The first baby to live in the White House since 1893, John Jr. makes headlines with every move. “Gift for Kennedy Baby,” the New York Times reports on the stuffed donkey, rabbits, and dogs that Madame Charles de Gaulle presents the new parents at the French Foreign Ministry on May 31, 1961.
In advance of his first birthday, White House press secretary Pierre Salinger reports, “John Fitzgerald Kennedy Jr. still has a cold and will not be brought [to Hyannis Port] for a joint birthday observance with his sister Caroline,” who turns four on November 27.
Citizens even vote on John Jr.’s “Little Lord Fauntleroy” hairstyle, which Jackie allows to curl over his collar. Dollar bills arrive at the White House along with instructions for Jackie to cut John Jr.’s hair (she refuses, though Jack reportedly asks Maud Shaw, the children’s nanny, to at least trim his son’s bangs, and to blame it on the president if Jackie objects).
Jackie revels in her role as mother, setting up play groups and a small kindergarten for Caroline at the White House, along with a tree house and a swing set for both children on the South Lawn. Caroline is even allowed to ride her pet pony, Macaroni, on the White House grounds; the sight of the happy little girl on her horse delights tourists and visitors (including singer/songwriter Neil Diamond, who credits the image as providing the inspiration for his beloved hit song “Sweet Caroline”).
Jack is also an involved father, one who, Jackie says, “loved those children tumbling around him,” and is often seen teasing and playing with John Jr. and Caroline. “It was John’s treat to walk to the [Oval] Office with him every day,” Jackie recalls. He’d often let them romp around the Oval Office, resulting in a famous series of photographs of John Jr. playing under the president’s desk. He also enjoyed telling them stories. “He didn’t like to read books to them much. He’d rather tell them stories. He’d make up these fantastic ones…you know, little things that had to do with their world,” Jackie recalls.
Arthur Schlesinger Jr. also remembers JFK telling the children stories that featured themselves on grand adventures—Caroline winning the Grand National or John Jr. sinking destroyers—and had one ongoing story about a white shark that ate socks. “One day, when the President and Caroline were sailing with Franklin Roosevelt Jr.,” Schlesinger says, Jack “pretended to see the white shark and said, ‘Franklin, give him your socks; he’s hungry.’ Franklin promptly threw his socks in the water.” Not only does this greatly entertain Caroline, but as biographers Collier and Horowitz point out, it’s “an oblique pun on that day twenty-five years earlier when his father [FDR] had asked Joseph Kennedy to drop his pants.” Crucially, Lem Billings notes, everyone learns that when Jack starts in on those tales, “it was time to move to another part of the yacht” or risk having to feed the sharks, too.
The children are doted on by the public, but Jackie does her best to impress upon them that their time in the White House is temporary. “I’d tell them little stories about other Presidents and [how] there would be a President after Daddy,” she recalls, “so they never got to think that all this was going to be forever.”
Jackie often takes John Jr. and Caroline out of Washington to Glen Ora, the four-hundred-acre horse farm they rent in Middleburg, Virginia, where they can be a little less in the spotlight, and she can participate in rituals like nightly baths and reading stories. “Jackie wanted her kids to have what she grew up with, and to make their lives normal and fun,” a friend recalls. “She applied effort and ingenuity to that.”
“I don’t want my young children brought up by nurses and Secret Service men,” Jackie tells the New York Times.
She also does her best to pass along her love of horseback riding to the children, but nothing compares to John Jr.’s true love: flying. John Jr. takes his first airplane ride—from Washington to Palm Beach—at fifteen days old, and his obsession with it never wavers. Even his Secret Service code name, “Lark,” is prescient.
Jack indulges his son’s fascination with flying machines, taking him on helicopter rides and letting him “fly” his toy version on the floor of the president’s secretary’s office. Nanny Maud Shaw says that even as a toddler, John Jr. “liked to put on the pilot’s helmet and push the control stick around and press the buttons, flicking the switches and making all the right noises for starting up and taking off,” and recalls “one wonderful memory of the time I went looking for John on a Saturday afternoon. This time I had a good idea where he would be—down in the hangar. Sure enough, he was. And so was the President. Both of them were sitting at the controls of the helicopter with flying helmets on. The President was playing the game seriously with his son, taking orders from Flight Captain John, thoroughly absorbed in the whole thing. I retreated quietly and left father and son very happy together.”
Joe Sr.’s nurse, Rita Dallas, also fondly remembers John Jr.’s childhood obsession with planes. “He adored airplanes and did everything he could to ‘bum a ride’ on anything that flew,” she says, adding that JFK often tries to accommodate him, but when he couldn’t, he instead leaves John Jr. a little toy plane. “He must have bought them by the gross,” Dallas notes, “for they were everywhere.” In a White House photo of John Jr. dated January 21, 1963, the smiling two-year-old is seen with a glossy press photo of Marine One airborne over the South Lawn, and a double-rotor replica model within reach.
The toy planes “usually pacified young John,” Dallas says, “but if it failed, the President would bend down and whisper in his ear, ‘You fly this one, son, and as soon as you grow up, Daddy’s going to buy you a real one.’” John Jr. would make him solemnly promise, at which point, “Little John would run off telling everyone the news. He’d tug at us, wave his toy plane, and say, ‘My daddy’s going to get me a real one when I grow up.’”
John Jr.’s passion for airplanes and helicopters is so fierce, JFK reveals some concerns over what they’ll do “when he’s old enough and wants to learn to fly,” as he tells his aide Kenneth O’Donnell, who also recalls how John Jr. “would race over and get on a helicopter, and when it came time for us to leave, he refused to get out of it,” to the point that “the poor Secret Service would take John kicking and squabbling off the helicopter or the plane.”
One such incident is recorded in an AP photo dated October 3, 1963, which shows the toddler “weeping bitterly” over being left behind when Jack boards Air Force One on a flight to Arkansas. Not even a return flight to the White House by helicopter consoles him. Similarly, Ted Kennedy recalls another photo that “showed John racing across the lawn as his father landed in the White House helicopter and swept up John in his arms. When my brother saw that photo, he exclaimed, ‘Every mother in the United States is saying, “Isn’t it wonderful to see that love between a son and his father, the way John races to be with his father?” Little do they know—that son would have raced right by his father to get to that helicopter.’”
Soon John and Caroline will see their father off on his last flight out of Washington. On November 21, 1963, Jack and Jackie board Marine One for a chopper ride to Andrews Air Force Base, where Air Force One will take off for Carswell Air Force Base in Fort Worth. The next time John wants to see his father, he will have to look at a photograph.
Or a painting.
In December 1963, shortly after vacating the White House for President Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson, Jackie, Caroline, and John are living in a house belonging to JFK’s undersecretary of state, W. Averell Harriman, on Washington’s exclusive N Street.
Secretary of Defense Bob McNamara and his wife, Marg, who are close to Jackie, send over two portraits of Jack. But Jackie’s grief is so fresh, she can only bear to look at a single photograph of her husband, one that shows his back, not his face. She props the paintings in the hallway, intending to return the thoughtful yet distressing gift.
Before she can, three-year-old John Jr. spots the portrait of his father at eye level, and he kisses it, saying, “Good night, Daddy.” Despite John Jr.’s sweet reaction, Jackie s
ees it as proof that the emotional danger of having Jack’s image close by is too high.
The paintings are returned.
Chapter 54
Suddenly, in 1968, John and Caroline gain a new member of the family: stepfather Aristotle Onassis.
When JFK made his spring 1961 state visit to France, President Charles de Gaulle was fascinated by the “unique” Jackie, predicting to his Minister of Culture, Andre Malraux, “I can see her in about ten years from now on the yacht of a Greek oil millionaire.”
He’s only off by a few years.
After Bobby’s assassination in June 1968, Jackie has an ever-present fear: “If they’re killing Kennedys, my kids are number one targets.” More than anything else, it fuels in her a desire to leave the United States. It also opens her up to the possibility of remarrying.
Although she has several other suitors, Jackie is most drawn to millionaire Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, despite the twenty-three-year age gap between them. She fondly credits Onassis for the comfort he offered her in August 1963, when she traveled to Greece while in mourning over the death of her son Patrick. Onassis had been crucial in buoying her spirits back then.
Perhaps he could do so again now.
More than anything, Jackie’s former assistant says, “I think she was very lonely. She needed somebody to talk to.”
Jackie herself agrees, telling one former suitor, “I know [my marriage] comes as a surprise to so many people,” but that Onassis understands her situation, and “wants to protect me from being lonely. And he is wise and kind.”
“Not a single friend thought Jackie should marry Onassis,” journalist Peter Evans remarks. “But now that Bobby was gone, there was no one who could stop her.”
On October 20, 1968, Jackie and Onassis marry on Skorpios. “We are very happy,” Jackie tells reporters. Patricia Kennedy, who attends the wedding, tells her mother, Rose, that the bride did seem happy—leading Jackie’s former sister-in-law and mother-in-law to conclude, “Who wouldn’t be with 400 or 500 million dollars and a ruby [a wedding gift from Onassis], which is worth $1,000,000?”
But another guest had a harsher take, observing that “It was like a business transaction,” and that “Jackie’s glance kept turning anxiously toward Caroline.” Jackie’s ten-year-old daughter and seven-year-old son are candle-bearers at the ceremony. Afterward, just as Charles de Gaulle had foreseen, the couple holds their wedding reception aboard Onassis’s luxury yacht, Christina, named for Onassis’s then-seventeen-year-old daughter. (“The fabled vessel,” proclaims People magazine, “remains in a class of its own,” and has been site to several other celebrity wedding celebrations, including that of movie star Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier III of Monaco in 1956, and supermodel Heidi Klum and musician husband Tom Kaulitz in 2019.)
But the devotees of the Camelot legend Jackie created are shocked that she is rewriting the ending. “Jackie, How Could You?” pleads a Swedish newspaper headline. On what would have been her fiftieth wedding anniversary to Onassis, the Washington Post reflects:
“Fifty years ago, the world mourned the end of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy.
‘The reaction here is anger, shock and dismay,’ declared the New York Times.
‘The gods are weeping,’ read a quote in the Washington Post.
A German newspaper announced: ‘America has lost a saint.’
But Mrs. Kennedy hadn’t died. She had only become Mrs. Onassis.”
The marriage is not destined to last as long as that, however. Although the former First Lady—thereafter nicknamed “Jackie O”—says “Aristotle Onassis rescued me at a time when my life was engulfed in shadows. He meant a lot to me. He brought me into a world where one could find happiness and love.” From the start they tend to live two separate lives. Jackie’s assistant recalls, though, that in addition to being famous for his extravagant gift-giving—according to Newsweek, he buys John a speedboat, a jukebox, and a Jeep—Onassis “was a good father to John and Caroline,” who “would sit with them at the dining room table and ask how was school. He might have been an older man, but he paid attention to them, and they loved him.”
Still, Jackie never cuts the ties she’s been building with the Kennedy family for fifteen years, as a daughter-in-law, and as a protector of heirs to an American dynasty. “Her [Caroline’s] father was gone, but her mother never flinched or withdrew from her obligations. She handled the loss, as a widow and mother, quietly and taught her only daughter the grace of dignity,” Rita Dallas observes of Jackie. “After her marriage, she still maintained her home on the compound and saw to it that both of her children remained Kennedys.”
But Jackie’s new union is clouded by a second premonition—one far more troubling than de Gaulle’s. Just as Jackie had sensed when she met Jack that he “would have a profound perhaps disturbing influence on her life,” Onassis’s daughter, Christina (who is not a fan of her new stepmother), similarly believes that she will bring tragedy upon her father, cruelly blaming Jackie for the deaths of her husband and brother-in-law. When a number of Onassis’s business ventures start to downturn—and, most tragically, after his son Alexander is killed in a plane crash in January 1973—Onassis’s health takes a sudden decline. He bitterly reflects on his daughter’s warning (though Christina’s prediction may have been self-fulfilling: in 1988, she dies of a heart attack determined to be caused by years of drug abuse), and he and Jackie separate, though they do not officially divorce.
“I was a happy man before I married her,” Onassis takes to saying. “Then I married Jackie and my life was ruined.”
By February 1975, Onassis is dead. Now forty-five, Jackie is again a widow.
And it’s back to being just Jackie, Caroline, and John Jr.
Chapter 55
Shortly after JFK’s death, Jackie had feared her own wish to die would prevent her from being an effective parent, especially a solo one. “I’m no good to them. I’m so bleeding inside,” she tells her confidant, Father Richard T. McSorley. For a time, she contemplates accepting Ethel’s offer to raise Caroline and John Jr. among their cousins at Hickory Hill, but Father McSorley cautions against that arrangement, citing the public and family pressures on Ethel. “Nobody can do for them except you,” he says.
Not to mention that Ethel and Jackie have nearly diametrically opposite approaches to parenting. Kennedy biographer Jerry Oppenheimer notes, “John, after his father’s death, was brought up by a controlling and domineering mother, but one who obsessively looked out for his care and well-being.” Conversely, life at Hickey Hill among Bobby and Ethel’s children is much more rough-and-tumble, and later, after Bobby’s death, Ethel’s “moods could swing drastically,” Oppenheimer writes. Grief makes Ethel alternately neglectful or abusive, and the troubled kids lash out. (Bobby Jr. even starts a gang he calls “The Hyannis Port Terrors.”)
Jackie listens to Father McSorley’s counsel and instead moves her family of three from Washington to New York City’s Upper East Side, where she grew up. They move into a five-bedroom, five-and-a-half-bath apartment spanning the entire fifteenth floor of a limestone prewar building at 1040 Fifth Avenue, with views of Central Park and the reservoir (eventually named for Jackie in 1994). Between interest from Kennedy family trusts and an annual government widow’s pension of ten thousand dollars, Jackie has an income of approximately two hundred thousand dollars a year. Impressive, even by today’s standards, but for Jackie it requires careful spending. The Kennedy family friend Chuck Spalding voices the impossible challenge: “Jackie on a budget?”
All that changes, of course, after her brief marriage to Aristotle Onassis—money is not something she need worry about again—but even beforehand, one thing Jackie can afford to give her children is personal independence. Although she threatens the Secret Service, “If anything happens to John, I won’t be as nice to you as I was after Dallas,” she insists her son “must be allowed to experience life,” citing the dire consequence that “unless he is allowed
freedom, he’ll be a vegetable.”
But only so much freedom. In the spring of 1973, Caroline (now fifteen) begins to exhibit the same obsession with flying machines her now twelve-year-old brother has shown since before the age of three. Lem Billings, without telling Jackie, brings the siblings to Hanscom Field in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, where a flight instructor takes Caroline up in a Cessna. “Me too,” John begs, but he is too young.
When Jackie learns what Lem has done, she puts a stop to it. “We cannot tempt fate in this family,” Jackie tells Benedict F. Fitzgerald Jr., Rose and Joe Sr.’s attorney as well as a licensed pilot. “We’ve had enough tragedy. I will never let my children fly. Never.”
Jackie understands better than anyone what disasters have come from the longstanding Kennedy tradition of pressing the odds. On hand for Ted’s protracted recovery following his 1964 plane crash, Jackie is privy to the dramatic yet accurate opinion of family physician Dr. Watt, who says, “These people [the Kennedys] are jumping all over the place. Joe Jr. was warned that his plane had a problem. Kathleen was on a small plane. Ted tried to find a pilot who would fly in bad weather when his crash occurred.” Not only that, but Ethel has also lost both her parents and her older brother to plane crashes, and just months earlier, Jackie’s twenty-four-year-old stepson, Alexander Onassis, suffered the same fate.
Jackie is far more tolerant of earthbound adventures. When thieves set upon thirteen-year-old John Jr. in Central Park and steal his pricey Italian bicycle, Jackie says “the experience was good for her son, that it would help him to grow up like other boys.”
The House of Kennedy Page 25
