A Thousand Days

by Arthur M. Schlesinger

  But he was light and bantering when he addressed the citizens of Fort Worth a little later in the soft rain in front of the Texas Hotel. “Mrs. Kennedy is organizing herself,” he said. “It takes longer, but, of course, she looks better than we do when she does it.” Then he went on to speak at a breakfast of the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce. “No one expects that our life will be easy,” he said. “. . . History will not permit it . . . [But] we are still the keystone in the arch of freedom, and I think we will continue to do, as we have done in our past, our duty.” At the conclusion the chairman of the meeting presented him with a cowboy hat. The President, who never put on funny hats, looked at it with suspicion and finally said, “I’ll put it on at the White House and you can photograph it there.” Back at the Texas Hotel, he chatted with Jacqueline and Kenneth O’Donnell about the role of the Secret Service. All they could do, he said, was to protect a President from unruly or overexcited crowds. But if someone really wanted to kill a President, it was not too difficult; put a man on a high building with a telescopic rifle, and there was nothing anybody could do to defend a President’s life. O’Donnell said afterward that Kennedy regarded assassination as a risk inherent in a democracy; “it didn’t disturb him at all.”

  During the short trip to Dallas, the men in the plane discussed the city’s aberrant atmosphere. The President “seemed puzzled by the prevalent Dallas attitude,” Congressman James Wright later recalled, “and asked questions of each of us in an attempt to understand its genesis.” Fanaticism was what he detested most—as the reason and poise he incarnated were what distraught and rootless people, drawn to Dallas by the climate of alienation and anger, might find most intolerable. The general conclusion, in Wright’s words, was that the real culprit was “the steady drum-beat of ultra right-wing propaganda with which the citizenry is constantly besieged.”

  When they arrived at Love Field, Congressman Henry Gonzalez said jokingly, “Well, I’m taking my risks. I haven’t got my steel vest yet.” The President, disembarking, walked immediately across the sunlit field to the crowd and shook hands. Then they entered the cars to drive from the airport to the center of the city. The people in the outskirts, Kenneth O’Donnell later said, were “not unfriendly nor terribly enthusiastic. They waved. But were reserved, I thought.” The crowds increased as they entered the city—“still very orderly, but cheerful.” In downtown Dallas enthusiasm grew. Soon even O’Donnell was satisfied. The car turned off Main Street, the President happy and waving, Jacqueline erect and proud by his side, and Mrs. Connally saying, “You certainly can’t say that the people of Dallas haven’t given you a nice welcome,” and the automobile turning on to Elm Street and down the slope past the Texas School Book Depository, and the shots, faint and frightening, suddenly distinct over the roar of the motorcade, and the quizzical look on the President’s face before he pitched over, and Jacqueline crying, “Oh, no, no. . . . Oh, my God, they have shot my husband,” and the horror, the vacancy.

  11. THE DRUMS OF WASHINGTON

  On Friday morning I had flown to New York with Katharine Graham, whose husband Philip had died three months before, for a luncheon with the editors of her magazine Newsweek. Kenneth Galbraith had come down from Cambridge for the occasion. We were still sipping drinks before luncheon in an amiable mood of Friday-before-the-Harvard-Yale game relaxation when a young man in shirtsleeves entered the room and said, a little tentatively, “I am sorry to break in, but I think you should know that the President has been shot in the head in Texas.” For a flash one thought this was some sort of ghastly office joke. Then we knew it could not be and huddled desperately around the nearest television. Everything was confused and appalling. The minutes dragged along. Incomprehensible bulletins came from the hospital. Suddenly an insane surge of conviction flowed through me: I felt that the man who had survived the Solomon Islands and so much illness and agony, who so loved life, embodied it, enhanced it, could not possibly die now. He would escape the shadow as he had before. Almost immediately we received the irrevocable word.

  In a few moments Galbraith and I were on Katharine Graham’s plane bound for Washington. It was the saddest journey of one’s life. Bitterness, shame, anguish, disbelief, emptiness mingled inextricably in one’s mind. When I stumbled, almost blindly, into the East Wing, the first person I encountered was Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr. In a short time I went with my White House colleagues to Andrews Field to await the return of Air Force One from Texas. A small crowd was waiting in the dusk, McNamara, stunned and silent, Harriman, haggard and suddenly looking very old, desolation everywhere. We watched incredulously as the casket was carefully lifted out of the plane and taken to the Naval Hospital at Bethesda. Later I went to my house in Georgetown. My weeping daughter Christina said, “Daddy, what has happened to our country? If this is the kind of country we have, I don’t want to live here any more.” The older children were already on their way back from college to Washington.

  Still later I went back to the White House to await the last return. Around four in the morning the casket, wrapped in a flag, was brought from the Naval Hospital and placed on a stand in the East Room. Tapers were lit around the bier, and a priest said a few words. Then Jacqueline approached the bier, knelt for a moment and buried her head in the flag. Soon she walked away. The rest of us waited for a little while in the great hall. We were beyond consolation, but we clung to the comradeship he had given us. Finally, just before daybreak, we bleakly dispersed into the mild night.

  We did not grieve alone. Though in Dallas school children applauded the news* and in Peking the Daily Worker ran a savage cartoon entitled “Kennedy Biting the Dust” showing the dead President lying in a pool of blood, his necktie marked with dollar signs, sorrow engulfed America and the world. At Harvard Yard the bells tolled in Memorial Church, a girl wept hysterically in Widener Library, a student slammed a tree, again and again, with his fist. Negroes mourned, and A. Philip Randolph said that his “place in history will be next to Abraham Lincoln.” Pablo Casals mused that he had seen many great and terrible events in his lifetime—the Dreyfus case, the assassination of Gandhi—“but in recent history—and I am thinking of my own lifetime—there has never been a tragedy that has brought so much sadness and grief to as many people as this.” “For a time we felt the country was ours,” said Norman Mailer. “Now it’s theirs again.” Many were surprised by the intensity of the loss. Alistair Cooke spoke of “this sudden discovery that he was more familiar than we knew.” “Is there some principle of nature,” asked Richard Hofstadter, “which requires that we never know the quality of what we have had until it is gone?” Around the land people sat desperately in front of television sets watching the bitter drama of the next four days. In Washington Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the Assistant Secretary of Labor, said, “I don’t think there’s any point in being Irish if you don’t know that the world is going to break your heart eventually. I guess that we thought we had a little more time. . . . Mary McGrory said to me that we’ll never laugh again. And I said, ‘Heavens, Mary. We’ll laugh again. It’s just that we’ll never be young again.’”

  In Ireland, “Ah, they cried the rain down that night,” said a Fitzgerald of Limerick; he would not come back in the springtime. David Bruce reported from London, “Great Britain has never before mourned a foreigner as it has President Kennedy.” As the news spread around London, over a thousand people assembled before the embassy in Grosvenor Square; they came in endless thousands in the next days to sign the condolence book. That Was The Week That Was on television, unwontedly serious: “the first western politician to make politics a respectable profession for thirty years—to make it once again the highest of the professions, and not just a fabric of fraud and sham. . . . We took him completely for granted.” “Why was this feeling—this sorrow—at once so universal and so individual?” Harold Macmillan later asked. “Was it not because he seemed, in his own person, to embody all the hopes and aspirations of this new world that is struggling to emerge
—to rise, Phoenix-like, from the ashes of the old?” In West Berlin people lighted candles in darkened windows. In Poland there was a spontaneous mass mourning by university students; church bells tolled for fifteen minutes on the night of the funeral. In Yugoslavia Tito, so overcome that he could hardly speak, phoned the American chief of mission; later he read a statement over the state radio and went in person to the embassy to sign the book. The national flag was flown at half-mast, and schools were instructed to devote one full hour to a discussion of the President’s policies and significance. In Moscow Khrushchev was the first to sign the book, and the Soviet television carried the funeral, including the service in the church.

  Latin America was devastated. Streets, schools, housing projects were named after him, shrines set up in his memory; his picture, tom from the newspaper, hung on the walls of workers’ shacks and in the hovels of the campesinos. “For Latin America,” said Lleras Camargo, “Kennedy’s passing is a blackening, a tunnel, a gust of cloud and smoke.” Castro was with Jean Daniel when the report came; he said, “Es una mala noticia” (“This is bad news”). In a few moments, with the final word, he stood and said, “Everything is changed. . . . I’ll tell you one thing: at least Kennedy was an enemy to whom we had become accustomed.” In Cambodia Prince Sihanouk ordered court mourning; “a light was put out,” he later said, “which may not be re-lit for many years to come.” In Indonesia flags flew at half-mast. In New Delhi people cried in the streets. In Algiers Ben Bella phoned Ambassador Porter in tears and said, “I can’t believe it. Believe me, I’d rather it happen to me than to him.” In Guinea Sékou Touré said, “I have lost my only true friend in the outside world.” The embassy reported, “People expressed their grief without restraint, and just about everybody in Guinea seemed to have fallen under the spell of the courageous young hero of far away, the slayer of the dragons of discrimination, poverty, ignorance and war.” In N’zérékoré in the back country, where one would hardly think they had heard of the United States let alone the American President, a group of natives presented a sum of money to their American pastor to buy, according to the custom of the Guerze people, a rush mat in which to bury President Kennedy. In Kampala Ugandans crowded the residence of the American Ambassador; others sat silently for hours on the lawns and hillsides waiting. In Mali, the most left-wing of African states, President Keita came to the embassy with an honor guard and delivered a eulogy. In the Sudan a grizzled old Bisharine tribesman told an American lawyer that it was terrible Kennedy’s son was so young; “it will be a long time before he can be the true leader.” Transition, the magazine of African intellectuals, said, “In this way was murdered the first real chance in this century for an intelligent and new leadership to the world. . . . More than any other person, he achieved the intellectual’s ideal of a man in action. His death leaves us unprepared and in darkness.”

  In Washington grief was an agony. Somehow the long hours passed, as the new President took over with firmness and strength, but the roll of the drums, when we walked to St. Matthew’s Cathedral on the frosty Monday, will sound forever in my ears, and the wildly twittering birds during the interment at Arlington while the statesmen of the world looked on. It was all so grotesque and so incredible. One remembered Stephen Spender’s poem:

  I think continually of those who were truly great. . . .

  The names of those who in their lives fought for life,

  Who wore at their hearts the fire’s center.

  Born of the sun they traveled a short while towards the sun,

  And left the vivid air signed with their honour.

  It was all gone now—the life-affirming, life-enhancing zest, the brilliance, the wit, the cool commitment, the steady purpose. Richard Neustadt has suggested that two years are the period of presidential initiation. He had had so little time: it was as if Jackson had died before the nullification controversy and the Bank War, as if Lincoln had been killed six months after Gettysburg or Franklin Roosevelt at the end of 1935 or Truman before the Marshall Plan.*

  Yet he had accomplished so much: the new hope for peace on earth, the elimination of nuclear testing in the atmosphere and the abolition of nuclear diplomacy, the new policies toward Latin America and the third world, the reordering of American defense, the emancipation of the American Negro, the revolution in national economic policy, the concern for poverty, the stimulus to the arts, the fight for reason against extremism and mythology. Lifting us beyond our capacities, he gave his country back to its best self, wiping away the world’s impression of an old nation of old men, weary, played out, fearful of ideas, change and the future; he taught mankind that the process of rediscovering America was not over. He re-established the republic as the first generation of our leaders saw it—young, brave, civilized, rational, gay, tough, questing, exultant in the excitement and potentiality of history. He transformed the American spirit—and the response of his people to his murder, the absence of intolerance and hatred, was a monument to his memory. The energies he released, the standards he set, the purposes he inspired, the goals he established would guide the land he loved for years to come. Above all he gave the world for an imperishable moment the vision of a leader who greatly understood the terror and the hope, the diversity and the possibility, of life on this planet and who made people look beyond nation and race to the future of humanity. So the people of the world grieved as if they had terribly lost their own leader, friend, brother.

  On December 22, a month after his death, fire from the flame burning at his grave in Arlington was carried at dusk to the Lincoln Memorial. It was fiercely cold. Thousands stood, candles in their hands; then, as the flame spread among us, one candle lighting the next, the crowd gently moved away, the torches flaring and flickering, into the darkness. The next day it snowed—almost as deep a snow as the inaugural blizzard. I went to the White House. It was lovely, ghostly and strange.

  It all ended, as it began, in the cold.

  Index

  Accelerated Public Works Act of 1962, [>] fn., [>]

  Acción Democrática, [>], [>]; and Fernando Belaunde Terry, [>], [>] ACDA. See Arms Control and Disarmament Agency

  Acheson, Dean, [>], [>], [>], [>], [>]; and Rusk appointment, [>]; describes Eisenhower’s National Security Council, [>]; reaction of to Bay of Pigs fiasco, [>]; described, [>]–[>]; and Democratic Advisory Council, [>]; and Gullion, [>]; and Indochina, [>]; and Berlin, [>], [>], [>]; military showdown policy for Berlin, [>], [>]–[>], [>]–[>]; opposition to Berlin policy of, [>]; JFK asks “political program” for Berlin, [>]; Rusk supports Berlin program, [>]; recommends foreign ministers meeting on Berlin, [>]; and Truman, [>]; criticizes JFK’s Algerian speech, [>]; and Africanists, [>]; on presidential addresses, [>]; and ExCom in Cuban missile crisis, [>]

  ADA. See Americans for Democratic Action

  Adams, John, on Vice-Presidency, [>]

  Aden, [>]

  Adenauer, Konrad, [>], [>], [>], [>]; public reaction of, to Berlin Wall, [>]; and LBJ, [>]; JFK’s view of, [>]–[>]; and Cuban missile crisis, [>]; and NATO, [>]; and FrancoGerman treaty of cooperation, [>]; and de Gaulle, [>]; and test ban treaty, [>], [>]

  Adoula, Cyrille, [>], [>]; and Kitona Agreement, [>]; government capitulation of, [>]

  Advisory Council on the Arts, [>]

  Adzhubei, Aleksei, [>]; JFK discusses U.S. nuclear policy with, [>]–[>]

  Affluent Society, The (Galbraith), [>]; JFK defends in 1960 campaign, [>]; “The New Position of Poverty,” [>]

  Africa, [>], [>]–[>], [>]; and Fulbright, [>]; Henderson proposal for ambassadors to, [>], [>]; task force, [>]–[>], [>]; Communism in, [>], [>], [>]; JFK and de Gaulle discuss, [>]; JFK and Khrushchev discuss, [>]; and Hammarskjöld, [>]; and UN, [>]–[>], [>]–[>], [>]–[>]; and neutrals, [>]; colonialism in, [>]–[>] (see also Colonialism); JFK interest in, [>]–[>]; presidential diplomacy with leaders of, [>]–[>], [>]–[>] passim; Soviet Aid to, [>], [>], [>]; and apartheid, [>]–[>]; reaction of to Cuban missile crisis, [>]; effe
ct of Meredith case in, [>]. See also names of countries in Africa

  “Africa is for the Africans,” [>]–[>]

  Agar, Herbert (The Price of Union), [>]

  Agency for International Development (AID), [>]; and Guinea, [>]; and Labouisse, [>]; and Hamilton, [>]–[>], [>]–[>]; presidential impatience with, [>]–[>]; and Clay committee, [>]–[>]; and David Bell, [>]–[>]; and population policy, [>]; and Alliance for Progress, [>]; and British Guiana, [>]

  Agricultural surplus, [>], [>]; task force on distribution of, [>], [>]; Eisenhower program for disposal of unwanted, [>]; and Food for Peace program, [>]; public storage problem, [>]; stock-piling of, [>]

  Agricultural Trade Development and Assistance Act of 1954, [>], [>]; and Food for Peace program, [>] Agriculture, U.S. Department of, [>], [>]–[>]; and Roosevelt, [>]

  AID. See Agency for International Development

  Air Force, U.S., [>]; state of in 1961, [>]; estimates Soviet missile strength, [>]; and B-70 program, [>]; and MLF, [>]

  Air Force One, [>]; brings JFK’s body to Washington, [>]

  Alabama, [>], [>]; freedom riders, [>