The Death of a President

by William Manchester

  Stopping did not occur to Liz, and in the absence of any sign from her Wells could only cling to her rear bumper. They passed through a half-mile of green lights before one turned red; then, braking together, they flung open their doors and met between the two cars.

  “Did you hear the broadcast?” he asked.

  She nodded once quickly.

  “Turn off your radio.”

  “I already did.” She searched his face. “What should I do?”

  “Nobody knows whether or not it’s serious. Keep going.”

  The traffic signal changed; they drove on. Using his microphone, the agent called: “Crown, Crown from Dasher. Request immediate instructions regarding Lyric in view of the present situation in Dallas. Over.”

  Crown was silent. Then: “Stand by.”

  The Ford’s commercial radio was describing how a policeman had chased two people up “a knoll”—the overpass. The announcer interrupted to confirm the shooting of the President.

  “Crown, Crown from Dasher. Request immediate—repeat immediate—instructions in connection with my previous inquiry. Get in touch with Duplex or Dresser. Over.”

  An answer: “Duplex’s lines are tied up. Stand by for Dresser.”

  Crown was stunned. On account of UPI’s speed, Liz Pozen and Tom Wells, cruising toward Maryland, knew more than those who should have advised them. Jerry Behn’s lines were tied up because he was talking to Roy Kellerman, and Agent Foster, for whom Wells was standing by, hadn’t a clue to what had happened. He had just strolled into Post F-5 after an admiring inspection of the new rug in the President’s office, and he was preoccupied with the design of a small flight jacket for young John.

  In Chevy Chase, near the intersection of Connecticut and Western, Liz let off the first child. In the street she and Wells held their second conference. Since he had no “procedural instructions,” he told her, they would continue with the pool.

  His own thoughts were beginning to jell, however, and by the time Crown connected him with Foster, who had merely been informed of “an emergency in Dallas,” Wells had convinced himself that he must spoil Caroline’s visit to the Pozens’. His next task was to convince Foster, his superior.

  “Dasher to Dresser. I feel the danger has grown. We don’t know whether this is an isolated thing, a plot, or a coup. If it’s a coup, Washington is sure to be a part of it, and I want Lyric back in a secure setting.” Raymond Street, he remembered, was a dead end, a kidnaper’s dream. “We’d be primed for a snatch, and in lieu of anything to the contrary from you I’m taking Lyric back to Crown.”

  It was not an easy judgment, nor would it be popular. Nevertheless it made sense to Foster. He agreed that “They might be trying to kill the whole family.” Upstairs he conveyed the decision to Maude Shaw, who was skeptical of it. The greatest skeptic, however, was going to be Liz Pozen. Wells, expecting her to be difficult, reached a second judgment; to avoid discussion he would say that he was acting under orders.

  In letting out the second child she made a U-turn. He turned off his commercial radio and waved her down. Their third huddle, which followed, was both distressing and hectic. He was so distracted that he forgot his emergency brake, and halfway toward her he caught a horrified glimpse of the Ford slowly rolling downhill. He caught it after a sprint, set the brake, and returned.

  “I have to take Caroline back to the mansion.”

  “Why?” she cried.

  “Security reasons.”

  She was even more stubborn than he had anticipated. In their two previous talks she had been more agitated than he was. But now that they were out of heavy traffic, she reasoned, the chances that Caroline might be spotted had diminished. Liz very much wanted to keep her. She had a case; it was inconceivable that an outsider could have discovered these arrangements, and this was no time to upset Caroline.

  “It’s not my decision,” he said. “I have no alternative.” Stepping past her, he put his head in the station wagon and said, “Caroline, you have to go back to your house. You better bring your overnight bag. Maybe you can come out a little later.”

  His nervousness heightened the tension. To Liz he seemed needlessly brusque and businesslike. The girls, she thought, looked like two fish—their mouths were open, and they were ready to cry. Caroline shrank back. She said, “I don’t want to go.”

  He opened the rear door and picked up the suitcase. “We don’t have any choice. Something has come up, Miss Shaw will probably tell you.”

  “Yes, I know what it’s about,” she said. He gathered that she had heard a broadcast.

  Hugging the bear and fighting back tears, she climbed over the seat toward him. Liz kissed her; Wells put her on the front seat beside him and left. At the first intersection he started to make a right turn. Preoccupied, he had lost his sense of direction. Liz saw his indicator light flashing and shouted, “Are you sure you know where you’re going?” Through his open window he shouted back, “I want Connecticut Avenue.” “Then turn left,” she called.

  A quarter-mile south of Chevy Chase Circle Caroline looked up at him. “Why do we have to go home?” she asked. Before Wells could reply she said again, “Never mind. I know.”

  She couldn’t know much. Still, his first explanation, he reflected, had been inadequate. She was entitled to something better than that. “Mummy has changed her plans and will probably come back to the White House tonight,” he said. “She wanted you and John to be home.”

  Caroline again fell silent. She withdrew into her own thoughts, which was not unusual for her. Wells observed that she had become very quiet, but he had no time to coax her into conversation. Re-entering the Rock Creek Parkway—which Caroline’s Uncle Ted and his two classmates had left a few minutes before—the agent became absorbed in a new, frightening complication. The specter which had plagued Liz Pozen became a reality: Another motorist recognized Caroline. They were passing a light green sedan when the driver glanced over and started visibly. He was a burly man in his early fifties, wearing a hat and what appeared to be a lumber jacket. The agent’s description is sketchy, because he immediately began trying to shake him; once the man had recovered he decided to give chase.

  He was taking a chance. Tom Wells was one of the finest marksmen in the White House Detail, and he was in a dangerous temper. Yet the anonymous driver is a sympathetic figure; his response was courageous and understandable. The black Ford carried no official markings, and anyone seeing the President’s six-year-old daughter speeding away with an unidentified man (Wells may have looked burly to him) in the minutes after the shooting might easily have concluded that she was being abducted. The agent, on the other hand, had no way of determining the motives of his pursuer. In taking Caroline from Liz Pozen he had inherited the obligation to keep his commercial radio silent. He couldn’t even ask specific questions of Crown without alarming the child beside him. Perhaps his fear of a coup was being vindicated at this very moment; perhaps the strange sedan was part of it. Wells damned the White House garage for failing to provide him a car with a Secret Service “fireball”—a red light under the car frame—or with a portable, pistol-grip flashlight that illuminated the black-on-red letters “POLICE.” In its absence he was left with but one choice: flight. Driving his accelerator to the floor, he swerved to the left. His pursuer also accelerated, and was at one point a few feet from his right rear bumper. Gradually Wells drew away. He cut in and out skillfully, allowing other traffic to filter between them, and when he reached the parkway’s Virginia Avenue exit there was no trace of the green sedan in his rearview mirror.

  “Crown, Crown from Dasher. Lyric is five minutes away.”

  Even that was enough to awaken Caroline’s curiosity. She asked, “Why are you telling them we’re coming home?”

  He concentrated on driving; there was no satisfactory answer. But he had to be sure that the south portico and Miss Shaw were alert.

  “Crown, Crown from Dasher. Lyric is two minutes away.”

  At 2:13
Washington time, thirty-six minutes after their departure, Tom Wells swept Caroline, her overnight bag, and her stuffed bear past the pallid guards at the Southwest Gate.

  For all who had been tuned in between 1:36 and 1:45 Washington time, automobile and home and office sets had provided the first spark in the firestorm. Dean Gorham, still slowly sipping his vanilla malted, had heard it on Texas Route 71. He kept speeding toward the Austin auditorium to deliver the souvenir programs for the great banquet which would never be held. Helen Williams had heard in the kitchen of the LBJ Ranch. She flung her apron over her face and ran out blindly past the hundreds of pies which had just become garbage. Bernard Weissman, the young right-wing salesman who had signed the full-page advertisement in that morning’s Dallas News, had heard while driving in downtown Dallas with a friend. According to his testimony, fearful that he would be blamed he had been holed up in a bar for four hours, saying of the assassin, “I hope he is not a member of the Walker group—I hope he’s not one of Walker’s boys.” H. L. Hunt had heard over the large console television set in his office. He left the set on and vacated the room for those members of his staff who might be interested in subsequent developments.

  Ted Dealey and Marguerite Oswald had both been tuned to Ted’s Station WFAA. An announcer, evidently out of breath, ran in front of the camera and gasped, “I’ve got some terrible news. The President has been shot, I don’t know if fatally.” Dealey was offended by the man’s unprofessional conduct. His television reporters, he felt, should be more suave. Marguerite was interested. This was real news. Tomorrow it would be all over the Fort Worth papers, like Lee’s defection to Russia in 1959, and she could read about it while watching the “Today” show. She felt no personal involvement. “I wasn’t upset emotionally—I’m not that type of person,” she said afterward. “I have this ability of accepting things. I never let my sleep or eating habits get disturbed.” In Irving Marina Oswald and Ruth Paine had heard it over the Zenith set Lee had been watching the evening before. Ruth translated for her friend and lit a candle. “Is that a way of praying?” Marina inquired. “Yes, it is, just my own way,” Ruth replied. Marina went into the yard to hang some clothes. The newscaster reported that the shots had come from the Texas School Book Depository, and Ruth went out to translate this, too. Marina said nothing, but she furtively checked the blanket roll in the garage. Seeing it there, not knowing it was empty, she whispered to herself, “Thank God.” Ruth did not connect Lee with the shots, though she thought it gripping to know someone who was downtown and could give a firsthand account of what had happened.

  In Washington J. Bernard West, the White House Chief Usher, had heard the first bulletin over his home radio, which he had just turned on two minutes before. He ran into his bedroom to change his clothes. Traphes Bryant, President Kennedy’s dog handler, had heard it on his car radio on West Executive Avenue. He stopped, put his head on the steering wheel, and prayed. The wife of Arlington’s superintendent, seeing one of the first television bulletins that interrupted soap operas, called her husband. “Just as the doctor was about to operate we saw it on TV,” she cried. He had no idea what she meant. Mrs. Earl Warren had also seen the bulletin, on the Warrens’ apartment set at the Sheraton-Park. She also phoned the office of her husband, whose secretary, Mrs. Dorothy McHugh, rapidly typed on a blank slip of paper: “There is a report that the President and Governor Connally have been shot in Dallas and taken to the hospital.” She gave the slip to a page, he rapped on the conference room door and handed it to Arthur Goldberg, and Goldberg gave the message to the Chief Justice, who rose, his eyes bright with tears, and read it aloud. The other justices rose together. They stood paralyzed; then Potter Stewart stirred and murmured that there was a transistor radio in his office. It was brought to the room and placed on the huge baize green table top, where it lay, tiny and incongruous, a flat plastic box from which assorted voices swelled and faded in concert while nine clay-faced men in dark suits bowed over it.

  Nina Warren had obeyed the universal impulse of the moment—to tell someone, preferably someone close, but, lacking that, anyone who had not yet been told. Dick Goodwin, holed up with his typewriter, and Sergeant Keith Clark, browsing over rare books, remained uninformed only because they had departed from their normal routines and their whereabouts were unknown. The breakdown of the telephone system, which seemed so menacing, was an inevitable consequence of this compulsion to spread the word. It is impossible to estimate how many of the 1,443,994 phones in service in the Washington metropolitan area on November 22 were snatched up in that first half-hour, but the Chesapeake & Potomac’s Friday record of over a quarter-million long-distance calls is staggering, and locally the phenomenon of what communications engineers call “the slow dial tone,” a result of overloaded exchanges, became frightening.11 Lines would go dead, return to normal when a sufficient number of people had hung up, and go dead again and return to life, over and over. The pattern was repeated throughout the country. It became obvious that in a national emergency this would be the first link to snap. The phoners likeliest to get through immediately were those who called as soon as they heard the first flash; Byron Skelton’s daughter, knowing that he was about to leave for Austin, dialed him at once and caught him at the front door. After that it was a matter of persistence and luck, because remote acquaintances, distant relatives, and estranged friends were searching for one another’s numbers by the millions. Even total strangers called—in Georgetown a ghostly voice told Bill Walton, “Turn on your radio, the President’s been shot.”

  Strangers were the most frequent source for those in public places. A fellow shopper stopped Provi Parades in Maryland, a fellow American drew Bishop Hannan aside in Rome, a passing neighbor called to Joe Gawler in Gawler’s backyard, a New York policeman approached General Eisenhower and his aide in New York. Fred Holborn, who was wondering why motorcycle policemen should be roaring down West Executive Avenue at breakneck speed, heard from a sobbing woman in Lafayette Park. Ben Bradlee glanced out Brentano’s window and saw pedestrians stumbling around “like penguins, or a gaggle of geese.” His first thought was that there had been a terrible automobile accident in the street just outside; he hurried to the sidewalk to find out whether anyone he knew had been hurt and learned that someone he knew had been—a thousand miles away. Taxi drivers told Richard Nixon, in downtown Manhattan, and former Secret Service Chief Frank Wilson, in suburban Washington. Washington waiters, ordinarily taciturn, babbled excitedly to Hale Boggs, Ted Reardon, and Nick Katzenbach. (Reardon had patronized the same place for three years because he was confident that no one there could identify him as a Kennedy aide. At 1:40 on November 22 he discovered that everyone there could. Katzenbach, like many others who were dining, was never again able to bring himself to enter the same lunchroom.) A waitress in Dallas’ Alamo Grill whispered to FBI Agent Jim Hosty that shots had been fired from the Book Depository, where, Hosty knew, a certain Lee Oswald was employed. A captain at La Caravelle restaurant whispered it to Steve Smith. Jean Kennedy Smith, his wife, on a New York street overheard a girl shrieking, “Haven’t you heard the news?” Jean encountered a friend who was parked nearby. They listened to the car radio together, and then, hearing that her brother was in critical condition, Jean turned away and walked through twenty blocks of Manhattan to her home on upper Fifth Avenue.

  Hearing an announcer, or reading a teletype bulletin, nearly always guaranteed acceptance of the fact as a fact. There were exceptions. At 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue Sergeant Leon Bodensteiner had answered the UPI flash bells, looked at the White House Communications Agency’s wire service monitor, and concluded that this was an operator’s prank. But Bodensteiner was in the Signal Corps. He knew how such things are done. Laymen are more trustful of devices, less trustful of other people. Ben Bradlee believed the news the moment he was told. Not many did. The assassination was so fantastic that the general reaction was utter incredulity. “George, I’ve just heard something wild,” a colleague called to Ge
orge Reedy on Capitol Hill, and Reedy agreed that it was absurd. He rose to check only because it was his duty to telephone Lyndon Johnson’s Walter Jenkins if anything unusual had happened in Texas. When Bill Moyers was told in Austin, “The President has been shot and the Vice President will want to see you immediately,” he at first dismissed it as a bad joke. So did Llewellyn Thompson, at Washington’s Metropolitan Club; Seaman Ed Nemuth, in Anacostia; and Arthur Schlesinger, who was attending a Newsweek luncheon in New York with Kenneth Galbraith and Kay Graham; Schlesinger concluded that the report was “some repellent form of intramural humor.” In Texas Michael Paine thought it was another anti-Kennedy quip, though when Paine heard the Book Depository mentioned he, unlike his wife, thought of calling the FBI about Lee.

  The very vehemence with which people scouted those early reports is suspect. It was almost as though they hoped that if they denied it with sufficient vigor, it would go away. “Don’t be ridiculous!” Justice Stewart’s wife snapped at her maid, and in the basement of the Supreme Court Building Joanie Douglas, who had driven down to meet her husband, raged at a guard, “Don’t you ever tease about such a thing!” On the West Coast an officer tried to break the news gently to Acting Secretary of the Navy Fay by saying, “I think the President’s been shot.” Fay whirled on him. “Don’t tell me what you think, Captain,” he snapped. “Tell me what you know.” In the Justice Department Barney Ross, hearing almost identical words, replied, “The president of what?” Across the Potomac Lieutenant Sam Bird said, “Oh, really,” took two steps, and asked indignantly, “The who?”

  One form of rejection was to ignore unimpeachable sources, or to assume that Kennedy’s recovery would be painless and swift. Justice Douglas, finding that the rest of the Court had lost interest in the conference, shut himself up in his office and buried himself in legal briefs; he wouldn’t even come out to see his wife. Aboard American Airlines Dallas-to-Washington Flight 58 the captain switched on the public address system and announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, we have just intercepted a radio broadcast from Miami, Florida, saying that President Kennedy has been assassinated and Governor Connally seriously wounded. We do not have any further details at this time.” Candy McMurrey wondered aloud what “assassinated” meant—was it killed or wounded, or was it merely an attempt?—and her husband said, “Oh, well, Miami, they have all those kooks and Cubans; you can’t trust what they say.” In Cuba itself, Fidel Castro greeted the report that Kennedy had been wounded with the cry, “Then he’s re-elected!” In the Lafayette dining room Sargent Shriver was summoned to a phone and told by his secretary. He returned to the table and said to his wife, “Something’s happened to Jack.” Eunice asked, “What?” “He’s been shot,” Shriver said. She asked if her brother was going to be all right. “We don’t know,” her husband replied. Eunice thought a moment and then said, “There have been so many crises in his life; he’ll pull through.” Here were two people in conspiracy against reality. They calmly studied the menu and ordered lunch; it arrived, and Eunice ate the bread and drank a cup of soup before a second telephone call destroyed their fragile façade.