Jackie

Chapter 25

On the second day of the New Year, a Saturday morning, Jack stands in the Senate Caucus Room and announces his candidacy for president. I buy him a puppy.

“To celebrate,” I say.

He laughs.

“You just wanted a dog,” he says.

“No, this dog is for you. Welsh terriers are very kind to people with allergies.”

“We’ll call him Charlie,” says Jack, as he picks up the dog and holds him still so Caroline can stroke the silky ears.

I campaign with Jack that winter, crisscrossing the country, climbing out of cars into the wind and slush. I work down one side of the street while he works down the other; hundreds of hands in the morning, hundreds more in the afternoon. Towns start to blend. I read De Gaulle’s memoirs and Henry Adams’s Democracy, marking passages to share with Jack. In the papers, I follow the story of four Black boys who walk into the Woolworths in Greensboro, North Carolina, sit down at the lunch counter, and refuse to get up until they are served.

I ask him about it.

“We can’t afford to lose the Southern white vote,” he says.

“Then you might have to figure out how to have that and the Black vote too.”

Teddy and his young wife, Joan, rent a house two blocks away from ours. They just had their first baby. I do Joan’s grocery shopping and help her find a nanny. For over a year, I’ve watched Teddy and Joan wash around in an unfinished life, no home of their own, schlepping suitcases back and forth from Hyannis Port to Palm Beach and back.

“It’s like riding a metronome, isn’t it?” I say to Joan one day. We’re sitting in her new living room. The baby has just woken up from a nap. “She’s beautiful, Joan.”

“She looks like Teddy, doesn’t she?”

“She’ll be a Hollywood beauty like you. We still need to get you curtains for this room.”

“It’s lovely,” Joan says, “just as it is. You’ve done so much for me.”

“Almost, but we’ll get there.”

She breaks down and talks about the trouble in her marriage.

“It’s not that I don’t love Teddy,” she says. “It’s just felt arranged from the start. Jean introduced us, you know, like Bobby and Ethel, but—”

“The rest of us will never be Ethel enough.”

She smiles. Only six or seven years younger than I am but she seems so very new to all this. She straightens the baby’s cloth on her shoulder, a stain of spit-up near her hair, in her hair.

“Ted had doubts too,” she says. “And I still feel unsure.”

“I don’t know if one is ever sure,” I say. “But this summer, let’s be different together. The rest of them can sail, football, and Kennedy around, and you can play the piano while I paint. We’ll go for walks on the beach. If we don’t come back, they can launch a search.”

She smiles, a fragile smile. “I know Ted runs around with other girls.”

“All Kennedy men are like that,” I say. “It means nothing.”

She looks uncertain; I feel something swift and dark move through me. I push it off.

“You can’t let it mean a thing, Joan,” I say.

Jack is home for three days in the middle of March before the Wisconsin primary. It’s the first warm spring day. We walk down to the canal. On our way home, as we’re approaching a crosswalk, a car slows. Jack is ahead, carrying Caroline. He’s telling her a story he made up about the sea; her hair spills toward his shoulder, that half-fantasy space the two of them disappear into. The car pulls alongside.

“Jack Kennedy.” It’s Marion Leiter—Oatsie. “Where are you headed?”

“Home, to get ready for you,” Jack says. “Rumor is you’re coming to dinner.”

She laughs, a long hand draped over the steering wheel. “May I bring a guest?”

“Only someone interesting,” Jack says.

Oatsie nods to the man in the passenger seat. He tips his hat.

“Ian Fleming, this is Jack Kennedy, and Jackie.”

“You’re James Bond,” Jack says.

Halfway through dinner that night, Jack pauses mid-conversation with Joe Alsop and turns to Fleming. “Say, here’s a question for you. If you were writing the perfect climax for a novel, how would you depose Castro?”

“I’d shame him out of office,” Fleming says.

“How?”

“Bombard him with inanity.”

“Example?”

“Air-drop leaflets over Cuba with fake scientific facts. Claims that beards draw radioactivity and cause impotence.”

The table erupts into laughter. Everyone but Jack.

“Ridiculous, and also smart,” Jack says. “Castro’s power is built on ego. What else?”

“Infuse the currency with fake bills.”

Jack nods. “Skew the economy. Throw his authority into chaos. I like it. Go on.”

Fleming picks up a dinner roll and tears off a piece. “Just more of that. Target those illusory things he uses to bolster his myth. Disrupt them. Get him to resign or be forced out. Of course, in fiction, it’s all possible.”

Jack smiles. “Everything is fiction.”

When he returns from campaigning in Wisconsin, I tell him I’ve skipped a period.

“So only one more trip for me,” I say. “After that, the doctor says, I should step back.”

“You mean stay home.”

“For the baby.”

He smiles. That word. I’m suddenly afraid.

“I don’t want to lose this baby, Jack.”

“You won’t.”

I touch his mouth, gently. He lets me.

He beats Hubert Humphrey in the West Virginia primary for the Democratic nomination. I fly down to meet him in Charleston. Together we walk into the crowded hall of the Hotel Kanawha. Flags, banners, lights, everyone cheering and yelling his name. Moments later, I’ve lost him. He’s drifted away, lifted by the chanting of the crowd. I push through the warm crush of bodies toward the stairs. Tony Bradlee finds me there.

“It’s wonderful, isn’t it?” she says, but I can see in her eyes she senses something’s wrong.

“This is how it will be if he wins.” I wish I hadn’t said it. I catch sight of Jack across the room. I wait for him to turn and scan the crowd for me. I touch the banister. The air feels close.

“I’m going to step outside for a moment,” I tell Tony. I leave through the back entrance and go to the car. I sit there for an hour in the hard warm dark of the backseat, until he gets in.

“Where were you?” he says. “When did you come out here?”

“Just a few minutes ago. It was so hot—”

“Over sixty percent, Jackie,” he says. “Humphrey’s thinking about bowing out.”

“That’s wonderful, Jack. I’m just so happy for you.”

“Will you go to the convention?” Joan asks. It’s early summer. We’re in Hyannis Port with the children.

“You should go for me,” I say. “I have to stay home and be pregnant.”

“And tape those radio commercials in Spanish and French.”

I laugh. “They’re finding all sorts of things for me to do.”

“You really won’t go to the convention?” Joan says.

“No. I need to read up on disarmament and that black-bearded dictator in Cuba.”

Cuba, I’ve learned, is the perfect way to shift a conversation. No matter who I’m talking to, communist angst is so deep, just a passing remark is enough. I don’t want to go to the convention. I have no interest in being pregnant in that southern California heat. I don’t tell Joan—I haven’t told anyone—how leveled I felt that night in Charleston, how easily Jack turned away and I just stood on the stairs watching the night unfold like a future where I’d ceased to exist.

“You aren’t nervous?” Joan asks, her voice careful.

“Nervous?”

“About Jack going alone to L.A.?”

I suddenly realize what she’s asking.

“It’s best this way,” I say. “He’ll be free to play tag around the bed with Marilyn Monroe.”

The sudden crumbling in her face stops me.

“I’m teasing, Joan.”

“I know. Well, sort of.”

“Sweet Joan,” I say, “you’ll know things, even things you wish you didn’t know, and you’ll move on. Besides, it’s much more likely that in L.A., Peter and the Rat Pack will drag Jack off in a car and they’ll all drive down to Palm Springs to toast the premiere of Ocean’s 11 and pour rum punch into Jack Haley’s pool.”

“I know that too,” Joan says—again that young smile.

“As Joe says: Doesn’t matter who you are, it only matters who people think you are.”

“You do such a good imitation of him,” she says.

I feel something bend inside me, the youth and tinge of wonder in her voice, and again I remember that day last summer holding Caroline’s small arms as I spun her through the surf, the driving sense I had that, if I could just keep spinning, my daughter’s body weightless, skimming those waves, I could embed that hard, free joy deep in a way that might last.

“I love Joe,” I say, “despite all.” Gently, I tuck a strand of Joan’s hair behind her ear.

On July 13, at the Democratic National Convention, Jack clinches the nomination on the first ballot. The next day, he invites Lyndon Johnson to be his running mate.

“I’ll need Texas to win,” he says when he calls from L.A. “For that reason alone, Johnson’s the choice.”

“Bobby agrees?” I say, knowing the answer.

Jack laughs. “Of course not. But I told him if we win, the first thing I’ll make Lyndon do is push Bobby through for AG.” Bobby and Lyndon Johnson are oil and water. A few months ago, when Johnson called Jack “a little scrawny fellow with rickets,” Bobby hit the roof. Jack just let it roll off his back.

On the phone now, he is happy. I can feel it—that sense of high.

My mother and I watch on a rented television set as Jack, flanked by Kennedys, gives his acceptance speech to close the Democratic convention. “We stand today on the edge of a new frontier…not a set of promises—it is a set of challenges….”

“They love him,” my mother says.

“I know,” I say.

The day after Jack gets home from California, Eisenhower’s CIA director, Allen Dulles, flies up to Hyannis Port to brief him on the training of Cuban exiles.

“Training for what?” I ask.

He hesitates.

“You can’t tell me, can you?”

“It’ll be like that sometimes,” he says, “until I figure this job out. Not that I’ve got it yet.”

“You will.”

“I’m not always sure I’m up for it.” He glances at me. “Forget I just said that.”

August.

Norman Mailer is sweating—a wrinkled, poorly tailored suit, pale searing eyes, boot-black hair. I’ve heard he likes pretty women and he likes to fight—bedrooms, barrooms, streets. He’s come to meet Jack for a piece he’s writing.

“Can I fix you a drink, Mr. Mailer?” I say as we walk into the living room. His eyes pause on my face. Disconcerting how he looks at me, like he’s rummaging around. “A cold drink? It’s so hot,” I say, as if the smile might bring things back to the surface. A sheen of sweat on his face. He reminds me of Aristotle Onassis, that same carnal insistence in his gaze.

“I would like a drink,” he says. “Thank you.”

“A daiquiri?”

He smiles. “No one here needs me on rum.”

For a moment I like him. “Iced tea, then?”

“Please.”

I ask about Provincetown, where he lives. “I’ve never been,” I say.

“It’s one of the few coastal towns in America that’s still a true fishing village, a Wild West of the East.”

“I’d love to go.”

“And how will you go?”

A funny question. “In a car, I imagine, like anyone else.”

He smiles, a wolfish smile. “What would it be? Three black limousines or a sports car at four a.m. with dark glasses?”

“And a blond wig,” I say.

“You just had a birthday, didn’t you? Thirty-one.”

“Mr. Mailer, your glass is already empty. Would you like another?”

Later, I watch his face brighten—he nearly seems to melt—when Jack tells him he’s read The Deer Park, along with Mailer’s other books. Pierre Salinger prepped Jack for that moment, telling him to specifically mention The Deer Park and not The Naked and the Dead, which made him a household name.

Mailer asks questions like my stepbrother Gore—half query, half bait. Nothing is innocent. Bobby told me that even before he arrived, Mailer had written most of the article, which struck me as strange. Why come at all? But that day in Hyannis Port, it’s clear. He is still gathering more. Breaking down our world, taking notes on us. No paper, no pencil, no pen. But in his hard eyes, I can see notations, calculations being made.

Jack is away for most of the fall, barnstorming the country. He’ll come home for a day, stride in, swoop Caroline up, give me a kiss, stay for dinner, then fly off again. He calls on our anniversary but forgets it’s our anniversary. A few days later, when a reporter phones, asking for comment on a statement in Woman’s Day about how last year I spent thirty thousand dollars on clothes, I laugh and say, “I couldn’t spend that much if I wore sable underwear.”

As soon as it’s out of my mouth, I regret it. Jack is furious. The comment’s picked up everywhere.

“That’s the last thing you’ll say on this campaign, Jackie.”

“Okay with me,” I say, “although I do hope my clothes have nothing to do with your ability to be president.”

I’m meeting Jack in New York when Mailer’s article in Esquire hits newsstands. I brace myself as I start to read. The piece is brilliant—searing, canny, generous. It’s about Jack and America. An exquisite endorsement and tribute. I remember how Mailer watched us that day in Hyannis Port—how hot it was, how high the baby pushed against my lungs; I craved ice, craved the cool, I wanted to slip out of the room unnoticed, but I was tied to the pleasantries, even as Mailer watched us in a penetrating way that wasn’t pleasant at all. In the Esquire piece, he describes Jack as a prince in the unstated aristocracy of the American dream. He does justice to Jack’s ideas, his vision and intent, his commitment to service. He barely mentions me. I feel a wave of relief.

I ride with Jack in a ticker-tape parade through Manhattan. A thirty-mile route up toward Yonkers for a rally in Larkin Park, then back downtown. Over a million New Yorkers line the streets as the motorcade presses through. Crowds push against the car. I sit close to Jack, perched on the back of the seat, one hand holding on, the other waving, keeping that strong fixed smile. I can feel the pressure of my belly, breathless as the baby kicks, while sheets of confetti and streamers rain from the sky. Jack leans down to shake the hands reaching up. A group of women surges toward him. The sides of the car seem to bend.

At a break for lunch in Rockefeller Center, our friend Bill Walton meets us.

“I’m concerned about the baby, Bill,” I say, loud enough for others to hear. “I’m afraid I should skip the rest of the route.” I turn to one of Jack’s aides. “Could you please let the senator know?” I slip out of my coat and turn it inside out. “Reversible,” I say to Bill. I pull on a pair of dark glasses and put my arm through his.

“I’ll get you back to the hotel,” he says. “You can rest.”

“Oh no,” I say quietly as we walk away. “I want to see those new paintings at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery. Come on. Let’s go.”

When I learn, a few days later, that Martin Luther King, Jr., has been arrested for a sit-in at the lunch counter of an Atlanta department store, I pick up the phone and dial.

“Yes,” I tell the operator, “this is Mrs. Kennedy. I need to talk to the senator. I am afraid it’s urgent. Please put the call through.”

It’s not King I’m thinking of, sitting with those college boys in the Magnolia Tea Room and refusing to get up. It’s his wife and that other woman, Rosa Parks, and it’s that dead boy’s mother, Mamie Till. I understand it then. It wasn’t the brutal details of her son’s murder that blew the world apart. It was the choice Mamie Till made to leave the casket lid open that forced the world to see.

Jack’s voice clicks in on the line.

“You must work to free King,” I say. “You know it’s a trumped-up charge.”

“Sarge and Wofford just told me the same thing.”

“That’s why you hired them.”

“Not to cost me the election.”

Jack had met with King a few weeks earlier. King had told him to do something to prove to the Blacks his commitment to them was real.

“Wofford’s prepared a statement,” he says, “criticizing the arrest, calling for King’s release. But Kenny says if I lift a finger, it’ll kill my chances. Even Bobby thinks it’ll backfire.”

“King’s wife is pregnant.”

“This isn’t personal, Jackie.”

“But it could be.”

“You want me to do the right thing and lose?” He gives that quick laugh and, for a moment, I let the silence hang. I do what, by then, I’ve learned how to do.

“All right,” he says finally, “what do you think?”

“Kenny thinks of politics as a chess match,” I say. “A winner, a loser, and a strategy of moves you can map out and count on. But not every game is zero sum.”

“In a campaign, only one person wins.”

“But ‘How do I win?’ can’t be the only question you ask.”

“If I help King, I’ll lose the South.”

“And if you win the Black vote?”

That stops him. I knew it would. Then, “That’s not why you’re asking me to do this.”

“No, but that’s why you will.”