The infant son of John and Jacqueline Kennedy died on August 9, 1963, after three days of life from a common lung ailment. Throughout those tense and desperate days, the front pages of newspapers around the world conveyed what they knew about Patrick Bouvier Kennedy’s fleeting existence, and of his parents’ trauma and despair, and their consummate grace and courage.

And yet, half a century after the event, key elements of Patrick’s saga have remained shrouded in mystery because the gifted doctors who battled valiantly to save him refused to discuss it, until now.

It also relates the many ways in which Patrick’s death would focus national attention on Hyaline Membrane disease, now known as Respiratory Distress Syndrome (RDS), a malady then responsible for claiming the lives of 25.000 babies a year in the U.S. alone.

Patrick’s death would serve to inspire funding by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Services (NIHCD) and lead to discoveries for effective ways to treat the lung syndrome that claimed his life.

So significant were these gains that in 2012, the NIHCD in a listing of long-range mission and scientific accomplishments, would announce, “Since becoming operative in 1963 under the Kennedy administration, the NIHCD highlights as its number one accomplishment the survival rates for Respiratory Distress Syndrome have gone from 5% in the 1960s, to 95% today”. Because Patrick lived and died, infants born today with Respiratory Distress Syndrome are no longer subject to a death sentence. Today, countless infants who suffer from it have been spared and gone on to lead healthy lives as a direct result of Patrick’s tragically brief but significant existence.