It was that kind of a night: emotive and unashamedly demonstrative. One felt, as in war, a kinship with everyone else there; one wanted to help, to share. Fritz Hollings, former Governor of South Carolina, had driven to the capital with a friend and the friend’s children, who wanted to see the Lincoln Memorial first. As Hollings awaited their return at the curb a young Southern Negro approached him and asked whether this was the rotunda. “No, but I’ll take you there,” said Hollings. He drove him to the hill, decided the line was too long for a man in his forties, changed his mind, and returned to wait from 11 P.M. to 6 A.M.
Fred Holborn, restlessly circling the Capitol on foot in the middle of the night, was again “struck by the generational thing. There seemed to be college students everywhere, often from far away. Along East Capitol some were singing folk songs gently.” Indeed, there seemed to be at least one guitar in every block. Miss McGrory noticed “the many, many young people,” and seven blocks from the Hill she saw a youth with a guitar case surrounded by children. She asked, “Do you know the President’s favorite song?” He didn’t, she told him, and together they sang:
“Won’t you come home, Bill Bailey, won’t you come home?” She moans the whole day l—ong.…
Then they sang “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” and the spiritual:
Hush, little baby, don’t you cry,
You know your Daddy was born to die.
All my trials, Lord, soon be over.…
A quartet of seamen harmonized the Navy hymn, and, to the music of “John Brown’s Body,” “He’s gone to be a sailor in the Navy of the Lord.” The Negroes sang “We Shall Not Be Moved”; the students joined them and then led them in the old folk, new collegiate repertoire—“Sinner Man,” “Aunt Rhody,” “Hard Travelin’,” “On Top of Old Smoky,” “Careless Love,” “Michael,” and “Reuben James.” A strapping Negro in a shiny black suit that looked far too thin for this weather gave them Ed McCurdy’s “Strangest Dream” in a vibrant baritone:
Last night I had the strangest dream I ever had before,
I dreamed the world had all agreed to put an end to war.
I dreamed there was a mighty room, and the room was filled with men,
And the paper they were signing said they’d never fight again.8
One towheaded tenor softly crooned the poignant, 140-year-old “Ich hatt’ einen Kameraden”:
Eine Kugel kam geflogen:
Gilt es mir oder gilt es dir?
Ihn hat es weggerissen;
Er liegt mir vor den Füssen,
Als wärs ein Stück von mir.9
And nearly everyone with a guitar, and many without one, sang:
… Someday…
Deep in my heart
I do believe
We shall overcome
Someday.10
Melville Bell Grosvenor, president of the National Geographical Society, passed round the catafalque and paused to watch those behind him. One Negro woman entered crying. A white woman in front of her “looked back reprovingly,” Grosvenor recalled later. “But as they reached the casket the white woman, too, broke out in sobs. Then she turned, put her arm around the colored woman, and the two walked out together.”
There were stifled tears, mute prayers, signs of the cross, and the stiff salutes of uniformed mourners; nothing more. Their presence spoke for itself. As they shuffled forward Melville Grosvenor heard someone whisper, “The Silent Americans.”
Ten
LIGHT
Monday morning:
At 7 A.M., in the first quarter-hour of daylight, a wiry figure emerged from the Southeast Gate of the White House and struck out on foot for Union Station, two miles away. “The weather was superb,” Mary McGrory wrote, as “crisp and clear” as a Kennedy order, and the walker was the man who, with his brother, had symbolized that briskness and clarity throughout the dazzling three-year reign which was about to pass into history. The Attorney General was restless. Striding back, he was recognized on Pennsylvania Avenue; a crowd began to gather around him, and hailing a taxi he re-entered the mansion grounds and telephoned Ted Sorensen. He had been thinking about the quotations he was to read at the grave, he said. Something was missing. He wanted to add one more, about civil rights.…
Ken Galbraith walked breathlessly into Sorensen’s office. He had finished still another draft of the joint session speech in Kay Graham’s library. Arthur Schlesinger’s secretary had rattled off two copies, one for Walter Jenkins and one for Ted. “If I do say so myself, it’s perfect now,” Galbraith told Sorensen. “You won’t have to change a word of it.…”
Ted put it aside. He couldn’t bring himself to think about the new President until his President had been buried. Instead, he fingered the stiff brim of a silk hat. After Richard Nixon’s defeat Alex Rose, the leader of the hatters union, had presented Kennedy and each of his chief lieutenants with expensive toppers for the inauguration. Sorensen, like his leader, never wore a hat. He had carried this one on January 20, 1961, and he would carry it again this November 25 and then pack it away forever.…
“The agony continues,” Schlesinger was writing on the far side of the White House,
and one can still only intermittently believe it. I keep supposing that tomorrow morning I will come down to the White House, Evelyn will be in her office and Kenny in his, and in a few minutes the President will be along with some jokes about the morning papers. The thought that we will never see him again is intolerable and unacceptable and unendurable. But we never will, and nothing will ever be the same again.
In Blair House Harry Vaughn, a figure from the past, telephoned Dwight Eisenhower’s suite at the Statler and stated the obvious: protocol was a mess. What could be done about it? To twenty million Republicans Truman’s Vaughn had been an unprincipled “influence peddler,” but among professional soldiers his reputation was unimpeachable. He was just the man to heal the breach between the two ex-Presidents, and he did. They agreed not only to ride together in Eisenhower’s limousine, but share the same pew in St. Matthew’s and return to Blair House afterward.…
On Wisconsin Avenue Gawler’s Funeral Home, continuing the pretense that this was a private funeral, chalked appropriate entries on its control board. Under “NAME” was written “President Kennedy,” under “RM” (room) “White House,” under “CEM” “Arl,” and under “REMARKS” “Wilbert Vault.”…
Mrs. Paul Mellon rose early, fetched the basket of Martinique willow-work from her greenhouse around the corner from the British Embassy, and wrote a touching note of gratitude to Kennedy.
Monday morning Republican Senator Margaret Chase Smith laid a single red rose on the back-row Senate desk which had once been Senator John Kennedy’s. Monday morning a New York newsdealer tacked a sign to his kiosk reading, “Closed because of a death in the American family.” Monday morning 730,000 American Telephone & Telegraph Company employees reported for work, and one of the first long-distance calls logged was from the Rev. Billy Graham, in Washington, to the tightly guarded hospital room of Governor John B. Connally, Jr. in Parkland Memorial Hospital. Nellie took it and thanked the evangelist for his good wishes. As she hung up her husband stirred. He emerged from a confused skein of dreams. The blur cleared; he was really conscious for the first time since the Presidential Lincoln had yawed beneath the Book Depository. An orderly brought him a breakfast of mush and coffee. A television set was wheeled in, and Nellie told him that their seventeen-year-old son Johnny had flown to the capital to represent him. Connally blinked at the screen, wondering whether he would see him.
The wounded Governor was one of the few men in Texas public life who could surrender to the national narcosis and watch the solemn pageantry in Washington. Duty required some to attend services for Officer J. D. Tippit in Beckley Hills Baptist Church and the subsequent graveside ceremony at Laurel Land Memorial Park, where the patrolman’s gray coffin would be lowered into a plot reserved for men who had given their lives while working for the city, and others were q
uietly working behind the scenes to tidy up the debris left by Friday’s tragedy. The most embarrassing chaff, of course, was the body of Lee Oswald. Luckily for its civic leaders, Dallas didn’t have to worry about that. The Secret Service had assumed responsibility for the burial, and Marguerite had chosen Rose Hill Cemetery in Fort Worth, thirty miles away. Two Rose Hill workmen were told Monday morning to dig a grave for one “William Bobo.” The fiction didn’t deceive them long; when Oswald’s cheap, moleskin-covered pine box arrived, it was accompanied by a hundred Fort Worth policemen, who sealed off the area to protect Marguerite, Robert, Marina, and her two children. The lid was raised. Forty reporters peered over the officers’ shoulders. Marina, who had been following TV and was learning about images, kissed her husband and put her ring on his finger.
But burying Oswald didn’t really dispose of him. Ruby was left; so were hundreds of unanswered questions, some infuriating, some sinister, and some—although the fact couldn’t be faced then—forever beyond reach. The issue of who should search for answers was obviously the first task of the new administration. Two years after the funeral Texas Attorney General Waggoner Carr revealed that the President had telephoned him that Monday to suggest that the state conduct its own investigation. This would spare the new President’s sending federal agents to Texas. Carr was urged to announce the inquiry to the press without disclosing its inspiration; “It was,” he recalled, “to look as if it were my own decision.” He followed Johnson’s advice, reading a four-paragraph statement at Washington’s Statler Hilton. But keeping federal investigators out of the state was quite impossible. They were already there in strength. Jack Miller, head of Justice’s Criminal Division, had arrived to coordinate their inquiries, and after the Tippit funeral he and Barefoot Sanders persuaded District Attorney Wade, and then Carr, to mark time until Nick Katzenbach could change the President’s mind.
Carr was easy to convince. At his press conference he had felt that “all the venom against Texas was poured on me.” The state’s conservatives, of whom he was one, were smarting bitterly under outside attacks and some from inside. The clergy of Dallas was especially vocal. The Methodist Mr. Holmes was already under police protection for disclosing that news of the President’s death had been greeted with classroom applause, and another Methodist pastor, William H. Dickinson, Jr., had told his congregation that malice was not confined to the irresponsible: “At a nice, respectable dinner party only two nights before the President’s visit to our city, a bright young couple with a fine education, with a promising professional future, said to their friends that they hated the President of the United States—and that they would not care one bit if somebody did take a potshot at him.” Walter Bennett, a Presbyterian pastor, said the city had harbored “a force of hatred that has erupted like a flame,” and a Dallas Baptist, Dr. James R. Allen, was writing a sermon charging that an “element in our city” had been responsible for the assassination—that the “white heat of a hate-filled atmosphere allowed the necessary warmth for this element to crawl out from under the rocks to be seen.”
This was very hard on civic rectitude, and civic leaders circled their wagons. Mayor Cabell observed that Oswald had not been a permanent resident and added, “It could have happened in Podunk as well as Dallas.” 1 Councilman Carie Welch insisted that “This should not reflect on the image or the character of Dallas.” And the Dallas News, resuming its offensive role, editorially demanded that its readers “banish any feelings of rancor and guilt” and settle down to “normal living.” The editorial conceded that the weekend had been difficult for Dallas. But “a city, like a tree,” it said, “must weather the winds of adversity to reach the heights of stature.” Clearly the winds of the News were not going to be stilled indefinitely. More significantly, the city was enlisting powerful sympathy elsewhere. A half-hour after the assassination a Voice of America broadcaster had described Dallas as “the center of the extreme Right Wing.” Now Arthur Krock of the New York Times denounced “this gratuitous, and, as it proved, false, suggestion that such was the affiliation of the assassin.” The News was concerned with the reputation of the conservative establishment in one city; Krock with the entire country’s. In each case the attitude seemed to be, “My image: may she always be right, but my image, right or wrong.” The esteem of a nation, and especially of one element in it, was at stake. It was expedient to dismiss the killer as a freak who had existed in vacuo.
“And the hell of it is,” Ralph Dungan had said, “they’ll blame it all on that twenty-four-year-old boy.”
After morning coffee Colonel Swindal assembled his entire Dallas crew outside Andrews Field’s MATS terminal. The only man missing was Sergeant Ayres, who would represent Air Force One in St. Matthew’s after delivering the last of the President’s Texas clothes to Godfrey McHugh’s office. Swindal wanted the Presidential plane airborne two hours early, because he anticipated a unique problem. Until today all other aircraft had yielded to 26000. But when Colonel Charles Walton at Lee Mansion gave the green light to the fifty jet fighters, one for each state in the union, they would streak for the river. The blinding speed of their F-105 engines could leave him far behind, so he climbed to the flight’s Initial Point before them and fingered his headset, listening intently to Walton’s walkie-talkie and to traffic from an H-43 helicopter posted over the parade route. Around his cockpit the fighters whined, forming inverted V’s: the apex of their final V was vacant—the symbol, since World War I, of a fallen flier.
Nine miles away the H-43 looked down on a transformed Washington. It was to be one of the rare Mondays in history on which the Supreme Court canceled a scheduled session; instead, the justices convened in Earl Warren’s apartment and rode to the White House. At 10 A.M. a buzzer summoned the Senate to postpone action on the wheat bill. Senators followed Congressmen around the bier; then the men with seniority drove to St. Matthew’s while their juniors crossed the Potomac to submit identification to Secret Service men in Arlington. There was to be no business in the capital. There was only a funeral. And virtually everyone was going to attend it. At 9 A.M., when the rotunda doors were closed, 250,000 people had filed past the catafalque. All seemed to be still here. The cutoff had excluded a line of twelve thousand (including a family from Cleveland which had been twenty feet from the threshold). They quietly drew back behind the forming ropes, joining those who had been waiting on curbstones, some since long before dawn, for the procession.
Actually, there were to be three processions. First, the Kennedy family and marching troops would escort the caisson from the Hill to the White House. Second, the widow would leave her car and lead those who were to follow the coffin on foot to St. Matthew’s. Finally, all mourners, in limousines, would proceed behind the gun carriage south to Constitution Avenue and then westward around the Lincoln Memorial, over Memorial Bridge, and down the Avenue of Heroes to Arlington. Altogether the route covered over six miles. A million people had gathered to line either side of it—“an enormous multitude,” wrote Russell Baker, “in this city that normally shuns the streets during state occasions for the comfort of home and television.” It was, Mac Bundy wrote, “as if the whole route to the cathedral and the longer route to Arlington were merely aisles in a theater of solemn grief.”
By 10 A.M. the Cabinet, the Congressional leadership, the White House staff, the President’s personal friends, and the eminent visitors from abroad had assembled in the mansion’s East, Green, Blue, Red, and State Dining rooms, each man bearing a small card reading:
THE WHITE HOUSE
is respectfully invited
to join the procession on foot
leaving The White House at 11:30 o’clock
for the
Pontifical Requiem Mass
at St. Matthew’s Cathedral
Monday, November 25, 1963
Inside St. Matthew’s the church truck awaited, draped in purple velvet. Six massive candles in towering gold holders stood upon the white marble altar, flickering redl
y on the vases Mrs. Mellon had arranged. Overhead Grant La Farge’s ornate dome looked down upon the gathering mourners: relatives of the dead President, the wives of the men who would walk, the diplomatic corps, the subcabinet, the elite of the New Frontier. And in Arlington the grave was ready. The Irish cadets stood at parade rest. The efficiency of the eternal flame was demonstrated for two generals who had been afraid it would ignite the pine boughs banked around it. In McClellan Circle an artillery captain named Gay stood by a battery of 76-millimeter cannon; Air Force bagpipers were at their posts; the vault below was open to receive the coffin from a mechanical lowering device.
To the national audience the tragic sweep of the ceremony would seem a triumph of majesty. So it was; but a state funeral is essentially high theater, and like any other performance this one was to have its backstage byplay and missed cues. John Kennedy would have enjoyed all of them. He disliked ineptness onstage, but fluffs in the wings appealed to his sense of the grotesque, and in their small way the slip-ups were as appropriate as, say, the yarns spun at a wake. Most of them went unnoticed. The only conspicuous blunder—Sergeant Clark’s broken note in taps—would be widely regarded as a deliberate effect. It wasn’t. The grave site stage managers, in their anxiety to please network cameramen, stationed the Sergeant five yards in front of the riflemen who were to fire three volleys before him, which meant that he would come on stone deaf. There was a visual slip in the cemetery too, though black-and-white television didn’t record it. The area around the grave and the sides of the press box were draped with gaudy yards of what Arlington calls “artificial grass.” Mrs. Kennedy would have far preferred the autumnal solemnity of November foliage to this bright fakery, suggestive of gangster funerals in old George Raft movies. Bunny Mellon would never have permitted it, but the draping was done after she had left the cemetery. Indeed, Bunny had been lucky to get Mrs. Kennedy’s little basket of Rose Garden flowers to the grave. She was barred from the slope by a cordon of suspicious soldiers until a Secret Service agent recognized her and hurried over. He promised to watch over the basket, Jack Metzler assured her he would supervise the unloading of the four truckloads of rotunda flowers, and then she and Nancy Tuckerman raced back to St. Matthew’s—the last women over the bridge before it was sealed off.