CHAPTER 4

Only when I was on the street, my head reverberating from the shock of Kennedy’s confession, my body shaking from the withdrawal of adrenaline, did I realize that we had talked almost through the lunch hour. I hadn’t eaten since 5:30 that morning. My stomach was growling. But instead of going to the restaurant when I got back to the Hay-Adams, I went straight to my room and called Debbie.

“Okay,” I said. “I’m going to tell you where I am and what I’m doing, but it has never been more important for you to say nothing to anyone except the children. And they must tell no one. Understood?”

“Of course.”

“I am really going out on a limb here, Debbie. I have guaranteed to the person with whom I’m working that you and they can be relied on 100 percent. If you or they say anything to anyone, I will not only have violated the most important confidence I have ever held, my career will be ruined. Because the whole world will know.”

“What on earth?”

“Do you understand?”

“Yes, yes, I said so.”

“You don’t hint about it. You just forget about it. If you have to, you lie.”

“For heaven’s sake, Asher.”

“Okay.” I took a breath, and said a little prayer. “I’m working with John Kennedy on his memoir.”

At least 10 seconds of silence passed. Then Debbie said, “Oh…my…God!” Another silence passed. “Oh, Asher! I feel like a fool.”

“I don’t want you to feel like a fool. I just want you to understand.”

“Of course I do.”

“Good.” I hesitated. “As for that other stuff, let’s just table it until I get this behind me. Okay?”

“Yes, yes, of course.”

Have you ever been in a position where winning seemed worse than losing? That was how I felt.

Five hours later, it was time to confront the prospect of an evening by myself.

I do not do well alone at night. I have never understood why, inasmuch as I enjoy being with my thoughts to the point that when I drive alone I almost never listen to the radio. Perhaps it’s because so much of a writer’s time is spent in silence and solitude that by day’s end he craves someone to talk to. Or perhaps it’s because if he is alone at night, his thoughts will inexorably drift back to his writing, with all of its problems and uncertainties. Each day is such an exhausting test for a writer—whether he is actually composing or developing the content, as I was doing now—that carrying his problems into the evening is the last thing he should do.

I persuaded myself, therefore, that I needed to relax in order to make certain I’d be fresh and keen the next morning. I persuaded myself that it would be helpful, as well, to begin to plant my cover story. What impresses me as I write this is how completely such excuses convinced me at the time.

By eight o’clock that evening I was at dinner with Maggie in Georgetown.

“That’s not quite your line, is it?” she said after I’d told her about the idea that had supposedly brought me back to Washington. “Since you’re being so elusive, I don’t exactly know what your line is, but if you’d written a book like that I would have known about it.”

“That’s just the point,” I said. “I’m tired of my line. I didn’t know how tired until I went with you to Joe Kraft’s. I’d like to get into the game. Listening to all your shop talk that evening, it just struck me that there was a great book to do called The Kennedys and the Media.”

“And you’ve sold the idea already?”

“That’s not the way it works,” I said, surprised at how comfortable I’d suddenly become with my story. “I’ve got to write an outline, and before I do that I’ve got to know what I’m talking about.”

“And you still won’t tell me what brought you here in the first place?”

“My lips are sealed.”

She parted my lips with the tips of her fingers, then leaned toward me and took the lower lip gently between her teeth. “Hey!” I muttered, pulling back, but she held on. At last she let go, leaned back and regarded me with a smile.

“So much for sealed lips,” she said.

“You really shouldn’t do that.”

“Are you afraid you’ll succumb?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Then why did you call me?”

“Because I hoped you could tell me whom I should talk to on my book,” I said.

Maggie drew back, tilted her head, fixed me with her eyes and pressed her lips together. “I don’t believe you, Asher Daniel.”

I said nothing, nor did my expression change.

At last, Maggie sighed, and said, “Jack Kennedy’s favorite reporters are Hugh Sidey, Joe Kraft, Joe Alsop and Charlie Bartlett. His favorite editors are Ben Bradlee of the Washington Post and Tom Winship of the Boston Globe. The list is almost identical for Bobby. You should interview all of those people for starters. And then, of course, you should interview me. Extensively.”

The mere prospect of doing that sent quivers into my limbs. “What do you do when you’re not seducing well-married men?”

“Are you a well-married man?”

“I would say so.”

“That’s less than a definitive ‘yes.’”

“You haven’t answered my question.”

“Nor have you quite answered mine.”

“You don’t seriously want me to bore you with the story of my marriage?”

“Why would you dream that I’d be bored? I feel I have a proprietary interest.”

I leaned back. “All right,” I said. “Let’s trade. Your story for my story. You’re first.”

“I can tell you my story in two sentences. I’ve probably had as many men as bachelor men in my line of work have had women. I’ve had three, maybe four steady lovers, but I’ve never come close to marrying.” She paused for just an instant, and in that instant her eyes seemed to bore past my defenses and into my mind. “Make that three sentences. The one man I would have married married someone else.”

I was the one who broke the contact, looking away from Maggie into the room.

It was almost 10, but the restaurant, a capacious, stripped down bar and grill, was as crowded as when we’d arrived. It was a noisy, young, beer-drinking crowd, for the most part, seated on high stools next to small round tables whose thick iron stands were fastened to the wood floors. We were at a conventional table in a corner at the rear of the room, my back to one of the walls that met at the corner, Maggie’s to the other. The table was so small that my left leg and Maggie’s right leg touched beneath it. I wondered if she could feel my trembling.

“I don’t believe you,” I said.

“Believe me. It’s true.”

“You’re not the marrying kind.”

“Not true. I got spoiled early.”

“Why are you doing this?”

“I’m not doing anything. I’m just front and center. That’s the only way I know to be.” We passed the next minute in silence. Then Maggie said, “Okay, your turn.”

Until that moment, I had never discussed my marriage with anyone. Doing so now—with Maggie, of all people—seemed like a form of infidelity. It took me a moment to start. “It’s nothing you haven’t read about in McCall’s or the Ladies Home Journal,” I said reluctantly. “You go along for twenty years, thinking you’re doing okay. You prosper, you get joy out of raising kids, you build a life. But then—maybe because the kids are launched and the life is set—it gradually comes over you that everything isn’t quite right. The excitement diminishes and eventually disappears. You become uncomfortable with the certainties that used to make you comfortable. Mostly, you find out that you and your spouse are different people than you were when you got married, and neither one of you is who you thought you’d be, and the people you became don’t go together like the people did who got married.”

“What do you consider your single greatest difference?”

“You always were good at asking questions,” I said. I thought for a moment. “Debbie lives for the present. My head’s in the future.”

“Oh, Ash! Why, for heaven’s sake?”

“Obviously, because I’m not that pleased with the present.”

“But whatever it is you do, you’re successful.”

“I am in the conventional sense, in that I succeed at what I do, and make an excellent living.”

“So it’s more than your marriage.”

“It’s all bound up with my marriage. Being married to Debbie obliged me to make certain career choices. Five years after I joined the Chronicle, there was an unexpected opening in the Washington bureau. I lobbied hard for it, and got it. Debbie agreed to go, but she was heartsick at the prospect of leaving her family and friends and even her city. Native San Franciscans really love their city. So what was the point? It was the road to disaster. But, for me, it was another kind of disaster. I was never going to do what I’d set out to do. As I said, seeing you, and the life you have, makes for a painful comparison.”

“Maybe seeing me isn’t such a good idea.”

“If I don’t see you, I’ll just be thinking about you.”

Maggie frowned, straightened and sat back, all at once, and regarded me intently. “Asher, dear heart, what are you saying?”

“That for years, the measure of my marriage has been how much and how often I’ve thought about you. When I’m happy with Debbie, I don’t think about you at all. When I’m not happy with Debbie, I think about you a lot. No fantasies—well, not erotic fantasies. Just imagining how we might run into one another and what that would be like.”

“What was it like?”

I nodded. “Unfortunately, it was nice.”

Maggie’s eyes bored into mine. “You’re not in love with Deborah, are you.” It was a statement, not a question.

I thought for a long time before replying. “Maybe I’m in that stage where being in love has passed to loving. I can’t imagine life without her. But she frustrates me a lot, and I get sore at her sometimes.” I hesitated, flustered by the sentence that had leapt into my mind, doubting if I should say it, knowing that I would. “And in the last few weeks I’ve had occasion to wonder whether she was the woman I should have married.”

Maggie nodded. Then she said, “Why didn’t you marry me?”

“As I said, you didn’t strike me as the marrying kind. You were so incredibly ambitious.”

“We could have worked together.”

I smiled—ruefully, I’m sure. “You’re dreaming, Maggie.”

She gave me a funny look, then stared into her empty wine glass, twirling the stem in her fingers. “Maybe,” she said. She was silent for another moment. “Maybe nobody gets it all.” Then she looked at me so nakedly that it took everything I had not to look away. “Be mine again, for one night.”

I took her hand and squeezed it, sensing that I shouldn’t be doing even that. “I just have a feeling that if we sleep together, it’s all going to crumble, and I’m not ready for that yet. I don’t know why, but I’m not. Besides, I’ve got a record to preserve.”

Once again, she drew back, and regarded me quizzically. “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”

“No one but her since you, Maggie.”

“Then chemistry’s not the problem.”

“In one sense it’s not. In another sense it is. It’s the chemistry that’s held us together, when we’d probably both be better off if we’d split.”

I paid the bill and walked Maggie home. At the door to her house she turned to me. I didn’t make a move. Suddenly, she laughed. “I think I’ll write a column about the changing roles of men and women. Unmarried woman propositions married man. Married man refuses.” She raised her fingers to her lips, then put her fingers on my lips. Then she went inside and shut the door behind her.

At a few minutes after six the next morning, a Secret Service man let me in to the Georgetown residence. I made my way to the study, slipped my coat off, loosened my tie, sank into the couch and began to thumb through the manuscript, fortified by a pot of strong, delicious coffee an anonymous member of Kennedy’s staff had provided me. Forty minutes later, I looked up from the pages and said aloud, “It’s not there. It’s just not there.”

I spent the next several minutes trying to figure out how I was going to get the 35th President of the United States to confront a gaping hole in his memoir. It was seven o’clock when I picked up the phone and called Maggie.

“Good morning, Ash,” she said brightly.

“How did you know it was me?”

“Because nobody else would dare call me at this hour.”

“I woke you?”

“Lord, no! It’s my writing time.”

“I’ll hang up.”

“Don’t you dare. I’ve waited 23 years to hear your voice in the early morning.”

“Yeah, I’ll bet. How did you sleep?”

“Briefly. You?”

“Restlessly.”

“If you’d spent the night, I could have remedied that.”

“If we’d gotten any sleep.”

“Well, that’s true, I suppose. So to what do I owe the honor of this call?”

“I just wanted to be sure you understood that my actions—or lack of them—have nothing to do with my desire for you.”

“Why, how nice. I’ll carry that thought with me through the day.”

“And what will you be doing today?”

“Well, actually, today’s a workout day, so as soon as I finish my column, I’ll head for my club.”

“Ah! I envy you. What’s your workout like?”

“This morning, it’s racquetball.”

“Racquetball! You play?”

“Yes. Do you?”

“I do.”

“Then play with me after work.”

I hesitated. “You won’t be too tired after your morning game?”

“The woman I’m playing isn’t very good.”

“And you are?”

“I won’t be modest. I’m the club champ.”

“Ah!”

“And you?”

“I’m okay.”

“Are you being modest?”

“We’ll see.”

I heard footsteps in the outer office. “Look, gotta go. I’ll call your office this afternoon and you can tell me where to meet you.”

“I can tell you right now.”

“Sorry, can’t do it. Later.” I hung up without waiting for a reply, just as Kennedy walked into the study, wearing chinos and a heavy sweater, stubble on his chin, a dark frown on his face, the deep lines around his eyes announcing that he’d slept poorly, his labored walk suggesting that his back was still bothering him. He regarded me warily—trouble, for sure. My alarm system set off every nerve in my body.

“I tried to reach you last night until 11,” he said.

“I was out with an old friend. Anything wrong?”

“I was hoping I could get to you before you called your wife.”

“I spoke to her yesterday afternoon.”

“And you told her?”

“Yes, of course.”

“That’s too bad.”

“Why is that?”

“Because this isn’t working and I’m calling it off.”

I stared at Kennedy, so shocked that I was speechless. “Just like that?” I managed at last.

“I warned you from the start that it could happen at any time.”

I kept staring at him, feeling my anger building to the verge of rage. “Thank you, Mr. President,” I said, rose at once and began to pack my notepads and pens into my day pack.

“Look,” Kennedy said, “you’ve done everything you could, and you’re very good at what you do, but the bottom line is that you were sent here to make me put things in my memoir that I believe are better left unsaid. No one can make those judgments for me. I have to make them myself.”

I looked up from my packing, and shaking my head, said, “That’s all very good, sir, but there are huge holes in your memoir. I mean, I found one this morning…”

“No more games, Asher,” Kennedy snapped.

He might as well have called me a thief. “I don’t play games, Mr. President,” I said, all but shouting at the former president, and not caring in the least. “I help people write books. I don’t give a fuck who you are, nothing I’ve done gives you the right to say that I have tried to trick you.” With that, I turned away from him and resumed packing.

After a moment, Kennedy said, “Why don’t you tell me about the hole you found this morning?”

I didn’t bother to look up. “You’re not going to do anything about it.”

“I’d like to know,” he said.

“Okay,” I said, suddenly grimly eager to prove my point. “It has to do with Lyndon Johnson.”

“What about him?”

“How you came to your decision about the ’64 election. And don’t tell me you covered that. No one’s going to believe that Lyndon Johnson took himself off the ticket for reasons of health.”

“Why not? Look at him today. He’s a very sick man.”

For the first time since I’d been in Kennedy’s presence, I felt that I had the upper hand. I knew my argument was solid, and, having just been fired, I could make it as strongly as I wished. “In 1964, Lyndon Johnson was not a very sick man. I didn’t believe at the time that his health had anything to do with it, and I didn’t know anyone who did, and if you don’t deal with that now, no one’s going to believe your book. They’ll know it’s bullshit.”

Kennedy stared at me but said nothing.

“Ah, screw it,” I said. I picked up my tape recorder, removed the cassette and handed it to Kennedy.

“I’ll reread the manuscript,” he said.

“Don’t bother. You’ve already made up your mind.”

I figured that was it, and resumed packing.

“All right,” he said, “what’s missing? In your opinion.”

I turned to him. “When you were lying in that Dallas hospital, you had to have wondered what would happen to the country under Johnson if you were to die.”

“That’s exactly the kind of speculation that wouldn’t do a goddamn thing but make a sick man suffer even more than he has already.”

We stared at one another, like gunfighters waiting for one another to draw.

“Ah, Jesus, here we go again,” Kennedy said at last. He gave a long sigh, so profound that it fluttered his lips. “I liked Lyndon. He was an original. Larger than life. Nobody could ever get things done the way he could if he wanted to. He could really put the arm on you. But he wasn’t presidential. His best quality was that he didn’t bullshit himself. He knew exactly who he was. Deep in his heart, he didn’t believe that he was worthy, or could do it.” He paused then, for at least 10 seconds, like a man who is contemplating whether to jump across a chasm. “And I didn’t believe it, either. Lyndon was a primitive. He thought in simplistic terms. His idea of the world was a caricature of what the world was really like.”

“So you were sorry you put him on the ticket.”

“Yes and no. No, because I couldn’t have won without him. Yes, because I was certain he’d cause a lot of trouble if he were to become president.”

“Why?”

“He had an insufferable amount of pride. I felt that he would confuse the country’s welfare with his own place in history. He wouldn’t have been able to negotiate our way out of Vietnam. He would have felt that he was being pushed around by a third rate power, and he wouldn’t have been able to accept that.”

I stared at Kennedy for some seconds, then opened my bag, withdrew my pad and riffled through my notes until I found what I was looking for. “That story you told me about the missile, here’s what you said: ‘For a couple of weeks I could hardly think of anything else. After I was shot I thought about it again in a very different context. I wondered how another president might have reacted.’” I looked up. “Weren’t you wondering specifically about Lyndon Johnson?”

“Yeah. Sure. What’s your point?”

“My point is that, given your feelings about Vietnam, and given the epiphany you experienced after Dallas, you didn’t want a vice president who wouldn’t pursue your agenda if you were to die.”

Kennedy stared at me. “Who said Dallas was an epiphany?”

“That’s what it was, Mr. President. You didn’t use the word, but that’s what you described.”

Somewhere in the house someone was running a vacuum. For a long while, that was the only sound. Finally, Kennedy said, “Look, the man’s got a bum heart. He was a loyal vice president. I just can’t say that.”

“You can’t say you dumped him because of Vietnam?”

“That’s right.”

“But that’s why you dumped him?”

“Yeah. That’s why. But there’s no way that’s going in the book.”

“Okay, Mr. President, there’s your gaping hole. At some point, you had to have considered what might have happened to the world if the bullet that grazed your face had blown off your head. You just said that Johnson would probably have stuck it out in Vietnam. What would that have done to the country? What else would he have done? You don’t know. Nobody knows. But what’s absolutely certain is that the fate of every one of us was riding on that bullet. So what you learned is a lesson for the country—that the vice president ought to be someone who will carry out the president’s mandate if the president dies. You owe the country that lesson.”

I put the notepad back in my bag, closed the bag and put on my coat.

“I can’t do it, Asher,” Kennedy said.

I looked at him. He seemed shaken, and weary. For the first time in my presence, he seemed to be pleading for understanding.

Now it was my turn to sigh. “You still don’t get it. You’re not the president any more. You’re an author writing a book. No one ordered you to write it. You volunteered. In doing that, you made a deal with the public: to tell the truth. The truth isn’t just this part and that part, it’s all the parts. Not just how you dumped Lyndon Johnson. How you dumped J. Edgar Hoover. How you cleared the field for your brother in ’68. And, yes, Mr. President, how you dealt with the rumors about you and Mrs. Kennedy.” I paused for a moment, dumbfounded at having to fight back tears. “Goodbye, Mr. President.”

I did not extend my hand. I just picked up my bag and left.

I didn’t even consider a taxi. I needed to walk off my anger—that river of rage you can feel cascading through your body when you’re convinced you’ve been profoundly wronged.

As noted earlier, I liked to believe that I never tried to kid myself. When I did poorly, I knew it. Conversely, I knew when I’d done well. In the matter of the memoirs of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, I was positive that I’d done exactly what I’d been asked to do and had needed to do to help him rescue his memoir. As of early this morning, he’d still had far to travel, but at least he was on the right road, and I was the one who’d set him there.

So much for doing your job well.

Now what? I asked myself as I was halfway back to my hotel.

I was in Washington with no legitimate reason to be there and no usable excuse for leaving, having only just returned, supposedly to determine whether I could gather enough compelling material to do a book called The Kennedys and the Media.

On the other hand, I was in no hurry to return to San Francisco with my hat in my hand, especially given the problems that awaited me there.

By the time I reached the hotel, I’d decided not only to remain in Washington indefinitely but—my reporter’s juices stirring for the first time in years—to go after that book aggressively. First step: talk to as many reporters and editors I could find who knew the story and would be willing to share it. Second step: confront the brothers Kennedy with the material. They might choose to ignore it, but my bet was that, given their media savvy, they would want to present their side of the story.

And then, of course, there was Maggie.

We met at her club in downtown Washington, and went to our respective locker rooms to change. On the court, I went through the motions of warming up in something of a daze; I was that shocked by the sight of her in shorts and a T-shirt. Here was a woman in her early 40s with the definition and suppleness of a superbly conditioned athlete in her late 20s.

I’d been playing a version of the game for at least 10 years before racquetball was invented, using paddle tennis racquets and a large rubber ball. Once racquetball caught on, I began to enter competitions, and was currently ranked number three in California in my age group. The game did not have the finesse of either tennis or squash, but the points between well-matched players could be intensely competitive and prolonged, which made for splendid cardiovascular conditioning.

We played three games, all of which I won. But Maggie was an exceptionally strong player, fast, well coordinated and deft, and with an excellent understanding of the game. By taking something off my shots I was able to prolong the points, some of which were thrilling. To those who don’t engage in physically taxing recreational sports, that statement may not have much meaning; those who do will understand the sense of exhilaration and well-being that goes with the experience. I knew that Maggie felt it; when the last and perhaps best point of the match had ended, she turned to me with joy in her eyes. We shook hands, and then suddenly embraced, our bodies drenched in sweat.

A feeling seized me then so acute that I was not sure I could endure it, yet so precious that I wanted it to go on forever, a feeling of being totally alive, totally open to whatever the future held, regardless of the uncertainty or risk. Like a well-remembered sound, it triggered echoes of a distant time, and I remembered myself as I had been, so eager, so open, so determined to try everything.

Maggie was thinking of that time as well, a fact I only sensed at first as her mood suddenly turned pensive, but that she confirmed later as we sat to a light dinner at the Hay-Adams, which I suggested because it was only a short walk from her club.

“You’re so gifted,” she said. “Everything you do you do so incredibly well. You were the best in the class…”

“I graduated second.”

“Never mind. You should have been first. My question is, have you really done with your gifts what you should have?”

“By whose terms?”

She looked at me earnestly, searching, it seemed, for a clue to some mystery I represented to her. “All right, let me change the question. Have you really done what you wanted to?”

“You know the answer to that.”

She shook her head. “But how can you accept that? Excuse the cliché, but this isn’t the dress rehearsal.”

I shrugged. “I’m not passing through life alone, Maggie.”

She looked at me in despair. “Asher Daniel, if you married a woman who kept you from being the person you wanted to be then you married the wrong woman.”

The waiter rescued me, but not for long. As soon as he had set our plates down, Maggie was back on the attack. “You should have taken the Pulitzer.”

“And be deprived of my chance to be gallant?”

“If you’d really wanted to be gallant, you’d have taken the money and invited me to come along.”

“People didn’t do that in those days, Maggie.”

“I did.”

For the next minute, we attacked our food in silence. Suddenly, Maggie grabbed my right forearm. “Look, you have the gift. I’d kill to have your gift. You could be a major writer. But you’re never going to be acknowledged until you come out of your hole.”

“What do you call what I’m doing here?”

Maggie leaned back, and studied me. “I’d forgotten about that,” she said. She thought for a moment. “The Kennedys and the Media is a nice idea, but it’s not a major book, Asher. It will only glorify a lot of people who aren’t important in and of themselves, only by what they represent. Let’s face it, we’re all a bunch of glorified spectators in this business. We’re not on the firing line. We just evaluate those who are.”

We finished dinner and walked to the lobby. When I turned to say goodnight, Maggie was looking at me, a challenge in her eyes. I didn’t need words to understand it. My room was an elevator’s ride away. In minutes we could be in one another’s arms. I stood there helplessly as conscience battled desire. “Oh, Maggie,” I said at last, “I will probably hate myself in the morning for saying what I’m about to, but I’ve got to cut this off.”

“Meaning?”

“That I can’t see you anymore.”

I couldn’t be certain, but I thought that an extra layer of moisture covered Maggie’s eyes. “What about your book?” she said. “Don’t you want me to help you with your book?”

I thought for a moment. “Let me see how far I get with the leads you’ve given me.”

For at least 10 seconds Maggie’s eyes never left mine. No question now, they were shimmering. “Of course,” she said, and walked off.

The phone was ringing as I walked into my room. Only four people knew where I was: Maggie, whom I’d just left; Doris Spivak, to whom I’d conveyed the bad news that afternoon; Deborah, who was avoiding me; and the former president, who’d just fired me. I picked up the phone, puzzled. “Hello?” I said.

“I’m glad you’re still here,” an unmistakable voice said, and then went on without a pause or acknowledgment from me. “I told you yesterday that the one good thing I could say about myself was that I learn from my mistakes. What I did this morning was a mistake. I’d like you back here tomorrow morning—assuming you’re willing to come.”

A clean and gracious concession. I cleared a lump in my throat. “Of course I’m willing to come,” I said.

“Good,” he said. The next thing I heard was a click.

I put the phone down slowly, as stunned by this reconciliation as I’d been by my dismissal that morning, and utterly perplexed by what might have prompted it.