These Few Precious Days (4 page)

For the next half hour, the president shaved in the tub to save time, then settled back in the soapy water and pored over the morning newspapers and classified documents. “It was not at all unusual,” said White House Press Secretary Pierre Salinger, “to get a sheet of paper from him that was soaking wet.”

THOMAS, MEANWHILE, LAID OUT JACK’S
first suit of the day. Over the course of an average day, JFK would change all of his clothes—from underwear on out—at least four times, often wearing as many as six shirts in a single twenty-four-hour period. Jack owned eighteen suits, all purchased by his father from Brooks Brothers. His underwear—JFK preferred white boxers—was also from Brooks Brothers, made exclusively for the store by D. & G. Anderson of Scotland. Jack’s shirts were custom-made by Charles Dillon shirtmakers of 444 Park Avenue, New York, his ties by Christian Dior and Givenchy, his hand-sewn size-ten-and-a-half shoes and his size-thirty-four belts by Farnsworth-Reed. Thomas placed the president’s gold Cartier watch with black leather band on the nightstand, alongside the three-foot-long custom-made shoehorn that enabled JFK to slip into his shoes—without having to bend down.

From the first day he went to work for Jack, then a first-time candidate for Massachusetts’s Eleventh Congressional District, Thomas realized his duties would far transcend those of an ordinary valet. Suffering from the second in what would be a long series of botched back surgeries, Jack was emaciated and drawn as he hobbled from one campaign event to another. After a particularly grueling day, he collapsed—but only after he had managed to shake thousands of hands while marching in Boston’s annual Bunker Hill Day Parade.

One campaign worker, Robert Lee, remembered that Jack “turned yellow and blue. He appeared to me as a man who had probably had a heart attack.” Lee and Thomas scooped Jack up, carried him to a second-floor apartment, stripped off his clothes, and sponged him down. An ambulance was called, and George Thomas rode with Jack to the hospital. There would be countless such incidents over the years, and there were still times when Jack’s pain was so intense that Thomas, now fifty-five, had to help the younger man—Jack was just forty-three when he became the youngest man ever elected president—into his clothes.

At 8:15 a.m., while the president still soaked in the tub, Maud Shaw knocked tentatively on the outer door to the president’s bedroom. More Mrs. Doubtfire than Mary Poppins, the Kennedys’ nanny had been caring for Caroline since she was eleven days old and still in the hospital. Breast-feeding, not particularly in vogue in the 1950s, was something that few society moms practiced, and Jackie was no exception. Like her mother before her, Jackie also felt that giving the baby her bottle or changing a diaper were tasks best left to the professionals. “If one of them was holding the baby and that smell began wafting up,” recalled close Kennedy friend Chuck Spalding, “well, it was, ‘Maud . . . oh, MAUD!’ and they held that kid at arm’s length until they could hand her over. But that was the way they’d been brought up—with servants always sort of appearing out of nowhere to clean things up. They weren’t your average people, and they weren’t your average parents either.”

At least Jack tried. During Shaw’s first week on the job, he told her he wanted to give Caroline her bottle. “He asked me to stand quite near him,” she said, “in case he dropped her.” Within five minutes, the president grew bored. “Miss Shaw,” he said, handing the baby back to her nanny, “how have you got the patience to feed the child all this bottle?”

Yet no one, least of all Miss Shaw, doubted Jack’s total devotion to Caroline. When the Kennedys lived in a narrow brick townhouse on Georgetown’s N Street, Jack wasted no time bounding upstairs to the nursery as soon as he came home. “That child always smiled for him when she never did for anybody else,” the nanny said. “Right from the very beginning, he loved her and she adored him.”

During the 1960 presidential campaign and long summer weekends spent at the Kennedy family compound in Hyannis Port, all Daddy had to do was clap his hands twice to summon his daughter. “As soon as Caroline heard that first clap,” said presidential press secretary Pierre Salinger, “she took off like a rocket.” The memory of her father’s sharp hand clap would linger in Caroline’s memory always, as would the sound of Jack’s voice as he called out the pet name he and only he had for her: Buttons.

Of course, Caroline wasn’t the only child in the Kennedy White House. Each morning Nanny Shaw awoke in her small room strategically situated between Caroline and the room occupied by John Jr., who was three years his sister’s junior. The children’s suite of rooms was just opposite the Yellow Oval Room, with its doors opening onto the Truman Balcony, and Jackie had gone to great pains to erase all traces of the drab, dated hotel décor favored by the Eisenhowers and the Trumans before them.

John’s spacious nursery was white—like his father’s bedroom—with blue crown molding, while Caroline’s was done in white and pink, with matching rosebud drapes and linens, a white canopy bed, stuffed animals, rocking horses, an ornate dollhouse (a gift from French president Charles de Gaulle), and a Grandma Moses hanging on one wall. Their nanny’s room had all the charm of a hall closet. “Maud Shaw won’t need much,” Jackie had written chief White House usher J. B. West before moving in. “Just find a wicker wastebasket for her banana peels and a little table for her false teeth at night.”

Once she had made sure the children had brushed their teeth and were bathed and dressed, Shaw brought them over to say good morning to their father. After knocking on the president’s door—by this time JFK had finished shaving—Shaw waited in the hallway while Caroline and John dashed past Harry Truman’s four-poster and into the bathroom.

“Daddy! Daddy!” Caroline and John shouted in unison as they ran up to the tub. Jack exuberantly greeted each with a kiss, oblivious to the fact that ink from soaked State Department cables was running down his arm and into the bathwater.

In preparation for their arrival, Jack always kept a dozen yellow rubber duckies lined up on the edge of the tub. “Here you are, John,” the president said, plucking a duck from the lineup and handing it to his wide-eyed son. “Let’s see if this little guy floats upside down!”

Caroline, meantime, ran back into her father’s room and turned the television on full blast. “You could hear it booming right down the hall,” recalled Nanny Shaw, “and it always made the Secret Service agents laugh. The president grew up in the middle of a big, noisy family, and he just loved the commotion—you could see the delight on his face.”

Ten minutes later, JFK, now wearing a dress shirt and boxer shorts, sat down in front of a tray and tore into his usual hearty breakfast: two soft-boiled eggs prepared to his specifications in a double boiler, bacon, toast, and orange juice. Thomas poured the president’s coffee, which he took with cream and at least three teaspoons of sugar. “Nauseating,” Jackie once said of the concoction, “but Jack had an enormous sweet tooth.”

While their daddy went over his schedule for the day, Caroline and John were sprawled on the floor, transfixed by the morning cartoons—
Rocky and His Friends, Huckleberry Hound, Yogi Bear
—that blared from the bulky black-and-white television set.

At 9 a.m. they switched to TV exercise pioneer Jack LaLanne, and Jack would clap and count out the repetitions as Caroline and John imitated LaLanne’s spirited repertoire of squats, push-ups, lunges, and jumping jacks. Depending on how bad his back was that day, the president would join John and Caroline in stretches and attempts to touch his toes, but for the most part he simply reveled in rolling around on the floor with his children.

On rare occasions Jackie, who seldom rose before nine, came over to watch. “He loved those children tumbling around with him,” she said, “in this sort of—sensual is the only way I can think of it. . . . He needed that time with them, he was just so completely crazy about them.”

The children were just winding down their exercise routine as Daddy slipped into one of the two-button, European-cut suits picked out for him by George Thomas. He then took Caroline and John by the hand and asked them to walk him to the Oval Office. On their way, they popped in to see Mommy, who by this time was usually eating her breakfast of white toast and coffee served on a tray in her bedroom.

Once the president was seated behind his desk, Miss Shaw whisked John away for a morning nap. Caroline, meanwhile, headed for the little school Jackie had set up in the third-floor solarium for her children as well as sixteen others—the offspring of White House staffers and several close friends. The invitation-only White House School boasted two teachers and a kindergarten and first-grade curriculum that included American history, hygiene, arithmetic, and French. Jackie had no trouble coming up with the colors for the school uniforms: red, white, and blue.

Ninety minutes later, the children were scampering about the White House grounds during morning recess—all under the watchful eye of two Secret Service agents, Nanny Shaw, and White House schoolteachers Alice Grimes and Elizabeth Boyd. As soon as he heard the sound of the children’s voices, the president stopped whatever he was doing and stepped out into the garden. “He’d clap his hands,” Jackie recalled, “and all the little things from school would come running.”

Not even the president, however, could trump the teachers’ authority. When JFK kept reaching into his pocket and doling out candy to Caroline and her best friend, Mary Warner, Grimes complained that he was being unfair to the other children. From that point on Kennedy’s devoted secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, always kept a glass jar filled with pink and blue rock candy on her desk as well as an entire box of Barricini chocolates in a drawer. This was more than enough for all of Caroline’s classmates and for John, who invariably toddled in with Miss Shaw to bang on Mrs. Lincoln’s typewriter for a few minutes before heading off for lunch at 12:30.

For her part, Jackie chose to remain in her room for most of the morning, going over the newspapers before summoning her personal secretary, Mary Gallagher, to her bedside with steno pad in hand. For the next hour, Jackie dictated letters and memos in a no-nonsense, rapid-fire style that belied her breathy, ethereal persona.

Once she was finished with the day’s correspondence, Jackie took a brisk hour-long stroll alone around the White House grounds before sitting down to work at what she described as her most prized possession: the Empire-style, ormolu-mounted, slant-front desk that had belonged to her late father, the flamboyant “Black Jack” Bouvier.

Sometimes, Jackie joined Caroline and John in the “High Chair Room”—the small informal dining area for the children she had set up off the kitchen—and watched while they gobbled hot dogs or hamburgers prepared by the White House chef and served to them by a butler on a silver tray.

Jack, in the meantime, headed for the White House pool promptly at 1:30. Once there, he usually stripped off his clothes poolside and eased himself into the 80-degree water. These brief, twice-daily swims were initially prescribed by Kennedy’s doctors both as a form of low-impact exercise and as therapy for his back.

When he arrived at the White House, Jackie noted that Jack was in “the best physical condition he was ever in in his life”—the result of unwinding at La Guerida, Joe Kennedy’s white-walled oceanfront villa in Palm Beach, Florida, between winning the 1960 presidential election and the inauguration nearly three months later.

“He never really needed to exercise,” Jackie said. “The campaign—jumping in and out of cars, walking, you know, kept him fit.” After the election, he swam in the ocean, walked on the beach, and played golf three times a week. “He had muscles and everything,” Jackie marveled. “It was wonderful.”

Landing at the White House, Jack “sat at his desk, without moving, for six weeks. He didn’t walk around the driveway, he didn’t swim, and suddenly his back went bad. He’d lost all the muscle tone.”

Getting “pumped full of Novocain”—Jackie’s words—by the physician who had always treated his back, Dr. Janet Travell, no longer worked. Instead, Jack managed to find at least some relief in the White House pool.

The president’s daily swims served another purpose as well. He looked forward to this time in the water as a chance to unwind with friends and escape the pressures of office.

“He hated to swim alone,” said the Kennedys’ photographer and friend Jacques Lowe, “so he was always grabbing people by the collar to swim with him.” Jack’s longtime political aide and storytelling buddy, Dave Powers, could always be counted on to take the plunge—literally—with the president.

A half hour later, the president pulled on a terry-cloth robe and ducked out a back door through the White House flower shop and the exercise room to elevators that took him upstairs to the family living quarters. By this time, Maud Shaw had tucked the children in for their afternoon naps, and Jackie was waiting for Jack in the living room.

“Mrs. Kennedy dropped everything, no matter how important, to join her husband,” chief White House usher J. B. West said. “If she had visitors in tow, they would be left for me to entertain.” The next two hours were, in fact, sacrosanct for the first couple. All staff and visitors were barred from the second floor, and the White House switchboard was directed to hold all calls short of anything alerting the president to a national emergency.