Nellie Connally was relieved and elated by the cheering crowds. As their car turned slowly onto Elm Street, she shifted around in the jump seat where she was riding next to her husband, and beamed at Kennedy: “Mr. President, you certainly can’t say that Dallas doesn’t love you!” His eyes grew wide with excitement. Dallas had surprised him, thought Nellie. And then the plaza rang with the first gunshot.
The first bullet tore through Kennedy’s throat, and his arms went up as if to block himself from further injury. His wife turned to him, and just as she did, another bullet shattered his head. The picture of her husband in his final moment of life seared itself into her memory. She remembered the strange elegance of his demeanor. “His last expression was so neat; he had his hand out, I could see a piece of his skull coming off; it was flesh-colored not white. He was holding out his hand—and I can see this perfectly clean piece detaching itself from his head; then he slumped in my lap.”
Later in her interview with White, Jackie returned to the moment of her husband’s death. It was an odd association to make, but something about his face brought back the alert play of his mind at press conferences. “You know when he was shot. He had such a wonderful expression on his face. You know that wonderful expression he had when they’d ask him a question about one of the ten million gadgets they’d have in a rocket? Just before he’d answer, he looked puzzled; and then he slumped forward.”
Now the contents of her husband’s precious brain were spilled all over the car. They splattered everyone riding in the limousine. To Nellie Connally it felt like she was being tattooed by “hot hail.” Even the motorcycle cops riding uselessly behind the presidential vehicle were splashed with Kennedy’s life matter.
The first lady tore the air with her frantic screams: “Jack, Jack!” And then: “They’ve killed my husband! I have his brains in my hand!”
Nellie Connally could offer no help. She was bent over her own husband, who was gushing blood through his shirt. By holding him tightly, Nellie Connally would save her husband’s life, blocking the gaping hole in his chest. “My God, they are going to kill us all!” the governor blurted before sagging forward. The Connallys would forever insist—contrary to the Warren Report, which strained to limit the number of bullets fired that day to fit its lone gunman theory—that the bullet that ripped into the governor’s back was not one of those that hit the president.
Suddenly the first lady, her pink suit drenched in her husband’s gore, was clambering onto the trunk of the moving limousine. She needed to retrieve the missing fragment of her husband’s skull. It was the only way that she could save him, that she could make him whole again. The sprinting Clint Hill pushed her back into the car, just as it suddenly sped off to Parkland Hospital. “We all lay down in the car and I kept saying, ‘Jack, Jack, Jack’ and someone was yelling, ‘He’s dead, he’s dead,’” she told White. “All the ride to the hospital, I kept bending over him saying, ‘Jack, Jack, can you hear me, I love you, Jack.’ I kept holding the top of his head down trying to keep the…” She could not finish the sentence.
At the hospital, sitting in the terrible Lincoln—“long and black as a hearse,” in Nellie’s words—Jackie could not let go of her broken husband. “The seat was full of blood and red roses,” she recalled. Everywhere else during the trip, they had given her the yellow roses of Texas. But at Love Field, she had been presented a bouquet of red American Beauties. Secret Service men were suddenly swarming everywhere, screaming, “Mr. President!” They pleaded with Jackie to get out of the car. “These big Texas interns kept saying, ‘Mrs. Kennedy, you come with us.’ They wanted to take me away from him. Dave Powers came running to me; my legs, my hands were covered with his brains. When Dave saw this, he burst out weeping. From here down”—and here, she made a gesture indicating her husband’s forehead—“his head was so beautiful. I’d tried to hold the top of his head down, maybe I could keep it in…I knew he was dead.
“They came trying to get me; they tried to grab me, but I said, ‘I’m not leaving.’ When they carried Jack in, Hill threw his coat over Jack’s head [but] it wasn’t repulsive to me for one moment—nothing was repulsive to me. And I was running behind this big intern, I was running behind with the coat covering it. I remember this narrow corridor. I said, ‘I’m not going to leave him, I’m not going to leave him, I’m not going to leave him.’” She remembered the grueling back operation that had nearly killed him when they were newlyweds. She had promised him that she would not leave his side during the surgery, but they had taken him away and she had not seen him again for hours. “They’re never going to keep me away from him again,” she told herself at Parkland.
Dr. Malcolm Perry, the surgeon working on her dying husband, did not want her in the operating room, but she forced her way in. She told him, “It’s my husband, his blood, his brains are all over me.” There was nothing Perry and the other doctors could do to save her husband. A priest was summoned to deliver the final rites. “There was a sheet over Jack, his foot was sticking out of the sheet, whiter than the sheet. I took his foot and kissed it. Then I pulled back the sheet. His mouth was so beautiful, his eyes were open. They found his hand under the sheet, and I held his hand all the time the priest was saying extreme unction.”
In the months following Dallas, the fallen president’s deeply despondent widow sought counsel from a Jesuit priest named Richard McSorley. She was plagued by something from that day, she told McSorley. Her husband was already dying from the fatal second shot before she realized it. “If only I had a minute to say goodbye. It was so hard not to say goodbye, not to be able to say goodbye.”
Later, in the hot confines of Air Force One, which Lyndon Johnson insisted stay on the Love Field tarmac until he was sworn in as the new president of the United States, everybody urged her to wipe her husband’s dried blood off her face. A photographer was going to commemorate the historic ceremony and Johnson wanted Jackie by his side. She stared at herself in the mirror. “My whole face was splattered with blood and hair. I wiped it off with a Kleenex.” But she immediately regretted it. “One second later I thought, why did I wash the blood off? I should have left it there, let them see what they’ve done.” That’s what she told Bobby when she saw him later. They should have seen her with her painted face and clotted hair when the famous photo was taken on Air Force One; her horrible visage would have condemned them for all time.
But, widowed at thirty-four, she already felt herself fading into history. White’s notes are filled with the word. She repeated it often during the interview. “History,” she said inexplicably at one point, as if describing herself, for that’s what she was becoming. As Air Force One flew through the darkening sky to Washington, events were already sweeping past her. “I thought no one really wants me here.”
For a brief, savage moment, Jacqueline Kennedy considered playing the role of a raging truth-teller from a Greek tragedy. This is how they killed the king! This is how they spilled his beautiful mind into my hands! But she would soon allow herself to be turned into “the Widder Kennedy,” as she mocked her image—the stoic woman who taught a nation how to mourn.
IN THE CHAOTIC HOURS after Dealey Plaza, the world tilted off its axis. Global leaders wondered whether the assassination of the U.S. president meant the beginning of nuclear war. The newly inaugurated president was not certain if he could control the shock waves from Dallas. Like his predecessor, he did not feel in full command of the country’s military machine. Would he be history’s master, or its victim, wondered Lyndon Johnson as Air Force One carried him, along with Kennedy’s remains and his shattered retinue, back to Washington?
Bill Moyers, Johnson’s young protégé, had rushed to his side as soon as he heard about the assassination, chartering a private plane in Austin, where he had been overseeing the final leg of the Texas trip, and flying to Dallas before Air Force One took off. Johnson—surrounded by angry, distraught Kennedy loyalists—was relieved to see the fresh-scrubbed face of the former
Baptist seminarian on board. The two Texans were closely connected by what Moyers called an almost-familial “umbilical cord.” Johnson—who knew that the Kennedy circle liked the bright, young Texan, who was serving as Sargent Shriver’s Peace Corps deputy at the time—needed him more than ever now. While Air Force One was still in the air, the new president recruited him to be his special assistant.
At one point during the flight, Moyers noticed his old mentor sitting by himself, gazing intently at the passing clouds outside his window. “What’s on your mind, Mr. President?” asked Moyers. A grim-looking Johnson turned to him and said, “I wonder if the missiles are flying.” Moyers was puzzled by the remark at the time. If the United States was launching a nuclear attack, certainly the new president would know it. But, in the frantic aftermath of Dallas, Johnson was clearly unsure who was running the country.
“The thought in Johnson’s mind at this time could only be that there had been a coup, and that once the airplane took off from Love Field for Washington, the country would spin into the hands of the button-pushers,” observed James K. Galbraith, a political historian at the University of Texas’s Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, in a recent interview. Galbraith, the son of the late economist and Kennedy advisor John Kenneth Galbraith, added that “Johnson knew that this was the moment of maximum strategic advantage” for national security hard-liners who yearned for a final confrontation with the country’s enemies. For nearly three years, Kennedy and McNamara had held off these rabid advocates of a final nuclear solution. But with JFK bluntly removed from the chain of command, there was no telling what they would now attempt.
These same fears were gripping the two foreign leaders most likely to be attacked by unhinged nuclear warriors in the United States. In Cuba, Fidel Castro was eating lunch with Jean Daniel, the French journalist who had brought peace feelers from President Kennedy, at the Cuban leader’s Varadero Beach residence when he received the stunning report about Dallas. “This is bad news,” a dazed Castro repeated three times after putting down the phone.
After their long and bitter jousting, Castro had begun to see Kennedy as an agent of change. “He still has the possibility of becoming, in the eyes of history, the greatest president of the United States, the leader who may at last understand that there can be coexistence between capitalists and socialists, even in the Americas,” Castro told Daniel during an all-night interview session on the eve of Dallas. “He would then be an even greater president than Lincoln. I know, for example, that for Khrushchev, Kennedy is a man you can talk with. I have gotten this impression from all my conversations with Khrushchev.”
Then Castro broke into what his French visitor described as a “broad and boyish grin,” pledging to help Kennedy in his reelection campaign: “If you see him again, you can tell him that I’m willing to declare Goldwater my friend if that will guarantee Kennedy’s reelection!”
But on the afternoon of November 22, as Castro and Daniel huddled over a radio, listening to an NBC News broadcast from Miami, the Cuban leader’s mood grew dark and foreboding. When Kennedy’s death was confirmed, Castro stood up and said, “Everything is changed.”
Then, as the radio played “The Star Spangled Banner,” Castro, surrounded by a circle of worried aides, made an astute prediction: “You watch and see, I know them, they will try to put the blame on us for this thing.” Later, as they rode in Castro’s car, the radio reported that Lee Harvey Oswald, the accused assassin, was married to a Russian. “There! Didn’t I tell you; it’ll be my turn next,” erupted the Cuban leader. Minutes later, it was. The American broadcaster reported that Oswald was a Castro admirer who belonged to the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. At first he tried to shrug it off, calling it an obvious “propaganda device. It’s terrible. But you know, I’m sure this will all soon blow over. There are too many competing policies in the United States for any single one to be able to impose itself universally for very long.”
But as the radio announcer ominously confirmed that Kennedy’s assassin was a “pro-Castro Marxist” and the tone of the reports grew increasingly shrill and aggressive, Castro’s equanimity began to fail him. He started grilling Daniel about what he knew of the new U.S. president. What were Johnson’s relations with Kennedy? With Khrushchev? What was his position on the Bay of Pigs? And then, “finally and most important of all,” Daniel recalled, Castro asked him: “What authority does he exercise over the CIA?” It was a question that Lyndon Johnson was asking himself at the very same time.
Meanwhile, in Moscow, the roly-poly leader who, clowning and growling, had at first tried to intimidate the young, untested American president—and then, after he had taken his measure of the man, settled into a mutually respectful quest with him for world peace—was utterly undone. Hearing the news from Dallas, Khrushchev broke down and sobbed in the Kremlin. He took the news as “a personal blow,” said one aide. For several days, he was unable to perform his duties. Khrushchev was convinced that Kennedy was killed by militaristic forces in Washington bent on sabotaging the two leaders’ efforts to reach détente. Would they now launch a nuclear strike on the Soviet Union? Would the Soviet leader be ousted by hard-line forces in his own government?
“Khrushchev needed Kennedy and thought Kennedy needed him,” observed Khrushchev biographer William Taubman. Together, they were staking out a course that was steering the two countries away from nuclear brinksmanship to a new world harmony. Even administration tough guy Bobby Kennedy looked forward to a second summit meeting, where—unlike the abrasive posturing of Vienna—the two leaders could “calmly sit and talk everything over.” Now Khrushchev’s essential partner was gone.
At the White House reception for the foreign dignitaries who attended Kennedy’s funeral, the guests were surprised to see the president’s widow coming downstairs to greet them, despite everything she had been through. In the receiving line, the Russian representative—Khrushchev’s old warhorse deputy, Anastas Mikoyan—approached Jackie, visibly trembling. She clasped both his hands in hers and in a voice filled with deep emotion, said, “Please tell Mr. Chairman President that I know he and my husband worked together for a peaceful world, and now he and you must carry on my husband’s work.” The old Bolshevik blinked and hid his face with both hands.
A week later, Jackie Kennedy followed up her remarks to Mikoyan by writing a letter directly to Khrushchev, to make sure he clearly understood her message. The day of the funeral had been so “horrible” for her, she explained in the letter, that she did not know how lucid she was in her brief conversation with his representative. She told Khrushchev how her late husband had regarded him as an integral force for peace. And then she made a revealing reference to the obstacles that Kennedy had faced in his search for détente—one that certainly would have resonated with the Russian leader, who confronted similar opposition at home. “The danger troubling my husband was that war could be started not so much by major figures as by minor ones,” wrote Mrs. Kennedy. “Whereas major figures understand the need for self-control and restraint, minor ones are sometimes moved by fear and pride. If only in the future major figures could still force minor ones to sit down at the negotiating table before they begin to fight!”
Jackie’s letter appeared to reinforce the confidential message that she and Bobby sent to the Soviet leadership that same week through their trusted friend Bill Walton: President Kennedy had been the victim of a conspiracy of small-minded men.
After Kennedy’s death, Khrushchev’s own days in office were numbered. In October 1964, less than a year after JFK’s assassination, the Soviet leader was removed from power in a shake-up engineered by his more stolid, less imaginative rival, Leonid Brezhnev. Ironically, it was a bloodless coup.
Living out his final years in domestic exile, sequestered in a log cabin on the banks of the Istra River, Khrushchev pursued his own personal glasnost. He bitterly complained about how the Brezhnev regime was reversing his reforms. Listening to the BBC and the Voice of America on an
old Zenith short-wave radio given to him years before by an American businessman, he grew increasingly impatient with the heavy-handed propaganda of the Soviet media. “This is just garbage!” he fumed, flipping through Pravda. He read a samizdat copy of Dr. Zhivago and regretted that his government censors had banned it. “I should have read it myself,” he said. He denounced the jailing of dissident Soviet writers and expressed disgust over the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia. “What kind of socialism is this? What kind of shit is it when you have to keep people in chains?”
Towards the end of his life, Khrushchev began work on his memoir. When the news reached Moscow, the Politburo demanded that he immediately stop and hand over what he had written to the Central Committee. He defiantly refused and after completing the manuscript, like a dissident writer, he had it smuggled out of the country and published in the West, where it became an instant bestseller. In the book, titled Khrushchev Remembers, the retired autocrat wistfully recalled his days with Kennedy, whom he praised as a “real statesman” despite his youth. If Kennedy had lived, he wrote, the two men could have brought peace to the world.
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