***
Among the living, in addition to President Kennedy, were Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Mary Jo Kopechne, Fred Hampton, Malcolm X, George Lincoln Rockwell, and 45,865 young American men who would die violently in Vietnam over the next nine years.
***
On November 12, 1963, Mrs. John F. Kennedy played hostess to two thousand underprivileged children on the White House lawn. It was her first official appearance since the death of Patrick the previous August, and while she supervised the distribution of two hundred gallons of cocoa and ten thousand sugar cookies among her guests, a detachment of Scotland’s Black Watch Regiment strutted and skirled for them. Hearing the tunes and liking them, the President came out of his oval office to watch the performance. Ten days later she would remember his pleasure and ask them to play again, at his funeral.
Nearly every day now impressions were being imprinted on her memory, to be recalled, brooded over, relived, savored, or regretted after Dallas. The day before the Black Watch appearance for the children, the President took young John, not quite three, to Veterans Day ceremonies at Arlington National Cemetery. To the indignation of some, who thought the occasion should be solemn, the little boy was allowed to toddle into the procession and disrupt it. His father was delighted, and while he beamed down at the child, cameramen put the scene on celluloid. There were those who thought that Kennedy had brought the boy along with that in mind. Look was coming out with an exclusive spread of John Jr. pictures; it would have been like the President to stage something for photographers who would feel left out by it.
The admiring spectators at Arlington included Major General Philip C. Wehle, commanding officer of the military district in Washington. Twelve days later he would look down on Kennedy’s body on the autopsy table at Bethesda Naval Hospital and recall A. E. Housman’s lines “To an Athlete Dying Young”:
Today, the road all runners come,
Shoulder-high we bring you home
And set you at your threshold down,
Townsman of a stiller town….
Mrs. Kennedy had many recent recollections which would put the tragedy in context; General Wehle had one. Most Americans hadn’t any. To them the blow that fell in Dallas came out of nowhere. They didn’t even know that the President was in Texas. His visit was only of local interest there; he had come down to make peace between two feuding Democrats, Senator Ralph Yarborough, the liberal, and Governor John B. Connally Jr., the deviate. Non-Texans were unaware of the trip until the first incredible bulletin reached them with the news that the President had been gunned down by a sniper while riding in a downtown motorcade.
Afterward Americans, giving a shape to their grief, reconstructed the events there. They came to know the grid of downtown Dallas streets; the location of the Texas School Book Depository, from which the shots had come, and Parkland Memorial Hospital, to which the President and Governor Connally, who had also been wounded, had been rushed; and the identity of each figure in the tragedy and the part each had played. In time the country forgot its terrible ignorance in the first hours after the assassination, and how they had learned about it.
Merriman Smith of UPI had been riding in the press pool car, four cars behind the presidential limousine in the motorcade. Moments after the sound of the gunfire, at 1:30 P.M. Washington time, he dictated the first bulletin to his local bureau over the pool car’s radiophone: “Three shots were fired at President Kennedy’s motorcade in downtown Dallas.” That went out on UPI printers at 1:34, two minutes before the presidential car reached the hospital. At 1:36 Don Gardiner of the ABC radio network cut into local programs with it. At 1:40 CBS-TV interrupted As the World Turns, a soap opera; viewers beheld a distraught Walter Cronkite relaying Smith’s report of the three shots and adding, “The first reports say that the President was ‘seriously wounded.’” At 1:45 NBC-TV scuttled another soap opera, Bachelor Father, to switch to Chet Huntley. That put the three networks on the air with the news, and they would remain there, with no interruptions for commercials, for three days and three nights, until the President had been buried in Arlington National Cemetery.
Some people first heard about the shooting from those early broadcasts and telecasts. One watcher in Fort Worth was Marguerite Oswald, the assassin’s mother; she was tuned to WFAA-TV. In Irving, a Dallas suburb, her daughter-in-law Marina was another viewer. Elizabeth Pozen, the wife of a government official, was listening to WGMS over her car radio in Washington. One of her passengers was Caroline Kennedy, who was going to spend the night with a Pozen child, and when Mrs. Pozen heard the announcer say “…shot in the head and his wife Jackie…” she instantly switched it off. But most people did not learn what had happened that directly. The news reached them third or fourth hand, from a passing stranger, or a telephone call, or a public address system, or a waiter in a restaurant—often from sources which were so unlikely that a common reaction was utter disbelief. To make sure that it was false, they gathered around transistor radios, car radios, and television sets in bars—whatever was available—and there they learned that it was true after all.
(Some of the reports were inaccurate or misleading, however. At 2:18 Washington time the Associated Press circulated an unconfirmed report that Lyndon Johnson had been “wounded slightly,” and at 3:14 Washington time AP teletypes chattered that “A Secret Service agent and a Dallas policeman were shot and killed today some distance from the area where President Kennedy was assassinated.” This seemed to support theories of an elaborate plot. It wasn’t corrected until 4:33 P.M.)
At 2 P.M. Washington time Kennedy was pronounced dead. The announcement was delayed until Lyndon Johnson could get away from the hospital. In that first hour it was widely assumed that the gunman had been part of a larger conspiracy. The new President left for the airport at 2:26 P.M. Six minutes later UPI quoted Father Oscar Huber, the Dallas priest who had performed the last rites, as saying, “He’s dead, all right.” Confirmation by the President’s acting press secretary followed, and at 2:35 Washington time—an hour earlier in Dallas—UPI bells chimed on teletype machines around the world:
FLASH
PRESIDENT KENNEDY DEAD
JTI35PCS
Meantime attention had shifted to another part of Dallas. Lee Harvey Oswald, having left his rifle in his sniper’s nest on the sixth floor of the book depository, had caught a bus outside, ridden in it for seven blocks, and then switched to a taxi. He stopped at his rooming house for a pistol. At 2:15 he committed his second murder in less than a hour, gunning down J. D. Tippit, a Dallas policeman who tried to question him. Oswald was seized thirty-five minutes later in a nearby movie theater. The homicide squad then learned that its new prisoner worked as a stockman in the book depository and was, in fact, the only depository employee missing at the building. The net of circumstantial evidence began to build.
At 3:38 P.M. Lyndon Johnson took the presidential oath of office on Air Force One with a stunned and bloodstained Jacqueline Kennedy standing beside him. Nine minutes later the plane took off for Washington’s Andrews Field. The flight took less than two and a half hours. Johnson made his first televised statement as President at Andrews Field and was then taken by helicopter to the White House. The Kennedy party followed the coffin to Bethesda and the autopsy, which continued through most of the night. It was 4:34 A.M. when the casket, now covered by an American flag, was carried into the White House and placed upon the catafalque in the East Room. Mrs. Kennedy knelt beside it and buried her face in the flag’s field of stars.
The next three days passed in a blur. Saturday was accompanied by drenching rains and high winds in the capital. The groggy country would later remember it as a gap between days, between the shock of Friday’s assassination and the murder of the assassin on Sunday. The University of Chicago study indicated that the average adult spent ten hours in front of his television set on Saturday, the weekend’s peak, but the watchers didn’t learn much. The body remained in the East Room;
Kennedy’s family, his friends, and senior members of the government called to pay their respects there. On Sunday the coffin was carried up Pennsylvania Avenue on a horse-drawn caisson led by a riderless horse with reversed boots in the stirrups, the symbol of a fallen chieftain. At the same time word of a new, unbelievable outrage came from Dallas. Lee Harvey Oswald, in the process of being transferred to another jail, was mortally wounded by a Dallas night club owner named Jack Ruby. The killing occurred in the presence of seventy uniformed Dallas policemen. Because NBC was televising the transfer, it was also television’s first live murder. The President’s widow was told about it when she returned to the White House. She called it “one more awful.”
On Monday the coffin was taken on the caisson to St. Matthew’s Cathedral for a funeral mass and thence to Arlington. Delegations from ninety-two nations, led by Charles de Gaulle, had come to participate in the funeral. Afterward they attended two receptions, one at the State Department and another, much smaller, at the White House; Mrs. Kennedy received them there. That was the end of it, though in a sense that weekend never ended; years later men would still be trying to fathom its meaning. It had been the greatest simultaneous experience in the history of this or any other people. Long afterward Americans would tell one another how they had first heard the news from Dallas, how they felt about the eternal flame Mrs. Kennedy had requested for the grave, and young John’s saluting of his father’s coffin, and the rest of it. David Brinkley concluded that the assassination was beyond understanding: “The events of those days don’t fit, you can’t place them anywhere, they don’t go in the intellectual luggage of our time. It was too big, too sudden, too overwhelming, and it meant too much. It has to be separate and apart.”
Nevertheless, people couldn’t stop attempting to incorporate it into their lives. The most obvious approach was to name something after the President. Cape Canaveral was rechristened Cape Kennedy. Idlewild International Airport was renamed. The National Cultural Center was changed to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. The Treasury began minting fifty million Kennedy half-dollars—and couldn’t keep them in circulation because they were being hoarded as souvenirs. In every part of the country committees and councils were voting to honor the President by altering local maps. Presently Jacqueline Kennedy was wondering whether she would be driving “down a Kennedy parkway to a Kennedy airport to visit a Kennedy school.” The impulse reached abroad. Canada had its Mount Kennedy—the first man to climb it was Robert Kennedy—and the climax was reached when England set aside three acres of the historic meadow at Runnymede, where the Magna Carta was signed, as a Kennedy shrine. In May 1965 Queen Elizabeth presided at the ceremony, dedicating the tract to the President “whom in death my people still mourn and whom in life they loved.” Mrs. Kennedy replied that it was “the deepest comfort to me to know that you share with me thoughts that lie too deep for tears.”
The hundreds of thousands of letters which Americans sent to Mrs. Kennedy then were often touching precisely because they were emotive and unashamedly demonstrative. To David Bell the fallen President was “a warrior-king”; to Natalie Hemingway “a dear godfather”; and John Steinbeck wrote the widow of “this man who was the best of his people” and who “by his life, and his death, gave back the best of them for their own.”
Buried in the bales of envelopes was another memorable letter which was found and answered long afterward:
Richard M. Nixon
810 Fifth Avenue
New York, N.Y. 10021
November 23
Dear Jackie,
In this tragic hour Pat and I want you to know that our thoughts and prayers are with you.
While the hand of fate made Jack and me political opponents I always cherished the fact that we were personal friends from the time we came to the Congress together in 1947. That friendship evidenced itself in many ways including the invitation we received to attend your wedding.
Nothing I could say now could add to the splendid tributes which have come from throughout the world to him.
But I want you to know that the nation will also be forever grateful for your service as First Lady. You brought to the White House charm, beauty and elegance as the official hostess for America, and the mistique [sic] of the young in heart which was uniquely yours made an indelible impression on the American consciousness.
If in the days ahead we could be helpful in any way we shall be honored to be at your command.
Sincerely,
DICK NIXON
THIRTY
The Long Arm
On an August afternoon in 1964 Dwight Eisenhower described to this writer Lyndon Johnson as he saw him in the Executive Office Building that rainy Saturday, the day after the assassination:
“I’d known him for a long time. He was, as he always is, nervous—walking around and telephoning everyone…. I would mention someone in the conversation and he would snatch up the receiver and call the person. He asked my advice about many matters, including the tax cut. I told him that he had to show what he was going to do with his own budget. We also discussed foreign affairs. As far as I could see at that time, Lyndon Johnson’s only intention was to find out what was going on and carry policy through. He suggested nothing new or different. He wanted to talk about Laos, Cuba, and so forth. He did seem to be less informed about foreign policy than about domestic policy.”
“Lyndon,” said the new President’s wife, “acts as if there is never going to be a tomorrow.” He himself defined his philosophy of leadership with his favorite Biblical quotation, from Isaiah 1:18: “Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord,” but he confessed that he liked to “show a little garter” while doing it, and in practice he persuaded other men to join what he called his “consensus” less by reasoning with them than by imploring, bullying, and begging them, and he was not above outright extortion. As Senate majority leader he had become one of the greatest manipulators in the history of Capitol Hill; his arm-twisting had been highly regarded there. One of his problems as President was that he never understood that the same wheeler-dealer reputation was a handicap in the White House. Eric Goldman called him “a Machiavelli in a Stetson.” The public might endorse his legislative goals, but his manner of reaching them was another matter. The pollster Samuel Lubell found that many Americans planning to vote for Johnson in 1964 were nevertheless suspicious of him. They had a feeling: he was a wheeler-dealer; you had to watch his hands; he was a master politician, useful at times, no doubt, but not entirely trustworthy. His admirers, and he had many of them, protested that this was unjust. While there was much to be said for this, the skepticism was not entirely unjustified. There is no blinking the fact that until early 1966 he deliberately misled the country about the extent of the American commitment in Vietnam, or that three of his closest associates—Bobby Baker, Walter Jenkins, and Abe Fortas—were involved in scandals during his administration.
Yet there was nothing dishonorable about Johnson himself, and nothing petty. At times in that first year he seemed to be everywhere at once, turning out the White House lights and cutting Kennedy’s budget to display economy with garter; declaring war on poverty, lobbying personally for Medicare, conferring with the chiefs of state of six American allies (“my prime ministers,” he explained to one journalist), settling the U.S.-Cambodian dispute (if only temporarily), offering to destroy 480 B-47 bombers if the Russians would demolish the same number of TU-16s, arranging a U.S.-USSR reduction in the supply of atomic materials, touring Appalachia, persuading the Republican presidential nominee to join him in a moratorium on the race issue during the 1964 campaign, intervening with armed force in the Dominican Republic, and, in a speech on October 31, 1964, envisioning “the Great Society.” Everything about the man was gargantuan. As he stepped down from an address to a congressional joint session, a senator congratulated him. “Yes,” said Johnson, “I got applause eighty times.” The senator checked the record, which confirmed the President; he had b
een counting the house as he spoke.
In both the oval office and in his bedroom three television sets stood side by side, permitting him to watch commentators on CBS, NBC and ABC at the same time. His telephone console had forty-two buttons; he could put that many callers on hold and deal with them in turn or talk to all of them at once. To sign three bills he used 169 pens, a record. He liked to drive fast. In Texas he took four women reporters for a hair-raising ride, going ninety miles an hour while describing in graphic detail the sex life of a bull. One of his passengers looked at the speedometer and gasped; the President whipped off his five-gallon hat and covered the dashboard with it. His appeals to patriotism were shameless; asked what had happened during a jawbone session about a railroad strike, a labor leader said, “Lyndon has a flag in the corner of his office. He picked it up and ran around the room with it.” He spoke of “my army,” “my government,” and “my taxes.” To make certain that no one forgot who he was, he had the presidential seal emblazoned on his cuff links, his boots, his twill ranch jackets, even on plastic drinking cups. He ordered a 44-foot portrait of himself for the Democratic national convention in 1964, and he scheduled the convention for the week of his birthday, August 27, so that the party faithful could present him with the biggest cake of all time. He wanted to roll up the greatest landslide in the history of American politics that November, and he pulled out all the stops. Entering a new city at night, he would cruise through its neighborhoods shouting into a bullhorn, “Howdy, folks! Come to the meetin’! Come to the speakin’!” Jack Gould of the New York Times called him “the Y. A. Tittle of handshakers.” Once in Los Angeles a pickpocket reaching into a pocket found his hand grasped by that of the President of the United States.
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 151