The Kennedy Men: 1901-1963 (126 page)

In his cover letter Bartlett admonished the president that unless he “put a personal priority on learning more about what is going on, the thing may slip suddenly beyond your control.” Bartlett was one of Corbin’s friends and
sources, and he may have been pulling the strings here, attempting a sweet, subtle revenge. Corbin had been wrong about Newman, but he was a prodigious researcher, and his other revelations were not necessarily wrong, only perhaps tainted in their purposes.

In most ethical matters that came across his desk, the president had sought Mike Feldman’s advice. Feldman never learned anything, however, of this matter. The president surely understood that by sending him these memos instead of investigating the administration and writing about it, Bartlett was letting his friendship take priority over his journalistic standards. Kennedy, however, was not so loyal to Bartlett as Bartlett was to him. “Charley, there are a lot of people over here very angry with you,” he told his friend.

The president told a number of people about Bartlett’s memos, including O’Donnell, making no apparent attempt to try to hide the source of these allegations. Bartlett was increasingly convinced that there was serious corruption involved and felt that the president was doing almost nothing to investigate the allegations. “The president never gave me the impression that he wanted to investigate this stuff,” Bartlett recalled. “That was my concern, though it took me a while. I suppose that gave Kenny O’Donnell a great deal of license. In other words, he could go anywhere and ask people for money, and when Larry said that he spent this hundred thousand dollars from California on Get Out the Vote money, why, I suppose Kennedy would have shrugged. But the fact was that they did both end up looking pretty rich. Of course, you always end up with people like that in the White House, but it seems to me that Kenny O’Donnell does you a lot more harm than good. I didn’t deal with him at all. I really sort of disliked him.”

I
n April the White House announced that thirty-three-year-old Jackie was pregnant. In late August she would become the only first lady since Mrs. Grover Cleveland in 1893 to give birth while in the White House. For Jackie, this was a double blessing, since the pregnancy gave her an excuse to cancel all her public duties and live the secluded, private life that she preferred.

Jackie had been involved in building a new fifteen-room weekend home called Atoka on Rattlesnake Ridge in the Virginia hunt country that she adored and her husband tolerated. It was supposed to cost $71,000 but had already reached $100,000, and she had not begun to furnish the residence except for two 173-year-old porcelain eagles for which she had paid $1,500. “It’s the only house Jack and I ever built together,” Jackie recalled, “and I designed it all myself. I didn’t want it to be exploited and photographed all over the place just because it was ours.”

The president had a wife who was an American icon, celebrated for her beauty and class, a woman who was almost never the victim of envy, that most American of sins. She was spending about $8,300 a month in personal expenses, more than most teachers earned in a year, but far less than she had spent when she first entered the White House.

Kennedy might smolder privately at his wife’s endless extravagances, but she was pregnant now, and woe betide anyone who did not understand the deference and care that she must be given. In July at his rented home on Squaw Island, he had come down one Saturday morning and asked his friend Jim Reed to reach Jackie’s obstetrician, Dr. John Walsh. The Washington doctor had come to the Cape to be close to the first lady. Dr. Walsh had gone out for a walk, and it was about an hour later when he finally strolled into the president’s summer home. Kennedy rarely lashed others with his tongue, but the cool tenor of his voice was enough to chill anyone so unfortunate as to have such words directed at them. “I just hope that if you do go off for a walk for any period of time that you always tell someone where you are,” he said, “how you can be reached immediately in case I do have to get in touch with you.” Obstetricians tend to be the most philosophical of doctors, realizing that for the most part nature is their master. The doctor hurried upstairs and soon reported to the president that Jackie was simply tired.

On August 7, Kennedy was in Washington when he learned that Dr. Walsh had Jackie taken to a specially prepared suite at Otis Air Force Base Hospital. By the time the president arrived, the first lady had given birth prematurely by cesarean section to a four-pound, ten-ounce son. The president had gone off carousing in Cuba soon after Caroline was born, and he had not even been in Washington when John Jr. was born. Now he had missed this birth too, but he appeared to appreciate the miracle of life in the presence of his tiny son the way he had rarely felt it before.

The newborn had some trouble breathing, but the president wheeled him into his mother’s room, where he placed the infant in Jackie’s arms. The baby continued to breathe fitfully, and Dr. Walsh decided to move him by ambulance to Boston. Before that was done, a priest baptized Patrick Bouvier Kennedy, named after the president’s grandfather and Jackie’s father.

The president flew back to Squaw Island to spend time with Caroline and John Jr. He then flew back to visit his convalescing wife at Otis, and then flew on to Boston to visit his newborn son. At this moment he was a husband succoring his wife. He was a father shepherding his children. He was a man whose newborn child was sick, and there was nothing he could do about it.

The baby was diagnosed as having idiopathic respiratory distress syndrome.
The doctors could not do much more than the president was doing, waiting and praying, hoping that the membrane on his air sacs, which so troubled his breathing, would soon dissolve. Patrick had been taken from his mother’s arms, and now he was moved to the Children’s Medical Center at Harvard’s School of Public Health, where he was put in a new experimental high-pressure chamber. The thirty-one-foot-long device was like a mini-submarine, a room within a room in which Patrick, the doctors, and the nurses were encased.

A healthy man sees only healthy men and he thinks he has seen the world. A sick man looks out on that same vista and sees the hurt and the lame, the crippled and the stricken. When it came to the imponderable pains of the world, the president had learned to turn away, looking toward all that was bright and gay. On this day, though, there was no turning his head away from the tiny inert form of his infant son, visible through the windows of the chamber.

Kennedy slept in the hospital that evening. He was awakened at two in the morning and told that Patrick was not doing well and that he should come to his son’s room. As Kennedy stood waiting for the elevator, he saw a burned child in an adjoining room. The president was a man of the deepest curiosity, but he turned away from any door that led into darkness. Yet now he pulled himself out of his own misery to ask about this child. He was told that the child’s mother came to see him every day. He wanted to do something for this woman. He was the president of the United States, but he had no power here to heal these wounds. He asked for a piece of paper and wrote a note to the woman, telling her “to keep her courage up.” Though he knew much of men standing bold under cannon fire and politicians holding firm in the name of principle, he knew nothing of this humble courage that won no medals, gained no accolades in books of history—a mother walking alone each day into a hospital to see her burned child.

When Kennedy reached his son’s room, Patrick was still alive, but two hours later he was gone. The president went off by himself into the boiler room, and when he opened the door again his eyes were red and wet. He had never thrown a football to Patrick on the turf at Hyannis Port, or led his pony down a trail at Glen Ora, but by the measure of his pain he might as well have.

When it came time to bury Patrick, the president went to the private services at Cardinal Cushing’s residence with his brothers and sisters and other Kennedys. They were all there except for the convalescing Jackie, who would have heard a special prayer for a mother who had lost three children. The fifteen mourners filled the tiny chapel and heard Cushing offer the Mass
of the Angels. When the service was over, the Kennedys filed out one by one until only the president and the cardinal remained. The president harbored the tiny casket in his arms, as if he sought to take it with him.

“My dear Jack, let’s go, let’s go,” the cardinal implored. “Nothing more can be done.”

The two men stood alone weeping and sharing a grief that for a moment even the grace of faith could not assuage.

P
atrick’s death was a brutal way for the president to grow emotionally, but after the tragic event he did care more and grieve more than he had previously appeared capable of doing. He had always been aware of the transitory nature of life, but he saw now more than ever that God or fate could in an instant turn a placid sea into turbulent, churning waters, and that in such moments man was powerless.

That summer he was sitting at mass one Sunday at St. Francis Xavier Church in Hyannis when he turned to the three White House correspondents sitting behind him. “Did you ever think if someone took a shot at me, he would probably get one of you first?” Kennedy asked. It was classic Kennedy irony, but clearly the president had been thinking about assassination.

A tragedy does not by itself bring people together, bur it allows those affected to display a humanity, generosity, and vulnerability that they may not usually expose. This was as true for the president and first lady as for anyone else, and out of Patrick’s death came a marriage they had never had before. “Jack was one of these men who was incapable of being loyal to one woman,” reflected Feldman. “But in the last year of their marriage, he cared for her as he had not before, and they had a closeness they had not had before.”

Their friends looked on as Kennedy displayed a gentle tenderness toward his grieving wife. “I think that Jack and Jackie both had their own particular problems,” reflected Betty Spalding, who often talked with both of them. “She had the same emotional blocks and limitations that Jack had, but they were both growing up emotionally. They were catching up. Their relationship was getting better and better.”

In September, Jackie was invited to go along with her sister, Lee Radziwill, for a cruise on Aristotle Onassis’s 303-foot yacht, the
Christina.
The president felt nothing but disdain for the Greek shipping magnate who had been indicted for his business manipulations. When Kennedy returned from his European trip, there had been an exquisite model ship sitting outside the Oval Office. It was the kind of object that Kennedy immensely admired, but
when he asked who had given him this marvelous gift, his secretary had not completed Onassis’s full name before Kennedy ordered, “Take that out of here.”

The president clearly would have preferred not to have his wife sailing around the Mediterranean with Onassis, but there was no other luxury yacht in the world like the
Christina,
and he figured it was just the tonic that Jackie might need before facing the rigors of his reelection. To keep up a pretense that the journey had some other purpose than amusement, and to watch over his wife, he asked Franklin Roosevelt Jr., his undersecretary of Commerce, and his wife, Suzanne, to go along.

Kennedy was consumed enough by the idea of his wife going off with the Greek magnate that while staying at the Carlyle Hotel on September 20, he doodled on a notepad “Jackie—Onassis.” Nine days later he drafted the precise words of a press release that Pierre Salinger was to read at his press briefing the following noon. “The yacht has been secured by Prince Radziwill for this cruise from her owner, Aristotle Onassis,” Kennedy wrote, a statement that was both untrue and unkind.

Jackie sailed off on October 5 from Athens, along with a crew of sixty, including two coiffeurs and a dance band. The ship had hardly left port when the previously sacrosanct Jackie became the subject of criticism. Was it “improper for the wife of the president … to accept [Onassis’s] lavish hospitality?” asked Congressman Oliver Bolton, an Ohio Republican. With his reelection campaign less than a year away, Kennedy was attuned to even the most subdued criticism. He knew that the Republicans would attempt to create an image of the White House, in the words of the GOP national chairman, as a scene of “twisting in the historic East Ballroom … [and] all-night parties in foreign lands.”

“Well, why did you let Jackie go with Onassis?” Kennedy was asked at a private party while the boat sailed the Aegean, bad publicity traveling in its wake.

“Jackie has my blessing to go anywhere that will make her feel better,” he replied, leaving the matter at that.

“
W
hat’s the helicopter coming in for, McDuff?” Kennedy asked Kilduff, his deputy press secretary, calling him by the nickname he usually employed. It was a Saturday morning in October and Jackie was still away.

“It’s for the news hens,” Kilduff said, using the president’s preferred term for the women reporters who covered Jackie and the East Wing. “They’re going to see Atoka.”

“Well, you go call that thing off, McDuff,” Kennedy said, not wanting
the reporters to visit the first family’s new weekend home. “That place is going to be just for Jackie and me.”

“Me go out there and tell them it’s off at this point?” Kilduff asked unbelievingly.

“Better you than me, McDuff,” the president laughed, pointing his press aide toward his duty.

“To me, it was very meaningful,” Kilduff reflected years later. “It sealed everything that I had observed since Patrick Bouvier died. They were closer now than any time in their marriage.”

The president and first lady had an emotional bond that they had not had before, but even so, Jackie chose to be away from her husband for several weeks. While the couple was physically apart, they both continued to display the aspects of their personalities that had been most detrimental to their marriage. This was a pleasure-loving, luxuriantly indulgent Jackie dancing her way through the high spots of Europe. She was unwilling to temper her behavior, to consider the impact on her position as the nation’s first lady, first wife, and first mother. As for her husband, the president used her time away as he always did, by bringing in other women. Whenever Jackie left town, he was like an innkeeper putting out a sign that the White House had vacancies.