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As the hours passed, faint hope faded to despair. Patrick was not responding to treatment, and the President decided that he must spend the night near his son. He stretched out on a hospital bed set up in a doctors' lounge on the fourth floor. Shortly after 2 o'clock Friday morning, the phone next to his bed rang, and the President was told that there was no longer any hope. The President hurried downstairs, for the next two hours waited restlessly on a straight-backed wooden chair, occasionally rising to peer through a tiny porthole, where he could see five doctors, a nurse and a technician working desperately inside the floodlit chamber. Ineluctably, the infant's life ebbed away. At 4:30 a.m., Press Secretary Pierre Salinger announced: "Patrick Kennedy died at 4:04 a.m. The struggle of the baby boy to keep breathing was too much for his heart."
On Saturday, the President sat alone in the first pew in a tiny chapel inside the residence of Richard Cardinal Gushing, Archbishop of Boston. The baby lay in a tiny white casket, and the Cardinal read a Mass of the Holy Angels.
Patrick Bouvier Kennedy, who lived 39 hours and twelve minutes, was the first to be buried in a new family plot at Holyhood cemetery in Brookline, Mass., marked by a single tombstone simply engraved "Kennedy."