Some men celebrated for their command of the language were also struck dumb. Cardinal Cushing greeted his naval visitor with five hoarse words: “Jack Kennedy has been assassinated.…” He couldn’t go on. His lips were working furiously, but there was no sound, and the admiral hastily withdrew. Ted Sorensen had been the rhetorician of the New Frontier, and at 2:35 he was also the most prestigious aide at the White House. Sitting across from Behn in McNally’s office he felt that he should assume some responsibility, yet he couldn’t. He felt shackled; if he had been standing in the middle of a stadium, he could have done nothing. At length he stirred a little and said with slow bitterness, “They wouldn’t even give him three years,” and left the East Wing for the West. Ted was as acrimonious as a man of his quiet temperament could be. The really aggressive were belligerent. In the West Wing Reardon shouted at Sorensen, “I’d like to take a fucking bomb and blow the fucking State of Texas off the fucking map!” Barney Ross hunched his shoulder and crashed his fist into a Justice Department wall. Abe Zapruder slammed the door of his office in the Dal-Tex Building and began kicking every object that would move. In Phoenix, Arizona, a thirty-three-year-old man fired two shots through the window of the local John Birch Society office, and at 819 North Eleventh Street in Temple, Texas, Byron Skelton plucked at his black tie and shrieked at his wife, “I knew it! I knew it! I knew it! If only they had paid some attention to those letters! Why? Why?—Why didn’t they listen to me?”
“Everything has changed,” Fidel Castro told his luncheon guest uneasily. He was wrong: individual modes of behavior had not changed, nor had extremism. Barry Goldwater, who had known John Kennedy in the Senate, and who admired and liked him, was as angry as Ross; when his plane landed he expressed his outrage and canceled all his public appearances. Not all Goldwater admirers shared his wrath, however. An Oklahoma City physician beamed at a grief-stricken visitor and said, “Good, I hope they got Jackie.” In a small Connecticut city a doctor called ecstatically across Main Street—to an internist who worshiped Kennedy—“The joy ride’s over. This is one deal Papa Joe can’t fix.” A woman visiting Amarillo, the second most radical city in Texas, was lunching in the restaurant adjacent to her motel when a score of rejoicing students burst in from a high school directly across the street. “Hey, great, JFK’s croaked!” one shouted with flagrant delight, and the woman, leaving as rapidly as she could, noticed that several diners were smiling back at the boy. In Dallas itself a man whooped and tossed his expensive Stetson in the air, and it was in a wealthy Dallas suburb that the pupils of a fourth-grade class, told that the President of the United States had been murdered in their city, burst into spontaneous applause.
Once the identity of the assassin had been established elaborate attempts were made to sponge away the memory of these incidents. The Radical Right wasn’t contrite. Its initial glee was confirmed and reconfirmed; during a meeting in the Cosmos Club which was brought to the attention of the FBI in Washington six months after the tragedy, a retired Marine Corps general told an admiring group of retired military officers that “It was the hand of God that pulled the trigger that killed Kennedy.”6 But the radicals were content to leave the guilt in Oswald’s grave. Their goal had been achieved, and they were anxious to avoid the undertow of public disapproval.
Even the facts about Dallas’ schoolroom episode were obscured. It was first mentioned in a blistering sermon against hate two days after the President’s death. The preacher was the Rev. William A. Holmes of the city’s Northaven Methodist church, and Walter Cronkite picked up his text on CBS. The network’s local affiliate, receiving advance notice of the network broadcast, followed it with an interview of a public school teacher who explained that her fourth-grade class had clapped after being told that it was being sent home early. The effect of the interview was to burnish the city’s tarnished reputation. In point of fact the station had the wrong school. In Dallas proper the announcement of the assassination had been coupled with a suspension of all classes, so the possibility of confusion did exist there. However, not all Dallas children attend the public schools. In the private, rich, racially segregated suburban school system of Park Cities—Highland Park and University Park, where Big D’s big money is—the school day continued to the final bell. Since the fourth-grade class mentioned in Mr. Holmes’s sermon was there, and since the pupils in it were told only of the death, they could have been applauding only that. For those who did not despise the President the episode is distasteful. To some it may still be incredible. Yet there can be no doubt of its authenticity. The source is the teacher herself, who went to the minister that Friday evening for guidance. He discussed it with Superintendent White, who conceded that quite apart from Park Cities the announcement of the President’s murder had inspired eleven separate acts of disrespect in the public schools of Dallas proper. Mr. Holmes became a highly controversial figure in Texas that week. Because of his sermon his life was threatened, and at the suggestion of the Dallas Police Department he left his house and found sanctuary in the home of a member of his congregation.
The swift solution of the riddle of who had fired the shots was to have the effect of dissipating early reactions. This was lucky for the gloaters. Had the assassin been identified, say, as an agent of the John Birch Society, Birchers everywhere would have been in for an awkward afternoon. It was also fortunate for domestic tranquillity. Almost as soon as conclusions had been drawn, they were to be confounded, and instead of hysteria the national attitude became one of pervasive sadness. Perhaps hysteria would have lost its momentum in any case. Since Orson Welles’s Martian fiasco of 1938 Americans had been through two major wars and the tensions of the Russian armistice; they had become more sophisticated and harder to jar. Conceivably they would have behaved equally well if the riddle had endured or grown more complex.
The early symptoms, however, were not reassuring. In Dallas Muggsy O’Leary had seen people running wildly from building to building, tripping, sprawling, picking themselves up, and running on again. On Connecticut Avenue, in Washington, the progress of Bill Walton’s taxi was blocked by a crowd which had gathered outside the ABC offices and flowed across the street to the Mayflower Hotel. In the cab Pat Moynihan reached for his billfold, which contained a map of roads leading to the huge West Virginia cave where, in the event of nuclear attack, the sub-cabinet was supposed to assemble. He checked himself and left his wallet where it was; the Office of Defense Emergency Planning had estimated that the ride to the cave would take twenty-five minutes, but with this chaos it might as well be in California.
North of Lafayette Park the bell in St. John’s church, the church of the Presidents, was tolling wildly, like a fire gong. And motorists were going berserk. They were ignoring stop signs, signals, pedestrians, policemen, and other motorists. Cars swerved drunkenly from lane to lane, or spun without warning in crazy U-turns, or were left forsaken in the middle of intersections, their engines idling and their doors hanging open. If the confirmation of the President’s death had been followed by a rash of other ominous developments—the assassination of Lyndon Johnson and the disappearance of the Cabinet plane, for example, and the proclamation of a new government by a committee of the Right or Left—the public convulsion could have become uncontrollable. In retrospect the mere suggestion of such a sequence seems preposterous. But at noon the assassination would have seemed preposterous.
Kennedy was still believed to be alive, and traffic had not yet entered its mad phase, when Mac Bundy crossed the Potomac with McNamara’s driver, each of them, as Bundy noted in his subsequent memorandum of events, boosting the courage of the other. In the corridor that curves past the oval office Bundy joined Ralph Dungan, whose return from the Chilean Embassy luncheon had preceded him by a few minutes. Neither of them said a word. The scene was studded with small incongruities: Dungan, puffing his pipe, looked serene and ironical, which he wasn’t; on the wall hung two Texas Ranger pistols buckled to a piece of ranch fence (a sign above identified th
em as “The Texas Peacemakers”); and General Services Administration workmen, having received no new orders, continued to put down the new blood-red rugs in the President’s and Evelyn Lincoln’s offices.
Walton, Moynihan, and Horsky arrived. Still no one spoke. Then Ted Sorensen came in from the colonnade by the Rose Garden and said hollowly, “It’s over, he’s dead.” Bundy—that strange blend of almost brutal realism and almost feline sensitivity—realized that Sorensen was the hardest hit and hurried to his side. Dungan removed his pipe and studied the stem blindly. He asked, “What have they done to us?”
Presently the men in the hall began to notice the new carpeting. Because it had been conceived as a surprise, none of them expected it, and they were shocked. Fred Holborn came up just as the men were replacing the furniture upon it; he stepped back, stupefied. Moynihan, perceiving the familiar rocking chair in the hall, peered in at the rug; to him “it looked as though they knew, that someone knew a new President was coming in.” Bundy had left Sorensen to call McNamara from Ken O’Donnell’s office, and he, too, was appalled. “Oh, my God, they’re putting scarlet carpets in the President’s office!” he said to Bill Walton. ‘We must stop it.” Walton disagreed. To stop it now, he said, would be pointless. They argued and finally told the men to finish, but to finish quickly.
Abruptly Walton declared loudly, “I’ve got to get out of here.” He glanced at his watch—it was 2:30 exactly, three minutes before Kilduff’s official announcement in 101–102 and Johnson’s arrival at Love Field—as he left the West Wing lobby with Pat Moynihan. Outside Pat remarked upon the colors, lowered at Commander Hallett’s order. “Bill, you might as well see that,” he said, pointing. Walton sagged. “Let’s walk out the way he would have expected us to,” he said, trying to smooth the wrinkles out of his voice. But he stumbled. He couldn’t quite manage it, and at the Northwest Gate Moynihan hailed a cab and helped him into it.
Returning to comfort Holborn, Pat was accosted by a White House policeman who asked to see his pass. He answered acidly, “What difference does it make now?” It made none; yet he was wrong and the guard right. If there was even a chance of a threat against the government, and the chance certainly existed at 2:30, a single act of carelessness could have become criminal negligence. Hindsight began early. Within the next three hours most of those who had considered this possibility began trying to forget it. They felt that they had been absurd. They hadn’t been. Undeniably some impulses were quixotic. Senator Eugene McCarthy’s maid began packing the family’s belongings on the theory that the lives of all Democrats were in danger; as a South American she was thinking in terms of a purge, which in a two-party country would be impractical. But the apprehension of men like Bill Pozen was entirely reasonable, and they were in good company. “You’d better get the Watch Committee going,” George Ball had phoned John McCone before McCone’s departure for Hickory Hill, and the director had replied shortly, “I already have.” The committee consisted of the sharpest eyes the CIA could focus on Moscow and Peking. Every member was a technician, expert in the intricate ways of Sino-Soviet agents, and they were to remain on the job all weekend and afterward, tapping foreign sources to determine whether or not the crime could have been the work of an outside ring.
In the Pentagon McNamara and the Joint Chiefs remained vigilant, though after their conference in the Secretary’s office the Chiefs decided they should leave sentry duty to subordinate sentinels and rejoin their meeting. General Taylor in particular felt that it was important to present a picture of stability and continuity, that it would be an error to let their visitors from Bonn suspect the depth of the tragedy until more was known. At 2:30 he and his colleagues filed back into the Gold Room. He told the Germans briefly that President Kennedy had been injured. General Friedrich Foertsch replied for his comrades that they hoped the injury was not too serious. The Chiefs did not reply, and for the next two hours they put on a singular performance. Aware that the shadow of a new war might fall across the room at any time, they continued the talks about dull military details, commenting on proposals by Generals Wessel and Huekelheim and shuffling papers and directives with steady hands. Even for men with their discipline it was a stony ordeal, and it was especially difficult for Taylor, who had to lead the discussion and whose appointment as Chairman had arisen from his close relationship with the President. As America’s first soldier he would be expected to make the first military decision should war come. Meanwhile he had to sit erect and feign an interest in logistics and combined staff work. At 4:30 the meeting ended on schedule. The Joint Chiefs rose together and faced their rising guests. Taylor said evenly, “I regret to tell you that the President of the United States has been killed.” The Germans, bred to stoicism, collapsed in their chairs.
At 4:15, exactly fifteen minutes before the Gold Room adjournment, the Chesapeake & Potomac Telephone Company’s Georgetown office, which served the Pentagon, had become the last exchange in the capital to resume normal operations. The phone emergency was then officially over. But though it, too, became quickly forgotten, while it lasted it had seemed unforgettable. Individual dialers, never having encountered this obstacle, naturally placed it in the context of the President’s murder; between 2 and 4 P.M. in Washington it required no great leap of imagination to picture the country crawling with sinister figures industriously sabotaging communications. What set this aspect of the crisis apart was its immunity to rank; all flashing lights looked alike to switchboard operators, and automated exchanges could not distinguish between the phone of an exasperated Senator and one in the hands of a child. Completing a call required luck and persistence, and the list of the luckless included a number of men and women who were accustomed to very quick service. Hale Boggs couldn’t reach the Speaker’s office. Mamie Eisenhower couldn’t get Ike. Ben Bradlee’s Newsweek phone was dead; so was Justice Stewart’s; so was Liz Pozen’s when she arrived home with Agatha. Mrs. Auchincloss did get through to the White House operator, but she was told that there was no way for her to reach her daughter at Parkland Hospital. Communications traffic between the capital and Texas had reached the saturation point. The phone company was doing its best—half the circuits in the entire Eastern half of the United States had been reserved for Washington traffic—but Dallas’ eighteen long-distance trunks were all overloaded, and every hospital phone Art Bales had confiscated was needed.
Even Crown was temporarily paralyzed. The Signalmen there had never been asked to do so much with so little. Because the President had expected to spend only three hours in Dallas, Signals had no direct lines to the city. Calls from the Sheraton-Dallas were being worked off the temporary board on the seventh floor of Fort Worth’s Hotel Texas, and the cascade of words from Clint Hill, Kellerman, Roberts, Bales, Behn, Shepard, Youngblood, and the Attorney General was streaming over this rickety, narrow bridge. In the capital Crown’s men were handling Agent Tom Wells’s guarded inquiries about Caroline, making arrangements to install five new White House lines in Lyndon Johnson’s home, putting in another five lines in Jack McNally’s office, and juggling the backlog of local calls to and from Robert Kennedy at Hickory Hill. Both the Signal board in the east basement and the NAtional 8-1414 board on the fourth floor of the Executive Office Building were in a bind. According to Sergeant Tarbell, Hill’s disclosure to Behn that the President was dead—which came a full twenty-five minutes before the public knew Father Huber had said, “He’s dead”—triggered an internal crisis. In the Sergeant’s words, “The switchboard went completely wild, with everyone attempting to call out.” The big wave broke within the next half-hour. The Chesapeake & Potomac dial tones grew progressively slower until they ceased altogether. For the first time in memory the Signalmen discovered that “we could not dial out.”
As expert technicians they realized that the trouble lay in overburdened exchanges. Unfortunately, the very nature of the emergency prevented them from reassuring outsiders, and Senator Kennedy, roaming the 1600 block of Twenty-eighth St
reet, had reached a frenzy of uncertainty. He and Claude Hooten continued to press buttons in a row of new town houses until Claude found one whose phone was functioning. He explained the situation to the woman of the house while Ted called his brother. Bob told him quietly, “He’s dead. You’d better call your mother and our sisters.” The suggestion seemed sensible. The country hadn’t heard from Father Huber, and had Ted had access to a permanent dial tone, he could have followed through. But there were no permanent dial tones. The instant he hung up the housewife’s line went dead.
Recrossing the street, he found that the extensions in his home were still out. Milt Gwirtzman said, “What about my house? Maybe we’ll have better luck there.” That, too, sounded logical. The Gwirtzman home was only eight blocks away. But the phones were lifeless there, too. Ted said between his teeth, “Let’s go to the White House.” It was a silent ride. He, deep in thought, did not mention his talk with Bob, and Milt, who had heard the worst over one of the Senator’s television sets just before they left Twenty-eighth Street, was tactfully quiet. At the mansion there were new frustrations. A crowd had formed on Pennsylvania Avenue, so Ted directed Milt to East Executive Avenue. The guard at the East Gate, recognizing the Senator, waved them through. Leaving the Mercedes in the driveway, Ted tugged at the center door. It didn’t give. It was the tourist entrance, which was always locked at this hour. He rattled it furiously, crying out, “Doesn’t anything work?”
The Death of a President Page 38