These Few Precious Days Read online

  The next two hours or more were devoted to drinks and banter and, occasionally, board games. “We played Chinese checkers, Monopoly, bridge,” recalled Charlie Bartlett. “Somebody said Jack played Monopoly like the property was real, and they were right. He loved winning, and he hated to lose even more. Jackie was the same way—very competitive, a born game-player. There was always a great deal of laughter, and everybody had a great time.”

  By way of after-dinner entertainment, they also screened new movies in the White House theater. Even though he regarded Jack as “the most urbane man I have ever met,” Bradlee had to confess that the president’s taste in movies was markedly middlebrow. “My mommy always watched cowboy movies with my daddy,” Caroline later told her teachers, “because my daddy liked cowboy movies. My mommy doesn’t like cowboy movies at all, but she watched them because she loves my daddy.” She didn’t have to watch for long; too restless to sit through an entire feature film, Jack usually excused himself after the first twenty minutes or so.

  TO BE SURE, IT WAS Jackie—not the president—who spearheaded a cultural renaissance in the nation’s capital by using the White House to showcase the arts. She invited stars of the Royal Ballet and the Metropolitan Opera, as well as Shakespearean actors and the world’s greatest classical musicians, to perform for visiting heads of state in the East Room.

  According to key Kennedy adviser Theodore Sorensen, JFK had “no interest in opera, dozed off at symphony concerts, and was bored by ballet.” (Chubby Checker’s “The Twist” was one of JFK’s favorite records, and the president asked that it be played repeatedly at private White House functions.)

  Still, Jack was immensely proud of his wife’s efforts and usually did his best to mask his distaste for what he privately derided as “longhair crap.” He certainly didn’t fool Caroline, who shared her mother’s love of ballet even as a child. “Daddy claps,” she said at the time, “but I don’t think he really likes it. He makes faces when he thinks no one is looking.”

  In fact, the high-spirited Kennedy kids were themselves often part of an evening’s entertainment. Several dinner guests arrived just as Caroline raced past them stark naked, with Maud Shaw in hot pursuit. Caroline “practically knocked us over,” one guest recalled. “Then she looked up with these huge yes, looked back at the nanny, and shot off down the hall.” Caroline’s antics certainly kept Secret Service agents on their toes; members of the Kiddie Detail spent hours in hot pursuit of the first daughter as she ran from pillar to pillar firing off her cap pistol, or zipped down marble hallways on roller skates.

  Jack delighted in their shenanigans, and made a point of spending time with Caroline and John just before bedtime. “No matter who we were having dinner with,” Jackie later recalled. “No matter how important they were, Jack would turn to me and say, ‘Go get the children!’ And of course I’d have to bring them out in their underwear or their pajamas … You know, the children were never bratty, but he liked to have them under foot.”

  So did Jackie. While the president was more inclined to roughhouse—even at the risk of reinjuring his back—Jackie smothered them with hugs, kisses, and motherly concern no matter who was watching.

  Yet for all the warmth they openly displayed as young parents, the president and first lady were often strangely formal around each other—even in front of staff members who saw them every day. In part, this was due to Jack’s antipathy toward couples that were overly affectionate in public, and his deep-seated aversion to touching and being touched in a nonsexual way—an idiosyncrasy rooted in his childhood.

  “He never would hold hands in public,” Jackie conceded, “or put his arm around me—that was naturally just distasteful to him.” Even when campaign aides asked Jack and Jackie to put their arms around each other for the cameras, JFK refused. “He wouldn’t be fake in any way,” Jackie said. “People just don’t understand him.”

  Long before Jack and Jackie were a couple, Jack’s friend and Senate colleague George Smathers of Florida noted that JFK “absolutely hated to be touched. If you put your hand on his shoulder, he would literally pull away. He just wasn’t brought up in a family where there was a lot of hugging and that sort of thing. It just made him terribly uncomfortable. It wasn’t like he could help himself. Jackie eventually broke through the wall, but it took her a long, long time.”

  Like Jack, Jackie grew up watching her parents treat each other with icy indifference. And, along with most members of her generation and her class, she viewed egregious displays of affection in public places as gauche.

  “Jackie was a very self-contained person, especially in the White House,” said Kennedy family photographer and close friend Jacques Lowe. “She very much lived her own life, as much as she was allowed to. Jack certainly wasn’t jumping into bed with her every night. But when they were both there, they made time for each other.”

  White House social secretary Letitia “Tish” Baldrige, who had known Jackie since when they were both students at Miss Porter’s School for Girls, in Farmington, Connecticut, insisted their day-to-day relationship was poignant. “Maybe they weren’t always madly ‘at’ one another,” Baldrige said, “but there were plenty of tender moments when I would catch him putting his arm around her waist, or she’d lean her head on his shoulder …”

  Throughout the day, Jack would find wry memos Jackie had planted around the White House to lift his spirits. “He’d read one of these little notes,” Baldrige said, “and burst out laughing. It was their private joke.”

  If Jack’s back was preventing him from falling asleep, Jackie would walk into the closet between their rooms and put the cast recording of Lerner and Loewe’s Camelot on the “old Victrola.” In the role of King Arthur, Richard Burton belted out the president’s favorite line at the very end of the album: “Don’t let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment …”

  Indeed, even as JFK coped with one domestic and international crisis after another, the public perception of life in the Kennedy White House was one of wit and charm wrapped in a glistening chrysalis of style.

  From their first triumphant European tour, when Jack introduced himself as “the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris,” to the sixty-six glittering state occasions they presided over with regal aplomb, the vital young president and his queenly first lady were the closest thing America had to royalty. “When they appeared at the top of those stairs,” veteran Washington Star reporter Betty Beale said of the Kennedys’ entrances at state dinners and formal receptions, “they were a glorious-looking, stunning couple—almost beyond belief. It was more a royal court than an administration.”

  NO ONE OUTSIDE A HANDFUL of intimates knew about the drama that played out behind the scenes: about Jack’s failing health and reckless womanizing, or how the very public loss of a child seemed to bring the president and the first lady closer than they had ever been before.

  In reality, during their brief time at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Jack and Jackie were working on clearing away the emotional obstacles in their path. Their afternoon naps—of which there were hundreds during the course of Kennedy’s presidency—proved at least a desire for closeness, for true intimacy. So did the daiquiris in the Yellow Oval Room, the casual lunches on trays and the quiet dinners with friends, the time spent with the children—all part of a daily routine designed to bring some semblance of normalcy to two of the most extraordinary lives ever lived.

  “Comparing their problems to another couple’s,” Jack’s confidant Paul “Red” Fay said, “is like comparing a Duesenberg to a Chevy.” Certainly, both John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Bouvier had been born into lives of wealth and privilege. But both had also been deeply scarred growing up in wildly dysfunctional households—families in which power, money, sex, and social position eclipsed more traditional values.

  Their ambition would, in the end, make them the most celebrated couple in the world. But a shared ambition was not what drew them together at first. “T
hey were two lonely people,” their friend Chuck Spalding said. “And they instantly recognized that in each other.” In fact, Spalding went on to describe them as “emotionally the two most isolated, most alone people I ever met.”

  It was easy to see why. A casualty of her parents’ bitter divorce, Jackie sought solace in solitary pursuits like horseback riding or reading. “She could be the belle of the ball when it was required,” a friend said. “But that was just an act. Jack was the same way. Before entering a room, Jack would say ‘Time to turn on the B.P.’—the Big Personality—but he hated glad-handers. It’s ironic that these two people who personified charm and grace for millions of people around the world were really lone wolves.”

  What Jackie detected beneath Jack’s gleaming breastplate of self-confidence was the sickly child who for years suffered fever, weight loss, stomach pains, hives, dizziness, and nausea—all while doctors tried in vain to diagnose what Jack himself called his “wasting disease.” Looked after by a battalion of governesses and nurses, Jack was virtually ignored by his mother, who dealt with her husband Joe’s rampant womanizing by taking expensive trips and lavishing expensive gifts on herself. As a result, Jack, who grew up in a family of nine children, worshipped the boisterous, fun-loving family patriarch while resenting the emotionally unavailable Rose. “My mother never really held me and hugged me,” Jack fumed after he had reached the White House. “Never, never!”

  Spending weeks at a time in bed recuperating, young Jack lost himself in the works of Rudyard Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Sir Walter Scott. This was the little-known part of Jack’s past that Jackie felt held the key to his personality. To her, the dazzling Mr. Kennedy was “really this lonely sick little boy, in bed so much of the time reading history, devouring the Knights of the Round Table.”

  It was hard not to be reminded of that little boy when they got ready for bed. Throughout their marriage, Jack said his prayers every night just as he had since childhood. “He’d come in and kneel on the edge of the bed and say them, you know,” Jackie recalled. “Take about three seconds. Then he’d cross himself. It was just a little childish mannerism, I supposed, like brushing your teeth. Just a habit,” she said. “I thought it was so sweet. It used to amuse me so, standing there …”

  It was the frail little boy hidden beneath the bravado, she reasoned, who emerged to connect with Caroline and John in a way she never thought possible. Jackie, thrilled that her husband had chosen to play such a hands-on role in their children’s lives, reveled in the small things—the fact, for instance, that on some days in the White House Caroline and John would “even have lunch with him. If you told me that would happen, I’d never have believed it.”

  In the end, Jackie concluded that they might never have come together as a tight-knit family had her husband not been elected to the world’s most powerful office. “You see,” she explained, “the one thing that happens to a president is that his ties to the outside world are cut. And then all you really have,” Jackie added with a smile, “is each other.”

  They both wanted desperately to connect, but hadn’t the faintest idea how. That’s what made their love story so achingly poignant. And it was, in every sense of the word, a love story.

  —CHUCK SPALDING, LONGTIME FRIEND

  They were so much alike. Even the names—Jack and Jackie: two halves of a single whole. They were both actors and they appreciated each other’s performance.

  —LEM BILLINGS, JFK’S FRIEND

  Getting to know him intimately was not easy. There were many parts of him … that he never revealed to anybody.

  —KENNETH O’DONNELL, JFK AID AND CONFIDANT

  Jack was no Boy Scout, but then a Boy Scout would have bored her senseless.

  —CHUCK SPALDING

  3

  An Electrical Current Between Them

  “How can you live with a husband who is bound to be unfaithful?” Jacqueline Bouvier asked a friend in a rare unguarded moment shortly before marrying Jack on September 12, 1953. “Even if you love that person, how can you put up with that, and not lose a large piece of yourself?”

  Yet Jackie clearly saw in the young senator from Massachusetts the same roguish qualities she admired in her own father, the tall, tanned, rakishly handsome, devilishly charming, Ivy League–educated John Vernou “Black Jack” Bouvier III. Like JFK, Jackie’s father remained a bachelor until his mid-thirties, when he decided to finally march down the aisle with a girl a dozen years his junior. While he did not share Black Jack’s penchant for boozing and gambling, there seemed little doubt that Jack was more than a match for Jackie’s father in the philandering department.

  As their romance heated up, several of Jack’s friends went out of their way to caution Jackie that, at thirty-five, Kennedy was “set in his ways” and “not about to change.” Chuck Spalding felt that “only made her more interested in him. Jackie had this thing about Black Jack. Dangerous men excited her. There was that element of danger in Jack Kennedy, without doubt.”

  “Jackie was always talking about her father,” said Jack’s pal and colleague in the Senate, Florida’s George Smathers, “and it was pretty clear that they worshiped each other. Marrying Jack Kennedy was as close as she was ever going to get to marrying Black Jack Bouvier.” Writer George Plimpton, whom she had met in 1949 during her junior year in Paris studying at the Sorbonne, concurred. “Jackie loved pirates,” Plimpton said. “Her father was one. So was Jack.”

  It wasn’t enough simply to be dangerous. “Jackie wanted to be the confidante of an important man,” said John White, a State Department official who dated her for a time. “Power and charisma seemed to override all other qualities in her estimation of people.”

  Jack unquestionably had all the qualities she was looking for, and then some. His heroic exploits as the skipper of PT‑109 in the Pacific during World War II were to become the stuff of legend.

  The young Kennedy’s wartime derring-do would also have unintended consequences for his family—and alter the course of history. Eager to outdo his little brother, Joe Kennedy Jr.—the Kennedy whom Joe Sr. intended to install in the White House—volunteered for what amounted to a suicide mission over German-controlled territory in France. On August 12, 1944, his plane exploded in midair, killing Joe Jr. and leaving Jack to pick up the torch for his martyred brother. Giving up plans to pursue a literary career—thanks to Joe buying up huge numbers of copies, he had already turned his Harvard thesis into a minor bestseller titled Why England Slept—Jack instead ran for and won a seat in Congress. After two terms in the House, Jack, again relying heavily on his father’s clout, trounced popular Republican Henry Cabot Lodge to win a seat in the Senate.

  What made these achievements all the more remarkable was the precarious state of Jack’s health dating all the way back to early childhood. Nearly killed by scarlet fever at the age of two, Jack suffered measles, chicken pox, German measles, whooping cough, mumps, diphtheria, bronchitis, anemia, tonsillitis, ear infections, and allergies (to dogs, cats, horses, dust, wool, and more) that quickly turned into severe asthma. While away at Canterbury, a Catholic boarding school in bucolic New Milford, Connecticut, thirteen-year-old Jack was rushed to the hospital in nearby Danbury with stabbing pains in his stomach. Hours later—and apparently just in the nick of time—Jack underwent an emergency appendectomy.

  Transferring to a markedly more Waspy Connecticut institution, Choate, Jack was in and out of the school infirmary with severe dehydration, abdominal pains, fainting spells, rashes, and fevers. Doctors suspected hepatitis, then leukemia, even ulcers. None of these diagnoses proved correct. (Doctors would later discover that Jack was also lactose intolerant, suffered from an underactive thyroid, and had a high cholesterol count that would peak at a startling 350 when he reached adulthood.)

  To further complicate matters, Jack was only twenty and a junior at Harvard when he suffered the crippling back injury that would plague him for the rest of his life. In October 1937, Jack and his bro
ther Joe were getting ready to compete in Harvard-Princeton football matchups—Joe as a varsity player, Jack as a junior varsity substitute—when Joe Sr. pulled up in his chauffeur-driven Buick (“Joe Kennedy was nuts about Buicks—that’s all the Kennedys drove,” said JFK campaign aide Patrick “Patsy” Mulkern). On Joe Sr.’s orders, the family driver announced their arrival by sneaking up on Jack and tackling him from behind.

  Jack, who as a freshman somehow also managed to qualify for the Harvard swimming and boxing teams, never played college sports again. “Jack was always sick with one thing or another,” said Jack’s roommate Charlie Houghton. “But this was different. This time he couldn’t just bounce back. He tried, but the poor guy couldn’t hide that he was in real misery.”

  From that point on, Jack almost always wore a corset or brace beneath his shirt. Fearing the truth—that he was a rich boy who had been bested by the chauffeur—JFK also concocted a less embarrassing story to explain how he sustained the injury, claiming in interviews that no fewer than three burley linemen had piled onto him during practice. “I’ve never been free from pain,” Jack said, “since that day in practice.”