Killing Kennedy (6 page)

The fact is that Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy never fully reveals herself to anyone—not even to her husband, the president.

*   *   *

In far-off Minsk, Lee Harvey Oswald is having the opposite problem. The woman he loves just won’t stop talking.

On March 17, at a dance for union workers, he meets a nineteen-year-old beauty who wears a red dress and white shoes and who styles her hair in what he believes to be “French fashion.” Marina Prusakova is reluctant to smile because of her bad teeth, but the two dance that night, and he walks her home—along with several other potential suitors smitten by the talkative Marina.

But Lee Harvey is defiant, as always. He knows the other men will soon be distant memories.

And he is right. “We like each other right away,” the defector writes in his journal.

After her mother’s death two years before, Marina, who was born out of wedlock, was sent to live with her uncle Ilya, a colonel in the Soviet Ministry of Internal Affairs and a respected member of the local Communist Party. She is trained as a pharmacist, but quit her job sometime ago.

Oswald knows all this, and so much more about Marina, because between the nights of March 18 and 30, they spend a great deal of time together. “We walk,” he writes. “I talk a little about myself, she talks a lot about herself.”

Their relationship takes a sudden turn on March 30, when Oswald enters the Fourth Clinic Hospital for an adenoid operation. Marina visits him constantly, and by the time Lee Harvey is discharged, he “knows I must have her.” On April 30 they are married. Marina almost immediately becomes pregnant.

Life is getting more and more complicated for Lee Harvey Oswald.

*   *   *

In the winter of 1961 the world outside the White House is turbulent. The cold war is raging. Americans are terrified of the Soviet Union and its arsenal of nuclear weapons. Ninety miles south of Florida, Fidel Castro has recently taken over Cuba, ushering in a regime thought to be friendly to the Soviets.

In America’s Deep South, there is growing racial strife.

In the marketplace, there is a new contraceptive device known simply as “The Pill.”

On the radio, Chubby Checker is exhorting young Americans to do the Twist, while Elvis Presley is asking women everywhere if they’re lonesome tonight.

But inside the Kennedy White House, Jackie sees to it that none of these political and social upheavals intrude on creating the perfect environment to raise a family. Her schedule revolves around her children. In a break from the traditional style of First Lady parenting, in which children are managed by the household staff, she is completely involved in the lives of three-year-old Caroline and baby John, taking them with her to meetings and on errands.

As she grows more comfortable in the White House, it will not be uncommon for Jackie to camouflage herself with a scarf and heavy coat and take the children to the circus or a park—discreetly followed by the Secret Service.

The sight of the First Lady playing with her children on the South Lawn will also soon become commonplace, causing one observer to note that Jackie is “so like a little girl who had never grown up.” Indeed, she speaks with the same breathy, almost childlike voice of actress Marilyn Monroe.

The First Lady likes to think of herself as a traditional wife and dotes on her husband. But she also has a fiercely independent streak, breaking White House protocol by refusing to attend the myriad teas and social functions other First Ladies have endured. Jackie prefers to spend time with her children or concoct designs for a lavish renovation of the White House, an activity that does not interest her husband, who has little aesthetic sense when it comes to such matters. Jackie Kennedy refers to her new home as “the president’s house” and takes her inspiration from Thomas Jefferson’s White House, elaborately decorated by the former ambassador to France.

Jackie was a devoted mother to her children, Caroline and John F. Kennedy Jr., pictured here playing with his mother’s necklace in the West Bedroom.
(Cecil Stoughton, White House Photographs, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston)

The current décor dates to the Truman administration. Many pieces of furniture are reproductions instead of actual period originals, giving America’s most notable residence a cheap, derivative feel rather than an aura of grandeur. Jackie is assembling a team of top collectors to enhance the décor of the White House in every possible way.

She thinks she has years to finish.

At least four. Perhaps even eight.

She thinks.

3

A
PRIL 17, 1961

W
ASHINGTON,
D
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B
AY OF
P
IGS,
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UBA

9:40 A.M.

John F. Kennedy absentmindedly buttons his suit coat. He is seated aboard Marine One, his presidential Marine Corps helicopter, as it flares for a landing on the South Lawn of the White House. He has just spent a most unrelaxing weekend at Glen Ora, the family’s four-hundred-acre rented country retreat in Virginia that the Secret Service has code-named Chateau.

The president is meticulous about his appearance and will change his clothes completely at least three more times today, on each occasion putting on yet another crisply starched shirt, a new tie, and a suit custom-tailored by Brooks Brothers. His suit coats are invariably charcoal or deep blue. But it is not vanity that drives John Kennedy’s obsession with clothing. Rather, it is a peculiar quirk of his personality that he is uncomfortable if he wears a garment too long. He drives his longtime valet, George Thomas, crazy with his constant changes.

But right now Kennedy is not concentrating on his personal appearance, even though he does, as always, pat the top of his head to make sure every strand of hair is in place. Habits are hard to break.

Kennedy is preoccupied with Cuba. Roughly twelve hundred miles due south of Washington, D.C., a battlefield is taking shape. Kennedy has authorized a covert invasion of the island nation, sending fourteen hundred anti-Castro exiles to do a job that the U.S. military, by rule of international law, cannot do itself. The freedom fighters’ goal is nothing less than the overthrow of the Cuban government. The plan has been in the works since long before Kennedy was elected. Both the Central Intelligence Agency and the Joint Chiefs of Staff have assured the president that the mission will succeed. But it is Kennedy who has given the go-ahead—and it is he who will take the blame if the mission fails.

Once the UH-34 helicopter touches down on the metal pads specially placed on the South Lawn as a landing spot, JFK emerges headfirst out the door, stepping down onto the new spring grass. The president looks calm and unflappable, but his stomach is churning, literally. The stress of the weekend, with its last-minute planning of the risky attack, has brought on severe diarrhea and a debilitating urinary tract infection. His doctor has prescribed injections of penicillin and a diet of liquefied food to make his afflictions more bearable. Yet he feels miserable. But as awful as things seem right now, the president knows that his Monday is about to get much worse.

The president walks purposefully through the serenity of the White House Rose Garden, even as the Cuban exiles comprising Brigade 2506 are in grave danger, pinned down on a remote stretch of sand in Cuba.

This inlet will go down in infamy as the Bay of Pigs.

John F. Kennedy steps through the Rose Garden entrance into the Oval Office, with its gray carpet and off-white walls. During the winter, when there are no leaves on the trees, it is possible to gaze out toward the National Mall from the tall windows behind Kennedy’s desk. At the far end, hidden from JFK’s view by the Old Executive Office Building, rises the Lincoln Memorial. But Kennedy doesn’t sit down, nor does he glance out in the direction of Mr. Lincoln.

He is much too anxious about the events in Cuba to have a seat.

*   *   *

It has not been a good week for America. On April 12 the Soviets stunned the world by launching the first man into space, proving to one and all that they have rockets capable of carrying nuclear warheads all the way to the United States. The cold war that has raged between the two nations for more than a decade is now clearly tipped in the Soviets’ favor. Many in Washington believe that overthrowing the pro-Soviet Castro will go a long way toward restoring equilibrium to the cold war.

Kennedy knew he had the backing of the American people when he authorized the invasion. Fear about the global spread of communism is rampant in the United States. Anything he does to stop it will be applauded. And while invading another country is an enormous diplomatic risk, the president enjoys a 78 percent approval rating after his first months on the job, political capital with which to gamble. Newspapers and magazines are gushing about the young president, calling Kennedy “omniscient” and “omnipotent.”

But no man is all-knowing, and even the president of the United States is not all-powerful. Kennedy is about to make the sort of sworn enemies that come with a colossal blunder. By the time the Bay of Pigs is over he will count among these enemies not only Castro but also one of the highest-ranking officials of the U.S.government: the wily CIA chief, Allen Dulles.

*   *   *

Kenny O’Donnell greets Kennedy in the Oval Office and quickly briefs him on the day’s schedule. The president then strides out through another of the Oval Office’s four doors. His path takes him past the desk of his loyal personal secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, and into the Cabinet Room, where Secretary of State Dean Rusk awaits.

A brilliant man, Rusk attended Oxford as a Rhodes scholar and served as a chief of war plans as an army officer in the China-Burma-India Theater during World War II, organizing covert missions very much like the Bay of Pigs. The Georgia native sat in on the many planning meetings leading up to the weekend’s invasion. Yet he was not Kennedy’s first choice to head the State Department, and just three months into his new job, the new secretary of state remains tentative with his boss, wary of speaking his mind. At a time when Kennedy desperately needs solid advice, Rusk is unwilling to share his professional misgivings about the Bay of Pigs, including his belief “that this thin brigade of Cuban exiles has a snowball’s chance in hell of success.”

Rusk’s reluctance to advise him in an open and honest fashion is the least of the president’s troubles at this point. Nobody, it seems, will level with Kennedy. As JFK awaits word from the battlefront, he craves the company of someone who will tell him the unvarnished truth.

Sensing a crisis, the president picks up a phone and dials.

*   *   *

Cuba.

Americans of means once made this steamy, rum-soaked paradise their favorite tropical playground. The country’s sandy white beaches are sensual and the casinos legendary. Ernest Hemingway wrote of Cuba’s many charms, then unwound with his favorite rum libation, the daiquiri. Behind the scenes, America’s organized crime bosses such as Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano were as comfortable in the Cuban capital, Havana, as they were in New York City. And for decades, U.S. corporations took advantage of Cuba’s climate and thoroughly corrupt government to set up vast sugarcane plantations, oil fields, and cattle ranches.

In fact, ever since that epic moment in 1898 when Teddy Roosevelt and his Rough Riders charged up San Juan Hill to liberate Cuba from Spain, the Cuban-U.S. relationship was mostly peaceful, free of tension, and, in a word, easy.

Until 1959.

Corruption reached an all-time high under the American-friendly regime of General Fulgencio Batista, sparking rebellion among Cubans. After four years of fighting, Fidel Castro, the thirty-two-year-old bastard child of a wealthy Cuban farmer, led his guerrilla army into Havana and toppled Batista. (The general died of a heart attack in exile in Portugal, just two days before Castro’s team of assassins could complete its mission.) The United States responded to Batista’s overthrow by officially recognizing the new government.