Read These Few Precious Days for Free Online

Jack said it was necessary to copy Sir Winston’s approach exactly. “If I’m going to do this,” the president told Pierre Salinger when his press secretary asked why he felt it necessary for so many changes of wardrobe, “then I’m going to do it right. Otherwise, what’s the point? Lying down and getting up in wrinkled clothes?”
    Knowing how much he liked to sleep with fresh air blowing through the room, Jackie often closed the curtains and then threw open the large windows herself. Jackie did not share Jack’s talent for napping (“I just can’t shut my mind off like that”), so she often tiptoed into her room, read one of her magazines, then came back to wake him before Thomas “officially sounded the alarm.”
    Jack took his third shower of the day after his afternoon nap, put on a fresh suit, and returned to work. More than any other president, Jack had crammed the Oval Office with photographs and cherished mementos. His first week in office, JFK personally carried photos of Jackie and the children as well as a favorite watercolor painting over from the family quarters in the East Wing. As might have been expected, the room took on a seafaring motif as Jack decorated it with naval paintings and seascapes, ship models, pieces of scrimshaw, semaphore flags, and a plaque with an old fisherman’s prayer: “O God, Thy sea is great and my boat is so small.”
    From the windows of the Oval Office, Jack could watch Jackie and the children in the play area she had specially designed for them. There was the small trampoline concealed by evergreens, a rabbit hutch, a leather swing, a barrel tunnel, and a tree house with a slide. When they first moved into the White House, Jackie often had to keep Caroline from trying to push her infant brother down the tree house slide, “carriage and all.”
    Soon Jackie returned to her mounting pile of correspondence, returning to the High Chair Room at 5:30 to sit with the children as they ate dinner. Caroline would later remember how her mother always made a point of asking them what they had learned in school that day.
    “Caroline is already reading at three,” Jackie boasted to family friend Chuck Spalding, “and over dinner she bubbles with excitement about what happened that day in her little class in the solarium.” Able to properly pronounce the tongue-twisting names of such world leaders as Konrad Adenauer, Nikita Khrushchev, and Jawaharlal Nehru, Caroline had no use for baby talk. When Pierre Salinger pointed out a “moo cow” standing in a field, Caroline replied, “No, that’s a Hereford.” (Nor did she brook any misbehavior on the part of her little brother. When John spit out food or banged his spoon on the table, Caroline’s reaction was swift. Rolling her eyes and shaking her head, she sighed, “There he goes again.”)
    Jack was seldom privy to his children’s dinnertime chitchat. Out of the office by 5:30, he repeated his morning ritual—into the pool with Powers, O’Donnell, or whoever else happened to be around for a half-hour dip, then back upstairs to shave, shower, and change into yet another suit—his third full wardrobe change of the day. (Jack was dumbfounded when, during a visit to the White House, his longtime journalist-friend Ben Bradlee informed him that he and a lot of other men saw nothing wrong with wearing the same shirt two days in a row.)
    There were times when some pressing matter kept Jack working in his office until 8 p.m. or later, but his day usually ended around six. It was then that Jackie, who always changed into a dress for dinner, met her husband for daiquiris in the Yellow Oval Room. In the absence of any formal functions requiring their presence downstairs, they usually dined alone or with close friends like Bradlee and his wife Tony, Kentucky senator John Sherman Cooper and his wife Lorraine, or the couple who actually introduced them, Charles and Martha Bartlett. At the time, Charles Bartlett was the Washington