Briefly, the President’s strategy was this. The first step was to see that all government security markets suspended trading at once. Second, Fowler instructed Alfred Hayes, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, to call Keith Funston of the New York Stock Exchange and Ted Etherington of Amex, requesting them to close down. The gongs rang, and just in time; the assassination of the President, coupled with a shocking vegetable oil scandal which had been exposed earlier in the day, had sent the Big Board into a dizzy spiral. Clearing the floors provided a respite. In itself it was no exploit. Funston, in fact, had anticipated the Treasury. The crux of Kennedy’s design lay abroad. The major risk was speculation against the dollar. Such piracy is easy to detect. Sharks buy gold, betting that the price will rise from $35 an ounce to $40, say, or $45. Stopping them is not so easy, and no solution can be improvised after the balloon of fear has gone up.
It worked magnificently. The key man was Al Hayes, because New York’s Federal Reserve is more than a reserve bank; it also serves as the government’s fiscal agent. Luckily for Hayes, foreign exchanges had closed before the assassination. Nevertheless America’s great vaults were opened that afternoon, and next day the bales of bills were to be used. On Saturday a few European gold markets opened, notably London’s and Zurich’s. On both, corsairs reached for the panic button. The Kennedy swap blocked them completely. Their dollars were taken, but in return they received other tender, not gold. (On Monday the Jolly Roger was hoisted again—after a few passes the speculators realized the extent of America’s preparations and withdrew. Meanwhile in the United States Wall Street was given the weekend plus an additional twenty-four hours of breathing time. Declaration of a bank holiday would have been alarming, so David Rockefeller, a friend of the Kennedys, persuaded his brother Nelson to halt trading as “a special mark of respect” for the late President. By Tuesday everything was steady.) The entire operation was a financial masterpiece, conducted on so high a plane that the oil and gas men of Dallas who had traduced JFK as a “Comsymp” enemy of free enterprise never even understood what was happening.
Fowler, who was to succeed Dillon in 1965, was functioning Friday afternoon as a member of what Washington calls “the subcabinet”—undersecretaries, deputies, and key aides. In the absence of the six Secretaries and the attenuation of the Attorney General these men were carrying on superbly. Katzenbach was wrestling with Texas law. Bundy, who wore a subcabinet hat because of his national security role, was setting up new locked files in the West Wing for Lyndon Johnson. George Ball and Acting Secretary of Agriculture Charlie Murphy were conferring with John Macy over the telephone impasse; they concluded that the solution to the Chesapeake & Potomac’s plight lay among Macy’s quarter-million Civil Service employees in metropolitan Washington, countless thousands of whom were attempting to dial their home phones while their wives tried to call them. Here again the answer was a Kennedy answer, this time a design of Robert Kennedy’s. Three months earlier, while preparing for the August 28 civil rights March on Washington, the President’s brother had suggested that government workers be released early on a staggered basis, in nine separate waves. With a fresh wave being disgorged every fifteen minutes the flow of traffic would be even, there would be no congestion, and the federal triangle—the great Corinthian complex between the Mall, the White House, the Hill, and Pennsylvania Avenue—would be cleared out. At 3:05 P.M., eighteen minutes after Swindal’s take-off from Love Field, Macy checked with the District police and then acted on his own responsibility. The rapid recovery of public communications during the next hour and a half suggests that setting the Attorney General’s plan in motion may have been the turning point for the frantic telephone company.5
As Angel dartled over the Cumberland River’s vermiculating shore, Washington’s most furious official activity that afternoon was in the Potomac segment of the Pentagon’s E Ring—for obvious reasons its nature cannot be described here—and in Foggy Bottom. In the New State Department Building, as the capital still called it, Angier Biddle Duke was putting out a condolence book and a silver tray for envoys’ cards. Cables were being dispatched to American legations around the globe, instructing them to prepare other books. The sole copy of the funeral ceremonies for FDR was exhumed from the department’s archives. Harlan Cleveland wrote out a proclamation of mourning for Lyndon Johnson—the new Chief Executive was to adopt it intact—while U. Alexis Johnson drafted a list of what had been accomplished and what remained. Both papers were then set aside for presentation at Andrews.
The second read:
November 22, 1963
MEMORANDUM FOR THE PRESIDENT
Following are suggested steps and procedures based upon historical precedents, including most recently the death of President Roosevelt:
1. The issuance of a proclamation by you appointing the day of the late President’s funeral as a day of national mourning and prayer.—Draft proclamation attached for your consideration.
2. A circular telegram from the Secretary of State to the Governors of all States and Territories, informing them of orders with respect to a period of thirty-day public mourning, information with respect to the funeral services, and requesting notification if they intend to be present at the funeral ceremonies.—This will be done as details are available.
3. On your order, the issuance of instructions by the Secretary of State, closing all Executive Departments and Agencies on the day of the funeral and instructing the Secretary of Defense that all military commands and vessels under the control of the Secretary of Defense fly flags at half mast for a thirty-day period of mourning.—This will be done.
4. Notification of the death of President Kennedy to all Chiefs of Mission in Washington by the Acting Secretary of State.—This has been done.
5. Notification by the Acting Secretary of State to all Chiefs of Mission in Washington that you have taken the oath as President, and announcing funeral arrangements for the late President. This will be done as soon as arrangements are known.
George W. Ball Acting Secretary
U: GWBall/vh
That completed, the State Department’s principals debated more delicate issues. For the first three hours the probable explanation of the killer’s provocation seemed clear. All the under secretaries were familiar with the political climate in Dallas. Then, at 4:25 P.M., an urgent Secret Service message arrived through channels. Treasury wanted to know whether State had a dossier on one Lee Harvey Oswald. Within minutes the networks were broadcasting the fact that Oswald had applied for Soviet citizenship, and George Ball’s demand for a check followed the Treasury’s. The dossier arrived; it was thick. Obviously Oswald had been to Moscow. Johnson ordered an investigation “to see if our handling of the case had been O.K.” At the same time a spirited discussion began over the possibilities of war. To Ball, Tommy Thompson declared vigorously that the Communists didn’t work this way. The U.S.S.R. would kill defectors, but not chiefs of state. They would never set a precedent which might be awkward for them. Averell Harriman, like Thompson a former ambassador to Russia, gave him eloquent backing. As a nuclear attack did not materialize, the two Russian specialists were vindicated and Alex Johnson observed that a revulsion in the country against Oswald’s professions of Marxism—professions which Harriman regarded with mounting skepticism—could undo all Kennedy’s careful work toward a détente with the U.S.S.R. Johnson requested that the District police provide an unobtrusive cordon around the Russian Embassy. One was set up, but it proved unnecessary. Like Harriman, most Americans on the East Coast found a Marxist Dallasite scarcely credible. At that very moment a mobile television unit was interviewing people in Rockefeller Plaza. All assumed that the crime had been inspired by what one called “the ultraconservatives that spread hate in the South.”
Despite his age, Harriman had felt himself bound to John Kennedy by a special tie. The tall, elegant patrician had long been a departmental maverick; he was notorious for filing State directives in his wastebasket. Wh
en FDR died he had been in Moscow. Convinced that no one in Washington could give Harry Truman an intelligent appraisal of Russia’s plans for postwar aggression, he had, without authorization from anyone, charted a nonstop course that would take him over Rumania, directly to the capital in forty hours—a world’s record at that time. (Afterward he said, “The Department thought me very naughty. But they always say no. So I never ask them.”) One of the staunchest of the original New Dealers, he had had another reason to remember FDR’s death. The recollection of Muscovites weeping outside the Kremlin as he left Molotov and Stalin that day had never been far from the surface of his mind. For sixteen years he had waited for another Roosevelt to rise. Then, in 1961, it had happened. “Franklin Roosevelt had talked over the heads of government to the hearts of people,” he said six months after Dallas. “The same was true of John Kennedy. He also had been an expression of the ideals that the world hoped us to live up to. His inaugural and his subsequent speeches were read everywhere, and the world felt that a new FDR had come to power.”
Now, suddenly, the magnificent gift had vanished. Harriman felt crushed: “Roosevelt’s death was shattering to me because I had hoped that he would play a role in building the peace. Then, with Kennedy, I had felt that his handling of the Cuban situation had materially changed the Russian policy. Khrushchev had used the threat of nuclear war against us and had told Robert Frost that democracies were too liberal to fight. I was terrified that he underestimated our willingness to fight and that there would be a showdown in Cuba. Kennedy convinced him that he would have to take his weapons out of Cuba—or else. Furthermore, the President had been sensible and wise enough to give Khrushchev a way out. Khrushchev had looked down that long nuclear barrel and he—and we—knew that President Kennedy had the Communists’ number. Most important, and this revealed his magical flair for statesmanship, other countries were on our side.”
Abruptly it was over: “No two Presidents before had had world opinion and affection centered upon them as had Roosevelt and Kennedy. In both cases people abroad felt they had lost a personal friend.” Franklin Roosevelt had been Harriman’s personal friend. In 1945 his loss had been almost insupportable. He hadn’t believed that he was capable of suffering that way again. Yet the assassination of John Kennedy was really worse: “You must remember that at Yalta President Roosevelt had been a sick man. The fact that he died, although a shock, was not so startling because one had wondered about his health. Besides, it was wartime, and death was not unusual. The Kennedy affair, on the other hand, was something I had never contemplated.… Then came the stunning fact, and the reaction in oneself, one’s country, and in the world was in some ways more vocal and more intense than the reaction to Roosevelt’s death. This was particularly true among youth. Someone had cared about them… genuinely cared, and was doing something about it. Youth knew and was responding. Suddenly… he was gone, gone, gone.”
Harriman abruptly walked out of the under-secretarial meeting and informed his staff that he would meet his afternoon schedule. They were astounded. One assistant, William H. Sullivan, encountering him in the foyer outside Ball’s office, protested, but Harriman shook his head doggedly. “No,” he replied, “the world must go on.” He was among those who had pondered what the President would have expected of him and concluded that Kennedy would want him at his post. He went there. Very shortly he regretted it. First on his schedule was a meeting with a group from several oil companies. The agenda called for a conference on measures which might improve the firms’ worsening position in South America. The talk was wobbly from the outset, and it dove beyond hope of recovery when a zealous junior executive suggested that since a dead President couldn’t help them, the new President should send a letter to the President of Argentina. That blew the discussion wide open. In Sullivan’s words, “I think all of us on the government side were adequately disgusted with that attitude so that we moved, with the collaboration of more senior and sensible executives, to a rapid closure of the meeting.”
Coming less than two hours after the announcement of Kennedy’s death, the mere term “the new President” was, to Sullivan, “particularly bad taste.” There were more unfortunate lapses that afternoon in Washington. Those who had disliked the Kennedy Presidency were adjusting to its end with amazing speed. They had never forgiven him his victory over Big Steel the year before. His appeal had eluded them, as Roosevelt’s appeal had baffled their fathers. Their failure to gauge the loyalty he had aroused became startlingly evident in several insensitive remarks which were casually passed Friday afternoon. While Air Force One was still climbing over eastern Texas Fred Holborn had received a telephone inquiry from a writer for a business periodical. Holborn had a 3:30 appointment with the writer at the White House. The journalist merely wanted to confirm the time; he saw no reason why they shouldn’t proceed. Holborn thought there was a reason, and he tartly suggested an indefinite postponement. Later he received another call from a slight acquaintance. At first he assumed that the caller wished to express sympathy. To his dismay—and utter disbelief—he realized that he was being asked whether he would use his influence, as Special Assistant to President Kennedy, to secure two fifty-yard-line tickets to the Army-Navy game.
The oil corporation’s company man, the business writer, and the football fan are hard to fathom. Yet it was a capricious time. The disguises which individuals wear in society, the lubricants that make day-to-day encounters bearable, had been swept away. Some men became meaner, some nobler; all were guileless. For three days men were to be transparent. During that weekend which they would afterward seal off in the attic of their minds they were artless, whole-souled, and, for once, unashamed of emotional display.
In the Capitol Congressman James Roosevelt, ordinarily bland, proposed that John Kennedy be awarded the Medal of Honor. Across the Hill’s lovely old park Earl Warren, the rightists’ Public Enemy No. 2, issued a blunt indictment of the apostles of hate.6 Senators Mansfield, Bible, and Byrd were in deep shock. At 3:48 David Brinkley noted that people were weeping freely on Nebraska Avenue. In the White House Hubert Humphrey was stumbling from one White House policeman to another, wringing hands and embracing them. Already a crowd had gathered across the street in Lafayette Park. No one knew what the men and women there expected. They didn’t know themselves; reporters found them incapable of speech. They kept peering anxiously at the mansion’s North Portico as though hoping to see the President emerge, smile, and wave.
Speed explained much of the response. The panorama of events whirled faster and faster; Friday afternoon was like one of those Pete Smith movie features of the 1930’s in which trick photographers trebled, quintupled, and then sextupled the movements of celluloid figures. Everywhere, everything was continuing to happen at once. Less than a minute after Angel’s wheels had left Love, while Colonel Swindal was still adjusting flaps and dive brakes, the Russian radio was playing funeral music, the House of Commons had adjourned, and Prime Minister Lester Pearson was finishing a nationwide broadcast to Canada eulogizing the President. Before Air Force One reached the Mississippi all Ireland was in prayer. As the Colonel passed Mammoth Cave National Park formal statements had been issued by President Hoover, President Eisenhower, Governor Rockefeller, Winston Churchill, and Pope Paul VI, and as the swept-back 707 wings swooped high over the dark craggy mass of West Virginia, where Senator John F. Kennedy had nailed down the Democratic nomination nearly four years before, the eight-year-old daughter of K. O. Mbadiwe, Nigeria’s Minister of State, was reciting Kennedy’s entire inaugural address to him from memory (he slumped, in tears), and Mayor Willy Brandt was asking his burghers to light candles in their windows that evening. The Berliners did more. “Ich bin ein Berliner,” Kennedy had told them, and they remembered. Down the narrow streets wound dense formations of youths holding blazing torches high against the night.
That was reflexive, and its spontaneity was moving. In Washington something else was required: competence and calm judgment. Some men wer
e incapable of it. On the Constitution Avenue side of the Justice Department Barney Ross sat in a stupor. Over an hour passed. Then he roused himself and called his home in Bethesda. His sixteen-year-old daughter answered, sobbing; the family had been trying to reach him, she said, but all the telephones seemed to have broken down at once. They wanted him with them. He mumbled that he understood, sat immobile for another hour, took the elevator to the street, bought a newspaper, read every story carefully, and boarded a No. 32 bus. All the way home he kept remembering that other ride twenty years before, when Lieutenant Kennedy had brought him through the Japanese lines to safety. But most key individuals and institutions stood the strain well. The Watch Committee was alert. The Pentagon was ready. The subcabinet was engrossed in its tasks. The President’s burial site had not yet been selected, but on a hunch Superintendent Jack Metzler of Arlington National Cemetery called for his file on state funerals—the most recent had been for the Unknown Soldiers of World War II and Korea. At Fort McNair the Military District of Washington was also alert, calling in police, State Department, and Navy liaison officers, though MDW’s high state of efficiency was largely luck. Herbert Hoover had been ill, and on September 9 a command post exercise (CPX) had guaranteed readiness in the event of his sudden death.7
Angie Biddle Duke, Chief of Protocol, was performing well. The crux of his difficulty, and that of everyone in the upper echelons of government, was that he didn’t know to whom they were all answerable. The Presidency is a very personal office. From a distance it tends to merge with the entire Executive Branch; its powers seem to be divided among the faceless members of a team. In crises this comforts those who feel that anonymity suggests impersonal precision. They delude themselves. The most vivid perception of those who have been close to a Chief Executive is of the man’s solitude. It cannot be otherwise. He and his understudy are the sole men for whom we all vote; without a President there could be no United States. On Friday Duke knew only that the President was dead. He hadn’t thought beyond that and didn’t even know whom to talk to. Legally the men in power were the former Vice President’s aides, but they themselves didn’t want that. Indeed, they weren’t prepared for it. George Reedy called Walter Jenkins, who suggested they meet in Jack McNally’s White House office. Reedy and Willie Day Taylor of Johnson’s staff drove down Pennsylvania Avenue in Johnson’s white Lincoln. They didn’t know where to park, so Willie Day continued on to the Cathedral to look after Lucy Baines Johnson. Inside the mansion, Reedy realized that he had no idea where McNally’s office was. In the west basement he asked directions and was led to the East Wing, where he found Jenkins in a meeting of Kennedy aides. The two of them sat in silence. Reedy was conscious of “some strain between the two groups, the Kennedy group and the Johnson group.… Walter and I felt like intruders. We had the authority, I guess, but we lacked the know-how. In practice we ratified the decisions made by Kennedy men.”
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