The Death of a President

  Youngblood supports Johnson, but O’Donnell was clearly dumfounded when, an hour later, he encountered the Johnsons on 26000. It is entirely possible that Johnson mentioned “the plane” to O’Donnell in connection with Carswell, and that the new President, remembering Roberts’ report of his own conversation with O’Donnell, thought that he and Ken were talking about the same plane. What is highly unlikely is that O’Donnell would have suggested that Johnson await Mrs. Kennedy when a second aircraft was available. Ken knew Johnson was anxious to take off immediately. He also knew that President Kennedy’s widow would not depart without his body and that she would, therefore, be delayed. Despite his shock O’Donnell would have instantly realized that the two were irreconcilable. The discrepancy between the two versions is probably a consequence of confusion though there is an alternative. The new Commander in Chief may have been determined to maintain the closest possible association with the fallen Commander in Chief during what might well become a national emergency, and he may have supposed that O’Donnell understood and shared his concern. This is subtle and intricate, but Johnson in full possession of his faculties is a subtle and intricate man. There is no way to pinpoint the exact moment that he regained control of himself that Friday afternoon. By all reports, including his own, he was still under Youngblood’s influence when they left Booth 13. He did not really become his own man until he reached Love Field. However, he may have had earlier thoughts about the value of identifying himself with what he called “the aura of Kennedy,” and in the light of certain remarks he made to associates the next day this construction upon his exchange with O’Donnell cannot be ruled out.

  If Lyndon Johnson is inscrutable, his wife and his aides are not. Like the late President’s staff, they were obviously heartbroken. Jack Valenti, who until now had been barred from the emergency area by his lack of credentials, hadn’t heard that Kennedy was no longer alive when he talked his way past the guards. Cliff Carter found him in the corridor between Major Medicine and Minor Medicine, looking at Jacqueline Kennedy. The dark, gnomelike Houston public relations man was wondering why “her eyes moved beyond me and through me as though I were an apparition.” Carter took his arm and whispered, “The President is dead, you know.” Valenti collapsed, sobbing uncontrollably. Carter said, “You must pull yourself together. You can’t let the Vice President see you in this condition.” But his own condition wasn’t much better. The two men staggered down the hall, propped against each other like drunks. The question of what Johnson would think of Valenti didn’t arise, because when Carter brought Jack back to Minor Medicine the new President had left.

  Nothing in Parkland was quite as it should be. Men sobbed, women were hushed. The confrontation between the two First Ladies was an affair of muffled dread. Looking neither left nor right, Lady Bird followed Roberts into what seemed to her to be “a hall full of silent people.”4 She saw a closed door—Doris Nelson was beyond it, working on the President’s body. Beside it, in Bird’s words, the young widow was standing, “quiet as a shadow,” her eyes “great wells of sadness.” Painfully conscious of the deathly quiet, Mrs. Johnson embraced her and said, crying, “Jackie, I wish to God there was something I could do.”

  Lady Bird tiptoed away. On the second floor, with Nellie, the atmosphere was quite different. The two women had been intimate friends for twenty-five years, the Governor was alive, and the very walls of bright orange tile seemed to encourage hope. Bird put her arms around Nellie and said, “He is going to get well.” Remembering a recent death in the Connally family, she added, “Too much bad has happened, he’s got to get well.” Almost fiercely Nellie replied, “He is, Bird, he’s going to be all right.” Her eyes filled up, and Jack Brooks, sensing that her brave front was about to crumble, handed her his handkerchief and said with a mock shrug, “Oh, he’ll be out there deer hunting at ninety.” She wiped her eyes and smiled faintly.

  Below them arrangements for the Johnsons’ leave-taking were picking up momentum. Lem Johns reported back to Youngblood: Chief Curry had surrounded Love Field with Dallas policemen. Two unmarked cruisers were waiting outside Parkland, with their motors idling and Curry himself behind the wheel of the first one. Johns was sent off again to look for a separate exit from the hospital. In the hall Youngblood met Kellerman, who, though unaware of the imminence of Johnson’s departure, had realized the need for increasing the guard around him. “You take the day shift, Roberts and his men,” he said, forgetting that Youngblood already had them. “Let me keep Stout’s [Stewart Stout, the shift leader] four-to-twelve people.” To Kellerman this appeared more than adequate. It gave the new President a complete shift, plus the Vice Presidential agents.

  In the nurse’s station Godfrey McHugh was smoothing the way for what he believed would be exclusively a Kennedy flight. He phoned Colonel Swindal, ordering him to move to another part of the Dallas airport, as a security precaution, and to draw up a flight plan to Andrews. After talking to a Dallas police captain on the runway, Swindal wisely ignored the first instruction. He was already in Love’s safest spot. Even before McHugh’s call he had begun other preparations; seven thousand gallons of additional fuel were gushing into the tanks of both 707’s—the fuel they had had was adequate for Austin, but not Washington—and he was plotting a course across Texarkana, Memphis, and Nashville for President Kennedy’s last trip across America. Like Kellerman, McHugh, and everyone else who hadn’t been in Booth 13, the Colonel had no idea that another President would be aboard.

  Had the occasion been less grave, Lyndon Johnson’s departure from Parkland Hospital might be called convulsive. It resembled one of those Chaplinesque farewells in which the only people who wind up on the mobbed train are those who have come down to see their friends off. Some of the right people left Parkland, but others didn’t, and the exodus was accompanied by episodes of disorder, hubbub, and unexpected bungling. “Suddenly,” said Henry Gonzalez, “I saw the might and power of the United States Government in complete confusion.” Rufus Youngblood, who until now had maintained a mastery of detail, completely forgot Lem Johns. Scouting all doors, Johns had found one which the press had overlooked and which led right to Harry Hines Boulevard. Delighted, he raced back to the emergency area and learned that for the second time in an hour he had run aground; the Johnson party had gone. Gonzalez was invited to join the group. Regretfully he declined. He was still juggling the blood-soaked paper bag, and decided that he should give it to Nellie Connally. Cliff Carter and Jack Valenti missed Johnson by less than a minute, but they did miss. They would have made it if Valenti hadn’t felt responsible for Liz Carpenter and Marie Fehmer. “Have them paged,” Carter suggested, and the two men were delayed while they waited for the two women who, unknown to anyone, had gone over to the Trade Mart to hear Johnson’s address.

  Amazingly, Liz and Marie were at the hospital when Johnson pulled out, and seats were found for them. At the Mart they had observed the questioning of a youth by two policemen. “Do you suppose he’s the one who did it?” Liz asked vaguely. Soon afterward their attention was attracted by a woman across the street with a transistor radio glued to her ear. Suddenly she screamed, and her expression told them everything. Even Liz realized that there would be no speech now. It occurred to her that Johnson might have gone to a hotel, and entering an airline office she borrowed a phone to reach him that way. Marie, more realistic, poured out their story to a sympathetic Dallas policeman. He put them in a state police cruiser, and they careened back to Parkland, pleading with the driver all the way to slow down. Drawing up, they saw Lady Bird in the second unmarked car. She, too, had just made it; after leaving Nellie she had flown downstairs and was trying to catch her breath. With a fluttering hand she signaled them to come along, and they squeezed into the hastily assembled caravan.

  Afterward Liz’s ingenuity was much admired. In fact, her presence had been pure luck, which was true of everyone there except the Johnsons, their bodyguards, and Ira Gearhart, who forced himself and his bag into a
policeman’s lap. Cecil Stoughton was to play a memorable role during the administration of the oath, but he was there for the ceremony only by chance. Stoughton had been among those who were holding telephone receivers for Art Bales. Johnson walked right past him with his long lunging stride, the big hands swinging, and observing Bales in the entourage, Stoughton asked, “Where’s he going?” “The President,” Bales hissed, “is going to Washington.” Immediately Stoughton understood. “So am I,” he said and handed the phone to Bales, who was thereby left behind. At that, the photographer was late. There was no room for him in the motorcade. Albert Thomas, quite by accident, wound up in the lead car as a human shield. After Johnson and Kilduff parted, Youngblood led the new Chief Executive to Chief Curry. The threat of a plot still obsessed the agent. That was why he had insisted upon two automobiles; if a sniper recognized Lady Bird he would be shooting at the wrong car. Youngblood put Congressman Thornberry beside Curry, got in back with Johnson, and told the President to crouch below window level. Because Johnson obeyed, Thomas, emerging from the hospital, didn’t see him. “Stop!” he shouted. “Keep going,” Youngblood called to Curry. From the floor Johnson inquired, “Who is it?” The agent told him, and Johnson, asserting himself for the first time, said, “Then stop.” Making the best of the delay, Youngblood decided to use every inch of flesh as protection. He directed Thomas to sit in front, pulled Thornberry into the rear, and arranged Johnson’s shoulders so that he was in the middle. Any bullet aimed at the President would first have to pass through Curry, one of the two Congressmen, or Youngblood.

  “We took off,” Jack Brooks later recalled, “like a striped-assed ape.” Lady Bird, more ladylike, remembered that “we went fast—fast.” Actually there were several exasperating delays. Curry had just begun to accelerate when a delivery truck appeared out of nowhere and halted right in front of him. The agents went for their guns, but the deliveryman, though guilty of extremely bad traffic manners, was real enough. Then there was the junkyard of abandoned cars. This obstacle was dodged by hurtling over curbs and grass. Next Curry destroyed the purpose of the unmarked cars by hitting his siren. “Stop that!” Johnson and Youngblood yelled together. The chief did. The motorcycle escort, however, had picked up his cue; the wails were audible for over a mile, and Curry had to radio them to cut it out. Thereafter things went more smoothly, though at times they had to slow to a crawl. The number of red lights was extraordinary. They didn’t stop for them, but to avoid collisions they had to treat them as what the Secret Service calls “pink lights,” pausing and glancing each way before speeding up. To those who were listening intently for rifle shots these pauses were almost unbearable, and the trip seemed longer than it was. It was within a minute of the time span of the drive from the triple underpass to Parkland: out the four lanes of Harry Hines, right at a sign reading “DALLAS LOVE FIELD,” right on Mockingbird, and through the break in the airport’s chain fence. Three miles, seven minutes; they were there.

  In Lady Bird’s car no one spoke or moved between the hospital and the airport. In the cruiser ahead, Youngblood, using the portable DCN set which still dangled from his shoulder by its leather strap, radioed ahead to Paul Glynn, Johnson’s valet, telling him to move all Johnson luggage from 86970 to 26000—the first notice to anyone at the field of the aircraft switch—and in the car behind Mrs. Johnson, Liz Carpenter, the only writer present, made the first notes for the statement which the President eventually would have to make to the American people. She had scarcely begun when the cars braked. As they alighted Youngblood shouted, “Everybody run up the steps.” Everybody did, and as Lady Bird entered the plane’s rear door for the first time she heard Walter Cronkite’s reedy voice coming from the stateroom, commenting on Kilduff’s statement: “… Lyndon B. Johnson, now President of the United States…” Although the volume was turned up, it was hard to hear him; in every compartment crew officers, stewards, and secretaries were weeping. Johnson headed for the television set, and Joe Ayres, his rotund face streaming, adjusted the picture for him.

  “Close all shades in the plane,” the President was calling. “Close the shades,” Youngblood echoed—a subtle change from Parkland.

  Obeying, Ayres beheld a remarkable sight: an automobile, in violation of all military and civilian safety rules, was racing toward him across the breadth of Love Field. Inside were Johns, Carter, Valenti, Stoughton—the Presidential photographer had finally found a seat with the stragglers—and a terrified Dallas policeman. Each of them knew that the short cut was insane, but in the past hour life had become cheaper; as Carter left the paper bag containing half Connally’s clothes with a nurse she had confided to them, “The Governor’s not expected to live.” So no one protested when Johns, who had thought that the aircraft had been moved to Southwest Airmotive, Love’s private plane terminal, cried in exasperation, “Hell, we’re on the wrong side of the airport! Let’s shoot the runways.” The control tower looked down in awe as they veered across the expanse of oil-stained concrete, their siren screaming, and swerved up beside the ramp.

  “Which one?” asked Valenti, looking at the two 707’s. He couldn’t tell them apart.

  “This one,” said Johns, leading him up.

  That was the last car in President Johnson’s first motorcade; with its hair-raising arrival from Parkland, the Youngblood breakout, as it might be called, was complete. Parkland didn’t know it, though. Most of the agents and aides in the emergency area were under the impression that the group that had begun the grand tour of Texas at San Antonio International Airport the day before was intact. And when they did hear of the lightning move later, they were indifferent to it. The man they still regarded as President lay dead; they couldn’t think beyond that.

  Had it not been for the hospital’s public address system, none of them might have been reminded of Johnson and his staff in the hour after Kennedy’s death. It would have been better if they had been allowed to mourn in private. The lodging house across from Ford’s Theatre had not been furnished with microphones. For all the phantasmagoria of April 14-15, 1865, Mary Todd Lincoln and her husband’s lieutenants had been insulated from intrusion. Not so Parkland in 1963. Besides being a place of tile, plastic, stainless steel, and institutional buff, the hospital was studded with loudspeakers whose metallic voices relentlessly repeated the page Valenti had left:

  “Liz Carpenter, please come to the administrative office. Liz Carpenter, please come to the administrative office. Liz Carpenter…”

  In a cubicle a few yards from the trauma room’s closed door Evelyn Lincoln heard it and blocked her ears. She was thinking of the campaigns, the Bay of Pigs, Big Steel, the missile crisis—of all they had been through together, all that had lain ahead. Now it was gone. It couldn’t be true. But the nagging PA system insisted that it was:

  “Liz Carpenter, please…”

  Oh, God, Evelyn thought, they’re taking over already.

  They weren’t really; not yet. To those who loved John Kennedy the transition of power seemed needlessly cruel. Certainly it was harsh. It couldn’t be otherwise; the brutal murder had guaranteed that. Consolidating the two groups on one airplane was to prove extremely unfortunate, and aspects of Johnson’s behavior in shock may have proved exacerbating, but the difficulty there was largely one of manners and mannerisms. Johnson was not himself that afternoon. In Dallas the national interest required strength, not elegance, and it is arguable that Johnson, far from taking over too quickly, did not take over quickly enough. The United States needed a President, yet neither he nor his advisers had fully grasped the fact of Kennedy’s death. Valenti spoke for the majority of them when he burst into 26000’s stateroom and said, “I got here as quick as I could, Mr. Vice President.”

  Between pink lights on the way to Love Field the wife of the former Vice President, now the President, had glanced up at a building and observed there a flag already at half-mast. It was then, Lady Bird recalled afterward, that “the enormity of what had happened first struck me.
”

  It was striking an incalculable number of Americans at the same time and in the same way. An irresistible, almost telepathic urge to lower the colors swept the country; banners were floating down outside schools, statehouses, prisons, stock exchanges, department stores, office buildings, and private homes. At the White House Commander Hallett sent a man out to reel down the mansion’s ensign immediately after he had ordered the Cabinet plane back to Andrews Field, and since the Commander had access to the Kellerman-Behn line, the standard at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue may have been the first to slide down its pole. The motive for Hallett’s swiftness lay in his own youth. He had marched in Franklin Roosevelt’s funeral cortege as an Annapolis midshipman, and he remembered that there had been criticism then because several hours had lapsed between the announcement of Roosevelt’s death in Warm Springs and the descent of the White House flag.

  Elsewhere the compulsion is harder to explain. In the nurse’s station Steve Landregan phoned instructions to haul Parkland’s flag down at once; at Brooks Medical Center in San Antonio Dr. Welch, who had no military role, dashed out to the spot where President Kennedy had stood the afternoon before and yanked in the halyard himself. Afterward neither man could explain why that had been his first thought. Whatever their reasons, such sights were to leave an indelible impression on those who witnessed them. Coming after a series of bulletins, each darker than the last, the spectacle of a falling banner was profoundly affecting. In Arlington Lieutenant Sam Bird, who had impetuously driven off to visit the Tomb of the Unknown Soldiers after hearing of the shooting, had just re-entered Fort Myer’s grounds when he saw the post’s standard begin its descent. He drew over to the curb, alighted, and saluted. After this, he thought, nothing could move him so deeply again. (Like everyone else who concluded that the emotional peak of the assassination had been reached, Sam Bird was mistaken, and he was among the first to have an inkling of what lay ahead; as he finished saluting, a captain strode up to him and said, “You’re taking an eight-man army casket team to MATS at Andrews. Pick the best eight on the post. I’m getting you an H-21 chopper—one of those banana jobs.”)