These Few Precious Days (6 page)

Throughout the day, Jack would find wry memos Jackie had planted around the White House to lift his spirits. “He’d read one of these little notes,” Baldrige said, “and burst out laughing. It was their private joke.”

If Jack’s back was preventing him from falling asleep, Jackie would walk into the closet between their rooms and put the cast recording of Lerner and Loewe’s
Camelot
on the “old Victrola.” In the role of King Arthur, Richard Burton belted out the president’s favorite line at the very end of the album: “Don’t let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment . . .”

Indeed, even as JFK coped with one domestic and international crisis after another, the public perception of life in the Kennedy White House was one of wit and charm wrapped in a glistening chrysalis of style.

From their first triumphant European tour, when Jack introduced himself as “the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris,” to the sixty-six glittering state occasions they presided over with regal aplomb, the vital young president and his queenly first lady were the closest thing America had to royalty. “When they appeared at the top of those stairs,” veteran
Washington Star
reporter Betty Beale said of the Kennedys’ entrances at state dinners and formal receptions, “they were a glorious-looking, stunning couple—almost beyond belief. It was more a royal court than an administration.”

NO ONE OUTSIDE A HANDFUL
of intimates knew about the drama that played out behind the scenes: about Jack’s failing health and reckless womanizing, or how the very public loss of a child seemed to bring the president and the first lady closer than they had ever been before.

In reality, during their brief time at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Jack and Jackie were working on clearing away the emotional obstacles in their path. Their afternoon naps—of which there were hundreds during the course of Kennedy’s presidency—proved at least a desire for closeness, for true intimacy. So did the daiquiris in the Yellow Oval Room, the casual lunches on trays and the quiet dinners with friends, the time spent with the children—all part of a daily routine designed to bring some semblance of normalcy to two of the most extraordinary lives ever lived.

“Comparing their problems to another couple’s,” Jack’s confidant Paul “Red” Fay said, “is like comparing a Duesenberg to a Chevy.” Certainly, both John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Bouvier had been born into lives of wealth and privilege. But both had also been deeply scarred growing up in wildly dysfunctional households—families in which power, money, sex, and social position eclipsed more traditional values.

Their ambition would, in the end, make them the most celebrated couple in the world. But a shared ambition was not what drew them together at first. “They were two lonely people,” their friend Chuck Spalding said. “And they instantly recognized that in each other.” In fact, Spalding went on to describe them as “emotionally the two most isolated, most
alone
people I ever met.”

It was easy to see why. A casualty of her parents’ bitter divorce, Jackie sought solace in solitary pursuits like horseback riding or reading. “She could be the belle of the ball when it was required,” a friend said. “But that was just an act. Jack was the same way. Before entering a room, Jack would say ‘Time to turn on the B.P.’—the Big Personality—but he hated glad-handers. It’s ironic that these two people who personified charm and grace for millions of people around the world were really lone wolves.”

What Jackie detected beneath Jack’s gleaming breastplate of self-confidence was the sickly child who for years suffered fever, weight loss, stomach pains, hives, dizziness, and nausea—all while doctors tried in vain to diagnose what Jack himself called his “wasting disease.” Looked after by a battalion of governesses and nurses, Jack was virtually ignored by his mother, who dealt with her husband Joe’s rampant womanizing by taking expensive trips and lavishing gifts on herself. As a result, Jack, who grew up in a family of nine children, worshiped the boisterous, fun-loving family patriarch while resenting the emotionally unavailable Rose. “My mother never really held me and hugged me,” Jack fumed after he had reached the White House. “Never, never!”

Spending weeks at a time in bed recuperating, young Jack lost himself in the works of Rudyard Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Sir Walter Scott. This was the little-known part of Jack’s past that Jackie felt held the key to his personality. To her, the dazzling Mr. Kennedy was “really this lonely sick little boy, in bed so much of the time reading history, devouring the Knights of the Round Table.”

It was hard not to be reminded of that little boy when they got ready for bed. Throughout their marriage, Jack said his prayers every night just as he had since childhood. “He’d come in and kneel on the edge of the bed and say them, you know,” Jackie recalled. “Take about three seconds. Then he’d cross himself. It was just a little childish mannerism, I suppose, like brushing your teeth. Just a habit,” she said. “I thought it was so sweet. It used to amuse me so, standing there . . .”

It was the frail little boy hidden beneath the bravado, she reasoned, who emerged to connect with Caroline and John in a way she never thought possible. Jackie, thrilled that her husband had chosen to play such a hands-on role in their children’s lives, reveled in the small things—the fact, for instance, that on some days in the White House Caroline and John would “even have lunch with him. If you told me that would happen, I’d never have believed it.”

In the end, Jackie concluded that they might never have come together as a tight-knit family had her husband not been elected to the world’s most powerful office. “You see,” she explained, “the one thing that happens to a president is that his ties to the outside world are cut. And
then
all you really have,” Jackie added with a smile, “is each other.”

They both wanted desperately to connect, but hadn’t the faintest idea how. That’s what made their love story so achingly poignant. And it was, in every sense of the word, a love story.

—CHUCK SPALDING, LONGTIME FRIEND

They were so much alike. Even the names—Jack and Jackie: two halves of a single whole. They were both actors and they appreciated each other’s performance.

—LEM BILLINGS, JFK’S FRIEND

3

“An Electrical Current Between Them”

“H
ow can you live with a husband who is bound to be unfaithful?” Jacqueline Bouvier asked a friend in a rare unguarded moment shortly before marrying Jack on September 12, 1953. “Even if you love that person, how can you put up with that, and not lose a large piece of yourself?”

Yet Jackie clearly saw in the young senator from Massachusetts the same roguish qualities she admired in her own father, the tall, tanned, rakishly handsome, devilishly charming, Ivy League–educated John Vernou “Black Jack” Bouvier III. Like JFK, Jackie’s father remained a bachelor until his mid-thirties, when he decided to finally march down the aisle with a girl a dozen years his junior. While he did not share Black Jack’s penchant for boozing and gambling, there seemed little doubt that Jack was more than a match for Jackie’s father in the philandering department.

As their romance heated up, several of Jack’s friends went out of their way to caution Jackie that, at thirty-five, Kennedy was “set in his ways” and “not about to change.” Chuck Spalding felt that “only made her
more
interested in him. Jackie had this thing about Black Jack. Dangerous men excited her. There was that element of danger in Jack Kennedy, without doubt.”

“Jackie was always talking about her father,” said Jack’s pal and colleague in the Senate, Florida’s George Smathers, “and it was pretty clear that they worshiped each other. Marrying Jack Kennedy was as close as she was ever going to get to marrying Black Jack Bouvier.” Writer George Plimpton, whom she had met in 1949 during her junior year in Paris studying at the Sorbonne, concurred. “Jackie loved pirates,” Plimpton said. “Her father was one. So was Jack.”

It wasn’t enough simply to be dangerous. “Jackie wanted to be the confidante of an important man,” said John White, a State Department official who dated her for a time. “Power and charisma seemed to override all other qualities in her estimation of people.”

Jack unquestionably had all the qualities she was looking for, and then some. His heroic exploits as the skipper of PT-109 in the Pacific during World War II were to become the stuff of legend.

The young Kennedy’s wartime derring-do would also have unintended consequences for his family—and alter the course of history. Eager to outdo his little brother, Joe Kennedy Jr.—the Kennedy Joe Sr. intended to install in the White House—volunteered for what amounted to a suicide mission over German-controlled territory in France. On August 12, 1944, Joe Jr.’s plane exploded in midair, killing him and leaving Jack to pick up the torch for his martyred brother. Giving up plans to pursue a literary career—thanks to Joe buying up huge numbers of copies, he had already turned his Harvard thesis into a minor bestseller titled
Why England Slept
—Jack instead ran for and won a seat in Congress. After two terms in the House, Jack, again relying heavily on his father’s clout, trounced popular Republican Henry Cabot Lodge to win a seat in the Senate.

What made these achievements all the more remarkable was the precarious state of Jack’s health dating all the way back to early childhood. Nearly killed by scarlet fever at the age of two, Jack suffered chicken pox, German measles, whooping cough, mumps, diphtheria, bronchitis, anemia, tonsillitis, ear infections, and allergies (to dogs, cats, horses, dust, wool, and more) that quickly turned into severe asthma. While away at Canterbury, a Catholic boarding school in bucolic New Milford, Connecticut, thirteen-year-old Jack was rushed to the hospital in nearby Danbury with stabbing pains in his stomach. Hours later—and apparently just in the nick of time—Jack underwent an emergency appendectomy.

Transferring to a markedly more Waspy Connecticut institution, Choate, Jack was in and out of the school infirmary with severe dehydration, abdominal pains, fainting spells, rashes, and fevers. Doctors suspected hepatitis, then leukemia, even ulcers. None of these diagnoses proved correct. (Doctors would later discover that Jack was also lactose intolerant, suffered from an underactive thyroid, and had a high cholesterol count that would peak at a startling 350 when he reached adulthood.)

To further complicate matters, Jack was only twenty and a junior at Harvard when he suffered the crippling back injury that would plague him for the rest of his life. In October 1937, Jack and his brother Joe were getting ready to compete in Harvard-Princeton football matchups—Joe as a varsity player, Jack as a junior varsity substitute—when Joe Sr. pulled up in his chauffeur-driven Buick (“Joe Kennedy was nuts about Buicks—that’s all the Kennedys drove,” said JFK campaign aide Patrick “Patsy” Mulkern). On Joe Sr.’s orders, the family driver announced their arrival by sneaking up on Jack and tackling him from behind.