These Few Precious Days Read online

  YET THERE WAS SOMETHING ABOUT Jackie that set her apart from the others. “I have never met anyone like her. Do you want to see what she looks like?” Jack asked Dave Powers as he pulled out a strip of black-and-white photos taken in a photo booth. “She’s different from any girl I know.” The snapshots, Powers said, “clearly show two people in love.”

  It was only when Jack took him aside and asked him about the wisdom of marrying someone so much younger that Powers realized Jackie might be the one. Powers pointed out that he himself was twelve years older than his wife—exactly the difference in age between Jack and Jackie. “Apparently that wasn’t enough,” Powers recalled. Jack apparently needed more reassurance than that. “Well,” he continued, “you two get along fine, don’t you?”

  Powers wasn’t the only friend who saw no problem with the age difference. “Jackie was wise beyond her years,” George Plimpton said. “The way she looked and the way she sounded sometimes was at odds with her intellect, which was formidable. Jackie liked people to underestimate her, I think. That was how she survived in that rather rarefied world. Jackie was one very smart cookie even then, and Jack saw that in her.”

  But marriage? The Kennedys’ Hyannis Port neighbor and longtime friend Larry Newman said he “didn’t think Jack would ever get married. I think he did love Jackie, but it was never in his makeup to be monogamous.”

  George Smathers shared Newman’s conviction and told Jack to be “damn sure that he was ready to give up his rather meandering ways and settle down to being a good husband … He just laughed.” Like most people who knew JFK, Smathers believed Jack was “a great politician, a great author, a great social guy, a great friend. But you never thought of him as a great husband or a great father.”

  The age difference was certainly of no consequence to their mutual friend Oleg Cassini, who had forgiven Jack for stealing Gene Tierney away from him. The designer pointed out to Jack that in Europe the formula for determining the ideal age for a bride was half the groom’s age plus seven years. “They were perfectly matched in that sense,” Cassini said, “although in some ways she was actually older than he was. She was a very well-read, cultured, charming person … She had a devastatingly wicked sense of humor, and a kind of natural grace. Strangely, he was remarkably rough around the edges, especially for someone who grew up under such privileged circumstances and was so brilliant in other ways. They had much to offer each other.”

  Nevertheless, Jack’s infirmities—particularly his incapacitating back trouble—at times made Jackie keenly aware of the age difference. “The year before we were married,” she later said, “when he’d take me out, half the time it was on crutches. When I went to watch him campaign, he was on crutches. I remember him on crutches more than not.” (Physician-pharmacologist Janet Travell, who treated JFK’s back and became the first female White House physician, confirmed that for long stretches he averaged four days on crutches per week.)

  If anything, Jackie was struck by the fact that, despite the intense pain he was in almost constantly, Jack never complained. “What’s the exact opposite of a hypochondriac?” she once asked. “That was Jack.” Dr. Travell agreed. “It was difficult,” she said, “to get him to state his complaints.”

  Equally impressive was the way in which he managed to convey an image of strength that belied his significant medical issues. “It was so pathetic to see him go up the steps of a plane on crutches, because then he looked so vulnerable. And once he was up there and standing at the podium, then he looked so in control of everything … So tanned and fit and powerful.”

  Only a few of JFK’s Senate colleagues were aware of his condition. When the bell rang for a Senate vote, it was up to George Smathers to literally pick Jack up and carry him down to the underground train that led to the Senate chamber. Once there, Jack somehow managed to make it to the Senate floor on his own, then returned to his office, “where he was wiped out from the sheer pain and physical exertion. Complain? Not once.”

  Whatever the cost, Jack went to great lengths to dispel Capitol Hill gossip that he was, in Gore Vidal’s unkind words, “decrepit—practically an invalid.” Jack played golf, swam, and even played softball at a Georgetown park with his Senate colleagues. “And he always would play touch football,” Jackie later recalled, “but he couldn’t run—I mean, he could run enough, but he could never be the one to run for the touchdown. He would pass and catch and run around a little …”

  Although Jackie often joked about his allergies to a variety of animals (“Can you imagine me with someone who’s allergic to horses?”), Jack tried to impress his fiancé by riding bareback with her across a field near Hammersmith Farm in Newport. “He was wheezing so badly when they returned,” Jackie’s mother recalled, “I thought he was going to pass out.”

  Not all of Jack’s physical antics were designed to impress. Like all the Kennedys, he often exhibited a disregard for consequences that seemed unwise, even reckless. Jackie “held on for dear life,” for instance, whenever Jack took the wheel of a car. Jack was “wicked, wicked, wicked” as a driver, Patsy Mulkern said. “Fast, very fast. Wild man.”

  Jack seemed in no particular hurry, however, to propose. Even after Jackie had broken off her engagement to John Husted, the senator from Massachusetts stalled for more than a year. To make matters worse, he was not exactly showering her with affection while she waited. “When he wanted to put his arm around her and kiss her,” Red Fay said, “well, he didn’t want to do it in front of me!”

  Or in front of anyone else, for that matter. “Jackie was from a world where people greeted each other with hugs and kisses on the cheek—even if they hated each other,” Cassini said. “It was difficult for her to put up with his inability to show affection in front of others. She knew it made him look cold, unfeeling toward her in the eyes of others, so she worked hard at getting him to warm up.”

  As for the usual romantic gestures and tokens: “Flowers? Candy? Valentines cards? Forget it!” Jackie joked. “He doesn’t even hold the door open for me. Jack did send me a postcard once, from Bermuda. It read: ‘Wish you were here. Jack.’”

  No one was more frustrated with Jack’s foot-dragging than Joe, who was more convinced than ever that Jackie was perfect first lady material. The elder Kennedy had developed a fondness for Jackie, who contrasted sharply both in style and substance with the loud, boisterous, gung-ho Kennedy women—the “Rah-Rah Girls,” Jackie dubbed them. “They fall all over each other,” she reported back to her sister, Lee, “like a pack of gorillas.” (The gorillas weren’t about to go easy on the young woman who insisted her name be pronounced “Jock-lean.” They slammed into Jackie during one of their famous football matches, breaking her right foot. “They’ll kill me before I ever get to marry him,” she told her mother. “I know they will.”)

  Unlike the others who were cowed by the curmudgeonly patriarch, Jackie was not afraid to tease Joe. When Joe boasted at the dinner table that he had given each of his children $1 million when they turned twenty-one, Jackie piped up, “Do you know what I would tell you if you gave me million dollars? I’d ask you to give me another million.”

  Jackie finally decided to take matters into her own hands by traveling to London to cover the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II for the Times-Herald. It was only then that Jack mustered the courage to propose to Jackie—over a crackling transatlantic phone line. Lem Billings thought it was the only way his friend could have done it, without having to actually look Jackie in the eye. “I couldn’t visualize him actually saying ‘I love you’ to somebody and asking her to marry him,” Billings said. “It was the sort of thing he would have liked to have happen without having to talk about it.” When she returned, Jack sealed the deal with a two-carat diamond-and-emerald engagement ring.

  Were they truly in love when Jack asked Jackie to marry him? Evelyn Lincoln thought not. “He was a politician and who wanted to be president and for that he needed a wife. I am absolutely certain they were not in love. At
least not at the time.” (As the blindly loyal secretary who for years had fielded Jack’s calls and made his excuses to the multitude of women he juggled at any given time, Lincoln was one of those key people Jack knew he could count on to do anything for him. “If I called her in here and told her that I had just cut off Jackie’s head,” Jack later joked, “and then said to her, ‘Mrs. Lincoln, would you bring me a nice large box so I can put Jackie’s head in it?’ she would say to me, ‘Oh, that’s lovely, Mr. President, I’ll get the box right away.’”)

  Notwithstanding Evelyn Lincoln’s view that Jack wasn’t in love with Jackie when he married her, many of their friends believed that what they did have at the time—what her half brother Jamie called “an intensity, an electrical current between them”—deepened in time. “If he was capable of loving any woman, and I believe he was,” Dickerson conceded, “that woman was Jackie.”

  4

  “I Hate It, I Hate It, I Hate It!”

  AUGUST 1956

  It was a revealing moment the nation would not get to see. Jack was grateful for that. Wearing a tasteful triple strand of pearls and a blank expression, Jackie, nearly eight months pregnant, sat ramrod straight in the living room at Hickory Hill, the historic Virginia mansion they had bought for $125,000 ten months earlier. She was answering questions on the NBC prime-time TV news program Outlook about what it was like to be the wife of a rising star in the Democratic Party.

  There was no hesitation when Jackie was asked if she wanted to be with her husband, who was making a dramatic eleventh-hour bid at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago to become presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson’s running mate. The answer was an unequivocal, if thoroughly predictable, yes.

  Then the interviewer interjected a casual observation of his own. “You’re pretty much in love with him,” the interviewer asked, “aren’t you?”

  “Oohh, no,” she replied emphatically. For several excruciatingly awkward moments, Jackie stared into the camera, smiling inscrutably but totally aware that she had made a Freudian slip of epic proportions.

  “I said ‘no,’ didn’t I?” Jackie said calmly.

  Clearly delighted, the reporter allowed that he was hoping Jackie wouldn’t say anything. Her refreshingly unexpected, unblinking response was, he said, “wonderful.”

  Jackie knew, of course, that Jack wouldn’t find her goof so wonderful. For another few unnerving moments, she continued to sit in total silence.

  “Great,” the interviewer continued. “You are pretty much in love with him, aren’t you?”

  Instead of rushing to set the record straight, Jackie hesitated again before finally murmuring a tepid response. “I suppose so …,” she said. Mercifully, the exchange was edited out of the final broadcast.

  In the three years since their Newport, Rhode Island, wedding and the whirlwind Acapulco honeymoon that followed, their love had been tested many times. Jackie had nursed her husband through two disastrous back surgeries—operations that, doctors warned him from the beginning, were highly risky because of his Addison’s disease.

  As predicted, the first operation resulted in a massive staph infection that left Jack in a coma. As he drifted in and out of consciousness, Jackie could hear Jack call out her name, but doctors and nurses physically barred her from entering the room. A second operation months later was also a catastrophe, leaving Jack in even worse shape than before. In both instances, a priest was summoned to Jack’s bedside and he was given last rites.

  “He didn’t even need the operations,” Jackie fumed. “They said, ‘We can’t tell if it will help or not.’ It just made me so mad how doctors just let people suffer … it’s just criminal.”

  HIS OWN UNCOMPLAINING NATURE ASIDE, Jack grew so dejected that for the first time Jackie saw “tears fill his eyes and roll down his cheeks.” (She would only see him cry twice more, after they moved into the White House.)

  In the wake of both failed back operations, Jackie seldom left Jack’s side. She read to him, relayed messages from colleagues and well-wishers (most notably Vice President Richard Nixon, who had been one of Jack’s closest friends in Congress), even arranged to have screen beauty Grace Kelly dress up in a nurse’s uniform and pay Jack a surprise visit in the hospital.

  Jackie also overlooked the fact that, to cheer himself up, Jack had taped a pinup of Marilyn Monroe to the back of his hospital room door. Priscilla Johnson McMillan, who visited Jack several times, recalled that the poster was especially suggestive because it was hung upside down and Marilyn’s legs were “you know, up in the air.”

  The Monroe poster wasn’t the only evidence of Jackie’s forbearance during this period. In addition to the parade of attractive young female visitors he identified to hospital personnel as his “sisters” and “cousins,” more than once Jack somehow mustered enough strength to slip out of his room for a night on the town sans Jackie.

  “Jackie was confident that she was the only truly important woman in Jack’s life, his one true love,” Dickerson said. “But he was hard-wired to go after women, and she dealt with it. It added to the sexual tension between them.” On her visits to Jack in the hospital, Jackie was “playful and kittenish—frolicking on Jack’s bed, jumping up and down on her knees,” Priscilla McMillan said. The objective, McMillan concluded, was “to keep him interested—and she did, even though he was unfaithful to her.”

  McMillan got a glimpse of this just before Jack underwent his first operation. At a dinner party in the legendary New York restaurant Le Pavillon, Jack was seated next to McMillan. Directly across from them sat Jackie with the host. “You know,” Jack told McMillan without ever taking his eyes off Jackie, “I only got married because I was thirty-six and people would think I was queer if I wasn’t.”

  McMillan was shocked, not only because Jack seemed to be making little effort to lower his voice, but because he never stopped staring at his wife, “literally drinking her in with his eyes … He was obviously proud. In some incredible way he had assimilated her.”

  While her husband battled for his life in the hospital, Jackie had more to do than just boost the patient’s morale. She finally decided to take matters into her own hands, striking out on her own to find a doctor who could end Jack’s pain once and for all—without surgery.

  She took Jack to see Janet Travell at Travell’s offices on West Sixteenth Street in New York. When Dr. Travell said she could give Jack a shot that would end his pain permanently but leave him feeling nothing from the waist down, his response was hardly surprising. “Well,” Jack scoffed, “we can’t have that now, can we, Jackie?”

  Travell offered another solution: Novocain, injected directly into Jack’s back. These shots, which offered immediate relief, were only a stopgap measure; the effects wore off after a few hours. But that was enough. “Well, she could fix him,” Jackie recalled. “I mean life just changed then. Jack was being driven crazy by this pain. If it hadn’t been for Dr. Travell …”

  NOT THAT JACK WOULD EVER be entirely free of pain. Returning to a hero’s welcome in the Senate, Jack still came home each evening and climbed into a hospital bed. “But during the day he’d walk all around the Senate,” she said, “looking wonderful and tan in his gray suit.”

  It was also during this time that Jack, growing bored during long stretches of confinement, began compiling material for an article on the lives of politicians who at some point risked everything to make the right choice. While he recuperated at the family’s Palm Beach mansion, where Joe had transformed an entire wing into a hospital ward staffed with nurses and orderlies, Jackie helped her husband expand the article into a book. Soon they were joined in this effort by Jack’s eager young assistant, Ted Sorensen.

  Sorensen’s contribution would always be a matter of debate. Jackie, knowing that Jack had written portions of the book in longhand on yellow legal pads while continuing his recovery at Merrywood, resented the fact that Sorensen did little to quell rumors that he had actually written Profiles in Courage
. “Jack forgave so quickly,” she said later, “but I never forgave Ted Sorensen.” However, JFK himself obviously believed Sorensen’s contribution was substantial. According to Jackie, Jack signed over all royalties to Profiles in Courage to Sorensen.

  Profiles in Courage became an overnight bestseller and would go on to win a Pulitzer Prize for biography. Just as important, it served to elevate the young senator even further above his Senate brethren. Now Jack, meditating on the larger issues of morality and conscience in the public arena, was viewed as something more than your run-of-the-mill politician. Jack was a statesman.

  “War hero, Harvard-educated, from one of the richest and most famous families in the nation, and now a Pulitzer Prize winner?” Smathers said. “Oh, did I mention good-looking, with a gorgeous, classy, and smart wife to boot? All the rest of us could do was just sit back and watch.”

  The Sorensen issue aside, Jack did not hesitate to publicly thank Jackie for her contribution to Profiles. The book would not have been possible, he wrote, “without the encouragement, assistance and criticisms offered from the very beginning by my wife, Jacqueline, whose help during all the days of my convalescence I cannot ever adequately acknowledge.”

  That summer, Jack bolstered his image even more with a seven-week tour of Europe. Yet again, Jackie proved a valuable asset, charming Pope Pius XII, French premier Georges Bidault, and, at a party thrown by Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis aboard his legendary yacht Christina, even Winston Churchill.