These Few Precious Days (37 page)

On Squaw Island, Martha Bartlett was surprised when the president literally dropped to one knee and “begged” his wife not to accept Onassis’s invitation. Jackie was unmoved. “She wanted to go,” Evelyn Lincoln said, “and that was that. Nobody told Jackie what to do, not even the President.” Tish Baldrige described this as “typical Jackie behavior. If you really wanted her to do something, then you told her
not
to do it. In this case, that’s where President Kennedy went wrong.”

Since he couldn’t dissuade Jackie from going, JFK scrambled for someone who might go along and lend the trip an air of respectability. Jackie suggested their friends Franklin and Sue Roosevelt. Now undersecretary of commerce, FDR Jr. boasted impeccable credentials and an unassailable surname, but he was also worldly and fun-loving. “Jackie knew,” Evelyn Lincoln said, “that he wasn’t going to get in the way of her having a good time.”

In the end, all JFK could do was make it look as if the trip had been his idea all along. “Well, I think it will be good for Jackie,” JFK told Pam Turnure when she raised concerns about the election. “And that’s what counts.” (Later, Jackie gave full credit to Jack. “He sent me to Greece,” she told Arthur Schlesinger Jr., “you know, for a sad reason this year, but he thought I was getting depressed after losing Patrick . . .”)

As it turned out, even Onassis was aware of the potential for embarrassment and offered to get off the
Christina
as soon as Jackie arrived. “I could not accept his generous hospitality and then not let him come along,” Jackie said. “It would have been too cruel.”

Excited about her upcoming trip, Jackie began to contemplate her return to Washington. She wasn’t quite yet up to hosting the state dinner for Afghanistan’s King Mohammad Zahir Shah on September 5—Jack’s sister Eunice filled in for her instead—but Jackie did oversee every last detail by phone from Squaw Island.

The president had a rare treat in store for his guests when, on his command, the Jefferson Memorial was illuminated for the first time. The evening also marked the first fireworks display at a state dinner, although problems arose when JFK asked that the eight-minute display over the White House be squeezed into four minutes. The resulting barrage was so unexpected, Secret Service rushed toward the king and the president to shield them. Within minutes, the Washington, D.C. police department switchboard was overwhelmed with calls from citizens wanting to know if an airliner had gone down or the capital was under attack.

The next day JFK was back with Jackie in Hyannis Port, this time to attend Joe’s seventy-fifth birthday. It was the usual raucous Kennedy family affair, with children dashing about, party favors and gag gifts, horseplay, cake, and song parodies.

The birthday boy, presiding over the festivities wearing a red, white, and blue party hat, appeared to be having the time of his life—until the president launched into his favorite tune, “September Song.” With its bittersweet message of time slipping away, Jack’s heartfelt rendition of the melancholy Kurt Weill–Maxwell Anderson ballad suddenly had half the room near tears.

“It was all part of his elegant fatalism,” said Oleg Cassini, who heard JFK sing “September Song” several times. “It expressed what Jack felt about himself, that he wouldn’t be around very long. It was a surprise to many people that he sang it so beautifully.”

ON SEPTEMBER 12, THE KENNEDYS’
movable feast relocated to Hammersmith Farm, where the president and his wife celebrated their tenth anniversary with—appropriately—a candlelit dinner for ten. Ben and Tony Bradlee rode up with Jack on the presidential helicopter, and the moment they landed in Newport they were struck by the new closeness between the Kennedys.

“This was the first time we had seen Jackie since the death of little Patrick,” Ben recalled, “and she greeted JFK with by far the most affectionate embrace we had ever seen them give each other. . . . They are the most remote and independent people, so when their emotions do surface it is especially moving.”

Before they sat down to dinner, Jackie and JFK exchanged gifts. She gave him a set of brass blazer buttons emblazoned with the insignia of the Irish Brigade, the famous infantry unit made up predominantly of Irish-Americans that fought on the Union side during the Civil War, and a scrapbook of before-and-after photos illustrating the restoration of the White House Rose Garden—a project that made them both especially proud.

The room grew silent when, as a poignant reminder of the baby they just lost, Jackie gave Jack a gold St. Christopher medal to replace the one he had placed in Patrick’s coffin. He, in turn, gave her a small gold ring with emerald chips—a reference to Patrick’s Irish heritage—that she wore on her little finger.

Then Provi the maid walked in with an armload of small boxes. Two contained drawings by Fragonard and Degas from the Wildenstein Gallery in New York. The rest were from a New York antiques dealer, J. J. Klejman, and contained an assortment of antiquities—mostly Greek, Roman, and Etruscan objets d’art and jewelry—along with catalog descriptions and a price list. “You can have any one you want, Jackie,” Jack said, “but remember, you can only pick one.”

While she examined each item, Jack read aloud the catalog description but refrained from stating the price. Several times, however, his eyes widened when he saw what he’d have to pay for the more expensive items. “Oops—got to steer her away from that one,” he muttered, only half joking, under his breath.

“I could see the present he wanted me to choose most was this Alexandrian bracelet,” recalled Jackie, who more than anything wanted to please her husband. “It’s terribly simple, gold, sort of a snake. I could see how he loved it. He’d just hold it in his hand. . . . He wouldn’t say which one he wanted to give me, but I could tell so I chose it.” (Jack was also rooting for an Assyrian horse bit until one of their guests that night, Jackie’s Vassar classmate Sylvia Whitehouse Blake, nixed the idea. “I do think we might have something a bit more sentimental for your tenth anniversary,” Blake laughed. Jack agreed, but he still wanted to try the ancient horse bit out on Macaroni “to see if it really works.”)

“I can’t think of two people who packed more into ten years of marriage than they had,” Janet later mused, adding that “all their strains and stresses, which any sensitive people have in a marriage, had eased.” Now, she believed, “they were very, very, very close to each other and understood each other wonderfully. He appreciated her gifts and she worshiped him.”

Jack and Jackie made a valiant effort to be merry that evening, but there were moments when the couple’s despair bubbled to the surface. “Just before we retired,” Ben Bradlee remembered, “Jackie drew me aside, her eyes glistening with tears, to announce, ‘You two really are our best friends.’ It was a forlorn remark, almost like a lost and lonely child in desperate need of any kind of friend.”

The Bradlees stayed on at Hammersmith Farm for the next few days, golfing, swimming, and cruising on Narragansett Bay aboard the
Honey Fitz
. Every day, Jackie told them the same thing. “Jack and I were so touched by your letters when Patrick died,” she said. “Your words meant so much to us . . .” Bradlee had been so shell-shocked by Patrick’s death and the suicide just days before of their mutual friend,
Washington Post
publisher Phil Graham, that he couldn’t remember what he’d written. In a masterpiece of understatement, Bradlee concluded, “It had been a bad summer for our friends.”

AS SEPTEMBER DREW TO A
close, Jackie seemed to be turning a corner. When Red and Anita Fay arrived on September 20 to spend the weekend, she seemed “exuberant,” according to Fay. No sooner had longtime Kennedy friend Vivian Crespi joined the party than Jack announced that he was in the mood for something entirely different.

“He called me over,” recalled White House photographer Robert Knudsen, “and said they wanted to have some fun and shoot a movie. The President wrote the script and he didn’t want anyone to know about it.”

Unknown to JFK, reporters on a distant hill had their binoculars trained on the action. In the key scene JFK gets off the
Honey Fitz
and is walking down Hammersmith Farm’s long private pier when he suddenly clutches his chest and falls to the ground.

First Crespi and her small son, Marcantonio, get off the boat and nonchalantly step over Jack on their way to the shore. Jackie is next, taking dainty steps over the president’s body as if it isn’t there. But when it’s Red Fay’s turn, he trips over the body and a gush of ketchup surges out of JFK’s chest, covering the front of his shirt.

Other scenes directed by JFK would have Fay in his underwear, chasing after a bikini-clad Crespi, pouncing on her in the rosebushes, then also winding up a bloody corpse. But obviously, it was the memory of the president acting out his own death just nine weeks before the actual event that came to haunt Knudsen and the others involved in the film. “I wondered if it was a premonition he had,” said the photographer, “or a quirk of fate.”

Mortified to learn that reporters had been watching their shenanigans all along, JFK instructed Knudsen to keep the only copy of the film under lock and key. “Anyone who knew Jack knew he was fascinated with death,” Chuck Spalding said. “That he wanted to actually act out his own on film, even in a silly way, was his way of facing it.”

Jack had always had the habit of abruptly turning to his friends and asking, “How would you like to die?” Whenever someone asked the same question of him in return, for years Kennedy answered “poison.” Now, he simply said, “Airplane.” Why? “Quick.”

Knowing that she would soon be off on her Greek adventure, Jackie returned to the White House on September 23 after a three-month absence. She wanted to be on hand that week when Caroline started first grade. Jackie also made Caroline’s religious instruction a top priority, motivated in part by the cosmic questions—Why would God let a baby die? Will we see Patrick in heaven someday?—she had been posing since her baby brother’s death.

Jackie, who at this point was markedly more devout than the president, had actually started the search for a suitable catechism school months before their tragic summer. The previous May she had dispatched Alice Grimes, headmistress of Caroline’s little White House School, to the Georgetown Visitation Academy—a cloistered convent—to see if it might take on Caroline and her six Roman Catholic classmates.

Sister Joanne Frey of the Mission Helpers of the Sacred Heart was Caroline’s catechism teacher at Georgetown Visitation. Although parents were invited to observe the first day of class, Frey was somewhat relieved when it appeared Jackie wouldn’t be able to make it. But Jackie did show—fifteen minutes late. “I went to the wrong side of the church,” Jackie said. “It’s so stupid of me, and now I’m disrupting your class . . .”

“SHE WAS QUITE FLUSTERED, QUITE
apologetic,” Sister Joanne remembered. “ ‘I’m just so sorry,’ she said. ‘Would you mind if I stay for class?’ Of course I was just looking at her and thinking, ‘Oh God . . .’ ”

Caroline “would have stood out even if she wasn’t the President’s daughter,” Sister Joanne said. “She was exceptionally well spoken for someone her age, and completely unspoiled.” When Frey asked students to draw the creation, the other kids drew animals and Adam and Eve. Caroline covered her paper in black crayon, then held it up to reveal she had punched out holes for the stars and a crescent moon. “And then there was light,” she said.