The Death of a President

by William Manchester

  There are certain situations in which the fitting of grooves can begin at once. That is the job of intelligence, and it would have been possible if the assassination had occurred in the White House, with its magnificently equipped Situation Room. In Dallas, however, there was no Situation Room, only the situation itself. Even after Ted Clifton had discovered that Johnson had driven to Love Field he couldn’t tell Washington, because Bales, under these extraordinary circumstances, couldn’t provide him with a scrambled line. Lacking security, technicians literally did not dare talk. At 1:35 P.M. the stateroom of 26000 was somewhat like Bastogne in the third week of December 1944, when the 101st Airborne became the last division in Belgium to learn that the town had been invested by enemy troops. If Dallas had been surrounded, the New York studios of CBS would have been a lot likelier to know of it than anyone within shouting distance of the thirty-seventh Vice President, now become the thirty-sixth President, of the United States.

  Dallas was not invested. The networks knew nothing Johnson did not know. He turned away, relieved. The big picture was not as frightening as it had seemed in imagination, unless, of course, the commentators were also in the dark. Actually, much was happening which was unknown to either Johnson or Cronkite. Unrecognized for what it was, the key to the puzzle had already appeared. Twenty minutes before the Johnson party boarded the plane, a policeman named J. D. Tippit had been shot to death two miles from the Book Depository, but another forty minutes were to pass before anyone suspected the significance of Officer Tippit’s death. At 1:35 it was logical to suppose that the great crime had been committed by a great criminal, backed, perhaps, by a criminal nation. If that were true, the grand design would be revealed in a grand fashion, not in the petty killing of a patrolman. Thus far it had remained hidden, and Johnson huddled with his fellow Texan politicians about his next move while the rest of the passengers, like their new President, wondered what was really happening outside.

  Although the desire for knowledge mounted steadily in the plane, it remained unsatisfied. Love Field was, if anything, more misinformed than Parkland Hospital. Each offered a massive refutation of the pebble-in-the-pond theory of communication, the fiction that information spreads from its source in evenly spaced concentric circles. To the layman the pattern seems both aesthetic and logical, and any outsider hanging around the airport fence at 1:35 P.M. would have instinctively placed himself in an outer ring, the policemen on the runway in intermediate rings, and the fuselage of 26000, glinting in the bright afternoon sunlight, in the center. But at Love Field geometry and proximity were irrelevant. In Colonel McNally’s words, “The cops were running around with goofy looks”—McNally believed that “if this had been a concerted affair, the conspirators could have had the plane and everything.” Those who didn’t look goofy felt goofy. Jim Swindal, for example, had greeted Johnson at the foot of the ramp with a snappy salute. From the fence he gave every appearance of knowledgeability. In fact, Colonel Swindal, like Colonel McNally and Sergeant Ayres, knew far less than Americans in distant parts of the country whose access to the nearest television set wasn’t blocked by a President, and who were, therefore, privy to the confidences of Cronkite and David Brinkley.

  The Presidential party’s rear echelon at the airport didn’t know what had happened at the hospital, and the best informed among them had only the haziest notion of the motorcade’s movements after 12:30 P.M. The last transmissions the aircraft had received from downtown Dallas had been Kellerman’s alarm and Roberts’ “Have Dagger cover Volunteer.” Then the plane’s Charlie set had gone dead. Swindal had gathered that there was an emergency of some sort, but he could only speculate. Remembering the Adlai Stevenson incident, he had guessed there had been a riot. After McHugh called from Parkland and told him their next leg would take them to Andrews Field he had hazarded that the strain of the trip had been too much for the President’s back, that they were going to take him back to Walter Reed or Bethesda Naval Hospital for treatment. Because of the Charlie blackout, and because the Signalmen who could operate the more complex equipment were all in the terminal restaurant (no one aboard remembered the UPI and AP teletype machines), Swindal had turned to the stateroom television set. Sergeant Ayres, George Thomas, and the two secretaries from Salinger’s office, Chris Camp and Sue Vogelsinger, had joined him there. As the full dimensions of the tragedy emerged, the women had dissolved. Swindal had recoiled, and Ayres tinkered madly with the reception until he got what he later called “a real good picture.” George Thomas had disappeared into Kennedy’s bedroom. The President would have no use for the clothes he had laid out, so George had carefully repacked them.

  Inside the terminal, those who were lunching had experienced the sensations which had been shared that moment in a million other American dining rooms. Munching sandwiches and sipping soup, they had become aware of a pervasive tension. Clearly something, somewhere, had happened to someone. Waitresses in far corners had been dropping dishes, and there had been a deafening clamor in the kitchen, as though everything suspended from hooks had fallen at once. Next a puzzling whisper had been passed from table to table; the captain of the Pan American press plane wanted his men to report to him immediately. Concerned, Master Sergeant Joe Giordano and the two men with him had risen to investigate. Discovering that their waitress had vanished, they had pooled their change, flung it on the table, and raced out, passing Colonel McNally, who had eaten early and was waiting patiently at the cashier’s desk. She had just received a phone call; he hadn’t even noticed her end of it. He had glanced up at Giordano and then noticed that the woman was talking to herself. “He’s been shot, he’s in the hospital,” she had been mumbling. She had been confused; she hadn’t seemed to know whether or not to take his bill. Speculating that a close friend or relative had been injured, he had asked charily, “Who?” She had looked vacant. The restaurant’s PA system had begun paging the crew members of both 707’s. The Colonel had repeated urgently, “Who?” She had shaken herself briskly. “President Kennedy,” she had said and rung up the sale.

  As McNally had stumbled into the sun, change in hand, and stared at the puddles on the field—puddles, he had remembered, between which John Kennedy had buoyantly stepped less than two hours before—the unheralded Johnsonian cavalcade had been swiftly moving from Parkland to Love. From his command post at the fence the Colonel had synchronized communications through the Sheraton-Dallas switchboard. Learning that Kennedy was gone, he had begun a few incoherent penciled notes: “A President is dead, murdered in a supposedly American city… tragic hours… One of the blackest days in our Nation’s history.” Unknown to him, as he had prepared his agenda of emergency communications action, Chief Curry had been hurrying through the pink lights on Harry Hines Boulevard. To the consternation of those in the rear echelon, the car had been preceded by SS 100 X (“The back seat,” wrote McNally, who couldn’t look, “was described as a horror”). Armed agents from the hospital had fanned out, crying to everyone they recognized that they would have given anything “to have been able to shoot it out with that son of hell”; that “he should be torn limb from limb; death is too good for him.” (A change, this, from the ominous “they”; the literal agents accepted a cardinal rule of ballistics: one weapon, one man.)

  In this melee Lyndon Johnson had unexpectedly headed for the ramp of 26000. There had been no opportunity to clear the stateroom for him. Swindal had barely had time to scramble down for that welcoming salute. That the television set should be on appeared normal to the new President. To those who had been watching it, however, his unforeseen appearance seemed inappropriate, and in embarrassment they scattered to other cabins and, in some cases, to the runway; Chris Camp and Sue Vogelsinger, concluding that Johnson’s presence on 26000 meant Kennedy would be on 86970, elected to switch to the other 707. (The secretaries anticipated no awkwardness between Johnson and the Kennedy group. They merely recalled that it was established policy for the President and his Vice President to ride on different
aircraft so that one crash could not kill both. The fact that the assassination had rendered the policy meaningless did not occur to them.) The women were lucky. The runway was far more comfortable than the airplane. After McHugh had ordered preparations for an immediate take-off, Swindal had disconnected the ground air conditioner, and the interior was rapidly becoming a kiln.

  Rufus Youngblood’s hour in history—it lasted almost exactly an hour—was nearly at an end. It was a freak, an outgrowth of the panic and uncertainty which had briefly broken the nation’s stride. Once the new Chief Executive felt secure the Secret Service was destined to fade back into the shadows, and for Lyndon Johnson security returned when he had been extricated from the vortex of Dallas. Climbing the ramp ended the threat. Only a return to the city could renew it, and he had no intention of flirting again with whatever dark forces lurked in those sunlit streets. He had been badly scarred. Ten months later he was invited to address an American Legion National Convention in Dallas at the height of the Presidential campaign; to the dismay of the Legion (and the chagrin of the city’s civic leaders) he refused. Love Field, although part of Dallas, represented a giant step toward asylum, and the period of the Youngblood protectorate, which had begun on Elm Street, may be said to have ended in the stateroom of 26000 when the agent first insisted that the Johnson family move directly into the White House upon arrival in the capital.

  He had crossed a line. To him the suggestion was just another safety precaution. Johnson saw that it had other implications, some of them exceedingly delicate, and he flatly rejected it. That was at approximately 1:45 P.M. Johnson was then firmly in control. In their early moments aboard, however, Youngblood had continued to act as his Ken O’Donnell, with Emory Roberts and agents of the Vice Presidential detail as his staff. Explaining that he himself would be tied down in the stateroom, Youngblood told Lem Johns to identify Vice Presidential advisers for the crew, order the stewards to draw up a passenger manifest and delay the plane’s departure until the arrival of the Kennedys. The first of these was essential. The crew knew Lady Bird from the newspapers, but the rest of the newcomers were strangers. (To complicate matters, some strangers didn’t know where they were; Liz Carpenter was under the impression that she was on 86970.) Before nightfall all who had been close to Johnson would be on their way to national eminence, but first Johns had to clear the way to the stage, and his task was not limited to the group from the hospital. One of his first problems was to deal with an A-priority request from Love’s control tower. Airport operations reported that “A Mr. Bill Moyers is in a private plane overhead, requesting permission to land.” None of Swindal’s men had heard of this Mr. Moyers. Johns persuaded them that Lyndon Johnson had; flashing his commission book he promised to vouch for him personally.

  “Do you know that we’re waiting for Mrs. Kennedy?” Johns inquired of Swindal. Swindal didn’t. Johns further inquired, “Do you know where we’re going to put the coffin?” Swindal didn’t know that either, and Johns tactfully ventured that stewards might remove the seats on the port side of the tail compartment. The colonel asked dazedly, “Where will we put the seats when we’ve taken them out?” “On the backup plane,” said Johns, and Swindal nodded slowly at Ayres, directing him to do it.

  Fifty feet away, at the fence, Emory Roberts was speaking crisply into one of McNally’s telephones: “Volunteer and Victoria are aboard. Where are Lancer and Lace?” Of all the unlikely conversations held that Friday afternoon, this one strains credulity most: Mr. and Mrs. Johnson were ready to leave Dallas. What was holding up Mr. and Mrs. Kennedy? One sympathizes with Roberts. His assignment was unenviable. To make things worse, he wasn’t getting through; the reply was an unintelligible squawk. Undaunted, he tried again and was again unsuccessful. No one could ascertain the whereabouts of the absent Kennedys.

  In 26000’s communications shack Johns made a discovery which was to grow in importance over the next hour. Jerry Behn, thanks to Colonel McNally’s electronic sorcery, was now in direct telephone communication with the plane through the Signal Corps switchboards in the Sheraton-Dallas and Hotel Texas. The link meant that the government in the capital needn’t be a slave to television. Furthermore, the splice between the White House and the plane made two-way conversations possible.

  The new President had shaken off the torpor of Booth 13; he had already begun accustoming himself to the mantle of authority when he had ducked past Swindal’s salute and homed in on the beam of Cronkite’s voice. Entering as he did through the tail compartment, he had had to pass the narrow corridor beside the Presidential bedroom. There he had wavered. “Is there any other place we can use?” he had asked Sergeant Ayres, explaining to Lady Bird, “These are their private quarters.” It was then that they had heard the television set and entered the stateroom. The steward brought them water. Johnson was parched; perspiring in the stuffy stateroom as he watched Cronkite, he drained a tumblerful and two bottles of Kennedy’s Poland water. His hand was dead steady (every eye was on it; now that he was President, his smallest gestures would be covertly observed by those around him), and although his own eyes were on the screen, he was issuing a spate of orders, reminding Rufus Youngblood to post a lookout for Jacqueline Kennedy, telling him to have the agents make a written record of their movements, and leading a running discussion with aides and Congressmen over the advisability of taking the Presidential oath immediately.

  On the couch opposite the stateroom desk Bird fingered her choker of pearls and jotted down her memoirs. They formed a jumbled chromo. She overheard “the agonized voice” of a Secret Service man crying that the Service had never lost a President before, and she “hurt for him.” She was aware of Lyndon, moving restlessly from chair to couch to chair. She intercepted a message from Parkland—Mrs. Kennedy wouldn’t move from Major Medicine without the body. Johnson let it be known that 26000 wouldn’t budge; they were going to “wait on” the gallant lady and the coffin. Television’s square eye had become somewhat newsier; there were reports that the President had been the victim of a .30–.30 rifle. The stateroom’s occupants kept loosening their collars and mopping their foreheads. Lady Bird alone felt chilled. She nursed her elbows and listened to Lyndon canvassing the men on the question of where he should be sworn in.

  His approach, a Johnsonian trademark, was subdued and noncommittal; he was requesting their opinions without disclosing his own. Jack Brooks, an impulsive ex-Marine, was a partisan of the instant oath. Homer Thornberry countered, “Let’s wait until Washington.” Albert Thomas sided with Brooks. “Suppose the plane is delayed?” he asked Johnson, echoing the convictions of the correspondents at Parkland. “The country can’t afford to be without a President while you’re flying all over the country.” Thomas was ignoring the fact that this was no ordinary airplane, and that Jim Swindal didn’t fly “all over” any route, but the debate itself was probably of little consequence. Johnson’s mind seemed to be made up—he was, Joe Ayres observed, “very much in command.” To Thomas he said, “I agree. Now. What about the oath?”

  They looked blank. Throats were cleared, limp ties loosened, but no one spoke. Here he was seeking, not a consensus, but hard information, and the Texas Congressmen hadn’t any. The best they could offer were fuzzy memories of textbook engravings of Chester A. Arthur or Calvin Coolidge, who, in the dancing illumination of defective lamplight, affixed his hand to a shabby family Bible while strangers in old-fashioned nightshirts stood around gaping. Everyone agreed that there was an official in the picture. His identity, however, was obscure. He could have been a Supreme Court Justice or a notary public. Undoubtedly he was supposed to do more than hold the Bible. Yet the fine print of the oath itself eluded the Congressmen entirely.

  It was all very unsatisfactory. Johnson was not limited to the passengers in 26000’s main cabin, however. Learning from the agents of the Vice Presidential detail that the communications shack was in contact with Washington, he eagerly looked around for telephones. The closest one hung from a hook on
the other side of the aisle. He ignored it. Possibly he could not yet bring himself to sit at Kennedy’s stateroom desk, though the more plausible explanation is that he wanted solitude. In any event, the instrument he did use was on another, smaller Presidential desk, in Kennedy’s quarters.

  Because he had not been briefed, the new President was unaware that conversations to and from 26000, 86970, 86971, and 86972 were monitored at Acrobat (Andrews Field) and automatically taped by the Signal Corps. Unfortunately, as General Clifton later explained to this writer, the device only operated when the planes were airborne. In this age of sophisticated eavesdropping, Angel dialogues were sometimes picked up by a group of zealous amateurs in Colorado, but a check has failed to uncover any such activity between 1:26 and 2:47, when Colonel Swindal took off and the turning reels at Andrews began to record voice traffic from the Presidential aircraft, together with that which was already being received from the Cabinet plane. The absence of an incontestable record and the nature of Johnson’s talks mean that the page of history he wrote in 26000’s bedroom is blurred. Nevertheless it is partly readable. Although he himself informed this writer that he could not even “recall the precise sequence of calls” which he made, he was never entirely alone—“I’m sticking to you like glue,” said Youngblood, trailing him inside—and in all important instances the recollections of the person to whom he talked are available.

  No consensus on the question of his reanointing could be complete if the government’s chief legal adviser were left out. Thus the first issue of the Johnson administration arose. It was a prickly one, because the man to whom the new President must now turn was the one member of the Cabinet who was entitled to sit out the transition. That respite was to be denied him. It was unfortunate that this was so, for the consequence was to be an extraordinary misunderstanding. Perhaps misapprehension was inevitable. No one was quite normal at that hour, but both Lyndon Johnson and Robert Kennedy were deeply disturbed men, staggering under fantastic burdens. The full weight of the most awesome responsibility in the world had just descended upon Johnson’s shoulders; harrowing personal tragedy had fallen on the younger Kennedy. However, the new President had little choice. The question he had asked of the Congressmen was constitutional, which meant that the buck couldn’t stop here on the plane. It had to go to the Department of Justice. Conceivably Deputy Attorney General Katzenbach could have been consulted; equally conceivably, Katzenbach would have checked with Kennedy anyhow. Thus the issue had to be laid before the lawyer who had been John Kennedy’s, and who was now automatically his successor’s, Attorney General. That he should be the dead President’s brother was cruel mischance, yet if the incoming Chief Executive were to exercise Tyler’s “greater caution” he had no option. Seated at the end of Jacqueline Kennedy’s bed, with Rufus Youngblood standing against the wall, he accordingly placed a call to Robert Kennedy in Virginia, and moments later the white phone at the shallow end of Hickory Hill’s swimming pool rang.