The Death of a President

  “Fortiter in re, suaviter in modo”—“Be graceful under pressure.” The man who lay in Oneal’s coffin had admired the Roman maxim. Without him his leaderless staff drifted into an ill-concealed enmity. Some made no attempt at camouflage. Ken O’Donnell was particularly vocal. Twice Johnson sent Moyers back to ask O’Donnell and O’Brien to sit with him. They flatly refused, and McHugh strode up to the pool seats, where Chuck Roberts and Merriman Smith were probing each other’s impressions of the hospital, to make certain the reporters knew about it. “I want the record to show,” he said, pounding the table between them to stress each syllable, “that Ken O’Donnell, Larry O’Brien, Dave Powers, and me spent this flight in the tail compartment with the President—President Kennedy.” Ted Clifton entered that rear compartment on an errand for President Johnson. Ken flashed, “Why don’t you get back and serve your new boss?” Clifton asked McHugh, “What’s eating him? I’m just doing my job.”

  The Texans, too, had loved Kennedy, and until today they had had greater reason to distrust Dallas. To them the suggestion that they bore any responsibility for the atrocity was unforgivable. They were prepared to discount sorrow, but this rankled, and they, too, felt a recrudescence of the Los Angeles spirit. Among them only Bill Moyers, the most generous of Johnson’s advisers, refused to be aroused. He had long been convinced that O’Donnell’s toughness was an act, that under the sardonic veneer he was a tender man. Realizing how deeply Ken had been hurt, he declined the bait.

  Moyers wasn’t in the staff area, though. There indignation was uncushioned. Paul Glynn, Johnson’s valet, stood uncomfortably against the forward bulkhead. He was only watching the President’s gripsacks. It was enough; the luggage was unwelcome, therefore its guardian was a trespasser. Though Glynn was a native of Delaware, he might as well have been wearing a five-gallon hat. In the Austin-Boston polarization there were no way stations, no neutrals; everyone was branded either JFK or LBJ. Sometimes the labeling required ludicrous distortions. The Johnsonians presumed that Mary Gallagher’s anger was Irish anger—among themselves they spoke of “Mary’s Irish.” In point of fact, Gallagher was merely her married name; she had been born an Italian.

  Still, her wrath was genuine enough. As she sorted out her blazing thoughts she heard the drone of the stateroom television set. The broadcaster’s voice was inaudible, but above it she heard a Texas Congressman cry, “Say, that’s great!” She stiffened. Two of the newcomers saw her expression and scowled at her. The meeting of eyes lasted only a moment. It was enough; it was searing. As a native of Dallas Marie Fehmer felt a special sense of torment, and she made a stab at pacification. She offered to order soup for the Kennedy secretaries. Lips tightened, heads were shaken. They didn’t want soup—didn’t, really, want an armistice.

  During the first hour of flight the most conspicuous drawl in the cabin was Cliff Carter’s. Cliff was dictating Lyndon Johnson’s minute-by-minute diary, beginning at 12:30 P.M., while Marie rapped it out on one of the two typewriters. On any other occasion Cliff’s voice would have been unobjectionable. Actually it was quite soft. The difficulty was his Bastrop County dialect. It was so pronounced that it was almost a separate language. To New Englanders it was more alien than Oxonian; the “whares” and “thangs” and “yews” and “mahs” and “yoahs,” and especially the repeated references to “Kinnidy” skirred on Kennedy ears. But then, any sound was jarring. Marie knew it. Conscious of the stutter of her keyboard, she was distinctly ill at ease. She hated the noise, hated the machine. She squirmed, wishing there were another way to print.

  Liz Carpenter found another way. The older woman had never felt so much like an intruder, and although she realized that death was the true intruder, she was determined not to attract attention to herself. The clatter of a second typewriter, she decided, would be indecent. Rather than use it she block-printed, even though her prose was far more urgent than Cliff’s diary. She was redrafting the statement the President must make to the battery of television cameras which she knew would await him when he debarked. Rummaging in her purse, she found the king-sized “ladybird card”—a white card with a silhouette of a tiny bird in one corner—that she had used during the frantic ride from Parkland to Love. Much of it was illegible, and she puckered, trying to remember what she had meant to write.

  She read:

  This is a tragic hour for

  [indecipherable] a [indecipherable]

  and the USA and for me and a

  deep personal tragedy for me—

  I will do my best

  that is all I can do

  and I ask God’s help—

  and yours—

  Laboriously printing a second draft, she passed it in to the stateroom. Johnson showed it to Moyers, asked him to hone it, made a few changes of his own, and sent it up to Marie, who copied it on a fresh 3 × 5 card. The typed version dissatisfied Johnson. It still lacked something. As Valenti watched he studied it carefully. Before slipping it in his side pocket the President reversed the two clauses in the peroration. It now ended: “I ask for your help—and God’s.”

  Johnson was restless. His big frame hulking against the stateroom’s pastel walls, he paced from side to side, telephoning from the desk, conferring with Texas Congressmen on the tawny aisle carpet, and hovering over the television set. The set’s reception was poor; the storms below were blurring newscasters’ images and garbling their voices. Joe Ayres’ deft fingers twirled futilely, and for minutes at a time the President lowered at a blank, silent screen.

  There was an incessant stirring around him. The pilgrims trekked to the rear and back; the Congressmen came and went; Valenti, Marie, Clifton, and Kilduff were in and out. Toward the end Cliff Carter entered and stayed. Four companions were constant: Mrs. Johnson, Ayres, Rufe Youngblood, and Bill Moyers. To Moyers the President remarked that the world would be watching him carefully during the next few days. Moscow must not detect the slightest shift in Washington’s foreign policy, and the West must be steadfast. A stable transition was essential. On the morning of April 11, 1937, Congressman-elect Lyndon Johnson had declared in Austin, “I don’t believe I can set the world on fire and go up there and reform the United States of America right away.” A quarter-century hadn’t changed his disposition. He wasn’t a man to mount a King Harry charger and pluck flowers from nettles. But he could be firm, he could be decisive. And he could get things done.

  With continuity in mind, he made several decisions during the flight. There was some talk of barring the press from Andrews. He shook his head vigorously; it would, he said, “look like we’re panicking.” Upon reaching Pennsylvania Avenue he wanted a series of meetings with key officials. Because of his background he thought of the Congressional leadership. “Democratic or bipartisan?” Castle crackled. “Bipartisan,” he replied, and Moyers left to get the names from Larry O’Brien. That, as it turned out, was to be the only conference that evening. At first the President contemplated a full-dress meeting of the White House staff. Bundy advised against it, pointing out that the men there were too bereft. O’Brien told Moyers the same thing; Moyers agreed, and Johnson reversed himself. Precisely how he learned about the Cabinet trip is uncertain. At one point he directed Clifton to have Rusk, McNamara, and Bundy, the three Presidential aides responsible for national security, on the airstrip when he landed at Andrews. Clifton answered that Rusk couldn’t make it. Whether he explained why is moot. Johnson may have learned from Bundy, or from Moyers, who had been told by O’Brien. In any event, the news that six ministers were over the Pacific staggered him. He ordered Clifton to see that the Cabinet plane returned immediately and was informed that it was already on its way.

  Johnson was learning—learning under the most trying circumstances conceivable—that a Chief Executive has virtually no privacy. Affairs of state and personal details intermingled, sometimes in the same conversation. One moment he was requesting a CIA briefing from John McCone. In the next moment he and his wife were being notified by Rufe Youn
gblood that their daughters were unharmed. Lucy was safe at the National Cathedral School, and Lynda was in Austin—Lady Bird’s motherly pride expanded when she heard that Lynda had gone straight to the Governor’s mansion to comfort the two young Connally children. Johnson said he wanted Secret Service agents assigned to both girls at once. Youngblood assured him that they were covered. Rufe still felt that the Johnsons should spend that night at the White House, but Johnson wisely demurred.

  “That would be presumptuous on my part,” he said. “I won’t do it.”

  The agent argued. He protested that he had “to think first of security.”

  “I realize that,” the President said, “but you can protect the Elms, too, can’t you?” Youngblood conceded that they could.

  Familial matters settled, Johnson returned to the bleary screen. It was like a picture seen dimly through a rain-lashed windowpane, and the sound was as instructive as a poltergeist. Already the networks had established the pattern which would hold through Monday. Having canceled all commercials until the funeral, they were filling in with eulogies from eminent statesmen, interviews of men-in-the-street, and video tapes of highlights in Kennedy’s life and administration. From time to time there were bulletins of hard information. Stoughton’s still photographs of the oath were being shown. The U.S. commander in Bonn had alerted his troops to a possible invasion from the East, and Oswald’s background was emerging. His residence in Russia, his application for Soviet citizenship, and his pro-Castro activity in New Orleans were now common knowledge, though their relevance, of course, remained a matter of conjecture.

  Clifton cleared his throat. The man with the football was aboard, he said, explaining exactly what the football contained. Johnson nodded and squinted at the maddening screen. The visitors to the rear passed and repassed. It was macabre; President Johnson occupied President Kennedy’s airborne office while President Kennedy’s staff, some of them bloodstained or carrying bloodstained clothing, shuttled between him and Mrs. Johnson on their way to the widowed First Lady. Lady Bird, sitting alone on the couch where Stoughton had crouched with his cameras, had the extraordinary illusion that she was two people. She felt “an air of sedation.” It was “like standing in a rarefied atmosphere on a mountaintop and seeing every detail limned in your mind’s eye, and yet part of you was seeing it as a somnambulist.” Obviously all this was happening, but to someone else. She sent for Liz Carpenter. She said she wanted to go over her notes. Liz, however, was under the impression that Bird just wanted company. Thinking ahead, she told the new First Lady, “You’ll be asked to say something when we get there.” Mrs. Johnson thought a minute. She said, “I just feel it’s all been a dreadful nightmare and somehow we must find the strength to go on.” Liz said, “Well, that will be your statement,” and wrote it down.

  Johnson instructed Youngblood to be sure that an agent was with the casket. Rufe replied that Behn, at Roy Kellerman’s suggestion, had already established a new shift; Kellerman, Hill, Landis, and O’Leary were assigned to the slain President and his wife. Then Johnson beckoned to Moyers. He told him that he had no intention of entering the bedroom now. Perhaps the widow would like to use it to clean up. Moyers, the gentle nexus, went back to tell Jacqueline Kennedy.

  Mrs. Kennedy, in Moyers’ words, “chose to stay with the body.” In her own words she sat looking at “that long, long coffin.”

  She sat on the aisle seat, closest to the body; Ken O’Donnell brooded beside her. After the hasty reconstruction of the tail compartment to accommodate the casket, those were the only two seats left. Godfrey, Larry, and Dave stood throughout the flight, and the visitors from the staff cabin would stand among them, shifting this way and that to avoid jostling one another. Afterward an incorrect report was circulated that some of them sat on the casket. They never touched it. Mary Gallagher felt a pervasive desire to kiss it, but knowing that would upset Mrs. Kennedy she turned away. Like everyone there, Mary’s first thought was to spare the widow, to help and serve her. There was about them an air of consecration; they couldn’t even bring themselves to lean over her. When Larry O’Brien first spoke to her, he knelt, and the others followed his example. Approaching Andrews, O’Donnell rose and knelt, too.

  This was an entirely new relationship. The day had gone forever when the pols dismissed the President’s wife as Jackie the Socialite. And she herself was a new Jackie, transformed by her vow that the full impact of the loss should be indelibly etched upon the national conscience. She declined Moyers’ invitation because she had no need of the bedroom. Remembering the strangeness of the fresh clothes that had been laid out there, she reflected that during her three years in the White House she had learned much about Lyndon Johnson. Their rapport had been excellent, but a great deal depended upon what the press was told when they landed. She sent for Kilduff and said, “You make sure, Mac—you go and tell them that I came back here and sat with Jack.” Kilduff bowed his head. He mumbled, “I will.”

  The new Jackie contrasted so sharply with the First Lady they had known that even the inner circle of Kennedy intimates were slow to grasp the extent of the volte-face. For as long as they could remember she had been quiet and retiring; she had dodged limelight, and when she did appear in public she was the apotheosis of the well-groomed alumna of Miss Chapin’s, Miss Porter’s, and Vassar. Stoughton had read O’Donnell’s thoughts correctly; Ken was furious about the release of the oath pictures, fearful that they would show the stains on her. The feeling that something must be done about her appearance had become universal. In the stateroom the Johnsons and Rufe Youngblood were concerned about it, but so were the standees in the tail cabin. “Why not change?” Godfrey asked her. She shook her head vigorously. Kilduff saw the rust-red blood caked under the bracelet on her left wrist and recoiled. Mary’s first thought, on arriving from the front of the plane, was to fetch a warm washcloth and soap. Speaking in hushed tones, she consulted Godfrey, Clifton, and Clint Hill about it until O’Donnell came over and said, “Don’t do anything. Let her stay the way she is.” Ken now grasped her purpose. Finally she broke her silence and spelled it out to Dr. Burkley. Kneeling, the physician indicated her ghastly skirt with a trembling hand. “Another dress?” he suggested diffidently. “No,” she whispered fiercely. “Let them see what they’ve done.”

  The last man to realize that she really meant it was Kilduff. He thought long about how they could offload the coffin at Andrews without pictures being taken. His solution was to open the galley door on the starboard side, opposite the usual exit. That way the great mass of the fuselage would mask both the coffin and the widow; photographers and television cameramen would see nothing. He proposed the plan. She vetoed it. “We’ll go out the regular way,” she said. “I want them to see what they have done.”

  What had been done had unstrung everyone else in the cabin, and they talked disjointedly. Kilduff tearfully told her about his four-year-old son Kevin, who had been drowned while he was abroad on a trip with the President. To Bill Moyers, Larry O’Brien appeared resigned, a man drained of all vitality. Moyers expressed his own sorrow. Larry said haltingly, “It’s incredible—he put all of this into it—he worked so hard for it—and this is what happened—this is how it ends.” Godfrey McHugh kept repeating to himself, “He’s my President—my President.” Dave Powers reminisced about their trip to Ireland in June and the Celtic songs Kennedy had loved there: “The Boys from Wexford,” “Danny Boy,” and “Kelly, the Boy from Killane.” Dazedly Ken O’Donnell said, “You know what, Jackie? Can you tell me why we were saying that this morning? What was it he said at the hotel? ‘Last night would have been the best night to assassinate a President.’ Can you tell me why we were talking about that? I’ve never discussed that with him in my life.”

  She shook her head. She herself had discussed it with her husband; she was recalling a conversation with him the Easter after his inaugural, and how they had concluded that they would have to rely upon the Secret Service. But this was no time to g
o into that. Really, words were so pointless now; Evelyn Lincoln came back to comfort her, and not knowing what else to say she recited mechanically, “Everything’s going to be all right.” Jacqueline Kennedy said, “Oh, Mrs. Lincoln!”

  Abruptly O’Donnell rose. “You know what I’m going to have, Jackie? I’m going to have a hell of a stiff drink. I think you should, too.”

  She was dubious. She had promises to keep, and miles to go, and a drink might trigger uncontrollable weeping. She asked, “What will I have?”

  “I’ll make it for you. I’ll make you a Scotch,” he said.

  “I’ve never had Scotch in my life.”

  But maybe he was right. Bracers were often prescribed for victims of shock. She hesitated, then nodded.

  “Now is as good a time as any to start,” she said to Godfrey.

  On a signal from him—he had ordered all galleys closed after the vegetable soup saturnalia—Sergeant John Hames produced glasses, and Ken brought her a tall, dark tumbler. It tasted like foul medicine, like creosote. Nevertheless she drank it, and drank another. Indeed, after the funeral, when she had moved to Georgetown, Scotch was the only whiskey she would take. She never learned to like it. But it always reminded her of that trip back from Dallas, of the hours she wouldn’t permit herself to forget.

  The clutch of men standing around her emptied glass after glass, and in the staff cabin Kilduff was setting something of a record. Mac was drinking gin and tonic as though it were going out of style. He later calculated that between Dallas and Washington he consumed nearly two-thirds of a bottle of gin. Like the Abbé Sieyès, who regarded the Reign of Terror as something to live through, each of them was trying to survive the hideous ride, and if liquor would help they wanted it.

  Liquor didn’t help. It didn’t do anything. Nothing testifies more persuasively to the passengers’ trauma than their astonishing immunity to alcohol. O’Donnell’s instinct had been correct; in time of stress, when emotions have been ravaged and shredded, spirits are usually medicinal. Up in the control cabin Colonel Swindal, who couldn’t touch anything now, was promising himself a tall jigger when he reached his MATS office at Andrews. He would keep that promise—and discover that it was like drinking tap water. Kilduff, having downed more than enough to anesthetize him, gave up in despair. He was still cold sober. And when Ben Bradlee met Mrs. Kennedy and her escorts at Bethesda Naval Hospital, he was outraged; from their conduct he assumed that no one had had sense enough to give them something to drink.