TWILIGHT OF CAMELOT

Death of a baby Kennedy.

Former Washington Post editor Levingston, author of Barack and Joe: The Making of an Extraordinary Partnership, concentrates on events in 1963 when Jacqueline Kennedy gave birth prematurely. Levingston’s impressive research turns up surviving sources in their 80s and 90s, and he delivers an intensely detailed account of the pregnancy, delivery, and failed struggle to save baby Patrick. Mostly, however, this is another dual biography of the Camelot couple. Their money did not make them stand out, but they were media favorites, far more glamorous than their successors. Theirs was a marriage of love, but John F. Kennedy, politically ambitious and sexually promiscuous, saw no reason to change his behavior. In 1956, when she was pregnant, suffered life-threatening bleeding, and delivered a dead baby girl, he was on a Mediterranean cruise “with a gaggle of beautiful young women.” He seemed uninterested in returning until media outrage and warnings from friends changed his mind. Their relationship remained difficult but improved when he was unexpectedly “smitten” at the birth of two healthy children in 1957 and 1960. After these extensive preliminaries, Levingston gets down to business as Jackie goes into labor six weeks early in August 1963. The author devotes many pages to world-class doctors trying in vain to relieve her tiny newborn’s struggle to breathe; he died after 39 hours. The author also recounts the funeral and the couple’s remaining three months, concluding with JFK’s assassination. Especially moving is Levingston’s description of spectacular advances in treating preterm births, a research backwater in 1963 but jump-started at JFK’s order. Today, Patrick, classified as only “mildly” premature, would have had a 95% chance of leading a normal life.

A poignant contribution to Kennedy lore.