The Kennedy Baby: The Loss That Transformed JFK

Table of Contents

- The Kennedy Baby

- Copyright

- ‘He’s a Kennedy-He’ll Make It’

- ‘Capital’s Best-Kept Secret’

- ‘With Babies it’s Hard to Be Sure about Anything’

- ‘Five Thousand Dollars for That!’

- On the Mediterranean

- ‘The Prettiest Baby I Have Ever Seen’

- ‘Isn’t He Sweet, Jack?’

- ‘Things Are Going Well’

- An Emergency Scenario

- A Race to the Hospital

- ‘The Baby’s Condition Is … Good’

- A Crucial Forty-Eight Hours

- Thursday, August 8, 1963

- Friday, August 9, 1963

- Saturday, August 10

- Caroline’s Bouquet for Jackie

- ‘He Seems So Alone Here’

- Happy to See His Baby Son

- A Note on Sources

- Notes

- Bibliography

- About the Author

- More from The Washington Post

- Connect with Diversion Books

The Kennedy Baby

The Loss that Transformed JFK

Steven Levingston
The Washington Post

Copyright

Diversion Books
A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.
443 Park Avenue South, Suite 1004
New York, New York 10016

www.DiversionBooks.com

Copyright © 2013 by The Washington Post

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

Cover image: Portrait of John Fitzgerald Kennedy by Aaron Shikler. The White House Historical Association (White House Collection)

For more information, email info@diversionbooks.com

First Diversion Books edition October 2013

ISBN: 978-1-62681-168-3

For Suzanne, Katie and Ben

Portrait of John Fitzgerald Kennedy by Aaron Shikler. The White House Historical Association (White House Collection)

Introduction

‘He’s a Kennedy-He’ll Make It’

On August 7, 1963, the news from Otis Air Force Base on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, flashed around the world. President John F. Kennedy and his wife Jacqueline had welcomed a third child. The boy arrived five and a half weeks early and weighed just four pounds ten and a half ounces. Immediately he began a struggle for life. Premature babies were at vastly higher risk than they are today, and the little Kennedy’s chest heaved to draw air. A team of the nation’s finest doctors converged, but their remedies for his weak lungs were few. The boy had to go it largely alone. To give him every chance, the newborn was rushed from Cape Cod to one of the finest hospitals in the world: Children’s Medical Center in Boston. Americans huddled by their radios listening for updates. Newspaper headlines attested to the instant affection for the child. “Whole World Taken by Littlest Kennedy” To many the mystique of the Kennedys meant that luck was on his side. The Boston Globe declared: “He’s a Kennedy—He’ll Make It.” The city, the country, the world was rooting for the newest member of the clan: Patrick Bouvier Kennedy.

Pat, as the Globe took to calling him, occupies a small corner in the Kennedy lore. He crops up for a few pages in books on the President or on his relationship with his wife. But most often Patrick is mentioned only in passing, if at all, as authors race to their next crucial point about the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, civil rights, or U.S. strategy in Vietnam. This fleeting notice is fitting perhaps, for Patrick’s presence was only temporary; he was allotted no time to carve out his place in the world. If we maintain an image of little Pat, it is not from ubiquitous photographs, as we have of his father and mother. In their absence, we are left to imagine a fragile infant described by those who glimpsed him as “beautifully formed.” But an abundance of prayer and hovering doctors were not enough. His tiny overworked heart gave out and life left him just 39 hours into his journey.

Though he was gone too soon, Patrick had a profound impact on his mother and father. For Jacqueline, his loss was her latest child-bearing trauma. She had already suffered a miscarriage and a stillborn. Measured against her sister-in-law Ethel, Robert F. Kennedy’s wife who delivered her eighth child around this time, Jacqueline was the Kennedy woman with the reputation for troubled pregnancies and births.

For John F. Kennedy, the significance of Patrick’s brief life was of a different nature. JFK was buoyant over the expectation of the new child and devastated by the loss. While it is impossible to peer into the soul of any human—and particularly that of a character as elusive as JFK—there is evidence to suggest that the President was moving toward a private transformation in the period leading up to Patrick’s struggle for life. JFK had matured emotionally since the birth of his two children, Caroline and John Jr. By mid-1963, there were indications that he had turned away from the manic womanizing that had characterized his past and that he was working hard to be a tender, heedful husband. The birth and death of his son Patrick was a crucial step in that evolution.

With the avalanche of rumor, gossip and contradiction surrounding the 35th president and his personal life, JFK resides in history as a protean spirit—an ever-changing figure who takes many forms and escapes the grasp. At one moment, he demonstrated unsurpassed kindness and in the next a brutal selfishness, leaving any final judgment on his character subject to endless debate. It was evident, however, that JFK and Jackie developed a genuine affection for each other toward the end of his life, and they displayed a tenderness in public that had been rarely glimpsed before. This change in their relationship was noticed by JFK’s inner circle, his friends and Secret Service agents, some of whom described it in their memoirs, and has been explored by several biographers including Ralph Martin, Christopher Andersen, J. Randy Taraborrelli and Thurston Clarke.

How long-lasting love and redemption might have been in Camelot is impossible to know, for barely three months after Patrick’s death, President Kennedy and his wife Jackie climbed into an open Lincoln Continental limousine for a ride through Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas.

‘Capital’s Best-Kept Secret’

Jackie Kennedy decorates Easter eggs in the kitchen of a rented home in Palm Beach, Florida, with John Jr. at her right and Caroline at the head of the table in April 1963, around the time she announced her pregnancy. (Cecil Stoughton. White House Photographs. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston)

Ben Bradlee had a brash question for the President’s wife. Bradlee, Washington bureau chief for Newsweek, got to know John F. Kennedy in 1959 when the Massachusetts senator was campaigning for the White House. The men became friends, social buddies, and, after the election, Bradlee shared many hours with the President in Washington, Palm Beach, Newport and Camp David. Their families, Bradlee’s wife Tony, and First Lady Jacqueline, dined together, downed Bloody Marys, went boating and golfing.

On April 2, 1963, the Kennedys and the Bradlees had just finished a private dinner alone at the White House, and the President had settled into a rocker that eased his persistent back pain. The conversation roamed over the prickly issues of Pentagon bureaucracy, British surveillance of Cuban exiles in the Bahamas, and news coverage of the White House when Bradlee popped his impertinent question. Was it true, he asked Jackie, that the Kennedys were adding to their glamorous brood? The President and Jackie already had ambassadorial Caroline who, at 5 ½, knew to curtsy in the presence of visiting dignitaries, and John Jr., a careening, tumbling, helicopter-loving 2 ½-year old who arrived two weeks after the 1960 election. Jackie was as private as Bradlee was presumptuous, and she pushed his query aside: She denied she was pregnant. “She said she was not,” Bradlee wrote later, “but we think she is.”

Bradlee was soon proved right, however. Two weeks later, during their Easter holiday at the Palm Beach ocean villa belonging to family patriarch Joseph P. Kennedy, Jackie and the President announced that their third child was expected in September. “Mrs. Kennedy Owned Capital’s Best-Kept Secret” cried The Boston Globe. Even the First Lady’s mother, Janet Lee Bouvier Auchincloss, was kept in the dark. The wonder was that Jackie was able to keep it quiet for so long—nearly five months. In Bradlee’s eyes, her trim appearance helped. “She’s going to keep her figure,” Bradlee observed once he heard the news. “She hardly looks pregnant at all.”

Tidings of a new baby put a little springtime charm into the air. As the Washington Star’s society columnist Betty Beale enthused, “a prospective little bundle of joy at 1600 Pennsylvania av. [is] adding to the sparkle of the sun-sprinkled capital.” That a sitting president was to get a visit from the stork heightened expectations. Only one other president had children while in the White House: Grover Cleveland had two daughters, one in 1893, and the other in 1895. If the Kennedy baby were a boy, it would be the first for a sitting president. Excited reporters asked JFK to guess the gender of the baby but he refrained. Before John Jr. had been born he had guessed—correctly. He had said repeatedly on the campaign trail in 1960—before John Jr.’s arrival—that a boy was coming. When asked how he knew, Kennedy quipped that his wife had told him. But something felt different in 1963. Besieged by reporters, press secretary Pierre Salinger put aside the question observing wryly that the President was “going to confine himself to such predictions in election years.”

Inside the White House anticipation ran high. Caroline, a well-spoken girl who was sometimes heard to use an imperious tone with her Welsh terrier Charlie: “Come along, Charles,” was eager to know if her new sibling would be a boy or a girl. Either way, she would still have her room of her own; not so, her younger brother. The White House, though it had 132 rooms, did not have a convenient separate space for a newborn. Among the Executive Mansion’s many rooms were a doctor’s office, an electric shop, a painting shop, a carpentry shop, a flower room, and many store rooms, “but no extra adjoining nursery for a growing American family,” Betty Beale told her readers. The children’s nanny Maud Shaw slept between Caroline’s and John-John’s rooms at one end of the second floor; but there were no other bedrooms in that wing. So the new arrival would have to stay in with Shaw until the infant was old enough to share with John-John. “Mrs. Kennedy sees nothing extraordinary about putting two children in one room,” Beale wrote. “The average American family must have at least two to a room.”

‘With Babies it’s Hard to Be Sure about Anything’

President Kennedy shakes hands with India’s President Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan at the White House after a state dinner in June 1963, with Jackie looking on. This was one of Jackie’s last public appearances before settling in on Cape Cod to await the birth of her third child. (Cecil Stoughton. White House Photographs. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston)

Jackie’s pregnancies were fraught with anxiety. She had lost two children, one by miscarriage in 1955 and another was stillborn in 1956. Caroline’s smooth birth the following year brought some relief. But the trauma returned with the birth of John Jr. on November 25, 1960. Arriving three weeks early, the newest Kennedy spent his first week in an incubator with breathing difficulties. Jackie was slow to recover from the birth, her third Caesarian section, and slumped into a post-partum depression. Little Caroline, unaware of the anxiety caused by John Jr.’s birth, put some levity into the long faces by announcing that she had gotten a baby brother for her third birthday, which came two days after his arrival. Using her well-developed verbal skills, she insisted that the boy would be called John, not Jack like his father, and that her first present to him would be a comb and a brush—he had quite a head of dark hair.

In mid-1963, when Jackie was looking forward to her third child, the Kennedy clan was bracing for a mini baby boom in the next several months. Joan, married to Sen. Ted Kennedy, was also expecting her third child in September, and the prolific, Attorney General Robert Kennedy’s wife, planned to deliver her eighth in June. “Boston and Washington have been chosen as the birthplaces,” The Boston Globe reported. “But, as everyone knows, with babies it’s hard to be sure about anything.”

Hoping for an uneventful pregnancy, Jackie curtailed her public appearances; she would not scurry from one public function to the next. Her usually hectic schedule was replaced by the expectation she would relax in Hyannis Port on Cape Cod for the summer. With the Kennedy wives all expecting, Letitia Baldrige, the White House social secretary, found herself sometimes scrambling to adjust. In May, Baldrige phoned the President in a panic over “a terrible, terrible dilemma.” She had promised to have a Kennedy wife on hand to greet a thousand female alumnae of Sacred Heart schools from across the country who were visiting the White House. But Jackie was unavailable, Ethel was eight months pregnant, and Joan was in bed with morning sickness. The President had a quick solution. The women may have been indisposed but he wasn’t, so he surprised the Sacred Heart women by walking into the White House lobby himself to explain the predicament: The wives were all expecting a baby. With his customary charm, he added: “My sisters may all be expecting as well. I don’t know. Don’t quote me on that.” He connected with the women by mentioning all of his female relatives who had attended Sacred Heart schools and, as Baldrige recalled the scene, he told the visitors: “You are the best-looking group of women in the world. It has been my honor and privilege to come and speak to you. I’ll tell Jackie, Joan, and Ethel what they missed.”

Jackie hoped to pass the summer in a cocoon of privacy on Cape Cod. But since her husband’s rise to prominence, Hyannis Port had become a stalking ground of gawkers. During the presidential campaign, the press and public had swarmed the Kennedy compound eager for a peek at the famous family. A week before the election, The Boston Globe sent a reporter out to Hyannis Port to paint the scene. He found the village quiet again after a burst of excitement during the summer when the surging candidate had made repeated visits for a few days’ respite from campaigning. But the area was gearing up for another influx. The newspaperman saw a painter slapping a fresh coat of white paint on a picket fence at the compound, lawns being mowed and new carpets going into JFK’s house. The extended family was to gather at Hyannis Port to watch the election night returns, and the public was scrambling to be on hand possibly to witness history.

“Nothing like this has ever happened to old Cape Cod,” the Globe’s Frank Falacci wrote. “Telephone lines are burning daily with calls from all parts of the country seeking reservations on or before the fateful Nov. 8. Motel owners report the callers will take anything—room with bath, without bath, or simply share lodgings and an army cot.”

The first summer after JFK’s victory was a celebrity snoopers’ fest, and the President and his family gave the crowds plenty to see. Tourists descended on the village filling the streets and plying the waters in tour boats to catch a glimpse of Kennedys at play: Jackie water skiing in a red bathing suit behind the motorboat Caroline K., Kennedy kids scurrying back and forth across Lewis Bay in JFK’s beloved boyhood sailboat Victura, or the President himself walking Buttons, his nickname for Caroline, to the local candy store. The selectmen of the city of Barnstable were alarmed that the influx of thousands of people into its village of Hyannis Port had “greatly disturbed the quiet tranquility.”

By the second summer, 1962, Hyannis Port was overrun with sightseers, and some locals weren’t enamored by the disruptive presence of the President’s entourage. The large Kennedy family played hard and frolicked freely on the waters. There were cruises aboard the presidential yachts, the 92-foot Honey Fitz and the 64-foot Patrick J., and the Kennedy’s own 51½ -foot Marlin. With the Coast Guard and police and Secret Service out on the water, along with the trailing press, traditional boating manners were sometimes strained. “During a cruise to the Islands on a recent weekend,” the Barnstable Patriot editorialized in July 1962, “the Patrick J. was reported to be most ‘ungentlemanly’ about ‘those little courtesies’ and irked one young sailor to the point of yelling ‘Damn you!’ before he realized whom he was addressing.”

In the summer of ‘62, the President’s wish to connect with the people collided with his family’s need for privacy, and he rented a house on Squaw Island belonging to the 1930s and ‘40s singer Morton Downey, a friend of the patriarch Joseph Kennedy, about a mile away from the Kennedy compound. Downey, known as the Irish Nightingale, moved easily among the Kennedys at Hyannis Port and was remembered by campaign insiders for gliding through Robert Kennedy’s house on election night in 1960 crooning “Did Your Mother Come from Ireland?” while passing out sandwiches.

For the summer of 1963, Jackie and the President found a new residence where the First Lady could enjoy full privacy during the final months of her pregnancy. They rented another house on Squaw Island; this one was owned by a textile manufacturer from Reading, Pennsylvania, named Louis Thun. Called Brambletyde, it was off a one-lane gravel road far from prying eyes. It was a “large, rambling, gray-shingled house … set back on a heavily wooded piece of property so that you could barely see it from the road,” remembered Clint Hill, Jackie’s Secret Service agent. The back of the house opened out onto a panoramic view of the Atlantic and a private beach. In the quiet of her upstairs bedroom and office Jackie could watch the waves and hear the muffled hammering of the sea. She was a woman who enjoyed her solitude and her books. “On her evenings at home, she reads, and reads some more,” Truman Capote said. “I mean she reads more than anyone I’ve ever known—including me.” She also got lost in her private thoughts. Norman Mailer had seen “something quite remote in her.” She appeared hard and untouchable, men feared her, partly for her intelligence and hard questions. During the lively Kennedy family gatherings, she sometimes sat as a silent observer. On one occasion JFK approached her and said: “A penny for your thoughts,” to which she replied: “If I told them to you, they wouldn’t be mine, would they, Jack?”

Although every effort was made to give her the space she needed on Squaw Island, her detachment from the world was not absolute; she was reminded of her position by the abundance of presidential communications equipment and Secret Service surveillance gear that threaded throughout the residence. A Secret Service command center had been set up in a trailer at the end of the driveway.

While protected and sheltered in her getaway, Jackie was not idle. She was an active First Lady, having overseen the refurbishing and redecoration of the White House, with an emphasis on the mansion’s historic importance, and now was engaged in planning for fall events. Her personal secretary, Mary Gallagher, was with her on Cape Cod and took dictation, worked on correspondence and tracked down people the First Lady wished to speak to by phone from her remote location. She also was carefully preparing for her baby. From out on Squaw Island she managed to oversee the creation of a small nursery at the White House.

When the President arrived, usually on weekends, it was as if a bolt of lightning shot through the sleepy place—his men were in constant motion, and Kennedy threw himself into boating and swimming and good times with gaggles of children. On his departure, Jackie resumed her quiet pursuits, but kept an ear to the outside world. When agent Hill went into the village she asked him casually, almost as an afterthought, to pick up some magazines. “I knew what she meant,” Hill recalled. “She loved to read the tabloids—especially if there were articles or photos of her in them—but she certainly didn’t want anyone to see her buying them.” While obsessive about her privacy, she followed her own story in the media, painful as it was at times. “That girl reads everything that is written about her,” Capote said, “and she’s totally aware of everything that is said about her on television.” On some days, she walked down the road with agent Hill to the compound to visit with her father-in-law Joseph P. Kennedy. Debilitated by a stroke in 1961 he was unable to speak, so Jackie filled the silence with her own voice, talking to him for hours on the porch, and sometimes reading to him from the newspapers.

At the White House, the much-awaited new Kennedy had become a regular topic of conversation. The President’s personal secretary Evelyn Lincoln kept a candy dish on a table beside her desk, a treasure that little Caroline had discovered on her first day in the office. The girl had asked why the dish was there and Evelyn told her she thought people working at the White House would enjoy it. Then the secretary added in a whisper, “But it really is so when you come over, you can have some candy.” In the summer of ’63, the President became fond of telling Evelyn that in addition to Buttons and John-John, his nickname for John Jr., it wouldn’t be long before a new set of hands was grabbing at the goodies on the table. “Mrs. Lincoln,” he said, “soon you will have three coming over to get candy from your candy dish.”

In mid-May the buoyant mood of stork-watching was interrupted by a wave of sadness. Joan Kennedy, the wife of Senator Ted Kennedy, who—like Jackie—was expecting her third child in September, abruptly cancelled a planned appearance. Later the public learned that she had suffered a miscarriage, five months into her pregnancy. There was little to report other than the words of a spokesman: “She’s fine. She’s at home and resting comfortably.” The loss was a worrying reminder to Jackie of her own delicate nature.

‘Five Thousand Dollars for That!’

Jackie had announced her intention of leaving Hyannis Port in late August to deliver her baby by Caesarean section at Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington. “From the security standpoint,” United Press International reported, “the White House prefers that Mrs. Kennedy go to Walter Reed where she would have more privacy in the Presidential Suite on the fourth floor.” But her past troubled pregnancies—and Joan’s unexpected misfortune—set in motion a search for a suitable backup location on Cape Cod, should it be required. Her obstetrician, Dr. John Walsh, had taken up residence on the Cape for the summer to be near his most famous patient. Walsh, a former Army surgeon in World War II, had delivered John-John in 1960. Caught in the media crush that accompanied John-John’s arrival, Walsh said he preferred to perform his job rather than sit in the celebrity spotlight. As he told the press after the birth, “I was sure nervous with so many newspapermen, cameras and microphones around. I was far more at ease in the operating room.” In the summer of 1963, he was vacationing on Cape Cod but was also on the job. A professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Georgetown University Medical School, he turned over his practice in Washington and suburban Maryland to another physician so he could attend to Jackie, and he showed up at Brambletyde almost daily to check on her. Well-acquainted with Jackie’s medical history, he also toured three facilities on the Cape, along with White House physician Janet Travell, in search of an emergency delivery room.

While stressing that Jackie fully expected to give birth at Walter Reed, the doctors agreed that the best secondary site was the hospital at Otis Air Force Base, a twelve minute ride by car from Squaw Island—and less by helicopter. Jackie’s pregnancy was progressing normally so far, and the White House went out of its way to play down the attention given to Otis. The New York Times reported that the project was only “precautionary.” White House press secretary Pierre Salinger assured the public that “no special arrangements for the delivery were being made at any hospital but Walter Reed.”

That didn’t stop the Air Force from sprucing up a wing at the hospital for Jackie’s use in an emergency. Building 3703 was a one-story wooden structure connected to the delivery room by a 100-foot breezeway. It had six bedrooms, two lounges, a kitchen and a nursery. Jackie’s room was outfitted with a standard hospital bed and chairs, a dresser and color television. There was also a room for the President that had rugs, a bedside table with phone and an adjoining mahogany-paneled sitting room with American southwest-style furniture. Air-conditioning was installed—making this wing the only one at the hospital with the cooling devices—and an electric dishwasher and garbage disposal unit added the latest in modern amenities.

But Air Force apparently went too far. On July 25, the President was alarmed to see a press photo of a smiling officer standing next to Jackie’s bed in the spruced-up wing. In another shot the President gazed upon a handsome bureau and lamp on a side table. The wing’s upgrade, JFK learned, cost about $5,000 (about $40,000 in today’s dollars), and he was livid. The military’s profligate expenditures on behalf of the President’s wife were a public relations disaster. Kennedy phoned his Assistant Secretary of Defense Arthur Sylvester and railed about out-of-control military spending.

“Five thousand dollars for that!” he cried. “Let’s cut their budget another hundred million.”

Sylvester explained that he told the Air Force to keep the press out of the hospital—under no circumstances were reporters or photographers to see the upgrade. But, he informed the President, “They went ahead on their own.”

The President was fixated on the captain in charge of the refurbishing and on the furniture in the photograph—attractive pieces from Jordan Marsh department store in downtown Boston. He wanted to know what the items cost and if the bills had already been paid. “I’d just like to send that goddamn furniture back,” he said. “I’d love to send it right back to Jordan Marsh in an Air Force truck this afternoon with that captain on it.” His aide laughed and the President joined him: “Now, what about transferring his ass out of here in about a month? … For incompetence, not for screwing us … And that silly fellow who had his picture taken next to the bed, have him go up to Alaska.”

Next the President got Air Force General Godfrey McHugh on the phone.

“See that fellow’s picture by the bed,” he began.

“Yes, sir,” replied the general in a meek tone.

Kennedy lacerated him, his sharp voice unrelenting. “And did you see that furniture they bought from Jordan Marsh? What the hell did they let the reporters in there for? Are they crazy up there? Now you know what that’s gonna do? Any congressman is going to get up and say, ‘Christ, if they can throw $5000 away on this, let’s cut ’em another billion dollars.’ You just sank the Air Force budget! You’re crazy up there! Are they crazy? That silly bastard with his picture next to the bed?

Almost in a mumble, the general said: “Sir, I’m appalled but…”

“Well, I’m appalled too.” Kennedy cut him off. “I mean, he’s a silly bastard. I wouldn’t have him running a cathouse! … Christ, they’re all incompetents!”

The penitent general tried to explain: “Why, sir, this is obviously…”

“Well, this is obviously a fuckup!” the President roared, and the conversation was over.

The President’s press secretary Pierre Salinger was sent out to quell the controversy. In his morning briefing, he told reporters that the Air Force had not informed the President of its refurbishing plan. “We had never heard about it until we read it in the newspaper,” he said. The Washington Post reported that an anonymous Defense Department spokesman had confirmed the $5,000 expenditure but insisted that the money went only toward standard upgrades for the room and did not include any purchases of furniture. But the Post story contained an admission by an anonymous Jordan Marsh spokesman that the store had supplied the furnishings. The store’s merchandising manager of home furnishings clarified: “We have definite instructions not to give out any information on any work we have done for that family.” And when asked if he meant the First Family, he said, “Yes.”

As heated as the President got, his concern turned out to be misplaced. The storm blew over quickly. The press scarcely pursued the story, and the White House and the military sidestepped any fallout.

On the Mediterranean

Jackie (left), eight months pregnant, at the Democratic National Convention in 1956, where JFK lobbied unsuccessfully for the vice presidential slot on the ticket headed by Adlai Stevenson. Nearly two weeks later, she gave birth about a month before she was due, and the infant was stillborn. (AP Photo)

Jackie had worries far beyond a passing squall over hospital redecorations. Besides her baby’s health, she was oppressed by a deep uncertainty concerning her husband. JFK did not have a good track record during her pregnancies. From their earliest time together, Kennedy was an aloof lover, inattentive and uncomfortable with displays of public affection. He was often absorbed with his male friends, jetting off on foreign jaunts, and with his political ascendancy, typically leaving Jackie alone and stewing. Fashion designer Oleg Cassini, who long knew both Kennedy and Jackie, described her early disquiet in Christopher Andersen’s Those Few Precious Days: “Jackie was from a world where people greeted each other with hugs and kisses on the cheek—even if they hated each other. It was difficult for her to put up with [Kennedy’s] inability to show affection in front of others.”

JFK’s cool detachment also extended into the bedroom. In the summer of 1962, the President began an affair with a nineteen-year-old White House intern named Mimi Beardsley, but, as she recalled, he didn’t so much as kiss her when he first had sex with her in the residential quarters of the White House. While Jackie was out of town, Kennedy offered the Wheaton College freshman a tour of the executive mansion and in Jackie’s bedroom guided her to the edge of the bed, where the teenager fell backwards on her elbows, half sitting up and half lying down. “Slowly, he unbuttoned the top of my shirtdress and touched my breasts,” Beardsley recounted in her memoir, writing under her married name Mimi Alford. “Then he reached up between my legs and started to pull off my underwear.” Beardsley was surprised but didn’t resist; in fact, she unbuttoned her shirt and let it fall off her shoulders. Then the President pulled down his pants, and the college freshman lost her virginity. When it was over he pointed toward a door in the corner and said, “There’s the bathroom if you need it.” In reconstructing the encounter later, Beardsley said she was too young then to know if the encounter was “caring” or “meaningful” but she would not describe it as making love.

Jackie’s doubts about her husband’s devotion dated back to the mid-1950s. She and JFK married in 1953 while he was serving as a senator from Massachusetts. She became pregnant in 1955 but after three months “suffered a miscarriage and learned that carrying and delivering a child would always be difficult for her,” recalled Kennedy’s friend and adviser Ken O’Donnell. Intensely private, the couple kept the disappointment to themselves, having informed only their immediate families that a child was on the way. Jackie’s next pregnancy, in 1956, was even more traumatic and left her with a lack of faith in the man she’d married. Jackie had no illusions about Kennedy’s wandering eye but she had been confident she could tame him. However, his political ambitions were also an aphrodisiac for the young politician, and caused the couple to make some ill-advised decisions regarding Jackie’s health during the pregnancy.

In 1956, after serving as a congressman and senator for nearly a decade, Kennedy had his sights set on the White House. For now he had to content himself with a run for the vice presidential nomination, because the top slot on the Democratic ticket was in the firm grip of Adlai Stevenson. So, while denying he was actively pursuing it, Kennedy jockeyed behind the scenes to be Stevenson’s running mate. The decision would come down to backroom politics and a delegate vote on the floor of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

In the run-up, Jackie and other members of the Kennedy clan were out wooing delegates and the nation. Jackie attended political breakfasts and waved Stevenson placards and dodged reporters when she didn’t want to give interviews. It was a massive strain on a woman eight months pregnant who was known to have a delicate make-up for childbearing. And with JFK working frenetically on his own behalf, Jackie rarely saw her husband. “If she or Jack had suspected he would turn out to be the star of the show, busy day and night at meetings and caucuses, she would have watched it on television at her mother’s home in Newport,” O’Donnell recalled. “Jackie … never had a chance to talk with Jack all week.” Kennedy was surging but in the end, the nonstop politicking proved futile. On the third delegate vote, he lost the vice presidential nomination to Estes Kefauver, the senator from Tennessee.

Although JFK had soared to national prominence and glowed on the television screen—sharply raising his future prospects—he was deeply disappointed by his failure to garner a spot on the 1956 ticket. But not one to linger over his letdowns, Kennedy had plans to cheer himself up. The day after the convention he flew off to Paris with a few friends and his brother Ted, leaving his wife on the verge of childbirth in the hands of others. The men frolicked for a night in Paris then set off on a cruise of the Mediterranean in a forty-foot yacht. Accounts of Jackie’s reaction have varied: In some, she put up a brave face, insisting her husband deserved a good time after all of his hard work at the convention; in others, she expressed a profound bitterness that he would desert her so near the birth of their child. There was also the unspoken apprehension that other women would be aboard the yacht to assuage the senator’s political wounds. After the trip, the Washington Star tracked down the yacht’s skipper and cook who confirmed that several young women had joined the sailing party. Kennedy’s sexual appetite was insatiable, and his philandering may have cut Jackie deeper than his absence at this crucial time. George Smathers, a womanizing compatriot of Kennedy’s, recalled “there just wasn’t anything she could do about it.”

With JFK out on the sea and out of contact, Jackie settled in at her family’s estate on Narragansett Bay in Newport, Rhode Island to await the birth, looked after by her mother Janet. Her parents had divorced when Jackie was eleven and her mother then married Hugh Dudley Auchincloss, an old-money investment banking attorney. The Newport estate, known as Hammersmith Farm, was built in 1887 and had a twenty-eight room mansion, a working farm and stables for sixteen horses. Dozens of gardeners looked after the grounds which were designed by Frederick Law Olmstead, the man responsible for the layout of New York’s Central Park. Jackie and Jack had been married in Newport, and the reception was held at Hammersmith where the elegant bride and her charming husband had bedazzled twelve hundred guests swarming the grounds. Now Jackie rested in the mansion on the hill, smoking cigarettes in a sea breeze known as “the sailor’s delight” and praying for the health of her baby. Even back then, doctors—including Jackie’s own obstetrician John Walsh—advised pregnant women to steer clear of cigarettes. Still, many did indulge, believing that a baby’s lower birth weight often associated with smoking during pregnancy also kept the mothers’ weight down.

On the morning of August 23, a month before her baby was due, Jackie awoke and cried out for her mother. She was hemorrhaging. Rushed to Newport Hospital, she underwent an emergency Caesarean while JFK was somewhere on the Mediterranean. The news was not good—the infant was stillborn, and Jackie was in critical condition. She had lost an enormous amount of blood and required several transfusions. A priest was called, in case last rites were necessary. A spokesman for Newport Hospital said: “Nervous tension and exhaustion following the Democratic National Convention, at which her husband just missed the vice presidential nomination, was the cause of Mrs. Kennedy suffering an internal hemorrhage.” Out in the Mediterranean JFK had no idea of the crisis back home—his yacht lacked a ship-to-shore radio. The Washington Post screamed the headline: “Senator Kennedy on Mediterranean Trip Unaware His Wife Has Lost Baby.” The paper reported that “it may be ‘two or three’ days before he learns of his wife’s illness.”

Before Kennedy learned what had happened, his brother Robert was at Jackie’s side as she slept, dispatched there by his wife Ethel who was herself about to give birth to her fifth child Mary Courtney. Ethel sensed Jackie’s need. “She’s not as strong as she likes us to believe,” Ethel said. “I know the real Jackie, and she’ll be devastated.” When Jackie awoke, Robert had the grievous task of informing her: she had a baby girl and lost her. Jackie and JFK had chosen names for either gender, and so the infant was named Arabella, after the flagship of John Winthrop’s fleet of eleven vessels that brought Puritan settlers to the Massachusetts Bay colony in 1630. Robert told the dazed mother that he had already planned the burial. When she asked about her husband, Robert gave her the truth: he was still at sea and his sister Eunice was trying to track him down.

Three days after the baby’s death, Kennedy and his mates sailed into port at Genoa and phoning home he learned the news. At first JFK saw no reason to rush back—the baby was already lost. He could do nothing about it now. Getting home quickly to his wife did not seem to occur to him until wiser friends suggested that public shame over his absence threatened to tarnish him forever in the eyes of women voters. His friend George Smathers put it bluntly to him: “You better haul your ass back to your wife if you ever want to run for president.”

‘The Prettiest Baby I Have Ever Seen’

President Kennedy with Caroline on the presidential yacht Honey Fitz cruising near Hyannis Port, Massachusetts about a week before Caroline’s baby brother Patrick was born. (Cecil Stoughton. White House Photographs. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston)

Jackie was distraught not only over the loss of Arabella but also over the callousness of JFK. His behavior left her with grave doubts about her marriage. Some biographers report that Jackie was edging toward a decision to divorce JFK but was talked out of it by his father Joseph Kennedy, who was concerned about the impact on his son’s future political ambitions. These biographers indicate that Joe Kennedy offered to set up a million dollar trust fund for any children that Jackie and JFK might have, as long as she stayed put. However, David Nasaw, author of The Patriarch, an exhaustive biography of Joseph P. Kennedy, believes it highly unlikely that Jackie and Joe ever had such discussions and that any special financial accommodation was considered. “As for Joe paying off Jackie, there is no evidence of that anywhere,” Nasaw says. He points out that JFK already had a huge trust fund that would amply supply the needs of Jackie and any future children and that the Kennedys, as Catholics, were not inclined to consider divorce an option. If anything, JFK and Jackie could lead separate, amicable lives just as Joe and his wife Rose did. That JFK would have been absent for a birth was typical in Kennedy family tradition, Nasaw says, which held that men were nuisances during pregnancies: “They got in the way.”

Whatever the reality, Jackie hung on and soon was pregnant again. In November of the following year, 1957, she gave birth to a healthy little girl—and the baby’s father was immediately smitten. The presence of Caroline had awakened an unexpected depth of emotion in JFK. Paul Fay, a Navy buddy of Kennedy’s, recalled that before his marriage the youthful Kennedy was blind to the magical bond that forms between parents and their offspring. “When I’d tell him with great enthusiasm of an experience with my children, he’d say, ‘I don’t understand how you can get such a big kick out of your children,” recalled Fay, who was Kennedy’s undersecretary of the Navy. But JFK was curious. “He really wanted to understand why almost all of his friends who were fathers were so crazy about their children.” With the ease of an infant, Caroline showed him. From the moment of her birth, she bewitched her father and opened channels to his heart that had never flowed. With her arrival, Kennedy started on a path toward maturity as a man, father and husband. There would be backsliding, of course; but it is not a stretch to say that a novel sense of responsibility to wife and child was profoundly stirred within him.

Jackie’s mother Janet saw the relief in JFK’s eyes when he learned that Caroline’s birth had gone smoothly. “I’ll always remember Jack’s face when the doctor came into the waiting room and told him that the baby had arrived and that it was a girl and that Jackie was fine and the baby was fine,” she said. “I will always remember the sweet expression on his face and the way he smiled … He just looked radiant when he heard that all was well.” When the proud father took his prep school friend Lem Billings to the hospital nursery, he demanded “Now Lem, tell me, which one of the babies in the window is the prettiest?” When Billings made the mistake of pointing to the wrong baby, Kennedy didn’t speak to him for two days. As Billings put it later, “Jack was more emotional about Caroline’s birth than he was about anything else.”

Kennedy made sure this time he was nearby when the baby arrived. His private secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, recalled that he was traveling a lot in the late months of Jackie’s pregnancy. “I could tell he was worried about Jackie,” Evelyn wrote in her memoir. “He would caution me each time he left to ‘keep in close touch with Jackie in case you need me in a hurry.’” After the baby came, Kennedy called Evelyn and rattled off the infant’s weight and eye color. “And,” he told her, “not just because she’s mine, but she is the prettiest baby I have ever seen.” A personal turning point seemed to have come in 1957—“that memorable year,” as Kennedy’s buddy Ken O’Donnell put it, which “brought the beginning of a new happiness to Jackie and Jack Kennedy’s marriage.”

Sweet Caroline had a profound impact but her influence didn’t last. JFK took a step backward with the traumatic birth of John Jr. in 1960 just weeks before the new President’s inauguration. If his wife and his family had finally turned his head, JFK’s constant mistresses—politics and power—lured him away again. Kennedy had eked by Richard Nixon in the 1960 election, winning 309 electoral votes to Nixon’s 219—but doing so by a popular vote margin of just 118,574, the smallest advantage since Grover Cleveland’s 23,000-vote win over James G. Blaine in 1884. Now, with Jackie nearly eight months pregnant, it was time to form a government, work on the transition and inauguration, and prepare to move into office with the momentum at the new president’s back.

Soon after the election, Kennedy flew to his father’s estate in Palm Beach to recover from the exhausting campaign and assemble his staff, leaving Jackie marooned in Washington on doctor’s orders this late in her pregnancy. That he didn’t stay with her in D.C. for the final month of her pregnancy disheartened Jackie. The President-elect had told the nation on television from Hyannis Port after his victory: “Now my wife and I prepare for a new administration and a new baby.” But he was little adept at balancing the two. To be sure, the serious task of interviewing prospective cabinet members and other high-ranking administration officials to serve in the White House—indeed, the business of laying the groundwork for running the nation—was of surpassing importance. It was also true that sitting by Jackie’s side while shouldering his new responsibilities did nothing to ensure a smooth pregnancy for her. What’s more, Jackie seemed quite well so far, and her planned Caesarean was weeks off.

So President-elect Kennedy settled into his work at the seaside Palm Beach estate. He flew back to Washington on November 23 for a quiet Thanksgiving with Jackie and Caroline and a few friends at their house on N Street the following day. Playing dutiful father, he arrived with presents for Caroline whose third birthday fell on November 27. His precocious daughter was fully aware of his new status and already had known the morning after the election to call her dad Mr. President. At the afternoon Thanksgiving dinner, one of the guests, artist and JFK friend Bill Walton observed that “Jackie never looked more beautiful. She was full of bounce, getting up and down from the table to help serve dinner.” But her spirit darkened when Kennedy informed her he was heading back to Palm Beach immediately after the meal. Although the baby was expected in three weeks, Jackie still could not persuade her husband to work from Washington, just in case the next little Kennedy was over-eager to get into the world. To JFK, Caroline’s on-time delivery had suggested that Jackie’s birthing travails were a thing of the past. After reassuring her, he was back in the air for Palm Beach, a departure that surprised Clint Hill, the secret service agent assigned to Jackie. “It seemed an odd arrangement, since most of the people he was interviewing for cabinet and staff positions were based in Washington,” Hill wrote in his memoir. “It wasn’t my business, but I felt empathy for Mrs. Kennedy.”

The President-elect flew back to Florida at 8:25 p.m. aboard the Kennedy family plane the Caroline, a twin-engine Convair 240 bought by Joseph Kennedy in 1959 and converted into an airborne living room with seating for twenty, a full galley and a bedroom. The press, tailing Kennedy everywhere, followed him to Palm Beach on a chartered, four-engine DC-6. Back in Washington, Jackie planned to take it easy the rest of the night and turned in, freeing agent Hill to return home to his apartment in Arlington.

But the night proved anything but quiet.

‘Isn’t He Sweet, Jack?’

President Kennedy sits with son John, Jr. in a rowboat on Bailey’s Beach in Newport, Rhode Island, in September 1963. (Robert Knudsen. White House Photographs. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston)

Sometime before midnight, Caroline’s nanny Maud Shaw heard a cry from Jackie’s room. Rushing in she found Jackie on a blood-stained bedspread clutching her stomach. Shaw called an ambulance and then notified the First Lady’s obstetrician John Walsh who raced to the house. The ambulance driver Willard Baucom climbed the stairs to Jackie’s bedroom and found her lying down in a nightgown and overcoat. “She was smiling and looked like a baby doll,” he said. Baucom and an assistant carried Jackie down in a stretcher and she was soon speeding to Georgetown Hospital.

As agent Hill was climbing into bed in Arlington, his phone rang. Hearing the news, he leapt up and was out the door. He was aware that the baby wasn’t due until December 15, and that the President was in the air on his way to Florida, and that Mrs. Kennedy had already lost two children. By the time Hill arrived at the hospital, Mrs. Kennedy was already in surgery on the fourth floor where Walsh was performing an emergency Caesarean.

Aboard the Caroline, a jovial JFK had been describing the makeup of his new administration when word came over the radio that Jackie was at the hospital. The mood on board immediately sobered. Kennedy was upset by his absence at this critical moment. His decision to leave Jackie alone in Washington haunted him. “He became tense and very nervous and restless, stricken with remorse because he was not with his wife,” Ken O’Donnell recalled. “‘I’m never there when she needs me,’ he said.”

The question was how to get the President-elect back to Washington as fast as possible. The decision was to carry on to Palm Beach and then commandeer the journalists’ DC-6 for the return trip. The DC-6 was the faster plane, and could cut thirty minutes off the flight to Washington. When JFK’s plane touched down at Palm Beach an open phone line from Georgetown Hospital was awaiting him. On the other end was a hospital nurse who briefed Kennedy on the emergency and informed him that his wife was in surgery.

When the DC-6 was airborne again, carrying not only JFK’s staff but the journalists as well, the President-elect walked up to the pilot’s cabin and put on the headphones to listen to the radio for updates on Jackie and his child. At 1:17 in the morning, he smiled for the first time in hours: over the radio crackle he heard that at 12:22 a.m. Jackie had given birth to a six-pound three-ounce son with a mound of dark hair. Salinger took to the plane’s intercom system to make the announcement: “We have been advised that Mrs. Kennedy has given birth to a baby boy. Both mother and son are doing well.” The press contingent erupted into cheers and applause, and Kennedy waved and took a bow. Then, according to O’Donnell, it was back to business. JFK “sat down, much relieved, and after a few minutes he began to talk again about selecting a Cabinet.”

The reports of good health were misleading. Despite the good cheer aboard the plane, conditions inside the delivery room were far from serene. Like many premature babies at birth, John F. Kennedy, Jr. had respiratory problems. Hyaline membrane disease, as the ailment was known, occurs in infants whose lungs have not had time to fully develop. Along with Dr. Walsh in the delivery room was a twenty-nine year-old second-year pediatric resident named Ira Seiler who was working Thanksgiving Day. His presence turned out to be a lifesaver for baby John. In those days, distressed newborns had no neonatologists or intensive care physicians on hand to assist. “When John-John was born,” Seiler recalled, “the chief of the anesthesia department held him up by the ankles and slapped his buttocks.”

But the infant did not squall into life. Watching as John Jr. turned blue Seiler urged that the newborn be intubated. The anesthesiologist handed the baby to Seiler who inserted a tube into the trachea and passed him back to the senior physician who was to breathe into the tube, assisting the baby’s respiration. “However, [the other doctor] was a bit nervous and knocked the tube out,” Seiler recalled. “I then grabbed the baby back, reinserted the tube, and for about six minutes, breathed air into the lungs of the baby.” John Jr. responded, and was transferred to the intensive care nursery and put in an incubator.

JFK arrived at the hospital at about 4:30 a.m. He went directly to see his wife who was sleeping, then headed to the nursery. The son he found there stirred Kennedy’s heart and answered the question he’d ask his old Navy buddy Paul Fay years earlier: Why were fathers so crazy about their children? Already charmed by Caroline, JFK was to be endlessly amused by John-John.

While Jackie recovered slowly John-John was consigned to an incubator for at least several days. The President-elect stayed in Washington, visiting the hospital three times a day. The New York Times ran a front page story headlined: Kennedy Alters Schedule to Stay Close to New Son. Agent Hill was stationed outside Jackie’s hospital room, and when the President-elect arrived he greeted Hill cordially, calling him by name, and asked for details about Mrs. Kennedy’s condition and how she slept during the night. “It was obvious he was sincerely concerned,” Hill remembered, “and despite the endless decisions that needed to be made as he prepared for the presidency, the well-being of his wife and son was uppermost in his mind.”

On one visit, the President-elect was introduced to Dr. Seiler and informed that he was the pediatric resident who resuscitated the baby after delivery. Kennedy sent a note thanking Seiler for his efforts, and soon afterward the young doctor also received invitations to the inauguration and its ball, and tickets to the receptions and concert. Several weeks later Seiler mentioned to one of the nurses at Georgetown Hospital how honored he was to be invited. “She informed me,” he recalled, “that she had written to the inaugural committee that if I had not been there John F. Kennedy Jr. would have died.”

A week after his birth, the baby was out of danger, and Jackie was creeping back to health. So Kennedy returned to Palm Beach, leaving Jackie in the hospital, to resume his transition meetings at his father’s estate. Jackie was mostly confined to bed but worked busily too prepare for life in the White House. She studied the history of the executive mansion and its daily operations—mundane aspects such as who looked after the grocery shopping and housekeeping, and where private family meals were served and how much privacy she would have. Agent Hill had been on President Eisenhower’s detail inside the White House so when he appeared Jackie peppered him with questions she had jotted down on a yellow legal pad.

“I’d go into her room,” Hill said, “and she’d be sitting in bed, propped up with pillows. Dressed in her bedclothes, with no makeup on, she looked younger and more fragile than she had prior to John’s birth, and I could tell she was physically drained.” But she still looked stunning. “She exuded a natural, timeless beauty.”

JFK dropped back into D.C. about a week later for John Jr.’s christening. Mother and son were still in the hospital, and Jackie was so weak that her husband pushed her in a wheelchair into the hospital chapel for the ceremony. She was dressed splendidly in a black wool broadcloth suit and black tulle toque with black pumps and white kid gloves. Jackie had little energy but she pulled herself out of the chair and stood next to her husband for the eleven-minute ritual. The baby was in the christening robe that his father had worn at his own ceremony in 1917 and also wore a white lace bonnet and a white satin bow that once had adorned his mother. About twenty guests listened to the blessings administered by Rev. Martin J. Casey, the pastor of Holy Trinity Church in Georgetown—“John Fitzerald Kennedy, Jr., go in peace and may the Lord be with you.” Only one reporter and one photographer were admitted. Exhausted but happy Jackie held little John in her arms for photos, murmuring to her husband, “Isn’t he sweet, Jack? Look at those pretty eyes.”

After two weeks in the hospital, Jackie and John-John left the hospital. The President-elect, “obviously very excited” about the homecoming, was determined to get to the hospital on time. “Twice in between his early morning appointments,” his private secretary Evelyn Lincoln recalled, “he asked me to be sure to let him know well in advance when it was time for him to leave.”

The newspapers pictured Kennedy, dapper in his dark suit, pushing a smiling Jackie in a lovely winter coat in her wheelchair, the baby beside them in the arms of family nurse Luella Hennessey. Jackie, far from recovered, raced over to the White House not two hours after she left the hospital to fulfill an obligation to departing First Lady Mamie Eisenhower. She tried to get out of it but the President-elect insisted she go—insulting Mrs. Eisenhower was out of the question. Nurse Hennessey, however, was alarmed—and took the President-elect to task for threatening Jackie’s health. “If you get up on your feet now, you might die,” she told Jackie. “I don’t care if he is the new president; he has no right to ask you to risk your life.”

But Jackie dutifully set off. Mrs. Eisenhower had invited Jackie on a tour of the thirty rooms of the White House’s private quarters to familiarize her with her new home. Walking the entire time was obviously too much for the new First Lady. So agent Hill phoned the White House’s chief usher, J.B. West, to ensure that a wheelchair was available. At the White House, Hill and West escorted Jackie to the elevator that went to the private quarters, where West said: “Mrs. Eisenhower is waiting upstairs.” He added that she wanted to conduct the tour in private—just the two women. So off Jackie went. Hill assumed the wheelchair was waiting upstairs.

An hour and half later Jackie returned still on her feet, exiting the elevator with Mrs. Eisenhower and looking pale enough to faint. West and Hill went with the women toward the south entrance where a White House photographer snapped some shots of the smiling women saying their good-byes with staged frostiness. The newspapers reported the next day that Mrs. Eisenhower remarked after the photographer had taken a few pictures: “I think that’s enough.” And shaking Jackie’s hand, she said, “Good-bye,” at which point Jackie chirped back, “Good-bye. Thank you so much for all you’ve done. You don’t know how much I appreciate it.” To which Mrs. Eisenhower, continuing the heavy heaping of cordialities, said: “I was very happy to do it.”

Back in the car, Jackie asked Hill if he had phoned West to arrange for a wheelchair, for there was no chair in sight. Hill was embarrassed, for he had in fact called the usher. Now he didn’t know what to say. Checking later, he discovered that West had carried through on the request. “The problem was that Mrs. Eisenhower didn’t want anyone to accompany her and Mrs. Kennedy, and she certainly wasn’t going to push the new first lady—her political rival—through the executive mansion.” Mrs. Eisenhower had made a wheelchair available but kept it hidden—it was to be brought out only if Jackie asked for it. And Jackie was too polite to ask.

The tour exhausted Jackie—Mrs. Eisenhower marched her around the private quarters not offering her a chance to sit even once. When Jackie got back to her Georgetown home she collapsed and sobbed. She was beaten down not only by Mrs. Eisenhower but by what she saw of her new home: the White House. She reportedly cried, “I hate it, I hate it, I hate it.” Redecorating the place would be an arduous task. As she told agent Hill, “It’s going to need far more work than I’d even imagined.” She had some choice words for the current décor: “It looks like it’s been furnished by discount stores.” The ground floor had the appearance of “a dentist’s office bomb shelter,” and the East Room was like “a roller-skating rink” with “seasick green” curtains and ashtrays from a “railroad Pullman car.”

Though emotionally drained, Jackie had no time to recover. The President-elect had planned for the family to head back down to Palm Beach right after Jackie’s White House tour, so she was soon in the air aboard the Caroline. Ken O’Donnell recalls that during the flight Jackie became protective of John-John’s health amid the heavy cigar smoke in the cabin. He remembers that the President-elect was in high spirits sitting in the back of the plane, “talking at a merry clip, and blowing cigar smoke around the baby’s bassinet until Jackie demanded that he take himself and the cigar up forward.” Another report suggests that John-John’s tender lungs—he was still recovering from the premature baby ailment hyaline membrane disease—were unable to handle the clouds in the cabin, and the infant took a slide back toward calamity. In his book, These Few Precious Days, Christopher Andersen quotes Jackie as saying, “There was, thank God, this brilliant pediatrician in Palm Beach who really saved his life, as he was going downhill.” Jackie herself was in such a weak state by the time she reached Palm Beach that she took to her bed for five days. Soon she would be called upon to perform for the nation as the dazzling First Lady at the inauguration and the balls.

‘Things Are Going Well’

President Kennedy speaks to the nation from the Oval Office in June 1963 on desegregation at the University of Alabama. (Cecil Stoughton. White House Photographs. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston)

President John F. Kennedy sailed into office on a wave of eloquence—timeless words in his inaugural speech: “My fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country”—and on a surge of elegance—five inaugural balls in white tie and tails accompanied to three of them by a glittering First Lady sheathed in white chiffon with white gloves and a flowing floor-length, white silk cape and bejeweled in diamond earrings from Tiffany’s. That Jackie was able to attend the festivities at all was a small miracle. “She was sick because of the baby,” said Eunice Kennedy Shriver, the president’s sister. “Do you have any idea how much pressure she was under? She was dazed the whole time.” And drugged. Even sitting in the parade reviewing stand after the inauguration was too much, and she had fled. When the President’s physician was summoned to see her in the afternoon before the balls, she found the First Lady in bed, fatigued and ashen. Jackie would need pharmacological help to get through the grueling night: Dr. Travell administered the amphetamine Dexedrine, and Jackie endured through three balls before she couldn’t go on anymore.

As soon as the President settled into the Oval Office he was besieged by a host of domestic and international challenges. The Cold War was in full swing: the Soviet Union’s tempestuous leader Nikita Khrushchev ratcheted up tensions with promises to support communists from the Congo to Vietnam to East Germany to Cuba. And the new President had to learn a new dance step: talking tough while maintaining peace. Only four months into his presidency he stumbled through the Bay of Pigs disaster in Cuba. For his failed efforts at overthrowing the communist leader Fidel Castro in Cuba he incurred the wrath of Khrushchev, who threatened “incomparable conflagration between the United States and the Soviet Union.” On the home front, civil rights violence was mounting. Freedom Riders protesting unconstitutional segregation on buses were beaten in Birmingham, Alabama, prompting the White House to send in federal marshals to protect the activists. On an upbeat note, the President announced an American program to send a man to the moon before the end of the 1960s. As his administration progressed, Kennedy’s push to turn back fears of global nuclear annihilation was dramatically interrupted when he confronted the Soviets over their construction of missile sites in Cuba. In October 1962, the U.S. and the Soviet Union teetered on the brink of a nuclear confrontation, which JFK defused with deft defiance and negotiation.

As his term pushed into 1963, JFK the President and the man carried the terror of the Cuban missile crisis with him, renewing his commitment to preserve peace for his children and for all children. By their mere youthful exuberance Caroline and John Jr. were helping Kennedy mature. As the infant John-John became a toddler, father and son came to love each other’s company. They played endlessly, taunting and teasing each other. If John-John knew his father was trying to catch him, he would run away in shrieks of laughter. “If caught,” JFK’s friend Paul Fay recalled, “he would struggle, argue and complain, ‘Daddy, let me go. You let me go. Mommy, make Daddy let me go.’ When he was released, the game would start all over again.” Fay watched the father-son frolicking and sensed that Kennedy had absorbed a rare understanding of childhood. “I felt that the father realized more vividly than most of us that the process of growing up would soon bring to an end the wonderful honest charm of a boy discovering the world around him,” Fay wrote in his memoir. Kennedy’s understanding of childhood also informed his politics—JFK seemed determined to make the world safe for future generations.

But as he sought to pilot a steady course for America, he still was reckless in his personal behavior. When Jackie became pregnant again in 1963, the President at first showed no signs of cooling his ardor for other women. Historian Robert Dallek has portrayed JFK’s inveterate womanizing from his youth onward as a “form of amusement.” But once Kennedy reached the presidency, “it now also gave him a release from unprecedented daily tensions.” Dallek identified the multitude of women including Jackie’s own press secretary Pamela Turnure, Ben Bradlee’s sister-in-law Mary Pinchot Meyer, two White House secretaries, a woman associated with the Mafia Judith Campbell Exner, the White House intern Mimi Beardsley and Hollywood stars and call girls. Most of the time Jackie had learned to accept the straying but it was always tougher to reckon with when she really needed him. As she embarked on her latest pregnancy, all the old apprehensions returned. Would JFK be there for her? How would he respond when really called upon?

In late April, after news of her pregnancy had been released, Ben and Tony Bradlee dined with the Kennedys at the White House. Early in the month, at a previous dinner together, Jackie had rebuffed Bradlee’s prying on the subject. Now the Bradlees were a little piqued to have been shut out but kept it to themselves. “It was plain that she had been pregnant two weeks ago when she told us she wasn’t,” Bradlee noted. “Tony was upset that she hadn’t been told before the public announcement.” But Tony rallied when Jackie revealed she hadn’t even informed her mother before making the announcement to the world.

As Jackie prepared to wait for the baby through the summer at the Kennedy’s rented house on Squaw Island, her husband had settled into the presidency with growing self-assurance. Wrestling with the world—and pretty much winning so far—and raising two bright, healthy children were giving Kennedy confidence in all corners of his life. He had stared down the Soviets, and Khrushchev blinked. His beautiful wife was coming along fine with their third child, and her two most recent pregnancies, despite some drama with the second one, had culminated in success. All of this was reflected in his demeanor in the Oval Office and was bringing him in small steps closer to Jackie.

When Newsweek’s James M. Cannon visited the President in the Oval Office in April he “was struck first by the serenity of the surroundings and the self-possession of the principal.” He found Kennedy looking “unhurried, un-badgered,” and when he asked how things were going, the President replied with a big smile, “Well, I think it’s going well. As you know we do have our ups and downs, the tides ebb and flow … [But] in general, I think things are going well.”

Later that year, E.B. White of the New Yorker captured the balance that had come to Kennedy’s life. His poem depicted a man caught in the whirlwind of Presidential affairs but grounded at home. It was inspired by a note in The New York Times that described Kennedy bending down to wipe John-John’s nose as father and son walked out of the Oval Office: “One crisis ebbs, another flows / And here comes John with a runny nose.”

An Emergency Scenario

JFK at the wheel of a convertible in Hyannis Port about a week before Patrick’s birth, with Jackie in the passenger seat and family friend Charles Spalding (left) and Jackie’s brother-in-law Prince Stanislaus Radziwill of Poland in the back seat. (Cecil Stoughton. White House Photographs. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston)

By June, Jackie was ensconced in her life on Squaw Island, reading, boating, taking walks, and generally embracing her privacy. Her days were structured to keep stress to a minimum, although she was actively engaged in planning for fall events at the White House. Her personal secretary Mary Gallagher was with her to assist her, taking dictation and keeping the White House switchboard operators on their toes. When the newspapers said that Jackie had ordered a wardrobe of new maternity clothes from a Manhattan designer, her press secretary Pamela Turnure swatted down the reports, reminding the public that the First Lady would be spending her summer largely out of view and in need of no elaborate attire.

Jackie passed some of her time at her painter’s easel. Two of her works were destined to become Hallmark Christmas cards sold to raise funds for a National Cultural Center for music, theatre and opera. Working in watercolor, the First Lady that summer created what art experts described as “bright primitives” and “talented lyrical primitives with great charm.” One of the paintings was titled “The Journey of the Magi” and depicted the Three Wise Men on black camels on a bright red background; the other, called “Glad Tidings,” portrayed a golden-haired angel in white on a turquoise background. The cultural institution that Jackie encouraged eventually was renamed the Kennedy Center.

Although the President was deeply absorbed by White House matters, pushing forward on a nuclear test-ban treaty with the Soviets and tackling the rising unrest over civil rights, he appeared eager to be around his wife and family as much as he could, and he made regular weekend trips to Squaw Island. While still giving in to his indiscriminate lust he appeared to be trying to temper it. Mimi Beardsley, the Wheaton College intern who lost her virginity to the President the previous summer, was back working at the White House in the summer of 1963. While the President resumed his relationship with her, he made it less of a habit. Beardsley’s duties that summer kept her right near the Oval Office so she saw the President almost every day he was in the White House. “But,” she recalls, “I didn’t sleep over in the residence anywhere near as often as I had the year before, because Mrs. Kennedy was expecting another child … and the President spent much more time with her and the children in Hyannis Port.”

In late June the President set off for Europe and spoke stirringly at the Berlin Wall, declaring “Ich bin ein Berliner”—“I am a Berliner.” While he became a hero of freedom in Europe, Jackie watched the adoring crowds on television from Squaw Island. After his ten-day European jaunt, the President arrived back at the White House at 2 a.m. on July 3 and spent the day absorbed in discussions over the nuclear test ban treaty and civil rights. Averell Harriman, the undersecretary of state for political affairs, was preparing for test-ban talks in Moscow on July 15. On Thursday, July 4, JFK arrived aboard Air Force One at Otis Air Force Base in Hyannis Port and climbed aboard a Marine Corps helicopter for the brief flight to the Kennedy compound, landing on the lawn where Jackie and the kids awaited him. Husband and wife embraced in a rare show of public affection, demonstrating, as they might not have done in the past, their joy at being reunited after nearly two weeks apart.

Then began a frolicsome Independence Day weekend. Some of the news reporting strained to reflect the giddy good times, as Robert V. Leary of The Boston Globe wrote of the July Fourth festivities: “Thursday had to be one of the ding-dongiest Yankee Doodling days of ’em all.” He noted bells ringing out, bonfires blazing, fireworks exploding and fifes and drums and bugles sounding off. And amid it all Ethel Kennedy gave birth that day to her eighth child, Christopher George, at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Boston. Of the Kennedy wives, only Ethel had a hardy childbearing constitution, along with a fierce athletic prowess. The day before she delivered, she played tennis; and when she arrived at the hospital she refused a wheelchair insisting on walking to the elevator that took her to the maternity ward. Ethel’s effortless spawning stood in stark contrast to Jackie’s repeated traumas. According to author Christopher Andersen, Jackie was hyper-sensitive to her inferiority as a breed mare; he quoted Jackie as quipping that Ethel “drops kids like rabbits … She’s the baby-making machine—wind her up and she becomes pregnant.”

Over the weekend, the President swam, cruised on the White House yacht Honey Fitz with Jackie, family and friends, and watched John-John guide a toy three-foot sailboat in wide circles on the calm bay waters. The Globe’s Frank Falacci strained to capture the carefree mood: “President Kennedy soaked up a sea dog’s share of aquatic amusement Friday along the Cape Cod shore.”

To his delight, JFK played golf—just five holes—for the first time in more than two years. His famously troubled back had recovered from its latest injury incurred during a tree-planting ceremony in Ottawa in 1961. Although the president bogeyed all five holes at the Hyannis Port Club, he sank a twenty-foot putt, eliciting a smile from Jackie who watched in a multi-colored maternity shift with a puppy at her side. The presidential couple appeared relaxed and comfortable with each other, and JFK got up to his trademark horsing-around with her. While driving her across the lawn in the compound in an electric cart, he swung close to a working sprinkler and doused her in the spray. The President also was seen wrestling playfully on the beach with a nephew and five-year-old Caroline who managed to kick sand in his face; and later he strolled along the shoreline with friends and the youngsters. “Like any thoughtful father,” the Globe reported, “the President’s destination proved to be an ice cream truck, and it wasn’t long before Caroline and a cousin ran down the beach together with big cones.”

Returning to Washington tanned and invigorated, Kennedy told Ken O’Donnell that he’d just had the “greatest Hyannis Port weekend in many years.” He recounted his cruises on Nantucket Sound aboard the Honey Fitz with Jackie and his father, his delight at playing golf and the pleasures of the rented house. “He reported that Jackie, in her seventh month of pregnancy, was healthy and happy,” O’Donnell recalled.

The President was back the following week for another cruise aboard the Honey Fritz and a few more holes of golf. He showed off his power swing knocking a 225 yard drive to the applause of his assembled spectators. When Air Force One landed at Otis Air Force Base he was surprised by the presence of his two-and-a-half year-old son who had come to greet him. John-John, dressed in light blue shorts, a white shirt and white shoes, sprinted toward his dad as he stepped off the plane’s ramp. Dad bent over for a chat, patting John-John on the head, as the boy excitedly balanced on one leg. As happy as he was to see his dad, John-John was even happier to ride aboard the Marine Corp helicopter from Otis to Hyannis Port. On the weekend before the birth of his brother Patrick, John-John appeared again at the air base and again went off at full speed across the tarmac toward his dad as he came off Air Force One and walked toward the waiting helicopter. This time the President swept the boy up in his arms and held him, and the next day a picture appeared in the newspapers of dad and son in a loving embrace. But the President knew the true story behind that photo, as he told his friend Paul Fay: “Every mother in the United States is saying, ‘Isn’t it wonderful to see that love between a son and his father, the way that John races to be with his father? Little do they know that that son would have raced right by his father to get to that helicopter but his dad stepped into his path and grabbed him.”

Toward the end of July all signs still pointed toward a healthy pregnancy. The press was upbeat, stressing the positive, trying, as if by sheer optimism, to will a normal birth. Kennedy family life was harmonious, full of its typical joie de vivre, touch football at the grassy compound, dogs streaking across the lawns, and JFK was solicitous and attentive to Jackie. The news reports reminded readers of the birthing plan—that Jackie would leave Hyannis Port in late August to have a Caesarean section at Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington. The Army Surgeon General Leonard D. Heaton said he was honored that Mrs. Kennedy had chosen Walter Reed, adding that the birth would be a great moment in the history of the hospital. Jackie calmly looked forward to the day, taking afternoon cruises on the Honey Fitz, reading, and enjoying her quiet pursuits. “Friends at Cape Cod say she has never looked more beautiful or happy,” the Globe reported. “She is approaching the time to have her baby in confident anticipation.”

But there were also the newspaper references to the back-up plan: the preparations at the hospital at Otis Air Force Base should the baby arrive early. The Boston Globe told its readers that the hospital was on “standby alert.” Reporter Frank Falacci nonetheless sought to paint the emergency scenario in the most jovial terms: “If the stork should decide to fly over Squaw Island ahead of schedule next month, Bldg. 3703 at nearby Otis Air Base will catapult into international prominence.” Still, the attentive reader could not help but sense the extreme caution that attended Jackie’s pregnancy, evident in the fact that Jackie’s obstetrician John W. Walsh was in Hyannis Port “on an indefinite ‘vacation’ to be near his patient.”

A Race to the Hospital

President Kennedy delivers a radio and TV address on the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty about about two weeks before Patrick’s birth. (Abbie Rowe. White House Photographs. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston)

After his successful European trip, President Kennedy had the momentum to push hard on bringing the Soviets to the table to ban nuclear testing. To his welcome surprise, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev expressed an eagerness to join the United States in such a ban. Khrushchev and Mao Zedong, the leader of China, the other giant communist nation, were locked in a rivalry over the future of communism and an easing of tensions with the United States gave the Soviet premier the opportunity to focus on trumping the Chinese. Further, a test ban treaty would isolate China on the global political stage.

Beyond the politics, however, both the United States and the Soviet Union were sensitive to the terror these weapons inspired after having raced to the edge of a nuclear confrontation during the Cuban Missile Crisis. When Under Secretary of State Harriman was in Moscow in mid-July negotiating an agreement, a Soviet representative told him it was time for cooperation as both sides had felt “the breath of death.” And a successful pact followed. The Soviets agreed to a limited nuclear test ban—outlawing atmospheric but not underground testing of nuclear weapons—and Harriman initialed the treaty.

On the evening of July 26, Kennedy spoke to the nation on television in what he said was “a spirit of hope.” Without identifying the confrontations of the past, he noted that meetings between Washington and Moscow have too often “produced only darkness, discord or disillusion. Yesterday, a shaft of light cut into the darkness … For the first time, an agreement has been reached on bringing the forces of nuclear destruction under international control.” He then left for Squaw Island. Under Secretary Harriman was also on his way to Hyannis Port to brief the President. At a brief press conference there, Harriman was asked why Khrushchev agreed to the treaty. He replied that it was “fairly plain” that the Soviet Premier “wanted to show the Red Chinese that his policy of co-existence [with the United States] could produce results.” As the world focused on the big headlines over the agreement, Jackie was able to celebrate her thirty-fourth birthday with family on July 28, just as she wished: quietly.

In the first week of August, Jackie went public with her own bit of Soviet news. Four puppies sired in mid-June by Caroline’s terrier Charlie (the one she sometimes called Charles) had attracted five thousand letters from across the country from people begging to have one. The mother of the puppies, known as pupniks, was Pushinka, the daughter of a Soviet dog that had orbited the earth seventeen times in August 1960. Premier Khrushchev had given the space dog’s daughter to Jackie several months after its birth two years ago. Pushinka was a mongrel with a fluffy white coat and feathery, brown-tipped ears; Charlie, a four-year-old Welsh terrier had an aristocratic lineage, and their pupniks were brown and black with splashes of white on the paws. But for those sending the five thousand entreaties, the news was not good. “We’re answering them all with a standard reply,” said Jackie’s press secretary, Pamela Turnure, adding that the pupniks would stay with the Kennedy family. “We have no plans to distribute them.”

The world’s attention shifted the next day from pupniks and test-ban treaties to a very private, yet scorchingly public, trauma for Jackie. Five and a half weeks before her scheduled Caesarean in Washington, the First Lady suddenly felt ill. The baby, it appeared, had chosen its own time to arrive. That Wednesday morning, August 7, Jackie had taken 5-year-old Caroline for a riding lesson at stables in Osterville, not far from the house on Squaw Island. It was Agent Hill’s day off, so Secret Service Agent Paul Landis accompanied her. Another agent, Lynn Meredith, was on hand from the so-called Kiddie Detail to keep an eye on Caroline.

At around 11 a.m. Jackie was watching at the fence of the riding ring when she turned and said, “Mr. Landis, I don’t feel well. I think you better take me back to the house.”

Meredith, who overheard Jackie’s plea, chimed in: “Right now, Mr. Landis.”

Meredith stayed behind to look after Caroline as Landis gently hustled Jackie into the car. Her face full of worry, the First Lady urged Landis to hurry. He drove as quickly as he could along the winding two-lane country road without endangering her, jolting through potholes and bouncing over bumps as she begged him to go faster.

From the car, Landis radioed in the emergency and the Secret Service flew into action. An assistant to the President’s naval aide, George Dalton, who worked closely with the Secret Service, was on duty in the trailer at the house. Landis told him to alert Jackie’s obstetrician, Dr. Walsh, and to make sure a helicopter was on standby should Mrs. Kennedy need to get to the hospital at Otis Air Force Base. As he drove the pained First Lady over the bumpy road Landis prayed he got her back to Brambletyde before the baby arrived. Pulling up to the house, he was relieved to see Dr. Walsh waiting. Jackie was assisted inside where Walsh did a quick examination, discovering that the baby was not going to wait for the scheduled caesarean in September. This newest Kennedy was not going to arrive, as planned, at Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington.

The doctor came out and told Dalton: “We need to get her to the hospital right away.”

Jackie was in labor—and for the fourth out of five pregnancies things weren’t going right. After a miscarriage, a stillborn, and an early delivery of John Jr., she again was entering the dark uncertainty of traumatic childbirth. In minutes she was in a helicopter making the quick jump to Otis Air Base. At the same time the race was on to find one of three donors at the base identified earlier who had Jackie’s blood type, A-1 RH positive, needed for her surgery. Only one could be tracked down, Airman 2nd Class John M. Bolger, a 22-year old medical corpsman from Jersey City, New Jersey, who gave two pints—and later fell into the spotlight for his donation. The attention made him uncomfortable. As he told The Boston Globe, there was nothing unusual about the routine procedure, except that he missed lunch that day. “It could have been anyone,” he said. “I happened to be around.”

Agent Hill was in a deep slumber when the phone jangled in his little cottage on the other side of Hyannis Port and he heard Dalton on the other end telling him to get to Otis—Mrs. Kennedy was in labor. Hill threw on some clothes, grabbed his gun and was out the door. On the way he told the local Secret Service men to alert the White House detail to the emergency in progress.

The President had two meetings scheduled in the morning, one with a committee of prominent Americans interested in ensuring Senate ratification of the test-ban treaty, the second with Ecuador’s foreign minister Neftali Ponce-Miranda. At 11:37 a.m. Evelyn Lincoln was looking over the mail when Jerry Behn, the special agent in charge of the White House detail, walked in and in a near whisper told her the news. Behn had learned that Jackie—not wanting to worry the President or disrupt his day—insisted that JFK not be informed just yet. When the President came into Evelyn’s office less than ten minutes later and began picking up things to read from her desk, there was an awkward silence. Evelyn waited for Behn to speak, and Behn waited for her to speak. Finally Evelyn piped up: “Jerry tells me that Mrs. Kennedy is on her way to Otis.”

The President’s first instinct was to ask Evelyn to get a hold of Dr. Walsh but he caught himself, realizing Walsh was probably with Jackie and very busy. So he had his secretary call the house on Squaw Island where she was able to track down the White House physician Dr. Janet Travell, who also was on the Cape. While he waited for Travell to come to the phone, Kennedy ordered an aide to check on the status of the White House planes and helicopters. He’d need transportation. Travell told the President she wasn’t sure about the status of Mrs. Kennedy but she promised to find out. Kennedy gave orders to the assembled staff in Evelyn’s office not to say a word to the press until he had details. When his top aide Ken O’Donnell came into the office, JFK informed him of the situation. But O’Donnell apparently didn’t hear, or misunderstood, the orders about the press, because he phoned Salinger who soon appeared wanting to know which hospital Jackie was headed for. Evelyn was about to tell Salinger about the clamp down on news when Dr. Travell called back to inform the President that Dr. Walsh was taking Jackie into the operating room.

“Then there was no doubt in his mind—he was going to Otis,” Evelyn recalled.

‘The Baby’s Condition Is … Good’

Patrick Bouvier Kennedy inside an incubator is carried from an ambulance into Children’s Medical Center in Boston on August 7, 1963, after an emergency trip from Cape Cod where he was born five and a half weeks early. (Associated Press Photo/JJ)

By 11:52 a.m., some fifteen minutes after the President first heard of his wife’s condition, he and several aides—Salinger, O’Donnell, Gen. McHugh, agent Behn, and Evelyn Lincoln—departed from the White House aboard a helicopter bound for Andrews Air Force Base. But neither of the President’s planes was available. Since he had no travel plans for the day, Air Force One was in the air for a check flight and the backup plane was out of commission for maintenance. So at Andrews the President boarded a smaller, slower JetStar, and at 12:10 p.m. was airborne heading north to Massachusetts. “We all sat in silence,” Evelyn remembers.

While Kennedy was en route staring out the window of the TriStar, Dr. Walsh emerged from surgery a little before 1 p.m. He found agent Hill and told him Mrs. Kennedy had delivered a baby boy and she was doing fine. The baby, however, was small—just four pounds, ten and a half ounces.

“We have some concerns about his breathing,” Walsh told Hill.

It was too early to know the severity of his problem—premature babies typically faced some lung issues at this stage. The infant was placed in an oxygen-pumping incubator called an Isolette. Hill said he would inform the president, who should be speeding up to the hospital shortly.

The JetStar carrying the worried White House entourage touched down at Otis at 1:25 p.m., and the President hustled to a waiting motorcade that set off at a fast clip. Word of the birth, with no mention of the baby’s condition, had spread through the base, inspiring wives and children of the servicemen to congregate behind ropes set up near the hospital to watch the comings and goings and possibly get a glimpse of the President. The crowd offered guesses for the name of the infant. One woman thought it appropriate to call the child Otis; another offered Andrew or Joseph or some “nice, old fashioned” name. A 13-year-old boy named Harvey Delaware knew exactly what the newest Kennedy should be called: Harvey, of course.

News of the birth had reached the floor of the Senate and the boy’s uncle Senator Edward Kennedy. When the Democratic leader, Mike Mansfield of Montana, announced to the chamber that President Kennedy and First Lady Jacqueline had welcomed their third child, the senators rose to their feet and applauded.

The President entered building 3703, the newly prepared wing, and found his friend Larry Newman, a Hyannis Port neighbor, waiting in the lobby. According to an account by Christopher Andersen, JFK had phoned Newman before leaving Washington and asked him to head over to the hospital “to be there for Jackie.” Kennedy was so wrought with emotion that he nearly embraced Newman but caught himself at the last moment and shook hands. “We’d known each other for so long, but I’d never seen this depth of feeling before,” Newman recalled. “He was very emotional and deeply worried about Jackie.”

Agent Hill, standing guard outside Jackie’s room, congratulated the President on the birth but was reluctant to tell him the tough news. So when the President asked how his wife was doing Hill told him she was still under sedation, and that Dr. Walsh could give him an update. The President’s sister, Jean Smith, was staying on the Cape and had rushed over to the hospital when she heard the news on the radio.

After a brief visit with a groggy Jackie, Kennedy spoke with Dr. Walsh and learned that his baby son was struggling with hyaline membrane disease. But the boy was getting the finest care possible. Already one of the nation’s top experts on respiratory ailments in infants was on his way from Boston Children’s Hospital. Dr. James Drorbaugh, a Princeton grad with a medical degree from Columbia University, was said to be a man of “quiet authority.” An associate in pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, he interned under the father of research into infant respiratory disease, Dr. Clement Smith, a professor of pediatrics at Children’s. When Kennedy finished from his conference with Dr. Walsh he ordered agent Hill to track down the base chaplain—the baby needed to be baptized at once. Twenty minutes later, with the Rev. John Seahill presiding, the infant was christened Patrick Bouvier Kennedy, after the President’s grandfather and Jackie’s father.

Agent Hill saw baby Patrick for the first time after the baptism when the newborn was put into a separate area for monitoring. Gazing on the child’s beautifully shaped head and tiny hands and feet, Hill was overwhelmed by the emotion of the moment. “He was beautiful,” he recalled. “But he was clearly fighting for each breath, as his poor little chest struggled to get the oxygen he needed to survive.” A father of two boys, Hill wanted to protect the fragile infant but knew he could do nothing other than pray. It was a battle little Patrick would have to fight on his own. “He looked so alone in the sterile incubator, with tubes going every which way.”

Salinger, dressed in a suit and tie, went outside into a sultry heat of eighty-three degrees and stepped up to a microphone to speak to reporters. Behind him stood the barracks-like buildings on stark grounds marked by a spindly sign reading USAF Hospital emblazoned with a medical red cross. A lone scrub pine quivered in a light sea breeze. “Mrs. Kennedy has given birth to a four pound ten and a half ounce baby boy,” Salinger began. There was no joy in his voice. “The baby was born at 12:52 here at the Otis Air Force Base hospital. He was five and a half weeks premature.” It would be several hours before the press learned of the developing crisis inside building 3703. The President wasn’t ready yet to go public with it, as Salinger’s next monotone statement made clear. “The baby’s condition,” he told the newsmen, “is described by the doctors as good and Mrs. Kennedy’s condition is described as good.”

President Kennedy shielded Jackie from the worst of the news. She had experienced enough disappointments in childbirth and had just come through a draining operation requiring two transfusions, and he saw no reason to further distress her. “He did so much to protect Mrs. Kennedy at that time,” recalled Jackie’s press secretary Pamela Turnure in an oral history interview two years later. “He was the most wonderful … He had a double concern—for her and then for the child.”

The air base hospital answered the initial crisis superbly, but it was not equipped to treat a baby in Patrick Kennedy’s condition. Dr. Drorbaugh, the physician from Children’s Medical Center, examined the newborn and noted he was breathing rapidly and grunting “with lots of effort going into each breath.” He immediately laid plans for getting little Patrick safely to Boston for treatment. Though a helicopter was speedier, it was deemed safer to take the boy the sixty-five miles by ambulance, with Dr. Drorbaugh at his side. Patrick was bundled in blue and placed into the ambulance, still in his Isolette. He was described as a “beautifully formed” baby.

The President went to give the news to Jackie who was still drifting in and out of consciousness. He told her that Patrick had a lung ailment similar to John-John’s at his birth and was going to Children’s Hospital in Boston as a precaution. Jackie was ‘very distressed” and wanted the baby to stay with her but it was not possible. Before her son set off on his journey he was wheeled into her room in his incubator for a quick good-bye.

Salinger reappeared before reporters in front of the lime-green, single story building to announce the baby’s transfer to Boston. At 5:50 p.m., a caravan with a state police escort set off, passing mobs of Cape Cod well-wishers. The procession traveled along Route 28, climbing over the Bourne Bridge, and made its way to Children’s Hospital in one hour and eighteen minutes. Police and Secret Service agents kept crowds back from the hospital entrance.

The President stayed behind. Accompanied by his sister, he climbed into a white convertible and went to Hyannis Port to have dinner with Caroline and John-John who were with the nanny Maud Shaw at the house on Squaw Island. He told them that their mother was fine and their baby brother was going to Boston to get treatment for a little breathing trouble. Over the next few days the President was in constant motion, tending to his wife, looking after his kids, and shuttling to the hospital in Boston to join his youngest.

A Crucial Forty-Eight Hours

The drama to save Patrick’s life grabbed the world’s attention. As the Globe’s Gloria Negri put it, “He is only 4 pounds 10½ ounces, but Wednesday he held the heartstrings of the world in his little red fists.” In Paris, France-Soir ran a seven-column front page headline: “Anguish of Kennedys.” In Frankfurt, Germany, the front page of Abendpost declared: “A son for the Kennedys—but the baby is sick,” while newspapers in Soviet-occupied East Berlin ignored the story. The Daily Express in London cried in a two-inch headline: Jackie’s Boy Ill.” Some of the foreign papers offered advice and background on lung disease in premature infants. The Le Monde in Paris sympathized with Jackie whose private maternal tribulations had become public conversation. “The White House must be a glass house,” the paper said, adding: Jackie “must account to the Nation in the same way her husband did recently to a news conference about a blemish on his cheek.” The Parisians adored Jackie. In its reporting, Paris Jour offered a brief biography of the First Lady, noting she had “the prettiest smile in the United States.” And the baby, according to the Globe’s Negri, inspired fervent meditation: “He caused some people who seldom pray to ask the Lord to be good to this little fellow who had just arrived through His grace.”

Before heading to Boston, JFK went back to the hospital at Otis and sat for a while with Jackie, who was in a semi-wakeful state. By now, the Kennedys’ private nurse Louella Hennessey who had helped Jackie through John Jr.’s early days was at her side, offering comfort to both mother and father. Outside the room, the President told agent Hill to make sure Jackie got everything she needed and to keep him informed.

Then he was off to see his ailing son. His jet touched down at Logan airport at 9:02 p.m. and taxied to a guarded American Airlines hangar. The President was the first to emerge from the plane, looking somber as he came down the ramp and stopping to shake hands with a police lieutenant. There was no fanfare for this arrival, no welcoming committee, no gawking crowd. Only a few news photographers, their flashbulbs popping as the President strode toward the car of Boston Police Commander Edmund McNamara. He climbed in and the motorcade sped out of the airport. Lights flashing and sirens wailing the procession raced through the Sumner Tunnel, which had been cleared of all traffic, and streaked up Storrow Drive. Outside the hospital several hundred Bostonians watched as the President emerged, head bowed. Someone shouted out in a strong voice: “Good luck!” and the President looked up toward the sound then disappeared inside.

As soon as word had reached Children’s Medical Center that the President’s son was on his way from Cape Cod, the staff had sprung into action. Over its 103-year history, Children’s had become a world famous institution known for its cool efficiency and top-flight care. Just a month earlier, doctors had performed open-heart surgery on a seven-day old infant who was now thriving. In 1960, doctors there replaced all the blood in a hemophiliac baby, the first time such a treatment had been tried.

The President went up to the fifth floor of Farley Building. As he made his way along the corridor to see Patrick in room 2534, three children in pajamas crouched in a doorway watching him go by. After looking in on his son, Kennedy conferred with his doctors. There were at least half-dozen physicians applying the latest knowledge in premature infant care. They were acutely aware that hyaline membrane disease was the No. 1 killer of babies born before full term, responsible at the time for 25,000 deaths a year. Premature babies have difficulty breathing because they do not have enough of a substance called surfactant in their lungs to help the air sacs expand and stay open. As a result, an insufficient amount of oxygen gets into the bloodstream, possibly damaging the brain and other tissues. Treatment options were minimal—mostly just a heat-controlled incubator and lots of attention. The critical period was the first forty-eight hours of life—if the baby could struggle his way through that delicate time, odds were better he’d survive, but were still only about forty to fifty percent. Had Patrick been born in 2013, he’d have had the benefit of ventilators and neonatal intensive care units and a ninety-five percent likelihood of surviving.

The President, confident his boy was in excellent hands, left the hospital for the Ritz Carlton to get some rest. As his motorcade came to the corner of Huntington and Massachusetts, his car slowed to a stop and the president leaned out the window to buy a newspaper from a surprised vendor.

Shortly after 10 p.m., press secretary Salinger met reporters at the Statler Hotel, announcing that the baby would stay at Boston Medical Center at least four days. Asked if the baby was on the danger list, Salinger replied: “I would not say that.” A reporter persisted: “Would anybody else?” And Salinger parried back: “Well, nobody that I talked to has.” He stressed again that Patrick’s condition was “not uncommon in premature babies.”

Evelyn Lincoln, who was traveling with Kennedy, had left the White House on such short notice in the early afternoon of this long day that she quickly scooped up all the papers on her desk to take along. Later she found she was inadvertently carrying around a large photograph of President Kennedy that was awaiting an autograph. The photo heartened her and kept her optimistic about little Patrick’s future, as she told Globe’s Mary McGrory: “Oh, he’s a Kennedy, he’ll pull through.” And on the Globe’s front page the next day was the cheering headline: “He’s a Kennedy—He’ll Make It.”

Thursday, August 8, 1963

The Kennedys’ private distress played out in front of a well-meaning but prying public. Baby Patrick was now Boston’s baby. The Boston Globe began referring to the infant not as Patrick but as Pat. A piece profiling the doctors attending to the young patient carried the headline: “They’re on Pat’s Medical Team.”

At 8:10 in the morning, the President conferred with Special Counsel Ted Sorensen on the test-ban treaty then was on his way back to the hospital. His siren-screeching police motorcade sped through the streets followed by a bus full of the White House press corps. Traffic cops at every intersection cleared the roadway, and at 9:54 the President pulled up at Children’s Medical Center. A crowd awaited him in the sticky, overcast morning. “They greeted him ghoulishly with applause and cheers,” wrote Mary McGrory. “If they honored his anguish, they gave no sign.” A large elderly woman who had arrived to drive a friend home—a friend whose son was in the hospital with meningitis—stood behind a rope keeping the public back in the lobby. She was aghast at the crowd cheering outside. “He has troubles enough, God knows, without them gawking at him,” she said. “You would think that they would leave him alone at a time like this.”

As the President rushed through the corridors to see his son, a tearful mother asked if he would visit any of the little patients in the hospital. When she was told that the condition of the President’s son was life-threatening, she replied: “My son’s is too. He’s got leukemia and he’s asking for him. My son’s had seven years, his had two days, how do you choose?”

After looking in on Patrick, the President conferred again with his doctors. Salinger, meeting with reporters, characterized the baby’s condition as “still serious.” That language took reporters by surprise—and seemed ominous—because Salinger hadn’t yet used the word “serious” in describing the boy’s health.

The President left the hospital to the cheers of five hundred well-wishers and offered a restrained smile in acknowledgment. Patrick’s fate had turned into a waiting game. If his still-developing lungs could hold on, he had a chance of survival. He simply had to tough his way through it—the fight was truly a matter of grit and luck.

JFK’s motorcade loaded with White House staff streaked through the streets of Boston again to the Fens Stadium in Back Bay where three helicopters waited. Kennedy, Press Secretary Salinger, Air Force Brig. Gen. Charles McHugh, and private secretary Evelyn Lincoln climbed aboard one and took off. Secret Service agents followed in a second helicopter. By 10:44 a.m., the President was on the ground at Otis Air Force Base and heading to Jackie’s room. He visited with her for more than an hour and emerged smiling a little before noon. He helicoptered to the rented house on Squaw Island for lunch with Caroline and John-John as Salinger told reporters that the President would be back at the hospital to see Jackie at 4 p.m. then head to Boston at 6 p.m. to check in on little Patrick.

But after less than an hour with his children, the President’s plans suddenly changed. Doctors at Children’s notified him that Patrick’s condition had worsened, and they were considering extreme measures to save his life. At 1:14 p.m. Salinger made a surprise appearance at the press headquarters on Squaw Island for a grim, terse announcement: “After consulting with the doctors, the President is returning to Boston immediately.” The newsmen rushed to the telephones.

While the White House staff hurried preparations for the return trip, word was sent to Jackie’s press secretary Pam Turnure that the First Lady should not be informed of the seriousness of the situation. She was gaining her strength slowly and the President and her doctors wanted her to rest. She had been given another transfusion of a quart of blood on Wednesday and on Thursday afternoon as the President was racing back to Boston she managed to take several brief naps. Dr. Walsh was fielding her calls and keeping in touch with Children’s Medical Center and with the President.

By 2:15 JFK’s helicopter touched down at Fens Stadium again, having lifted off from there just four hours earlier. He and Jackie’s mother, Janet Lee Bouvier Auchincloss, who had been visiting her daughter on Cape Cod, climbed into a waiting police cruiser. Ten minutes later the President passed a gauntlet of spectators and entered the hospital to applause. A teenager in the crowd turned to a companion and said: “I didn’t know he was so light of hair.”

As the President made his rounds, visiting Patrick and conferring with doctors, patients and their parents were kept out of the way, often confined to roped-off areas. One man complained bitterly when he was prevented from getting to his son’s room. “I was for him last time,” he said of Kennedy. “But I’ll be against him next time.” Realizing how uncharitable that sounded, the man corrected himself. “No, I didn’t mean that at all,” he said apologetically. “I know how he must feel at a time like that.” About an hour later, the President was seen stepping from an elevator with his mother-in-law and passing through a set of glass doors into a garden. A girl in a wheelchair was disappointed the President didn’t stop to greet her. “You mustn’t blame him,” her mother consoled her, “he’s worried about his son, you know.”

Downstairs in the hospital gift shop children lined up to buy get-well cards for little Patrick. One card, a best seller costing a nickel, read: “This comes with more wishes/Than any words can tell/That you are feeling better/And soon completely well.” For a dime, kids could buy a larger card that depicted a child with an uncanny resemblance to Caroline pushing her baby brother in a carriage.

JFK left the hospital for the Ritz Carlton at about 4 p.m. and on his way through the lobby stopped at the newsstand to buy magazines and newspapers from a star-struck vendor named Eva Needle. As the President began to pay for Esquire, Fortune, Holiday and Town and Country—and four newspapers—Needle grandly declared: “It’s on the house, Mr. President.” She quickly added that she wished him and his family all the best.

Doctors at Children’s, meanwhile, were preparing for a last-ditch effort to save the fragile child. To force oxygen into Patrick’s lungs, it was decided to place him in a hyperbaric chamber—a steel device thirty-one feet long and eight feet in diameter that Salinger referred to as the first of its kind in the United States. The press secretary described it as similar to a submarine with air vents and pressurized doors and a window to see the patient inside. Lawrence Altman, a physician who writes for The New York Times, reported in 2013 that the device had been used to boost oxygen levels in babies born with heart defects and had been tried unsuccessfully on premature infants two or three times. “Lacking anything else to offer Patrick,” Altman wrote, “the team thought it was worth the medical equivalent of a Hail Mary pass.”

Patrick was placed in the chamber at 4:41 p.m. Flooding his lungs with oxygen appeared to help him, and the President received word that the child was responding favorably. In an effort to keep Jackie’s spirits up, Kennedy phoned her to report that Patrick’s condition had slightly improved. The good news, however, only alerted Jackie to the fact that the baby’s condition had worsened so much that JFK had sped back to Boston that afternoon instead of visiting her again as planned. At first, she was alarmed. But the “reassurance [the President] gave her brought a glow to her face,” The Washington Post reported. To help soothe Jackie, her mother flew back to Cape Cod a little after five o’clock. As she was about to enter her daughter’s room at the base hospital, a reporter asked about the baby. “He’s doing very well,” she replied. The newsman saw through the forced optimism, writing: “Although maintaining her poise, Mrs. Auchincloss appeared somewhat distressed.”

JFK rushed to the hospital for the third time on this one day to see his son’s improvement for himself. At the urging of Jackie’s sister, Lee Radziwill, the President had launched the Secret Service in search of Dr. Samuel C. Levine, a New York specialist who successfully attended to Radziwill’s premature daughter born in 1960. The agents tracked down Levine while he walked through Central Park and rushed him to Boston “in record time,” as one report put it, arriving shortly after five o’clock. At 6:30 p.m., Press Secretary Salinger spoke to reporters: “In the late afternoon,” he announced, “there was a halt in the downward trend in the baby’s condition.” He described the hyperbaric chamber that was now assisting Patrick in his breathing. “His respiration rate has gone down, he is breathing with less effort, and the laboratory tests taken since he was placed in the chamber show improvement.”

Reassured for the moment, President Kennedy left the hospital at about 6:40, returning to the Ritz Carlton for dinner served in his suite. He placed another call to Jackie to give her the latest news of the baby’s progress. His brother Robert Kennedy, and close friend and advisor Dave Powers, arrived from Washington a little after 8 p.m. and hurried to the hospital, where the President went again for his fourth visit of the day to look in on Patrick. Kennedy decided he wanted to be near his son through the night so Powers bunked with him in a vacant fourth floor room, sleeping on a cot beside the President’s bed. At 11:30 p.m. Salinger announced the hospital sleepover, telling reporters that the President would confer with doctors the following morning at 8 a.m. He also informed the crowd of stubborn spectators outside the hospital that they would not see President again tonight. Unhappy at their lost opportunity, the gawkers groaned.

Friday, August 9, 1963

President Kennedy mounts the steps of Otis Air Force Base Hospital on Cape Cod on August 9, 1963, on his way to see Jackie after the death of their newborn son Patrick. (Associated Press Photo)

Agent Hill hadn’t left the hospital at Otis Air Force Base since the First Lady had arrived for her emergency Caesarean on Wednesday. So he took over a bedroom in the presidential suite to get some rest and, before turning in late Thursday, he asked Tommy Wells of the children’s detail to stand outside Jackie’s door in case she needed anything during the night. It was an uneasy night for the First Lady. Wells watched as the night duty nurse went in and out of the room again and again. “Each time she came out,” Wells told agent Hill, “I’d ask, ‘How is she doing?’ And every time the answer was the same. She’d say, ‘Mrs. Kennedy is really having a tough time tonight. She’s been so restless all night, just tossing and turning. She just can’t seem to get to sleep.”

In Boston, Jackie’s baby was still struggling to breathe inside the hyperbaric oxygen chamber, and throughout the night doctors watched helplessly as little Pat’s condition deteriorated. The day-and-a-half old infant fought to get enough oxygen into his lungs and nourish the rest of his body but he was losing the battle. His condition turned critical.

At 2 a.m. Agent Behn awakened Dave Powers, and Powers roused the President. A call was made to the President’s brother, U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy, who was at a nearby hotel. As Robert Kennedy rushed to the hospital, the President went down the corridor filled with ailing children on the way to see his own distressed newborn. While waiting for\the elevator he paced restlessly, and his eye wandered into a nearby room, falling on a small child who had been badly burned. JFK summoned the night nurse and asked about the child and the parents. He wanted to know how the accident happened. And how often did the mother visit the hospital? When he learned the mother came every day, the President asked the nurse, “Could you tell me the mother’s name?” Taking a slip of paper and a pen from Powers he scrawled a note of sympathy to the mother. “There he was, with his own baby dying downstairs,” Powers said, “but he had to take the time to write a note to that poor woman, asking her to keep her courage up.”

His son had been moved into the basement into a special room equipped for the hyperbaric chamber. The President and Powers were kept outside the room, peering in through a small window in the door. JFK gazed in at the jarring sight inside—his tiny son enclosed in the monstrous steel chamber, with doctors in pressurized body suits and helmets at work tending to him. Robert found his brother in the basement and joined in the vigil. For nearly two hours the father paced back and forth, stopping to look into the room. At about 4 a.m., the doctors were forced to admit that all their training and technology could not stop the inevitable. Little Patrick Bouvier Kennedy had scarcely any life left. The infant was removed from the chamber and placed in his father’s arms, still alive. With Powers and Robert beside him, Kennedy cradled his son as the frail newborn took his last labored breaths. He had lived for thirty nine hours and twelve minutes until finally his heart gave up. “He put up quite a fight,” the President said softly. “He was a beautiful baby.”

Patrick died at 4:04 a.m.

At the hospital on Cape Cod, Jackie had been restless most of the night. Then, just about 4 a.m., the nurse came out of her room and told agent Wells, “She’s finally gone to sleep. Just now. She just fell asleep.”

The President made his way back up to his room on the fourth floor at Children’s and asked Powers to go phone his brother Ted. JFK sat on the edge of the bed as Powers closed the door. From outside the room Powers heard what few ever heard. A Kennedy weeping. The President had given him the task of tracking down Ted, Powers said, because “he didn’t want anybody to see him crying.”

Salinger announced the sad news at 4:26 a.m. He went in front of the television cameras and said in a choking voice: “Patrick Kennedy died at 4:04 a.m.” Groans arose from the newsmen. “The struggle of the baby boy to keep breathing was too much for his heart,” the press secretary continued. “The President, his brother the Attorney General, and the President’s friend, Dave Powers, were with the baby when he died.”

A reporter asked the pressing question: “Has Mrs. Kennedy been notified?”

“Not yet,” Salinger replied, shaking his head.

Jackie, having finally fallen into a slumber, was visited by her obstetrician Dr. John Walsh shortly after she awoke at 6:25 a.m. He had the dreadful task of delivering the news. “She was devastated,” Agent Hill recalled. “It was heartbreaking to see her in such emotional pain … There was nothing I could do, nothing anyone could do to protect her from the pain.” Dr. Walsh sedated her and, under the influence of the medication, Jackie fell back asleep.

As the President began organizing the baby’s mass and funeral, he felt an urgent need to be with Jackie. Patrick had in some subtle way tied a bond between JFK and Jackie that nothing else had ever been capable of doing. He recognized the profound sadness Patrick’s loss was going to have on her and wanted in whatever way was within his power to usher her through it. As Evelyn Lincoln put it, “The President’s only concern at this time was the welfare of Mrs. Kennedy.”

By 9:33 a.m., racing about on less than four hours sleep, the President arrived at Otis Air Force Base. Flags were flying at half-staff. He entered the squat, green-roofed hospital and stayed with Jackie for more than two hours. As he told his friend Paul Fay, “It is so hard for Jackie. She wanted to have another child. Then after all the difficulties she has in bearing a child, to lose him is doubly hard.”

JFK then went to see his children on Squaw Island. Their nanny Maud Shaw recalled how difficult it was for the President to tell Caroline and John-John that their new baby brother “was not coming home—that he had been sick and he had gone to heaven.” John-John, not quite 3-years old, was too young to fully take it in but Caroline, at nearly 6, “was old enough then to understand [and] … was very concerned about it all.” The President’s handling of the delicate information changed Shaw’s view of the man. “I saw a part of the President I had not seen before,” she said in an oral interview in 1965. “I had always thought him a very good father but my opinion since then [was] that he should have had a large family, that he proved himself a wonderful father.” The President returned to Jackie’s side again in the afternoon, staying with her for another hour and twenty minutes. He went back a third time in the evening with his brother Robert.

Kennedy family members were streaming toward Cape Cod. His brother Ted landed in the afternoon, while Jackie’s sister Lee Radziwill was en route from Athens. Jackie’s mother Janet Lee Bouvier Auchincloss was already there. The President phoned his father, Joseph at the nearby family compound and reached his mother Rose in Paris and dissuaded her from rushing home. The following day, the family was to head to Brighton, Massachusetts, for a Mass then to Brookline for the baby’s burial. Several other relatives of the President were expected to attend including his sisters and their husbands, and the wives of his brothers. It was to be a private ceremony for family only. Jackie, still not well enough to travel, would stay behind at the hospital on Cape Cod. And Caroline and John-John would remain under the care of nanny Maud Shaw at Brambletyde on Squaw Island.

As John and Jackie grieved, the public obsessively watched. The sympathy was heartfelt and instinctive but it also shined an inescapable spotlight on the father and mother at a time of their deepest sorrow. As The New York Times opined: “Theirs is the added burden of having no privacy in their grief, for they must endure their family tragedy before the eyes of all the world.”

Expressions of sorrow poured in from every corner of the globe: from Pope Paul VI, British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, Canadian Prime Minister Lester Pearson, West German President Heinrich Luebke, French President Charles de Gaulle and Premier Georges Pompidou, Austrian President Adolf Schaerf and the Australian Governor General Lord de L’Isle. But the word from Moscow was muted. Moscow Radio reported the death without comment. Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, however, phoned his condolences to Secretary of State Dean Rusk who was in Moscow for the signing of the nuclear test-ban treaty. On the floor of the U.S. Senate, which only two days earlier had cheered and applauded Patrick’s birth, Democratic Leader Mike Mansfield expressed a “deep sense of sadness.” And the President of Italy, Antonio Segni, rushed a note to President Kennedy saying that it greatly saddened him to know “that the happiness of yourself and Mrs. Kennedy was so brief.” The world’s newspapers flashed page one headlines. In London, the Evening News declared: “Jackie’s Baby Dies.” In Rome’s Paese Sera a five column banner headline read: “The Third Child of Kennedy is Dead.”

Saturday, August 10

The Associated Press did its historical research and dug up the comfortless fact that four other Presidents had suffered the loss of a child while in office: John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Calvin Coolidge. All of the children were much older than the infant Patrick but none was grieved over any less. Calvin Coolidge’s 16-year-old son, also named Calvin, died of blood poisoning in 1924. “When he went,” Coolidge wrote in his autobiography, “the power and the glory of the Presidency went with him.”

The private mass for Patrick was held at 10 a.m. in the small chapel at the residence of Richard Cardinal Cushing, a longtime Kennedy family friend and religious advisor. The press published the family’s wishes for the day, a plea for privacy: “The public has been asked to stay away this morning and leave the President and his family to themselves,” the Globe wrote. The chapel, which could hold only about sixteen worshippers, stood amid the abundant flowers and trees on the grounds of St. John’s Seminary at Commonwealth Avenue and Lake Street in Brighton. Several Japanese crabapple trees greeted visitors just outside, and from inside the foyer a window looked out on two slender pines. A pair of stained-glass windows captured blue light, and the marble floor was covered in deep red carpeting.

Cardinal Cushing had a great love for the Kennedys—he had married them and baptized their children. He also was a ready ear for the President whenever he had a question concerning the Church. “People who know the cardinal know that he has sound judgment politically,” recalled Francis X. Morrissey, a savvy political friend of the Kennedys. Morrissey arranged the mass and funeral and was with Cardinal Cushing as he decorated the altar himself and found a beautiful white little gown for the baby. Morrissey was one of two non-family members to attend to services; the other was Cardinal Spellman, the Archbishop of New York.

The Kennedy mourners—twelve family members in all—arrived at Cardinal Cushing’s residence in five black limousines. Inside the chapel little Patrick lay in his white gown in a small, white casket covered, at the request of his mother, in a blanket of white flowers. Once the Kennedys were assembled, a cross-bearer entered the chapel followed by Cardinal Cushing who sprinkled the baby’s casket with holy water, offering the words: “Blessed be the name of the Lord, now and forever.”

The Cardinal—dressed in white—celebrated a Mass of the Angels, a special requiem for children. His tone was one of praise and joy and optimism. Dying so young, Patrick was deemed to have a sinless soul and to have been welcomed immediately into the presence of God and to the company of his angels. The Mass lasted about a half hour, concluding with a prayer of reassurance: “Almighty and most loving God, for no merits of their own, as soon as they leave this world, You give everlasting life to all little children reborn in the font of baptism, as we believe You have given it today to the soul of this little child.” Francis Morrissey praised the Cardinal for delivering a touching sermon that conveyed an understanding of the tragedy and appreciation of what the loss of a child means to a mother. “It was a beautiful day,” Morrissey said, commenting on the bright sun and the Cardinal’s white vestments and the baby’s white gown. And it was one of the few times, he’d seen JFK cry.

The President was the last one to leave the chapel. Overwhelmed with grief, he shed “copious tears,” Cardinal Cushing remembered later. But JFK was in no hurry to go. As the others filed out he stayed beside the casket in its white marble case. “He literally put his arms around that casket” like he was going to carry it out, the Cardinal recounted in an oral history. “I said, ‘Come on, Jack. Let’s go. God is good.’”

The procession then moved to the Kennedy family plot in Holyhood Cemetery in Brookline. The gathering of spectators along the route was tiny and respectful, apparently heeding the family’s wishes for privacy. There was a hush on the streets—no one clapped or moved.

Patriarch Joseph Kennedy had bought the plot at Holyhood fifteen years earlier and on it erected a twenty-ton marker of Vermont granite bearing a one-word inscription: Kennedy. The plot was large enough for twenty four graves but until this day no Kennedy had been laid to rest there. The mourners gathered on a slight knoll beneath a canvas canopy. A fresh grave about four feet long and two feet wide waited nearby at the base of a tree-shaded slope. Cardinal Cushing offered prayers for Patrick and for the family: “Grant that they may not languish in fruitless and unavailing grief, nor sorrow as those who have no hope, but through their tears look meekly up to You, the God of all consolation.” The boy’s white coffin was lowered into the grave. Going into the earth with him was his father’s gold Saint Christopher’s Medal, a wedding gift from Jackie which JFK had worn until he placed it into his son’s coffin. As the baby’s casket went down, President Kennedy laid his fingers on it and whispered a farewell.

The funeral party, exhausted and solemn, rode back to St. John’s Seminary where waiting helicopters ferried everyone to Cape Cod. The President’s friend, Paul Fay, recalled a few years later that Kennedy spoke to him about Patrick only once. After describing the hardship for Jackie, his voice trailed off, as if he were looking into an imagined future with an expanded family—his wife, his son John, his daughter Caroline, whom he called Buttons, and Patrick. “It has been so much fun with ‘Buttons’ and John,” he told Fay with subtle emotion, “it would have been nice to have another son.” The President’s private secretary sensed that Kennedy wished most of all that he’d been able to see his son through the crisis. If only he’d been able to give Patrick the chance to embrace life. Evelyn described what she felt most saddened the President: “It wasn’t so much grief for his own son, but for a potential that would never be realized.”

Caroline’s Bouquet for Jackie

President Kennedy with daughter Caroline and Jackie aboard the presidential yacht Honey Fitz off the coast of Hyannis Port about two weeks after the loss of Patrick. (Cecil Stoughton. White House Photographs. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston)

On doctor’s orders Jackie was to have no visitors during the hours of the mass and burial. She sobbed and prayed silently on her own in her hospital room, with Dr. Walsh at her side. When her husband came to see her again, he was not the John Kennedy of his earlier years—the cool stoic who shied away from tough emotions. He had had a slow awakening. This was not the young JFK who in 1956 cruised the Mediterranean while his wife anguished at home over their stillborn daughter. He had separated himself from that trauma and scarcely absorbed it. Since then he’d discovered paternal devotion—he had his head turned by Buttons and John-John, and he had instinctively raced to Jackie at his first son’s birth. And then came a potent awakening: he had held his dying second son in his arms. The needs of those closest to him were palpable. Patrick was the final building block in John F. Kennedy’s transformation. Everybody close to the President and the First Lady noticed the change in him and in their affection for each other. “The death of the infant was one of the hardest moments in the lives of both President and Mrs. Kennedy,” Salinger recalled. “The White House had brought about a closeness in their relationship, a wider understanding of one another. The death of their baby brought them even closer.”

JFK went up the steps of the hospital at 11:38 a.m. with Jackie’s sister Lee Radziwell who had flown in from Greece the day before. He entered Jackie’s room alone and recounted for her the beauty of the Mass and the loveliness of the white flowers she wanted covering the coffin. And they cried together. Dr. Walsh ordered a “very quiet day” for his patient. Jackie was recovering well from her Caesarean section and was on a mostly fluid diet except for some toast. She was able to sit up in bed but was not yet walking.

In the swirl of the birth and its aftermath, Jackie hadn’t seen her children since Wednesday when she had taken Caroline to her riding lesson. On Sunday morning at 11:15 Caroline, a few months shy of six, walked into the hospital hand in hand with her dad. She carried a bouquet of trumpet flowers, black-eyed Susans and blue larkspur she had picked herself. She wore a beach shift and blue topsiders, and a short blonde ponytail bounced on the back of her head. As she neared the hospital, Caroline pressed her face against her dad’s hand and kissed it, an image caught by a photographer.

Her mother left her hospital bed for the first time and walked into a nearby lounge where she visited with her daughter and husband for about an hour. Assistant White House press secretary Andrew Hatcher said Mrs. Kennedy was “greatly cheered” by the visit. Earlier the President had attended Sunday Mass at St. Francis Xavier Church in Hyannis Port with his friend and aide Dave Powers, the crowd outside applauding him as he entered and as he departed.

JFK returned to the hospital in the early evening, this time hand-in-hand with John-John who was nearly three and was heard asking, “Where is mummy?” An hour and a half later, the President and his son came out of the hospital. The boy eyed the news photographers and said: “I betcha they’re taking our picture.”

And so it went. The President visited as often as he could but he also had to attend to the affairs of state. He stayed over Sunday night and took both children together to see their mother on Monday morning, only after Dr. Walsh gave the all clear for the dual visit. JFK spent another half hour with Jackie in the afternoon before flying back to Washington. He returned to the Cape on Tuesday expecting Jackie to be released from the hospital on Wednesday, her condition now being described as excellent. She had been walking in the suite every day, and was eager to be home with Caroline and John-John.

The President, fearing she might slip into a depression, worked hard to keep her spirits up. He arrived on Tuesday with a gift for her: a black and white male cocker spaniel puppy nine weeks old, which she “just adored.” The puppy had been sent to the President by his cousins in County Wexford, Ireland, whom he’d visited on his European jaunt in June. The unnamed pup was being temporarily called No. 8, because the Kennedy kids already had seven dogs.

At last, one week after giving birth, Jackie left the hospital at eleven in the morning in an Oleg Cassini pink shift and white, low-heeled pumps, with her husband at her side. JFK held her hand as she negotiated two small steps then the couple walked hand-in-hand several feet to a black limousine with Jackie smiling and cameras clicking. The President helped her get settled in her seat then went around and climbed in beside her. His new tenderness toward Jackie was obvious to all. “After the death of Patrick, the other agents and I noticed a distinctly closer relationship, openly expressed, between the president and Mrs. Kennedy,” agent Clint Hill recalled. “I first observed it in the hospital suite at Otis Air Force Base but it became publicly visible when Mrs. Kennedy was released from the hospital.” A telltale clue, Hill said, was that the President and First Lady emerged holding hands. “It was a small gesture, but quite significant to those of us who were around them all the time. Prior to this, they were much more restrained and less willing to express their close, loving relationship while out in public. The loss of Patrick seemed to be the catalyst to change all that.”

Jackie and the President went by helicopter to the house on Squaw Island. As she came out of the aircraft, Jack was beside her, with his arm around her waist, stabilizing her, the two moving slowly stair by stair with synchronous steps. Though Jackie was making a “very satisfactory recovery,” Dr. Walsh ordered her to undertake only limited activity and to abandon her official schedule through the rest of the year. That meant she was to stay away from the state dinner for the King and Queen of Afghanistan on September 5, and no visiting with Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia on Oct. 1. Throughout her convalescence, the First Lady was to be under the watchful eye of Louella Hennessey, the Kennedys’ private nurse. Before leaving the hospital, Jackie thanked the staff profusely and told them she hoped to be back next year to give birth again.

The President wasn’t apart from Jackie now for more than a day or two at a time. If he returned to Washington on Monday, he was back at midweek, then again by Friday for the weekend. On his trips back to the White House, the President apparently was further curbing his womanizing. On one visit while Jackie was still in the hospital, he invited the intern Mimi Beardsley up to the residence. On this night, sex wasn’t his ambition, but rather simple companionship. The President hated to be alone, and Beardsley was adoring, uncomplicated company for a man who’d lately had too much complication. JFK and the intern sat outside on the balcony as he went through a stack of condolence letters, reading them aloud to her. He wrote notes on some, “tears rolling down his cheeks,” Mimi recalled. “But mostly he just read them and cried.” Looking back from a distance of fifty years, the one-time intern noticed a measurable change in the President after Patrick’s death. The loss, she wrote in her memoir, “must have filled him not only with grief but with an aggrieved sense of responsibility to his wife and family. Even an irrepressible Don Juan like him might think it unseemly to continue his philandering ways when his family needed him so much.” By August 1963, Beardsley was engaged to be married, which was another factor she believed tamed the President’s wanton passion for her. “Whatever the reason,” she said, “it’s clear to me that he was obeying some private code that trumped his reckless desire for sex—at least with me.”

The newspapers took notice of how the President comported himself during the crisis. While the public had perceived a coolness to his charm, a detachment that suggested insensitivity, now observers commented on his emotional engagement and his consideration of his wife’s sorrow. A Boston Globe commentator sensed “a widespread reappraisal of his character … The image is of a man more warm-hearted, more considerate, more kind.” The absence of privacy during his grief ended up enhancing the public’s respect for the president as husband and father. His shuttling between Otis Air Base and Children’s Medical Center, arranging the Mass and burial, attending to his children blunted the “stories of the formidable Kennedy family reputation for ruthlessness, all-conquering efficiency and ambition.” The photographic images resulting from the tragic episode left a lasting impression. “It will be a long time,” the Globe wrote, “before any photographer snaps a better picture than the one showing [Caroline] with her do-it-yourself bouquet kissing her father’s hand as the two walk into the hospital for [her] first visit with her mother since the untimely death of her younger brother.”

‘He Seems So Alone Here’

Pushinka with her four puppies—Streaker, Butterfly, White Tips, and Blackie—in June 1963. About a week after Patrick’s death, the Kennedys announced they planned to give away two of the puppies, known as pupniks, to children selected from among thousands who had written to the White House asking for them. (Cecil Stoughton. White House Photographs. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston)

Surrounded by her husband, kids and sister Lee Radziwill, Jackie was recovering smoothly at Brambletyde and was “feeling great.” She spent the time reading, painting, looking over her mail and sitting in the sunshine. Without leaving the house, she undertook modest public efforts. After announcing in early August that the family was not going to give away any of the pupniks born to the white Soviet space mongrel, despite thousands of letters, Jackie now changed course. She decided to give away two of the four puppies. Caroline and John-John had named the four Butterfly, Streaker, Blackie and White Tips, and in response to the five thousand letters asking for a White House pupnik Jackie had ten requests selected at random for her consideration.

A ten-year-old girl in Westchester, Illinois, Karen House was overjoyed to learn she was to receive Butterfly, a dark brown female pup with white markings on her paws, and a nine-year-old boy in Columbia, Missouri, earned the male puppy Streaker for his poignant letter, written in pencil, to the First Lady. “Dear Mrs. Kennedy,” Mark Bruce wrote, “On June 8, I was playing baseball. I was batting. Our dog Midget got behind me when swinging the bat and I accidentally hit her in the head. She died almost immediately.” He revealed that he was a member of his local 4-H youth group and Midget was his project in dog care. “If you would let me have one of the pups I could continue in 4-H.” The pupniks, which had been on Cape Cod, flew back to Washington aboard Air Force One, and then were shipped at First Family expense to the children, along with a dossier describing their habits and food preferences. The two other pups were given to family friends. And Caroline—how was she about losing all four? She still had five dogs to keep her busy. Salinger assuaged any concerns: “She’s fine—not disturbed.”

Gradually life got back to normal—as much as the Kennedy clan’s or any President’s life could. World affairs never rested. The deteriorating situation in Vietnam absorbed JKF’s attention. The government of Diem in the South was losing the backing of the people, and without popular support, Kennedy believed, it could not fight off the communist north. And there were concerns at home: black protests in the streets of America. Dealing with a combustible Southeast Asia and with a tinderbox of civil rights unrest, the President moved between Washington and the Cape, running the U.S. government from both locations.

Still consumed by sorrow, Jackie immersed herself in distractions: she got back on the water, taking cruises aboard the yacht Honey Fitz, and focused on the children. She and JFK, now tied together by a shared grief, drew on each other for solace. “The loss of Patrick affected the President and Jackie more deeply than anybody except their closest friends realized,” recalled Kennedy’s buddy Ken O’Donnell. Among their friends the First Couple were no longer embarrassed to show their affection for each other. Bill Walton, an artist and longtime friend who visited with them on Squaw Island, noticed the pair cocooning after Patrick’s death. “Jack and Jackie were very close,” he said. “She hung onto him and he held her in his arms—something nobody ever saw at any other time because they were very private people.”

Just over a month after Patrick’s death, Jackie was well enough to travel to Hammersmith Farm, her family’s estate in Newport, Rhode Island, to celebrate her and JFK’s tenth wedding anniversary. It was a very quiet affair with family and a few friends with swimming, boating, golfing and gift-giving. Jackie was already at Hammersmith when the President arrived from Washington with a couple of congressmen and Ben Bradlee. As the helicopter touched down on the lawn, Jackie was there to welcome her husband. Bradlee recalled the moment vividly as it was the first time he’d seen Jackie since little Patrick’s death. “She greeted JFK with by far the most affectionate embrace we had ever seen them give each other,” Bradlee remembered. “They are the most remote and independent people we know most of the time, and so when their emotions do surface it is especially moving.” Clint Hill, the First Lady’s Secret Service agent, recalled that Jackie appeared genuinely to enjoy the activities of the weekend—she was gradually surmounting her grief.

Her recovery was coming along so well that Jackie returned to Washington on September 25 for the start of Caroline’s schooling at the White House; Jackie had arranged classes for about twenty kids of administration employees. Though her initial plans were not to engage in official functions until after the New Year, Jackie made her first ceremonial public appearance on October 1. She and the President welcomed Emperor Haile Selassie at Union Station and they all rode in the motorcade to his lodging, Blair House, with Jackie and the Ethiopian leader speaking French together. Emperor Selassie presented the First Lady with a leopard-skin coat, hoping its quality would trump a similar gift she received two years earlier from Selassie’s enemy, the leader of Somalia. Quizzed on the difference between an Ethiopian leopard and a Somalian leopard, the emperor was diplomatic: “The Republic of Somalia and Ethiopia are in the same region of Africa and one can say there is no difference in the leopards.” Losing herself in the moment, Jackie modeled the full-length leopard skin under the gaze of admiring eyes.

That evening Jackie skipped the State Dinner and caught a plane to Athens to visit her sister Lee Radziwill who was spending the summer with the tycoon Aristotle Onassis. Jackie and Lee were to cruise the Greek islands on Onassis’s yacht. The President was wary of Onassis for his business practices and his affection for famous women. But, knowing Jackie needed a spirit-raising adventure, he agreed to the trip. While she was away he kept Caroline and John-John close by at the White House. The kids escorted dad from the living quarters to the Oval Office every morning before Caroline went off to her White House school. During the day John-John wandered in and out of the office, sometimes popping in on important meetings, and when no one was visiting he played on the rug by his father’s desk. During school recess, a throng of kids scampered about outside the office door.

On the weekends, JFK and the kids went off to Camp David, a favorite escape for the President. It had everything he wanted: terrific scenery, a heated swimming pool, horses, a three-hole golf course, and privacy. The President and his children explored the wooded paths, took a dip in the pool, and Caroline rode ponies while John-John attacked the jungle gym. “The affection between the President and his children is apparent to anyone who sees them together,” the Globe said.

Sorrow over little Patrick lingered and reared up in unexpected ways. One weekend in late October the President attended the Harvard-Columbia football game with his buddies Dave Powers and Ken O’Donnell. Near the end of the first half, he fell silent and seemed to be brooding. His son lay in the family plot not far away in Brookline. “I want to go to Patrick’s grave,” Kennedy said to O’Donnell, “and I want to go there alone, with nobody from the newspapers following me.” As the President slipped out of the stadium, reporters rushed to follow. O’Donnell, understanding the President’s need, ordered the Secret Service to enlist Boston Police to block the reporters’ cars in the parking. At the cemetery, the President had a moment with his son. After gazing at the headstone inscribed with just one word: Kennedy, he muttered to Powers and O’Donnell: “He seems so alone here.”

The President achieved a major victory—Senate approval of the test-ban treaty in late September. But in early November came the alarming news that the U.S. allies in South Vietnam, Ngo Dinh Diem, and his brother Nhu, were assassinated in a coup. Gen. Maxwell Taylor, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recalled that Kennedy “leaped to his feet and rushed from the room with a look of shock and dismay on his face which I had never seen before.” If conditions in Vietnam were vexing, at least life with Jackie was settling into a welcome harmony. More than they did in the past, JFK and Jackie dined alone at the White House, just the two of them, and they were looking forward to his next term. JFK was growing into his job as President and maturing as husband and father. Jackie was ready again to begin playing the role of beautiful political wife, helping his presidency and his coming campaign for re-election.

Happy to See His Baby Son

Jackie, pictured on August 20, 1963, still recovering from her emergency caesarean and death of her son Patrick. (Associated Press Photo)

At first Jackie was hesitant about accompanying her husband to Dallas in late November for what was being described as a political trip—the 1964 election was a year away and it was never too soon to begin campaigning. During dinner with the Bradlees in October, the discussion turned to Jackie’s trip to Greece and the high times she had with Onassis aboard his yacht. The press had played up the extravagance: a crew of sixty, lavish dinners, fancy dances. Bradlee sensed that Jackie was “a little remorseful about all the publicity.” And she admitted that JFK was being “really nice and understanding.” Hearing this, the President realized he could use “Jackie’s guilt feelings” to his advantage.

“Maybe now you’ll come with us to Texas next month,” he urged Jackie.

She wanted to be with him: “Sure I will, Jack.”

While Jackie lent both a glamorous sheen and a family-man aura to the image of the politicking President, Kennedy wanted her there for more than show. “There was a growing tenderness between them,” recalled Roswell Gilpatric, the deputy defense secretary. “I think their marriage was really beginning to work out at the end.” Now that Jackie was part of the entourage an adjustment in the planned traveling party had to be made. The President’s intern, Mimi Beardsley, had been asked to join the trip but the invitation was rescinded, the latest sign of Kennedy’s embrace of what was important to him. “I was a little disappointed that I’d been dropped from the roster,” Beardsley wrote in her memoir. “But I understood why: Mrs. Kennedy had decided to go to Dallas with her husband.”

The brevity of his presidency—and the power of his charm—has made John F. Kennedy’s life most ripe for speculation. What would a second term have brought? What would he have done about Vietnam? Civil rights? The Soviet Union? Conjecture also answers questions about his personal life. Did the tragedies of his lost babies, particularly Patrick, and the suffering of his wife change him? Had he become a wiser man before his death? He gave every impression that he was evolving into a compassionate family man. Of course, it’s impossible to know what might have come if he hadn’t climbed into the open limousine with Jackie for a ride through Dealey Plaza. But in a sad way it seems right—given their tenderness with each other toward the end—that he died with Jackie at his side.

Certainly John F. Kennedy was an incomplete man. He was a complex character given to egregious self-interest but also known for strokes of unexpected empathy. He was a man of sharp intellect and self-awareness and a significant capacity for emotional growth and maturity. His actions after the birth of his children through the death of Patrick seemed less the work of a politician burnishing an image than a husband and father obeying the dictates of his heart and hoping to be well-remembered by his loved ones. With his panoply of illnesses, Kennedy had a sense he would die young and it is not a stretch to say that he realized he didn’t have a lot of time to stamp his loving imprint on the people who mattered most to him.

His daughter Caroline passed her sixth birthday just days after the assassination without her dad to call her Buttons. Thanksgiving also raced up upon the family, and Jackie, seeking some semblance of normalcy, took the kids to Hyannis Port for a traditional celebration with the Kennedy clan. Under a dull sky, the day followed the pattern of past years, though nothing was the same now. The family gathered at the home of the patriarch Joseph Kennedy, with the many kids having their dinner in the afternoon and the adults following with theirs in the evening.

The Kennedy nanny Maud Shaw sought to explain the death of their father to John-John and Caroline. She kept it simple and brief for the younger boy but Caroline—who “had been so dear to her father and so close to him”—was able to understand and take it in. She told Caroline that there had been an accident—her father had been shot and God had taken him to heaven because doctors couldn’t make him better. “She was terribly upset,” Shaw remembered. She told Caroline that her father had gone to be with Patrick and he was very happy to see his baby son. For the man who didn’t like to be alone, Shaw said, “Patrick would be company to him.” A little later, Caroline asked her nanny what her daddy was doing in heaven and Shaw explained to the child that God had made him “guardian angel for mommy and Caroline and John.” Caroline, Shaw recalled, was “quite reconciled that he is watching over her and her mother and her brother.”

President Kennedy was laid to rest alone in Arlington National Cemetery in a special burial plot on a grassy slope. Near the end of 1963, he was joined by his two infant children. In a quiet ceremony on the night of December 4, his daughter Arabella, stillborn in 1956, and his son Patrick, who struggled for life for 39 hours, were each reburied on either side of their father.

A Note on Sources

After fifty years, most of the Kennedy administration’s main figures and JFK’s friends and contemporary family members have passed on, so this short book is based partly on the memoirs and oral histories of some figures no longer with us and some still living. Particularly enlightening were Mimi Alford’s Once Upon a Secret: My Affair with President John F. Kennedy and Its Aftermath, Ben Bradlee’s Conversations with Kennedy, Paul B. Fay, Jr.’s The Pleasure of His Company, Clint Hill and Lisa McCubbin’s Mrs. Kennedy and Me, Evelyn Lincoln’s My Twelve Years with John F. Kennedy, Kenneth P. O’Donnell and David F. Powers’ “Johnny We Hardly Knew Ye,” and Pierre Salinger’s With Kennedy.

I have also drawn on the works of historians and biographers who have discussed the life of Patrick Bouvier Kennedy as part of their larger themes focusing on JFK and Jackie’s relationship or on JFK’s life or presidency. I’m grateful to those authors for conducting some fine primary research through interviews and archival digging. Particularly helpful were Christopher Andersen’s Jack and Jackie: Portrait of an American Marriage and These Few Precious Days: The Final Year of Jack with Jackie, Thurston Clarke’s JFK’s Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President, Robert Dallek’s Camelot’s Court: Inside the Kennedy White House, and An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963, Ralph G. Martin’s A Hero for Our Time, and Randy J. Taraborrelli’s Jackie, Ethel, Joan: Women of Camelot.

My goal here was a simple one: to give readers a sense of how the life of Patrick Bouvier Kennedy flickered like a brief, intense light and how he left a lasting impact on those who cherished him. Patrick’s impact on his mother and father has been explored by previous writers, though not with the context and granular detail as is provided here. My hope was to put readers in the moment, to offer a sense of what it might have been like to be engaged in this drama at the time it unfolded, to have lived through this heart-wrenching episode along with JFK and Jackie and the world. In order to do that, I have also relied on contemporary newspaper coverage of The Boston Globe, The Washington Post and The New York Times. The wonderful virtue of newspapers is that they give us history as it is being made.

I’m grateful to my Washington Post colleagues, Vince Bzdek, Wendy Chen, David Griffin, Molly Gannon, Kalea Clark, Marlon Correa, and Eddy Palanzo for their nonstop enthusiasm and their dedication and speed in getting the book published.

And a final word: my lasting gratitude, as always, to my wife Suzanne for her tireless assistance with this project.

Notes

Introduction—"He’s a Kennedy—He’ll Make It”

“Whole World Taken by Littlest Kennedy”: The Boston Globe, Aug. 8, 1963.

“He’s a Kennedy”: The Boston Globe, Aug. 8, 1963.

“beautifully formed”: The Boston Globe, “Baby Sped to Boston,” Aug. 8, 1963

“Capital’s Best Kept Secret”

For more on Jack and Jackie’s relationships, see Andersen, Christopher

“She said she was not”:Benjamin C. Bradlee, Conversations with Kennedy (New York: W.W. Norton, 1975), 165.

“Mrs. Kennedy Owned”: The Boston Globe, April 21, 1963.

“She’s going to keep her figure”: Bradlee, Conversations with Kennedy, 186.

“a prospective little bundle”: The Boston Globe, April 21, 1963.

“going to confine himself”: The Washington Post, Aug. 4, 1963.

“Come along, Charles”: The Boston Globe, May 26, 1963, 28.

“but no extra adjoining”: Ibid., June 2, 1963, A23.

“Mrs. Kennedy sees”: Ibid.

“With Babies it’s Hard to Be Sure About Anything”

Information on JFK Jr’s birth from The Boston Globe, “Kennedy Baby Christened Today,” Dec. 8, 1960.

Information about Caroline’s reaction to the new baby from The New York Times, Nov. 27, 1960.

“Boston and Washington”: The Boston Globe, May 6, 1963, 4.

“a terrible, terrible dilemma”: J. Randy Taraborrelli, Jackie, Ethel, Joan: Women of Camelot (New York: Grand Central, 2012), 189.

“My sisters”: Ibid, 190.

“Nothing like this”: The Boston Globe, “Reservations Pile Up as Hyannis Gets Set for Kennedy Election, Oct. 30, 1960.

“greatly disturbed the quiet tranquility”: Leo Damore, The Cape Cod Years of John Fitzgerald Kennedy (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1967), 241.

“During a cruise”: Ibid., 262.

“Did Your Mother”: Kenneth P. O’Donnell, David F. Powers, and Joe McCarthy, “Johnny We Hardly Knew Ye” (New York: Pocket Books, 1973), 256.

“large, rambling, gray-shingled house”: Clint Hill and Lisa McCubbin, Mrs. Kennedy and Me (New York: Gallery Books, 2012), 236.

“On her evenings at home”: Ralph G. Martin, A Hero for Our Time (New York: MacMillan, 1983), 385.

“something quite remote in her”: Thurston Clarke, JFK’s Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President (New York: The Penguin Press, 2013), 69.

“A penny for your thoughts”: Clarke, 69 quoting Martin, Seeds of Destruction.???

“I knew what she meant”: Hill, Mrs. Kennedy and Me , 237.

“That girl reads everything”: Martin, A Hero for Our Time ,385.

Information Jackie’s visits with Joseph Kennedy from Hill.

“But it really is so”: Evelyn Lincoln, My Twelve Years with John F. Kennedy (New York: David McKay Company, 1965), 241.

“Mrs. Lincoln”: Ibid., 338

“She’s fine”: The Boston Globe, May 17, 1963.

“Five Thousand Dollars for That!”

“From the security standpoint”: The Boston Globe, June 5, 1963.

“I was sure nervous”: The Boston Globe, “It’s Dr. Walsh on Job When Crisis Calls,” Aug. 8, 1963.

“precautionary”: The New York Times, July 25, 1963.

“Five thousand dollars … a fuckup”: Ted Widmer, ed. Listening In: The Secret White House Recordings of John F. Kennedy (New York: Hyperion, 2012), 273-276

“See that fellow’s picture”: Ibid., 273-76.

“We had never heard”: The Washington Post, July 26, 1963.

On the Mediterranean

“Jackie was from”: Christopher Andersen, These Few Precious Days: The Final Year of Jack with Jackie (New York: Gallery Books, 2013), 59.

“Slowly, he unbuttoned”: Mimi Alford, Once Upon a Secret: My Affair with President John F. Kennedy and Its Aftermath (New York: Random House, 2012), 50.

“suffered a miscarriage”: Kenneth P. O’Donnell, David F. Powers, and Joe McCarthy, “Johnny We Hardly Knew Ye” (New York: Pocket Books, 1973), 109.

“If she or Jack”: Ibid., 136.

Information re: Washington Star story in Martin, A Hero for Our Time, 123.

“There just wasn’t anything”: Andersen, These Few Precious Days, 59.

“the sailor’s delight”: Martin, A Hero for Our Time, 72.

Information on the stillborn child from Andersen, Jack and Jackie and These Few Precious Days.

“Nervous tension”: The Washington Post, August 25, 1956.

“Senator Kennedy on Mediterranean Yacht”: Ibid.

“It may be two”: Ibid.

“She’s not as strong”: Taraborrelli, Jackie, Ethel, Joan: Women, 191.

Information regarding Kennedy’s reaction to Arabella’s death in Taraborrelli.

“You better haul”: Martin, A Hero for Our Time, 123.

“The Prettiest Baby I Have Ever Seen”

“As for Joe paying off”: David Nasaw, telephone interview, Oct. 7, 2013

“They got in the way”: Ibid.

“when I’d tell him”: Paul B. Fay, Jr, The Pleasure of His Company (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 54.

“I will always remember”: Janet Lee Bouvier Auchincloss interview, by Joan Braden, Sept. 5, 1964, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library Oral History Program, 8.

“Now, Lem”: Andersen, Jack and Jackie, 188.

“I could tell”: Lincoln, My Twelve Years with John F. Kennedy, 108.

“And…not just because she’s mine”: Ibid., 109.

“that memorable year”: O’Donnell, Powers and McCarthy, “Johnny We Hardly Knew,” 148.

Information about election from Dallek, An Unfinished Life, 294-295.

“Now my wife and I prepare”: O’Donnell, Powers, and McCarthy, “Johnny We Hardly Knew,” 260.

“Jackie never looked more beautiful”: Martin, A Hero for Our Time, 246.

“It seemed like an odd arrangement”: Hill, Mrs. Kennedy and Me, 19.

“Isn’t He Sweet, Jack?”

“She was smiling”: The New York Times, Nov. 25, 1960.

“He became tense”: O’Donnell, Powers, and McCarthy., “Johnny We Hardly Knew,” 268.

“We have been advised”: Ibid., 268-269

“sat down much relieved”: Ibid., 269.

“When John-John was born”: Dean R. Owen, November 22, 1963: Reflections on the Life, Assassination, and Legacy of John F. Kennedy (New York: Skyhorse, 2013), 339.

“However, he was a bit”: Ibid., 339-340.

“Kennedy Alters Schedule”: The New York Times, November 26, 1960.

“It was obvious”: Hill and McCubbin, Mrs. Kennedy and Me, 22.

“She informed me”: Owen, November 22, 1963: Reflections, 341.

“I’d go into her room”: Hill and McCubbin, Mrs. Kennedy and Me, 22-23.

“John Fitzgerald Kennedy Jr”: The New York Times, Dec. 9, 1960.

“obviously very excited”: Lincoln, My Twelve Years with, 212.

“If you get up”: Andersen, These Few Precious Days, 103

“Mrs. Eisenhower is waiting”: Hill and McCubbin, Mrs. Kennedy and Me, 26.

“I think that’s enough”: The New York Times, Dec. 10, 1960.

“The problem was”: Hill and McCubbin, Mrs. Kennedy and Me, 27.

“I hate it”: Martin, A Hero for Our Time, 252.

“It’s going to need”: Hill and McCubbin, Mrs. Kennedy and Me, 28.

“It looks like it’s”: Martin, A Hero for Our Time, 251-252.

“talking at a merry clip”: O’Donnell, Powers, and McCarthy, “Johnny We Hardly Knew, 277.

“There was, thank God”: Andersen, These Few Precious Days, 103.

“Things Are Going Well”

“My fellow Americans” John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum.

“She was sick”: Taraborrelli, Jackie, Ethel, Joan: Women, 31.

“incomparable conflagration”: Terry Golway and Les Krantz, JFK Day by Day: A Chronicle of 1,036 Days of John F. Kennedy’s Presidency (Philadelphia: Running Press, 2010), 39.

“If caught”: Paul B. Fay, Jr, The Pleasure of His Company (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 216.

“I felt that”: 216.

“form of amusement”: Dallek, An Unfinished Life: John, 475.

“It was plain”: Benjamin C. Bradlee, Conversations with Kennedy (New York: W.W. Norton, 1975), 186.

“was struck first”: Dallek, An Unfinished Life: John, 632.

“One crisis ebbs”: E.B. White, The New Yorker, Oct. 12, 1963, 56.

An Emergency Scenario

“bright primitives”: The New York Times, Sept. 12, 1963.

“But… I didn’t sleep over”: Alford, Once Upon a Secret, 118-119.

“Thursday had to be”: The Boston Globe, July 5, 1963.

“drops kids like rabbits”: Christopher Andersen, Jack and Jackie: Portrait of an American Marriage (New York: Avon Books, 1996), 175.

“President Kennedy soaked up”: The Boston Globe, July, 6, 1963.

“Like any thoughtful father”: The Boston Globe, July 8, 1963.

“greatest Hyannis Port weekend”: O’Donnell, Powers, and McCarthy, “Johnny We Hardly Knew, 434.

“He reported that”: Ibid.

“Every mother in America”: Fay, The Pleasure of His Company, 217.

“Friends at Cape Cod”: The Boston Globe, July 26, 1963.

“If the stork”: Ibid., July 27, 1963.

“on an indefinite vacation”: The Washington Post, July 24, 1963.

A Race to the Hospital

“the breath of death”: Dallek, An Unfinished Life: John, 626.

“a spirit of hope”: The Boston Globe, July 27, 1963.

“fairly plain”: Ibid., July 28, 1963.

“We’re answering them all”: The New York Times, Aug. 6, 1963.

“Mr. Landis”: Hill and McCubbin, Mrs. Kennedy and Me, 239.

“We need to get her”: Ibid., 240.

“It could have been”: The Boston Globe, Aug. 9, 1963.

“Jerry tells me”: Lincoln, My Twelve Years with, 350.

“Then there was no doubt”: Ibid., 350.

“The Baby’s Condition Is…Good”

“We all sat in silence”: Ibid., 351.

“We have some concerns”: Hill and McCubbin, Mrs. Kennedy and Me, 241.

“Nice, old-fashioned”: The Boston Globe, Aug. 8, 1963.

“to be there”: Andersen, These Few Precious Days, 258.

“We’d known each other”: Ibid.

“quiet authority”: The Boston Globe, Aug. 8, 1963.

“He was beautiful”: Hill and McCubbin, Mrs. Kennedy and Me, 242.

“Mrs. Kennedy has given birth”: YouTube video, Aug. 7. 1963.

“He did so much”: Pamela Turnure in Maud Shaw Interview, April 27, 1965, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, 11.

“with lots of effort”: The New York Times, “A Kennedy Baby’s Life and Death,” July 29, 2013.

“beautifully formed”: The Boston Globe, “Baby Sped to Boston,” Aug. 8, 1963.

“very distressed”: Ibid.

A Crucial Forty-Eight Hours

“He is only 4 pounds”: The Boston Globe, “Whole World Taken by Littlest Kennedy,” Aug. 8, 1963.

“Anguish of the Kennedys”: The Washington Post, “Europe Shares Concern for Kennedy Baby,” Aug. 9, 1963.

“The White House”: Ibid.

“the prettiest smile”: The Boston Globe, “Paris Papers Feature Birth,” Aug. 8, 1963.

“He caused some people”: The Boston Globe, “Whole World Taken by Littlest Kennedy,” Aug. 8. 1963.

“Good luck!” : The Boston Globe, 8 ‘He’s a Kennedy—He’ll Make It,’ Aug. 8, 1963.

“I would not say that.” The Boston Globe, “Baby Sped to Boston,” Aug. 8, 1963.

“not uncommon in premature babies.”: The Boston Globe, ‘He’s a Kennedy—He’ll Make It,” Aug. 8, 1963

“Oh he’s a Kennedy”: Ibid.

Thursday, August 8, 1963

“They’re on Pat’s Medical Team”: The Boston Globe, Aug. 9, 1963.

“They greeted him ghoulishly”: The Boston Globe, “Helpless as any Father,” Aug. 9, 1963.

“He has troubles enough”: Ibid.

“My son is, too”: Ibid.

“still serious”: Ibid.

“After consulting with the doctors”: Andersen, These Few Precious Days, 261.

“I didn’t know”: The Boston Globe, Aug. 9, 1963.

“I was for him”: Ibid., “President’s Day: Helter Skelter,” Aug. 9, 1963.

“You mustn’t blame him”: Ibid., “Helpless as any Father,” Aug. 9, 1963.

“send a message up”: The Boston Globe, “Children Send Get-Well Cards, Aug. 9, 1963.

“It’s on the house”: Ibid., “Helpless as any Father,” Aug. 9, 1963.

“Lacking anything else”: The New York Times, “A Kennedy Baby’s Life and Death,” July 29, 2013.

“The reassurances (the President) gave her The Washington Post, “Mrs. Kennedy Cheered by Son’s Gain,” Aug. 9, 1963.

“He’s doing very well”: The Boston Globe, “Mrs. Kennedy Never Knew Pat Worse ‘Til JFK Said He’s Improving,” Aug. 9, 2013.

“in record time”: The Boston Globe, “Helpless as any Father,” Aug. 9, 1963.

“In the late afternoon”: The Washington Post, “JFK Baby is Slightly Improved,” Aug. 9, 1963.

Friday, August 9, 1963

“Each time she came out”: Hill and McCubbin, Mrs. Kennedy and Me, 245.

“Could you tell me”: ”: O’Donnell, Powers, and McCarthy, “Johnny We Hardly Knew, 436.

“There he was”: Ibid.

“He put up quite a fight”: Ibid.

“She’s finally gone to sleep”: Hill and McCubbin, Mrs. Kennedy and Me, 245.

“he didn’t want anyone”: O’Donnell, Powers, and McCarthy, “Johnny We Hardly Knew, 437.

“Patrick Kennedy died at 4:04 am”: Pierre Salinger announcement, August 9, 1963. Accessed Oct. 6, 2013.

“She was devastated”: Hill and McCubbin, Mrs. Kennedy and Me, 246.

“The death of the infant”: Pierre Salinger, With Kennedy (Garden City: Doubleday, 1966), 101.

“The President’s only concern”: Lincoln, My Twelve Years with, 354.

“It is so hard”: Fay, The Pleasure of His Company, 217.

“was not coming home”: Maud Shaw interview, April 27, 1965, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, 11.

“Theirs is the added burden”: The New York Times, “A Little Boy,” Aug. 10, 1963.

“deep sense of sadness”: The Washington Post, “World Grieves with the Kennedys,” Aug. 10, 1963.

“that the happiness”: Ibid.

“Jackie’s Baby Dies”: The New York Times, “World Voice Grief on Death of Kennedy Baby,” Aug. 10, 1963.

Saturday, August 10, 1963

“When he went”: The Washington Post, “Five Presidential Children Died in Fathers’ Terms,”

“The public has been asked”: The Boston Globe, “Grief A Family Affair,” Aug. 10, 1963.

“People who know”: Francis X. Morrissey interview, DATE, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, 62-63.

“Blessed be … little child”: The New York Times, “Funeral Mass Said for Kennedy Baby,” Aug. 11, 1963.

“It was a beautiful day”: Morrissey, 64-65.

“He literally put his arms”: Richard Cardinal Cushing, recorded interview with Edward M. Kennedy, Feb. 7, 1969, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library Oral History Program.

“Grant that they”: The Boston Globe, Grief-Stricken President in Sad Farewell to Son,” Aug. 11, 1963.

“It has been so much fun”: Fay, The Pleasure of His Company, 217.

“It wasn’t so much”: Lincoln, My Twelve Years with, 354.

Caroline’s Bouquet for Jackie

“The death of”: Salinger, With Kennedy, 101.

“a very quiet day”: The Boston Globe, “A Mother Waits in Grief,” Aug. 11, 1963.

“greatly cheered”: The New York Times, “Caroline, Carrying a Bouquet, and John Jr. Visit Mother in Hospital,” Aug. 12, 1963.

“Where is mummy?”: Ibid.

“just adored”: The Washington Post, “Mrs. Kennedy Rests at Home,” Aug. 16, 1963.

“After the death”: Hill and McCubbin, Mrs. Kennedy and Me, 248-249.

“a very satisfactory recovery”: The New York Times, “Mrs. Kennedy Ends Hospital Stay,” Aug. 15, 1963.

“tears rolling down his cheeks”: Alford, Once Upon a Secret, 120.

“Whatever the reason”: Ibid., 125.

“a widespread reappraisal”: The Boston Globe, “Reaction to Tragedy Enhanced JFK’s Image,” Aug. 16, 1963.

“the stories of”: Ibid.

“It will be a long time”: Ibid.

“He Seems So Alone Here”

“feeling great”: The Boston Globe, “Mrs. Kennedy’s Recovery Going Well,” Aug. 18, 1963.

“Dear Mrs. Kennedy”: The New York Times, “White House Puppies Going to Midwest Children,” Aug. 19, 1963.

“She’s fine”: The Boston Globe, “Puppy Corps Launched, Aug. 19, 1963.

“The loss of Patrick”: O’Donnell, Powers and McCarthy, “Johnny We Hardly Knew,” 438.

“Jack and Jackie”: Martin, A Hero for Our Time, 528.

“She greeted JFK”: Bradlee, Conversations with Kennedy, 206, 209.

“The Republic of Somalia”: The Boston Globe, “A Leopard Coat for Mrs. Kennedy,” Oct. 10, 1963.

“The affection between”: The Boston Globe, “JFK Baby-Sits While Jacqueline’s Away,” Oct. 14, 1963.

“I want to go…alone here”: O’Donnell, Powers and McCarthy, “Johnny We Hardly Knew,” 438.

“leaped to his feet”: Robert Dallek, Camelot’s Court: Inside the Kennedy White House (New York: Harper, 2013), 417.

Happy To See His Baby Son

“a little remorseful”: Bradlee, Conversations with Kennedy, 219.

“Maybe now”: Ibid., 220.

“There was a growing tenderness”: Martin, A Hero for Our Time, 534.

“I was a little”: Alford, Once Upon a Secret, 534.

“had been so dear”: Shaw interview, JFK Presidential Library, 13.

“guardian angel”: Ibid.

Bibliography

Alford, Mimi. Once Upon a Secret: My Affair with President John F. Kennedy and Its Aftermath. New York: Random House, 2012.

Andersen, Christopher. Jack and Jackie: Portrait of an American Marriage. New York: Avon Books, 1996.

———. These Few Precious Days: The Final Year of Jack with Jackie. New York: Gallery Books, 2013.

Bradlee, Benjamin C. Conversations with Kennedy. New York: W.W. Norton, 1975.

Clarke, Thurston. JFK’s Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President. New York: The Penguin Press, 2013.

Dallek, Robert. Camelot’s Court: Inside the Kennedy White House. New York: Harper, 2013.

———. An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963. Boston: Little, Brown, 2013.

Damore, Leo. The Cape Cod Years of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1967.

Fay, Paul B., Jr. The Pleasure of His Company. New York: Harper & Row, 1966.

Golway, Terry, and Les Krantz. JFK Day by Day: A Chronicle of 1,036 Days of John F. Kennedy’s Presidency. Philadelphia: Running Press, 2010.

Hersh, Seymour M. The Dark Side of Camelot. Boston: Little, Brown, 1997.

Hill, Clint, and Lisa McCubbin. Mrs. Kennedy and Me. New York: Gallery Books, 2012.

Lincoln, Evelyn. My Twelve Years with John F. Kennedy. New York: David McKay Company, 1965.

Martin, Ralph G. A Hero for Our Time. New York: MacMillan, 1983.

Nasaw, David. The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy. New York: Penguin Books, 2013.

O’Donnell, Kenneth P. and David F. Powers. “Johnny We Hardly Knew Ye.” New York: Pocket Books, 1973.

Owen, Dean R. November 22, 1963: Reflections on the Life, Assassination, and Legacy of John F. Kennedy. New York: Skyhorse, 2013.

Sachs, Jeffrey D. To Move the World: JFK’s Quest for Peace. New York: Random House, 2013.

Salinger, Pierre. With Kennedy. Garden City: Doubleday, 1966.

Taraborrelli, J. Randy. Jackie, Ethel, Joan: Women of Camelot. New York: Grand Central, 2012.

Widmer, Ted, ed. Listening In: The Secret White House Recordings of John F. Kennedy. New York: Hyperion, 2012.

Transcripts

Auchincloss, Janet Lee Bouvier, recorded interview by Joan Braden, Sept. 6, 1964, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library Oral History Program

Cushing, Richard Cardinal recorded interview by Edward M. Kennedy, Feb. 7, 1969, JFKL Oral History Program.

Fay, Paul B Jr., recorded interview by James O. Oesterle, Nov. 11, 1964, JFKL Oral History Program.

Hennessey-Donovan, Luella, recorded interview by Edward Martin, Sept. 25, 1991. JFKL Oral History Program.

Knebel, Laura Bergquist, recorded interview by Sheldon Stern, Aug. 1, 1977, JFKL Oral History Program.

Lincoln, Evelyn, recorded interview by Frederick L. Holborn, April 2, 1964, JFKL Oral History Program.

Morrissey, Francis, recorded interview by David Farrell, June 9, 1964, JFKL Oral History Program.

Shaw, Maud, recorded interview by Pamela Turnure, April 27, 1965. JFKL Oral History Program.

Spalding, Charles, recorded interview by John F. Stewart, March 14, 1968, JFKL Oral History Program.

Stoughton, Cecil, recorded interview by Vicki Daitch, Sept. 18 & 19, 2002, JFKL Oral History Program.

Thomas, Helen recorded interview by Vicki Daitch, June 19, 2003, JFKL Oral History Program.

Travell, Janet, recorded interview by Theodore C. Sorensen, Jan. 20, 1966, JFKL Oral History Program.

Tuckerman, Nancy and Pamela Turnure, recorded interview by Mrs. Wayne Fredericks, Oct. 30, 1964, JFKL Oral History Program.

About the Author

Steven Levingston is nonfiction editor of The Washington Post Book World. His book, Little Demon in the City of Light: A True Story of Mesmerism and Murder in Belle Epoque Paris, will be published in February 2014. He has worked for The Wall Street Journal, the International Herald Tribune and China Daily, with stints in Hong Kong, Paris, and Beijing. He is a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley and Stanford University.

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