Chapter 23
Fall 1958
Things begin to shift in the Senate campaign. The same men gather in our living room—cigarette butts in the ashtrays, papers on the table, glasses of juice, and coffee mugs. But this year feels different. This run-of-the-mill reelection race is only a prelude to the real campaign. And Jack is different—his ambition sharper, not just on the surface but melding into the ideals that drive him. I can feel it in how he talks, thinks, listens.
They want me to go with him to Omaha in September, where he’ll speak at a gathering for the Democratic Party. They send Bobby to ask me.
“I’ve always dreamed of spending my fifth wedding anniversary in Nebraska.”
“You’ll enjoy it, Jackie.”
“Maybe for you, I’ll go.”
The crowd in Omaha is double the size they anticipate.
“Twice as big with Jackie here than if you were alone,” Kenny O’Donnell says to Jack on the plane home.
“That true?” Jack says.
“Yep.”
“Well, for Pete’s sake, don’t tell her,” Jack says, and when I glance up, he’s looking at me, that little look. He smiles.
We’ve been happy. It startles me to realize this. Some new brightness has slid between the careful walls I’d constructed to keep my heart safe.
I take a few more trips with him that fall, but I don’t like to be away from Caroline. It’s a pull in my body, missing her, her voice, smell, those slight hands on my neck, long hours with her in the warm autumn sun on the lawn.
His team asks me to do another campy show for television, At Home with the Kennedys. A living room shoot in Hyannis Port. Rose and I sit together. She asks how I’ve liked campaigning.
“So much,” I say brightly, the good wife, my hands in my lap. “Jack and I have been traveling through the state, trying to meet as many people as we can….”
“Well, congratulations, Jackie,” says Rose in her dry laryngeal voice, “and congratulations to Jack that he found a wife who has so enjoyed the campaign.”
It’s hard not to laugh, but I force the right smile as the producer hits the cue and Jack appears out of thin air; he stands behind us in the living room, under the painting of a raging sea. The young shining hero, with that devastating smile, he thanks every woman across the state for joining his family on TV. He reminds them to cast their ballots on November 4.
And they do. Seventy-three percent of the vote in Massachusetts goes for Jack.
“I think we can call that a landslide,” I say.
That winter of 1959, Lee quietly slips out of her marriage to Michael Canfield and marries the Polish count, Stas Radziwill. Three months pregnant, Lee is still so tiny, just the slightest bob in her shape under the simple white dress she wears for her wedding.
As we leave the church, I say to Jack, “Lee told me once she thought it was worth getting married just to have your own house.”
“Now she has three.”
I laugh. We continue down the steps.
The days turn toward spring. I set up an inflatable pool in our backyard in Georgetown and fill it with the garden hose. Caroline, eighteen months old, splashes for hours, crawling along the rippled plastic bottom, pretending to swim. We have picnic lunches together and afternoon “tea and cakes” in the shade, the small yard drenched in sunlight. I take her for long walks on the towpath and to Rose Park to play on the swings. Sometimes when I check on her under the stroller hood, I notice she is not asleep, her small face alert, watching the edges of the world from her blanket.
“How long have you been awake, little one? Such a wise little watcher, you.”
Her small hands reach from inside the carriage, fingertips warm on my face. No matter how many times it happens, I feel that same flood of joy. “You’re my heart, soul, sky,” I say, unclipping the safety straps from her slight body, lifting her out.
Almost every afternoon, Caroline looks up at me and says, “Daddy?”
“Yes, darling, he’ll be home soon.”
I’ve learned to use that word whether soon is tomorrow or later that week.
“Soon,” Caroline says, turning the word over. Then she looks past me, or out the window, toward the blue plunge of the sky at the top of the trees.
“Soon.”
Before I leave with her for Hyannis Port, where we’ll spend the summer, I take one more short campaign trip with Jack, to Yakima, Washington. Just before he’s due onstage, he leans over to me. “Maybe I’ll close with Tennyson, Jackie. What do you think?”
“You should.”
“Give me those lines from ‘Ulysses,’ the ones that begin Come, my friends….”
He passes his speech to me and, in the white space at the bottom, I write down the lines from that poem, one I used to recite for my grandfather Bouvier on our Wednesdays as he sat with his cane resting near his chair, wearing his three-piece suit, the twirled waxed ends of the mustache bobbing. I pass the paper back to Jack. He walks to the podium, delivers his speech, and closes with those lines. A surge of applause from the crowd.
“That worked,” he says to me as we’re led offstage. “I think I missed a few words. I was trying not to look down.”
“You missed less than I would have.”
A little smile, almost shy, and he says, “You know that’s not true.”
They’re shaping campaign plans for the presidency. The key players of the inner circle: Joe, Jack, Bobby, the Irish trio, Ted Sorensen. Sorensen is funny—whenever he’s near Jack, he puffs himself up like a boy, but he has an uncanny gift for channeling Jack’s intellect into speeches. Steve Smith, married to Jack’s sister Jean, is put in charge of financing and logistics. Journalist Pierre Salinger is hired to deal with the press. They spend hours pre-thinking obstacles: Jack is only forty-two. Too young, many will contend, to deal with the challenges facing the country. Plus, a Catholic has never been elected president.
“Jack’s not even a good Catholic,” I remark to Joe one afternoon. “And we all know I’m not Bess Truman enough.”
“What do you think of the draft of the biography Jack gave you to read?” Joe says.
Jack steps through the screen door. He sits down next to me.
“It doesn’t do him justice,” I say. “In the first fifty pages, the author describes Jack as quiet, taut, casual as a cash register. And he plays to Jack’s detractors, implying he’s a lightweight, a puppet of his former-ambassador rich daddy.” I smile at Joe. “Johnson will love that.”
Joe has an expression he sometimes gets when I speak my mind.
“And I don’t like that he brings up the Addison’s,” I say.
“That was our suggestion,” Jack says. “It’s going to come out. We want to get ahead of it.”
“But he writes about it like you might not be up to the job.”
Joe laughs. “Why don’t you tell me what you really think?”
On the side table next to my chair is a book Jack’s been reading on Jefferson and the August Life magazine. I’m on the cover: Jackie Kennedy: A front runner’s appealing wife. Jack is there as well but in the background, muted in a way he never is in life. I don’t like the photograph. My face looks too polished, almost smug. But there’s another in the interior pages that I love, of me in the surf with Caroline. I’m in my clothes, my pants rolled up as I swing her around. We’re both soaked. I barely remember the film crew shooting it, but I remember the moment itself—the cold of the sea and my daughter’s fierce laughter as she shrieked with joy, the light ballast of her body as she flew.
No one really wants that on a magazine cover, though.
“It’s always bad news, Dad,” Jack says, “when she gets quiet and just stares off like that.”
“I think you can win, Jack,” I say. “But we need to focus on what makes you different—your convictions, your vision and ambition, even your youth.” I look at Joe. “And you, I’m afraid, need to be just a nice old man we visit at Thanksgiving and Christmas.”
“I can do that,” he says.
“Overall, though,” I say, “things seem to be going well.”
“Nothing wrong with better,” Joe says.
“Do you really want this, Jack?” I ask after Joe has left and we’re alone on the porch. He’s watching the clouds bank over the ocean. Strange, almost vertical bands of grated light.
“Jack?”
“What?”
“Do you want this?”
“Don’t worry about that biography.”
“I’m asking you a question.”
“It’s the presidency, Jackie. Don’t overthink it.” In the past, that sudden sharper tone might have stopped me. Now I can feel the uncertainty behind it.
“Actually, Jack, I think you need to spend a little more time thinking about it. Because that isn’t in the pages of that manuscript, and it’s not in the world yet either. Give them more of what you believe—this writer and that other man who wants to trot along after you on the campaign trail. Let them in. Decide what you want them to know. And when you go stumping around, no matter what little town you’re in—blue collar, white collar, factory, mining, East Coast, Midwest, South—set aside those two-sentence profiles everyone uses to prep you, because what you need to know is: What’s unique about this town? These people? What do they want, love, care for? What have they lost or sacrificed? What do they grieve, fear, dream?”