These Few Precious Days (12 page)

At the house on N Street, Jackie put an inflatable pool in the backyard and used a garden hose to fill it up herself. “We spent a number of hours playing in the swimming pool,” she said, “and having these little afternoon teas and lunches together.”

NO ONE WAS MORE SMITTEN
with Caroline than Daddy. Yet Jack also saw something else in their daughter—a valuable political asset. “Jack’s desire,” Charlie Bartlett said, “was to get the bountiful positive publicity only a child might yield.”

Jackie would have none of it. “No pictures of the baby, Jack,” she insisted. “That’s final. I’m not going to let our child be used like some campaign mascot. I don’t care how many votes it costs you.” But in April 1958, as Jack positioned himself to become his party’s 1960 presidential nominee, Jackie finally caved in—with the understanding that Jack would take a break from campaigning that summer and take her to Paris. On April 21,
Life
hit the stands with a beguiling Kennedy family portrait on the cover. “It looks wonderful, Jack,” Mommy said when he proudly showed the magazine to her. “And that’s good because we won’t be doing that again any time soon.”

Jack, however, was not about to give up so easily. He would ultimately turn to photographer Jacques Lowe, a refugee from Nazi Germany who had befriended Bobby Kennedy, to create the Norman Rockwell image of a perfect American family, frame by frame. At times, Lowe found Jack the Front-runner to be “grumpy, awkward, and preoccupied. But he perked up whenever I asked him to sit with Caroline.”

The charming, wholesome images seemed at odds with the fact that Jack soon returned to his extracurricular pursuits. In addition to a brief fling with Quincy, Massachusetts–bred actress Lee Remick, Jack began his sporadic, two-and-a-half-year affair with Marilyn Monroe. A year after divorcing Joe DiMaggio, Marilyn married the playwright Arthur Miller. The couple settled in bucolic Roxbury, Connecticut, but within months Marilyn was meeting Jack secretly at his suite in New York’s Carlyle Hotel, a duplex that occupied the thirty-fourth and thirty-fifth floors and boasted two terraces and a glass-enclosed solarium—all with wraparound views of Central Park and the Manhattan skyline.

“As Jackie saw it,” Betty Spalding said, “her main job was to keep Jack interested.” That Christmas of 1957, she proudly handed Jack the keys to a white Jaguar sedan. Although she used only a small portion of the money her father had left her to purchase it, Jack insisted the British-made luxury car was “too showy.” He promptly traded it in for Joe Kennedy’s vehicle of choice—a sedate, dark green Buick.

This time Jackie was determined to keep a closer eye on her husband. She joined Jack on the campaign trail for the first time as he sought reelection to the Senate in 1958—a race he needed to win by a landslide as prelude to a White House run. She posed for pictures alongside the candidate, stared adoringly at him whenever he gave a speech, and helped man the phone bank with her Kennedy sisters-in-law as part of an “Ask Senator Kennedy” telecast paid for by Papa Joe.

Ironically, Jackie’s very first campaign speech was not in English, but in French, delivered to members of Worcester’s Cercle Français. Since Jackie also spoke Spanish and Italian, Jack took her to Boston’s North End. When she addressed one crowd with a few phrases in flawless Italian, it erupted in cheers. Jack won his reelection with an unprecedented 73.6 percent of the vote.

By the time Jack formally declared his presidential candidacy on January 20, 1960, he had already logged tens of thousands of miles aboard his campaign plane—a ten-passenger DC-3 Jack named, with Jackie’s blessing, the
Caroline
. Given her father’s frequent absences, the real Caroline’s first spoken word—“goodbye”—seemed particularly poignant.

The goodbyes weren’t only for Daddy. Jackie gamely tagged along in her role as the candidate’s adoring wife. Flying through blizzards, dense fog, and thunderstorms aboard the
Caroline
(“I’d be turning green, and they’d both just be sitting there reading,” Lowe said), the Kennedys crisscrossed the country at a breakneck pace. Once airborne, Jack usually strategized or worked on speeches with Sorensen, O’Donnell, Salinger, and Powers between bowls of fish chowder—JFK’s favorite dish. Jackie sat quietly doing needlepoint or reading Jack Kerouac—“an island of serenity in the chaos,” Jacques Lowe said. “But you always knew she’d rather be someplace else.”

Jackie, considered cold and aloof at first, gradually proved herself to be a valuable asset to the campaign. West Virginia campaign organizer Charles Peters worried that she was too “high-toned” for his state, but he admitted that he was “dead wrong. It turned out that the voters loved her. She was perceived as the princess, and they basked in her glamour rather than being offended by it.” Pierre Salinger, who had signed on as Jack’s press secretary, conceded that “Jackie did a credible job of concealing her natural distaste for politics from the voters. But God, she just hated it. She kept saying she knew her husband was involved in a ‘great struggle’—meaning the race against Nixon—and that as his wife she knew she had to be a part of it.”

Now that he was facing a tough battle for the White House against the well-financed, well-organized, and even better-known incumbent vice president, Jack wanted Jackie by his side in the general election. But that was not going to happen. When he returned from racking up primary victories in New Hampshire, Wisconsin, and West Virginia, Jackie told the candidate she was expecting another baby in December.

This time Jack did not even consider asking his wife to attend the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles. He did not have to be reminded that the strain of campaigning in 1956 cost them the life of their infant daughter and almost killed Jackie in the process. “Now Jack understood what it was to be a parent,” Larry Newman said. “He already saw his baby as a human being, and not a thing. . . . He was a changed man in 1960.”

The day after Jack beat back a last-minute challenge by Texas senator Lyndon Johnson and secured the nomination on the first ballot, reporters descended on Hyannis Port wanting to talk to the candidate’s wife. While Caroline careened about, Jackie apologized for her decision to stick close to home for the rest of her pregnancy. “I suppose I won’t be able to play much part in the campaign,” she allowed, “but I’ll do what I can.”

Privately, Jackie was less eager to oblige. Her spies at the convention—including her sister Lee, now married to Polish Prince Stanislas (“Stas”) Radziwill—had kept her abreast of Jack’s dates with Marilyn Monroe. (Marilyn told Jack’s brother-in-law Peter Lawford that she found her time spent with JFK to be “very penetrating.”)

“She was no dumbbell,” Smathers said. “Jackie knew all about Marilyn and what they were up to at the convention.” Much of the time, “what they were up to” occurred at Jack’s secret Los Angeles hideaway in an apartment house owned by a close friend of Joe Kennedy,
Wizard of Oz
Tin Man Jack Haley.

Jackie assumed that Marilyn wasn’t the only woman her husband had been involved with during this period, and she was right. On the eve of the pivotal New Hampshire primary back in March, Jack had begun an affair with a slender, blue-eyed, raven-haired twenty-six-year-old named Judy Campbell at New York’s Plaza Hotel. Campbell, who had been introduced to JFK by Frank Sinatra, also happened to be the girlfriend of Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana. During the convention in Los Angeles, Campbell spent the night with Jack at Peter Lawford’s Beverly Hilton Hotel suite.

Jackie wasn’t worried about losing Jack to any of these women, but she did live in fear of one thing. “So long as she was not held to public ridicule,” Gore Vidal said, “Jackie accepted Jack’s womanizing as a fact of life. It’s not that they didn’t care about each other. I think she eventually grew quite fond of Jack, and he took a certain pride in her.”

“Jackie was not threatened—not even by Marilyn Monroe,” Clare Boothe Luce claimed. “But if somehow word had gotten out, it would have upset her terribly. She could not bear the thought of being publicly humiliated.”

“Jackie was anxious, confused,” said their Hyannis Port neighbor Larry Newman. “She thought a child would make all the difference, and it didn’t, not really.” As she faced the inevitable demands that would be made on her, said Newman, “there were plenty of moments when there was this look in her eyes—somewhere between sadness and panic.” As for crowds: “They terrified her.” Whenever she saw people approaching, or the car she was in was about to be swallowed up by the throng, “she always looked like a frightened deer.”

Yet she was not about to let her true feelings show to the voters. “She hid it,” Newman said, “from the press, the cameras, the public.” But not, as it happened, from Jack’s election team. “Get the hell out!” she shouted at Kennedy advance man Frank Morrissey when he came to drive her to meet Jack at Cape Cod’s Barnstable Airport. “I’m staying right here!” It was to be Jack’s triumphant homecoming, but at first Jackie did not want to give him the satisfaction of seeing her play the part of loyal wife.

She came around, of course, but not before telling Newman that she didn’t want to go because the same thing always happened: She was going to run up the gangway and join Jack in the
Caroline,
and reemerge with him to the roar of the crowd. Then someone would shove a bunch of roses in her arms and Jack would then desert her to shake hands. “I hate it,” she said. When everything happened exactly the way she predicted, Jackie, clutching her roses, turned to Newman and said, “What did I tell you?”

Even though Jack could always count on crowds being twice the size if Jackie was with him, he didn’t seem particularly interested in her welfare on the hustings. Jacques Lowe said JFK was “never intentionally rude” to his wife, but instead was “very focused on what he was doing and not always paying that much attention to her. He could be walking out into a crowd and she’d be about a half-mile behind him, just trying to keep up.”

According to Betty Spalding, this had less to do with campaigning than it did with Jack’s “terrible manners” when it came to the opposite sex. “He didn’t have any manners, in the sense of letting women go through the door first or opening doors for them or standing up when older women came into the room. He was nice to people, but heedless of people.”

BEFORE THE CAMPAIGN AGAINST HIS
old friend Richard Nixon started in earnest, Jack unwound with his family at Hyannis Port. Not that summers at the compound were ever particularly restful. Presided over by Caroline’s fiercely competitive grandparents, “vacations” were invariably a frenetic blur of swimming, sailing, tennis, snorkeling, badminton, golf, and of course the compulsory games of rough-and-tumble “touch” football on the lawn. Always looking for ways to indulge his passion for speed, Jack would ignore his bad back and take the wheel of a golf cart, careering around the grounds as Caroline and her cousins held on tight and shrieked in terror.

Once she had settled back into the rhythm of life at Hyannis Port, Jackie was able to tamp down her own anxieties and offer words of comfort to her new sister-in-law, Ted’s wife Joan. When Joan confided that Ted wasn’t even bothering to hide his interest in other women, Jackie laughed it off. “Kennedy men are like that,” she said. “They’ll go after anything in skirts. It doesn’t mean a thing.”