Jackie

Chapter 30

We arrive at Orly Airport on the last day of May to a crowd of thousands waving American flags. De Gaulle has arranged a spectacle—tremendous black horses, motorcycles, waves of gold-helmeted troops. He stands, tall and solemn and alone, on the red carpet at the foot of the steps.

“He’ll try to one-up you,” I say to Jack as we leave the plane. “He likes to traffic in power, even if France doesn’t have what they once did.”

“Macmillan calls him ‘the pinhead.’?”

I smile. “And you’re the young dashing one. Look at all these people who’ve come out for you.”

“Or you.”

We start down the stairs.

“Just remember,” I say, “the world wants a Jack. Someone who overturns what’s outdated. They want adventure and change.”

“We don’t know that yet.”

“It’s true. And now you’ve gone on national TV and promised to put a man on the moon.”

While Jack meets with De Gaulle, André Malraux is my guide through Paris. Months ago I asked my chief of staff, Tish, to tell the French ambassador I hoped to meet Malraux.

“Your intellectual crush,” Tish teased me.

“How could one not be a little in love with a French Resistance fighter turned cultural minister who literally scrubbed the soot-black stones of the Louvre?”

But just a week ago, Malraux’s two sons were killed in a car wreck. I sent word to him immediately, saying we should cancel. To my surprise, he wrote back, insisting we still meet.

He is an extraordinary man of intellect and grace. We walk together through the Musée du Jeu de Paume, then drive to Empress Josephine’s Chateau de Malmaison outside Paris. I’ve told him I want to see the restoration work Stéphane Boudin did on Josephine’s house. I find it curious, I tell him, the degree of extravagance Napoleon’s wife engaged to shape the most beautiful garden in Europe—not just the two hundred varieties of roses and lilies from her native Martinique, but her insistence on three hundred pineapple plants in the orangery, as well as kangaroos, llamas, black swans. The curator walking with us mentions that Josephine was “extremely jealous” of Napoleon.

This makes me laugh. “But she wound up on her feet,” I say, “while he was exiled to Saint Helena.”

Malraux smiles. “Tonight at Versailles, we’ll dine on gold-trimmed china that once belonged to that exiled emperor.”

I take his arm as we walk. “I’ve been thinking, André, that someday you might lend me a French painting. Who knows, perhaps La Joconde?”

He laughs, and a bright joy floods through me that my audacious, absurd request for him to send the Mona Lisa might dispel, if just for a moment, the dark grief of loss he suffers.

De Gaulle looms, a towering figure at dinner in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. I am seated next to him. We talk together in French about art and my love of Paris, my experiences as a student on Boulevard Saint-Michel. I tell him that earlier that day, when I was supposed to be resting, I asked one of the Secret Service agents to drive me around the city, just so I could cross over my favorite bridges and drive down the streets I walked as a college girl.

The candelabras are lit; the mirrored walls catch the bouncing light like stars. The ceiling soars. Through the tall arched windows, I can see the outline of the night gardens, the spangled flow of water from the fountains.

We discuss French history. “Remind me, please,” I say, “who did Louis XVI’s daughter marry?” As we chat on in French, I can feel that sterner aspect of him soften. We walk from the dining room to a ballet Malraux has arranged, which was first performed for Louis XV. Flaming torches light the theater.

“And from here you travel to Vienna?” De Gaulle says.

“Yes. The president will meet with Chairman Khrushchev.”

“Watch out for his wife,” De Gaulle says, a dour smile. “She’s the craftier of the two.”

The Russian leader compliments my dress and draws his chair closer. We talk about horses and Ukrainian folk dances.

“Remind me, please, Mr. Chairman,” I say, “of the name of the dog you sent up into space.”

“Strelka.”

“Such a lovely name!”

“There are puppies.”

“Why don’t you send me one?”

He laughs. “Perhaps I’ll send you two.”

We are at the state dinner at the Sch?nbrunn Palace in Vienna. We can hear the low drone of crowds outside.

“It’s your name they’re chanting,” Khrushchev tells me.

I smile. “I think it’s my husband’s.” He studies me for a moment, then cocks his bald head, pretending to listen.

“No,” he says, “they are for you.”

There’s something cozy about him, though I remember a line from the briefing papers about how he gets ornery when he’s tired. Just last year, he took off his shoe and brandished it at the UN. Now at the Sch?nbrunn Palace, I ask Khrushchev about a book I read, The Sabres of Paradise, the story of a Muslim guerrilla leader who fought for decades against the czar. I tell him how intrigued I was and ask if he can tell me more. He frowns for a moment, then starts to talk about how the quality and number of teachers in the region are far more robust now under the Soviets than they were under the czar. I let him go on for a while, puffing himself up, then I touch his arm and smile.

“Oh, Mr. Chairman, please don’t bore me with statistics.”

A blunt silence. Several heads turn in our direction, but Khrushchev only laughs.

“You are charming,” he says.

He is brutal, though, to Jack, when they meet the next day to discuss Berlin. “That bone in my throat” is how Khrushchev describes the divided city, a Western enclave deep in communist East Germany. He refuses to discuss a nuclear détente between the United States and the Soviet Union. He turns Jack’s arguments around, aiming well-placed shots to underscore Jack’s inexperience. When Jack says that a nuclear exchange would kill seventy million people in ten minutes, Khrushchev shrugs and coolly remarks that a Soviet treaty with East Germany by year-end is inevitable. He demands that the United States withdraw from West Berlin. If not, he threatens, he’ll cut off Allied access to the city.

“I did it all wrong,” Jack tells me afterward in our hotel room. “Everything I’d been warned about his tactics flew out of my head.”

“Macmillan told you he bluffs,” I say.

“There was no bluff. He savaged me and, because of Cuba, he could.”

On the flight to London, Jack talks to Rusk, O’Donnell, and Powers. I try to close my mind to the brooding mood on the plane. Soon we’ll land in England. I’ll fly on to Greece. Jack will stay for a night to confer with Macmillan, then return to the States. I miss the children. I wish I was flying home to them. Through the window, the gray sky floods away underneath.

Clint is there when I land in Athens.

“It’s so good to see you again, Mr. Hill.”

He takes his place in my shadow as we walk from the plane. Evening. The air is warm, and I feel my skin release to it.

The prime minister and his wife welcome us. To the side hovers a group of fidgeting boys dressed as Evzones, the elite Greek military guard. I kneel by the smallest boy and say hello in Greek. He smiles shyly, reaching for my hand.

The sea is cyan blue, outstretched below the villa in Kavouri. I swim that first night before dinner. The next morning, the yacht that will take us through the islands is moored offshore. Fishing boats and small craft dart around it. The Greek Navy pushes them off.

We embark for Epidaurus. The town has been whitewashed to greet us, thyme and flowers strewn through the streets. In the amphitheater on the eastern coast, we sit on a two-thousand-year-old bench and watch a rehearsal of Sophocles’s Electra, that play about the violence of justice and regret, the story of a brother and sister who murder their mother to avenge their father’s death. The title role is played by a young actress—dark hair, slight, her face with a curious intensity that seems to magnetize the open space. Watching that familiar play unfold in the ancient, brilliant light on a dirt-stone stage, where it was first performed thousands of years before, feels uncanny, almost transcendent. Who is to say what endures?

“What did you think of the play, Mr. Hill?” I ask afterward as we walk down to the harbor.

“I liked it,” he says, “although I’m afraid I didn’t understand a word.”

I laugh. “I didn’t really either. Apparently, there’s another Epidaurus. The prime minister’s wife told me. A sunken city off the coast, ruins just meters below the surface. It’s a short drive from here.” We turn a corner and start across an open square. “Mr. Hill, do you think we might shift our itinerary this afternoon?”

He looks at his supervisor, Agent Jefferies, walking ahead of us. Jefferies is a play-by-the-book kind of man. He doesn’t like the little schedule changes I try to weave in here and there to keep breathing room in my day.

“What would you like to do, Mrs. Kennedy?” Clint asks.

“I’d love to see that other Epidaurus. And perhaps swim there.” I feel him hesitate. I know what I’m asking for, and I know it’s too much. There would need to be an advance. “It’s all right,” I say. “We won’t do that.”

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Kennedy.”

“Maybe, though, could we bend time a bit this afternoon? Enough for a short swim and half an hour to water-ski?”

He smiles. “That I can do.”

I ski off the back of a small motorboat. Clint sits in the stern, watching as I cut over the wake, carving long tails of spray that rise and fall through the air. The light is sharp, the space so bright and open it’s as if the sky is hurtling away. I drop the line and the boat circles back. Clint helps me in.

“Will you give it a try, Mr. Hill?”

“There wasn’t much water where I grew up.”

I laugh. “This summer, in Hyannis Port, I want to teach you to water-ski.”

As the small boat picks up speed, heading toward the yacht, the thought strikes through me, a hot current. I don’t want to go back. It startles me. It’s not that I don’t miss home. I miss the children intensely. Little voices, faces, hands. And Jack. But I love, so much, the rush of freedom I feel here as the boat flies across that wide expanse.

Overnight, we travel to Mykonos. I wake the next morning into a blaze of light. The buildings on the island tumble over each other like dice. We walk up the steep hill through the winding streets of town toward the villa of Helen Vlachos, the only woman in Greece who owns a newspaper.

“The light is different here,” I say to her. “It seems to reveal more.” We’re eating lunch under an arbor of flowering fruit trees. “I want to bring my children to visit.”

“Before you leave Athens,” she says, “be sure to make the climb to Cape Sounion and the Temple of Poseidon. Lord Byron carved his name into one of the pillars.”

A butterfly lands on the table near a vase of flowers, its wings bluish, sheer, and I think of that day I first came to Hyannis Port, years ago, Jack and I in his childhood bedroom with all those books, the stories of heroes and legends he’d loved as a child. I remember his face as he lay back on the bed and looked at me, that look I’ve never seen in anyone but him.

“Go late in the day to Cape Sounion,” Helen Vlachos says to me now. “It has an unearthly beauty at sunset. One of the most magnificent sites in Greece.”

Days later, I take that walk along the cape near the Temple of Poseidon. As the sun collapses into the sea, I step carefully around an archaeological dig, long pits in the ground exposing layers of rock and stratified earth, pottery, bones—levels of what was once a sunlit world layered over other worlds, the dead layered over the dead like leaves.

We never imagine it. That we will be there someday, centuries from now, skulls ground to unnamed and intimate fragments, trampled by new generations who in turn can’t imagine their lives will also be broken to dust. Jack would understand this, the nuanced implications; even if he didn’t want to, he would—how everything marked critical, classified, urgent, eventually turns to this.

He meets me at the airport. Slipping into the car, I kiss him. He thumps on the back of the driver’s seat. “Let’s go.”

His back hurts. I can tell by the set in his jaw. There was a story in the paper while I was away and photographs of him boarding a cherry picker that would lift him from the tarmac to the plane because he couldn’t climb the steps. I know how much he hates it—the weakness.

I hold his hand and watch the moving sky through the window. I feel a strange and heady disconnect, like only half of me is home, while the other half still drifts through the whitewash of those islands, the rising daylight six hours ahead, the gorgeous blue waste of the sea.

That sense stays with me for weeks—even as I rework curriculum plans for Caroline’s preschool; even as I skim the landslide of clippings that praise my state visits, saying the intractable Khrushchev was smitten; even when two Russians walk into the White House, bearing a gift from him to me, one of the space-dog puppies, which I name Pushinka; even when Jack starts calling me the “sex symbol,” because he’s read the same news stories and seen photographs of this glamorous woman who took Europe by storm and happens to be the woman he’s married to.

“She’s a figment,” I tell him.

He smiles. “As long as she’s what they want.”

I’m with the children for the rest of that summer in Hyannis Port. Long hours with Joe on the porch of the main house. Every morning, I take Caroline to the stables to ride. In the afternoons, I work through memos and folders of correspondence sent up from Washington.

I’ve begun to rethink the vision for the state rooms at the White House—the Red Room and the Blue Room. I want to shape something in those rooms: a purely American sense of strength, discipline, purpose. National power, or at least the impression of it, even as Jack grows into the thing itself. I want those rooms to become a space where he, as a leader, can emerge into history.

I keep thinking of Greece—that water and sky, how the ancient, brilliant light revealed more, stripped more away, that light a kind of alchemy. I want to do that here. Work elements of a physical space into beauty and significance, infuse a room with a sense of promise and truth. I don’t want artifice. Artifice will bleach to nothing in the light of time. That’s not what I’m after.

The days pull toward Friday afternoon and the three-o’clock chime of the ice cream truck, shortly followed by a phone call to say that Air Force One has arrived at Otis and Jack is on his way. Within the hour, he’ll blow in. Caroline will race him up the steps so he can change into sneakers and drive her in the golf cart to the candy store in town before it closes.

“Let me say hello to your mother, Buttons.”

“But she’ll be here all night, and the candy store won’t.”

He’ll pop his head into whatever room I’m in. “Hey, kid,” he’ll say—that smile. “It’s you.”

His back pain has improved, and that lightens his mood. Even when he limps, there’s a grace in his step. On those long summer weekends, there are blueberries and corn, clam chowder, and lobster rolls. There are swims or a cruise on the Marlin. When storms roll in, there’s backgammon, Chinese checkers, and late-afternoon daiquiris. In the main house, away from the children and their rough-and-tumble, there are debates and strategy meetings for Jack, Bobby, and their team about how to avoid a nuclear showdown with the Soviets. A crisis has developed in Berlin. On August 12, a barbed-wire fence went up overnight, dividing the eastern and western parts of that city. Nearly two hundred kilometers, the Berlin Wall runs through cemeteries and zigzags along canals, closing the border between communist East Germany and the West. Jack has refused to do what Khrushchev demanded—remove U.S. troops from West Berlin. “We’ll defend free Germany,” Jack says.

Toward the end of August, Khrushchev sends a private letter to Jack about how a tentative peace, or at least a hold in the conflict, might be approached. The letter is unofficial, but it creates a sense of pause.

That evening Jack and I sit together on the porch. It feels unusual to have that bit of time alone. The sun is down. Tribes of moths beat around the screen. I tell him then about the walk I took along the dig at Cape Sounion, how the sky seemed to stretch and breathe, the raw, haunted sense I felt in that place.

“It reminded me of Homer’s epics,” I say. “Those ruins infused with the dead—bodies loved or slain, pressed together in passion or war. Even the heroes.”

Jack smiles. “Even the heroes.”

“I wish you’d been there with me. I want to go sometime to that place with you.”

“I’ll carve my name on the pillar next to Byron’s.”

I continue to feel it—that curious sense of dislocation, like I’ve moved into a separate space, and though Jack and I are closer, when he leaves at the end of each weekend, I don’t feel the piercing ache I used to feel.

“Who’s in charge of a woman’s life?” I asked John White, years ago, when I was working at the paper and he’d made some remark about one of my columns.

Once, I thought I understood what I was willing to give up when I married Jack. My work, the freedom to go where I wanted or see who I wanted whenever I wanted. But the deeper sacrifice, I’ve come to realize, is about power and the accommodations a woman is called on to make. To shrink enough, to be small enough, to fit into the corners of a man’s world, to file down her own edges to be the kind of wife he’ll need, that he and others expect her to be.

Back in Washington that fall, I’m deliberate in how I map my time. There are always things to do. Events to attend or create, lists of tasks I need to address. I work better, with more intention, when there’s the pressure of an upcoming trip, even just a weekend with the children to Glen Ora.

“Little trips away keep me light,” I tell Jack. “And out of your hair.” That makes him laugh, but I can feel it also unsettles him.

I plan a Shakespeare production in the East Room for the president of Sudan and scribble a memo about it to Pam.

Let’s please include a scene fromMacbeth. And some half scenes from the comedies, to capture both the light and the dark.

I invite cellist Pablo Casals to play at a November dinner in honor of the governor of Puerto Rico. Jack and I throw a black-tie dinner dance for Lee and the Agnellis.

“What about Stas?” I ask my sister. “Is he coming too?”

“He might,” Lee says, “or not.”

I know what that means. “Oh, Lee.”

“It’s my marriage,” she snaps.

“Well, you alone are a beautiful excuse for a party, Pekes.”

At that dinner dance, I ask Oleg Cassini to introduce the Twist. As he’s out on the floor, trying to teach a man how to use his shoulders to get the right twisting motion in his hips, Pierre Salinger walks up to me and looks pointedly at Oleg and the couple laughing on the dance floor.

“Too risqué,” he says.

“Oh, please don’t worry, Pierre. You can send a denial to the press tomorrow. Claim we engaged in nothing more suggestive than the foxtrot.”

Stas, as expected, does not attend. Jack raises a glass in a toast: “To Stas, wherever you are.”

Around eleven, I’m in the Blue Room when my stepbrother Gore wanders in. He comes over to sit with me, but there’s no second chair, so he kneels by mine. He’s rather drunk and says a few snide remarks about Lyndon Johnson—“the lox,” he calls him, as Lyndon tries to do the Twist, nearly knocking the lovely Helen Chavchavadze to the floor.

“A Mad Hatter evening you’ve made, my dear Jackie,” Gore says. “I do admire it. Though Lem went after me for not being at the Arts Council. He is a—”

“Don’t say it, Gore,” I warn. “You love to pick fights. I don’t want it tonight.”

“My lovely step-step, don’t pretend you’re not half charm, half malice, like me.”

“Those aren’t your percentages tonight, Gore. You’re drunk, all malice, and that’s just dull.”

He seems briefly contrite. He stands up, wavering on his feet; his hand falls on my shoulder. A moment later, his hand is knocked sharply away, and Bobby steps between us.

“Impertinent son of a bitch,” Gore says, throws a punch. Bobby catches his fist mid-swing. We get Gore packed into a car, heading home. I tease Bobby for being so protective on my behalf.

“Was it the hand on my shoulder?” I say. It makes him flush.

“He was upsetting you,” he says, but glances away as he says it. I touch his hand.

“Thank you,” I say.

We’re with Joe in Palm Beach in December. Jack has a brief trip to Nassau to meet with Harold Macmillan. The day he leaves, I’m swimming with Caroline in the pool when Joe comes out onto the patio.

“You’re back early,” I say. “Too much golf?”

“Too much sun.”

I swim to the edge of the pool. He sits down on one of the lounge chairs in the shade, his legs stretched out.

“You look tired, Joe,” I say.

“I had to quit after the fifth hole,” he says with some disgust.

“Sweet Joe, even you are not invincible.” I splash at the water just enough so drops strike near his feet without hitting his shoes. “Go take a rest,” I say. “Get into your room, where it’s cool.”

“Don’t you dare call a doctor.”

“I promise.”

He pushes himself up and walks off, the usual long stride at first, but as I watch, he slows, like his body can’t quite keep up with the heat. He steps inside. Two hours later, his niece Ann looks into his bedroom to check on him, and he cannot speak or move.

I’m with him at the hospital every day. On Christmas Eve, Jack and I stay with him until midnight. We take Communion in the hospital chapel. Thrombosis to his left cerebral hemisphere—his right side is entirely paralyzed. He’s a shell of himself. He can barely speak. I read aloud to him. I feed him and wipe the shine of saliva from the edge of his mouth.