“Exactly.”

“Well, my beloved, if that’s what you want, I will make sure you have it.”

“Will you, really?”

“Whatever made you think I wouldn’t?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Sometimes I forget what a good man you are.”

• • •

That morning, at the last ExComm of the crisis, George heard Mac Bundy invent a new way of describing the opposite sides among the president’s advisers. “Everyone knows who were the hawks and who were the doves,” he said. Bundy himself was a hawk. “Today was the day of the doves.”

But there were few hawks this morning: everyone was full of praise for President Kennedy’s handling of the crisis, even some who had recently argued that he was being dangerously weak, and had pressed him to commit the United States to a war.

George summoned up the nerve to banter with the president. “Maybe you should solve the India-China border war next, Mr. President.”

“I don’t think either of them, or anyone else, wants me to.”

“But today you’re ten feet tall.”

President Kennedy laughed. “That’ll last about a week.”

Bobby Kennedy was pleased at the prospect of seeing more of his family. “I’ve almost forgotten my way home,” he said.

The only unhappy people were the generals. The Joint Chiefs of Staff, meeting at the Pentagon to finalize plans for the air attack on Cuba, were furious. They sent the president an urgent message saying that Khrushchev’s acceptance was a trick to gain time. Curtis LeMay said this was the greatest defeat in American history. No one took any notice.

George had learned something, and he felt it was going to take him a while to digest it. Political issues were interlinked more closely than he had previously imagined. He had always thought that problems such as Berlin and Cuba were separate from each other and had little connection with such issues as civil rights and health care. But President Kennedy had been unable to deal with the Cuban missile crisis without thinking of the repercussions in Germany. And if he had failed to deal with Cuba, the imminent midterm elections would have crippled his domestic program, and made it impossible for him to pass a civil rights bill. Everything was connected. This realization had implications for George’s career that he needed to mull over.

When ExComm broke up George kept his suit on and went to his mother’s house. It was a sunny autumn day, and the leaves had turned red and gold. She cooked him supper, as she loved to do. She made steak and mashed potatoes. The steak was overdone: he could not persuade her to serve it in the French style, medium rare. He enjoyed the food anyway, because of the love with which it was made.

Afterward she washed the dishes and he dried, then they got ready to go to the evening service at Bethel Evangelical Church. “We must thank the Lord for saving us all,” she said as she stood in front of the mirror by the door, putting on her hat.