Page 53 of Jackie

“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.

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