November 22, 1963

Reflections on the Life, Assassination, and Legacy of John F. Kennedy

Dean R. Owen

• Publisher: Skyhorse
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781510707399
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Gripping, personal stories about the life and death of President Kennedy. In November 22, 1963, Dean Owen curates a fascinating collection of interviews and thought-provoking commentaries from notable men and women connected to that notorious Friday afternoon. Those who worked closely with the president, civil rights leaders, celebrities, prominent journalists, and political allies are among the many voices asked to share their reflections on the significance of that day and the legacy of JFK. A few of the names include: • Tom Brokaw, a young reporter in Omaha in 1963
• Andy Rooney, veteran television and radio newscaster
• Letitia Baldrige, former Chief of Staff to First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy
• Congressman John Lewis, sole survivor of the "Big Six" black leaders who met the president after the March on Washington in August of 1963
• Cliff Robertson, Academy Award–winning actor who portrayed JFK in PT 109 With a compelling foreword from renowned author and journalist Helen Thomas, November 22, 1963 investigates not only where we were that day nearly fifty years ago, but where we have been since. A commemorative and insightful read, this book will unite generations.Skyhorse Publishing, as well as our Arcade imprint, are proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in history--books about World War II, the Third Reich, Hitler and his henchmen, the JFK assassination, conspiracies, the American Civil War, the American Revolution, gladiators, Vikings, ancient Rome, medieval times, the old West, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

SECTION EIGHT:

Those with Humorous, Poignant, Quirky, and Tragic Encounters and Connections

Patricia Baillargeon

Assistant to Eleanor Roosevelt

“After almost an hour, he obviously just couldn’t bear being a bystander any longer. He threw down his cane and went running onto the field. My first thought was, ‘If your back is that bad, how can you do that?’”

IN mid-1953, I started working for Eleanor Roosevelt at the United Nations Association in New York City, and a few months later, the weekend of January 30-31, 1954, I was visiting a friend in Washington, D.C. That Sunday morning, longtime friend from Washington State, U.S. Senator Henry (“Scoop”) Jackson, took me to breakfast at the Mayflower Hotel and then to the “Red Mass” held annually for government leaders at St. Matthew’s Cathedral when Congress convenes.

President and Mrs. Eisenhower were there, as well as many judges, senators, and representatives—including Senator John Kennedy and his wife Jacqueline. Although there was no opportunity to meet the senator after Mass, I was to have such an occasion later that day.

It was the custom for Senator Jackson and other Senate colleagues and staff members to gather in Georgetown on Sunday afternoons to play touch football. So a couple hours after the cathedral service, we joined his group at a Georgetown playfield. Jack Kennedy and his brother Robert had just arrived and “Scoop” introduced me to them before he (“Scoop”) and Robert went into the game. I was more formally dressed for traveling on the train, which I did later that day, back to New York.

Senator Kennedy, who was walking with a cane, was not dressed for football either. So he and I stood on the sidelines and visited. We talked about current issues, the United Nations, and touched on various lighter subjects and I greatly enjoyed our conversation. After almost an hour, he obviously just couldn’t bear being a bystander any longer. He threw down his cane and went running onto the field.

My first thought was, “If your back is that bad, how can you do that?”

But, of course, we know now that it was that bad. He was to have serious surgery later that year. After about ten minutes, he returned to the sidelines and quickly grabbed his cane. He obviously was in pain.

In a letter to my parents in Seattle dated February 2, 1954, all I said of John and Robert Kennedy was, “They are most attractive.” Rather an understatement. My impressions of Jack Kennedy that afternoon were that he was extremely vigorous and delightfully bright, energetically involved in the issues of the day. He connected with people individually; he had a sparkle. To use today’s vernacular, he had charisma. To a young woman in her twenties, he was very handsome and I enjoyed his sense of humor. And he laughed a lot.

It was in the Senate dining room a few weeks later that I again saw Jack Kennedy. I was in Washington for a day, and Kennedy said he remembered me. We had a very friendly chat and my first impressions were reinforced. I saw Senator Kennedy and later President Kennedy several more times, but always with groups of various sizes.

In 1960, after winning the Democratic nomination, Senator Kennedy continued his efforts to acquire Mrs. Roosevelt’s endorsement. He knew how invaluable it would be in the tight race against Richard Nixon. Finally, Mrs. Roosevelt was ready to express her support for the senator and a date was set for a private meeting the second week of August in Hyde Park. The day before the meeting, Mrs. Roosevelt’s granddaughter tragically was killed falling off a horse. Senator Kennedy offered to postpone, but Mrs. Roosevelt kept the appointment. Although I was not in Hyde Park that day, I can envision the two of them having luncheon alone at a table by the corner window in Mrs. Roosevelt’s living room at Val-Kill Cottage.

The very last time I saw him was at a distance during his visit to Seattle in November of 1961, when he delivered a speech on foreign policy. President Kennedy was here to commemorate the one-hundredth anniversary of the University of Washington. His remarks, more than a half century ago, are of special interest in today’s world:

“We must face problems which do not lend themselves to easy or quick or permanent solutions. And we must face the fact that the United States is neither omnipotent nor omniscient—that we are only 6 percent of the world’s population and that we cannot impose our will upon the other 94 percent of mankind—that we cannot right every wrong or reverse each adversity, and that, therefore, there cannot be an American solution to every world problem.”

Late in the evening of November 21, 1963, I returned to Seattle from New York City after attending a meeting of the Rockefeller Panel on the Performing Arts, a group of national leaders preparing a report assessing the arts in America. I had been asked to issue a press release in Seattle about the panel’s work. So, on the morning of the twenty-second, I called a friend who was a producer at KING-5 television, the NBC affiliate in Seattle. She informed me that the network had just received a news bulletin that President Kennedy had been shot. “Turn on your TV,” she said, and we both instantly rang off. I turned to a friend who was with me and said, “Thank God Mrs. Roosevelt isn’t here to see this.”

Of course, I was stunned and shocked like everyone else. Americans of my generation had never experienced the assassination of a president. That weekend, I attended a memorial Mass where about one thousand people of all faiths were pressed into the church and more were lining the street outside. Television scenes became lasting images in the minds of people throughout the United States and the world: the dramatic and surreal sight of Jacqueline Kennedy in her pink suit climbing on the back of the presidential limousine as the Secret Service agent rushes toward her. And, of course, the solemn riderless horse in the funeral procession.

John Kennedy’s presidency offered many lighter moments: his self-deprecating humor when, following Jackie’s thunderous welcome in France, he introduced himself, saying, “I am the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris, and I have enjoyed it.”

What is JFK’s legacy? Perhaps it was the new focus on outer space or maybe his foreign aid program. But I think rather, most importantly, it was that he inspired several generations of Americans by his call to service: “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.” Certainly the Peace Corps is one remarkable legacy, not only for its peaceful involvement with recipient countries, but for providing many mainstream American adults with an in-depth experience and an understanding of world problems and cultures.

Dr. William Bernhard

Surgeon who fought for thirty hours to save the life of Patrick Bouvier Kennedy

“He was a quick study … In my work, there usually is a lot of family emotion involved. There was no emotion in this. He was cool, but concerned. I’ve never talked about this experience publicly. It was all too sad.”

THE hyperbaric tank belongs to the Industrial Medicine Department of the School of Public Health at Harvard, but it was accessible to Children’s Hospital in Boston. And inside was a dreary, grubby room with a tank at one end, and in front of the tank was a relic rocking chair with some spokes missing. It also had some cracks in it. I remember sending a couple of my technicians to talk to the Secret Service agents and to tell them, “Don’t sit in the rocking chair.”

So as the afternoon went on, President Kennedy came in. We had one of our chats (about his newborn son’s condition), and immediately afterward, he leaped on to the rocking chair. He was rocking back and forth and really enjoying it. About the fourth or fifth rock, the whole thing came apart, and he went head over heels and landed on the cement floor. The Secret Service agents ran around frantically trying to pick him up, because he had back problems.

And he got up laughing. He had a good sense of humor. Life was not all grim and gloomy to him.

That story sets the tone for what happened over the next two days.

We were doing research in this facility. I had some ideas that I wanted to increase the oxygenation of these very blue infants with congenital heart disease we were dealing with. If there was some way we could increase their arterial oxygen saturation, they might be a little more stable during anesthesia.

There was a second smaller chamber, a decompression chamber. Everyone who was in there for an hour or so had to go through decompression, so they would not have a nitrogen embolism. That second chamber was only about six or eight feet long. The only time I remember the president came in the decompression chamber was to get some food; he popped in to have a close look at the baby.

Dr. James Drorbaugh was selected to check this baby out in Hyannis. We were doing some research together on another project, and we knew each other quite well. Drorbaugh was the one they brought in, and they did not know what to do with this little kid. The child was obviously dying. He was a three-pound preemie. So the hyperbaric chamber was sort of the last resort.

I was not paying attention to all the commotion outside, the police helicopters. Then I got a late phone call from Dr. Drorbaugh. He said, “Things are not going well. Why don’t you come up? Maybe we can do something for this little baby. ”

I said, “I’ll come over. But I have avoided patients with lung disease in the past. I’m afraid I would damage their lungs with one hundred percent oxygen. I don’t like to take any chances.”

He said, “Well, we don’t have a lot of choices here, so if you’re willing to come over, pop over and see him.”

So I zipped over. I knew it was the son of the president, but I did not get involved with that. It was just another very sick baby. You can’t be star-gazing. I was trying to figure out what I might be able to do. I had never treated anybody like this. The baby didn’t have enough lung capacity to boost up his saturation. I listened to him and did not hear a lot of breath sounds, except in his upper chest. I wondered whether he had hypoplastic lungs, lungs that have lot of bronchioles that end up blunted. I didn’t know whether he had hyaline membrane disease or hypoplastic lungs.

So we brought the infant down. We pumped the chamber up to three atmospheres absolute. Everything was all right, so we remained at three atmospheres absolute, about equivalent of the depth of sixty-six feet of sea water. Afterwards, we pressurized and checked the baby out. He was a little three-pounder, about as big as a small doll. And his chest was pumping away; his respirations were at least at one hundred. He was trying to stay alive, breathing one hundred percent oxygen.

After about five or ten minutes, Drorbaugh, who was outside the chamber, said, “His EKG looks better!”

The baby’s heart was getting a little more oxygen. We checked his saturation, and it had increased from about forty-five to fifty and then almost sixty. So that was a little improvement. Drorbaugh was overjoyed. So we continued at that pace and everything was very stable.

The baby was struggling, breathing about one hundred times per minute, despite a small improvement in oxygen saturation. He was still very short of breath.

So the president came in again and we had a little chat.

I said, “Things look improved on paper, but the baby doesn’t appear any better, and I’m concerned we’re not going to make out very well here.”

The president said, “Yeah, he looks like he’s having a really hard time.”

I said, “The deal is, he has to have enough energy to keep moving his diaphragm up and down. So he’s burning fat.”

We were giving him some glucose and water by vein, but we could never make up for the caloric loss he was sustaining by working so hard to breathe.

So I told the president, “He’s going to get tired if he keeps this up. And if we have to pick a moment as he gets tired to put an endotracheal tube in, get an anesthesiologist in here, and ‘bag’ him with one hundred percent oxygen to take over the load of his breathing, the chances of his survival are very, very slim.”

So the president left again, and we continued on for a number of hours. I stayed the whole time. I couldn’t bear to think of leaving the place, with nobody else knowing anything about it (function of the hyperbaric chamber), and no one there but technicians. There was no way I was going anywhere.

After many more hours, it was sometime during the night, I got the feeling the baby was about ready to stop breathing. I watched the corners of his mouth. He seemed to be using accessory muscles plus his diaphragm.

I said, “Better get ahold of the anesthesia department.” They sent a very good anesthesiologist over. He had not seen the baby before. He was pretty impressed that things were not looking very good, so he popped a tube in the trachea, taped it up and “bagged” him (assisted ventilation).

As soon as he “bagged” him, the baby stopped struggling. The baby looked absolutely peaceful because the anesthesiologist’s hand was doing the work, rather than this infant.

So we continued on for another number of hours, but things basically did not improve.

Saturation dropped back; his arterial saturation was in the upper fifties. All this time, he had hypertension in his right ventricle, that is, he had fetal circulation. This is the way the baby exists in the uterus. The lungs obviously are deflated—there’s no gas exchanged—using the mother’s arterial blood to keep the baby alive. The kid was having all these problems because he was receiving unsaturated blood.

There wasn’t enough functioning lung to sustain life. And the baby died.

The president had been in three or four hours earlier, but he knew the baby probably wouldn’t make it. So it was no shock to him.

I never saw the president again. I had seen him four times over the previous several hours and in some cases we spent a fair amount of time together talking about what we—the doctors—were doing. He had been on the board of overseers at Harvard, and I did not want him to get too depressed about the School of Public Health tank facility. I did not want to say anything that would disturb the university’s opinion of this facility used to instruct students.

We talked about a number of subjects. I had been a naval officer about two years after him. We talked quite a bit about the Navy.

I never heard from him or anyone else in the family again. And I’ve never talked about this experience publicly. It was all too sad.

John Kennedy was an amazing character. He was a diligent, caring parent, but he didn’t bleed all over the floor. He kept his emotions to himself, made very intelligent inquiries, and was just the nicest person. He was very engaged. He wanted the best for his child, but he knew from the beginning it (the child’s progn...