Shortly after 10 p.m., press secretary Pierre Salinger stepped before reporters in a makeshift pressroom at the Statler Hotel. For the first time he acknowledged that Patrick had a breathing ailment, identifying it the way doctors did, as “idiopathic respiratory distress syndrome.” Playing down the seriousness, he explained that the condition was not uncommon in premature infants. But he acknowledged it was “a cause for concern.” He told reporters it would be four days before doctors could “make a final diagnosis.”
A reporter pressed Salinger on the outlook for the baby: “Is it on the danger list?”
“I would not say that,” Salinger replied.
“Would anybody else?” the reporter ventured.
“Well,” Salinger snapped, “nobody that I talked to has.”
He then revealed that Patrick was baptized soon after birth, prompting a reporter to ask why so quickly.
“I would rather not comment on that,” Salinger answered.
In his suite at the Ritz-Carlton, Jack called Jackie twice around midnight. Wishing to keep her spirits up, he tilted his words toward the positive. “The President assured Mrs. Kennedy,” the United Press International reported, “that everything was all right.”
His calls had the intended effect. Jackie’s mother, Janet Auchincloss, arrived at the hospital late in the evening and visited Jackie around midnight. She told a reporter that her daughter was in “remarkably good condition” and “awfully happy that everything was going well.”
During the night, an enterprising photographer with a telephoto lens sneaked upstairs in a building opposite Children’s and found a window in line with Patrick’s room. While chief resident James Hughes hovered over the incubator, the photographer clicked off a series of shots.
Days later a grainy black-and-white image dominated the cover of Life magazine under the headline: “Hospital Vigil over the Kennedy Baby.” The photograph through the cross panes of Patrick’s window showed an unnamed doctor—Hughes—in scrubs and a white mask, head bowed, looking down at what was the baby’s incubator, though all that was visible on the cover was a fuzzy black smear in the lower-right corner. Standing beside Hughes was a nurse, her starched white cap perched high on her head, her face an indistinct blur.
A four-photo spread inside the magazine was blurrier than the image on the front: doctors and nurses moving about, their heads dark splotches against a gray-lighted background.
The magazine’s report featured one more image, a particularly intrusive one. A Life photographer had managed to shove his way into a Children’s Hospital elevator with President Kennedy for a candid, closeup shot that filled a full page. In the photo the beleaguered president is pinned against the elevator’s back wall, shoulders hunched, arms crossed, eyes staring downward. The headline read “. . . A Worried Father Visits His Stricken Son.”
Neither Hughes nor the nurse had any idea they were under press surveillance while looking after Patrick. Hughes learned of his anonymous fame only after the edition hit newsstands: “Somebody called us and said you’re on the cover of Life magazine.” Hughes embraced his anonymity. He had no wish to go public. “There was nothing magical about the moment,” he explained. “It isn’t as if I held up a newborn baby for the world to see. I was there attending as best we could as this kid struggled for breath.”
