times when some pressing matter kept Jack working in his office until 8 p.m. or later, but his day usually ended around six. It was then that Jackie, who always changed into a dress for dinner, met her husband for daiquiris in the Yellow Oval Room. In the absence of any formal functions requiring their presence downstairs, they usually dined alone or with close friends like Bradlee and his wife, Tony, Kentucky senator John Sherman Cooper and his wife, Lorraine, or the couple who actually introduced them, Charles and Martha Bartlett. At the time, Bartlett was the Washington correspondent for the Chattanooga Times and Bradlee wrote for Newsweek.