The Death of a President

by William Manchester

  The one rebel against this machine was Black Jack. After the first five hundred yards the gelding broke into a sweat. Pfc Carlson had never known him to do that before. In the 30-degree weather his streaming flanks were unnatural, alarming. His steel hoofs clattered in jarring tattoo, an unnerving contrast to the crack cadence in front; his eyes rolled whitely. He was nearly impossible to control. Yet today his convulsions were scarcely noticed. The limousine passengers sat in utter stillness, for to them the way back was heartrending. West on Constitution, northwest on Pennsylvania, north on Fifteenth, west on Pennsylvania—this was the very route Kennedy had followed after his inaugural address, on his first trip to the White House as President. Then the curbs had been banked with slabs of snow. There had been no gun carriage and no detachment of Vietnam veterans among the troops; bleachers packed with spectators had cheered. Nevertheless the streets and buildings were the same. The stately federal triangle on the left and the souvenir shops and hamburger shops on the right hadn’t changed. Every pillar, every silhouette against the sky—now, as then, a stainless blue—was unchanged, and at times only the haunting silence of the dense crowds reminded them that this wasn’t yesterday, that yesterday was gone forever.

  The hushed crowds and the music. The melodies were very different. The Marines struck up “Holy, Holy, Holy” and “The Vanished Army,” and the other service bands played “Onward Christian Soldiers,” “Vigor in Arduis,” the funeral marches of Beethoven, R. B. Hall, and Chopin—the most famous of them all and the most dolorous—and, at the end, the redeeming “America the Beautiful”:

  … O beautiful for heroes proved

  In liberating strife,

  Who more than self their country loved,

  And mercy more than life!…

  O beautiful for patriot dream

  That sees beyond the years

  Thine alabaster cities gleam

  Undimmed by human tears!

  America! America!

  God shed His grace on thee.…

  In the Oval Room O’Donnell, O’Brien, and Red Fay watched the procession on television. In the background Dave Powers was marching John up and down, halting him, commanding him to salute, and then tramping off again. Once, while the casket team was carrying the coffin down the east steps, the boy had run over and pressed his face against the glass screen. Now John was gone. An agent had taken him to join his sister, and Powers suggested they drink a champagne toast to their fallen leader. Maître Fincklin always kept a bottle on ice; he quickly filled goblets, and the four men in mourning clothes raised them to the caisson on the screen.

  Putting his glass down, Dave said softly, “I can just see the President in heaven. He’s looking down and saying, ‘Look at that son-of-a-bitch Powers. He can always find an excuse for a toast when it’s my liquor he’s drinking.’ ”

  Across Lafayette Square the bells began to toll.

  The bells tolled, the Annapolis choir on the lawn sang “The Londonderry Air” and “Eternal Father,” the paraders shifted to left shoulder arms and halted on Seventeenth Street, beyond the mansion; the gun carriage peeled off and rolled up the driveway between the state flags, under the tortured shadows of the leafless trees overhead; and Agent Tom Wells became involved in a quiet struggle with the toughest bodyguards of the Sûreté Nationale. Jacqueline Kennedy had told Wells that during the walk to St. Matthew’s she wanted her children as close to her as possible, in a limousine. The car was parked by the portico, pointing toward the Northwest Gate. Caroline, John, and Miss Shaw were in the back seat, and the doors were locked from the inside. Agents Foster, Lynn Meredith, and Muggsy O’Leary were posted around it. “Start easing up,” Wells told the White House sergeant behind the wheel. “Just follow me.”

  He stood in front of the front bumper and stepped into the diplomatic corps, doing a breast stroke with his arms. “Pardon me, excuse me,” he said, pawing his way through ambassadors and prime ministers. Suddenly he was in the second rank. Only Charles de Gaulle and Haile Selassie were in front of him, and it was there that the trouble started. Burly Frenchmen rushed him from both sides. “Non, non, non!” they cried, clawing at him. Wells reached behind him to be sure the car radiator was still there and then resumed his breast stroke. “Excuse me,” he said politely. “Excusez-moi.” The French guards were enraged, and Angie Duke, who had just finished lining up his heads of state—and was relieved to see that they would go through the gate in one rank, shoulder to shoulder—hopped over shouting, “Stop! You can’t do that!” “Pardon me,” said Wells, beaming at him. “C’est impossible!” howled a Sûreté man. De Gaulle looked around, startled, and stepped back. That was the opening Wells had been waiting for. He strode forward between the General and the Lion of Judah, the car followed, and Wells flagged it down in exactly the right spot to enter the procession in front of de Gaulle. Ahead of him the Vice Presidential limousine streaked out of West Executive and tore off toward the cathedral. It was not, as many assumed, a decoy—Lynda and Lucy were in it—but the new President and First Lady hadn’t changed their minds either. Led by Jerry Behn, they were hurrying over from the EOB to join the Kennedys.

  Alighting in the drive, the widowed First Lady stumbled a little, and as she righted herself she heard the last chorus of the Navy hymn fading away. The choir was preparing to sing a third hymn, but she was too quick for that. Pausing by the Grand Duchess of Luxembourg and Haile Selassie, she looked at General de Gaulle a moment. She appeared to be decisive. Actually, she was bewildered. This part of the funeral had been handled by other people. She hadn’t given much thought to who the distinguished visitors would be, and really hadn’t believed that they would walk. Now here they were, all lined up. From under her veil she peered up at de Gaulle. She nodded once, slightly, and saw him “sort of nodding and bowing his head, his face just stricken.”

  She turned on her heel and started to walk. The choir, which had filled its lungs for the canon “Dona Nobis Pacem,” was cut off. The church bells continued to boom, however, and as Bob moved up on her right and Ted on her left their deep knell was joined by a shrill skirl. The nine pipers of the Black Watch were being fed into the column by Colonel Miller. In their shaggy black bearskins, red tartan kilts, and snowy leggings they were as surprising as their music, but the bagpipes’ plaintive wail, unlike Chopin’s dirge, seemed fitting. Moreover, anyone could walk to it. Keeping in step didn’t matter, though the three Kennedys (each unaware of it) were in step. At the first distant note of the pipes the widow wavered, close to tears. Then the American drummers began rolling their muffled drums, and she straightened. Turning off Pennsylvania and up Seventeenth, Ted said in a low voice, “We’d better pick it up a little bit, to keep up with the band.” She had been holding Bob’s hand. Now she dropped it and stepped forward briskly, head high, the wind fingering the long folds of her veil. She herself was conscious only of Bob and Ted saying “This is too fast” or “A little faster.” The great throngs, on the other hand, saw no one but her. Her impact on them was tremendous; in her bearing they saw a confirmation of her gallantry in the rotunda, a symbol of the national catharsis. Melville Bell Grosvenor, watching from a fourth-floor window, wrote: “Jacqueline Kennedy walked with a poise and grace that words cannot convey—as regal as any emperor, queen, or prince who followed her.” Lady Jean Campbell cabled the London Evening Standard that the widow had “given the American people from this day on the one thing they always lacked—majesty.” She wore her grief, another spectator thought, “like a brave flag.”

  She never looked back. Right behind her, equally intent, were Jamie Auchincloss, Sargent Shriver, and Steve Smith; then, after a five-yard interval, the Johnsons, followed by Caroline and John’s unmarked car. The new President was nearly lost in a human convoy led by Behn and Youngblood, but his protection was dwarfed by that of the dignitaries in back of the children’s limousine. Twelve abreast, the foreign delegation strode and shuffled in sixteen ragged ranks. De Gaulle, Haile Selassie, King Baudouin,
Queen Frederika, Ludwig Erhard, Chung Hee Park of South Korea and Diosdado Macapagal of the Philippines were conspicuous in front, and impressed onlookers assumed that the two hundred men around them were also sovereigns or chief mourners. In fact, over half were armed escorts, squinting up at windows. They surrounded Lee Radziwill and the Kennedy sisters, and so many had closed in on Mikoyan that he was completely obscured.

  The formlessness of the pack undoubtedly helped security, but it wasn’t planned. It simply couldn’t be helped. Language barriers prevented whispered instructions, and age was a crippling handicap for men like de Valera, Lübke of West Germany, and Inönü of Turkey, all of whom had started in the first rank and who, by the time the procession turned half-left into Connecticut Avenue, were rapidly drifting astern. The jumble offended no one. It was quite enough to see the exotic figures in vivid purple, green, and red sashes trudging bareheaded past the Mayflower and the Peoples Drug Store and the Potomac Federal Savings & Loan, to know that an American President had meant this much to the world. Yet after they had passed, spectators felt a flicker of chauvinism to see the U.S. Supreme Court march up in one straight line, in perfect order; to watch the Cabinet in two even ranks, heads high; and to admire the almost martial air of the Presidential assistants, of Kennedy’s personal friends, and of the White House servants. They looked so proud. And so they were. “What friends he had, and how much they cared,” Mac Bundy wrote afterward. “Even in our grief we were… proud of his confidence and proud of each other.”

  Passing the Metropolitan Club Bundy remembered that it was “the President’s persistent and not always gentle needling” that had led him to resign in protest against the club’s segregation, though he had never got round to telling Kennedy. Now he never would. But he could do this. For him, and for all of them, marching, in Byron White’s phrase, was “a great surge of relief.” Ralph Dungan had asked Evelyn Lincoln whether she thought she could make it. She had answered, “I’m ready to walk to Rockville.” Retired Justice Stanley Reed was striding with the rest of the Court, and though Maxwell Taylor had been on his feet since leaving the Capitol and was beginning to limp, he still wished he could march all the way to Arlington.

  On the steps of St. Matthew’s, a half-block off Connecticut, Cardinal Cushing waited in his black and red vestments and tall white miter. To Jacqueline Kennedy, when she first glimpsed him, he appeared “so…enormous.” He himself had just seen his President’s coffin turn up Rhode Island Avenue; he was gently inclining his head and weeping briefly, wiping away the tears with a trembling hand. For seven years the Cardinal had known that he himself was a dying man. Malignant tumors had already taken his prostate and a kidney, and his asthma and emphysema were so severe that his voice box was practically a creation of throat surgeons. Yet he was always strong in an emergency. He looked like a high priest. And if in his long public prayers his rasping tones seemed to scold God, in private he was infinitely tender. The moment the Army Band finished “Hail to the Chief” and began the hymn “Pray for the Dead” he opened his arms to Mrs. Kennedy and her children. He kissed her and let her kneel and kiss his ring—a gesture which he, with his strong convictions about the separation of church and state, would ordinarily never have allowed. Then, in her words, he “sort of shepherded me in.”

  He returned, followed by an acolyte holding a crucifix for the traditional antiphon and psalm sung for the dead at the church entrance. Lieutenant Bird hadn’t counted on this. The casket team had unbuckled the caisson straps and was bearing the coffin to the top of the steps when the Cardinal reappeared with holy water, blocking the way. The eight body bearers were in the worst possible stance. The weight was unevenly distributed, and Bird desperately braced himself against the rear while the grating voice went on and on. The Lieutenant had never heard so long a prayer; totally ignorant of Catholic liturgy, he wondered wildly whether this was what was called a Mass. Just as he was about to whisper, “Cardinal, you better move,” His Eminence reached the final “Et lux perpetua luceat ei”—“And let perpetual light shine upon him”—and, kissing the flag, stepped aside. The spent team lowered their burden to the waiting church truck. The Cardinal went in; Bishop Hannan remained, searching faces feverishly and composing his long salutation.

  In the center aisle the Cardinal, looking around for an usher, saw Mrs. Joseph Kennedy standing to one side. “Rose, my dear,” he said, and embraced her. “Come with me.” She shook her head. The President’s mother had been too upset to walk in the procession; she had made her way here with Ann Gargan and Bobby Fitzgerald, a cousin. Physically she was near collapse. She had refused to tell anyone but Ann and Bobby, however. She was determined to stay out of sight and enter the front pew at the last moment, and she waved the Cardinal on. Behind him came Lyndon Johnson. He, too, did not look himself. In the dim cathedral light the veined pouches beneath his lashes darkened, exaggerating his vulpine look. Slowly he paced behind the rolling coffin until, in the transept, where the main aisle is bisected by the cross corridor, it was halted by clerical traffic up ahead. The President stopped by Ben Bradlee. Suddenly Ben felt compassion for him: “I knew he would live in Kennedy’s shadow for the rest of his life, and that he needed help.” Ben whispered, “God bless you,” and the President responded with his eyes.

  Overhead, St. Matthew’s choir sang the Gregorian “Subvenite” while Ben and the eight other ushers struggled to seat the marchers quickly. The family was easy enough. Jacqueline Kennedy’s only special request had been to have Clint Hill directly behind her. Joe Gargan held a space between her and her children for the President’s mother until Rose arrived. Bob and Ted were at the end of that row, and their wives, sisters, and children were in the second and third pews. The snag was over the dignitaries. This was Angie Duke’s worry, and it was a stupendous one. The slight, sensitive chief of protocol had been working without rest for three days and three nights. Ahead of him, after the funeral, lay two crucial receptions—Mrs. Kennedy’s, in the executive mansion, and President Johnson’s, at State. Nevertheless it was his hour in church that was to be his hour of trial. First he found that the pews he had earmarked last night had been confiscated by Jack McNally for President Kennedy’s staff. He was obliged to lead his chiefs of state off to the right, to St. Joseph Chapel—from which, he discovered in horror, the main altar was invisible.

  Angie improvised. He seized a church functionary and demanded a television set. There was one in the cathedral, he was told, but using it in church during Mass was unthinkable. It had to be thinkable, said Angie, arguing furiously; diplomatic relations with ninety-one countries were at stake. The set appeared and was plugged in. It would be the only one in the cathedral, he told his charges, and they looked immensely pleased. Their pleasure diminished, however, when he started seating them. It was then he realized that in failing to allow for overcoats he had miscalculated badly. He had forgotten something else; the Emperor of Ethiopia, the King of the Belgians, and the husband of the Queen of England were all carrying bulky swords, more space-takers. Putting four bodies in a pew instead of five made a difference of twenty people—twenty world leaders who would have to stand. It wouldn’t do. He would have to start cramming. Like a conductor on a crowded bus he kept urging them to move over. They complied, grunting. Some situations were especially awkward. When Princess Beatrix of the Netherlands came up, the only patch of bench left was between Mikoyan and Mikoyan’s bodyguard. He put her there, where, as she later informed him, she had “a silent service.” The last standee was Sir Alexander Bustamante, Prime Minister of Jamaica. The chapel had reached capacity, so Angie took him to the governors’ section. Nelson Rockefeller jumped up, Sir Alexander sat, and Rockefeller started shoving. The governors crunched together. “They were jammed in like sardines,” Angie said of the foreigners later. “I stood throughout the Mass and suffered. Somehow we had got them all seated, but I hate to think how it was done.”

  From the front pew in the main well of the church young John saw Haile
Selassie. The Lion of Judah, who looked like a midget to Larry O’Brien, was a giant to John. Last summer he had come to the mansion bearing gifts: a leopard-skin coat for Mrs. Kennedy (which she, as a token of respect, had worn at the time despite the sweltering heat) and two toys carved of pure ivory, a doll for Caroline and a warrior for John. Since then the children hadn’t stopped talking about Haile Selassie, and John pointed toward the side chapel and gazed across at him admiringly. Then the formalities became boring to the boy. He fidgeted. St. Matthew’s bronze doors had clanged shut behind the last four persons to enter—Judge Sarah Hughes, Bunny Mellon, Martin Luther King, and Mary Ryan from Ireland. Luigi Vena was singing Leybach’s “Pie Jesu” as the crucifer slowly returned the cross to the altar, accompanied by two other acolytes carrying candles. The Cardinal followed them, chanting in Latin. Behind him the casket team, moving stiffly like drugged automatons, wheeled the coffin into position in front of the first pew, a few feet from the widow.

  “In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti. Amen,” His Eminence prayed. “Introibo ad altare Dei…”

  “I am come to the altar of God…”

  None of this had any meaning for the President’s little son. From across the aisle Nina Warren and Joanie Douglas, in the Supreme Court section, heard him say, “Where’s my daddy?” The boy lifted his arms. “Somebody pick me up.” Agent Foster, lurking near, carried him to the back of the church.

  Ad Deum qui laetificat iuventutem meam…

  To God, who makes me young and joyful…

  It had been expected that the President’s body would enter St. Matthew’s at 12:13 P.M. Attorney General Kennedy’s decision to enter the rotunda had disturbed the officers riding around in command cars with stopwatches, but the widow, in rapidly walking away from Charles de Gaulle, had cut the time set aside for that phase of the parade, so that the coffin passed through the cathedral doors at 12:14. The martinets were relieved, which was irrelevant; what did matter was that millions of individuals, reading the funeral timetable in the morning papers, had spontaneously chosen that moment to express their own bereavement. Officially the entire day had been set aside for mourning, but the tide of public sorrow reached its crest while Cardinal Cushing finished sprinkling holy water under the anxious eye of Lieutenant Sam Bird, walked past Captain Cecil Stoughton (who, after three days of brilliant photography, suddenly toppled to the stone steps, weeping into his camera), and led the procession inside. For the next five minutes the continental United States was virtually isolated: telephone and cable communication with the outside world was suspended until 12:19. Yet the world beyond had read the timetable, too. The Panama Canal was closed. Around the globe the flags of the ninety-odd nations represented in the church dipped to half-mast. Ships at sea cast wreaths overboard. Seven thousand artillery pieces were firing twenty-one-gun salutes on seven thousand U.S. military posts, including those in Vietnam, where it was fourteen minutes past midnight. Warriors held a tribal feast of mourning in the darkness of Nairobi, and in Athens, which was at the height of its evening rush hour, Greek policemen stepped into the middle of intersections and stopped all cars.