The Death of a President

  For a former Harvard professor Arthur Schlesinger was foxy. The Secretary had speculated innocently about next November, but his driver, usually voluble, had listened with the laconism of an O’Donnell. McNamara was a registered Republican. Schlesinger was a zealous Democrat, and despite his silence on this point his convictions about the campaign were far more partisan than the Secretary’s. He wondered whether Lyndon Johnson should be his party’s candidate in the coming election. Already he was looking ahead to the convention in Atlantic City. After leaving Dupont Circle he conferred with Chairman John Bailey, asking him whether it would be possible to deny the new President the nomination. John, according to his account, replied that “it might be technically feasible, but the result would be to lose the election for the Democrats.” Schlesinger suggested that the party was likely to lose anyway, that either Rockefeller or Nixon would win by carrying “the big industrial states.” He then added perceptively, “But I suppose that Johnson is astute enough to recognize this too, which means that he may be driven to an aggressive liberal program.” This judgment was reached on the thirty-sixth President’s first full day in office, before he had made a single move in any direction, and it came from a Democrat who was pondering the wisdom of forfeiting the election, “regardless of merits,” to beat him. Yet it would be hard to find a shrewder appraisal of the Johnsonian domestic program that would later emerge.

  The daylight was as broad as it would ever be. In the aoristic haze oak leaves lay in sodden arabesques beside Eisenhower’s old putting green, and beneath the three windows of the First Lady’s bedroom a lone, bedraggled squirrel scolded his paws. Jacqueline Kennedy did not see him. She was unconscious. That is the only adequate word to describe her condition. She was not asleep; no one in the mansion was as incapable of rest as the hostess. But Dr. John Walsh had resolved upon a drastic step. She could not go on this way. He would have to knock her out with powerful medication, administered intramuscularly.

  Leaving the East Room, she had debouched in a second-floor vestibule and stumbled into the arms of her maid. Provi was weeping; the two women had embraced and then, in her private quarters, Mrs. Kennedy had finally shed her stained clothing. By now the President’s blood was no longer damp; the blemishes had darkened as they dried. Even so, the maid was overcome by the extent of the blood. Nothing she had seen or heard on the television reports had prepared her for this. While her mistress bathed, Provi packed the clothes and hid the bag.

  Walsh came in after the bath. In the tower suite Walsh had administered one shot to his star patient. It had been worthless. Now he grimly armed another needle, this time with the strongest weapon in his arsenal. She lay down on her side of the double bed, the soft side (the other side was board and horsehair), and he injected a full half-gram of Amytal. He didn’t tell her what it was, but it was formidable enough to knock out a prizefighter, and as he and Provi slipped out into the West Sitting Room they were convinced that she was insensible.

  She wasn’t yet. She could cry, and did, but she could not cry herself to sleep. Eventually, the sedative reached her. For the first time since rising in Fort Worth’s Hotel Texas, when her husband’s voice had drifted up from the parking lot eight stories below, she was out.

  Eight

  CROWN

  She was quiet for perhaps an hour. Shortly after six o’clock she asked her maid for orange juice, and then the drug dragged her down for another two hours. That was the limit of its effect, however; too much was on her mind, and she swung up into a sitting position on the side of the bed, determined to resolve two issues before the 10 A.M. Mass. Unaware that Robert Kennedy had agreed with her about the coffin, she asked for him. Meantime she braced herself to talk to her children.

  At 7:30 the door of the President’s bedroom, where Jacqueline Kennedy’s mother had just awakened, had swung open and Caroline had entered. In a dreamlike tone the President’s daughter said to her grandmother, “He’s dead, isn’t he?”

  There could be no adequate answer, merely a tight nod. But the little girl did not seem to expect details.

  To young John Kennedy, Mrs. Kennedy said that a bad man had shot his daddy, then added that he hadn’t been bad really; he had just been sick. The boy looked blank. For him the full meaning of the assassination was impossible to grasp.

  Robert Kennedy assured his sister-in-law that the public would not see the President. Then, while she changed to black weeds—it was the only black dress she owned; in five years she had worn it just twice, at the press conference when her husband announced his candidacy for the Presidency on Capitol Hill and, more recently, at John’s christening—he struck off on a lonely walk through the mist-shrouded south grounds. It was just past eight o’clock. In the West Wing Pierre Salinger’s phone was ringing. The operator said, “The President wishes to speak to you.”

  Salinger was startled—“I’d had very little sleep, and I was not yet thinking of anyone else as being the President.” Johnson came on the line, gentle and soft-spoken. He understood Pierre’s personal involvement with Kennedy, he said, but he wanted him to stay as press secretary: “I need you more than he needed you.”

  The new President’s first problem, upon leaving the Elms, was selecting a destination. As Chief Executive he was entitled to occupy the oval office. One may reason that his duty lay there, that any other course would sap confidence in government at a critical time—indeed, several men stated the issue just that way. On the other hand, grief remained the nation’s dominant mood. His presence in the White House would inevitably become the source of misinterpretation and resentment. There was no clear option, and Johnson was uncharacteristically indecisive. His first choice was to go to the West Wing.

  As Head of the White House Detail, Jerry Behn commanded his convoy of agents. Behn’s habitual greeting was, “What’s new?” The gambit was depressingly trite, an office joke. This morning Evelyn Lincoln saw Behn before he saw her, and it is a sign of the widespread antagonism toward the Secret Service that Evelyn looked him hard in the eye and said bitterly, “Jerry, there’s something new.” He turned away without answering.

  Evelyn was packing; Mac Bundy had assigned Maxwell Taylor’s old EOB office to her. She knew the Attorney General wanted the West Wing cleared of President Kennedy’s belongings, but she felt no sense of urgency, and she even asked Cecil Stoughton to photograph the newly decorated rooms while JFK bric-a-brac was still there. Then LBJ unexpectedly appeared and asked her to step into the oval office. “Yes, sir,” she said, and obediently followed.

  President Johnson sat on one of the two facing divans. Evelyn started toward the rocking chair, veered away, and sank on the opposite couch. According to her recollection he said, “I need you more than you need me. But because of overseas”—presumably a reference to the necessity for shoring up confidence abroad—“I also need a transition. I have an appointment at 9:30. Can I have my girls in your office by 9:30?”

  He was giving her less than an hour. She said faintly, “Yes, Mr. President.”

  Muggsy O’Leary, who was standing by Evelyn’s desk, admiring the new red carpeting, overheard the conversation. Of Johnson he felt there was “anxiety on his part to get in.”1

  Johnson then said to Evelyn, “Do you think I could get Bill Moyers in Ken O’Donnell’s office?”

  She didn’t know how to reply. She lacked any influence with Kennedy’s chief of staff. After an awkward pause she faltered, “I don’t know, Mr. President.”

  Withdrawing in confusion, she encountered the Attorney General in her own office. She sobbed, “Do you know he asked me to be out by 9:30?”

  The younger Kennedy was appalled. He had just come in from the South Lawn to see how the moving was progressing, but he hadn’t counted on this. He said, “Oh, no!”

  In the hall he encountered the new President. This was the first meeting of the two men since the assassination, and it must be viewed in context. Lyndon Johnson was no longer a Kennedy subordinate; it was the other way a
round. Robert Kennedy had been aroused by the reports of the President’s demeanor on the plane, while Johnson, for his part, was in an impossible position. Nothing he did Saturday morning would have pleased everyone. His first obligations were to his country, and it should be remembered that he met those obligations handsomely. To George Reedy he had said, “There must be no gap; the government must go forward.” It was a wise conclusion. And there was no gap. At the juncture of administrations there would merely be an unsightly scar.

  The President was coming out of O’Donnell’s office when he saw the Attorney General. He said, “I want to talk to you.”

  “Fine,” said Robert Kennedy. But he didn’t want to talk in the Presidential office. They entered a little anteroom opposite the President’s washroom, and Johnson told him that he needed him more than his brother had. By now a half-dozen members of the administration had quoted this same line to Kennedy. And he did not want to discuss his continuance in the Cabinet now anyhow. He told Johnson that the immediate issue was more prosaic. It was furniture. Crating his brother’s things was going to take time, he explained, and he asked, “Can you wait?”

  “Well, of course,” the new President answered, and in the next breath he began qualifying his reply. In effect he said that while he himself did not want to occupy the White House at once, his advisers were insisting upon it.

  The Attorney General was not impressed, and his unresponsiveness seems to have triggered Johnson’s prompt decision to switch back to the EOB. The story that he had walked up to the threshold of the new red rug, declared solemnly, “No, this isn’t right,” and spun on his heel rapidly became gospel among lesser Johnsonian aides. It is untrue. Yet he was not exaggerating the pressure upon him to take over—pressure which, after his exchange with Kennedy, he resisted fiercely. He walked down to the Situation Room for a briefing from McCone and Bundy; then, huddled under an umbrella held by an agent, he dashed across West Executive Avenue for meetings with Rusk, McNamara, and the Congressional leadership. To his staff he said tersely, “Marie will handle the phones, Juanita will handle the people.” There was some discussion of a nationwide television address that evening. He shook his head. Colonel William Jackson, his Vice Presidential military aide, argued forcefully that he ought to go back to the White House. The President ignored him. “It would give the people confidence,” the Colonel explained. “People will get confidence if we do our job properly,” Johnson said tartly. “Stop this. Our first concern is Mrs. Kennedy and the family.”2

  On the other side of the street Robert Kennedy told Evelyn that she needn’t hurry. Nevertheless she sped along. Two Kennedy rocking chairs were rapidly roped together and rolled across West Executive on a little dolly. Evacuation by 9:30 was an impossibility, but Evelyn was determined to have everything in cartons by 11 A.M., and although she left briefly for the religious service in the mansion, she made it. Alone the task would have required a full day. From the moment she reached for the first box, however, she was surrounded by an eager crew: her husband, Mary Gallagher, Joe Giordano, Boots Miller, and Muggsy. Ken O’Donnell glanced in briefly, said he approved of the rapid removal of the President’s belongings, and slapped his Texas trip folder on her desk. “I’m going home,” he said in his pithy way; she assumed he was quitting. The folder was packed away with the President’s ship models, paintings, the cigar box in front of the Presidential chair in the Cabinet Room, the carved desk from the oval office and the personal mementos on it—photographs of his wife and children, the coconut shell upon which he had carved the news of his survival after the sinking of PT 109, and a silver calendar noting the dates of the Cuban missile crisis. To Giordano, unfastening the wall set of Paul Revere lamps, a gift from the White House Correspondents Association, was the toughest job he had ever tackled. As one Chief Executive’s furnishings departed, another’s arrived. Behind Evelyn’s desk a huge gold-framed portrait of Lyndon Johnson, brought over from his Vice Presidential office, was swiftly hung.3

  As Evelyn and her team packed, Schlesinger was completing his letter of resignation in the East Wing, Sorensen was notifying his staff in the West Wing that he intended to quit and that he expected them to do the same, most of the agents who had been in Texas were toiling over their longhand reports, Bill Greer was taking President Kennedy’s Dallas clothing to Protective Research for a scientific check, Miss Shaw was looking out with brimming eyes on the forest of umbrellas in Lafayette Park, Mac Bundy was on duty in the Vice President’s EOB anteroom, Dwight Eisenhower was en route to see Johnson, who was telephoning first Hubert Humphrey, thanking him for his televised tributes over CBS and NBC, and then Ralph Yarborough, to acknowledge his telegram of support. Pierre Salinger wearily screened all the correspondents’ requests to see Sorensen and approved two, from Teddy White and Art Buchwald. Sorensen received White promptly and then completely forgot Buchwald, who was left waiting in the depressing west lobby. A floor below him Ken O’Donnell, on his way to the mansion, paused to tell a group of openmouthed subordinates about the comportment of the coroner and the judge at Parkland. At the eastern end of the same corridor Larry O’Brien stood alone, his stocky neck bowed, blinded by tears.

  Despite his woolly head John Kenneth Galbraith decided that someone ought to write a proper obituary for the Washington Post. He called the editor, volunteered to do it himself, and set to work in Kay Graham’s study. In various rooms of Hickory Hill Ethel Kennedy, her children, and Dave Hackett all awoke stunned. Hackett began sobbing before his feet hit the floor; from bed he telephoned his mother. Six miles away the Old Guard (minus five half-hour shifts of the Death Watch, which were at the White House) fell out on Fort Myer’s north parade ground to hear the formal proclamation of mourning the State Department had drawn up for President Johnson. Rain had begun to descend, yet Lieutenant Sam Bird found that every man in ranks had independently reached his own conclusion about raincoats; not a slicker was in sight.

  From Texas Byron Skelton telegraphed Robert Kennedy: “I only wish the warning to you in my letter of November fourth against the Dallas visit could have been heeded”; in Dallas Lee Oswald lay in his fifth-floor maximum-security cell. His wife, his mother, and his two daughters were in suite 905–907 on the ninth floor of the Hotel Adolphus. Thomas B. Thompson of Life had whisked them there from the Paine home. The evidence against the assassin had been accumulating through the night. At 4 A.M. CST, executives of Klein’s Sporting Goods in Chicago, after poring over their microfilmed records for six hours, found the American Rifleman coupon with which Oswald had ordered C2766 eight months before. His rest had not improved the behavior of the rifle’s owner. When Oswald was returned to the 11 × 14 interrogation room, Forrest Sorrels felt he was “baiting Fritz, hoping Fritz would beat him up so he’d have a police brutality charge.” On the other hand, police interrogation techniques hadn’t improved either. The tiny room was again invaded by a convention of city, state, and federal officers, and some of the questions put to the prisoner seem scarcely pertinent. Fritz, for example, asked him if he believed in “a deity.” The Captain later recalled that Lee said he “didn’t care to discuss that”—a sensible rebuff. He did offer a pitiful fabric of lies about his past. He insisted that he couldn’t afford a rifle on the Book Depository’s $1.25 an hour. And he was anxious that the standees in the cubicle understand that “I’m not a Communist, I’m not a Leninist-Marxist, I’m a Marxist,” an effort which, considering the absence of a dialectical materialist among his questioners, seems pointless. None of them knew Hegel. But then, neither did their prisoner.

  Of the assassination he remarked, “People will forget that within a few days” because there would be “another President.” That, and a passing reference to the Chief Executive’s “nice family,” was about all he had to say about his victim; to Fritz he observed that he didn’t have “any particular comment about the President,” by whom he meant President Kennedy. Sketchy as the record is (apparently he wasn’t asked about Connally), one feels that a full
transcript would be equally disappointing. Even when he was allowed to see his wife, mother, and brother he was singularly uncommunicative about the national tragedy. During a five-minute interview with his wife and mother he largely ignored Marguerite. Instead, he asked for news of the children in Russian; at one point his wife laughed aloud and explained to her mother-in-law, “Mama, he say he love me and buy June shoes.” Marina did not ask him whether he had killed Kennedy. Nevertheless it was very much on her mind. Later she said, “I could see by his eyes he was guilty.”

  That expression had an extraordinary effect on her brother-in-law, who followed them and whose visit lasted twice as long as theirs. According to Robert Oswald’s subsequent recollection, his brother “seemed at first to me to be very mechanical. He was making sense, but it was all mechanical. I interrupted him and tried to get him to answer my questions rather than listening to what he had to say. And then the really astounding thought dawned on me. I realized that he was really unconcerned. I was looking into his eyes, but they were blank, like Orphan Annie’s, and he knew, I guess from the amazement on my face, that I saw that. He knew what was happening, because as I searched his eyes he said to me, ‘Brother, you won’t find anything there.’ ”

  Marina, meantime, was rapidly losing patience with her mother-in-law. The children were the sole bond between the two Mrs. Oswalds. Apart from attending to their needs and getting rid of one of the snapshots showing Lee holding the assassination rifle (according to the recollections of the two women, Marina burned it in an ashtray and Marguerite flushed the ashes down a toilet) their relationship was abrasive and unfruitful. Marina, tired, lay down.