These Few Precious Days by Christopher Andersen Read Free Book Online

children—all part of a daily routine designed to bring some semblance of normalcy to two of the most extraordinary lives ever lived.
    “Comparing their problems to another couple’s,” Jack’s confidant Paul “Red” Fay said, “is like comparing a Duesenberg to a Chevy.” Certainly, both John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Bouvier had been born into lives of wealth and privilege. But both had also been deeply scarred growing up in wildly dysfunctional households—families in which power, money, sex, and social position eclipsed more traditional values.
    Their ambition would, in the end, make them the most celebrated couple in the world. But a shared ambition was not what drew them together at first. “They were two lonely people,” their friend Chuck Spalding said. “And they instantly recognized that in each other.” In fact, Spalding went on to describe them as “emotionally the two most isolated, most alone people I ever met.”
    It was easy to see why. A casualty of her parents’ bitter divorce, Jackie sought solace in solitary pursuits like horseback riding or reading. “She could be the belle of the ball when it was required,” a friend said. “But that was just an act. Jack was the same way. Before entering a room, Jack would say ‘Time to turn on the B.P.’—the Big Personality—but he hated glad-handers. It’s ironic that these two people who personified charm and grace for millions of people around the world were really lone wolves.”
    What Jackie detected beneath Jack’s gleaming breastplate of self-confidence was the sickly child who for years suffered fever, weight loss, stomach pains, hives, dizziness, and nausea—all while doctors tried in vain to diagnose what Jack himself called his “wasting disease.” Looked after by a battalion of governesses and nurses, Jack was virtually ignored by his mother, who dealt with her husband Joe’s rampant womanizing by taking expensive trips and lavishing gifts on herself. As a result, Jack, who grew up in a family of nine children, worshiped the boisterous, fun-loving family patriarch while resenting the emotionally unavailable Rose. “My mother never really held me and hugged me,” Jack fumed after he had reached the White House. “Never, never!”
    Spending weeks at a time in bed recuperating, young Jack lost himself in the works of Rudyard Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Sir Walter Scott. This was the little-known part of Jack’s past that Jackie felt held the key to his personality. To her, the dazzling Mr. Kennedy was “really this lonely sick little boy, in bed so much of the time reading history, devouring the Knights of the Round Table.”
    It was hard not to be reminded of that little boy when they got ready for bed. Throughout their marriage, Jack said his prayers every night just as he had since childhood. “He’d come in and kneel on the edge of the bed and say them, you know,” Jackie recalled. “Take about three seconds. Then he’d cross himself. It was just a little childish mannerism, I suppose, like brushing your teeth. Just a habit,” she said. “I thought it was so sweet. It used to amuse me so, standing there . . .”
    It was the frail little boy hidden beneath the bravado, she reasoned, who emerged to connect with Caroline and John in a way she never thought possible. Jackie, thrilled that her husband had chosen to play such a hands-on role in their children’s lives, reveled in the small things—the fact, for instance, that on some days in the White House Caroline and John would “even have lunch with him. If you told me that would happen, I’d never have believed it.”
    In the end, Jackie concluded that they might never have come together as a tight-knit family had her husband not been elected to the world’s most powerful office. “You see,” she explained, “the one thing that happens to a president is that his ties to the outside world are cut. And then all you really have,” Jackie added with