On August 23, 1956, Jacqueline Kennedy, in the eighth month of pregnancy, was rushed to the Newport (R.I.) Hospital because she was hemorrhaging. The future First Lady awoke later to learn that she had undergone an emergency cesarean section and that the infant was stillborn. Jackie’s condition was critical, and a priest was summoned.
Efforts to reach her husband, U.S. Senator John F. Kennedy, meanwhile, proved difficult. Having lost his bid for the Democratic Party’s vice-presidential nomination a week or so earlier, the senator had chosen to spend the time relaxing at a villa that his father, Joe Kennedy, had rented on the Riviera. Accompanied by Sen. George Smathers and a number of unattached young women, Kennedy was enjoying what one biographer has called a “bacchanalian yachting trip on the Mediterranean.” Three days after receiving the news, JFK finally agreed to go home to his wife. Smathers, with Joe Kennedy’s help, had to persuade him to cut short his vacation. “I told him I was going to get him back there even if I had to carry him,” Smathers said. What did the trick, biographers report, was telling JFK that the press had already learned of the stillbirth, and should he ever run for president, all this could hurt his prospects.
Books about the Kennedys, even from admirers, are replete with stories like this, and this one does not even involve payoffs, bribes, lies, blackmail, attempted murders of foreign leaders, liaisons with Marilyn Monroe, parties with Frank Sinatra and the Hollywood Rat Pack, drugs, mobsters, spies and spooks.
JFK was hardly the only one who engaged in any of this sordid activity—Bobby and Teddy did, too—and some of us had managed to put the stillbirth story out of our minds until the death of Ethel Kennedy on October 10 elicited the usual rapturous notices, from Democratic politicians and their toadies in the press. The recent prominence of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., selected by President-elect to head the Department of Health and Human Services, has received somewhat less adoring coverage, obviously, but once again brought the Kennedy family and its so-called legacy to public attention, giving—for some of us—our Gore Vidal moment.
Cosmopolitan: “Tell us about the Kennedys.”
Vidal: “Oh, dear, are people still interested in them?”