With her departure at 10:40 the others drifted off. Special assistants returned to their offices (Sorensen found the patient Buchwald waiting for him) and the family’s closest friends gathered around Robert Kennedy in the State Dining Room. The two children went for a ride with their nurse, the kiddie detail, and Sydney Lawford. In Georgetown Mrs. Auchincloss’ Jaguar briefly joined them. Parking in an Esso station, they fetched cones from a Wisconsin Avenue ice cream parlor and drove off again through the Virginia countryside in what was now a torrential storm. Foster, Wells, and Maude Shaw were trying very hard to be discreet. It was a gallant attempt, and it was doomed. Miss Shaw in particular kept biting her lip, wishing she could recall slips of her tongue; out of habit, she repeatedly started to say, “Your daddy wants you to do this,” or “Your daddy likes that.” Caroline didn’t correct her tenses. The girl had overheard a few fragments of adult conversation. They had been enough. Unlike most first-graders in the East, she knew precisely where Dallas was. Her father’s travels had provided her with an extensive knowledge of geography. She didn’t need a map of Texas. There was a map in her mind.
There was none in John’s; the basic dimensions of the tragedy had not yet swum into focus for him. He sensed that something enormous had happened, but interpreting for him proved to be an insoluble problem. To the dismay of the agents, he would announce in one breath, “A bad man shot my daddy,” and, in the next, “I want to go to the office to see my dad.” Hoping to divert him, they altered course and headed for Andrews Field, holing up in MATS’ VIP lounge. For a while the choice seemed wise. Though Caroline remained unapproachable and Sydney was plainly bored, the boy beamed excitedly at the powerful T-39’s. Foster and Wells had known that Aircraft 26000 would be in its hangar, under guard, out of sight, and they had thought John would have forgotten it. They were expecting too much. His right hand described a dramatic arc, and he cried, “Whoosh! Here comes my daddy, and he’s landing!” Miss Shaw quietly explained that was impossible, that his father had gone to heaven. John asked curiously, “Did he take his big plane?” She said, “Yes, John, he probably did.” He appeared satisfied. Then, moments later, he said, “I wonder when he’s coming back?” The President’s son was still incapable of grasping the concept of heaven.
His mother, meanwhile, was examining the West Wing rooms which had been refurbished during her absence from the capital. Clint Hill was unprepared for the scarlet carpeting, and he averted his eyes, as from a blasphemy. Jacqueline Kennedy, however, had been largely responsible for the renovation. Until today she had considered the Presidential office cozy and Victorian. Now, she thought, it was rather grand. She lingered there only a moment. Packing was in process all around her, and both there and in Evelyn Lincoln’s office she felt that she was in the way. Besides, she could inspect the new rugs just as well in the third of the redecorated rooms, the Cabinet Room.
For ten minutes she sat at the long polished table there with Mr. West, reminiscing and plucking at the ragged fragments of her disordered present. The chief usher, tidy, spruce, and ordinarily phlegmatic, was still unable to respond. At one point she asked him, “Mr. West, will you be my friend for life?” and although he desperately wanted to tell her all that was in his heart, the best he could do was bow his head. She talked about her son and daughter: “They’re good children, aren’t they? They haven’t been spoiled?” Like the rest of the mansion staff, West felt a proprietary interest in Caroline and John. Foster and Wells, for example, had spent twice as much time with them as with their own children, and West would have defended them as zealously as any agent. Assuring their mother that they were unspoiled seemed grossly inadequate, but he couldn’t talk, couldn’t cope, couldn’t think. Mrs. Kennedy shared the President’s talent for putting people at their ease. This was one of her rare failures. The chief usher felt monstrous.
Walking back past the Rose Garden, she reflected that this had been “the cut”—the divider between the two administrations. Because of her highly developed visual sense, she was keenly aware of color and form. A vivid tableau meant far more to her than the intricacies of the Tyler precedent, and she had deliberately made the trip from the mansion to see, really see, the transition. Now she grasped it. The snug old office was gone forever. The elegant new appointments, which she had designed for her husband, were to become the splendid headquarters of President Lyndon Johnson.
The national audience did not know of her visit to the oval office, had not been told of the new rugs, and was scarcely conscious of the existence of the thirty-sixth Chief Executive. Though the iron gates of the White House had been closed as a security precaution, public interest was riveted upon the catafalque. In its century and a half the ballroom had witnessed homage to the coffins of five Presidents who had died in office—Harrison, Taylor, Lincoln, Harding, and Roosevelt—but to contemporaries those had been events which happened elsewhere, and which were read about in newspapers. On November 23, 1963, that lag was gone. The massive joint effort of mass communications brought the nation to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and, through the use of Zoomar varifocal lenses, across the barbered lawn to the rain-lashed steps of the mansion. When a seaman stamped his heels together to salute an arriving dignitary, tens of millions watched the resultant splash and the soggy leggings. Nina Warren’s tears were visible as she left the portico, Shriver and Angie Duke could be seen extending their wet hands in greeting, and in the intervals between calls the shrouded north entrance was shown while Van Heflin, off-camera, read the lines Whitman had written after Lincoln’s murder:
… I with mournful tread
Walk the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.
For over seven hours the stately pantomime went on. Occasionally the networks would switch to film clips, memorial concerts, or Dallas, and sometimes commentators spoke. They could not always be heard, however—producers, alert to the wavering pitch which signaled an imminent collapse, would switch them off—and the overriding impression was of the Death Watch’s rigid dignity and the heartbreakingly slow salute as shifts were changed. It was majestic, it was awesome, and like everything else it didn’t quite register. The cut had been too sharp. Associating funereal pomp with Kennedy vitality was asking too much. Afterward Lady Bird was to remember “the solemnity of Saturday in the East Room—the servicemen standing at each corner. At the foot there was a large crucifix. Or was it a candle? All the chandeliers were swathed in black. Or did they have time to do that so soon?” She couldn’t be sure. The new First Lady, ordinarily a keen observer, wasn’t at all certain that she had seen what she had seen.
Yet there was a minimum of confusion. Indeed, there was virtually no movement by the catafalque. The scene was static, the rubrics stylized. Visitors were ushered into the Blue Room, where members of the slain President’s family took turns as hosts and hostesses; then they filed through the Green and East rooms, paused at the foot of the bier, and proceeded downstairs and out to the south grounds. Because of the weather many guests arrived thoroughly drenched, so black rubber matting was placed in the entrance hall, and beginning at 1 P.M. the green-bereted Special Forces replaced the enlisted soldiers in the joint honor guard. These were among the very few digressions from form, and the only ones the audience saw. The rest was offstage. Jean Smith and Pat Lawford had changed dresses after Mass and were discussing the painting the family had planned to give to the White House when Bob Kennedy put his head in the Queen’s Room and asked them to come down and welcome people in the Blue Room. Downstairs the sisters examined one another and flinched. Jean was wearing a gray suit, Pat was in brown. The small lapse went unnoticed; cameras missed them, and this was one broadcast which could hardly be in color anyhow.
During Mass protocol had been revised in deference to the new President. Lyndon Johnson clearly had to be the first man to pass the coffin after the family had retired, and early arrivals were asked to wait for him. There were a lot of them. General and Mrs. Taylor drove in as the service was
ending. Two cars were already parked ahead of them, and a young aide, looking half drowned, hurried over and suggested they stay where they were. Dwight Eisenhower and his son John were inside the mansion, seated in the Blue Room. After Mrs. Kennedy left, Mr. West, the usher, was told that the former President had asked for him, and they chatted a while, recalling the days when Eisenhower had been master of this house. Earl and Nina Warren were also there, damp and haggard, speaking in husky whispers.
After Jacqueline Kennedy vacated the Cabinet Room the Cabinet had assembled there, thinking to follow Johnson. Then he appeared and thwarted the plan. He crossed West Executive with the Congressional leadership in tow and brushed past them, and the result was a second unforeseen receiving line. The President and his entourage circled the catafalque; then the Cabinet, having followed them, shook hands with them. Warren’s prompt arrival meant that the Supreme Court later showed up without its Chief Justice. Individual mourners—Ormsby-Gore, Fred Holborn, Dick Goodwin’s wife—were unconsoled by a single tribute and insisted upon returning. Moreover, although John Kennedy had been interested in the families of the men he led, there had been no provision for children. Some were brought anyhow. The Secretary of Defense and Mrs. McNamara approached the coffin with thirteen-year-old Craig McNamara between them. Stephen and Andrew Bundy knelt with their parents, and Schlesinger brought his sons and daughters. Mac Bundy wrote: “By some accident we had him to ourselves for the few moments that we had the strength to linger.” At noon the Galbraiths also found themselves alone with the bier, the candles, and the Death Watch. Both men felt that the absence of others was remarkable, and it was. Usually a crush was waiting, for of the enormous number of friends and officials who had received calls and wires—over a thousand holders of Presidential appointments, both houses of the Congress, all members of the federal judiciary, the governors of the fifty states, and the diplomatic corps—only one conspicuous absentee was noted; Herbert Hoover lay ill in Manhattan. Harry Truman went through. So did the dying Senator Clair Engle of California, in a wheelchair, his arm cradled in a sling; so did Ralph Yarborough and Albert Thomas, their eyes still wild from yesterday’s harrowing hour at Parkland. All day jets were landing at Andrews, Dulles, and Washington National, skidding in through the gray porridge to bring the governors. Ross Barnett brought Mrs. Barnett and Ross Barnett, Jr. An entire delegation of Mississippians arrived. Ethel Kennedy was on duty in the Blue Room when they entered, dripping rainwater and mellifluous Southern compliments. She remembered the violent confrontation between state and national power in Oxford and thought the appearance of so large a retinue was distinctly odd. Ben Bradlee had reached the same opinion. “The people who weren’t good enough to hold his shoes were crawling in,” he bitterly recalled later, “and when Harry Byrd came, I went.”
Kennedy’s enemies came because they had no alternative. A flagrant snub of the White House that Saturday would have been unthinkable for anyone in public life. The haters had been too vocal in the past, and the question of whether the sniper had been part of a larger apparatus was still mysterious. Undoubtedly some of the callers were hypocrites. But a great many who had vehemently differed with the President had been attracted by the warmth of his personality. Politically he and Harry Byrd had been two centuries apart, but the Virginia Senator cherished the memory of the Chief Executive’s helicopter landing in his orchard at the climax of a birthday party honoring him, and Barry Goldwater had been openly proud of his affection for the man with whom he had contested every issue of significance.
The East Room’s crepe struck two groups with almost physical force: the Court, led by Justice Black, and the Assistant Attorneys General. Each had been a guest at Wednesday night’s reception. The contrast was too sharp to be overlooked. Less than seventy-two hours ago this floor had been waxed, the ballroom had been vibrant with the lilt of music, and dancers had moved back and forth across the very place where the great somber catafalque now stood. Joanie Douglas was wearing the same black velvet dress she had worn then, and irrationally she wondered whether it had been a harbinger, a sign of the coming terror.
The silent processions, the set faces, and the ceaseless drumbeat of the rain outside finally broke through Ken O’Donnell’s mask. After praying by the coffin with George Smathers, Hubert Humphrey went over to the West Wing to console Larry O’Brien (“Poor Larry seems so lost,” he confided to his journal. “He has no idea what the future holds, what his role will be in this government”), and in the hall just behind the lobby he met O’Donnell. A few hours later Humphrey wrote, “We put our arms around each other—and I saw a strong, ordinarily taciturn and cool and calm man break down into tears, as did I.… We sat together for quite a few minutes. Kenny was shocked and shaken. He told me how brave Mrs. Kennedy had been through all of this. That she wouldn’t leave the casket for a single moment, that she stayed with it at Bethesda Naval Hospital and, of course, over at the mansion. He was amazed, as he put it, at her calm fortitude and courage.” Later in the day, when the White House correspondents were permitted to file past the bier, O’Donnell embraced Mary McGrory and wept again. Of Ken she had written in the Evening Star that “he would have died for him.” He thanked her. She said, “Everybody knows that, Kenny.”
The working press was one of the last two delegations to pass the catafalque; the other was the White House servants. By then all the famous names had gone. The ambassadors were back on Massachusetts Avenue, the governors in their hotel suites, the Senators on the Hill. Newscasters were not interested in the homage of colleagues, or in the prayers of Master Sergeant Giordano, Maître Fincklin, or George Thomas, and the national audience was not told that they had called. Nevertheless they had, and unlike the officials they had not been inspired by any sense of obligation. The homage of wire service reporters and special correspondents—indeed, that of butlers, carpenters, and upstairs maids—was extraordinary. It was not part of the state funeral plan. Like last night’s crowds at Andrews and Bethesda and the reverent filling station attendants along Wisconsin Avenue at dawn, it was a measure of the extent to which the entire country had been drawn into the vortex of anguish. George Thomas had polished every shoe and pressed every pair of trousers upstairs; he felt he had to be here, too, and on his knees. The newspapermen, never regarded as slavish admirers of any President, walked across the naked floor in absolute silence, and afterward they asked, and were granted, permission to follow the caisson on foot when the coffin would be borne up Pennsylvania Avenue to the Hill tomorrow.
Mary McGrory halted by the two prie-dieux at the foot of the catafalque and knelt. She tried to pray, yet all she could remember were four words, Horatio’s farewell to Hamlet. Like a rondeau they ran through her mind over and over again: Good night, sweet prince.
The East Room was hushed and the oval office naked, but the Vice Presidential suite had never been busier. There was a physical, visible frontier between the two administrations that morning. It was West Executive Avenue, that one-way, one-block street, which actually served as the White House parking lot. On one side of the twin row of cars stood the elegant old executive mansion, haunted by the ghost of the youngest man ever elected to the Presidency; on the other side preoccupied men darted in and out of the Executive Office Building or, as Dwight Eisenhower still called it, “the old State, Army, and Navy Building”—an astonishing reminder that until World War II its French neo-classic façade had been large enough for the offices of both American diplomacy and the national military establishment.
Certain individuals crossed the frontier, Johnson himself among them. All were aware of its existence, however, and the leadership of the Executive Department was split into two camps, those who wished to hurry the day when West Executive was once again a paved strip used for VIP angle parking, and those for whom the very thought of transition was agony. In his office Arthur Schlesinger was once more writing a note to Mrs. Kennedy: “I feel in such a state of total and terrible emptiness—and I know that what any of us f
eel here can only be a fraction of the vacancy and horror which you feel.” He told her that he expected to devote himself to work on the President’s papers; he had already submitted his resignation to Lyndon Johnson.
That summed up the loyalist position: the President was dead; the work of the Presidency must be carried forward by others. At one end of Saturday’s spectrum were Schlesinger, Sorensen, O’Donnell, and their leader, Robert Kennedy, who despite the gloomy sky had donned dark glasses after the Mass to conceal his swollen eyes. At the other end stood men like Mac Bundy, who repeatedly reminded other members of the Kennedy team that “the show must go on” and who declared that he, for his part, intended to remain as long as he was wanted and needed by the President of the United States. Ted Sorensen saw the issue rather differently. At 7:30 P.M. he went over to the EOB at the invitation of the President, who solicited his advice about personnel. Sorensen said quietly, “You have two kinds of problems: those who will not make themselves available to you and those who will be too available.”