The Kennedy Men

by Laurence Leamer

  The newborn had some trouble breathing, but the president wheeled him into his mother’s room, where he placed the infant in Jackie’s arms. The baby continued to breathe fitfully, and Dr. Walsh decided to move him by ambulance to Boston. Before that was done, a priest baptized Patrick Bouvier Kennedy, named after the president’s grandfather and Jackie’s father.

  The president flew back to Squaw Island to spend time with Caroline and John Jr. He then flew back to visit his convalescing wife at Otis, and then flew on to Boston to visit his newborn son. At this moment he was a husband succoring his wife. He was a father shepherding his children. He was a man whose newborn child was sick, and there was nothing he could do about it.

  The baby was diagnosed as having idiopathic respiratory distress syndrome. The doctors could not do much more than the president was doing, waiting and praying, hoping that the membrane on his air sacs, which so troubled his breathing, would soon dissolve. Patrick had been taken from his mother’s arms, and now he was moved to the Children’s Medical Center at Harvard’s School of Public Health, where he was put in a new experimental high-pressure chamber. The thirty-one-foot-long device was like a mini-submarine, a room within a room in which Patrick, the doctors, and the nurses were encased.

  A healthy man sees only healthy men and he thinks he has seen the world. A sick man looks out on that same vista and sees the hurt and the lame, the crippled and the stricken. When it came to the imponderable pains of the world, the president had learned to turn away, looking toward all that was bright and gay. On this day, though, there was no turning his head away from the tiny inert form of his infant son, visible through the windows of the chamber.

  Kennedy slept in the hospital that evening. He was awakened at two in the morning and told that Patrick was not doing well and that he should come to his son’s room. As Kennedy stood waiting for the elevator, he saw a burned child in an adjoining room. The president was a man of the deepest curiosity, but he turned away from any door that led into darkness. Yet now he pulled himself out of his own misery to ask about this child. He was told that the child’s mother came to see him every day. He wanted to do something for this woman. He was the president of the United States, but he had no power here to heal these wounds. He asked for a piece of paper and wrote a note to the woman, telling her “to keep her courage up.” Though he knew much of men standing bold under cannon fire and politicians holding firm in the name of principle, he knew nothing of this humble courage that won no medals, gained no accolades in books of history—a mother walking alone each day into a hospital to see her burned child.

  When Kennedy reached his son’s room, Patrick was still alive, but two hours later he was gone. The president went off by himself into the boiler room, and when he opened the door again his eyes were red and wet. He had never thrown a football to Patrick on the turf at Hyannis Port, or led his pony down a trail at Glen Ora, but by the measure of his pain he might as well have.

  When it came time to bury Patrick, the president went to the private services at Cardinal Cushing’s residence with his brothers and sisters and other Kennedys. They were all there except for the convalescing Jackie, who would have heard a special prayer for a mother who had lost three children. The fifteen mourners filled the tiny chapel and heard Cushing offer the Mass of the Angels. When the service was over, the Kennedys filed out one by one until only the president and the cardinal remained. The president harbored the tiny casket in his arms, as if he sought to take it with him.

  “My dear Jack, let’s go, let’s go,” the cardinal implored. “Nothing more can be done.”

  The two men stood alone weeping and sharing a grief that for a moment even the grace of faith could not assuage.

  Patrick’s death was a brutal way for the president to grow emotionally, but after the tragic event he did care more and grieve more than he had previously appeared capable of doing. He had always been aware of the transitory nature of life, but he saw now more than ever that God or fate could in an instant turn a placid sea into turbulent, churning waters, and that in such moments man was powerless.

  That summer he was sitting at mass one Sunday at St. Francis Xavier Church in Hyannis when he turned to the three White House correspondents sitting behind him. “Did you ever think if someone took a shot at me, he would probably get one of you first?” Kennedy asked. It was classic Kennedy irony, but clearly the president had been thinking about assassination.

  A tragedy does not by itself bring people together, bur it allows those affected to display a humanity, generosity, and vulnerability that they may not usually expose. This was as true for the president and first lady as for anyone else, and out of Patrick’s death came a marriage they had never had before. “Jack was one of these men who was incapable of being loyal to one woman,” reflected Feldman. “But in the last year of their marriage, he cared for her as he had not before, and they had a closeness they had not had before.”

  Their friends looked on as Kennedy displayed a gentle tenderness toward his grieving wife. “I think that Jack and Jackie both had their own particular problems,” reflected Betty Spalding, who often talked with both of them. “She had the same emotional blocks and limitations that Jack had, but they were both growing up emotionally. They were catching up. Their relationship was getting better and better.”

  In September, Jackie was invited to go along with her sister, Lee Radziwill, for a cruise on Aristotle Onassis’s 303-foot yacht, the Christina. The president felt nothing but disdain for the Greek shipping magnate who had been indicted for his business manipulations. When Kennedy returned from his European trip, there had been an exquisite model ship sitting outside the Oval Office. It was the kind of object that Kennedy immensely admired, but when he asked who had given him this marvelous gift, his secretary had not completed Onassis’s full name before Kennedy ordered, “Take that out of here.”

  The president clearly would have preferred not to have his wife sailing around the Mediterranean with Onassis, but there was no other luxury yacht in the world like the Christina, and he figured it was just the tonic that Jackie might need before facing the rigors of his reelection. To keep up a pretense that the journey had some other purpose than amusement, and to watch over his wife, he asked Franklin Roosevelt Jr., his undersecretary of Commerce, and his wife, Suzanne, to go along.

  Kennedy was consumed enough by the idea of his wife going off with the Greek magnate that while staying at the Carlyle Hotel on September 20, he doodled on a notepad “Jackie—Onassis.” Nine days later he drafted the precise words of a press release that Pierre Salinger was to read at his press briefing the following noon. “The yacht has been secured by Prince Radziwill for this cruise from her owner, Aristotle Onassis,” Kennedy wrote, a statement that was both untrue and unkind.

  Jackie sailed off on October 5 from Athens, along with a crew of sixty, including two coiffeurs and a dance band. The ship had hardly left port when the previously sacrosanct Jackie became the subject of criticism. Was it “improper for the wife of the president … to accept [Onassis’s] lavish hospitality?” asked Congressman Oliver Bolton, an Ohio Republican. With his reelection campaign less than a year away, Kennedy was attuned to even the most subdued criticism. He knew that the Republicans would attempt to create an image of the White House, in the words of the GOP national chairman, as a scene of “twisting in the historic East Ballroom … [and] all-night parties in foreign lands.”

  “Well, why did you let Jackie go with Onassis?” Kennedy was asked at a private party while the boat sailed the Aegean, bad publicity traveling in its wake.

  “Jackie has my blessing to go anywhere that will make her feel better,” he replied, leaving the matter at that.

  “What’s the helicopter coming in for, McDuff?” Kennedy asked Kilduff, his deputy press secretary, calling him by the nickname he usually employed. It was a Saturday morning in October and Jackie was still away.

  “It’s for the news hens,” Kilduff said, using the president
’s preferred term for the women reporters who covered Jackie and the East Wing. “They’re going to see Atoka.”

  “Well, you go call that thing off, McDuff,” Kennedy said, not wanting the reporters to visit the first family’s new weekend home. “That place is going to be just for Jackie and me.”

  “Me go out there and tell them it’s off at this point?” Kilduff asked unbelievingly.

  “Better you than me, McDuff,” the president laughed, pointing his press aide toward his duty.

  “To me, it was very meaningful,” Kilduff reflected years later. “It sealed everything that I had observed since Patrick Bouvier died. They were closer now than any time in their marriage.”

  The president and first lady had an emotional bond that they had not had before, but even so, Jackie chose to be away from her husband for several weeks. While the couple was physically apart, they both continued to display the aspects of their personalities that had been most detrimental to their marriage. This was a pleasure-loving, luxuriantly indulgent Jackie dancing her way through the high spots of Europe. She was unwilling to temper her behavior, to consider the impact on her position as the nation’s first lady, first wife, and first mother. As for her husband, the president used her time away as he always did, by bringing in other women. Whenever Jackie left town, he was like an innkeeper putting out a sign that the White House had vacancies.

  At the same time Kennedy spent more time with Caroline and John Jr. The president had never had his father’s attitude toward his own children, though not his grandchildren, that little sons and daughters were largely decorative objects who only became interesting when they were old enough to think, reflect, and talk in rounded sentences. As much as the president saw the political advantage of having children in the White House, he also adored moments such as when his namesake walked with him to the Oval Office each morning. That had always been a pleasant diversion, but since Patrick’s death there was an intensity to Kennedy’s moments with his children. This had become time when he blocked off the world.

  “I’m having the best time of my life,” Kennedy told Kay Halle, a family friend, when she came to visit. As he talked, looking at his two children, John Jr. rushed forward. “I’m a great big bear,” he said. “I want something to eat.” Halle pretended to feed the child, but the president intervened. “I’m a great big bear,” he said his voice charged with false menace, “and I’m gonna eat you up in one bite.” Little John Jr. replied in a cascade of laughter.

  When Jackie was away, she wrote her husband of ten years a seven-page, handwritten letter that was an exquisite rendering of her complex feelings for him. Even her most perfunctory thank-you note always had some graceful, unique phrase. In these pages all of her exquisitely nuanced sensibilities came together. There was both an emotional intimacy and a near formality, as if she were reaching something within herself and in her husband that neither of them had touched but that she knew she must touch now. “I loved you from the first day I saw you and if I hadn’t married you my life would have been tragic because the definition of tragedy is a waste,” she wrote. “But ten years later I love you so much more.” She wanted her husband to know how much she cherished their love. “I am just sorry for Caroline—all I will tell her to put into and expect from marriage—but if she doesn’t marry someone like you what good will it do her.”

  Surely there are few things in life as unknowable and mysterious as the intimate truths of a marriage. She loved her husband, and Jackie’s letter was like a rare orchid, a flower of beauty and subtlety, but a flower that needed warmth and light and shelter.

  Kennedy loved his wife, but he preferred bouquets to a single stem. He wrote his own cryptic rendezvous letter, but it was not to Jackie. Although the salutation has been clipped off the letter, it was most likely written in October to Mary Meyer, although Kennedy’s sex life was such that it could have been written to a number of other women as well.

  Why don’t you leave suburbia for once—come and see me—either here or at the Cape next week or in Boston the 19th. I know it is unwise, irrational—and that you may hate it—on the other hand you may not—and I will love it. You say that it is good for me not to get what I want. After all of these years you should give me a more loving answer than that. Why don’t you just say yes. J.

  There was a sentimental yearning in Kennedy these days that had long been dormant within him. In the middle of October, he hosted a state dinner for Sean Lemass, the prime minister of Ireland. During the dinner Kennedy scribbled a few notes for his eloquent toast about Ireland’s role as a beacon of liberty. The fiddlers and the bagpipers played the old Irish songs, but as so often with things Irish, it wasn’t until the hour grew late and almost everyone was gone that the evening truly began. A small group of no more than ten guests went upstairs to the family quartets, the president bringing the Irish bagpipers with them.

  Gene Kelly danced an Irish jig, and the others sang, clapped, and laughed. Teddy sang too with such enthusiasm and emotion that no one cared if he sang out of tune. The greatest of Irish songs are sad ones, and the gathering was infused with a sweet melancholic sadness.

  One of the president’s favorite songs, “The Boys of Wexford,” echoed poignantly through the White House.

  We are the boys of Wexford,

  Who fought with heart and hand

  To burst in twain the galling chain

  And free our native land.

  When it came time to go, they sang “Danny Boy,” their Irish benediction. “The president had the sweetest and saddest kind of look on his face,” Jim Reed remembered. “He was over standing by himself leaning against the doorway there, and just sort of transported into a world of imagination apparently.”

  In the third year of his administration, Kennedy still had an antipathy toward what he considered the prissy moral tone of American liberalism. After the Cuban Missile Crisis, the president had cooperated in an inside account for the Saturday Evening Post, written by his friend Charles Bartlett and Stewart Alsop. The two journalists found many top White House officials ready to savage UN Ambassador Stevenson, as long as they could do their mugging anonymously. One official said, “Adlai wanted a Munich. He wanted to trade the Turkish, Italian, and British missile bases for Cuban bases.” When Bartlett gave the article to Kennedy to read for criticism before publication, the president asked that the reference to Sorensen as a “dove” be taken out. Sorensen had been a noncombatant as a young man, and Kennedy apparently did not like the implication that a pacifist had pushed him toward peace. When it came to the devastating comments about Stevenson, however, the president uttered not a word. Instead, he called in Schlesinger, his favorite conduit of misinformation to Stevenson. Kennedy told the former professor “he understood that it [the article] accused Stevenson of advocating a Caribbean Munich.”

  “Everyone will suppose that it came out of the White House because of Charley,” the president said. “Will you tell Adlai that I never talked to Charley or any other reporter about the Cuban crisis, and that this piece does not represent my views.”

  Whatever weaknesses Stevenson may have had, a lack of honor was not one of them. He could have been as duplicitous as the president, calling in his reporters and defending himself with the truth. That would have ended the carping attacks that he suffered in the wake of the article, but it might have destroyed the American-Soviet deal, and it was not Stevenson’s way. Undersecretary of State George Ball noticed a change in the man. He went “through the motions, making speeches, yet with a feeling in his heart that it didn’t make any difference to the world if he fell over and had a heart attack.”

  Stevenson’s presence rankled Kennedy so much that it may have affected policy decisions and his attitude toward disarmament. In 1963 the president told Bobby that this was the one area in which he wished he had done more. “It was personal again—if Stevenson brought it up, it irritated him,” Bobby said. “To shock him and give him something he’d talk to his girls about, he�
�d say that disarmament was just a lot of public relations stuff.”

  Kennedy believed that peace in the nuclear age would be won by hard men speaking tough truths, not by what he considered gushy overwrought men of public virtue. In June 1963, the president finally made the issue of peace his own, and he did so at American University in one of the seminal speeches of his time. The graduating seniors heard an eloquent address that pandered neither to the American people nor to the Russians. Kennedy took a bold step forward, announcing that the United States would unilaterally not “conduct nuclear tests in the atmosphere so long as other states do not do so.”

  Kennedy described peace as “a process—a way of solving problems.” It was a process in which he wanted to involve his nation, the Soviet Union, and the world. The president talked about the nature of Soviet communism, but beneath that he expressed an underlying belief in the commonality of humankind and the hope that the threat of nuclear weapons might in the end draw the world’s people closer, not further apart.

  The young people in that audience were living at a time when many Americans feared that the world’s problems were overwhelming and intractable, with the shadow of nuclear war hovering over everything they did. Giving in to despair, however, was not what Kennedy had been brought up to do, and as much as his speech was about a strategy of peace leading toward nuclear disarmament, it was equally about the spiritual armament and strength that would be required in this world.

  “Our problems are man-made,” Kennedy told the students. “Therefore, they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings. Man’s reason and spirit have often solved the seemingly unsolvable—and we believe they can do it again.”

  No one listened to the president’s words more attentively, and analyzed them more closely, than the Russians, who had their own goal of “peaceful coexistence.” In late July, Khrushchev announced that he would agree to a limited ban on nuclear testing, ending all but underground tests that could not be verified by off-site testing. This was just a way station to a broader peace, but it was a way station that was reached in part because Kennedy had made such a deep, brave speech.