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

  Jackie, on the other hand, was anything but stoic. She had blithely assumed that bodyguards and Secret Service agents would provide them with all the protection they needed, and was outwardly distraught when she was told how close she and her children had come to being blown to pieces. “We’re nothing,” she said, “but sitting ducks in a shooting gallery.”

  “I don’t think it ever really occurred to Jackie that somebody could get past all those people who constantly surrounded Jack,” said Letitia “Tish” Baldrige, Jackie’s classmate from Miss Porter’s School and the woman she hired to be her White House social secretary. “Jackie always worried about people violating her family’s privacy. I never heard her say a peep about somebody wanting to do them harm.”

  There were only a few weeks left until inauguration day, and Jack had no time to think about anything beyond putting his administration together. The frenetic pace he set back in Georgetown continued beneath Florida’s swaying palms.

  While Jackie tried to rest upstairs, bow-tied Harvard intellectuals, polished Washington operatives, and grizzled Boston pols all vied for her husband’s attention. If she wanted to make her way from her bedroom to the upstairs bathroom, a nightgown-clad Jackie risked bumping into a stranger on her way there. Making matters worse was the added presence of her noisy Kennedy in-laws, whose frat house antics had always annoyed Jack’s decidedly more civilized bride. “Ethel and Bobby are here. Mayhem,” she complained to Baldrige. “Complete and utter chaos.”

  By comparison, John, even with his health issues, was no trouble at all. Like millions of mothers in the 1960s, Jackie had no interest in breastfeeding. It was left to Luella Hennessey to heat up the baby’s bottle, change his diapers, and get up several times during the course of the night to feed John and then rock him back to sleep. Shaw happily took care of Caroline, who periodically upstaged her father during press conferences by teetering around the room in her mother’s stiletto heels.

  Shutting herself upstairs with the drapes drawn, Jackie refused to join Jack’s boisterous relatives for dinner on the main floor. “I couldn’t hold food down,” she recalled. “I guess I was just in physical and nervous exhaustion because the month after the baby’s birth had been the opposite of recuperation.”

  Nevertheless, Jackie, who had her own plans for the White House, made the most of those hours alone in her bedroom. “It’s the worst place in the world,” she had told a friend after her long march with Mamie. “So cold and dreary. A dungeon like the Lubyanka . . . I can’t bear the thought of moving in. I hate it, hate it, hate it.” Unable to sleep, she pored over blueprints and photographs of the Executive Mansion, laying the groundwork for what she already envisioned as a historic restoration.

  Still shaky, Jackie returned to Georgetown alone on January 14, less than a week before the inauguration. She explained to Jack that she wanted to go ahead of the rest of the family because there was no way she could unpack and introduce the children to their new home at the same time. So John and his big sister remained behind with their father, Maud Shaw, and Elsie Philips, the new nanny hired to take care of John.

  At exactly noon on January 20, 1961, Jackie appeared impervious to the teeth-chattering twenty-degree cold as she watched her husband being sworn in by Chief Justice Earl Warren. Jack was the country’s first Roman Catholic president, the first born in the twentieth century, and at forty-three the youngest ever elected to office—although Jackie, just thirty-one, had always viewed him as a much older and wiser man.

  He proved it with his inaugural address, which called the younger generation to action with its enduring “Ask not what your country can do for you” message. But Jackie had no opportunity to congratulate him; Jack, who had always resisted public displays of affection, did not follow tradition by kissing his wife after he took the oath. And once Marian Anderson had closed the ceremonies with a stirring rendition of the national anthem, JFK bounded off the platform without his wife.

  Bravely weathering the icy conditions, the new first couple kicked off the inaugural parade, riding in an open car from the Capitol to the White House. Jackie climbed onto the reviewing stand but could stay for only an hour. Bone-weary and freezing, she now dreaded the long night of inaugural balls that stretched before her. “I’m exhausted, Jack,” she said, excusing herself from the parade festivities. “I’ll see you at home.” She would later acknowledge that it took a moment for it all to sink in. She was not heading back to their “sweet little house that leans slightly to one side” on N Street; home was now 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

  Trying to recover her strength, Jackie went straight to the Queen’s Bedroom (so named because five queens had slept there) and refused to budge—not even to greet family members at a private reception in the State Dining Room. Instead of dining that night with her husband and members of his cabinet, she had dinner on a tray in bed.

  None of it worked. Jackie was unable to summon the strength to get out of bed. “I can’t do it,” Jackie told Dr. Travell. “I just can’t move.” In the weeks leading up to the election, the infamous “Dr. Feelgood,” Max Jacobson, had been injecting the candidate, his wife, and several members of the Kennedy inner circle with amphetamines. Now Dr. Travell was handing Jackie a little orange pill—Dexedrine—to give her the energy boost needed to make it through the rest of the evening.

  An hour later, the nation’s glamorous first lady felt strong enough to accompany her dashing husband to the first three of five inaugural balls they were scheduled to attend. The reaction at each was the same: As the orchestra struck up “Hail to the Chief” and the first couple—he in white tie and tails, she in a dramatic floor-length white silk cape—made their entrance, a collective gasp went up from the throng, which then exploded in cheers and applause.

  By the fourth ball, however, Jackie’s Dexedrine-fueled high had worn off. “It was like Cinderella and the clock striking midnight. I just crumbled,” she said. “All my strength was finally gone.” She excused herself, sending her husband along to attend the final two balls solo.

  “I always wish I could have participated more in those first shining hours with Jack,” Jackie later said. “But at least I thought I had given him our John, the son he had longed for so much.”

  * * *

  WITH THE INAUGURAL festivities behind them, Jackie now felt free to fly the children up from Palm Beach—something Jack had been urging her to do for weeks. To the surprise of everyone who knew him, Caroline’s arrival in 1957 had transformed the notoriously libidinous JFK into a doting and devoted dad. “He wanted the children around all the time,” said Jacques Lowe, Kennedy’s longtime official photographer and friend. “Like a lot of fathers who are smitten with their kids, he couldn’t keep his hands off them. But Jackie called the shots when it came to Caroline and John.”

  Jackie’s excuse for keeping the children in Palm Beach was credible enough: their rooms in the family quarters of the White House were being painted, and she didn’t want them exposed to the noxious fumes. Just as important, she wanted to shield them at least for a little while longer from the pomp and circumstance that from now on would be an inescapable part of their lives. “I want my children to be brought up in more personal surroundings,” she told Baldrige. And, while everyone in the family had a code name—the president was “Lancer,” Jackie was “Lace,” Caroline “Lyric,” and John “Lark”—Jackie made it abundantly clear to everyone working at the White House that she would be a hands-on mom. “I don’t want them to be raised by nurses and Secret Service agents,” she told Baldrige.

  Flying in the face of reality—and the inescapable fact that her children would always be cared for by nannies and governesses—Jackie vowed that John and Caroline would have something approaching a normal childhood. “It isn’t fair to children in the limelight to leave them in the care of others and then expect that they will turn out all right,” she said. “They need their mother’s affection and guidance and long periods of time alone with her. That is what giv
es them security in an often confusing world.”

  The first lady was pleased to learn that John’s and Caroline’s toys had been stashed away in the closet of White House Chief Usher J. B. West. “We’ll bring them out as soon as the children’s room are ready,” she had instructed him. The toys were, in fact, the first things to arrive from the N Street house, covertly smuggled in while the Eisenhowers were still very much in residence.

  Before she took on the daunting task of restoring the long-neglected public rooms of the White House to their former glory, Jackie first tackled the upstairs living quarters. “Sometimes I wondered, ‘How are we going to live as a family in this enormous place?’ ” she later recalled. “I’m afraid it will always be a little impossible for the people who live here. It’s an office building.”

  Jackie quickly set about to purge the place of the motel modern décor favored by her predecessors. Her own chandeliered French provincial bedroom was done up in hues of green and blue, with leopard-skin throws draped here and there for drama. The president’s bedroom, connected to his wife’s by a walk-in closet that contained a stereo system, was decorated in blue and white. On one wall, Jackie hung Childe Hassam’s American impressionist masterpiece Flag Day.

  The children’s rooms were just across from the Yellow Oval Room. Jackie decided to make John’s spacious nursery a reflection of his father’s room. The walls were white, and the crown molding a vivid blue. Caroline’s room, not surprisingly, was all done in shades of pink and white, with rosebud-patterned drapes that matched the linens, and a country scene by Grandma Moses hanging opposite the white-canopied bed.

  The nanny slept in her own small room positioned right between John and Caroline. “Maud Shaw won’t need much,” Jackie wrote in a memo to J. B. West. “Just find a wicker wastebasket for her banana peels and a little table for her false teeth at night.”

  Those first few nights in the White House, Nanny Shaw was getting little sleep. Jackie was upset that her infant cried constantly and didn’t seem to be gaining any weight. “John had been in such delicate health,” Baldrige said, “that naturally any little sign of something going wrong was cause for alarm.”

  Shaw doubled the amount of formula the baby was getting and switched his morning meal of beef extract to lunchtime. Within six weeks, John was no longer crying incessantly, and had developed a healthy appetite for cereals, soup, strained fruit, vegetables, and meats.

  By that time, Jackie’s makeover of the upstairs living quarters of the White House was complete. “She wanted to cozy things up with flowers and family photographs and the paintings that she liked,” Baldrige said. “She turned this drafty, cold old place into a warm environment for a young family overnight.”

  As an adult, John conceded that he could not actually distinguish between his firsthand recollections and what he learned from newsreels, photographs, and the endless stream of Camelot tales spun by relatives and family friends. In the end he believed that his earliest memories were of playing with his father on the floor of the president’s bedroom, part of the daily routine that seldom varied during their thousand days in the White House.

  By design, the president and first lady seldom saw each other in the morning. “That time,” Baldrige said, “was the children’s time.” By the time Shaw brought them into their father’s bedroom, he had already spent thirty minutes going over cables and scanning the morning newspapers while soaking in the tub.

  After the kids kissed their father, he went to the dressing room to change while they sat on the floor watching cartoons. At 9 a.m. they switched to TV exercise pioneer Jack LaLanne, and the president clapped along as Caroline followed LaLanne’s signature regime of jumping jacks and stretches. At first, Shaw sat in a corner chair tending to Baby John while father and daughter enjoyed this time together.

  Later, when John was a toddler, Jack spent less time clapping and more time actually rolling around on the floor with both children. “He was absolutely crazy about Caroline. He adored her,” their old friend Chuck Spalding said. “But there was a special connection with John. Even before John was able to walk, Jack threw him in the air, tossed him around, tickled him—things he did with Caroline, but to a greater extent with John.”

  That he could do any of these things at all was remarkable in itself. In addition to his often incapacitating allergies and a medical history that included scarlet fever, anemia, an underactive thyroid, colitis, and a cholesterol level of 350, JFK had long been secretly battling Addison’s disease, a degeneration of the adrenal glands that—like AIDS—destroys the immune system. He also endured crippling back pain—pain so severe that he spent most of his time hobbling around on crutches.

  As a result, the president risked a visit to the emergency room every time he roughhoused with his kids. “You’d see that look on his face that told you the pain was terrible,” Jacques Lowe said, “but he never complained. To see the sheer joy on his face when he was playing with John—obviously to him it was all worth it.”

  Once the president was dressed, John was handed off to Maud Shaw and Caroline walked hand in hand with her father to the Oval Office. When he was old enough, John joined them. “It was very touching to see the president walking down the corridor holding hands with the children,” JFK’s longtime secretary Evelyn Lincoln said. “He was always talking to them, asking them questions. He never talked baby talk to them. Both the president and Mrs. Kennedy always spoke to Caroline and John as if they were little adults.”

  Not that it was always easy to comprehend what John was trying to say. At her father’s behest, Caroline sometimes acted as interpreter, often appending commentary of her own. When John toddled into the Oval Office in the middle of a meeting between JFK and his uncle Bobby, the attorney general, everything stopped while the most powerful man in the world strained to understand his son’s gibberish. “He’s saying he wants a cookie,” Caroline explained authoritatively. “But he shouldn’t have one because he’s been a very naughty boy.”

  Unlike other children who saw little of their parents during working hours, John and his sister encountered theirs several times throughout the day. Caroline spent the rest of the morning at the school Jackie set up on the third floor for the president’s children and the sixteen or so offspring of several White House staffers and a few close friends. During the school’s morning recess, JFK stepped out into the garden and clapped his hands to summon Caroline and her classmates. The first ones to make it to the president were rewarded with a piece of candy—something that did not go over well with Caroline’s teachers.

  JFK summoned John in much the same way—calling the boy’s name repeatedly (“John. John!”) while he clapped his hands. It usually took a few tries before the easily distracted toddler actually showed up, prompting staffers to start calling the president’s son “John-John.” It was a nickname neither parent embraced. “Jackie hated the whole ‘John-John’ thing and would cast a withering glance in the direction of anyone who used it,” Baldrige said. “To her and to the president, he was always just John.”

  At noon, Jackie joined John and Caroline as they ate lunch in the “High Chair Room,” the small dining area for the children she had set up off the kitchen. Then Caroline returned to class and John, under the watchful eyes of two Secret Service agents and nannies Shaw and Phillips, headed for the play area his mother had designed for the children just outside the president’s office window. The space included a tree house with a slide, a leather swing, a barrel tunnel, and a small trampoline.

  Adding to the general mayhem was the first family’s growing menagerie. The Kennedys arrived at the White House with just one dog, their Welsh terrier Charlie. But soon Pushinka, a gift from Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, would arrive. “We trained that dog to slide down the slide we had in the back of the White House,” John later said. Pushing Pushinka down the slide, he added wistfully, “is probably my first memory.”

  Charlie and Pushinka were joined by Wolf, an aptly named Irish
wolfhound that had been given to the family by a Dublin priest. Joe Kennedy then gave Jackie a German shepherd, Clipper. The most celebrated Kennedy pet, Caroline’s pony Macaroni, had a stable all his own. Few people were aware of the existence of John’s pony Leprechaun. The boy did not share his father’s allergic reaction to dogs and cats, but horses were another matter.

  Jackie simply turned a blind eye to the boy’s discomfort. An accomplished equestrienne, the first lady was thrilled that Caroline had turned out to be “an absolute natural” on horseback. She saw no reason why her son couldn’t be as well. “The poor kid’s eyes would water and he’d be sneezing away,” Chuck Spalding said, “but Jackie just figured he’d get over it.”

  John’s earliest childhood memories also included Caroline’s cat Tom Kitten, who eventually had to be given away because of their father’s allergies; a beer-drinking rabbit named Zsa Zsa (after the actress Zsa Zsa Gabor, a friend of Jack); and a rotating cast of lambs, ducks, and guinea pigs. Aside from the dogs, the Kennedy children spent the most time playing with the few animals allowed to be kept in cages in Caroline’s room: Bluebell and Marybell the hamsters, and Caroline’s favorite pet, a canary she insisted on naming Robin.

  Whenever she could spare even a minutes away from her first lady duties, Jackie would run down to the play area and push John on the swing or guide him down the slide. She also managed to squeeze in a little relaxation time for herself, watching the children play as she bounced on the trampoline.