The Death of a President

by William Manchester

  To the continuing embarrassment of civic leaders who wanted outsiders to pay some attention to Big D’s urbanity, other grotesque sideshows kept cropping up. Klein’s Sporting Goods received 150 orders for Mannlicher-Carcanos from souvenir-hunting citizens, though Mr. Klein refused to fill any orders for the weapon from anywhere in the world. A local entrepreneur set up “Historical Enterprises, Inc.” and marketed a novel desk set—a $3.75 bronze-colored replica of the assassination site, with a slot for a ballpoint pen—and insensitive executives bought them. Vernon Oneal, the undertaker, was even more enterprising. After the President’s funeral he invested in a duplicating machine, borrowed Judge Ward’s death certificate, and mailed copies to fellow Texas morticians as souvenirs. On January 7, 1964, Oneal submitted his bill to the Kennedy family: “Solid double-wall bronze casket and all services rendered at Dallas, Texas—$3,995.” A CPA representing Robert Kennedy requested a breakdown. On February 13 Oneal offered to deduct $500 on the ground that he had not provided certain items which were ordinarily thrown in, e.g., embalming and “use of chapel.” The new total was $3,495. Actually, as he conceded to this writer, he was hoping for a return of the coffin. He made two trips to Washington in the hope of retrieving it. Word of this reached the right quarters, and to avoid an exhibition he was paid. The wholesale prices of coffins are a closely guarded trade secret, but at the request of the author a licensed funeral director and a cemetery manager made discreet inquiries at the Elgin Casket Company about its Britannia model. Both were quoted an identical figure: $1,150. Thus Oneal’s fee represents a markup of $2,345.

  The plight of Marie Tippit and Marina Oswald appealed to American generosity; mailbags of checks and cash descended upon them. Mrs. Tippit handled herself admirably. She thanked contributors for the $643,863 she had received, put half in trust for her children, and spent almost none on herself. In her living room she kept a photograph of the Kennedy family inscribed by the President’s widow: “There is another bond we share. We must remind our children all the time what brave men their fathers were.” Marina, who could hardly do that, led a more colorful career. With $70,000 in donations she engaged a series of business agents. Her husband’s Russian diary brought $20,000 and a picture of him holding the Mannlicher-Carcano carbine $5,000. Then she went after the gun itself, arguing that since Oswald was dead it could not be held as evidence. A Denver oil man who wanted it as a souvenir sent her a $10,000 down payment—about 49,900 percent profit on Lee’s original investment—and then sued Katzenbach for possession. Early in 1966 a federal court threw the case out. Late that autumn the Justice Department took title to C2766.

  Marina had spent the money long ago. With affluence she had acquired mobility. At first she had told the press that the strongest force in her life was her love for the father of her children; she only wanted to live near his grave. This quickly changed. First she became a coed at the University of Michigan. Returning to Dallas, she bought an air-conditioned house, a wardrobe of Neiman-Marcus clothes, and membership in the Music Box, a private club. She became a chain-smoker and a drinker of straight vodka. In the Music Box she spun through a series of romances. Then, in 1965, in a Texas town called Fate, she became a June bride. The groom was a six-foot, twice-divorced drag racer. Eleven weeks later he was in jail. His bride had a string of complaints. In an affidavit she charged that “He slapped me in the face and tried to get me to put the children outside so he could be alone with the gun he carried. I’m afraid he might try to do me bodily harm.” He replied, “It’s just time for her to have some more publicity.” A JP reunited them. “Love triumphed,” the JP said. Marina said, “I don’t want these things to happen. I had too much of this with Lee.”

  Neither Ruth Paine nor Marguerite Oswald saw Marina after November 1963. Marguerite grew increasingly critical of her former daughter-in-law. She read that the girl was dyeing her hair, using lipstick, and smoking, all of which, she felt, were bad examples for her dead son’s children. Marguerite’s chief grievances, however, lay elsewhere. She resented the Warren Report’s treatment of Lee and the fact that she, unlike Marina, Mrs. Tippit, and Mrs. Kennedy—her information about the Kennedy wealth was astonishing—remained comparatively poor. Of the first she said, “Publicwise we have not had the truth”; of the second, “Moneywise I got took.” By failing to pay her for her testimony, she reasoned, the Commission had taken “the bread and butter out of my mouth.” Actually, she sold letters Lee had written her to Esquire and refused to talk to magazine writers until she had been paid. With the money she bought a new two-tone Buick, an enormous reproduction of Whistler’s “Mother” framed in brass, which she hung in her living room, and a gold statuette of the Virgin Mary, which she wore around her neck. She kept her number in the Fort Worth telephone directory and was always ready to talk to journalists, though the phone rang less and less.

  During the 1964 Presidential campaign the assassin’s mother read a lot of right-wing literature, which doesn’t mean much; the Goldwater forces had monopolized the state’s paperback outlets, and shrill propaganda was everywhere—in newsstands, drugstores, hotels. The election results showed how ineffective it all was. In Texas as elsewhere the Republican candidate was thoroughly routed. The Senatorial race, however, was more complicated. In February the Connally-Yarborough feud had flared up again—even as national leader of the party Lyndon Johnson was unable to arrange a lasting truce—and the Governor quietly threw his weight behind the Senator’s Republican opponent. Ironically, the assassination had severely damaged the prospects of Yarborough, the one avowed Kennedy man in the state’s Democratic leadership. His handicap was that he hadn’t been shot in Dealey Plaza. Before that Friday the Senator had been running ahead of Connally in Texas polls, but in the election the Governor ran away from all opposition.

  The $350,000 which had been collected from ticket sales for the November 22 banquet in Austin was kept (though one man did ask for his $100 back on the ground that he had not been fed) and divided equally between the national and state parties. The Senator had trouble getting funds. On September 14 a preposterous situation arose: at seven o’clock that evening there were two testimonial dinners in Dallas, one at the Sheraton-Dallas for Yarborough and the other, for Connally, at the Trade Mart. Every Democrat was asked to choose sides. Byron Skelton threw up his hands and stayed home; later a Connally man replaced him as National Committeeman. Against all advice, Yarborough refused to ride on President Johnson’s coat tails. Instead, his literature stressed his identification with President Kennedy, and on November 3 he squeaked through.

  But not in Dallas. He lost the county by nearly 27,000 votes, the worst local drubbing he had ever taken in any election. Even Goldwater in defeat won more Dallas votes than the Senator. Earle Cabell unseated Bruce Alger, and Connally led the ticket, outrunning the opposition two to one. Here the influence of the Dallas News was evident; the Governor was the only candidate Dealey backed strongly. One might have expected that the ardor of the right-wing Texans would be dampened by Goldwater’s eclipse, but they were undiscouraged. Locally their prestige had survived the assassination, they had a new Public Enemy No. 1 in Earl Warren (their literature now referred to the U.S. Supreme Court in lower case, viz., “the warren court”), and whatever the image-makers of the Citizens Council said they saw no reason to revise their opinion of John Kennedy. Each season brought fresh testimony of the animosity they still bore toward the President who had been murdered on Elm Street. The week the Warren Report was published a book store on Commerce Street displayed Legacy of an Assassination, a 479-page tract which pictured Kennedy as a traitor who had led a sordid private life. The morning of the first anniversary of his death copies of Thunderbolt, the organ of the National States’ Rights party, were hawked downtown with a front-page headline libeling the late President. The following May 29, which would have been his forty-eighth birthday, Texas radicals in the state legislature defeated a bill which would have renamed the state school for the mentally retarded
in Kennedy’s honor. The Governor’s brother voted against it, and the Texas Observer quoted some of the reasons given by others who had voted in the majority: “It’s the politics of the man—the dead man”; “Not well thought of”; “Don’t want to get hurt politically”; “Just wouldn’t be popular back home”; and “I didn’t like him.” That autumn, on the second anniversary of the assassination, a Lou Harris survey showed that the percentage of people who mourned President Kennedy in Dallas was dramatically below the national average. The following autumn William M. Henry reported in the Los Angeles Times that the USIA’s deeply moving film tribute to JFK, Years of Lightning, Day of Drums—which was drawing enormous audiences elsewhere in the country—“has been a complete flop in Dallas.”

  During the winter of 1963–64 several people who had played peripheral roles in the events of the previous November died unexpectedly or fell victims to strange violence. Warren Reynolds, a used-car lot employee who had witnessed Lee Oswald’s flight after the shooting of Tippit, was himself shot in the same Dallas lot on the evening of January 23. The rifleman was seen but never found; one man was picked up but released on the testimony of a woman who, after her subsequent arrest on a charge of disorderly conduct, hanged herself in a Dallas cell. The general who had welcomed Kennedy to San Antonio in behalf of the Air Force, the waiter who had served him his last breakfast in Fort Worth, and the advertising director of the Dallas News all dropped dead. The advertising director, forty-five years old, had been in excellent health. So had the twenty-seven-year-old captain who had been Lieutenant Sam Bird’s superior officer throughout the capital’s ceremonial farewells to the President. The previous September he had passed his regular Army physical; his cardiogram had been normal. Ten days after the burial in Arlington he took a day off and toppled over at his dinner table, the victim of a heart attack. Two years later the odd toll took another jump: Earlene Roberts, Oswald’s landlady, died of stroke, and Bill Whaley, his taxi driver, was killed in a traffic accident.

  In the wake of the funeral every principal figure except Marguerite Oswald was troubled by physical discomfort of some sort. The complaints ranged from Lady Bird’s persistent chills to Dave Powers’ headaches—violent pains which were confined to the back of his skull, where he had seen the last bullet strike the President. For six months Ken O’Donnell suffered from violent nausea. Several people required extensive medical help. The doctor’s bills of Howard Brennan, who had watched Oswald fire that final shot, reached $2,700, and Roy Truly, Oswald’s boss, was ill nearly a year. Nearly everyone suffered from insomnia. Forrest Sorrels would start up from a bad dream. It was always the same one, and it always took him a while to realize it hadn’t been a dream at all. Jesse Curry awoke each night between 2 and 3 A.M. and reached for his Bible; troubled also by hypertension, rising dissatisfaction among his subordinates, and the city council’s decision to have outside experts investigate the police department, he resigned in February 1966 for “medical reasons.”

  In the innermost circles of official Washington emotional stress was heightened by the prolonged extension, from week to week, of the air of unreality which had begun on the afternoon of November 22. Each morning’s newspapers brought news of some fresh Johnsonian triumph. As the Kennedy legend flourished, the profile of the new President emerged and took shape. It was, Reston wrote, “almost a Texas ‘tall story’—Johnson conquering George Meany and Henry Ford, Martin Luther King and Harry Byrd, the savers and the spenders, Wall Street and Main Street.” Most of Washington wanted to be conquered; that is the only explanation for the near unanimity with which the press corps agreed that Johnson’s joint session speech differed significantly from the addresses Kennedy had written with Sorensen. After the long weekend of grief the capital desperately wanted continuity to be an unqualified success, and so men who ought to have known better persuaded themselves that the government could move ahead with no significant changes of personnel—that the galaxy of talent which Kennedy had brought to the city could remain and serve effectively under Johnson.

  The day after his predecessor’s burial in Arlington Johnson summoned Arthur Schlesinger to the oval office. “I just want to say that I need you far more than John Kennedy ever needed you,” he began. “He had the knowledge, the skills, the understanding himself. I need you to provide those things for me.… You have a knowledge of the program, the measures, the purposes, of the history of the country and of progressive policies, you know writers and all sorts of people.… I have your letter of resignation, and that is fine as a gesture, but I reject it as a fact.” Arthur interrupted to remark that he felt every President ought to have his own people around him. Johnson replied that he considered Arthur one of his people. “The men who have been working with me are good men,” he said, “but they aren’t in a class with you men here in the White House. I shall blend three or four of them into the staff, but I am counting on all the present members of the staff to stay.” He wanted them to remain for at least a year; by then, he said, he was confident that he would have convinced them he was worthy of their loyalty.

  Back in the East Wing Schlesinger wrote this down and added: “He said all this with simplicity, dignity, and apparent conviction. I am a little perplexed as to what to do. I am sure that I must leave, but I can see the problem of disengagement is going to be considerable.” His intuition was correct: no marriage between Johnson and Kennedy’s men could have lasted long. He had to become his own President. Yet the new President’s instincts were right, too. Despite the glowing praise from a sympathetic press, the inescapable fact was that he could not really become a national leader until he had been elected to the office. Meanwhile he must shore up Kennedy’s selection of him three years earlier as Vice Presidential nominee by creating the impression that the entire Kennedy team had believed him to be the second-best man in the country.

  In his second week in office the President summoned the Attorney General to the West Wing. He mentioned misunderstandings over his presence in this office Saturday morning and the departure of the Presidential aircraft from Dallas Friday. Of the first he repeated that Rusk and McNamara had urged him to move in swiftly, which was true; of the second he insisted that “We took off as soon as Jackie got there,” which was not. “People around you are saying things about me,” he went on. “I won’t let people around me say anything about your people, and don’t let any of your people say anything about me.” Robert Kennedy didn’t want to argue with the President, and he couldn’t bargain with him either. It was an impasse. The meeting lasted about five minutes, and apart from formal occasions and an exchange of telegrams at Christmas it was virtually the only contact between the two men that winter.

  Early in December Pierre Salinger announced that he, Ted Sorensen, Ken O’Donnell, and Larry O’Brien would remain as long as they were needed. It was an empty gesture. No one working in the West Wing expected that the line could be held for long, nor was it. On January 16 Sorensen became the first man out. Jerry Wiesner returned to academic life two days later, Schlesinger made his resignation stick January 29, and Ted Reardon quit February 5. Next month Salinger himself left Johnson to seek a seat in the Senate. Andy Hatcher followed him to California. Godfrey McHugh resigned from the Air Force, Taz Shepard went to sea, Ralph Dungan was appointed Ambassador to Chile. In the East Wing the drawls of Liz Carpenter and Bess Abell replaced the finishing-school accents of Nancy Tuckerman and Pam Turnure, who ran Mrs. Kennedy’s temporary office on the first floor of the Executive Office Building. Evelyn Lincoln was given another EOB suite to catalogue Kennedy’s Presidential papers; Mary Gallagher was next door. During Christmas week the White House school had been moved behind the black wrought-iron gate of the British Embassy on Massachusetts Avenue. Clint Hill, Muggsy O’Leary, and Provi Parades joined the President’s widow in the Harriman house.

  Lyndon Johnson held on to most of the big names through the campaign: Shriver, Bundy, and the leaders of the mafia. Shriver and the Irishmen were priceless assets
in preserving the illusion of harmony. Kennedy’s brother-in-law reigned over his kingdom, of course; he wasn’t a member of the White House staff. O’Donnell and O’Brien were, though, and Ken’s attitude during the flight back from Love Field had scarcely encouraged hope that he might stick it out more than a few days. His decision to stay surprised nearly everyone, including, in private, Johnson himself. Like the President, Robert Kennedy was moving toward independence. He resigned from the Cabinet, went into New York, and, in November 1964, he ran on the ticket with Lyndon Johnson. On June 19 Ted had been gravely injured in a plane crash. Joan campaigned for him and was charming, which was all that was necessary; St. Patrick couldn’t have defeated a Kennedy in Massachusetts that year. The Republicans offered only token opposition, and Ted was swept back into office by over 909,000 votes. Salinger lost, but on Capitol Hill the two brothers inevitably came to be regarded as the nucleus of a government-in-exile.

  The President, running against the most inept Republican of all, won the greatest victory of all: the highest percentage (61.3 percent) of the popular vote in American history. The Radical Right’s dreams of national power were annihilated on the night of November 3. Johnson interpreted the results as a personal mandate; running the government, in the words of one of his aides, had become “a new ball game.” The first inning was to be the inauguration. The inaugural chairman was the Washington representative for the Dallas Chamber of Commerce. The celebrations of January 20, 1965, were advertised in advance as “a Texas-style gala.” Texas bands led the parade down Pennsylvania Avenue, the slogan was “Y’all come and see us,” and so many did show up at the inaugural balls that there was little room for anyone except the jubilant President, who looked as though he could have danced all night and nearly did.