These Few Precious Days (27 page)

“That’s the time I’ve been closest to him,” said Jackie, who never ventured far and made a point of sleeping with Jack “even if it was only for a nap.” At times, she waited outside the Oval Office or eavesdropped at the door of the Treaty Room, where ExComm members thrashed out opposing views.

Jackie was surprised when, on the spur of the moment, Jack asked her to join him for a walk around the grounds. “It’s funny,” she said. “You know, he didn’t very often do that. We just sort of walked quietly, then we’d go back in. It was just this . . . vigil.”

Even Jackie, a master at concealing her emotions, was impressed by Jack’s ability not to surrender to despair. But as he pondered the very real possibility of a global thermonuclear war, JFK’s mask of confidence slipped during one of their strolls on the South Lawn. “We’ve already had a chance,” he told Jackie, “but what about all the children?”

On Monday evening, October 22, JFK sat at his desk in the Oval Office and spoke to the nation. In his seventeen-minute address, he outlined the dimensions of the Soviet military buildup just ninety miles off the coast of Florida, and demanded that the Soviet Union “halt and eliminate this clandestine, reckless, and provocative threat to world peace.”

He then warned both Cuba and the Soviets that he had “directed the armed forces to prepare for any eventualities,” and spelled out the immediate steps the United States was taking—most notably, a naval blockade of Cuba aimed at halting Soviet ships with cargo that included offensive weapons.

“My fellow citizens,” JFK concluded, “let no one doubt that this is a difficult and dangerous effort on which we have set out. . . . The cost of freedom is always high—and Americans have always paid it. And one path we shall never choose, and that is the path of surrender and submission.”

Now they played a waiting game. Would the unrepentantly bellicose Khrushchev up the ante, pushing the world ever closer to nuclear Armageddon? Or would the Soviets, fearing the consequences of a direct military confrontation, simply back down?

In the meantime, Jack explained to his wife that, contrary to her dramatic statement, no one was going to go standing on the White House lawn if war was imminent. He did, however, have the unenviable task of deciding who would be joining his immediate family in the emergency national headquarters carved out of Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains, thirty miles outside Washington. “I’m afraid,” JFK later told Ben and Tony Bradlee over dinner, “neither of you made it.”

Understandably, Jackie was smoking up a storm, and both she and Jack were leaning more heavily than ever on the good services of Dr. Feelgood. Now Max Jacobson, who had been greatly influenced by Swiss rejuvenation pioneer Dr. Paul Niehans, was adding animal cells to his injections—including placenta, bone, and liver cells. He did not volunteer the information to either the president or the first lady and, he later said, “they never asked.”

Indeed, by mid-1962 the Kennedys had become so dependent on Jacobson’s pick-me-ups that Jack, concerned that the press would eventually find out what the shady Dr. Feelgood was up to, repeatedly invited him to move into the White House. That way, the president reasoned, Jacobson could merely be described as a member of JFK’s medical team and be more easily shielded from the press by the Secret Service.

Dr. Max declined to leave New York, where he numbered among his patients some four hundred multiple sclerosis sufferers. “I could never abandon them,” explained Jacobson, who nevertheless continued to make himself available to JFK and Jackie virtually around the clock. Jacobson also refused the president’s periodic attempts to pay him, claiming this was merely his way to pay back the adopted country he loved. After Max discovered several hundred-dollar bills a Secret Service agent had surreptitiously planted in his coat pocket, the doctor mailed the money back to JFK.

“They both had remarkable stores of energy,” Chuck Spalding said, “but I doubt if they could have functioned at the level they did without Max’s help. He was a crazy guy, and even then I worried about what he was doing. Max was also indispensable. They needed him.”

Jack also needed close friends to confide in during this tense period, and Spalding was called more frequently than most. “He’d find me, wherever I was,” Chuck said, “and call me up in the middle of the night. Just to relieve his tension, I guess. He would talk about anything from Voltaire to girls, always warm and funny.”

While millions of frightened Americans emptied out supermarkets, practiced air raid drills, and flocked to churches to pray, Jackie tried to bolster her husband’s spirits. Toward that end, she quickly threw together a small dinner party to take place immediately after Jack’s ominous-sounding address to the nation.

“Jackie tried to be upbeat,” said Oleg Cassini, one of the half-dozen guests. “But it was a tense evening.” McGeorge Bundy drifted in several times, and when Jack got up to take a call, Cassini followed him. The president’s mood was “detached, fatalistic.” Yet Cassini was impressed with how his friend “refused to seem depressed or overwhelmed by the immensity of the moment.”

Cassini was also among the guests at a dinner party the next evening, this one thrown together to substitute for a dinner dance that had originally been planned for the Maharaja and Maharani of Jaipur. This time, Jackie shuttled between her guests in the State Dining Room and the West Hall on the second floor, where JFK and David Ormsby-Gore, British ambassador to the United States, squatted on the floor, going over the latest missile photographs.

Once again, Cassini was impressed with Jack’s air of “elegant fatalism. He believed, ‘I’ll do my best, in my style, and leave the rest to God.’ Jack could be serious, even solemn, yet never defeated or deflated. He always had that spark, for want of a better word. This was equally true of Jackie.”

The next morning—Wednesday, October 24—JFK was meeting with ExComm members when word came that Soviet cargo ships carrying missiles were turning back. “We’re eyeball to eyeball,” Secretary of State Dean Rusk said, “and I think the other fellow just blinked.”

Jack remained cautious. The United States still had to find a way to remove the Soviet missiles already on the ground in Cuba. “Well,” he said after one long puff on his cigar, “we still have twenty chances out of a hundred to still be at war with Russia.”

Later, Oleg Cassini managed to get JFK alone for a few moments. “Mr. President,” he asked, “are you saying war is still possible?”

“Oh yes,” JFK replied without hesitation. “It’s possible, all right.”

Nevertheless, the world breathed a giant sigh of relief. Spalding was driving from Connecticut to his office in Manhattan when he heard the news on his car radio. He pulled over and called the White House from the first phone booth he could find. “You did it! You did it!” Spalding told Jack.

“So I trust,” JFK said nonchalantly, “the boys on Wall Street are pleased as well.” Spalding, like most of his countrymen, had been “sweating bullets” about the outcome. Yet “here the world had been pulled back from the brink of nuclear destruction, and he was calm enough to make that kind of casual, witty remark.”

With events apparently still moving in the right direction, Jackie headed off for Glen Ora that Saturday to ride in the opening meet of the Orange County Hunt. Within hours of Jackie’s departure, Mimi Beardsley arrived at the White House with her overnight bag—just in time for the crisis to take another dark turn.

That evening, Beardsley waited upstairs while JFK met with ExComm members. He managed to come up to the residence for a quick drink but “his expression was grave,” Mimi said. “Even his quips had a half-hearted, funereal tone.” After returning from one meeting, he told the college sophomore, “I’d rather my children be red than dead.” She concluded that “these were the words of a father who adored his children and couldn’t bear them being hurt.”

That night, Jack did not join Mimi upstairs. Instead, he and Dave Powers unwound in the White House theater watching one of JFK’s favorite films, 1953’s
Roman Holiday
. Given Jack’s fondness for action movies and westerns, the romantic comedy starring Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn seemed out of character. Kennedy had briefly dated Hepburn before he was married, but apparently that wasn’t the main reason he screened
Roman Holiday
again and again. In her Oscar-winning American screen debut, the saucer-eyed, winsome Hepburn played a headstrong young princess who falls for an American reporter (Peck) during her one day of freedom in Rome. During another screening of the movie, Jack leaned over to Cassini and whispered, “Doesn’t she remind you of Jackie?”

ONCE THE CRISIS WAS OVER
, Jack searched for a way to thank the ExComm members and other advisers—Bundy, McNamara, Rusk, Gilpatric, Salinger, and so on—for going without sleep for days on end as they searched for a solution. JFK wanted them to know,” he told Jackie, “how much it meant to have them stick by me.” He decided on a sterling silver calendar showing the month of October with the recipient’s initials and “J.F.K.” in script at the top. The thirteen perilous days—October 16 through October 28—were highlighted.

Tish Baldrige took JFK’s hand-drawn design to her old boss, Tiffany chairman Walter Hoving, who then went ahead and produced forty of the calendars. However, he refused JFK’s request for a discount. “Never!” Hoving protested. “Abraham Lincoln tried to get a discount from Tiffany on a pearl necklace for his wife and we wouldn’t do it. We never give discounts to presidents.”

After the predictable blowup (“What? You tell that bastard Hoving . . .”), Jack paid for the calendars out of his own pocket. On the day they arrived Jackie discovered Jack had ordered one for her as well. Completely taken by surprise, she unwrapped it, placed it on the desk she had inherited from her father—and burst into tears.

In the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Jack’s popularity soared to an impressive 76 percent in the polls—enough to ensure a solid showing for the Democrats in the 1962 midterm elections. Among the six new Democratic senators: thirty-four-year-old Teddy Kennedy, who despite having no political experience and a tarnished past (he was expelled from Harvard for cheating), sailed to a lopsided two-to-one victory in Massachusetts.

With one son in the White House, another serving as U.S. attorney general, and now another in the U.S. Senate, Papa Joe’s dreams of dynastic glory were being realized. Yet at the series of small get-togethers the Kennedys hosted to celebrate JFK’s triumphs on both the world and domestic stages, Kennedy himself refused to gloat. Over dinner with the Bradlees, Jack downplayed the significance of his so-called victory over the Soviets. He predicted that a misstep between the two superpowers would inevitably lead to a war that would “wipe out all of us at this table and our children.”

“Jack could make these grim statements with a twinkle in his eye,” the Kennedys’ friend George Plimpton said. “He meant what he was saying, but he also wasn’t going to let it get in the way of his enjoyment of life.”

Not even when it came to predicting the possible circumstances of his own death, which he did frequently. JFK believed assassination was “not unlikely,” and that if it were to happen he would be shot “while riding in an open car through a downtown street, with all the people and the noise.”

One Sunday JFK’s Hyannis Port neighbor Larry Newman was sitting next to the president at Mass. Gesturing to the people sitting around him, Kennedy leaned over to Newman and asked nonchalantly, “Do you think if somebody tried to take a shot at me, they’d get one of you first?”

Newman swallowed hard. “No, Mr. President,” he replied. “But now that I think of it, I won’t be sitting with you next Sunday!”

“That’s okay,” JFK said with a grin, turning to look at the reporters seated just a few rows behind him. “I still have the press right behind me for protection.”

Humor, Pierre Salinger said, was the Kennedys’ “secret weapon. The things they had already gone through could have made them both bitter, but they were as far from bitter as you can be. They both loved to laugh, and got a special kick out of kidding each other.”

The first lady had a thin skin when it came to satire, however. Released that November,
The First Family,
comedian Vaughn Meader’s send-up of the Kennedys, sold a breathtaking 7.5 million copies, making it the biggest comedy album of all time. Jackie hated
The First Family
because she thought it mocked her children, but Jack loved it, cracking at a press conference that he thought Meader’s impersonation of his clipped Boston accent sounded “more like Teddy.”

Nonetheless, Jackie took special pleasure in teasing her husband—friends knew this was about to happen when she started calling him “Bunny”—and was never more satisfied than when she could prick his often overinflated ego. “Where’s that famous Kennedy wit I keep hearing so much about?” she asked. “We certainly don’t see any of it around here.”

In reality, the Kennedy wit was most in evidence when they were able to unwind in the company of their closest friends—the Bartletts, the Spaldings, the Radziwills, the Bradlees, Billings, Cassini, Walton, Smathers, Plimpton, and one or two others. This core group was essential because, Jackie explained, “being in the White House does make friendships difficult. Nobody feels the same. Jack’s even more isolated than I am, so I do try to have a few friends for dinner as often as possible.”