Page 74 of Jackie

“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.

---