Four Friends

by William D. Cohan

  In a 1961 letter to her grandmother, Caroline described John as “a bad squeaky boy who tries to spit in his mother’s Coca-Cola and who has a very bad temper.”

  From an early age, John seemed particularly drawn to airplanes. Accompanying his father by helicopter to Andrews Air Force Base, he decided he wanted to go with him on Air Force One for a speech at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. Photographers captured pictures of the nearly three-year-old John crying when he discovered the news that he would not be able to join his father on the trip to Colorado and instead had to return to the White House. In September, at Otis Air Force Base in Massachusetts, John again tried to accompany his father on Air Force One and again was brought back to the reality that he could not go along—this time by his cousin Robert Kennedy Jr. In October 1963, the Times ran a photograph of John crying yet again, this time as his father left Andrews Air Force Base to deliver a speech in the Midwest. To make it up to him, his father would take John to the hangar where the helicopters were kept. John would put on the pilot’s helmet and push around the control stick and press a bunch of buttons. John’s uncle Teddy later recalled, “A famous photograph 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 that 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.’”

  Maud Shaw, his nanny, thought that John “suffered a great handicap by being brought up in the White House, surrounded by all the restrictions that have to be placed on a President’s children.” By contrast, she thought Caroline had benefited by spending her first three years growing up in Georgetown, away from the spotlight, where she could go with Shaw for walks and to get ice cream—“things that John could never do without Secret Service men trailing behind him and, unwittingly, causing a sensation.” One of the benefits of John’s security detail, though, was that he developed a close bond with them—Lynn Meredith, Bob Foster, and Tom Wells—and it was Foster who taught John how to ride a bike after hours of trial and error. “At times,” Shaw wrote, “their devotion to the children was a bit frustrating, for whenever John wanted anything, he knew he had only to ask one of the Secret Service men for it,” and a pattern was set.

  Once, when President Tito of Yugoslavia visited the White House in October 1963, John wanted to go out on the Truman Balcony to have a look at the preparations that had commenced on the lawn below. Maud Shaw let him out. “He loved that,” she wrote, “staring at the men putting the platforms and microphones in place and watching the television and film cameras being lined up.” He had dressed up like a gunslinger, with a couple of toy six-shooters on his belt. Unbeknownst to Shaw, one of his plastic guns slipped from the belt and fell to the ground below. Soon thereafter, she and John were off to Dumbarton Oaks, a public estate in Georgetown, for a walk around the gardens there. By that evening, the press was reporting that John had dropped one of his toy guns on Tito’s head. The next morning, John’s father asked Shaw to come to the Oval Office.

  “Miss Shaw,” he said, “I thought I asked you to keep John-John out of sight yesterday.”

  “Yes you did, Mr. President,” she replied. “And I did take him away from the White House during the ceremony. I assure you we were at Dumbarton Oaks when he was supposed to be dropping his gun on President Tito’s head.”

  “Is that right?” he responded.

  “Yes, Mr. President,” she said. “You can check with the Secret Service detail.”

  “All right, then,” the president said. “Thank you.”

  Jackie strictly limited photographers’ access to the children, but in October 1963, she set sail for a two-week vacation aboard the yacht owned by Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis. (The trip followed the tragic death of her second son, Patrick, two days after his birth.) With Jackie away, the president allowed Look magazine to take candid photographs of the children. The Look issue contained the most famous photograph ever taken of the president and his son—the one where Kennedy was seated at the Resolute desk while his son peeked out of a secret hideaway at his feet, which the magazine claimed he called his “secret house.” Years later, John sent a note to President Clinton about the famous picture of him. According to Paul Begala, one of Clinton’s senior advisers, “I was working at the White House and I was on the impeachment team. And there was a moment. I’m sitting in my office. I had a private fax, and the thing starts whirring and it spits out a one-page note, handwritten. It says, ‘Dear Mr. President, I’ve been under that desk. There’s barely room for a three-year-old, much less a 22-year-old intern. Cheers, JK.’ I have to say I took that thing into the Oval Office, and Bill Clinton laughed so hard—tears. It was a great release. It was a great moment.”

  On November 4, a day after a coup in Saigon toppled the South Vietnamese president, John walked into the Oval Office while his father was taping some of his thoughts about the coup and the other events of the day. Suddenly, a big “hello!” could be heard on the tape—John—followed by his father asking him some questions: Why do the leaves fall? Why do leaves turn green? Why does the snow cover the ground? Where do we go on the Cape? John’s responses were muffled. There seemed to be lots of giggling.

  * * *

  NOVEMBER 22, 1963, “BEGAN PERFECTLY NORMALLY, of course,” Shaw wrote, with both Caroline and John coming into her room to say good morning. Caroline went off to school in the solarium in the White House converted for that purpose. Shaw and John went for a walk. At lunch, along with two of their cousins—Senator Ted Kennedy’s children Teddy and Kara—they talked about the upcoming birthdays of John and Caroline. Shaw was about to put the children down for their naps when she got the call from Nancy Tuckerman, Jackie’s secretary, that the president had been shot.

  On the plane back from Dallas, a call went out to Jackie’s mother that Caroline and John should be brought from the White House to the ten-thousand-square-foot Auchincloss mansion at 3044 O Street, in Georgetown. Jackie’s mother spoke with Shaw, who told her, “I will bring enough things so that they can stay as long as Mrs. Kennedy wants them there.” John’s grandmother brought a crib down from her attic—it was tied together with string—and asked her cook to make them supper. She wasn’t sure what time exactly the children arrived at her house. “It was so dark, as it is November afternoons,” she recalled. When Jackie’s mother met up with Jackie at the Bethesda Naval Hospital, in Maryland, where the president’s body had been brought after Air Force One had landed at Andrews Air Force Base, they eventually got to speaking about how Caroline and John were at the Auchinclosses’ O Street mansion. It turned out that Jackie hadn’t given that directive at all, and wanted the children returned to the White House. “Fortunately they hadn’t gone to bed yet,” Shaw continued, “and they were taken right back to the White House. So they thought they had just simply come to have supper with their grandmother, which they had done before. And I never have known exactly who that message came from. I think it must have been somebody who thought that Jackie wouldn’t want them at the White House and had taken it into their own hands and decided that this is what she would have wanted to happen. Whoever it was, was wrong. I think that Jackie’s reaction was exactly right, as it certainly was through all of the ensuing days.”

  On his third birthday, John bid his father goodbye in front of a nation overcome with grief. “A little boy at his grieving mother’s side saluted the passing coffin,” according to an account in the New York Times. “And in that moment, he seemed the brave soldier his father wanted him to be on this day.” He was dressed identically to his older sister: red shoes, white socks, shorts, and a powder blue double-breasted overcoat. Odd attire to be sure, but one guaranteed to stand out against the black funereal garb worn by his mother—along with a nearly opaque black veil—and by his two
uncles, Bobby and Teddy. That historic photograph, taken by Daily News photographer Dan Farrell, seared into our collective conscious the image of an adorable little boy, dressed like Little Lord Fauntleroy, saying goodbye to a father he had barely known. “That salute of John Jr. is the first extraordinary celebrity moment in John Jr.’s life,” explained Laurence Leamer, who has written extensively about the Kennedys. “From that moment on, his life was different.”

  Although understandably in a state of shock and despair—a condition that would drive her to the brink of suicide at times during the years after her husband’s assassination—Jackie tried desperately to reestablish some semblance of normalcy for her children. After a few days in Hyannis Port, the family had returned to the White House on December 2, with the expectation that they would move out three days later. Even though she would later say of this period that she was “not in any condition to make much sense of anything,” on the evening of December 4, she secretly arranged for the caskets of her two deceased children, Arabella and Patrick—which had been removed previously from a family cemetery in Massachusetts—to be placed into a grave beside their father in Arlington National Cemetery. While Caroline and John remained at the White House, Jackie, her sister, her mother, and Bobby Kennedy headed to Arlington for the reburial. “Seeing the three—father, daughter, son—back together again, albeit in death was a stark reminder of the Herculean effort made by their parents to bring these babies to term,” wrote Philip Hannan, the pastor who presided over the ceremony.

  Jackie bought an eighteenth-century brick house at 3017 N Street, in Georgetown, and asked the decorator to re-create in the new home the kids’ rooms exactly as they had been in the White House. By the time she and the kids were ready to move in, in February 1964, N Street, where they had already been staying at the borrowed home of W. Averell Harriman, had become “one of the tourist sights of Washington,” Shaw wrote. “There was never a time when there were not crowds of sightseers gathered outside, waiting to see her and the children, taking photographs and trying to peep into the windows.”

  Much to his delight, John discovered that their new house had an elevator. He and Caroline lived with Shaw on the top floor of the house, along with a large room filled with toys that had been packed away at the White House but were once again ripe for playtime. “John found an old machine gun and went round the room firing the thing off,” Shaw wrote. He had a life-sized tiger on wheels and a huge tile construction kit. John especially liked to go up to the top of the house and look out of the skylight.

  As the first anniversary of her husband’s assassination loomed, Jackie decided to move to New York. “It was obvious that the continual stares of the people who gather day after day outside No. 3017 upset her,” Shaw wrote. “What was hard for John to accept was that he no longer lived in the ‘big white house’ in Washington. Whenever he saw a photograph of it, he would frown and ask me: ‘That’s where we live isn’t it, Miss Shaw?’” She had to remind him that he no longer lived there.

  In New York, the family spent six weeks at the Carlyle Hotel while the renovations of their penthouse apartment at 1040 Fifth Avenue were completed. By this time, Shaw had made many observations about John. She found him to be intelligent but not as “studious” as his sister. “He always much preferred horsing about to studying,” she wrote in 1965. “While Caroline tends to be a little shy and reserved, John is outgoing and full of self-confidence. He is the clown of the two and a natural comic.” She recalled how John’s imitation of the Beatles, with his hips swaying and singing, “She loves you, yeah-yeah-yeah,” cracked up her and his mother. She found John to be “as sharp as a tack” and not easily fooled. She also thought he had “his father’s gift” of being able to ask “just the right questions” and being able to continue to ask them until he received satisfactory answers. “John was one hundred percent boy,” she wrote. “He was much more interested in cowboys and Indians, guns, swords, soldiers, airplanes and space rockets than anything else. And he was just as bloodthirsty as any other boy.”

  At least high above Fifth Avenue, there were not people peering in their windows or lining up outside their doors, hoping to catch a glimpse of one of them or another. The doormen at 1040 Fifth Avenue made sure of that. But despite New York’s more blasé attitude toward celebrities, Jackie and her two children—and John especially—remained the object of fascination for both the media and the paparazzi, which could never seem to get enough of them, or him. Jackie had an office on Park Avenue, which she used to answer thousands of letters sent to her and to begin to frame what the Kennedy Library would be. For Caroline and John, one of the best things about New York City was that their new home was situated directly across from Central Park. The Secret Service would bring their bicycles into Central Park, for John and Caroline to ride. They went to the Central Park Zoo and visited the two deer that had been at the White House with them and had been donated to the zoo near their apartment. (John still considered them his deer.) They went to the Bronx Zoo and rode camels and watched the lions being fed. Another benefit of living in New York City was that any number of their cousins lived nearby. The only negative about New York from John’s perspective was that he could no longer play on the presidential helicopters and jets.

  In July 1966, the front-page news in the New York Times was that John, while on vacation with his family in Hawaii, had accidentally fallen into the remains of a charcoal fire and suffered first- and second-degree burns on his right hand, forearm, and butt. He was at a private resort owned by Laurance Rockefeller when the incident occurred and was flown back to Honolulu for further treatment. A month later, while in Hyannis Port, John had his tonsils removed at the Cape Cod Hospital. He also broke his wrist when he fell off the pony he was riding in New Jersey.

  In August 1968—two months after the assassination of his uncle Bobby—the papers reported that John would be leaving St. David’s and moving across town to the Collegiate School, the oldest school in Manhattan. John’s mother decided to make the switch because the teachers at St. David’s believed John should repeat second grade until he “becomes mature.” One father of a student in John’s class described him as “restless” and “inattentive” and often “disruptive.” Another theory for the change was that Leonard Bernstein, the famous conductor, had urged Jackie to make the switch and that his son was an eighth-grader at the school. But Carl Andrews Jr., the school’s headmaster, told the Boston Globe that John was “no more rambunctious than any other second grader. He applied, was tested and accepted. It’s that simple.” It was a difficult time for the Kennedys. After watching Bobby Kennedy be buried in Arlington National Cemetery next to his brother, her husband, Jackie famously said, “If they’re killing Kennedys, then my children are targets … I want to get out of this country.” But of course, that did not happen. She instead sought the security she thought a billionaire shipping magnate might provide.

  Jackie married Aristotle Onassis on October 20, 1968, on Skorpios, Onassis’s private Greek island. John went to the wedding, of course. (He skipped a few days of school to attend.) And there were plenty of stories about his return to New York City, without his mother, three days later. According to the Boston Globe, the Kennedy party was the last to leave the TWA flight from Athens to New York. John was the first Kennedy to emerge from the jet, wearing “a tan topcoat, short pants, gray knee socks and brown shoes.” He “gave a quick smile and skipped down the steps” into a waiting limousine.

  Eric Pooley at Time described John at Collegiate as being “a distinctly average student, restless in class, jiggling his leg nervously, rarely speaking.” Pooley’s description made sense to Peter Blauner, John’s classmate. “My personal impression of him was lots of brown hair,” he said. “I believe the de rigueur light-brown corduroy jacket of the day, and I seem to remember red turtlenecks. When he would sit in class, he often sat with his legs pretty far apart and then, again, in the manner of adolescent boys, was able to wiggle them back and forth w
ith amazing speed, almost like a hummingbird.” Another classmate claimed John “ate erasers.”

  He was given permission to miss a week of school to commemorate the fifth anniversary of his father’s death—which was, of course, front-page news—and to celebrate his eighth birthday, which he did with school friends at the country home his mother had rented in the horse country of Peapack, New Jersey. John spent much of the summer of 1969 in Greece aboard the Christina, his stepfather’s luxurious 325-foot yacht. In an August 7 letter to McGeorge Bundy, who had been her husband’s national security adviser, Jackie thanked him for the “extraordinary” letter he had written to John in the weeks after the July 20 moon landing, which his father had once envisioned. “If you could have seen his little face when he opened it,” she wrote on the yacht’s stationery. John read Bundy’s letter to himself and then he asked his mother to read it aloud. There was silence as Jackie read it; her small audience was moved nearly to tears. “All the thoughts at those days of going to the moon,” Jackie wrote to Bundy, “and Jack not there to see it and John who must find his father through long years of searching.”

  On February 3, 1971, President Nixon invited Jackie and her children to the White House for a private dinner with him and his family. It was their first visit back since the days after the assassination. They were together for a bit more than two hours, including a visit to the Oval Office. At one point during dinner, John spilled a glass of milk into Nixon’s lap, who reportedly “reacted graciously.” In his thank-you note to the president the next day, John thanked him and the First Lady for showing him the White House again. “I don’t think I could remember much about the White House,” he wrote. “When I sat on Lincoln’s bed and wished for something my wish really came true. I wished that I [would] have good luck at school.” He told Nixon he “really loved” his dogs and noticed that when he got home to New York, his dogs were sniffing him. “Maybe they remember the White House,” he concluded. John obviously had a much higher opinion of Nixon than did the Daniel brothers.