1963, November 22-29, Jack & Jackie
t was just before we got on the freeway, Lyndon,” Jackie Ken-I nedy told the vice president later that evening. They were at Lyndon’s ranch, a planned overnight stay, and they both stared at the door behind which the president had sequestered himself.
Puzzled by the president’s behavior, they discussed the day’s events, trying to understand when it had started.
“He was normal, waving to people… Happy, you know? Then he just froze, hand still in the air. He had turned toward me. I saw his face. It was blank, as if he were in a trance or something. It was creepy. I couldn’t let him zone out like that in public. I elbowed him in the ribs once, and again harder. He snapped out of it, but slow, reluctantly, as if he had something more important to do.”
“You don’t say…”
“He looked confused too, for the next minute or two, and he looked behind the motorcade three or four times. He even asked Connally if he was ok, for some reason. We were halfway to the Trade Mart before he finally came back. I saw it in his face, like he’d been gone somewhere and finally returned.”
“Well,” Lyndon replied, “he’s been under a lot of stress. We could chalk it up to that if it weren’t for the writing. Tell me about that again.”
48
“It was just after he returned from the trance. He snatched up a legal pad and pen he found in the limo and started writing. Fast.
Very fast. No explanation, he wouldn’t talk to me. He had this…
crazy look. I took hold of his writing hand. That stopped him, but he just kept staring at the page, with that look. He tried writing again a couple of times, but I held on tight, and finally, he looked at me.
He said he had to do this, now, before it passed him by, it was too important, and I had to help him, cover for him, help him get it done, and then he could talk to me about it, not before. Then he pulled his hand away, and started writing again. He hasn’t said a word to me since.”
“The devil you say!”
JFK had written in his legal pad all the way to the Trade Mart.
There, he’d continued writing, standing with his back to a wall, and waved away people who tried to approach. Loyal political wife that she was, Jackie stepped in to assume her role, deflecting some, beg-ging forgiveness of others, and gracefully charming those for whom the disappointment of not conversing with the president was so great that they could be consoled by no less than she. When it was time for JFK to speak, he carried the legal pad with him to the po-dium. Several staffers observed the pad never left his hand.
JFK wrote the entire night spent at Johnson’s ranch, sleeping for only a couple hours just before dawn. By then it had become entirely too spooky for Jackie, and she began thinking it would be better if no one knew. She even regretted having told Lyndon.
JFK worked on the trip back to D.C. and continued the entire weekend, locked away in the Executive Residence, eating little and sleeping less, pausing only once, to order a combination safe be retrieved from the family home in Cape Cod and installed in the Oval Office. When he stopped writing, after midnight on Sunday, he had amassed a stack of twelve legal pads: seven filled to the end of the last page, four filled except for a few blank pages at the end, and one, the last, with only eleven pages filled.
When he walked to bed, Jackie awoke. He said, “I’m done. I should be dead.” Then he fell into bed and was instantly asleep.
49
In the morning, Jackie rose quietly and stole from the room.
She allowed no one to disturb Jack, hopeful the incident was behind him, and if he could catch up on his sleep, she could have her husband back. And she got him back. Good as new.
“Better, actually,” she thought, from time to time, in the following weeks.
When Jack rejoined the world it was nearly noon, Monday. He devoured a hearty breakfast while discussing his schedule with Jackie and Kenny, his closest aid. He needed one additional hour, he told them, to finish one more task. JFK commandeered the Xerox room and made a copy of each notepad, page by page, by himself.
He stapled each pad’s copies together with a heavy-duty stapler, placed them in a single stack, placed on top an envelope with a handwritten note inside, wrapped the whole mass with locker paper, and sealed the paper over its entire surface with wide, heavy fila-ment tape. He locked the package and original legal pads in the aforementioned safe, after he changed the combination.
Later that week JFK would contact a banker friend of the family, an old gentleman JFK knew well, and whom he trusted to keep a confidence. Jack delivered the package containing the copies, late at night, and deposited them in a safe deposit box. He had with him a minimum-security detail, who, if questioned, would swear JFK
never left the residence that night. The banker had with him two additional employees who were necessary to open the vault at that time of night, but they watched the front door when JFK entered through an underground parking facility.
JFK also prevailed upon his banker friend to accept a commission to find, within his own bank or another facility, secure space where he could have a room-sized vault constructed and maintained in perpetuity, for his exclusive use.
Of the original legal pads stored in the Oval Office safe, Kennedy usually carried pad number one with him in a small, thin, metal briefcase he’d had custom made. He kept it locked, and he usually carried it with him to the residence. If the pad left his hand, he re-50
turned it to the briefcase or the safe. No exceptions. On travels, do-mestic or abroad, Kennedy would carry the metal briefcase with him. It never left Air Force One.
From day one, Kennedy established a pattern concerning his legal pads. First, he didn’t discuss them. And no one could look at them. To further that end, he tried not to use the pads in the presence of others, succeeding most of the time. However, there were meetings and conversations when his need to consult the pads super-seded his desire to keep the existence of them low key, so it didn’t take long for the mysterious pads to become common knowledge among White House staff, and not long after that, among White House reporters.
It was, however, easy for JFK to deflect questions regarding the pads.
“Com-on Bob, you got better questions than that!” Jack would quip, with a grin, as he’d begin pointing to the next reporter’s raised hand, and as the chagrined reporter slouched down in his seat.
Or, “Notes, guys. I take notes. You should try it,” he’d say, as he held a yellow legal pad aloft.
It was never really a contest. The legal pad questions died with a whimper, even as the American Pad and Paper Company noticed increasing sales of their product through the mid-sixties.
One additional outcome of the Dallas trip was the list, a dozen items long, that Kennedy handed to the point man for his security team on the first Tuesday after Dallas. He said he wanted the changes on the list implemented ASAP. There would be no more open motorcades, and they would no longer publish, nor even decide, motorcade routes ahead of time. His security team couldn’t have been happier, although they wondered, amongst themselves, who’d lit the fire under the president.
Anyone, including immediate family, who in the following weeks thought to ask JFK about the tightened security, or complain it was too restrictive, or suggest it be relaxed for this or that reason, learned quickly just how serious the president was about the secu-51
rity changes, and they made a big mental note not to bring the subject up again.
Jack routinely brought documents, briefings and reports with him to bed, and stayed up for hours reading them. After that first Monday, when he’d slept until noon, he began bringing the metal case with him along with the other documents he wanted to read, and he began interrupting his reading of those documents to study the pad he would remove from the case.
“He is lost in the writing on that pad,” Jackie thought. He would rub his furrowed brow as he appeared to search for something, turning to the next page, then the next, and then back to the first again. “Like he’s trying to follow a trail, loses it, and starts over, again, and again.”
She could feel the pain she saw on Jack’s face when he dove into one of those sessions. He heard nothing she said. At times it appeared as though he’d forgotten to breathe, and she wondered if he were really in the room at all. Nights like that, he didn’t even notice when she turned off her light.
Jackie hadn’t forgotten that Jack had promised to talk to her about his frenzied writing after he finished it, but she was almost afraid to press him for that explanation, afraid she would regret knowing what her husband was involved with, to learn what had happened to him in that instant on Elm Street in Dallas.
Dallas. Whatever it was, it began there. Something happened to her husband on that short little street full of his cheering admirers, and it had changed him, in ways perhaps only she could notice, but notice she did, and it frightened her. By a force of will she didn’t know she possessed, she remained calm and cool on the outside, while on the inside she felt as she had thirty years ago, when confronting the possibility of monsters under her bed.
She gave Jack a few days to explain his behavior on his own.
When one week had passed since the Dallas trip, and Jack hadn’t offered the explanation he’d promised, she felt she had waited long enough. She arranged for their evening plans for Friday, November 29, to be canceled at the last minute. She saw the children to bed, 52
and waited. When Jack showed up at the residence, expecting to spend the evening reading, Jackie gently, but firmly, grabbed his left ear and pulled him to a seat by the fireplace, Jack protesting all the way. She handed him a glass of dark, red wine, picked up another for herself, and settled into the chair opposite.
“It’s time,” she said. “I’m listening.”
Jack gazed at his wife and smiled, that way only he could, as he took a sip of his wine. “A week. I wondered how long I could put this off. Not because I wanted to keep you in the dark, but because I still haven’t figured out how to explain this in a way that won’t have you thinking I’ve, you know, gone off the deep end.”
“You mean crazy? Of course, you’re crazy. Why else would you want this job? I promise to find you no crazier now than a week ago. How’s that?”
“That’ll work,” Jack said. Then he took a deep breath. “I still don’t know where to start.”
“Try 12:30, on Elm Street, in Dallas,” Jackie said.
“Ah, very observant. That’s when it began. I should have been killed then, but the plans began some time ago, and the plan to rescue me shortly after that. It gets complicated, and I only know a small part of the whole. Here’s what I do know…”
Their wine forgotten, Jack talked for the better part of an hour.
Jackie interrupted often, argumentatively, at times. When he’d finished, they both sat for a few minutes, saying nothing.
As she considered the possibilities inherent in Jack’s story, the full and unbounded potential of his words occurred to her only slowly, in stages, each stage readable on her face as she struggled to digest one impossible concept after another. She opened her mouth several times to speak and then thought better of it. She realized the woeful inadequacy of her own, or anyone else’s, ability to comprehend the things her husband had told her.
Their fairy tale life in Camelot had ended. The assassination attempt, and mysterious rescue, had altered their lives beyond measure, and would continue to do so as far into the future as she could imagine. With a tear in her eye for their lives that had been, “Jack,”
53
she said, “Oh Jack, what… What are we going to do?”
“I’m working on it,” he replied.
54