by Paul Wolfe
“It’s about paradigms. A paradigm is the structure we think in. Paradigms are unconscious, so it doesn’t matter what thoughts we think, because those thoughts are shaped and filtered through our paradigm. Taking LSD shifts our paradigm so we can think freshly, newly, without restraint.”
Lorraine Cooper: “Mary, I can’t comment on his paradigms, but Sherman is a senator, and you’re asking me to turn him loco. I’m in.” A moment of relief.
Georgette LeBlanc: “I’ve been seeing Dr. Winthrop Rubenstein. You should give him a try. He’s a brilliant man.”
I told her therapy is fine, but the psychedelic journey is of a different order of magnitude. Dr. Leary himself is a distinguished clinical psychologist who has concluded that talking in a doctor’s office is simply no match for the power of our emotional fixations. Both talking and understanding are just a spit in the ocean. We’re driven by imprints from childhood, and it takes a chemical stimulus to loosen those neurological bonds.
Pamela Harriman: “Well, you’ve become quite the little professor, Mary. Can you imagine my Averell on some crazy drug, prancing around and doing the Twist with a lampshade on his head?”
Polly Wisner: “You know Frank hasn’t been well . . . The doctors gave him some electric shock treatments. This is said in complete confidence, you all understand. His brain couldn’t take another jolt like this.”
Anne Truitt: “Jim will love it.”
Katharine Graham: “Phil will never agree to something so mentally drastic, and he’s already challenged. He would never trust me to give him something so dangerous.”
I told them Dr. Leary had assured me that moderate doses of LSD were safe when taken in a tranquil, supportive environment. “Leary also said LSD is a psychedelic drug that occasionally causes psychotic behavior in people who have not taken it,” I told them, trying to lighten the mood. But no one laughed.
“We’re simply not as free and far-out as you are, Mary” was Vangie’s unexpected reaction. I said I was just another wife, or ex-wife, just like them. “Ex marks the spot!” she shouted, and everyone roared. Katharine Graham, not surprisingly, uttered the final opinion. “Mary, you’re a free woman, and we’re not. It’s as simple as that. You paint, you do men, you blast your brains out with drugs, you have no fear . . .”
We were not just women with fine houses and difficult husbands, I said. The ladies gathered here for this mission just might hold the future of the planet in their hands. With fingers I have always considered too chubby I held up the pills, tiny tablets of history emerging from a dimension far beyond the band of consciousness we all inhabit. Fabricated in some lab, they emitted a presence, like the stones of Stonehenge. Then I passed them around. Pamela walked away. The others each took one.
Lorraine Cooper deposited hers in a small silver pillbox. “I hope I don’t mix it up with the Libriums.”
SEPTEMBER 22
Roxanne Arcturis says we will begin to unveil the outlines of the future of the Aquarian Age in 1963. “We are currently preparing for the Wave X vortex emanating from Center. The new transmissions will travel on reverberations of light and sound codes.” She says this is especially true of the energies and teachings of the Divine Feminine.
SEPTEMBER 28
James Angleton, I realize, found the perfect disciple in Cord Meyer. And after our divorce, while wandering in the wilderness of dead ideals, Cord found Jesus in James Jesus Angleton. He believed this Jesus would save him, but this Jesus was not in the saving business. This Jesus pulled Cord into deep realms of fear, a frigid plunge into the swamps of what Tim Leary calls fear-based, ego-based biochemical secretions. There isn’t much recognizable of the sweet young man I once married who fought so ardently for the idea of world government.
Do I miss him? I don’t miss him. But I miss what he meant. Maybe that is what we miss when we miss people—we don’t miss their bodies so much as their meanings, the promise of a future now lying dead in the past. It is the meanings that linger and cause pain deep in my heart, deep at night.
I leave Cord to James Jesus and the cigarettes and move on to a destiny bequeathed me by my father. I will bring world peace.
And I don’t want anyone to remember I had anything to do with it.
OCTOBER 3
Many poets obsess over death, but how many actually include it in their job description? James Angleton, in the strange asymmetry of his nature, is actually quite a poetic man. He once penned a short book about the wet religion to which he serves as high priest: fly fishing. I have not read it, but I have perused the opening line: “As long as rivers run and trout glide and paths lead up mountains and down hills and sunlight filters through leaves, nothing descends so gently on water as the lightness of a well-cast fly.” So perhaps their new godfather will take my boys fly fishing. I wish them to enjoy “the lightness of a well-cast fly.”
OCTOBER 10
The stillness after the act. He spent, she spent. The moment when a man’s drive to conquer worlds and launch wars is momentarily released, and limbs lie useless under sheets. Jack does not permit himself long to recover. His petite mort is less mort than with most men, so frighteningly inert they become after the act. He is up and off. And my small death grows as I get up and dress, get up and leave, go home alone.
OCTOBER 12
Autumn comes, though it is southern autumn here. No chill as in northern air, when the jackets come out in October and all living things sense the coming of freeze. It is cold in my studio now in the morning, and I asked Ben Bradlee to get me a small electric heater. I don’t want my paint to freeze on the canvas. He looked at me skeptically. “Don’t set fire to my goddam garage, now,” he growled. He’s a charmer. Tony is so lucky to have found a man of such strength. She found a full-time newsman, and I found a part-time president.
OCTOBER 15
Fear grips the country. As the year of 1962 sprawls to its close, the dream of peace is slipping away, and we are glued to television sets. A U-2 spy plane has discovered missile sites in Cuba.
Jack confronted Khrushchev over the sites, threatening grave consequences if Soviet missiles ever find their way to Cuba. The generals howl that anything less than war is appeasement. That word appeasement tortures Jack because of his father Joe’s shameful opposition to the war against Hitler. Strange that both Jack and I are children of Hitler appeasers. Even Dean Acheson is urging Jack to commence bombing immediately. The world teeters on a nuclear brink, and of course I can’t get through to Jack. The accoutrements of a woman were all that gained me entrance to the White House in the first place, and female anatomy carries no weight in a missile crisis.
I try to imagine the strain engulfing Jack, but I can’t. He has never dealt with a crisis of this magnitude; perhaps no human has. Kenny O’Donnell has urged me to wait. This is the crisis of his administration, and Jack can’t be distracted. I need to be patient.
I asked Kenny how Jack was doing, and he said he was doing fine. “How is he really doing?” I asked then. Kenny whispered that the doctors have elevated Jack’s medicine to an extraordinary degree. I asked him what they were giving him, and he said, “Mary, I can’t tell you that,” and I said, “Like what?” He said, “I’m not a doctor,” and I repeated: “Like what?”
Kenny said Jack’s taking steroids for his Addison’s disease.
“Which is?”
“I don’t know. Steroids are some kind of hormones. And they’ve beefed up the painkillers for his back.”
“Is that it?”
“I think he’s taking drugs for his colitis, and antibiotics for his urinary tract. Then he’s got allergies. I’ve seen Dr. Jacobson giving him pep pills.”
“Jacobson is Dr. Feelgood?”
“Yes. Jack’s got fatigue and these black moods, and Jacobson’s pep pills counteract them. He says that when he takes them, he doesn’t need the crutches for his back. And then he has stuff for his sleep.”
“Kenny, I’m worried sick about Cuba and the missiles and how J
ack will get us all out of this. But I also don’t know how Jack’s body can take all those drugs and pills and medicines. Isn’t he scared?”
“Mary, you know the boss. He doesn’t do scared. When they give him another shot, he says, ‘I don’t care if it’s horse piss. It works.’”
OCTOBER 17
My heart is in free fall. I worry for my boys, growing up in the woods far, far from Cuba and missile silos. Far, far from a mother swerving daily off the beaten path but carrying ridiculous love for them through each adventure.
I worry for Jack, sick and smiling, waking up daily with the weight of human existence next to his two poached eggs. I worry for my sisters, the one sister of blood and the many not of blood, all gathered together last night at the Bradlees’ in a solemn ceremony of concern. We are a species poised to annihilate itself over a tiny island off Florida. I turned for solace to Arthur Schlesinger because he is the bow-tied professor of Jack’s entourage, and in this crisis one longs for a bow-tied professor.
He pulled a pipe from his wet mouth. Pipes play havoc with lips. He whispered in a tone of chilling secrecy that Jack is now totally isolated from the Pentagon and the generals. They see the missile confrontation as the final opportunity to eliminate Castro. They blame the president for this disaster. If he hadn’t pulled the air support at the Bay of Pigs, if he’d proceeded with Operation Northwoods, there would have been a full invasion of Cuba, and we wouldn’t be in this situation. The military men pulled off regime change in Iran in 1953. They did it again in Guatemala in 1954. What was the big deal about Cuba? Just go in. But this isn’t Guatemala. A war with Cuba would escalate fatally. Bobby is running back-channel conversations with the Russians. He’s at the center of all the negotiations; he hasn’t slept for days.
I asked Arthur, How does it all end?
Bobby might pull it off, he said, if he could get Khrushchev to realize how little power Jack really has. How little he actually controls the military. How the generals might even seize power in a coup. Then he might back down and withdraw the missiles.
I wonder if I will ever speak to Jack again. Or if there will even be a world left for us to speak in. Billions of people waking up every day in small lives, pushing their hearts against small problems, and this bizarre few, so few, determining their fate, deciding the very existence of a planet spinning in space.
OCTOBER 18
Ben and Tony’s living room was a waiting room in hell. We waited to hear Khrushchev’s response to Jack’s demand. War or peace? Sanity or psychopathy on a global scale? We waited to see if the world would continue. Ben sat heavily in his easy chair, still in his Woodward & Lothrop shirt, loosened tie, and striped suspenders. Tony was putting out trays of food, ever the dutiful woman. Joe Alsop puffed away on an ivory cigarette holder and stared straight into the room, not speaking, as if he were a secret conspirator who already knew the end of the story and was waiting for everyone else to catch up.
The phone rang, a jarring explosion of sound that penetrated our chests. I jumped an inch off the couch. What agent of destiny could be on the line? Tony picked it up, and said it was for me. When I put the strange receiver to my ear, Kenny O’Donnell was on the line. He said ExComm had been meeting all night. ExComm was the Executive Committee of the National Security Council, handpicked by Jack to navigate the missile crisis: a dozen or so figures, including Bobby, Lyndon, Bundy, and McNamara. “Jack asked if he could see you for a few minutes. Can you come to the White House?”
I stood there, stunned, certain I could never reveal where I was going. I mumbled to all assembled that I had to handle an issue with my son.
“Is he all right?” Tony asked, so concerned, and I was struck by how utterly sweet my sister was, and how sadly removed we were from each other. We had so many secrets, though we were sisters and traveled in the same circles, though I painted every day in her garage. I felt a twinge of sadness at how life had changed us, but it dissolved when I remembered why it was I was standing up and leaving. I said it would be fine. How could I tell the journalists of Washington that I was heading for the White House?
Kenny ushered me into the small room adjoining the Oval Office. I have made out with Jack in that room—he loves that crazy sense of panic, forbidden intrigue, kissing my neck and rubbing my breasts while heads of state wait patiently on the other side of the door. I waited. This is what people do in crises and in childbirth, I thought as I stood there: they wait.
Eventually Jack came in. I had never seen him so weary, so exhausted. I hugged him, and we just stood there together a moment, hugging. Maybe that was all he wanted—a mother’s love that never came from his mother, nor from an impenetrable wife, nor from streams of girls offering themselves up to a handsome president. Unconditional love, I thought, and I just held him.
“LeMay said it’s appeasement,” he whispered, and I nodded. “But we’re going to blockade Cuba.” I nodded again, not saying a word. “We’re not going to invade, we’re not going to bomb, we’re not going to take out the missiles with air power, but we’re also not going to ignore it. We’re going to blockade. Sorensen suggested calling it a quarantine, and I like that. A strike would lead to nuclear retaliation, but doing nothing would put Berlin and the rest of Latin America at risk. This is a middle ground. A way through the fucking chaos back in that war room. A blockade gives us flexibility and gives Khrushchev wiggle room to back down and save face. We’re going to scrap the missiles near Turkey, but that’s going to remain a secret for now.”
“That’s a good plan,” I whispered. “You’ve done a masterful job. I think it will work. No one will get killed. You’re steering a course through the madness.”
“I’ve got to go now, Mary,” he said.
“I know.”
“I’ll see you soon.”
“Yes.”
NOVEMBER 1
When it ended, Jack was different. The blockade he mounted in defiance of the red-faced generals, his refusal to press the button of invasion on a tropical island, had succeeded. The missiles on their way to Cuba had turned around, headed back to the scrap heaps of the Soviet Union. As I walked the strangely silent streets of Georgetown, it felt as if a newer, quieter world had been born.
Jack, who had contemplated the extinction of mankind, didn’t come back unchanged. He had envisioned nuclear fire broiling the planet, sweeping human existence into oblivion with no record that any of us had existed. Caroline and John John, vanished. Everybody’s children erased because two middle-aged men faced off on a chessboard called the earth and, addled with testosterone and urged on by maniacs, refused to back down. They could have attempted to win a war that couldn’t be won. But wisdom had prevailed, and survival had been achieved. Eased along, of course, by the secret agreement to dismantle Jupiter missiles in Turkey.
Jack emerged from the Cuban missile crisis with the aura of an invincible hero. Our work together would continue. I smiled at this, knowing how gentle he actually was; a boy who loved to read, shoved by his dad into being tough, urged on by Bobby, pounded by the generals, challenged on a global stage by Fidel Castro. It could have ended differently.
Over champagne at a White House dinner, I told Jack that there was simply no one else with the power, wisdom, and independence to end the Cold War. Normally he recoils from such grandiose terms, and Pinchots speak in grandiose terms. But as I spoke those words last night at a party in honor of Jackie’s sister, Princess Lee Radziwill, and her husband with the phony Polish title, Prince Stanislaw Radziwill, Jack just grinned and blew smoke from his cigar at me. “It’s a Cuban,” he said, in honor of all that we had come through. I blew some Marlboro back at him. Then, when no one was looking, we blew kisses at each other. Two people with rotten lungs blowing kisses at each other.
NOVEMBER 6
A cacophony of female tongues are unleashed by alcohol, secrets splattered over Persian carpets and rich herringbone floors. Gossip speaks in shrieks rather than whispers. Chantilly Lace has resumed, in the b
edlam of Lorraine Cooper’s Monday-afternoon women’s salon.
I find myself becoming ever more a listener as time goes on. It is not so much an increased fascination with the wisdom and anecdotes of others as it is the sense that small talk in some ways makes you smaller—that when you waste words, you waste other parts of yourself, as well.
Sometimes I spend an entire day in the studio, talking to no one but Evangeline, my foolish cat, named for Vangie Bruce. Solitary Mary. There has always been this aspect to my nature. Even at Vassar, when other girls had departed for parts and boys unknown, I sometimes spent entire weekends at school by myself. I loved sitting alone in the dining hall, reading and eating the baked beans that Fritz cooked up especially for me.
But in the name of world peace and the cause of Chantilly Lace, I leaped into Lorraine’s clacking of birds on Monday, happy to see my friends: Lorraine, Georgette, Vangie, Bebe, and Kay, all recovered from their weekend dinners and parties, all affirming the beautiful fall day with fresh new clothes, all happy to see me.
Lorraine studied me when I arrived, wrinkling up her forehead. She is ever theatrical, speaking as if to reach the last rows of some imagined theater. “Oh, Mary! Pedal pushers?” She looked down at my pants, I looked down at my pants, and then I shrugged. I hadn’t realized what I was wearing; I had just come from painting.
“You can take the girl out of Pennsylvania, but you can’t take Pennsylvania out of the girl,” I said.
“No, but you can pull down her pants!”
I think Lorraine might be the funniest woman I know. Women aren’t supposed to be funny, as a species; no one encourages us to evoke laughter, nor does it seem that evolution has selected us for wit. We have other assets that assist in the propagation of the species, and I fear I am the least funny woman I know. I have always preferred leaping headlong into adventures, and telling jokes implies a stepping back from experience.