These Few Precious Days by Christopher Andersen Read Free Book Online Page A

a smile, “is each other.”

They both wanted desperately to connect, but hadn’t the faintest idea how. That’s what made their love story so achingly poignant. And it was, in every sense of the word, a love story.
—CHUCK SPALDING, LONGTIME FRIEND

    They were so much alike. Even the names—Jack and Jackie: two halves of a single whole. They were both actors and they appreciated each other’s performance.
—LEM BILLINGS, JFK’S FRIEND

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    “An Electrical Current Between Them”
    “H ow can you live with a husband who is bound to be unfaithful?” Jacqueline Bouvier asked a friend in a rare unguarded moment shortly before marrying Jack on September 12, 1953. “Even if you love that person, how can you put up with that, and not lose a large piece of yourself?”
    Yet Jackie clearly saw in the young senator from Massachusetts the same roguish qualities she admired in her own father, the tall, tanned, rakishly handsome, devilishly charming, Ivy League–educated John Vernou “Black Jack” Bouvier III. Like JFK, Jackie’s father remained a bachelor until his mid-thirties, when he decided to finally march down the aisle with a girl a dozen years his junior. While he did not share Black Jack’s penchant for boozing and gambling, there seemed little doubt that Jack was more than a match for Jackie’s father in the philandering department.
    As their romance heated up, several of Jack’s friends went out of their way to caution Jackie that, at thirty-five, Kennedy was “set in his ways” and “not about to change.” Chuck Spalding felt that “only made her more interested in him. Jackie had this thing about Black Jack. Dangerous men excited her. There was that element of danger in Jack Kennedy, without doubt.”
    “Jackie was always talking about her father,” said Jack’s pal and colleague in the Senate, Florida’s George Smathers, “and it was pretty clear that they worshiped each other. Marrying Jack Kennedy was as close as she was ever going to get to marrying Black Jack Bouvier.” Writer George Plimpton, whom she had met in 1949 during her junior year in Paris studying at the Sorbonne, concurred. “Jackie loved pirates,” Plimpton said. “Her father was one. So was Jack.”
    It wasn’t enough simply to be dangerous. “Jackie wanted to be the confidante of an important man,” said John White, a State Department official who dated her for a time. “Power and charisma seemed to override all other qualities in her estimation of people.”
    Jack unquestionably had all the qualities she was looking for, and then some. His heroic exploits as the skipper of PT-109 in the Pacific during World War II were to become the stuff of legend.
    The young Kennedy’s wartime derring-do would also have unintended consequences for his family—and alter the course of history. Eager to outdo his little brother, Joe Kennedy Jr.—the Kennedy Joe Sr. intended to install in the White House—volunteered for what amounted to a suicide mission over German-controlled territory in France. On August 12, 1944, Joe Jr.’s plane exploded in midair, killing him and leaving Jack to pick up the torch for his martyred brother. Giving up plans to pursue a literary career—thanks to Joe buying up huge numbers of copies, he had already turned his Harvard thesis into a minor bestseller titled Why England Slept —Jack instead ran for and won a seat in Congress. After two terms in the House, Jack, again relying heavily on his father’s clout, trounced popular Republican Henry Cabot Lodge to win a seat in the Senate.
    What made these achievements all the more remarkable was the precarious state of Jack’s health dating all the way back to early childhood. Nearly killed by scarlet fever at the age of two, Jack suffered chicken pox, German measles, whooping cough, mumps, diphtheria, bronchitis, anemia, tonsillitis, ear infections, and allergies (to dogs, cats, horses, dust, wool, and more) that quickly turned into severe asthma. While