Jackie, page 19
“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.”
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 Château 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 Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna. We can hear the low drone of crowds outside.
“It’s your name they’re chanting,” Khrushchev tells me.
