These Few Precious Days (29 page)

The next morning, everyone tore through the wrapping on their presents with abandon. Jack, in particular, made a point of ripping open presents with unvarnished glee and he instructed the children to do likewise. “It’s half the fun,” he once told Baldrige, who had her own methodical approach to unwrapping gifts. “Jesus, Tish,” he complained as he watched her gently open gifts at an impromptu office party, “you’re not disarming a bomb.”

What was inside those packages, in the Kennedys’ case, was usually something rare—and costly. When buying gifts for each other, Jackie and Jack took great care to come up with something unique. That Christmas, she had commissioned Milton Delano—a distant cousin of FDR—to etch a sperm whale’s nine-inch molar with the presidential seal. This became the centerpiece of Jack’s scrimshaw collection, proudly displayed in the Oval Office.

The president devoted just as much time and energy to finding the perfect gifts for his wife: a Renoir drawing of two nudes, and a painting by post-Impressionist master Maurice Prendergast titled
Summer Day in the Park.
As soon as they returned to Washington, Jackie hung the Prendergast in her bedroom.

The Cuban Missile Crisis had left Jack with one important piece of unfinished business. In return for the Soviets’ withdrawing their missiles, JFK had promised not to invade Cuba. As part of the grand bargain, the United States would pay a ransom of $53 million in humanitarian aid for the safe return of the 1,113 Bay of Pigs fighters imprisoned by Castro.

Two days after Christmas, JFK invited five newly released leaders of the invasion force known as Brigade 2506 to the Paul mansion in Palm Beach. Jackie, in particular, was eager to have the children meet the “brave fighting men” she believed the United States had abandoned twenty months earlier.

On December 29, 1962, the president and first lady helicoptered to Miami Beach’s Orange Bowl to join forty thousand Cuban exiles in welcoming home the freed soldiers. Jackie, who at this stage might have shied away from such a big event, had instead insisted on accompanying her husband. JFK had planned to read a carefully crafted, somewhat restrained speech, but when a Bay of Pigs veteran proudly presented him with Brigade 2506’s battle-worn flag—hidden by a prisoner during his thirty months in captivity—JFK suddenly became emotional. “I can assure you,” he told the cheering crowd, “that this flag will be returned to this brigade in a free Havana!”

Translating her husband’s stirring words into flawless Spanish, Jackie once again had the crowd hanging on her every word. Then, speaking without notes, she added heartfelt remarks of her own. “It is an honor to stand here today,” she began in Spanish, “with some of the bravest men in the world—and to share in the joy of their families who have hoped and prayed and waited so long . . .” When she was done, the spectators, many of whom were openly weeping, burst into cheers and thunderous applause.

The first couple then climbed into a white Lincoln convertible and waved to the throng as they drove out of the stadium. “You were wonderful, Jackie,” the president told her. “They loved you. Your remarks were just perfect.”

JACKIE SCORED ANOTHER INTERNATIONAL TRIUMPH
less than two weeks later, when the most famous painting in the world, the 460-year-old
Mona Lisa,
was unveiled at Washington’s National Gallery of Art. Thanks to Jackie’s warm relationship with both de Gaulle and French minister of culture André Malraux, the French government was allowing Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece to leave the Louvre on one condition—that it be loaned not to an American museum, but personally to the president.

Shipped in a climate-controlled, bulletproof crate and occupying its own stateroom aboard the luxury liner SS
France, La Gioconda
had arrived in the United States in late December. On January 8, after attending a dinner for one hundred at the French Embassy, JFK and Jackie joined some 1,200 invited guests at the National Gallery. When the elevator to the second floor of the gallery got stuck, Jackie, dressed in a Cassini strapless mauve silk chiffon gown glistening with crystal beads, could only make it up the stairs with an uncomfortable Clint Hill holding her short train—like, the Secret Service agent recalled, “an attendant at a wedding.”

Once the president and first lady arrived, the reception quickly devolved into chaos. In the crush of guests and photographers, it became evident that Jackie—not the
Mona Lisa
or even JFK—was the real star of the evening.

Three days after upstaging Leonardo, Jackie was in the middle of dictating a letter to her secretary, Mary Gallagher, when she came to an abrupt halt. She wanted to know if Gallagher thought she’d done enough as first lady. She needn’t have waited for an answer; even with her frequent absences from the White House to spend time with her horses and her children, Jackie already ranked as one of the most activist first ladies in U.S. history.

Jackie called Tish Baldrige to the West Sitting Room and declared, “I am taking the veil!” From now on, she was going to cut back dramatically on her official duties and devote more time to her family. “Semi-official” trips abroad, ship launchings, press luncheons were to be back-burnered. And while Jackie claimed she would only perform those official duties her husband deemed essential, Baldrige knew that meant “she was going to do what she wanted to do. The President, bless his heart, really couldn’t force her to do anything if she didn’t want to.”

Neither Gallagher nor Baldrige knew the reasons behind Jackie’s decision to scale back her workload, although Provi the maid had already guessed: Jackie was pregnant. The baby was due the first week in September, and she intended to keep her pregnancy under wraps as long as possible.

Her self-described “declaration of independence” aside, Jackie’s schedule was more packed than ever in the early months of 1963. In the span of a few weeks, she and Jack dined at the Washington homes of Franklin Roosevelt Jr., the Douglas Dillons, and the Joe Alsops, then went to New York to catch the hit satirical revue
Beyond the Fringe
and attend parties thrown in their honor by Adlai Stevenson and former U.S. ambassador to Cuba Earl Smith. (Smith’s wife, former model turned society queen bee Florence Pritchett, had dated JFK when he was a young senator and remained one of Jack’s closest female friends.)

Flush with the excitement of having another child on the way, Jackie and JFK took full advantage of their weekend in New York. Trailed by their Secret Service detail, they strode up and down Park Avenue on their way to and from favorite haunts like Voisin and Le Pavillon. With the Carlyle as their base, Jackie and Caroline had managed to walk up and down the streets of Manhattan’s Upper East Side without drawing a crowd. Even the president was able to take his daughter on a stroll through Central Park. Rather than using the Carlyle’s front entrance, they sneaked out a service door on East Seventy-seventh Street, directly opposite the tony Finch College for Women (which Richard Nixon’s daughter Tricia would soon be attending). Unnoticed, JFK and Caroline were then able to enjoy a rare treat, laughing and chatting as they walked hand in hand through one of the world’s most famous public spaces.

Caroline’s parents cherished such stolen moments of privacy. But they remained the exception to the pomp- and ceremony-filled rule. To a state dinner honoring Lyndon Johnson and Chief Justice Earl Warren on January 21, Jackie wore a citron yellow chiffon-and-satin gown inspired, she said, by the turbans she had seen on her trip to India. Weeks later, it was black silk chiffon and pearls for a state dinner honoring Venezuelan president Rómulo Betancourt.

From the moment they learned she was pregnant, both Jackie and the president were understandably concerned that, once again, she might lose the baby. There were now days when, overcome with exhaustion, she would lie down for a nap and sleep for twelve hours straight. As the first lady entered her third month, only a handful of people—Joe and Rose Kennedy, Clint Hill and one or two other key Secret Service agents—were let in on the secret. Jackie’s own mother, the talkative Janet Auchincloss, was not.

Jackie had already given up water-skiing and riding, replacing her workouts astride Sardar, Bit of Irish, and Rufus with long, brisk walks. Nothing too taxing, of course—and nothing like the torture her husband had in mind for their friends.

Even before he was sworn in as president, Jack railed in speeches and articles against the new “generation of spectators” who had replaced strenuous exercise with long hours spent staring at the television set. To get these “soft Americans” back on the road to fitness—literally—he resurrected a 1908 memo from then-president Theodore Roosevelt to his Marine Corps commandant instructing corps officers to stay in shape by periodically hiking fifty miles in less than twenty hours.

Soon Americans everywhere were taking the president and TR up on the challenge. JFK himself was in no condition to do any such thing; his back pain in early 1963 was so excruciating he told the Bradlees he’d prefer the pain of childbirth. But he still wanted a member of his administration to march alongside the Marines. “Unfortunately,” said the rotund, cigar-smoking Pierre Salinger, “he kept looking at
my
waistline.”

Salinger played along for a while, until finally bowing out on the grounds that, as he put it, “if I went I would be dead—serious!” The man closest to JFK had already proven himself up to the task. While Jackie and Jack were traipsing around Manhattan, Bobby Kennedy hiked fifty miles up the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal straight to Camp David—and in only eighteen hours.

The previous Christmas, JFK had bet Stas Radziwill and Chuck Spalding a thousand dollars they could never finish the hike. Jack’s sister Eunice Shriver upped the ante by another thousand, with everyone agreeing that the winners would donate the money to charity. Now that Bobby had successfully completed the hike, Jack was more determined than ever to have his band of hikers follow through.

Sibling rivalry, Kennedy-style, was now in play as Radziwill and Spalding began their hike along the new Sunshine Parkway from Palm Beach to Miami at 2 a.m. on February 23. To ensure their safety, Clint Hill was enlisted to hike alongside them. “Bobby had hiked through the woods,” Spalding said, “and Jack didn’t want to be shown up by his little brother.” The event quickly took on a life of its own, and soon Radziwill and Spalding were inundated with sneakers sent to them by well-meaning strangers from around the country.

Although it was going to cost him and his sister two thousand dollars, JFK was determined that his friends beat Bobby’s time. To ensure that, he sent along Dr. Max Jacobson—whose Constructive Research Foundation stood to get the money if Stas and Chuck won—to look after the middle-aged hikers. In addition to oxygen, Jacobson was, said Spalding, “giving us shots all over the place.”

Jackie and Lee drove out periodically to check on their progress, and the president interrupted a cruise aboard the
Honey Fitz
to rendezvous with his hikers when they reached Pompano Beach—the thirty-five-mile mark. While Stas and Chuck sprawled on the grass, the president drove up in his white Lincoln Continental to deliver a “pep talk. Mainly,” Spalding said, “Jack was worried about Stas having a heart attack and told him he could quit if he wanted to.” Radziwill declined, and the trio made it to the finish line in Fort Lauderdale at 9:35 p.m.—fifteen minutes ahead of Bobby’s time.

Along the way, they weren’t exactly roughing it. All three men took frequent smoking breaks, and whenever the mood struck them they called for the Secret Service to deliver ice, steaks, and even champagne and orange juice to make mimosas. Once it was over, a limousine picked them all up and drove them to Palm Beach, “where,” Spalding said, “Jack had a big buffet waiting for us and champagne, and the jukebox was playing ‘Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen’ by the Andrews Sisters.”

“Congratulations!” Jack said as he hung a “medal” made of purple construction paper around each hiker’s neck. These medallions were inscribed with a personal message from JFK, who boasted with a wink that he had even drawn a presidential seal on each one “to make it official.” (Back at the White House, Salinger gleefully accepted an award from his press office staff for
not
hiking fifty miles.)

The fifty-mile hike down Florida’s Sunshine Parkway made front-page news across the country, but it seemed doubtful that it could have been accomplished without the help of Dr. Max. “What people didn’t know,” Spalding said, “was that with all that speed we could’ve walked all the way to Rio, we were so hyped up!”

Spalding also noticed during this time in Palm Beach what he called a “sea change” in the outward relationship between the president and his wife. “They were as happy as I’d ever seen them,” he said, “and they were much more affectionate toward each other. We couldn’t put our finger on what was up exactly . . . because none of us knew at the time that Jackie was pregnant.”

There were other, subtle signs that changes might be afoot. On March 8, 1963, Jackie and Jack gave what would be the last of their now-famous White House dinner dances—this one for World Bank chief Eugene Black. With music provided by society bandleader Lester Lanin in the softly lit Blue Room and fireplaces roaring in the Green Room and the Red Room, the Executive Mansion was, recalled Tish Baldrige, “everything I believed Jackie ever hoped it could be when she first set foot inside—an elegant, inviting home brimming over with life.”