Page 75 of Jackie

“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.

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