The Death of a President

by William Manchester

  That was at 3:34 P.M. The networks quickly switched to the south grounds of the White House, where U Thant, Dr. Ralph Bunche, Anastas Mikoyan, Haile Selassie, Sir Alexander Bustamante, Hayato Ikeda, Zalman Shazar, Diosdado Macapagal, and diplomats from Korea, San Salvador, Nigeria, Ghana, South Vietnam, Finland, Tunisia, Somalia, Spain, Peru, and Czechoslovakia were seen streaming toward the Diplomatic Reception Room.

  On her return from Arlington Jacqueline Kennedy had set a two-week moving deadline. In the gift room, next to the Presidential swimming pool, Joe Giordano and Bootsy Miller had begun putting pictures, phonograph records, and four file cabinets of mementos into cardboard cartons; upstairs Mr. West was packing books, and George Thomas, clothes. In the staff mess some forty Presidential advisers were sorting out their personal futures. The mafia was conferring in Larry O’Brien’s office, Dr. Burkley was repeating his offer to resign to Walter Jenkins, Pierre Salinger was serving as press secretary to two administrations, and Ted Clifton was explaining the nation’s most intimate military secrets to Texans who didn’t have security clearance and whom he didn’t even know; Colonel Jackson stood beside him, identifying them as bona fide Johnson men. In the West Wing, Ted Sorensen settled into his tall leather chair and read Galbraith’s joint session speech for the first time. He put it aside and read other drafts which had been sent to him, from Charlie Murphy and Horace Busby. He decided to start afresh.

  He wrote:

  Mr. Speaker, Mr. President, Members of the House and Senate, my fellow Americans:

  All I have ever possessed I would have gladly given not to be here today.

  For the greatest leader of our time has been struck down by the foulest deed of our time—and I who cannot fill his shoes must occupy his desk.

  Sorensen struck out the last eleven words. A President must not sound obsequious. He continued,

  No words are sad enough to express our sense of loss. No words are strong enough to express our determination to continue his work. Today John Fitzgerald Kennedy lives on in the immortal words and works he left behind. He lives on in the mind and memories of mankind. He lives on in the hearts of his countrymen.…

  Sorensen wrote seven pages, setting down in rough form the address that the new President would actually deliver to the Congress two days later, including Johnson’s plea for early passage of Kennedy’s civil rights and tax cut legislation (“No memorial oration or eulogy could more eloquently ennoble his memory than the earliest possible passage of the Civil Rights bill for which he fought. We have talked long enough in this country about equal rights. We have talked for 100 years or more. It is time now to write the next chapter”); the denunciation of fanatical absolutists (“Let us put an end to the teaching and preaching of hate and evil and violence. Let us turn away… from the apostles of bitterness and bigotry, from those defiant of law and liberty and those who pour venom and vituperation into our nation’s bloodstream”); and the concluding

  And on this Thanksgiving eve, as we gather together to ask the Lord’s blessing, let us unite in the simple, familiar:

  “America! America!

  God shed His grace on thee,

  And crown thy good with brotherhood

  From sea to shining sea!”4

  The Kennedys’ duty lay downstairs, where Angie Duke was leading their exotic guests to two buffets in the state and family dining rooms. One of the President’s traits had been to watch television reruns of himself with a critical eye—he had never missed his own press conferences that way—and several members of the family were standing upstairs in the west hall, studying a local channel’s rerun of funeral highlights, when Jacqueline Kennedy appeared. She took them aside individually, comforting them and thanking them. Then she suggested they take turns greeting visitors; she would join them later. Ted Kennedy led them down and set up the first reception line in the Red Room with Eunice, Pat, and Jean. Meanwhile Mrs. Kennedy phoned Evelyn Lincoln in the staff mess and asked her to come to keep the President’s mother company. She explained, “I have to comb my hair for all these dignitaries.” Evelyn thought, How do you do it?

  It is doubtful that any woman has ever prepared herself for a state function in less time. Before Peter Lawford entered the West Sitting Room to sit with Evelyn and his mother-in-law, Jacqueline Kennedy had removed her veil and black beret, raked her simple coiffure into shape, and was in the Oval Room, ready to meet people. She was not going downstairs just yet, though. Here as everywhere she had her own way of doing things. For a little while she was going to be nearly as great a trial to Angie Duke as Jack McNally. A protocol officer must think in terms of nations, not people; he must pretend that every country is like every other country, distinguishable only by the alphabet. Sovereigns understood that. At the buffet Angie proposed that Queen Frederika precede President Lübke, on the ground that she was a woman; she recoiled, pointing out that GErmany comes before GReece. Jacqueline Kennedy didn’t like those rules. She only wanted to see four men in private, and she named them: Haile Selassie, Charles de Gaulle, Eamon de Valera, and Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh.

  The first stage of the Kennedy reception therefore had three foci: her salon in the oval study, Rose Kennedy’s group in the sitting room, and the others downstairs. Various intermediaries shuttled in and out of the study—the Attorney General usually, assisted by Mac Bundy, by Angie, who had reluctantly agreed to “slip them up,” and, unexpectedly, by the President’s son and daughter. Caroline and John had been assigned no role. They were supposed to be playing with Miss Shaw. Their impromptu appearances were welcomed, however, because famous men are just as susceptible to the magic spell of the very young as their constituents, and brother and sister scored their own triumphs, notably with the Lion of Judah. Bundy noted how he saw their mother “charm the old black Emperor and let him charm her children—which he did most sweetly.” Really they were the charmers. The language barrier was formidable—Jacqueline Kennedy and Selassie spoke French, for his English was extremely limited—but the children had their own ways of communicating. “He was,” Mrs. Kennedy remembered, “their hero”; she fetched them from across the hall, and as they entered, timidly at first, she pointed to his glittering chest and said, “Look, John. He’s such a brave soldier. That’s why he has all those medals.” The boy crept up into his lap and touched one. Then Caroline ran out to get the doll he had given her last summer. Her brother darted after her, and suddenly they were both in the Emperor’s lap, showing him the ivory carvings they had treasured. Haile Selassie examined John’s toy. “You will be a brave warrior,” he said haltingly. “Like your father.” They sat there for about twenty minutes, and to their mother the bond between them and the bearded old man in the gorgeous uniform was almost mystical. “He had this thing of love, and they showed him their little presents,” she recalled later. “And they were so happy, just staring at him and worshiping.”

  The meeting with the President of France was very different. Mac Bundy had the impression that she was using the reception as “an easy screen for what she really wanted, which was a chance for a private word” with selected individuals—“above all, de Gaulle.” The children were whisked out, for this occasion was to be more formal. Indeed, it is not too much to call it an episode in personal diplomacy. She received the General “like a queen,” to use Bundy’s phrase. The French President merely wanted to repeat what he had told Rusk last evening, and Steve Smith a few minutes ago: that he was here as an emissary of his people. She had something else in mind. Leading him to facing couches beneath the mantel clock, she talked to him about “this France, England, America thing,” and reminded him that virtually everyone, including Hervé Alphand, had become bitter over it. “But Jack was never bitter,” she said. Then she led him out to Bundy and the waiting elevator, and crossing the wide hall she took the General’s hand and said, “Come, let me show you where your beautiful commode is.” On the chest he had sent them there was a vase of fresh oxeye daisies. She plucked one out and handed it to
him. “I want you to take this as a last remembrance of the President,” she said, and de Gaulle rode down holding the American flower.

  The talks in the sitting room and downstairs were less substantive. Their real value lay in the consolation they gave the family; as their visitors sought them out the Kennedys realized just how widespread the President’s influence had been. While Haile Selassie was in the study de Gaulle had stepped into the sitting room to tell Rose Kennedy of it, and Selassie, at Jacqueline Kennedy’s suggestion, had followed him there. Here again the Emperor was especially effective. The President’s mother recited his childhood diseases in French; “He was never a strong boy,” she said, “but he was so determined.” Selassie nodded and described how he had lost his own son, his crown prince. He and Rose discovered that they were the same age. “It’s wrong for parents to bury their children. It should be the other way round,” she said. He agreed: “It’s a violation of nature.” On the first floor the same feeling of shared sorrow was bringing political antagonists together in brief amity. De Gaulle and Prince Philip chatted over tea, with Shriver as amicus curiae; Eunice liked Alec Douglas-Home so much that she hopped upstairs to tell Jackie she must meet him, with the subsequent result that Angie, taking Sir Alec up, met the President of Ireland on the way and introduced the two men. The President bore the scars of British misrule on his own body. He wasn’t likely to become an Anglophile in his eighties. But he agreed with Eunice’s appraisal of the Prime Minister, and later he participated in agreeable tête-à-têtes with both Douglas-Home and Prince Philip.

  The Attorney General brought de Valera into the study and stayed. Inevitably this meeting was emotional for him and both Kennedys. He had with him a letter from his wife, whom the President had liked so much, and they talked of her, of the visit to Ireland, of Galway and Ballkelly Church, of Irish legend and Irish poetry, particularly the poem by Gerald Griffin (1803–1840) which Mrs. de Valera had learned as a child in school, which she had recited to the President last June, and which he had then memorized:

  ’Tis, it is the Shannon’s stream,

  Brightly glancing, brightly glancing!

  See, oh, see the ruddy beam

  Upon its waters dancing!

  Thus returned from travel vain,

  Years of exile, years of pain

  To see old Shannon’s face again,

  O! The bliss entrancing!

  Hail, our own majestic stream

  Flowing ever, flowing ever

  Silent in the morning beam

  Our own majestic river!

  Fling thy rocky portals wide

  Western ocean, western ocean!

  Bend ye hills on either side

  In solemn, deep devotion

  While before the rising gales,

  On his heaving surface sails

  Half the wealth of Erin’s vales

  With undulating motion.

  Hail our own beloved stream

  Flowing ever, flowing ever

  Silent in the morning beam

  Our own majestic river.

  Mrs. Kennedy saw her brother-in-law’s dauntless façade crack for the first time. The old man was also in tears, and when Bob took him away through the President’s adjoining bedroom she went to the hall door sobbing—and opened it on an embarrassed Prince Philip. The Duke of Edinburgh had been squatting on the floor, chuckling with young John; in the background Angie was bringing Sir Alec up. Philip saw Mrs. Kennedy’s face and colored. Straightening, he explained that John had reminded him so much of his own son at that age that he couldn’t resist unbending. “John, did you make your bow to the Prince?” she asked. “I did!” he crowed, and discomfort vanished in laughter. Inside she sent for her sister. They were sipping Bloody Marys when Angie entered. The chief of protocol was perturbed. He thought it vital that she give equal time to the dignitaries at the foot of the stairs. Did she want to mingle with them, or have a receiving line, or what? She looked at Philip appealingly. He said, “I’d advise you, you know, to have the line. It’s really quick and it gets it done.”

  Actually, most of the people around the buffets, including her own relatives, were surprised to hear that the widow had come down. It seemed far more than they had any right to expect. Their gratitude was obvious in their expressions and their anxiety to spare her as much as possible. Philip had been correct: the thing did go speedily. The only delays came when she herself paused for a special word for this or that guest. Standing under the bronze chandelier in the lovely red parlor, with Teddy on her right, Angie on her left, and Godfrey McHugh hovering in the background, she greeted them wanly, shook hands, responded with a few phrases when there was a common language or through an interpreter when there was none. Those for whom she had private messages emerged shaken; in this splendid setting of American Empire furnishings her wistful manner marked the cruelty of the hour. Ludwig Erhard was hardly likely to have forgotten that he was to have been John Kennedy’s state guest today, yet he slumped perceptibly when she whispered, “You know, you and I were to have had dinner this very evening. I had ordered German wine and German music, and just now you and I would be getting dressed.” The Queen of the Hellenes passed in a blur, extending both hands in commiseration, but farther down Mrs. Kennedy could clearly see the Deputy Premier of the Soviet Union approaching. His distress was apparent. The tough old Bolshevik was trembling all over. She reached for his hand, and as he gave it he looked terrified. She said, “Please tell Mr. Chairman President that I know he and my husband worked together for a peaceful world, and now he and you must carry on my husband’s work.” The interpreter translated. Mikoyan blinked and covered his face with both hands.

  He was one of two men who broke. The other was last in line, and it was well he was, for it is doubtful she could have faced another after him. He had a particular significance for her. Once she had told the President, “I just hope once before we get out of the White House I have an interview, because someone’s going to ask me who’s the greatest statesman that I’ve ever met. And it isn’t going to be de Gaulle or Nehru or Macmillan or anyone; it’s going to be Lleras Camargo of Colombia.” In 1961 Lleras had greeted the Kennedys in Bogota; he had shown her through the presidential palace, which serves as a museum of national history, and that had been the inspiration for her own renovation of the executive mansion, including this very room. Now the gaunt, almost calvinistic ex-President stood before her, and he too was distraught. Falteringly she told him that of all the tours she and her husband had taken abroad the trip to Colombia had been the best. He began to cry, and Angie, who had been with them there, reached for his own handkerchief. Embracing Lleras she said, “Please—don’t let them forget Jack.”

  Angie rode up with her on the agonizingly slow Otis elevator. They were both incapable of speech. He was past due at the new President’s reception; in the hall he kissed her on both cheeks and left her there, standing by herself and weeping. And descending in the wrought-iron cage he himself lost all control, though not because of Lleras; there had been an earlier incident, when she greeted Prince Philip outside the Oval Room, and for an hour the grief had been building up inside him. Its origin went back to the President’s first European trip. After the confrontation with Khrushchev in Vienna they had flown to London, and she had called Angie back to the rear of the Presidential aircraft to inquire whether she should bend her knee to Queen Elizabeth at that evening’s dinner in Buckingham Palace. He had told her then that the wife of a chief of state never curtsies for anyone. Today, as she asked her son whether he had made his bow, she had curtsied to Prince Philip. Then, turning with a smile like a dim lost leaf, she had said gently, “Angie, I’m no longer the wife of a chief of state.”

  On Kalorama Road Charles de Gaulle was dining with the Alphands. President Johnson had been shaking hands in the State Department’s candlelit reception room since 5 P.M., but 220 people were waiting to see him, and since this was his first opportunity to display as Chief Executive his demonstrative natur
e, the warm person-to-person persuasiveness that had made him master of the Senate, the process was obviously going to take some time. De Gaulle knew Johnson. They had met in Paris thirty months ago. Then the General had cut the Vice President short with the icy question, “What have you come to learn?” Now he sent word that the President of France did not wait in line. He would eat, bathe, and change his clothes, and then he and his bodyguards would be over. Yet it was part of the conundrum of de Gaulle that he could respond on several levels simultaneously; he was impervious to personal diplomacy but highly vulnerable to gracious gestures. Midway through his meal he stirred from an Olympian trance. Unbuttoning the side pocket of his khaki tunic, he turned to Nicole Alphand, on his right. “Madame, this is the last souvenir I shall have of President Kennedy,” he said thickly, producing the daisy. “She asked me to keep it, and I shall keep it always.” Carefully replacing it in his pocket, he added, “She gave an example to the whole world of how to behave.”