The Death of a President

  He wished now that he had been able to murmur a word, just one word of solace to Jacqueline Kennedy. He wanted her to know that he was a Kennedy Democrat, that he didn’t share the segregationist opinions of so many of the other green-shoulder-tabbed men in Dallas’ elite Patrol Division. He wanted to tell her that he had been in the Navy in the Southwest Pacific in World War II, and had once served on a PT boat. Most of all he was thinking: Why not me? Bob Dugger had been born in Waxahachie, Texas, thirty miles south of Dallas on Route 77; he was forty-three years old, and the most spectacular thing in his future was likely to be a plainclothes desk job. So he was wondering, Why couldn’t they have killed me? The Sergeant felt certain that his death would have been little trouble to anyone. Despite his big body, he was sure, he didn’t have that much blood to spill.

  These were only impressions, unexpressed and, because he was the man he was, unexpressible. Dugger stood rooted by the door in his green tabs and polished badge, his visored cap (he had forgotten to remove it) squarely on his head. To all outward appearances he was impassive and unmoved, a great long gallows of a man with thick, stiff thighs. Behind the horn-rims his eyes were hard and unblinking. Yet he was suffering. Over and over the medley rang through his mind, The President of the United States. The President. The President…

  It was 1 P.M. on the IBM clock. The EKG needle was still motionless, and Kemp Clark heaved up from it and said heavily, “It’s too late, Mac.” Perry’s long hands crimped in defeat. He slowly raised them from Kennedy’s unnaturally white breast, slipped off the stool, walked blindly from the room, and slumped in a chair, staring off into space and absently worrying the nail of his little finger with his teeth. From the head of the hospital cart Dr. Jenkins reached down and drew a sheet over the President’s face.

  Clark turned to Jacqueline Kennedy. He said, “Your husband has sustained a fatal wound.”

  The lips moved again: I know.

  Burkley reached over to check Kennedy’s pulse—they were that close—and felt nothing. He swung back, bracing himself on the tile walls, and held his square, florid face next to her face. He had to be sure she understood. He tried to tell her, “The President is gone.” But his voice was indistinct. He had treated a thousand Marine Corps gunshot wounds in the Pacific, he was a Regular Navy admiral, yet he couldn’t control himself. He swallowed hard and in a clotted voice managed to say, “The President is dead.”

  There was no audible response, but she inclined her head slightly and, leaning forward, touched his cheek with her own. The doctor began to weep openly. Embarrassed, he turned to the others and lapsed into navalese. “Clear the area!” he commanded hoarsely. “I want this area cleared!”

  Doris Nelson took him literally and began a clean sweep-down. Elsewhere in Major Medicine new cases had been accumulating. A boy named Ronald Fuller was bleeding from a fall. A man, Carl Tanner, had severe chest pains which required diagnosis. One Ada Buryers complained that she was nervous, and a newcomer suffered from the inability to void. Subordinate nurses were dispatched to fetch a plastic shroud to Trauma Room No. 1 and two paper bags, which looked much like shopping bags, were brought for John Kennedy’s belongings. Outside, Doris asked what arrangements should be made for the disposal of the body. Then she prepared a death certificate for Kemp Clark, who, as senior physician in attendance, would have to sign it.

  Ken O’Donnell sleepwalked past Pediatrics to tell Lyndon Johnson. Powers scrawled:

  100 Mr President pronounced dead by Dr William Clark

  By 1 P.M. Dallas time, according to a University of Chicago study conducted the following winter, 68 percent of all adults in the United States—over 75 million people—knew of the shooting.10 In that first half-hour information was meager, imprecise, and distorted, but it was clear from the outset that the crime on Elm Street was the most spectacular single American disaster since Pearl Harbor. An entire nation had been savaged, and the nation realized it; before the end of the afternoon, when 99.8 percent had learned that the elected President had been murdered, the country was in the grip of an extraordinary emotional upheaval. Over half the population wept. Four out of five, in the words of the report, felt “the loss of someone very close and dear,” and subsequently nine out of ten suffered “physical discomfort.”

  The discomfort—deep grief—followed confirmation of the President’s death. In those first, indecisive thirty minutes there was a dissonant medley of response: dread, hope, prayer, rage, and incredulity. Parkland’s disorder and distress were being repeated in every community with a television set, a transistor radio, a telephone, or a primitive telegraph, and virtually no one was beyond reach of one of them. America, at the moment of the President’s death, was one enormous emergency room, with the stricken world waiting outside.

  The swiftness of the blow intensified the national trauma. There is no way to cushion the shock of an assassination, but the knowledge that fantastic events were in progress at that very moment, coupled with the maddening uncertainty, had created a havoc which had swept up tens of millions of Americans. The immediacy of a running account, however piecemeal, outstrips any report of an accomplished fact. If a thing is done, it is done; if it is being done, the spectator feels that the outcome may be altered—may even feel that he himself may alter it. Audiences are under the illusion that they are on stage. In a sense they are. Their yearning puts them there.

  Friday’s boundless national audience had begun to gather six minutes after Lee Oswald ceased firing. At 12:36 CST Don Gardiner of the ABC radio network cut into local programs with a relay of the embattled Merriman Smith’s first precede, torn off teletype machines two minutes before. At 12:40—when Kellerman was telling Behn “Look at your clock”—CBS interrupted “As the World Turns,” a soapland daydream. Viewers beheld Walter Cronkite announcing that “In Dallas, Texas, three shots were fired at President Kennedy’s motorcade. The first reports say that the President was ‘seriously wounded.’ ” At 12:45 NBC, the champion of news coverage, became the last of the three to reach the public. NBC was relying heavily upon the Associated Press, that bumbling giant, and to make matters worse the network was “down”—there were no national programs at the moment; local stations were in control.

  This was the hour of David Brinkley’s private ordeal. With every teletype hammering out history, the monitor in his office was continuing to present a fashion show. The manager of NBC’s Washington affiliate was out to lunch. No one knew where he was, or would assume responsibility for bouncing the models. In New York Chet Huntley had scuttled “Bachelor Father,” WNBC-TV’s marshmallow, but Brinkley’s hands were tied, and when he finally reached the air he was in a state of what another NBC newscaster described as “controlled panic.” British television approached the news more soberly, regularly interrupting programs to announce the shocking news, but not immediately giving the mass of detail that was to follow.

  During the first critical hour in the United States the ratio between the public and its true informants was roughly 38,000,000:1. The Cronkites and Huntleys were as out of touch as their demoralized listeners; the best they could do was pass along details from Smith, at Parkland’s cashier’s desk, and Jack Bell, in admissions. As commentators the television newscasters would normally have commented. At the moment any gloss would have been highly inappropriate, and their chief contribution was to realize that and remain unruffled. Since most of them had known the President personally, their impassivity that afternoon was no small feat. Even for men with training and long experience it was difficult, and composure vanished off camera. Bill Ryan and Frank McGee dissolved when relieved. Cronkite, taking his first break, numbly answered a studio phone. A woman on the other end, not recognizing his voice, told him, “I just want to say that this is the worst possible taste to have that Walter Cronkite on the air when everybody knows that he spent all his time trying to get the President.” He replied, “This is Walter Cronkite, and you’re a Goddamned idiot.” Then he flung the receiver down.
r />   Until their elaborate staffs began to function they were marking time. America’s multimillion-dollar communications empire had been reduced to a crude, truncated megaphone with two-thirds of the nation at the listening end and, at the shrunken mouth, two wire correspondents clutching commandeered hospital telephones. Smith and Bell shared the same desperate plight. They weren’t learning much where they were. Yet should either surrender his outside line, the chances of finding another were negligible. They were dependent upon the cooperation of colleagues and tolerant passers-by who, hopefully, would be reliable. It is a fact, and it is something of a miracle, that the megaphone worked. Fellow reporters were exceptionally generous, scrupulous, and resourceful; most of the groundless rumors circulated in the country that afternoon came from viewers and listeners who heard correct versions and embellished them in the retelling.

  Here speed was an asset; before the deceived could spread the deceptions, they themselves had joined the great audience that was forming. Lacking that celerity, lies could have been sown beyond hope of uprooting. Even as it was, most of the 76 million first heard of the tragedy through hearsay. It was a workday. The reputation of daytime television was low; for every housewife who enjoyed the pablum of “Bachelor Father” or “As the World Turns,” there were perhaps a score who were occupied otherwise, and who were therefore alerted by her, sometimes at second or third hand. Word-of-mouth was the initial form of communication nearly everywhere, including the White House, whose private news agency was the U.S. Secret Service.

  In theory the executive mansion had access to more complete information than any other house, not because agents are better reporters than correspondents, but because they were better situated—Smith, twenty-five yards away from the closed wide door of the emergency area, couldn’t compete with the Kellerman-Hill team inside. As a publisher, however, the White House Detail was inept. Its service was, after all, secret. The scraps Smith and Bell did pick up and dictate were rephrased by professionals, beamed across all fifty states in even, well-modulated tones, and received by sets which were familiar furniture at every American address, including 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The voice of the Secret Service was the rasping cop’s accent of Jerry Behn. First from his own desk, and later, after his office had grown hopelessly overcrowded, from the conference table in the larger office of Jack McNally, Behn would repeat aloud everything he heard over the open line from the nurse’s station. Volunteers would then dash down corridors repeating it again, much as their predecessors, on August 24, 1814, had rushed about shouting that the British were on their way from Bladensburg with torches.

  In this haphazard fashion the Chief Executive’s home had learned that the head of the household lay gravely wounded in a Texas hospital. The butlers polishing tableware heard it from a government carpenter; a guard told the agent on the south portico; a White House Police sergeant shouted it across the west lobby; Jack McNally told Clark Clifford in the staff mess; a Navy yeoman blurted it out to Taz Shepard, who then thrust his head into the East Wing office where Nancy Tuckerman was putting the finishing touches on the seating plan for the Erhard dinner. Like so many women of the New Frontier, Nancy had led a genteel, sheltered life. Now, because of her position as social secretary and her twenty years of friendship with Jacqueline Kennedy, she had to serve as a grim courier. Among others she telephoned Maude Shaw, upstairs, and Mrs. Auchincloss, on O Street; and she dealt with a bewildered inquiry from Lee Radziwill in London. Nancy’s approach, like Nancy, was gentle and thoughtful. “What are you doing?” she would begin cautiously, and then she would proceed in stages, explaining that the President had been hurt, that he had been badly hurt, that his condition was critical, that it would be wise to prepare for the worst. It was a valiant attempt at tact, though the enormity of what had happened crushed it; in two instances the result was hysteria.

  Since the first UPI bulletin had preceded Kellerman’s call by six full minutes, and since every government communications center was equipped with wire service machines, powerful officials who were in their offices had known of the shooting before Secret Service headquarters. The ragged yellow strips of paper—“Dallas, Nov. 22 (UPI).—Three shots were fired…”—were handed to George Ball at the State Department and J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI; to Ted Sorensen, just returning from lunch after a stop at his apartment; to Walter I. “Bill” Pozen, who was minding the store at the Department of the Interior during Secretary Udall’s absence on the Cabinet plane; to Dean Rusk, the senior minister aboard that plane, nine hundred miles out of Honolulu; and to Robert McNamara at the Pentagon. Simultaneously the Pentagon’s command center sounded a buzzer, awakening General Maxwell Taylor, who was napping in his office between sessions with the Germans. McNamara had a tremendous reputation, and he deserved it. Despite his deep feeling for the President—the emotional side of his personality had been overlooked by the press, but it was very much there—he kept his head and made all the right moves. An ashen-faced aide came in with the bulletin. Jerry Wiesner studied the man’s expression as the secretary read it. Wiesner thought: The Bomb’s been dropped. McNamara quietly handed the slip around—Wiesner felt momentary relief; anything was better than a nuclear holocaust—and then the Secretary acted quickly. Adjourning his conference, he sent Mac Bundy back to the White House in a Defense limousine and conferred with Taylor and the other Joint Chiefs. Over the JCS signature they dispatched a flash warning to every American military base in the world:

  1. Press reports President Kennedy and Governor Connally of Texas shot and critically injured. Both in hospital at Dallas, Texas. No official information yet, will keep you informed.

  2. This is the time to be especially on the alert.

  By every readable signal the situation was very red. Assassinations generally precede attempts to overthrow governments, and General Taylor issued a special warning to all troops stationed in the Washington area. At Interior Bill Pozen had assumed that this was the first stage in a coup. Never within his memory had the capital been so wide open. Six Cabinet members were over the Pacific, and both the President and the Vice President were in Dallas. There was another chilling aspect, which struck Pozen with special force: The President’s daughter had just left the mansion. She was somewhere in the District of Columbia with Pozen’s own daughter and his wife. Trying number after number, he attempted, unsuccessfully, to locate them. Then all lines went dead. The Department of the Interior was cut off.

  Secretary Rusk, standing in the stateroom of Aircraft 86972, fingered the two-line bulletin and asked all ladies to retire to the rear of the plane. Beckoning to a steward, he ordered him to summon Dillon, Freeman, Udall, Wirtz, Hodges, Salinger, Heller, Assistant Secretary of State Robert Manning, and Mike Feldman of the White House staff. Rusk waited until all were present, hoping that his face wouldn’t betray him. It did. Orville Freeman decided that some momentous international development had caused the President to cancel their Japanese visit. Douglas Dillon’s thoughts were more specific. Like Wiesner, the Secretary of the Treasury concluded that a thermonuclear device had exploded over an American city.

  By now three bulletins had arrived. All the men were present, and Rusk said quietly, “We have just received a ticker report, which may or may not be accurate, that the President has been shot in Dallas, possibly fatally.”

  “My God,” Freeman said. Luther Hodges began to sink toward the floor; he grabbed the table top with a flapping motion and swung himself into a chair. Pierre Salinger, still holding his briefing book open to the section on Japanese economics, leaned over Rusk’s upper arm, reading. Wordlessly he took the bulletins from him and read them again. Willard Wirtz, stepping beside Salinger, spoke up. In his opinion, he said, the messages were “quite garbled.”

  In the plane’s central compartment Alvin M. Josephy, Jr. was scribbling:

  850 Jean Davis of State just whispered in my ear that word has come over [word indecipherable] that President Kennedy has been shot. Suddenly notice that all the C
abinet members & Manning & Salinger are in forward cabin with Rusk & Dillon.

  It is true. Terrific, stunned condition up here. No one knows how badly President is. Scty Rusk apparently has a news ticker up in his forward cabin. We are 2 hrs out of Honolulu. Gov. Connally has been shot too. Manning & Salinger running back & forth to Rusk’s cabin & to us. President shot in Dallas.

  Back in the front cabin, Pierre said, “We’ve got to turn back right now.”

  Rusk said, “We ought to have some confirmation.”

  Confirmation of a press report was clearly Pierre’s job. He entered the communications shack, and it was then, as he confronted the Signal Corps sergeant on duty, that he missed his small code book.

  “Get me the White House,” he said. As an afterthought he added, “See if you can get me Admiral Felt at CINCPAC, too.”

  In less than a minute the mansion came through. Commander Oliver Hallett, in the Situation Room, was on the other end. The only code name Pierre could remember was his own, so he said, “Situation, this is Wayside. What’s the word on the President?”

  Hallett was receiving relays from Behn through the Signal Corps operator. He said, “We are still verifying. The President has been shot, we believe in the head.”

  “Is he alive?”

  “Our information is that he is alive.”

  Pierre, like Behn, was repeating each sentence. In the stateroom Rusk turned to the group and asked, “What shall we do?”

  “We’ve got to turn this plane around,” Dillon said decisively.

  There was a twenty-second discussion, then everyone agreed. The word was passed to the pilot, and Wirtz, looking out, saw the southern wing dip in a 180-degree arc. Josephy scrawled, “Sudden sharp bank—wing turning…” Tokyo was no longer their destination. The new destination, however, was uncertain. “Word is we’re going to Dallas,” Josephy wrote. In the shack Rusk called George Ball: “We got the flash. We’re coming back. Should we go to Dallas or Washington?” he asked him. Ball didn’t know. “We’ll be at Hickam Field in forty-five minutes,” the Secretary said. “I’ll call you from there.” Pierre, beside him, was connected to CINCPAC. He arranged to have a jet on a Hickam runway with full tanks to fly himself and Rusk directly to Love Field. The more the Secretary of State thought about it, the more sensible this plan seemed. But it was pure improvisation. He had no concept of the situation in Dallas and didn’t even know that the Vice President had accompanied the President there.