At thirteen days old, John Jr. is baptized at Georgetown University Hospital’s chapel. Jackie chooses her sister Lee’s husband, Prince Stanislas Radziwill, as godfather and Martha Bartlett—who first introduced Jackie to Jack—as his godmother. While posing for press photos, Jackie holds her son, saying, “Isn’t he sweet, Jack? Look at those pretty eyes.” John’s “pretty eyes” are brown like Jackie’s, not blue like Jack’s.
The first baby to live in the White House since 1893, John Jr. makes headlines with every move. “Gift for Kennedy Baby,” the New York Times reports on the stuffed donkey, rabbits, and dogs that Madame Charles de Gaulle presents the new parents at the French Foreign Ministry on May 31, 1961.
In advance of his first birthday, White House press secretary Pierre Salinger reports, “John Fitzgerald Kennedy Jr. still has a cold and will not be brought [to Hyannis Port] for a joint birthday observance with his sister Caroline,” who turns four on November 27.
Citizens even vote on John Jr.’s “Little Lord Fauntleroy” hairstyle, which Jackie allows to curl over his collar. Dollar bills arrive at the White House along with instructions for Jackie to cut John Jr.’s hair (she refuses, though Jack reportedly asks Maud Shaw, the children’s nanny, to at least trim his son’s bangs, and to blame it on the president if Jackie objects).
Jackie revels in her role as mother, setting up play groups and a small kindergarten for Caroline at the White House, along with a tree house and a swing set for both children on the South Lawn. Caroline is even allowed to ride her pet pony, Macaroni, on the White House grounds; the sight of the happy little girl on her horse delights tourists and visitors (including singer/songwriter Neil Diamond, who credits the image as providing the inspiration for his beloved hit song “Sweet Caroline”).
Jack is also an involved father, one who, Jackie says, “loved those children tumbling around him,” and is often seen teasing and playing with John Jr. and Caroline. “It was John’s treat to walk to the [Oval] Office with him every day,” Jackie recalls. He’d often let them romp around the Oval Office, resulting in a famous series of photographs of John Jr. playing under the president’s desk. He also enjoyed telling them stories. “He didn’t like to read books to them much. He’d rather tell them stories. He’d make up these fantastic ones…you know, little things that had to do with their world,” Jackie recalls.
Arthur Schlesinger Jr. also remembers JFK telling the children stories that featured themselves on grand adventures—Caroline winning the Grand National or John Jr. sinking destroyers—and had one ongoing story about a white shark that ate socks. “One day, when the President and Caroline were sailing with Franklin Roosevelt Jr.,” Schlesinger says, Jack “pretended to see the white shark and said, ‘Franklin, give him your socks; he’s hungry.’ Franklin promptly threw his socks in the water.” Not only does this greatly entertain Caroline, but as biographers Collier and Horowitz point out, it’s “an oblique pun on that day twenty-five years earlier when his father [FDR] had asked Joseph Kennedy to drop his pants.” Crucially, Lem Billings notes, everyone learns that when Jack starts in on those tales, “it was time to move to another part of the yacht” or risk having to feed the sharks, too.
The children are doted on by the public, but Jackie does her best to impress upon them that their time in the White House is temporary. “I’d tell them little stories about other Presidents and [how] there would be a President after Daddy,” she recalls, “so they never got to think that all this was going to be forever.”
Jackie often takes John Jr. and Caroline out of Washington to Glen Ora, the four-hundred-acre horse farm they rent in Middleburg, Virginia, where they can be a little less in the spotlight, and she can participate in rituals like nightly baths and reading stories. “Jackie wanted her kids to have what she grew up with, and to make their lives normal and fun,” a friend recalls. “She applied effort and ingenuity to that.”
“I don’t want my young children brought up by nurses and Secret Service men,” Jackie tells the New York Times.
She also does her best to pass along her love of horseback riding to the children, but nothing compares to John Jr.’s true love: flying. John Jr. takes his first airplane ride—from Washington to Palm Beach—at fifteen days old, and his obsession with it never wavers. Even his Secret Service code name, “Lark,” is prescient.
Jack indulges his son’s fascination with flying machines, taking him on helicopter rides and letting him “fly” his toy version on the floor of the president’s secretary’s office. Nanny Maud Shaw says that even as a toddler, John Jr. “liked to put on the pilot’s helmet and push the control stick around and press the buttons, flicking the switches and making all the right noises for starting up and taking off,” and recalls “one wonderful memory of the time I went looking for John on a Saturday afternoon. This time I had a good idea where he would be—down in the hangar. Sure enough, he was. And so was the President. Both of them were sitting at the controls of the helicopter with flying helmets on. The President was playing the game seriously with his son, taking orders from Flight Captain John, thoroughly absorbed in the whole thing. I retreated quietly and left father and son very happy together.”
Joe Sr.’s nurse, Rita Dallas, also fondly remembers John Jr.’s childhood obsession with planes. “He adored airplanes and did everything he could to ‘bum a ride’ on anything that flew,” she says, adding that JFK often tries to accommodate him, but when he couldn’t, he instead leaves John Jr. a little toy plane. “He must have bought them by the gross,” Dallas notes, “for they were everywhere.” In a White House photo of John Jr. dated January 21, 1963, the smiling two-year-old is seen with a glossy press photo of Marine One airborne over the South Lawn, and a double-rotor replica model within reach.
The toy planes “usually pacified young John,” Dallas says, “but if it failed, the President would bend down and whisper in his ear, ‘You fly this one, son, and as soon as you grow up, Daddy’s going to buy you a real one.’” John Jr. would make him solemnly promise, at which point, “Little John would run off telling everyone the news. He’d tug at us, wave his toy plane, and say, ‘My daddy’s going to get me a real one when I grow up.’”
John Jr.’s passion for airplanes and helicopters is so fierce, JFK reveals some concerns over what they’ll do “when he’s old enough and wants to learn to fly,” as he tells his aide Kenneth O’Donnell, who also recalls how John Jr. “would race over and get on a helicopter, and when it came time for us to leave, he refused to get out of it,” to the point that “the poor Secret Service would take John kicking and squabbling off the helicopter or the plane.”
One such incident is recorded in an AP photo dated October 3, 1963, which shows the toddler “weeping bitterly” over being left behind when Jack boards Air Force One on a flight to Arkansas. Not even a return flight to the White House by helicopter consoles him. Similarly, Ted Kennedy recalls another photo that “showed John racing across the lawn as his father landed in the White House helicopter and swept up John in his arms. When my brother saw that photo, he exclaimed, ‘Every mother in the United States is saying, “Isn’t it wonderful to see that love between a son and his father, the way John races to be with his father?” Little do they know—that son would have raced right by his father to get to that helicopter.’”