Chapter 17
The November 22, 1963, final evening edition of the Boston Globe lies on the floor next to the bed of the ailing patriarch Joe Kennedy. The headline screams: “Extra! Extra! PRESIDENT SLAIN: Assassin’s Bullet Fells Kennedy on Dallas Street.”
America’s beloved president John F. Kennedy is dead, the third of Joe’s nine children to die a sudden, violent death.
The seventy-five-year-old patriarch, who had long boasted of his conquests in bed and in business and even bargained with the Mafia to send union votes to his son—had suffered a paralytic stroke nearly two years earlier, on December 19, 1961. Initially, through aggressive rehabilitation, he’d successfully battled back, relearning to walk with the aid of an engraved silver and black stick, a gift from his beloved daughter-in-law Jackie. But in recent months, his condition has drastically deteriorated.
A month earlier, on Sunday, October 20, 1963, President Kennedy had visited Hyannis Port. When Joe wheeled his chair onto the porch to say good-bye, Jack kissed his father on the forehead, turned to leave…then went back again, as if Jack believed he was seeing his father for the last time.
“He’s the one who made all of this possible,” Jack told his aide Dave Powers inside the helicopter, “and look at him now.”
His father seemed on the cusp of death.
But the man entering his final days will not be Joe.
Ted and Eunice break the terrible news of Jack’s assassination to their father, as Rose can’t bear to. “We have told him but we don’t think he understands it,” Rose said.
Or it may be that he simply cannot stand the truth that Jack is dead.
Afternoon shadows crisscross Joe’s room. The man who built the powerful House of Kennedy is left with only his memories to comfort—or taunt—him.
* * *
A few days earlier, President Kennedy and the First Lady are in Jack’s White House dressing room, reviewing travel plans. The next day, they’ll depart on a whirlwind two-day, five-city trip to Texas, with a final stop on November 23 at LBJ Ranch, which the vice president acquired when serving as a senator.
Richard Nixon, the Republican presidential nominee whom Kennedy defeated in 1960 and who has since been practicing law in New York City, is also in Dallas for a corporate speaking engagement. He’s ready to predict a key absence from the 1964 Democratic ticket—Johnson’s. “In 1960, Lyndon was a help. In 1964 he might not be,” Nixon theorizes.
The president is experiencing a surge of health. “I feel great. My back feels better than it’s felt in years,” Jack tells White House aide Kenny O’Donnell.
Nevertheless, JFK is wearing his Nelson Kloman back brace, made at the surgical supply company in Washington, DC. As customary, his tie clip features a replica of his wartime boat, PT-109. Valet George Thomas coordinates the array of clothing needed for the multiple public appearances the Kennedys have planned for each day of the trip.
Jackie is also busy with preparations, from hair to wardrobe. She’s written a four-page packing list to her personal assistant, Providencia Parendes, inspired by the president’s advice: “Be simple—show these Texans what good taste really is.”
The First Lady’s signature low-heeled shoes—a narrow size 10A—are specially made, according to biographer Barbara Leaming, “to make large feet look smaller and more feminine.” In her memoir Jackie’s Girl, former personal assistant Kathy McKeon reveals another of Jackie’s sartorial secrets: “[A] quarter-inch lift affixed to one heel on each pair of shoes, apparently meant to compensate for one leg being slightly shorter than the other. No one ever would have guessed.”
A possible inspiration for the footwear adjustment comes from the president himself. Dr. Janet Travell, the first woman to be appointed as personal physician to the president, has been treating Jack since his third back surgery in 1955. “One of the first things I did for him,” she says, “was to institute a heel lift” to correct his left leg being shorter than his right.
During her tenure as First Lady, Jackie has already become a style icon, known for her “overwhelming good taste” and her collaborations with the dress designer Oleg Cassini, informally known as “the Secretary of Style,” who called her an “American Queen.” “Jackie wanted to do Versailles in America,” Cassini recalls. Together they create the “Jackie look.”
While Jack is proud of his wife’s style, he’s annoyed at how much she spends—though his father, Joe, foots the bill for all of her Cassini dresses. “Just send me an account at the end of the year. I’ll take care of it,” he tells the designer.
For the trip to Texas, however, Jackie packs mainly Chanel.
* * *
The 1961 Lincoln Continental convertible—painted presidential blue metallic and code-named SS 100-X by the Secret Service after undergoing two hundred thousand dollars in security modifications—is ready to drive the Texas streets. It’s the first presidential car outfitted with a removable transparent roof. But the top is not bulletproof, and the body of the upgraded vehicle, though heavy, lacks protective armor. Gary Mack, curator of Dallas’s Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, describes the car as an “expensive, fancy limousine.” Any glare or reflection might disrupt an assassin’s clear shot. And in any case, Jack, who once astounded the French president Charles de Gaulle by insisting on touring the Champs Élysées by convertible even in the rain, is against using the roof. “I don’t want the bubbletop on the car,” he tells Kenny O’Donnell, who is organizing his Dallas schedule. “I want all those Texas broads to see what a beautiful girl Jackie is.”
Despite tensions in their marriage, and Jackie’s initial discomfort at the public role of First Lady (she remarked to the New York Times in 1960, after Jack’s election, that she felt like she had become “a piece of public property. It’s really frightening to lose your anonymity at thirty-one”), she confides to a friend in 1962, “The last thing I expected to find in the White House [has been] the happiest time I have ever known—not for the position—but for the closeness of one’s family.” By early August 1963, that family is set to expand—Caroline is five and a half, John Jr. is two and a half, and Jackie is pregnant with another baby, due around the same time as what will be her tenth wedding anniversary, on September 12.
But on August 7, 1963, more than a month prematurely, Jackie goes into labor while vacationing on Cape Cod. The date is significant—it’s the twentieth anniversary of the Japanese attack on PT-109 that made Jack a naval hero. There is “no way in God’s Earth,” says Ben Bradlee, that the president wouldn’t have noted the coincidence. Unlike when Jackie went into labor with Arabella, this time Jack rushes to his wife’s side at Otis Air Force Base on Cape Cod, where Jackie is undergoing an emergency Cesarean.
Patrick Bouvier Kennedy is born at 12:52 p.m., suffering from hyaline membrane disease, a lung disorder common in babies born prematurely.
In 1963, the odds of the four-pound, ten-and-a-half-ounce boy surviving are only fifty-fifty, yet the Boston Globe optimistically predicts, “He’s a Kennedy—he’ll make it.” An article published the day of Patrick’s birth notes the White House press secretary, Pierre Salinger, saying, “The doctors are hopeful,” and quotes one of those doctors describing the boy as “a lovable little monkey” whom they’re treating with “tender loving care, medicine, oxygen, and everything else we can do to correct the symptoms.”
Tragically, Patrick’s condition worsens. He’s rushed by ambulance to Children’s Hospital in Boston, and Jackie is not well enough to accompany him. The president alone watches over the infant, encased in an incubator. “Nothing must happen to Patrick,” Jack tells his mother-in-law, “because I just can’t bear to think the effect it might have on Jackie.” Yet he can only stand helpless as a team of doctors tries and fails to revive his son. Jack is able to hold him at the end, saying, “He put up quite a fight. He was a beautiful baby.” But the Washington Post notes, “The First Lady never once held little Patrick in her arms or heard him cry.”
Nor
is she able to attend his funeral, in a private chapel at Cardinal Richard Cushing’s Boston residence. “Overwhelmed with grief,” according to Cushing, Jack throws his arms around the tiny coffin. The cardinal, who officiated at Jack and Jackie’s wedding, places a hand on his shoulder. “My dear Jack, let’s go, let’s go, nothing more can be done.”
But the president cannot be consoled. “He was genuinely cut to the bone,” remembers Larry Newman, a Secret Service agent. “When that boy died, it almost killed him too.”
* * *
Despite the tragedy of Patrick’s death, one positive aspect is noticed by everyone near to the First Couple—this shared loss has brought the two of them closer together, and they are even publicly affectionate in ways previously unseen. “The other agents and I noticed a distinctly close relationship, openly expressed, between the president and Mrs. Kennedy,” recalls the Secret Service agent Clint Hill. “Prior to this, they were much more restrained.”
“It was different than I had seen them before,” deputy press secretary Malcolm Kilduff says. “It was very nice.” He adds, “I thought to myself how protective he was being of her.” White House intern Mimi Beardsley also recalls feeling that after his son’s death, the president is filled “not only with grief but with an aggrieved sense of responsibility to his wife and family,” significantly curtailing, and possibly ceasing, all of his affairs.
By the time of their trip to Texas, the Kennedys are closer than they have ever been.
Jackie’s mother, Janet Auchincloss, notes that “all their strains and stresses,” have subsided to a point where “they were very, very, very close to each other and understood each other wonderfully.”
Chapter 18
The president and First Lady are scheduled for a joint appearance at a breakfast at the Hotel Texas in Fort Worth on November 22, 1963, one of Jackie’s first since Patrick’s death in August. The people waiting outside in the hotel parking lot early that morning are chanting “Jackie! Jackie!” eager for a glimpse of the First Lady. “Mrs. Kennedy is organizing herself,” Jack tells the disappointed crowd. “It takes her longer, but, of course, she looks better than we do when she does it.”
The crowd inside is eager, too, thousands of them cheering when Jackie appears in an American-made “line-for-line” copy of a Chanel strawberry-pink wool suit with a matching pillbox hat ensemble that her husband found “smashing.” (Although Jackie has been a longtime Chanel client, it’s deemed “too foreign, too spendy” for her to buy clothes directly from Paris as First Lady—so instead Chanel sends the patterns and material to New York, to be technically created in the U.S.)
As the Chicago Sun-Times editorializes that morning, all hopes are riding on Jackie. “Some Texans, in taking account of the tangled Texas political situation, have begun to think that Mrs. Jacqueline Kennedy may turn the balance and win her husband this state’s electoral vote.”
At the hotel, Jack signs what may be a last autograph, for Texas Hotel chambermaid Jan White, on the front page of that day’s Dallas Morning News, which features a photo of the couple in San Antonio the day before, Jackie smiling widely and wearing another chic Chanel dress, this one white and belted with a thin black bow.
Historian William Manchester says that Jackie herself later revealed to him that she and the president made love aboard Air Force One on the jaunt between San Antonio and Houston on the afternoon of the twenty-first—a detail he cloaked in his 1967 book, The Death of a President, as their “last hour of serenity,” coyly ending with “the President emerged in a fresh shirt.”
After the breakfast, the Kennedys leave the Hotel Texas and head back to Air Force One, ready for the thirteen-minute hop from Fort Worth Carswell Air Force Base to Dallas Love Field.
* * *
Dallas is the new home of former major general Edwin A. Walker, a self-proclaimed “super patriot” whom Newsweek labeled “the Thunder on the Right.” Despite a psychiatrist deeming his actions indicative of “paranoid mental disorders”—Kennedy privately commented, “Imagine that son of a bitch having been commander of a division up till last year. And the Army promoting him?”—in September 1962, Walker’s supporters were even carrying “Walker for President 64” signs.
Fellow Dallas resident and ex-marine marksman Lee Harvey Oswald is not one of those supporters. As a declared Communist, Oswald is exactly the kind of enemy Walker and his zealots seek to vanquish.
In 1959, twenty-year-old Oswald visits Moscow on a tourist visa with the intention to defect, but the KGB rejects him and his “outdated information,” and determines that he’s no double agent. “His intellectual training experience and capabilities were such that it would not show the FBI and CIA in good light if they used people like him.” But a top member of the Politburo intervenes and in 1960 puts him to work at a television radio factory in Minsk, where the KGB bugs his government-issue apartment.
John F. Kennedy is inaugurated president of the United States in January 1961, and that April, Lee Harvey Oswald marries Marina Prusakova after a six-week courtship.
In June 1962, the US and Soviet governments agree to allow the “re-defector” Oswald and his family to return to the United States.
On April 10, 1963, Oswald decides to use Walker as “target practice.” In the Marines, Oswald had earned a sharpshooter qualification, rated by the sergeant in charge of his training as “a slightly better than average shot for a Marine, excellent by civilian standards.” Now, he trains the telescopic sight of his high-powered Mannlicher-Carcano infantry rifle—mail ordered with his family’s grocery money under the alias A. Hiddell—on the former general as Walker sits at his desk inside his Dallas home.
He pulls the trigger—and misses.
“He couldn’t see [properly] from his position because of the light,” Walker later theorizes to the Warren Commission. “He could have been a very good shot and, just by chance, he hit the woodwork.”
Although Oswald tells his wife, Marina, “I shot Walker” immediately upon returning home late that night, it’s not until after the events in Dallas that the ammunition used is linked back to Oswald.
Prior to JFK’s visit in November 1963, Walker, an outspoken adversary of the president’s, has his extremist associates distribute five thousand flyers. The flyers show a stylized mugshot of Kennedy alongside seven accusations of treason, from the political—“Betraying the Constitution”—to the personal—“LIES to the American people (including personal ones like his previous marriage and divorce).”
Hours before the president’s plane touches down in Dallas, twenty-four-year-old Lee Harvey Oswald takes off his wedding ring and leaves it on the bedroom dresser. (Fifty years later, that ring will sell for one hundred eight thousand dollars at auction.) In recent months, he’s become estranged from his wife, Marina, and she and their daughters are staying with a friend, Ruth Paine, in suburban Dallas, while Oswald has a room in a boardinghouse. But on Thursday night, November 21, he decides to stay at the Paine house, where he typically visits only on weekends.
“I was surprised to see him,” Ruth Paine remarks. The couple fought often, but that evening she has “the impression that relations between the young Oswalds [are] ‘cordial,’ ‘friendly,’ ‘warm’—like a couple making up after a small spat.”
They sleep in the same bed, but in the middle of the night he kicks her away when her feet touch him. “My, he’s in a mean mood,” Marina thinks. The next morning, he sleeps late, then gets a lift to his job at the Texas School Book Depository from a coworker, Buell Wesley Frazier, one of Ruth Paine’s neighbors. While they are driving to work, Frazier asks Oswald what’s in the elongated brown package he’s brought.
“Curtain rods,” Oswald tells him.
Chapter 19
It all began so beautifully. After a drizzle in the morning, the sun came out bright and beautiful. We were going into Dallas,” Lady Bird Johnson observes in her diary of November 22, 1963.
The Texas native and wife of Vice President Lyn
don Johnson will ride in the third car of the presidential motorcade that sets out from Love Field just before noon. The planned route is an eleven-mile drive through the city’s downtown at a slow crawl of twelve to fifteen miles per hour, ending at the Dallas Trade Mart for a scheduled 1:00 p.m. luncheon.
Fifteen minutes earlier, from inside Air Force One, Jack takes in the cheering crowd of two thousand gathered around the fenced perimeter of the airfield and remarks to Kenny O’Donnell, “It looks like everything in Texas is going to be fine for us.”
Earlier that morning, at the Hotel Texas in Fort Worth, Jackie had felt uneasy upon seeing a hate-filled, full-page anti-Kennedy ad from the “American Fact-Finding Committee” in the Dallas Morning News. The ad was bordered in mourning black, and despite a headline proclaiming “Welcome Mr. Kennedy,” its tone was deeply belligerent.
On the spring day when Jackie first met Jack, she’d felt that he “would have a profound perhaps disturbing influence” on her life. Would angry Texans be the source of the disturbance she had sensed more than a decade before?
But her husband makes light of her fears, joking, “We’re heading into nut country today…You know, last night would have been a hell of a night to assassinate a president,” he tells her, remarking on how easy it would have been for someone among the anonymous masses lining the streets in Fort Worth with “a pistol in a briefcase…could have dropped the gun and briefcase and melted away into the crowd.”
* * *
A fellow boarder at Lee Harvey Oswald’s rooming house recalls his rapt attention to a televised report two days earlier, on November 20, detailing the president’s upcoming visit and adding information to the maps and routes that the Dallas Times Herald had published on November 19.
Oswald now knows the expected timing of the presidential motorcade’s passage through Dealey Plaza, then on past the Texas School Depository building where he works. He knows that the president and the First Lady will be in the lead car, along with Governor John Connally and his wife, Nellie.
The House of Kennedy Page 9