The Death of a President

by William Manchester

  There were other façades. Although the facts were set forth in a few stark words, a handful managed to misinterpret them. Joe Dealey and Warren Harding at the Dallas Trade Mart independently decided that “The President’s been hit” meant that he had been hit by rotten fruit. Reardon and Mary McGrory thought another plane had opened fire on Air Force One. Angier Biddle Duke took “shot” to mean “shot at”—in other words, a miss. In her Dallas classroom Marilyn Dailey, one of the schoolchildren who had held the “MR. PRESIDENT, PLEASE STOP AND SHAKE OUR HANDS” sign at Lemmon Avenue and Lomo Alto, heard the principal’s announcement over the loudspeaker and thought, Oh! He’s only wounded! Marilyn didn’t react until the principal’s voice had been followed by organ music; then, in a matter of seconds, she developed a splitting headache. Even after repeated verification there was a tendency to work and rework the concise sentences, looking for the hole that, people felt, had to be there somewhere. This disposition was strongest among those who, like Eunice, remembered the many times the President had cheated death in the past; Arthur Schlesinger recalled PT 109 in the Solomons and felt “an insane resurgence of hope.”

  In Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy’s Hyannis Port home the maid, Dora Lawrence, shouted up from the first floor at Ann Gargan, “Ann, Ann! Did you hear? Did you hear?” Ann, about to leave for Detroit, turned from her uncle’s nurse with irritation. The maid was always panicking. If the poodles slipped outdoors, she would wring her hands. But this was too much—her shrillness was apt to waken Uncle Joe or Aunt Rose. Hurrying to the head of the stairwell, Ann asked crossly, “What is it?” Dora gave her own version of the first flash: “Someone has taken a shot at the President!”

  Back in her room with Rita Dallas, Ann switched on her television set. The bulletins were pouring in, and in her own panic she committed the sin for which she had been about to reproach the maid: she increased the volume to an alarming pitch. The President’s mother appeared in the doorway. “Please turn the TV down, Ann,” she said. “I’m taking a rest.”

  Her niece and the nurse gestured at one another and reached for the knob, too late; Rose Kennedy had heard that her son had been hit by gunfire. She sank into a chair, trembling. Yet at most she would have been spared no more than a few moments. The telephone rang. It was Bob Kennedy in Virginia. He told his mother that “It looks bad”—that “As far as I know Jack can’t pull through.”

  Rose hung up and hugged herself, as though to ward off the coming chill. She looked haggard. “I can’t stand it,” she said. “I’ve got to keep moving.”

  Two doors away they heard her pacing up and down, pivoting at each corner and returning deliberately. Ann remembered the President’s father, asleep down the hall, and began to cry softly. The nurse puckered. Since girlhood she had been told that her face was a map of Ireland, and it was; it was as Celtic as the Sinn Fein. But now she was preoccupied with her name. “Dallas… Dallas… Dallas,” the hideous set kept saying, and as her pucker deepened she thought in astonishment, Why, that’s my name.

  The name had another significance in Washington’s F Street Club, where Senator Fulbright and Gene Black, former head of the World Bank, had been finishing their lunch. Black was among those with appointments to see Kennedy immediately after the President’s return from Texas. He and the Senator were drinking coffee and discussing economics. Elspeth Rostow, wife of the State Department’s counselor, entered the room moments before a man appeared and blurted out what had happened, and where it had happened. Mrs. Rostow saw Fulbright throw down his napkin and jump to his feet. “Goddamn it!” he shouted. “I told him not to go to Dallas!”

  Just as water piles up behind a keel in a typhoon, baffling the screws and forcing the helmsman to violate every principle of seamanship to avoid broaching to, so anguish foils the human mechanism. In their struggle to preserve sanity that Friday men and women suspended the laws of normal behavior. In the White House a member of the President’s staff blacked out for two hours. Afterward he had no recollection of where he had been, but since no one saw him he was probably one of those for whom privacy was an absolute necessity. Rose Kennedy had to go to her room. Jean Kennedy Smith had to walk those twenty blocks. Dave Hackett, who had known Bob Kennedy since boyhood, couldn’t bear to be among friends; he left a meeting and scoured the neighborhood for a taproom where he would be unknown and where he could down a stiff shot unnoticed. In Dallas, Judge Sarah Hughes, hearing of the shooting, quietly walked out of the Trade Mart and drove home. In Washington a lady in Lord & Taylor’s suddenly realized that there were no other customers, no clerks, no floorwalkers; she could have walked off with the whole store.

  She didn’t become a shoplifter, but had she acted queerly she would have been in a large company. Eisenhower’s secretary was talking long distance from Gettysburg to a woman at Twentieth Century–Fox who was idly watching a teletype machine beside her desk. The keys rapped out the first flash; without explanation the woman filled her lungs and screamed into the receiver. She kept shrieking—the secretary re-placed the call an hour later, after she herself had learned what had happened and had collected herself, and was again greeted by hysteria. On the Pennsylvania Turnpike a filling station attendant was making change for a driver with Texas license plates. A radio beside the cash register broadcast the bulletin, and the attendant returned to the car and flung the fistful of silver in the driver’s face. Mary McGrory, in the middle of a physical checkup, submitted to a routine blood-pressure test immediately after her doctor’s nurse had told her the news. She was in excellent health, and there ought to have been nothing unusual about the reading, but under these circumstances it was so appalling her physician wrote her a prescription for hypertension.

  After the initial blow had been absorbed, after the first bruises had begun to darken, broadcasts from Dallas were unquestioned. The difficulty was that not everyone had immediate access to them, and it was during this period that trespassers slipped into unoccupied automobiles and turned on dashboard radios, or invited themselves into strange homes with muttered apologies, or entered raffish bars because bars were known to be equipped with television sets, or polled fellow workers to determine who had transistors. The radios turned up in unexpected places—desk drawers, pockets, purses. Afterward this was a source of embarrassment for some owners, who would go to elaborate lengths to point out that ordinarily they were never brought to the office, just as educated housewives, telling how they happened to call their husbands, would carefully preface their accounts by explaining that usually they didn’t look at such soporifics as “As the World Turns”; it was pure chance that they had tuned in on November 22. At the time, however, no questions were asked. If a set was available, it was used. In the staid Metropolitan Club television was never watched except during the World Series. The rule was ironclad, and when the screen there flickered to life, members who didn’t understand the reason tottered to their feet with outraged splutters. Then Dean Acheson stepped into the room, his eyes brimming, and silenced them with a glance. Ted Kennedy’s expedient of temporary confiscation from a member of his staff was widespread. Chairman John W. Macy, Jr. of the U.S. Civil Service Commission appropriated a portable radio belonging to one of his 230,000 employees in the Washington area and charged around his office propping it on desks and tables until he found a narrow ledge where it emitted a faint signal. At the British Embassy David Ormsby-Gore retired to his bedroom with another portable and lay there alone, wrestling with private agony. The phantom voice which had advised Bill Walton to turn on his radio assumed that he had one. He didn’t, so he and his two guests moved into the maid’s room to watch her television set.

  In another bedroom at the executive mansion Maude Shaw, a nondriver, worriedly asked Agent Foster, “Oh, dear, what will I do now without White House cars?” Like Sergeant Dugger, fretting at Parkland about his unauthorized use of a cruiser, she was genuinely concerned. The majority focused upon the central tragedy immediately. A minority, of whom Miss Shaw was typica
l, seized fetishistically upon an insignificant corner of it, and seen in that light her question is entirely understandable. Her next move was to stand watch over the door of the President’s sleeping son, but if she had ordered a car and taken him for an afternoon drive through Montrose Park, that, too, would have been explicable. She might even have glimpsed familiar faces there. Nicole Alphand, intently studying the expression on her husband’s face as he heard the news over a telephone at the other end of their luncheon table, leaped to the conclusion that President de Gaulle had been assassinated. Set straight, she sent for the embassy chauffeur and drove off to call upon the Robert Kennedys. Nicole was the wife of the French Ambassador and was accustomed to paying her respects; to her, at that moment, it was as simple as that. On O Street the wife of the Peruvian Ambassador, second in seniority in the diplomatic corps, similarly called upon Jacqueline Kennedy’s stricken mother. Countless others also took refuge in habit. Two designers at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, feeling utterly lost, neatly laid out their tools and doodled away at a John F. Kennedy commemorative stamp. (Though meant to be tentative, those Friday sketches were flawless; four days later they were in the hands of the Postmaster General, and the stamp was issued the following spring.) Writers wrote tributes. Composers fingered keyboards. Doctors—e.g., Mary McGrory’s—methodically met their patients. A petty functionary at the Library of Congress, clinging to a pet prejudice of librarians, refused to believe a word until it had been confirmed by the New York Times. He tried to call the Times Washington bureau, found he could not get through, and prickled with the sense of alarm which was terrifying telephoners elsewhere.

  The devout prayed. On his way back to the White House, Reardon bowed his head in the rear seat of a taxi and chanted over and over, “Dear God, just let him be wounded.” Mrs. Auchincloss crossed to a quiet Episcopal church on the other side of the street and was amazed to find every pew full and the minister at the altar. The desk of Acting Secretary Joe Fowler became an improvised altar; he shut the door of his Treasury Department office and fell to his knees beside it. And in Boston Cardinal Cushing, the priest closest to the President, was mobilizing his every ecclesiastical resource. The aged prelate sent word to the four hundred parishes of his archdiocese to “Pray, pray, pray for him.” He shepherded the nuns who attended him into his private chapel, and while they said their beads he himself mounted his golden prie-dieu, faced a golden statue of Christ, and begged God to spare the life of America’s first Catholic President.

  His prayers continued. The nation’s suspense continued. So did mute phone lines, official fears of a plot, and, through the Joint Chiefs’ global alert, the quick knotting of the Pentagon’s awesome fist. Erratic reactions also continued, triggered by unsuspected inner quirks. The pathetic refusals to accept the facts persisted, though they were being defeated as each passing minute eroded individual defenses of denial and misunderstanding. Those who needed solitude paced their lonely rooms and streets, those who required company forged intimate friendships with strangers they would never encounter again, and those capable of speculation wondered about the source of the shots. Nearly all the conjecture led in the same direction. There was little doubt about the political convictions of the sniper. It was assumed that he and his accomplices, whose existence was also assumed, were agents of the Radical Right. This was true even of the surmises of members of the John Birch Society, and next morning thousands of communities would be retelling the story of the local rightist who had been indiscreet enough to express his elation in public. Elation was unwise, anywhere. America was in no mood to tolerate its haters. Men were assaulted, or at the very least insulted, for less than he had done—driving home from the Trade Mart, Treasurer Warren Harding noticed a riflemen’s association sticker on the windshield of the automobile behind him; swerving around, Harding blocked the street and placed the driver under citizen’s arrest.

  On Washington’s Massachusetts Avenue Hubert Humphrey, listening to the radio of his parked car, was swept by alternate waves of anger and pity. The targets of his anger were the “refined Nazis” of Dallas, as he thought of them, and his pity was for the rest of the city, which needed so much “sympathy and understanding.” Liberty, he wrote in a memorandum to himself the following day, had become license. Freedom of expression had been “perverted and abused”; it had been converted into a “vehicle for vicious propaganda and hatred that inspired people to do such things as happened in Dallas to our President.” Humphrey was still among the incredulous as he listened to his car radio, but he was beginning to gather the fragments of fact together with perception. He felt sorrow for the Kennedy family, and especially for the widowed First Lady, and in his Saturday memorandum, while events were still fresh in his mind, he recalled his anxieties about the Vice President’s health: “I knew that this would be a terrible blow for him, and I was deeply concerned lest it literally overwhelm him.”

  Within a few minutes of 1 P.M. Dallas time, when Kemp Clark pronounced John Kennedy dead, the set in Humphrey’s car, like those everywhere, reported that “Two priests have gone into the hospital where the President is.” The announcement that the President had been shot in the head had been somber, but this was the first concrete sign of what was to come, and because of the peculiar nature of the communications megaphone the country outside knew it before the emergency area toward which the clergymen were headed. Dr. Clark’s words had been inaudible outside Trauma Room No. 1. Members of Kennedy’s staff in the surgical booths a few yards away were unaware of what had happened, yet the audience of 75 million heard that the clerics had arrived at the entrance of the building. No names were available. They would have been meaningless anyhow. Unlike Cardinal Cushing, Father Oscar Huber and Father James N. Thompson were not towering figures in the Church. Neither had presided at a pontifical Mass or knelt upon an ornate prie-dieu. They were just parish priests in Dallas who had been summoned because their church was closest to the martyred President, and now, as Clark stepped away from his mutilated scalp, they had finally reached Parkland.

  Jacqueline Kennedy moved silently forward, brushing past Dr. Burkley, and looked down on the hospital cart. There had been some difficulty with the white sheet. The cloth was too short for the President’s long body. The face was visible. From her the skull wound was hidden. His eyes excepted, she couldn’t see that anything had happened to him. Below the forehead he was almost entirely natural, and there was no fear in his expression, no indication of agony; on the contrary, his features seemed to convey compassion. It was all in his mouth. The sight transfixed her. Elsewhere in the room there were new sounds—the rolling out of equipment, the clatter of the pedal as used gauze was stuffed into the waste can, the sticky rustle of the transparent winding sheet, the thud of soggy clothes in the shopping bags, Burkley’s strangled sobs—but beside the cart the widow was utterly still. To Sergeant Dugger she appeared to be as quiet as her husband. Standing by his broad shoulders, his hand clasped in her hand, she gazed down on the face she had loved and continued to love; and she was there, steady and poised, when the first priest entered.

  He entered with a priestly problem. Si capax, “if possible,” is often heard when extreme unction is celebrated in emergency rooms. It connotes conditional absolution. If possible, if the soul has not left the body, the priest grants the forgiveness of sins. He can do no more; at the instant of death his authority ends. The cruel issue is: when does a man die? It is a vexing theological question, and Father Oscar Huber had given much thought to it. Long ago, when he administered the last rites to his dying parents, he had decided that it was preposterous to leave the answer in the hands of secular physicians. The needle on an electrocardiograph had little meaning for him. The soul was more durable than that. In his own mind he had worked out a complicated formula which measured the endurance of each soul by the stamina of the body which had sheltered it. If a Catholic succumbed after a long malignancy, for example, the soul left within thirty minutes of the pronouncement of
death. Had the man been in the full flush of health, it could linger anywhere from two to three hours. Like many other Church propositions, this one is deceptive. It seems fatuous at first, but on contemplation it grows in wisdom, and the events of the next three days were to vindicate the judgment of the elderly pastor who, at a few minutes past one o’clock Central Standard Time, was convinced that the soul of John Fitzgerald Francis Kennedy had not yet fled.

  Si capax—the Latin phrase might have been written across that entire day in Father Huber’s calendar. The pastor had come as quickly as he could. Before Agent Ready’s call Father James N. Thompson, a six-foot, middle-aged priest, had heard the UPI bulletins in the recreation room of Holy Trinity’s rectory. Information was fragmentary, but it was enough: the President had been shot and was being taken to Parkland. Shouting out the news, Father Thompson sprinted to the garage, and he had backed out Holy Trinity’s black Galaxie—“Built in Texas by Texans,” read the rear-window sticker—when Father Huber arrived.