These Few Precious Days (35 page)

There had always been this wall between them, but their shared grief tore that wall down. At long last, they were truly coming closer together. But it would prove to be too late.

—
THEODORE WHITE

There was a growing tenderness. I think their marriage was really beginning to work at the end.

—
ROSWELL GILPATRIC, FRIEND

We were about to have a real life together.

—
JACKIE

10

“If I Ever Lost You . . .”

A
fter ten minutes in the air, the helicopter landed at Otis Air Force Base and Jackie was whisked to the special presidential wing that had been set up to handle just such a medical emergency. Clint Hill, who had separately radioed the Secret Service Command Center and told them to notify the president, arrived at Otis by car and rushed to Jackie’s side. Hill touched Jackie’s arm and reassured her that everything was going to be okay, but there was no escaping the worry in her eyes.

At 12:52 p.m., Wednesday, August 7, 1963, Jackie gave birth by caesarean section to a four-pound, ten-and-a-half-ounce boy who was immediately placed in an oxygen-fed Isolette incubator. Despite Jackie’s insistence that her husband not be notified, JFK was in the air and headed for the hospital even before the baby’s delivery. To further complicate matters, the president was not able to fly aboard one of the large planes that usually served as Air Force One. Since he wasn’t scheduled to travel until Friday, one plane was in the air on a flight check and the other was undergoing routine maintenance. Once at Andrews, JFK and his party commandeered one of the slower, eight-passenger JetStars sitting on the tarmac.

“It was obviously a tense flight,” recalled Pierre Salinger, who along with Nancy Tuckerman and Pamela Turnure “dropped everything” to accompany JFK on the flight to Otis. “Nobody knew what to say, and President Kennedy spent most of the flight staring out the window, lost in his own thoughts.”

The president’s plane touched down at Otis at 1:35 p.m. and ten minutes later he walked into the hospital. Before leaving Washington, Jack had called his Hyannis Port friend and neighbor Larry Newman from the Oval Office and asked him to drive over to the hospital “just to be there for Jackie.” Newman was sitting in the lobby when JFK walked in.

“He almost threw his arms around me, but then his natural reserve kicked in and he grabbed my hand,” Newman recalled.

“Thanks for being here, Larry,” he said. “It makes me feel so much better just knowing you were here.”

Newman was struck by “the emotion in his eyes. We’d known each other for so long, but I’d never seen this depth of feeling before. He was very emotional, and deeply worried about Jackie.”

Jackie was still in surgery when he arrived, but as soon as she regained consciousness Jack went in to see her, and then to see the baby. In the hallway outside, he conferred with Dr. Walsh. The news was not good. The baby was born with hyaline membrane disease, a severe respiratory disorder not uncommon among premature infants. It was, in fact, the same condition shared by John and his stillborn sister, Arabella. A specialist from Boston, Dr. James E. Drorbaugh, was being flown in to help decide the best course of action.

In the meantime, JFK approached Clint Hill and asked him to find the base chaplain so that the baby could be baptized immediately. Less than twenty minutes later, the baby was christened Patrick Bouvier Kennedy, after Jack’s paternal grandfather and Black Jack Bouvier.

For the moment, no mention would be made of the baby’s medical problems. In announcing Patrick’s birth to reporters waiting outside the hospital, Salinger would only say that he was five and a half weeks premature and that “the baby’s condition is described by the doctors as good, and Mrs. Kennedy’s condition is described as good.” In fact, Jackie was also in a weakened condition, having undergone two major blood transfusions following her caesarean.

It was agreed that Patrick should immediately be transported by ambulance to Children’s Hospital in Boston, where he would get better treatment. Jack broke the news to Jackie. “Oh no, Jack,” she said. “Does he have to go? I want to be with him, Jack.”

“It’s just a precaution, Jackie,” he explained. “Apparently he’s got the same lung problem John had. The doctors think it’s best just to play it safe. Everything will be okay.”

Jackie would never get to hold her infant son in her arms, or even touch him. But she would at least be allowed to see him once—if only for a few fleeting minutes. Jack wheeled tiny Patrick’s incubator into Jackie’s room so that she could say goodbye, then accompanied him to the ambulance. Mary Gallagher was standing in the hallway and got a glimpse of Patrick as he was wheeled past. “His hair was dark,” she said, “his features well-formed.”

At 5:55 p.m., the ambulance carrying Patrick departed for Boston with a full police escort. Jack spent a few more minutes with Jackie, then rushed to Squaw Island to spend time with Caroline and John.

AT MAUD SHAW’S URGING, CAROLINE
had been praying for her mother and new baby brother. Now she and John lit up as their father walked through the front door. “Patrick has a little problem breathing and has to go to a hospital in Boston where they can make him better,” he explained patiently. “Mommy is fine, everything is going to be okay.”

An hour later, JFK returned to Otis to check on Jackie before flying on to Boston. He was pleased to find Louella Hennessey, the Kennedy family private nurse who had cared for Jackie after John’s birth, sitting at the first lady’s bedside.

At 8:45 p.m., JFK’s helicopter, emblazoned with the presidential seal, lifted off from Otis. It landed at Boston’s Logan Airport twenty minutes later. As his motorcade made its way through downtown Boston, crowds lining the streets waved and cheered.

JFK was soon shuttling between a suite at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel and Children’s Hospital, where a team of Harvard-trained specialists worked feverishly to keep the president’s son alive. Jack also flew in an expert of his own—Dr. Sam Levine from New York’s Cornell Medical Center, the doctor who had treated Lee Radziwill’s daughter just two years earlier.

After ninety minutes quizzing doctors and watching his tiny son struggle for every breath, Jack returned to the Ritz-Carlton. The crowds this time were even larger and more enthusiastic, and larger still when he made the short trip back to Children’s Hospital the next day. At 10:40 a.m. on Thursday, with thousands of cheering people lining the roadways in both directions, the president flew back to Otis Air Force Base to bolster Jackie’s spirits.

He planned to check in on Caroline and John as well, but at 1:14 p.m. the doctors in Boston called with disturbing news. In a last-ditch effort to keep Patrick breathing, they were moving him to the adjacent Harvard School of Public Health and placing the newborn in a thirty-one-foot-long hyperbaric chamber.

“After consulting with the doctors,” a grim-faced Salinger announced, “the President is returning to Boston immediately.” This time when his motorcade sped toward the hospital, the people were still there, and in even greater numbers than before, but they were solemn. Now America and the world, transfixed by the unfolding drama, prayed for tiny Patrick’s recovery.

Jackie, meanwhile, drifted in and out of consciousness. The president and her doctors agreed that, in the interest of her recovery, she not be told everything. “What’s the point?” Jack asked Hennessey rhetorically. “I don’t see the point . . .”

JFK wound up checking on Patrick four times that day, and was joined at one point by Janet, the baby’s grandmother. “Nothing must happen to Patrick,” he told her. “I just can’t bear to think of the effect it might have on Jackie.” Reporters swarmed around Jackie’s mother when she left the hospital, peppering her with questions about Patrick’s condition. “He’s doing very well,” she replied unconvincingly. “Although maintaining her poise,” one paper reported, “Mrs. Auchincloss appeared somewhat distressed.”

That night, Jack refused to leave the hospital. Instead, he and Dave Powers moved into a vacant room five floors above the basement oxygen chamber where Patrick battled for his life. To make the modest room more suitable for their important guest, the hospital furnished it with a desk, multiple phone lines—and a padded rocker.

At 2 a.m. Friday, Powers awakened the president to tell him Patrick had taken a turn for the worse. He was now in critical condition. On the way to the elevator that would take them downstairs, JFK and Powers passed the room of a severely burned child. Jack stopped the night nurse and asked about the child, then dashed off a heartfelt note of encouragement to the mother. “There he was, with his own baby dying downstairs,” Powers said, “but he had to take the time to write a note to that poor woman, asking her to keep her courage up.”

Just outside the door to the chamber, JFK and Powers were given surgical gowns, masks, and caps. They would not be allowed inside the chamber—that required a far more elaborate pressurized bodysuit and helmet—but they could observe what was happening through a small window in the door. For the next ninety minutes, JFK paced in the corridor, stopping every now and then to look inside at the doctors in their Buck Rogers outfits bending over Patrick’s incubator.

It was no use. There was nothing more the elite medical team could do. The door opened, and the baby was wheeled out into the hallway. One of the doctors lifted Patrick out of the incubator, and, after telling Jack the baby had only a few more minutes to live, gently handed him to the president.

At 4:04 on Friday morning, April 9, Patrick Bouvier Kennedy died of cardiac arrest in his father’s arms. He had lived thirty-nine hours and twelve minutes. Back at Otis Air Force Base, Jackie had been restless all night long, tossing and turning and unable to find a moment’s peace. At the same moment Patrick passed away, the night nurse noticed something strange. As if a switch had been flipped, Jackie abruptly stopped stirring and fell into a deep, peaceful sleep.

“He put up quite a fight,” Jack told Powers. “He was a beautiful baby.” Then the president returned to the vacant room upstairs, closed the door behind him, sat on the edge of the bed, and wept. Jack was too proud to let anyone see him crying, Powers said, “so he asked me to go outside and telephone Teddy.”

JFK felt John Walsh was best equipped to break the news to Jackie. When the doctor arrived to tell her the tragic news at 6:25 a.m., he tried to avoid the red-rimmed eyes of nurses, orderlies, Secret Service agents, and Air Force officers. “It was a national tragedy,” Salinger said. “Did I cry? You bet I did. Anybody with a pulse cried, especially if you knew them. It was just terribly, terribly sad.”

After Dr. Walsh left, Jackie’s quiet sobs were nonetheless audible in the hallway. “If you weren’t weeping before,” Dr. Travell said, “you were now.” It took more than an hour for Jackie to pull herself together with tissues, some makeup, and Mary Gallagher’s help. She knew Jack was as devastated as she was, but she was determined to put on a brave face for him. “How terrible Jack must feel,” said Jackie, who seemed to focus on the pain of others as a way of coping with her own. “This is such a heartbreak for him.”