These Few Precious Days (36 page)

But when Jack walked in the door of her hospital room, they broke down together. “Oh, Jack, oh, Jack,” she sobbed. “There’s only one thing I could not bear now—if I ever lost you.”

At the house on Squaw Island, Maud Shaw was handed the unenviable task of telling the children. She was crushed by the news of Patrick’s death, and asked that someone less emotional—one of the Secret Service agents, perhaps—break the news to Caroline and John.

After hours of hemming and hawing, Shaw finally screwed up her courage and asked the children to sit down at the kitchen table. This was not going to be easy. The arrival of a baby brother had been eagerly anticipated by both children, but especially by Caroline. In her bossy big-sister way, she had taken care to lecture John on the care, feeding, and sleeping habits of infants.

“I have some bad news, children,” Shaw said. “Do you remember what your daddy said about Patrick not being able to breathe? Well, the doctors tried to help little Patrick, but it was just too hard for him. He’s with the angels now.”

Caroline thought for a moment. “Miss Shaw,” she said, “Patrick is still my baby brother, right?”

“Yes,” the nanny answered. “He is still your baby brother.”

“Then I think,” she said, folding her hands in prayer, “we should ask God to take care of him in heaven.”

Shaw was in awe of the little girl JFK called Buttons. “Caroline was so quiet, so composed,” Shaw said. “And the rest of us all had red eyes from crying.”

Jackie spent a full week recovering from her ordeal, and was too exhausted to attend Patrick’s funeral. She did have one special request, however—that the tiny coffin be completely covered in flowers as her father’s had been.

On Saturday, JFK, New York’s Francis Cardinal Spellman, Bobby and Ethel, Teddy and Joan, Lee Radziwill, and Jamie and Janet Auchincloss were among the few who heard Richard Cardinal Cushing celebrate a “Mass of the Angels” at the chapel inside his Boston residence. Once it was over, Jack stepped forward and placed the gold St. Christopher medal Jackie had given him as a wedding present inside the tiny white casket.

As the family filed out of the chapel, Jack was crying “copious tears,” Cushing recalled. The president was the last of the mourners to leave, with Cushing following right behind. The casket was in a white marble case, and at one point, the cardinal recalled, “the President was so overwhelmed with grief that he literally put his arms around that casket as though he was carrying it out.”

“Come on, Jack,” Cushing said, putting his arm around JFK. “Let’s go. God is good.”

The burial took place at Holyhood Cemetery in Brookline, not far from JFK’s birthplace; sadly, baby Patrick was the first Kennedy laid to rest in the large family plot purchased by Joe Kennedy. A grief-stricken Jack reached out to touch the tiny coffin as it was lowered into the ground. “Goodbye,” said Patrick’s father, tears streaming down his cheeks. “It’s awfully lonely down there.”

After the funeral, JFK went straight to the hospital to check on Jackie. He reported to her that the service was beautiful, and that Patrick’s casket had been covered with a blanket of flowers as she requested. Within minutes, Dave Powers recalled, they were both crying.

Powers returned to the Squaw Island house to keep Jack company the night of the funeral, and shortly after dinner the two men were joined by Joan. Having just suffered a late-term miscarriage, JFK’s sister-in-law understood the pain they were going through.

“Why would God let a child die? An innocent child?” It was a question he began asking when Patrick was still alive, and for the moment he felt compelled to pose it again and again. Joan answered that she didn’t know if things happened for a reason, as Cardinal Cushing had said. But she knew that bad things happen, and that “when they happen we just have to go on somehow, and know that we have the strength to carry on.” More than anyone she knew, Joan told him, Jack had the courage and the strength to cope with tragedy—even the loss of a child.

According to Powers, Jack was “deeply moved” by what Joan had to say. “She was there the next night and the next, and the President was grateful.”

JACK WAS NO LONGER THE
kind of husband who could happily cruise the Mediterranean while his wife coped with the loss of a child. This time his grief was palpable, and his concern for Jackie paramount. He visited her at least twice a day, and just two days after Patrick’s death brought Caroline along. Jackie lit up when she saw Caroline holding on tightly to a bouquet of black-eyed Susans. She wore a paisley sundress and sneakers, and her blond hair was pulled back in a ponytail.

Still, Jack worried that Jackie might sink deeper into a well of depression. “The President was very concerned about her,” Arthur Schlesinger said. “He tried to think of ways to cheer her up.”

Knowing how fond she was of Adlai Stevenson, he wanted Schlesinger to ask if Adlai would drop her a note at the hospital. “It would mean a lot to her,” JFK said. Jackie was, Schlesinger said, “deeply touched” when Stevenson’s letter arrived. Jackie never suspected that her husband was behind it. “He was just happy to see her smile.”

The White House was swamped with thousands of phone calls and letters of condolence—touching expressions of sympathy from common people and world leaders alike. Later, at Squaw Island, the president showed several to Bill Walton. “He’d read them and then pass them over to me to look at,” Walton recalled, “and he’d say, ‘Look at what the pope said,’ or ‘How am I going to answer that one?’ ”

Back in Washington, Jack gave Mimi Beardsley her first “real lesson in grief” when he asked her to sit with him on the Truman Balcony while he pored over the heartfelt notes of sympathy from both friends and strangers. Mimi recalled tears “rolling down his cheeks” as JFK would periodically scrawl a reply in the margin. “But mostly he just read them and cried,” she added. “I did too.”

Patrick’s death was also a “crucial signpost” in her relationship with the president, filling him “not only with grief but with an aggrieved sense of responsibility to his wife and family.” Looking back, it dawned on Beardsley that even though they saw each other countless times in the Oval Office that summer of 1963, the president had been “winding down” the physical part of their relationship for some time. Now, even when she accompanied him on trips, there was no hanky-panky. She believed he was finally “obeying some private code that trumped his reckless desire for sex” and “shutting down our sexual relationship”—just as he had done with Mary Meyer.

Jackie put up a brave front when she left the hospital, presenting each doctor and nurse with a framed lithograph of the White House that she had signed. “You’ve been so wonderful to me,” she told the nurses, “that I’m coming back here next year to have another baby.”

As they walked outside, the president and first lady held hands—a rare open display of their affection for one another. Both somehow managed a smile for the cameras. Behind the façade, the first lady was “destroyed. To lose another child that way,” Schlesinger said, “was bad enough. But for it to be such a public spectacle magnified the pain a thousand fold.”

As Jackie became more depressed, Janet Auchincloss confided in Jack that she feared for his wife’s mental health. “I’m afraid Jackie will have a nervous breakdown,” she told him. Jack worried, too, but he also understood. “It is so hard for Jackie,” he told Red Fay. “After all the difficulties she has in bearing a child, to lose him is doubly hard.”

JFK did not only have Jackie to be anxious about. “He knew how sad Caroline was going to be,” Jamie said, “and he wanted to try and offset that in some way.” So, before their mother returned home from the hospital, Jack showed up with a cocker spaniel puppy.

The day JFK escorted their mother home from the hospital, the kids ran outside to greet her. “Look, Mommy!” Caroline shouted, holding up the newest member of their canine family. “The puppy’s name is Shannon!” The others—Clipper, Charlie, and Pushinka’s puppies White Tips, Blackie, Streaker, and Butterfly—barked and wagged for attention.

For the rest of the summer Jack tried to be there for his wife as much as he could, adding quick midweek overnights to Cape Cod along with the usual long weekends. While Jackie recuperated, JFK swam off the
Honey Fitz
with the children, drove Caroline to her riding lessons, and, when it was time to depart for Washington, let them both ride with him to Otis Air Force Base in the presidential chopper.

During this period Jackie also counted on her sister for moral support. Only days before, Lee Radziwill had boarded a Boston-bound flight in Athens thinking Patrick was going to be just fine. Now she was on Squaw Island doing whatever she could to help Jackie get over the death of her son.

“It was obviously tough, very tough,” said Chuck Spalding, the first person outside the family to visit. “We golfed late in the day—I thought it would be good to get Jack’s mind off things—but it didn’t matter. He and Jackie were just crushed, and there was no way of getting around it.”

Spalding, like the others, witnessed a heightened intimacy between his hosts. “They folded into each other on the couch,” he said. “You couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began.” Once Spalding saw Jackie beginning to get emotional. Before Spalding could do or say anything, Jack was “at her side with a tissue, wiping her tears and holding her. They didn’t seem interested in hiding their feelings anymore.” At private moments like this, “you almost felt you were intruding. There were times when I had to look away.”

“She hung on to him and he held her in his arms,” said Bill Walton, who also spent the weekend with them. This was “something nobody ever saw at any other time because they were very private people.” It was Jack, Theodore White said, who finally saw the light. “They were both shattered by Patrick’s death,” White observed, “and for the first time, Jack reached out to her as he had never done before, had never been
capable
of doing before.”

Caroline noticed the difference. “There was a tenderness between her parents that she really hadn’t seen before,” Salinger said. “It made an impression on her.” As she watched her parents embrace in front of others “you could see the little gears in her head turning.”

Lee Radziwill’s gears were turning as well. After spending time with Jackie at Squaw Island, she returned to Europe in mid-August convinced that her sister was headed for a nervous collapse if something wasn’t done—and soon. The two Bouvier women had always been close. They both adored their father Black Jack, who called Jackie “Jacks” and Lee “Pekes,” and barely tolerated their social-climbing mother. At social events, Jackie and Lee could invariably be spotted gossiping in a far corner—a scene that was repeated so often Truman Capote dubbed them the “Whispering Sisters.”

Cruising the Aegean with Aristotle Onassis and his longtime mistress, the opera diva Maria Callas, Lee talked movingly of her sister’s anguish. “If only there was some way I could help cheer her up,” Lee said. “She really needs to just get away for a while . . .” Onassis took the bait, inviting both the president and Jackie to join them aboard the
Christina
.

Lee’s own affair with the notorious Greek shipping tycoon had been going on for months, and there were rumors that Lee intended to divorce Stas Radziwill and marry Onassis. Knowing that Jack and her sister were now more deeply in love than ever, she certainly did not see Jackie as potential competition for Onassis’s affections—or his millions. She jumped at the chance to invite them both.

Jackie had fallen in love with Greece during her trip there in 1961 and wanted desperately to return. She knew Jack couldn’t go, of course, but she needed to escape—to “experience life just for the sake of living,” she told Cassini, before being “swallowed up by Washington.”

True, there was no political fallout eight years earlier when then-senator Kennedy and his wife met Winston Churchill aboard the
Christina
. But now that he was president—and facing reelection—Jack balked at the idea. Onassis’s notoriety extended far beyond the $7 million fine he paid for illegally operating U.S. surplus warships. Since World War II, his connections with fascist dictators, his nearly successful attempt to secure a shipping monopoly on Saudi oil, and his slaughter of undersize sperm whales in violation of international law had all made him a target of the FBI.

Onassis had also purchased a 52 percent interest in Monte Carlo’s Société des Bains de Mer (Sea Bathing Society, SBM for short). SBM owned Monaco’s famed casino, the Yacht Club, the Hôtel de Paris, and about 34 percent of Monaco itself. The purchase in effect gave Onassis economic dominion over the tiny principality. For years Onassis, who also maintained ties to organized crime, battled fiercely with Prince Rainier—husband of the Kennedys’ old friend Grace Kelly—for total control of Monaco.

“I don’t want you to go, Jackie,” JFK said. “Onassis is a pirate. That’s not just a turn of phrase. He is a
real
pirate.” JFK called Spalding and complained that if Jackie was photographed in Greece cavorting with Onassis, “it’s not going to look good—all those jet-set types, Americans don’t like them.” More specifically, he believed Onassis to be “a real crook,” and that Jackie’s association with him was going to cost him votes in the upcoming election. “That Onassis is trouble,” he told Spalding. “Jackie’s playing with fire, only it’s my ass that’s going to get burned.”