Killing Kennedy

remember the alarm she felt, realizing that “whenever you’re married to someone and they ask something—yeah, that’s the whole point of being married—you must sense some trouble in their voice and mustn’t ask why.”
    But she asks anyway.
    “Well, never mind,” JFK answers, not telling her his reasons. “Why don’t you just come back to Washington?”
    Then, suddenly, the president changes his mind. At a time like this, he wants nothing more than to relieve his burden and be with his family. So the president finally tells Jackie about the possibility of a nuclear war.
    “Please don’t send me away to Camp David. Please don’t send me anywhere,” Jackie answers. She now pleads with her husband, disregarding her safety. Jackie knows that in event of an attack, the family will be evacuated to the Maryland presidential retreat, which will take her and the children away from JFK—perhaps forever. “Even if there’s no room in the bomb shelter in the White House. Please, then I just want to be on the lawn when it happens. I just want to be with you, and I want to die with you, and the children do too.”
    The president assures his wife he will not send her away. Then, instructing Pierre Salinger to explain to the press that he has a cold, JFK flies back to Washington, D.C. The New York Times will report that a “slight upper respiratory infection” is the reason the president is cutting short the three-day trip; the paper is unaware that the president is flying back to Washington in an effort to prevent global thermonuclear war.
    Jackie and the children are waiting when he arrives.
    *   *   *
    There is no day and there is no night in the Kennedy White House as the Cuban confrontation escalates. The president is in such pain from his back that he gets around on crutches, further adding to the tension. He sleeps just one or two hours at a time, then rises and talks on the phone for hours in the Oval Office, before returning to bed for another short nap. Jackie sleeps with him now, whether night or day. Sometimes they sleep in his small bed; at others, in her bedroom, in the two double beds, which have been pushed together to form one large king. They often talk late at night about the crisis. Once, Jackie wakes up to see Mac Bundy standing at the foot of their bed to wake her husband, whereupon JFK rises instantly and disappears for several more hours of top secret phone calls.
    Jackie will later remember these days and nights as the time she felt closest to her husband. She walks by the president’s office all the time, cheering him up by bringing the children for surprise visits. She arranges for dinner from a favorite Miami seafood restaurant to be flown to Washington. The president and First Lady often slip into the Rose Garden for a quiet walk, where he confides in her about the escalating tension.
    When the president returns to his work, he is not alone—nor is Jackie. While Bobby Kennedy works closely with his brother, his wife, Ethel, and their three children are frequently at the White House. It is Ethel who gives White House nanny Maud Shaw a pamphlet on how to prepare children for nuclear war—a pamphlet that Jackie snatches away moments later. “Don’t you know that panic is catching? And that children are susceptible?” the First Lady scolds Shaw.
    This is not the demure Jackie the public sees, but a fiercely protective mother and wife taking charge of her household.
    For two days, the president and his small White House entourage debate the top secret threat to the United States. Photos taken by U-2 spy planes show that the Soviets are working around the clock to complete the missile sites, meaning that warheads could be launched toward the United States within a matter of days. No one “bitches it up,” in JFK’s words, by leaking this information to the press, even though it’s clear that some journalists already know. Not even the Congress is told.
    On the night of Monday, October 22, the scene changes. President John Fitzgerald Kennedy appears on national television to inform America about the potentially lethal missiles in Cuba—and what he plans to do about them. The end of the world is no time to keep the American people uninformed.
    *   *   *
    “Good evening, my fellow citizens,” John Fitzgerald Kennedy greets the nation from his study at the White House. There are deep grooves under his greenish-gray eyes, giving him a haggard look instead of the