Killing Kennedy (18 page)

More ominously, Jackie knows about the time his Addison’s almost killed him, fifteen years earlier. She also remembers that, in 1954, a metal plate was inserted into her husband’s spine (to counter a degenerative condition) and a postoperative infection put him in a coma. Once again, John Kennedy was administered the last rites of the Roman Catholic Church. And once again he battled back.

That makes three times—PT-109, Addison’s, and the back surgery—in which JFK defeated death. Jackie Kennedy knows that her man, the president of the United States, is extremely tough. He will persevere. He always has.

But it’s actually the men of ExComm who have the First Lady concerned. Jackie has pressed her ear to the door and eavesdropped on their meetings. She has heard the strain. She believes these men are working to “the peak of human endurance” to save the world.

McGeorge Bundy, too, is quite sure that the ExComm men are all about to crack. They’ve been awake night and day for almost two weeks. These staid men have become emotional because of their extreme exhaustion and have cultivated opinions and petty jealousies that will define their relationships for years to come. One of the most powerful voices among them is that of air force general Curtis E. LeMay, who sees nothing wrong with blowing Cuba off the map.

*   *   *

Then Khrushchev’s message arrives. The letter’s wording is personal, an appeal from one leader to another to do the right thing. The Soviet leader insists that he is not trying to incite nuclear war: “Only lunatics or suicides, who themselves want to perish and to destroy the whole world before they die, could do this,” he writes. The Soviet ruler rambles on, questioning Kennedy’s motivations.

Khrushchev concludes his letter by negotiating with Kennedy in a somewhat confusing fashion. The paragraph that draws the most attention states: If you have not lost your self-control, and sensibly conceive what this might lead to, then, Mr. President, we and you ought not to pull on the ends of the rope in which you have tied the knot of war, because the more the two of us pull, the tighter the knot will be tied. And a moment may come when that knot will be tied so tight that even he who tied it will not have the strength to untie it, and then it will be necessary to cut that knot.”

The ExComm crew does not believe that Khrushchev’s message is the sign of an outright capitulation. But they all agree it’s a start.

For the first time in more than a week, John F. Kennedy feels hopeful. Yet he does not lift the blockade. There are still nearly a dozen Soviet vessels steering directly toward the quarantine line—and these ships show no signs of turning around.

The tension increases the next afternoon, when word reaches JFK that Cuban surface-to-air missiles have shot down an American U-2 spy plane. The pilot, Major Rudolf Anderson Jr., has been killed.

In retaliation, the Joint Chiefs of Staff demand that the president launch U.S. bombers in a massive air strike on Cuba within forty-eight hours, to be followed by an outright invasion.

Worst of all, spy plane photographs now confirm that some of the Soviet missile installations are complete. There are twenty-four medium-range ballistic missile launchpads, and forty-two MRBMs. Once the warheads are attached, the MRBMs can be launched. Each has a range of 1,020 miles—far enough to reach Washington. Soviet diplomats in their Washington, D.C., embassy are so convinced war is imminent that they have begun burning sensitive documents.

The crisis isn’t over. The prospect of nuclear war has never been greater. The United States is so close to invading Cuba that one bad joke in the nonstop series of ExComm meetings is that Bobby Kennedy will soon be mayor of Havana.

White House appointments secretary Kenny O’Donnell sums up the mood best, describing the ExComm meeting on Saturday evening, October 27, as “the most depressing hour that any of us spent in the White House during the president’s time there.”

President Kennedy secretly sends Bobby to meet with Soviet officials in Washington, promising not to invade Cuba if the missiles are removed, and also to meet a Khrushchev demand that he withdraw U.S. missiles from Turkey that are currently in range of the Soviet Union. The Turks won’t like it, and the missiles are technically under control of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), but the president is willing to make this one concession if it will stave off war.

It is a war that could be just hours away.

*   *   *

Then Khrushchev blinks.

The Communist leader is so sure that Kennedy is bluffing that he has not mobilized the Soviet army to full alert. Yet Khrushchev’s intelligence reports now show that the United States is very serious about invading Cuba. And if that happens, the Russians will be forced to fire nuclear missiles. Failure to do so would make Khrushchev and the Soviet Union an international laughingstock. Far worse, the world will think that John Kennedy is more powerful than Nikita Khrushchev.

There is no way the Soviet leadership or the Soviet people will stand for that humiliation. Khrushchev will be toppled from power.

Despite this possibility, the Soviet leader becomes less bellicose. The “funny little man” is introspective when it comes to the subject of war. He lost his first wife to typhus during World War I. Khrushchev may be remembering his beloved Yefrosinia when he says of war “it has rolled through cities and villages, everywhere sowing death and destruction.” The Russian dictator sees that the American president is willing to conduct a nuclear war if pushed to the limit. Yes, the United States will be gone forever. But so will the Soviet Union.

On Sunday morning, at 9:00
A.M
., Radio Moscow tells the people of the Soviet Union that Chairman Khrushchev has saved the world from annihilation. The words are also aimed directly at JFK when the commentator states that the Soviets choose to “dismantle the arms which you described as offensive, and to crate and return them to Soviet Russia.”

After thirteen long days, the Cuban missile crisis is over.

*   *   *

In Dallas, Lee Harvey Oswald has been following the action closely. His reaction is to show solidarity with the Russians and Cubans by joining the Socialist Workers Party.

Oswald is alone in the new two-story brick apartment he has rented on Elsbeth Street and is eager for Marina to join him. She and baby June are living with friends in Fort Worth, and he is lonesome for her company despite their violent history. Yet when Marina finally arrives in Dallas, on November 3, their domestic battles resume. She calls their squalid new dwelling a “pigsty.” They scream at each other for two solid days. Oswald swears that he’s going to “beat the hell out of her,” and then goes one step further by threatening to hit her so hard and so long that he’ll kill her.

Marina has had enough. She leaves him again, moving in with some of her Russian friends. So complete is their split that she doesn’t even give Oswald her new address. The members of the Russian community in Dallas, who never liked Oswald, refuse to assist him in his search for his wife.

Outcast, misunderstood, and alone, Lee Harvey Oswald, who considers himself a great man, destined to accomplish great things, festers in a quiet rage.

He has now become desperate.

*   *   *

On November 6, 1962, Teddy Kennedy is one of the first beneficiaries of the outcome of the defused crisis, sweeping into office as the newly elected U.S. senator from Massachusetts. There will now be three Kennedys in Washington. And while the Cuban missile crisis has seen JFK’s approval rating soar to 79 percent, not everyone is happy about the growing Kennedy influence. The Joint Chiefs of Staff are irate that JFK did not, and now
will not
, invade Cuba. Fidel Castro feels sold out by the Soviets and is already seeing his influence in Latin America plummet because he has been exposed as a Russian puppet. Seething, he blames Kennedy.

With good reason. The Cuban missile crisis does not mark the end of efforts to get rid of Castro. And while the president has promised Khrushchev that he will not meddle in Cuban affairs, this does not mean that the CIA’s Operation Mongoose has come to an end. The brainchild of JFK, Mongoose involved inserting teams of Cuban exiles into Cuba to foment rebellion against Castro. Initially, the Mafia was also secretly enlisted, with the primary aim of killing Castro. The president never used the word
assassinate
to describe the operation’s ultimate mission, but the Mafia is not a military organization, and their well-documented involvement took Mongoose beyond a popular overthrow by the exiles and into the realm of carefully plotted political murder.

*   *   *

The bond between Jack and Bobby Kennedy became tighter than ever during the Cuban missile crisis, even as Lyndon Johnson once again stumbled. The vice president made the crucial mistake of being disloyal to President Kennedy, initially aligning himself with the hawkish generals who advocated a full-blown invasion. Bobby, meanwhile, took the opposite point of view. He thought an attack on Cuba would remind the world of Pearl Harbor—an opinion mirroring that of JFK.

Now, with the crisis successfully defused, John Fitzgerald Kennedy is elated. He sees a comparison between the successful outcome of the Cuban missile crisis and Abraham Lincoln’s stable leadership that brought about the end of the Civil War. “Maybe this is the night I should go to the theater,” JFK jokes to Bobby, remembering that Lincoln attended a play as the war ended—only to be assassinated.

It is a bold joke, a playful poke at a fellow president’s murder, almost tempting fate. And it is out of character for John Kennedy, a man with echoes of Lincoln everywhere in his life: from sleeping in the Lincoln Bedroom on the night of his inauguration, to having a secretary surnamed Lincoln, to being driven in a bubble-top convertible Lincoln Continental limousine. But after the nail-biting tension of the recent crisis, John Kennedy feels he is allowed a touch of black humor. Even such a morbid joke feels lighthearted after the darkness that has enveloped his life these last thirteen days and nights.

The president and the attorney general laugh.

“If you go” to the theater, Bobby answers, “I want to go with you.”

Little do they know how macabre those words actually are.

PART II

The Curtain Descends

8

J
ANUARY 8, 1963

W
ASHINGTON,
D
.
C
.

9:30 P.M.

Jackie Kennedy’s bare, tanned shoulders accentuate the pink color of her strapless Oleg Cassini gown. She wears dangling diamond earrings designed by legendary jeweler Harry Winston. Long white gloves come up past her elbows. She makes small talk with a man she adores, André Malraux, the sixty-one-year-old writer who serves as the French minister of culture. The First Lady’s eyes sparkle after a restful family Christmas vacation in Palm Beach, Florida.

On this night, the First Lady is truly a vision.

And, unbeknownst to all but one of the thousand people filling the West Sculpture Hall of the National Gallery of Art, she is also pregnant.

The president stands less than three feet away, paying no attention whatsoever to his wife. He gazes at a dark-haired beauty half his age named Lisa Gherardini. She is blessed with lips that are full and red, contrasting seductively with her smooth olive skin. Her smile is coy. The plunging neckline of her dress hints at an ample bosom. She bears the faintest of resemblances to the First Lady.

There are television cameras, newspaper reporters, and those thousand guests. The president’s every move is being scrutinized, but he is unafraid as his gaze lingers on this tantalizing young woman. He is the president of the United States, a man who has just rescued the world from global thermonuclear war. Everything is going his way. Surely John Kennedy can be allowed the minor indiscretion of appreciating this lovely twentysomething.

Playing to those who might be watching closely, JFK smiles at young Lisa. But he is a changed man since the Cuban missile crisis, and far more enchanted by Jackie than by other women—at least for the time being. That near-catastrophic experience reminded him how deeply he loves his wife and children.

The new Congress begins tomorrow, and the president’s State of the Union address is less than a week away. Kennedy will push for “a substantial reduction and revision in federal income taxes” as the “one step, above all, essential” to make America more competitive in the world economy. But that tax cut will be controversial, a hard sell with the new Democratic Congress. Tonight the burdens of being president of the United States are far more pressing than spending time with Lisa Gherardini.

The president moves on.

*   *   *

But Jackie stays, turning away from Malraux to gaze at the same bewitching young woman. Lisa Gherardini is not actually here in person, but in a painting hanging on the gallery wall. She is also known as
La Gioconda
, or the
Mona Lisa
, a wife and mother of five children who sat for this portrait in the early sixteenth century.