The Death of a President

  “You’re right,” Kennedy said incisively. “Close it.” Turning away, he went upstairs with Spalding.

  Salinger broke the news to the press, and although the networks were almost at their wit’s end for scraps of information they displayed admirable taste in playing the announcement down. Even so it aroused curiosity. Innumerable members of the national audience were convinced that the casket was sealed because there was something to hide. At NBC David Brinkley was “flooded by letters and wires demanding an explanation. I was repeatedly asked to provide one, and usually I refused, though I sometimes said it was at the request of the family, or for reasons which seemed obvious. To me it was obvious. I feel strongly that the coffin should be closed at all funerals.”

  One magazine offered a gratuitous elucidation. Time (December 6, 1963) reported that “The casket… was never to be opened because the President had been deeply disfigured.” This was wholly untrue. Neither wound had damaged the President’s face. His features, intact when his wife examined them at Parkland, had been treated with cosmetics, and this was what gave offense. Her impressions of Sunday morning, when she next saw him, are chronologically out of place here. Yet one of them is pertinent: “It wasn’t Jack. It was like something you would see at Madame Tussaud’s.”

  Dawn was unmemorable, which is unsurprising, because the moment of daybreak is imprecise anyhow. In the U.S. Naval Observatory at Massachusetts and Thirty-fourth N.W. sunrise was recorded at 6:50 A.M. That was determined by scientific instruments. It is arbitrary on any day, but meteorologically November 23, 1963, was about to smother the Eastern seaboard. Between dawn and dusk not a single ray of sunshine would be discernible to the trained scanners at the observatory at Dulles, or at Washington National. The overcast was solid, an unbroken blot.

  Yet even the dimmest sunrise is preceded by what infantrymen call morning twilight. At 4:34, when President Kennedy had been carried up the steps of the North Portico on the aching fingertips of six enlisted men and one junior officer, the sky had been swarthy. Pale streaks were lacing the eastern horizon as the first shift of the Death Watch mounted guard, however, and that first light was oddly translucent. The grayness was not entirely gray. The penumbra was tinged with a sickly yellow which any seaman would have recognized and distrusted. Already storm signals were flapping on the Chesapeake and the lower Potomac. It was going to blow, hard.

  An abrupt barometric drop from 29.76 to 29.44—those were the early readings—induces an atavistic tension in people and animals. Farmers know the signs as well as sailors. With the charge of negative electricity that precedes the deluge barnyards become restless. Sheep bleat. Cattle low. It is a primitive warning; trouble is on the way. But Washingtonians who were awake in Saturday’s seventh hour don’t remember that either. Their nerves were incapable of withstanding another turn of the screw. They couldn’t imagine greater trouble, and therefore as the darkness outside merged unobserved into gloomy daylight, the darkness within them went on and on. Once—it had been yesterday noon, a staggering thought—life had been normal. At lunchtime one had looked forward to the office, home, dinner, children, sleep. Since then routine had been ruptured and displaced by a grotesque abnormality. Though a full night had passed since then, there had been neither normal work nor meals nor repose.

  Only a handful slept at all. Ken Galbraith induced insentience with a mild overdose of sleeping pills; he was shortly awakened by a punishing headache. Mac Kilduff stretched out on the press room cot he had used during the Cuban missile crisis. Chief Usher West tossed on a mansion couch for an hour, General Wehle in his Fort McNair CP for two hours, Lieutenant Bird dozed forty-five minutes in Fort Myer’s Bachelor Officers Quarters. Bill Walton drifted off in “a skin-thin, foxhole sleep; I had been thrust back twenty years into the 82nd Airborne.” An unnatural trance was the best the most phlegmatic could manage. The sensitive couldn’t close their eyes, and genuine slumber was a phenomenon. Lieutenant Bird leaped to his feet at the first spatter of rain. His first thought was that he was going to get thoroughly drenched, because he was “too proud to wear a raincoat.” Taz Shepard heard the drizzle and approved. Any other weather, he felt, would have been an affront. In Georgetown Ben Bradlee lay through the ominous gloaming, listening to the dying of the last sirens. Beside him Toni sprawled weeping, and not because she was a woman or especially emotive; it had been a night of tears; Mac Bundy, the Kennedy-Johnson aide who had made the swiftest transition, later noted tersely, “Friday and Saturday I cried at home—after that not.”

  Bundy then rose and summoned a White House car. “Jobs,” he wrote, “were our only comfort.” And a job was not a task performed during specified hours; it was a substitute for void. The impact of the tragedy did not strike everyone with equal force, of course. Though Mac described it as “deep and general,” he also observed that “The shadings of grief were varied—and the sense of sharing seldom complete. Jackie and Bobby were in a circle all their own; near them were the family; then—in different ways—Kenny and Bob McNamara—and then for different things a lot of us. And in different ways each circle of hurt found it easy to forget that others were also in grief. In particular it was easy to forget that the new President and his circle were hurt, too.”

  There were no closed planes; total immunity was almost unknown. With absolutely nothing to do at that unearthly hour, Washington had seldom been busier. Bundy, wretchedly attempting to set up a staff conference, reflected that “The real sadness… was not at predictable moments—but whenever one got hit at some unguarded opening by a fresh thought of loss and change. I remember such states in passing the Rose Garden, in coming to the elevator to the second floor, in admiring the new red rug in his office which he never got to see.” Nor were the afflicted confined to those who had known John Kennedy. It would be hard to find a less susceptible crew than Joe Gawler’s undertakers. They were so accustomed to death that they maintained a scoreboard in the funeral parlor basement to keep track of each day’s remains. Yet Gawler and his men couldn’t go home after the East Room ceremony. Leaving Pennsylvania Avenue, they picked up their unused hearse at Bethesda, repaired an S iron on its side, and began preparations for Saturday’s funerals.

  On the third floor of the Executive Mansion George Thomas inspected the President’s Texas luggage, which had been deposited on a rack outside his room. He couldn’t bear to open it, so he became a kind of community valet, polishing shoes and pressing suits for any man who would have him, including, later in the day, another gentleman’s gentleman whom he mistook for a distant Kennedy relative. Godfrey McHugh sat alone in his East Wing office, fumbling through dull Air Force orders. He had considered himself relieved by the Death Watch, but since he didn’t know what else to do he greeted Saturday by struggling through unreadable military prose. Dr. Burkley decided to resign—Arthur Schlesinger subsequently regarded himself as the first Kennedy appointee to try to quit, but the physician beat him. Leaving the mansion after Father Kuhn’s blessing, Burkley crossed West Executive and notified Walter Jenkins that he wished to retire. Neither man thought it extraordinary that the other should be functioning at five o’clock in the morning.

  The writers went on writing. In crisis literacy may eclipse every other passion. Drunks were sober, lechers chaste, and aspirants for the Presidency—including every Republican who had been mentioned as a candidate—were free of Potomac fever; but the stream of words swelled hourly. By 5:15 A.M. Schlesinger was back at his East Wing typewriter, banging away. With pencil and White House stationery Charlie Bartlett dashed off, not a column, not a letter, but an extraordinary unaddressed tribute:

  We had a hero for a friend—and we mourn his loss. Anyone, and fortunately there were so many, who knew him briefly or over long periods, felt that a bright and quickening impulse had come into his life. He had uncommon courage, unfailing humor, a penetrating, ever curious intelligence, and over all a matchless grace. He was our best. He will not be replaced, nor will he be forgotten, for in truth he was
a kind of cheerful lightning who touched us all. We will remember him always with love and sometimes, as the years pass and the story is retold, with a little wonder.

  One deciphers Bartlett’s handwriting with wonder. He had rarely written so well for publication. He was, of course, as close to Kennedy as any writer; he and Martha, “shamelessly matchmaking,” as Jacqueline Kennedy later said, had introduced the future Mrs. Kennedy to the future President. Yet those who had met John Kennedy but once or, more often, not at all were setting down panegyrics as moving. From Torquay seventy-nine-year-old Sean O’Casey was writing a friend in New York:

  What a terrible thing has happened to us all! To you there, to us here, to all everywhere. Peace who was becoming bright-eyed now sits in the shadow of death: her handsome champion has been killed as he walked by her very side. Her gallant boy is dead. What a cruel, foul, and most unnatural murder! We mourn here with you poor, sad American people.

  André Malraux cabled Mrs. Kennedy: “Nous pensons à vous et nous sommes si tristes.…” A Frenchman who had never seen either member of the First Family wrote the widow: “Madame, La mort de votre mari m’a fait un très grand coup au coeur.… Votre mari était un grand homme qui restera pour toujours [word illegible] dans ma mémoire.” In the American Embassy in London, where it was now 11 A.M., an unknown Englishman set down in halting script: “With the death of President Kennedy every man in the Free World is a Kennedy,” and an eleven-year-old British schoolboy wrote Jacqueline Kennedy, “I thought that he was a peace loving, brave and kind man. In fact, all that a man should be. One day I hope that I will follow his example.”

  The English had a special affection for the great-grandson of an Irish potato farmer who had seemed to them to have become the apotheosis of their own moribund aristocracy, a regency figure miraculously reborn. But the glow had spread everywhere; in Italy, which had learned overnight that the assassination weapon was a product of Terni Arsenal, C2766 was already known as “il fucile maledetto”—“that accursed gun.” Even those who had chivied, traduced, and fought Kennedy were also awake and scribbling. Charles de Gaulle was groping for the right words. So was Nikita Khrushchev. So was Fidel Castro. And so, at 810 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, was the Republican presidential candidate of 1960.

  None of the homage was easy. For this man, however, every stroke of the pen must have been excruciating. It was not generally known, but Richard Nixon had admired the President extravagantly. He wrote of his and his wife’s thoughts and prayers for Mrs. Kennedy and mentioned the role of fate in making the two men enemies. Somehow, the letter conveyed a spirit of what Nixon himself might have called Americanism. It was civil, and it was touchingly gentle.

  It is notable that the one man who enjoyed absolute peace that night—the best, he confided to his brother next day, that he had ever known—was the assassin. To Robert Oswald and to his interrogators Lee Oswald trumpeted that he was refreshed. Certainly he looked spry. In Dallas another Texan, a bystander who had witnessed the assassination, also slept soundly. Young Ron Fischer, the bookkeeper who admired Barry Goldwater, said afterward, “Sure, I had a reaction. It took me several minutes to drop off. That may have been my digestive system, though. I’d had a real big meal, and I always eat too fast. It’s the one thing that’s really wrong with me.”

  Nevertheless Oswald and Fischer were unusual. America was not a fit nation early Saturday. Across the country, millions, including many who had voted Republican in 1960, arose feeling drugged. Ken Galbraith’s hangover may not be attributable to pills. His lethargy was widespread. It was quite ordinary for an individual to stir awake with the sensation that he had just been rescued from a dreadful nightmare. Roy Truly didn’t experience it because he was one of the true insomniacs. The Book Depository superintendent had wrestled vainly through the night with a clammy sheet. He had the feeling that his stomach was “tied up in a huge knot.” He was suffering from violent nausea and diarrhea and was under medication. Howard L. Brennan, the pipefitter who had seen Oswald fire the fatal shot, was even sicker. Although Brennan, like Truly and Fischer, had violently disapproved of the Kennedy Presidency, he was deeply disturbed. Obsessed with the fear that the assassin’s co-conspirators would kill his two-year-old granddaughter, he commenced the first of a long series of therapeutic sessions.

  In the White House guest rooms even fitful rest was exceptional. Dr. John Walsh was flitting from threshold to threshold doling out red ovoid Seconal capsules, two to a customer. They were gulped obediently, if cynically. Hardly anyone expected results. The ineffectiveness of barbiturates and alcohol had been repeatedly demonstrated; they had become a bad joke; in lieu of narcotics the guests conversed with one another. Like Jacqueline Kennedy at Bethesda, they were trying catharsis. Bob Kennedy talked to Chuck Spalding. Sargent Shriver and Jean Smith knelt together by the closed coffin and then talked in the hall. Jean transferred her bag to the Rose, or the Queen’s, Room, thinking to nap there. She didn’t stay long. At 6:25 Pat Lawford and six-year-old Sydney descended an American Airlines ramp at Dulles Airport, and Peter and Milt Ebbins, his theatrical manager, arrived at about the same time. Pat walked in on Jean, and the first moves in a weekend of musical bedrooms were made: Jean, Peter, and Milt went to the third floor, and Pat and her daughter lay down in the room adjoining the Queen’s so Sydney would be close to Caroline. First, however, the sisters had to compare notes, and just as they had wound up and Jean was settling down on her new mattress, her husband arrived on the new day’s first shuttle from New York and whizzed in through the Southwest Gate. He wanted to talk.

  Elsewhere on the third floor O’Donnell and O’Brien, who had been assigned adjoining bedrooms, were not in them. They were combining their persuasive talents to enlist Salinger, who had no bed—not that it mattered—in the faction supporting a Boston burial. Pierre capitulated quickly. Ken and Larry then told of the tensions of the flight from Dallas while the three men, attended by George Thomas, shaved. The 10 A.M. Mass in the mansion for intimate friends and associates of the President was their first real commitment, and busy work and cat naps were broken off to tidy up. Inevitably they were inefficient. They were—literally—sleepwalking. In the President’s bathroom Hudi Auchincloss’ ablutions were interrupted by the Attorney General. Robert Kennedy stepped in, apparently looking for something, and stepped out. He hadn’t said a word. Auchincloss crossed to his wife, who lay wide-eyed on her rack. He said wonderingly, “You know, I don’t think he even saw me.”

  The ceaseless, repetitive dialogues went on in bathrooms, dressing rooms, by the catafalque, anywhere. Dave Powers went home to change his blemished suit and told his wife the most remarkable yarn of his life until the clock warned him he must return to the mansion for the Mass. Nancy Tuckerman and Pam Turnure hurried home, changed, hurried back to the White House, and joined new conversations. In an apartment just off the 6100 block of Sixteenth Street Evelyn Lincoln’s husband had greeted her with “Do you remember what I said about Texas?” She replied groggily, “You said something was liable to happen in Dallas.” He nodded, and they were off. “I’ve got to be at the office at eight,” she finally said—forgetting that her employer was no longer alive. Marie Fehmer, whose employer had become the most active man in the world, alternately wept and chatted with her two roommates until the hour struck. Then she dressed with such speed that she didn’t notice her choice until she had reached the EOB. To her horror she saw that on this atrabilious day she was wearing a skirt of gay Kelly green—at about the same time that Evelyn realized that she had absently dressed in pink.

  Marie and Evelyn wrung hands, as Nellie Connally had twenty-four hours before, and as pointlessly. Friday morning Jackie had been the only woman anyone had noticed, and on this Saturday nothing short of indecency would have raised an eyebrow. With a forty-six-year-old President lying in a coffin, the world was transformed. Westminster Abbey’s tenor bell tolled each minute in a tribute reserved for monarchs, Brazilian television technicians terminated a bi
tter strike to transmit news from America, the Japanese captain who rammed PT 109 was inconsolable, the Chairman of the Soviet Union sat dazed in the American Embassy, Norodom Sihanouk of Cambodia ordered his anti-American posters hauled down, and the ruling junta in the Dominican Republic, which the Dallas News had endorsed but which President Kennedy had refused to recognize, proclaimed nine days of official mourning.7

  Under these circumstances, and particularly at this early hour, decorum had no meaning. One of the most searching assessments of the days ahead was held by a Cabinet Secretary and a Special Assistant to the President in the front seat of a private automobile. Arthur Schlesinger, a fast writer, left the mansion to drive Robert McNamara home. As the serpentine murk spread grayly along the stately little complex of residential streets beyond Dupont Circle, Schlesinger parked. According to his journal, McNamara told him that the country had “suffered a loss which it would take ten years to repair, that there is no one on the horizon to compare with the President as a national leader.” McNamara thought that “Goldwater was out, that Nixon would be the likely Republican candidate, and that a party fight among the Democrats would be suicidal. He said that he did not know Johnson well and did not know his habits of work but supposed that he would concentrate above everything else on the 1964 election.”

  Concern over the new President grew, and like the dawn their image of Lyndon Johnson was muddled and smudgy. The Secretary described the helicopter ride from Andrews. Although Johnson had urged him to stay, he said, he was “uncertain whether the relationship would work.” As he left the car—it was now daytime, soupy but light—Schlesinger declared that he himself would leave the administration immediately. He felt that “the whole crowd of us should clear out—that is, those of us in the White House,” leaving Johnson with “his own people around him.” Schlesinger observed that “The Cabinet is different from the White House staff, which is personal. Even there Mac Bundy is an exception and has created his own job.” He was convinced that President Kennedy’s official family could not become President Johnson’s. The Kennedy Cabinet might become the Johnson Cabinet; that was a separate issue.