Because her mind was still whirling Dr. Walsh gave her another half-gram injection of Amytal. Once more her constitution fought the drug. She had to talk to her brother-in-law again. Last night the prospect of an open coffin had tormented her; tonight she had to make sure its lid could be raised in private before they left for the Capitol. She sent for him and said, “I have to see Jack in the morning, I want to say good-bye to him—and I want to put something in the coffin.”
He understood. It was a secret of his strength, and a source of the special affection shared by those close to him, that he never asked them for reasons. If you were a relative or a friend, that was enough. He assumed you knew what you were doing, and the franker you were, the better he liked it. He jotted down their Sunday schedule for her and said, “I’ll come for you. We’ll go down there together.”
After he had gone Jacqueline Kennedy wrote her husband a letter. Later she was uncertain about the precise time of composition. Medication and accumulated sleeplessness had blunted her perception, and the servants had drawn her drapes in the southwest corner of the Presidential apartment so tightly that it was impossible to distinguish daylight from night. In her darkened room, she wrote her final impassioned letter, filling page after page. Then she folded the pages and sealed the envelope.
Nine
PASSION
Sunday, November 24, 1963, was, among other things, the day upon which President Kennedy’s gun carriage was to be drawn up Pennsylvania Avenue to the great rotunda of the Capitol, where the first formal tributes were to be delivered. Except for her rapid descent from Aircraft 26000 on Andrews Field’s truck lift at 6:06 P.M. Friday, it would be Mrs. Kennedy’s first public appearance since the assassination, and her two children would stand with her before the national audience. Sunday was to be the second full day of the thirty-sixth President’s administration; it would mark the arrival at Dulles and Washington National airports of the eminent funeral guests; it would provide final opportunities for the Shriver-Dungan planners, who would finally be joined by Richard Cardinal Cushing and Auxiliary Bishop Philip N. Hannan; and it would be the first of two consecutive days in which a martyred President would be consecrated as a national hero. All this had been envisioned the evening before. It was not a predictable weekend, however, and the day’s most memorable events were to be entirely impulsive: a gesture by the widow, a massive invasion of the U.S. capital by the bereft American people, and television’s first live killing.
The weather had cleared. Robert Kennedy, peering out from a second-floor mansion window, saw a mild, flawless sky; he glanced down and was surprised at the size of the crowd in Lafayette Park. The mute witnesses were maintaining their vigil. Their identity was as striking as their mass. Usually Pennsylvania Avenue’s sightseers are faceless, camera-hung anonymities: tourists, curious travelers passing through, high school seniors in chartered buses. This morning the park’s spectators included Washingtonians accustomed to hand-lettered White House invitations—Dean Acheson; and Mr. and Mrs. John W. Macy, Jr.; and Bill Walton and his son who, like so many other Harvard students, had driven nonstop to be here. At 9:06 A.M. Merrill Mueller became the first commentator to point out a phenomenon which became increasingly evident: a clear majority of the weekend immigrants appeared to be in their early twenties. John Kennedy had been forty-six years old, but the youths beneath the almost leafless trees regarded him as the leader of their generation.
During the night the state of the nation had remained unchanged. Sunday morning 10 percent of America’s local stations began slipping in spot commercials (the suspension, auditors had told the networks, would cost nearly forty million dollars), and the switchboards of the thrifty were jammed with indignant calls. In a wealthy Long Island suburb a twenty-four-year-old English teacher who had told her class Friday that “the country will probably be better” was informed that she faced summary dismissal. The public was intolerant, apprehensive, anxious, and united in its yearning to carry some share of the national burden. Political partisanship had vanished. On his Gettysburg farm Dwight Eisenhower rose early to prepare a memorandum of recommendations which President Johnson had requested. At 6:30 A.M., a half-hour before daybreak, Earl Warren groped for a box of sharpened pencils which his wife always kept by his bed. Six hours later he had a version, and though like Mike Mansfield he was unhappy with it, Mrs. Warren typed it up for him. For once the Chief Justice had had no time for Sunday newspapers; for once his countrymen had time for little else. Spent, haggard, and drawn, the stubble beginning to show on men’s faces, Americans scanned the headlines with bloodshot eyes. After two unbelievable days the national audience was virtually shockproof. Friday and Saturday had left people jaded. Only an event of extraordinary magnitude would stir the disheveled viewers slumped in front of television sets. They were too tired to do more than gape.
The bright-eyed exception, once more, was Lee Oswald. His undisturbed sleep went unmentioned at the time. (It was one of the few tidbits about him which were not reported.) The policemen guarding the jail’s three maximum-security cells didn’t think it remarkable, and there is little reason to believe that those outside would have drawn a different conclusion. Yet in retrospect his phlegm is singular. According to the NORC study, over fifty million men and women were suffering from insomnia, but for the second night in a row the man responsible for it enjoyed an untroubled slumber. To be sure, his rest had been threatened by few disturbances. Accounts that he was subjected to police brutality (these were widely credited in France) are preposterous. The opposite is true. He was not only unmolested; he was frequently ignored. During the whole of Saturday he had actually been interrogated less than three hours. Under local law a suspect accused of a felony had to be moved to the county prison twelve blocks away on Dealey Plaza, between the Book Depository warehouse and the bronze, businesslike father image of the Dallas News’s publisher, but Oswald’s repose wasn’t interrupted for that either. Chief Curry had assured the television technicians that he planned to make a real production out of the transfer. They could count on setting up their intricate equipment at ten o’clock Sunday morning—eleven o’clock in Washington, when, by coincidence, the Kennedy family would celebrate its last private Mass for the President in the East Room.
Except for his abortive attempt to telephone Marina and his frenzied moments on camera, when he had resembled a front-runner at a political convention, Oswald had been largely idle. The assassin was the one principal figure in the drama with time on his hands. He had been returned to his cot at 7:15 P.M. Saturday, and for the second night in a row he had given every evidence of being blessed with an untroubled conscience. On April 22, 1964, exactly five months after the assassination, Captain Will Fritz was to muse: “You know, I didn’t have any trouble with him.” The Captain’s ward might have returned the compliment. He had been deprived of Civil Liberties counsel, but he didn’t know that. It must have struck him as odd that for a captive who had been charged with the premeditated assassination of the President of the United States and the killing of a popular police officer—not to mention the wounding of the Governor of Texas, whose condition was still considered critical—he himself was having remarkably little trouble with cops.1 A scrupulous review of the records shows that he was never adequately grilled. Anyone familiar with police mentality knows that law enforcement officers interpret the law freely, and that it is an article of faith among them that a suspect is guilty until proven innocent. The case against the warehouse stock boy had been airtight within three hours of the murders, he had been in custody for forty-six hours, and he was being handled with conspicuous gentleness. The reasons are now transparent. If Oswald wasn’t concerned about his future, Big D’s civil leadership was. Appalled at the thought that the city’s reputation might be further marred, they were following their police chief’s investigation with the absorption of Argus watching Io, never dreaming that their solicitude might encourage vigilantism and thus provoke the very backlash they feared most.
That much is clear. What is less lucid, and what muddles all memories of those late autumn days, is the total incompatibility between the bravo’s last hours and the ritualistic splendor in the nation’s capital. As Robert Kennedy looked down on the quiet dignity of Lafayette Park’s standees, Forrest Sorrels of the Secret Service squinted through a pane on the third floor of the Dallas Police Department. He beheld a gaudily painted Edsel with a plugged .50 caliber machine gun mounted on the top. This monstrosity was parked on Commerce Street, and behind the wheel was a Dallas extrovert who advertised himself as “Honest Joe Goldstein, the Loan Ranger.” Sorrels’ sutler’s eyes lingered briefly on the mounted gun and swept on. He knew the exhibitionist as a rich, generous pawnbroker who fawned upon policemen and ingratiated himself to them by marking down price tags. Sorrels was unaware that one of Honest Joe’s best friends was named Jack Ruby. Had he been told, he would have thought the relationship irrelevant, which it really was. The significance of the scene lies in the fact that the world of the tawdry Edsel and the world of the Presidential gun carriage coexisted. The pairing of Dallas and Washington, like that of John Kennedy and Lee Oswald, is an affront, yet all were irrevocably joined in American history that weekend.
Probably any attempt to refurbish the city’s reputation was doomed. If the findings of poll takers are valid, over 27 million Americans had broadly indicted “the people of Dallas” for the crime; in Hyannis Port Rita Dallas had by now received so many crank calls because of her name that she asked the telephone company for an unlisted number. It would be a mistake to exaggerate that aspect of the drama, however. The same pollsters declared that 85 percent of the public wasn’t thinking about Texas at all, and in Washington chief participants in the coming ceremonies were preoccupied with their immediate obligations. Mike Mansfield and John McCormack were preparing an agenda of eulogies. Because of his seniority McCormack would speak last; Mansfield would be first. In the park across from Union Station an artillery battery had been chocked up, and to ensure prompt transmission of the word to commence firing the twenty-one-gun mourning salute a portable PRS-10 radio had been placed at a captain’s feet by the Capitol’s east steps. The Joint Chiefs of Staff had been issuing orders to one another; they would march up Pennsylvania Avenue in ranks of two. Seaman Nemuth was gingerly fingering the towering Presidential standard at the executive mansion. Lieutenant Bird had acquired a church truck to wheel the coffin from the catafalque in the East Room to the North Portico, where the caisson and Black Jack would be waiting, and Elmer Young, the White House florist, was working on wreaths for Jacqueline Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson.
They were to be the only garlands in the great rotunda. Bunny Mellon, stumbling over the thick cords of video cables which lay in the gutters like tropical growths, was greeted on the Hill by a delegation: the director of the U.S. Botanic Gardens, an Army officer who had been placed under her command, and the president of the Allied Florist Association of Greater Washington. The first two delighted her, the third cheerfully informed her that every flower shop in the United States was remaining open this Sunday to accommodate people who wished to send bouquets here. Since all networks had broadcasted the family’s appeal to omit flowers thirty-six hours earlier, this is puzzling. To Bunny it was appalling; she foresaw a deluge of blossoms descending upon the Capitol, and that, she knew, was the last thing Jacqueline Kennedy wanted. Fortunately, most of the tributes could be disregarded. For once constituents would have to nurse their hurt feelings. All the wreaths couldn’t be ignored, however. It would be a grave error to slight the diplomatic corps. Bunny’s solution was to bank their tokens in one of the marble halls adjacent to the rotunda entrance and to arrange those from states, lodges, veterans’ organizations, and women’s clubs in a similar chamber on the opposite side. No one would feel snubbed, yet Mrs. Kennedy needn’t see a single petal. Inspecting the scene, Bunny felt torn. It was grand but rather stark, and she murmured that she missed “something softening, something green flanking the doors as you come in.” Within minutes gardeners bearing bright palms arrived from the Botanic Gardens. Another of the weekend’s patterns was holding: the technicians, taking refuge in the rote of vocational skills, were performing superbly.
The President’s mother again attended seven and eight o’clock Masses at St. Francis Xavier; Cardinal Cushing presided over a pontifical Mass in Boston; and the last Kennedy White House Mass was held for close friends and members of the immediate family in the East Room. That service ought to have been memorable. It wasn’t. The ritual was almost exactly like yesterday’s, and the communicants had too much on their minds. The procession up Pennsylvania Avenue was now imminent. The Joint Chiefs were hoping they could keep in step; they were old men, and hard of hearing. Provi Parades was furtively removing the stained red rose from Mrs. Kennedy’s purse and putting it away for a calmer time. Bob Kennedy phoned the British Embassy, inviting David and Cissy Ormsby-Gore to come over for the day because “Jackie’s had another bad night.” Muggsy O’Leary couldn’t attend the Mass at all. The clothing President Kennedy had been wearing in Dallas had been stored in Bill Greer’s locker in the White House garage. Another agent told Muggsy that “Jackie wants a medal or something for the casket, and it’s in there.” Unfortunately Greer had the only locker key, and he was in his home off Maryland Route 50. Muggsy raced out there, picked him up, and delivered the key to Dr. Burkley at the mansion.
After the Mass Jacqueline Kennedy and her brother-in-law went straight to the Presidential apartment. Maude Shaw had just dressed the two children in their powder-blue coats and red lace-up shoes—the clothes they had worn Thursday, when their parents had left for Texas—and she was adding a black mourning band for Caroline’s hair when their mother entered the nursery with blue stationery. She told her daughter, “You must write a letter to Daddy and tell him how much you love him.” John was too little to write, so she asked him to mark his sheet as carefully as he could. It was, she said, to be a message for his father.
Holding a blue ball-point pen, Caroline wrote that they would all miss him and told him that she loved him very much. Then, holding John’s hand, Caroline helped him scribble up and down as best he could. It was wholly illegible, of course, but their mother, sitting on one of the little nursery chairs while Miss Shaw hovered over the children, saw that they were doing their best. Mrs. Kennedy had three envelopes now, theirs and her own; yet the letters weren’t enough. The impulse which had begun at Parkland when she had fastened her wedding ring to his finger had grown stronger. She had become obsessed by a yearning to leave something he had treasured with him. There were, she now remembered, two gifts from her that he had really loved. Before their marriage he had never been interested in men’s jewelry; if he had needed a pair of cufflinks for a formal shirt he would pick up a Swank set in a drugstore. As a young girl her own allowance had been rather small, and at the wedding she had given him a briefcase. A year later, however, she had seen a beautiful pair of inlaid gold links in a New York show window. The price was staggering—$800—but she had splurged. It had been her first really expensive present to him, and it was a great success; he had worn them on every possible occasion and displayed them with pride.
The second present had begun as a light gesture. During their second year in the White House she had read a newspaper story about a man who had carved a likeness of the President. The craftsman’s real specialty, the account went on, was scrimshaws—decorative articles carved from whalebone. She told Clint Hill it might be rather nice to have a scrimshaw bearing the Presidential seal. Clint found the man, and the result was an unexpected triumph. The man found an ancient bull whale’s tooth, set it in timbers from a New Bedford whaling ship, and spent 180 hours embellishing it with an ornate, early-nineteenth-century design of the seal. On Christmas 1962 Mrs. Kennedy had given it to her husband. That morning she had thought of it as “just a little present,” but he had been enchanted. From that day forward he had always kept it on the right-hand corner
of his desk, and remembering how much it had meant to him she had asked Evelyn Lincoln to send it up to her when they returned from Bethesda.
Bearing the letters, the links, and the scrimshaw, she descended to the first floor with the Attorney General, and at 12:34 the widow and Robert Kennedy entered the East Room.
Robert Kennedy had alerted Godfrey McHugh; the General met them at the threshold. Clint closed doors while Godfrey folded back the flag, unlatched the casket top, and glanced inside to be certain everything was all right. Closing it and replacing the field of stars, he ordered Lieutenant Sawtelle to march the Death Watch out. Jacqueline Kennedy heard him. She whispered to Bob, “No, they don’t have to leave the room. Even though we’re here, Jack would be so—” she groped for a word—“lonely. Just tell them to go to a far corner and turn their backs.” The joint services team had already started to withdraw; McHugh had refolded the flag and was propping the lid open on its hinge. The Attorney General spoke to the retreating honor guard. “I don’t want that,” he said quietly, and the Lieutenant halted his four men, ordered a left-face, and executed one himself. Flanked by Godfrey and Clint Hill, they faced the wall at attention.
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