Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver

by Scott Stossel

  Dungan brooded behind his desk, sucking on an unlit pipe; Sarge sat in front on a straight-backed chair. Between them they reached the first funeral decisions during the next two hours. They were never alone. One of their fellow planners described the meeting—which was to continue nonstop through three successive nights—as “Jack’s last campaign.” It was a lot like a campaign; a man almost had to be a political veteran to function in it.

  Dungan’s office was almost always teeming: McGeorge Bundy, Everett Dirksen, Angier “Angie” Biddle Duke, Joe English, John Kenneth Galbraith, Dick Goodwin, Katherine Graham, Averell Harriman, Jack McNally, Ted Reardon, Arthur Schlesinger, Ted Sorensen, Adlai Stevenson, Bill Walton, and dozens of others—including a large complement of priests and policemen—came and went frequently.

  Everyone seemed in a daze—except Shriver, who seemed almost to gain clarity as others lost it. This lent force to his authority; as he gave everyone their assignments, no one questioned his orders. He quickly sized up who was in a condition to handle which tasks—who might benefit from having something important to do, who might buckle under the strain. He sent one group of aides to compile a list of President Kennedy’s friends, divided into appropriate categories, so the process of figuring out whom to invite to the funeral (and where they should be seated) could begin. Shriver consulted with Adlai Stevenson and Angie Duke, who had been the president’s social secretary, about protocol for presidential funerals and funeral processions. At 3:42 p.m., Shriver was informed that the president’s body would soon be on its way to Andrews Air Force Base. He quickly assigned aides to meet the plane there, to be accompanied by a protocol officer from Angie Duke’s staff.

  Shriver then turned his attention to the burial and began consultation with Lt. Col. Paul C. Miller, who was the federal government’s official ceremonies officer. What, Shriver asked him, does a formal state burial entail? Miller explained that presidents and five-star generals and admirals were supposed to lie in state. Where the president would lie in state depended on where the burial was to take place. If the president were to be buried somewhere in Washington, Miller suggested, his body might lie in state either in the East Room of the White House or in the great Rotunda of the Capitol. Miller wasn’t sure what to do if the president were to be buried in the family plot outside Boston, but he had begun to make arrangements to have the body delivered there, either by train, airplane, or naval destroyer.

  Most of those thinking about the issue believed that the president should be buried in the Kennedy family plot in Brookline, Massachusetts, but Shriver believed that as a navy veteran and the commander in chief of the US armed forces, Jack should be buried at Arlington National Cemetery. So he called Arlington and spoke to its superintendent, John Metzler. Shriver’s first question was whether there was any rule prohibiting a Catholic burial in a national cemetery. “Negative,” Metzler responded. “We have Catholic ceremonies almost every day.” Shriver also asked whether children could be buried at Arlington. They could be, Metzler told him. Jack’s children Caroline and John could be buried alongside him. Discussion about the burial site would continue within the Kennedy inner circle, but for Shriver the issue was settled. No ordinary cemetery would do. The president belonged to the country as much as to the Kennedy family. Jack must be buried at Arlington.

  The next issue Shriver had to worry about was more grisly: What would happen to the president’s body once it was returned to Washington? Who should receive the body? Should an autopsy be performed? And who would prepare the body for burial? These were matters of grim protocol that no one had contemplated. It was determined that the president’s body would be delivered to Bethesda Naval Hospital, in Maryland, where it would be autopsied and embalmed.

  While Ralph Dungan, Ted Sorensen, and other aides flew by helicopter to Andrews Air Force Base to receive the president’s remains, Shriver, Dick Goodwin, and Bill Walton stayed behind in Dungan’s office with Colonel Miller to begin planning the funeral parade. The president’s aircraft—carrying Lyndon Johnson, Lady Bird Johnson, Jacqueline Kennedy, and President Kennedy’s remains, as well as aides and secret service agents who had been in Texas with them—arrived at Andrews about 6:00 p.m. Jackie Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy went from there to Bethesda with the late president’s remains, while President Johnson headed for the White House with some of Kennedy’s old aides.

  Once at the White House, Johnson went to Ralph Dungan’s office to offer Shriver his condolences. Shriver accepted them briskly before fielding the first of a series of calls from Bobby Kennedy, who was relaying requests from Jackie at the hospital. Shriver took Bobby’s call in Dungan’s reception room and stepped back inside the office with the new orders. After Shriver got off the phone, his first words to the assembled crowd in Dungan’s office were that Mrs. Kennedy wanted the president’s burial to be “as distinguished a tribute as possible.” One specific request involved the question of where the president’s body would lie in state. Jackie remembered that on page 39 of the White House guidebook for tourists there was an engraving of Abraham Lincoln’s body lying in state on its catafalque, in the East Room of the White House. The East Room, Jackie decided, was where she wanted her husband to lie. Furthermore, she conveyed to Shriver, “While my husband is there, I should like the room to look as much as possible as it did when Lincoln was there.”

  Shriver, of course, knew little about how the East Room had looked after Lincoln’s assassination. So he asked the Kennedy administration’s resident historian, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., to research the Lincoln funeral. Schlesinger, in turn, made an emergency call to the Library of Congress, which sent archivists scurrying through the stacks with flashlights, looking for accounts of the ceremonies that followed Lincoln’s assassination. The most detailed accounts were delivered to Goodwin, who laid out two that included sketches—Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper and a May 6, 1865, issue of Harper’s Weekly—for Bill Walton to pore over.

  The sketches depicted the East Room draped in heavy black crepe, and Lincoln’s casket covered in a canopy. Reproducing these effects, Walton and Shriver concluded, would look ridiculous to modern eyes. Besides, exactly duplicating the East Room’s appearance would have involved removing huge chandeliers that had been installed sometime since 1865. Shriver and Walton agreed that it would be best to try to capture the spirit of the Lincoln sketches without trying to copy them exactly. Walton set to work doing that. (Several years later, William Manchester would write that “the two most impressive men” in the White House that evening were Shriver and Walton.)

  Shriver had to juggle multiple tasks while always keeping one eye on the clock, since he wanted to have an honor guard ready in time to receive the president’s body when it arrived at the White House. The best estimates of what time the president’s body would leave the morgue kept getting later. Originally, Shriver was told it would be 11:00 p.m. Then it was midnight. Finally Shriver was told to expect the body about 4:00 a.m. Shriver borrowed Colonel Miller’s copy of State, Official and Special Military Funeral Policies and Plans and tried quickly to glean what he needed to know. He also initiated a series of conversations with Richard Cardinal Cushing, a Kennedy family friend, about what the funeral Mass should include.

  This was not a simple issue to resolve—there had never before been a Roman Catholic funeral for an American president. About midnight, Angie Duke suggested that perhaps a secular funeral would be more appropriate, especially given the lengths to which President Kennedy had gone to maintain the proper separation of church and state. A nondenominational funeral, Duke went on, would be on safer constitutional grounds, especially if it were to be held at the White House. Shriver listened to Duke for as long as he could bear before cutting the protocol chief off curtly. “The family will not permit a nonreligious funeral,” Shriver said.

  A priest who was present suggested to Shriver that the funeral be a pontifical Mass—or High Mass—of requiem. According to David Pearson, a young Peace Corps aide who was pre
sent, Shriver shook his head. He glanced at Joe English, who understood exactly what his boss was thinking. “Let’s take the low road, Sarge,” he said. When the priest looked dismayed, Shriver said, “Look, [the president] made it a point to attend Low Mass himself every Sunday. Why should we force a High Mass on him now?”

  Telephone calls flowed into the White House all day and night. All “idea” calls were routed to Shriver by the switchboard operator, who prioritized them and delegated volunteers to attend to the best and most urgent of the ideas. As soon as each call had been dealt with, Shriver would return to presiding over the compiling of lists. Which foreign leaders should be invited to the funeral? Which governors? The whole Supreme Court? The Reverend Billy Graham? Kennedy’s comrades from PT-109? There were always more people to remember. At one point, after a phone conversation with Cardinal Cushing, Shriver clapped his hand to his forehead and exclaimed, “My God! We forgot to invite Truman, Ike, and Hoover”—the three living former presidents.

  John Bailey, the Connecticut political operative who had been instrumental in securing the Democratic nomination for Kennedy in 1960, kept rattling off names of politicians who he thought should be invited. Shriver rejected most of them. When Bailey persisted in rattling off more such names, wasting valuable time, Shriver glared at him and interrupted. “John,” he said curtly, “we are not trying to return political favors here tonight. We are trying to ask only those people who we know were personal friends of the president.”

  Then another gruesome question: Should the president’s casket be open or closed for the funeral? Jackie, Shriver surmised, would want the casket closed. But Lyndon Johnson had conveyed his desire that the casket be open. He feared a closed casket would fuel conspiracy theories—for instance, about the casket being empty, or containing a body other than Kennedy’s—that would somehow cast doubts on the legitimacy of Johnson’s presidency. Ultimately, the decision was an easy one. Once the president’s body arrived, Joe English and Bill Walton looked at it to see if it was fit for viewing. “The embalmers had done as good a job as possible,” English recalled, “but it was still clear that the back of his head had been blown off. So that settled that.”

  As the hour of the dead president’s arrival drew near, Shriver headed downstairs to check on the progress of the decorations in the East Room. As he walked through the curved corridor on the White House’s main floor, Shriver swore he could hear Jack’s voice. For a moment he thought he might be going mad or hearing a ghost. But rounding a corner he came upon a small office, vacant but for a television set showing his brother-in-law addressing the German people in West Berlin. Hearing his brother-in-law intone “Ich bin ein Berliner!” in his idiosyncratic New England twang, Shriver walked into the office and sank into a chair in front of the television to watch. He sat several minutes riveted to the television screen. No one dared speak to him.

  As the German crowd roared its approval of the American president on the screen, Shriver stood up and continued toward the East Room, where there was a great deal still to be done. Bill Walton was commanding a large crew of volunteers—including everyone from Arthur Schlesinger and Dick Goodwin to the president’s dog handler and the official White House upholsterer—who were engaged in a frenzy of draping black crepe over everything. The East Room was the biggest room in the mansion, and Shriver feared it would not be done before Jackie Kennedy saw it. So he rolled up his sleeves, clenched some carpet tacks between his teeth, and began hammering black cloth onto the walls and doors. The motley crew of decorators spoke little as they went somberly about their work. Whenever a question arose, everyone deferred instinctively to the judgment of Walton and Shriver.

  The East Room was finally beginning to look as Walton and Shriver imagined Jackie Kennedy would want it to look: stately without being pompous; somber without being crushingly so; and capturing the essence of how it had looked when Lincoln had lain there in state, but without violating modern standards of taste. Walton began attending to important details, such as whether a crucifix—a statue of Christ nailed to the cross—should be placed atop the president’s coffin. A gold and silver crucifix was delivered from the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, but when Walton saw it he deemed it too gaudy for Jackie’s taste. After a few others were brought in and deemed wanting, Walton began to wonder whether a crucifix was even necessary. But when he again consulted the 1865 engravings, a crucifix was plainly evident at the foot of Lincoln’s bier. President Kennedy would have to have one.

  Doesn’t anyone have one that would fit?” Walton asked, beginning to panic.

  “I’ll get mine,” Shriver said, thinking of the simple black cross, hand-sculpted by Benedictine monks in Minnesota, that hung on the wall of his Timberlawn bedroom. More than twenty years earlier, on a vacation in the Bahamas while at Yale, Shriver had struck up a close friendship with a priest there, the pastor of the church in Nassau, who had sent him the cross as a wedding gift. Shriver had carried the cross with him from place to place ever since; it had hung on his bedroom wall in every apartment and home in which he had lived. He immediately sent a White House car to Timberlawn, with instructions to have Mary Ann Orlando—who was helping the Shriver family nursemaid take care of the three Shriver children while Eunice was in Hyannis and Sarge was at the White House—pull the cross from the wall in his bedroom.

  When the driver returned with Shriver’s cross, Walton looked it over. “Perfect,” he declared. “It could have been ordered for the occasion.”

  Shriver walked out to the north portico, the White House’s front entrance. Although it was after three in the morning, thousands of people were walking aimlessly around Pennsylvania Avenue in a state of collective shock, waiting for the president’s body to arrive, perhaps feeling somehow that their presence outside the gate that night would honor him. Seeing these people, it occurred to Shriver that something more was needed to make the setting equal to the occasion. In 1963 the White House was not illuminated from outside; at night, the mansion had a cold, foreboding aspect. He recalled some of the White House parties he had attended, at which Jackie had arranged to have the grounds illuminated by low-slung, flaming pots. Perhaps something of that nature, he thought, would provide the touch of grace and warmth the moment called for.

  He summoned all the military officers present and announced, “This funeral for a president is going to vary a little bit from the manual. I know he isn’t really coming home, but I want it to look that way.” To that end, he explained, he would like the road from the gate to the north portico to be lit. Could the officers retrieve some lights? There were none available, he was told. “None?” Shriver asked, incredulous. “Not even flashlights?” The military men looked at one another helplessly. What if we beamed a searchlight down from a helicopter, one of them suggested tentatively. “Ridiculous,” Shriver replied, deciding he had better take the matter into his own hands. Remembering that he had occasionally seen low-slung, hand-lit torches on the highways at night, to warn drivers of construction work ahead, he went inside and called the Washington Highway Department to see if they had any such torches available. They didn’t—the highway department had recently converted to electric lights and all the old equipment had been thrown out. Shriver hung up in despair—only to be informed a short time later that the department had tracked down some of the flambeaux in an old warehouse. They would be delivered by 3:30 a.m.

  By 4:00 a.m., in William Manchester’s account, Walton and Shriver “had created a scene of indescribable drama: the flame-lit drive, the deep black against the white columns, the catafalque ready to receive the coffin.” As Robert Liston would write in True magazine several months after the assassination,

  This scene, and those brutally emotional ones which pinned the world to its television sets for the next three days came more out of Shriver than out of anyone else. Mrs. Kennedy’s wishes were dominant, but it was he who translated them into the multiplicity of details which lent majesty to the national tragedy and moved a
nation to tears.

  He was, at times, the dynamic executive, forgetting personal feelings to get a tough job done well—and going without sleep and food in the process. He was the man of seemingly endless energy, still running strong when younger men were ready to drop. He was the aesthetic man of taste and sensitivity, the proper greeter of dignitaries at the White House and the family man in step behind Jacqueline Kennedy on her mournful march to her husband’s funeral.

  Playing these interlocking roles perceptively was characteristic of Shriver, and he emerged from them all with stature greatly enhanced.

  Now all that remained was to prepare to receive the president’s remains. Shriver looked around, hoping to see the military personnel who could form an honor guard to grace John Kennedy’s arrival. “All right,” he said to Taz Shepard, who had been Kennedy’s naval aide, “where are they?”

  Shepard indicated he didn’t know. Shriver looked at him icily.

  “The president of the United States is going to be here any minute,” Shriver said, “and there’s nobody to meet him. Goddamn it, Taz, we want some soldiers or sailors who will walk slowly and escort him to the door, reflecting the solemnity of the occasion.”

  Dean Markham, who had been the head of JFK’s narcotics commission, remembered that there was a Marine Corps barracks on the corner of Eighth and I streets, southeast of the Capitol. Shepard called the barracks duty officer while Colonel Miller ordered a bus to deliver them. Within seventeen minutes, the drill team had gone from lying in their bunks to standing at arms on the south portico of the White House. They marched double time through the Diplomatic Reception Room to arrive, just in time, on the north portico.