One hour later, as the president of the United States, his Secret Service detail, and select members of his staff race to Otis Air Force Base crammed inside a small six-passenger JetStar aircraft, Patrick Bouvier Kennedy takes his first breath. The president’s second son weighs just four pounds, ten and a half ounces.
However, there are grave concerns about that breath. It appears shallow and labored. The baby grunts as he exhales. His skin has a bluish pallor, and his chest wall is retracted. The infant is immediately placed in an incubator.
Baby Patrick is assigned a Secret Service agent, even though it’s becoming clear that the only direct threat against the newborn’s life comes from within his own body. The lungs are among the last organs to develop in the womb, and young Patrick is suffering from hyaline membrane disease, the most common form of death among children born prematurely.
The First Lady is still sedated from her Caesarean and doesn’t know of the problem. As soon as the president arrives, he takes command. He huddles with Dr. John Walsh to discuss the status of his new son. The doctor explains that there is a chance Patrick might die. Kennedy immediately summons the base chaplain to baptize Patrick, ensuring that his son will go to heaven, based upon the teachings of the Catholic Church.
Dr. Walsh then makes the suggestion that Patrick be moved to Children’s Hospital in Boston, which has state-of-the-art facilities for treating hyaline membrane disease. The president immediately agrees.
At 5:55 P.M., as Jackie is still shaking off the grogginess of her sedation, Patrick Bouvier Kennedy is placed in an ambulance for the hour-long drive to Boston.
This child is precious cargo. Far dearer than the
The caravan does not stop. The baby’s life must be saved.
Now comes the waiting. Jackie Kennedy remains in her ten-room maternity suite, recovering. So it is the president who moves on to Boston to hold vigil at Children’s Hospital. This is a far different man from the one who, in 1956, waited three days before returning from Europe to see his wife after her first miscarriage. Now he stares helplessly at the thirty-one-foot-long experimental high-pressure chamber in which the small body of his son gasps for air. Patrick can clearly be seen through the chamber’s small windows. The intensive care unit is cleared of all visitors whenever JFK is on the floor, which only adds to the president’s solitude.
“How are things with little Patrick?” Evelyn Lincoln gently asks. She has made the trip to Boston to help the president manage the many details of his office that still need his attention.
“He has a fifty-fifty chance,” JFK responds.
“That’s all a Kennedy needs,” she assures him, knowing that her longtime boss will appreciate this sort of encouragement.
World leaders and good friends barrage Kennedy with phone calls and messages, but he never takes the focus off his newborn son. The president has a deep love for children. This baby, conceived in the wake of the Cuban missile crisis, holds special significance. This is the child who would have never entered the world if the crisis had ended in global thermonuclear war. Patrick Bouvier Kennedy, who is named for JFK’s paternal grandfather and for Jackie’s father, has been a source of pride and concern ever since the day the First Lady announced she was pregnant.
The president has a room at the Ritz-Carlton overlooking Boston Common, where he spends the first night of Patrick’s life restlessly passing the hours reading up on documents for a nuclear test ban treaty. But he prefers to spend the second night closer to his ailing son and moves from the luxury of the Ritz-Carlton to an empty hospital room.
At 2:00 A.M. on August 9, Secret Service agent Larry Newman gently awakens him. JFK gets up in an instant and rides the hospital elevator to the pediatric unit on the fifth floor, along with Dr. Walsh and Special Agent Newman. The Secret Service veteran has seen a great deal during his time on the White House detail and knows the president’s moods and personal issues intimately. Newman, who admits he doesn’t cry easily, has himself been on the verge of tears during this heartbreaking ordeal.
Now Special Agent Newman sees anguish settle upon the president’s shoulders. Dr. Walsh is informing JFK that Patrick is in grave condition and is unlikely to survive until the morning. The baby’s underdeveloped young lungs aren’t functioning properly. He has begun to suffer prolonged periods of apnea, with his body refusing to breathe at all.
The elevator door opens. The hallway is dark and empty at this early hour. John Kennedy begins the slow trek to the intensive care unit to gaze upon his dying son.
Then the president hears the sound of children’s laughter. Curious, JFK pokes his head into the room from which it is coming. Two little girls sit up in bed. They are young, just three or four years old. Both have bandages covering large portions of their bodies.
“What’s wrong with them?” he asks Dr. Walsh.
They’re burn victims, explains the doctor, who goes on to add that one girl may soon lose the use of her hands.
The president pats his pockets, searching for a pen. He doesn’t have one. This isn’t unusual. The only thing he carries in his pockets is a handkerchief.
Special Agent Newman and Dr. Walsh come up with a pen. A nurse, seeing that the president has no paper, finds a scrap from the nurse’s station. Then JFK writes a note to the children, telling them to be courageous, letting them know that the president of the United States cares for their well-being. The nurse assures him that she will give the note to their parents. “Nothing was ever said about it,” Newman will later recall. “He just went on to do what he had to do—to see his son. This was part of the dichotomy of the man—the rough-cut diamond.”
Patrick Bouvier Kennedy dies just two hours later. “He was such a beautiful baby,” the president laments to top aide Dave Powers. “He put up quite a fight.”
Kennedy is holding young Patrick’s hand as the child breathes his last. As the president absorbs the terrible moment, he is well aware that his grief is not private. The nurses, doctors, and his own staff watch to see how he handles this awful moment. Slowly, JFK leaves the room and wanders the hospital hallway, keeping his pain to himself.
In the outside world, there is so much going on. A movie about Kennedy’s old boat, PT-109, is a popular summer hit, further burnishing the president’s heroic image. The political situation in Texas is a growing mess that the president himself will try to fix by visiting the state in a few short months. In Chicago, mobster Sam Giancana is swearing revenge on the Kennedy brothers for tightening surveillance on his alleged criminal behavior. Ninety miles from Florida, Fidel Castro is in a rage about ongoing American covert activity in Cuba. In the nation’s capital, Martin Luther King Jr. is about to direct hundreds of thousands of civil rights protesters onto the Washington Mall. In Vietnam, the chain-smoking Catholic despot Diem is out of control. And, finally, in New Orleans, a ne’er-do-well named Lee Harvey Oswald is under arrest for distributing Communist literature, leading the FBI finally to reopen their investigation into his behavior.
But right now none of that matters to John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
The president’s son has died. He lived just thirty-nine hours. The grief is almost too much to bear.
JFK takes the elevator back upstairs to the room in which he had been sleeping. There, he sits down on the bed, lowers his head, and sobs.
“He just cried and cried and cried,” Dave Powers will later remember.
Sixty-five miles to the south, Jackie is also overcome with agonizing grief. The press swarms outside the hospital at Otis Air Force Base. A few hours later, the president arrives to be with his wife.
Even in the midst of her incredible pain, the First Lady can see how much her husband is also suffering. Gently, she reminds him that they still have each other, as well as John and Caroline.
“The one blow I could not bear,” Jackie tells JFK, “would be to lose you.”
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