by Jim Bishop
The women began to speak rapidly in Russian. A policeman in the front seat said he grew up understanding some Czech, but he couldn’t decipher the conversation. The three cars rolled back down the highway toward Dallas. The Czech-descent cop said to Mrs. Paine: “Are you a communist?” “No,” she said. “I am not, and I don’t even feel the need of the Fifth Amendment.”
Roanoke and Lynchburg stood still in the darkness below, embers in a dead fireplace. The big plane seemed to have no forward motion. Far below, the government trackers watched it and listened to Swindal and his first officer ask instructions for descent. The code names of beacon stations, the radio call wavelengths, the rate of descent were heard and repeated. Air Force One was two hundred miles out. The earth was black; the sky at forty thousand feet was still deep blue; the dying sun lingered behind, over Dallas. They had seen each other this day, that sun and this man, and he had gloried in the effusion of warmth and light. Behind the huge blue and white tail, the sun was still up. It had outlived him by four hours and more, but no one marked it or cared. Night was a fitting mask for faces.
He had wanted to say something while the sun was high. To him, San Antonio was romance; Austin was political friction; Houston was a muscular giant; Fort Worth was war planes, and Dallas was a snob. There was something to be said in each of those places and much of it was superficial and pedestrian, but he had polished the stone of the Dallas speech with his own hands. He had rubbed the words and refashioned the phrases. The knowledge that he needed Dallas but Dallas didn’t need him raised the hackles on the back of his neck. It was necessary to bow deferentially to the self-sufficient when he would have preferred to use the words to whip these people.
Mr. Kennedy had no patience with those who could not see. To his way of thinking, they were mournful apostles trying to resurrect a world which died when the last cannon cooled in 1945. America could not shirk its responsibilities to a world which could look in but one of two directions for leadership. Never again could it withdraw in safety to its shores. The cost of leadership would have to be borne by the taxpayers who cried for relief. In peace the cost of the military machine became more expensive. Man’s metal arced across the skies of space, and so did man.
To a young President with a lifted chin and one hand in his jacket pocket, it was a new world with new geopolitics, chronic tensions, and internal convulsions. The civil rights decision had been handed down by the United States Supreme Court in May, 1954, but it had waited for the Young Knight to implement it. To some he was too young, too swift; to others he was the sunny smile of tomorrow; to the politicians he was the leader of the liberal wing of his own party; to Dallas he was a radical.
Had he spoken, Kennedy would not have appeased Dallas. The speech, fired in ringing phrases over the heads of luncheoners at the Trade Mart, would have attempted to divorce the reactionary voters from their reactionary leaders.
Three paragraphs into the body of the speech, he wanted to say: “America’s leadership must be guided by the lights of learning and reason—or else those who confuse rhetoric with reality and the plausible with the possible will gain the popular ascendancy with their seemingly swift and simple solutions to every world problem.” He did not say who, but a discerning ear might conjure the voices of the Murchisons, the Hunts, the Algers, the Walkers, the Governor who sat beside him. “There will always be dissident voices in the land, expressing opposition without alternatives, finding fault but never favor, perceiving gloom on every side and seeking influence without responsibility. Those voices are inevitable. But today,” he wanted to say, “today other voices are heard in the land—voices preaching doctrines which apparently assume that words will suffice without weapons, that vituperation is as good as victory, and that peace is a sign of weakness.”
Would Dallas have understood the shaft or smelled the blood? It is doubtful. The words, high-flown and as incandescent as bubbles, might have drawn applause from those who were bleeding. “We cannot expect that everyone, to use the phrase of a decade ago, will ‘talk sense to the American people.’ But we can hope that fewer people will listen to nonsense. And the notion that this nation is headed for defeat through deficit, or that strength is but a matter of slogans, is nothing but just plain nonsense.”
Deftly his oratory danced from subject to subject: military strength backed by national will; foreign aid; Polaris submarines; to paraphrase a paragraph, he desired to tell his audience that “our successful defense of freedom is due not to the words we use, but to the strength we stand ready to use on behalf of the principles we stand ready to defend.”
The words hung dead like a clapper in a bell. No one heard them; no one clamored to hear them. Makeup editors of afternoon newspapers cursed their luck as they replated editions which said: “Today at the Trade Mart in Dallas, President John F. Kennedy said . . . Swindal eased the engines and the pitch subsided to a murmur. It meant nothing to the man of the many words. He lay wrapped in plastic, the face puffy and discolored.
It meant something to others. Stomachs had asserted themselves and the stewards brought soup and sandwiches, coffee, cheese, and liquor. Especially liquor. General McHugh had ordered the kitchen closed. Someone else had ordered it opened. The empty fifths of Scotch and bourbon tumbled into bags of refuse. A few passengers were sadly drunk and maudlin. They talked of better days and better times and remembered the day Jack Kennedy said . . . The electricity of shock was in others so deep that liquor sharpened the grief. Some passengers penciled notes as though time might prove to be anesthetic. Many, confined to the plane and the presence, regressed a little and, like children, wished it all away; it never happened.
The road to safety, for Lyndon Johnson, lay in immersing himself in work. He had spent a time of terror in that hospital, but it would not happen again. He had Valenti, Clifton, Kilduff, Moyers, and Marie Fehmer running. They manned phones, made calls. He made decisions and took the more important messages. The Kennedy minions asked that the press be barred from Andrews. Johnson said no. “It will look like we’re in a panic,” he said. He called the Situation Room and told McGeorge Bundy that he wanted to call a series of meetings tonight and tomorrow morning. “Bipartisan,” he said.
In the back of the plane, the Irish had finished a few rounds of whiskey and the conversation became sporadic. Each was deep in thought for periods of time. O’Brien, Powers, and Burkley were fatigued from the long period of standing, but Godfrey McHugh and Kenny O’Donnell kept a wary eye on those who kept the faith. Somewhere in mid-flight, Mrs. Kennedy voiced a thought about the similarity of martyrdom between Lincoln and her husband. It may have been uttered to O’Donnell or Burkley. By the time Air Force One began to descend, Abraham Lincoln had become the theme, the motif of the three-day “wake” of John F. Kennedy. It was an understandable and exalted thought on the part of the widow, and, in the acute distress of sudden mourning, the others thought that Kennedy had been every bit as great as Lincoln.
Someone suggested that the Kennedys could avoid the glare of lights and cameras by debarking from the starboard side of the plane; a fork lift could be raised to the level of the galley entrance. The casket and Mrs. Kennedy would be in the shadow of the plane, and the sanctity of privacy could be maintained. Jacqueline Kennedy looked up from her empty glass in the breakfast nook. “We will go out the regular way,” she said in that odd, litany-like manner. “I want them to see what they have done.”
In the forward cabin, the President was revising a short statement written by Liz Carpenter. It had the correct note of humility without being slavish. He said to Merriman Smith and Charles Roberts—still writing their impressions of the trip for the pool reporters—“I’m going to make a short statement in a few minutes and give you copies of it. Then when I get on the ground, I’ll do it over again.”
The confinement of the Johnsons and the Kennedys in the plane for a period of one hundred and fifty minutes was sufficient to cleave the families in permanent schism. Johnson, the burly, eart
hy Texan, lost the battle for unity by succeeding to the presidency. He was not, and could not aspire to be, Kennedy people. He could be tolerated as a Vice-President because his loyalty to John F. Kennedy was complete and unquestioned. Within the family, only Bobby and Kenny O’Donnell could not abide him as Vice-President. To them, he was a rumpled wheeler-dealer, part Southerner, part Westerner with cowdung on his heels. He lacked what they might refer to as “class.”
To those among the Kennedys who felt neutral, or apathetic, about Lyndon Johnson, his tragic ascendancy to the presidency tipped their opinions against him. He was not worthy to follow their fallen hero, and his every act lent itself to two interpretations so that, among themselves, they could make him look mean and avaricious. He did not belong on Air Force One, they felt. The least he could have done was to permit the widow and her dead husband the privacy of the plane for the trip home. He should not have burdened Bobby—even though he was the Attorney General—with a question about being sworn in as President. It was a crass grab for power.
On the plane—her plane—he violated her privacy by offering condolences, taking over the private bedroom, issuing statements, holding the plane until a judge swore him in, thus imperiling the remains of Kennedy which might have been impounded by Dallas County at any moment. He was a crude, impossible man. At a time of stunning shock, he had the nerve to call Kennedy’s top lieutenants and offer to keep them on, to give them “blank checks” to carry on the Kennedy tradition.
Lyndon Johnson must be charged with a lack of understanding of the Kennedy mentality. They required a villain for their rancor. The world lay shattered in their hands and no one could put it together again. When their chief fell among the dead roses, the heart of their political cult stopped. They had no standing anymore, no prestige. Among the politically and socially dead were Bobby Kennedy, David Powers, Kenny O’Donnell, Larry O’Brien, General McHugh, McGeorge Bundy, Dean Rusk, Robert McNamara, Jacqueline Kennedy, Arthur Schlesinger, Ted Sorensen, Mrs. Lincoln, Pierre Salinger, Orville Freeman, Major-General Clifton—a host of men and women. They were dead and they were aware of it. Many of them held Johnson in such contempt that they could not endure his offer of resurrection.
In the first moments of Johnson’s presidency, he did not feel strong enough to go alone. He needed these people. He was willing to bury his pride in the bottom of his pocket and tell them that he required their counsel, their guidance. In spite of his own considerable ego, Lyndon Johnson lacked the confidence of a John F. Kennedy. “When the going gets tough,” Kennedy used to say, “the tough get going.” Most of all, in the cold loneliness at the summit of power, Johnson needed a feeling of continuance of administration. And this is what the Kennedy clan would deny him.
As Air Force One began to surrender to the forces of gravity, the small group in the back of the plane began to plot ways and means of keeping the President of the United States out of the casket photos. The world would be watching, and the Kennedys did not want the Johnsons in their mourning pictures. At one point, when Major-General Ted Clifton went aft to ask a question, O’Donnell, sitting opposite the grieving lady, curled his lip and said: “Why don’t you hurry back and serve your new boss?” It was less a question than a declaration of the honorable thing—that all must go down with the ship and the captain.*
The Secret Service suggested that the new President spend the night at the White House. There was lots of room without disturbing the Kennedy family. This was declined at once. Johnson was irritated by it. “We are going home to The Elms,” he said. “That’s where we live. If you can protect us at the White House, by God you can protect us at home too.”
The long rays splashed red against the broken comb of downtown Dallas, and a timid westerly breeze swept the confetti of the parade against the curbs on Main Street. Lights went on at the burlesque house off Ackard, and homeward traffic bounded on the elevated highways. For Dallas, this was going to be a long night. The city, afflicted with a monumental ego, flinched. As Lieutenant Jack Revill had said: Big D died.
At the end of the maximum security alley, the last rays of sunlight splashed against the dirty opaque window. By glancing at it, Lee Harvey Oswald could detect the difference between daylight and dark but nothing else. He heard the clang of the security door and looked up to see jail guard Jim Poppelwell coming in. The guards on the chairs became alert. “All right,” Poppelwell said, “he can make his phone call.”
Oswald dropped down off the bunk. Poppelwell was turning a dime over in his hand. The cell door was opened, and the prisoner emerged in his shorts and socks. As Oswald was led out, the Negro prisoner was awakened and told that he was being transferred to another wing. The three cells would be exclusive for Lee Harvey Oswald.
The two telephones in the glass booth were also exclusive. Guard Poppelwell placed his man inside and prepared to lock the door after handing the prisoner a dime. Oswald asked how he could phone New York with that. The guard shrugged. That was not his department. Oswald has thirteen dollars somewhere in this jail. Poppelwell explained that he had nothing to do with the matter except to follow orders—give Oswald a dime and permit him to make a phone call. It was a patent injustice to grant the right of a telephone and deny the prisoner the right to use his money to make it, but Oswald realized that a protest would be fruitless.
He deposited the dime and asked for long-distance information. The operator asked, “Where?” and he said: “New York.” He was told that he could deposit his dime and dial 212-555-1212. He did. When he was asked whom he wanted, the young man spent considerable time saying and spelling John Abt. He might have asked for the law firm of Freedman & Unger, at 320 Broadway, but he didn’t know. Besides, it was close to 6 P.M. in New York, and attorneys would be homeward bound with their briefcases.
The operator said she had a John J. Abt at 299 Broadway. He said that would do. The number was AC 2-4611. Oswald repeated it and hung up. Then he looked back at Poppelwell and asked him to open the door. He had forgotten the number. Could he have a piece of paper and a pencil? Jim Poppelwell considered the matter gravely. He could not think of a prison regulation against supplying a prisoner with a pencil and a bit of paper.
Oswald was locked in while the guard went for it. Poppelwell tore the corner from a telephone contact slip and handed it in with a pencil. The prisoner was locked in and the process started again. This time he wrote “John J. Abt, 299 Broadway, New York” and, underneath: “212 AC 2-4611.” Then he redialed the long-distance operator and asked to place the call collect. In a moment, the operator was back with him. She wanted to know who was calling collect from Dallas, Texas. He told her “Lee Oswald.” It turned out almost as he must have divined; the call was refused.
Could he call again later? Poppelwell took him out of the booth and said he would ask Captain Fritz. Oswald said that he would call home and ask his wife to call Abt. On the third floor, reporters were asking police officers if Oswald had asked for a lawyer. “He’s phoning one now,” they were told. None of the cops could recall the name of the lawyer, except that he was a New York man.
At Andrews, the drill team came to attention. The distinguished gentlemen of the United States, and the equally distinguished gentlemen of many foreign countries, were organized in disorganized knots on the concrete. Outside the fence, thousands of faces peered through the metal links, as a similar crowd had six hours ago in Dallas. The overhead lights in a big hangar tossed a pale carpet on the apron. Military officers in blue and in gold, bedecked with ribbons and fourragères, stood at ease, watching the television cameras being set up on wooden stands.
The company was impressive and strained. Conversation was whispered. Now and then a platoon of military in gleaming boots and steel hats would march out of the darkness into the light, the rows of feet lifting rhythmically and setting down hard on the strip, to come to a loud halt in the area of the lights. The White House helicopters, green bugs with pinwheel hats, sat on the edge of the night.
So
meone said: “Here he comes.” Eyes lifted to the night sky. The word was passed. “Here he comes.” A youthful voice roared: “Ten-shun!” Fire trucks astride the runway turned their lights on. The revolving beacon on top of the control tower snapped green. A small brown staff car took off with a burning of rubber. The word having been passed, all eyes looked in varied directions. To the west, a yellow star above the horizon was the only thing that moved.
Air Force One was on its base leg. It could be seen, not heard. The small yellow light descended slowly. It moved toward the city of Washington. All aircraft aloft or on the strip at Washington International Airport remained in aeronautical limbo. The tower cleared them out with “V.I.P.” warnings, but the captains and the first officers, usually unconcerned, searched the skies from their flight decks looking for the last moment of John F. Kennedy’s last flight. Some were in a holding pattern as far off as Friendship Airport at Baltimore.
The big plane was low coming over the Potomac basin. The Pratt and Whitney fans were down to a whisper. Under the silver wings passed the pale vision of the White House, the Capitol dome, scenes of triumph. The big plane made the final turn. Those waiting at Andrews Air Force Base could see nothing for a moment. Then the plane’s star-bright wing lights came on, and the vision looked like a steady yellow candle standing in the sky. It remained there, seeming not to move, then the engines could be heard and the plane dropped down and down, louder and louder, over the fence and holding its rubber feet a foot or two over the blue-ribboned runway, then it touched and the engines gathered their breath for one final shriek of protest.
Air Force One ran down the runway, the windows bright with lights, and came to a pause at the far end. A woman in the group of silent men dug into her purse for a kerchief. She caught her husband’s stern glance and snapped it shut. The long night had begun.