JFK's Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President (3 page)

In
Profiles in Courage,
his Pulitzer Prize–winning biography of eight U.S. senators who had chosen principle over political expediency, he had written about men who, much like himself until 1963, had “
sailed with the wind
until the decisive moment when their conscience, and events, propelled them into the center of the storm.” His two June speeches represented just that moment, and some of the remarks he made after delivering them sounded as if he were nominating himself for a chapter in his own book.
After the test ban treaty was initialed
in Moscow, he told Sorensen he would “gladly” forfeit reelection to win the sixty-seven votes needed to ratify it in the Senate.
After a Gallup poll reported
that 50 percent of Americans believed he was moving “too fast” on civil rights, he told a reporter at a press conference, “
Great historical events
cannot be judged by taking the national temperature every few weeks. . . . I think we will stand after a period of time has gone by,” and said to his secretary of commerce, Luther Hodges, a former Southern governor, “
There comes a time
when a man has to take a stand and history will record that he has to meet these tough situations and ultimately make a decision.” During a White House meeting with civil rights leaders he pulled a scrap of paper from his pocket containing the results of a poll showing his approval ratings falling from 60 to 47 percent since his speech and said grandiloquently, “
I may lose the next election
because of this. I don’t care.”

His June speeches had been a decisive break from the past: one offered the first concrete proposals for limiting the spread and testing of atomic weapons since the beginning of the cold war; the other represented the first time an American president had identified civil rights as a moral issue. They condemned racial discrimination and nuclear war as immoral, stressed the common humanity of whites and blacks, and Americans and Russians, and were profoundly optimistic. At American University he had said, “Our problems are man-made; therefore they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings.” The following evening, he declared that passage of his civil rights bill would enable America “to fulfill its promise.” The author and peace activist Norman Cousins, who had been serving as a clandestine intermediary between Kennedy and Khrushchev, spoke of “
a new spirit of hopefulness
” abroad in the world that summer, writing, “
Nothing is more powerful than an individual
acting out of his conscience, thus helping to bring the collective conscience to life.”

The political scientist James MacGregor Burns had concluded his 1960 biography of Kennedy by writing, “
Kennedy could bring bravery
and wisdom [to the presidency]; whether he would bring passion and power would depend on his making a commitment not only of mind, but of heart, that until now he has never been required to make.” Kennedy’s two speeches answered Burns’s criticism and honored a pledge he had made to the poet Robert Frost. During a visit to the White House two days after the inauguration,
Frost had presented him with a signed
and handwritten copy of the poem that he had composed for the ceremony but could not read because of the glare from a dazzling winter sun. As Frost watched, Kennedy read the poem, which amounted to a challenge to display the kind of courage that he had celebrated in
Profiles in Courage
and concluded by predicting,

A golden age of poetry and power

Of which this noonday’s the beginning hour.

“
Be more Irish than Harvard
,” Frost said as they parted. “Poetry and power is the formula for another Augustan age. Don’t be afraid of power.” At the bottom of a typed thank-you note to Frost, Kennedy scrawled, “It’s poetry and power all the way!”

There had been poetry in his early speeches.
In November 1961
, he warned students at the University of Washington that “the United States is neither omnipotent nor omniscient. . . . We cannot right every wrong or reverse each adversity.”
During the Cuban missile crisis
he spoke of a nuclear war “in which even the fruits of victory would be ashes in our mouths,” and said, “Our goal is not the victory of might, but the vindication of right.” But it was not until June 1963 that he finally began to be more Irish than Harvard, governing from the heart as well as the head, harnessing poetry to the power of the presidency without checking the thickness of the political ice, promising in his American University speech, “Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave . . . not merely peace for Americans, but peace for all men and women—not merely peace in our time but peace in all time,” and the next day calling civil rights a moral issue “as old as the scriptures and . . . as clear as the American Constitution.”

•   •   •

J
ACKIE
GAVE
BIRTH
to their son while Kennedy was in the air.
He sat silently during the flight
, staring out a window.
Another passenger remembered
seeing the same stricken expression on his face on November 25, 1960, when he had flown back to Washington from Palm Beach after learning that Jackie had gone into premature labor with John. He had been tense and perspiring then, and was overheard muttering, “
I’m never there when she needs me
.”

Jackie had suffered a miscarriage in 1955 and had become pregnant again the following year. Her physician had urged her to skip the 1956 Democratic Convention, but she felt obliged to attend because her husband was a candidate for the vice presidency. She went to her mother and stepfather’s estate in Newport afterward while he flew to Europe for a holiday.
While he was cruising
off Capri with what one newspaper called “several young women,” she went into labor and gave birth to a stillborn baby girl they planned to name Arabella, after the tiny ship that had accompanied the
Mayflower
. He did not hear about the tragedy until three days later and decided to continue the cruise, leaving Bobby to comfort Jackie and bury Arabella. He flew home after one of his best friends in the Senate, George Smathers of Florida, told him during a transatlantic call, “
You’d better haul
your ass back to your wife if you want to run for president.”

Jackie spent most of the autumn of 1956 in Newport and London, avoiding Hyannis Port and telling her sister, Lee Radziwill, that her marriage was probably over.
But when she gave birth to Caroline
a year later he arrived at the hospital carrying a bouquet of her favorite flowers, periwinkle-blue irises, and was the first to lay their daughter in her arms.
He boasted of her being
the prettiest baby in the nursery, and his voice broke when he described her to Lem Billings, who had never seen him happier or more emotional. Caroline had repaired some of the post-Arabella damage, and John’s birth would also bring them closer, but neither ended his philandering.

Before flying to Otis
he had called Larry Newman, a journalist and friend who lived across the street from the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port, and asked him to drive to the base hospital and wait for him in the lobby. When he arrived, he began to throw an arm over Newman’s shoulder but stopped in midair and shook his hand instead. “Thanks for being here,” he said in a voice so choked with emotion that Newman almost burst into tears.

Dr. Walsh reported that his son, whom he and Jackie had decided to name Patrick, was suffering from “hyaline membrane disease” (now known as respiratory distress syndrome), a common ailment among premature infants in which a film covering the air sacs of the lungs hinders their ability to supply oxygen to the bloodstream. The chances that a five-and-a-half-week-premature infant weighing 4 pounds 10½ ounces with this ailment would survive in 1963 were, as Travell had warned, only fifty/fifty. (The chances have since improved dramatically.) Kennedy flew in a pediatric specialist who recommended sending Patrick to Children’s Hospital in Boston, the premier medical center in the world for childhood diseases. Before an ambulance took the infant away he wheeled him into Jackie’s room in an isolette, a pressurized incubator simulating the oxygen and temperature conditions of the womb. The boy lay motionless on his back, a name band hanging loosely around his tiny wrist.
Hospital personnel described him
as “beautifully formed” and “a cute little monkey with light brown hair.” Jackie was not permitted to hold him and became upset after learning that he was going to Boston.

She had suffered months of postpartum depression following John’s birth, and Kennedy feared it might happen again.
He pulled aside
an Air Force medic, Richard Petrie, and asked what he knew about television. Puzzled by the question, Petrie said, “Well, I can turn one on and off.” Kennedy explained that if Patrick died he did not want Jackie hearing the news on television, and to prevent this happening he wanted Petrie to disable her set. The medic slipped back into her room, pried off the back of her television, and smashed a tube.

“
Nothing must happen to Patrick
,” Kennedy told his mother-in-law, Janet Auchincloss, before flying to Boston, “because I just can’t bear to think of the effect it might have on Jackie.”

A jubilant crowd
at Logan Airport, either unaware of Patrick’s condition or unable to believe that anything bad could happen to such a charmed family, greeted him with cheers and applause. Flashbulbs popped and girls screamed and held out autograph books. He offered a tight smile and a halfhearted wave.

There was no cure for hyaline membrane disease in 1963, and an infant survived only if its normal bodily functions dissolved the membrane coating the lungs within forty-eight hours. Kennedy had consulted the best physicians and sent his son to the best hospital. Now all he could do was wait. He spent the night at his family’s apartment in the Ritz Hotel.
Before returning to Children’s Hospital
the next morning, he called Ted Sorensen to review his formal statement accompanying the presentation of the test ban treaty to Congress. It called the agreement “the finest concrete result of eighteen years of effort by the United States to impose limits on the nuclear arms race” and said it embodied “the hopes of the world.” Sorensen remembered him reading these sentences out loud in “a downcast but factual manner.”

Patrick’s breathing stabilized, and Kennedy returned to Otis to deliver the news to Jackie.
She was so encouraged
that she spent the afternoon choosing lipsticks and arranging for a ballet company to entertain Emperor Haile Selassie during his state visit in October. Kennedy returned to their rented house on Squaw Island—a spit of land connected to Hyannis Port by a causeway—and lunched on the terrace with Janet Auchincloss and her eighteen-year-old daughter, also named Janet. Young Janet was supposed to have her society debut in Newport the next weekend but wanted to cancel it because of Patrick. Hearing this, Kennedy said, “
This is the kind of thing
that has to go on. You can’t let all those people down.” Knowing she was self-conscious about her weight, he added, “You know, Janet, you really are a very beautiful girl.” Her face lit up and she said, “Oh, Mr. President, I don’t know what you mean.”
Her mother believed
that this last-minute flattery gave her the confidence to have the party.

Patrick’s condition suddenly deteriorated, and Kennedy rushed back to Children’s Hospital by helicopter, landing on the grass of a nearby stadium. The boy’s physicians had decided to force oxygen into his lungs by placing him in a hyperbaric chamber, a thirty-one-foot-long steel cylinder resembling a small submarine, with portholes and air locks between its compartments. It was the only one in the country and had been used for infants undergoing cardiac surgery and victims of carbon monoxide poisoning. Patrick would be the first hyaline membrane baby placed inside it.

Upon returning to the Ritz
, Kennedy asked Evelyn Lincoln to bring him some White House stationery. She found him sitting on his bed, staring into space.
After a full minute of silence he wrote
on a sheet of paper, “Please find enclosed a contribution to the O’Leary fund. I hope it is a success.” He enclosed a check for $250 (worth about $1,800 today), sealed the envelope, and told her to have the Secret Service deliver it.
Weeks later, an accountant
handling his personal finances informed Lincoln that a bank was questioning the validity of his signature on an August 8 check to the James B. O’Leary Fund. She recalled reading about a Boston policeman named O’Leary who had been killed in the line of duty. Kennedy had been so distraught about Patrick that his handwriting on the check was even more indecipherable than usual.

•   •   •

K
ENNEDY
HAD
ALMOST
DIED
from scarlet fever when he was two years old. His temperature rose to 105, blisters covered his body, and he was quarantined in a Boston hospital.
His father attended Mass
every morning for three weeks and promised God to donate half his wealth to charity if his son survived. He kept his word, up to a point, sending a check for $3,750 to the Guild of Apollonia, an organization of Catholic dentists providing free dental care to needy children. It was a generous sum for the time but could have represented only half the money in his personal bank account, not half his net worth. It would be surprising if Kennedy, like his father and most other parents in his situation, had not bargained with God. Perhaps the O’Leary check was part of the deal. If it was, and the Almighty was keeping score, He could have added it to a long list of acts of thoughtfulness and compassion on Kennedy’s part, some trivial but nevertheless part of a pattern.

While serving in the Pacific
he had torn the
PT 109
patch off his shirt and mailed it to a cousin who was homesick at boarding school along with a note saying, “I’m not so crazy about where I’m at either, kiddo. Be brave. Wear my patch, and we’ll get through this.”
While staying with Paul Fay
in California during leave from the Navy he was so charmed by Margaret (“Miggie”) McMahon, the Irish nursemaid who had raised Fay, that he began calling her every year on her birthday, a tradition he continued throughout his life, making his last call from the White House in 1963.
While rushing to grab a quick lunch
, he had noticed a group of spastic children touring the White House grounds in wheelchairs and insisted on engaging each child in a lengthy conversation. When a boy mentioned that his father had also served in a PT boat squadron, he darted back into his office, found his PT boat skipper’s hat, and placed it on the boy’s head. “His father was in PT boats, too,” he explained to a Secret Service agent who was wiping away tears. “His father is dead.”
He studied photographs
of the agents so he could address each by his first name.
One brutally cold
winter evening, he asked the agent on duty outside the French doors leading to the garden to come inside. After the man explained that he could not leave his post, he returned with his own fleece-lined coat and insisted he wear it, then reappeared with two mugs of hot chocolate that they drank while sitting on the icy steps.