The Death of a President

by William Manchester

  Now, as at Parkland six hours earlier, men with jobs were lucky. Under Secretary Johnson presided all night over a State Department task force assembling scraps of data about Oswald (a scene he would have relished). At Gawler’s the Death Watch rehearsals continued with an innovation; their commander, First Lieutenant Donald W. Sawtelle, had been informed that Mrs. Kennedy wanted members of the honor guard to stand with their backs to the coffin. It couldn’t be done. The watch was silent; the enlisted men moved on visual signals. They had to be stationed so that they could see the officer in charge out of the corner of their eyes. But trying it was something to do, and Sawtelle persisted. In the basement of the EOB Joe Giordano and Boots Miller furled and refurled Kennedy’s Presidential flag before storing it with his seal of office in Room 89½; then they went to work on his silk American flag, carefully adjusting each fold. Chief Rowley assembled his Texas agents in the White House staff mess. He grilled them individually and issued an order that they and the men still on duty with Johnson or with Kennedy’s body must submit detailed reports before leaving for home. In the mansion Charles Fincklin told his six butlers that in view of Mrs. Kennedy’s uncertain plans they would all remain on duty throughout tonight and tomorrow. The staff would pass the time by making sandwiches. He hadn’t counted on the servants’ eagerness. By 9 P.M., when Sawtelle transferred his command post from Gawler’s to the White House, all available space in the State Dining Room was covered with towering platters, and tables were being cleared in the President’s theater downstairs for more of them.

  Again, as in the hospital, some of those without work invented it. Policemen couldn’t sit idle, so they crisscrossed the capital in tight motorcycle formations, and it became a quite ordinary thing to see these grim V’s of helmeted men roaring aimlessly across the city. The firehouses continued to scream. Even in Georgetown, normally so quiet, one heard their banshees till dawn; had there been a real fire, one felt, every unit in the District, southern Maryland, and northern Virginia would have responded pell-mell. The writers wrote. In Schlesinger’s office he and Ken Galbraith drafted separate letters to Mrs. Kennedy. Galbraith’s note was brief but poignant in its pledge of devotion.

  Schlesinger’s was longer, and almost illegible:

  Friday evening

  Dearest Jackie:

  Nothing I can say can mitigate the shame and horror of this day. Your husband was the most brilliant, able and inspiring member of my generation. He was the one man to whom this country could confide its destiny with confidence and hope. He animated everything he did with passion and gaiety and wit. To have known him and worked with and for him is the most fulfilling experience I have ever had or could imagine—

  Dearest Jackie, the love and grief of a nation may do something to suggest the feeling of terrible vacancy and despair we all feel. Marian and my weeping children join me in sending you our profoundest love and sympathy. I know that you will let me know when I can do anything to help.

  With abiding love

  Arthur

  Others drank, and learned what those who had been aboard the Presidential aircraft could have told them: there were no intoxicants on November 22. Pat Moynihan and a friend split a fifth of whiskey. Their senses remained undulled; they examined the label with astonishment. Jim Swindal pushed aside a glass at Andrews, telephoned his wife in Falls Church and encountered another aspect of the assassination: the countless women who had loved Kennedy from a distance were inconsolable. The Colonel’s wife was among the few who had met him. A Stoughton photograph of her with the President was her most treasured possession, and she was hysterical. So was Marie Fehmer; so was Marie Harriman. Mrs. Harriman was valiantly trying to serve as hostess to a brilliant group of guests which was headed by Adlai Stevenson and which later included Schlesinger and Galbraith, but she wasn’t up to it. In the thirty-three years of their marriage Harriman had never seen her so upset. His wife was caught up in a terrible, vindictive rage. She had been one of those who had dreaded the Dallas Right, and now she was beyond comfort.

  Many men who had thought themselves at loose ends became busy answering telephones. The chief telephoner was the new Chief Executive. The Johnsonian era had begun. With the two White House switchboards at his disposal he found fulfillment; one hand was wrapped around the receiver in a stranglehold—no one has succeeded in covering so many inches of plastic—while the other played deftly over the colorless buttons of the Signals console. Two of the men he reached Friday evening were Arthur Goldberg and Ted Sorensen. Justice Goldberg’s home phone rang at 9 P.M. The President had recognized him at Andrews; he asked why Goldberg hadn’t come forward to shake his hand. The justice explained that he had gone to meet the coffin of President Kennedy. He agreed to come to Johnson’s office tomorrow for a further talk. Sorensen heard from the President at approximately 9:30, just as he was finishing dinner. Like Goldberg, Sorensen was asked to call tomorrow. Automatically Ted replied, “Yes, Mr. President.” Then the implications of what he had just said reached him. He would never call John Kennedy “Mr. President” again. He replaced the receiver and collapsed.

  Lyndon Johnson was perhaps the most active telephoner in the city, which is saying a lot, because Chesapeake & Potomac records indicate voluminous activity in every exchange. These were the hours when long-distance dialing began to climb steeply. Congressmen were especially in demand; their constituents were calling them. The Texans were out of action, knocked out by exhaustion. After long-distance conversations of their own, to relatives, they went to bed and sank into a deep sleep from which they could not be roused. Any Senator or Representative in the buildings flanking the Capitol was almost certain to hear from home, however. He would find himself listening to members of his party, of the opposition; even to foreigners who felt a compelling need to speak to someone in public life.

  Hubert Humphrey had the impression that he had half the state of Minnesota on the line. After discussing Lyndon Johnson with George Smathers (who “thought I was going to be needed very much by the President”) Humphrey went to his desk in Suite 1313 of the New Senate Office Building. He felt forsaken. Then the ringing began. The callers were

  people who merely wanted to tell me how sorry they were… plain people who would weep over the telephone. I recall one particular phone call from a Minneapolis or St. Paul cab driver who had just finished work, and he wanted to tell me that his whole family wanted to be remembered to… Mrs. Kennedy and the children and how sorry they were that they had lost their great friend President Kennedy. That was characteristic of all the calls. Not a single one was anything but filled with sorrow and sympathy and understanding. How wonderful it is that the people of the country felt so close to the President.

  Reaching Senators was relatively easy. Barney Ross was obscure. Nevertheless he heard from two former crewmen of PT 109, one in Louisiana and one in New Hampshire. Twenty years after their shipwreck they remembered the young officer who had rescued them, and they wanted Barney, the other officer who had been aboard, to know that they were on their way to the funeral. Fitful, Barney herded his wife and children into the car and drove slowly around Bethesda, observing the crowd. The Rosses thus joined the capital’s army of roamers—those who had gathered at Andrews Field or outside the hospital or in Lafayette Park, who went to the office or explored strange taverns, who walked the streets. Humphrey abandoned his suite and showed up on three network broadcasts. Sorensen had encountered Burkley’s chief petty officer in the West Wing. “Did he suffer?” he asked. Chief Hendrix assured him that the President couldn’t have felt anything; death had been instantaneous. Ted nodded silently and wandered off, winding up in his brother’s apartment. The wife of the French Ambassador paced West Executive Avenue with her husband in tow. Hervé Alphand had come reluctantly. It was against his professional intuition; he never came to the President’s residence unless formally invited. But Nicole was adamant. She must be at Jackie’s side, she insisted, and she gave up only after Taz Shepard, on his way to
brief Johnson in the EOB, told her Mrs. Kennedy was remaining at the hospital with the President’s body. At about the same time there was a flurry of activity on the opposite side of the mansion; a car was stuck in the middle of East Executive Avenue. Behind the wheel was Ed Guthman. A writer, like Schlesinger and Galbraith, he had been trying to set down his impressions of the day in his Justice Department office, and had just quit. The language had never seemed so inadequate. So now he was here. Anything odd in that sensitive neighborhood stirred suspicion Friday evening, but the explanation was embarrassingly simple. Guthman’s car was out of gas.

  The legitimate workers, those who invented busy work, the telephoners and writers and wanderers, were a minority. The majority maintained its television vigil, and late in the evening their new President rejoined them. Leaving George Reedy to prepare tomorrow’s agenda, Johnson raced out MacArthur Boulevard to Spring Valley with Moyers, Valenti, Cliff Carter, and Horace Busby, a former Texas newspaperman who subsequently joined his staff. Behind the wrought-iron gates of the Elms, patrolled by agents with shotguns, the President restlessly strode from set to set. Lady Bird came down to the terrace and sat beside her husband for a while. Then Busby left and everyone else trooped up to the master bedroom and studied the screen. Their comments were sporadic. Once the President said softly of Mrs. Kennedy, “At a time when we showed the world our seamy, ugly side, she revealed and symbolized our nobler side. We should always be grateful to her.” But most of the time he just looked. Later Valenti recalled that the networks “were re-enacting scenes of Dallas and of Texas, and of the world-wide reaction to the assassination; they would show the parade and the motorcade and then they would show films of John Kennedy making statements and speeches in the past. Lyndon Johnson watched this with interest.”

  Eventually the man of the house turned off the light, and the conversation continued in the dark until he fell asleep. His three aides then tiptoed out. The first night of the Johnson administration was one of the few in which the President was not the most rapt viewer in the capital; many Washingtonians remained attentive through the night, switching from television to radio and back. The nonstop broadcasts of that weekend were to leave Americans with the feeling that news coverage could not have been more complete. Actually, it was random. Some of the most significant developments were deliberately (and wisely) concealed, and insignificant sidelights were ignored by the press, not because of their unimportance but because broadcasters were unaware of them. The public did not know, for example, that President Kennedy and Officer Tippit were not the only people killed in Dallas on November 22. At 10:40 that evening there was a third murder, unrelated to the others. The victim, a thirty-two-year-old woman, was stabbed to death by her lover. In police language he “picked up and grabbed a butcher knife and started cutting up on the deceased.” She was pronounced dead at Parkland.

  The arrival of the Kennedy party in Bethesda’s suite had set in motion a strange ritualistic dance. Groups formed, parted, and re-formed; partners were changed; speaking in metallic voices, the participants watched each other covertly and swiftly glided to the side of anyone who displayed signs of distress. Certain individuals detached themselves. Evelyn Lincoln sat on a window sill clutching the President’s worn black alligator briefcase, drifting in a private world of thought; Jean Smith, similarly withdrawn, stood off to one side; and Bob Kennedy was frequently on the telephone, talking to Officer Tippit’s widow, to Nellie Connally, to Lee Radziwill in London, to Shriver. Otherwise the drawing room ballet was continuous. Dave Powers had set the stage by ordering drinks, beer, and coffee. The hospital galley sent up sandwiches—thick, crusty cheese sandwiches, the antithesis of the dainty wafers which were traditional at the White House—and with these props the show went shakily on. At one point the Attorney General even ordered a record player. That was too much for Ben Bradlee. He protested. Kennedy looked around vacantly. “She’d like it,” he said, pointing at Toni, and instructed a yeoman to bring the music. Ben waited anxiously, but the yeoman did not return. Bob apparently forgot about it.

  In the danse macabre certain themes recurred. At one time or another nearly everyone present urged Mrs. Kennedy to change her clothes. To each such suggestion she shook her head tightly. Then it was felt that she ought to take a sedative, and attempts were made to enlist Captain Canada’s support. Here, too, she was inflexible, and Dr. John Walsh supported her. He said, “If she doesn’t want it, O.K. Leave her alone, let her talk herself out.” She was talking a great deal—he thought she was “on a talkathon.” To him she recounted her recollection of what had happened in the Presidential Lincoln. She told Ben and Toni the story of the ring at Parkland and recalled the death of Patrick. Always the two deaths were intertwined. For the country the assassination of the President stood alone; for her the two acts of the double tragedy were inseparable.

  All afternoon her mother had been afraid that she would feel a revulsion against the United States. Since the age of twelve Jackie had lived most of her life in the capital. Washington, Janet Auchincloss believed, was the proper home for her older daughter, and she wanted her grandchildren brought up as Americans. In the bedroom she said, “I hope you will never live any place but in this country, because Jack would want that.” Mrs. Kennedy looked amazed. She replied, “But of course. I’m going to live in Georgetown, where Jack and I were.”

  In Mrs. Auchincloss’ words, “Jackie knew how the President’s funeral should be, and there were no wrong notes in it.” At Bethesda the widow seemed to be conscious of her new responsibilities. She was, as she recalled afterward, “sort of keyed up in a strange way.” Seeing Pam Turnure in tears, she put her arms around her and said, “Poor Pam, what will become of you now?” She worried about all of them and worked at bracing their spirits, even those of Dave Powers, the professional jolly. “Do you know what we should have in the Kennedy Library?” she asked, smiling faintly. They waited cautiously. “A pool,” she said, “so Dave can give exhibitions of how he swam with the President.” Powers was delighted, and envious. He could not have done so well.

  The specters shifted partners, the brittle talk continued. Between calls the Attorney General reaffirmed to Ken O’Donnell and Larry O’Brien that he had not urged Johnson to take the oath on the plane. They exchanged wondering looks, not appreciating the possibility that Johnson may have wished to emphasize the continuity of the Presidency. It was one more piece of “senselessness,” which, to them, was the dominant theme of the tragedy. Throughout that weekend Mac Bundy could not get the German word “Unsinn”—“absurdity”—out of his head. Ken had much the same thing in mind when he asked those around him, over and over, “Why did it happen? What good did it do? All my life I’ve believed that something worthwhile comes out of everything, no matter how terrible it is. What good can come out of this?” The meaninglessness threatened the anchor of Ken’s faith.

  O’Donnell asked questions. Ethel Kennedy asked none. Ethel had lost both her parents in the crash of a private plane. Extreme Unction had been impossible. For a woman of her piety the raising of the faintest shadow of doubt would be disastrous. Therefore she did not inquire. She simply accepted. At 7:15 she arrived in the suite after an unpleasant ride—Dave Hackett had slowly driven her over in the Attorney General’s Cadillac, whose controls he didn’t understand, and at the gate a Bethesda guard had flashed a bright light in her face to identify her. Running up to the widow, she embraced her and cried, “Oh, Jackie!”

  Her sister-in-law told her she felt certain that the President had gone straight to heaven and “is just showering graces down on us.”

  “Oh, Ethel, I wish I could believe the way you do.” Then: “Bobby’s been so wonderful.”

  “He’ll always help you.”

  Really there was no option. The President’s widow and the new head of the Kennedy family had to make decisions jointly. With a single exception, which arose later in the evening, they were of one mind. They certainly never disagreed about the issue of
an undertaker. She repeated to him, “I don’t want Jack to go to any awful funeral home,” and he nodded vehemently.

  Sitting down, she faced Toni Bradlee across the round drawing room table.

  “Do you want to hear?”

  Toni had never wanted anything less. Still she assented. Like Bob Kennedy, she felt that what she wanted was irrelevant. And so she heard.

  “How can she do it?” whispered Ethel.

  “It’s her French blood,” Ben said. “She’s purging herself.”

  John Walsh said, “It’s the best way. Let her get rid of it if she can.”

  Shortly before 7:30 the Secretary of Defense reached the hospital. Bob Kennedy had talked to him at his home minutes after his return from the White House, and his arrival at the hospital was typical of McNamara; to the annoyance of Admiral Galloway and Captain Canada, who thought the Secretary should travel in an official limousine, with an escort, he drove a dark blue Galaxie, the last model manufactured by the Ford Motor Company before he resigned its presidency to come to Washington. He had bought it in October of 1960, he was proud of it, and he refused to be shunted into a gleaming Cadillac. Expecting to stop in for a few minutes, he left Mrs. McNamara in the front seat. Discovering that Mrs. Kennedy wanted him to stay, he rode down and reminded his wife that their thirteen-year-old son must be picked up at his Boy Scout meeting before 8:30. The Navy was speechless. No panoply, no color—he might as well have been an accountant. The McNamaras didn’t care; like Ethel Kennedy, Margie McNamara drove her own car pool shift, and she and her husband were active in civic activities and parent-teacher groups. To Ben Bradlee the Secretary’s very presence in the suite was electrifying: “After Bobby he was the second towering person there. There was no subterfuge in that man, no special smile; just naked strength. He was a man without guile, and it was that kind of occasion.”