Mrs. Kennedy and Me: An Intimate Memoir (22 page)

“Well, it’s just terrible, isn’t? How serious is Joe’s condition?”

I told him what I could about Ambassador Kennedy’s condition—basically the information the family had already made public.

“And how is Jackie?”

“She’s doing very well, Mr. Sinatra. As well as can be anticipated under the circumstances.”

The conversation went on for about twenty minutes, as it usually did, with Sinatra trying to find out what he could about Mrs. Kennedy’s activities, and me giving him the barest of information in return. I didn’t enjoy these conversations, but I knew that I was saving Mrs. Kennedy the uncomfortable position of having to go through them herself.

“Well, please tell Jackie I called,” he said, as he always did.

“Oh, yes, I will, Mr. Sinatra.”

I hung up the phone and called Mrs. Kennedy.

“I just got off the phone with Mr. Sinatra, Mrs. Kennedy.”

“Oh? What did he say?”

“We had a very pleasant conversation and he wanted me to relay to you his concern about the ambassador as well as his concern for you and the president.”

“Thanks for letting me know, Mr. Hill. I’ll talk to him myself one of these days.”

T
HE APPROACHING
C
HRISTMAS
Day caused Mrs. Kennedy some concern regarding gifts and the appropriate attitude considering the Kennedy patriarch’s condition. She decided to once again venture out to Worth Avenue, hoping to regain the celebratory feeling of a normal Christmas. Once again the store employees were in awe and soon people were gathering and gawking through store windows. Agent Jeffries and I worked as a team, with one of us walking in front of Mrs. Kennedy, parting the way through the crowd, constantly saying, “Excuse us, please. May we get through here please?” while the other walked behind her. We tried to be as respectful as possible, and usually people responded positively to our requests, but every so often, we’d have to extend an arm or use our body to fend off an overzealous individual trying to reach Mrs. Kennedy. We managed to keep the people away so that she could purchase some gifts for Caroline and John, and other family members, but it was not the pleasant experience she had hoped for.

Later she pulled me aside and said, “Mr. Hill, it seems I can’t go anywhere anymore without causing a scene. It is so difficult to do the rather simple things I enjoy, like buying a gift, without it becoming a front-page story.”

She wasn’t complaining, just stating the facts. Then she looked up at me with wistful eyes and asked, “Isn’t there something you can do about it, Mr. Hill?”

A thought entered my head, but rather than respond right away, I paused and said, “Let me think about the problem, Mrs. Kennedy, and I’ll see what I can come up with.”

Thus it was that I became a frequent shopper on Worth Avenue, buying swimwear for the president, toys for the children, and personal items for Mrs. Kennedy. This was not in the job description the Secret Service had for me, but it was just one more way to make life a lot easier and less confrontational for Mrs. Kennedy. She appreciated my efforts, and I considered it a good protective move to remove her from public exposure as much as possible.

Christmas came and went, as the remaining time in Palm Beach became somewhat routine, day after day. Go to St. Mary’s Hospital to see the president’s father; stop by the chapel and pray or go to St. Ann’s Church in West Palm Beach or St. Edward’s in Palm Beach; have a lunchtime cruise aboard the
Honey Fitz;
back to St Mary’s Hospital in the afternoon. The days were long, and the
laughter that had once been constant in the bustling Kennedy household had all but disappeared.

Late one evening, Paul Landis and I were driving back to Woody’s Motel together, discussing the day’s events and how incredibly sad the situation was. By this point the doctors had said there was nothing they could do. Ambassador Kennedy would be paralyzed and confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life. They said that he had retained full cognizance and intellectual capacity, but it was unlikely he would ever speak again. He would be a prisoner in his own body, unable to have the influence that he had thrived upon, and on which President Kennedy had relied.

It seemed like there was nothing to feel good about, when Paul suddenly remembered a bright spot in the day.

“I did see the president smile one time today,” Paul said.

“Oh really?” I asked. I couldn’t imagine what could have possibly made the president smile throughout this terrible ordeal.

“He had just taken Caroline in to visit the ambassador, and when we walked out of the elevator, on the ground floor, there was a gumball machine there. Caroline saw it and asked, ‘Daddy, may I please have a gumball?’

“The president looked at her and said, ‘Oh, Buttons, I’m sorry, you need a penny for the gumball machine. I don’t have a penny.’”

I shook my head in amusement. It was so typical of JFK—he never carried money. Here he was the President of the United States and he didn’t have a penny for the gumball machine.

Paul continued, “Poor Caroline looked like she was going to crumble. So the president turned to me and asked, ‘Mr. Landis, do you happen to have a penny?’

“I pulled out the change in my pocket, and fortunately, I did have a penny.

“‘As a matter of fact I do,’ I said as I handed Caroline the penny.

“Her eyes got big and she said, ‘Oh, thank you, Mr. Landis!’

“You’d think I had given her a diamond ring,” Paul added with a laugh.

We were both laughing now. I could see little Caroline, just as excited as could be over such a simple thing as a gumball.

Paul continued. “So she struggled a bit to get the penny into the machine, but she finally did it, and the president helped her turn the knob, and when the gumball rolled out, she just grabbed it and popped it in her mouth, and began chewing away, a big smile on her face.

“I turned to look at the president and he had a big grin on his face.

“Then he said, ‘Thank you, Mr. Landis. I owe you a penny.’”

E
VEN AFTER THE
president returned to Washington, Mrs. Kennedy stayed in Palm Beach with John and Caroline, and continued to visit the ambassador in the hospital on a daily basis. It was clear to me that these visits were not out of obligation, but came from her deep love and devotion to her father-in-law. She would often bring Caroline, whose innocent, exuberant spirit was uplifting not only to Mr. Kennedy, but to members of the hospital staff as well. Caroline would help the nurse push her grandfather’s wheelchair down the hospital corridor, chattering on about what had happened on the morning’s walk on the Lake Trail, completely undaunted by his inability to respond.

It was a rough Christmas on all of us—for the Kennedy family, who were struggling to understand what the future would be like without Joe’s ability to offer advice; for Mrs. Kennedy, trying to deal with the ever-growing pressures of being in the public eye; and for the agents, spending another holiday away from our own families.

Everybody was looking forward to turning a new page in 1962. Little did we know it would be one of the best years of our lives.

Mrs. Kennedy at the Taj Mahal

I
n early February, Jerry Behn, the Special Agent in Charge of the White House Detail, informed me that, after much discussion and several postponements, Mrs. Kennedy was going to India, and Pakistan as well. I would be in charge of the advance, working closely with Ambassador John Kenneth Galbraith.

“Mrs. Kennedy’s sister, Princess Radziwill, will accompany her on the trip,” Behn said, “and the tentative schedule I’ve been given has them traveling the entire month of March: four days in Rome, seventeen days in India, five days in Pakistan, and three days in London. But you know as well as I do, that schedule will change.”

I laughed. “Jerry, with Mrs. Kennedy
nothing
is ever carved in stone.”

He smiled. “Yes, I’m well aware that she prefers things to be—shall we say—unstructured?”

“Yes, you could say that,” I said, with a smile.

“But listen, Clint, whatever resources you need, just let me know,” Behn said. “I know it’s not going to be easy.”

It
was
an ambitious itinerary—and the first time an American first lady had ever visited India or Pakistan. In both countries, Mrs. Kennedy would visit a number of different cities, and each one had to be advanced. There was no way Agent Jeffries and I could adequately protect Mrs. Kennedy on our own, so I selected a team of agents from the President’s Detail and other field offices, choosing men with whom I’d worked before on trips like this, and on whom I knew I could depend.

Based on my past experience in that part of the world, I knew there was a good chance some of us were going to get sick, so I assigned two-agent teams at each location to do the advances. The itinerary was so complex that the teams of agents would need to leapfrog from one city to another, without a break. Advancing Mrs. Kennedy’s trip to India would be the most challenging assignment of my career thus far.

So it was that on February 16, 1962, I and fourteen other Secret Service agents boarded a Pan Am flight at New York City’s Idlewild Airport headed to New Delhi. It would take us nearly two days to get there, with stops in London, Frankfurt, Munich, Istanbul, Beirut, and Tehran.

For the guys who hadn’t been on Eisenhower’s India trip, New Delhi was an eye-opening experience. The U.S. Embassy security officer met us at the airport with a bunch of cars and drivers to take us to our hotel. As we drove through the streets of New Delhi, I watched the expressions on the faces of my colleagues as they saw what we were going to be dealing with.

Sharing the road with trucks and cars were horse-drawn carts, stray cows, pigs, goats, rickshaws, tractors, and every so often, a camel strutting along, all seemingly oblivious to the traffic around them. Darting in and out of this chaos, were people on bicycles. Everywhere you looked there were bicycles. And there wasn’t just one person to a bicycle. More often than not, there would be two, three, or even four people pressed together, balancing with their legs dangling as the driver pedaled with all his might to propel the bike with the extra weight.

Along the side of the road, vendors with street carts were selling fruits, vegetables, clothing, pots and pans, fabrics, tires, and sandals. People were cooking
over open fires, as small, naked children with protruding bellies wandered amid stray animals and mounds of garbage. The dust and dirt created smog that made your eyes tear, while burning cow patties and elephant dung gave off an almost unbearable stench. Dotted throughout this slumlike environment were bright splashes of turquoise and pink and yellow as women in flowing saris and veils carried huge baskets of grass or clay pots of water on their heads. It was like we were in the middle of a traveling circus.

Everywhere I looked, I thought of what Mrs. Kennedy would think, how she would react, and most important, what we were going to have to do to protect her in this unsanitary and unpredictable environment. She was scheduled to arrive on March 1, eleven days later, and we still didn’t have the final itinerary. Pakistan had its own set of problems, and I was going to have to fly to Karachi as soon as we got the India portion squared away.

I pulled out a notepad and jotted down thoughts as they came to me: purified water, imported fruits, soap, medical supplies,
gloves.
Mrs. Kennedy wore gloves to church and often to formal banquets, but here I thought she could wear them not just for fashion, but also to keep her hands clean. She would need plenty of gloves.

I had worked with the State Department to arrange hotel rooms at the elegant Ashoka Hotel in the diplomatic section of New Delhi for the duration of our stay there. The rooms were luxurious, and due to the favorable exchange rate between the dollar and the Indian rupee, were well within our per diem, which had recently been increased to sixteen dollars per day.