Kati Marton (22 page)

MOMENTS OF HIGH TENSION
in the White House brought the Kennedys closer to each other. The president’s personal physician, Dr. Janet Travell, was struck by a scene that preceded the gravest crisis of his presidency, the Cuban missile crisis. “I watched him walk briskly from the West Wing across the lawn to Chopper Number One. The usual retinue … trailed behind him …. They boarded the helicopter and waited to see the steps drawn up …. Instead the president reappeared in the doorway and descended the steps alone. How unusual, I thought. Then I saw why. Jackie, her hair wild in the gale of the rotors, was running from the South Portico across the grass. She almost met him at the helicopter
steps and she reached up with her arms. They stood motionless in an embrace for many seconds …. Perhaps no one else noted that rare demonstration of affection.” For a man as allergic to public displays of affection, who continually refused photographers’ entreaties that he kiss his wife in public, the scene captured the growing intimacy between husband and wife.

Three days later, on October 22, 1962, at 7
P.M.,
President Kennedy faced the television cameras to make the most important speech of the Cold War. “Within the past weeks unmistakable evidence has established the fact that a series of offensive missile sites is now in preparation on [Cuba],” he said. Kennedy pledged that it would be his “unswerving objective” to remove the nuclear menace. A blockade would be the first step, to be followed by stronger measures, if necessary. “This is the first day of the world crisis,” wrote Prime Minister Harold Macmillan in his diary the day after Kennedy’s speech. The next thirteen days, with the world on the brink of nuclear war, were the most stressful that Kennedy and the country experienced since the end of World War II. “Now the Americans will realize what we in England have lived through for the past many years,” Macmillan wrote. The president’s nerves were being tested in the most dramatic way imaginable. Kennedy had recently read Barbara Tuchman’s
The Guns of August,
in part about the misperceptions and missed communications that led to World War I. “The great danger and risk in all of this,” he noted, “is a miscalculation, a mistake in judgment.” “They’re scared shitless,” CIA director of operations Richard Helms said of the people in the White House. Before Jack relayed his ultimatum to Khrushchev, he telephoned Jackie at Glen Ora, their Virginia house, and asked her to come back to the White House with the children that evening so that they could be together. Later that week, the president suggested Jackie move out of Washington, to be closer to their assigned underground shelter in case of a sudden attack. She refused to leave the White House.

The hours and days of nuclear blackmail took their toll. Kennedy’s aides had never seen him so tightly wound, so beleaguered, so dependent on his brother Robert. “At night after long hours of secret planning Kennedy would walk alone on the grounds of the White House trying to
clear his mind,”
Time
White House correspondent Hugh Sidey recalled. “Jackie would walk out to meet him and the two would go back inside for dinner where he would tell her everything that was happening.” But, in Dean Rusk’s famous words, “the other fellow blinked” first. On October 28, an announcer for Radio Moscow read the tenth message Khrushchev and Kennedy had exchanged since the beginning of the crisis. It was from the party chairman. “In order to eliminate as rapidly as possible the conflict which endangers the cause of peace … the Soviet Government, in addition to previously issued instructions to cease further work on weapons construction sites, has issued a new order to dismantle the weapons which you describe as offensive, and to crate and return them to the Soviet Union ….”

Kennedy, en route to 10
A.M.
mass, turned to Dave Powers and said, “I feel like a new man. Do you realize that we had an air strike all arranged for Tuesday? Thank God it’s over.” Khrushchev had been in such a rush to resolve the crisis that Castro first heard about the settlement on the radio. When the president presented his key advisers silver calendars with the thirteen crucial days of October marked off, he gave his wife one too.

The new closeness did not translate into a diminution of Kennedy’s appetite for other women. When planning a European tour in the summer of 1963, he asked his secretary of state if he knew of a quiet spot for a personal visit. The upright Dean Rusk suggested the Villa Serbelloni on Italy’s Lake Como, owned by the Rockefeller Foundation, which Rusk had once headed. Kennedy instructed Rusk to clear the villa of all residents—staff, servants and even Secret Service. Even the caretakers who lived on the premises were evicted. Only the faithful Powers and Ken O’Donnell accompanied the president. When Rusk learned that Marella Agnelli, the wife of Fiat chairman Gianni Agnelli, was the lady for whom all the precautions were imposed, he was furious. Rusk never quite forgave Kennedy for putting him in such an uncomfortable situation. Kennedy reportedly savored his secretary of state’s embarrassment.

Both Kennedys were game players, though Jack was a greater thrill seeker than his wife. Was it coincidence that when Jackie spent her vacation
on the Amalfi coast, she was seen so often in the company of Gianni Agnelli that her husband telegraphed her, “A little less Agnelli, a little more Caroline”?

Of course his most dangerous liaison was the one with Judith Campbell Exner. She claimed to have visited him in the White House twenty times between May 1961 and April 1962, while at the same time seeing Mafia boss Sam Giancana. The president was thus leaving himself open to blackmail by two of the most dangerous people in the country, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and Giancana. That he emerged unscathed was a function of the times, the different standards for what constituted fair journalism. “A journalist came into my office one day,” Kennedy’s press spokesman Pierre Salinger recalled, “and said, ‘I hear Kennedy has mistresses.’ I replied, ‘Look, he’s the president of the United States. He’s busy running the country. He doesn’t have time for a mistress.’ He never mentioned it again, and neither did anyone else.” But had someone chosen not to play by those rules, had the president’s reckless behavior with a mobster’s girlfriend come to light, Kennedy could have faced impeachment. What is bewildering is that an appetite for sex and thrills would so overpower this supremely rational man. But all his life, people had willingly covered for him, considering it a privilege to do so.

One of those who occasionally helped Kennedy out of potentially dangerous situations was Clark Clifford. “During the time he was a senator I was called in on incidents that looked quite delicate and sometimes I thought I was quite helpful …. I would say only that
he was bold beyond human belief,
impossibly bold, unbelievably bold and what the attitude of the family was, I do not know.” Clifford refused to divulge the particulars of Kennedy’s “boldness.” But he did express some disappointment with Kennedy.

With Kennedy it was more than just the aphrodisiac of power. Women found his combination of chiseled good looks, unself-conscious ease and laconic wit irresistible. All his life women had made themselves available to him, under almost any terms he set. They were often prepared to make fools of themselves—and of his wife. And she, who missed very little, could not have missed this. But she was willing to pay the price.

Their children pulled them closer together. Jack was in his forties when he became a father. He doted on his small son and daughter. Jackie’s miscarriages and the stillborn birth of a daughter enhanced their joy in Caroline and John. The president loved showing off his appealing offspring, fixtures in the Oval Office who mixed with heads of state and lesser grandees of public life. He wanted more children. Bradlee recalled one time when his wife, Toni, and Jackie were on the lawn of the Kennedys’ Virginia house, playing music on a portable record player when Jackie suddenly got up and said she had to go inside, her husband was waiting upstairs. “It was the day in the calendar when they were supposed to be trying for a baby. She was rushing in with anticipation, it seemed to us—whether for having the baby or the act itself, I do not know. It was definitely on her mind.”

“He never wanted them all crowded together like Bobby and Ethel,” Jackie recalled, “so small children in the middle were miserable and their parents harassed. But he always wanted a baby coming along when its predecessor was [growing] up. That is why he was so glad when he learned I was having Patrick.”

On August 5, 1963, President Kennedy signed the proudest achievement of his presidency, the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, banning atmospheric nuclear tests. It was the first arms control agreement between Washington and Moscow, a small step toward ending the Cold War, but
Kennedy liked to say that a great journey begins with small steps. His sense of triumph was short-lived.

Two days after the Moscow signing, Jackie, vacationing near Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, began labor five weeks prematurely. “Should I notify the President?” Dr. Travell asked Jackie. “Absolutely not,” she replied. She told the doctor and the crew of the helicopter whisking her to the military hospital at Otis Air Force Base, “I don’t want anything to happen to this baby.” Minutes later Jackie gave birth by cesarean section to a four-pound-ten-ounce boy who was immediately placed in an incubator.

Despite her instructions that Jack not be alerted that she was in labor, he arrived forty minutes later. By then the base chaplain had baptized the baby Patrick Bouvier Kennedy, after Jack’s grandfather and her father. Even before he reached his wife, JFK was told the child suffered from a severe respiratory problem involving the lung’s hyaline membrane, which was common in premature infants. He wheeled Patrick into Jackie’s room, where she held the baby for a few minutes, before father and son were sped to Boston’s Children’s Hospital. At the end of the awful day, in a bed two floors above where the infant was struggling to breathe, the president collapsed in exhaustion. At 5
A.M.
on August 9, Patrick, aged forty hours, died. Kennedy returned to the room where he had spent the night, closed the door and wept. Returning to his wife’s bedside, the two cried together. “There’s only one thing I could not bear now,” she told him. “If I ever lost you.”

They wanted to put something in Patrick’s coffin that was from both of them. Jack chose the Saint Christopher’s medal that she had given him when they were married. Jack was reluctant to leave the small coffin. “Come on, Jack,” Cardinal Cushing gently prodded, “let’s go. God is good.”

Jackie stayed in the hospital for another week. Her husband was worried about her. He asked Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., to get Adlai Stevenson, whom Jackie liked and admired, to write to her, to cheer her up. Their shared grief was greater than anything they had experienced before.

Jackie had seen him sick, seen him wracked by pain, seen him close to death. He had twice seen her devastated by the deaths of babies she
had carried nearly to full term. No one else—not his family, not his closest aides, surely not the women he slept with—had experienced what they had together. The wall of reserve that shielded them even from each other appeared to be crumbling. There was a different quality to their marriage. Their friends noticed the new closeness. Less concerned about the cool image than about helping each other through a rough time, they were now willing to hold hands in public.

He wanted her to get better. He needed her. On September 12 they celebrated their tenth wedding anniversary. He asked her to choose gifts from a famous antique dealer’s catalog. She gave him a Saint Christopher’s medal to replace the one he had put in Patrick’s coffin. He gave her a gold ring with sapphire chips in memory of Patrick. Jackie’s sister, Lee, suggested a Greek cruise to lift her spirits. The flamboyant and much investigated Greek shipping baron, Aristotle Onassis, offered his yacht. Some of Kennedy’s advisers cautioned against the first lady accepting such potentially controversial hospitality. You have an election year coming up, they told the president. Kennedy, knowing his wife’s love of luxury, put her recovery ahead of any potential image problem.

So she joined Onassis and feasted on hedonistic pleasures. And she wrote unusually revealing letters to her husband, letters that expose her complexity but also an authentic love. “I miss you very much, which is nice, though it is a bit sad. But then I think of how lucky I am to be able to miss you. I know I always exaggerate everything, but … I realize here so much that I am having something you can never have—the absence of tension. I wish so much that I could give you that—so I give you everyday … I have to give.”