The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [453]
The president told a number of people about Bartlett’s memos, including O’Donnell, making no apparent attempt to try to hide the source of these allegations. Bartlett was increasingly convinced that there was serious corruption involved and felt that the president was doing almost nothing to investigate the allegations. “The president never gave me the impression that he wanted to investigate this stuff,” Bartlett recalled. “That was my concern, though it took me a while. I suppose that gave Kenny O’Donnell a great deal of license. In other words, he could go anywhere and ask people for money, and when Larry said that he spent this hundred thousand dollars from California on Get Out the Vote money, why, I suppose Kennedy would have shrugged. But the fact was that they did both end up looking pretty rich. Of course, you always end up with people like that in the White House, but it seems to me that Kenny O’Donnell does you a lot more harm than good. I didn’t deal with him at all. I really sort of disliked him.”
In April the White House announced that thirty-three-year-old Jackie was pregnant. In late August she would become the only first lady since Mrs. Grover Cleveland in 1893 to give birth while in the White House. For Jackie, this was a double blessing, since the pregnancy gave her an excuse to cancel all her public duties and live the secluded, private life that she preferred.
Jackie had been involved in building a new fifteen-room weekend home called Atoka on Rattlesnake Ridge in the Virginia hunt country that she adored and her husband tolerated. It was supposed to cost $71,000 but had already reached $100,000, and she had not begun to furnish the residence except for two 173-year-old porcelain eagles for which she had paid $1,500. “It’s the only house Jack and I ever built together,” Jackie recalled, “and I designed it all myself. I didn’t want it to be exploited and photographed all over the place just because it was ours.”
The president had a wife who was an American icon, celebrated for her beauty and class, a woman who was almost never the victim of envy, that most American of sins. She was spending about $8,300 a month in personal expenses, more than most teachers earned in a year, but far less than she had spent when she first entered the White House.
Kennedy might smolder privately at his wife’s endless extravagances, but she was pregnant now, and woe betide anyone who did not understand the deference and care that she must be given. In July at his rented home on Squaw Island, he had come down one Saturday morning and asked his friend Jim Reed to reach Jackie’s obstetrician, Dr. John Walsh. The Washington doctor had come to the Cape to be close to the first lady. Dr. Walsh had gone out for a walk, and it was about an hour later when he finally strolled into the president’s summer home. Kennedy rarely lashed others with his tongue, but the cool tenor of his voice was enough to chill anyone so unfortunate as to have such words directed at them. “I just hope that if you do go off for a walk for any period of time that you always tell someone where you are,” he said, “how you can be reached immediately in case I do have to get in touch with you.” Obstetricians tend to be the most philosophical of doctors, realizing that for the most part nature is their master. The doctor hurried upstairs and soon reported to the president that Jackie was simply tired.
On August 7, Kennedy was in Washington when he learned that Dr. Walsh had Jackie taken to a specially prepared suite at Otis Air Force Base Hospital. By the time the president arrived, the first lady had given birth prematurely by cesarean section to a four-pound, ten-ounce son. The president had gone off carousing in Cuba soon after Caroline was born, and he had not even been in Washington when John Jr. was born. Now he had missed this birth too, but he appeared to appreciate the miracle of life in the presence of his tiny son the way he had rarely felt it before.