The Death of a President

by William Manchester

  In the moment it takes to drive over a crack of gray Texas asphalt his life and his country’s history had been transformed. He had no way of knowing why it had happened, but he had been a political creature since youth. The instant his antennae began to sweep the scene he had to deal with the stupendous fact that in the eyes of the United States and the world beyond, a Texas murder had put a Texan in power. The catastrophe had struck him harder than any other man in Dallas. If he was mesmerized, if some of his actions were incomprehensible, the nature of that unprecedented shock has to be borne in mind constantly, and to recapture its impact on him the reel of events must be wound back to 12:36 P.M., when Lady Bird, after a frightened glance at the pink blur at SS 100 X, darted into the hospital behind the wedge of agents surrounding her husband.

  At 12:36 P.M., Bertha L. Lozano, R.N., had been on duty at the emergency area’s Triage desk, where emergency cases were sorted and routed to appropriate treatment areas. This outpost, halfway down the main corridor between the ambulance dock and the wide door leading to Major Medicine, commanded all approaches to surgery. Any unexpected arrival would have to pass here, and Nurse Lozano was a seasoned lookout. Unfortunately, the distraught switchboard had neglected to inform her that President Kennedy had just been shot on Elm Street. According to her account, she was unaware of anything unusual until “I suddenly heard a door open, and an unaccountable number of Dallas policemen screamed at me for help and to bring a carriage.” Wheeling in a stretcher from O.B. Gyn., she returned to a corridor packed with yelling policemen. A litter rolled past bearing a patient whose face and head were covered with a suit coat; then she was engulfed by a mass of shoving men. Abruptly the mass parted. She found herself face to face with Lyndon Johnson, “and when I looked at him, recognizing him, I suddenly sensed who our patient on the carriage might be.”

  If Johnson had followed a direct route he would have reached the Triage desk well before the body of John Kennedy, but neither he nor his bodyguards had known which way to turn. Two prominent doors facing the dock from outside were permanently locked. Beyond the real entrance, to the left, lay an exasperating series of choices: a lobby, a waiting room, the blood bank, two flights of stairs. To Rufus Youngblood and Emory Roberts, preoccupied with thoughts of a plot, every room looked like a trap. Youngblood appealed to Miss Lozano for a quiet place. She led them into Minor Medicine.

  Lady Bird followed with mounting alarm. In the car she had discounted Yarborough’s cries, but the agents around Lyndon could not be ignored. Until today the Secret Service had provided him with only token protection. Obviously this was the real thing. Their concern was infectious, and the maze they were following multiplied her fear. Right, left, right, left, she thought; every gleaming hospital wall was the same. She couldn’t possibly retrace her steps without help—they were almost entirely dependent upon the strange woman in starched white. Furthermore, Youngblood, in securing the area, was eliminating the few landmarks which might have been useful. A Negro man lay in a bed to their left. “Move him,” Youngblood told the nurse, and to Agents Kivett, McIntyre, and Bennett he said, “Close all blinds.”

  When the Johnsons drew up at the end of a ward they had the impression that they had reached the interior of the hospital. Actually they had been following a great circle. Had the shade in the ward’s single window been raised, they would have discovered that they were standing just a few feet from the ambulance dock. Nurse Lozano had taken Youngblood at his word: Minor Medicine’s Booth 13 was the quietest place on the floor. But the reason it was unoccupied was that it was adjacent to the emergency area entrance. That wasn’t quite what Youngblood had had in mind. If a second assassin had trailed the motorcade here—and in the turmoil his only difficulty would have been finding a place to park—his prospects of success would have been fairly good. Although he couldn’t have seen his target, the window by Booths 12 and 13 was the only one on the first floor on that side of the building, and its drawn blind attracted further attention to it. Little cunning would have been required to guess that inside, within range of an automatic weapon or a grenade, stood Kennedy’s successor.

  He stood with his broad shoulders braced against a blank wall, sniffing from a vapor inhaler that he always carried to clear his nasal passages. Bowing his head, he pinched one nostril, breathed deeply, then repeated the process. There was no conversation. He, his wife, and his bodyguards were speechless. Lady Bird was resting her back against the tangential wall, watching him. “Lyndon and I didn’t speak,” she recalled later. “We just looked at each other, exchanging messages with our eyes. We knew what it might be.”

  Nevertheless they weren’t sure. They waited indecisively, craving information like everyone else. Johnson sent an agent for Roy Kellerman. After the inevitable wrong turns and misadventures the man blundered into Major Medicine and came back with Kellerman. “Roy, can you tell me the condition of the President?” Johnson asked. Kellerman replied, “President Kennedy has been hit. He is still alive. The condition is not good.” Johnson asked, “Will you keep me advised?” and Roy answered, “Yes, sir.” He meant to keep his promise, but he never saw that part of the floor again; when he returned to Major Medicine, his hands were full.

  Ken O’Donnell thrust his head into Booth 13. “It looks pretty black,” he said. “I think the President is dead.”

  Johnson didn’t reply. Now he could only wait.

  In the interlude men gravitated toward him. The first newcomer was Agent Johns. Skirting the cashier’s cage, where Merriman Smith was holed up dictating, Johns ran past the vacant Triage desk. Outside the wide door leading to Major Medicine he nearly collided with Art Bales. “Are you the bagman? Stay here,” Johns gasped, racing on. Bales sent Gearhart, the real bagman, into Minor Medicine, where, because he was unknown to the Vice Presidential detail, he was kept secluded in Booth 8, from which the Negro patient was being evacuated, until Emory Roberts saw him and identified him.3 Cliff Carter, a more familiar figure to the agents, was sent straight in, and four Congressmen—Thomas, Brooks, Thornberry, Gonzalez—loitered uncertainly in the passage between hospital beds. Henry Gonzalez had been wandering through the labyrinth of halls when Carter plucked his sleeve and said, “Why don’t you go see the Vice President? I’m worried about him.” He pointed the way, and the Congressman peered into Booth 13. There seemed to be nothing wrong. Johnson was just standing there, sniffing. Gonzalez asked an agent, “Is Mrs. Kennedy badly hurt?” The man said, “No, it’s the President. She’s all right.” Henry inquired, “How is the President?” The agent replied, “Bad,” and Henry said, “Oh, gosh.”

  Others besides Gonzalez had mistaken the identity of the victims. Leaving Larry O’Brien, Jack Brooks had immediately sought out the Vice President. To Carter he said, “How’s Lyndon?” Carter answered, “He’s O.K., but the President’s pretty bad.” A low voice muttered, “He’s dead, Jack.” Brooks decided to stay put. One place was as good as another, and in those early minutes all accounts were equally valid. Later, sorting out their recollections, individuals would usually remember who first told them that the President was dead. What they forgot was that at the same time they were hearing other, unfounded bits of information, and it was this atmosphere of doubt that sent them scampering toward every corner of the floor, including Johnson’s. One of the first rumors to sweep the hospital was simply, “Everybody’s been shot.” It reached Jack Price, and he was systematically checking the entire emergency area. The search was slow going. Nurse Lozano, his sentry, was still absent on vital errands, and her chair had been taken over by an hysterical mother with a two-year-old boy bleeding from a small cut. Peering into Minor Medicine, Price caught a glimpse of Mrs. Johnson’s white, strained face. As he hurried forward an agent stepped from Booth 13 and said curtly, “He’s O.K.”

  It was a time of tension, of fright—after Elm Street, anything could happen—and of strangeness. The place itself was strange. Even those members of the Presidential party who were from Dallas (Baskin, Mar
ie Fehmer) were unfamiliar with Parkland. It was inhabited by oddly dressed people. Minor Medicine, like Major Medicine, surrounded the visitors with hundreds of yards of taut white sheets, behind which unidentifiable voices held peculiar conversations. Jack Brooks never found out who had said, “He’s dead, Jack.” Similarly, Henry Gonzalez overheard a man, apparently talking to a telephone, say impatiently, “Yes, yes, yes, I saw him. It’s all over with, I tell you, I saw the body! It’s over!” What body? Henry wondered. What was all over? He was puzzling over this when a nurse in an operating gown hurried up with two paper bags. “Who do I give these to?” she asked, her voice muffled by her surgical mask. Gonzalez and Cliff Carter came forward. “The Governor’s personal effects,” she explained, handing a bag to each. “They have to be signed for.” Carter’s signature passed unchallenged, but for some reason she eyed Henry stonily. “Who are you?” she demanded. “This is Congressman Gonzalez,” Carter said, introducing him. She stalked off wordlessly, and the Congressman noticed that blood was seeping from the bottom of his bag.

  Gonzalez wasn’t horrified. He was past that, and grateful to be of use. Here, as elsewhere in the emergency area, the search for something to do had become intense. Carter scurried off to a vending machine and brought coffee to the Johnsons. Lady Bird, who always carried notebooks to record what she called her “never-to-be-forgotten moments,” had produced one from her purse and was rapidly writing down her impressions. Thornberry was also making notes, and Youngblood was in constant motion. He acquired two folding chairs for his charges—Lyndon sat briefly, then resumed his hunched stance, switching the inhaler from nostril to nostril—and he said to Bird, “I want you to give me the current whereabouts of Lynda and Lucy.” Lucy, she told him, was at Washington’s National Cathedral School for Girls, on Wisconsin Avenue; Lynda was in the Kinsolving Dormitory at the University of Texas. Youngblood said to Kivett, “Call the chief in Washington and the Austin Secret Service office. Put the girls under protection.”

  Another agent asked Youngblood to make a call. “I’m not leaving this man for anybody,” he said crisply. He did, however, want to leave Parkland. From the moment they reached the ambulance dock he had been plotting a getaway. Not only the hospital, but the entire city had become an abomination to him. He was a man of exceptionally strong will, and he felt strongly that he couldn’t meet his responsibilities to Johnson as long as they remained here. To Youngblood Dallas was a place of violence and death. Staying in it was an insane risk. Love Field was the obvious escape hatch; they should head there immediately. Emory Roberts was of the same opinion, and the two agents pressed their view on Johnson.

  To them the issue seemed simple. Yet in it lay the first germ of what later became a series of misunderstandings. For those who had been close to the slain President, it was impossible fully to appreciate the tremendous shock, the sudden pressure, inflicted on the new President. While he had already succeeded to the office, he didn’t realize it, and the slumped figure in Booth 13 bore little resemblance to the shrewd, assured President Johnson the country later came to know. Within a few months he was to become the despair of the Secret Service, the President who rode roughshod over agents and disregarded their advice. In Parkland all that lay ahead. Dazed, silent, he was far readier to take orders than to issue them. His poise had dissolved. In a feeble whisper he said to Thornberry, “This is a time for prayer if there ever was one, Homer.”

  Two factors increased his muddle. Johnson wasn’t the only man incapable of coping with the fact of his succession. Kennedy’s grieving staff couldn’t bear to face it either. As Air Force Aide to the President, Godfrey McHugh was the logical man to coordinate air transport back to Andrews Field. Twice agents asked him to speak to Johnson, and each time he refused, merely pointing out that the Vice President had his own plane. The second factor was the absence of Jerry Behn, the Head of the Secret Service White House Detail. In deciding that he would not make each Presidential trip Behn had not only broken precedent; he had left his agents without a leader. Had he been present, the bodyguards in Minor Medicine would never have dreamed of acting without his consent. But Behn was in the East Wing of the White House, gripping a telephone receiver and awaiting news from Roy Kellerman. Kellerman was his deputy. It is conceivable that a more tenacious deputy might have imposed authority over all the Secret Service men in Dallas, though that point is moot; Youngblood had the bit in his teeth. Of all the agents there he had the quickest tongue and one of the clearest minds. He had Johnson’s confidence. He and Roberts had a plan, and neither was in the mood to defer to Kellerman. Indeed, they didn’t even consult him. Although Roy was the agent in charge at Parkland, he wasn’t told that the new President was to be taken from the hospital. During the next half-hour he talked with both Youngblood and Roberts. Somehow the subject never came up. Only later, by chance, did he learn from his men that Johnson had already left.

  In Booth 13 Youngblood and Roberts opened the campaign with the new President after Kellerman’s return to Major Medicine. Roberts told Johnson that he had seen Kennedy’s head wound. “The President won’t make it,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.”

  Youngblood said, “We don’t know the scope of this thing. We should get away from here immediately.”

  “Is Carswell possible?” Johnson asked hesitantly.

  It wasn’t; Youngblood sent Lem Johns out to ask a local policeman the route there, and when Johns returned everyone agreed that the SAC base was too far.

  “We’ve got to get in the air,” Roberts persisted.

  Still hesitant, Johnson said, “Maybe President Kennedy will need the airplane.”

  This was a second germ of misunderstanding. No one asked which airplane he had in mind. It may be (as Roberts and Johns later came to believe) that the talk of Carswell had confused them, leading them to think that the Vice President’s plane was being moved there. It is equally possible that the agents, like the man they guarded, were drawn by the halo the press had given Angel. In any event, the subsequent discussions in the booth seem to have been based on the assumption that only one Boeing 707 was parked at Love Field. In reality the situation there was unchanged. Neither 26000 nor 86970 had been moved. Each carried the same equipment, both were guarded. Nevertheless, from this point forward the backup plane was forgotten. Johnson and his agents thought only of 26000, Angel, Air Force One—the aircraft identified with John F. Kennedy.

  Johnson was reluctant to leave. He did not want to seem presumptuous, he said, and he told the agents that he would not move without approval from a member of Kennedy’s staff, preferably Ken O’Donnell. Roberts sought out O’Donnell in Major Medicine. “Johnson wants to go,” he said. “Is it O.K. if he uses the plane?” O’Donnell nodded—a gesture to be borne in mind in the light of the subsequent confusion—and Roberts reported back to Johnson, “Ken says it’s O.K.”

  Youngblood continued to hammer away. “We don’t know what type of conspiracy this is, or who else is marked. The only place we can be sure you are safe is Washington.”

  Over the past half-hour there had been a build-up of information. Kellerman had prepared them for the worst; O’Donnell had appeared in the booth with what Lady Bird described in her notebook as “that stricken face.” Everyone in the ward knew that Jack Ready had phoned for a priest, and now Roberts recrossed the corridor for fresh reports from Trauma Room No. 1. At 1:13 P.M. he reappeared before Johnson.

  “The President is dead, sir,” he said.

  The new President felt, as he later put it, “shocked and sickened.” He glanced at his watch. To Lady Bird and Cliff Carter he said, “Make a note of the time.” Then he said to his wife, “We’re leaving. We’ll go as quietly as possible.”

  It was evident that they would also go swiftly. Johnson instructed Carter to round up Jack Valenti, Liz Carpenter, and Marie Fehmer, and Youngblood told Johns, “Get an unmarked car and find a policeman who knows Dallas like the back of his hand.”

  Events were moving rapidl
y when Lady Bird intervened. Her first reaction to Roberts’ announcement had been wild anger. A choking sensation followed. Her emotions were in violent conflict. In her words, “Nobody ever had to shift gears so fast. One minute I had been thinking about the ranch, and now this.”

  “Can I—” she began. She paused and said firmly, “I must go see Mrs. Kennedy and Nellie.”

  Her husband not only agreed; he wanted to accompany her. Youngblood, however, was still very much in command, and when he told the new President that he could not leave this ward, Johnson dropped the idea. Roberts was sent over once again to ask Jacqueline Kennedy whether she would see Lady Bird. Leaning over her, he asked, “Is it all right for Mrs. Johnson to come and say hello?” She nodded, and he brought Lady Bird over. Congressman Jack Brooks tagged along as a spare guard.

  In their absence Ken O’Donnell made a second trip to Booth 13 and confirmed Kennedy’s death to Johnson. The conversation that followed is a matter of dispute. According to Johnson, O’Donnell twice urged him to board Air Force One. It is Johnson’s recollection that he consented, with the stipulation that he would wait there until Mrs. Kennedy and President Kennedy’s body were brought to the plane. O’Donnell declares this version to be “absolutely, totally, and unequivocally wrong.” He says that Johnson raised the possibility of a conspiracy and that “I agreed that he should get out of there as soon as possible.” Then, he recalls, “He asked me whether they should move the plane—meaning, I thought, Air Force Two—to Carswell Air Force Base. I said no: It was thirty-five miles to the Air Force base and it would take too long to move the plane. Besides, no one would know that he was going from Parkland Hospital to Love Field anyway; they had no way of knowing.” Concerning 26000, O’Donnell says, “The President and I had no conversation regarding Air Force One. If we had known that he was going on Air Force One, we would have taken Air Force Two. One plane was just like another.”