“They’re fixing to put you there,” Maverick’s friend insisted, and he was right, for as Yarborough approached the crocodile of automobiles he was confronted by Agent Youngblood, a slender, balding, aggressive Georgian.
“Senator, you’re scheduled to ride in the Vice President’s car here,” Youngblood said, relaying another O’Donnell decree.
Yarborough looked right through him, spun on his heel, and walked up to Gonzalez. “Henry,” he said, “can I hitch a ride with you?”
The Congressman was delighted. So was the White House press corps. All forty correspondents had the Senator’s Air Force One quote now, and local reporters had given them the San Antonio motorcade assignments. When they saw him avoiding the Vice President, they drew the inevitable conclusion. They decided to call it a snub.
Youngblood slid into the front seat of the rented convertible, turned, and spread his hands. “Well,” he said, “I told him.”
The situation was awkward for the Johnsons. Every other car was packed. Their back seat would easily accommodate three people, and no matter how they spread themselves, they were obviously missing a passenger. As Lady Bird put it later, “We’d been told Ralph was going to be with us, but every time we looked for him, he wasn’t there.” Lyndon stared straight ahead. Connally was to blame, but Connally was safe and snug in the big Lincoln; it was Johnson who was losing face. Life, President Kennedy had once observed, is unfair.
It was also being unfair to Kennedy, whose day this should have been. When a reporter asked Gonzalez what he thought the day’s lead story should be, Henry replied, “San Antonio gives President a boisterous reception.” The newspaperman shook his head. “Yarborough refuses to ride with Lyndon Johnson,” he said. Gonzalez, indignant, said, “Boy, you’re really giving it to him, aren’t you?” “That’s news,” the man said defensively, and by traditional standards it was. Correspondents had to take note of it, just as they were obliged to dwell on the scattered Goldwater banners in the crowd, the obscure placard “WELCOME PRESIDENT KENNITTY,” and the way Kennedy raised his eyebrows at the NAACP sign outside the airport—“MR. PRESIDENT, YOU ARE IN A SEGREGATED CITY”—and leaned forward to question Connally about it, raising his voice to be heard above the whirring of a police helicopter three hundred feet overhead.5
Yet the Congressman, though biased, had a point. The real excitement that afternoon had nothing to do with political bloodletting. It had been captured, oddly, by an afternoon newspaper which had gone to press while the President was still in the air, and which hit the streets as his motorcade nosed between the palm trees at the terminal entrance and turned east on Loop 410, headed downtown. Under the headline “CHEERS FOR JFK, JACKIE,” the San Antonio Light had written: “President John F. Kennedy, visiting the Alamo City for the first time, flew into San Antonio Thursday to a wildly enthusiastic greeting.” The editors of the Light hadn’t been guessing. They had known the greeting would be enthusiastic, because they knew their viva subscribers. A school holiday had been proclaimed, stores had put up their Christmas decorations a week early, labor was out in force, the Democratic organization was marshaling the party faithful. The parade couldn’t miss, even if the Kennedys’ drawing power had been myth. As it happened, that power had been underrated. The turnout was fantastic. Over 125,000 people were jammed along the route, and they had transformed their city.
On an ordinary day it is a drab community, an oleograph of the Southwest. Palms are attractive but rare. In the overpopulated neighborhoods greenery has been replaced by ugly Laundraterias, El Rancho bars, Bar-B-Q nite spots. Homes are roofed with campy terra cotta, new construction is bogus Old World housing, and several gasoline stations are dingy replicas of the Alamo. The number of filling stations is staggering. Like most cities in the Southwestern United States, San Antonio sometimes gives the curious impression that it is inhabited by automobiles. Entire blocks are devoted to the care and feeding of motor vehicles. Signs advertise paint body shops, tire stores, wheel alignment establishments, greaseries, transmission specialists, tune-up bargains, seat covers, hydraulic services, “Chevvy Land,” “A-1 Auto Parts,” and “Free Valves and Rings.” Motels and trailer parks outnumber hotels; car graveyards are more conspicuous than cemeteries. There are U-Drive-Its and U-Haul-Its, drive-in stores and drive-in restaurants, and drive-in theaters littered with souvenirs of last night’s love.
This anarchy was invisible to the distinguished visitor because it had been masked by a mantle of humanity. The curbs were dense with shining Latin faces. They hadn’t come to stare, or even just to cheer; thousands of individuals had given considerable thought to an original reception, and the President became as much spectator as spectacle. At Howard School each pupil was waving an American flag. At Alamo Heights High School parents stood with their children, and on St. Mary’s Street an entire student body had gathered behind an enormous purple-and-white “BRACKINRIDGE HIGH SCHOOL WELCOMES YOU.” Lady Bird, who shrewdly discounted mass-produced placards, saw hand-lettered signs on every side: “WELCOME, JFK,” “BIENVENIDO, MR. PRESIDENT,” and “JACKIE, COME WATERSKI IN TEXAS!”
Two cars ahead, the Kennedys started counting jumpers and screamers and gave up. Everybody was one or the other except a cripple in a wheelchair, and when the President got out to shake the cripple’s hand he was nearly swept away. They stopped again outside Incarnate Word College—Mrs. Kennedy wanted to change seats with Connally; the wind was blowing her hair—and a nun narrowly missed the President with a lunging movement that looked much like a flying tackle. In the business district they encountered delirium: a blizzard of confetti floated down on them at the intersection of Travis and Broadway, the mob was screaming with a single voice, and conversation within the Lincoln had become impossible. Meanwhile the motorcade had begun to come unstuck. The battery in the pool car had gone dead, marooning the press in a chaos of yelling Spanish Americans and blocking the cars behind it. Kellerman signaled Greer to hit the gas; the lead cars sped out to Brooks Medical Center.
But the Center was no sanctuary. The Air Force had set up nine thousand folding chairs for people who wanted to hear the President’s brief speech of dedication. There were twenty thousand waiting to occupy them. The public relations officer, a quiet lieutenant colonel, was stunned. Nobody had briefed him on the problems that come with such a multitude, and he was momentarily overwhelmed. Six high school superintendents arrived posing as correspondents for their school papers and were seated in the press section. A man dressed as a priest and carrying a black bag was ushered to the front before a horrified acquaintance recognized him as a mental patient. An elderly woman had just finished a painting of blue-bonnets; she wanted to give it to the President. An elderly man wanted to give him two ears of Texas hard corn. In the confusion none of the officers noticed the arrival of the White House flag detail. When the last crackpot had been whisked away, they found the President’s flags and seal miraculously in place on the podium; the base band was playing “The Man I Love,” and the man himself was emerging from his Lincoln. Simultaneously a woman with a glassy stare detached herself from the crowd and lurched at his wife. She sobbed, “Mrs. Kennedy, Mrs. Kennedy, please touch my hand!” Their fingers brushed. “Oh, my God!” the woman wept. “She really did touch me! She really did!” The First Lady shrank back, her face frozen in a fixed smile.
Suddenly everything was under control. Agents, policemen, and Air Force MP’s moved in. The tail of the motorcade arrived—the pool car had been left at one of the nine San Antonio garages specializing in battery repairs—and even the VIP bus was there. Evelyn Lincoln and Mary Gallagher were peering out, waving at the platform, and Godfrey McHugh was clowning in pantomime. The President laughed. The General had been forgiven, which was a good thing; in two hours he would take over as Kennedy’s officer of the day.
The brisk wind had grown brisker. Over half the audience couldn’t hear the speech, a ringing reaffirmation of the New Frontier.
“… we… stand on the edge
of a great new era filled with both crises and opportunity, an era to be characterized by achievements and challenge. It is an era which calls for action, and for the best efforts of all those who would test the unknown and the uncertain in every phase of human endeavor. It is a time for pathfinders and pioneers.…”
Mrs. Kennedy could hear. She sat directly behind him, listening as intently as any young wife who had never heard a President speak.
“… the wartime development of radar gave us the transistor and all that it made possible.…”
I never knew that, she thought, surprised.
“This nation has tossed its cap over the wall of space—and we have no choice but to follow it,” he said, turning to his last 5 × 7 card. “… with the help of all those who labor in the space endeavor, with the help and support of all Americans, we will climb this wall with safety and with speed—and we shall then explore the wonders on the other side.”
During the applause Major General T. C. Bedwell, Jr., commander of the base, asked Kennedy if he would like to see four youths in an experimental tank, breathing pure oxygen at a simulated altitude of nearly thirty thousand feet. The oxygen chamber wasn’t on the schedule; Bedwell was merely making a hospitable gesture. To his surprise, Kennedy said he would like it very much. They trooped over to Building T-100, where Dr. B. E. Welch, a phlegmatic young scientist, shook hands with the Kennedys and escorted them to the tank’s circular window. From inside, the youths, popeyed, beheld the President of the United States. He was in an inquisitive mood. Donning a headset, he subjected them to one of his typical grillings. How long had they been sealed up in there? Exactly how high were they supposed to be? What did they eat? How did they feel? Why had they volunteered? “Thank you very much. Jackie?” He was offering her the earphones. But her hair was already disheveled from the wind, and the beret was in the way. She laughed and shook her head.
He drew Dr. Welch aside. He had one more inquiry: “Apart from space research, there must be other medical implications here. Do you think your work might improve oxygen chambers for, say, premature babies?”
The scientist rather thought it might. Nevertheless the question puzzled him. He had been busy in his laboratory this past year and had rarely glanced at a newspaper. He wondered why the President should be concerned with infant mortality and why, as Kennedy turned for a final glance into the steel tank, his tanned face should seem so pensive.
Immediately after the departure of the Presidential party from San Antonio International Airport Colonel Swindal had moved his three-plane fleet to nearby Kelly Field, and there, at 3:48 P.M., the Kennedys re-boarded Aircraft 26000. They were drenched and limp. The attrition of vitality, the ineluctable toll of such a journey, had begun. At Brooks Kennedy had tried to rest briefly in the Lincoln while the First Lady made her farewells. Harassed by a band of housewives who kept hissing, “Psst! Your wife, Mr. President!”—they were unaware that etiquette dictates that a President, alone among American husbands, may precede his wife—he had given up and gone to fetch her. The motorcade was resumed. During the half-hour drive which followed, the automotive nature of the landscape signs became depressingly evident (“Need gas, Mr. President? We give out stamps”), and someone had neglected to tell the railroads about the parade; a freight train had to be halted at a grade crossing. At Kelly itself five thousand government workers gave them a thunderous cheer. It was exhilarating but depleting. After two Cokes the President and Mrs. Kennedy retired to their bedroom.
Their life together now had nearly a full day to run. Yet this was to be their last hour of serenity. The tyranny of events and exhaustion would begin to close in when they finished the two-hundred-mile lap to Houston. Actually, they hadn’t even an hour. In this plane the hop took only forty-five minutes. Privacy was that limited, confined to a tiny blue cabin racing thirty thousand feet above the tessellated green and brown plains of central Texas, the long straight roads which led from farm to market, the tidiness of lonely farms, the vast stretches of mouse-colored desert, of outcrop and barren land and dry river beds, and then: a complex of irrigation canals; a sinuous river crowded with thick shoulders of live oak; the geometric patterns of suburbia; Houston. Their time was up.
The President emerged in a fresh shirt and summoned Albert Thomas.
“How did it go?” he inquired.
At Kelly he had requested Thomas, who had come aboard with the shift of Congressmen, to step into the Yarborough-Connally brawl and “get them sweetened up.” For the past half-hour Houston’s senior Congressman had been trying. First he had taken the Senator to the front of the staff area and told him things had gone far enough. Yarborough had tentatively agreed. In the interests of harmony he would speak at the Thomas testimonial dinner this evening. He had made just one condition. His wife was going to meet him at the Houston airport, and he wanted the Yarboroughs to ride into town with the Thomases. This, of course, was a blind. He wanted a pretext to avoid the Johnson car. Since the decoy was named Opal Yarborough, however, courtly Albert Thomas couldn’t object.
“O.K.,” Kennedy said tightly. “And the Governor?”
“John’s dragging his feet,” said the Congressman.
After escorting the Senator to his seat, Thomas had led Connally forward. The fight had to end, he repeated; it was time everyone shook hands. The Governor was evasive. When Thomas suggested that Connally introduce the President at the dinner, and Yarborough the Vice President, he got an argument. During introductions, he was told, the Senator should be benched. Reluctantly Thomas agreed. He sought other concessions and got none. It was all very unsatisfactory. “You’re a grown boy,” he snapped at the Governor, who replied frostily that he wanted to talk to Larry or Ken.
“I got to them first,” Thomas said. “I told them to sit tight.”
There was a grinding sound: 26000’s slowing brakes went out, then its landing flaps. The President looked reflective. He asked, “How do you feel about Houston?”
“Nervous,” Thomas said nervously. San Antonio had impressed him. He wanted his district to put on as big a show, and he promised the President that it would. “My people have been busy as a cranberry merchant,” he said. “They’ll deliver.”
“We’ll see,” said the President.
They saw a repetition of San Antonio’s airport welcome. There was Lyndon, waiting at the foot of the ramp like Grover Whalen; there was the Mayor, all effusion; there were three dozen yellow roses for the First Lady and a white orchid from Albert Miller, Florist; and eight thousand Texans packed around the terminal’s cargo entrance, sweating in the ferocious afternoon heat and yelling hoarsely for “Jackieee.” Thomas needn’t have worried. During the past week Jack Valenti had virtually taken a leave of absence from the public relations firm of Weekley and Valenti. As general chairman for tonight’s dinner he had sold 3,450 tickets, and he had pulled all the promotion stops in an effort to meet his commitment to O’Donnell. If Air Force One landed before dark, he had written Ken on November 1, he guaranteed “the enormous downtown working crowd,” from “200,000 to 300,000.”
Houston lacked the ardor of San Antonio. The turnout was really about 175,000. It was no Dallas, but liberals were a minority here; Houston’s Harris County had gone to Nixon in 1960 by a handsome margin. Today the local right wing had erected several noisome posters along the Presidential route: “WATCH KENNEDY STAMP OUT YOUR BUSINESS,” “BAN THE BROTHERS,” “KENNEDY, KHRUSHCHEV, AND KING”; and a biplane over the field tugged a warlike streamer reading “COEXISTENCE IS SURRENDER.” Yet despite Kennedy’s tardy arrival—his visit to the oxygen chamber had thrown everything off—the dominant mood was enthusiastic. Thomas waved at his applauding constituents and bowed to the President. “Well?” he asked proudly. “O.K.,” Kennedy laughed. “You win.”
At the gate fence both Kennedys gave themselves to the mob. This kind of campaigning was unfamiliar to Jackie, but she had taken the bit, and her husband was appreciative; from time to time he glanced back at her, smil
ing encouragement. Once she nearly vanished. Both her wrists were grasped by several talon-like hands, and in near panic she felt herself being dragged over the railing. The talons slackened and she staggered back, juggling yellow roses. “Don’t leave me,” she panted at Albert Thomas. “Don’t get too far away.” “That’s enough,” he called, and he and two of his friends, both septuagenarians, ran interference for her until she reached the car.
The blue Lincoln had been flown on to Dallas in a cargo plane for tomorrow’s motorcade there. Here the President would ride in a smaller white convertible. Otherwise the caravan was the same, and Ralph Yarborough remained its most prickly figure. Marty Underwood, the Houston advance man, approached Yarborough and Johnson separately, pointing out to each that they were supposed to be together. Johnson was agreeable, the Senator wasn’t. “We have you scheduled for that car,” Underwood insisted. Yarborough just shook his head. Agent Youngblood made a second attempt to tame him. “You were supposed to be with the Vice President in San Antonio, Senator,” he said reproachfully, “and you’re supposed to be there here, too.” “I’m riding with my wife if that’s all right with you,” Yarborough said thickly. “Well, you’re scheduled to ride in the Vice President’s car for the rest of the trip,” the agent said, and reported back to Johnson. “I’ve bugged him enough,” he said, exasperated. Lyndon said nothing. He nodded stonily.
After a hundred yards all the cars slowed to a crawl. The alternative was mayhem: people had swarmed out on the concrete ribbon of the Gulf Freeway, where people never are. Even Valenti hadn’t expected this, and John Connally was dumfounded. Lady Bird, using her homely yardstick, took note of a wizened old man holding a hand-lettered “WELCOME KENNEDY”; a dozen uniformed Girl Scouts from “TROOP 1381”; a little boy with a faded American flag, standing rigidly at attention. Mrs. Kennedy pointed excitedly—on Travis Street the spectators were packed ten and twelve deep, and behind them the traffic was backed up for miles. The President said wryly, “That’s why I’ve started going into New York without a police escort. For every vote we’re winning here, there’s some poor guy who can’t get to his home over there—” he gestured toward the blocked bridges crossing Buffalo Bayou, on their right—“and who’ll be two hours late to his dinner. He won’t love us. He’ll just be furious.”
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