Jackie

Chapter 29

January 20, 1961, Inauguration Day

The old poet steps up to the podium in the piercing wind and falters. His hand brushes his eyes. The winter sun is blinding, light trapped in the edges of ice, air sparkling, so sharp it feels cruel, as he stumbles through the first lines of the poem, trying to read off the paper in his hands.

Lyndon Johnson stands up to help him, moving to shield the sun with his broad shoulders and top hat. The glare still too bright, the poet finally gives up. He sets the paper down, closes his eyes, and starts with new lines, a different poem, one he recites from memory.

I feel the bite of the wind through my coat. Robert Frost’s voice is tremulous but strong, and as he comes to the end, Jack steps up. He doesn’t wear a coat. He shakes Frost’s hand and takes the old man’s place on the dais and delivers the address he has worked and reworked. I know the words by heart. We shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and success of liberty. The words flow through my ears, and I let myself go into that inspired bolt of Jack’s voice. The crowd surges like a wave and I let it sweep into me, the thunder of applause and cheers.

As the ceremony ends, I’m shuttled to a room with other women. Coffee, hot cider, a glass of sherry someone has pressed into my hand. I catch sight of Jack and push through to him. I touch his cheek, and it is just the two of us. I love you, he says. I love you. Tears in his eyes, he looks down at me. We’re here, Jackie, he says. Then the cameras flash, and when my eyes adjust, he is gone again, drawn away by someone who has his arm, his ear. I feel it all that day, how he belongs now to something larger than either of us can grasp—a vision, a mission, an ideal. I am part of that, and from now on I will share him with the world. It isn’t only him they need; it’s the dream he’s promised. On that searing-cold day, minutes flash by. Faces, bodies. Everything seems to glisten and shine. I smile, answer questions, shake hands. After a while I am brought to him again, and to see his face there, so beautiful and free, lifts me. He reaches for my hand and holds it tightly as we board an open car and ride through the winter city to the White House and the reviewing stand, where his father waits with his brothers, my mother, my sister. They are all there. As we draw up, Joe tips his hat, and at the same time, Jack stands, doffing his to Joe.

I make it through two of the inaugural balls before I beg off and return to the White House.

The chief usher, Mr. West, meets me at the door. There’s nothing I can read in his face, no opinion or disdain for my fatigue or weakness, no compassion either. The complete lack of expression shoots a warmth through me—gratitude as I realize he sees everything, judges nothing. I almost confide in him then that, on the ride back, it struck me I’d never be able to undo the whole length of tiny pearled buttons down the back of my dress, and since Provi, my assistant, has already gone home to her sons, perhaps I will have to sleep in my dress like some beached mermaid, but the joke of it feels like too much to explain, so I just lean a bit on Mr. West’s arm and he escorts me in silence. At the Queens’ Bedroom, he turns the knob and holds the door open, and I see then that he has asked a young woman to stay, to help me with the dress or anything else I might need.

I turn to thank him, but he’s already closing the door behind him.

It’s after three when Jack wakes me up and pulls me down the hall in a sort of hobbling waltz to the Lincoln Bedroom. He hurls onto the bed.

“We are sleeping here!” he cries. “Here!”

We stay there for the rest of that night, and in the morning we talk in bed with the extra pillows kicked onto the floor, the blankets drawn up around our chins, sunlight streaming in.

Boxes of our things fill the rooms.

He carries photographs of me and the children from the Residence to the Oval Office, which begins to assume the design of a captain’s quarters: ship models, paintings of rocky coasts, a plaque engraved with the mariner’s prayer. His bits of scrimshaw are set around the room.

The day after we move in, I walk into his office and ask Dave Powers to please leave. When we’re alone, I ask Jack if it’s true what my chief of staff, Tish Baldridge, just told me, that three days before the inauguration someone in Jack’s camp called up Sammy Davis, Jr., and disinvited him and May Britt.

“I told you he wasn’t going to perform,” Jack says.

“You didn’t say he was asked not to.”

“We barely won this election.”

“You did win, and he supported you.”

There’s an uncertain look on his face, and I realize that whether or not he knew in advance it was going to be done, he doesn’t feel good about it.

“We still need the South, Jackie.”

“That man campaigned for you because you asked him to.”

“Then he went and married that woman.”

“A woman he loves.”

“Who’s white when he isn’t.”

I look at him for a long moment.

Later that afternoon—almost five—I’m in the Residence with Tish and Pam when the folded note arrives.

Jackie,

Let’s declare war on the toilet paper.

Where is it?

I smile. His olive branch. He might not apologize for what happened to Sammy Davis, Jr., and May Britt, but the note is his way of saying he heard what I said.

I continue working, going through boxes, unpacking and sorting, until I come across an unframed photograph in a box from the Georgetown house. The two of us at the Hyannis airport. I don’t remember the photograph being taken, but I remember the moment. In the picture, my back is to the camera, Jack is leaning in to kiss me goodbye, an awkward unclaimed intimacy between us, captured in those nuanced dark shapes against the white sky behind.

For those first weeks, the halls ring with the sounds of hammering, smells of paint and linseed oil. Though the house isn’t ready for them yet, the children are the focus of my days. I miss them desperately, their skin, their smells, Caroline’s voice and laughter, John’s sweet sleepy face and how his hands grip and uncurl. He’s still so fragile.

“I want my children to have a routine,” I tell Pam as we unpack Caroline’s books and toys, “a sense of an ordinary life outside the spotlight and fairy tale. Do you think that’s possible? To construct a normal childhood for them?”

“It seems to me,” Pam says quietly, “you can build whatever you want.”

“I’d like to keep my station wagon. I don’t want to always drive around in one of those long black cars.”

She smiles.

“And when Tish is pushing me to do more, I’d love it if you’d help find people who can stand in for me, so I can take the children on small trips to the circus or the theater. I’ll tell Tish before I go, so she won’t take it out on you.”

Pam is unwrapping a lamp when Mr. West walks in with a short list of questions. Some art has arrived, he says, and would I like the paintings hung before dinner?

“Also, Mrs. Kennedy, we are going to order the playground set and the treehouse.”

“Thank you, Mr. West. Let’s have those placed near the president’s office, so he can see the children play.”

He makes a note on the list. “You’ve also added here a trampoline?” he says, not even an eyebrow raised, as if such a request comes with every change in administration.

“Yes, Mr. West. Thank you. Full size, I should have mentioned, and please have that placed a distance from the swing set.”

“But it is for the children?”

“Oh no, Mr. West. They can use it if they’re supervised, but, no, the trampoline is for me.”

I’ve hired a designer, Sister Parish, to help me with the family quarters. Ideally, I explain, we’ll use what we have and buy as little as possible. I want to keep the funds we’ve been allocated for the restoration of the public rooms. But things don’t go as planned and, within weeks, the budget is spent. We scour the boarded-up rooms and the cellar for antiques. Sister Parish always wears a dark dress with a tremendous white spread collar, while I dress in jeans, sneakers, and an old sweater. They nickname me “Queen of the Rummage Sales.” We find a bust of George Washington in a bathroom sink. In the unused carpenter’s shop, we find some old statuary and a seventeenth-century table that once served as a sawhorse. I crawl under the table. “Get down here with me, Mr. Hill,” I say to Clint. “See how this is carved?” I say, running my fingers down the wooden leg. “This level of craftsmanship would never happen today. Imagine the time it took. This detail is by hand.”

Organizing things as well as Field Marshal Rommel ever did.That’s how I describe it to Bill Walton. I invite him to the Residence for lunch. I tell him I’m doing what Joe Alsop suggested back in August, in a letter he wrote about art and power.

“Speaking of Alsop,” Bill says. “At a party last week, I overheard him call Jack ‘Mr. Facing Two Ways.’?”

I don’t want to think it’s funny, but when Bill gives me a quizzical look, head slightly cocked, I laugh.

“It can be a vicious little town,” I say. “Just another reason to keep my circle small. You, of course. Because I trust you forever. Tony and Ben, and Bunny Mellon, whom I’ve come to adore. We’ve asked Bunny to redesign the White House gardens. And I want her to teach me how to make the sort of arrangements she has everywhere in her house—freesia and tulips in baskets that look like Dutch paintings. I love Bunny’s house.”

“It’s not too shabby here,” Bill says.

“And the other thing so intriguing about Bunny,” I say, “is that, along with design, she’s perfected privacy to high art. She minds her own life and walks around with that absolutely lovely smile, saying nothing. I need to learn how to do that.”

Jack is restless in those early weeks. He’s assembled his cabinet and named Bobby attorney general, which creates a stir. Bobby’s only thirty-five, the youngest AG since 1814, and he doesn’t have the legal experience one would expect for the role.

“I need him in there with me,” Jack says.

In those weeks, he emerges from long classified briefings looking worn out. He paces the West Wing, the executive offices. Someone finds him in the mailroom, I hear, just standing there with a letter opener, opening unsorted mail. I ask him about it when he comes home to the Residence that evening. He shrugs.

“Just trying to figure things out. Hey, let me show you this.” He digs into his briefcase and draws out a letter from John Steinbeck.

“You found this in the mail room?” I ask.

He smiles. “No. But it’s nice. His response to my inaugural.” He hands me the letter, I sit down and read it. Steinbeck has written how a nation might be shaped by its statesmen and military but is often remembered for its artists. He writes how grateful he feels to Jack for capturing it.

“Excellently written…” I read aloud, “that magic undertone of truth.” I set the letter down. “I love this, Jack.”

“Let’s replace all the generals with artists.” He toys with an empty glass on the table, turning it over like there’s something in it he is looking for, and I think about how glass isn’t brittle at all but solvent, fluid, when it meets the right heat.

“What’s wrong?” I ask.

“Communism. Vietnam. The disintegration I’ve inherited.”

“You’ve known all of that.”

“And Cuba. A plan developed by Eisenhower and his CIA. They want me to back a strike against Castro eight weeks from now. Exiled Cuban leaders trained by our military.”

“For what?”

“To incite a civilian uprising.”

“What about the UN?”

“There’s that.”

“Your address was about peace and cooperation, global understanding. Overthrowing another government doesn’t quite align.”

“The Cubans want this,” he says. “They’re depending on it.”

“What does Adlai think? He’s your UN ambassador.”

“Adlai doesn’t know.”

“He doesn’t know what he thinks, or he doesn’t know?”

He just looks at me. They haven’t told Adlai Stevenson.

By early February, Caroline’s room and the nursery are finished. The solarium on the third floor has been turned into a schoolroom. I’ve arranged for Caroline’s playgroup to move to the White House. Some of the mothers, I tell Jack, are concerned. He’s come home for lunch and a rest.

“Their kids will never be safer than when they’re here,” he says.

“I’ve told them that, and now I’m trying to woo them with guinea pigs.”

“Good,” he says.

I look past him to the molding by the bed table, studying it.

“You’re going to need to be discreet, Jack. Here. You know that, don’t you?”

“Don’t mix that up with the children.” His voice is sharp.

I look at him then. “That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

“I’ve got to get back to work.” He reaches for his watch.

John and Caroline are flying in from Palm Beach. As we drive to the airport, Jack tells me the press will expect photographs.

“Of course,” I say. “That will be fine. We can get on the plane and get them ready.”

He smiles. “You mean you’ll wrap the baby in so many blankets they can’t see his face?”

“It is winter.”

The White House gardeners have built a massive snowman for Caroline—twice her size, with a panama hat, a carrot nose, a red ribbon bow tie. She flies out of the car and pokes at the coal buttons at its portly waist, then looks back at me. Her hair has grown longer in the last weeks, past her shoulders now, stripped lighter by the Florida sun. So beautiful, her shy, thrilled smile.

Jack asks me to go for a walk that afternoon. He throws a stick for the dog. Charlie bounds away from us, tripping on a crust of deep snow.

“There’s a lunch on Friday,” he says. “I’d like you to be there with me.”

“I was planning to take the children to Glen Ora Friday, but that’s fine, we can leave afterward.”

“Is the house finished?”

“Almost.”

“It’s just a rental, Jackie. Whatever you do there has to be undone before we move out.”

I clap for the dog, who bounds back, the stick in his mouth, muzzle caked in snow.

“What is it, Jack?” I say. “What’s bothering you?”

“Cuba.” He shakes his head. “And I can’t talk about it.”

The rambling mansion is just visible in the dusk as we fly in. John is on my lap, Caroline beside me.

“Look,” I say, pointing through the helicopter window. “That’s Glen Ora.”

Stone terraces, stucco walls, old shutters painted white. Our family place away. The helicopter touches down in a cleared field. It’s dark by the time we walk into the house. I squeeze Caroline’s hand.

High-ceilinged rooms, a library, a large kitchen, five bedrooms upstairs. Most of the furniture is from our home in Georgetown.

“We’ll ride every morning we are here,” I say.

“Tomorrow?” Caroline asks.

Jack flies in on Saturday, lugging his battered briefcase full of memos, marked Urgent.

It comes up again and again: Cuba. He shares some of the briefs and memos with me. One from Arthur Schlesinger, the tone startling as he argues that, as the president’s first major foreign-policy initiative, an engagement in Cuba could dissipate all the extraordinary good will which has been rising toward the New Administration…

“Surprising, coming from Arthur,” I say. “He reveres you.”

“Not in this case.”

“How will you respond?”

“If it succeeds, I won’t have to.”

In March, Lee flies from London to New York. I meet her for dinner and a play.

“You must have things in Washington you’re supposed to be doing, Jacks,” she says.

“There’s some delegating. But look on the bright side, Lee—I didn’t delegate you.”

“Jack doesn’t mind you aren’t there?”

I feel a light flash of anger. My sister knows better.

“He’d rather have me away and happy than underfoot and not.”

I don’t tell Lee about the rumors of the naked swimming parties in the pool while I am away for the weekend in Glen Ora or the scent of other women I sometimes notice on his clothes. As long as I don’t have to watch it play out right in front of me. He’s that kind of man, like my father. I tell myself that. I knew it going in. It means nothing. I am fine.

“When you’re back in Europe, Lee, I’d like your help. I’ve hired a designer for the White House who I have to pretend doesn’t exist.”

“Why?”

“Because he’s French. Stéphane Boudin. We will focus on American history, American design, but Stéphane has a truly unique talent, and if there’s an antique on your side of the Atlantic he recommends, I’ll need you to go see it for me. You can be my eyes.”

It’s the kind of project my sister will love. The conversation takes off, away from Jack.

I return to Washington for a state dinner and two other events, then the children and I fly to Palm Beach. Jack joins us for Easter. We stay with Joe, who insists Jack sit at the head of the table. When Jack refuses, his father’s fist comes down. “You’re the president now. That’s where you’ll sit.”

I almost point out that since Jack is president, he should be able to sit where he likes.

After dinner, when it’s just the three of us, Jack talks more openly about Cuba and a new proposed plan. The men, Cuban exiles covertly trained by the American military, will land at a different beach farther up the coast, near an inlet, the Bay of Pigs. The goal is to spark an organized resistance against Castro’s regime.

“They want air cover for the landing,” Jack says. “A B-52 strike to take out Castro’s air force.”

“Who is ‘they’?” Joe asks.

“CIA, the joint chiefs.”

“Then do it.”

Jack shakes his head. “Air strikes are noisy. The plan should be strong enough to succeed without them.”

“I disagree,” says Joe. “If it succeeds, it’s a huge win. You show the world, including Khrushchev, what you’re made of.”

“And if it doesn’t?” I say.

Joe looks at me, his eyes cool.

I stand up. “Well, that’s my cue to go and be a good mother.”

Joe laughs and says, “I’m sure you haven’t finished putting in your two cents.”

I smile back. “My two cents, Joe, will never equal your ten.”

Jack is quiet on the flight back to Washington, but his mind seems lighter, like the sun and the warmth have blown the dust off things. He sits in the row across from me, alone.

“You’ve decided, haven’t you?” I say as we begin our descent.

When we land, he leaves for a meeting in the West Wing, and the children and I go back to the Residence. It’s late by the time he comes home for dinner. I don’t have to ask what decision he’s made. I can read it in his face. Later, as we lie in bed, the air is full with what we don’t say. We listen to low strains of music playing on the Victrola. Ella Fitzgerald. When he falls asleep, I slip out of bed; the floor feels strangely cold under my feet as I cross the room, through the open door into the dressing room. As I lift the needle off the record, I know somehow in that silence he is making a mistake.

The following afternoon, Jack brings the British prime minister, Harold Macmillan, to the Residence to meet me. I’ve skimmed his briefing papers:

…shot through with Victorian languor…He walks with a slow, stiff shuffle that might cause some to think him incapable of serious action, but in fact he is masterful, dominating, shrewd—able to spring onto his toes like a ballet dancer.

Macmillan is tall, gray hair swept back, a high forehead, and an unruly mustache. His eyes droop, but he seems aged and wise, with a kind of shattering dignity, like an old tree. I like him immediately. I’ve heard rumors about his marriage—his wife and a torrid affair she kept up for years with a man named Boothby.

I mix cocktails for Jack and Macmillan as they pick up the conversation they began a few weeks ago when they met in Key West, about Laos, the political crisis there, and whether or not America should intervene.

I notice Jack doesn’t mention Cuba. I can feel he wants to. If Macmillan is advising against military intervention in Laos, what would his thoughts be on Cuba?

Before Macmillan leaves, I invite him to visit us at Glen Ora. Jack looks surprised.

On Wednesday, April 12, during a press conference, a reporter asks Jack, “Mr. President, have you reached a decision on how far this country will be willing to go in helping an anti-Castro uprising or invasion of Cuba?”

“There will not, under any conditions, be an intervention in Cuba. This government will do everything it possibly can to make sure there are no Americans involved in any actions in Cuba.”

Friday morning, he asks if I’ll take another walk with him. A brilliant morning. The lawns stretch away from us—the light sharp, the sky that steep, untampered blue. We walk down to the pond.

“I have to approve or cancel air strikes in Cuba by noon,” he says. “An hour from now.”

“And?”

“I don’t know.” He picks up a stone, brushes off the wet dirt, and turns it in his hand.

“Something else,” he says. “That Russian’s space flight. I’ve called a meeting later today. Khrushchev’s too far ahead. We have to catch up.”

It’s been all over the news. Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin—the first human being to orbit the earth—was fired off in a Vostok rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Shortly after Gagarin landed, Khrushchev issued a statement proclaiming Russia’s lead in the space race.

“You sent a telegram to Khrushchev, didn’t you, Jack? Congratulating him and expressing a desire to share resources, research.”

“I sent it.” That’s all he says. The American space program hadn’t been a priority. Three years ago, after Sputnik, Eisenhower established an organization called NASA to map strategies that might close the so-called “missile gap.” Until now, though, there’d been no push, no sense of urgency. Gagarin’s flight—and the explosion of press around it—has changed that.

“I have to get back,” he says. “I need to decide on the air strikes.”

“You’ll make the right decision.”

I feel a heaviness inside him as we cross the lawn. I reach for his hand.

He heads toward the office. I head to the Residence. At the end of the hall, I look back. He isn’t there. I knew he would have already turned the corner, but I look for him anyway. I walk upstairs and pack reports I’ll read over the weekend to prepare for next week’s visit from the Greek prime minister. I throw in a copy of Edith Hamilton’s book The Greek Way.

Jack flies to us in Glen Ora the next day. The helicopter touches down just before lunch. I walk out to meet him and know from his face things haven’t gone well.

It all looked on track at first, he tells me, but by 11, the UN was involved.

“Then Adlai will handle it,” I say.

“He still doesn’t know. He can’t know and, at the same time, deny U.S. involvement.”

I stand still for a moment, light currents of air shifting through my skull. Jack has allowed the United States to back a covert military invasion, and his UN ambassador hasn’t been told.

“What’s for lunch?” he says.

“Hamburgers,” I say slowly.

“Good. Let’s eat, then we’ll take a drive over to the steeplechase races.”

“Why did you come here today, Jack? Not that I don’t want you here, but it seems like you’d be able to handle things better from Washington.” We’ve almost reached the house.

“It’s out of my hands, Jackie.” His jaw is set. “I’m not going to stay and oversee something the United States isn’t involved with.”

He doesn’t last at the steeplechase. When I come back to Glen Ora, I find him whacking golf balls in the back pasture. Strong, hard strikes. He aims for the horizon without looking at it; he just sets the next ball down on the tee.

Sunday afternoon, the phone rings.

“I’m not signed onto this,” he says harshly into the receiver. He hangs up.

“Who was that?” I ask. He shakes his head and walks to the bureau. He picks up a tie clip, then puts it down and leaves the room. I follow him. He walks into the kitchen and sits at the table. He looks at me for a moment, then away.

“We’re in it,” he says. “Rusk told me to call off the second round of air strikes. The generals object. How can men land without air cover?” He is asking the empty room, not me. I sit down at the table with him.

“I have to get back early tomorrow,” he says ten minutes later, out of nowhere.

“We’ll leave first thing,” I say.

The phone shatters the dark at half past four Monday morning. It’s the secretary of state, Dean Rusk, again. Then the deputy CIA director, General Cabell, is on the phone. He’d gone to Rusk, begging for air cover.

Jack hangs up and just sits there, on the edge of the bed.

By nine o’clock when we reach the White House, two American ships transporting men and supplies have been sunk by Castro’s planes. By three that afternoon, Castro’s tanks are on the beach. They’ve surrounded the exiles.

I find a sheet of paper with his notes on his desk.

Only the one word staggered again and again throughout, circled.

Decision.

Decision.

Decision.

When he comes home hours later from the Cabinet Room, he barely meets my eyes. He touches Caroline’s head; his fingers graze her hair. He kisses John, then slips past them and goes into the bedroom.

“We’ll be right back,” I tell the children. I follow him into the bedroom, closing the door behind us. He sits with his head in his hands. He is crying. He tells me the air raids failed—too late, it all failed, a devastating rout. The U.S.-trained Cuban exiles were trapped on the beach. Hundreds of them, surrounded by twenty thousand of Castro’s troops.

“Those were men,” he says. “I sent them off with my promise and I knew in my gut it might be the wrong call, but I kept telling myself to trust Eisenhower’s plan, trust his generals. The CIA organized this. They said the invasion would spark a coup, but there was nothing. A disaster. You can’t half-do a thing like this and have it end well.

“Dulles wore his goddamn bedroom slippers,” he tells me. The CIA director just sat there in the Cabinet Room, puffing away on his pipe, as he went through the list of every damn thing that had gone off the rails, quietly blaming the defeat on Jack’s refusal to approve the air strikes and on soft-pedal political compromises. All through that long awful day, news filtered in. The brigade of Cuban exiled leaders trapped, support trucks burned, as Castro’s tanks spread out, took over the beaches where the men still alive had fled.

I sit down beside him and say his name. In his face, humiliation and a bewildered rage.

“I never wanted this,” he says.

“Cuba?”

“Any of it.”

That night, I hold his arm as we descend the stairs to the Congressional Reception in the East Room. No one knows yet. He is in white tie and tails, and we dance to “Mr. Wonderful,” played by the Marine Corps band. His smile is crisp, his fingers tight against my waist. At the edge of the dance floor, Dean Rusk approaches Lyndon and whispers something. Lyndon’s eyes shift to Jack. They’re about to summon him. I see it happen a moment before Lyndon steps onto the dance floor.

I attend a tea the next day for three hundred women, the wives of newspaper editors. When it’s over, I go to find Bobby. He’s down the hall from the Oval Office, standing alone with a cup of coffee.

“Tell me everything,” I say.

“The thing turned sour in a way you can’t believe, Jackie. Men shot like dogs. Hundreds captured. We only got twenty-six out.”

Bobby blames Dulles. He blames the CIA leaders Jack inherited from Eisenhower. The plan Jack got, he says, was full of holes. Doomed to fail. Eisenhower’s men claim it wasn’t, since air strikes were in the original plan. They’re already chirping that the defeat was because politicians pared away too much for the plan to succeed. But they are the ones who bungled it. And now they refuse to acknowledge their part. There was a leak. The Soviets knew about the invasion. The CIA knew the Soviets knew and still gave Jack the green light.

“What choice did he have, Jackie? If he hadn’t moved forward, they would have called him a coward.” Bobby’s face is tight as he tells me about the message from the brigade commander that came in after midnight. Desperate. Out of ammo. Will you back us or not? Low jet cover. Can you give us just this? Jack ordered more air support then, opposing Rusk, and, as they waited for the outcome, he went outside at 3:00 a.m. to walk the grounds alone.

“Stay close to him, Jackie,” Bobby says.

“He sent a message this morning telling me to take the children to Glen Ora.”

Bobby’s eyes pause on my face. “Then that’s what you do. If that’s what he wrote, it means he wants you there so he can leave all this and go to you.”

Jack arrives the next day. He’s canceled a scheduled trip on a naval aircraft carrier. Half an hour after landing at Glen Ora, he takes his golf clubs and goes out to chip balls. Morose. Chip. Ball after ball to the pasture. Chip.

“Those sons of bitches with all the fruit salad just sat there nodding, saying it would work.”

Chip.

“How could I have been so stupid?”

“You couldn’t have known, Jack.”

He doesn’t answer.

Chip.

“How could I have made this mistake?”

Thursday, April 20, the failed mission hits the headlines. Two U.S. citizens are executed in Cuba, over one hundred of the exiles killed. Castro crows the invasion was crushed.

“It’s only a matter of time,” Jack says to me that morning in the Residence, turning the paper facedown.

“Before what?”

“I’m drawn and quartered.”

Even when he smiles, the rage is there. He’s furious with his generals, furious with Eisenhower, furious most of all with himself.

“Here’s an unfair truth about war,” I hear him say to Bobby hours later. “Success has a hundred fathers, defeat’s an orphan. Tacitus. This defeat is solely, squarely mine.”

“No,” Bobby says.

The three of us are walking down the hall, heading toward the press room, where Jack is due to speak.

“I need to own it,” Jack says. He stares at the floor as we walk, his stride long.

“Political suicide to take all the heat for this,” Bobby says.

Jack stops. “You’re wrong.” His tone cold. Flushed of emotion. “United States involvement in Cuba is going to be on every front page by the first of next week. I need to take the punch and get this behind me. I need to tell them why this happened and what’s at stake. And if I have to spend the next year climbing out of this dark hole of failure, so be it.”

He starts walking again; Bobby takes a quick step to catch up. Neither of them speaks until we turn the corner. A knot of reporters waits outside the door of the briefing room.

“I’m with you,” Bobby says, his voice quiet. “Make space in that hole for me.”

In the press conference, Jack walks a finer tightrope than I anticipate. Not evasive exactly, but he doesn’t come out and admit the central part the United States played. His face is grave, the lid on his right eye lower than usual. His fingers tap the podium. He is measured with his words as he talks about how the conflict on that tiny island is another chapter in the fight of liberty against tyranny, democracy against communism. He talks about the threat of Castro, aligned with Russian interests, on an island only ninety miles off the Florida coast. He describes the Cuban exiles as refugees, not mercenaries, as Castro’s dubbed them, and he adds, “We face a relentless struggle in every corner of the globe…only the courageous, only the visionary,” will survive.

It’s a good speech, the words clear and strong, and I understand they are words for the long game, but I can feel the rift between those words and his heart.

We’re alone briefly that afternoon.

“I’m sorry, Jack,” I say.

He looks at me, that burning anger alive again in his eyes.

“This is failure, Jackie.” He bites down on the word. “My failure, my fault, and no matter what I have to say publicly, I need to know it was mine.”

I understand then what he’s after. It’s not simply out of guilt. The guilt is there—men died for his mistake and in the belief that he’d protect them. Shot like dogs. Doomed to fail. These words will ring in him for weeks. He let other men force a decision that was his alone to make. He’s not trying to forget or dodge that, though. He understands there’s power in accepting the blame. There’s power and a galvanizing fuel not to make the same mistake again. I recognize that quiet rage. It’s what I saw in him early on, when we were first together, before we were married, when I was falling in love. It’s a source of his grit, his strength, a true and real dimension of him I believe in without always having the words to capture it. Jack hasn’t become who he is because it was easy. Despite the privilege, despite the wealth, despite whatever his father has bought or traded for him and however Faustian those bargains may have been, Jack was first and foremost a disappointment. The sickly one. Weak, injured, bedridden sometimes for months on end. He wasn’t the favorite son. Trapped in a broken body, he knows what it is to be left, crippled, alone. He knows as well how to take that wrenching loss and transform it. And the bold spirit infusing his words, his fight, his fierce sense of meaning and ideals—the spirit that sparks his cool, pragmatic mind—is no unearned thing but rather comes from a concentrate of hardened experience, the doubt and shame and leveling pain he’s had to work through and endure.

He’ll trust none of them now. I know this. He’ll trust only Bobby and his own gut. He’ll let this failure and the consequent rage breathe in him until every trace of starry-eyed chaff has burned away.

He glances at me then, that little look.

“I have an idea, Jackie.”

He sends a memo that afternoon to Lyndon Johnson. Questions.

Do we have a chance of beating the Soviets by putting a laboratory in space, or by a trip around the moon, or by a rocket to go to the moon and back with a man?

Is there any space program which promises dramatic results in which we could win?

He wants to know how much a program like that would cost. What type of rockets could the United States use?

“I know what it’ll look like,” he tells me. “Like I’m trying to shift focus in a shell game I’ve already lost.” He’s getting dressed, choosing between two ties laid on the bed.

“I don’t think it matters what it looks like, Jack,” I say, “if it matters to you and if you give people something to believe in that you believe in. Some new dream.”

He picks up the navy tie with faint diagonal stripes; his eyes meet mine, and in that brief silence I remember words from his inaugural, words he told me he tinkered with until they were his: Let both sides seek to invoke the wonders of science instead of its terrors. Together let us explore the stars….

The children are coming. I hear the light beat of Caroline’s sweet footsteps running toward us down the hall.

On May 5, NASA puts the first American into space, astronaut Alan Shepard. The twenty-five-meter Mercury Redstone rocket, Freedom 7, lifts off from Cape Canaveral and travels 166 miles into space for a fifteen-minute suborbital flight.

“Ninety-three minutes less than the Russians,” Jack remarks when success of the launch floods the headlines, “but at least we’re in the game.”

A thirty-page report lands on his desk. A team at NASA and Secretary of Defense Bob McNamara have compiled five priorities to overhaul the U.S. space program, including satellites, high-propulsion rockets, and a manned lunar mission before the end of the decade.

Jack doesn’t talk about it much at first. When the Bradlees and Bill Walton come for dinner, he asks a few abstract questions. What are their thoughts on U.S. efforts in space? Is the projected cost too steep? What would make it worth the risk?

It’s Lyndon Johnson who gives Jack the nudge he needs. I like Lyndon and his wife, Lady Bird. They’re Southern and sometimes awkward in our world—Johnson stands out with his six-foot-three lumbering frame and blunt, heavy drawl—but he and Lady Bird are kind to me. In the days following Shepard’s flight, Lyndon tells Jack that the moon landing is what they should focus on. The human face of the program, Lyndon calls it, contending if NASA gets “guts enough” to back the plan, it’s not a question of whether but how.

Together, they hammer out a strategy. Lyndon works to gain support of lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, and on May 25, Jack goes before a joint session of Congress in a televised speech to the nation. He argues the case for more spending on an aggressive U.S. space program to surpass the Soviets and land an American on the moon. It’s a speech about freedom and the future, about strong decisive action and the impact of the space adventure “on the minds of men everywhere.”

As I listen to his clear, measured voice, I can still see traces of that burning anger in his eyes. How much I respect what he’s done, how he’s taken the embers of failure and transmuted it to this.

I meet him at the portico when the car brings him back that afternoon.

“You did it,” I say.

He smiles. “It’s a start.”

Dave Powers steps up to us. “I’m afraid we need you,” he says. “News from the South.”

Turning to leave, Jack pulls me in briefly. His lips brush my face. “I’ll find you later, Jackie.”

Inept.That’s the word De Gaulle reportedly uses to describe the American fiasco in Cuba.

Within days, we’re leaving for Europe. First Paris, where Jack will meet with De Gaulle; then Vienna, for a summit with Khrushchev. I was surprised when Jack told me Khrushchev accepted his invitation to discuss a nuclear détente. Then I realized why. Khrushchev scented weakness, prey. He and De Gaulle see Jack as a boy king playing at world leader who can’t keep his own house in line.

“De Gaulle may be an ally,” Jack tells me, “but he’s a bastard.”

“French or not,” I say, “I promise to like him less for your sake.”

Bobby is with us in the Residence. Jack turns to him now.

“While I’m gone, please keep the civil-rights mess off the front page.”

It’s been unfolding: The Freedom Riders and the unending violence in the South. Buses burned. Bricks and lead pipes hurled at passengers stepping off. On Mother’s Day, an all-white mob barricaded a bus carrying Black and white riders in Birmingham. They slashed the tires, smashed windows, threw firebombs in, and blocked the doors so the passengers were trapped.

“Birmingham one day,” Bobby says, “Anniston the next.”

“The local police?” Jack says.

“Late.” Bobby’s eyes are flat. “Every time.”

“All right, deal with it.”

“I need real support. U.S. marshals, the National Guard.”

“Too much fuss. Get it done quietly.”

“It’s not the kind of thing that’s going to keep quiet.”