Chapter 27
November 9, 1960, Hyannis Port
When I wake, it is night still. The light has just begun to rise. Muffled sounds in the yard below. I pull the curtain back and see them. Dark forms. The number seems to have doubled. They move differently, a certain necessary intention and skill. I can hear Jack’s light snore from the bed, still in the dark of the room; I want to crawl back under the covers, move close to him, be in that same dark. My throat feels tight. I watch the men below. My fingernails dig into the sill. What will happen now? To our life? The children? My freedom and solitude, the new glow of happiness between us? Everything, from this point on, will change.
The baby kicks. I run my hand over my stomach, find the knob of one small shoulder.
The night before, I had a quiet dinner with Bill Walton. We asked him to stay with us, in the guest bedroom of the small house Jack and I have rented near Joe’s. Bill and I sat together in the dining room after we ate, and we talked about painting. We talked about how if Jack won, I’d need a house away.
“What about Camp David?” Walton asked.
“Sometimes I’ll need away-away,” I said.
“I’ll help you find something.”
“Thank you. I’m afraid I’ve only gotten as far as the purple coat I’m wearing tomorrow.”
Around nine, Bill Walton and I walked over to Joe’s. Jack was there, with Bobby, Teddy, and the rest of the family. Old friends and aides, campaign workers. Jack couldn’t sit still. He’d cross the room to talk to one person, then walk back. He’d sit down, stand up, cross the room again, his fingers worrying his trousers pocket, his eyes bright. At half past ten, when early returns looked like the momentum was heading Jack’s way, I told them I was tired. The baby, I said. Joe made some absurd proclamation that, if Jack won, he wouldn’t attend the celebration at the Armory. He’d keep to the shadows for Jack’s sake, he said, as he had all year.
“Assuming Jack wins,” I said, “I think he’ll want his father there.” I plucked at the cuff of Joe’s sleeve and whispered, “You might as well just come—if this lifelong dream of yours is a done deal, they can’t unelect him.”
Assuming Jack wins.
I’ve practiced saying it, thinking it. Knowing what I’m not fully ready to know. And soon it will be light. The press will sweep in, past the gate, up the drive, onto the lawn, a wave of flashbulbs, pads of paper, pens, shouldering one another out as they push in, trying to get past the Secret Service, a tightening circle around us.
Outside now, the gray of the sky has paled; threads of fog drift over the roofs as the cedar-shake houses begin to emerge. And still those moving men below. How easily I can distinguish them from the police detail of the night before. These men move like the dead. Noiseless. Trained to disappear. One, standing by the break in the hedge, lights a cigarette. A pinprick orange glow as he inhales. The match drops. His toe grinds it out on the lawn.
“We won, Jackie.”
Jack grips my hand. A stormy morning, the ocean wild. I came down to the beach for a walk. Fifteen minutes later, Jack came to find me. I felt my heart lift when I saw him walking toward me through the rain.
His eyes are shining. “We won,” he says again.
“I know, Jack. And I’m so happy.”
“Come back up to the house,” he says.
The men are near us as we walk, the Secret Service men, moving at the hem of things.
The house is a tumult. The air shifts ten octaves as we walk in, the rip roar of laughter, cheers, loud faces, pumping hands. Bodies teem through all seventeen rooms; they spill onto the porch and the lawn.
It feels like a glare, this new world.
“Jackie, you must be thrilled!” someone says.
“What kind of First Lady do you want to be?” That’s Jack’s sister Jean.
Half the room turns toward me, and I say I’m not quite sure how I feel about the term First Lady. It sounds a bit like a saddle horse.
They all laugh.
That night we have a small dinner with the Bradlees and Bill Walton. Lem Billings wanted to be there, but he and Ben don’t get along, so Lem with his rough jokes and battered suitcase was exiled to the main affair still roaring away at Joe’s.
At dinner, Ben tells Jack he should think about replacing Allen Dulles, Ike’s CIA director.
Walton agrees. “And toss Hoover out of the FBI. Make a clean sweep.”
Jack listens, nods. He tells them he’s nominating Adlai Stevenson for UN ambassador and Dean Rusk for secretary of state.
“I thought you wanted William Fulbright?” Walton says.
Jack shakes his head. “I don’t like his support for segregation.” He tells them then he’s been thinking about bringing in some Republicans: C. Douglas Dillon as secretary of the Treasury. McGeorge Bundy as national security advisor. Mac Bundy was a friend of Kick’s during the war.
“Roosevelt installed Republicans,” Jack says. “Truman did too, to bridge the aisle. Bob McNamara is the third GOP I’m considering. For Defense. What do you think?”
“McNamara’s barely GOP,” says Bill Walton. “He’s in the NAACP and the ACLU.”
“Jack likes that he’s an intrepid mountaineer,” I say.
They laugh. Dinner continues, more talk, more debate, candles flicker and burn. Jack doesn’t mention Bobby or his intent to nominate him as attorney general. We discussed it earlier, before our friends arrived. “I might float it out to them,” he said, “to see how it lands. Or I might just focus on the Republican appointments and, when no one is looking, slip Bobby in.”
I smiled then. “Jack, do you really think there will ever be a time again when no one is looking?”
He is young. My Secret Service detail, Clint Hill.
I’ve been told he was assigned to Eisenhower’s detail for a year. He grew up in North Dakota. He has a wife and child. But no one mentioned he is close to my age, my height. Dark hair, a solemn, neatly shaven face. In my living room in Georgetown, Clint Hill looks around, that quick scan with his eyes, taking in the sofa and chairs, antiques, bookshelves, marking exits and entrances, windows and doors. I wait for a pause, for something to register, but as his eyes shift back to meet mine, they are blank. And I realize then this detail is not what he wants, to be assigned to the wife. He doesn’t want it any more than I do, and in that moment I decide we might get along.
“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Hill. Please sit down.” I’m always saying something like this to someone—please sit down, please come in, please don’t get up, and what can we get you to drink? I ask him about a drink.
“Nothing, thank you,” he says.
My back hurts. I feel the baby move.
Later that day, I’m scheduled to meet the new girl Jack’s office has recommended to serve as my press secretary: Pam Turnure. Or is that tomorrow? No, today. And what about the rumor that this Pam might have had a brief affair with Jack once? Is that true? Does it matter?
I have to call Oleg Cassini. I’m going to ask him to design my clothes. Cassini is an old friend of Joe’s, the only friend of Joe’s who will understand what I mean when I ask for a suit in a “nattier blue.” Cassini will also intuitively grasp that, for me, style is not only art but armor.
So here I am—the Wife.
I feel a wave of nausea.
The other agent with Mr. Hill outlines how things will work. Every house will have a perimeter. Anytime I step over that line, Agent Hill will be with me.
“My baby is due in a month,” I say. “I’ll be primarily in Washington. My concern is keeping a degree of privacy for our children. I don’t want them to feel like animals in a zoo.”
“We don’t trust the press any more than you do, Mrs. Kennedy,” says Mr. Hill.
“So every time I take a walk, you’ll go with me?”
A slight smile crosses his eyes, brief; his mouth does not shift.
On a brilliant morning later that week, Mr. Hill and I walk down 34th Street toward the Potomac. I am thinking about that little girl, six-year-old Ruby Bridges from New Orleans, who, just a few days ago, walked through a white mob brandishing fists, guns, and little Black dolls in caskets. Ruby, wrapped in a cloud of U.S. marshals, marched up the steps with her lunchbox into first grade at an all-white school. She’s three years older than Caroline.
I wonder what Mr. Hill would think about Ruby Bridges and all those white parents who pulled their children out of the school just because she walked into it? I want to ask him, but I don’t really know who he is yet, so instead I say, “Mr. Hill, I’ve heard you have a son who’s just about my daughter Caroline’s age. What’s your little boy’s name?”
Bill Walton spends Thanksgiving with us in Georgetown.
I raise my glass. “To one last Thanksgiving in our beloved house that leans to one side.”
“With my favorite doorknob,” Jack says.
“Here’s to caviar and clam chowder with Thanksgiving dinner,” Walton says.
“And a December baby,” I say.
Bill has come through on his promise to help find a house in the country, a place where we can be just a family. He found a property called Glen Ora.
“Camp David is free,” Jack says.
“That’s an official house,” I say. “Free in only one sense of the word.”
“There are stables at Glen Ora,” Bill says, “plenty of land, Jackie, where you can ride.”
That night, I hemorrhage. Jack has already left to fly down to Palm Beach for meetings. I lie in bed with my nightgown and overcoat on and, when the ambulance team arrives, I tell them, “I lost a baby once, and I’m afraid. Let’s please go now.” I try to smile, but the pain is just so sharp. I can feel the wet along my leg.
Later I learn that Bill Walton reached Jack just as the plane touched down in Palm Beach. Jack boarded another plane and flew back.
“The baby’s system isn’t quite developed.”
That’s what my obstetrician, Dr. Walsh, tells us about our baby boy once I surface from surgery.
“Will he be all right?” Jack asks.
“We think so.”
The baby didn’t cry right away, Dr. Walsh explains. He didn’t cry even when they held him up and gave his little bottom a slap. They fed a tube into his trachea, blew air into his lungs, and he began to breathe. We’ll be in the hospital for at least two weeks, possibly more.
As soon as we can hold him, Jack has the baby in his arms. He sits in the chair by my bed, the small head resting in the crook of his elbow, the unskinned surface of our baby’s eyes sponging up the world.
Jack says his name. John. The baby shifts at his voice. Caroline is next to Jack, one small hand resting on his shoulder, watching, transfixed, and for a moment it’s like the four of us are held in frieze, the four of us imprinted into time, and I feel something new move through me. The light in the room feels altered. Every object in the room touched by that new light.
From the hospital, I begin to prepare. The private rooms first, to create a sense of home for our family. Everything else will follow. I send Clint to get books and periodicals, histories of the White House, its antiques, architecture, and grounds. I study photographs and blueprints, the before and after of Teddy Roosevelt’s design for the West Wing. I make notes on how the various public rooms have been used. I draw up lists of things to be packed from our house on N Street, designating what should be moved where. Shortly before I’m released from the hospital, I ask Oleg Cassini to come. I show him pages I’ve torn out from magazines and sketches I’ve made.
“Your sketches are very good,” he says.
“Not as good as the ones I used to make on the back of my exam books.”
He laughs, his hair stiff with pomade, the deep tan. He was born in Paris, he tells me that day. “At three in the morning, the doctor swept into the delivery room straight from a party, in white tie and tails.” He glances at the stack of books on the small table by the window, then back at me. “Have you had any rest at all?”
“It’s quite stunning, how much there is to do. I’m not even the president-elect.”
“Well, the president-elect didn’t just give birth.”
“Oleg, what do you think about an American Versailles?”
“America is not France,” he says.
“I suppose, but don’t you think we could have a little magic?”
As the elevator rises to the Residence, I remember the first time I saw the White House as a child—the soaring promise of the building outside, how inside there was nothing, only cavernous dark rooms and a musty smell, windows that hadn’t been opened in years.
In the elevator, the chief usher, Mr. West, stands slightly turned away. An almost British sense of propriety and discretion. When he met us at the portico, he showed no surprise that I was sitting in the front seat of the station wagon while Mr. Hill drove. He led us inside and asked Mr. Hill to wait downstairs.
The elevator slows to a halt on the second floor. The door slides open.
In the hall stands Mamie Eisenhower, her crisp smile and shirtwaist, curled bangs pulled forward and flattened, a noose of pearls. I’ve heard that Mamie calls me “that college girl.”
Mr. West steps forward.
“Mrs. Kennedy,” he announces. I wait a moment for the older woman to step toward me, but she doesn’t. Mamie only extends her hand, forcing me to take the step to bridge the distance between us. Ninety minutes later when the visit ends, I’m exhausted. The pain flares where my stitches are, those muscles still so weak. The wheelchair we requested never appeared. Later, I will learn Mamie instructed Mr. West not to offer it unless I asked.
Stepping out into the sharp cold day where Clint is waiting with the car, I feel the fresh wind against my face as a white pop of flashbulbs bursts in the shadow of the portico.
We are in Palm Beach for Christmas. I tell Jack I’ve been thinking about a slightly different plan for the White House.
He’s reading a briefing packet. He glances up.
“Different how?”
“The executive mansion is only borrowed by the president. It belongs to all Americans. It should be a living museum of the country’s past. When I walked through last week, there were rooms painted seasick green. There’s no sense of history or beauty.”
We are in the bedroom, the French doors open onto the little balcony, the cooler breeze, the sky.
“You’ll have fifty thousand dollars to redecorate,” Jack says.
“Redecorate is a flimsy word,” I say. “What I’m thinking about is more of a restoration.” I shift in bed, push off the quilt. “This isn’t about me, Jack, my tastes or what I want. It’s about the country, and what we’ve never quite had. We have no myths, no heroes.”
He sets the briefing packet down. “We do have heroes,” he says, “and I am pretty sure we can’t afford whatever you’re envisioning.”
“Well, you don’t exactly know that yet.”
“I’ll make a bet.”
I pause, then, “You’re going to need me to do something with my time, Jack, so I’m not always hanging on you.”
“There will be plenty to do.”
“I don’t mean ninety-nine cups of tea with some other national leader’s wife.”
He laughs. “We’re not buying Jeffersonian antiques.” He picks up the briefing packet.
“Jack, don’t worry. We can solicit donations or fundraise to pursue things we don’t have.”
“Pursue as in purchase?”
“Monroe ordered pieces from Paris.”
“The White House had burned to the ground.”
“Why don’t I just give it a try for a month or so,” I say. “Maybe the idea will flop, and we can move on.”
He looks at me, a flash of uncertainty, but I can see he is intrigued, and for the moment I have won.
I’m the last to leave Palm Beach. It’s like watching a season fall away. I spend days alone with the children on the property caged by tall hedges, palms, bougainvillea.
“It’s lovely here,” I say to Joe one afternoon as we sit by the pool. “And quiet now. The day before Jack left, I walked out of the bathroom to find Pierre Salinger holding a press conference in my bedroom.”
Joe laughs.
“It’s going to be a fishbowl life,” I say, “isn’t it?”
“Just stand by Jack.”
“I’m afraid I’ll have to request an appointment whenever I want to see him.”
“Some days it might be like that. But he needs you.”
The water in the pool is still. The faintest wind ripples the surface. The children will stay on in Palm Beach when I fly north for the inauguration. Their rooms in the Residence aren’t ready, there’s still too much chaos. I don’t want to bring them into that, at the same time I can’t imagine leaving them. John, six weeks old, is so tiny, too fragile, he isn’t sleeping well.
Joe looks at me over those wire rims, his blue eyes penetrating.
“This is a great thing, Jackie.”
“I know. The long twilight struggle, the new frontier, a new generation of leadership. I’ve read the inaugural draft. ‘Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate.’ I love it, Joe. It’s thrilling. A great thing.”
“I still think that speech is too short,” Joe says.
I smile. “Jack doesn’t want anyone to think he’s a windbag.”
Joe laughs again. For him, I know, this is a dream come true. What is it, though, for Jack? For me? And what will I bring to those people we see, who turn out with their shining faces and their hope? I’ve been asked by Jack’s team to gather details of my life into a brief story they can share. I’ve collected photographs, jotted down notes. I wrote passages about my childhood, my parents, even their divorce. I wrote about meeting Jack, about our marriage, and the words I used imply an intimacy between us that is not exactly there but could be. The facts are intact, but I’ve washed the truth. People need a story. I understand that. Just as they need something to believe in.
One request intrigued me. A writer I know was assigned a piece for Look, “What You Don’t Know about Kennedy.” He wrote asking for any thoughts I might share. I wrote back, I’d describe Jack as rather like me, in that his life is an iceberg. The public life is above the water— the private life—is submerged…. At the close of the letter, I told him he could use the words I wrote, but with no attribution to me. It did strike me as I sealed the letter that I might not have been so honest about that split between our public and private selves if Jack was here. Somehow the distance made it possible to admit the more complicated terrain that still exists between us.
When I leave Palm Beach, a crowd has gathered on Southern Boulevard as we approach the airport. We pull to the curb at the terminal. I empty my face and step out. I turn and wave. I let my focus blur, as I’m learning to do whenever I feel that leveling fear and flood, taming a rush of people into a softer featureless shape, a darker cutout against the pure blinding bright of Florida sky.
They’ve come this time not for Jack but for me. As I move closer, a face in the crowd catches my eye, a woman roughly my age, light-brown hair pulled sharply back, a dust of freckles. Our eyes meet, and I feel a splitting ache, that wrench of leaving my children behind. I look at that woman in the crowd. She’s a mother. I can feel it. Even without seeing a child near her, I know. I smile at her. She smiles back.
I board the plane. My new press secretary, Pam Turnure, is with me, along with the Secret Service men, who call me Lace. My code name. Jack is Lancer; Caroline, Lyric; John, Lark. As those men walk up and down the cabin aisle with their guns, I look through the plane window to the crowd below, scanning the faces, marking the features I can make out from that distance. I am looking for that woman, that mother, her smile, the flash of recognition between us. I look for her knowing I won’t find her, or see her, again.