Page 73 of Jackie

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.

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