"The Struggle of the Baby Boy"

THE PRESIDENCY

With a Secret Service man at the wheel, the car carrying Jacqueline Kennedy and her two children turned into the driveway of a Cape Cod farm where the Kennedys keep their horses. Caroline, 5, and her brother, John Jr., 2, scrambled out of the car and raced toward the stables. It was just after 11 a.m.--time for the kids to go riding. They were raring to go, but Jackie did not leave the car to join them. She had just had the first twinge of labor pains, more than five weeks prematurely.

So, last week, for the President and his wife began an agonizing period that ended with the death of an infant son.

When Jackie told the Secret Service man of her pains, he sprinted for the farmhouse, phoned the Kennedy sum mer home on Squaw Island and asked that someone summon Dr. John Walsh, Jackie's obstetrician, who was "vacationing" on the Cape, while actually on stand-by in the event that Jackie's time might come ahead of schedule. Then the Secret Service man rounded up Caroline and John, took them to the car and sped off for Squaw Island, eight miles away.

Into Surgery. Dr. Walsh was waiting at the summer home. "I think I'm going to have the baby," said Jackie. Gently, she told Caroline and John that she had to leave, suggested they might have their lunch at "Grampy Joe" Kennedy's place down the beach. Then she packed a bag. By 11:20 a.m., Jackie, Dr. Walsh and a Secret Service man were in a helicopter bound for Otis Air Force Base hospital, 20 miles away.

The base was well prepared for the crisis. Mrs. Kennedy has a medical record of premature births, and both her children were delivered by caesarean section. If the baby had not been premature, it would have been born at Washington's Walter Reed Hospital. But, just in case, the Air Force had long since readied a ten-room suite (nursery, kitchen, two lounges and six bedrooms) at Otis. By the time Jackie arrived, 200 special guards had been posted around the 22,000-acre base. Three airmen with Jackie's blood type (A1 Rh positive) had been picked several weeks ago, and now stood by to give blood transfusions. At noon one gave two pints for Jackie. She had gone into surgery as soon as she arrived.

Not Even a Toothbrush. Meanwhile, Dr. Janet Travell, the White House physician, who was also on a Cape Cod vacation, phoned the President in Washington to tell him the news. Within 19 minutes of her call, John Kennedy, half a dozen hastily gathered newsmen and several White House staffers were aboard Air Force helicopters, bound from the White House lawn to Andrews Air Force Base. No one in the party, including the President, had so much as a toothbrush along.

Since neither of the two presidential Boeing 707 jets was available for the rush trip to Cape Cod, Kennedy took a twinjet, eight-passenger Lockheed Jet-star--an airplane never before used by a President because it lacks the intricate communications facilities that go with the Chief Executive whenever he is in the air. While President Kennedy was still on the way, a ten-member military medical team assisted Dr. Walsh with the caesarean delivery. And at 12:52 p.m., a baby boy (4 Ibs. 10 oz., and 17 in. long) was born to Jackie Kennedy.

The first word to reporters was that mother and child were doing nicely. But in the operating room, doctors knew differently. The President's son was suffering from hyaline membrane disease, a lung ailment common, and often fatal, to premature babies. Within minutes after the birth, the doctors called for Father John Cahill, an Air Force chaplain, who baptized the baby Patrick Bouvier Kennedy. Then began a desperate fight to save the infant's life.

Just One Look. The President had been informed of the birth while still airborne. But he, along with his sister, Jean Smith, who heard of the birth over her car radio, were waiting in Jackie's room when she came back from surgery. Peering into an incubator (an ultramodern type known as an Isolette) in the private nursery, the President saw his tiny, brown-haired son for the first time at 2:30 p.m. Three hours later, he wheeled the incubator up to Jackie's bed, and she saw little Pat for the first--and only--time.

The baby obviously needed--and at once--specialists and special equipment beyond the resources of the Air Force base. Bundled in a blue blanket inside his incubator, the infant was slipped out a back door and into an ambulance for a dash to Children's Medical Center in Boston, more than an hour away. The President flew to Boston, walked grimly past a crowd of well-wishers outside the hospital, donned a white gown and mask to see Patrick. He conferred anxiously with doctors, then left for the Kennedy family suite at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel.

Later that evening, upon word that his son was holding his own, the President flew back to Squaw Island. There, at noon the next day as he lunched with his mother-in-law, Mrs. Hugh P. Auchincloss, he got an urgent call from the hospital. His son was sinking rapidly. The President tried to call Jackie, but she was asleep. He left word that he had gone back to Boston --but told doctors not to tell her why.

At Children's Medical Center, doctors suggested a radical move: put Patrick in a huge hyperbaric pressure chamber that would force oxygen into his lungs (see MEDICINE). This hyperbaric chamber had been used in 28 open-heart surgery cases during the past 17 months--but never for a lung ailment. The President agreed.

Toward Despair. Late that afternoon, Kennedy wearily returned to the Ritz, called Jackie and told her for the first time how serious the situation was. Then he made another visit to the hospital, returned to dine alone at the hotel, called before he headed for the hospital again. His brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, and Kennedy Confidant Dave Powers joined the President there.

As the hours passed, faint hope faded to despair. Patrick was not responding to treatment, and the President decided that he must spend the night near his son. He stretched out on a hospital bed set up in a doctors' lounge on the fourth floor. Shortly after 2 o'clock Friday morning, the phone next to his bed rang, and the President was told that there was no longer any hope. The President hurried downstairs, for the next two hours waited restlessly on a straight-backed wooden chair, occasionally rising to peer through a tiny porthole, where he could see five doctors, a nurse and a technician working desperately inside the floodlit chamber. Ineluctably, the infant's life ebbed away. At 4:30 a.m., Press Secretary Pierre Salinger announced: "Patrick Kennedy died at 4:04 a.m. The struggle of the baby boy to keep breathing was too much for his heart."

On Saturday, the President sat alone in the first pew in a tiny chapel inside the residence of Richard Cardinal Gushing, Archbishop of Boston. The baby lay in a tiny white casket, and the Cardinal read a Mass of the Holy Angels.

Patrick Bouvier Kennedy, who lived 39 hours and twelve minutes, was the first to be buried in a new family plot at Holyhood cemetery in Brookline, Mass., marked by a single tombstone simply engraved "Kennedy."

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