Suddenly Dr. Burkley vanished. Burkley had never deserted Evelyn before, but he sensed that something terrible had happened. The atmosphere was ominous. Strangers were reeling around in circles. Doug Kiker of the Herald Tribune was sobbing passionately, “The goddamned sons-of-bitches.” With his chief pharmacist’s mate in tow, the doctor flagged Agent Andy Berger, who was about to leave in a police cruiser. The physician had just tossed his black bag on the floorboard when Chuck Roberts of Newsweek ran up. “Let me go with you,” Chuck begged. Burkley, usually gentle, slammed the door in his face; the cruiser skirred into Harry Hines Boulevard and dropped the doctor outside Parkland’s emergency entrance minutes after the President’s disappearance within.
That left Valenti with five women, all of them approaching hysteria. He himself was becoming highly agitated. His face flushed, he sprang at Ranger after Ranger, demanding information. No one would tell him anything. Where was the President? Inside. Why couldn’t they enter? No Secret Service. Where was the Secret Service? A shrug. Then, from the corner of his eyes Valenti saw a luncheon guest in a business suit emerging from a telephone booth. The man appeared disabled. His arms hung slackly, his legs were wobbling. He addressed them as a group. “Are you White House people?” he asked in falsetto. Without awaiting a reply he said, “The President’s been shot,” and wobbled off. “What a bad joke!” Marie Fehmer gasped. Liz laughed—a high-pitched, mirthless laugh. “Why should anyone start a rumor like that?” she asked Evelyn. Valenti, damning all Texas Rangers, fell on a passing Dallas policeman. The officer nodded gravely; it was true. All the cruisers had gone, but a deputy sheriff was parked nearby. He was off duty, driving his own car. Moments later Valenti and the deputy were transferring tools, toys, and a stack of dry cleaning from the rear seat to the car’s trunk. They wedged themselves and the five women inside and rocketed away. Mary Gallagher was plucking wildly at rosary beads and whispering, “If I ever needed them, I need them now.” Marie, a Catholic herself, had no beads. She squeezed her eyes shut and recited Hail Marys.
Parkland’s grounds had begun to resemble an automobile graveyard. Marooned cars were strewn along its driveways and lawns, some with motors running, most with at least one door open, all of them parked at random angles. Inside, the emergency area had been overwhelmed. Aesthetics aside, a metropolitan hospital is better equipped to handle a panic than almost any other public place, but no institution in the world could have weathered this one satisfactorily. There were too many people with too much rank, and there was an almost total collapse of discipline.
The press, surprisingly, was the most docile group there. Their presence frightened Jack Price; he signaled Steve Landregan, the hospital’s public relations man, who led them to classrooms 101–102, on the other side of the building, where most of them patiently awaited a briefing. (They weren’t being selfless. They had their pool, and experience had taught them that if they stuck together until a press secretary appeared none of them would be left out.) A greater cross for Price was his own staff. He found himself begging them to return to their own wards. They argued, with some logic, that they were needed to control patients. Ambulatory cases were hobbling in every door, deaf to entreaties to turn back. One man told a nurse, “If the President’s dead, why can’t we see him? A dead body won’t know the difference.” Unwisely she suggested that Mrs. Kennedy was entitled to privacy. “Jackie’s here?” he cried. “Where?” He had to be restrained.
The Secret Service should have thrown up a security screen. But the disaster had exposed a hidden weakness—the allegiance of individual agents to a man, not an office. As long as Kennedy had been in command the lines of authority were clear. Now the old order had been transformed into hopeless disorder. Theoretically Roy Kellerman was still the agent in charge. Emory Roberts had already defied him, however, and when Roy issued instructions that all the agents who had been riding in Halfback were to guard the hospital’s entrances, nobody bothered to point out that Roberts had undercut him by reassigning them.
In fact, few agents bothered to tell Roy anything, which was probably just as well, inasmuch as a showdown would have led to no real decision. Since Presidents pick their chief bodyguards, and since Kellerman was a stranger to Lyndon Johnson, Kellerman was already a lame duck. The identity of his successor was not so clear. Roberts was with Johnson, but Youngblood had been there before him and was a Johnson protégé. Thus the Secret Service, which should have been a symbol of continuity, was riven by disunion. The agents were as leaderless and perplexed as the rest of the Presidential party. A few (Kellerman, Hill) remained near Kennedy. Others (Youngblood, Roberts, Johns) went with Johnson. Most were following personal loyalties. There was no overall plan, no design, and the inevitable consequence was anarchy. The impressions of Shirley Randall, a nurse’s aide, are instructive. A few moments after 12:35 P.M. she found herself surrounded by strangers “barging in with big guns.” Her first thought was that she was in the hands of “some underworld characters.”
The atmosphere of tension was heightened by what appeared to be a communications crisis. Parkland’s switchboard operators saw their lines pre-empted—apparently by people dialing 9 on hospital extensions—until all twelve switchboard alarm lights were ablaze, indicating an absolute overload. The implication was that demand had completely outstripped facilities, cutting off the emergency area from the outside world. This was untrue. During the first half-hour, when pressure was at its greatest, members of the Presidential party repeatedly placed calls to Washington and elsewhere. The telephone in the nurse’s station, which became the Secret Service command post, was in constant use. At no point was the Presidency threatened by isolation.
After leaving President Kennedy’s stretcher in Trauma Room 1, Kellerman, Hill, and Lawson entered the station, a glassed-in office just across the green line from Mrs. Kennedy. An attendant secured an outside line for Kellerman. Roy asked Lawson, “What’s the Dallas White House number?” “RIverside 1-3421,” said Lawson. Hill dialed it. Kellerman identified himself to the Sheraton-Dallas board as Digest and said, “Give me an instant circuit to Washington, and keep this line open—don’t pull the plug.” The White House Signals board relayed Digest to Duplex; in the East Wing of the executive mansion Jerry Behn picked up his office phone. “Look at your clock,” Roy told Jerry. “It is now 12:40 here.” (Behn’s clock read 1:39 EST—that is, a minute earlier.) “We’re in Parkland Memorial Hospital,” Roy said. “The man has been hit.” Dumfounded, Behn asked, “What do you mean?” “Shot,” Roy said. “He’s still alive in the emergency room. Both he and Governor Connally were hit by gunfire. Don’t hang up. This line should be kept open, and I’ll keep you advised.”
The line was even kept open when Behn moved downstairs to the larger office of Jack McNally, Special Assistant in charge of staff administration, for the first of the ad hoc sessions which were to begin in the East Wing, end in the West, and continue all weekend. Behn, chalk-faced, was at one end; Kellerman and his group of agents were at the other. Furthermore, the White House Communications Agency was capable of expanding this single connection into a conference call at any time. While Clint was listening to Behn’s breathing (which grew progressively more irregular), he heard a click, followed by a familiar feminine voice saying, “Wait a minute.” It was Ethel Kennedy in Virginia. A moment later she was followed by her husband, inquiring for details. The interruption was so unexpected, and the Attorney General sounded so much like the President, that Clint grabbed a clipboard hook for support. At another point Godfrey McHugh entered the nurse’s station. He wanted to talk to the west basement Situation Room. “O.K., but don’t hang up when you’re through,” Kellerman warned. Godfrey thoughtlessly did. Yet when Roy snatched up the receiver the connection was still intact. Signal’s operators were listening, and although discreetly silent they were very much on the job.
For the most part the virtuosity of the Signal Corps was unappreciated.7 Parkland’s switchboard girls didn’t realize that th
ey were being unobtrusively knocked out of action by a single individual, Chief Warrant Officer Art Bales, who didn’t have time to explain what he was doing or why. He was racing through the hospital with a hastily assembled posse of policemen from the Trade Mart. He would keep dialing 9 until a dial tone broke flatly. Then he would establish a direct circuit to the Signals board in Washington through the Sheraton-Dallas, hand the open receiver to a waiting officer, tell him to guard it, and systematically move on to commandeer the next instrument. Meanwhile he had alerted Colonel McNally and Jack Doyle of American Tel & Tel, who was the company’s liaison man for the trip, at Love Field. Bales’s fellow technicians were on their way from the airport. They were under instructions to relieve the policemen and set up a second switchboard, three additional dial trunks, and four new long-distance trunks. Because of the ingenuity of Tel & Tel, Doyle could avoid the presently overloaded trunks that linked Dallas with the capital by routing Parkland-to-Washington calls through Chicago and Los Angeles. Bales, on the spot, was aware of all this, and he knew that should all his other emergency measures fail he would have recourse to the motorcade itself, four of whose vehicles—SS 100 X, Halfback, and the pool and Signals cars—were capable of contacting the White House through radio patch.
So the switchboard crisis was largely illusion. But under certain circumstances appearances are more important than reality. Parkland’s operators, who never laid eyes on Bales, couldn’t know that they were being by-passed for a reason—that there was a method in the madness which confronted them. They saw only hubbub and chaos. Their outgoing lines were mysteriously vanishing one by one, and incoming calls were forming a composite nightmare. Already UPI bulletins were stimulating cranks all over the world. In the next two hours one girl, Phyllis Bartlett, would log conversations with England, Canada, Australia, Venezuela, France, and Mexico. She wrote: “Every call coming in long distance is urgent and everyone seems to have a title that demands priority.”
Some of the titles were legitimate. Most weren’t. Genuine insiders went through Signals, as Ethel Kennedy had. The bulk of the direct-dial long-distance calls came from the curious, the disturbed, the downright demented. A woman in Toledo identified herself as “The Underground”; she asserted that she had occult powers which would keep Kennedy alive. A man said, “You nigger lovers, you killed our President.” Another man threatened an operator: “I know who you are, and you’d better be careful when you start your car.” Most disquieting was a young boy who called three times, talking to a different operator each time. His approach never varied. “I want to talk to my Daddy,” he would begin plaintively. Asked who his father was, he would say, “My Daddy—President Kennedy.” Then he would giggle and ring off.
Perhaps all these grotesque calls were placed in mental wards, but during that first hour hysteria was far more widespread than men could bring themselves to acknowledge. In retrospect many later constructed accounts of how they felt they ought to have behaved—with emotion, but with control. The facts are more jagged. There was little control, and there were many aberrations which made no sense whatever. It is not necessary to trace anonymous telephone calls for proof of this. Abundant evidence lies in the conduct of those who were present in Parkland’s emergency area. All were able. All were accustomed to strain. Yet nearly everyone, in the minutes before or after one o’clock, acted in a fashion that on any other afternoon would have been considered most odd. None of their quirks deserves ridicule, yet a few examples are useful; otherwise an understanding of the general mood is impossible. Those who would pass judgment on the demeanor of any individual should remember that singular behavior was endemic—that it was so commonplace, indeed, that it briefly became the norm. Even when it wasn’t, it seemed so to others.
Consider Ted Clifton. He was a general officer, a combat veteran, the President’s senior military aide. Of all the men there, Clifton should have been the likeliest to grasp the capabilities of the Signal Corps. However, he was under the impression that those facilities were not immediately available. Instead, he presented a priority card to a Parkland operator and told her that he wanted to make a long-distance call to the White House. Miraculously he got through to the National Command Center, briefed them, and then switched to the Situation Room in search of intelligence. A later, second call, in the presence of Godfrey McHugh, the second aide, who apparently hadn’t heard the first call, was placed to Clifton’s own office. He asked that Mrs. Clifton, Mrs. O’Donnell, and the other wives be informed that their husbands were uninjured, and then inquired as to further intelligence. The order of precedence seemed unusual to McHugh, but he raised no question about it. A bachelor himself, he concluded that husbandly solicitude was correct at a time like this.
Or take Clint Hill, a man of exceptional presence of mind who had just demonstrated it on Elm Street. Roaming the emergency area, he realized that he was without his suit coat. It suddenly seemed important that he be properly dressed, and he approached Steve Landregan, who was just his size, and asked to borrow his coat. The public relations man promptly surrendered it, though he wondered—quite reasonably—what possible difference shirt sleeves could make at a time like this.
Dave Powers, like Clint Hill, was preoccupied with clothes. Leaving the stretcher in Trauma Room No. 1 he noticed bloodstains on his sleeve. He remembered telling his wife that when you travel with the President it doesn’t matter what you wear; everyone will be looking at him. So he had worn this cheap brown suit, and it was vaguely comforting to realize that only an inexpensive garment had been ruined, that it could be easily replaced.
Outside the trauma room, Sergeant Bob Dugger was scowling fiercely. The bespectacled Sergeant was a towering bullock of a cop, with a beefy face and piercing eyes; to Jacqueline Kennedy he looked rather ugly. She had no way of knowing that he was worried sick about an automobile. He had heard the news at the Trade Mart and had driven here in the deputy chief’s car. There hadn’t been time to acquire permission, and now anxiety was gnawing at him. What would Chief Batchelor think? Would he report a stolen vehicle? Would charges be filed? This was a serious matter. The Sergeant glowered. Mrs. Kennedy, observing him covertly, wondered what his thoughts about the President had been, whether he could be a Bircher.
A message for the wives; a clean coat for Clint; a chief’s borrowed car—thus men turned from the unwieldy central event and seized upon details with almost pathetic gratitude. One by one they could be wrapped with understanding and tucked away on the narrow shelves of the mind, postponing that awful moment when all the wrapping and tucking would be done and the enormous fact that would not fit must be faced.
Almost any diversion was welcome. Mac Kilduff strolled outside and saw that Halfback was deserted. Here was an opportunity for two chores. He would use the dashboard radio to inform the White House that the President had been shot. (Kilduff, it will be remembered, had been sitting beside Merriman Smith when Smitty dictated his account in the pool car.) First, however, he must run the engine. He recalled the dead battery yesterday in San Antonio. That mustn’t happen again. The pointless message to Washington concluded, Kilduff noticed SS 100 X. Suppose photographers took pictures of the bloody back seat? Presidential press secretaries were supposed to prevent that sort of thing. Kilduff briskly summoned Bill Greer and Sam Kinney and briskly ordered them to put up the bubbletop at once.8
Individual conduct varied wildly in situations that were virtually identical. Jacqueline Kennedy and Nellie Connally stood a few feet apart, awaiting news of gravely wounded husbands. Both knew that the President’s injuries had been mortal, and if there is such a thing as decorum in these circumstances, the Governor’s wife should have been the first to speak. She wasn’t. Jackie gently inquired about Connally. At first Nellie said nothing. She was thinking that this woman was almost a total stranger to her. She replied abruptly, “He’ll be all right.” And that was all.
Ralph Yarborough started yelling and couldn’t stop. He was taken into the office of the blood
bank director on the other side of the main corridor. Over and over he kept screaming, “He’s dead! What a terrible thing! What a terrible thing!”
Mayor Cabell of Dallas, on the other hand, became almost as quiet as O’Donnell, and when he did speak he denied reality. To those who could hear him he was whispering, “It didn’t happen.”
Hugh Sidey took furious notes, half of which, he later found, were illegible. Bob Baskin, after reporting to his editors over a two-way radio in a photographer’s car, on instructions left the press pool. He rode downtown to the city room of the Dallas News, tried to drink a cup of coffee, spilled some of it and stood trembling. He composed himself while an assistant managing editor continued drafting a first-person, I-was-there story under Baskin’s by-line.
The absence of an effective security screen invited intruders. Luckily, Parkland’s bewildering floor plan insured the privacy of Lyndon Johnson. He was so far back in Minor Medicine that when the time came for him to leave a guide would be needed. Major Medicine, the trauma area, was nearer the corridor, and the most spectacular incursion occurred at the wide door which separated the red line from the green line. Nurse Doris Nelson was just passing through it when a tall man in a light gray speckled suit shouldered his way past her, shouting, “I’m FBI!” He appeared violent, and Andy Berger, the closest agent, knocked him down. Sprawled on all fours the intruder gurgled, “You’re not in charge now. What’s your name?” “What’s yours?” demanded Kellerman, moving in. Credentials and commission books were whipped out; it turned out that the man really was from the Bureau’s Dallas office, though his presence in the hospital was unauthorized. Dragging himself away, he protested, “J. Edgar Hoover will hear about this!” Hoover did, and the unfortunate agent vanished into the limbo reserved for FBI men whose blunders embarrass the Director.
The Death of a President Page 27