The Death of a President

  Like him, those in Dungan’s office received the news with mixed feelings. Bill Walton objected that a beacon would be “aesthetically unfortunate”—later he became converted to it—and Tish Baldridge was disappointed because it meant the end of her flower-laced latticework. But there was no time for debate now. They had to hurry. The exasperating delay in providing a uniformed escort for the coffin’s return from Bethesda still rankled, so Dick Goodwin was designated flame expediter. Goodwin was as tough as he was smart; brass and braid didn’t impress him, and the past three years had taught him that the most common word in Army bureaucracy was “can’t.”

  “We can’t do it,” MDW’s staff duty officer told him.

  “Why not?”

  “We’d have to fly to Europe. That’s the only place they know about them.”

  “O.K.,” Goodwin snapped. “It’s six hours to Europe. Go get it.”

  There was an uneasy silence. Then: “Maybe we can fabricate it.”

  “Good. Fabricate it.”

  The officer traced Lieutenant Colonel Bernard G. Carroll, Fort Myer’s post engineer, to Jack Metzler’s Arlington office. “We have a request from Mrs. Kennedy,” he said. “She wants an eternal flame at the graveside.”

  To Carroll this sounded somewhat vague. He asked, “What’s ‘eternal’?”

  “Before, during, and after the ceremony,” the officer said promptly.

  That sounded easy. Carroll could use almost any kerosene pot which would burn for an hour or so. On reflection, however, it sounded too easy. He suspected that the widow had something else in mind, and he raised so many questions that the officer said he’d have to call him back.

  In the West Wing Goodwin was summoned to a phone. He listened a moment and then said icily, “Eternal means forever.”

  The staff duty officer hemmed and hawed, but each time he raised an objection he was cut down with whipsaw orders to stop giving reasons why it couldn’t be done and start doing it. Goodwin was frankly exercising civilian control of the military, a Kennedy hallmark since the Bay of Pigs; it was one reason why uniformed panjandrums had quietly detested the administration for nearly four years. Driven back to his last outpost, the officer raised a final obstacle.

  “She can’t light it.”

  “Why not?”

  “There’s too much danger. It might go out.”

  “Listen,” Goodwin said. “If you can design an atomic bomb, you can put a little flame on the side of that hill, and you can make it so she can light it.”

  The gist of this was relayed to Colonel Carroll. His response was curious; with all the resources of the American military establishment available to him, he turned to the yellow pages of the metropolitan telephone directory. Leafing through it to the listings under “Gas Companies,” he dialed half the numbers while Metzler, on another telephone, dialed the other half. They quickly exhausted Virginia—not a single office was open—and began on Maryland. Halfway down Carroll’s list Rockville’s Suburban Propane answered. The answerer was a repairman who had just stopped in on his way to an emergency, and he readily agreed to send another man there and stand by. Then the Colonel located a torch in a Washington Gas & Light Company substation. He sent two sergeants to drive it to Fort Belvoir’s metal shop, called Rockville again, and asked the cooperative service man to bring tanks and copper tubing in through Arlington’s Hatfield Gate.

  At 9 P.M. the torch arrived from Belvoir, welded to a frame. The tubing was buried in a trench; the tanks were out of sight. Technicians began the final step: connecting torch, tubing, and tanks. Ted Clifton had changed from blues to greens and crossed the river for an inspection, and he and the Army’s chief of the engineers were present when Carroll tested the device for the first time. It was exactly midnight. A thick bright tongue of fire flared up, roiling with liquid movements in a light breeze. The colonel tried it a second time, a third, a fourth. “This is going to work,” the chief of engineers said. Clifton asked, “Can she do it herself?” The chief was hesitant. Nothing would be more embarrassing than to have the light fail then, he pointed out, and Clifton, half convinced, wondered aloud whether the torch should be ignited in advance and concealed beneath a cover. Mrs. Kennedy could remove the cover at the end of the graveside service, and there would be no risk. The specialists who had set it up assured him that was unnecessary. Their commanding officer, Major Stanley Converse, would hand her a lighted taper, and when the taper touched the gas the propane would blaze up. As an added precaution, both Converse and the sergeant assisting him would stuff their pockets with match books and cigarette lighters. They would lurk near her like a couple of walking incendiary bombs. If anything went wrong they could set it right in a jiffy.

  The installation of the torch capped the most frenzied day in the memory of the cemetery staff. Throughout Sunday the slope beneath Lee Mansion had been swarming with men and women, most of them strangers to one another: gravediggers, communications experts laying video cable, carpenters building a press stand, Carroll’s engineers, an Irish liaison officer, advance security men, and Robert S. McNamara, who once more slowly paced the borders of the plot, map in hand, checking off items on a little list. There were lots of generals hanging around, and they looked rather confused. They had attended many other Arlington funerals, but until now a stranger’s rank had been visible on his shoulder insignia. Today that was reversed. The only uniformed member of the White House staff was Clifton. Drab young men in mufti could be members of the Commander in Chief’s staff, with clearances denied to most flag officers, and some of the most urgent matters were being handled by women. Indeed, the last person to report to the Kennedys that afternoon had been Bunny Mellon, who had spent an exhausting day in the rotunda, at St. Matthew’s, and, finally, in the cemetery.

  Jackie and Bob received her in the sitting room. Both Kennedys, it seemed to Bunny, had far more dignity than she herself did. Bob thanked her for the pleasure the Rose Garden had given the President, and after he withdrew the widow talked quietly of flowers. “I don’t want the church to look like a funeral,” she said. “Jack loved flowers, and that’s why he hated the way flowers are used in most funerals.” She remembered Tony Biddle’s funeral, with “awful purple wreaths and gold ribbons all around, looking like Harlem or Coney Island.” It had been wrong for Tony, and it would even be worse for the President. She knew there would be flowers in Arlington, she knew the senders couldn’t be insulted. “But do one thing for me, Bunny,” she said. “Please see that they’re put far, far from the grave.”

  Bunny had already done it; she had anticipated this. In the little time she had she had given the cathedral a touch of springtime, rejecting bushels of sickly Easter lilies and a series of tasteless rented vases. Pam Turnure had brought two simple blue vases from the executive mansion, and Bunny and Elmer Young, the White House florist, had filled them with simple arrangements of daisies, white chrysanthemums, and fragrant white stephanotis. The vases were placed on little pedestals before the altar rail; then she and Young crossed the bridge and studied the grave site with Arlington’s landscape gardener. Bunny pointed to a spot high on one side of the slope. In the morning, after the rotunda had been closed, she wanted the flowers there loaded in trucks and banked on that spot like an enormous floral blanket. From that distance the ribbons and easels and all the funereal trumpery would be lost in the mass of lovely colors.

  So it was all done. Mrs. Kennedy sat back, silent for a moment. Then she said, “When Patrick died you sent such a nice, simple basket. So there’s one other thing I want at the grave. A straw basket with just the flowers he had in the Rose Garden. Only those flowers, and nothing else at the grave.” She rose; they walked to the double doors together. As they parted she said, “Write a note to Jack, Bunny. When you pick the flowers, somewhere scrunched down, in the moss and the wet, put your own note to him.”

  From Elmer Young’s basement nursery Bunny took a fifteen-inch-long wicker basket and a pair of scissors. Outside the night was
very black. The only illumination came from the windows of the mansion. Yet that didn’t matter. She knew every blossom and stem in the garden, though at this season she had not expected to find much here; she thought she would have to fill the basket with flowers from her own greenhouse, where duplicates of every Rose Garden plant grew under glass. Much that had been here in mid-autumn was indeed gone. Frost had taken the blue cornflowers, the red geraniums, the carnations and nicotiana. But to her vast surprise she did find blue salvia, chrysanthemums, and dozens of white roses blooming in this last week of November. She plucked them, and cut berries from the sheltering hawthorn and crab apple trees. Then, kneeling among the foliage midway between the President’s dark silent office and the blazing mansion—the same shrubs that had bowed to President Kennedy’s farewell rotors three and a half days ago—she placed the brimming basket on the thick carpet of grass, and in a shaft of light from the State Dining Room she prepared a little place in the moss and the wet.

  As Bunny Mellon rose to leave, a caravan of black Mercurys glided in through the Southwest Gate and drew up outside the Diplomatic Reception Room. The President’s mother and her party had arrived from Cape Cod. Upstairs she embraced Jacqueline Kennedy and was shown to her room by Shriver. Until then she had been composed, but standing by the towering Lincoln bedstead—“that bed like a cathedral,” her daughter-in-law had once called it—she collapsed in Shriver’s arms. “It just seems so incredible,” she sobbed. “Jack being struck down at the peak of his career and my husband Joe in a wheelchair.”

  “Grandma, you’ve had the book thrown at you,” said Shriver. “Rosemary, young Joe, Kick, Mr. Kennedy—and now this.”

  “But think of Jackie! I had my nine children. She’s so young, and now she doesn’t even have a home.”

  He told her he thought it “simply amazing how both of you are holding up so well.” And Rose, repeating Jackie’s words almost verbatim, said, “What do people expect you to do? You can’t just weep in a corner.”

  Collecting herself, she sent for her daughters. She had brought black stockings for tomorrow; she wanted to be sure they had some, too. Suddenly trivial details of mourning dress seemed extremely important to the women and to the men, too. When Eisenhower anxiously phoned from the Statler to inquire whether black armbands should be worn—a custom which was still observed at Army funerals—the question was weighed carefully before sending him a negative reply. The demand for refitted swallowtail coats was so great that a Georgetown tailor worked all night, his hands and teeth bristling with the tools of his trade and the measurements of six Cabinet members strewn about. Afterward the only payment he asked of the client whose coat had taken the most time was a Mass card; the work, he explained, had been therapeutic. So it was for all of them. “I had never understood the function of a funeral before,” Schlesinger observed afterward. “Now I realized that it is to keep people from going to pieces.”

  Rose Kennedy dined upstairs with Stas Radziwill; Jacqueline Kennedy, her sister, and Robert Kennedy were served in the sitting room. The rest of the Kennedys ate in the family dining room with their house guests, McNamara, Phyllis Dillon, Dave Powers, and Aristotle Socrates Onassis, the shipowner, who provided comic relief of sorts. They badgered him mercilessly about his yacht and his Man of Mystery aura. During coffee the Attorney General came down and drew up a formal document stipulating that Onassis give half his wealth to help the poor in Latin America. It was preposterous (and obviously unenforceable), and the Greek millionaire signed it in Greek.

  After dinner pilgrimages to the Hill began. Jackie and Bob rode up again in midevening, and an hour later the President’s mother went with the Shrivers, the Lawfords, Lem Billings, and Radziwill. Waiting for the others in the second-floor hall, Stas told Jackie that he was anxious to put something in the President’s coffin; he wanted his most treasured possession, an old Parisian rosary, to be there. From a table vase she drew a red carnation. “Wrap it around this,” she said, “and give it to one of the agents there.” At midnight Ted went with Joe Gargan and two of Ted’s assistants. Each visit was of a pattern: the Mercurys parked unobtrusively by the east steps; the visitors rode up in a Capitol elevator, entering the rotunda from the south side; the endless stream circling the coffin recognized them and quietly parted; a soldier unhooked the velvet rope. One by one the Kennedys passed through and knelt in prayer by the catafalque and the wreath with the card reading, “From President Johnson and the Nation.”

  They did not pass unphotographed; the nation’s amateur cameramen were present in force. At the time their squinting eyes and snapping lenses seemed to be an insensitive intrusion, but it wasn’t that simple. They were prompted by more than curiosity. As a country the United States had long been conscious of documentation, and nearly everyone on the Hill—the famous principals, their quiet witnesses, the listening nation which was vicariously present—was in the midst of history. Most of them knew it, and millions were converted into chroniclers of events. The number and variety of Americans who were keeping written accounts of their impressions is striking. In Washington they included Kennedy relatives and aides, the new First Lady, Cabinet members, the White House Detail, and the White House Communications Agency; in Dallas they were Robert Oswald, Ruth Paine, Dallas policemen, and the entire staff of Parkland Hospital. The professional pollsters were working round the clock on their questionnaires, while New York and California psychiatrists were noting their patients’ responses. New England professors were interviewing their students, and Long Island and Illinois grade school teachers were planning how to gauge pupil reactions.

  These men and women were professionals; their reports were later published in professional journals. It is the amount of unpublished material, however, which is overwhelming. There were literally tons of it. Judging from the mail which reached 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue immediately after the funeral, at least fifty thousand adults and children were writing poems Sunday evening, and railroad men, taxi drivers, and airline hostesses were setting down their own thoughts and observations of their passengers’ behavior. Dismissing them all as Paul Prys would be belittling. They were more than just inquisitive; profoundly moved by the historical catastrophe, they wanted to participate in the country’s homage, and if their doggerel was often trite and their gestures clumsy, they were expressing themselves with all the eloquence they had, and sometimes it was a lot.

  At the time the dimensions of this emotional upheaval were unperceived. The average individual lived in a cocoon with his own reflections, the commiseration of those he loved, and his television screen, which, baffled by the absence of formal ceremony Sunday evening, picked up what it could at Idlewild and Dulles airports, where the funeral guests were arriving. Despite the unprecedented number of eminent names on the passenger lists these scenes were disappointing. The dignitaries declined to make statements, and neither their Washington ambassadors nor the State Department could presume to speak for them. Indeed, State couldn’t even meet them all. Dean Rusk, George Ball, and Averell Harriman were spelling one another at Dulles, lurking in the airport’s big mobile lounges and speeding out as ramps were wheeled into place, but with important delegations touching down every few minutes the ambassadors had to take care of their own. Rusk bounded around, pumping the hands of King Baudouin, Paul-Henri Spaak, Chancellor Erhard, Eamon de Valera, and the entire British delegation, and Angie Duke, masterminding international etiquette by telephone, found the newcomers from abroad most understanding; without exception they agreed that on all formal occasions the order of rank for chiefs of state should be by country, in alphabetical order, in the English language. Nevertheless, Dulles was a protocol officer’s incubus. The inevitable language difficulties were compounded by the size of the deluge. Bishop Hannan landed with the President of Turkey, the Foreign Minister of Italy, and a Moroccan prince who didn’t speak a word of English; the prince had to manage with one of Hannan’s French-speaking priests. And when Charles de Gaulle told Rusk, “Je ne fais qu?
??exprimer en ma personne la profonde douleur de mon pays. En vérité, je représente le peuple français. C’est lui qui m’a envoyé ici,” the Secretary of State was obliged to wait uneasily for a translator.

  De Gaulle had spoken for all the potentates: their people had sent them. The British Prime Minister explained that “the convulsion” in England was unique in the experience of his government; London teenagers, he said, were “just distraught, openly crying in the streets although they had never seen President Kennedy.” In fact, the Americans were entitled to some sort of explanation from the British. State had had no idea that the United Kingdom was going to send so many people. For a giddy moment it appeared that both houses of Parliament were on their way. Although Ormsby-Gore had pleaded with London to “hold it down,” he was surrounded by Sir Alec and Lady Douglas-Home, the Duke of Edinburgh, the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, Harold Wilson and Jo Grimond—whose Labour and Liberal parties had insisted that they come—and teams of Scotland Yard inspectors, private secretaries, and valets. Ormsby-Gore telephoned apologies to Shriver for “hogging space” in St. Matthew’s and then set about making room for everyone in his embassy. He didn’t succeed. Wilson had to find a bed elsewhere.

  The future prime minister didn’t complain; no one did. The guests and their American hosts were being especially polite to one another, for the murder of Oswald had created a supercharged atmosphere. For two days the United States had been in deep mourning. Now its pride was stung, too. Its diplomats were anxious to skirt any mention of the new shame, and the foreign dignitaries, realizing that a slur tonight would never be forgotten, were tactfully keeping their mouths shut. Had contacts been confined to the greetings in the mobile lounges, they would have seen no traces of the ugly strain of violence in U.S. society which had brought them here. Unfortunately for diplomacy, the embassies were equipped with television and radio, which reminded them that all Americans weren’t as sane and civilized as Rusk and his under secretaries. Outside the White House, they learned, a picket had paraded on Pennsylvania Avenue with a hand-lettered placard reading “GOD PUNISHED JFK.” In Birmingham an Alabaman declared over a WQXI “open-mike” show that “Any white man who did what he did for niggers should be shot”; he was instantly cut off the air, but the thing had been said. And at 10:55 P.M. the visitors were told that Astronaut John Glenn, the symbol of Kennedy’s space dreams, had belatedly reached the airport here after a bomb scare—in Texas.