youngfirstlady:

If the president’s national security advisers understood his love for children, so did the Secret Service. Larry Newman was one of the White House agents assigned to Kennedy on the evening in August 1963 when the president made a visit to his younger child, Patrick, born prematurely and hospitalized with a lung ailment, who was fighting for his life in Children’s Hospital in Boston…Newman recalled that while walking the president to intensive care, “we passed a room where there were two delightful-looking little girls who were sitting up in bed. They were probably about three or four years old, and they were talking and laughing together. They only problem — one girl had bandaged up her chin. She had severe burns. And the other had burns down her arms and huge pods [of bandages] on the end of her hands. President Kennedy stopped and just looked at these two little girls. He asked the doctor, ‘What’s wrong with them?’ And he doctor explained that one girl may lose the use of her hands. The president stood there. His son was down at the end of the hall in grave to critical condition… He started feeling his pockets — it was always a sign he wanted a pen. He said, ‘I’d like to write a note for the children.’ And nobody had any paper for him to write on. So the nurse scurries to the station and gets the name of the children and the family and Kennedy writes a note to the children. There was no fanfare, no photo-op. There was nothing. The nurse took the notes and said she would see that the family got it. And then we proceeded down the hall to see his son, who of course died the next day. It was something he didn’t need to do, but he always seemed to come out of his reserved and Bostonish [ways] with children.