Jackie had set up a school at the White House so that Caroline could attend without having to force her way through the daily crush of reporters trying to take her picture if she were to leave the White House. Each morning before school Caroline would walk with Jack to the Oval Office hand in hand and have some sweets with the presidents secretary before returning to the upstairs room that housed her school. It was a ritual that was important to both father and child and gave them time to talk and learn about each other. Jack would tease Caroline calling her by a variety of different names to which she would seriously respond that her name was Caroline.

Both children had very different personalities, Caroline was a thoughtful serious child, more introspective like her mother, she loved to draw and paint and would visit her daddy with the many pictures she had drawn for him. She was very close to her parents and spent a lot of time talking with them about things that concerned her. John on the other hand was a boisterous young boy who had a love of helicopters and airplanes. He was mischievous and full of fun and his father was to form a bond with him so strong that he would hate to have to leave him behind when he travelled.

Visitors to the White House came to realise that it was not unusual to have meetings and visits interrupted by Caroline on her tricycle or walking around in her mother's high heels or John marching through the office playing at being a soldier and practising his salute. Both children were encouraged to be themselves wherever they were and whomever they were with.

Jack and Jackie wanted to keep life as normal as possible for their young children and encouraged friends and colleagues to allow their children over to play where they would hold parties, screen films or allow the children to play in the gardens. Jackie would take them for sleigh rides across the White House lawns or allow them to swim in the fountains in the summer.

Jack loved to play with and tease his children, but because his bad back would not allow them him to lift and carry them he encouraged his brothers and friends to throw them in the air and swing them around as they begged him to do. He would sit with them for hours listening to their stories and encouraging each child in their own particular interests. Never having had a close relationship with his own mother he was quite surprised by the intensity of his love for his children. He actively encouraged their visits to the Oval Office and wanted to spend as much time with them as he could. He would allow them to wander around the office while he worked and what seemed a distraction to others proved to be for him moments of sheer joy in an otherwise unrelenting pressurised world.

Each evening the children would join their father for a swim in the White House pool where he would cajole and tease them. They in turn would show off their valiant efforts at underwater swimming and diving.
Everywhere in the White House there was evidence of the children. Jack like any proud father had photographs in his office, favourite snap shots of the children, little gifts or drawings from them and he allocated a wall of his outer office to be filled with a gallery of photographs of the family together.

Jack and Jackie's marriage had been troubled from the outset but it was their children that formed the bond between them that would grow stronger as the children got older. Their three years in the White House was to prove the happiest times of their married life and the first time that they would truly consider themselves a family.

When Jack and Jackie's infant son Patrick died in August 1963 it had a devastating effect on Jack. For the first time in his adult life his family and friends would see him openly weeping. He found it hard to come to terms with the death of a baby that he had stayed with for the three short days of its life. Having known such joy with his two children he felt the burden of the loss of this little baby even more. This was a moment in his life that was to profoundly affect him and it is clear that from this time on he worked much harder in his relationship with his wife and cherished each moment with his children.

Returning to the White House he spent more and more time with Caroline and John, explaining to Caroline that God needed her baby brother and that he had gone to heaven. Never a tactile person, Jack held his children close after that, always providing a hand to hold, or a knee to sit on so that he could whisper to them as they read or played.

He was proud of his children too and encouraged them in their day to day pursuits, Caroline with her pony and John with his love of dressing up or 'pretending' as he called it. He was to ensure that visiting dignitaries spent a few moments with the children and would boast of their accomplishments as any proud parent does.

The American public were enchanted by these two beautiful children and loved to see pictures and articles of them with their parents. Jack realised that this interest was there and was pleased to have a limited number of photographs released so that people would enjoy the sight of the small children playing together uninhibitedly.

Jack Kennedy's handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis was undoubtedly impacted by his feelings for his children. As he had aged and matured and watched his own children growing, he felt more and more that he wanted to keep the world safe for their future. He became what he called a 'peace at any price' President determined that his children would be able to live in a country that was free of intolerance and hatred and where the threat of war no longer loomed large behind them.

His children hated to see him leave on his many trips and he in turn felt sadness when he boarded Air Force One to leave them behind. No one knows what his final thoughts were in Dallas on that sad November day but we can be confident that his children were amongst them. Regrets must have crossed his mind that he would not live long enough to see them grow into the sort of adults he wished them to be. Probably his greatest legacy is that he left behind two well-grounded children who loved him deeply and tried to emulate him and honour his memory as they made their own journey through life.