Page 66 of Jackie

“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.

Thursday, January 19, 1961

The day before the inauguration, snow falls. It layers the streets and trees outside. A blistering wind. It is dark by four. I watch from the window of my bedroom in Georgetown as cars snake through the whiteness, snow falling through their headlights.

As a child, I loved to watch snow fall through light, each flake a soul, emerging for that instant into its own brightness, then falling back into the dark. Beyond the bedroom door, the house is full. It is time.

Eerie, haunting. Those are the words that come to me as the limousine flows through the night streets toward Constitution Hall. Bill Walton is with us. “You’ll float away,” I told Jack. “As soon as we arrive, someone will come and bear you off. Bill can stay with me.”

The three of us sit in the back of the car, snow crushed under the tires. The frost a white dust on the windows, the glass blurred with the inside heat, our bodies and breath. Time slows, like we are moving from the past into the future. I can feel an excitement I’ve not let myself feel—in the dark mystical silence of the car where we sit on this night journey toward the inaugural concert and from there to the inaugural gala. Jack is in his tails. I am in my white gown, a necklace, heavy and cool against my throat, grounding me. And the snow blows everywhere, free in a way I love, as we travel wrapped in the warm isolation of the car, moving through the cold and the dark outside.

I am with Jack, and I can feel him near me, close. Then he turns to Bill Walton and says:

“Turn on the lights so they can see Jackie.”

Part III

I am become a name

—Tennyson, “Ulysses”

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.

—

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