These Few Precious Days Read online

  Despite her initial refusal to turn their daughter into a campaign “mascot,” Jackie relented. After all, Nixon was trotting out daughters Tricia and Julie at the drop of a hat. Not to be outdone, Caroline was shown in one magazine layout after another hugging her teddy bear, napping, smiling at her parents, or simply staring wide-eyed into the camera. “She was,” Lowe said, “a phenomenally photogenic child.” Maud Shaw, of course, was nowhere to be seen in the photographs. As far as the voting public was concerned, Jack Kennedy’s down-to-earth wife was raising their daughter without the help of a nanny. “It was perfectly fine,” Shaw later said. “I understood they had an image to project, and she really was a wonderful mother to Caroline.”

  Being photographed was one thing, but Jackie still insisted that Caroline be kept out of the fray. She would not allow her daughter to be jostled and gawked at by the mob. “Jack wanted to cart Caroline out as often as he could,” Lowe said, “but he wasn’t about to defy Jackie when it came to their child.”

  Or at least not directly. Jack’s personal photographer discovered early on that his boss had few qualms about letting staff members take the heat for something he wanted accomplished. “He’d tell us to do something Jackie expressly didn’t want done,” Lowe said, “and then play dumb.”

  “The campaign gave us a good idea of how things were going to work between them in the White House,” Pierre Salinger said. “The president insisted on deniability when it came to Jackie.”

  “You know,” added Lowe, “it was ‘What? Who, me?’ He didn’t like any unpleasantness with Jackie. Jack would do anything to avoid an argument with her. He genuinely cared about her feelings, and tried his best, even with all the distractions and incredible pressures involved in running for the presidency, to keep her happy.”

  Notwithstanding the fact that the JFKs’ little family was appearing on newsstands everywhere, Jackie and Caroline managed to lie low for the first twelve weeks as Daddy barnstormed the country nonstop. Perhaps too low. On the evening of September 12 Jackie was about to sit down for dinner at Hyannis Port with several Kennedys and Auchinclosses when the phone rang. “That’s Jack!” she said excitedly. She had been waiting for his call from the campaign trail all day. Moments later, Jackie returned to the living room with, said one guest, “that blank, resigned look she always had when she didn’t want anyone reading her emotions.” Was something wrong? Rose Kennedy asked.

  “Today’s our anniversary,” Jackie told everyone, “and Jack never mentioned it.” In his defense, Jack, who had asked Evelyn Lincoln to send his wife flowers that day, later called to apologize.

  Nothing had changed since that day a few years earlier when Gore Vidal asked Jackie if she didn’t find her husband’s political stardom exciting. “For Jack it is,” she answered. “Not for me. I never see him.”

  Jackie would be the first to concede, however, that Jack had every reason to be distracted. The most critical moment in the campaign was fast approaching: September 26, when CBS was scheduled to air the first of four historic debates between Kennedy and Nixon.

  Unbeknownst to all but two or three confidants, Jack was going into the first debate armed with a secret weapon. Just days earlier, he and Chuck Spalding decided to attend a party in New York after a strenuous day of campaigning. Bright and early the next morning, Spalding went out of town on a political errand for Jack, and came back to Jack’s Carlyle Hotel suite “raring to go.”

  “I’m just pooped,” JFK confessed, “completely wiped out. You went to the same party I did last night … Where in the hell do you get all this energy?”

  Spalding let JFK in on his little secret. In addition to helping Jack out in the campaign, Spalding had a high-pressure executive position on Madison Avenue and was going through a rough divorce that left him exhausted. At a friend’s urging, Chuck went to see a mysterious Dr. Max Jacobson on East Seventy-Second Street in New York. In the waiting room that afternoon was Broadway and film star Zero Mostel, singers Johnny Mathis and Eddie Fisher, and even Jack’s old Choate classmate Alan Jay Lerner, the lyricist for such hit Broadway musicals as Brigadoon, My Fair Lady, and Jack’s favorite, Camelot. (“And to think,” JFK later joked when Lerner brought the New York cast of Brigadoon to perform at a state dinner for King Hassan II of Morocco, “neither of us thought the other would amount to anything.”)

  Spalding quickly discovered that Max Jacobson—“a loud, arrogant, kind of mad scientist type”—counted “half of Hollywood” among his patients. They were all apparently willing to overlook Dr. Max’s scruffy appearance, his fingernails blackened with chemicals, and the bizarre knack he had for suddenly dozing off in strange places. (Once when the doctor fell asleep in a bathtub, longtime patient Eddie Fisher tried and failed to scrub Jacobson’s fingers clean.) Nor was Dr. Max much of a stickler for hygiene. Fisher described the shiny black medical bag Jacobson carried as “a jumble of dirty, unmarked bottles and nameless chemical concoctions which he would just dump out on a table when he began to mix an injection.” According to Jacobson’s assistant, Harvey Mann, “many of Max’s patients ended up with hepatitis, because the office was filthy.”

  Spalding was indeed put off by Jacobson’s brash behavior and unkempt appearance, but he rolled up his sleeve anyway. “I let him give me a shot,” Spalding said. “Well, I went over the top of the building! I felt wonderful, full of energy—capable of doing just about anything. I didn’t know exactly what he was giving me, but it was a magic potion as far as I was concerned.”

  Jacobson, later dubbed “Dr. Feelgood,” was shooting up his high-profile clientele with amphetamine cocktails, mostly Dexedrine laced with steroids. The upside was immediately obvious: as a stimulant, these concoctions not only increased energy but infused the patient with a sense of power, confidence, and well-being. Conversely, amphetamines were highly addictive, often led to severe depression, and in some cases triggered symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia. For the moment, of course, Jacobson kept the downside of using amphetamines to himself.

  “Well, if it’s doing all that for you,” Jack told Spalding, “then I want some. Can you put me in touch with this guy?”

  Spalding hesitated. He told Jack that if anything went wrong, he didn’t want to be responsible. Bobby Kennedy was fiercely protective of his brother, so Spalding figured that he’d run the idea by Bobby first.

  Bobby not only urged his brother to see Max Jacobson; he soon counted himself among Dr. Feelgood’s regular patients. Only days before the first debate, Jacobson cleared out his office and JFK entered through the garage. “The demands of his political campaign were so great he felt fatigued, “Jacobson said. “His muscles felt weak. It interfered with this concentration and affected his speech.”

  The first shot was 85 percent speed and 15 percent vitamins—and within minutes Jack was a new man. His muscle weakness had vanished and, according to Jacobson, JFK was instantly “cool, calm, and very alert.”

  The injections had another effect, as well. To alleviate Jack’s back pain, Dr. Travell had increased the prescription for the time-release DOCA pellets in his thighs from 150 to 300 milligrams. Cortisone pills replaced the steroid injections he had also been getting twice a day. Normally, such elevated levels of cortisone typically increase muscular strength, raise energy levels, and sharpen mental focus. They also can lead to a quantum boost in libido. “It was pretty obvious,” Smathers said, “that if Jack was a tiger before, he was even more of one now.”

  IT WAS NOT LONG BEFORE, Spalding said, “we were all taking injections. Jack, Jackie, Bobby, everybody.” In most cases, Jacobson gave the shots twice a week, although Jack in particular sometimes demanded—and got—more. “I thought, this doesn’t make any sense,” Spalding recalled. “It’s so simple. It wasn’t until much later I found out it wasn’t so simple after all.”

  Dr. Feelgood’s influence would reach into the White House and have far-reaching consequences not only for the personal relationship of the president and his wife, but also
for the nation. In the short run, Jacobson’s amphetamine cocktails would simply help get JFK elected.

  Those who listened to the first debate on the radio, including Lyndon Johnson, felt Nixon won decisively. But the millions who watched the two candidates square off on television were won over by Jack’s tanned, relaxed appearance in contrast to Nixon’s darting eyes, five o’clock shadow, and sweaty upper lip. In the words of debate producer Don Hewitt, who become best known as the producer of CBS’s 60 Minutes, Jack “looked like a young Adonis.”

  Jackie had watched the first three debates from the comfort of home, but for the final face-off she showed up at the ABC studios in New York to lend moral support—and outshine a comparatively mousy Pat Nixon in the process. “Poor Pat Nixon,” she said to Salinger. “She can look so New York chic, but they won’t let her.”

  Chic was not always required, or even desired. It was inevitable that Jackie’s own admittedly lavish spending habits, although willingly funded by an appreciative Joe Kennedy, would become a bone of contention. That fall, a newspaper reported that American women resented Jackie because in a single year she spent $30,000 (the rough equivalent of $240,000 in 2013 dollars) on Paris fashions alone. Jackie snapped back that she couldn’t possibly spend that much unless she “wore sable underwear.”

  During the closing months of the campaign, Jackie saw her husband only a half-dozen times, and then fleetingly. When Jack decided he could spare two days to unwind in Palm Beach, she immediately joined him in Florida. “She was totally thrilled to see him,” Maud Shaw recalled, “even if it was only for a short time.”

  Instead of spending time with his wife, however, Jack wanted to hit the links. Jackie was determined that he spend time with her, but Jack headed off for the golf course with Chuck Spalding as planned. When Jackie sent word pleading with him to return to the house, Jack grew remorseful—but not enough to want to call off his game. “Chuck,” he told his friend, “go back to the house and see her.”

  Spalding wished he hadn’t. “So I went up to her and she flew at me in a rage,” he said. “I had never seen her so angry. She really went off the deep end, yelling and screaming at me.”

  “Hey, hey,” Spalding said, hoping Jackie would regain the dignified aura for which she was already becoming famous. “We’ve been friends a long time. You and I are family. It’s just a golf game. Why don’t you come with us?”

  Spalding’s invitation fell on deaf ears. “She just looked at me, absolutely fuming, then turned on her heels and left.”

  As the race grew tighter, Jack begged Jackie to join him in New York for the jam-packed closing days of the campaign. Defying doctor’s orders, she agreed. It was difficult for her to say no, since the campaign schedule drawn up for Jack had him shaking hands and delivering speeches a minimum of eighteen hours a day. “He just works so hard,” she said, “and you know I think he hates it almost as much as I do, at least he says he does.” Besides, she added, “It’s the most important time of Jack’s whole life. I should be with him.”

  As she had done so skillfully during earlier races, Jackie spoke Italian to crowds in Little Italy and Spanish in Spanish Harlem. The candidate and his eight-months-pregnant wife flirted with disaster, however, when they rode on the back of an open car during a ticker-tape parade through New York’s “Canyon of Heroes.” Three million screaming fans turned out, yanking at their sleeves, rocking the car—at several points along the route Jackie was convinced they were about to be hurled to the pavement.

  A shaken Jackie returned to Hyannis Port to wait out the election and what remained of her pregnancy. Browsing through a copy of Life, she took little comfort in reading that someone had gone to the trouble of categorizing Jack’s legion of hysterical female fans as “jumpers, shriekers, huggers, lopers, touchers, gaspers, gogglers, swooners, and collapsers.”

  Indeed, Jack was now inspiring the kind of frenzied reaction that had previously been reserved for Frank Sinatra or Elvis Presley. “It’s hard to explain the hold he had on these young women,” Nancy Dickerson said, chalking it up to what she called his “incredible sexual pull.” Lowe said the atmosphere at every campaign stop was the same, and could best be described with one word: “orgasmic.”

  Even though she had already sent in her absentee ballot—casting a single vote for her husband and no one else, not even LBJ—Jackie was again recruited to accompany her husband to Boston on Election Day. “It doesn’t matter that I’m tired and about to have a baby,” she complained to Newman. “They need their picture of me smiling from ear to ear while Jack casts his vote.”

  Back in Hyannis Port, Caroline, who would soon turn three, raced into her father’s arms as soon as he walked in the front door. They had not seen each other in two months. Jack ran his fingers through his daughter’s blond curls, held in place by two powder blue ribbons.

  Then Jackie ordered her husband to sit in his favorite wing chair while Caroline recited two poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay. “My candle burns at both ends,” she began. “It will not last the night …”

  “Wonderful, Buttons!” Jack said when she was done, clapping his approval. “Wonderful!” A half century later, Caroline would call this one of her most cherished childhood memories.

  THAT NIGHT OF NOVEMBER 8, 1960, it looked at first as if JFK might win a landslide victory. “Oh, Bunny,” she said at 10:30 p.m., using her favorite nickname for Jack. “You’re president now.” But then Nixon surged ahead. While the entire Kennedy clan watched the seesawing results on television, precinct-by-precinct numbers were pouring in over the thirty phone lines installed on Papa Joe’s veranda.

  Realizing it was going to be “an all-night thing,” Jackie went up to bed. “It was so sweet, Jack came up and sort of kissed me good night,” she said, “then all the Kennedy girls came up, one by one, and we just hugged each other.”

  Jack stayed up until 4 a.m. and then, intent on not disturbing her, went to bed in the guest room next to theirs. At 8:30, Jackie sprang out of bed. “I went flying into his room to hear the good news,” she said, admitting that she startled Jack to such an extent he “sprang” out of bed. “But no, there wasn’t anything.”

  A little before 9 a.m. Ted Sorensen woke Jack with the news that he’d won. Minutes later, the president-elect was soaking in the bathtub.

  “Daddy, Daddy!” Caroline hollered as she ran into the bathroom. “You won! Miss Shaw told me to call you ‘Mr. President’ now.”

  As it happened, victory would not be certain for hours. When Nixon’s camp finally did concede, it became clear that Jack had won the narrowest of election victories, squeaking by with a margin of less than one-fifth of 1 percent.

  Ignoring his problematic back, Jack walked outside and gave Caroline a piggyback ride around the lawn. Then, still holding his little girl in his arms, he walked over to the gaggle of reporters waiting by a bank of microphones.

  With all eyes on her husband, Jackie threw on a coat and raced down to the beach alone. Jacques Lowe was trying to assemble all the Kennedys together for a family portrait when he glanced out the window and saw Jackie “rushing down to the sea. That Wednesday morning when the rest of the family was jubilant and embracing each other and laughing it up, Jackie was deeply shaken,” he said. “She was clearly in a state of shock.”

  Jackie, Lowe said, “definitely had ambivalent feelings about becoming first lady. She had always lived in a fairyland, in the role of the storybook princess. I’m not sure Jackie ever counted on being queen.”

  “Where’s Jackie?” Jack asked. “Everyone’s waiting to have their picture taken.”

  Lowe pointed to the solitary figure standing on the beach, holding her collar up against the cold, her hair whipping in the wind. “It’s okay,” Jack told Lowe. “I’ll go get her.”

  Lowe watched as Jack walked briskly down to the water’s edge and put his arm around her.

  “What will happen now, Jack?” she asked. “What will happen to us?”

  LOWE WATCHED
AS THEY CHATTED for a minute or two more. “He obviously reassured her everything would be all right,” Lowe said. “Then they hugged. It was a very moving scene.” Once Jack brought Jackie back up to the house, she changed into a red dress and walked into the room where the rest of the family had gathered to have their picture taken. Everyone, including the hypercritical Rose and the Kennedy in‑laws Jackie had once called a “pack of gorillas,” leapt up and cheered. “You see,” Jack whispered into Jackie’s ear, “they know I couldn’t have done it without you.”

  Come here any time and keep us company. Because we are so lonely.

  —JACKIE,

  in a note to her friend Oleg Cassini

  5

  “Our Strange Little Life”

  Just three weeks away from her due date, Jackie was not about to take any more chances. She and Jack had planned on having the baby where Caroline was born, at New York Hospital, and that meant moving into Jack’s Carlyle Hotel suite a week or so before the baby was due.

  Until then Jackie was under strict orders from Dr. Walsh to stay home. While she rested, Jack shuttled between Washington and the Kennedy mansion in Palm Beach, where he and his father went over possible cabinet choices as they lounged by the pool.

  Meanwhile, crowds gathered outside the N Street house, already cordoned off by the Secret Service, to catch a glimpse of the president-elect and his attractive family. Inside, the usual chaos prevailed as gruff, cigar-chomping pols mingled with JFK’s band of bow-tied and bespectacled young advisers and distinguished future cabinet appointees like Dean Rusk and Robert McNamara. “I could be in the tub,” Jackie said, and when she was finished return to find “Pierre Salinger holding a press conference in my bedroom.” At one point Jackie complained that she’d nearly collided with Jack’s national security adviser McGeorge Bundy on her way to the bathroom. “For God’s sake, Jackie,” JFK replied, “all you have to worry about right now is your inaugural ball gown.”