These Few Precious Days (41 page)

This last night of JFK’s life, Jackie went to Jack’s bedroom to spend the night with him, but he told her it probably wasn’t a good idea. The stomach cramps that had plagued him for years were back with a vengeance—another nervous reaction, he surmised, to their grueling schedule. “You were great today,” Jack told her as they fell into each other’s arms. In that moment, Jackie later said, they were both so tired it was as if they were holding each other up. They kissed, and she returned to her separate room for the night.

The next morning, they awoke to the sound of a crowd gathered in a parking lot across from the hotel. Thousands of people had waited in the rain for hours to see the president and Mrs. Kennedy, and they were far from satisfied when only Jack came out to address them.

“Where’s Jackie? Where’s Jackie?” the crowd demanded.

Jackie was, in fact, upstairs with Mary Gallagher, digging through her luggage for makeup that had already been packed away for Dallas. She had taken a close look in the mirror and decided she needed a touch-up for the tough day ahead. “One day in a campaign,” she sighed to her secretary, “can age a person thirty years.”

All of which left the president downstairs in the parking lot, trying to explain to the crowd why she wasn’t coming down to see them. “Mrs. Kennedy is organizing herself,” he told them. “It takes a little longer, but of course, she looks better than us when she does it.”

From there, the president went to the hotel’s grand ballroom, where he was guest of honor at a Chamber of Commerce breakfast. According to their schedule, Jackie was not supposed to attend this event, either. Now that the crowds in the parking lot were clamoring for her, he told the Secret Service to bring her down to the breakfast—and fast.

With Mary Gallagher’s help, she buttoned up her short white kid gloves and then took one last look in the mirror. “Oh Mary,” she said wistfully, “I’ve found another wrinkle.” When she finally made her entrance a half hour after the breakfast started, the ballroom erupted in hoots and cheers; men
and
women climbed up onto chairs to applaud.

JFK watched as Jackie was guided to the dais and seated at the head table. “Two years ago,” he told the euphoric crowd, “I introduced myself by saying I was the man who accompanied Mrs. Kennedy to Paris. I am getting somewhat that same sensation as I travel around Texas.” Then, glancing over at Jackie in the pink Chanel suit he had picked out for her to wear in Dallas, he asked, “Why is it nobody wonders what Lyndon and I will wear?”

Thrilled at their reception that morning, the president and Jackie returned to their hotel suite to relax before boarding Air Force One for Dallas. They took a few minutes to appreciate the masterpieces that were hanging on their walls, and quickly placed a call to one of the donors to say they were “touched” by the gesture.

Jack was also touched by his wife’s willingness to campaign with him; he always knew that together they were a potent force, but assumed she would sit this election out as she did in 1960. It was just another sign, their friends agreed, of the strengthening of their marriage.

“They had been through so much together in the last few years,” Spalding said, “particularly the baby’s death. I think by the time they got to Dallas she saw herself as a full partner.”

At 10:35 a.m., Kenny O’Donnell knocked on their hotel room door and told them it was time to depart for Dallas. As they walked out the door, Jackie said to Jack, “I’ll go anywhere with you this year.”

He wasted no time taking her up on the unexpected offer. “How about California in two weeks?” he asked.

“I’ll be there,” she grinned.

The president looked at O’Donnell, eyes wide in mock disbelief. “Did you hear
that
?” he asked.

On the thirteen-minute flight to Dallas, someone handed Jack a copy of that morning’s
Dallas News,
containing a black-bordered full-page ad paid for by the “American Fact-finding Committee.” The ad slammed Kennedy’s “ultra-leftist” policies and branded him “fifty times a fool” for signing the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.

Jack showed his wife the ad and shook his head. “We’re heading into nut country today,” he told her. Then he made the kind of comment she had heard so often, it no longer had any impact. “But Jackie,” he said, “if somebody wants to shoot me from a window with a rifle, nobody can stop it, so why worry about it?”

By the time Air Force One touched down at Dallas’s Love Field, the rain had been replaced by blue skies and sunshine. The president and Mrs. Kennedy stepped out into the broiling heat and were once again welcomed with wild cheers and applause.

Someone thrust another bouquet in her arms, and then she and Jack headed for the fence to shake hands. It was then that she realized the roses she clutched weren’t the yellow roses of Texas she had been handed in San Antonio and Houston and Fort Worth. They were red.

AS THE PRESIDENT’S LIMOUSINE LEFT
Love Field at 11:55 a.m., Secret Service agent Roy Kellerman radioed to all units “Lancer and Lace departing.” With them were Governor Connally, who sat on the pull-out jumpseat in front of Jack while Nellie Connally sat in front of Jackie. The motorcade was bound downtown for the Dallas Trade Mart, where 2,600 people were waiting to have lunch with the president and his wife.

To everyone’s surprise, the reception in Dallas was the friendliest yet. Thousands of cheering, placard-waving Texans lined the streets, in some spots thirteen people deep. Elated, the president stopped the motorcade twice—first to shake hands with a group of awestruck schoolchildren and then to say hello to a group of nuns.

Making small talk along the route, Jack asked Nellie Connally how she would respond if someone booed her husband. “If I’d get close,” Nellie answered, “I’d scratch their eyes out.” Kennedy laughed but kept right on waving. “Mr. President,” she said as the car made a hard left turn from Houston Street onto Elm Street, “you certainly can’t say Dallas doesn’t love you.”

“No,” he replied, “you certainly can’t.”

Sweltering in her wool suit and squinting in the brilliant sun—Jack had asked her not to wear sunglasses so the crowd could see her face—Jackie prayed they would reach their destination soon.

Nellie Connally pointed to an overpass ahead.

“We’re almost through,” she said. “The Trade Mart’s beyond that.”

“Good,” Jackie thought to herself as she and Jack exchanged a fleeting glance. “It will be so cool in that tunnel . . .”

WHAT HAPPENED NEXT WAS SAID
to be the catalyst for an era of turmoil, discord, and bloodshed. Vietnam, campus unrest, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, race riots, the rise of the counterculture and a surge in drug abuse, even the toxic political climate that gave rise to Watergate—all seemed to flow from the wellspring of shock and despair that was tapped in Dallas on November 22, l963.

Serious historians and conspiracy theory crackpots alike have spent a half century dissecting the events of that day and analyzing how an assassin’s bullets changed the trajectory of history. Along the way, dark secrets were unearthed and the Camelot myth that Jackie had so painstakingly nurtured shattered beyond repair. For all this, we seem no closer to the truth about JFK’s murder (Was it a lone gunman? The Mafia? Fidel Castro? The CIA?) or what Kennedy might have done—particularly whether he would have sent American troops to fight in Vietnam.

One simple fact, however, has never been disputed—that Jackie’s strength and natural sense of dignity in the days following her husband’s death were the glue that held a stunned nation together. Only those closest to her knew that for months after the assassination Jackie was consumed with grief.

“I cry all day and all night until I’m so exhausted I can’t function,” she told her friend Kitty Carlisle Hart. “Then I drink.” Jackie wrote Ben and Tony Bradlee telling them that there was “one thing you must know. I consider that my life is over, and I will spend the rest of it waiting for it really to be over.” She confessed to her friend Roswell Gilpatric that, for a time, she had even considered suicide. “I have enough sleeping pills to do it,” she told him. “But of course she wouldn’t,” Gilpatric said, “because of the children.”

On her own, Jackie would for decades continue her reign as one of the most talked-about, written-about, and speculated-about people in the world—the most celebrated American woman of the twentieth century. Not even her decision to marry Aristotle Onassis just months after Bobby Kennedy’s assassination—so shocking to a world more comfortable thinking of her as the beloved widow of a martyred president—would tarnish Jackie’s image for long. “She would have preferred to be herself,” her brother-in-law Ted Kennedy remarked, paraphrasing a remark she had made about Jack. “But the world insisted that she be a legend, too.”

When Jackie succumbed to lymphoma on May 19, 1994 at the age of 64 with John Jr., Caroline, and her longtime companion Maurice Tempelsman at her bedside, there was a spontaneous outpouring of emotion from world leaders and common folk alike. Many Americans, taken by surprise, were both stunned and saddened by the passing of someone who had been part of the national landscape for more than thirty years. They contemplated what their world would be like without this living, breathing reminder of a man and an era of political idealism that—for all its shortcomings—seemed at one time to hold so much promise.

In the end, it all came back to the electrifying young couple in the White House that held the world spellbound for a thousand days. Was their marriage deeply flawed? Without a doubt. Complicated, even frustratingly so? No question. Infidelity, recklessness, and deceit were part of their imperfect union. But so, too, were courage, loyalty, wit, faith, fortitude, and a true, abiding affection.

After a decade of tragedies, triumphs, betrayals and reconciliations, the president and his wife were dealt the most devastating blow any couple could endure—the loss of a child. In that brief period of time between Patrick’s death and Dallas—not quite four months—Jackie and Jack grew closer together than they had ever been. Too late to make up for all the pain that had gone before? Perhaps. But not too late for Jack to fulfill the promise to Jackie he made every time he got up to sing “September Song”:

And these few precious days I’ll spend with you These precious days, I’ll spend with you.

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