The House of Kennedy(80)
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.’”
Soon John and Caroline will see their father off on his last flight out of Washington. On November 21, 1963, Jack and Jackie board Marine One for a chopper ride to Andrews Air Force Base, where Air Force One will take off for Carswell Air Force Base in Fort Worth. The next time John wants to see his father, he will have to look at a photograph.
Or a painting.
In December 1963, shortly after vacating the White House for President Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson, Jackie, Caroline, and John are living in a house belonging to JFK’s undersecretary of state, W. Averell Harriman, on Washington’s exclusive N Street.
Secretary of Defense Bob McNamara and his wife, Marg, who are close to Jackie, send over two portraits of Jack. But Jackie’s grief is so fresh, she can only bear to look at a single photograph of her husband, one that shows his back, not his face. She props the paintings in the hallway, intending to return the thoughtful yet distressing gift.
Before she can, three-year-old John Jr. spots the portrait of his father at eye level, and he kisses it, saying, “Good night, Daddy.” Despite John Jr.’s sweet reaction, Jackie sees it as proof that the emotional danger of having Jack’s image close by is too high.