The priest was already chattering a paternoster, swinging his green bag by its drawstring as he tuned up his voice. But he was about to be surprised. His second appearance was to be a damp squib. He had exposed himself earlier inside. The piety of the mafia had been sorely tested, and they weren’t going to give him another opportunity to come near Mrs. Kennedy. Everyone here was a stranger to them, and every hand seemed to be against them. Just as there was no way of ascertaining that the assassin had been a stray dog, so was it impossible to tell that Rose was not a representative of Texas authority acting under instructions. It was hard to believe that a minor functionary would take so much on his shoulders. They had heard a lot of static; they had seen a great deal of muscle and a policeman’s gun. There might be worse to come. To the Presidential staff—Kennedy’s lieutenants, aides, and agents were unanimous in this—it appeared highly probable that a superior force was on the way to intercept them. If they loitered in Dallas, they couldn’t put anything in the field to match it. Their only chance was to hurry. They had temporized too long as it was. Perhaps that had been Rose’s purpose, some of them thought; perhaps he had been sent to delay them. They had to move quickly, and Father Cain was no help. As Catholics the Irishmen were grateful for his blessing, but his timing was most inopportune.
At the wide door O’Donnell had been the strong man. On the dock it was O’Brien. During his years with Kennedy he had become so suave that even his wife Elva had forgotten that Larry’s glibness was a veneer, that he was the son of a Springfield, Massachusetts, bartender. Underneath he hadn’t changed, however; he had the ovoid torso of a bouncer. In his present frenzy he was capable of bouncing a priest, and in essence that is what he did. Dugger and the agents were exchanging grimaces and rolling their eyes; O’Brien acted. “I was in a panic to get out of there,” he recalled afterward. “That little lady just couldn’t stand there with her husband’s body that way.” Father Cain was propelled to the dock edge, where he continued his incantations while the staff, coached by Oneal, eased the President into his ambulance-hearse’s cargo compartment. There was a door on the right-hand side, leading to a jump seat beside the coffin. Dugger, who was nearest, opened it for Jacqueline Kennedy.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
The sergeant started, and he began to weep. He still felt tongue-tied, but by speaking to him the President’s wife had given him a feeling of identity. He remembered that he had a name. He looked at her as directly as his clouded spectacles would permit; he held out his clumsy hand, she touched it lightly, and he said, “Bob Dugger, ma’am.”
Then he closed the door. It was exactly 2:08 P.M. Burkley, who entered the hearse by the rear doors, squeezed his chunky frame behind Mrs. Kennedy. He had to make himself very small. Clint Hill and Godfrey were there, too, and three agents were cramped in front. Kellerman was on the right as usual, but Andy Berger was behind the wheel. This was the only time in these last days that Bill Greer did not chauffeur the President. Preoccupied by paper bags, he was temporarily lost in the warren of halls, and Kellerman was unwilling to wait. The prospect of a pitched battle in the presence of the young widow had intimidated them all. They were determined to reach the airport and take off before the imaginary reinforcements could arrive and overpower them.
“Do you know the way to my mortuary?” the undertaker called to Roy. “I’ll meet you there.” Roy replied, “We’re not going there. We’re going to Love Field. Follow us and you can pick up your ambulance.” “Hearse,” Oneal instinctively corrected him. Then he turned to Hugh Sidey and expressed concern over who would pay him.
Sidey just stared at him. The correspondent had no way of knowing that the long weekend ahead was to demonstrate just how splendidly the memory of a President could be extended beyond death. Sidey glanced from the funeral director and the small semicircle of curiosity seekers in front of the tangled parking lot to the wintry pile of the hospital overhead and then out to the neoned boulevard, where the six-lane stream of blatting traffic halted and moved, halted and moved as the signal lights mechanically turned red, amber, green. Sordid, he thought, what a sordid place for the glory of the Kennedy era to end.
The passengers in the white Cadillac and the four-car column that trailed it felt the first stirrings of relief as they tore out Harry Hines and Mockingbird. The vehicle immediately behind the hearse was a convertible, a relic from the motorcade which now seemed to belong, not merely to another day, but to another age, as in a sense it did.3 Pam Turnure was there with Mac Kilduff, Evelyn Lincoln, Mary Gallagher, and several others—nearly a dozen people sardined together. It’s like a circus car, Pam thought, fighting for air. But the greater the distance between them and the hospital, the safer they felt. Their apopemptic ride was an escape, and because pursuit was assumed—because the men at the door to Major Medicine had been told that they were fugitives from Dallas justice—it took on the character of a stampede. At breakneck pace they passed a Slick Airways hut, spun right, and right again. Braniff and American Airlines hangars came into view, shimmering in the midafternoon heat on the opposite side of the concrete and tarmac desert of Love. There were two warning signs:
RESTRICTED AREA
And:
Slow
DANGEROUS
Trucks
Andy Berger was inattentive. No hearse had ever traveled at such speed. They were traveling at least as fast as the Johnson party had, and they took the unpaved patch by the fence gap as though it were as hard as a highway. Greer, with his Old World courtesies, had never given them such a ride,
Jacqueline Kennedy, talking to Clint, became conscious of a movement behind her, and pivoting in the jump seat she saw Burkley, squeezed in his meager space. He was burrowing into his clothing. She peered back, wondering what could be the matter with him. Then his hand appeared with the two roses intact. “These were under—were in his shirt,” he panted, red-faced, and she took them and put them in the pocket of her suit.
At Gate 28 Berger was braking beside Aircraft 26000, which they still thought of as their plane. There was no discussion as they disembarked. Kennedy was going aboard first; everyone knew that. Early in his administration he had held a door for Eleanor Roosevelt, “No, you must go first,” she had said. “You are the President.” He had laughed and said, “I keep forgetting.” And she had said gently, “But you must never forget.” He had never really forgotten, but sometimes protocol had become a bore and had been disregarded. Not now, though; the Secret Service, Ken, Larry, and the military aides prepared to carry the coffin up. “It’s awful heavy,” Ted Clifton said anxiously, and looking at the steep steps of the ramp leading up to the rear door, he said, “Do you suppose we can get it up there?” The others were silent. It was going to go, they were going to do it, that was all.
In their haste they damaged the Elgin Britannia. Not being undertakers, they did not know that a device automatically pins a coffin to the floor of a modern hearse. There was a catch which released the lock, but they didn’t see it. The four-to-twelve shift bounded for the doors and unlatched them in double-quick time, and when the coffin wouldn’t budge they made it budge. Heaving and straining, they felt a tremor. They yanked together and heard two brittle cracks. Vernon Oneal’s most expensive