THE FIRST FEW MILES of the presidential procession were along an avenue flanked by low light-industrial factories, and relatively few people were watching as the motorcade swept past: an unmarked white police lead car, and helmeted motorcycle police outriders; then the Kennedys and Connallys in the presidential limousine with the flags fluttering from its bumpers and two motorcycle escorts flanking it at the rear; then the Queen Mary armored car with four agents erect on the running boards and Ken O’Donnell and Dave Powers in the jump seats; then, after the careful seventy-five-foot gap, the gray vice presidential convertible and vice presidential follow-up car, the press cars and buses and the rest of the long caravan. But then the motorcade reached Dallas’ downtown, and turned onto Main Street. For a while, Main was lined on both sides by a row of tall buildings, so that as the cars drove between them, they might have been driving between the walls of a canyon, not a New York–height canyon, of course, but deep enough, and the windows of the buildings were filled, floor after floor, building after building, with people leaning out and cheering, and on the sidewalks the crowds were eight people, ten people deep. Overhead, every hundred yards or so, a row of flags hung vertically from wires stretched across the street, and at the end of the canyon, after the buildings ended, was a rectangle of open sky.
As the procession drove further into the canyon, the noise swelled and deepened, becoming louder and louder so that the motorcade was driving through a canyon of cheers. Every time the President waved, the crowd on the sidewalk surged toward him, pressing back the lines of policemen, so that the passage for the cars grew narrower, and the lead car was forced to reduce speed, from twenty miles an hour, to fifteen, to ten, to five. Every time Jackie waved a hand in its white glove, shrieks of “Jackie!” filled the air. As the tall governor with the leonine head of gray hair waved his big Stetson, the cheers swelled for him, too. The four passengers in the presidential limousine kept smiling at each other in delight. “Mr. President, you certainly can’t say that Dallas doesn’t love you!” Nellie Connally said; the President’s “eyes met mine and his smile got even wider,” Mrs. Connally was to recall.
TRAILING THEM in his rented car, driving between crowds of people cheering but not for him, sharing a seat with a man who had humiliated him, Lyndon Johnson was far enough behind the presidential limousine that the cheering for the Kennedys and Connallys—for John Connally, some of it, for his onetime assistant who had become his rival in Texas—had died down by the time his car passed, and most of the faces in the crowd were still turned to follow the presidential car as it drove away from them. So that, as Lyndon Johnson’s car made its slow way down the canyon, what lay ahead of him on that motorcade could, in a way, have been seen by someone observing his life as a foretaste of what might lie ahead of him if he remained as Vice President for the next five years: five years of trailing behind another man, humiliated, almost ignored—most important, powerless. The vice presidency, “filled with trips … chauffeurs, men saluting, people clapping … in the end it is nothing.” He had had three years of that nothing; to stay as Vice President might mean five years more of it.
And if there was nothing at the end of the Dallas canyon but empty sky, what, the observer might have asked, would there be for him at the end of that five-year-long canyon; what would there be at the end if he stayed on as Vice President? He had accepted the vice presidency because he had felt that at the end might be the presidency. Now there was another man who wanted the presidency. And in five years, Bobby Kennedy would have had five more years to build up a record. He would have had five years to hold other positions besides attorney general: secretary of Defense, perhaps—whatever positions he wanted, in the last analysis. And could Lyndon Johnson realistically believe, after watching the rapport between John Kennedy and his brother, that if President Kennedy had to choose between him and his brother to be his successor, he would choose Lyndon Johnson? Observing Lyndon Johnson’s life, one might have wondered if what was waiting for him at the end of the vice presidency, in that empty space at the end of it, was only that slight, hunched figure he had long hated and now had learned to fear?
And what if his vice presidency wasn’t five years longer, but only one? What if he was dropped from the ticket in 1964?
He had been saying for some time—had apparently convinced himself—that that was the probability. That belief—that fear—may, or may not, have been justified before the call to Copenhagen, before Bobby Baker had been on magazine cover after magazine cover, before the name of Don Reynolds had entered the picture; and before this trip to Texas. Given what the President was seeing for himself in Texas, given what was happening at that very moment in the Senate Office Building, the President’s assurances that he would be on the ticket might start to have a hollow ring indeed. Whether he had another term as Vice President or not, Lyndon Johnson’s prospects may indeed have justified the adjective he had been applying to them: “finished.”
LEAVING BEHIND the deep crowds of Main Street, the motorcycle police, the lead car and the presidential limousine swung right onto Houston Street and then left onto Elm, which sloped slightly downhill toward a broad railroad overpass; on the right was a grassy open space, with scattered spectators standing in it, called “Dealey Plaza.” In Washington, at just about the same time, Don Reynolds was showing the Rules Committee investigators the papers—the invoices from the Magnavox Company, the checks made out to KTBC—which he said proved his charges against Lyndon Johnson, pushing the documents, one by one, across the witness table. In New York, the Life editors were assigning reporters from its task force to investigate specific areas of Lyndon Johnson’s finances while still debating whether the magazine should run a story on Johnson’s wealth in the magazine’s very next issue. Ahead of the vice presidential car, the spectators in Dealey Plaza began to applaud the Kennedys and the Connallys as Johnson followed in their wake.
There was a sharp, cracking sound.
It “startled” him, Lyndon Johnson was to say; it sounded like a “report or explosion,” and he didn’t know what it was. Others in the motorcade thought it was a backfire from one of the police motorcycles, or a firecracker someone in the crowd had set off, but John Connally, who had hunted all his life, knew in the instant he heard it that it was a shot from a high-powered rifle.
Rufus Youngblood didn’t know what it was, but he saw “not normal movements” in the presidential car ahead down the incline—President Kennedy seemed to be tilting toward his left—and in the Queen Mary immediately ahead of him, one of the agents was suddenly rising to his feet, with an automatic rifle in his hands. Whirling in his seat, Youngblood shouted—in a “voice I had never heard him ever use,” Lady Bird says—“Get down! Get down!” and, grabbing Johnson’s right shoulder, yanked him roughly down toward the floor in the center of the car, as he almost leapt over the back of the front seat, and threw his body over the Vice President’s body, shouting again, “Get down! Get down!” By the time, a matter of only eight seconds later, that the next two sharp reports had cracked out—everyone knew what they were now—Lyndon Johnson was down on the floor in the back seat of the car, curled over on his right side. The sudden, loud, sharp sound, the hand suddenly grabbing his shoulder and pulling him down—now he was on the floor, his face on the floor, with the weight of a big man lying on top of him, pressing him down; Lyndon Johnson would never forget “his knees in my back and his elbows in my back.”
He couldn’t see anything other than Lady Bird’s shoes and legs in front of his face—she and Yarborough were ducking forward as far as they could. Above him, as he lay there, he heard Youngblood yelling to Herschel Jacks to “Close it up! Close it up!”—the Secret Service agent still wasn’t sure what had happened, but he knew he would have the most protection if he stayed close to the car ahead of him that was packed with men and guns; and, lying on the floor with Youngblood on top of him, Lyndon Johnson felt the car beneath him leap forward as Jacks floored the gas pedal, and he felt the car
speeding—“terrifically fast,” Lady Bird was to say, “faster and faster”; “I remember the way that car … zoomed,” Johnson was to say—and then the brakes were slammed on, and the tires screamed almost in his ear as the car took a right turn much too fast, squealing up the ramp to an expressway, and hurtled forward again. “Stay with them—keep close!” Youngblood was shouting above him. The shortwave radio was still strapped to Youngblood’s shoulder, so that it was almost in Johnson’s ear. The radio had been set to the Secret Service’s Baker frequency, which kept Youngblood in touch with the vice presidential follow-up car, but now Johnson heard the agent’s voice above him say, “I am switching to Charlie”—the frequency that would connect him with the Queen Mary ahead of him. For a moment there was, from the radio, only crackling, and then Johnson heard someone saying, “He’s hit! Hurry, he’s hit!” and then “Let’s get out of here!”—and then in his ear a lot of almost unintelligible shouting, out of which one word emerged clearly: “hospital.”
He still couldn’t see anything, so he didn’t see what Youngblood was seeing, as, sitting more erect now, the agent stayed on top of him, shielding his body with his own. He didn’t see what Youngblood was seeing ahead: as the third shot had rung out, a little bit of something gray had seemed to fly up out of Jack Kennedy’s head; then his wife in her pink pillbox hat and pink suit, that seemed suddenly to have patches of something dark on it, was trying to climb onto the long trunk of the limousine, and then was clambering back into the car, where her head was bent over something Youngblood couldn’t see; one of the agents on the Queen Mary’s running board, Clint Hill, had, a moment after the first shot, sprinted after the limousine as it was accelerating, leapt onto its trunk, grabbed one of its handholds, and was now lying spread-eagled across the trunk of the speeding vehicle, but he managed to raise his head, look down into its rear seat, and then, turning to the follow-up car, make a thumbs-down gesture.
The agents in the Queen Mary were waving at Jacks to stay close. The patrolman, a laconic Texan—“tight-lipped and cool,” Youngblood was to call him—pulled up within a few feet of the armored car’s rear bumper, and kept his car there as the two vehicles, with the presidential limousine not many feet ahead of them, roared along the expressway and then swung right at an exit ramp.
The man underneath Rufus Youngblood was lying very quietly, seemingly calmly, except when his body was jolted forward or back as the car braked or accelerated or swerved. His composure would have surprised most people who knew Lyndon Johnson, but not the few who had seen him in other moments of physical danger, including moments when he was under gunfire. Johnson’s customary reaction to physical danger, real or imagined, was so dramatic, almost panicky, that at college he had had the reputation of being “an absolute physical coward.” All during World War II he had done everything he could to avoid combat. Realizing, however, that, “for the sake of political future,” as one of President Roosevelt’s aides wrote, he had to be able to say he had at least been in a combat zone, he went to the South Pacific and flew as an observer on a bomber that was attacked by Japanese Zeroes. And as the Zeroes were heading straight for the bomber, firing as they came, its crew saw Lyndon Johnson climb into the navigator’s bubble so that he could get a better view, and stand there staring right at the oncoming planes, “just as calm,” in the words of one crew member, “as if he were on a sight-seeing tour.” Although his customary reaction to minor pain or illness was “frantic,” “hysterical”—he would, says Posh Oltorf, “complain so often, and so loudly” about indigestion that “you thought he might be dying”—when in 1955, in Middleburg, Virginia, a doctor told Johnson that this time the “indigestion” was the heart attack he had always feared, Johnson’s demeanor changed. Lying on the floor of Middleburg’s “ambulance”—it was actually a hearse—as it was speeding to Washington, he was composed and cool as he made decisions: telling the doctor and Oltorf, who were riding in the ambulance, what hospital he was to be taken to, which members of his staff should be there when he arrived; telling Oltorf where his will was, and how he wanted its provisions carried out. It was a major heart attack—when he arrived at the hospital, doctors gave him only a fifty-fifty chance of survival—and at one point during the trip Johnson told the doctor that he couldn’t stand the pain. But when the doctor told him that giving him an injection to dull it would require stopping for a few minutes, and that “time means a lot to you,” Johnson said, “If time means a lot, don’t stop.” There were even wry remarks; when the doctor told him that if he recovered, he would never be able to smoke again, he said, “I’d rather have my pecker cut off.” Lady Bird was always saying that her husband was “a good man in a tight spot.” Oltorf had never believed her—until that ambulance ride. He had thought he knew Johnson so well, he was to say; he had realized on that ride that he didn’t know him at all. This, in Dallas, was a tight spot. Lying on the floor of the back seat with Youngblood still on top of him, Johnson asked the Secret Service man what had happened. Youngblood said that “the President must have been shot or wounded,” that they were heading for a hospital, that he didn’t know anything, and that he wanted everyone to stay down—Johnson down on the floor—until he found out.
“All right, Rufus,” Lyndon Johnson said. A reporter who later asked Youngblood to describe the tone of Johnson’s voice as he said this summarized the agent’s answer in a single word: “calm.”
A moment later, the voice on the shortwave radio told Youngblood that they were heading to Parkland Hospital, and the agent, shouting, he was to recall, against the noise of the wind and the wail of police sirens, told Johnson what to do when they arrived: to get out of the car and into some area the Secret Service could make secure without stopping for anything, even to find out what had happened to the President. “I want you and Mrs. Johnson to stick with me and the other agents as close as you can. We are going into the hospital and we aren’t gonna stop for anything or anybody. Do you understand?”
“Okay, pardner, I understand,” Lyndon Johnson said.
THERE WAS another squealing turn—left onto the entrance ramp to the Parkland Emergency Room; the car skidded so hard that “I wondered if they were going to make it,” Lady Bird said—and then the brakes were jammed on so hard that Johnson, and Youngblood, were slammed back against the seat. Then Youngblood’s weight was off him; hands were grabbing his arms and pulling him roughly up out of the car and onto his feet. The white carnation was still in his lapel, somehow untouched, but his left arm and shoulder, that had taken the brunt of Youngblood’s weight, hurt. There were Secret Service men all around; police all around; guns all around. Then Youngblood and four other agents were surrounding him, the hands were on his arms again, and he was being hustled—almost run—through the entrance to the hospital and through corridors; close behind him was another agent, George Hickey, holding an AR-15 automatic rifle at the ready. He was later to say that he had been rushed into the hospital so fast, his view blocked by the men around him, that he hadn’t even seen the President’s car, or what was in it. Lady Bird, rushed along right behind him by her own cordon of agents, had seen, in “one last look over my shoulder,” “a bundle of pink, just like a drift of blossoms, lying on the back seat. I think it was Mrs. Kennedy lying over the President’s body.”
Lyndon Johnson was being hustled, agents’ hands on his arms, down one hospital corridor after another, turning left, turning right; his protectors were looking for a room that could be made secure; then he was in what seemed like a small white room—it was actually one of three cubicles in the Parkland Minor Medicine section that had been carved out of a larger room by hanging white muslin curtains from ceiling to floor. Two of the cubicles had been unoccupied; in the third, a nurse was treating a patient; the agents were pushing nurse and patient out the door; they were pulling down the shades and blinds over the windows. Then he and Lady Bird were standing against a blank, uncurtained wall at the back of the furthest cubicle. Youngblood was standing in front of t
hem, telling another agent to station himself outside the door to the corridor, and not to let anyone in—not anyone—unless he knew his face. Three of the other agents were stationed in the cubicle between this one and the corridor. Someone was saying Youngblood should get to a telephone and report to his superiors in Washington; Youngblood was saying, “Look here, I’m not leaving this man to phone anyone.” Remembering that a Vice President’s daughters did not normally receive Secret Service protection, he asked Lady Bird where the girls were at the moment (Lynda Bird was at the University of Texas, Lucy at her high school in Washington), told one of the agents to call headquarters and have guards assigned to them immediately, and then to get back to the cubicle as fast as possible.
Someone brought two folding chairs into the cubicle, and Lady Bird sat down in one. Lyndon Johnson remained standing, his back against the far wall. As had been the case in every crisis in his life, a first consideration was to have people loyal to him around him, aides and allies who could be counted on to take his orders without question. He knew the Texas congressmen who had been in the motorcade must be nearby, and he asked Youngblood to have them found, and Homer Thornberry was brought in, and after a while Jack Brooks. His aide Cliff Carter came in and handed him a container of coffee, which he drank.
And then, for long minutes, no one came in. Lyndon Johnson stood with his back against the far wall. It was very quiet in the little curtained space. “We didn’t know what was happening,” Thornberry was to recall. “We did not know about the condition of the President.… I walked out once to try to see if I could find out what was going on, but either nobody knew or they didn’t tell me.” Johnson asked Youngblood to send an agent to get some news, and he returned with Roy Kellerman, chief of the White House Secret Service detail, but Kellerman didn’t provide much information. “Mr. Johnson asked me the condition of the people and the Governor,” he was to relate. “I advised him that the Governor was taken up to surgery, that the doctors were still working on the President. He asked me to keep him informed of their condition.”
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