On August 11, 1963, two days after the death of baby Patrick Bouvier Kennedy, the President of the United States did something that had nothing to do with politics, nothing to do with the presidency, and everything to do with being a father and a husband — he gathered five-year-old Caroline and two-and-a-half-year-old John Jr., loaded them into a car at Hyannis Port, and brought them out to Otis Air Force Base Hospital to see their mother, because he understood instinctively that Jackie, lying in a hospital bed still recovering from an emergency cesarean section and still raw with grief, needed to see her children more than she needed anything the doctors could give her. Caroline arrived clutching a bouquet of black-eyed Susans — yellow and wild and completely unplanned, the kind of flowers a little girl picks because they make her happy, not because anyone told her to — and when Jackie saw her daughter walk through that door in a paisley sundress and sneakers with her blond hair in a ponytail, something in her face broke open into warmth for the first time since August 9th. Little John, just two years old, made his father laugh in the car on the way over when he noticed all the photographers outside and said with complete seriousness, "Daddy, I think they're trying to take my picture" — What makes this visit so quietly important in the full story of the Kennedy marriage is that Jack had been shuttling between Boston Children's Hospital and Otis for four straight days on almost no sleep, sitting through the night on a couch in a hospital boiler room while Patrick struggled to breathe, weeping behind a closed door after his son died, and then driving back to Jackie to describe the small white casket and the white flowers she had wanted at a funeral she was too ill to attend
