John Jr.

David Kipps, the night dispatcher at the Hospital Ambulance. Oxygen & Equipment Co., put the telephone back on its cradle and called out to Driver Willard Baucom. "Emergency call." he said. "Go to 3307 N Street, N.W., and pick up a Mrs. Kennedy." Then the significance of his message slowly dawned on Kipps. "At first it didn't register at all." he recalled later. "When it did, I got really excited."

With its siren muted and its red emergency beacon flashing, the ambulance sped through the quiet, post-holiday streets of Georgetown to the red brick home of President-elect John Kennedy. Driver Baucom and Attendant Walter Myers were admitted by a maid. A few minutes later they were joined by Dr. John Walsh, the family obstetrician. In her second-floor bedroom they found Jacqueline Kennedy waiting, with a white sweater and a tweed coat over her nightgown, a pair of white wool socks on her feet. She gave them a wan smile. "Will I lose my baby?'' she asked the doctor apprehensively (Jackie Kennedy had lost two babies by miscarriage before the birth of her daughter Caroline three years ago--a record that had curtailed her campaigning). Dr. Walsh assured her that all would be well, as the ambulance attendants tucked her into a litter. At Georgetown University Hospital, just ten blocks away, the young woman who will be the nation's next First Lady was taken to the operating room. Like Caroline, the baby was to be delivered by Caesarean section.

Other Plans. Only three hours earlier, Jack Kennedy had kissed his wife and daughter goodbye and flown off again to Palm Beach. The three had spent a relaxed Thanksgiving Day together with just one guest, Friend and Neighbor William Walton. The baby was not due for another month. But before Jack was halfway back to Florida that night, his wife had a hemorrhage, and the baby made it unmistakably clear that it had other plans.

The Caroline had just landed on the rain-soaked runway at Palm Beach airport and was taxiing up to the apron when the message came in over the pilot's radio that an emergency telephone call was waiting. Hostess Janet Desrosiers rushed back with the message to Jack Kennedy's rear compartment. As he emerged from the plane, Kennedy was told that his wife was in the hospital. He paused only long enough to shout back at the plane, "We'll be going right back," then hurried grimly to the phone behind a flying wedge of Secret Service men.

After barely 30 minutes on the ground, Kennedy and his party took off again in the faster DC-6 press plane. At 1:14 a.m., he moved up to the cockpit, adjusted a pair of earphones and hunched over the shoulder of the flight engineer. Poker-faced Press Secretary Pierre Salinger ambled back to the public-address system. "We have just been advised that Mrs. Kennedy has given birth to a baby boy," he announced. "Both mother and son are doing well." The cabin rang with applause.

"I Think She Decided." In Washington, smiling Jack Kennedy raced from the airport to the hospital to greet his wife and have a first look at his shock headed, 6-lb. 3-oz. son and heir. The crowds around the hospital began to grow as the news got out, and the messages of congratulations--ultimately even from President and Mrs. Eisenhower and Queen Elizabeth--began to pour in. It was nearly dawn when a sleepy, grinning Jack Kennedy finally got back to the house on N Street and thanked another crowd of well-wishers. Someone asked him what the baby boy's name would be. "Why, it's John F. Kennedy Jr.," he said, blinking in the lights of the police cars. "I think she decided--it has been decided. Yes--John F. Kennedy Jr."

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