It really was time, so he vaulted into No. 1. But they couldn’t leave just yet. Mrs. Kennedy hadn’t appeared, and after fingering a shaving scar, pulling up a sock, and drumming his fingers on his right knee, the President made a fist.
“See if she’s waiting over there,” he ordered.
General Clifton and Agent Clint Hill ran in by the Rose Garden, found her and fetched her, and presently she scrambled aboard in a two-piece white wool bouclé dress and a coat—just the thing for a chilly day. Her husband took a sharp breath and glared at McHugh.
Now the rotors began to spin. Like great brown wasps the three choppers trembled on their pad, rose, and dipped toward Andrews AFB, a twelve-minute ride to the southeast. The President’s departure was always a memorable spectacle, and passers-by paused to observe the take-off. Sorensen and Holborn looked up from the soggy lawn. Charles Fincklin, the White House’s Negro maître d’hôtel, peered out through the trembling, nearly naked branches of Andrew Jackson’s magnolias. House Whip Boggs, who happened to be driving past on South Executive Avenue, stopped his car, leaped out to wave farewell, and abruptly stopped, feeling ridiculous when he realized that no one could possibly see him from above. Across East Executive Avenue Henry Fowler had been scowling at columns of tax figures in the Treasury Building office. He turned in his massive leather chair as the whirring choppers fled past the Washington Monument. And on the opposite side of the mansion, on West Executive Avenue, Dean Markham had been watching the boarding and the flight with Don Ellinger, a visitor from Texas. “I didn’t know O’Brien and O’Donnell were going,” Markham said absently. “Of course,” said the Texan. “It’s a political trip.” He described the Connally-Yarborough feud and added, as the gigantic wasps disappeared into the overcast, “This is a trip the President can’t win, no matter what happens.”
In the autumn of 1963 the White House telephone number was still NAtional 8-1414,3 and when the man of the house was home communications were relatively simple. Of course, the President himself didn’t answer the phone. A light would flash on a forty-bulb switchboard on the fourth floor of the Executive Office Building, and if you knew the name of a Presidential aide one of the woman operators would instantly connect you with the proper extension, from which you could be transferred to the oval office or the mansion. But the moment the Chief Executive left his helipad all that changed. The Presidency shifted gears. Elaborate security precautions went into effect.
Even names were changed. Code replaced them.4 The White House was no longer the White House. It was Castle, and during a trip the President’s precise location at any given moment was Charcoal. He himself was no longer John Kennedy. He was Lancer, who was married to Lace, whose children were a daughter named Lyric and a son named Lark. The First Family was all in the L’s—though Lyric’s and Lark’s grandmother lived in a Georgetown house which was referred to as Hamlet. Secret Service men were in the D’s. Chief James J. Rowley was Domino; Roy Kellerman, Digest; Clint Hill, Dazzle; Floyd Boring, Deacon; Paul Landis, Debut. Lynn Meredith, Bob Foster, and Tom Wells of the kiddie detail were, respectively, Drummer, Dresser, and Dasher. W’s were for staff. Ken O’Donnell, Lancer’s chief vassal, was Wand. Evelyn Lincoln was Willow; Pierre Salinger, Wayside. Mac Kilduff, who was to do Wayside’s press chores on the Texas trip—and who, ironically, had been told to start looking for another job because Wand had decided that he was expendable—had been christened Warrior. Generals Clifton and McHugh were Watchman and Wing. Taz Shepard, who would be minding the store at Castle during the Texas trip, was Witness. V’s were reserved for the Vice President and his family. Lyndon Johnson was Volunteer. Lady Bird, who had never had much luck with names, became Victoria.
Tourists thought of the President’s home as stationary, at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. They were wrong. The White House was capable of multiple division. It could be in several cities simultaneously. The girls on the fourth floor of the EOB remained on duty, but the real White House was wherever Lancer happened to be, and once he hit the road the key switchboard was a jungle of color-coded wires in the executive mansion’s east basement, manned by elite Signal Corps technicians of the White House Communications Agency. It was a national security precaution that Lancer always be within five minutes of a telephone. Colonel George McNally, alias Star—this was the S group—saw to it that he was much closer than that. There were phones in the President’s helicopter, phones aboard Aircraft 26000, portable phones spotted fifty feet away from every airfield space where 26000 would park, and radiophones in his motorcade cars, operating on two frequencies. Like the Secret Service and the Democratic National Committee, Colonel McNally had a corps of advance men. By dawn of that Thursday morning temporary switchboards had been installed in trailers and hotel rooms in San Antonio, Houston, Fort Worth, Dallas, Austin, and at the LBJ Ranch. Each had its own unlisted phone numbers. The Dallas White House, for example, was in the Sheraton-Dallas Hotel. It could be reached through Riverside 1-3421, Riverside 1-3422, and Riverside 1-3423, though anyone who dialed one of them and lacked a code name of his own would find the conversation awkward.
S’s advance man for the Texas trip was Warrant Officer Art Bales (Sturdy), a gaunt thirty-year veteran who knew every executive in the Southwest Bell Telephone Company, could bug any line from the nearest manhole or conduit, and had the facilities to scramble almost any conversation or to disconnect it without notice. When out of town the President needed one clear circuit to Washington at all times, which meant that Bales had to be prepared to pull the plug on a Cabinet member, if necessary. (Once the Secretary of State had found himself talking to a dial tone.) In motorcades Bales would ride in the Signals control car. By tradition this was the last vehicle in the caravan, and his companion there, and his roommate at hotel stops, was a swarthy S man, Warrant Officer Ira D. Gearhart.
Gearhart, or Shadow, had been assigned the most sinister task in the Presidential party. No one called him by his Christian name, his surname, or even by his code name. He was “the man with the satchel,” or, more starkly, “the bagman.” The bag (also known as “the black bag” and “the football”) was a thirty-pound metal suitcase with an intricate combination lock. Within were various bulky Strangelove packets, each bearing wax seals and the signatures of the Joint Chiefs. Inside one were cryptic numbers which would permit the President to set up a crude hot line to the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and the President of France on four minutes’ notice. A second provided the codes that would launch a nuclear attack. The rest contained pages of close text enlivened by gaudy color cartoons. They looked like comic books—horror comics, really, because they had been carefully designed so that any one of Kennedy’s three military aides could quickly tell him how many million casualties would result from Retaliation Able, Retaliation Baker, Retaliation Charlie, etc. Taz Shepard had prepared these Doomsday Books. No one liked to think about them, much less talk about them, and on trips the man with the football was treated as a pariah. He needed Art Bales’s company. His only job was to stick around, lug the satchel, and remember that vital combination in case the duty aide forgot it. Yet both he and his ghastly burden were necessary. At the outset of the nuclear age Harry Truman would have had four hours to think things through if Soviet bombers had appeared over Canada in force. In the Kennedy administration that time had been cut to fifteen minutes, and it was shrinking.
In Dallas both warrant officers were destined to play crucial roles—Bales, because a hospital emergency room is the worst possible place to establish secure communications; Gearhart, because the bagman was a stranger to agents of the Vice President’s Secret Service detail. In Washington, however, they were merely two names to be checked off a long manifest. A President’s entourage is enormous. There were S teams, D teams, W teams, secretarial pools, political advisers, medical men, the military, the luggage crew—it seemed endless. Each group had a standard trip drill and a bible. The luggage bible, for example, began with a pretrip trip to a closet beside the carpent
er’s shop in the White House basement. There, on the night before each take-off, an Army master sergeant extricated two portable three-inch plywood bed boards and a five-inch horsehair mattress and sent them via truck to the MATS (Military Air Transport Service) terminal at Andrews Field for loading. Two men were responsible for the American and Presidential flags and the Presidential seals, one of which had to be correctly mounted before every Kennedy speech. Whenever Volunteer accompanied Lancer it was necessary to rent an electric podium which would be exactly seventy-six inches away from the Vice President’s bifocals. Every member of the party was issued a 3 × 5 card telling him his position in the caravan (“Miss Turnure: you will ride in AF #1 during the Texas trip. You will ride in the VIP bus on all stops in Texas”), and everyone had been issued an identification pin. The background color for these changed from trip to trip, but the patterns were constant. Those for staff members were elliptical, with a dot in the middle. Signals pins were crossed by a diagonal line. Secret Service agents had lapel bars with a break in the middle, and since the colors for Texas were to be white on red, each agent looked as though he were wearing an Army good conduct medal.
Agent Bob Foster wore no bar on the short hop to Andrews. He and his ward weren’t going anywhere, though John, Jr., being young and very much a Kennedy—already he had his father’s eyes and jaw—wasn’t reconciled. As the chopper settled down beside the immaculate splendor of Air Force One his mother and father hugged him. “I want to come,” he told his father, his voice beginning to break. “You can’t,” the President said gently. The little boy began to cry. Since photographers had assembled on the airstrip, the Kennedys decided to leave him in the helicopter; otherwise there would be unfortunate halftones on tomorrow’s front pages. The President kissed his sobbing son for the last time and patted the trembling shoulders in the small London Fog coat. Then he looked at the agent who would be staying behind. He said, “You take care of John, Mr. Foster.”
“Yes, sir,” said Foster, who thought this odd, because although there had been tearful farewells before, he had never been given such an instruction. The travelers descended, and Foster settled into the Presidential chair, holding the child in his lap. He diverted him with a story about Bertram the Beaver, another about Jaggy the Jaguar, a third about Jasper the Jet. His repertoire exhausted, they waited and squinted until, as the graceful white fuselage of Aircraft 26000 rose in the murky sky, its blue flashings vanishing in scudding clouds, John sighed. He always loved to watch that plane.
Earlier in the morning five thousand cheap handbills had appeared on the streets of Dallas. At the top were two offset photographs of the President, one full face and one in profile. The effect was that of a Bertillon police poster, and it was deliberate, because the headline read:
WANTED
FOR
TREASON
“THIS MAN,” the dodger declared, “is wanted for treasonous activities against the United States,” and it offered a seven-point bill of particulars. The Chief Executive was accused, among other things, of betraying the Constitution, “turning the sovereignty of the U.S. over to the communist controlled United Nations,” betraying such friends as Cuba, having “been WRONG on innumerable issues,” including Cuba and the Test Ban Treaty, encouraging racial riots, invading “a sovereign State with federal troops,” upholding the Supreme Court “in its Anti-Christian rulings,” and appointing “Anti-Christians to Federal offices.” The last count charged that “He has been caught in fantastic LIES to the American people (including personal ones like his previous marraige [sic] and divorce).” In sum, the broadside was an incendiary amalgam of all the invective being spread by Kennedy’s enemies. Any hater, left or right, could find fuel in it.
Its significance may be exaggerated, however. There was no connection between the President’s assassin and its printers. And Kennedy’s Dallas enemies were already aflame anyhow. A few more fagots weren’t going to raise their temperature much. That same morning, the loudspeaker at W. E. Greiner Junior High School, just across the Trinity River from the Texas School Book Depository, announced that students could go to tomorrow’s motorcade provided their parents came for them. It was the opening period; Warren Harding’s fourteen-year-old son was attending his first class of the day. Just before the bell sounded the teacher told her pupils to put their books aside. “Nobody here will be let out for that parade,” she told them. “I don’t care if your whole family shows up. You still have to be in this class. He’s not a good President, and I don’t say that because I’m a Republican. It don’t make no matter whether it’s him or his brother Bobby. One’s as bad as the other. You’re not going, I’m not going, period.” She smiled faintly, a smartly dressed young woman in her mid-twenties. “If I did see him,” she said, “I’d just spit in his face.”
An hour later, at 10:30 A.M., the first edition of the afternoon Times Herald hit the streets. One of the clerks at the Book Depository bought a copy at Elm and Houston and ran inside, waving the newspaper map of the motorcade route. He created a hubbub in the grimy warehouse; his fellow workers were plainly excited. Tuesday’s report was confirmed. The President’s car was going to pass beneath their windows, cruising slowly toward the triple underpass.
Aircraft 26000 departed Andrews at 11:05 EST. For a fleeting instant the great rotunda of the Capitol lay under the swept-back left wing like a squat chess piece; then they were up and away, zooming toward the Southwest at 550 mph. Colonel Jim Swindal was a story-book pilot, a rakish Alabaman with a Terry-and-the-Pirates profile, and he had a dream plane to fly—a hundred tons of gleaming machinery, exquisite appointments, and air-conditioned, soundproof cabins. Boeing called it a 707; the Air Force, a VC-137; but under any of its various names it had become known to the world as the personal flagship of the American President.
Essentially it differed little from its sister ships. All were equipped with identical Pratt & Whitney jets, and when they weren’t flying the same guards watched over them. But 26000 was John Kennedy’s plane, a projection of himself. He had supervised Raymond Loewy’s design of it, had ordered its blue motif (the engine pods of 86970, 86971, and 86972 were painted red), and since its commissioning on October 21 of the previous year he had flown 75,000 miles aboard it. On the wall of its stateroom amidships, on its pillowcases and crockery, and in the center of each of its telephone dials were reproductions of the gold Presidential seal. They alone made it unique. But the plane also had a personality of its own—it subscribed to fifteen magazines and five daily newspapers—and all other flights, military and civilian, deferred to it. Its progress was monitored on radar screens, and a chain of Secret Service checkpoints was established on the ground beneath its airborne route. Should it make a forced landing, an agent in a souped-up car could be on the spot very quickly. Indeed, the failure of the ranking agent aboard to report that he was passing checkpoint Able or Baker would have been sufficient to start the sirens screaming. Before Swindal landed or took off from any airport, the field was unavailable to other aircraft for fifteen minutes. Although he could fly with any two of his four jets, his crew inspected each of them at each stop. In flight, 26000 was assigned air-lane priority. Only after it was aloft were its backup and press planes allowed to leave, and they had to pass it in the air so their passengers could disembark at the Chief Executive’s destination and arrange themselves before he descended his ramp to the strains of “Hail to the Chief.”
The press, forty Washington reporters and the two foreign correspondents—Brandon of the London Sunday Times and Barber of the Telegraph—flew on a chartered airliner; they were represented aboard 26000 by the reporters of the White House press pool, a quartet of veterans from the wire services, television networks, news magazines, and metropolitan dailies. The pool would change at each stop, with Bob Baskin of the Dallas News joining it in Dallas. The thirteen Texas Congressmen making the trip were also to be rotated. Space had been reserved on 26000 for four of them. Each would be allowed to ride in and out of h
is own district on the prestigious flagship; otherwise, unless Kennedy wished to talk to them, they would languish in the luxurious boredom of the backup plane. This rule even applied to Albert Thomas, their dean, and on the leg to San Antonio Thomas’ companions were Woody Taylor, Victoria’s Secret Service agent, and, unexpectedly, Godfrey McHugh. Normally, McHugh would have ridden on 26000. He was, after all, the Air Force Aide. He had had a hand in Loewy’s design, and had chosen the painting of a French farmhouse which hung over the President’s Air Force One bed. But God was temporarily in exile, and the number of his airborne doghouse was 86970. He peered out, brooding, as they dog-legged past Colonel Swindal’s cockpit.
Aloft, the two doors on 26000’s port side could not be discerned. The forty-five windows beneath the huge blue-on-white legend “United States of America” resembled those of a conventional airliner. They were deceptive. The interior was divided into compartments. Swindal, his smashed-down cap at a jaunty angle, sat in the nose with the four officers of his staff, surrounded by black leather-padded knobs and luminous dials. Behind them was the communications shack: two million dollars’ worth of electronic gear, including teletype machines, the hooded cryptographic device, and a flying switchboard linking the plane to the White House Signals board and the Secret Service network on the ground. Then came the forward galley and crew’s quarters, and then the staff area—thirty seats and two desks with electric typewriters. After that, a closed door; the stateroom, or office, lay beyond. There, five miles up in the sky, his polished shoes resting on a blue rug adorned with a golden eagle and thirteen gold stars, President Kennedy could hold conferences and telephone subordinates as easily as though he were in his Castle’s West Wing.