The Death of a President

by William Manchester

  Adults in other limousines brooded or stared out moodily at the spectators, who moodily stared back. To Lieutenant Bird the stillness was almost unbearable: “As the guards along the curbs saluted the colors over the casket you could see the long faces of the people on the sidewalk, trying not to break down and failing over and over. One old man put his hand over his heart, and then his face screwed up and he clapped his other hand over his eyes.” Block by block the hush deepened. Sergeant Setterberg thought it “spooky.” General Clifton remembered one afternoon in 1944 when, driving ahead of combat troops in a jeep, he had alighted and found that he seemed to be the only man in Florence. For three hours he had walked clear across the abandoned city, yet it seemed to him that “there was more noise in Florence then than there was in Washington on this march. All you could hear was the drums and the clump of the horses.” Up ahead General Wehle heard “only the drums, the terrible drums”:

  Boom Boom Boom, Drrr

  Boom Boom Boom, Drrr…

  “Oh, Lyndon,” Mrs. Kennedy said suddenly, breaking for the first and last time her vow never again to call him by his first name, “what an awful way for you to come in.”

  The new President said nothing. Throughout the ride both he and Lady Bird were speechless. Robert Kennedy was also silent, comforting Caroline and watching Black Jack’s fearful writhing. After the incident of the gloves the President’s children were subdued, and to the best of everyone’s recollection, including Bill Greer behind the wheel and Jerry Behn beside him, Jacqueline Kennedy’s consoling remark was the only comment in the lead limousine.

  Because those in the procession were looking ahead to the Capitol, and because the networks’ pool cameras were trained on the marchers, neither the principals nor the national audience saw the most dramatic moment in the forty-minute cavalcade. According to the Shriver-Dungan plan, the last two units behind the gun carriage were to be the policemen and “[13] Other Mourners.” For eleven blocks the only walking pedestrians had been the correspondents. At Ninth and Pennsylvania, beside the FBI entrance to the Justice Building, this abruptly changed. The crowd which had been left behind surged into the street and pressed forward. The marching District policemen dropped out and, locking arms, formed a barrier across the street. It was pointless to follow the cortege, they shouted. Capitol Plaza was already packed solid. That was true, but reason was pointless here. It was like arguing with an incoming tide, for the entire area from Justice to the Treasury had become black with straining people. The mob was the quietest ever to break a police line, and the break was so quick and effortless that none of the riders up ahead suspected anything unusual. The spectacle was, in fact, spectacular; climbing the equestrian statue opposite the National Archives, three of the routed policemen attempted to estimate the size of the multitude. Their best guess was that John Kennedy was being followed by a hundred thousand “Other Mourners.”

  General Wehle led the caisson around the Senate side of the Capitol and halted it beneath the east steps. The chief mourners stood by the bottom step, awaiting the sounding of honors. To the north, in Union Station Park, an artillery battalion commander held one hand aloft and listened intently to his headset while a captain in Capitol Plaza told him to stand by. Nearby another officer shouted “Pre-sent!” As a rising wind fingered the casket flag the captain, allowing for a three-second echo delay, ordered “Fire!” In the next moment the other officer cried, “Arms!” the first shot of the twenty-one-gun salute thundered overhead, rifles were raised, stiff hands touched the bills of caps, and the first note of the Navy Band came through sweet and clear.

  The Band sounded ruffles and flourishes, and then, with the battery firing each five seconds:

  Hail to the Chief who in Triumph advances!

  Honor’d and bless’d be the evergreen pine.…

  For millions this was the breaking point. Even the tone-deaf knew there was something different about the Navy’s rendition. The Presidential march is usually a jaunty tune, played 120 beats to the minute. Now the country heard it as a dirge adagio, 86 beats to the minute, slower than a man’s heartbeat. Each soaring strain was drawn out tragically, and when the last measure had been played—as Lieutenant Bird’s casket team unbuckled the coffin and the wind-whipped flag—the band played in the same anguished measure the hymn which, to anyone who had been in naval service, was even harder to bear:

  Eternal Father, strong to save,

  Whose arm doth bind the restless wave,

  Who bidd’st the mighty ocean deep

  Its own appointed limits keep:

  O hear us when we cry to Thee

  For those in peril on the sea.

  And one man, a former seaman, heard another line:

  O God, protect the men who fly

  Through lonely ways beneath the sky.

  He stood a little apart, shoulders hunched, his hand worrying his hair, looking off in the distance, then down at young John. With Caroline and the President’s widow he moved slowly up the steps, just behind the struggling casket team. Robert Kennedy did not know they were struggling, and the watching nation had no inkling of it, but they were really going through excruciating torture. Each member of the reinforced, eight-man team was near panic, and their lieutenant, holding the rear, wasn’t at all sure they would not founder before they reached the top of that great marble mountain. Afterward the weight of President Kennedy’s coffin became a matter of dispute. The undertaker said it couldn’t possibly weigh more than five hundred pounds. The estimates of others ranged from nine hundred pounds to twelve hundred, but even the highest figure seemed absurdly low to the men who carried it, and since each of them was a veteran of over a thousand Arlington funerals their ordeal is inexplicable unless one assumes, as one must, that the answer lay within themselves.

  Behind them Seaman Ed Nemuth dipped the great Presidential standard forward and arched his back to counterbalance it; the tip just passed beneath the top of the portal. It was too heavy for the stand inside, so he held it, standing stiffly as the casket team eased the coffin on the deck of the original Lincoln catafalque. The honor guard filed in, and the circle of mourners was complete. Furtively they eyed one another for signs of approaching hysteria. The accumulation of sleeplessness, pills, and shock—culminating, for those who comprehended it, in the shooting of Oswald—was evident; Mac Kilduff had collapsed on the steps as the President’s children passed him, and the music had taken its toll on everyone. Jean Smith thought nothing could be harder to endure than “Hail to the Chief.” Both she and Eunice were anxious about their sister Pat, the most high-strung of the Kennedys. They stood nearby, ready to help her, while Pat herself watched her brother’s widow. If Jackie can do it, she thought, I can.

  Jacqueline Kennedy was preoccupied with her son. In church even Caroline had been a pew-banger at his age. John had survived one Mass earlier in the fall, but then she had been able to entertain him with illustrated books, and her husband had been there on the other side. She was afraid the child wasn’t going to make it here. She was right; the ceremonies had scarcely started before he began to squirm and ask questions. Miss Shaw whispered, “This is no place for a little boy.” Clint Hill and the kiddie detail helped her whisk him away to the Speaker’s offices, an austere, rather intimidating suite furnished with red plush and much Victorian furniture. That didn’t seem to be a place for a little boy either, but at least he could shout all he liked, be bounced on Clint’s knee, and watch Dr. Martin Sweig, McCormack’s assistant, crawl around on the floor with a toy tank furnished by the agents.

  Sweig was a collector of tiny flags. From a wooden stand the ensigns of all UN nations were arranged in a fan, and he handed his young visitor the Stars and Stripes. John said he wanted another “for my sister.” Uneasily the agents saw his finger hover over Cuba’s colors; then he chose Pakistan’s. He told Miss Shaw the Union Jack was hers, but none of the others interested him. Wandering into the next room, he studied a display of governmental flags and pointed to o
ne. No one there knew what it was, which isn’t strange, because it wasn’t anyone’s flag. Years ago Congress had debated giving each Senator and Representative his own ensign. The resolution had been shelved, but the little flag for Representatives was still here. With its blue field and circle of yellow stars it bore a strong resemblance to the Presidential flag, which is undoubtedly the reason it attracted John’s attention.

  “Can I have that one?” he asked. “I want to take it home to my daddy.”

  “You certainly can,” Sweig said unevenly, and handed it to him.

  In the rotunda, meanwhile, his father was being eulogized. Mansfield spoke, Warren spoke, McCormack spoke. Inevitably the circle of listeners was captious. No one criticized McCormack, because he didn’t say anything, but the Chief Justice’s strong denunciation of hatemongering had a mixed reception. Robert Kennedy thought talk of hatred inappropriate here, and Mac Bundy felt that “the dominant meaning of the tragedy is that it was senseless.…” But Galbraith saw the point: “He said the one thing that needed to be said; namely, that while few will advocate assassination, many will contribute to the climate which causes men to contemplate it.”

  Mike Mansfield, however, was by far the most controversial of the three. Like Warren he grasped the essence of the Dallas crime—“the bigotry, the hatred, prejudice, and the arrogance which converged in that moment of horror to strike him down”—but in its imagery and high diction his address was altogether different. It was, indeed, an authentic masterpiece which went unappreciated, like so many great speeches, at the time of its delivery. Because of the dreadful acoustics many did not even hear it. Most of those who did had been raised in the tradition of understatement, and his frankness and emotional overtones shocked them. Douglas Dillon cringed inwardly; David Ormsby-Gore thought it “absolutely appalling.” Scarcely anyone there realized that it was a tribute to a President and the President’s First Lady. Those who were watching her thought Mansfield was being needlessly cruel to her, but they hadn’t been in that car, they hadn’t seen the blood, they hadn’t known the antiseptic nightmare of Trauma Room No. 1, they were strangers to violent death. Only Jacqueline Kennedy could judge Mike Mansfield, and she couldn’t believe what she was hearing; she didn’t know a eulogy could be this magnificent; looking up into his suffering eyes and his gaunt mountain man’s face, she thought his profile was like a sixteenth-century El Greco. To her the speech itself was as eloquent as a Pericles oration, or Lincoln’s letter to the mother who had lost five sons in battle. It didn’t turn aside from the ghastly reality—“It was,” she thought, “the one thing that said what had happened.” He finished, and with his vibrant voice still echoing in the dome above he came over and handed her the manuscript. She said, “You anticipate me. How did you know I wanted it?” Mansfield bowed his head. “I didn’t. I just wanted you to have it.”

  Her wreath already stood by the coffin. Now Lyndon Johnson stepped forward for the ritualistic wreath-placing by the President of the United States. His floral tribute was huge, brilliantly green with red and white carnations, mounted on a stand held from behind by a lanky Army sergeant 1st class. As Johnson faced it and glided forward, the soldier retreated, matching his steps with the President’s. The odd two-man waltz ended; the sergeant swiftly departed. Johnson paused in momentary prayer and returned to his place. Except for the muted sobbing of the sergeant—two colonels were leading him to an anteroom—the great rotunda was silent. The plans had ended here. The fourteen-minute ceremony was over, and suddenly Mrs. Kennedy, who had felt faint and was swaying slightly, realized everyone was waiting for her to leave first.

  She wasn’t quite ready. Facing Robert Kennedy she asked softly, “Can I say good-bye?” He nodded once, and she took Caroline by the hand. She felt rather awkward, but she didn’t want it to end just yet. To Caroline she whispered, “We’re going to go say good-bye to Daddy, and we’re going to kiss him good-bye, and tell Daddy how much we love him and how much we’ll always miss him.” Mother and daughter moved forward, the widow gracefully, the child watching carefully to do as she did. Jacqueline Kennedy knelt. Caroline knelt. “You know. You just kiss,” whispered Mrs. Kennedy. Eyes closed, they leaned over to brush their lips against the flag. Caroline’s small gloved hand crept underneath, to be nearer, and in that single instant an entire nation was brought to its knees. The audience in the rotunda, the national audience, those who until now had been immune, those who had endured everything else were stricken in a fraction of a second. A chord deep in the hearts of men had been touched, and Justice Douglas felt paralyzed, and General Clifton, half blinded by his own tears, looked across the circle and saw the Joint Chiefs standing at attention, their faces set and their cheeks streaming. Still clutching Caroline, she rose and stepped toward the door with simple majesty. The others stumbled after her.

  Outside in the pellucid sunlight they beheld for the first time the size and character of the waiting crowd. Clifton looked down on “a sea of faces—I felt as though the whole land was alive with people.” Albert Thomas explored it less out of curiosity than a sheer need to do something. That final, unexpected scene in the rotunda had hit him with tremendous impact; his throat was so thick he thought he was strangling. He found the gigantic complex of the Capitol surrounded. The overflow spilled down the streets between the Congressional office buildings, the Supreme Court, the Library of Congress, and the Folger Library, and to the west it ran from the Botanic Gardens to the Taft tower. Shortly before the ceremonies commentators had briefly announced that the rotunda would be open to the public. Since then the traffic had been growing progressively more heavy on every bridge and highway leading to the District. On New York Avenue cars were bumper to bumper; by dusk that line would stretch all the way to Baltimore, thirty miles away. Of those already there a newscaster reported that they were “young, people mostly in their early twenties,” and Byron White was impressed by the number of students in college sweaters, some of them carrying textbooks.

  On the sidewalk, by the waiting limousines, Mrs. Kennedy stepped over to Mrs. Johnson. She said, “Lady Bird, you must come to see me soon, and we’ll talk about you moving in.” Taken aback, the new First Lady replied, “Now there’s one thing I want to say about that—I can go and wait till whenever you’re ready.” As she recalled later, the widow smiled faintly and said to her, “Any time after tomorrow. I won’t have anything to do after that.”

  At 2:19 P.M. she entered her car and left the Hill, and six minutes later Frank McGee of NBC, who had withheld the news until now, confirmed that Lee Oswald had died. Jacqueline Kennedy hadn’t even known he had been shot. The murder of the assassin, she thought, was “just one more awful thing.”

  The State Department, watchdogs of proper form, wavered significantly in its plans for the eminent guests who would be arriving that evening. Clearly there would have to be some sort of reception for them after the funeral. Dean Rusk first thought he would act as their host. It was tactfully pointed out to him that he was not a head of state. Neither was the Attorney General, but Rusk and Under Secretary Alexis Johnson, still living in the immediate past, decided that Robert Kennedy ought to receive them. By Sunday State had accepted the new President as President; he would meet the visitors at the department. Then Jacqueline Kennedy, at Bundy’s suggestion, sent word that she wanted them at the White House. It had never crossed Alexis Johnson’s mind that she would do it—“It seemed so far above and beyond the call of duty.” But the diplomatic gains would be enormous, and so two occasions were scheduled, one for each administration.

  Departing the Hill as the public advanced on it, the two resumed work in the White House and the Executive Office Building. There is a fine architectural justice in this. Mrs. Kennedy sat upstairs in the beautiful white mansion while Johnson prowled the corridors of the awful but functional EOB. When he entered his office after the rotunda ceremony, his first act was to telephone Nick Katzenbach. He wanted a report on Oswald. Katzenbach assured him that Jack Miller,
the head of Justice’s Criminal Division, was flying to Dallas, and that the FBI had formally entered the case. At three o’clock Henry Cabot Lodge and John McCone opened the President’s first extensive briefing on Vietnam. Later in the day there was some discussion over which foreign visitors the President should see tomorrow; really it was a jurisdictional dispute between George Ball and Mac Bundy over who should draw up the list. The President settled it (in Bundy’s favor), and at 5:15 he was introduced to the wonders of the federal budget—while Kennedy’s financial advisers were introduced to the wonders of Lyndon Johnson. At noon Kermit Gordon, the Budget Director, had conferred briefly with him. Now Gordon returned with Secretary Dillon, Under Secretary Fowler, and Walter Heller. They wanted his support of Kennedy’s $11.5 billion tax cut, and they wanted him to understand that the new budget was in the final stages of preparation. To reach Congress in time, it had to be in the hands of the Government Printing Office within the next two or three weeks. Johnson was for the tax bill. Moreover, he instantly invested the budget with political import.

  “Johnson’s budget” was to become his first Presidential triumph. Determined to capture the support of as many businessmen as possible, he felt that the quickest way was to show himself as a tiger fighting spendthrifts. By the new year everyone outside the Executive Department believed that President Kennedy had planned a $103 billion budget and that President Johnson had cut it so sharply that it was below the previous year’s budget. This was sheer myth. Before going to Texas Kennedy had pared nearly two billion from the $103 billion estimate, and he had told Dillon that it had to be driven below $100 billion. Otherwise, he said, the tax bill was doomed. Johnson wound up with a budget slightly higher than last year’s $97.7 billion. Kennedy’s would have been approximately the same. The real difference between the two was showmanship. It bewitched the financial community, creating the image of the most economical President since Coolidge. Not a single Washington correspondent saw that it had all been done by sleight of hand.