The Death of a President

by William Manchester

  Schlesinger, who was writing more than he was tacking, noted: “It is now twenty minutes to two. The casket will arrive at the White House around 3:30.” He overheard “forlorn scraps of conversation” about “the rooms in which we had had such happy times, filled with memory and melancholy.” The estimated time of arrival was then changed from 4 to 4:30. That proved correct, though down in the theater the rehearsing Death Watch received the news with soldierly skepticism, and those upstairs were too busy to give it much thought. Between crepe-looping sessions they were dealing with artifacts. Considering the protean group and its lack of experience with funerals, there was remarkably little discussion. Most were intimidated by Walton and Shriver. Walton was the New Frontier’s artist-without-portfolio. And Shriver had his own notions about taste. He frowned down at the monstrous East Room piano, which was designed by Franklin Roosevelt and which looks rather like a Byzantine altar. “We’ll move it,” he said briskly. The men around him sagged. It was a Herculean job—what was really needed was a crane—but groaning and perspiring they somehow managed it.

  The catafalque replica, which had been arriving in pieces since midnight, was uncrated and erected. It should have been majestic. It looked barren. Accouterments were needed. Lincoln had had them; they must be provided for Kennedy. Walton thought first of flowers, and pointing to one of Jacqueline Kennedy’s East Room urns he told West, “Fill it with magnolia leaves.” West said he hadn’t any. “Yes, you do,” Walton said. “Cut them off Andy Jackson’s trees, they’ll grow back.” Two men from Gawler’s arrived, bearing various objects. Walton, a Mitford reader, gave them a walleyed stare. Two prie-dieux were accepted. The rest—rich satin backgrounds, ornate candlesticks, a five-foot cross of natural wood—was immediately rejected. Walton studied them and then said quietly, “Well, it’s just hideous, Sarge.” Sarge agreed that it was pretty bad, and the undertakers crept out.

  Candlesticks fetched from St. Matthew’s turned out to be even worse than the undertakers’, and while wooden sticks from St. Steven’s were presentable and were adopted, a crucifix from the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, a gold Saviour affixed to a silver cross, was so dreadful that Walton began to wonder whether they needed any cross at all. He checked the Lincoln engraving. A crucifix was clearly visible. Furthermore, it had lain at the foot of the bier; it would be conspicuous to every visitor. “Doesn’t anyone have one that would fit?” he asked in despair. “I’ll get mine,” said Shriver. He dispatched a White House car to his home in Maryland, and his secretary, who had been watching the Shriver children, gave the driver the Benedictine cross from his bedroom—black, hand-sculpted, with a realistic, Germanic figure. “Perfect,” said Walton when he saw it. “It could have been ordered for the occasion.”

  Sarge walked out to the portico with Goodwin, West, and Dr. English. Across Pennsylvania Avenue the huge, eerie crowd was milling about. They would never see the crepe-bordered East Room, Shriver thought, and the occasion should be made memorable for them, too. Remembering White House parties when the President and Mrs. Kennedy had had the grounds lit with little flaming pots, he called a council of the military men present. “This funeral for a President is going to vary a little bit from the manual,” he said. “I know he isn’t really coming home, but I want it to look that way.” He explained the need for light. They replied that they had none. “None?” Sarge repeated sarcastically. “Not even flashlights?” Hurt, one officer suggested helicopter lights. “Ridiculous,” Shriver fumed, and telephoned the District Highway Department. He recalled seeing tiny flambeaux set out to warn night drivers of highway construction. They weren’t used any more, he was told. The department had been completely converted to electrical equipment. He hung up, abandoning hope. But the old equipment had not been discarded. The right warehouse was located, the man with the key was found, and at 3:30 A.M. pots were situated on either side of the entrance drive and ignited.

  Meantime Shriver had turned to the door. It was one of his greatest problems, and he never completely solved it. The entrance to the mansion was handsome. Unfortunately it was obscured by a storm door and framework; both were aluminum, which seemed to him to be cold and ugly. Bill Walton agreed. He further pointed out that in the event that the coffin should be cumbersome, the storm door might not be wide enough for it. Sarge waved his arm. “Take it off,” he said. The mansion staff huddled. The answer came back to him: “It won’t come off.” Sarge glowered at them. “Goddamn it, I was in the Merchandise Mart and I know it will come off,” he said. He was partly right. The three-sided glass enclosure could be dismantled, and West supervised its removal. But the frame was embedded in concrete. It had to stay. Lawrence Arata and his wife mounted stepladders and tacked crepe around it, and nobody noticed the frame. Shriver and Walton thought it was gone.

  Among them they had created a scene of indescribable drama: the flame-lit drive, the deep black against the white columns, the shrouded doorway, the East Room in deep mourning, the catafalque ready to receive the coffin. There was only one omission, and Shriver was now free to concentrate on it. He said to Shepard, “All right, where are they?”

  He didn’t identify them. It was unnecessary. Shepard spread his hands. He just didn’t know.

  “The President of the United States is going to be here any minute,” Sarge said flintily, “and there’s nobody to meet him. Goddamn it, Taz, we want some soldiers or sailors who will walk slowly and escort him to the door, reflecting the solemnity of the occasion.”

  “Get the Marines,” Dean Markham suggested. Markham had served in the Marine Corps in World War II, and he knew that the Corps’s crack drill teams were garrisoned at Eighth and I streets, southeast of the Capitol.

  Colonel Miller thought it was an excellent idea. “That’s closer than any Army or Navy post,” he said. “I’ll send a bus.”

  Shepard phoned the barracks’ duty officer. Under pressure himself, he spoke with exceptional force: “Break out the Marines. The Commander in Chief has been assassinated, and I want a squad at the White House double-quick. You better move!”

  They moved. At the time of Shepard’s call they were in their bunks. Exactly seventeen minutes later they appeared on the South Portico in immaculate dress blues, each man trailing a glossy rifle at order arms. The entire squad had dressed in the bus. Unquestionably the men of any other service would have responded eagerly, but the selection of the leathernecks was particularly fitting for two reasons. Thomas Jefferson had ordered the construction of the barracks at Eighth and I, but John Kennedy had been the first President to inspect them. The Marines remembered that. They remembered something else. Every one of them knew where Lee Harvey Oswald had learned to shoot.

  Double-timing through the Diplomatic Reception Room, the squad appeared on the North Portico. Under his breath Shriver said to English, “They made it.”

  Their officer, First Lieutenant William Lee, formed them in ranks, dressed the ranks, and then strutted them down the drive toward the gate. At mid-point he ordered a halt and began speaking to them in a low voice. From the mansion it was inaudible, and after the vexing delay those on the portico were afraid the squad might be lost. Shriver squinted toward the gate. In the flickering torchlight he had an indistinct impression of glittering brass buttons, buffed shoes, choker collars, and visored white caps. Lieutenant Lee’s sword shimmered, but the comforting thump of boots had stopped; they were making no sound at all.

  “Where’s he taking them?” Goodwin asked uneasily. “What are they doing?”

  A voice behind him said, “They’re bowing their heads.”

  Lieutenant Bird’s pallbearers saluted the flag-draped coffin, and Dr. Burkley headed for the seventeenth floor. Ethel and Jean, roused by light knocks, remained in the background with Burkley and McNamara while Jacqueline Kennedy and the President’s brother headed the group from the tower suite. Mrs. Kennedy was uncertain about their destination; she was under the impression that they would go to another room and wait there—that ha
d been the pattern for fourteen hours. Instead, it seemed, they were going to walk awhile. Leaving the elevator on the third floor, she followed the bobbing hat of a naval officer for nearly two hundred strides over seemingly endless stretches of rolling, red-tiled corridor to a second, push-button lift which carried them down to the basement. The hat bobbed to the right, past an out-patient clinic, left beneath a sign flashing physicians’ call numbers, and then she saw the flag outside the morgue and knew they were really going home now.

  The purpose of the long trip had been to shield her from photographers. The cameramen were undeceived. They had scouted every exit and spotted the ambulance parked beside Gawler’s hearse. She saw them beyond the concrete platform, dim figures prancing behind ropes, and again she murmured to Clint Hill, “Don’t keep them away. Let them see.” They didn’t see. Everything happened too quickly. The coffin slid in; she sat on the jump seat beside it; Robert Kennedy crouched on the floor, and at 3:56 A.M. Clint told Bill Greer to pull out. Greer followed General Wehle’s staff car in a rapid tour of the hospital grounds, back out the main gate, and down Wisconsin to Massachusetts.

  It was the smallest hour of the morning. Hardly anyone spoke. Everything had been said, and they were exhausted. Bob Kennedy saw that they were passing Gawler’s and remembered that the new coffin had come from there, but he remained mute. So did his wife, in the car behind the ambulance, though Ethel looked sideways at McNamara and wondered “what his philosophy could be, what made him strong and sympathetic like Bobby.” Except for the red roof light on the staff car, the cavalcade did not announce itself. Nevertheless the silent witnesses were there. Wehle, McHugh, Dave Hackett, and Lieutenant Bird looked out wearily and saw men in denim standing at attention beside cars halted at intersections, and in all-night filling stations attendants were facing the ambulance, their caps over their hearts. To Hackett this hushed trip back to the mansion was the most moving moment of the weekend, because the roughly dressed workmen heading for the 5 A.M. shift, the attendants and the bareheaded Negroes on the sidewalks were, he thought, “the people the President had been working for hardest.” They knew it, and they were here. And although traffic was thinnest at this time of day, a tremendous escort had sprung to life. The casket team rode in the last car of the procession. Yet as they turned off Massachusetts at Twentieth Street, Lieutenant Bird looked back up embassy row and saw “hundreds of automobiles following us, bumper to bumper as far back as the eye could see, their headlights flashing.”

  In Lafayette Park the naked elms and beeches above the crowd there glistened with dew and stirred faintly in a southerly breeze as the General turned off his roof light. He radioed a brief report to the rest of the cars that they were entering the Northwest Gate and slowing down to pick up an honor guard of Marines. The report couldn’t reach the rear of the ambulance. Mrs. Kennedy heard “a slow clank-clanking” outside. The Attorney General thought he could hear the roll of drums, and perhaps the distant strains of music. In reality there was only Lieutenant Lee’s squad, moving ahead at port arms, in flawless formation, in that heartbreaking cadence of mourning which the Marine Corps learned at the turn of the century.

  The two chief mourners stepped out; Shriver silently clasped their hands. The casket team moved up to the ambulance. Normally the officer commanding military body bearers does not touch the coffin, because he would throw it off balance, but on the portico steps Lieutenant Bird’s six men began to lurch alarmingly. Stepping up swiftly, he slid his fingers beneath the coffin and felt a wrenching strain in his arms. The soldier in front of him rolled his eyes back and whispered, “Good God, don’t let go,” and the seven of them carried it across the marble hall, into the East Room, onto the catafalque. Maître Fincklin and a doorman lit the tall candles. The hands of both Negroes were trembling violently, and in attempting to ignite the fourth taper the doorman extinguished his torch and had to begin again. Bill Walton handed a sheaf of flowers to Godfrey McHugh, who laid them against the coffin. McHugh did the job awkwardly, but Walton decided that rearrangement could wait. He tiptoed away; he was anxious not to intrude upon the family’s grief. Everyone who had joined in the redecoration felt that way. They bunched together on the south side of the room, from time to time looking at the casket almost furtively. Among them was Pierre Salinger, who wrote: “Our Chief was home. And for the first time since I peered at the yellow piece of paper in the hand of the Secretary of State, I began to believe he was really dead.”

  Standing in the doorway of the elegant room she had loved, whose history she knew so well, and which she had last left at the height of Wednesday’s judiciary reception, the widowed First Lady recognized the tallest of the men—gaunt, pocked Chuck Spalding. Their eyes met. During that fleeting exchange she saw the harrowed lines of suffering in his face and thought of Abraham Lincoln; Spalding himself thought “of all the things planned for, all the things fought for, all the things achieved, all the things to do, all the things so suddenly lost.”

  “A priest said a few words,” Schlesinger noted. It was a brief blessing. Those at the far end of the chamber could not hear it. Father John Kuhn of St. Matthew’s was reading the De Profundis, Psalm 130:

  Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord; Lord, hear my voice!…

  My soul waits for the Lord more than sentinels wait for the dawn.…

  For with the Lord is kindness and with Him is plenteous redemption;

  And He will redeem Israel from all their iniquities.

  To the widow the blessing, like the yards of exquisitely folded crepe, was supremely appropriate. She had been through so much that was sordid and tawdry since her departure from the mansion. Now she knew she was home. Kneeling by the veterans’ flag, she buried her face in the field of stars.

  “Then she walked away,” Schlesinger wrote. “The rest of us followed.”

  They trooped out to the hall. She mounted the stairway to the second floor, and they stood about uncertainly, awaiting some instruction from the Attorney General. Bob had one. During their moments together beside the catafalque he had whispered to Jackie that he would settle the coffin issue before retiring. To do that, however, he must return to the East Room and ask that the lid be raised for him. While Lieutenant Sawtelle’s Death Watch ceremoniously relieved Lieutenant Bird’s body bearers, the top was lifted and cocked open on its small hinge by Godfrey McHugh or Joe Gawler. Either could have done it; each recalls it; the recollection of neither is persuasive. Gawler remembers a conference by the bier between Robert Kennedy and Eunice Shriver, who was, of course, in Hyannis Port. McHugh’s memory is more circumstantial, but in his mind the incident seems to have blurred together with an almost identical scene Sunday, when Jacqueline Kennedy was present. It was really not a time of clarity. Her spontaneous gesture with the bunting had shattered them all.

  The President’s brother requested that the servicemen withdraw from the catafalque, and approached it alone. It was the first time he had seen the body. He made up his mind then: Jackie had been right. Yet it couldn’t be entirely a personal decision. McNamara’s argument still carried force. John Kennedy had been a husband and a Kennedy, but he had also been the American Chief of State, and others who had been close to him—including O’Donnell and O’Brien—felt a sealed top was improper. Therefore Bob Kennedy solicited several opinions. Emerging into the hall, his cheeks damp, he requested those who were waiting there to go in and return with their impressions. He explained, “Jackie wants it covered.”

  Perhaps this was leading them. Had he not indicated her preference, the results might have been different. This is possible, though hardly probable, for the Secretary of Defense came out a minority of one. Indeed, of those who entered—McNamara, Schlesinger, Spalding, Walton, Nancy Tuckerman, Frank Morrissey, and Dr. English—only the doctor and the Secretary considered the President presentable. English said he was opposed to an open coffin on principle, but was “surprised that his appearance was as good as it was, that he looked well.” He merely wonde
red why the President’s body was “tilted somewhat to the right, if that was because of the shell and what it had done.” (Actually, tilting is standard undertaking practice. In “casketing,” to quote a trade journal, “natural expression formers” should always “turn the body a bit to the right and soften the appearance of lying flat on the back.” This avoids “the impression that the body is in a box.”)

  The verdict of the others was vehement, and because they knew Robert Kennedy’s tough fiber, they did not soften it. Arthur Schlesinger and Nancy Tuckerman went in through the Green Room. “It is appalling,” Arthur reported. “At first glance it seemed all right, but I am nearsighted. When I came closer it looked less and less like him. It is too waxen, too made-up.” Nancy echoed faintly, “It really is not like him.” Spalding said bluntly that the face resembled “the rubber masks stores sell as novelties.” He urged Bob to “close the casket.”

  His eyes full, the Attorney General turned to Bill Walton and whispered, “Please look. I want to know what you think.” Walton looked as long as he could, with a growing sense of outrage. He said to Bob, “You mustn’t keep it open. It has no resemblance to the President. It’s a wax dummy.”

  Schlesinger, anticipating questions about a Head of State—the McNamara argument—assured Kennedy he would be acting on the best of precedents. The Roosevelt coffin had been closed.

  “Don’t do it,” Walton pleaded.