Jackie was, said St. David’s headmaster David Hume, “a sensible, affectionate mom who had a straight relationship with her son.” Some people, he continued, “coo over their children.” Jackie didn’t coo. “When they reach out a hand, you should hold it. When they want to let go, you should let go. Jackie understood that.”
Jackie also understood that, no matter how wonderful she was as a parent, there was little she could do to protect either of her children from those who were mentally unhinged. “I’m nerve-racked about the safety of the children,” she told one of John’s teachers. “There are so many nutcases about.”
Jackie and Caroline were leaving St. Thomas More Church on East Eighty-ninth Street one Sunday when a woman ran up to Caroline and grabbed her by the arm. “Your mother is a wicked woman who has killed three people!” she shrieked as Jackie stood there, horrified. “And your father is still alive!”
With the help of the Secret Service, Jackie succeeded in pulling the deranged woman off, and she was taken to Bellevue Hospital for observation. “It was terrible, prying her loose,” Jackie recalled years later. “I still haven’t gotten over that strange woman.”
Jackie always tried to walk her son home from school each day, and she was more determined than ever that November 22, 1966—the third anniversary of her husband’s assassination—not be any different. As they left the school, however, Jackie realized that several students were trailing them. They were less than halfway down the block when one of the children yelled, “Your father’s dead! Your father’s dead!” The others quickly joined in the chant.
The cruel words were all too familiar to John’s mother. “You know how children are,” said Jackie. “They’ve even said it to me when I’ve run into them at school, as if . . . Well, this day John listened to them saying it over and over, and he didn’t say a word.”
What John did do was take his mother’s hand and squeeze it firmly—without ever pausing to look back at their tormentors. Jackie later said it was “as if he was trying to reassure me that things were all right. And so we walked home together, with the children following us.”
* * *
JOHN WAS ONLY six years old and already exhibiting a keen awareness of other people’s feelings—especially his mother’s. “He surprises me in so many ways,” Jackie said. “He seems so much more than one would expect of a child of six. Sometimes it almost seems as if he is trying to protect me instead of just the other way around.”
To be sure, Jackie was finding it impossible to shield her children from the front-page headlines being generated by her ongoing feud with William Manchester over his book The Death of a President. She claimed to have spoken to Manchester “in the evening and alone, and it’s rather hard to stop when the floodgates open.” What she feared most was exposing her children to the gory details of their father’s death.
“We didn’t talk about it, of course,” Jackie said. “But children pick things up . . . There was no way to keep them from passing newsstands going to and from school. It was natural for them to look at the magazines and the headlines. Or be told something in school or on the street. It isn’t always easy for the children.”
“Jackie worried endlessly about Caroline and John,” Plimpton said. “But I think she focused even more attention on John because she worried that Jack’s memory would be overshadowed by her fame. Caroline was older, and she would never forget her father—Jackie was confident of that. She wasn’t so sure about John.”
“He’ll never remember his father. He was too young,” Jackie admitted saying to herself. “But now,” she decided in early 1967, “I think he will.” True to her nature, Jackie was not about to leave anything to chance. “I want to help him go back and find his father,” she stated flatly. “It can be done . . .”
From this point on, Jackie made sure that John was constantly exposed to the people who knew John best—from longtime pals like Red Fay, Chuck Spalding, Oleg Cassini, Bill Walton, and his ubiquitous sidekick Dave Powers to such New Frontier stalwarts as Pierre Salinger, Theodore Sorensen, and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. These were the folks “who knew Jack well and the things Jack liked to do.” As long as they were around, she reasoned, “each day John will be getting to know his father.”
Powers did more than just regale John with tales of his father’s wartime heroism and political good deeds. Although Jack cared little about professional athletics—an uncommon trait in a politician—Powers was an avid sports fan. “There will always be a Dave Powers to talk sports with him,” Jackie said, admitting that she drew a blank when John brought up the names of sports figures like Cassius Clay and Bubba Smith. “John,” she sighed, “seems to know an awful lot about sports . . .”
Jackie claimed her main contribution was to fill her son in on “the little things, like ‘Oh, don’t worry about your spelling. Your father couldn’t spell very well, either.’ That pleases him, you can bet.” She also walked John across the street from their first Fifth Avenue apartment to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which housed one of the world’s greatest collections of medieval armor. While the little boy gazed up in wonder at helmeted knights on horseback and the banners and flags unfurled on the Gothic stone walls, Jackie regaled him with tales of King Arthur’s Round Table—and made sure he understood these were the same Camelot stories that his father loved when he was a boy.
No one did more to keep JFK’s memory alive than John’s uncles. At Hyannis Port, Bobby playfully tossed John in the surf and roughhoused with him on the lawn of the Kennedy compound while Teddy took his nephew out in Nantucket Sound aboard Jack’s twenty-six-foot sailboat Victura. There were other, “even smaller things” that Jackie felt brought John “closer to Jack. The school insists that children even as young as John must wear neckties. That was all right with him. It gave him a chance to wear one of his father’s PT-boat tie pins.”
That summer of 1967, John and Caroline went along with Jackie on their first trip to Ireland. Despite attempts to hold the press at bay—they spent much of their time behind closed gates at Woodstown House, a sixty-room Georgian manor house rented for them by their wealthy New Jersey friends Murray and Peggy McDonnell—busloads of reporters following them everywhere.
One morning John was sprinting through a field when he abruptly stopped and turned back to his mother. “There’s electricity in the grass,” he yelled. “I got a shock! Electricity!” It didn’t take long for Jackie to figure out that this was the first time John, who was used to running across the meticulously trimmed lawns at Hyannis Port, Palm Beach, and Hammersmith Farm, had ever encountered nettles.
During an afternoon jaunt to Woodstown Beach, Caroline frolicked with a group of local children in the chilly waters of Waterford Harbor and a grim-faced John built sand castles—all while dozens of photographers encircled them, snapping away. Clearly unhappy with all the attention, John broke away and, with his Secret Service detail shadowing him, headed straight for a nearby candy store.
“What do you want, dear?” the lady behind the counter asked while reporters streamed inside and began taking notes.
“Everything,” John replied.
The salesclerk smiled. “Now,” she said, “you know you can’t have everything.”
“I can, too!” John shouted back before his chagrined mom appeared to take him away.
Spending time in the ancestral home of Duganstown, John impressed his distant Kennedy cousins by singing “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling” straight through—all thanks to Uncle Teddy, who taught John all the words to the song and then rehearsed with him until he mastered it.
Their Irish escapade nearly turned to tragedy when Jackie sneaked off to a local beach and, caught in the undertow, came perilously close to being swept out to sea. “The tide was rushing in with such force,” she later recalled, “that if I did not make the end spit of land opposite, I would be swept into a bay twelve miles long.”
Jackie searched the coastline, but “there was no one in sight to yell to. I was bec
oming exhausted, swallowing water and slipping past the spit of land,” she said. It was then that she “felt a great porpoise at my side.” The porpoise was Jack Walsh, the same Secret Service agent who had rescued John in Hawaii. Jackie hadn’t realized that Walsh, fearing for her safety but honoring her desire for privacy, had secretly followed her that night. “He set his shoulder against mine and together we made it to the spit. Then I sat on the beach coughing up seawater for half an hour while he found a poor itinerant and borrowed a blanket for me.” With no idea where the sea had deposited them, Jackie and Walsh walked more than a mile before finally coming to a dirt road.
It had been the narrowest of escapes, and Jackie knew it. Although she would describe the incident in chilling detail years later, Jackie asked that the children not be told what happened. “They have suffered so much already,” she explained. “Can you imagine how upsetting it would be for them to think they almost lost their mother, too?” In the meantime, she recommended that Walsh be cited for valor, and that he head up her detail in New York.
That fall, John settled back into his school routine, taking his place among the other first-graders at St. David’s. Jackie was proud of both of her children’s academic accomplishments—Caroline was more deserving, perhaps—but she fretted that they might become “just two kids living on Fifth Avenue and going to nice schools.”
Uncle Bobby, for one, was not about to let that happen. He told them “about the rats and about terrible living conditions that exist right here in the midst of a rich city,” Jackie said, and when he described “broken windows letting in the cold,” John “was so touched by that that he said he’d go to work and use the money he made to put windows in those houses.”
Both Kennedy children were also shocked to learn that countless thousands of children their age never had or likely would receive Christmas presents. That Christmas of 1967, John and Caroline gathered up most of their toys and asked Jackie to give them “to the poor children in Harlem.”
The irrepressibly adventurous Jackie was also intent on exploring the world beyond the doorman-guarded doors of 1040 Fifth Avenue. Before she struck out on solo excursions to Southeast Asia and Mexico, Jackie made sure the children’s new nanny had matters well in hand. Dark-haired, slender Marta Sgubin was a devout Roman Catholic who spoke French, Italian, Spanish, and German as well as English. Although decidedly more reserved than Maud Shaw, Sgubin made sure they did their homework on time, and that John, in particular, behaved. She also ate dinner with the children, played games with them, tucked them into bed, and then woke them up at seven the next morning. Sgubin took turns with Jackie walking the children to school. It soon became obvious, said Plimpton, “that they both adored her.”
Secure in the knowledge that John and Caroline would be safe in the new governess’s capable hands, Jackie jetted off to Cambodia, ostensibly to tour the fabled ruins of Angkor Wat. In truth, Jackie was being sent on a delicate diplomatic mission to charm Cambodia’s ruler, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, who in 1965 had severed relations with the United States over its growing involvement in Vietnam.
From the very beginning, Jackie’s trip to Southeast Asia had all the hallmarks of a state visit. Once again following their mother’s progress in the papers, John and Caroline were shown pictures of Jackie being greeted in Phnom Penh by two hundred schoolgirls in bright green sampots, the traditional Cambodian dress, and walking barefoot among the ancient ruins of Angkor Wat. John was particularly impressed by photos of Jackie feeding bananas to Prince Sihanouk’s sacred white elephants, peels and all.
John and Caroline also came across newspaper and magazine stories linking their mother to a man—in this case, Lord Harlech. In the dark days following Dallas, Jackie leaned heavily on the former David Ormsby-Gore and his wife, Sissie, for emotional support. When Sissie was killed in a car crash in Wales just two weeks before Jackie’s planned trip to Ireland, Jackie rushed to comfort her grieving friend. (Ironically, Lord Harlech himself would be killed in an automobile accident in 1985.)
Rampant speculation about a blossoming romance between Jackie, then thirty-seven, and the forty-nine-year-old British peer eventually compelled Lord Harlech to issue a formal statement. Of rumors that there was anything other than friendship between them, he could only say, “I deny it flatly.”
Jackie’s trip to the ancient Mayan ruins on Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula in March 1968 also proved grist for the gossip mill, only this time speculation centered on another old friend serving as her escort—Ros Gilpatric. In truth, Gilpatric, still married to the third of his five wives, was besotted with Jackie. “At that point, we were very much in love, yes,” said Gilpatric, who planned to get a divorce and ask Jackie to marry him. “The trip to Mexico was very romantic, and Jackie surprised me by being so free and open about us.”
He also found something else surprising—the number of times Jackie brought up the name of yet another man. “Even at the most romantic moments,” Gilpatric said, “she kept mentioning Aristotle Onassis’s name—what did I think of him? Was he as rich as they said he was? Was he, as some people said, a ‘pirate’? She also said she felt he was very protective toward her, and that he cared about the children and their welfare. She was weighing the pros and cons, and it became very clear very fast that Onassis was the man who most intrigued her. Not me, not even Bobby.”
* * *
NEITHER JOHN NOR Caroline was old enough to fathom what all the commotion was about. They had both met Lord Harlech and Gilpatric several times, and were not at all surprised to see newspaper photos of the two gray-haired gentlemen escorting their mother on her foreign trips. But the man who pursued Jackie more relentlessly than anyone else during this period was never even mentioned in the papers as a potential love interest for the former first lady.
John and Caroline were certainly unaware of how serious things had become between their mother and Onassis. By taking an apartment in Jackie’s Upper East Side neighborhood and then showering her with flowers, gifts, and heartfelt love notes, the cigar-chomping Greek had managed to charm his way into Jackie’s bed. Short (five feet four to Jackie’s five feet nine), squat, swarthy, and far from handsome, Onassis had something more than looks to recommend him. He boasted his own fleet of supertankers, his own airline (Olympic Airways), one of the world’s most lavishly appointed yachts, mansions in Paris and Athens, and his own private island, Skorpios.
A relentless social climber, he used every conceivable ruse to insinuate himself into international society. Conversant in Spanish, French, German, and English as well as his native Greek, he spoke knowledgeably about every subject from British history and opera to ballet, art, and polo.
RFK viewed Onassis as “a complete rogue on the grand scale,” and with good reason. It was only by ruthlessly pursuing a series of blatantly crooked business deals that Onassis was able to parlay an initial stake of only sixty dollars into a half-billion-dollar empire. In the process, he also seduced some of the twentieth century’s most intriguing women—including Argentina’s Evita Perón and Joe Kennedy’s longtime mistress, silent screen legend Gloria Swanson of Sunset Boulevard fame.
To shore up an alliance with fellow shipping magnate Stavros Livanos, forty-six-year-old Onassis then married Livanos’s daughter Athina (“Tina”), who was just seventeen at the time. That marriage, which produced two children, Alexander and Christina, imploded in 1959, when Tina decided to take a midnight stroll on the deck of the Christina and caught her husband and prima donna assoluta Maria Callas making love in the yacht’s mirrored bar.
The ruthless tycoon and the outrageously temperamental opera star were perfectly suited for each other. Through a combination of grit, ambition, talent, and no small amount of ruthlessness, both had managed to claw their way to the peak of their chosen fields. Callas would have become Mrs. Onassis as early as 1960 had it not been for the opposition of the Onassis children. According to Ari’s aide Johnny Meyer, Alexandra and Christina “hated” Callas. They called her,
simply and contemptuously, “the Singer.”
Now that Ari (“Aristo” to his closest friends) was making his intentions clear to Jackie, she was torn between the prospect of marrying the wealthy and powerful foreigner and her emotionally satisfying but ultimately dead-end extramarital relationship with Bobby. “She was always thinking of what was best for the children,” Tish Baldrige said, “and as far as she was concerned, Bobby was always best.”
That changed when Bobby decided to challenge Lyndon Johnson for his party’s nomination in 1968. Jackie and Ros Gilpatric were exploring the ruins at Chichen Itza in Mexico when the news reached them that Bobby was running for president. Not long after, LBJ shocked the nation by announcing that he would not seek reelection for a second full term.
As far as Jackie was concerned, with Johnson out of the way Bobby had a clear path to the White House. “Do you know what will happen to Bobby?” she later asked Arthur Schlesinger. “The same thing that happened to Jack. There is so much hatred in this country, and more people hate Bobby than hated Jack . . . I’ve told Bobby this, but he isn’t fatalistic, like me.”
Bobby shrugged off Jackie’s prophecies of doom. What troubled him now was the fact that she was seriously mulling over the idea of marrying Onassis. The mere thought of JFK’s sainted widow carrying on with a shadowy foreigner would inevitably leave a sour taste in voters’ mouths. But marriage? “For God’s sake, Jackie,” Bobby pleaded, “this could cost me five states.”
For his part, Onassis was thrilled that Bobby had decided to run. He knew that his chief rival for Jackie’s affections would now be too preoccupied with his presidential campaign to cater to Jackie’s needs or, equally important, to fulfill his duties as a surrogate dad to John and Caroline. “Now,” Ari told Johnny Meyer, “the kid has other fish to fry.”
The Good Son_JFK Jr. and the Mother He Loved Page 12
