America's Reluctant Prince

by Steven M. Gillon

  While she awaited the autopsy and embalming at Bethesda Naval Hospital, Mrs. Kennedy phoned a family friend, artist William Walton, and asked him to consult a book of sketches showing Abraham Lincoln lying in state at the White House in 1865. She wanted her husband’s viewing and funeral modeled after that of Lincoln, the first American president to be assassinated. Historian and Kennedy aide Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and speechwriter Richard Goodwin rushed to the Library of Congress and spent the night researching details of the Lincoln rites.

  The family arrived back at the White House with the body of President Kennedy at 4:35 that morning. Workers spent most of the night and early morning preparing the East Room for the viewing. Schlesinger described the scene as Kennedy returned to the White House for the final time. “The casket was carried into the East Room and deposited on a stand. It was wrapped in a flag. Jackie followed, accompanied by Bobby. . . . A priest said a few words. Then Bobby whispered to Jackie. Then she walked away. The rest of us followed.”

  Jackie retired to her room, but Bobby returned and asked Schlesinger to view the body and make a recommendation about whether to have an open casket. Schlesinger recorded his thoughts in his journal later that day: “And so I went in, with the candles fitfully burning, three priests on their knees praying in the background, and took a last look at my beloved president, my beloved friend. For a moment, I was shattered. But it was not a good job; probably it could not have been with half his head blasted away. It was too waxen, too made up. It did not really look like him.” Schlesinger reported back to Bobby, who made the decision to have a closed-coffin ceremony.

  Mrs. Kennedy went to sleep that night without seeing her children. She slept for a few hours with the help of another powerful tranquilizer. The next morning, she had to handle the dizzying preparations for the funeral, but, more important, she needed to help her children face the reality that their father was dead.

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  I had little interest in the assassination until my senior year at Widener College in Chester, Pennsylvania, which was a few miles from my home. I was walking home from the library one evening when I saw a poster announcing a presentation about the “conspiracy” to kill Kennedy. I was curious enough to stop by, thinking I would stay for only thirty minutes. But the show—and it was more of a show than a dry, academic presentation—turned out to be wildly entertaining and quite disturbing. Leading the performance were roughly six young, bearded men, all of whom looked as though they had just graduated college. They presented the Zapruder film, the famous 8mm silent color home movie footage of the assassination taken by Abraham Zapruder, to make the point that the fatal head shot must have come from the front, in the area by the grassy knoll, a gently rising slope to the front of the limousine. I learned for the first time about the mysterious “umbrella man,” who had been wearing a trench coat and carrying an umbrella on a sunny, warm day. Without a doubt, they argued, the umbrella shot a poison pellet directly into the president’s throat. They challenged all the major conclusions of the Warren Commission, established by Lyndon Johnson and chaired by the chief justice of the Supreme Court, Earl Warren, by charting the path of the “magic bullet” as it meandered through Kennedy’s body and then Governor Connally’s. Clearly, they claimed, there must have been at least two shooters, maybe even more. It seemed by the end of their presentation that everyone in Dealey Plaza that day, with the possible exception of Mrs. Kennedy, had a motive to kill Kennedy. The military, the Secret Service, the CIA, the FBI, and the Mob apparently conspired with various outside forces—the Soviets and the Cubans—to murder JFK and then orchestrate a cover-up. Oh, wait, I forgot Lyndon Johnson. He was in on it, too.

  When I met John in 1982, I stood firmly in the conspiracy camp. By the 1990s, I had not only abandoned conspiracy theories entirely but also had lost interest in the whole debate over the assassination. It was settled history, and I never raised the topic with him. It came up only once, around the time when director Oliver Stone’s conspiratorial megahit movie JFK hit theaters in 1991. I don’t recall the context of the conversation, but John stated cryptically, “Bobby knew everything.” Years earlier, I would have seen that statement as an acknowledgment of conspiracy. By then, however, I was not even curious enough to pursue the subject further.

  Early on the morning of November 23, Caroline entered Maud Shaw’s room looking “pale, and her big eyes were sad and puzzled.” John appeared a few minutes later. Their nanny told them gently that their grandparents were sleeping in the president’s bedroom and that they should go see them. It is likely that she also broke the news to John about his father’s death. Janet and Hugh Auchincloss, who had accompanied Jackie and the president’s body back to the White House, slept for only an hour before John and Caroline wandered into the room at seven o’clock. Caroline was carrying a stuffed giraffe that her father had given her, and John was pulling a toy behind him. The first daughter headed to the bed and pointed to a picture of her father emblazoned on the front page of that morning’s newspaper.

  “Who is that?” she asked.

  “Oh, Caroline,” Janet responded. “You know that’s your daddy.”

  Caroline looked at her and responded, “He’s dead, isn’t he? A man shot him, didn’t he?”

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  Jackie managed only a few hours of sleep. When Robert Kennedy, who’d slept in the Lincoln Bedroom, walked down the hall, he found his sister-in-law sitting on her bed talking to John and Caroline. By this point, John clearly knew about the loss because when his uncle entered, John told him that “a bad man” had shot his father. Caroline added that her father was too big for his coffin.

  Although still traumatized, Jackie needed to prepare for a Mass that would be held in the East Room for seventy-five family members and close friends. As she had requested, White House workers labored through the night to make the room look exactly the way it had in 1865. It was decorated entirely in black. The bulbs in the great chandeliers were dimmed. The president rested in a closed flag-draped casket supported by a platform called a catafalque. Flickering candles adorned each corner.

  Shortly before ten o’clock, Mrs. Kennedy gathered the children so they could say good-bye to their father. Jackie wanted to place mementos in the coffin, so she helped John and Caroline write scribbles. “I would like you to write a letter to your father, telling him how much you loved him,” she told them. John drew an X on a piece of paper. Caroline wrote, “We’re all going to miss you, Daddy. I love you very much.” Jackie composed her own long letter that began with “My darling Jack.” She took the children by the hand and led them downstairs, where they knelt in front of the casket and prayed.

  She also collected several of President Kennedy’s most cherished items, including gold cuff links she had given him on their first anniversary and a PT boat tiepin. She and Bobby carried the items down to the East Room to place them in the coffin. RFK ordered that the casket be opened and that the guards turn their backs to give them privacy. Jackie kissed her husband, cut off two locks of his hair, and put them in a small ceramic frame. She kept one and gave the other to Bobby. “I had never seen her looking so wan and desolate,” observed her secretary Mary Gallagher. “She seemed on the verge of fainting.”

  John and his sister did not attend the Mass but watched it through the open doors of the Green Room. Once the Mass ended, Kennedy’s body remained in the East Room for the next twenty-four hours as the Cabinet, congressional leaders, governors, diplomats, the Supreme Court, and the White House staff walked solemnly past the casket. The public would get its chance on Sunday, when the body would be moved to the great Rotunda in the Capitol until the burial on Monday.

  Mrs. Kennedy wanted to keep the children busy, so she asked the Secret Service to take John and Caroline to Andrews Air Force Base to watch the planes take off and land. While Caroline was old enough to realize that her father would not be coming
back, John did not fully grasp the finality of death. One minute he would tell the agents, “A bad man shot my daddy.” A few minutes later, he would ask them to take him to the office to see his dad. John still associated Andrews Air Force Base with JFK, since just two days earlier he had watched from the tarmac as his father left for Dallas. At one point, he cried, “Whoosh! Here comes my daddy, and he’s landing!” Mrs. Shaw explained to him that his father had gone to heaven. “Did he take his big plane?” John asked. “Yes, John, he probably did,” Shaw responded. Shortly afterward, John wondered out loud, “When is he coming back?”

  Later that afternoon, Janet Auchincloss and Jackie’s half brother, Jamie, took John and Caroline to the battlefield at Manassas, the site of two momentous clashes between the Union and Confederate armies in the early years of the Civil War. They also brought with them two family dogs: a German shepherd and a French poodle. At first, they walked the dogs on a leash but then decided to let them run. The animals raced off and ended up in the visitor center, where they were greeted by an angry National Park Service ranger shouting, “No dogs allowed!” But as soon as he uttered those words, he saw John and Caroline rushing to retrieve the dogs. “At that moment,” recalled Jamie, “he realized that he was talking to the children of the slain president. His jaw flew open, and he had a hard time controlling his emotions.”

  When they returned home, Jackie and Janet went to the nursery to see them. Jackie, who had been so controlled all morning, could no longer contain her emotions. Tears streamed down her face as she embraced John and Caroline. She pleaded with Mrs. Shaw to entertain the children. “That is all you can do for me. As long as I know they are happy, it will be a great help.”

  While everyone did his or her best to keep John occupied, he clearly felt his father’s absence. Later that day, he wandered around the White House, complaining, “I don’t have anyone to play with.”

  On Sunday John joined his mother and sister for the ride to the Capitol, where President Kennedy’s body would lie in state until the funeral on Monday. As the family gathered in the East Room, the major networks, which were providing live coverage of the procession to the Capitol, cut away with a news flash that the president’s alleged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, had been shot down in the basement of the Dallas city jail as he was being transferred to the county jail. The assailant, Jack Ruby, was a local nightclub owner with close ties to the police.

  The news did not faze the Kennedys, who no longer wanted to hear about anything happening in Dallas. They stood together on the steps of the North Portico as the caisson moved slowly down the drive. Mrs. Kennedy wore a black wool dress. John and Caroline wore similar pale blue coats and red shoes. Behind the caisson, following military tradition, came a riderless bay gelding, with the military boots reversed in the silver stirrups. When John pointed at the animal, his mother leaned down and told him that the horse was a symbol representing the nation that had lost its leader. Jackie, along with John and Caroline, joined by President and Mrs. Johnson and Robert Kennedy, all piled into the first of the ten-car procession to the Capitol.

  An estimated crowd of three hundred thousand lined Pennsylvania and Constitution Avenues to witness the caisson carrying the slain president travel from the White House to the Capitol. While riding in the car, RFK noticed that John was wearing gloves and instructed him to remove them. A few minutes later, Jackie noticed that John was not wearing the gloves. “Where are John’s gloves?” she asked. “Boys don’t wear gloves,” Robert responded. The gloves stayed off. When they reached the Capitol, Mrs. Kennedy and her children walked up the marble steps, trailed the flag-draped coffin into the Capitol Rotunda, and took their places in a small section that had been roped off for them.

  The entire ceremony proved overwhelming for John. A reporter described him that morning as “wild eyed and bewildered.” As he grew more restless and rambunctious, Shaw whispered to Agent Foster, “This is no place for a little boy.” Foster picked him up and carried him to the Speaker of the House’s offices. Agent Wells followed and stood outside the door, where he heard John ask, “Mr. Foster, what happened to my daddy?” Foster never figured out an answer, but John became distracted by a wooden stand containing miniature flags from all the nations. A guide asked John if he would like one of the flags. “Yes, please,” he said. “And one for my sister, please.” The guide handed him two flags. “Please, may I have one for Daddy?”

  At the end of the ceremony, Mrs. Kennedy and Caroline stepped a few feet forward and touched the flag and the coffin beneath. Mrs. Kennedy knelt and kissed the coffin, then led Caroline away to the top of the Capitol steps, where they were rejoined by John. Clasping John’s and Caroline’s hands, she slowly descended the long flight of steps before entering a limousine for the trip back to the White House.

  As they made their way home to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, the news flash announced that Oswald had died from the single gunshot to his abdomen.

  On Monday morning, November 25, Shaw organized an intimate breakfast celebration for John’s birthday. The three-year-old sat in the dining room while Shaw and Caroline sang “Happy Birthday” and gave him two presents: Caroline, a helicopter, and Shaw, a book.

  The formal remembrances concluded that afternoon with a Mass at St. Matthew’s Cathedral and burial at Arlington National Cemetery. Mrs. Kennedy, along with Robert and Ted Kennedy and hundreds of visiting heads of state and dignitaries, walked the seven blocks from the White House to St. Matthew’s. John and Caroline traveled by car and met their mother at the base of the church. Bewildered, John looked around and started crying. His mom whispered something to him, managing to calm him down. They then ascended the steps of the cathedral, and there waiting was Richard Cardinal Cushing of Boston, who had married the Kennedys in 1953 and had baptized both children. Mrs. Kennedy, holding her son’s and daughter’s hands, went inside and proceeded down the aisle to their seats. The church was already packed with 1,200 mourners who had been admitted by special invitation. The president’s casket rested in front of the altar just underneath the soaring dome.

  Once again John grew restless. Someone gave him a copy of a booklet—The Church Today: Growth or Decline—from the literature rack in hopes of distracting him. The gesture did not work. “Where’s my daddy?” he was heard saying. “My poor mummy’s crying,” John said, “and she’s crying because my daddy’s gone.” He then lifted his arms in the air. “Somebody pick me up.” Agent Foster swooped in, picked up John, and carried him into an anteroom. In an effort to keep him occupied, Foster asked John to practice his salute. Old habits proved hard to break. On Veterans Day, just two weeks earlier, John had pulled off a perfect right-hand salute, but now he had reverted to using his left hand.

  A marine colonel was watching John and offered to help. “Why don’t you give the colonel a salute?” Foster urged. When John once again used his left hand, the colonel corrected him gently. “John, you are doing it all wrong. This is the way you salute.” In one demonstrative move, the marine stood upright and offered a crisp salute. It clearly had an impact on John because he immediately started using his right hand again. By this time, the Mass had ended, so Foster brought John, still grasping his church booklet, out to join his mother and sister as they exited the church.

  Mrs. Kennedy, with Caroline and John on each side, led the mourners from the cathedral and then stood on the outside steps while the casket was removed and placed on the caisson, which was positioned directly in front of the Kennedy family. Once the casket was secured, the military rendered a salute to its fallen commander in chief. At that point, Mrs. Kennedy leaned down and whispered, “John, you can salute Daddy now and say good-bye to him.” John handed her his church booklet, took a small step forward, stood tall, and then lifted his right hand to his brow. With the entire world watching, three-year-old John saluted his slain father. “It was almost more than I could bear,” recalled Clint Hill. “I looked around and saw colonels and gener
als and colleagues—some of the toughest men I knew—and they too were fighting to hold back tears.”

  The original plan had been for John and Caroline to accompany their mother to Arlington for the burial, but at the last minute, she decided to send them back to the White House. After the funeral services, Mrs. Kennedy invited 220 foreign dignitaries and diplomats to the White House for a reception. As the guests started to leave, Dave Powers kept John busy by playing the role of drill instructor. “One, two, three, four—cadence count!” he proclaimed as he led John to the end of the south hall and back into the dining room.

  Mrs. Kennedy decided to proceed with a planned birthday party for John that evening. She wanted to disrupt his life as little as possible. The party was a tradition that she would continue for the rest of her life. It served as much as a distraction from the ritual media focus on the assassination as it did a celebration of John’s life. At seven o’clock she left the reception and went upstairs to the celebration. “I couldn’t disappoint little John,” Jackie told family friend Countess Vivian Crespi. The entire Kennedy family, including distant relatives in town for the funeral, attended the event. When cousin John Davis walked into the dining room, he saw John with a paper hat on his head and a toy rifle over his right shoulder. “He had been seen marching all day and could not get it out of the system,” he recalled. By contrast, Caroline sat somberly, not saying a word. Eventually John put away his rifle long enough to start opening his presents. The guests applauded every time John ripped the wrapping paper off the gift. Mrs. Kennedy laughed when John took a deep breath and blew out his three candles. “I’m glad they are happy,” she said quietly.

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