These Few Precious Days (30 page)

Perhaps a little too much life. As with many of the Kennedys’ bashes, this one had its bacchanalian moments. The girlfriend of JFK’s Air Force aide, General Godfrey McHugh, reportedly took a dip in the White House pool and then went upstairs to the residence to jump on Abraham Lincoln’s bed. When word reached the president the next day, he was not amused. “Get after McHugh,” he told Jackie, who had actually dated McHugh before she met Jack.

The March 8, 1963, dinner dance was memorable for more than just hijinks. One of the guests that night was Mary Meyer, who by late 1962 had become a fixture at the White House. “She was almost part of the furniture,” recalled White House counsel Myer Feldman. “I would see her in the Oval Office or over in the residence. There wasn’t any attempt to hide her the way there was with some of the other women.”

For over a year, Meyer had occupied a special place in the hierarchy of Jack’s women. “He was certainly smitten by her,” Charlie Bartlett allowed. “Heavily smitten.” Yet the same bohemian spirit that made Meyer irresistible to him also gave Jack pause. “Mary would be rough to live with,” he suggested to Ben Bradlee more than once, and, more than once, Bradlee agreed.

At one point at the last dinner dance, Jack looked out over the sea of beautiful women on the dance floor, turned to Bradlee, and sighed, “If you and I could only run wild, Benjy.” Bradlee, who claimed to be unaware of JFK’s shenanigans at the time, took that as nothing more than a nostalgic reference to their bachelor days. In retrospect, George Plimpton later theorized, “Jack was admitting that he couldn’t ‘run wild’ any more and risk hurting Jackie. And certainly not while she was pregnant. They were both terrified she’d lose the baby, and of course he would do anything to keep that from happening.”

LATER THAT EVENING, JACK CORNERED
Mary and they disappeared together for a heart-to-heart conversation. Despite the freezing temperatures outside, she had chosen to wear a frilly chiffon summer dress that had belonged to her great-grandmother, instantly setting herself apart from the other women in the room. When she and the president were finished talking, an anguished Meyer wandered out onto the snow-covered South Lawn in her flimsy dress, then fled the party on the verge of tears.

It is unlikely that Jackie had delivered an ultimatum to her husband, demanding that he break off his relationship with Meyer—since Marilyn Monroe’s death, the only “other woman” Jack seemed to have any real feelings for. There was no need. Jackie’s pregnancy had changed everything.

That same evening at the White House, she turned to Adlai Stevenson and, without revealing that she was expecting, hinted that things might be different inside her marriage. “I don’t care how many girls Jack has,” she told the stunned Adlai, “as long as I know
he
knows it’s wrong, and I think he does now. Anyway,” Jackie added, looking across the crowded room at her husband, “that’s all over, for the present.”

I know my husband was devoted to me. I know he was proud of me. It took a very long time for us to work everything out, but we did.

—
JACKIE

9

“
You’re
My Ideal, Jacqueline”

“J
ohn, slow down now. You’ve got to behave. Watch where you’re going, John!” Maud Shaw’s pleas fell on deaf ears as the headstrong two-year-old darted at his customary breakneck speed across the lawn toward Daddy’s office. The nanny reached out, but before she could grab him, the boy stumbled and banged his mouth on a concrete step. A bloody tooth went flying, and John collapsed on the grass in tears. Nanny Shaw finally managed to calm the toddler down when, suddenly, John jumped up and dove into the bushes. He emerged holding the incisor, which he then proudly showed off—along with his new gap-toothed grin—to Secret Service agents, cabinet members, and anyone else he came across that day.

John had to wait until his father got home before he could show him the wayward baby tooth; when all the commotion occurred outside his office, the president was busy delivering his third State of the Union speech to a joint session of Congress. History repeated itself just two weeks later when John broke another tooth while playing in the Kennedy children’s treehouse. This time Jack was in the Oval Office and rushed outside to comfort the boy.

As he looked forward to the birth of another child, Jack seemed more besotted than ever with the two he already had. He was so eager to communicate with John, for example, that when the boy was only ten months old his father demanded to know why it was taking him so long to learn to talk.

“Oh, but he does talk, Mr. President,” Maud Shaw answered. “It’s just that you can’t understand him.”

“That’s right, Daddy,” Caroline chimed in. “He does talk to me.” JFK decided that, from then on, Caroline would serve as the president’s official interpreter of John-speak.

The Kennedys’ dinner guests often availed themselves of Caroline’s services. “John-John has a big thing about coming up to you and whispering a lot of gibberish in your ear,” Ben Bradlee said at the time. “If you throw your head back and act surprised, John-John roars with laughter until he drools.”

Bradlee was impressed with the way “John-John and JFK quite simply just break each other up. Kennedy likes to laugh and likes to make people laugh, and his son is the perfect foil for him.”

Jack couldn’t resist teasing the boy. “So how’re you doing, Sam?” he would ask John-John nonchalantly when he toddled into the room.

“I’m not Sam, I’m John.”

“What was that, Sam?”

“No, no, no,” John answered. “I’m not Sam. I’m John. John, John, JOHN!”

“Oh, sorry, Sam.”

Vacations in Palm Beach, at Hyannis Port, and at Hammersmith Farm gave father and son even more opportunities for mischief. A favorite spot to swim near Hammersmith Farm was the swimming pool at Bailey’s Beach in Newport. There, according to Jamie Auchincloss, his two-year-old nephew often jumped off the low diving board into the deep end with no one there to catch him—sending suited-up members of the Kiddie Detail scrambling to pull him out. Other times, John would ask for help to climb up the ladder to the high diving board, and go “racing off the board to ten feet of free fall. His father was often there to catch him.”

As John climbed up the ladder one day, the president reached up and yanked his swim trunks down, exposing the boy’s derriere.

“Daddy,” John protested as he pulled his swimsuit up. “You are a bad man!”

John turned and resumed his climb up the stairs, only to have his father pull down his trunks a second time. “Daddy,” said the toddler, now seething with righteous indignation, “you are a poo-poo head!”

Feigning outrage, JFK lowered his voice. “John,” he said, “no one calls the President of the United States a poo-poo head.”

Father and son were “really great pals,” White House photographer Cecil Stoughton said. “Little John was so endearing. His father couldn’t get enough of him.”

It was typical for John to wander in and out of the West Wing, and the president “really didn’t try very hard to get rid of him,” Salinger said. “He liked having John around.” George Smathers believed his friend JFK “could not deny that boy anything. If the President was having a cabinet meeting or talking to some head of state, it didn’t matter—he’d stop everything if John came skipping into the Oval Office.”

Ted Sorensen remembered John lingering at one breakfast meeting attended by Pierre Salinger, Arthur Schlesinger, and Mc-George Bundy. “After shaking hands and bowing all around, John took over a proffered chair and very nearly took over the meeting,” Sorensen said. “His father’s suggestions to leave, accompanied by bribes to take him to the office later, were loudly resisted. Deciding to ignore him, the President opened his request for questions with the usual, ‘What have we got today?’ ”

John answered immediately. “I’ve got a glass of water,” he proclaimed.

On those rare occasions when John was barred from the Oval Office, he didn’t handle it well. While JFK tried to pin down Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko on such critical issues as Cuba and the Berlin Wall, a frustrated John stood outside the door shouting “Gromyko! Gromyko!” until he was led away by Maud Shaw.

To the White House press corps, there was no more familiar sight than John waiting impatiently on the South Lawn for his father’s helicopter to land. The president would then climb down the helicopter steps and stretch out his arms to greet his son—only to have John dash straight past him toward the chopper.

By early 1963, whenever Marine One landed to whisk the president away, John would plead, “Daddy, please don’t leave me.” It wasn’t long before Jack started taking the boy with him to Andrews Air Force Base, then kissing him goodbye before he was choppered back to the White House.

There were times when Jack couldn’t take the boy along to Andrews, and on one of those occasions the president reached into his pocket and pulled out a tiny plastic plane. “Here’s a toy airplane for you until I get back,” he told John. “You fly this one, son, and as soon as you grow up Daddy’s going to buy you a real one.”

As much as John liked his plastic plane, his favorite plaything was the toy helicopter he got for Christmas. White House photographer Cecil Stoughton guided John’s hand as the boy wrote his name on the toy. “It was,” Stoughton said decades later, “his first autograph.”

Even when there were no helicopters around, John amused himself by pretending to be one. Arms extended and imitating the sound of a rotor, the boy spun around until he toppled over, giggling, from dizziness. Soon the president had a new nickname for his frisky son: Helicopter Head.

There were quieter, more private moments between JFK and his son. Jack would take John to the hangar where Marine One was parked and, said Maud Shaw, sit “patiently inside the helicopter, putting the helmet on John and showing him how things work, moving gadgets for him just like a big boy.” Soon “Captain John” was in the pilot’s seat, confidently issuing orders to the president—orders that JFK convincingly pretended to obey.

On the afternoon of March 28, 1963, Jack summoned Stoughton to the West Wing. When Stoughton arrived, his boss was already on the terrace outside the Oval Office. Caroline and John, wearing the matching red winter outfits their mother had picked out for them, were dashing between Daddy’s legs, “laughing and giggling,” Stoughton recalled. “Nothing got to John and Caroline like the Tunnel Game. The President would squeeze his knees together and trap them, then give them a pat on their behinds as they squirmed through. They were in hysterics by the time he was finished with them.”