The Death of a President

  Steven Landregan identified himself. He said, “I’m going to give you a man, and I want you to do what he says. This is confidential.”

  There was a pause. Then another voice: “This is Clint Hill of the Secret Service. I want you to bring a casket out here to Parkland. I want you immediately.”

  “Hold on—hold on!” Oneal said. “We’ve got merchandise at all prices.”

  “Bring the best one you have,” said Clint. “Any questions?”

  “Well, what about a police escort?”

  “Get a police escort if necessary.”

  Oneal promptly forgot the escort. He had too many other matters on his mind. Running into his selection room, he chose his most expensive coffin, the Elgin Casket Company’s “Britannia” model, eight hundred pounds of double-walled, hermetically sealed solid bronze. He couldn’t carry it alone. Hurrying out to his driveway, he stood vigil there until he had collected three returning employees. The four of them eased the massive coffin into the pride of his vehicular fleet—a snow-white, air-conditioned 1964 Cadillac which he had bought at the October convention of the National Funeral Directors in Dallas. It was less than a month old, had exactly nine hundred miles registered on the dashboard indicator, and was furnished with light-green window curtains.

  At Parkland’s ambulance dock Oneal and Ray Gleason, his bookkeeper, opened the back of the Cadillac. Agents and White House correspondents sprang forward to help them; the coffin was laid on the rubber cradle of one of the undertaker’s portable, lightweight carts—known in the trade as church trucks—and wheeled down the long corridor. At the door into Major Medicine the correspondents stepped back. Andy Berger signaled Ken O’Donnell; they were here.

  “I want to speak to you,” Ken said to Mrs. Kennedy in an undertone, motioning her to follow him down the passage.

  She followed him to a door there, and then Pam Turnure saw her reach out like a cat and grab the knob to be sure it was open. She hadn’t seen the church truck, but she had guessed correctly what was arriving, and that they wouldn’t want her to see it. Ken had made a promise. She intended to see that it was kept.

  Kemp Clark appeared beside Ken. She appealed to the physician. “Please—can I go in? Please let me go back.”

  “No, no,” he mumbled.

  She leaned toward him. “Do you think seeing the coffin can upset me, Doctor? I’ve seen my husband die, shot in my arms. His blood is all over me. How can I see anything worse than I’ve seen?”

  Clark capitulated. “Ah, oh, all right, I know.” He stepped aside.

  Dave Powers noted:

  130 Undertaker—Vernon B. O’Neal [sic] to Emergency Room #1

  She was right behind Oneal. Crossing the passage, she continued to ponder what she could put with the President, and she had the odd feeling of reliving a moment in her own past. She remembered: it had been at her father’s funeral. That had been the first time she had seen anyone dead, and she had been heartbroken. That day she had been wearing a bracelet; it was a graduation present from him. He had been so proud of her the day he had given it to her, and standing by his coffin she had unfastened it on impulse and placed it in his hand. She wanted to do the same thing now. But what could it be? Until this summer he had carried a St. Christopher medal, fashioned as a bill clip. She had given it to him when they were married, and it would have been appropriate now. It wasn’t here, however. They had put it in the little coffin with Patrick. Afterward the President had asked her for another one, so on their tenth wedding anniversary, when he had presented her with a slim ring set with green emerald chips, she had given him a medal of gold. It would be here in his billfold; Kenny or one of the nurses could find it. Then she changed her mind. The new St. Christopher’s, she decided, would be wrong. It was only two months old. It hadn’t been with him long enough to be really a part of him. Besides, it was his, not hers. It already belonged to him. It couldn’t be a gift twice.

  Suddenly she thought of her wedding ring. Nothing had ever meant so much to her. Its very plainness made it dear. Unlike the circlet set with emeralds, it was unadorned. It was, in fact, a man’s wedding band. The President had bought it in a hurry in Newport just before their wedding. There hadn’t even been time to put the date in; she had taken it to a jeweler and had that done later. The ring would be exactly right—provided she could get it off. She attempted to unfasten the left glove and couldn’t even work the snap.

  They were inside the room now. Apart from the disinfectant and the blistering artificial light overhead, the place was much altered; it was nearly immaculate and almost empty. The audience of a half-hour ago had dispersed. Oneal was there, leaning over his burnished coffin, adjusting it on its truck. O’Donnell stood in the doorway. Sergeant Dugger had followed her across the threshold. He looked competent, and drawing herself up she held her wrist toward him. He understood. He found the snap with his thumbnail and unpeeled the glove.

  She moved to the President’s side and lifted his hand. An orderly succeeded in working the ring over Kennedy’s knuckle with cream, and she looked down tenderly. She yearned to be alone with him. If only these people would go away. They would never leave her, of course; she knew that. They would be frightened for her and of what she might do, terrified of unspoken and nameless perils. To ask them would only upset them, so she withdrew in silence. In the passage she asked Ken, “The ring. Did I do the right thing?”

  He said, “You leave it right where it is.”

  Now the waiting began, a dreadful time, a time of small acts of callousness and, at the end, a great, ugly eruption. The President had come to Parkland in one clamorous outburst; he was to leave it in another.

  The door had been closed again. Within, Vernon Oneal was plying his craft. He was concerned about the Britannia’s pale satin upholstery; it was immaculate now, but could easily be stained. Motioning to Orderly David Sanders, Oneal directed him to line the inside of the coffin with a sheet of plastic. Nurse Doris Nelson and Diana Bowron swooped around, wrapping the body in a second plastic sheet. Then the undertaker asked Doris to bring him a huge rubber sheath and a batch of rubber bags. Placing the sheath over Sanders’ plastic lining, he carefully cut the bags to size, enveloping the President’s head in them one by one until he had made certain that there would be seven protective layers of rubber and two of plastic between the damaged scalp and the green satin.

  All this took twenty minutes. Jacqueline Kennedy had returned to her chair, looking, Henry Gonzalez thought, “like a wounded rabbit.” To Henry, and to the rest of the Presidential party, John Kennedy’s slender young widow had become a mystic symbol; they had never felt so close to another human being. They supposed that everyone felt the same, and those who learned that they were mistaken were deeply shocked. Henry was the first of them. He was looking down a narrow hallway, toward a room which physicians used to take emergency calls. A fragile nurse patting a well-cherished head of blond hair and a youth with a thin, conceited face were standing there together. They had their arms around one another, a gesture, Henry assumed, of commiseration. Then the nurse smirked. The youth murmured something in her ear, and she giggled. Henry called indignantly, “Show a little respect, can’t you?” They looked up, startled, and vanished.

  To suggest that frivolity or incivility was dominant at Parkland would be a gross injustice. Most members of the staff were as bereft as their bewildered visitors, and were doing their best to shape order out of unprecedented chaos, but accident rooms, like drunk tanks, are unlovely places; some employees inevitably become hard-bitten, and while the nurse and her escort were a flagrant exception to the general rule, there were other incidents which grated: the resonant sound of baritone laughter echoing down one corridor, horseplay between two orderlies in a second, an exchange of colorful language from opposite ends of a third hall.

  Jacqueline Kennedy noticed none of this. By now Major Medicine’s carnival-house floor plan had been mastered by the mafia, the agents, and the military aides. They had her tho
roughly sealed off. None of them liked the place, and there was a general feeling that waiting for the body was unnecessarily cruel for her—a viewpoint she did not share; “You could go back to the plane now,” one of them said to her, and she replied again, “I’m not going back till I leave with Jack”—but they believed that she was safe from intruders. Only a freak of chance could break the box they had built around her.

  But it was a freakish hour. A Catholic clergyman was probably the one stranger who could slip through the concentric circles of sentinels around her. The outer guards would conclude that the Catholic widow had sent for him; the Boston Irishmen who were closest to her would defer to him. And this is precisely what happened, exposing Mrs. Kennedy to what would be remembered as “the episode of the priest.” Later O’Donnell, O’Brien, and Powers wondered whether he had been a real priest. No genuine cleric, they felt, could have behaved the way he did.

  He was authentic enough. Father Thomas M. Cain was the superior of the Dominican Fathers at the Roman Catholic University of Dallas, six miles from Parkland. At the same time, he was undoubtedly eccentric. An energetic, bespectacled cigar smoker with thinning gray hair and a turkey gobbler neck, Father Cain was, even on serene days, a man of erratic mannerisms. He talked a great deal, sometimes disjointedly, gesticulating loopingly with his long arms, and he tended to swing between cycles of impulsive activity and remorse. When the academic dean of the university had called him at his priory and told him of the shooting, he had but one thought: a Catholic President had been wounded, and he belonged at the President’s side. The fact that other priests would be closer was irrelevant, for he had something they did not. In a green bag in his office he kept an ornate crucifix containing within it a minute splinter from the True Cross, encased in plastic. Changing to his robe and collar, Father Cain pocketed the bag, bounded out to his car, and headed for the hospital. He drove the accelerator straight to the floor. It was, he admitted afterward, something of a miracle that he wasn’t killed. Pausing only to pick up a newspaperman, he left the car in the anarchy of badly parked automobiles and dashed in past the Dallas policemen, the Kellerman shift, the two uniformed generals, and the mafia. On the way he heard someone say that the President was dead.

  Mrs. Kennedy looked up and saw him hovering over her. His eyes were wild.

  “When did he die?”

  “In the car, I think,” she said haggardly.

  Father Cain loosened the bag string. “I have a relic of the True Cross.”

  He held it out and asked her to “venerate it.” She kissed the crucifix, not quite understanding what this was all about. Then he said he wanted to take it in to the President. She thought, This must mean a lot to this man, and If he wants to give it to Jack, how touching. O’Donnell nodded; the priest went in. But he didn’t leave the relic. He merely walked around, waving it ceremoniously in the air above Vernon Oneal, the nurses, the orderly, the plastic and rubber sheeting and the seven rubber head bags.

  Coming out he said, “I have applied a relic of the True Cross to your husband.”

  She stared. It was still in his hands. She thought, You mean you didn’t even give it to him?

  O’Donnell edged toward him. Father Cain, however, wasn’t to be dismissed that easily. He was moving around in a state of excitement, his larynx bobbing. He pressed her hand and tried to put his arms around her, addressing her by her first name, calling her endearing names, and promising to write her a letter. Just as Ken—and Larry and Dave, who were closing in from the other side—thought they had the priest cornered, he jerked away from them. Skirring back into the trauma room, he walked around Oneal, pranced out, confronted a group of hospital employees standing against a wall, and led them in a recitation of the Lord’s Prayer.

  He returned to Mrs. Kennedy and reached for her hand again.

  She yanked it away. “Please, Father. Leave me alone.”

  Now O’Donnell stalked him in earnest, and now he backed away, clutching the bag. They could hear his voice drifting across a cubicle wall, chanting prayers feverishly. They thought they were rid of him, but he was only a few feet away, and he had no notion of leaving.

  The long burnished coffin was closed and poised on its church truck. Jacqueline Kennedy smoked her last cigarette, smoked one Dugger borrowed for her, stamped it out—fumblingly he produced an ashtray, too late—and began to fidget. She was ready. The undertaker was ready. Parkland, having done all it could, had turned to new emergencies. Yet they weren’t moving. The trauma room door was propped open, and the IBM clock there revealed that they had been in the hospital for over an hour.

  “Sergeant, why can’t I get my husband back to Washington?”

  Bob Dugger knew why. He had overheard certain conversations; the nature of the fresh development was clear to him. He wasn’t going to brief her, however. It made Dallas look like a hick town, he thought; as a Texan he felt humiliated. The other men had tacitly agreed to keep it from her, and, amazingly, they were successful; it was the loudest and longest uproar of the afternoon, it raged all around her for over half an hour and nearly ended in a fistfight a few feet from her, yet not until much later, in Washington, did she understand just why they had been delayed so long.

  Roy Kellerman had been the first agent to scent trouble. Shortly before the coffin arrived, Roy had been standing with Dr. Burkley in the nurse’s station, hanging onto the Behn line, when a pale, freckled, walleyed man in shirt sleeves entered, reached for another phone, and flipped the receiver off snappily, like a gunman in a Western. “This is Earl Rose,” he said. “There has been a homicide here. They won’t be able to leave until there has been an autopsy.”

  Father Cain had been a temporary distraction; Rose was a stage heavy. The priest had meant well. At most (as he himself believed afterward) he had been a victim of the national distress. Rose was not a man to be plagued by self-doubt, and he was unaccustomed to criticism from others. He was the Dallas County Medical Examiner, with an office in the hospital. He was, moreover, an official of strong convictions. Pedantic and brittle, he had a way of wagging his finger and adopting the stylized tone of an overbearing schoolmaster. He seemed to invite hostility. His colleagues thought him arrogant and smart. He was certainly bright; he knew a great deal of Texas law, and he treated it as revealed religion. “Dura lex, sed lex”—“The law is hard, but it’s the law.” That was his attitude. Unlike the priest, the doctor was to suffer no feeling of shame afterward. He worked himself into a white-hot anger that afternoon, and he was so sure he was right that his wrath never ebbed; a year later the mere mention of the battle he had fought on November 22 was enough to make him tremble. As a physician and a Dallas appointee he represented both the medical and legal professions. He could be an obstacle of formidable bulk if he chose to be, and he so chose. To him the situation at Parkland was clear, and clearly outrageous. A man had been killed in Dallas. Other men were trying to remove the corpse, in open defiance of Texas statutes. They were flouting rights of which Dr. Earl Rose was the appointed guardian. Strong action was required, and he meant to take it.

  He hung up and turned to leave the nurse’s station.

  Kellerman blocked the way. In his most deliberate drawl Roy said, “My friend, this is the body of the President of the United States, and we are going to take it back to Washington.”

  “No, that’s not the way things are.” Rose wagged his finger. “When there’s a homicide, we must have an autopsy.”

  “He is the President. He is going with us.”

  Rose lashed back, “The body stays.”

  “My friend, my name is Roy Kellerman. I am Special Agent in Charge of the White House Detail of the Secret Service. We are taking President Kennedy back to the capital.”

  “You’re not taking the body anywhere. There’s a law here. We’re going to enforce it.”

  Dr. Burkley argued with Dr. Rose, physician to physician. It was useless. Kellerman, who hadn’t moved from the doorway, gathered his million muscles a
nd loomed forward.

  “My friend, this part of the law can be waived.”

  Rose, stonewalling, shook his head.

  “You will have to show me a lot more authority than you have now,” said Kellerman.

  “I will,” Rose said scathingly, reaching for the phone.

  He could, too. Now that John Kennedy was no longer a living President, his mortal remains were in the custody of the state. The examiner’s position was impregnable, unless he abandoned it, and he was digging in deeper every moment. He phoned the sheriff’s office and the homicide bureau of the police department. Both agreed that an autopsy was mandatory. Under the law they had little choice. Given the uncertainty of the hour and the absence of federal jurisdiction, Rose had an ironclad case. Assassination is murder, murder is a felony, and in felonious crimes he had a legal obligation to Dallas County. That was why he had an office in Parkland Hospital. Justice must be served; when and if captured, the assassins or assassin had rights, among them the right of access to the findings of an impartial post-mortem examination. The point is arguable, of course, because by now it ought to have been categorically clear to Rose that the Secret Service would maintain a vigilant watch over Kennedy’s body, and had he been realistic he should have realized that an assassination without a scrupulous post-mortem was unthinkable. Nevertheless, there was area for reasonable debate. His error, which was grave, was that he was not behaving reasonably.

  Burkley begged him to reconsider. “Mrs. Kennedy is going to stay exactly where she is until the body is moved. We can’t have that.”

  What Mrs. Kennedy did was of no concern to Rose. She could come or go as she liked. She was alive and had been accused of no infraction of the law. His sole interest was in the cadaver. “The remains stay,” he said flatly. “Procedures must be followed. A certificate has to be filed before any body can be shipped out of state. I can release the body to a Texas JP who will function as coroner, or hold the body and have an autopsy here.”