These Few Precious Days (21 page)

That meant taking Caroline and John on picnics, pushing them on the swings, watching them swim, giving them baths, and putting them to bed—“all the normal things a mother should be able to do with her children without feeling you’re constantly watched.”

Soon Jackie and the children were leaving the White House for Glen Ora every Thursday afternoon, returning late the following Monday. Jack, who would arrive Saturday afternoon and depart the next day, was not nearly so enamored of the place. “He hated it, actually,” Jackie conceded. “There was nothing for him to do there. He’d sleep all Saturday afternoon, and then he’d watch television from his bed. It was just a letdown for him.” At one point, Jack told her, “I don’t really care about Glen Ora because all I use it for is sleep.”

Jackie did what she could, conspiring with Paul Fout to surprise Jack on his forty-fourth birthday with a very difficult four-hole golf course at Glen Ora—“9,000 square yards of pasture,” Ben Bradlee recalled, “filled with small hills, big rocks, and even a swamp.” The first day out, Bradlee added wryly, JFK “shot the course record—a 37 for four holes.”

As it happened, the president was a fairly decent golfer—“competitive as hell with a natural swing,” Bradlee determined, “but erratic through lack of play.” JFK was far too impatient to ever go looking for a lost ball, “but he was great fun to play golf with because he didn’t take the game seriously and kept up a running conversation.” The chitchat, as Spalding and other golfing buddies attested, was liberally laced with profanity, “Bahsted!” (“Bastard!”) being the preferred expletive whenever Kennedy sliced a drive or landed in the rough. Jack also enjoyed giving a running commentary while he played—“With barely a glance at the packed gallery, he whips out a four iron and slaps it dead to the pin”—and liked to unnerve his competitors by pointing out that the golf bags lugged around by his Secret Service agents contained guns, not clubs.

JFK appreciated his wife’s efforts to get him to warm up to the place, but Glen Ora would never be to his liking. “So dark, so small, so boring, I can hardly wait to get the hell out,” he told Red Fay. “The whole reason for Glen Ora,” Paul Fout said, “was to be nice to Jackie.” That, and remembering Black Jack Bouvier’s advice: “Keep her riding and she’ll always be in a good mood.”

The Fouts belonged to the highly selective Orange County Hunt Club (the Duchess of Windsor was refused membership), and on the basis of Jackie’s horsemanship invited her to join. Sailing over hedges and fences, skimming over ponds and ditches, Jackie became a local fixture in her knee-high leather boots, black leather gloves, tight-fitting tan jodhpurs, black jacket, and helmet. “She knew how to ride,” said fellow foxhunting enthusiast Oleg Cassini. “It was a religion with her.” It was also the reason Jackie claimed to dislike being called
first lady.
“It always,” she said, “reminds me of a saddle horse.”

Careful to tread lightly on the sensibilities of her press-shy neighbors, Jackie insisted that she was not worthy of being considered a part of the hunt country life. She loved Glen Ora for the privacy it afforded her (“People there let me alone”) and the chance to accompany Caroline when she took Macaroni out for a ride.

Glen Ora was, Jackie said, “the most private place I can think of to balance our life in the White House.” But she quickly discovered that there was really no escape—not even in the Virginia countryside. Out riding with the Piedmont Hunt one Friday morning that November, Jackie and her horse Bit of Irish were about to jump a rail fence on the estate of Paul Mellon when a local photographer named Marshall Hawkins leapt out of the bushes and startled them. Bit of Irish jolted to a halt, hurling the first lady over the fence headfirst.

Miraculously, Jackie managed to beak her fall with her hands and was unhurt. But she quickly called Jack and insisted he intervene to stop the embarrassing photo from being published in
Life
magazine. “It was on private property,” she argued. “It’s clearly an invasion of my privacy.”

Jack was not about to tangle with the press over this. “I’m sorry, Jackie,” he said, “but when the First Lady falls on her ass, it’s news.”

Jackie was a woman full of love and full of hurt. They were
two private people, two cocoons married to each other. She felt it
was up to him to reach more than he did. But he couldn’t.

—
LINDY BOGGS, JACKIE’S FRIEND

We are like two icebergs—the public life above the water, the private life is submerged.

—
JACKIE

7

“It Was a Real Look of Love”

“A
nd what does your new puppy eat, Mrs. Kennedy?”

“Reporters,” Jackie replied with a straight face. There was silence, followed by nervous laughter. The first lady had done little to disguise her antipathy toward the press—particularly the “news hens” who were traditionally assigned to cover the wife of the president. There were a few obligatory press luncheons and receptions that Jackie dutifully attended. For the most part, however, she seemed to take particular pleasure in snubbing women reporters, branding even seasoned veterans like UPI’s Helen Thomas,
Washington Post
columnist Maxine Cheshire, and Associated Press writer Frances Lewine as “harpies.”

Jackie simply felt that overnight she had been reduced to an object, a commodity. At Jack’s urging, she had cooperated for back-to-back articles in
Ladies’ Home Journal, McCall’s, Life, Redbook
, and
Look
. It gradually dawned on her that, no matter what she agreed to, the public’s appetite for stories about the first family would never be satisfied. Jackie was beginning to feel, she told Lowe, as if she was being viewed as something other than human. “There ought to be a nicer word than
freak
,” she said of the way she was being treated, “but I can’t think of one.”

Jackie was, understandably, even more concerned about how all the unwanted attention might psychologically damage Caroline and John. “She was a lioness protecting her cubs,” Salinger said. “You didn’t want to cross her. From the moment she set foot in the White House, she wanted to keep them out of the spotlight. She made this abundantly clear to me on many occasions. Whenever a photo was taken of Caroline or John that she hadn’t signed off on, I could be certain to catch hell for it.”

“They have all the pictures of Macaroni they need,” Jackie wrote to the beleaguered press secretary when a harmless shot of Caroline on her horse was picked up by the wire services. “I want no more—
I mean this
—and if you are firm and will take the time you can stop it. So please do.”

The photographers themselves were not immune to Jackie’s wrath. She “could strike terror in your heart,”
Look
photographer Stanley Tretick said at the time. “She was a tough babe.” Tretick found out the hard way when he ignored Jackie’s express orders not to take photos of Caroline playing with her cousins at Hyannis Port and did anyway. When the pictures appeared in
Look,
Jackie bawled out JFK for letting it happen.

“Get that fucker Tretick on the phone!” Jack yelled to his secretary. Ted Sorensen later told Tretick he was “so angry” it was a good thing he wasn’t there at the time. “Thank God,” the photographer said, “I was out shopping at the local Safeway.”

Jacques Lowe watched as Jackie became increasingly “paranoid about the press. But Jack knew they were a great asset for his administration. He was proud of them. He wanted to show them off.” The president, Baldrige agreed, “saw a photo op behind every tree.”

The result, Lowe observed, was that the push-pull over pictures of the children “got to be a game between the two of them, with me stuck in the middle.” Lowe was not alone. At one point, Salinger simply told Jackie that the president was behind a new batch of Caroline and John pictures that had popped up in the press. “I don’t give a damn,” she blasted back. “He has no right to countermand my order regarding the children.”

Yet Jackie was not completely clueless when it came to the children and publicity. As long as Jackie was handed complete control of the final product, she was perfectly happy to have publications like
Life,
the
Saturday Evening Post,
and
Look
run heartwarming stories on John and Caroline.

These tightly managed glimpses of the first family captivated the American public: JFK clapping while his children dance and twirl around the Oval Office; Caroline and John showing off their Halloween costumes while Daddy cracks up; Caroline sitting in a horse cart with her mother at Glen Ora or riding Macaroni on the White House lawn.

Yet the president wanted more. Reluctant to provoke a confrontation with his wife, he often waited until she went out of town—usually to Glen Ora—before inviting photographers in to work their magic. “As soon as she snuck out,” Tretick said, “I snuck in.” Publicity wasn’t the only area of disagreement between the Kennedys when it came to their children. It wasn’t long before JFK, elected at a time when crew cuts and close-cropped hair were the norm, tired of John’s long, European-style cut. He wasn’t alone; soon the White House was inundated with letters demanding the president’s son get a haircut. Some outraged citizens even sent in money to pay for it.

Jackie wouldn’t budge on the issue; she found the Little Lord Fauntleroy look to be “perfectly appropriate for a young American boy his age.” Eventually, JFK took Nanny Shaw aside and told her to at the very least trim John Jr.’s bangs. Anticipating Jackie’s reaction, Jack promised he would take the blame. “If anyone asks you,” he told the apprehensive nanny, “tell them it was an order from the President.”

The open affection between Jackie and the children had been expected, but photographers were particularly impressed with the tenderness JFK showed toward Caroline and John. Tretick was struck by Jack’s “almost sensual” interest in the boy whom people around the world knew as “John-John.” John F. Kennedy Jr. had acquired the nickname John-John because whenever the president called the boy’s name over and over again (“John! John!”) he came running. To family members, however, JFK’s son was always just “John.”

One night, Tretick recalled, John was sitting on the floor of the Oval Office while the president talked to him. “And then he just kind of reached for the boy and pulled his pajama up—you know, bathrobe and pajama—and he kind of rubbed his bare skin right above his rear end. He wanted to touch him.”

Another time, Jack threw John over his knee as if to spank him, but tickled him instead. “He was having fun with him,” Tretick said. “It was a genuine thing between the two of them.”

John usually had to wait for Daddy to be going either to or from the office before they could play “Going Through the Tunnel,” his favorite game. While JFK stood tall with his legs apart, John would go through them over and over again. “John never tired of this game,” Maud Shaw said. “I’m sure the President did.”

Not that he ever let it show. Ignoring his bad back, Jack would grab his children and toss them in the air, tickle them, and roll around on the floor with them. The president also took the time to perfect his skills playing peekaboo, leapfrog, hide-and-go-seek, and tag. “The children could be playing all over him,” Baldrige said, “and he could still be conducting a conference or writing a speech.”

JFK also never tired of making up stories for the children on the fly—about John in his PT boat sinking a Japanese destroyer and Caroline foxhunting with the Orange County Hunt and winning the Grand National; about Maybelle, a little girl who hid in the woods; about a giant named Bobo the Lobo, and about the Black Shark and the White Shark, both of which subsisted on a diet of socks.

For the young parents, holidays took on a new meaning. On Valentine’s Day, Jackie helped Caroline cut out and color heart-shaped cards to give to her classmates. They dyed Easter eggs together in the White House kitchen, lit sparklers on the Fourth of July, and watched the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade on television. Caroline and John had a ringside seat for the lighting of the national Christmas tree, decorated the family tree at the house in Palm Beach, and used the White House switchboard to place a direct call to the North Pole.