Killing Kennedy

before.” JFK persuaded Garbo to arrive early to the White House dinner party in order to rehearse her lines for Kennedy’s elaborate ruse.
    “Early” in Camelot usually means sometime around 8:30 P.M. Tonight is no exception.
    This is because the president has worked yet another typically exhausting day. His schedule began with a 9:45 A.M . meeting with columnist Ann Landers about the 1963 Christmas Seal campaign and ended with a 6:30 P.M. meeting with John A. Hannah, head of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. In between there was a meeting with the president of Czechoslovakia; a South Lawn pipe and drums performance by the Black Watch (Royal Highland Regiment), from Great Britain; a fifteen-person meeting about the poverty in eastern Kentucky; and a smaller foreign policy meeting with Dean Rusk, McGeorge Bundy, and former secretary of state Christian Herter in the early evening.
    The president took his usual midafternoon swim at 1:10 and had lunch at 1:40, but otherwise the pace never slackened. Meeting followed meeting, with Kennedy expected to be not just in attendance, but also knowledgeable about and decisive on each of the many varied subjects presented to him. All the while, in the back of the president’s mind, was the thought of next week’s trip to Texas.
    When JFK hit the pool for his second swim of the day, it was 7:15. By the time he toweled off and went up to his bedroom, it was 8:03 P.M . Garbo had already arrived. Kennedy took his time showering and changing, knowing Jackie would explain to the actress that he’d been delayed.
    Lem Billings was ecstatic when he saw Garbo. “Why, Greta! Oh, my gosh. How are you?” he exclaimed.
    Garbo stared at him with a blank expression, then turned her gaze to Jackie. “You must be mistaken. I do not recall that we have ever met before,” she said.
    When the president arrived, Garbo repeated her assertion that she didn’t know Billings. The president’s old friend grew more and more dismayed, ignoring JFK to remind Garbo over and over about where they’d met and some of the same people they knew. The more Billings talked, the more obvious it seemed that Greta had never met him before. Throughout it all, JFK unwound, setting aside the cares of the office as he reveled in the easy banter of this lighthearted dinner and his practical joke. Lem Billings will not realize he’s been had until tomorrow morning.
    Soon after dinner ended, JFK took the entire group on a private tour of the White House. Now a tipsy Greta Garbo doesn’t want to soil the bedspread in the Lincoln Bedroom, so takes off her shoes before lying down atop the mattress. The tour ends in the Oval Office. Unbeknownst to most Americans, JFK has a habit of collecting scrimshaw and often bids anonymously for these pieces of inscribed whale’s teeth. They are on display in a case in his office. When Garbo admires the collection, the president opens the case and offers her a piece as a gift. The actress gladly accepts.
    This is life in Camelot: a day spent solving the world’s problems, two therapeutic nude swims, celebrities at the table for a late-night dinner, and a tour of America’s most famous residence with a glamorous former movie star. Where else would such a thing happen?
    But the evening ends abruptly. “I must go. I am getting intoxicated,” Garbo proclaims before disappearing back to her hotel.
    Thus ends the last dinner party ever held in Camelot.
    But the memory of this magical evening will linger, and even someone as famous as Greta Garbo is not immune to Camelot’s allure: “It was a most unusual evening that I spent with you in the White House,” she writes in her thank-you note to Jackie Kennedy. “It was really fascinating and enchanting. I might believe it was a dream if I did not have the president’s ‘tooth’ facing me.”
    But Camelot is not a dream. It is reality—and that reality is about to take a turn that will alter America forever.

 
    21
    N OVEMBER 16, 1963
    D ALLAS, T EXAS
    1:50 P.M.
    Thirteen-year-old Sterling Wood aims his Winchester 30-30 rifle at the silhouette of a man’s head. He exhales and squeezes the trigger, then squints downrange at the target. It is Saturday. Sterling and his father, Homer, have come to the Sports Drome Rifle Range to sight their guns for deer season.
    Young Sterling notices a young man standing in the shooting booth next to him. He is aiming at a similar silhouette. The teenager reads a lot of gun books and is