Killing Kennedy

free-spirited. The First Lady has lost all of her baby weight. It would be a shame not to flaunt her newly slim figure in the privacy of her opulent surroundings. So she makes sure her staff puts a bikini in her suitcase before she boards the TWA 707 for Greece on October 1.
    It has been exactly fifty-two days since she endured the tragedy of baby Patrick’s death. It is exactly fifty-two days until she will endure another unspeakable tragedy.

 
    17
    O CTOBER 6, 1963
    C AMP D AVID, M ARYLAND
    10:27 A.M.
    The president of the United States is furious. John Kennedy steers a golf cart to Camp David’s military mess hall for Sunday Mass. The paved path meanders through a thick wood, taking him past the Hawthorn, Laurel, Sycamore, and Linden guest cabins on his three-minute journey. With him are five-year-old Caroline and John Jr., who will turn three next month. But it is not politics that is on the president’s mind—his trip to Texas is set. (After meeting with Governor John Connally two days ago, the much-needed political foray is a done deal.) Nor is it the pressures of the office. And it is certainly not his children who have JFK annoyed—the president is excited to be spending time alone with Caroline and John. He has even asked legendary Look magazine photographer Stanley Tretick to take some informal photos of them at play.
    No, what’s making the president so angry is the First Lady. She won’t come to the phone.

    Despite her husband’s objections, the First Lady spent two weeks as a guest on Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis’s yacht Christina in 1963. (Associated Press)
    It’s bad enough that Jackie Kennedy is cavorting around the Mediterranean with Aristotle Onassis, a man whom the president does not trust. But it’s far worse that pictures of her Greek adventures are front-page news around the world, leading many to ask why the president is allowing his wife to spend time with a man who has been investigated for fraud against the U.S.government. Perhaps worst of all, however, Aristotle Onassis is a known philanderer.
    A simple phone conversation with Jackie might lessen Jack’s tension. But the First Lady is now unreachable. Even when the president plans ahead and accounts for the time change, the most powerful man in the world cannot speak to his wife. JFK doesn’t know whether she’s avoiding him or if the Christina truly lacks modern communication technology.
    The situation is not just making Kennedy angry—it’s making him jealous.
    *   *   *
    Four months. Four long months. That’s how long it will take for Lee Harvey Oswald to obtain a Soviet visa, which it turns out he needs before Cuban officials will grant him travel documents.
    But Oswald doesn’t have enough money to wait four months. He needs to go to Cuba now.
    And so he stands toe-to-toe with consul Eusebio Azcue at the Cuban consulate in Mexico City, arguing with him over the Soviet visa. The conversation long ago stopped being civil. Oswald is “highly agitated and angry,” in the eyes of one employee of the Cuban consulate. Instead of being deferential to the man who controls his entry into the Communist country, Oswald is yelling at him.
    Finally, Azcue has had enough. The diplomat in him is gone, and he speaks candidly with the American. “A person like you,” Azcue tells Oswald in fractured English, “in the place of aiding the Cuban Revolution, are doing it harm.”
    Azcue concludes by telling Oswald that he will never get the paperwork to enter Cuba.
    The consul turns and strides back to his office, leaving Oswald crushed: his dream of escaping to Cuba is over. A consular employee hands Oswald a scrap of paper with her name and the embassy’s contact information on it, should he ever want to try again.
    A despondent Oswald stays the weekend in Mexico City, loading up on the local food and taking in a bullfight. But his despair is growing.
    He then takes the bus back to Dallas, where he rents a room at the YMCA and looks for work. He sheepishly phones Marina, who is still living with family friend Ruth Paine and is due to deliver the Oswalds’ second baby any day. Paine is a Quaker housewife who was introduced to the Oswalds by George de Mohrenschildt, the well-educated Russian with possible CIA connections whom Oswald met in the summer of 1962.
    Ruth Paine speaks a smattering of Russian, which helps to make Marina feel more at home. All Marina’s possessions are stored in Paine’s garage. Among