There were, to be sure, some lapses. As if to make up for these silences, other details were later inserted, sometimes needlessly. At one point the new President was seen rubbing his fingers. In light of the fact that he had just been observed shaking a great many hands, it was natural; elaboration was unnecessary. Nevertheless a newscaster spoke up with detailed descriptions of minor medical treatments the new President had once received for his palm. And undoubtedly mass media inspired a number of eerie side effects. One writer watched broadcasts closely and then held a group of distinguished men rapt with sensational accounts of “what Jackie told me about Dallas.” He hadn’t seen her since her return from Texas, but they were months finding that out. Other spectators insisted that they had seen things which could not possibly have happened, and this phenomenon became a genuine problem during the investigation of the Warren Commission and the inquiry which led to this book. Texas witnesses were easily muddled; they had difficulty distinguishing between events they had actually witnessed and scenes they had watched on their sets.
Yet singling them out would be unfair, because the same thing happened in the capital. Repeatedly one encountered intelligent men and women who couldn’t possibly have met between Thursday and Tuesday but who had observed each other on television—and were convinced that they had talked together. Barney Ross actually heard himself being interviewed over radio. Monitor had taped sessions with members of the old PT 109 crew, and Kennedy’s executive officer naturally came first. As Barney wearily trudged into his front hall in Bethesda every set in the house was on, blaring out his husky Illinois drawl in concert—his own version of JFK’s heroism twenty years and three months ago. He leaned against the jamb. If this could happen, he reflected, anything could. And he was right. In another national emergency the implications could be frightening. The United States had become the victim of voluntary hypnosis. There seemed to be no way for Americans to avoid concentration on the center of the national stage. Volume knobs were turned up full everywhere—on the Presidential aircraft, at the LBJ Ranch, in Hyannis Port, in living and drawing and bedrooms, in hotels and motels and bars, on every floor of the White House and the Elms.
Frequently those who had deliberately absented themselves from the ceremonies, suspecting that the emotional stress would be too much for them, were subjected to an even greater strain than those who went. Most of the participants were to be on the outskirts, but the Zoomar lens of the camera eye took viewers right there. That was the experience of Dick Goodwin, who had elected to stay behind in the mansion while his colleagues were on the Hill, and of a Kennedy friend who watched a set at Page Airways, across the Potomac. Joseph P. Kennedy, propped on pillows, saw his daughter-in-law and his grandchildren and then, at 4:21 P.M., stared as his wife, youngest son, and Eunice boarded a Jetstar at Otis for the capital. John and Joyce Macy had agreed that the services on the Hill would be too much for them. Leaving Lafayette Park, they drove home across Memorial Bridge. They thought they could bear to listen to their car radio, however, and they erred; with the first strains of the Navy Band on the east steps of the Capitol Chairman Macy drew over to the side of the road and buried his face on his steering wheel.
None of official Washington was able to dodge the impact of the drama, for that matter, because reruns of the day’s highlights—and, next day, of the funeral’s—were endless. Just as young Caroline Hallett had been the first member of her family to identify Oswald Friday, so were other children, or disabled relatives, or neighbors, or even total strangers vigilant and eager to relay descriptions of close-ups to those who had merely stood on tiptoe on the outer fringes of the throng beneath the soaring rotunda dome. Justices Goldberg and White didn’t see much on the Hill November 24; their chief memories were to be drawn from subsequent video tapes. Ed Guthman, like Dick Goodwin, had stayed away, watching the passing caisson from a Justice Department balcony—and watching also, as the gun carriage rolled slowly past, the dismay on his son’s face as the boy, for the first time in his life, saw his strong father cry. Ed thought that would be the end of it. The coffin had gone, the cortege had passed. But like everyone else who had been close, or had felt close, to the President, the Guthmans went home and, in Mrs. Guthman’s phrase, “remained glued to television.” Moreover, you didn’t have to be a member of the government to feel that tug. It wasn’t necessary to stand on Pennsylvania Avenue and see the Stars and Stripes flutter over the coffin for a man to weep before his children. He could sob sprawled on a couch, or in a leatherette rumpus room chair. It was happening to heads of families in every part of the country, ranging from a third of the anti-Kennedy Southerners to nearly two-thirds of the pro-Kennedy Northerners, with the national average well over 50 percent.
Therefore flight was impossible. Every hatch was battened down, every roadblock impassable. An entire nation was trapped in grief. “What has happened,” a network commentator said a half-hour after the Oswald shooting, “has been too much, too ugly, and too fast.” The velocity of transmission, moving at the speed of light; the surfeit of horror; and the sense of shared sorrow bound the American people together more closely than any other nation since the beginning of man. The number of absentees was phenomenally small. Abe Zapruder, the camera enthusiast, was one of them. In the 8.3 seconds required for his color film to record 152 historic frames—from the moment Zapruder saw the President had been shot once to the disappearance of the car from his camera’s view—Abe had absorbed all he could take. He had become a casualty, one of the weekend’s walking wounded; he couldn’t bear to watch anything on television. There were a few others like him, yet they were never more than 5 percent of the adult population Sunday afternoon. The average American, whatever his race, religious convictions, or politics, was gaping, anesthetized by what after two full days he still felt could not be happening.
It was happening; or rather, to be precise, it was about to happen. As the clock over Lyndon Johnson’s vacant Vice Presidential chair read 1:08, Angie Duke’s protocol officers finished designating a great circle in the unlit hall beneath the rotunda’s 183-foot canopy, segregating roped-off areas for the Supreme Court, Cabinet, Congressional leadership, White House staff, friends of the family, and the family itself. John McCone was having a final word with the three eulogists. They were inattentive, and Mike Mansfield was particularly tense. He had a polished draft ready, but though he had tried again to read aloud to his office mirror he still broke down in the fourth paragraph: “There was a father with a little boy and a little girl and the joy of each in the other and, in a moment, it was no more. And so, she took a ring from her finger and placed it in his hands.” As typed, Mike’s encomium ended with a tribute to John Kennedy’s gifts and asked rhetorically, “Will we have, now, the sense and the responsibility to take them? Will we take them before it is too late?” Dissatisfied, Mike struck out the second sentence and uncertainly substituted, shakily, “I pray to God that we will shall and—Under God—we will shall—we will!” In a firmer hand he scrawled across the left ear of the first page, “To Jacqueline Kennedy with affection, love, respect—Mike Mansfield, Majority Leader, U. S. Senate.”
Waiting for her in the Senate Press Gallery, Joe Alsop was for the moment transformed:
I love you, as I loved him—I hope you won’t mind my saying it—and I wish now that one might send an enormous box of love like a box of flowers. But one can’t; there is only one thing I can send—a strange thing to send at such a time, and yet deserving to be sent—I mean my thanks and my congratulations. To play a high role of history perfectly in a great moment of history—to be always warm, always true, always yourself under the glare of history—is not an easy thing to do, to put it mildly indeed.
Alsop wondered “whether or when I have ever felt anything at all before this; for nothing has been quite like this.”
Once there had been something close. When Abraham Lincoln had become the first President to lie in state beneath this frescoed dome, which he himself had ordered co
mpleted in the bleakest days of the Civil War as a symbol of the enduring Union, a chronicler had described the spectacle as “half circus, half heartbreak.” The hearse had been “large and horrible” with “black tassels and flounces that twitched and rocked.” That coffin had been mahogany, too, and then, as now, the mass of mourners had been unsettling: “To enter the creeping lines at sun-up meant reaching the coffin five hours later.” But Kennedy’s anonymous mourners were to be more orderly—in 1865 “The crush trembled always at the edge of riot. Hundreds were injured”—and as a hero’s charger Black Jack was more splendid by far than Old Bob, the aging bay who was led riderless far behind Lincoln’s coffin. Furthermore, the excess of Victorian crepe had been dispelled. Today it was draped with decorum. A century earlier everything “seemed to have been wounded and… bandaged… in black.”
All the same, the elements of carnival were there today. Mac Kilduff turned away several “real creeps,” including a man who insisted that he had been “the President’s personal veterinarian”; and Colonel Miller quietly barred the door to a Congressman and twenty of his constituents. Taken as a group, Congressmen left an unfortunate impression on the Kennedy men inside the rotunda. Red Fay noticed several “pushing against the ropes to have their pictures taken, and I felt very critical toward them, particularly those who had been political enemies of the President.” Two representatives who didn’t make it stood immediately behind Jerry Wiesner, Mike Feldman, and Fred Holborn. In loud voices they wondered to each other who these “young whippersnappers” could be; then they speculated over whether or not it would be good politics for Johnson to go through with Kennedy’s speaking engagements. In another segment of the huge circle, according to Galbraith’s journal, “The congressmen who were immediately adjacent to us seemed principally concerned in their conversation with whether or not they were to be invited to the funeral next day.”
Doubtless the leaderless Presidential aides were hypersensitive and alert for slights; it didn’t take much to offend them. Galbraith himself outraged everyone within earshot by announcing that he had written “a very good draft overnight” for the new President’s address to the joint session, and when Walter Heller reported a “fantastic” conversation—“LBJ tapped me on the chest with his finger and said, ‘I want you and your liberal friends to know that I’m no conservative; I’m a New Deal Democrat’ ”—Heller’s friends turned away. His eyes glistening, McNamara described the progress at Arlington—“It will be almost a shrine”—and added, “Nothing will be quite the same with him gone. Among other things he reached the hearts of people around the world with a quality and a style and a sophistication which epitomized the age and the times. Lyndon Johnson won’t be able to approximate it.” Orville Freeman said, “We’re fortunate to have a strong man like Lyndon in the driver’s seat, though.” McNamara nodded. Those around them said nothing.
From outside they heard the vibrant voice of a young Army captain. “Mr. O’Donnell!” he called. “Mr. O’Brien! Mr. Sorensen!…”
The traditional state funeral plan called for a military honor guard on the east side of the Capitol, a double line of uniformed men who stood on every other step, facing one another and saluting the coffin as it passed between them. Sargent Shriver had substituted the thirty-six aides who had been closest to the President, and the captain’s roster was a muster of New Frontiersmen: “Mr. Bundy! Mr. Salinger! Secretary Fay! Secretary Reed! Mr. Dungan! Dr. Wiesner! Mr. O’Leary! Mr. Hatcher! Mr. Schlesinger! Mr. Feldman! Mr. Holborn! Dr. Burkley! Mr. Kilduff! Mr. White! Mr. Powers! Mr. Reardon! Mr. McNally!…”
They assembled in a bunch. The captain withdrew and Jack McNally replaced him. As Special Assistant in charge of staff administration, Jack felt that he should take over here. He was all business. “All right, now,” he said, briskly, “we’ll line up out here in the order of rank.” Sorensen stared at him; the others looked around in bewilderment. “Rank?” someone repeated uncertainly. Everyone knew there was no such thing as rank among the Special Assistants. Had there been, Jack himself would have been at the bottom. O’Donnell, who would have been among those at the top, said wryly, “It took the assassination of the President to put McNally in charge of the White House.” As Jack began assigning positions, Sorensen dryly made a mental note: To have seniority, it appeared, one must first be an Irishman.
McNally finished and placed himself tenth. Unconsciously assuming the stance of attention, they looked out over one another’s shoulders. Red Fay and Jim Reed, side by side near the bottom, were remembering Lieutenant Commander Tom Warfield, the martinet on the PT base on Rendova. Sorensen was examining the façade of the Senate Office Building; he glanced at his feet and realized that he had stood on this very spot during Kennedy’s inaugural address. Ted Reardon, who had been with the President longer than anyone here, recalled bounding up these steps with twenty-nine-year-old Congressman John Kennedy in January 1947. That had been the first time for both of them, and they had been young and exuberant. In a few minutes, Reardon thought numbly, Kennedy would be entering the Capitol for the last time. And in Muggsy O’Leary’s mind there was a picture of the slender Senator with the bad back painfully ascending the stairs five years ago.
Mac Bundy shivered. It was cold. “And somehow,” he wrote afterward, “it was good to stand and wait.”
They listened intently. The cortege would have to wind around the Capitol’s East Wing; they would hear it before they saw it, and presently they did hear something. From the far end of Pennsylvania Avenue came a faint, unfamiliar, haunting sound:
Boom Boom Boom, Drrrr
Boom Boom Boom, Drrrr
Boom Boom Boom, Drrrr
Boom: Boom-boom-boom
It was repeated over and over, growing more distinct as it approached them, until even those who were unprepared for it and had only read of it in books knew they were listening to the broken roll, the dreadful stutter of muffled drums.
Drums are muffled by loosening the tension on each drumhead, thus deadening the resonance. The two bass and sixteen snare drummers had completed this task before falling in outside the White House, and had been holding their sticks with practiced ease when Mrs. Kennedy shepherded her children into the limousine outside the portico. Accompanying them were Attorney General Kennedy, the new President and Mrs. Johnson on the jump seats, and, somewhere in the back seat, a small and astonishingly mobile pair of white gloves.
The gloves belonged to John F. Kennedy, Jr. Miss Shaw had put them on upstairs, and his mother had noticed them and approved. Next time she looked they were gone. “Where are your gloves, John?” she asked, and he produced them. She helped with the snaps, glanced away, glanced back, and started. No gloves.
“John, put your gloves on,” she said.
“He doesn’t have to wear gloves,” Robert Kennedy said.
She thought he did; again the cycle was repeated, and this time he couldn’t find them. They had been confiscated by the Attorney General. Gloves, he thought, were for sissies; he had been quietly urging John to peel them off, and rather than upset her with an argument he had waited until no one was looking and slipped them in his own pocket. He assured her that “Boys don’t wear gloves.”
She turned away, convinced, though with trepidation, for if he was right, every marching unit in the cortege, including the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was effete. “Dress w/white gloves” had been specified, and Major General Wehle raised an immaculate white hand to signal the start of the procession. As military commander of the nation’s capital, he led it. Behind him were the drummers; an eighty-nine-man naval company, their fixed bayonets flashing in the sunlight; various clergymen; the Chiefs; Ted Clifton, Godfrey McHugh, and Taz Shepard; the horse-drawn gun carriage bearing the coffin; John Kennedy’s Presidential flag; the riderless horse; Lieutenant Bird’s casket team; and the widow’s limousine and nine other cars carrying Kennedys, Fitzgeralds, Auchinclosses, Shrivers, Smiths, Lawfords, and their children. Behind the last bumper the White House pr
ess corps straggled in disorderly formation. Marching police and three automobiles brought up the rear.
Down the long drive they moved beneath the naked trees, and the fifty colorful state flags, ranged on either side, dipped in homage to the simple caisson; Wehle pivoted east on Pennsylvania, south for the three-block jog around the Treasury Building, and then east once more on Pennsylvania, wheeling elaborately by the Hotel Washington and striking out toward the Capitol dome eighteen blocks away. Usually the sounds of marchers on that street are lost in choruses of gay shouts, and today the crowd was enormous, but between the long drum rolls you could hear the precise thump of sailors’ boots, the irregular tattoo of the Joint Chiefs, hopelessly out of step, and the clatter of hoofs. Black Jack had never been so wild. He threatened to break away at any moment, and his spectacular prancing was ominous. Yet the matched grays drawing the gun carriage were almost as menacing. Sergeant Thomas Setterberg was leading them on an ordinarily placid gelding. Despite Setterberg’s mouth-spreading curb rein, the horse was shying badly, and the Sergeant was terrified that he might trample the men ahead underfoot.
In the cars scarcely anyone spoke. In the second limousine Shriver and Ethel Kennedy did, because they were watching over Bobby Shriver and two of Ethel’s boys—the Attorney General was determined that his children should never forget these days—and from the front seat Agent Wells marveled at how gently Ethel spoke of their uncle’s death and how deftly Shriver fielded other questions, explaining that the reversed boots were for a warrior killed in battle and, observing young Bobby Kennedy’s anxiety, diverting him by describing the functions of the government buildings they were passing and the symbolism of the statuary in front of them. Wells had passed the statues a thousand times and had never thought about it. To his astonishment he found the ride educational.