These Few Precious Days (20 page)

AT THE END OF SEPTEMBER 1961
, Jack joined Jackie in retreating from the pressures of Washington. This time, they spent ten days together at Hammersmith Farm, taking leisurely cruises on Narragansett Bay aboard the ninety-two-foot presidential yacht, the
Honey Fitz
(renamed by Jack in honor of his colorful maternal grandfather, legendary Boston mayor John Francis “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald). “We sit for hours on the terrace just looking at the bay and drinking in the beauty and all one’s strength is renewed,” Jackie wrote to her mother, who was traveling with Uncle Hughdie in Europe. “You would never guess what this vacation has done for Jack. He said it was the best he ever had.”

JFK returned to the Oval Office looking tanned and rested, but it would not take long for the aura of well-being to fade. Early in September 1961, United Nations secretary-general Dag Hammarskjöld was killed in a plane crash. In a blatant move to increase their influence over the international body, the Soviets moved quickly to replace the secretary general with a troika made up of the Soviet Union, the United States, and the theoretically nonaligned nations.

JFK flew to New York to make America’s case for scrapping the Soviet plan before the UN General Assembly, but on the eve of his speech he was stricken with laryngitis—the apparent result of a steady diet of stress and cigars. When Max Jacobson arrived at Jack’s Carlyle Hotel suite, he found the president still dressed in his pajamas—and virtually mute. “So, Max,” Jack whispered as he pointed to his throat, “what are you going to do about this?”

“I can cure your laryngitis in time for the speech, Mr. President. But only if I inject the drug in your neck, directly below the larynx. I’m afraid,” he added, “it may be very painful.”

“Do what’s necessary,” Jack shrugged. “I don’t give a hoot.”

There would be other, similar emergencies where Dr. Feelgood would be called upon to work his magic: for example, just before an important reception in the East Room during the Steel Crisis (“Now I can go downstairs to shake hands with several hundred intimate friends”) and the day National Guard troops were called in to help desegregate the University of Mississippi (“Wasn’t that a ball breaker?”). Later, Dr. Max (who referred to JFK as “the Prez” when talking to his wife and staff members) would do multiple duty injecting the president, first lady, and members of their inner circle at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Apparently even Jacobson, aware that Dr. Travell and other physicians treating the president vehemently objected to his methods, entertained doubts about whether his was the right approach. Although JFK assured him that the regular four-times-weekly injections weren’t interfering with his work, Jacobson handed Jack his letter of resignation. JFK tore it up.

“The President was very fond of Max Jacobson, and it wasn’t just because of the boost he was getting from those shots,” conceded Pierre Salinger, who claimed JFK often urged him to avail himself of Dr. Feelgood’s services. “He came to rely on Max to bolster Jackie’s spirits. The quicksilver changes in her mood were getting pretty hard for him to take.”

“Jackie could be absolutely giddy and enchanting,” her half brother Jamie Auchincloss said, “and then you’d turn around, and for no apparent reason, she’d just turn off as if someone had flipped a switch.” These shifts could spell the abrupt end of even a long friendship. “She was one of the most emotionally self-sufficient people ever,” Jamie marveled. “You’d be in her life one moment, and out the next. Gone. And it really didn’t seem to bother her one bit.”

Oleg Cassini could understand Jack’s frustration in dealing with his wife’s shifting moods. “She might be very warm one day and freeze you out the next,” he said. “She did this to everyone, even her closest friends. You never really knew where you stood with Jackie. I never quite knew on which foot to dance.”

Dr. Max’s magic bullets may have helped Jack and Jackie cope in the short run, but Dr. Travell and her colleagues grew increasingly concerned about how they might interact with the dozen or so other drugs Jack was taking for his Addison’s-related problems (cortisone, testosterone, Florinef), chronic colitis (paregoric, Metamucil, Lomotil), recurring urinary tract infections (penicillin), allergies (antihistamines), and of course his back (Novocain, procaine).

Travell and Salinger both pleaded with the president to get rid of Jacobson, but to no avail. Even Gore Vidal, who had been a patient of Jacobson’s, was “horrified” to learn he was treating Jack. “Watch out,” he warned Jackie. “Stay away from him. I know him well. Max drove several people mad.”

The man who introduced Max to the Kennedys, Chuck Spalding, was also having second thoughts. At one point, Jacobson’s bizarre behavior and his own dependence on the injections made Spalding “very frightened. . . . The whole thing had gotten so completely out of hand.”

With nowhere else to go, Salinger turned to Jack’s brother Bobby. Even though he had also sampled Dr. Feelgood’s wares, RFK intervened in his capacity as attorney general, demanding that Jacobson hand over samples to the Food and Drug Administration for testing. Since neither amphetamines nor steroids were officially determined at the time to be either addictive or harmful, the FDA gave Dr. Max’s pick-me-up cocktails its seal of approval.

Not that it mattered to the president. “I don’t care if there’s panther piss in there,” JFK said, “as long as it makes me feel good.”

The last time Max Jacobson treated Jack was on the eve of his fateful trip to Dallas. Until then, the doctor and his shiny black medical bag would make dozens of trips to Washington, New York, Hyannis Port, the Kennedys’ weekend retreat in Virginia, and Palm Beach on behalf of his friend “the Prez.” Chuck Spalding, who himself was trying to get off the drugs, watched warily from the sidelines, “praying that Jack wouldn’t get so hyped up he’d accidentally start World War III. If you’re President, I suppose you should be more careful. But at the time we all needed a boost.”

For all the energy she poured into her official duties, Jackie unhesitatingly described herself as “a wife and mother, first and foremost.” J. B. West agreed that the most glamorous first lady in American history was “never more animated or happy” than when she was spending time with Caroline and John.

In addition to the elaborate playground Jackie had built for the children—including the trampoline concealed by evergreens (“All they’ll be able to see is my head, sailing above the treetops”)—there were also doghouses for Pushinka and Charlie, the Kennedys’ feisty Welsh terrier; Clipper (a German shepherd given to Jackie by her adored father-in-law); and an Irish wolfhound with the unimaginative name Wolf, a gift to JFK from a priest in Dublin.

Eventually, Jackie provided pens for lambs, guinea pigs, ducks, and a beer-guzzling rabbit Caroline named Zsa Zsa. Bluebell and Marybell, the children’s hamsters, lived in Caroline’s room with her favorite pet, a canary named Robin. Far and away the most famous first family pet was Caroline’s pony Macaroni, who shared temporary stalls on the White House grounds with Leprechaun, the pony Jackie purchased for John. Unfortunately, it turned out that John, like his father, was intensely allergic to horses. As far as Daddy was concerned, the growing menagerie was fine—as long as the animals kept a respectful distance.

Jackie felt much the same way about the Secret Service. In a confidential memo, the head of the Kiddie Detail relayed the first lady’s wishes to Secret Service chief James J. Rowley. “Mrs. Kennedy feels strongly, though there are two children to protect, it is ‘bad’ to see two agents ‘hovering around.’ If Mrs. Kennedy is driving the children, she still insists the follow-up car not be seen by the children.”

Jackie, the memo continued, was “adamant” that the agents “not perform special favors for John Jr. and Caroline or wait upon them as servants.” That meant agents were “not to carry clothes, beach articles, sand buckets, baby carriages, strollers, handbags, suitcases, etc., for Caroline and John Jr., and the children must carry their own clothing items, toys, etc.” She asked that agents “drift into the background quickly when arriving at a specific location, and remain aloof and invisible until moment of departure.” The bottom line was that she felt it was “bad for the children to see grown men waiting upon them.”

The first lady’s insistence that the children not be “either spoiled or smothered” extended to matters of safety. Whenever they were at Hyannis Port, for example, Jackie wanted the agents to back off. “Drowning is my responsibility,” she said, adding that the Secret Service was “not responsible for any accident sustained by the children in the usual and normal play sessions.” In the end, she reiterated, if anything happened to the children in the course of their simply behaving like children, it was “the sole responsibility of Mrs. Kennedy.”

A Lindbergh-style kidnapping aside, few things bothered agents more than the possibility of Caroline being injured or worse while horseback riding. Their first instinct was to jump on mounts of their own and tail Caroline as she rode Macaroni. But as the agent assigned to protect the first lady, Clint Hill, learned early on, it was pure folly to try to keep up with Jackie as she tore across the Virginia countryside on horseback. “After seeing Mrs. Kennedy ride,” he recalled, “I sure as hell knew I couldn’t keep up with her.”

The same was true of her daughter. Jackie bluntly informed the Secret Service that even as a child Caroline was “a better rider than the Secret Service agents. In fact, Caroline would probably be safer riding with other children than she would be with a Secret Service agent who has a very limited knowledge of horses.”

Besides, Jackie had broken her collarbone tumbling off a horse when she was a little girl, and as a newlywed suffered such a serious fall while riding with the Piedmont Hunt that she was knocked cold, swallowed her tongue, and turned blue before being revived by another rider. She expected Caroline “to have her share of riding spills and accidents. How else will she learn?”

In this, Jack, whom Ben Bradlee described as “looking like Ichabod Crane with his legs flying” when he tried to ride, was in full agreement. At Hyannis Port, Kiddie Detail agent Joseph Paolella sprang into action when Caroline took a nasty fall off Macaroni. “Caroline, get up!” yelled JFK, who continued rocking on the porch. “Get back on the horse.” Jackie, when told of the incident, nodded in agreement. “You don’t even have to ride,” she said, “to know that old saying about conquering fear.”

That November of 1961, Jackie took a notable tumble of her own, not far from Glen Ora, the leased country house (at $600 a month, or around $4,800 today) that would become her sanctuary. Located just forty miles from Washington, in historic Middle-burg, Virginia, Glen Ora sat on four hundred manicured acres at the epicenter of the state’s horse country. With its pale yellow stucco walls, gunmetal gray slate roof, white shutters, and peaked dormers, the 180-year-old main house more closely resembled an overgrown cottage in the Cotswolds than a baronial hunt-country estate.

WHILE THE WHITE HOUSE ARMY
Signal Agency installed an elaborate command center near the stables, built guardhouses, and scoped out landing zones for Marine One, the presidential helicopter, Jackie wasted no time setting up a simple metal-framed swing set (swings, slide, glider) between the six-bedroom main house and the Olympic-sized pool.

Even before Jack was sworn in to office, the first lady had arranged to spend most of her time here, a spot just remote enough and protected enough for her to preserve something of her privacy. And since this was to be the first family’s home away from home, Jackie hired Sister Parish to redo the interior at a cost of $10,000—the equivalent of at least $80,000 today. (Unfortunately, when they moved out eighteen months later, the owner insisted on having the place put back just as it was, triggering another heated quarrel between Jackie and the president over her spending.)

At Glen Ora, Jackie relied heavily on her longtime friends Paul and Eve Fout, who owned the nearby farm where Jackie briefly boarded her frisky bay gelding, Bit of Irish, and Rufus, a considerably better-behaved pinto. “Jackie wanted her kids to have what she grew up with,” Eve Fout said, “and to make their lives normal and fun.”