by Adam Braver
An hour later the chief of the day sent word that everybody should be prepared and on alert. Kennedy’s remains were en route to the hospital. Floyd called Stringer, who said he was on the way. Since the hospital would not be letting anybody in or out, Floyd was charged to wait at the front entrance in order to confirm not only that Stringer was who he claimed to be but also that he was needed inside the building.
Floyd was ashamed to admit that he felt pretty excited.
In the crowded morgue, Floyd hid in the corner. He was waiting. His skin buzzing electric. He held on to the Canon. Ran the focus in and out.
After setting up his equipment, Stringer walked back, folded his arms, and leaned against the wall. Asked Floyd how he was doing now that he’d hit the big time. If he was prepared. Ready to witness this. “Strange thing how the events on the TV seemed to be taking place in another world,” Stringer said, “yet just like that, we’re in that world. Like we’ve entered into the TV.”
“Amazing thing,” Floyd said. “Does make you a little jittery.”
Stringer leaned in closer, drawing his voice down to a whisper. “You have film in that camera? In the Canon?”
Floyd nodded.
“And extras in your pocket? Because if you don’t have extras in your pocket, I want you to run down to the office and load up.”
“I’ve got another roll. Maybe two.”
“That’s good. Good.”
“You want me to shoot alongside you or something?”
Stringer slid over closer. “This is an occasion,” he said.
“An occasion?”
“An occasion. You should be shooting the whole room. Documenting it. Re-creating the atmosphere.”
“That’s not too general?”
“It’s just as important, in order to understand the whole story.”
“You think so?”
“That’s why you became a photographer, isn’t it? To document the story, yes? Well, this is history, Mr. Riebe, and you’re in the middle of it. With a camera . . . An occasion, Mr. Riebe. An occasion.”
Floyd patted the spare roll in his pocket. “You think it’s okay? I guess I’m still not sure why I’d bother.”
“It’s your obligation.”
The gurney rolled in, its black wheels wobbling and shaking under the weight of the bronze casket. Nobody talked. A tech named O’Conner unzipped the body bag down the middle, stinking up the place to high heaven. He peeled the plastic back while two other men came around to help.
Seeing Kennedy’s body on the table was anticlimactic. Lying there naked and stiff, the towels off his head, the president looked no different than the other bodies Floyd had seen. Pale, stupid expressions. Everyman scars. Clumsy, stiffened postures, with their heads awkwardly cradled in a stainless-steel stirrup. No different than the young man who’d died in the tanker accident earlier in the year. Or the old admiral who keeled over into his cereal bowl. And while this should have come as a relief, Floyd felt disappointed.
Stringer was already at the camera, snapping some photos, rolling the lights, while the doctors made general notes and prepared for the X-rays. He looked back once, nodding for Floyd to get going.
Looking around the room, Floyd made sure no one was paying attention to him. He worked his way three or four steps behind Stringer, who was already circling around the doctors, and took a deep breath. One agent got out of his way, apologizing with a side step. He snapped a couple of pictures in the general direction of the autopsy table, capturing both Stringer and the doctors. It seemed a little vague. With all due respect to his teacher, Floyd preferred the absolute. It seemed like direct shots of the body were the best document. Not the atmosphere. Still, he figured he’d try. Supposedly Stringer was the best.
He was able to get a quick series of Kennedy’s body. From the unorthodox angle and positioning, Kennedy looked as though he lay alone in the room, disoriented. Then people started to lean over. Interact with the corpse. The movement began to excite the scene. Create a narrative. Floyd had to admit it was nice being freed from the doctors’ procedures. He broke away from Stringer. Turning slightly, he felt the motion of the room around him. As though he were part of a film, rolling from frame to frame. More and more he found himself lost to the lens. Watching the events unfold one shutter click at a time. For once, within the experience while capturing the experience.
There were so many telling expressions. The staid but uncomfortable mien of one of the agents. Dr. Humes’s eyebrows wrinkling as he turned to respond to Dr. Burkley. The nurses standing a step behind. The political aides conferring with the doctors. One shot captured Bobby Kennedy’s shoulder as he leaned anxiously through the double doors, looking for somebody.
Floyd focused on one particular Secret Service agent, catching the exact moment when he glanced at Kennedy’s skull, swallowing, his eyes fixed to the side, wearied, and maybe for the first time heartbroken at his failure to protect. And just as Floyd snapped the picture, the agent glared right at him. Face tightening. Lips pursed. He walked over and grabbed the Canon. Popped open the back as if he’d read the owner’s manual and stripped the film out the back, holding it up to the light, as though he enjoyed watching it expose. It ended that quickly.
Floyd Riebe had been trained to be loyal only to facts. And he’d embraced that. Maybe too well. Stringer knew. Understood. Maybe that’s why he’d told him to document the occasion. To try to find the artfulness. See beyond the objective eye. But it wasn’t his way. Wasn’t right. It was only a seduction.
Forget art.
Forget artfulness.
Floyd had confined everything he’d just witnessed to the destroyed film, and without it, how could he know anything? He could only be part of an occasion about which he had no memories.
Pushing himself through the crowd, Floyd backed up into a corner. He looked at Stringer, but the big man didn’t notice. He watched over the room, reciting the scene to himself. Lips moving, but not speaking aloud, he narrated the precise details. Cataloging the movements of the doctors. The amount of film cassettes used. The order of things. At some point he knew he’d be asked about the experience, and he knew that on some level he would make a story about it (how could he not?), but he wanted to be sure that the story was accurate, the details precise, and that any discrepancies were technical, not interpretive. He said them over and over to himself, reversing the order when needed, blinking his eyes as though developing and fixing them to his memory, knowing that he’d never take another photo for art’s sake, believing the bureaucrat’s creed that the details are grounded in the world of absolutes.
The Burial Site.
The word is Boston. But no one thinks much of it. Even if it did make sense, it’s only out of convenience. The inner circle is asking around. Straw polls on the seventeenth floor of the Bethesda Naval Hospital. They ask Ben Bradlee. He’s an original Bostonian. What does he think of it for the grave site? Of Boston? Brookline, where the family plot is. Maybe Cape Cod. He shrugs and says he doesn’t like either. But it’s only kneejerk reacting. How could he have thought about it? Who could be giving this any serious thought right now? At least, who other than those who must?
And does it matter that the lineage was to Martha Washington and not to George? Does it help that George Washington always thought of George Washington Parke Custis as his own, even though he was born to Martha’s son from a previous marriage? That Washington adopted the boy when his father died from camp fever during the Battle of Yorktown? That there was so much Washington pride running through that family that George Washington Parke Custis built Arlington House as a tribute to George Washington, the man he considered to be more of a father than a grandfather? Does it matter that George Washington Parke Custis had a daughter named Anna Marie, and she married her cousin Robert E. Lee, and that when her father died she inherited Arlington House, and that she and Lee called it home for thirty years, until 1861, when Lee, loyal to his Virginia roots, traded in his U.S. Army stripes in
order to command the Confederate army? Does it matter that on May 13, 1864, William Christman of the Sixty-seventh Pennsylvania Infantry Regiment was the first soldier to be buried on the grounds of Lee’s estate, which had already been seized by the government due to back taxes and then made a Union headquarters? Or that by the war’s end, the grounds interred upward of sixteen thousand? Does it matter that General Miegs of the Union Army had soldiers buried directly in front of Arlington House, just to disgrace Robert E. Lee and to make sure he never returned to the house? To Anna Marie Custis Lee it mattered. After all, her great-grandparents were George and Martha Washington.
Early in 1963, Paul Fuqua was giving President Kennedy a tour of Arlington National Cemetery. As the official tour guide, Fuqua made reference to Memorial Bridge being a symbolic link between the North and the South. President Kennedy hadn’t known that and asked Fuqua to tell him more. Together they stood in an untamed spot as Fuqua explained how the bridge had been perfectly aligned between Arlington House and the Lincoln Memorial. The placement and design had been conscious, meant to be seen as a healing gesture. Kennedy and Fuqua looked down the hillside, almost perfectly centered between the two memorials. The sun was shining, and there was a light breeze that whistled through the leaves, and the valley looked so sadly bucolic, as though unscorched by its history. “This is so beautiful,” President Kennedy said. “I could stay here forever.”
The issue of the burial site has not been brought up with Jackie yet. But the probability of Arlington is becoming more and more likely. And once this autopsy is finished Bobby is going to look at the site, the space where Jack stood when he said he could stay there forever, and see if it is a place he in fact thinks his brother could stay forever. Then he’ll present it to Jackie. They’ll need to make a decision. If not by tonight, then by morning, because the area will have to be cleared—apparently the plot is all clay and roots. The more the idea starts to settle, the better it sounds. Plus it’s logical. Jack was both a war hero and the commander in chief. He should rest among his peers. And whatever is missing of Brookline or Cape Cod they can bring to him, in memoriam. Cape Cod granite. The fescue and clover of a Massachusetts field. It’s all so logical and uncommonly easy. As though they’d been thinking about it for days, planning it out for weeks. Already perfectly natural.
Breaking and Crumbling: Part One.
She asks him if he knows, and Bobby says, “Knows?” and she says, “Yes, do you know what is going on with the procedure? Are they still doing that autopsy?” She’s looking right at him, her face stiff and composed, but her eyes drifting elsewhere. It nearly murdered her to say the word.
But there are new pains. They stab in her belly. Deep inside. Shooting up her spine. And they remind her of labor pains. If only she could anticipate them. Yet she can’t pinpoint the pains to any particular place or order. Still, when they come she is almost doubled over. Caught between a clenched fist and a scream.
He says, “Let me telephone. I’ll check. See what I can find out.”
She smiles back at him. “I’m breaking,” she says. “I’m breaking all over.”
“Breaking?”
“Crumbling. Crumbling apart.”
“Should I get Dr. Walsh?”
“He’s already tried. I think I might die of an overdose before I feel the effects of his drugs.”
“What can I do for you?”
“You can find out. I’m not sure how I’ll hold . . . You can find out.”
“Right. What they know.”
“And when they’re going to stop.”
“Stop?”
“Cutting him apart.”
Fixed in Wax.
Tom Robinson was part of the team from Gawler’s Sons Funeral Home that prepared the body for burial following the autopsy. Most of his work began after the arterial embalming. Initially, he assessed the makeup needs for the president. Mostly cosmetic. The facial damage was minimal, just a few marks on the temple, near the hairline. They were small enough that he didn’t need stitches to close them. The president’s hair could cover the wounds. But, just in case, Robinson would apply a bit of wax to smooth it out. The bigger concern, of course, was the hole in the back of the skull. A piece of rubber was brought in to seal it up. First they had to dry the skin out. Then insert as much of the rubber as they could under the scalp and hair, and then try to sew the skin to the rubber. As Robinson later testified, the objective was to sew it up tight, with perfection and precision. They were afraid of leaks, because “once the body is moved or shaken in the casket and carried up the Capitol steps and opened again, we had to be very careful, there would have been blood on the pillow.”
After completing the procedure, Robinson dabbed his sponge along the president’s face, evening out his complexion. Brushing his hair in a way that denied any suggestion of trauma.
Breaking and Crumbling: Part Two.
She’ll agree to Arlington. And though they’ll want the site to be nearly in front of the Lee house, Major General Jack Graham of the Army Corps of Engineers will succeed in working with the family to move the grave site down, to a point just over the military crest, where it will still be in line with Memorial Bridge but distinct from Arlington House. She won’t say much to Bobby and McNamara other than to agree and make sure there is ample space. Already she will be planning to have Patrick’s remains removed from the Brookline plot, along with their stillborn daughter, Arabella, buried in Newport, and have them both transported to Arlington to be reinterred, resting beside their father. And when she thinks about the dead babies she’ll get those shooting pains again, as though those lost children are still trying to kick and push their way out of her. It’s almost a full-body contraction. Maybe when they’re laid together, and the physicality of it relieves the shock of dying, the pain will hurt a little less. And her body can stop breaking and crumbling.
A CENTENNIAL FUNERAL (facts & stories)
IN PROCLAMATION 3382, dated January 7, 1960, President Eisenhower called on Americans from all arenas to participate in the observances for the centennial of the Civil War, to be celebrated between 1961 and 1965. Topps trading cards climbed right on board. In 1962, they put out a series of eightyeight Civil War cards that, along with bubble-gum sticks and reproduced Confederate currency, depicted colorful scenes of Civil War moments with titles such as Destructive Blow, Wall of Corpses, The Cannon’s Victim, and City in Flames. The final card in the commemorative set, #87, was called The War Ends (there was a #88, but it was just the checklist). There wasn’t a Lincoln Gets Murdered card.
By 1961 President Kennedy had to reorganize the Civil War Centennial Commission. What should have been a proper memorial had become a staging ground in which many of the Southern states advocated the preservation of racial segregation while their northern counterparts commemorated emancipation. But perhaps the real downfall of the original commission was its inability to promote the centennial as nostalgia. It was expected to make a celebration of America’s military history, not our cultural history. One hundred years was supposed to be significant, a monumental divider that firmly plunked our past into history. But instead it exposed the ugliness with an almost sanctioned attention, delivering the message that one hundred years is barely enough time for the wound to scar.
In addition to replacing members of the committee, President Kennedy did his part to turn the conversation back to a nostalgic American narrative in which freedom and victory always triumph through moral and physical strength. Speaking to descendents of the Civil War Medal of Honor winners on the South Lawn in April of 1962, he spoke about how the memory of the great Civil War battles “gives me, as an American, a source of satisfaction to realize that we are the inheritors of that great martial tradition . . . I don’t think that there is any feat of arms that is more dramatic than the Andrews Raid—and all the actions of the Civil War, the Indian Wars that followed, and the wars in this century.”
Now they were getting a handle on it.
A cente
nnial perfectly suited for Topps bubble-gum cards.
Nelson Pierce found out about Dallas at the East Gate of the White House. He’d left his part-time morning job on Fifteenth Street NW at a little past one thirty, heading over the few blocks to the White House, where he’d start his afternoon shift as the usher on duty. As one of five ushers, Nelson’s job was to make certain that the first family had everything they needed. A car. A piece of furniture moved. Food. Something for the children. If the White House residence were a hotel, the ushers served as its hotel managers. They hired and oversaw the servants, as well as controlled the entertainment budget. But the true managerial duties rested with the chief usher, Mr. West. Nelson, along with the other three—Scouten, Carter, and Hare—ran the floor.
He got to the East Gate at a quarter to two, about an hour before his shift began. When the family was out of town, he was usually able to leave an hour early, and on a Friday night, after putting in some morning hours elsewhere, that seemed like something of a perk. It’s easy to picture him walking up casually. Knowing it should be a relatively quiet day and already thinking about what he might do with the evening’s extra hour. He probably would not have recognized the urgency of the policeman at the gate, trying to will him forward, wanting Nelson to move more quickly but not able to move himself. The policeman nearly left his post to get to Nelson. “Pierce,” he said, “hurry and get to the office. The boss has been shot.”
And it’s easy to picture Nelson partially smiling, unsure of what gives, but his mouth slowly dropping open when he realized the policeman wasn’t playing. That his expression wasn’t breaking. And that the policeman’s voice was shaking when he looked at Nelson, and said, “I’m on the level.”