These Few Precious Days

by Christopher Andersen

  Jack was eager to meet his idol, even though there was no love lost between Churchill and Papa Joe. As FDR’s ambassador to the Court of St. James’s in the years leading up to World War II, isolationist Joe—already suspect because of his Irish roots—had argued against U.S. involvement in the looming fight against the Nazis.

  On board the Christina fifteen years later, Churchill now appeared to be giving Joe’s son the cold shoulder—although it was hard to tell if it was intentional. “The poor man was really quite ga‑ga then,” Jackie said. “It was hard going. I felt so sorry for Jack that evening because he was meeting his hero, only he met him too late.”

  That didn’t explain, however, why Churchill seemed to lavish so much more attention on the other guests—particularly Jackie. “I don’t know,” Jackie said, glancing over her husband’s white dinner jacket. “Maybe he thought you were the waiter, Jack.”

  If Jackie had hoped to have Jack all to herself during their European idyll, she was sadly mistaken. This time, it appeared that Jack even made a play for Jackie’s sister, Lee, right under the nose of Lee’s first husband, Michael Canfield, adopted son of the legendary publisher Cass Canfield. Gore Vidal insisted that Canfield claimed “there were times when I think she [Lee] went perhaps too far, you know? Like going to bed with Jack in the room next to mine in the South of France and then boasting about it.”

  Whatever constituted the last straw, Jackie was telling their traveling companions that she was no longer willing to put up with Jack’s unfettered cheating. According to Peter Ward, a British friend who rendezvoused with them in Antibes, “they were split. She said, ‘I’m never going back’ in my presence several times.”

  Yet, less than a week later, Jackie and Jack were all smiles as they dined with Lee and Michael Canfield in Monaco. Jack had agreed to stop his philandering, but only because of what Jackie told him: she was expecting a child.

  They told no one. “Jackie was a firm believer in waiting until it was obvious—at least three months—before making any sort of announcement,” Janet Auchincloss said. “Just the immediate families knew.” But in October, shortly after moving into Hickory Hill and starting to decorate the nursery, Jackie miscarried in her third month. Once again, Jackie and Jack made little of their loss and simply moved on. “They really,” Yusha Auchincloss said, “didn’t share their feelings with anyone.”

  Three months later, Jackie was expecting again. The child was due in September 1956, but it was clear that politics, not fatherhood, was the first thing on Jack’s mind. Adlai Stevenson, who had lost the presidency to Dwight Eisenhower four years earlier, once again had the nomination sewn up. As Democrats prepared to hold their convention in Chicago that August, however, the second spot on the ticket was up for grabs.

  For months leading up to the convention, Jack and his minions lobbied hard to make it happen. At first, they left Jackie alone. “That was perfectly fine with her,” said Arthur Schlesinger Jr., a Stevenson adviser who would become a key member of JFK’s brain trust. “Jackie resented us all on some level, I’m sure. We were always under foot, popping up out of nowhere, invading their privacy.”

  According to Hyannis Port friend and neighbor Larry Newman, Jackie simply “loathed politics and politicians,” and Gore Vidal agreed that the intensity of Jackie’s feelings went far beyond mere resentment. “Jackie saw there was nothing glamorous about that world. It was just sleazy,” Vidal said, “and boring.” Whenever “the pols came into view,” Chuck Spalding added, “you could see this desperate ‘get me out of here’ look in her eyes.”

  It was a look Jack’s team of hard-core pols and tweedy Ivy League intellectuals knew all too well after the newlyweds rented their first home, a narrow nineteenth-century townhouse at 3321 Dent Place in Georgetown. These invaders strolled in and out of the house unannounced, left the toilet seats up, ground mud into the rugs, dropped cigarette butts everywhere, and smashed Jackie’s Sèvres ashtrays.

  “I hate it, hate it, hate it!” Jackie complained to her friend Tish Baldrige after being trapped once again in the bathroom wearing nothing but a negligee, waiting for the coast to clear. “There are meetings in the living room, meetings in the kitchen, meetings in the hallways, and meetings on the stairs. Step outside for a breath of fresh air, and they are sitting on the front steps. Where am I supposed to go to get away from them?” At one point, Jackie told Baldrige that she was thinking of getting “a bullhorn and just blasting them every time I want to walk down the front stairs or use the bathroom.”

  Now that she was left to her own devices in the Virginia countryside, Jackie set out to transform the inside of Hickory Hill from an Eisenhower era, wall-to-wall eyesore into an antique-filled showplace. She paid special attention to the nursery, furnishing it in shades of yellow and white so that it would be appropriate for either gender. “She may have felt a little isolated out there, all alone while Jack was out in the world shaking things up,” Jamie Auchincloss said. “She was very nervous about losing the baby, too.”

  It didn’t help, Rose Kennedy pointed out, that Jackie responded to stress by chain-smoking two packs of Salems a day (Jackie later switched to L&Ms, and then to Newport menthols). “You really shouldn’t smoke, my dear,” Rose would admonish her daughter-in-law in that unforgettable cackle. “It’s not healthy for the baby, you know.” Jackie’s response was to do a dead-on impression of Rose the minute she left the room—but not before lighting up. “She had a wicked sense of humor and was a superb mimic,” George Plimpton said. “Her imitation of Rose even had Jack on the floor, absolutely convulsed with laughter.”

  Rose had a point, of course. Jackie’s obstetrician, Dr. John Walsh, had repeatedly urged Jackie to quit smoking, at least until after she had the baby. “My words fell on deaf ears,” Walsh said of Jackie’s smoking habit, which began back at Miss Porter’s. “It was just a blind spot with her,” added Dr. Janet Travell. “Yes, a lot of pregnant women did smoke in those days, but even then it was widely frowned upon. The medical community certainly knew you were risking complications if you smoked.”

  Still, Travell conceded that Jackie was “under a lot of stress, and apparently trying to kick a serious nicotine addiction wasn’t something she could deal with at the time.” For his part, Jack had no serious objection to Jackie’s smoking habit, as long as it was done out of sight and away from cameras. She, conversely, went so far as to encourage Jack’s cigar smoking (he had a particular fondness for Havana Upmanns) as a way of masking her cigarette smoke—a ruse she continued in the White House. “If anyone asks,” Jackie shrugged, “I just blame his smelly stogies.”

  Jackie’s hopes of being left alone for the rest of her pregnancy were dashed when Jack pleaded with her to join him at the convention in Chicago. When she balked, telling him that she was concerned she might miscarry again, Jack pointed out that Bobby’s wife, Ethel, who was also eight months pregnant, would be there. (Jack’s sister Patricia, married to the movie actor Peter Lawford, was even further along in her pregnancy and decided to remain home in Los Angeles.)

  Not wanting to disappoint her husband or exclude herself from this important part of his life, Jackie accompanied Jack to Chicago. As it turned out, while Jack worked the convention floor, Jackie was left to fend for herself at a breakfast for the Massachusetts delegation and a cocktail party for campaign wives.

  Jack lost the vice presidential spot to Tennessee senator Estes Kefauver on the third ballot. Jackie, emotionally drained and physically exhausted, stood sobbing next to Jack as he thanked supporters gathered in their suite at Chicago’s Conrad Hilton Hotel. “It’s all too much to bear,” she told Smathers. “I don’t know how you all do it.”

  At that point, Smathers was surprised at how hard both Jack and Jackie were taking the defeat, but he wasn’t particularly worried about the baby. “None of us knew about the first miscarriage,” he explained. “Jack never said a thing. They kept that all private. Since Jackie was young and the Kennedys seemed to have a knack
for producing children, there seemed to be no cause for concern.”

  Immediately after the convention, Jack told Jackie that he would not be returning with her to Hickory Hill. Instead, he was going to join his parents as they vacationed on the French Riviera, and then cruise the Mediterranean aboard a yacht with his brother Teddy and George Smathers.

  “What do you mean, Jack?” she asked incredulously. After all, she had done everything he had asked of her. “I’m due in a month,” she pleaded. “Please don’t leave me alone. I’m frightened.”

  Jack was frightened, too—of Joe. The senior Kennedy had angrily warned Jack that it was too soon to try for national office, that he must not squander his political capital making a futile vice presidential bid. Now he felt he had to make amends with his father.

  IT WAS LESS EASY TO explain why Jack also felt free to take a Mediterranean cruise while his wife was back home about to have a baby. “For God’s sake, Jackie,” he said—Salinger, Spalding, Lowe, and others recalled that JFK routinely prefaced his remarks with “For God’s sake, Jackie” or “Oh my God, kid” whenever he was irritated with her—“I’ll only be gone for nine days. There are lots of people around to take care of you. You’ll be fine until I get back.” It wasn’t as if he felt it was necessary even to be there when Jackie gave birth; Joe, for all his involvement in their adult lives, had not been present at the birth of any of his nine children.

  But Jackie wasn’t just worried about the baby. George Smathers conceded that Jack was going to have “his share of female company” on the trip, and that Jackie knew it. In the end, Smathers said, “there just wasn’t anything she could do about it.”

  Instead, Jackie went home to Hammersmith Farm—and to her mother. While his wife tried to regain her strength back in Newport, Jack enjoyed the company of his friends and several female guests aboard a chartered forty-foot yacht. Jack had personally invited several of the women aboard but seemed most interested in one: “Pooh,” an attractive Manhattan socialite who only spoke of herself in the third person: “Pooh is so glad you asked me to come along,” “Pooh would like a daiquiri.”

  On the morning of August 23, 1956, Janet Auchincloss awoke to hear her daughter screaming for help. She pushed open the door to Jackie’s room and found her on the floor, clutching her stomach. Jackie was rushed by ambulance to Newport Hospital, where doctors moved quickly to perform an emergency caesarean.

  When she regained consciousness several hours later, Bobby Kennedy was at Jackie’s bedside, holding her hand. It fell to Jack’s brother to tell Jackie that doctors tried but failed to save the life of her stillborn daughter.

  Jackie had also almost died in the process, hemorrhaging so badly that she required several blood transfusions. At one point her condition was so grave, Bobby told her, a priest had been called to her room. Not wanting to upset her, Bobby made no mention of the fact that he had already made arrangements for the unnamed baby to be buried in Newport. (Jackie and Jack had actually already picked out names, and if it was a girl, they agreed she would be named Arabella, after the ship John Winthrop took to New England in 1630.)

  Out to sea and out of radio contact, Jack was blissfully unaware of the tragedy—and of the desperate attempts to reach him. While Bobby issued a statement citing “exhaustion and nervous tensions following the Democratic National Convention” as the cause, the Washington Post carried a dramatic front-page headline: SENATOR KENNEDY ON MEDITERRANEAN TRIP UNAWARE THAT HIS WIFE HAS LOST BABY.

  Devastated and feeling abandoned by her husband, Jackie waited for three days before Jack put into port in Genoa and called home. Incredibly, he still hadn’t been told of the baby’s death; even that sad and emotionally draining task was left for Jackie to bear.

  “Oh, Jack, Jack,” she wept into the phone, “I’m so sorry. I know how much you wanted this baby.” Janet Auchincloss was “horrified” at Jack’s callousness in going in the first place and now tried to persuade her daughter to leave him. But rather than lashing out, Jackie seemed intent on blaming herself for both the miscarriage and the stillbirth.

  Just two days after Jackie lost her baby, Pat Lawford gave birth to her daughter Sydney. Ethel would deliver her fifth child, Courtney, just two weeks later. To Jackie, these were not only painful reminders of her own loss, but proof that what the other Kennedy women had been whispering to one another was true: the haughty-seeming Miss Bouvier wasn’t up to the physical demands of carrying a child full-term.

  Jack would have none of it. According to George Smathers, his friend looked “as if he’d been smacked in the face” when he learned the news. “It was a blow, a real blow. Jack didn’t show his feelings if he could help it, and he didn’t cry or anything, but it was clear he was in a state of shock. After that, he wasn’t thinking clearly.”

  That became obvious when he informed Jackie he saw no reason to abandon his friends and fly home. “I’m not sure what that would accomplish,” he told her over the phone. “I don’t want to disappoint Teddy and the others. Why don’t I finish up the last four days of the trip and fly back from Nice?”

  Incredulous, Jackie lashed out over the phone. How could he be so callous and unfeeling? She lost the baby because he insisted she go to the convention. Now he wasn’t going to interrupt his vacation over something as minor as the death of a child?

  At first Jack remained silent, taken aback by his wife’s sudden outburst but also trying to absorb all that had happened while he was literally out to sea. “Now Jackie …”

  “This time I’m serious, Jack,” she interrupted him before hanging up. The breathy little-girl-lost voice was gone, replaced with a steely resolve. “I cannot live like this. I need you here with me—right now.”

  Moments after hanging up the receiver, Jack relayed the details of the exchange to Smathers. “You better get your ass back there right away,” Smathers told him bluntly, “if you plan on staying married—or on getting to the White House.”

  Jack wasted no time commandeering a car and taking the wheel himself. “We drove like a bat out of hell to the airport,” Smathers said. By this time, apparently, it had dawned on Jack that the place for him to be was by Jackie’s side. Conceding that it was “a shame” Jack didn’t come to that realization immediately, Smathers also insisted that Jack “cared deeply” for Jackie and “felt terrible about hurting her feelings.” In his own, guarded way, Jack “was concerned,” Smathers said. “He was concerned.”

  It was too little, too late. “Jackie was miffed,” Jamie Auchincloss said. “She gave him the silent treatment. She could be the warmest person in the world or so cold that it made your teeth chatter.”

  In contrast to Jackie’s sulking, dark moods, and grudge-holding (“She could stay mad at you forever,” George Plimpton said), Jack’s temper would flare “but that was it. He’d blow sky-high over something, pound his fist on the desk, the whole deal,” Pierre Salinger said, “and then five minutes later it was like it never happened.” Smathers agreed that “even though Jack had a hell of a temper, he never held a grudge. It wasn’t his style. Now, Jackie was something else entirely.”

  JACK ARRIVED IN NEWPORT THE day after their phone call, but it was too late. Jackie felt betrayed and abandoned, and held Jack accountable for her ill-fated pregnancies. Had it not been for the hectic pace of Jack’s political career and the demands made on Jackie when she was at her most vulnerable, at this point in their married life they would already be the parents of two healthy children.

  Within days Jack was back at work in Washington, making the most of his new post-convention status as a rising star of the Democratic Party. Jackie, meanwhile, divided her time between Newport and New York, giving rise to rumors of a split. But this wasn’t just idle gossip; for at least the second time in their brief marriage Jackie was seriously considering divorce.

  Joe, with whom Jackie had always shared a warm and joking relationship, would have none of it. When Time magazine claimed that the infamously ambitious Joseph P. Kennedy h
ad offered Jackie $1 million not to divorce his son, Jackie phoned and cracked, “Only one million? Why not ten million?”

  The offer was real and, according to Joe’s longtime friend Clare Boothe Luce, as well as Gore Vidal and others, she took it. “Yes, Joe did offer Jackie the money to stay with Jack,” Vidal said, “and she took it. Happily.”

  Joe also agreed to rent a house for Jack and Jackie at 2808 P Street in Georgetown while they looked for a new home. There was no way, she told Jack, that she could return to Hickory Hill—not with the nursery she had so lovingly decorated for their baby. A few months later they sold Hickory Hill to Bobby and Ethel, who over seventeen years wound up having eleven children. “Wind her up,” Jackie quipped, “and she becomes pregnant.”

  In March 1957, Jackie learned that she, too, was pregnant again. By this time, Jack had—with Joe’s blessing, of course—decided to run for president in 1960. As much as she wanted to be part of her husband’s life, Jackie made it clear that this time she would not subject herself to the strains of politics.

  While her husband traveled the country making speeches (144 in the span of just ten months), Jackie busied herself decorating their new home—a redbrick Federal townhouse at 3307 N Street in Georgetown. Jackie instantly recognized the building as “an architectural gem” that she could turn into a warm yet stately home. Jack was drawn to the house for one very specific reason. “He bought our house in Georgetown,” Jackie said, “because the doorknob was old, which he liked.”

  Jackie flooded the rooms with expensive eighteenth-century French furniture (all on Joe’s tab) and, to Jack’s surprise, had no qualms about decorating the third-floor nursery in a style similar to the one at Hickory Hill.