by Scott Farris
Mrs. Kennedy, known to the tabloids and the world as “Jackie,” was wrong. In great measure due to her own deportment during the funeral activities, Jackie invested her husband’s death with considerable meaning. The poet Archibald MacLeish wrote that Mrs. Kennedy had “made the darkest days the American people have known in a hundred years the deepest revelation of their inward strength.”
The most powerful images from those horrible four days in November 1963 were of Mrs. Kennedy’s “expression of ineffable tragedy,” first in her blood-spattered pink dress and matching pillbox hat, later dressed all in black, her sad beautiful face framed by a mourning veil, her two heartbreakingly young children in either hand.
Mrs. Kennedy’s dignity generated many classical allusions during those days. Her nobility “represented all the heroes’ widows down the centuries since Andromache mourned Hector outside the walls of Troy,” one biographer wrote. She took what had been a day of national shame, that such a violent act could occur in America, and instead restored the country’s pride by showing that grief could be borne with such grace and resolve. In planning her husband’s funeral, Jackie herself sought historic parallels, insisting that Kennedy receive the “dignified funeral trappings of Abraham Lincoln.” In this way, she changed the popular image of her husband from that of a young, vital, contemporary politician full of faults and burdened by missteps into an ageless sage honored with an eternal flame.
It had been an anomaly that Mrs. Kennedy was sitting by her husband’s side when the bullets struck. Mrs. Kennedy had made no political appearances since the 1960 campaign; indeed, since the election she had not been west of Middleburg, Virginia, where the Kennedys had a horse-country estate. So when it was announced that she would accompany JFK to Texas, it was big news. Present at the event, she now became the focal point of all news coverage—and what coverage it was! Kennedy’s assassination, with the recent availability of satellites, was the first globally televised event in human history, which greatly explains its enduring impact. Ninety-five percent of all Americans watched at least part of the funeral on television or listened on the radio. A. C. Nielsen estimated that the average American family watched thirty-two hours of coverage of the assassination and funeral. There was, during those four days, as one observer noted, literally no other news; it was an event unique in human history, and Jackie Kennedy, even more than her husband, was at the center of it.
A survey of college students conducted in the weeks after the assassination found that “attention to Mrs. Kennedy’s actions and deportment bordered on the obsessive.” And her deportment was extraordinary. Lady Jane Campbell, writing for the London Evening Standard, delighted Kennedy admirers and appalled those dismayed by the idea that the Kennedys represented American royalty when she said that Mrs. Kennedy’s poise and dignity had “given the American people from this day on the one thing they always lacked—majesty.” Frank Sinatra said Jackie had become “America’s Queen.”
There was majesty, but Mrs. Kennedy’s greater achievement was that she also created familiarity. The riderless horse, the muffled drums of the funeral procession, the eternal flame at Arlington National Cemetery, all this pageantry enthralled and impressed; but the thirty-four-year-old Jackie also made the funeral seem personal, a reminder that not just a president but a young family had been felled by tragedy, and two children left fatherless. A typical sentiment was one expressed on a sign tacked to a New York City newsstand the day of the president’s funeral: Closed because of a death in the American family. By the time almost-six-year-old Caroline Kennedy was heard consoling her mother—“You’ll be all right, Mummy. Don’t cry. I’ll take care of you”—and John Jr. (he turned three years old the day his father was buried) was seen saluting his father’s coffin, 80 percent of Americans surveyed said they felt as if they had personally lost “someone very close and dear.” Nine in ten reported that grief over the assassination caused them “physical discomfort.” The sense of personal grief is captured in this famous exchange, when Washington Star columnist Mary McGrory tearfully told some dinner guests the day after the assassination, “We’ll never laugh again.” To which one of the guests, Kennedy aide Daniel Patrick Moynihan, gently replied, “Oh, we’ll laugh again, Mary. But we’ll never be young again.”
Despite this intensity of feeling, Mrs. Kennedy worried her husband would soon be forgotten. In a letter dated January 31, 1964, she told British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, “Already without him it is disintegrating.” Although she had already captured the public’s imagination, she now sought an image of her husband’s presidency that would capture it too. She was leaving nothing to chance. Learning that the journalist Theodore White, author of The Making of the President 1960, was writing a Kennedy retrospective for Life magazine, Jackie implored him to remember Jack for his love of history and great men, real and mythic, such as King Arthur. She insisted that she and Jack had loved the musical Camelot, especially a line from the title song’s reprise, “Now don’t let it be forgot that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot.” White knew the story was likely bunk; even Camelot’s lyricist, Alan Lerner, a personal friend of Kennedy, could not recall Kennedy expressing any admiration for the musical. “But,” said White, “I was taken with Jackie’s ability to frame the tragedy in such human and romantic terms. . . . So I said to myself, ‘Why not? If that’s all she wants, let her have it.’ So the epitaph of the Kennedy administration became Camelot—a magic moment in American history when gallant men danced with beautiful women, when great deeds were done and when the White House became the center of the universe.”
Mrs. Kennedy had not known it at the time, but she had not needed to construct a legend to ensure her husband’s legacy. A man more likely to don a cowboy hat than King Arthur’s crown had already begun the process. As author William Manchester, an unabashed Kennedy admirer noted, Mrs. Kennedy may have “possessed a far greater power, over men’s hearts,” but it was Kennedy’s vice president and successor, Lyndon Johnson, who now had the political power, and he intended to use it to simultaneously honor the dead president while ensuring his own election to the presidency in 1964.
New York Times columnist James Reston once wrote, “The heart of the Kennedy legend is what might have been.” That is wrong. First, from his handling of the Cuban missile crisis to successful ratification of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, Kennedy’s presidency could boast some significant achievements. Further, most of what else Kennedy might have achieved in office had he lived, certainly in domestic affairs, was achieved by Johnson; in fact, Johnson may have been able to achieve more than Kennedy could have. It is the saddest of ironies that as public belief in conspiracy rather than a lone Kennedy assassin has grown, a 2003 Gallup poll found 18 percent of Americans believed Johnson was part of that conspiracy!
Johnson had long fretted about the legislative ineptitude that led Kennedy’s legislative program to languish, and which had convinced many that Kennedy’s agenda might never become law. Some key advisors urged LBJ not to pursue civil rights legislation because a president should not waste political capital on lost causes. “Well, then,” he replied, “what the hell’s the presidency for?”
Kennedy’s body was hardly cold when Johnson realized how the assassination might be used to create good from an act of evil. He had already privately told Kennedy friend Florida senator George Smathers that he intended to pursue Kennedy’s program “because he’s a national hero and we’ve got to keep the Kennedy aura around us through this election.” Johnson exploited the vague consensus that “extremism had killed Kennedy.” In the wake of the assassination, few wanted to be seen as extremists, and Johnson skillfully defined the term as being in opposition to Kennedy’s (and his own) policies. Conservative opposition began to crumble, though it was the Republicans’ misfortune in 1964 that they nominated for president Barry Goldwater, who unabashedly defended “extremism in the pursuit of liberty.”
What Johnson failed to appreciate was that the successes would always be Kennedy’s, never Johnson’s, while the failures, like Vietnam, would always be associated with Johnson and not Kennedy. Martyrs are not saddled with failures.
And so, by his death, Kennedy was associated with civil rights for African Americans, as his widow had hoped. And because Lincoln was associated with freedom for African Americans, Kennedy’s assassination was now seen as a twin to Lincoln’s murder. This linkage has grown over time, especially when Kennedy’s death is placed in the context of the subsequent murders five years later of Martin Luther King Jr. and of his own brother, Robert Kennedy, who had evolved to become a strong advocate for civil rights. This supposed common thread among all four deaths was articulated in the popular 1968 song “Abraham, Martin and John,” sung by Dion, with its refrain “it seems the good they die young.” The song, in gentler words than many would use, conveyed the belief that American had become a “sick” society that found ways to eliminate racially progressive leaders. As the historian Stephen Ambrose said of Kennedy, “There is a very strong sense that if [Kennedy] had not died, we would not have suffered the thirty years of nightmare that followed—the race riots, the white backlash, assassinations, Vietnam, Watergate, Iran-Contra.”
And so Kennedy’s death took on an epic quality, so much so that CBS newsman Dan Rather predicted it will still be discussed “a hundred years from now, a thousand years from now, in somewhat the same way people discuss The Iliad.” If this is true, much credit will be due to Kennedy himself and much to the work of Johnson, his loyal successor, but it will be primarily the result of the dignity exhibited by Kennedy’s widow, who played the role of America’s Penelope as steadfast in her loyalty to her husband as Odysseus’s wife had been, but in service to a husband who would never return.
“History admires the wise, but it elevates the brave,” noted Reagan biographer Edmund Morris. As the poet Archibald MacLeish observed, Mrs. Kennedy exhibited that bravery, an inner strength we would like to believe exemplifies what it means to be an American. So did Reagan the day he was shot.
The only real precedent to Reagan’s experience is the shooting of Theodore Roosevelt, then an ex-president, while TR was campaigning for president in 1912 as an independent candidate on the Progressive ticket. Roosevelt not only survived the shooting, he insisted on delivering a planned speech before seeking medical treatment. Roosevelt’s courage was much remarked upon at the time, and Reagan’s behavior seven decades later would win similar accolades.
While organized labor was not a natural ally of his administration, Reagan had looked forward to speaking to the AFL-CIO on March 30, 1981, and reminding them that because of his membership and presidency of the Screen Actors Guild, he was the only president to hold a union card. He made a strong pitch to the AFL-CIO members to support his economic program, especially his tax cut proposals, which faced an uncertain future in the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives. He told the union delegates, “I know we can’t make things right overnight. But we will make them right. Our destiny is not our fate. It is our choice.”
Outside the Washington, DC, Hilton Hotel, waiting for Reagan was twenty-five-year-old John W. Hinckley, a year older than Oswald had been, and equally as alienated from the world. The son of a wealthy oil executive, Hinckley had been raised in the affluent suburbs of Dallas and Denver. Despite advantages that would have been beyond Oswald’s imagining, Hinckley was no more of a success. An indifferent student, he attended college sporadically but never earned a degree. He dreamed of being a singer-songwriter but was too shy to perform even before his family. After his parents threw him out of the house, he stole some gold coins from them and pawned them, as well as his guitar and most of his small gun collection, to finance a life on the road.
During the brief time he attended Texas Tech University, Hinckley had a black dormitory roommate, whom Hinckley acknowledged was nice enough. Still, the experience somehow convinced Hinckley that he was both a white supremacist and an “all-out anti-Semite.” It was around this time that Hinckley also first saw the 1976 film Taxi Driver, which he subsequently watched at least fifteen times and which left him infatuated with the young lead actress in the film, Jodie Foster, who was thirteen years old when the film was made. Hinckley began stalking Foster, who by 1980 was attending Yale University, but lacking the courage to actually approach her, he decided he would win her attention by killing a famous man. During the 1980 presidential campaign, Hinckley stalked President Jimmy Carter, including at one rally in Ohio where Hinckley was within arm’s reach of the president, but he had not brought a gun. That’s when he had a revelation; it would be easy to shoot a president.
At almost exactly 2:30 p.m. on Monday, March 30, 1981, Reagan exited the Hilton. No one paid any attention to Hinckley, who was armed with a semiautomatic .22-caliber handgun that he had purchased at a Dallas pawnshop and which he had heinously loaded with Detonator bullets, whose tips carried a high explosive, called lead azide, that was designed to explode on impact. As Reagan waved and smiled at the crowd that had gathered to get a glimpse of the president, Hinckley stepped forward and fired six shots in 1.7 seconds.
The first bullet fired struck Reagan’s press secretary, Jim Brady, in the head. The second bullet struck the back of Washington police officer Thomas Delahanty, who was standing between Hinckley and Reagan. The third shot sailed over Reagan’s head. The fourth bullet struck Secret Service Agent Tim McCarthy, who had instinctively whirled around and placed his body between the shooter and the president, in the chest. The fifth bullet struck the presidential limousine, which caused the bullet to explode and flatten as it ricocheted and struck Reagan in the chest. The sixth and final bullet cracked across the hotel driveway as other Secret Service agents and police tackled Hinckley.
Initially it was unclear whether Reagan had been hit. Secret Service Agent Jerry Parr had pushed Reagan into the presidential limousine and then fallen on top of him as a shield. Because the bullet had flattened on its impact with the limousine and entered the president’s chest at an angle, the entry wound was a small slit that produced no visible blood. Once inside the president’s body, however, the bullet rotated and created a dime-width’s path of destruction through Reagan’s body, with the bullet stopping an inch from his heart. Reagan ascribed the intense pain he felt while riding in the limousine to Parr having broken his ribs when he landed on top of the president. But when Parr noticed a bloody froth on Reagan’s lips, he surmised Reagan had been wounded in the lungs. He immediately redirected the limousine driver to George Washington University Hospital. Had Parr continued on to the White House first, as had been the original plan, Reagan would have certainly died.
When the limousine arrived at GWU’s emergency room, three minutes after the shooting, Reagan, despite intense pain, insisted on walking inside the hospital, but he collapsed seconds after making his way through the doors. His systolic blood pressure, which was normally 140, had dropped to 60. Before he made it to the operating room, he would lose more than half of his blood. When Reagan’s wife, Nancy, arrived at the hospital, she said her f
irst thought was to recall that she had been driving down San Vicente Boulevard in Los Angeles on November 22, 1963, when she heard that Kennedy had been shot.
While reports that shots had been fired at the president triggered many memories of what had happened in Dallas eighteen years before, there was less concern because early news reports erroneously stated that Reagan had not been wounded. Once it was learned that the president had been hit and that the bullet had come close to his heart, many wondered how the now-seventy-year-old Reagan could recover. Nor was the nation assured by the actions of Reagan’s staff back at the White House. A briefing by deputy press secretary Larry Speakes had been a disaster, and Secretary of State Alexander Haig’s constitutionally incorrect assertion before the cameras that he was now in charge gave a sense of chaos. Reagan’s chief of staff, James Baker, asked Lyn Nofziger, who had served Reagan in several capacities dating from Reagan’s time as governor of California, to try to calm the situation.
Nofziger updated the news media on Reagan’s condition, but as he stepped away from the microphone, he received one last question from a reporter: “Did he say anything?” Nofziger, smiling gently, pulled some rumpled notes from his pockets, saying, “I have some stuff here.” He noted that Reagan had assured friends, “Don’t worry about me. I’ll make it.” Then he noted that when Reagan first saw his wife, he said, “Honey, I forgot to duck”—a reference by Reagan, an old sportswriter, to Jack Dempsey’s comment to his wife when he had been knocked out by Gene Tunney in their heavyweight championship fight in the 1920s. Nofziger then repeated for reporters the president’s quip to the operating physicians, “I hope you’re all Republicans.” And he told of how, when Reagan saw Baker and his other top aides, Edwin Meese and Mike Deaver, the president asked, “Who’s minding the store?”