John and Caroline: Their Lives in Pictures
By James Spada
4/5
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About this ebook
They were America's children, symbolic of hope and youth, then of tragedy, and finally of the enduring power of the Kennedy legacy. In the 255 vibrant photographs in this book - mostly never before published - we watch John and Caroline grow up in the adoring, and sometimes harsh, glare of public attention.
They were the youngest children to live in the White House in over a century - Caroline just three and John Jr. a newborn when their father took the oath of office. Symbolizing the youthful vigor of the new administration, they won the hearts of the American people as they romped around - and under - their father's desk in the Oval Office. And when, three years later, Caroline kissed JKF's coffin and John Jr. saluted the passing bier, they were forever etched into the nations' collective heart.
We see their awkward adolescence, their sorrows at senseless losses in the family, their first forays into romance, their efforts to establish themselves as responsible adults, their happy marriages and Caroline's motherhood. And we watch in admiration as Caroline recovers from the untimely death of her beloved brother to assume the mantle of the Camelot legend.
This is a book that will tug at the heart-strings of all who remember fondly these two remarkable American offspring.
James Spada
James Spada is a writer and photographer whose many books have included bestselling biographies of Grace Kelly, Peter Lawford, Bette Davis and Barbra Streisand. Spada has also created pictorial biographies of John and Caroline Kennedy, Ronald Reagan and Jackie Onassis, among others. He lives in Natick, Massachusetts.
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Book preview
John and Caroline - James Spada
PART ONE
1957–1963
She’s as robust as a sumo wrestler.
—JOHN F. KENNEDY on his infant daughter, Caroline, 1957
John is a bad squeaky boy who tries to spit in his mother’s Coca-Cola and has a very bad temper.
—Three-year-old CAROLINE describing her infant brother, 1961
Isn’t he a charge?
—JFK on his toddler son, 1963
They were born into singularly charmed lives. Caroline, the first young child of a President in nearly a century; John, the Chief Executive’s infant namesake, born just weeks after his father’s election.
Charmed, too, were most of the people of America and the world, who watched these children develop adorable personalities and use the White House as a playhouse. They hid underneath the President’s desk, danced as their father gleefully clapped his hands. Caroline rode her ponies into the mansion; John sat behind the controls of the President’s helicopters and gave orders as Flight Captain John.
Their mother tried to protect them from the intrusions of paparazzi and curiosity seekers, with spotty success. Once, besieged by photographers with flashbulbs popping, Caroline slumped down in her car seat, out of view, and pleaded, Please tell me when no one’s watching.
The idyll came to an abrupt, shocking end when an assassin’s bullet shattered the vital young President’s skull. Six-year-old Caroline kissed her father’s flag-draped coffin, aware of how much she had lost. John, three, saluted his passing caisson but was too young to comprehend just how much his life had been altered.
Now the children, and their mother, had become not just celebrities but icons, symbols as much as people. The President’s widow wondered whether, under such circumstances, she could bring them up to be the good, responsible, and emotionally stable people she wanted them to be.
Her aunt Caroline Lee Canfield holds sixteen-day-old Caroline Bouvier Kennedy during her christening at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City, December 13, 1957. Boston’s Archbishop Richard Cushing officiates as the child’s father, Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy, and her godfather, Robert F. Kennedy, look on. The baby wears the same christening gown her mother, Jacqueline, wore twenty-eight years earlier.
Caroline poses for a christening-day portrait. The baby’s birth on November 27, the day before Thanksgiving, was a truly blessed event for the Kennedys after a miscarriage and a stillbirth. The child weighed seven pounds, two ounces, and was, according to her father, as robust as a sumo wrestler.
Her mother said the day of Caroline’s birth was the very happiest of my life.
Jackie’s mother recalled being impressed by the sheer, unadulterated delight
Jack Kennedy took in his newborn daughter. The look on his face, which I had never seen before … was radiant.
Caroline Kennedy’s first magazine cover, April 21, 1958. Jackie had initially refused Life’s request to do a photo feature on her baby, telling Jack that I’m not going to let our child be used like some campaign mascot
for his Senate reelection bid that November. But she relented when he promised to take a break from campaigning to spend time with his family that summer. The accompanying article ran a photo of Caroline, eyes as big as saucers, peering over her bassinet at her father. I’m not home much,
the caption quoted Kennedy, but when I am she seems to like me.
During the same vacation, her father prepares to read to twenty-one-month-old Caroline. The child showed above-average intelligence, and an interest in reading, at an early age.
The Senator had made a stab at bottle-feeding the baby when she was an infant, but her nurse, Maud Shaw, recalled, I fear the whole process was too slow for him, and after about ten minutes he handed her back to me with a smile. ‘I guess this is your department after all,’ he said. ‘I had better leave it to you.’
During a vacation at the Kennedy family compound in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, in August 1959, Jackie carries Caroline to shore after a sailing excursion on Nantucket Sound. The Kennedys loved these carefree days with their daughter, but knew that they would soon be rare, since Jack, reelected to the Senate in a landslide, planned to announce his candidacy for President in January. Jackie fretted about the campaign’s possible effect on Caroline. I get this terrible feeling,
she said, that when we leave, she might think that it’s because we don’t want to be with her.
Holding Caroline’s oversize Raggedy Ann doll, Mother Annie,
Jackie kisses her husband farewell as he leaves Hyannis Airport for a campaign trip in October 1960. Caroline waits her turn to say good-bye to Daddy. Kennedy had won the Democratic nomination for President in July after a bruising series of primaries. Jackie reported that Caroline’s first words were good-bye,
New Hampshire,
Wisconsin,
and West Virginia.
I am sorry so few states have primaries,
Jackie quipped, or we would have a daughter with the greatest vocabulary of any two-year-old in the country.
The Kennedys beam at a press conference in Hyannis Port the day after Jack won election as the thirty-fifth President of the United States. Mrs. Rose Kennedy, the President-elect’s mother, sits at left. According to Maud Shaw, it was Caroline who had informed her father that he had won the election—which was still undecided when Kennedy went to bed at four in the morning—by entering his bedroom and declaring, as Miss Shaw had instructed her to, "Good morning, Mr.