Spy in a Little Black Dress

III



Jackie’s heart skipped a beat when she picked up the phone and heard a vibrant man’s voice with an unmistakable Boston accent say, “Hello, Jacqueline, this is Jack Kennedy. I hope I’m not calling too early, but I wanted to reach you before I got tied up in Congress all day.”

What a shrewd judge of character Allen Dulles is, Jackie thought, as she remembered her CIA boss assuring her that she’d hear from Jack again. But the very next day at nine in the morning? From what she’d seen, an indifferent nonchalance was the secret of Jack Kennedy’s success as a roué. So Dulles had been right when he predicted that John Husted’s appearance out of the blue would ignite a competitive spark in Jack.

“No, you’re not calling too early,” Jackie reassured him. “In fact, I was just getting ready to take my horse Sagebrush out for a morning ride. The grounds at Merrywood are gorgeous this time of year with everything in bloom.”

“Not as gorgeous as the lady on horseback will be, I venture to say.”

He wakes up flirting, Jackie thought, but all she said was, “You’re very kind.”

“Well, I understand that you’re quite the horsewoman,” Jack said, “but as a Democrat, I’m afraid the donkey is more my speed. Some of my political enemies might say that’s because I’m such an ass myself.”

“I hardly think that’s true,” Jackie responded with a chuckle. Jack’s self-deprecating humor was a refreshing change from all the braggadocio that she heard at Merrywood, where her stepfather’s circle of Washington’s power brokers frequently gathered to hold forth on their latest accomplishments like talking billboards.

“Actually, I’m allergic to horses, strange as that might seem,” Jack said, “so I have a different idea. How would you like to go dancing in the Blue Room at the Shoreham Saturday night?”

“Oh, Jack, I’d love to,” Jackie said, forgetting not to sound overeager, as her father had warned her against when a gentleman caller asked her out for a date. But she was genuinely pleased. The Blue Room was the city’s swankiest nightclub, drawing stars as big as Judy Garland, and the Shoreham was the most famous hotel in Washington. Senators, congressmen, and diplomats lived there; presidential inaugural balls took place there; and President Truman often came there for his regular poker game. Perle Mesta, Washington’s “Hostess with the Mostest,” held social gatherings at the Shoreham, and Jackie herself had gone to many a society dance, school prom, debutante’s coming-out party, and wedding in its regal ballroom. Jack Kennedy had picked the perfect place for their first night on the town.


It was now a beautiful Friday morning in late spring, cool for that time of year, and Jacqueline Lee Bouvier was enjoying the weather by taking a stroll through the streets of Georgetown. She was glad to have the time off from her training at the Farm. Her mind was stuffed to bursting with all of the information she had learned in Escape and Evasion, Flaps and Seals, and Codes and Ciphers, and her body was stiff from daily bouts of calisthenics and running the obstacle course. With all this behind her for the week, she was looking forward to a civilized lunch with Charlie Bartlett, who had promised to fill her in on the elusive Mr. Kennedy.

Hearing a man nearby speak into an open phone booth with a distinct Boston accent, Jackie turned, thinking it might actually be Jack Kennedy. But when she got a look at the man, she was disappointed to see that the Boston accent belonged to someone else. That Jack Kennedy, she thought, giving the devil his due—so dangerously attractive, he could get under a girl’s skin. But she knew it was her job to get under his skin, and she was hoping that Charlie Bartlett would provide her with the insights she needed to do just that.

She loved walking down Wisconsin Avenue in the heart of Georgetown, with its quaint shops and wonderful restaurants, including her favorite, Au Pied de Cochon, which resembled nothing less than a Paris bistro that just so happened to be plunked down in a Washington, D.C., neighborhood. Next to the restaurant was another one of her favorite Georgetown locations, an antiquarian bookstore that was filled with hidden literary treasures. Early for her luncheon date with Charlie, Jackie decided to stop in there for a leisurely browse through the stacks.

The tinkling bell over the doorway announced her arrival to the shop’s owner, a tweedy man with owlish glasses and a neatly trimmed Vandyke, who stood behind a counter, removing archaic books from a wooden crate.

“Hello, Miss Bouvier,” he said. “What can I do for you today? I just got a very rare first edition of The Old Curiosity Shop. It’s in excellent condition.”

Jackie looked sufficiently impressed, then said, “Sounds like it’s too rich for my blood. I’m just a poor working girl. I was wondering, though, if you have any books on Cuba.”

Although she was searching for nothing in particular, she thought it might be helpful to pick up a book on Cuba, since this was where her next assignment would be. She knew that there had to be more to that Caribbean island than rum, sugar, the mambo, and Desi Arnaz, that cute Cuban bandleader who had successfully teamed with former MGM beauty Lucille Ball to star in the popular television series I Love Lucy.

The owner pointed her to a small section near the back of the shop, and Jackie began to browse the shelves, forgetting all about her recent problems and becoming lost in a place that seemed to have more in common with Dickensian London than with 1950s Washington, D.C. And then, as usually happened while she was immersed in this world of paper and glue and musty smells and dust, one title in particular seemed to rise and float in front of her eyes. This one announced, A Recent History of Cuba.

As though under a spell cast by the book, Jackie’s hand reached out and plucked it off the shelf. She opened it and laughed to herself. This book had been printed in 1855. Recent, indeed! Although she doubted that there was anything in it relevant enough to add to her current store of knowledge on the subject, Jackie impulsively decided to purchase the book. She took it to the counter, where the owner, acting like a proper English bookshop proprietor, wrapped the book in brown paper and tied it with twine before handing the package to Jackie and taking her money.

Still early for her luncheon date with Charlie, Jackie entered Au Pied de Cochon next door. There she ordered a glass of wine and waited for her friend while examining her new purchase.

Seated at a table where she could watch the great parade of pedestrian traffic pass by, Jackie tore away the brown paper and twine from her parcel. She opened the cover and was surprised to find a bookplate that read PROPERTY OF WASHINGTON COLLEGE. Jackie knew that this was the original name of Washington and Lee University, after the general who provided the initial financial impetus for the institution, George Washington. There was no WITHDRAWN FROM CIRCULATION stamp anywhere on the book, meaning that it had been either illegally removed from the college library or checked out and never returned.

Jackie leafed through the book. The pages were yellowed with age, but the book itself was in surprisingly immaculate condition for one so old. As she looked through it, though, something curious happened. The endpapers at the front of the book popped open and several folded-up pages fluttered out and landed on the table in front of her.

What was this? Jackie put down the book and picked up the pages and unfolded them. They were as yellowed as those in the book, unlined and covered with minuscule handwriting. The author of these pages was obviously intent on writing as much as possible within the confines of the small page.

Jackie quickly looked through them, admiring the writer’s neat penmanship. She then started from the beginning and began to read the pages, which she quickly determined were portions of a diary. She turned to the last page, but the name of the writer appeared to be absent.

The waiter set her glass of wine down in front of her, but Jackie was so caught up in the diary that she didn’t notice.

As she skimmed its pages, several individual entries popped out at her:


… February 24th, 1855… a great day. I have joined William Walker’s army of filibusters and will soon take part in the invasion of Nicaragua.


… July 13th, 1855… glory hallelujah, we are victorious. We marched through the streets of Granada, greeted by the locals as conquering heroes. One young girl came up and threw a flower at me. I put it in my hair and marched on, warmed by the reception I and my fellow filibusters received…


… [undated]… I have been introduced to Our Lady of the Flower. Her name is Maria Consuela. The introduction was made by the Great Man himself. To my surprise, Maria Consuela, who left the convent on the day of liberation, is now the mistress of William Walker. I guess he mourns no more for the dead fiancée he left behind, buried in their native New Orleans…


… [undated]… the Great Man has become too powerful and his recent rulings have made many powerful enemies back in the U.S. of A., including his chief financial supporter, Cornelius Vanderbilt. I fear that our days in this country are now numbered.


… April 30th, 1857… it is late at night and I find myself a partner in a momentous secret undertaking. Knowing of my friendship with Maria Consuela, the Great Man has charged me with the responsibility of spiriting her out of Nicaragua and escorting her to safety in Cuba. The Americans will be landing on the morrow with express orders to place Walker under arrest. Under cover of darkness, I will flee with Maria Consuela and the Great Man’s treasure to Cuba. I will pray for a moonless night.


… [undated]… we have landed safety in Cuba. I wonder how the Great One is faring back in Granada. Whatever his fate, his treasure is safe here. I will mark its location with a map. Once I have ascertained that Maria Consuela is safe, too, I shall endeavor to return to the U.S. of A., where I hope to resume my career as a professional soldier.


Jackie was surprised to find that there was a small gap in the dates until the unnamed diarist picked up his account again. But there was no time to read them because here was Charlie, on time for their lunch. She put the book and the diary pages away in her pocketbook and rose to greet Charlie. Finding out the unnamed diarist’s fate would have to wait.


“One thing you need to know about Jack Kennedy is that as soon as he has a woman, he loses interest,” Charlie Bartlett told Jackie over lunch. “The chase is everything to him, the challenge of getting the woman to say yes, and then he’s off to the next one. He has a voracious sexual appetite; it’s like Chinese food—an hour after a meal, he’s hungry again.”

Jackie glanced around the room, hoping that no one in the crowd of politicos in conservative suits and dowagers in tasteful outfits had overheard Charlie. She didn’t want anyone to know that she was having lunch with him so that he could brief her in preparation for her date with Jack Kennedy. When she expressed concern that they might bump into Jack at the popular Au Pied de Cochon, Charlie had assured her that the congressman always brought his lunch in a brown paper bag to the Cannon House Office Building. “Sometimes, the security guards mistake him for a tourist and try to stop him from going up to his office,” Charlie had told her, laughing.

Jackie had to laugh too. “Bringing his lunch in a brown paper bag to the office doesn’t sound like much of a ladies’ man,” she said.

“Well, he’s not the kind of ladies’ man who romances a woman, takes her out to lunch, sends her flowers, or writes love notes to her. He’s a Don Juan type—the kind of rake that women find irresistible. In that respect, he takes after his father.” Charlie carefully buttered his chunk of baguette and gave Jackie a questioning look. “You’ve heard about Joe Kennedy and Gloria Swanson, haven’t you?”

Jackie nodded. It seemed that all of Washington knew about Joe Kennedy’s scandalous affair with the famous actress, whom he had met years ago when he was a Hollywood producer. Tongues were still wagging about how Joe would bring his mistress into the family home in Hyannis Port and make love to her there while his kids were around and his peripatetic wife, Rose, was shopping in Paris or praying in a shrine in Rome.

“It’s odd, but Jack’s father always wanted him to be privy to his extramarital affairs,” Charlie said, pausing to take a bite of his coq au vin and a swallow of his pinot noir. “Joe would give him an explicit description of every woman he slept with, and when Jack got older, Joe constantly talked about exchanging girls with him.”

Jackie picked at her salad niçoise and pretended to be shocked, but her own father had exhibited a similar predilection, drawing her into his lecherous affairs as a confidante when she was a child. Black Jack even told his little daughter how he had slipped away from her mother on their honeymoon while sailing to England on the Aquitania and had made love with heiress Doris Duke. Whenever Jackie was alone with him, her father would point out different women and ask her which one she thought he should seduce. At least Jack Kennedy and I have something in common, she thought.

“But when it comes to marriage,” Charlie informed her, “Jack doesn’t want a girl who’s an ‘experienced voyager,’ as he puts it.”

Jackie smiled. “You mean he wants a virgin?” she asked, recognizing the “experienced voyager” reference from a collection of Lord Byron’s journals and letters. “That’s a quaint way of putting it. I didn’t know Jack was so literary.”

“Oh, he’s as avid a reader as you are, Jackie,” Charlie said. “He plays it down, but he’s as well schooled in the classics as he is in historical and political works. He was very sickly as a child—still has a serious back problem—and was bedridden a lot of the time, so he buried his nose in books.”

Another thing we have in common, Jackie thought, remembering how books became her refuge from unpleasantness when she was growing up. To escape from violent brawls between her drunken father and enraged mother, Jackie would retreat to a room with floor-to-ceiling bookcases and read anything that she could get her hands on—Chekhov, George Bernard Shaw, Byron, and Gone with the Wind, which she had read three times by the age of eleven. It surprised her that Jack Kennedy had also enjoyed a privileged childhood in many ways, but not the rosy one that most people assumed.

“I wouldn’t have guessed Jack was such a lonely bookworm as a boy,” she told Charlie. “He seemed so outgoing and self-confident at the party and had such presence. It was amazing.”

“He’s worked hard to develop that persona, believe me,” Charlie said. “When I first met him in Palm Beach right after the war, we were both shy young navy veterans who came from rich Catholic families and were trying to climb the Mount Everest of WASP high society. Jack’s looks, charm, and spunk have taken him a long way, but the family carried the stigma of being Irish Catholic ‘riffraff.’ That’s why Rose was so obsessed with neatness and propriety. She made her children pass inspection like the toughest drill sergeant in the army.”

Sounds like my mother, Jackie thought. Like Rose, Janet had struggled in vain to gain full acceptance into the higher echelons of the WASP world, even inventing an aristocratic southern lineage for herself to cover the fact that she was the daughter of a rough-hewn businessman. Driven to measure up, Jackie’s mother sought perfection in her Porthault sheets, gourmet meals, and ball gowns. And she would not let Jackie out of the house unless every stitch of her clothes was in perfect shape—the same kind of exacting standards that Jack’s mother had imposed on him and against which he apparently had rebelled. The more Charlie talked about Jack, the more Jackie thought that she and the congressman might be kindred souls.

One thing that the two of them did not have in common was money. Charlie had previously let it slip that when Jack had turned twenty-one, he had begun to receive income from several trust funds that totaled ten million dollars. “Jackie, that’s a million dollars a year,” Charlie had said in awe. That was real money, as Janet liked to call it, especially impressive compared to Jackie’s total inheritance of three thousand dollars from her paternal grandfather and her allowance of fifty dollars a month from her nearly destitute father.

But Jackie didn’t want to talk about Jack’s money. She was more interested in finding out some specifics about his political leanings. It would be terrible if she committed another faux pas like her outspoken attack on Senator Joe McCarthy, not knowing that Jack’s brother Bobby worked with him.

“I’m just wondering, Charlie,” she broached the subject, “do you think Jack will care that my stepfather is such a staunch Republican?”

“Oh no, Jack’s not a wild-eyed liberal,” Charlie said, wiping his lips with his napkin as he finished his meal. “He’s a very pragmatic congressman who knows how to work both sides of the aisle. Jack is a new breed of politician, more flexible and open-minded than the stalwarts, and he’s not as self-serving as his father. I think Jack really cares about people who are less fortunate, not just in our country, but in other parts of the world too. You know, he’ll soon be off to Southeast Asia as part of a seven-week trip around the world. It’s not just a pleasure trip. He wants to get a better understanding of the conflicts that are happening in the underdeveloped world.”

“That’s admirable,” Jackie said, genuinely impressed.

“It is, and if you ask me, Jack’s sympathies are with the underdog, the new nations that are revolting against the old authoritarian ones.” Charlie smiled. “Jack is a rich man’s son—a patrician, you might say—but he’s a rebel at heart.”

Jackie was starting to like the character emerging from Charlie’s description more and more. She could identify with Jack’s desire to break free of the Old Guard’s narrow-mindedness and rigidity—it was the same battle she was waging with her mother. And fresh from her assignment in Paris, where she’d helped a princess save her small country from being carved up by more powerful neighbors, she felt for the underdog too.

Charlie’s mention of incipient rebellions against the old totalitarian order gave Jackie an opening to bring up the situation in Cuba. She wondered if Jack knew anything that could help her with her upcoming CIA mission, and she was curious to hear if Jack’s sympathy for the downtrodden extended to the plight of the poor there.

She approached the subject casually. “If Jack is so interested in political dissent, why doesn’t he visit Cuba?” she asked, after taking the last bite of her salad. “There are always newspaper reports about unrest there, and it’s a lot closer than Southeast Asia.”

Charlie laughed. “When Jack goes to Cuba, it’ll be to see a live sex show or to have a private romp at one of the hotels,” he said. He shook his head and rolled his eyes. “Jack hasn’t stopped talking about that since a senator friend of his came back raving and offered to go there with him and show him around.”

Jackie was sorry she’d asked. Whatever Jack Kennedy did with other women was his business. All she was interested in, as far as the congressman was concerned, was carrying out the task Dulles had assigned her to do: persuade Jack to become a friend of the CIA. But Jack Kennedy was a fascinating man, and she had to admit that she was looking forward to their date Saturday night with the kind of anticipation that could get a girl in trouble if she wasn’t careful.


After lunch with Charlie, Jackie saw that the day was still delightfully temperate, so she decided to prolong her visit to Georgetown and take a walk over to the C&O Canal Towpath. She walked down Wisconsin, past the bustling intersection where the avenue met M Street—the epicenter of Georgetown activity. To her right was the campus of Georgetown University, and to her left, in the distance, could be found the White House. When she reached the towpath, she strolled along it until she found a nice empty bench overlooking the Potomac River, one of the best locales in the District to appreciate this beautiful day.

Once again, Jackie took out the book and the diary pages and began to read them where she had left off. Truth to tell, as excited as she had been to hear Charlie expound on the subject of Jack Kennedy, there was something in the back of her mind that kept returning to the unknown diarist and wondering what the rest of his pages would disclose about his fate.

She read on:


… April 15th, 1861… The President has declared war on the South. We will soon take these Johnny Rebs to the woodshed, and wherever we march we expect to leave a carpet of blood-soaked Butternut in our wake…


… September 12th, 1862… we have taken the fight to the enemy. This is where it all began, where John Brown’s body lies a-moldering in his grave. Let us pray that his ghost stirs this night to put the fright into the Johnny Reb.


… May 15th, 1864… we have met the enemy and they are—children… in the valley of the Shenandoah… This war has become sickening to me. And yet, we must fight on because our cause is just.


… July 29th, 1864… I have just come from the tunnel, where our sappers have almost finished their labor. A premonition has come to me: When we go into battle on the morrow, I fear that my life will be ended, but whether by rebel ball or bayonet I am yet to know. I have taken precautions and hidden these incriminating diary pages in this book, which I have liberated from the Washington College library. Its title reminded me of Maria Consuela. I am afraid that being a library thief has been the least of my crimes, which I expect to pay for when tomorrow’s day dawns. The treasure map I will place elsewhere for safekeeping. May God have mercy on my immortal soul…


Jackie turned the page over. With a chill, she saw that it was blank, an indication that the unnamed diarist’s prophecy had probably come true. She was disappointed to realize that now she would never know what happened to this nameless Civil War soldier and Nicaraguan filibuster, whatever that was. And this William Walker, who was he? He was a historical figure that she was not familiar with.

Carefully, she folded up the diary pages and put them back inside the book. She then rewrapped the book and placed it inside her handbag. Something from those diary entries called out to her. Cuba and Walker’s treasure, and some kind of map showing the location of the treasure. It was like a half century of dust and cobwebs had been shaken off and the dead had come back to life to tap her on the shoulder.

As though a fire had suddenly been lit under her, Jackie leaped off the bench and ran back up to M Street in search of a pay phone. She found an empty booth, picked up the phone, dropped a nickel into the slot, and dialed a familiar number. When the operator answered and said, “Central Intelligence Agency,” Jackie responded, with a note of urgency in her voice, “Allen Dulles, please.”