The Passage of Power

by Robert A. Caro

  After three blocks, the procession wheeled around the corner by the Treasury Building, and suddenly, facing the marchers a mile away, rearing up—huge, gleaming, almost dazzlingly white against the clear blue sky, thrusting up out of a base so long that it seemed to fill the horizon—was the dome of the Capitol. Stretching along the base, the building that held the two chambers of Congress, were tall white marble columns and the pilasters that are the echo of columns, and the dome was circled with columns, too, circled by columns not only in its first mighty upward thrust, where it was rimmed by thirty-six great pillars (for the thirty-six states that the Union had comprised when it was built), but circled by columns also high above, hundreds of feet above Pennsylvania Avenue, where, just below the Statue of Freedom, a circle of thirteen more slender shafts (for the thirteen original states) made the tholos, a structure modeled after the place where the Greeks left sacrifices to the gods, look like a little temple in the sky. As the long procession moved down that broad avenue before the packed, silent throng, to the thunderous roll of the muffled drums, it was moving toward columns atop columns, columns in the sky—a procession carrying the body of a republic’s slain ruler, in all the stateliness and pomp a republic could muster, toward a structure that represented, and embodied, all a republic’s majesty.

  For long minutes the drums would roll and the air reverberate with their sad, fateful sound, then the drums would stop, and so quiet was the watching crowd that in those intervals the clatter of hooves, Black Jack’s and those of the matched grays, and the rhythmic tread of the marching sailors echoed down the avenue. “Block by block, the hush deepened,” an observer wrote. General Clifton, marching with the other military aides, was to recall that “All you could hear was the drums and the clump of the horses”—“the drums, the terrible drums,” another marching general was to say.

  The procession from the White House to the Capitol took about forty-five minutes. As the lead limousine came out of the White House gates, there was, Lady Bird Johnson was to recall, a “sea of faces stretching away on every side—silent, watching faces.” She would remember the flags at half-mast all along the avenue, and the sailors marching in front of her, “and always there was the sound of muffled drums in the background.” But “most vivid of all was the feeling of a sea of faces … and that curious sense of silence, broken only by an occasional sob.”

  Lady Bird sat next to the man her husband hated—and who hated him. Robert Kennedy’s “face was grave, white, sorrowful,” she was to recall. John-John, “in a peripatetic mood,” kept jumping back and forth from the back seat to his uncle’s lap and back again, until finally Robert said, “John-John, be good, you be good and we’ll give you a flag afterwards.” The “only time the Attorney General said anything else,” she says, was as the car passed the Old Senate Office Building. “The Attorney General looked over and said … as though to himself, or perhaps to the children, ‘That was where it all began. That was where he ran for the presidency.’ ”

  “There was a flinching of the jaw at that moment that almost made—well, it made your soul flinch for him,” she says.

  Otherwise, Lady Bird says, “we were a pretty silent group as we rode along, each wrapped in his own thoughts.” She was to sum up that ride in a single word: “interminable.”

  IN THE PLAZA before the Capitol’s East Front, Lyndon and Lady Bird got out of the car, and he helped the children and Mrs. Kennedy out. Robert got out last without looking at Johnson.

  The staircase on the East Front, broad and tall, was lined now on each side with a double row of men in dress blues and white gloves, rigid in salute, and the coffin of the dead President was carried up between their bayonets, flag of his country fluttering ahead of him, his own flag fluttering behind, to lie in state in the soaring, stone-floored Rotunda under the dome, with its friezes and paintings commemorating historic moments in the nation’s past. As the coffin went up the steps, a Navy band played a sailor’s hymn asking for help “for those in peril on the sea,” for the President had once been in peril on the sea—and played also “Hail to the Chief,” but in an unusually slow tempo, so that as it was played for the last time for John Fitzgerald Kennedy, it was played as a dirge. “Nothing could be harder to endure than ‘Hail to the Chief,’ ” Kennedy’s sister Jean felt.

  In the Rotunda, the coffin lay on the very catafalque on which Lincoln’s body had lain after he had been shot. In front of the circle of statues of great men of the nation’s past was a circle seven or eight deep of the major figures of the present, and there were eulogies from McCormack, representing the House; Mansfield, representing the Senate; and the Supreme Court’s Warren. During the speeches, Mrs. Kennedy stood holding Caroline’s hand; John-John had been taken away to Speaker McCormack’s office, where one of McCormack’s aides was amusing him by letting him play with flags, one of which attracted his interest. “Can I have that one?” he said. “I want to take it home to my Daddy.” Jackie turned her face attentively toward each speaker, a reporter saw. Sometimes, he wrote, “there was the shine of tears in her eyes, but her lips never trembled,” her face was still the immobile mask. They didn’t tremble even when Mansfield told how in Dallas she had taken the ring from her finger and put it in the coffin. “For an instant, her eyes closed, her shoulders sagged,” but she caught herself and stood erect again. During the last speech she swayed for a moment, but then “the soldierly figure … firmed again.” Another of Jack Kennedy’s sisters, Pat, was thinking, If Jackie can do it, I can. Says Lady Bird Johnson, “Her behavior from the moment of the shot … was, to me, one of the most memorable things of all. Maybe it was a combination of great breeding, great discipline, great character. I only know it was great.” Sometimes, Lady Bird says, she herself wanted to cry, but felt that she couldn’t permit herself “the catharsis of tears.” One reason for that, she says, “was that the dignity of Mrs. Kennedy and the members of the family demanded it.” After the speeches, during which Lyndon Johnson stood in the third row of spectators, behind the Kennedy family, came his moment in the ceremonies, a somewhat awkward moment. He had to place a wreath by the coffin, and the wreath, a large one on an easel, was to be carried in front of him by an Army sergeant. For some reason, the sergeant walked backward as he carried the wreath and easel, facing Johnson, matching his steps to Johnson’s, so that their approach to the casket resembled, to one observer, an odd dance. And then, immediately after Johnson had returned to his former place, came another moment. Jacqueline Kennedy and Caroline walked forward to the coffin and knelt beside it. “You just kiss,” Jackie had told her daughter, and Jackie knelt, touched the flag covering the coffin, and kissed it. The little girl beside her touched the flag, too, but, as if she couldn’t get close enough to her father that way, then put her hand under the flag to touch the coffin. The Joint Chiefs of Staff were standing at attention, tears running down their cheeks.

  AFTER THE CEREMONIES, the Johnsons followed the Kennedys down the broad steps, and they drove away, this time in separate cars. And as soon as the dignitaries had left the Rotunda, the people who had been waiting were admitted.

  While the ceremonies had been going on, crowds that had been waiting outside to view the coffin had been joined by crowds from Pennsylvania Avenue who had followed the procession to the Capitol, and now the building was surrounded by a throng which filled the plaza all the way to the Supreme Court Building and the Library of Congress, filled the streets around the Senate and House Buildings and spilled down the hill toward Union Station. And the crowd was growing. Every highway leading into Washington “seemed to be jammed for miles with cars bringing more people.”

  There would not be much to see when these people got inside—just the coffin and its guard of honor—and they would have time only to file past it, and kneel quickly if they wished, yet more and more came. Dusk fell, the temperature dropped into the low thirties, yet the line of people grew longer as people joined it faster than people could be admitted to the Rotunda. The lig
hts were turned on, the great dome was illuminated by floodlights so that it loomed, beautiful and majestic, in the dark. By midnight, when perhaps a hundred thousand people had passed by the coffin, the line, five abreast, of people waiting to get in was three miles long, and still getting longer. The people who entered the Rotunda at 2:30 a.m. had been waiting in line in the cold for eight hours. At 5:45 Monday morning, a policeman near the end of the line told people who were just arriving that they might as well go home because the doors had to be closed at 8:30, and “only 85,000 more can get in,” and there was no chance that they would be among them.

  MONDAY WAS THE DAY of the funeral itself.

  As a procession was bringing the coffin back from the Capitol to the White House, to be taken from there to St. Matthew’s Cathedral for the funeral Mass and then to Arlington National Cemetery for burial, the pageantry was suddenly at a new level. The honor guards were in it, and the flags, and Black Jack, and there were also bands, their brass instruments agleam in the sun: the Marine Band, in scarlet tunics, its muffled drums draped in black, playing “Onward, Christian Soldiers”; the Navy Band marching behind the caisson; tall tartan-clad figures, bagpipers of Scotland’s “Black Watch,” the Royal Highland Regiment, which had played for President Kennedy at the White House; and troops of marching men, West Point cadets in gray uniforms, striding with their famed precision, the gold insignia of their headgear shining; Annapolis midshipmen in Navy blue and white; Air Force cadets in lighter Air Force blue—close to half a mile of bands and troops. And when, at the White House, other marchers fell into line to walk behind the coffin the eight blocks to the cathedral, it became a procession that was, in the Times’ description, “extraordinary.”

  First came Jackie Kennedy, walking between Robert and Edward, her face veiled in black, but her shoulders back, behind them a group of other Kennedys; then the Johnsons—he had been advised not to walk but to go to the cathedral inside a car but had refused, and around him the heads of Secret Service agents swiveled back and forth as they scanned the roofs along the route, and the windows. And after them came what the Times called an assembly of the world’s leaders “such as this city has never seen.” In the first row behind the Johnsons were a king, Baudouin of Belgium; a queen, Frederika of Greece; a prince, Philip of England; three Presidents, Lübke of West Germany, Macapagal of the Philippines and General Park Chung Hee of South Korea—and two figures who, each in his own way, stood out in even this assemblage, one, quite tall, de Gaulle of France, erect and dignified in a soldier’s plain khaki uniform, not a decoration on it, the other, quite short, the Lion of Judah, Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, in a uniform all but aglow with medals and braid. And behind this group came a throng of other heads of state and world leaders, more than a hundred of them.

  And after the service there was another moment. Three-year-old John F. Kennedy Jr. was standing next to his mother on the sidewalk outside the cathedral as John F. Kennedy’s coffin was lifted onto the caisson for the last time, and the horses began to pull it away to lead the procession to Arlington. As his father’s body passed, the little boy in his blue coat drew himself up to attention, and standing stiff as a soldier, raised his hand to his forehead in a salute.

  At Arlington, with the troops drawn up below the grave site—massed soldiers among the graves of soldiers fallen—fighter jets screamed overhead, with, as was military custom, one plane missing from the formation, and then Air Force One flew over, very low, and Colonel Swindal dipped its wings in farewell, and then there was the rifle salute and taps, and the lighting of the eternal flame, and, as the last of the dignitaries left, the crowds began to trudge up the hill.

  NEVER IN AMERICAN HISTORY—never in the history of any republic since, perhaps, the great pageants of Rome—had the passage of power been marked by such pageantry, pageantry which made the three days of funeral ceremonies for John F. Kennedy three of the most memorable days in American history.

  The images of those days—of the coffin on the gun carriage; of the widow in her veil, erect and tearless in grief (tearless in public: inside the cathedral, she broke down once, crying and shaking uncontrollably); of her children, Caroline and John-John, the little girl’s hand creeping under the flag, and the little boy’s hand up in salute; of the long processions; of a hundred heads of state walking behind the caisson; of Black Jack and the matched grays; of Air Force One dipping its wings over Arlington—were poignant, dramatic, indelible.

  And they were engraved, indelibly, on the consciousness of the nation, and, to a remarkable extent, of the world, in a way that had never before happened with a major historical event, because these images were seen, seen live, as they were happening, which added to the drama, to the viewers’ sense of involvement, and to the viewers’ emotions. “The juxtaposition of tapes of the happy Mrs. Jacqueline Kennedy, touring at her husband’s side in the Texas morning, with the live pickup of her arrival behind her husband’s coffin in the Washington evening were almost too much to bear,” Jack Gould wrote. Television had given “a new dimension to grief,” he said. People didn’t have to be satisfied with a description of the great parades; they saw the parades for themselves. And it wasn’t only funeral ceremonies that were seen live. “He’s been shot! He’s been shot! Lee Harvey Oswald has been shot! Pandemonium has broken out!” an NBC announcer shouted, and then viewers saw police officers swarming over a balding man with a gun. Oswald’s mortal wounding, and Jack Ruby’s arrest, “marked,” as the Times said, “the first time … that a real-life homicide had occurred in front of live cameras.” It wasn’t grief alone that, during those three days, had been given a new dimension. “For total horror,” Gould wrote, “nothing could quite compare with … Oswald’s death” on … live TV. “Through television the shock of history reverberated in every home,” Gould wrote. “Clustered around millions of television screens, most Americans were involved in the death and burial of Kennedy to a degree unimaginable before the age of electronic communications,” wrote Louis Heren, then chief Washington correspondent of the London Times. “The grief and pride of those … days became a collective national experience surely unprecedented anywhere in the world and anytime in history.”

  “And,” Heren says, because of television, Americans were involved to a similar extent not only in Kennedy’s death but “in his life.” During those three days, he says, “Thousands of feet of film were shown, of Kennedy on the campaign trail, at home, as President, and even speaking in Texas a few hours before he was killed.” “No man, living or dead, had ever been given such concentrated exposure.” Television, the medium Jack Kennedy had understood before other politicians understood it (“Do you know who’s the most well-known senator in the United States?”), the medium that had done so much to make him his party’s nominee, and then had done so much to make him President, had now during those three days transmuted him into a figure of legend and myth.

  DURING THOSE THREE DAYS, the focus of America and the world was on Washington, but on the White House and the Capitol and the cathedral and the cemetery. Very little was on the Executive Office Building.

  On Sunday and Monday, Lyndon Johnson’s relegation to the “background,” to the “sidelines” of the events unfolding in Washington that had begun on Saturday, continued. The television cameras across Pennsylvania Avenue could have panned slightly and shown the side entrance of the EOB as well as the North Portico, but there was no Marine honor guard at the EOB, no long line of limousines pulling up to it, no long line of the “mighty of the land” going in, just the very occasional car with a Cabinet member—Rusk or McNamara—getting out quickly and hurrying through the door. There were no television cameras inside EOB 274, and what would they have shown had they been there?—just Johnson talking on the telephone or sitting at the conference table talking to Rusk or McNamara. Indeed, each time a conference was finished, the photographers—still photographers—were called in, and the pictures were taken, and newspapers ran them: obviously posed pictures
, static, dull.

  And indeed the setting in which Lyndon Johnson was working hardly seemed one in which memorable events would occur, particularly in contrast with the majestic settings—the East Room, the Rotunda—in which the vivid pageantry of those days was being played out. It hardly seemed presidential: just a governmental office suite, a little more elegantly decorated than most, that, with all the new staff members working in it, was overcrowded, cluttered. Johnson himself was to remember these days in terms of a contrast—of what he called “a strange counterpoint”—between “the harsh glare” of the fluorescent “office lights burning deep into the night, then the somber hush and the dim, soft light in the East Room from the four large candles flanking John F. Kennedy’s coffin,” between “the frenzied pace of meetings and briefings held behind closed doors, then the measured cadence of the funeral march.”

  At least on Sunday some of the banner headlines had been about Johnson. Not so on Monday. Most of Monday’s banners didn’t even mention Lyndon Johnson. PRESIDENT’S ASSASSIN SHOT TO DEATH IN JAIL CORRIDOR BY DALLAS CITIZEN; GRIEVING THRONGS VIEW KENNEDY were the headlines across the top of the front page of the New York Times, for example. None of the stories at the top of that front page were about him. The two huge pictures on the page were of Caroline putting her hand under the flag and of Oswald grimacing as Ruby shot him, the detective next to Oswald aghast, his mouth open in shock. The Washington Post’s photos were of the grimace and the grays, as the horses pulled the caisson away from the White House. Johnson barely made the front page of that paper at all; the only story on the activities of the new President was squeezed onto the bottom of the page. Television reported on his activities but television was the realm of the picture, and what pictures could compare with the tape of Oswald’s shooting, which was shown over and over that day, or with the live coverage of the incredible procession and the funeral and the foreign leaders following the coffin and the Kennedys? “The drama” of the three days following Jack Kennedy’s assassination “centered on the flag-draped catafalque in the East Room,” Hugh Sidey was to write. “Beyond the legend of the dead Kennedy which was then being magnified in every hamlet was the presence of the Kennedy family. Johnson could not compete with them.… The great and the near-great came in waves for three days. Charles de Gaulle was a more imposing and fascinating figure than the new President.” Then there were Selassie, Macapagal, “Germany’s Ludwig Erhard, Queen Frederika, Ireland’s marvelous old De Valera, … Mikoyan. Lyndon Johnson had less glamour than any of them.” During those three days, he “stayed in his old office … only on the edge of the drama.”