These Few Precious Days (14 page)

Indeed, Jack was now inspiring the kind of frenzied reaction that had previously been reserved for Frank Sinatra or Elvis Presley. “It’s hard to explain the hold he had on these young women,” Nancy Dickerson said, chalking it up to what she called his “incredible sexual pull.” Lowe said the atmosphere at every campaign stop was the same, and could best be described with one word: “orgasmic.”

Even though she had already sent in her absentee ballot—casting a single vote for her husband and no one else, not even LBJ—Jackie was again recruited to accompany her husband to Boston on Election Day. “It doesn’t matter that I’m tired and about to have a baby,” she complained to Newman. “They need their picture of me smiling from ear to ear while Jack casts his vote.”

Back in Hyannis Port, Caroline, who would soon turn three, raced into her father’s arms as soon as he walked in the front door. They had not seen each other in two months. Jack ran his fingers through his daughter’s blond curls, held in place by two powder blue ribbons.

Then Jackie ordered her husband to sit in his favorite wing chair while Caroline recited two poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay. “My candle burns at both ends,” she began. “It will not last the night . . .”

“Wonderful, Buttons!” Jack said when she was done, clapping his approval. “Wonderful!” A half century later, Caroline would call this one of her most cherished childhood memories.

THAT NIGHT OF NOVEMBER 8, 1960
, it looked at first as if JFK might win a landslide victory. “Oh, Bunny,” she said at 10:30 p.m., using her favorite nickname for Jack. “You’re president now.” But then Nixon surged ahead. While the entire Kennedy clan watched the seesawing results on television, precinct-by-precinct numbers were pouring in over the thirty phone lines installed on Papa Joe’s veranda.

Realizing it was going to be “an all-night thing,” Jackie went up to bed. “It was so sweet. Jack came up and sort of kissed me good night,” she said, “then all the Kennedy girls came up, one by one, and we just hugged each other.”

Jack stayed up until 4 a.m. and then, intent on not disturbing her, retired to the guest room next to theirs. At 8:30, Jackie woke with a start. “I went flying into his room to hear the good news,” she said, admitting that she startled Jack to such an extent he “sprang” out of bed. “But no, there wasn’t anything.”

A little before 9 a.m. Ted Sorensen called Jack with the news that he’d won. Minutes later, the president-elect was soaking in the bathtub.

“Daddy, Daddy!” Caroline hollered as she ran into the bathroom. “You won! Miss Shaw told me to call you ‘Mr. President’ now.”

As it happened, victory would not be certain for hours. When Nixon’s camp finally did concede, it became clear that Jack had won the narrowest of election victories, squeaking by with a margin of less than one-fifth of 1 percent.

Ignoring his problematic back, Jack walked outside and gave Caroline a piggyback ride around the lawn. Then, still holding his little girl in his arms, he walked over to the gaggle of reporters waiting by a bank of microphones.

With all eyes on her husband, Jackie threw on a coat and raced down to the beach alone. Jacques Lowe was trying to assemble all the Kennedys together for a family portrait when he glanced out the window and saw Jackie “rushing down to the sea. That Wednesday morning when the rest of the family was jubilant and embracing each other and laughing it up, Jackie was deeply shaken,” he said. “She was clearly in a state of shock.”

Jackie, Lowe said, “definitely had ambivalent feelings about becoming first lady. She had always lived in a fairyland, in the role of the storybook princess. I’m not sure Jackie ever counted on being queen.”

“Where’s Jackie?” Jack asked. “Everyone’s waiting to have their picture taken.”

Lowe pointed to the solitary figure standing on the beach, holding her collar up against the cold, her hair whipping in the wind. “It’s okay,” Jack told Lowe. “I’ll go get her.”

Lowe watched as Jack walked briskly down to the water’s edge and put his arm around her.

“What will happen now, Jack?” she asked. “What will happen to us?”

LOWE WATCHED AS THEY CHATTED
for a minute or two more. “He obviously reassured her everything would be all right,” Lowe said. “Then they hugged. It was a very moving scene.” Once Jack brought Jackie back up to the house, she changed into a red dress and walked into the room where the rest of the family had gathered to have their picture taken. Everyone, including the hypercritical Rose and the Kennedy in-laws Jackie had once called a “pack of gorillas,” leapt up and cheered. “You see,” Jack whispered into Jackie’s ear, “they know I couldn’t have done it without you.”

Come here any time and keep us company. Because we are so lonely.

—JACKIE,

in a note to her friend Oleg Cassini

5

“Our Strange Little Life”

L
ess then a month away from her due date, Jackie was not about to take any more chances. She and Jack had planned on having the baby at New York Hospital, where Caroline was born, and that meant moving into Jack’s Carlyle Hotel suite a week or so before the newest Kennedy was scheduled to arrive.

Until then Jackie was under strict orders from Dr. Walsh to stay home. While she rested, Jack shuttled between Washington and the Kennedy mansion in Palm Beach, where he and his father went over possible cabinet choices as they lounged by the pool.

Meanwhile, crowds gathered outside the N Street house, already cordoned off by the Secret Service, to catch a glimpse of the president-elect and his attractive family. Inside, the usual chaos prevailed as gruff, cigar-chomping pols mingled with JFK’s band of bow-tied and bespectacled young advisers and distinguished future cabinet appointees like Dean Rusk and Robert McNamara. “I could be in the tub,” Jackie said, and when she was finished return to find “Pierre Salinger holding a press conference in my bedroom.” At one point Jackie complained that she’d nearly collided with Jack’s national security adviser McGeorge Bundy on her way to the bathroom. “For God’s sake, Jackie,” JFK replied, “all you have to worry about right now is your inaugural ball gown.”

On November 25, Jack returned to Georgetown for a quiet Thanksgiving dinner with his wife and daughter at their house on N Street—“my sweet little house,” Jackie liked to say, “that leans slightly to one side.” Midway through dinner, Jack informed Jackie that he intended to return to Palm Beach that night.

Jackie was crestfallen. Worried that this delivery might not be as easy as Caroline’s turned out to be, she begged Jack to postpone his trip to Florida just a few weeks—until the baby was born. “Why can’t you stay here until I have the baby?” she asked. “Then we can all go down together.”

Jack refused. “Caroline had arrived on time,” Jack’s friend Bill Walton said, “and he saw no reason to think anything would be different this time around.” Instead of remaining by his wife’s side, JFK departed right after dessert.

Just one hour later, Maud Shaw heard a scream and rushed upstairs. Jackie was crumpled over on the edge of her bed, clutching her stomach. The bedspread, Shaw noted with horror, was stained with blood. Shaw grabbed the phone and called Dr. Walsh. Within minutes, Jackie was being rushed by ambulance to Georgetown Hospital. Sheet-white by the time it arrived, Jackie summoned enough strength to ask the emergency room doctors one question: “Will I lose my baby?”

Meanwhile the president-elect was in high spirits aboard the
Caroline,
puffing on a cigar and chatting about his plans for the transition. It was then that the news of Jackie’s condition crackled over the radio. This time Jack was “stricken with remorse,” Kenny O’Donnell said, “because he was not with his wife.” Jack muttered to O’Donnell, “I’m never there when she needs me.”

As soon as the
Caroline
touched down in Palm Beach, Jack called Georgetown Hospital and was told that Jackie was being prepped for an emergency caesarean. To get back to Jackie’s side as quickly as possible, Jack commandeered the fastest plane available—the DC-6 press plane that trailed the
Caroline
to Florida.

As the press plane sped back to Washington, Jack clamped on the cockpit headphones and waited for news. It came a little after 1 a.m.: Jackie had given birth by caesarean section to a six-pound, three-ounce boy. Mother and child were healthy and resting comfortably. From the cockpit, Pierre Salinger announced the birth of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Jr., and the reporters cheered. It was only then that Jack, who just moments before had worried that this time he might lose both his wife and their child, lit another cigar, faced the press—and took a sweeping bow.

Salinger’s glowing statement aside, Jackie and her son were not out of the woods—far from it. John Jr. would spend the first six days of his life in an incubator. It would be months before they would fully recover, both suffering near-fatal setbacks along the way.

John Jr. was less than a day old when Kennedy family nurse Luella Hennessey, flanked by Secret Service agents, wheeled Jackie in to see him in his incubator. Halfway there, a photographer lunged out of a storage closet and popped off a half-dozen flashbulbs before the agents confiscated his film.