17
OCTOBER 6, 1963
CAMP DAVID, MARYLAND
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 them is a green-and-brown rolled blanket in which Lee Harvey Oswald’s rifle is concealed. Ruth Paine, being a peace-loving Quaker, would never allow the gun in her garage, but she has no idea it’s there.
Oswald regales Marina with tales of Mexico, but also admits that his trip was a failure. Marina listens, and believes that there is a change for the better in her husband. But she refuses to live with him. So, while looking for work, Oswald phones his wife when he can and sometimes hitchhikes from Dallas out to the Paine residence to see her.
Finally, thanks to a kindly reference from Ruth Paine, he finds a job. It is menial labor for a man with Oswald’s relatively high IQ of 118, and involves nothing more than placing books into boxes for shipping. But he and Marina are happy nonetheless. Maybe it’s a sign of a new beginning.
At 8:00 A.M. on Wednesday, October 16, Lee Harvey Oswald reports for his first day on the job at the Texas School Book Depository. The seven-floor redbrick warehouse is located on the corner of Elm and North Houston and overlooks Dealey Plaza, named for a onetime publisher of the Dallas Morning News. Most fortuitously, Parkland Memorial Hospital is just four miles away, should Marina go into labor with the new baby while Oswald is at work.
On October 18, Oswald gets a birthday surprise: the Cuban embassy in Mexico City has inexplicably reversed itself and granted him a travel visa. But it’s too late. He has moved on.
On October 20, Audrey Marina Rachel Oswald is born at Parkland Memorial. Lee Harvey doesn’t immediately go to see his wife and child, fearful that the hospital will present him with a bill he cannot pay.
This absence from the life of his newborn daughter is something Marina and the baby will have to get used to. Because Lee Harvey will not be around to watch young Audrey Marina Rachel Oswald grow up.
* * *
Jackie Kennedy is back in Washington. Between her summer on Cape Cod, two September weeks in Newport, Rhode Island, and the two weeks in Greece, she’s been gone from the White House for almost four months. The date is October 21, and it’s suppertime in the White House. The First Lady has invited Newsweek correspondent Ben Bradlee and his wife, Tony, over for a late meal. They will dine in the White House family residence on the second floor, which Jackie renovated in 1961, hand-selecting the antique wallpaper portraying scenes from the American Revolution.
And while tonight’s meal will be light and the conversation lively, this room has ghosts. President William Henry Harrison died here in his bed from pneumonia back in 1841. Abraham Lincoln’s eleven-year-old son, Willie, took ill and died here in 1862. And Lincoln himself was embalmed in this room after being shot dead. Finally, just before the turn of the century, this high-ceilinged chamber served as the bedroom of William McKinley, who was also killed by an assassin’s bullet.
This impromptu dinner is the sort of get-together the First Lady enjoyed so often before baby Patrick’s death. It’s been a long time since the Kennedys had friends over just for fun. And while Jackie has canceled all formal social obligations until January 1964, this simple supper is an attempt to begin a normal daily life again. She waited until late afternoon to confirm that the president’s schedule was clear. The Bradlees received their invitation only at 7:00 P.M. but were more than happy to drop everything and come over.
The president has had a terrible day. The ongoing racial unrest down in Birmingham and the pitched battles over civil rights legislation here in Washington have left him in a foul mood. But the Bradlees are perhaps the Kennedys’ closest friends in Washington, and the president knows that, with them, his words are off the record. So Jackie did well by inviting Ben and Tony. JFK sits in his shirtsleeves sipping a drink and blowing off steam by talking politics across the table. Much of the conversation revolves around what he plans to do if he is reelected. “Maybe after 1964,” Kennedy repeats over and over. “Maybe after 1964.”