Jackie, page 14
It was a Greek, Heraclitus, who insisted that change is the fundamental impulse of the universe. Our souls are like the stars and moon, turning bowls of fire.
Later that evening, in the car on our way to dinner, Jack asks me, “Well, how did I do?” It takes me a moment to realize he’s referring to Churchill.
“I think he thought you were the waiter,” I say.
He sighs. I slip my fingers through his.
“It’s just too late, Jack,” I say. “You met him too late. That’s all.”
* * *
—
But I remember that night. Even after we are home, back in the blustery chaos of Jack’s Senate reelection campaign, I remember the exotic otherworldliness of the Christina. The heady sensation I felt watching that evening play out. The contradiction of Onassis. Not attractive. To me, something almost repulsive about him, the base sense of humor, gargoylish features. At the same time, I felt galvanized by him and his world. Not the blatant wealth; it was more than that—something inexorable, visceral, so alive that everyone else, even Churchill, even Jack, seemed colorless. Only he was real.
* * *
—
Years later, when I see Onassis again, he’ll allude to that night.
“It was ten years ago this month, the first time I saw you,” he says.
“Yes.”
“You were aloof. Why aloof?”
“I wasn’t sure I liked you.”
“You wanted to stay for dinner.”
“I was curious.”
“You liked the Christina.”
“It was a little bright.”
“You mean gaudy.”
“I said bright.”
“You liked the story I told.”
“I’ve always loved stories.”
“That night we met, I noticed the unusual way you have of making men look at you.”
I smile.
“And I noticed that Kennedy had no idea.”
Something snaps between us.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I shouldn’t have said that.”
But the moment is severed, and I don’t answer.
Fall 1958
Things begin to shift in the Senate campaign. The same men gather in our living room—cigarette butts in the ashtrays, papers on the table, glasses of juice, and coffee mugs. But this year feels different. This run-of-the-mill reelection race is only a prelude to the real campaign. And Jack is different—his ambition sharper, not just on the surface but melding into the ideals that drive him. I can feel it in how he talks, thinks, listens.
They want me to go with him to Omaha in September, where he’ll speak at a gathering for the Democratic Party. They send Bobby to ask me.
“I’ve always dreamed of spending my fifth wedding anniversary in Nebraska.”
“You’ll enjoy it, Jackie.”
“Maybe for you, I’ll go.”
* * *
—
The crowd in Omaha is double the size they anticipate.
“Twice as big with Jackie here than if you were alone,” Kenny O’Donnell says to Jack on the plane home.
“That true?” Jack says.
“Yep.”
“Well, for Pete’s sake, don’t tell her,” Jack says, and when I glance up, he’s looking at me, that little look. He smiles.
We’ve been happy. It startles me to realize this. Some new brightness has slid between the careful walls I’d constructed to keep my heart safe.
* * *
—
I take a few more trips with him that fall, but I don’t like to be away from Caroline. It’s a pull in my body, missing her, her voice, smell, those slight hands on my neck, long hours with her in the warm autumn sun on the lawn.
His team asks me to do another campy show for television, At Home with the Kennedys. A living room shoot in Hyannis Port. Rose and I sit together. She asks how I’ve liked campaigning.
“So much,” I say brightly, the good wife, my hands in my lap. “Jack and I have been traveling through the state, trying to meet as many people as we can….”
“Well, congratulations, Jackie,” says Rose in her dry laryngeal voice, “and congratulations to Jack that he found a wife who has so enjoyed the campaign.”
It’s hard not to laugh, but I force the right smile as the producer hits the cue and Jack appears out of thin air; he stands behind us in the living room, under the painting of a raging sea. The young shining hero, with that devastating smile, he thanks every woman across the state for joining his family on TV. He reminds them to cast their ballots on November 4.
And they do. Seventy-three percent of the vote in Massachusetts goes for Jack.
“I think we can call that a landslide,” I say.
* * *
…
That winter of 1959, Lee quietly slips out of her marriage to Michael Canfield and marries the Polish count, Stas Radziwill. Three months pregnant, Lee is still so tiny, just the slightest bob in her shape under the simple white dress she wears for her wedding.
As we leave the church, I say to Jack, “Lee told me once she thought it was worth getting married just to have your own house.”
“Now she has three.”
I laugh. We continue down the steps.
The days turn toward spring. I set up an inflatable pool in our backyard in Georgetown and fill it with the garden hose. Caroline, eighteen months old, splashes for hours, crawling along the rippled plastic bottom, pretending to swim. We have picnic lunches together and afternoon “tea and cakes” in the shade, the small yard drenched in sunlight. I take her for long walks on the towpath and to Rose Park to play on the swings. Sometimes when I check on her under the stroller hood, I notice she is not asleep, her small face alert, watching the edges of the world from her blanket.
“How long have you been awake, little one? Such a wise little watcher, you.”
Her small hands reach from inside the carriage, fingertips warm on my face. No matter how many times it happens, I feel that same flood of joy. “You’re my heart, soul, sky,” I say, unclipping the safety straps from her slight body, lifting her out.
Almost every afternoon, Caroline looks up at me and says, “Daddy?”
“Yes, darling, he’ll be home soon.”
I’ve learned to use that word whether soon is tomorrow or later that week.
“Soon,” Caroline says, turning the word over. Then she looks past me, or out the window, toward the blue plunge of the sky at the top of the trees.
“Soon.”
* * *
—
Before I leave with her for Hyannis Port, where we’ll spend the summer, I take one more short campaign trip with Jack, to Yakima, Washington. Just before he’s due onstage, he leans over to me. “Maybe I’ll close with Tennyson, Jackie. What do you think?”
“You should.”
“Give me those lines from ‘Ulysses,’ the ones that begin Come, my friends….”
He passes his speech to me and, in the white space at the bottom, I write down the lines from that poem, one I used to recite for my grandfather Bouvier on our Wednesdays as he sat with his cane resting near his chair, wearing his three-piece suit, the twirled waxed ends of the mustache bobbing. I pass the paper back to Jack. He walks to the podium, delivers his speech, and closes with those lines. A surge of applause from the crowd.
“That worked,” he says to me as we’re led offstage. “I think I missed a few words. I was trying not to look down.”
“You missed less than I would have.”
A little smile, almost shy, and he says, “You know that’s not true.”
* * *
—
They’re shaping campaign plans for the presidency. The key players of the inner circle: Joe, Jack, Bobby, the Irish trio, Ted Sorensen. Sorensen is funny—whenever he’s near Jack, he puffs himself up like a boy, but he has an uncanny gift for channeling Jack’s intellect into speeches. Steve Smith, married to Jack’s sister Jean, is put in charge of financing and logistics. Journalist Pierre Salinger is hired to deal with the press. They spend hours pre-thinking obstacles: Jack is only forty-two. Too young, many will contend, to deal with the challenges facing the country. Plus, a Catholic has never been elected president.
“Jack’s not even a good Catholic,” I remark to Joe one afternoon. “And we all know I’m not Bess Truman enough.”
“What do you think of the draft of the biography Jack gave you to read?” Joe says.
Jack steps through the screen door. He sits down next to me.
“It doesn’t do him justice,” I say. “In the first fifty pages, the author describes Jack as quiet, taut, casual as a cash register. And he plays to Jack’s detractors, implying he’s a lightweight, a puppet of his former-ambassador rich daddy.” I smile at Joe. “Johnson will love that.”
Joe has an expression he sometimes gets when I speak my mind.
“And I don’t like that he brings up the Addison’s,” I say.
“That was our suggestion,” Jack says. “It’s going to come out. We want to get ahead of it.”
“But he writes about it like you might not be up to the job.”
Joe laughs. “Why don’t you tell me what you really think?”
On the side table next to my chair is a book Jack’s been reading on Jefferson and the August Life magazine. I’m on the cover: Jackie Kennedy: A front runner’s appealing wife. Jack is there as well but in the background, muted in a way he never is in life. I don’t like the photograph. My face looks too polished, almost smug. But there’s another in the interior pages that I love, of me in the surf with Caroline. I’m in my clothes, my pants rolled up as I swing her around. We’re both soaked. I barely remember the film crew shooting it, but I remember the moment itself—the cold of the sea and my daughter’s fierce laughter as she shrieked with joy, the light ballast of her body as she flew.
No one really wants that on a magazine cover, though.
“It’s always bad news, Dad,” Jack says, “when she gets quiet and just stares off like that.”
“I think you can win, Jack,” I say. “But we need to focus on what makes you different—your convictions, your vision and ambition, even your youth.” I look at Joe. “And you, I’m afraid, need to be just a nice old man we visit at Thanksgiving and Christmas.”
“I can do that,” he says.
“Overall, though,” I say, “things seem to be going well.”
“Nothing wrong with better,” Joe says.
* * *
—
“Do you really want this, Jack?” I ask after Joe has left and we’re alone on the porch. He’s watching the clouds bank over the ocean. Strange, almost vertical bands of grated light.
“Jack?”
“What?”
“Do you want this?”
“Don’t worry about that biography.”
“I’m asking you a question.”
“It’s the presidency, Jackie. Don’t overthink it.” In the past, that sudden sharper tone might have stopped me. Now I can feel the uncertainty behind it.
“Actually, Jack, I think you need to spend a little more time thinking about it. Because that isn’t in the pages of that manuscript, and it’s not in the world yet either. Give them more of what you believe—this writer and that other man who wants to trot along after you on the campaign trail. Let them in. Decide what you want them to know. And when you go stumping around, no matter what little town you’re in—blue collar, white collar, factory, mining, East Coast, Midwest, South—set aside those two-sentence profiles everyone uses to prep you, because what you need to know is: What’s unique about this town? These people? What do they want, love, care for? What have they lost or sacrificed? What do they grieve, fear, dream?”
Jack
He watches her face as the words leave her. It’s fascinating to him, how words coming out of her mouth, the ideas and passion behind them, awaken her face. They are words she’s already forming into lines she might write down, a dashed-off memo she’ll hand to him. “Just some notes you might want to use for one of your speeches,” she’ll say.
He’s wanted to be there in the midst of that casual alchemy. In the air around her hand and a pencil, her face studying sentences on a page, that short double line between her brows. He can see it as she goes on talking, those lines like a portal. He remembers what he felt once when they were first together, a kind of hunger to track the complex workings of her mind, and when he realized he couldn’t—that, like him, she’d always keep some space of herself apart—something in him wanted to tear the whole architecture down.
The memory comes in a rush. He’s not proud of it—the coldness he showed her, the arguments and small cruelties. The odd satisfaction he used to feel sometimes when he said something dismissive and the words hit, and he watched that strong light in her eyes fade. He doesn’t like remembering this.
* * *
—
“What are you thinking?” she asks.
He smiles at her. “Come on,” he says, standing up. “Let’s go find Caroline and take a walk before the light is gone.”
1960
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.
