Patrick Bouvier Kennedy is born at 12:52 p.m., suffering from hyaline membrane disease, a lung disorder common in babies born prematurely.
In 1963, the odds of the four-pound, ten-and-a-half-ounce boy surviving are only fifty-fifty, yet the Boston Globe optimistically predicts, “He’s a Kennedy—he’ll make it.” An article published the day of Patrick’s birth notes the White House press secretary, Pierre Salinger, saying, “The doctors are hopeful,” and quotes one of those doctors describing the boy as “a lovable little monkey” whom they’re treating with “tender loving care, medicine, oxygen, and everything else we can do to correct the symptoms.”
Tragically, Patrick’s condition worsens. He’s rushed by ambulance to Children’s Hospital in Boston, and Jackie is not well enough to accompany him. The president alone watches over the infant, encased in an incubator. “Nothing must happen to Patrick,” Jack tells his mother-in-law, “because I just can’t bear to think the effect it might have on Jackie.” Yet he can only stand helpless as a team of doctors tries and fails to revive his son. Jack is able to hold him at the end, saying, “He put up quite a fight. He was a beautiful baby.” But the Washington Post notes, “The First Lady never once held little Patrick in her arms or heard him cry.”
Nor is she able to attend his funeral, in a private chapel at Cardinal Richard Cushing’s Boston residence. “Overwhelmed with grief,” according to Cushing, Jack throws his arms around the tiny coffin. The cardinal, who officiated at Jack and Jackie’s wedding, places a hand on his shoulder. “My dear Jack, let’s go, let’s go, nothing more can be done.”
But the president cannot be consoled. “He was genuinely cut to the bone,” remembers Larry Newman, a Secret Service agent. “When that boy died, it almost killed him too.”
* * *
Despite the tragedy of Patrick’s death, one positive aspect is noticed by everyone near to the First Couple—this shared loss has brought the two of them closer together, and they are even publicly affectionate in ways previously unseen. “The other agents and I noticed a distinctly close relationship, openly expressed, between the president and Mrs. Kennedy,” recalls the Secret Service agent Clint Hill. “Prior to this, they were much more restrained.”
“It was different than I had seen them before,” deputy press secretary Malcolm Kilduff says. “It was very nice.” He adds, “I thought to myself how protective he was being of her.” White House intern Mimi Beardsley also recalls feeling that after his son’s death, the president is filled “not only with grief but with an aggrieved sense of responsibility to his wife and family,” significantly curtailing, and possibly ceasing, all of his affairs.
By the time of their trip to Texas, the Kennedys are closer than they have ever been.
Jackie’s mother, Janet Auchincloss, notes that “all their strains and stresses,” have subsided to a point where “they were very, very, very close to each other and understood each other wonderfully.”
Chapter 18
The president and First Lady are scheduled for a joint appearance at a breakfast at the Hotel Texas in Fort Worth on November 22, 1963, one of Jackie’s first since Patrick’s death in August. The people waiting outside in the hotel parking lot early that morning are chanting “Jackie! Jackie!” eager for a glimpse of the First Lady. “Mrs. Kennedy is organizing herself,” Jack tells the disappointed crowd. “It takes her longer, but, of course, she looks better than we do when she does it.”
The crowd inside is eager, too, thousands of them cheering when Jackie appears in an American-made “line-for-line” copy of a Chanel strawberry-pink wool suit with a matching pillbox hat ensemble that her husband found “smashing.” (Although Jackie has been a longtime Chanel client, it’s deemed “too foreign, too spendy” for her to buy clothes directly from Paris as First Lady—so instead Chanel sends the patterns and material to New York, to be technically created in the U.S.)
As the Chicago Sun-Times editorializes that morning, all hopes are riding on Jackie. “Some Texans, in taking account of the tangled Texas political situation, have begun to think that Mrs. Jacqueline Kennedy may turn the balance and win her husband this state’s electoral vote.”
At the hotel, Jack signs what may be a last autograph, for Texas Hotel chambermaid Jan White, on the front page of that day’s Dallas Morning News, which features a photo of the couple in San Antonio the day before, Jackie smiling widely and wearing another chic Chanel dress, this one white and belted with a thin black bow.
Historian William Manchester says that Jackie herself later revealed to him that she and the president made love aboard Air Force One on the jaunt between San Antonio and Houston on the afternoon of the twenty-first—a detail he cloaked in his 1967 book, The Death of a President, as their “last hour of serenity,” coyly ending with “the President emerged in a fresh shirt.”
After the breakfast, the Kennedys leave the Hotel Texas and head back to Air Force One, ready for the thirteen-minute hop from Fort Worth Carswell Air Force Base to Dallas Love Field.
* * *
Dallas is the new home of former major general Edwin A. Walker, a self-proclaimed “super patriot” whom Newsweek labeled “the Thunder on the Right.” Despite a psychiatrist deeming his actions indicative of “paranoid mental disorders”—Kennedy privately commented, “Imagine that son of a bitch having been commander of a division up till last year. And the Army promoting him?”—in September 1962, Walker’s supporters were even carrying “Walker for President 64” signs.
Fellow Dallas resident and ex-marine marksman Lee Harvey Oswald is not one of those supporters. As a declared Communist, Oswald is exactly the kind of enemy Walker and his zealots seek to vanquish.
In 1959, twenty-year-old Oswald visits Moscow on a tourist visa with the intention to defect, but the KGB rejects him and his “outdated information,” and determines that he’s no double agent. “His intellectual training experience and capabilities were such that it would not show the FBI and CIA in good light if they used people like him.” But a top member of the Politburo intervenes and in 1960 puts him to work at a television radio factory in Minsk, where the KGB bugs his government-issue apartment.
John F. Kennedy is inaugurated president of the United States in January 1961, and that April, Lee Harvey Oswald marries Marina Prusakova after a six-week courtship.
In June 1962, the US and Soviet governments agree to allow the “re-defector” Oswald and his family to return to the United States.
On April 10, 1963, Oswald decides to use Walker as “target practice.” In the Marines, Oswald had earned a sharpshooter qualification, rated by the sergeant in charge of his training as “a slightly better than average shot for a Marine, excellent by civilian standards.” Now, he trains the telescopic sight of his high-powered Mannlicher-Carcano infantry rifle—mail ordered with his family’s grocery money under the alias A. Hiddell—on the former general as Walker sits at his desk inside his Dallas home.
He pulls the trigger—and misses.