The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [223]
Spalding had an astute sense of Jack’s emotional condition, and he tried to change the subject, playing the buffoon, or the wit, whatever worked to get Jack thinking about something else. Jack just wasn’t getting better, and in February he was flown up once again to New York. He was so sick that the last rites were administered once again over his dormant form. And while surgeons operated, removing the metal plate in his back and doing a bone graft, his family huddled outside united in prayer.
This time the operation seemed successful and Jack was able to walk out of the hospital and return to Palm Beach for more months of recovery. By mid-February, he was able to go through his mail and dictate a lengthy memorandum to his Washington staff. He was already focused on his reelection campaign three years hence. He told his staff that for “anybody we did a favor for … take their name for our political file so that we will have … it in 1958 when we need it for the campaign … and go back through all the letters since we started in Congress and see the people from the correspondence … that would help us in future campaigns.”
Jack was not a man of natural solicitousness, but he recognized that politics was a matter of relationships. The cheapest and best way to win votes was often through letters or cards or the baby books that he sent out to new parents in Massachusetts. He told his staff how to answer each letter and whether to address the person by his or her first name. He told his aides how to handle journalists: “I don’t know Raymond Lajoie … and I don’t know really what sort of story he wants to write—definitely can’t use any pictures from here—no quotes— … I don’t think there is anything in it so that Ted can turn him off tactfully.”
Jackie was there with Jack in Florida. Marriages are tested in the bad times, not the good. And the bad times always come, though usually not as early as they did in Jack and Jackie’s marriage. Jackie had hardly said her wedding vows before her new and much older husband became seriously ill. In that dreadful fall of 1954, she not only saw her husband almost die but miscarried what would have been their first child. In the months since then, she had spent most of her time succoring him. She changed the dressing on his open, draining wound. She put his slippers and socks on his feet and sat with him for hours. She took dictation and helped him research a book he was writing. She flew to Washington and in Virginia found a white Georgian mansion known as Hickory Hill where she and Jack would move once he recuperated. Jackie proved herself a devoted wife without a hint of the sulkiness that previously had so perturbed her husband.
As Jackie watched over her husband, Jack kept up a correspondence with Gunilla, trying to arrange an assignation with her in the summer when he hoped to be recovered. The Swedish woman knew that Jack was married, but she believed that “he needed someone to love. It was all about love, unconditional, passionate love. I knew in the depths of my being that this was exactly the kind of love I could give him, and that he would give back to me.” Jack had already found a trusting, caring love in Jackie, as her conduct these last months should have told him. The problem was not that he had a wife incapable of deep love, but that he was apparently incapable of returning that emotion for more than a few days in a distant clime.
“I am anxious to see you,” Jack wrote Gunilla that spring. “Is it not strange after all these months? Perhaps at first it shall be a little difficult as we shall be strangers—but not strangers—and I am sure it will all work out and I still think that though it is a long way to Gunilla