The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [454]
The newborn had some trouble breathing, but the president wheeled him into his mother’s room, where he placed the infant in Jackie’s arms. The baby continued to breathe fitfully, and Dr. Walsh decided to move him by ambulance to Boston. Before that was done, a priest baptized Patrick Bouvier Kennedy, named after the president’s grandfather and Jackie’s father.
The president flew back to Squaw Island to spend time with Caroline and John Jr. He then flew back to visit his convalescing wife at Otis, and then flew on to Boston to visit his newborn son. At this moment he was a husband succoring his wife. He was a father shepherding his children. He was a man whose newborn child was sick, and there was nothing he could do about it.
The baby was diagnosed as having idiopathic respiratory distress syndrome. The doctors could not do much more than the president was doing, waiting and praying, hoping that the membrane on his air sacs, which so troubled his breathing, would soon dissolve. Patrick had been taken from his mother’s arms, and now he was moved to the Children’s Medical Center at Harvard’s School of Public Health, where he was put in a new experimental high-pressure chamber. The thirty-one-foot-long device was like a mini-submarine, a room within a room in which Patrick, the doctors, and the nurses were encased.
A healthy man sees only healthy men and he thinks he has seen the world. A sick man looks out on that same vista and sees the hurt and the lame, the crippled and the stricken. When it came to the imponderable pains of the world, the president had learned to turn away, looking toward all that was bright and gay. On this day, though, there was no turning his head away from the tiny inert form of his infant son, visible through the windows of the chamber.
Kennedy slept in the hospital that evening. He was awakened at two in the morning and told that Patrick was not doing well and that he should come to his son’s room. As Kennedy stood waiting for the elevator, he saw a burned child in an adjoining room. The president was a man of the deepest curiosity, but he turned away from any door that led into darkness. Yet now he pulled himself out of his own misery to ask about this child. He was told that the child’s mother came to see him every day. He wanted to do something for this woman. He was the president of the United States, but he had no power here to heal these wounds. He asked for a piece of paper and wrote a note to the woman, telling her “to keep her courage up.” Though he knew much of men standing bold under cannon fire and politicians holding firm in the name of principle, he knew nothing of this humble courage that won no medals, gained no accolades in books of history—a mother walking alone each day into a hospital to see her burned child.
When Kennedy reached his son’s room, Patrick was still alive, but two hours later he was gone. The president went off by himself into the boiler room, and when he opened the door again his eyes were red and wet. He had never thrown a football to Patrick on the turf at Hyannis Port, or led his pony down a trail at Glen Ora, but by the measure of his pain he might as well have.
When it came time to bury Patrick, the president went to the private services at Cardinal Cushing’s residence with his brothers and sisters and other Kennedys. They were all there except for the convalescing Jackie, who would have heard a special prayer for a mother who had lost three children. The fifteen mourners filled the tiny chapel and heard Cushing offer the Mass of the Angels. When the service was over, the Kennedys filed out one by one until only the president and the cardinal remained. The president harbored the tiny casket in his arms, as if he sought to take it with him.
“My dear Jack, let’s go, let’s go,” the cardinal implored. “Nothing more can be done.”
The two men stood alone weeping and sharing a grief that for a moment even the grace of faith could not assuage.
Patrick’s death was a brutal way for the president to grow emotionally, but after the tragic event he did care more