These Few Precious Days (33 page)

The sudden arrival of spring and the breathtaking views also had a profound impact on Caroline’s father. “You know, Buttons,” he told her as they stared out over the capital, “I could stay here forever.”

That afternoon, the Kennedys boarded a helicopter on the South Lawn and headed for Camp David with the Bradlees and the Nivens. Jack, decked out in white pants, a sky-blue polo shirt, and tasseled loafers, drove everyone in his Lincoln convertible to a skeet-shooting range, where David Niven cracked everyone up by pretending to be an expert marksman (“It’s all in your tone of voice when you say ‘pull!’ ”)—and then missing every shot.

Later, when the group went for a swim in Camp David’s heated outdoor pool, JFK lent the British actor his swim trunks; the president wound up in the pool wearing only his white cotton boxers. It was obvious to everyone that Jack’s back pain was even worse than usual. Niven and Bradlee were surprised when JFK took off his shirt to swim to see that he was wearing his back brace (which French ambassador Hervé Alphand described as “his peculiar little white corset”). Jack kept it on even for the short walk from the dressing room to the pool.

Before lunch, everyone gathered on the terrace to sip Bloody Marys while the president opened more presents that had somehow survived the mayhem of the night before. Again, Jack tore through the pile, paying equal attention to expensive gifts from close friends and inexpensive items that had been sent to the White House by total strangers. Bill Walton’s elegant framed drawings of Lafayette Square were a hit with Jackie. JFK’s favorite was a scrapbook from Ethel parodying the White House tours by substituting her own Hickory Hill “madhouse,” overridden with untamed children, for the Executive Mansion.

AFTER ENDURING A MISCARRIAGE, A
stillbirth, and two difficult pregnancies, Jackie looked forward to a relaxing summer in Hyannis Port. Once again, they had rented a house on Squaw Island that was close enough to the Kennedy compound but afforded Jackie the peace and privacy she craved.

It was also important to her that, while JFK’s children were allowed to play with their rambunctious and often ill-behaved Kennedy cousins, Caroline and John should always follow her strict rules of conduct. Keeping the Bouvier-Kennedys a healthy distance from Ethel’s wild brood would be an essential part of Jackie’s plan to raise two well-mannered kids. “Jackie didn’t want Caroline and John
inhaled
into that frenzied macho world of the Kennedys,” her friend David Halberstam, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, later remarked. Another longtime acquaintance, Peter Duchin, said the influence of the wild Kennedy cousins was something Jackie “worried about all the time.”

Nestled in the woods at the end of a narrow gravel road, “Brambletyde” was a sprawling gray-shingled house that offered glorious ocean views from the rear and a broad private beach. It was also more luxurious, more secluded, and infinitely quieter than the houses that made up the Kennedy homestead. The plan was to set up house there on June 27, then move on to Hammersmith Farm for the baby’s anticipated arrival in September.

Before she settled into Brambletyde at the end of June, the first lady put the finishing touches on Wexford. The house did have panoramic windows that offered jaw-dropping Blue Ridge Mountain views, but it was otherwise unremarkable. Jackie sought to change that with the décor, filling the rooms with brass tables, carved elephants, camel saddles, tapestries, and other exotic mementos of her travels through India and Pakistan.

Jackie was perhaps proudest of her Mogul miniatures—scenes from the
Kama Sutra
—which she displayed prominently in the dining room. Clint Hill had his own theory as to why Jackie hung the erotic works in the dining room as opposed to the bedroom, which Gallagher deemed more appropriate. “Shock value,” Hill wrote in his excellent memoir. “Pure and simple.” It turned out that Jack was even more impressed with the green, red, and orange paisley wallpaper that covered every square inch of the guest room—walls, doors, even the ceiling. “It looks,” the president said, “like the inside of a Persian whorehouse.”

After all Jackie’s hard work, she made a startling decision after spending just one night at Wexford that spring: she and Jack would lease the place out from June to October at $1,000 a month ($8,000 a month in 2013 dollars). JFK was especially pleased, since he was once again on the warpath about Jackie’s spending, and this was one way to offset the cost of renting Brambletyde. “The President wasn’t too thrilled about spending money on the Squaw Island rental,” Larry Newman said, “when they had a beautiful home at the compound.” But in the end, Oleg Cassini said, “he wanted her to be happy at all costs, especially with the baby coming.”

The first week in June, Jack headed west to address graduates of the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado, observe missiles being launched in White Sands, New Mexico, and watch a display of America’s military might from the flight deck of the aircraft carrier
Kitty Hawk
off the California coast. He also spoke with the nation’s mayors in Honolulu, attended party fund-raisers in Los Angeles—and met with Lyndon Johnson and Texas governor John Connally about a campaign trip to Dallas tentatively planned for November.

Jackie, meanwhile, amused herself by spending a day at the Maryland farm of Ros Gilpatric—“the second most attractive man in the Defense Department” (next to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara). Gilpatric was returning to his law practice in New York, and Jackie was crestfallen. In Jack’s absence, Gilpatric, whose own romantic entanglements had provided grist for the New York and Washington rumor mills for years, had provided a sympathetic ear. He had also provided her husband with sound advice that led JFK to make the right decisions during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The following Thursday, Jackie sat down at her desk in the White House and wrote Gilpatric an emotional farewell letter. “I loved my day in Maryland,” she said. “It made me happy for one whole week . . . I always push unpleasant things out of my head on the theory that if you don’t think about them they won’t happen—but I guess your departure—which I would never let myself realize until tonight—is true.”

Jackie went on to say that she pitied whoever would replace Gilpatric at the Defense Department. “They will always live in your shadow . . . and no one else will be able to have force and kindness at the same time. . . . Please know Dear Ros that I will wish you well always—thank you—Jackie.”

Gilpatric conceded that he “filled a void” in the first lady’s life. But by the time he left Washington he was more impressed than ever with new direction the Kennedys’ marriage had taken. “They loved each other,” he reflected. “If anything, I think they were growing closer toward the end.”

Whatever the strains between them over the years, there was one thing Jackie never doubted about Jack: his greatness. On June 10 and June 11, she watched in awe as her husband gave back-to-back speeches that were instantly hailed as historic. In his “Peace Speech,” delivered at American University’s commencement in Washington, Kennedy announced that the United States was suspending aboveground nuclear testing and called for both a reduction in nuclear weapons and an across-the-board reexamination of U.S.-Soviet relations.

The next day, in the wake of segregationist Alabama governor George Wallace’s vow to block the integration of the University of Alabama, JFK took to the airwaves again. In an eloquent eighteen-minute prime-time address to the nation, Kennedy argued for equal rights under the Constitution and promised to propose new laws against discrimination based on race, religion, ethnic origin, or sex.

Medgar Evers, Mississippi field secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, was so excited by JFK’s speech he rushed home from his office to tell his young children what had just happened. As he got out of his car outside his house, Evers was shot by a white racist and bled to death in front of his family. Jack was so moved by the tragedy, which further galvanized the civil rights movement, that he met with Evers’s widow and their children in the Oval Office just ten days later.

Jack continued to use his wife as a sounding board, talking about the difficulties that confronted him at every turn as he grappled with the issues of the day. She downplayed her importance in this role, but it was crucial to JFK’s decision-making process. “She had a keen mind and knew all the personalities involved,” John Kenneth Galbraith said. “Jackie, like her husband, was also a student of history. What she thought clearly mattered a great deal to him, and she was very proud of that.”

Given her delicate condition, there was no question of Jackie accompanying her husband when he embarked June 22 on a history-making two-week trip to Europe. Without Jackie there to speak to the multitudes in their native tongues, the linguistically challenged president would have to fend for himself.

The first stop was West Berlin, and he was determined to say at least a few short phrases in German. Struggling with the pronunciation as he practiced his lines for more than an hour, he finally jotted a few key lines phonetically and prayed.

More than 1.5 million people—three-fifths of Berlin’s entire population—poured into the streets to hear Kennedy’s rebuke of communism and the ugly wall that now divided the city. “Freedom has many difficulties, and democracy is not perfect,” he told the cheering crowd, “but we have never had to put up a
wall
to keep our people in.” He concluded that “all free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin, and therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words ‘Ich bin ein Berliner.’ ”

(Jackie, who watched the speech at the White House with Robert McNamara, called to congratulate her husband. However, she would later be told by a German-speaking friend that by inserting “ein” before “Berliner” he may have been saying something entirely different. “You were wonderful, Jack,” Jackie said, “but apparently it sounded to him like you were saying ‘I am a doughnut.’ ”)

No matter. Just hours after leaving Germany, JFK was given an equally hearty welcome in Ireland. Sixteen years earlier he had visited his ancestral homestead in County Wexford’s Dunganstown, and now his distant cousins welcomed the world’s most famous Irishman back with tea, cookies, hugs, and smiles. Here, in particular, people wanted to know how Jackie was doing, and they congratulated the president on their coming new addition to the family. JFK was exuberant, bounding up the stairs at the U.S. Embassy in Dublin and shouting, “They love me in Ireland!”

JFK was still in a jovial mood when he stopped over in England to compare notes on the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty with Harold Macmillan. The British prime minister later wrote that the president’s disposition was “puckish”—due partly to the resounding success of his “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech but also to improved conditions on the home front, mainly Jackie’s pregnancy.

From London, Jack flew on to Rome, where the Vatican was still reeling from the death of the beloved reformist pope John XXIII. “The two Johns” were often linked in praise for ushering in a new era of change, but ironically they had never met. Instead, Jack met with John XXIII’s successor, Pope Paul VI, whose installation had taken place less than twenty-four hours earlier. Back home, the press held its collective breath to see if America’s first Catholic president would kneel before the new pope and kiss the ring of St. Peter. As the two men came together for the first time, Jack smiled broadly, reached out, and firmly shook the pontiff’s hand.

BACK AT HYANNIS PORT, JACKIE
was reminded of her own precarious position when Joan suffered a miscarriage in June, just six weeks before her baby was due. She and Teddy already had a daughter and a son, but he was in a race to outdo Bobby, and Joan felt “under pressure” to reproduce. Jackie understood completely. When Ethel gave birth to her eighth child—the second of her sons to be born on the Fourth of July—Jackie invited Joan to Squaw Island. “Jackie was so wonderful,” Joan said of her sister-in-law’s efforts to console her. “So wonderful.”