The Death of a President

There was a rush toward the hall. The wire men were off again. Peter Geilich, a Parkland administrative assistant, leaped aside to avoid being trampled. They reminded Geilich of movie reporters rushing out to grab the nearest telephones. Unluckily for them, it wasn’t that pat. The nearest phones were useless. All outgoing lines had been snared by Bales; Smith and Bell battled the ensnarled switchboard in vain while a woman outfoxed both. Virginia Payette, a former reporter who had married the local UPI manager, dropped a dime in a second-floor pay phone. At 1:35 UPI bells chimed on teletype machines around the world:

  FLASH

  PRESIDENT KENNEDY DEAD

  JR135PCS

  “He died,” Kilduff had meantime continued, “of a gunshot wound in the brain. I have no other details regarding the assassination of the President. Mrs. Kennedy was not hit. Governor Connally was hit. The Vice President was not hit.”

  Wicker started to ask him about the swearing in of Johnson and broke down. Kilduff, grasping the sense of the question, tried to answer it. He began to cry. Nevertheless the subject seemed too significant to be dropped, and another correspondent rose.

  “Has the Vice President taken the oath of office?”

  “No. He has left,” Kilduff replied.

  He stepped aside for a break. In a show of bravado he lit a cigarette; his lighter flame quivered violently. He yearned for an excuse to adjourn the meeting. It was impossible. Reporters were clamoring for a medical briefing. He saw Sidey’s face and hoarsely called to him, “I can’t do it.” Yet he thought it logical; like them he was remembering Eisenhower’s heart attack. Actually, the precedent wasn’t valid—Eisenhower had survived—but putting a doctor on this platform seemed to be the next step. He nodded listlessly and promised to do what he could. Unhappily, he didn’t know the names of any of the physicians who had treated President Kennedy. He couldn’t even find his way back through the building. Taking a white-coated attendant aside, he asked directions, and the man led him through the long halls like a keeper.

  In the emergency area he explained the situation to Dr. Burkley. Burkley, like Clifton, was still adrift. He asked vapidly, “Did you tell the press I was with the President when he died?” Taken aback, Kilduff replied that he had. Burkley bobbed off erratically and fetched Mac Perry. Three other physicians later joined Perry in 101–102, but he bore the brunt of the briefing, and it was harrowing. The scene was bedlam. Several correspondents were hysterical. A question would be asked, and the doctor would be halfway through his answer when another reporter broke in with an entirely different question. Misquotations were inevitable. Had the scene been calm and orderly, the results would still have been unfortunate, however, for none of the doctors, Perry included, had thoroughly examined the President. Because they had failed to turn him over—in Carrico’s later words, “Nobody really had the heart to do it”—they hadn’t seen his back. To them the throat wound suggested that one of the shots had come from the front. Reporters who drew that conclusion weren’t to blame. They hadn’t seen the body. Perry, who had, was their source.

  Under any circumstances the possibilities for muddle in gunshot cases are almost infinite. Abraham Lincoln, like John Kennedy, was shot in the posterior part of the head. Because Booth’s nineteenth-century weapon was low-powered his victim survived for nine hours and the .44 caliber derringer ball of Britannia metal did not shatter his head; a one-inch disc of bone was driven three inches into the brain, and the ball lodged in his skull. In other respects the fatal wounds of the two Presidents are similar though, and the medical reports of April 1865, like Perry’s, were baffling. Lincoln’s assassin had approached him from the right side, yet the derringer ball entered his head from the left. Perplexity and unfounded rumors persisted until the conspirators’ trial, when one of the witnesses testified that the President, attracted by something in the pit of the theater, had twisted his head sharply leftward and downward at the last moment. Medical briefings are supposed to quash such misunderstandings. The one at Parkland did exactly the opposite. Perry was asked whether one bullet could have struck the President from the front. He replied, “Yes, it is conceivable.” Sidey, realizing the implications, cried, “Doctor, do you realize what you’re doing? You’re confusing us.” It was too late. By the following morning millions were convinced that a rifleman had fired from the top of the underpass, and in many parts of the world the conviction is established truth today.

  The press rightly divided the bewildering montage of events into two main stories: the assassination and the succession. During Kilduff’s trip to the emergency area and again after the briefing they speculated about where Johnson would take the oath. According to Robert Donovan of the Los Angeles Times, “The consensus immediately prevailed, of course, he would take it in Dallas, because in the kind of world we are living in you can’t have the United States without a President, even in the time it takes to get from Dallas to Washington.” Here the reporters must be faulted. There is no evidence that any of them challenged the assumption that the office of President of the United States was vacant. In perspective this is amazing, for the seasoned White House correspondents in 101–102 had covered the inauguration on January 20, 1961. They should have recalled that the correct answer to the question “Has the Vice President taken the oath of office?” was affirmative; he had sworn that he would, to the best of his ability, “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States” that frosty noon on the Hill nearly three years before. Indeed, he had, in accordance with custom, done so before John Kennedy.

  In 1963, when the warning time for nuclear missiles from the Soviet Union had been reduced to less than a quarter-hour, any Presidential hiatus was intolerable. There ought to have been no interregnum. That one existed must be traced to men’s minds, not to the law of the land. The most brutal murder in American history seemed to be the paramount fact that Friday afternoon. It overwhelmed everyone, and the stunned nation demanded to know the identity of the assassin. No one at the press conference thought to ask the identity of the man who, at that very moment, occupied the mightiest office in the world. Yet there was an answer. The Presidency, like an immortal heart, never stops. America had a new Chief Executive. His name was Lyndon Baines Johnson, and although even he did not realize it, he had been in power for over an hour.

  Four

  VOLUNTEER

  In the White House Situation Room Commander Oliver Hallett told Crown to bring the Cabinet plane straight back to the capital, with no Dallas stop, and in the communications shack west of Hawaii Pierre Salinger heard an even voice say: “From Stranger to Wayside. You are to turn around”—the turn had been completed, but the Situation Room didn’t know that—“and come back immediately to Washington.” Salinger repeated it slowly. Dean Rusk looked around in bewilderment. “Who is Stranger?” he asked. “Who’s in Washington?” Lacking a code book, his fellow passengers aboard Aircraft 86972 could only stare. Actually, the cipher would have been of little help. “Stranger” was literally a stranger. He was Major H. R. Patterson, an obscure officer in the White House Communications Agency’s net control. Like their fellow careerists in other sensitive agencies, Commander Hallett and Major Patterson were acting because the need for action was evident and the government was in a state of temporary paralysis. The Presidency abhors a vacuum. Its powers require constant exercise. Should the Chief Executive be inactive, relatively little men start taking over at once. Their motives aren’t selfish; they merely believe that certain steps are necessary, that the orb of authority must be wielded by someone. And they are quite right. The alternative is anarchy.

  Had Vice President Johnson assumed the Office of President at 1 P.M. in Parkland, there would have been no void. The transition would have been immediate. The fact that he failed to do so may be traced to the riddle of Presidential succession, which had confounded constitutional scholars for 122 years. The American Constitution, that imperfect classic, specifies in Article II, Section 1, Clause 5, that “In Case of the Removal of
the President from Office, or of his death, Resignation, or Inability to discharge the Powers and Duties of the said Office, the Same shall devolve on the Vice President”—a solecism which should have made the Founding Fathers blush. What is meant by “the Same”? If the phrase to which it refers is “Powers and Duties,” then the Vice President remains Vice President, exercising those powers and performing those duties until the people can choose a new President. We know now that this was the desire of the men who framed the Constitution. The notes of James Madison, published long after his death, provide a cogent record of the secret deliberations of 1787. The founders never intended that any man should become Chief Executive unless he had been elected to that office. The wording they approved stated that in the event of the death of an incumbent the Vice President should serve as acting President “until another President be chosen.” This unequivocal provision was then dropped by the Constitutional Convention’s five-man committee on style, which made constitutional interpretation the art of the impossible. It is worth noting that the most perceptive analysis of the two versions of II, 1, 5 was written by the sixty-eighth Attorney General, Robert F. Kennedy, in 1961.1 Robert Kennedy concluded that it was the sense of the Convention that should a President die in office “merely the powers and duties devolve on the Vice President, not the office itself.”

  But the Madison papers appeared too late. The second possible antecedent for “the Same”—“the said Office”—had become hallowed by precedent. In 1841 William Henry Harrison caught cold during his inauguration and became the first American Chief Executive to die in office. His Vice President, John Tyler, learned the news while playing marbles with his children in Williamsburg, Virginia. Tyler, who didn’t know about Madison’s notes, never doubted that he was entitled to occupy “the said Office.” Several eminent American statesmen dissented, notably Henry Clay and former President John Quincy Adams, who, on April 16, 1841, seven days after Tyler’s inaugural address, made acid reference in his diary to “Mr. Tyler, who styles himself President… and not Vice-President acting as President.” Tyler, however, had powerful allies, chiefly Secretary of State Daniel Webster, and he had already moved into the White House. Time and custom were working for him. By the end of June even Adams was calling him “Mr. President.”

  During the next century death elevated six more Vice Presidents—Millard Fillmore, Andrew Johnson, Chester Arthur, Theodore Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, and Harry Truman—and the claims of each to “the said Office” were uncontested. The Tyler precedent held, despite grumblings that few running mates to emerge from conventions were big enough to lead the ticket. Roosevelt and Truman excepted, the six were an uninspiring and undistinguished group. In the words of one scholar, the Vice Presidency was “a comfortable sinecure with which to honor some of the country’s more able politicians.” The qualifications of the second office in the land bore little relationship to the demands of the first. Nevertheless the silent engine of succession was still there, waiting to be used. Tyler had led the way. Succession had, in effect, become automatic.

  Or almost automatic. Tyler did something else which acquired a special significance in Dallas. His action arose from the realization that men like Adams were certain to contest his right to occupy the White House. When he picked up his marbles in Williamsburg, convinced in his own mind that he was already the tenth President of the United States, he was aware that Article II, Section 1, Clause 7, of the Constitution stipulated that a Chief Executive, “before he enter on the Execution of his Office,” must swear or affirm his support of that Constitution. Although he had already done that as Vice President, he resolved to make assurance doubly sure. Leading the Cabinet to the Indian Queen Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue, he repeated the pledge on April 6, 1841. It was administered by Chief Justice William Cranch of the District of Columbia Circuit Court, who immediately afterward signed an affidavit setting forth the legal situation. The document declared that Harrison’s successor deemed himself qualified to take over “without any other oath than that which he has taken as Vice President,” but that he had asked to be sworn in again “as doubts may arise, and for greater caution.”

  John Tyler has much to answer for. Apart from annexing Texas and taming the Seminoles he did little for his country during the next four years, and in tightening his grip on the Presidency at the Indian Queen Hotel he had left an exasperating constitutional trap for Fillmore, Johnson, Arthur, Roosevelt, Coolidge, and Truman, all of whom fell into it. No one remembered Cranch’s affidavit. The document was filed away in the National Archives and forgotten. But everyone recalled the dramatic oath, and each of the six men who were to stand in Tyler’s shoes felt obliged to repeat it. An act undertaken “for greater caution” was magnified out of all proportion. The ceremonies, conducted while the grieving republic mourned its fallen leaders, became folklore, and the very Bibles on which the new Chief Executives rested their hands were integrated into the myth. The Constitution, of course, mentions the Bible nowhere.

  In time of crisis the pull of myth increases tenfold. On November 22, 1963, the typical American, like the typical correspondent in 101–102, was under the impression that the oath was mandatory. He still is. His leaders (though lamentably few of them have thought the matter through) are divided. Speaker John McCormack, who with Kennedy’s death became next in line of succession, echoes the popular misconception. He thinks Johnson had to be sworn in as soon as possible “because the country had to have a President.” Chief Justice Warren agrees. The oath is needed in such circumstances, he argues, to put the new leader’s dedication to the Constitution on record. Reminded that Johnson had taken that vow at the Kennedy inaugural, he replies, “But he hadn’t taken it as President.”2

  The weight of informed opinion lies on the other side. Barefoot Sanders, who was the U.S. Attorney on the spot, thinks Johnson became President the moment Kennedy died. So does Robert Kennedy; so does Nicholas de B. Katzenbach, who followed Kennedy as the sixty-ninth Attorney General. Hubert H. Humphrey, whom Johnson chose as his own Vice President, declares emphatically, “A Vice President becomes President when there is no President. Later, when he takes the oath, he puts on the cloak of office. But that act is purely symbolic.” Former President Eisenhower takes the strongest position of all. In the view of Eisenhower—who scorns the second oath—Johnson became Chief Executive the moment it was obvious that Kennedy was dying; that is, before Kemp Clark pronounced him dead. The former President believes that Johnson was entitled to sign legislation at any time after 12:30 Central Standard Time. Had a national emergency arisen between then and 2:38 P.M., when he took that second oath, and had Johnson failed to act, Eisenhower holds that he would have been derelict in his duty and subject to impeachment.

  The cadre of professionals who serve the Presidency is similarly split, though they, too, are inclined to dismiss the oath as inconsequential. Because the Secret Service White House Detail lacked forceful leadership on November 22, individual agents are vague. Former Chief Wilson is a more vigorous witness than any of them. When Franklin Roosevelt died, Wilson left one man with Mrs. Roosevelt and immediately reassigned all others, including those who had been guarding the President’s grandchildren, to Truman. “As far as the Service is concerned,” Wilson declares, “when a President dies the Vice President becomes President at once, and all protection goes to him and his family.” Colonel McNally of the White House Communications Agency concurs: “It sounds coldblooded, but the instant President Kennedy died, communications-wise he disappeared off the face of the earth. Oath of office or not, Lyndon Johnson was President in our eyes and head of the government.”

  It is improbable that Johnson had considered these complex issues before a blaze of gunfire confronted him with them. Over a year and a half afterward he informed this writer that it was his opinion that “the Vice President becomes President immediately upon the death of the President. He is obligated thereafter to take the oath of office, but there is no lapse in the powers of the P
residency.” Having taken the second oath, he perhaps felt an obligation to defend it. Otherwise the statement conforms with judicial opinion. However, it was made after the full ramifications of the question had been laid before him. In Dallas, he conceded, he had felt differently. Although “immediately aware” of his new responsibilities, the “full realization,” the “subjective identification” of himself as Chief Executive, “came gradually.”

  Perhaps anticipation of the consequences of a President’s death should be obligatory for Vice Presidents, but it wouldn’t come easily. There is little evidence that Johnson’s seven predecessors had given the matter much thought. The attitude of national politicians toward the White House is highly ambivalent; they simultaneously crave it and recoil from it. Vice Presidents, like Presidents, are loath to dwell upon the fact that they are a heartbeat away from the executive mansion, and when the beat suddenly stops they are dumfounded. “I don’t know if any of you fellows ever had a load of hay or a bull fall on him,” Truman told reporters on April 14, 1945, “but last night the whole weight of the moon and stars fell on me.”

  Truman’s reaction should be mulled over if the Dallas transition is to be put in perspective. When the news arrived from Warm Springs, with which he had no connection, he was in Washington. His predecessor had died peacefully. There had been no violence. Johnson’s plight, on the other hand, was ghastly. The President had been visiting the Vice President’s home grounds, and in twenty-four hours the Connally-Yarborough feud had transformed the trip into a Johnsonian disaster. At 12:29 P.M. his career was at a low ebb. He sat sluggishly in the back seat of his convertible, insensitive to the cheers around him, seeking refuge in the blare of a dashboard radio. His prestige had come apart, and for the moment he had apparently abandoned hope of reassembling it. Then, sixty seconds later, the elected President and his lady lay in a welter of blood, and Lyndon Johnson was the leader of the nation.