The Death of a President

by William Manchester

  The announcer’s source was Kilduff’s pool, fifty feet behind Lady Bird. Earlier the correspondents there had been even closer. The pool car, the sixth and final vehicle in the aborted motorcade, had hugged Varsity’s rear bumper as they shot up the freeway ramp. Since passing the Trade Mart it had begun to lose ground and was now weaving dangerously. Actually, the chauffeur was doing well to keep the road. He was driving in the middle of a furious scramble.

  Merriman Smith had seized the radiophone while they were still on Elm Street. His Dallas UPI bureau heard him bark: “Three shots were fired at President Kennedy’s motorcade in downtown Dallas.”

  Smith was not as astute a reporter as he seemed. Despite extensive experience with weapons he had thought the sounds in the plaza were three shots from an automatic weapon, and in a subsequent message he identified them as “bursts.” But his speed was remarkable. That first bulletin was on the UPI printer at 12:34, two minutes before the Presidential car reached Parkland. Before eyewitnesses could collect themselves it was being beamed around the world. To those who tend to believe everything they hear and read, the figure of three seemed to have the sanction of authority, and many who had been in the plaza and had thought they heard only two reports later corrected their memories.

  Of the driver’s five passengers, Kilduff, Baskin, and Clark of ABC could do nothing until the car stopped. Smith and Jack Bell of AP were a different breed. They were wire service reporters; they dealt in seconds. Smith’s seniority had given him a clear beat, the greatest in his career, and the longer he could keep Bell out of touch with an AP operator, the longer that lead would be. So he continued to talk. He dictated one take, two takes, three, four. Indignant, Bell rose up from the center of the rear seat and demanded the phone. Smith stalled. He insisted that his Dallas operator read back the dictation. The wires overhead, he argued, might have interfered with his transmission. No one was deceived by that. Everyone in the car could hear the cackling of the UPI operator’s voice. The relay was perfect. Bell, red-faced and screaming, tried to wrest the radiophone from him; Smith thrust it between his knees and crouched under the dash, and Bell, flailing wildly, was hitting both the driver and Kilduff.

  “What’s that big building up ahead?” Kilduff yelled at the driver.

  “Parkland Hospital,” the driver shouted back.

  Smith surrendered the phone to Bell, and at that moment it went dead.

  The buff brick entrance was illumined by two red neon signs: “EMERGENCY CASES ONLY” and “AMBULANCE ONLY.” Of the three parking bays which led to its loading dock only the first was occupied, by one of the fleet of white dual-purpose vehicles which served Vernon B. Oneal, an enterprising Dallas undertaker, as both hearses and ambulances. SS 100 X skirted the bays, swerved left, and drew up on a diagonal outside them, its trunk toward the building. The other five vehicles skidded into odd angles of repose on the circular driveway beyond.

  Doors flew open. Smith grabbed Clint Hill.

  “How is he?” he panted.

  Hill swore and blurted out, “He’s dead, Smitty.”

  Smith, swarthy and piratical, dashed inside. On the left of the corridor a clerk was sorting slips in the emergency room’s cashier’s cage. He burst in on her and snatched up her telephone. “How do I get outside?” he demanded. “You—you dial nine,” she stammered. He dialed it, dialed the local UPI number, and quoted Hill.

  Clark of ABC had found a second phone in the blood bank office, and Bell was looking for a third. He had jumped out of the press car and run toward the Presidential limousine. Upon seeing the President’s body, he asked an agent, “Is he dead?” The man had replied, “I don’t know, but I don’t think so.” Speeding down the corridor, Bell found a line at the admissions desk, seventy-five feet beyond Smith, and reached the Dallas Bureau. He said, “Flash—President Kennedy shot,” and began rapid-fire dictation. However, the information he did have was hopelessly garbled by a grief-stricken operator. On the machine “KENNETH O’DONNELL” came out “KENNETH 0’;$9„3)),” “BLOODSTAINED” was translated “BLOOD STAINEZAAC RBMTHING,” and “HE LAY,” in a tragic stutter, as “HE LAAAAAAAAAAA.”5

  Outside in the Vice Presidential car Youngblood had extricated himself. Johnson alighted, rubbing his arm (that gesture, witnessed by a spectator, became the basis for the report that he had been injured), and found himself being borne firmly along by the five agents, the nucleus of the future White House Detail. Momentarily Mrs. Johnson was unescorted. She hurried along behind. From the loading dock she peered over the heads toward the Lincoln and saw what appeared to be a graceful drift of pink falling toward one side—her first glimpse, as America’s thirty-second First Lady, of her predecessor. She fled inside.

  Everyone else had converged on the Presidential car—everyone, that is, except litter bearers. There wasn’t an attendant in sight. Kellerman, Sorrels, and Lawson looked at one another, aghast.

  “Get us two stretchers on wheels!” Roy bawled.

  There was no movement from the hospital.

  The failure of the police radio—for it was the dispatcher’s stuck button which was largely accountable for this appalling situation—played no role in the passion of John Kennedy. Had his injuries been less grievous, the delayed alarm would have become a proper matter for a searching inquiry. So would the decision to put Dr. Burkley at the end of the motorcade. But the Chief Executive was past saving, and had been now for six minutes. Burkley, gowned and masked and supported by the entire staff of Parkland, could have done nothing for him after 12:30. In fact, had he been anyone but the President of the United States, the first physician to see him would have tagged him “DOA”—“Dead on Arrival.” There was no discernible respiration. His pupils were dilated and fixed. His brain was quite destroyed.

  Still his wife held him in her arms, embracing him and moaning.

  As Lawson vanished within the building, Powers and O’Donnell bounded toward the Lincoln. Powers heard Emory Roberts shouting at him to stop but disregarded him; a second might save Kennedy’s life. He wrenched open the right-hand door, expecting to hear the familiar voice say, “I’m all right.” They had been through so much. There had been so many crises. It couldn’t be, Dave was thinking; it couldn’t be. Then he saw the staring eyes and knew it was.

  “Oh, my God, Mr. President!” he cried and burst into tears.

  O’Donnell drew up by the left fender, erect and rigid, a figure in stone. His hands were by his sides. He was at attention.

  Emory Roberts brushed past O’Donnell, determined to make sure that Kennedy was dead. “Get up,” he said to Jacqueline Kennedy. There was no reply. She was crooning faintly. From this side Roberts couldn’t see the President’s face, so he lifted her elbow for a close look. He dropped it. To Kellerman, his superior, he said tersely, “You stay with Kennedy. I’m going to Johnson.” He followed Lady Bird.

  Greer was helping Lawson arrange the stretchers in tandem. The Kennedys and Connallys lay entangled in their abattoir. The others stood about, limping a little, like casualties. Shock had disabled them, and ignorance. Seven minutes ago they had been en route to a luncheon. Now they were milling around in the driveway of a nameless hospital. Few knew who had been hurt, or how badly. One man saw the blood on Mrs. Kennedy and gibbered, “My God, they shot Jackie!” The remark was heard and passed along to patients in the building. Yarborough and Kilduff simultaneously observed a clot of blood on John Connally’s head. They assumed that it was his, that he had been shot in the forehead. His face was yellowish-gray. Each of them separately concluded that he was dead.

  Meanwhile the Governor, who had been reconciled to death, was recovering consciousness. The jarring of brakes had roused him. His lids fluttered open. He became aware of the movement around the car, and the thought occurred to him—it was occurring to several others at the same moment—that no one could reach the President until the jump seats had been cleared. He tried to heave himself up. His wife, misunderstanding, restrained him. Since the car
had stopped Nellie had become visibly agitated. As long as they were moving her self-discipline had been admirable, but now a pendulum was swinging within her. To her the situation here seemed obvious. The man behind her was dead. She had seen the gore; no one could live after that. Yet everybody was fussing over the backseat. They were fretting over a corpse and paying no attention to her John. They were just letting the Governor of Texas lie there, leaving him to bleed while they poked and fooled around, and it was outrageous.

  The focus of attention was, in fact, the President, but no one was ignoring the Governor. They couldn’t; even if they had been indifferent to his suffering, the stark fact remained that he was in the way. Therefore attendants, who had appeared at last, were leaning over Nellie from her side while Dave Powers, choking back his tears, was lifting out Connally’s legs. The transfer was easily accomplished. His condition was far less serious than it then seemed. The Governor’s muscles were tense; he could brace himself, and being conscious he could help his bearers. They placed him on the first of the two stretchers and carried him inside, Nellie stumbling after them.

  Now it was the President’s turn.

  Mrs. Kennedy hadn’t budged. It would seem that in the pitiless exposure of the open car, surrounded by eyes, nothing was left to her; nevertheless she was trying to preserve a cantlet of privacy. Bowing her head, she continued to hold her husband. If she released him, the harrowing spectacle would reappear, and she couldn’t endure that. Avoiding the faces around her, she crumpled lower and lower, pressing her husband’s stained face to her breast. There was a strained hush. The men could hear her making little weeping sounds.

  Clint and Roy mounted the steps on either side of the spare tire, Clint directly behind her.

  “Please, Mrs. Kennedy,” he said.

  He touched her shoulders, and they trembled convulsively. Four seconds passed, then five. Ralph Yarborough had an inkling of what was happening. He didn’t understand the crux of it, for he hadn’t seen the wound, but he sensed that she was determined not to let the mob see her anguish. The Senator was part of that mob. He was gawking with the others. He couldn’t help it. Yet he admired her defiance of him and those around him, and he stepped back involuntarily as she stifled a final sob and controlled herself with a single, violent spasm. Her proud head rose, the face a mask. Still she didn’t move.

  “Please,” Clint mumbled again. “We must get the President to a doctor.”

  Inaudibly6 she moaned, “I’m not going to let him go, Mr. Hill.”

  “We’ve got to take him in, Mrs. Kennedy.”

  “No, Mr. Hill. You know he’s dead. Let me alone.”

  Suddenly he realized what was troubling her—because he had seen the back seat in those first moments he was the only other person there who could know it—and rearing up he ripped off his suit coat and laid it in her lap. Tenderly she wrapped the President’s head in the lining as Clint, Roy, Dave, Greer, and Lawson drew him toward the second stretcher. She had another, brief moment of panic; they were moving too fast, the coat was slipping away. Scrambling along the wet seat, she seized it in white-knuckled fists while they grappled with his hips and thighs. It was a formidable struggle. Unlike Connally, his body lacked tension. It was rubbery, and as a former practicing lawyer Yarborough recognized the signs. Horrified, he thought, His legs are going every whichaways.

  Now the President was on the litter, and they were rapidly wheeling him past a black “NO LOITERING” sign, through scuffed double doors. Beyond lay another world. There was no sunlight. The air reeked. The corridor was walled in dreary tan tile, the floor was a dingy brownish-red linoleum, and on either side lay a maze of cubicles assigned to Pediatrics, Triage, O.B., Gynecology, X-Ray, Admittance. Emergencies were guided by a broad red stripe in the center of the floor which swung left, then right down a long hall, to a wide single door in the right-hand wall bearing the meaningless digit “5.” Inside 5, after a short break, the red stripe was replaced by a green one. This was the surgical subdivision of Major Medicine. White sheeting hung on either side, partitioning booths. A final left, and they were in a passage scarcely wider than the rear of the Lincoln. To their left was Trauma Room No. 2. John Connally was inside, groaning. Nellie stood silently in the doorway, her face swollen, her eyes averted. The President was wheeled right, into No. 1. An arm seized Jackie, and there, on the threshold, she relaxed her grip on Clint’s coat and stepped back. Her hopeless vigil had begun.

  Grief has no single shape. Some men—among them the most deeply affected—weep within. Ken O’Donnell was of these. He had the appearance of a deaf mute. Next to Jacqueline Kennedy, perhaps, he bore the deepest scars there, and his response was total withdrawal. Never voluble, he had now become catatonic; he wandered from the trauma area to the nurse’s station and back again, a dark little man with a peculiar, hammered look. Questions were put to him. He didn’t reply, but no one thought that remarkable; he had always been terse. Enmeshed in their own distress, they didn’t grasp the profound change in him. O’Donnell had been the most dependable of Kennedy’s squires. Now that he had lost his knight he was bereft and helpless.

  Dave Powers scribbled three lines:

  1235 I carried my President on stretcher

  ran to Emergency Room #1 (10 × 15 ft.)

  Jackie ran beside stretcher holding on

  Ralph Yarborough had been bred in the fulsome tradition of Southern oratory; he thought in rolling phrases, and they were as genuine from him, and as moving, as the silence of O’Donnell. When the first reporters encountered the Senator, he began brokenly, “Gentlemen, this has been a deed of horror.” He filled up and turned aside, whispering, “Excalibur has sunk beneath the waves.…”

  But it was too early for most people to react. Jack Price, Parkland’s administrator, was accustomed to mayhem, and as a conservative Republican he had not been bewitched by the Kennedy aura, yet even he could not fashion a meaningful link between the present horror in his halls and what had been, until this moment, a remote, immaculate concept of the American Presidency. Price had been helping with Connally. Standing in the corridor, trying to organize his staff, he had seen the second stretcher fly past with roses on the body’s chest. Litters were part of his trade; he dismissed this one, and since the patient’s head was swaddled in a suit coat he saw nothing striking there. “Oh, my Lord, they have shot President Kennedy,” someone moaned. It didn’t register. Price simply couldn’t absorb what had happened. Then he glimpsed the girl hurrying behind. He recognized her from her pictures, and as her crouched figure darted through the doors that led to Major Medicine he whirled for a second look. But something was wrong. In the photographs he had seen she had always been faultlessly dressed. Now she was blotched and disheveled. And he couldn’t imagine how her stockings had become coated with thick red paint.

  Parkland was still recoiling from this first invasion when the second, denser wave arrived from the Trade Mart. The interval was bound to be brief because the buildings were so close, and two circumstances virtually eliminated it. The first was the motorcade schedule. Drivers had been told that the procession would pick up speed after leaving Main Street, and in the excitement which followed the shots they accelerated so rapidly that during the twelve seconds of Officer Clyde Haygood’s pistol-in-hand ascent of the overpass embankment every vehicle in the caravan, including the Signals car, swept past him. The second factor was communications. Curry’s alarm had been intercepted by all Dallas police radios at the Mart. The men there who had heard it were preparing to escort any member of the Presidential party who could establish his credentials.

  Thus Agent Lem Johns, who had broken the motorcade chain by debouching on Elm Street, never stopped moving, and since he felt indebted to the photographers who had picked him up he started a stampede. Outside the Mart he flashed his commission book at a motorcycle policeman. The officer pulled him into his sidecar. “Can we come?” called one of the photographers. “Sure,” Johns called back. “Turn on your lights a
nd follow us.” Captain Stoughton, in the other cameramen’s convertible, was sitting beside a Dallas News man. As they hesitated outside the Mart Stoughton shouted at a policeman, “Where did they go?” The reply “Parkland” meant nothing to the captain, but the News man said, “God, that’s a hospital—let’s take off.” The stars on the shoulders of Ted Clifton and Godfrey McHugh attracted an honor guard with sirens and flashing red lights. The first Congressional car executed a U-turn and roared in their wake; it moved so quickly that Henry Gonzalez was alighting in the emergency area driveway while the President’s body was being removed from the Lincoln.

  There were some stragglers. The two press buses unloaded as scheduled between the Furniture Mart and the Apparel Mart, on Industrial Boulevard; the bulk of the White House press corps showed their Polaroid identification cards, entered the Trade Mart, and heard the news either from officers or luncheon guests who had picked up Merriman Smith’s flash over transistor radios. Among the last to learn that anything had gone awry were the passengers of the hapless VIP bus. They had been instructed to go directly to the rear of the Trade Mart. But there were no Dallas policemen at the rear entrance. The guards were Texas state policemen who weren’t tied into the radio network and didn’t know what had happened. None of them, moreover, had ever seen a White House pass. They had been told that Secret Service agents would vouch for bona fide Kennedy people. But most of the agents had left for Parkland after picking up Kellerman’s distress signal over the Charlie network. The result was an icy reception for Dr. Burkley, Evelyn Lincoln, Pam Turnure, Mary Gallagher, Jack Valenti, Liz Carpenter, and Marie Fehmer. A Ranger who knew Barefoot Sanders offered to admit him. No one could go with him, however. As a Texan Liz was mortified. “This is Evelyn Lincoln, the President’s personal secretary,” she said indignantly, thrusting Evelyn forward. The guard inspected Evelyn’s pass and handed it back to her. He said impassively, “I’m sorry, lady.”