AT 43, JOHN FITZGERALD KENNEDY was one of the youngest men ever elected president. In succeeding the 70-year-old Eisenhower, he seemed to represent a break from the somnolent conformism of the fifties and to embody America’s desire to, in Kennedy’s words, “get the country moving again.”
The world was still a dangerous place, with the Soviet Union and Communist China rising like red tidal waves to challenge the West, and it was far from clear who would win the cold war. There were crisis points everywhere, from Europe and the Middle East to South America and Indochina. At home, society was changing. African Americans were demanding their fair share of the nation’s bounty in the Civil Rights movement, which was gathering force, and there was rising concern about poverty, injustice, the future of the cities, and the troubled economy.
From the start, Kennedy challenged the country to live up to its potential and promised a new era of government activism. He captured the spirit of the times with his inaugural address as the 35th president on January 20, 1961. “Let the word go forth from this time and place,” he said on that frigid afternoon, “to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans.” He went on to issue a breathtaking pledge: “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” And he added an idealistic peroration that still rings through the years: “My fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.”
Kennedy realized the importance of public image, especially on the ever-expanding medium of television. And he made Air Force One more important than ever as a link between the president and the people.
At six feet tall and a slim 175 pounds, with a distinctive shock of brown hair over his forehead, the dashing young president had matinee-idol good looks, and he knew it. So he made TV appearances whenever possible. With his keen PR sense, he also realized the symbolic value of his plane.
He was well aware that the Secret Service and the military were using a special code name for any aircraft carrying the president—Air Force One. He also knew the brass preferred to keep the name secret as a security precaution. But Kennedy believed Air Force One had a certain majesty to it, so he authorized aides to use it in public. That has been the name for the presidential plane ever since.
Adding to the mystique, Kennedy approved another important change. He thought the words “United States Air Force” and “Military Air Transport Service” on the upper fuselage were inadequate in conveying the plane’s broader symbolism. Instead, he ordered that “United States of America”—in huge, bold letters—be painted on the fuselage, and he added an American flag to each side of the tail fin. He wanted the president’s plane to be known not just as a military aircraft but as a symbol of the presidency as an institution and of the nation as a whole.
The new president meant to signal that America was a superpower and was eager to compete in the struggle against Communism, says Jeffery S. Underwood, historian of the U.S. Air Force Museum at Ohio’s Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. “This aircraft told everyone we were a world power—we were here, and we were here to stay,” Underwood says. “We were containing Communism and we wanted to be the symbol for the free world to look toward. And this was as good a symbol as any, because this symbol was not in New York Harbor, the Statue of Liberty, this symbol could go around the world.”
Kennedy loved to generate excitement by having Air Force One pull up to waiting TV news and still photographers, abroad and at home. Unlike the no-nonsense Eisenhower administration, White House press aides would routinely call local news executives with the time and place of the president’s arrival, and tell them where to position themselves at the appropriate airport. Air Force One would be seen descending majestically from the sky, and it would pull up directly in front of the journalists. The gambit was designed to give the local media fresh footage of his arrival, which often would be carried live, and give the three national broadcast networks of ABC, CBS, and NBC the same opportunity. This tradition has been followed by every succeeding president.
Kennedy inherited Ike’s basic-model 707 when he took office in January 1961, and he used it for his historic trip to meet with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev that year. But on October 10, 1962, a newer model of the Boeing 707, with the tail number SAM 26000, arrived at Andrews Air Force Base. It would become one of the most famous planes in history.
Faster and with a longer range than Eisenhower’s plane, this 707 had upgraded communications systems, enabling the president for the first time to contact people around the world in a secure manner rather than over open channels. This made it much easier for the president to make decisions and coordinate policy while “on the road.” In fact it was more of a working environment than ever before, featuring a spacious presidential stateroom containing a desk, two leather-upholstered, high-backed swivel chairs, and two sofas that could be converted to beds; a conference room with two tables, six chairs, and a couch seating another three persons; a special galley with four burners to cook meals; and a main passenger cabin containing 24 reclining seats, two desks, and four sleeping berths. Air Force One quickly became one of the perquisites of office that Kennedy most enjoyed.
The sleek plane, like the sleek new president and First Lady, seemed to embody modernity itself. To that end, Kennedy asked his wife, known for her exquisite fashion sense and glamour, to help develop a new color scheme. It was Jackie, with the advice of industrial designer Raymond Loewy (creator of the Ritz cracker logo and the designs for Lucky Strike cigarette packaging), who came up with the blue and white hues still in use today. She also brought fine china aboard and hung oil paintings in the presidential quarters.
Kennedy reveled in the idea that he was only six hours from Europe, and told friends he understood now why President Eisenhower had traveled so much during his final year in office, when he finally had access to a jet. People who thought the presidency was the toughest job in the world had never flown on Air Force One, Kennedy observed.
He and Mrs. Kennedy used SAM 26000 for the first time in November 1962, a year before he died, to attend the funeral of Eleanor Roosevelt in New York. He flew on it in June 1963 to Ireland and Germany, where he gave his “Ich Bin Ein Berliner” address. And of course 26000 took Kennedy on his final trip, to Dallas on November 22, 1963.
JFK OFTEN USED the plane to relax in his private compartment. “He had a big bed back there,” recalled Vernon “Red” Shell, a flight steward at the time. “On a short trip, say to Cape Cod, a one-hour flight, he’d skim through two or three newspapers real fast, maybe have a cup of fish chowder, then take a little nap.”
Contrary to his public image, he was not the perfect husband, nor the perfect host. Members of the Air Force One flight crew said he would ignore his wife as she struggled on board with their children. Instead, he would immediately begin reading about himself in the newspapers while the First Lady soldiered on. And he displayed a roving eye when Mrs. Kennedy was not on board, talking openly about other women with his aides and guests.
Kennedy allowed the black Labrador of his brother, Robert, to romp unimpeded throughout the plane until the crew came up with a novel way to control the animal: They mixed a couple of martinis and served them to the dog on a plate, whereupon it promptly fell asleep. That was the tactic they used from then on whenever the canine started to bother passengers.
A scion of privilege, Kennedy loved being pampered, and fawning aides were everywhere. They kept Air Force One supplied with a half dozen newspapers at all times so JFK could read his notices, which he did as often as possible. Hot New England seafood chowder was always in stock to indulge his passion for the meal he had enjoyed since boyhood.
He loved to smoke cigars and often had an unfinished one in his mouth when he was ready to exit the plane. Just before stepping out, he would take the cigar in his left hand, put his hand in the left pocket of his suit jacket, and walk down the stairs. He sometimes burned a hole in his clothes, but he could then take a few puffs in his limousine en route to his destination without having to light up another one.
True to his nature, JFK and his inner circle spent hours swapping political stories, sharing gossip, smoking cigars, and enjoying a few drinks. Kennedy favored Beefeater gin, Ballantine’s Scotch, and daiquiris, but he rarely consumed alcohol to excess, and when his staff overindulged, he would shake his head and frown but never give orders to refrain. His expression of displeasure usually put a stop to it, at least until he was out of sight. Drinking was a part of life for men of power in those days.
So was sangfroid. Kennedy once recalled that Roosevelt’s death was not traumatic for him, even though much of the civilian population in 1945 was grief-stricken upon learning of FDR’s passing. For men of Kennedy’s age who had served in the armed forces, any display of emotion was disdained. “They had learned to keep themselves to themselves, to avoid getting hurt,” wrote author William Manchester in 1962. “Today the President, speaking in the idiom of his time, scorns soul-searching as ‘couch talk,’ and nearly all those who are close to him hold the world at arm’s length… . Their strong points are manipulation, expertise, and efficiency, even to the sacrifice of individuality… . This is the veteran generation. They were young in the early 1940s, and most of them were very much in the war. Men Eisenhower’s age were in charge of the maps, but men Kennedy’s age did the actual fighting.”
A certain degree of cold-bloodedness was shared by every member of the World War II–era generation to hold the presidency, from JFK to Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and George H. W. Bush. They refused to—indeed, were unable to—wear their hearts on their sleeves, unlike the baby boomer generation represented by Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. To do otherwise was not considered manly.
Instead, Kennedy became a symbol of energy and style—what Manchester described as “hatless, coatless, on-the-ball vigor.” He believed in the power of reason to solve the world’s problems—a faith eventually tempered by failures such as the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba and the near disaster of the Cuban missile crisis.
“John F. Kennedy was a happy President,” wrote Theodore C. Sorensen, one of his senior advisers. “Happiness, he often said, paraphrasing Aristotle, is the full use of one’s faculties along lines of excellence, and to him the presidency offered the ideal opportunity to pursue excellence… . He liked the job, he thrived on its pressures. Disappointments only made him more determined.”
He was a self-starter and a cool pragmatist, and he wanted the country to know that unlike the Eisenhower norm, he and his advisers were working 14-hour days. The contrasts were everywhere. While the former general was spit-and-polish and staid, Kennedy was informal and spirited. While Ike was a countrified Kansan, Kennedy was an urbane Bostonian. While Ike enjoyed simple Westerns, Kennedy was proudly and broadly literate, author of the Pulitzer prize–winning Profiles in Courage and an admirer of Churchill’s memoirs and modern morality novels such as Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird.
One Saturday in October 1963, Kennedy flew to Amherst College in Massachusetts to honor poet Robert Frost. Aboard Air Force One, he worked over his speech and revealed his appreciation for the life of the mind when he discussed Frost’s poems with adviser and scholar Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. He expressed admiration for one line in particular: “I have been one acquainted with the night.” Somehow, it had special resonance for him.
But another staffer broke his reverie with the lighthearted warning that a woman he knew, who despised Kennedy, might try to interrupt the ceremony and the president might see his aide “struggling with a woman and rolling on the ground.” Kennedy brightened at the thought and added slyly, “We will give you the benefit of the doubt.”
Kennedy kept in touch with popular culture, watching movies a few times a month; among his favorites were Casablanca, starring Humphrey Bogart, and Spartacus, starring Kirk Douglas.
KENNEDY EXPERIENCED HIS SHARE of poignant moments on the plane. In December 1961, less than a year after he took office, his father suffered a stroke in Palm Beach, Florida. The president immediately decided to visit him. During that trip, the president and adviser Sorensen reviewed the legislative agenda for 1962, but his father’s condition weighed heavily on him. “It was with difficulty and incredible self-discipline that he engrossed himself in our work on that sorrowful flight,” Sorensen recalls. “The mutual bonds of affection and admiration between father and son had not diminished in the White House, and Joseph P. Kennedy’s subsequent inability to communicate freely to his son removed a welcomed source of encouragement and cheer for the president.”
His journey to the divided city of Berlin on June 26, 1963, was a high point of his presidency, and his life. He received a spectacular reception from the vast, roaring throng that listened to him outside City Hall as he delivered one of his most inspired speeches. “Two thousand years ago the proudest boast was ‘Civis Romanus sum,’” he declared. “Today, in the world of freedom, the proudest boast is ‘Ich bin ein Berliner.’ … We … look forward to that day when this city will be joined as one—and this country, and this great continent of Europe—in a peaceful and hopeful globe. When that day finally comes, as it will, the people of West Berlin can take sober satisfaction in the fact that they were in the front lines for almost two decades.
“All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin, and, therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words ‘Ich bin ein Berliner.’”
As Air Force One left Germany for Ireland, Kennedy wandered into the staff cabin, obviously pleased with himself. He said the tumultuous reaction would show Americans that their efforts to defend West Germany from the Communist threat were very much appreciated. He said he would leave a note to his successor, to be opened at a difficult time, that would read: “Go to Germany.” Then the president sat down across from Sorensen and said, “We’ll never have another day like this one as long as we live.”
FOREIGN POLICY WAS the all-important subtext of the Kennedy era. It was a dangerous world. The superpowers were bristling with nuclear weapons and tensions with Moscow were on the rise.
Four months into his term, and not long after the disastrous American-sponsored invasion of Cuba known as the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy flew to Vienna for his first summit meeting with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. It would be a pivotal event, and as so often happens with any president under stressful conditions, there were several key moments aboard Air Force One.
On particularly difficult trips, Kennedy would bring a doctor—sometimes more than one—to give him medication that would ease the severe pain in his back, which tended to worsen on long flights and when he was under pressure. This was kept secret so he didn’t look weak and vulnerable. His staff installed a very firm horsehair mattress in his cabin, which gave him some relief when he reclined, and he wore a medical corset virtually all the time to ease the pain and give him support.
As luck would have it, he aggravated the problem during a tree-planting ceremony in Ottawa in May 1961, not long before his springtime summit with Khrushchev in Vienna. He arrived on June 3, exhausted and in excruciating pain after three days of intense and pressure-packed meetings with French president Charles de Gaulle in Paris. “His doctors had told him that if he must go to Europe, he should use crutches,” reports historian Michael Beschloss. “He had shaken his head: he was ‘simply not’ going to meet Khrushchev ‘as a cripple.’ As a congressman in 1949, Kennedy himself had charged that the Kurile Islands and other strategic points had been ‘given’ to Stalin by a ‘sick’ Roosevelt at Yalta. He wanted no such talk about his performance at Vienna.”
Yet much of Kennedy’s public image of good health and vigor was a sham. He suffered from not only chronic back problems but also various other ailments, including Addison’s disease, which attacks the adrenal glands and causes weakness and, left untreated, death. Kennedy took cortisone for the Addison’s, which stabilized the disease and enhanced his stamina but resulted in bloating, surges in libido, and mood swings. His aides scrupulously kept his Addison’s disease and the extent of his other illnesses secret.
All this was a huge gamble. Dr. Kenneth Crispell and author Carlos Gomez argue in their study of hidden presidential illnesses: “One might feel admiration for Kennedy’s demonstrable heroism in overcoming his illnesses were it not for the fact that he was gambling not only with his future but with the future of his men in the South Pacific [as a young PT boat captain seeking to make his reputation], the future of his constituents from Charlestown, Massachusetts [as a congressman], and later, the future of the people of the United States and conceivably of the entire world. That Kennedy felt compelled to mislead the public about his illness, then to brand his critics as liars when they correctly charged that he was an ill man, also detracts from the heroic qualities.”
Historian Robert Dallek adds: “On one level this secrecy can be taken as another stain on his oft-criticized character,” but on another level it revealed “the quiet stoicism of a man struggling to endure extraordinary pain and distress and performing his presidential (and pre-presidential) duties largely undeterred by his physical suffering.”
It was the back pain that was his immediate problem during his trip to Europe in the spring of 1961. In Paris, he soaked in a golden bathtub in his suite at the Quai d’Orsay. But what relieved his pain were the injections of procaine, an anesthetic, he received two or three times a day from Dr. Janet Travell, a private physician he brought along to keep him at his best. This was double or triple his normal dose. It helped him for a while, but the pain always returned.
Beschloss cites evidence that Kennedy also received mysterious injections from Max Jacobson, a controversial New York doctor who became known for giving celebrities “vitamin and enzyme shots.” These unusual concoctions were never proven medically effective, were dangerous, and could have caused erratic behavior. Jacobson claimed that he joined Kennedy in Paris and flew with him on Air Force One to Vienna to assist in his medical treatments, even though there is no White House record of Jacobson on Air Force One at this time.
The summit with Khrushchev in Vienna went poorly. The blustery Soviet hardliner took the measure of his American counterpart and judged him shallow and weak. A particularly bitter sticking point was Berlin, divided between East and West. Khrushchev bullied Kennedy, demanding that the West leave Berlin or face a lethal confrontation. Kennedy, startled, did not respond with the same resolve shown by his adversary.
The next stop was London, and the atmosphere on Air Force One reflected the American delegation’s dejection. Everyone, especially Kennedy, seemed depressed, and there was a grim silence for most of the flight. “Kennedy had never encountered any leader with whom he could not exchange ideas—anyone so impervious to reasoned argument or so apparently indifferent to the prospective obliteration of mankind,” wrote Arthur M. Schlesinger. “He himself had indicated flexibility and admitted error, but Khrushchev had remained unmoved and immovable. Apart from Laos, about which Khrushchev evidently cared little, there was no area of accommodation. The test ban seemed dead. Berlin held the threat, if not the certitude, of war. Filled with foreboding, the President flew on to London. It was a silent and gloomy trip.”
Observed Godfrey McHugh, Kennedy’s Air Force aide: “It was like riding with the losing baseball team after the World Series.”
Kennedy called Kenneth O’Donnell, one of his closest confidants, into his stateroom and, as so many presidents have done aboard the plane after a pressure-packed event, began to vent. For an hour, he unburdened himself of his frustrations and anger, condemning Khrushchev as a “bastard” and a “son of a bitch.” His self-control, so evident in public, disappeared in the privacy of Air Force One, and his real feelings came tumbling out as he expressed his deepest fears about a possible war with Russia.
“We’re stuck in a ridiculous situation,” he fumed. “It seems silly for us to be facing an atomic war over a treaty preserving Berlin as the future capital of a reunited Germany when all of us know that Germany will probably never be reunited.”
Kennedy also said, “All wars start from stupidity. God knows I’m not an isolationist, but it seems particularly stupid to risk killing a million Americans over an argument about access rights on an Autobahn in the Soviet zone of Germany, or because the Germans want Germany reunified. If I’m going to threaten Russia with a nuclear war, it will have to be for much bigger and more important reasons than that. Before I back Khrushchev against the wall and put him to a final test, the freedom of all of Western Europe will have to be at stake.”
O’Donnell vividly remembered Kennedy’s final remarks as the plane was about to land in London. “If we’re going to have to start a nuclear war,” the young president said, “we’ll have to fix things so it will be started by the president of the United States, and nobody else. Not by a trigger-happy sergeant on a truck convoy at a checkpoint in East Germany.” He was clearly worried about pushing Khrushchev into making an impulsive and cataclysmic move, and wanted to bear all that responsibility on his own shoulders.
As O’Donnell later wrote in his memoirs, Kennedy “seldom revealed his deep feelings or talked about them at any length… . On the flight from Vienna that Sunday night, however, he was in the mood to talk freely about the many questions and doubts concerning the Berlin crisis that were troubling him, as if talking about them would help him to weigh them and put them into order in his mind.”
After meeting in London with British officials and dining with Queen Elizabeth II of England at Buckingham Palace, Kennedy boarded Air Force One in his tuxedo and tried to relax on the trip home. After takeoff, he ordered his customary hot soup and read the London newspapers, but he could not stop thinking about the momentous events of the previous week.
He stripped to his boxer shorts and called in Hugh Sidey, a friend and correspondent for Time magazine. This may seem strange today—a president in his underwear talking to a journalist on Air Force One—but in JFK’s day there was a much more trusting and cozy relationship between politicians and the press. A president could be reasonably sure that a reporter would not embarrass him under such circumstances. Sidey recalled later that Kennedy’s eyes were “red and watery, dark pockets beneath them.” The president said his meetings with Khrushchev were “invaluable” if only because they had given him firsthand knowledge of what he was up against.
Before going to sleep in his private cabin, Kennedy wrote out a Lincoln quotation that gave him solace. “I know there is a God, and I see a storm coming. If he has a place for me, I believe that I am ready.”
Over the years, this dynamic of introspection has occurred with extraordinary frequency aboard Air Force One. Perhaps it’s because presidents so often find themselves on the plane after tense situations or amid crises, and they need to talk about their feelings and their fears. Perhaps Air Force One becomes a unique incubator of presidential candor because the chief executive tends to be surrounded by friends and loyalists and he believes no one will talk out of school. Perhaps it’s the same dynamic that many air travelers experience as they cruise for hours in the sky, alone with their thoughts. But Air Force One definitely encourages presidents to look inward.
Kennedy was ultimately proven wrong about German reunification, of course. But he was correct to worry about misunderstandings between East and West. Even more pertinent to his immediate problems, his youth and inexperience were turning out to be liabilities. The following year, Kennedy and Khrushchev would bring the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation in the Cuban missile crisis.
KENNEDY’S BACK PROBLEM got so bad after he returned from Europe that he flew to Palm Beach, Florida, on Thursday, June 8, 1961, to take a badly needed long weekend at the home of a friend, Charles Wrightsman. He got plenty of sleep, sat around in his pajamas, and used crutches to get to and from the heated pool. “In the evening,” Beschloss says, “he entertained friends and several of the White House secretaries with daiquiris and Frank Sinatra records on the phonograph.”
When he left for Washington, he was forced to use crutches as a hydraulic lift transported him to the door of Air Force One at West Palm Beach airport. Again, this was hidden from the public. At the White House, he was forced to stay in bed with a heating pad.
KENNEDY SEEMED PARTICULARLY somber in November 1963. The Washington weather was gloomy, but the president’s mood was shaped more by the continuing tension with Moscow and the deteriorating situation in South Vietnam. He would soon be forced to decide how far the United States should go to bail out its ally in Saigon.
He spent another weekend at Palm Beach with friends, then boarded Air Force One for the trip back to Washington on Monday, November 18. But even though a regimen of calisthenics had done some good, his back was painful and he spent much of the flight lying in bed in his private cabin. He asked Florida senator George Smathers, a friend who was on the plane, to visit his bedside.
The president’s upcoming trip to Texas, it turned out, was weighing heavily on him. Lyndon Johnson, his handpicked vice president, was extremely eager for Kennedy to visit his home state, but the personal conflicts among Democratic leaders were Byzantine and bitter.
“God, I wish you could think of some way of getting me out of going to Texas,” Kennedy said. “… Look how screwed up it’s going to be. You’ve got Lyndon, who is insisting that Jackie ride with him. You’ve got [liberal senator] Ralph Yarborough, who hates Lyndon, and Johnson doesn’t want Yarborough with him. [John] Connally is the Governor. They’re all prima donnas of the biggest order… . I just wish to hell I didn’t have to go. Can’t you think of some emergency we could have?” Kennedy was well aware that Texas was filled with right-wing zealots who hated him, and he felt a sense of foreboding. But he went ahead with the trip anyway.
As the president and his wife flew to Texas on Thursday, November 21, Kennedy thumbed through briefing books on the visit of Chancellor Ludwig Erhard of West Germany, who was to be the guest of honor at a state dinner Monday at the White House. He called aides Kenneth O’Donnell and David Powers into his office and said, “You two guys aren’t running out on me and leaving me stranded with poor Jackie at Lyndon’s ranch. If I’ve got to hang around there all day Saturday, wearing one of those big cowboy hats, you’ve got to be there too.”
The ranch visit never came to pass. On Friday, November 22, 1963, John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas.
AS A RESULT OF that shattering event, Kennedy’s Boeing 707, SAM 26000, became the most famous of all Air Force One aircraft. It was there, in an overheated and cramped staff cabin, that Lyndon Johnson was sworn in, at 2:39 P.M.—an image immortalized by White House photographer Cecil Stoughton and transmitted around the world. Stoughton’s photograph shows a somber Johnson, towering over everyone else, with his right hand raised to take the oath administered by a bespectacled, diminutive federal judge named Sarah Hughes, wearing a polka-dot dress. A stricken Jackie Kennedy, still in her bloodstained pink suit from the fatal motorcade, stood at his left side and a dazed-looking Lady Bird Johnson stood at his right. The cabin was crammed with grim-faced aides.
At first, Kennedy’s staff had thought Johnson, for reasons of safety, was going to return to Washington immediately after the shooting, since no one knew if the new president was in imminent danger. The Kennedys expected that the slain president’s widow, his body, and his aides would leave for Washington a bit later, after the casket arrived.
When the Kennedy party got on the plane at Love Field, the group was astonished to find Johnson was still there with his own retinue. He said he thought it wise for them all to go back together. Johnson added that he wanted to take the oath of office before departure and he was waiting for federal judge Hughes, his old friend, to administer it. O’Donnell took it upon himself to be Jackie Kennedy’s protector at her moment of trauma, and he was very unhappy with the way things were going. Mrs. Kennedy was under extreme strain, and he believed she should get back to Washington as soon as possible. Besides, he felt, taking the oath was just a formality that could wait until later.
Meanwhile, the Air Force One crew had to figure out what to do with the casket. It didn’t seem proper to place it in the cargo hold with the luggage, and it was too big to fit in the rear compartment, where the Kennedys wanted it. Joe Chappell, the flight engineer and veteran Air Force troubleshooter, hastily removed a bulkhead and two rows of seats just forward of the rear door, which gave him sufficient room to wedge the coffin inside. LBJ helped maneuver it into the compartment, Chappell recalled. They swung it hard to the left at the top of the rear stairs and placed it along the left side of the cabin. Still, the casket barely fit. Someone brought in a chair and placed it next to the casket. That’s where a dazed Mrs. Kennedy sat in the ghastly atmosphere, only a few hours after she and her husband had made their triumphant arrival in Dallas.
There was another complication. The Secret Service wanted to move Air Force One out of sight to protect the new commander in chief from snipers or other attacks, but there was no secluded spot to park it at Love Field. This made the bodyguards even more nervous.
Amid the confusion, Johnson still insisted on delaying the departure, telling his own aides that he wanted to reassure the country that the continuity of government was being preserved—and he felt that taking the oath aboard Air Force One would be a very effective symbol. He also told the Kennedy aides that he wanted Jackie at his side, to certify his own legitimacy. Although numbed by the ordeal, she agreed.
As everyone assembled, Secret Service agents pulled down the shades so snipers couldn’t draw a bead on the new president through the windows. After the swearing-in, Johnson offered Mrs. Kennedy the use of the president’s lounge in the middle of the plane but she declined. Back in the rear, with the casket two feet away, the Kennedy clan, including the grieving widow, drank several glasses of Scotch apiece. O’Donnell and Kennedy confidant Dave Powers described the atmosphere as “a wall of coldness” between the Kennedy group and the Johnson people.
During the two-hour flight, Jackie Kennedy and her husband’s advisers traded warm and funny stories about the slain president in what resembled an Irish wake. Mrs. Kennedy brought up her husband’s visit to Ireland, his ancestral homeland, the previous June, where he received a tumultuous reception. “He said it was the most enjoyable experience of his whole life,” the widow recalled with a smile. They talked about how proud he had been that his father had actually seen him ascend to the White House, and how, on a sad note, the president had been so deeply hurt by the death of his infant son, Patrick, only a few months earlier.
When Air Force One landed, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, the slain president’s brother, rushed onto the plane and dashed through each cabin until he found Jackie in the rear compartment with the casket. Johnson later complained that he had extended his hand to Robert Kennedy for a handshake but the attorney general ignored him. Kennedy aides said the brother was just too distraught and emotional to think about such things, and may not have noticed Johnson’s offered hand.
In any case, it was the start of a descent into bitterness for all sides, just as Lyndon Johnson’s controversial presidency was beginning.