The Death of a President

  In the weeks which lay ahead Oswald’s death, and especially the manner of his dying, were to loom ever larger until they had assumed undeserved dimensions. At the time this was untrue. The attention of the national audience was focused on the North Portico of the White House. The murder of the assassin almost seemed to be an intrusion. Most of those who had been closest to Kennedy had tuned Dallas out forty-eight hours ago. They had been so occupied with the coming funeral that they hadn’t had time for the swarming humanity in Curry’s dingy warrens. Nancy Tuckerman was as withdrawn as the Governor of Texas. Since the disruption of the motorcade outside the Book Depository she had devoted every waking moment to Jacqueline Kennedy’s wishes. The President was dead; that eclipsed everything else, and when an excited secretary thrust her head into Nancy’s office and cried that Oswald had been shot, Nancy mumbled, “Who’s Oswald?” To Robert Kennedy, President Johnson’s Blue Room protest that the United States was getting “a bad name around the world” was untimely; the Attorney General afterward remembered that “I thought at the time that… it wasn’t, it couldn’t be, the thing foremost in my mind.” Steve Smith “just heard it, that’s all.” On Capitol Hill, where reports were being relayed by functionaries glued to portable radios, Larry O’Brien was “no more interested than if someone had been telling me the score of a ball game.” Ken O’Donnell was the same—he had been equally disinterested when told of Oswald’s arrest Friday—and beside Sargent Shriver’s desk, Dick Goodwin, a summa cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School, felt an unprofessional disinterest, a “complete indifference.… I wouldn’t have cared if I’d been told that Connally had been charged with the shooting.” Sarge picked up the receiver, put it down, and announced, “Somebody just shot Oswald.” No one in the office said a word. “We went on,” Goodwin put it, “with our business.”

  That was one reaction to the murder. The fact that Shriver felt obliged to make the announcement had been another. His console was flashing all the time, and he didn’t pass along other news. In relaying this he was displaying a common response; inner urges required that men blazon it. Early Sunday afternoon the same men and women who had telephoned or bellowed word of the assassination two days earlier were again responding to an instinct older than the invention of language, babbling away as self-appointed heralds to relatives, friends, and passers-by. Ted Kennedy yelled up the Hyannis Port stairwell to Eunice. Eisenhower’s wife phoned him. Word-of-mouth bulletins reached the executive mansion’s entrance hall, inches from the President’s coffin, and were murmured to Lieutenant Sam Bird’s body bearers by him; on the third floor Peter Lawford and his agent, watching George Thomas’ set, had seen NBC’s live telecast of Ruby’s assault on Channel 4, and they darted downstairs to tell everyone of it.

  Convincing nonviewers wasn’t so easy. On the red carpet outside the Diplomatic Reception Room Tazewell Shepard heard of the report, stopped dead, and narrowed his eyes skeptically. This was another echo of Friday—intuitively one suspected a hoax. Congressman Albert Thomas was telephoning the Philippine Ambassador, who had one eye cocked on a television screen as they talked. The embassy’s set was tuned to Channel 4. Listening to the Congressman with one ear, the diplomat heard commentator Tom Pettit, standing five feet from Oswald, describe the jail transfer. Pettit, ordinarily mild-mannered, gasped, “He’s been shot—Lee Oswald has been shot! There is panic and pandemonium! We see little in the utter confusion!” The Ambassador said to Thomas, “My God, you Texans are just crazy. They’ve shot that boy.4 I saw it a few seconds ago.” The Congressman concluded that it was the diplomat, a volatile Spaniard, who was deranged.

  George Reedy and the Filipino witnessed the killing under almost identical circumstances—never in the seven centuries of trial by jury had a crime been committed in the presence of so many spectators—and Reedy was as dumfounded as he had been two days before. He was cradling an EOB phone and monitoring Channel 4 from the corner of his eye. He saw the shot, but it didn’t register; he ordered a secretary to flip off the switch. “What are they doing breaking into the President’s funeral with an old Hollywood gang thriller?” he demanded indignantly. Then it came to him that this gunman wasn’t an Edward G. Robinson, and he hung up in such bewilderment that to this day he cannot remember to whom he had been speaking. (Apparently the other man had the same reaction; he never called back.) Byron White, preparing to leave his home for the rotunda, responded similarly: “I wasn’t sure this wasn’t the late movie.” Dave Hackett witnessed the murder in Robert Kennedy’s home, and his emotional temperature didn’t fluctuate a jot: “I didn’t care. It was too grotesque for me to absorb.” Chief Justice Warren, scribbling his coda at his desk, was not a spectator himself, but his daughter Dorothy burst into his study crying, “They just shot Oswald.” The Chief Judge laid aside his pencil and said waspishly, “Honey, don’t pay any attention to those wild rumors.”

  When Justice Douglas arrived home he was accosted at the doorway with the news by his young wife, who seemed, if anything, more breathless than he. Douglas took a deep breath and said pensively, “Well, it’s just unbelievable.” To Joanie Douglas, who had been an onlooker moments before, it had not only been believable; it had actually been satisfying. As the assassin crumpled she had leaped up, shrieking jubilantly, “Good! Give it to him again!” This was atypical. Inevitably a minority had been feeling the red pangs of blood lust since Friday, and before Oswald’s death was officially pronounced Parkland’s embattled switchboard operators were fielding calls from anonymities who advised them to “kill him while you still have him there” or accused them of being “nigger-lovers and murder-lovers.” For many the spirit of revenge was temporary. Joanie later flushed over what she described as her “barbarism.” The Chicago survey disclosed that 89 percent of the American people had hoped (and had trusted) that “the man who killed” Kennedy would not be “shot down or lynched.”

  Among the dissenting 11 percent, surprisingly, was Ruth Paine. Mrs. Paine was frankly glad, and she didn’t repent later either. But her reasons were personal. Her Quaker faith was unshaken; nevertheless she was convinced that “this way would be so much easier for Marina.” Americans less solicitous of the assassin’s widow were disapproving and dismayed. Later that afternoon, when he had had time to reflect upon the day’s events, Robert Kennedy remarked to Nick Katzenbach, “It’s too bad about the shooting of that fellow in Dallas.”

  At the time his Deputy Attorney General, who was among those who had seen the whole thing on television, had rendered an instantaneous, one-word, four-letter verdict. A choleric backlash was probably the most widespread repercussion among those who had been following the events in Texas. It assumed many forms: in the Blue Room Lady Bird’s chill was temporarily replaced by a silent, burning anger; Marie Fehmer crouched weeping over her television set—to Marie this was another indelible stain on the name of her home town—and in Parkland Bill Stinson, Connally’s administrative assistant, whirled on the orderly who had told him, punched him in the stomach, and cried, “Be quiet! Be quiet!” Galbraith reflected in the rotunda that “in some ways” this was “the most unforgivable thing of all.” Llewellyn Thompson saw the murder as a diplomatic catastrophe. It struck Thompson that the timing, coming “just as the funeral was about to restore our foreign image, couldn’t have been worse. Two of the Joint Chiefs felt the same way. Maxwell Taylor strolled into the Fish Room and saw Curtis E. LeMay gaping at the screen. The Air Force Chief of Staff blurted out, “Look! They just shot Oswald!” and as the generals watched a video tape replay Taylor thought how “lawlessness was damaging our world-wide reputation.” In her Macomb Street apartment Mary McGrory thought to herself, The Republic is finished. We’ll never be the same. It’s all over. Pat Moynihan, the one Washingtonian who had distrusted the Dallas police force from the beginning, was in his Labor Department office on Pennsylvania Avenue. His phone rang, and his wife told him of the killing. Pat had a sudden, vivid impression of newspaper stories beginning, “The alleged a
ssassin was shot while escaping.” He reared back, kicked the wall as hard as he could, and started telephoning everyone he knew, bellowing incoherently into the instrument.5

  In the Fish Room General Taylor had a second thought. “I also felt sure,” he later said, “that there would be suspicion that the killing of Oswald by Ruby had been done to suppress something.” That was a shattering understatement. For those who gave the matter any attention at all the suspicion, in the first hours after the basement murder, was a certainty. Jesse Curry’s explanations seemed pitifully inadequate. Even after the facts were in, dregs of doubt remained. Early the following year the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith was to confirm the findings of the professional polls, reporting that a majority of Americans remained convinced that the two slayings “were the result of organized plotting.” But on Sunday there was scarcely any minority to dissent. Conspiracy seemed to be the only reasonable deduction.

  Indeed, the more a man knew about conspirators, the firmer his conviction was. In the West Wing lobby a Secret Service agent watched Ruby disappear and muttered tightly, “That was the messenger.” Independently of one another the Service, the CIA, and J. Edgar Hoover all assumed a previous link between Ruby and Oswald. In the rotunda Douglas Dillon speculated about the identity of the people behind the double murder, and Ted Sorensen cried rhetorically, “This makes it worse. My God, when will it end?” In Dallas U.S. Attorney Barefoot Sanders was driving his wife and Judge Sarah Hughes to Love Field en route to Washington for the funeral. Sanders had just left them when his car radio blared out the first bulletin, and he raced directly back to his office, officially bringing the FBI into the case on the jurisdictional grounds—incredible to a layman, but legally above reproach—that Oswald’s civil rights had been violated. The Secret Service had already plunged into its own inquiry; Forrest Sorrels was on the telephone with Jerry Behn, discussing how the Ruby-Oswald connection could be quickly uncovered. Behn said, “It’s a plot.” Sorrels said, “Of course.”

  Ironically, neither Oswald’s wife nor his mother witnessed his final appearance. The two women had been shunted from hotel to hotel by Secret Service agents. That morning they were first in the Executive Inn and then at the Six Flags, between Dallas and Fort Worth. According to Marguerite’s later recollection, her daughter-in-law said, “Mama, I want to see Lee.” The older woman explained that “She was hoping Lee was coming on the picture, like he did.” Marguerite’s reply was negative, however: “I said, ‘Oh, honey, let’s turn the television off. The same thing over and over.’ And I turned the television off. So Marina and I did not see what happened to my son.”

  Robert Oswald did not see it either, but he was the first member of the assassin’s family to hear what had happened; Mike Howard, a Secret Service agent, took him aside and told him the news had just come over the radio. The Oswalds are not an attractive group, and the more closely one examines their conduct that weekend, the less attractive they become. Nevertheless Robert somehow stands apart. He was not always successful in his attempts “to arrange my thoughts and my fears,” as he put it in his makeshift diary, a ringed notebook. He did, however, manage a certain somber dignity. Driving straight to Parkland, where a guard frisked him for weapons (“This I did not mind since he did not know me at all,” he confided to the notebook; Robert was not Lee), he was led into one of the emergency area’s cubicles. An orderly later remembered him as “a slender man wearing gray unpressed pants, with a matching coat lying on the table. He was wearing a white shirt but no tie. He seemed like a nice enough fellow.” An agent entered and said, “Robert, I am sorry, but Lee is dead.”

  Robert sobbed into his hands. The world knew Lee as a killer, but to his older brother he would always be the weedy little boy who had enjoyed playing hide-and-seek with cap pistols, styling himself as “Two-Gun Pete.” The fact that the little boy had grown up, acquired two real guns, and killed a President with one and a policeman with the other could not alter that recollection. While Robert waited there for a minister a stranger remarked, “Violence breeds violence.” The assassin’s brother replied shakily, “Does that justify anything—or all of this?” In his diary he observed, “I do not recall if he answered that or not.” It was, of course, unanswerable. Robert did not bear a popular name. Though blameless himself, for two days and two nights he had lived with the fact that he would carry the stigma of his brother’s guilt to his own grave; already other Oswald families were petitioning courts to permit them to call themselves Smith or Jones. The best he could do was try to carry himself like a man. He did remarkably well. He lost his temper with only one person, his mother. When Marguerite heard of Lee’s death, she reached the extraordinary conclusion that he had been acting as a U.S. agent. To Robert’s undisguised disgust she announced that since Lee had given his life for his country, he should be buried with full honors “in the Arlington Cemetery.” He said, “Shut up, Mother.”

  Jacqueline Kennedy had appeared on the North Portico, a child in either hand. The President’s son and daughter did not have to come out this way. They could have been driven out the south grounds and up Constitution, and before her departure for Texas their mother would have insisted upon that; at Andrews Field three days earlier she had forbidden John to leave the helicopter because photographers were present. But today and tomorrow were to be a season apart in her life. The shock of that brief scene was immense. In that one instant she revealed to the great audience the full measure of its loss. Old Guard infantrymen in dress blues and snowy gloves flanked the fatherless First Family, straining at attention. Caroline, her eyes hazy in reflection, gently rested her black headband against her mother’s slim waist. John squirmed, wriggled free, and clenched his tiny fist behind his back in a crimping gesture which brought a stab of pain to those who remembered his father’s restless right hand. Few saw it, however, for nearly every eye was upon the widow. Transfigured beneath the North Portico’s hanging lantern she awaited the procession, her swollen eyes fixed on the caisson and the six matched horses. Her expression of ineffable tragedy was, in that flicker of a moment, indelibly etched upon the national conscience; in a survey of New England college students conducted later that week the investigators found that “attention to Mrs. Kennedy’s actions and deportment bordered on the obsessive.”

  This was her first exposure to it. It was also the first sunlight she had seen since Dallas, but she did not blink. Steadfast and still, she awaited the signal to move, her lashes heavy and her lovely mouth drawn down in a classic curve of grief. Immediately behind her, vigilant as always, stood Robert Kennedy. The cameras were frozen on the motionless widow, and omitting those who were reading newspaper accounts or talking to friends, nearly everyone in the United States was watching Mrs. Kennedy. By its own account, a minimum of 95 percent of the adult population was peering at television or listening to radio accounts.6 To the Americans must be added all of Europe and those parts of Asia which were periodically reached by relay satellite. Even Russia had announced that the Soviet Union would televise the funeral, including the Mass in St. Matthew’s. By Sunday noon the U.S.A. and most of the civilized world had become a kind of closed-circuit hookup. Nothing existed except this one blinding spotlight.

  Not only had commercials been canceled; such routine reports as weather, newscasts, and sports were unmentioned. The National Football League was playing its full schedule, but the country was unaware of it. The communication industry’s coverage was unprecedented. It was also superb. Spending three million dollars on equipment—a figure that did not include the loss in advertising revenue—CBS, NBC, and ABC had supplemented the Chesapeake & Potomac’s outlay with over eleven miles of video and audio cables. No single network could have done this alone; cameras had to be pooled at key locations. The rotunda, for example, was assigned to NBC and shared by ABC and CBS.

  Largely because of the celebrity of Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, NBC’s audience outnumbered those of the other two networks combined; consequen
tly its decision to keep its rotunda crews on duty throughout the coming night, when ordinary Americans circled the catafalque, meant that for over half the viewers there was no letup from 6:59 Sunday morning till 1:18 A.M. Tuesday—a forty-two-hour telethon. In irresponsible hands this could have been dangerous. The possibilities were Orwellian. Art Kane, a short, nervous, thirty-three-year-old CBS producer, was coordinating forty-one pool cameras in twenty-two locations from a 30-by-10-foot electronics control booth under the Capitol steps. (At the eye of the storm, Kane didn’t hear about the killing of Oswald until it was stale news.) Brinkley later calculated that “the shocked and stunned nation was listening to six people at most, us commentators. It would have been so easy to start a phony rumor that would never die, that would be alive fifty years later.” Fortunately, the half-dozen broadcasters took their responsibilities extremely seriously. There were few sermons about Oswald, and the remarks about extremism were carefully worded. Each man tried to avoid exciting, provoking, or irritating his listeners. Of course, personal control wasn’t always possible. Veteran commentators knew that they wouldn’t be able to trust their voices during the rotunda ceremonies or the funeral. Therefore they let events unfold of themselves. Sometimes as long as fifteen minutes would pass with no comment whatever.