The Death of a President

Atop the moving lift Lieutenant Sam Bird, approaching the coffin, raised his white-gloved hand in a salute. For the Lieutenant, Air Force One’s arrival was followed by a chain of small surprises. The truck, with his second team marching alongside, had begun to roll the instant the lights went up, and from the corner of his eye he had glimpsed the quiet crowd beyond the fence. He was amazed; he hadn’t known anyone was there. Then he had seen the Attorney General and had joined the general perplexity: why, he wondered, hadn’t the accounts from Dallas reported that the President’s brother had been with him when he died? At the sight of the casket Sam Bird’s throat became congested. It disturbed him for a special reason: its cover was bare. Accustomed to the pageantry of Arlington, he missed the national colors. A fallen chieftain should be shielded by a flag, he thought, and he wished he had brought one with him. Then the lift halted by the hatch and he looked up into the face of Godfrey McHugh. The Lieutenant hadn’t seen many generals, but he recognized McHugh from his newspaper photographs. He saluted again. To his dismay Godfrey ordered, “Clear the area. We’ll take care of the coffin.” Sam Bird and his body bearers scrambled unceremoniously down a yellow metal ladder.

Looking over McHugh’s shoulder, Roy Kellerman spotted Agent Floyd Boring on the ground. “Floyd! Can’t they raise this thing any higher?” he called down. “It isn’t flush.” Boring inquired and called back, “It’s as high as it can go.” The lift was a total failure; it couldn’t even reach the Presidential door. Kellerman on one end, Greer on the other, the five agents and Godfrey McHugh twisted Oneal’s Britannia onto the truck bed. Jacqueline and Robert Kennedy stepped after it; the others followed, the swollen faces of Evelyn, Mary, Burkley, and O’Donnell forming a stolid rank behind the widow. As the lift began its descent Mac Kilduff precipitantly decided that he couldn’t be left behind; he lunged forward, was nearly caught between the frame and the bed, and was pulled back to safety by a steward.

Bob Kennedy explained the transportation choices to his sister-in-law. “There’s a helicopter here to take you to the White House. Don’t you want to do that?”

“No, no, I just want to go to Bethesda.” She saw the gray ambulance, assumed it was the one she had requested, and said, “We’ll go in that.”

With five feet to go the lift reached its limit and stopped. The men could jump, the women couldn’t. Pam, feeling faint, fell forward and was caught. Mrs. Kennedy was helped down by Taz Shepard and Ted Clifton—like Kilduff, Clifton couldn’t bear to be excluded, and had made his way here from the front ramp. The last man off was Burkley; the President’s physician hovered near the coffin as it was being removed from the platform. The transfer was awkward. Lieutenant Bird’s second team swung in and was waved away by McHugh. But they were needed; there was no one else to receive the casket. Struggling and writhing, a union of Presidential aides, agents, and enlisted men from the five armed forces shouldered the chipped bronze box and eased it down. For a moment it wobbled wildly. “Grotesque,” wrote a reporter in the press pen.

Kellerman brushed past Boring and explained to Chief Rowley that SS 100 X would be arriving from Dallas in two hours; it, too, must be met and taken to the White House garage for a detailed Secret Service–FBI examination. Major General Philip C. Wehle, Commanding Officer of the Military District of Washington, was making a final check with the MDW helicopter pilot who had been assigned to President Kennedy. The pilot told him he had just heard of a change of plans—the body was going by car. General Wehle’s first thought was of security. In this he was typical; never having been assigned to an assassinated President before, agents and soldiers were thinking of Presidential protection. Wehle set off to inform McNamara.

The Secretary nodded. The General rounded up Sam Bird and six members of his second team and led them aboard the helicopter. Having failed to provide a proper military escort here, he was determined to be on hand when the coffin reached Bethesda. The enlisted men were awestruck—they had never ridden on an H-21 with cushioned seats—and the pilot raced across the capital (passing directly over the Greenlawn Drive home of Barney Ross, who ran out in time to see its familiar belly lights); then, with a cough of engines, the rotors settled down on the hospital’s heliport. In 1961 Burkley had requested the pad, hoping he could persuade the President to inspect Washington’s naval hospital. Kennedy had never found time. This was the first time the heliport had been used, and like so much else between 6 and 6:30 it was an occasion for bizarre misunderstanding. As Lieutenant Bird stepped to the ground, a score of Speed Graflex bulbs exploded together. Newspaper photographers assumed that the casket was right behind him.

During the seething movement of humanity at Andrews Jacqueline Kennedy had been temporarily stranded. Clint Hill assumed she would sit on the ambulance’s front seat and went that way. She balked. “No, I want to go in the back,” she said, and pivoted aside. She tried the rear door, tried again and wrestled with it. It was fastened from the inside. Why doesn’t somebody help her? Mary McGrory wondered. Jim Swindal saw the difficulty and sprinted over, but just as he arrived the driver reached back and released the lock. Mrs. Kennedy wrenched it open and scrambled in.

Beside the driver, gaping, were the heart specialist and nurse who had been sent to attend Lyndon Johnson. At Roy Kellerman’s request all three slid out wordlessly and Greer, Kellerman, Landis, and Burkley scrambled in, Burkley on Landis’ lap. The Attorney General entered the back, sitting opposite his sister-in-law; Godfrey perched beside her. The rest of the Bethesda cavalcade lined up swiftly, Clint and Dr. Walsh in the second car; the mafia in the third; Evelyn, Pam, Mary, Muggsy, and George Thomas in the fourth. Before the truck lift could be removed and a ramp brought up for the new President, the body of President Kennedy had begun its forty-minute drive to the hospital.

Bob Kennedy slid open the plastic partition separating the rear of the ambulance from the front and asked, “Roy, did you hear they’d apprehended a fellow in Dallas?”

Roy hadn’t. For two hours Lee Oswald had been news in the rest of the nation, but of 26000’s passengers only those who had been watching the stateroom television set knew of it.

Jacqueline Kennedy told him, “I don’t want any undertakers. I want everything done by the Navy.”

He asked Godfrey to see to that. Then a disjointed discussion ensued, touching upon the probable future of Kennedy aides, the delayed take-off from Love Field, McHugh’s role in that, and the explanation which the new President had offered at the time. “He said he’d talked to you, Bobby,” Jackie told her brother-in-law, “and that you’d said he had to be sworn in right there in Dallas.” The Attorney General was startled. There must be some misunderstanding, he said; he had made no such suggestion.¹

Leaning gently on the coffin, Mrs. Kennedy whispered, “Oh, Bobby—I just can’t believe Jack has gone.”

Her eyes fixed on a gray curtain over his shoulder, she described the motorcade, the murder in the sunlight, and the aftermath. For twenty minutes he listened in silence. Afterward he said, “It was so obvious that she wanted to tell me about it that whether or not I wanted to hear it wasn’t a factor.… I didn’t think about whether I wanted to hear it or not. So she went through all that.” Still, it could only have been an ordeal for him. Jacqueline Kennedy and Robert Kennedy were different, too. She was entirely feminine, he masculine; she was Gallic, he a Celt; she had to share her grief, he had to camp alone with his. But he could take hers, too. It was part of being the new head of the family, and so, without comment or expression, he heard the full horror of Dallas; heard the tale told in that husky voice which came to him softly across the scarred casket.

He looked out between the curtains. Until now the landscape had been either nondescript or coarse. Leaving the base Bill Greer had taken Westover Drive and Suitland Drive, driving through forested land to Suitland Parkway’s four lanes. Except for the rolling hills they might have been on a Texas superhighway. “Speed Limit 45, Speed Radar Checked,” the signs had warned; “No Trucks,” “Keep Right,” “Caution Construction Work Ahead,” “Entering Washington.” Crossing into the District they had passed through a labyrinth of viaducts and industrialization: a gasworks, a trumpery of motels, package stores, billboards, and Gulf and Esso (“Happy Motoring!”) filling stations. A few people had been waiting for them—Pam Turnure saw children standing in pajamas—but the groups were random, because the motorcade to Bethesda had been unexpected right up to the moment of its departure.

At the South Capitol Street Bridge the first downtown landmark appeared, the jutting Washington Monument, and Bob Kennedy saw it. To the right, and then dead ahead, shone the Capitol. The open circuit of his consciousness picked up another line; Jackie retained his attention, but part of his mind turned inward in retrospect. He was remembering the late 1950’s on the Hill when Senator John F. Kennedy sat on the McClellan Committee and Robert F. Kennedy had served as chief counsel with Kenny and Pierre as staff assistants. Greer turned west from Canal down Independence and the Mall. Now everything was evocative. The Federal Trade Commission: Big Steel. NASA: Glenn. The red gingerbread of the Smithsonian: his brother’s love affair with America’s past. His own office at Justice: Oxford, the Cuban prisoners. Internal Revenue: the tax cut. The Labor Department: Reuther and the March on Washington.

They passed between the twin wings of Agriculture. Greer swung north toward Seventeenth Street, and Bob peered north across the Mall and the Ellipse. On the left the unlovely mansard roof of the Executive Office Building hulked briefly, a bad Ronald Searle joke. Then, through the spidery late autumn foliage of Grover Cleveland’s maples and Theodore Roosevelt’s daimio oak, the Attorney General saw the gleaming South Portico of the executive mansion. For 1,036 days it had been the home of President John Kennedy. But this was the last of them. The thousand dawns were memory. The light had glimmered and died, and as Greer began the tortuous approach to the construction around the State Department, the Pan American Union Building intervened, eclipsing the pale vision.

Leaving the Mall, Greer had twisted his wheel to avoid a tall, narrow green truck parked by an open drain, into which a party of workmen were feeding coils of thick metal rope. Television technicians were already preparing funeral coverage; the Chesapeake & Potomac had begun laying what ultimately became nearly six miles of temporary video cable. By the following evening, when Bunny Mellon returned from the Caribbean, she would have the impression that “all Washington was being wired.” Certainly all downtown Washington was. Ultimately everything from the Hill to the Potomac was to be under electronic surveillance, with a CBS producer coordinating tripartisan network broadcasts. The forerunner of all this had been the brief scene at Andrews, when the national audience glimpsed for the first time the principals in the drama which had begun four and a half hours before. Unknown to the passengers in the Pontiac ambulance, each of the public buildings they passed was crowded with officials who had watched the descent of the truck lift—Guthman and the Assistant Attorneys General at Justice; the Assistant Secretaries of Freeman, Wirtz, and Hodges; and the Interstate Commerce Commission at Twelfth and Constitution.

That was the federal triangle. It had been no different elsewhere; Bill Greer took the Rock Creek Parkway, then Waterside Drive to Massachusetts Avenue, then Massachusetts to Wisconsin, and there was hardly a home in northwest Washington which did not know as much about the history of the day as he did—which did not, in fact, have more information about the assassin who had observed Greer through the cheap telescopic sight five hours earlier. At Jacqueline Kennedy’s mute appearance in 26000’s doorway the Ormsby-Gores had wept in the British Embassy, the Alphands in the French. They had known the President well, but there were also tears in the legations of nations so small that most of John Kennedy’s constituents couldn’t have placed them on a map. Out Massachusetts and along Kalorama Road this was normally the prime hour for weekly cocktail parties. There had been none today. Ambassadors hadn’t even advertised the fact that they were canceling them; that in itself would have been considered undiplomatic. In a state of semihypnosis the envoys who hadn’t driven to the MATS terminal had beheld the black and gray images flitting across the squares of glass. Indeed, it is possible to divide almost everyone in the District at that time into two groups: those who went to Andrews and those who monitored broadcasts of it. Lucy Johnson cried at the Elms, Mrs. Harriman in Georgetown, Mrs. Greer—with relief—in suburban Maryland. Even Agents Foster and Wells had seen some of it. Storing their shotguns on a high shelf in the Auchincloss kitchen, they had carried Caroline’s old crib down from the attic, rapidly improvised substitutes for two missing parts, and set it up for John. While the children played with young Jamie Auchincloss the men had hunched furtively over a set, keeping the volume knob down until, when Caroline ran in with a question, they had to switch it off altogether.

The capital was typical of the nation. Colonel Swindal had approached his landing strip at six o’clock there, five o’clock in the Midwest, four o’clock over the Rocky Mountains, and three o’clock on the West Coast. All America had been out of touch with the Presidency since the take-off from Love Field, and those who could feign disinterest or suppress curiosity were exceedingly rare. In Houston the staff of the Rice Hotel had assembled in Max Peck’s office, identifying among the Andrews pallbearers their Secret Service advance man, who had been among them twenty-four hours before (they had been worried about him; the denial that an agent had been killed had not yet caught up with the story), and in Dallas Marie Fehmer’s family saw her come down the MATS ramp after the new President and embraced one another, certain now that she was safe.

Seven screens had been alight in the White House alone: Nancy Tuckerman’s, Salinger’s, the Fish Room’s, the Situation Room’s, and, in the Presidential apartment, those in the West Sitting Room, the Treaty Room, and the third-floor hall. In the absence of the First Family and its retinue they were watched by servants. After Andrews the help continued to gaze. It was part of the national fever. Television, in Justice White’s words, had become “a hypodermic, an emotional bath.” Men who never watched regularly scheduled programs became helpless witnesses of whatever was shown; Justice Goldberg had hardly used his set before, yet all weekend he was either participating in funeral functions or at home, staring at shadows. At the time few doubted the wisdom of the networks’ policy. One did; Dwight Eisenhower thought the experience was upsetting to the American people. Eisenhower considered the renunciation of commercials a proper gesture of respect, but felt that a five-minute hourly summary of recent developments would have provided adequate news coverage, and that the familiar television diet would have been less disturbing. Perhaps the people needed to be disturbed. There is no doubt that they were. The marathon went on and on until White’s little daughter asked him, “Daddy, when are we going to be happy again?”

One unforeseen consequence of the ban on commercials was that programmers were hard-pressed to fill the time. Almost anyone with a eulogy to the slain President, or a memorial concert, or the haziest recollection of his assassin was instantly put on camera. Lacking those, producers dug into their video-tape libraries, running and rerunning every reel which was remotely relevant. One minute a viewer might see a still photograph of Jack Kennedy, Harvard ’40, in his black silk swimming suit. Moments later Lieutenant (jg) Kennedy would be decorated for valor in the Pacific (1943), Congressman Kennedy would be campaigning in Boston (1946), Senator Kennedy would be moving for Estes Kefauver’s Vice Presidential nomination by acclamation (1956), and President Kennedy would be informing the nation that the Soviet Union was installing a billion dollars’ worth of warheads in Cuba and that he had therefore ordered the island blockaded (1962). The sequence might be reversed, scrambled, or interrupted by films of Franklin Roosevelt’s funeral, which, in turn, might be succeeded by an amateur cameraman’s record of the abortive attempt on President-elect Roosevelt’s life in 1932. Since announced distinctions between tape and live camera were infrequent, and since television was the chief—sometimes the sole—tie with reality, individual recollections of that weekend are often an idiotic pastiche; Ted Sorensen returned from Andrews, walked into the Fish Room, and found himself listening to familiar words spoken by a familiar voice: it was the President delivering his Houston speech of yesterday evening, the text of which Kennedy and Sorensen had reviewed here in the West Wing yesterday morning.

Upstairs one picture was dark. The Oval Room had been deserted since 6 P.M. Twenty minutes before Air Force One landed, a small group of friends and relatives had been bracing themselves to console Jacqueline Kennedy there. After seeing the children off Nancy Tuckerman and the Bradlees had received Janet and Hudi Auchincloss. The strain had been conspicuous; all five had sat in constricted postures. Unsummoned waiters had arrived with chicken sandwiches, which were unwanted, and drinks, which were drained. Conversation had been spasmodic, schizoid. Mr. West, dignified and discreet, had entered occasionally to tell Nancy of the plane’s progress. Abruptly Jean Kennedy Smith, unheralded, appeared in the doorway holding the overnight bag in which she had packed her black mourning dress. She looked about uncertainly, her face white and pinched. Conversation stopped entirely. There really hadn’t been anything to say anyhow, and now they abandoned pretense and retired into private reveries. Less than a minute later Mr. West glided in behind Jean with word that the widowed First Lady would be going directly to Bethesda.

Nancy wavered. To Toni Bradlee she seemed unsure of her position; despite her long friendship with Mrs. Kennedy, Nancy had only been White House social secretary since early summer. “You don’t want to intrude,” she said hesitantly. “But maybe everyone will take that attitude and no one will go.” Then, decisively: “I’ll order a car.”

Jean left her bag in the Lincoln Room; Provi Parades hurried down from the third floor, where she had been listening to Frank McGee’s description of her mistress’ defiled suit over NBC, with a makeup case and a suitcase of clean clothes initialed “J.B.K.” Nancy took them, though neither was destined to be opened that night. Squinting down they saw that the Rose Garden was thick with reporters who had guessed that the coffin might be brought directly here. To avoid the press Nancy ordered Carpet (the White House garage) to take her party out through the East Gate.

Carpet, the garage; Crown, the mansion; and Castle, the White House headquarters where all Signal Corps ganglia met, were straining at the tether, and their eagerness to be of service to the family is the only rational explanation for the wild ride which followed. Everything was overdone. It was sensible of Castle to warn Captain Canada that “the First Lady’s parents” were on their way, but the rest of it was entirely unreasonable. A platoon of white-helmeted motorcycle policemen led the car to the District line, where Maryland state troopers took over. Every officer was winding his siren, and from passing cruisers and firehouses, some of them blocks away, other sirens echoed the strident wails. It was baroque. It was Ray Bradbury. It was a perpetual fire alarm—if every house in greater Washington had been ablaze, the noise would have been identical.

At the approach to Bethesda the sidewalks were solid. Because of the passengers’ stupor the dense crowds made little impression. The instinct of self-preservation is unquenchable, however, and their speed was as fantastic as it was needless. None of them had seen an automobile travel this fast on urban streets. As Greer moved steadily up Suitland Parkway, observing the 45 mph limit out of habit, they were hurtling along Wisconsin at over 90. Ben and Hudi in front and the four women cowering together in the back were literally frightened for their lives. They saw one near fatality. A motorcyclist overturned, sailed over his sidecar, landed on his feet, and scrabbled into the silent mass of curbside witnesses. “That ride was so bad,” Ben recalled later, “that it took your mind off everything else. It was an assault on a man’s senses. It added a new dimension. Before there had been sadness and the suffering with the children. Now there was darkness and this unbelievable velocity. The gaping bystanders began to look like ghouls to me; I had the feeling that we were racing toward our doom.”

The chauffeur chose one of the hospital’s three gates at random, and they were met by a civilian guard and a sedan bearing a Catholic chaplain and a senior nurse who had been told to watch for Mrs. Kennedy. The reception at either of the other two gates would have been the same. Since the Secret Service had dislodged the regular driver at Andrews, Captain Canada had no idea where the ambulance would enter. Therefore he had stationed chaplains and nurses at all of them. The guards were under orders to admit no one except employees, patients in serious condition, their relatives, and cars with White House clearance. Canada was worried about crowds. Minutes after the televised announcement that President Kennedy was en route here multitudes had begun to surround the grounds. Their sheer numbers were overwhelming, and unprecedented; Bethesda had not had this many visitors in all its history. Effective precautions were impossible. The sole barrier linking the gates was a low fence of four parallel green pipes. A child of six could scale it. Children did, and so did the infirm. The lawn was covered with a shapeless blur of onlookers.

The Captain had sent a distress signal to Fort McNair, without luck. General Wehle was at Andrews, and his MDW deputies were awaiting his return. Canada had exactly twenty-four Marines. Frantic, he deliberately misled the press, announcing that the President’s body would be taken to the emergency entrance. Then he mobilized all off-duty corpsmen at the heliport. He expected the worst. As it turned out, he couldn’t have been wider of the mark. The huge mob was to grow huger, but it was docile. Like the three thousand at Andrews, those here simply gazed. After the first hour most of the insiders forgot they were there. Ben Bradlee, who didn’t, continued to regard them as ghouls “or the kind of people who show up at society funerals.” That was unkind. Like Ben they were here out of respect, touched by what Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature.” They didn’t want to bother anyone, and they weren’t a bother. Not knowing how else to express themselves they just stood, some all night.

Bethesda Naval Hospital was dominated by its soaring stone tower. Nancy’s hotspurs led them there, and they alighted, grateful to be in one piece. Captain Canada greeted them; officers in blues swarmed around and ushered them to the elevator. The hospital had two VIP suites, on the sixteenth and seventeenth floors. In 1949 James Forrestal, the first Secretary of Defense, had leaped to his death from the first. They were taken to the second, a set of rooms shaped like a short-stemmed T. The stem was a corridor, separating a bedroom on the left and a small kitchen on the right. The T was crossed by a long narrow drawing room. Perhaps because it was unnautical—the only salty touch was an engraving of a sea serpent beset by four puffing winds—Bethesda was proud of the décor. It was certainly an expensive suite, generously equipped with air conditioning, wall-to-wall carpeting, and bedroom television, but it was drab; walls, furniture, jalousies, and carpeting were uniformly colored a shade of tan perilously close to institutional buff. Toni thought it “sanitized and cold.” On the brightest day the effect would be depressing, and this was not that.

He left, and Jean Smith nervously applied lipstick. Toni watched her and nudged Nancy. In an undertone she asked, “Do you think we should?”

Jiggs Canada had once been George Burkley’s shipmate, and he should have known him better. Posting three teams of chaplains and nurses had been superfluous. Though Burkley made light of his rank, he was a rear admiral in the Regular Navy, and a stickler for form. “The President of the United States always enters by the main gate,” he firmly told Greer as they followed the Tuckerman race out Wisconsin. Even the team there was by-passed. “Don’t stop,” Burkley ordered. This time there were no flashing lights or orchestration of braying sirens, because those close to the President knew he had despised them, but there was a motorcycle escort. Greer accelerated, the policemen roared ahead, and the ambulance and its train of shadowing Mercurys swept up to the entrance. Canada saluted; a commander opened the door. Burkley struggled off Landis’ lap.

There he found everything shipshape. On the blue-and-gold anchor-embellished welcome mat were the captain; Rear Admiral Calvin Galloway, the commanding officer of Bethesda’s medical center; and a fourth chaplain—Canada was the kind of seaman who carries spare anchors everywhere. He and the Attorney General helped Mrs. Kennedy out. Clint, Pam, and Dr. Walsh approached from the other cars, and in an uneven rank they crossed the marble lobby and vanished into the dark brown elevator.

Admiral Galloway lingered on the walk, detained by General McHugh. “We’re going to the morgue for the autopsy and the embalming,” Godfrey said. “Mrs. Kennedy doesn’t want an undertaker.”

Godfrey pressed him. “Those are the family’s wishes. Isn’t it possible?”

“It’s not impossible,” said the Admiral frowning. “It’s difficult, though. And it might be unsatisfactory.”

O’Donnell and O’Brien came over, and the matter was laid before them. “You’ve heard the decision from the General,” Ken said curtly, and the Admiral left perturbed. They then headed for the elevator. Godfrey stayed by the coffin; as the honor guard, he meant to remain with the President’s body, wherever it went. To his dismay it went nowhere for five full minutes. Everyone seemed to have gone. Even the Mercurys had driven off. McHugh, Greer, and Kellerman and the coffin had been left among the motionless spectators. In the deflected lobby light their eyes shone like cat’s eyes. The General started counting them and then gave up. He looked down uneasily. He couldn’t move the coffin alone. He didn’t know what to do. He had been prepared for everything except inactivity.

The muddle was the consequence of a failure in interservice communication. The Army had been as vigilant as the Navy; General Wehle had stationed himself beyond the cornerstone in a staff car, with Lieutenant Bird and his body bearers right behind him in a truck. They had observed Mrs. Kennedy’s arrival, but the darkness, the great blocks of silent people, and the many moving vehicles distracted them. It had confused two naval physicians, too. When an ambulance drew away from the curb they called, “That’s it—we’ll guide you to the morgue.” At the morgue Wehle, Bird, and the six enlisted men debarked and inspected each other’s uniforms while awaiting some movement from the ambulance. It was still as still. The Lieutenant crept up and peered inside. It was empty. Even the driver had gone. Panicky, they fled back and saw, among the shining cat’s eyes, the uneasy face of Godfrey McHugh. Wehle and Bird colored. The Military District of Washington was meticulous about ceremony; for a casket team to leave a Commander in Chief’s casket was an astounding lapse, and after casting about bitterly—and vainly—for the two doctors, they re-formed the tiny escort.

The morgue was fronted by a concrete jetty approached along the left side by a short flight of cement steps. Since coffins were the most precious burden to pass this way the stairs should have been designed for them. They weren’t. They were too narrow, and a steel handrail was an impediment to bearers. The railing thwarted a gesture of McHugh’s. This once, he thought, it would be appropriate for a general to join hands with five enlisted men, and he relieved the Coast Guardsman in the team. But navigating the ponderous Britannia required exceptional dexterity on the left. McHugh was too old. He tried, and kept trying until his eyes filled with frustration. It was no use. He was holding them all up, and motioning to the lanky Coast Guard youth he capitulated. The others moved quickly then, inside and sharp left through double brown doors labeled “RESTRICTED—AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.” Lieutenant Bird decided that he wasn’t an authorized person. After his men had lowered the casket to a wheeled gurney he shepherded them into the corridor and mounted guard. Two Navy corpsmen passed, rolling a litter. Nothing appeared to be on it except a small lump wrapped in sheeting. “What’s that?” he inquired. “Baby. Born dead,” one mumbled. The Lieutenant whispered, “Oh.” It occurred to him that Bethesda wasn’t going to be at all like Arlington.

Actually a morgue—any morgue—is starker than any cemetery, more forbidding than even an emergency room. Within its severe limits this one was a model of cleanliness and efficiency. The anteroom, from which Sam Bird had retreated, was furnished with eight reefers (neatly labeled “Remains”) and twin gurneys. The spotless tile walls of the main chamber were lined with specialized equipment: medical scales, a cylindrical sterilizer, a washing machine for rubber gloves, and a sawing machine which looked curiously like a hobbyist’s jigsaw. Dominating them all was the eight-foot-long autopsy table in the center. The table resembled nothing encountered in ordinary experience. It was high, constructed of stainless steel, and perforated with hundreds of holes. Tubes, faucets, and motors jutted from the sides; enormous drainage pipes swooped down from the surface and disappeared into the cement floor. Such frames are so obviously what they are that some medical schools have adopted the practice of administering tranquilizers to students examining one in operation for the first time. The layman recoils, and long after he has left he remembers the stench of the chemicals.

Two laymen, Generals McHugh and Wehle, watched the Navy’s autopsy crew open the Dallas coffin and carefully lift the body of the President to the perforated table top. Godfrey couldn’t take it. Giddy, he sank to a bench, and Roy Kellerman tiptoed in and sat beside him. MDW’s CO remained, standing at attention at the foot of the table. Husky, jut-jawed, a 1930 graduate of West Point, Philip Wehle looked like a cartoonist’s concept of a brass hat. But labels are deceptive. General Wehle’s ideal had become a politician, a man younger than himself and a former naval person. To him John Kennedy had been a gallant officer, tried in combat. He had voted for him and enthusiastically approved of his foreign and domestic policies. Eleven days ago the General had pulled his rank to acquire a firsthand view of him in Arlington. He had watched the President stride vigorously at the head of the Veterans Day parade, his small son at his side, and that evening he had decided that everything he had learned on the Hudson about leadership and character had taken on new meaning.

Now, he thought—and he thought of it that way—the nation’s Commander in Chief has been killed in action. He felt “a great welling love, an unendurable sadness, the cruelty of a personal loss.” He stood erect, shoulders back, thumbs tight along the seams of his creased trousers in the Academy posture he had learned at the Highlands, his eyes on the tall table’s punched steel surface. Two naval officers had sliced away Vernon Oneal’s rubber and plastic envelopes with flashing scalpels and stripped Kennedy entirely. The Chief Executive lay naked on his back. At this angle the throat was invisible to Wehle. He observed a slight discoloration over one eye. Otherwise the President appeared unmarred. The general became oblivious of the steel slab and its immaculate machinery. He saw nothing except Kennedy. He thought, What a magnificent body he had, the physique of a Greek god. From deep in his past, from over a third of a century, the strains of A. E. Housman’s “To an Athlete Dying Young,” memorized in a childhood classroom, came to Wehle’s mind:

The time you won your town the race

We chaired you through the market-place;

Man and boy stood cheering by,

And home we brought you shoulder-high.

To-day, the road all runners come,

Shoulder-high we bring you home,

And set you at your threshold down,

Townsman of a stiller town.

It was 6:25. They were over the White House south grounds.2 Earlier the big brown wasps had used the grass, but now the steel pad had been set up, and the first H-21, shining in the beams of lights held by servants and correspondents, eased toward it. Seventy feet away the passengers could see the tree house and young John’s swing and slide set. The children were first in the thoughts of those on the ground, too. They had always been the helicopter’s chief greeters, and as Lyndon Johnson stepped onto the lawn, arriving at the executive mansion for the first time as President, he looked about and discovered that no one was looking at him; as though in response to a silent command all had pivoted toward the balcony, where Caroline and John would normally have been. Three years ago, when President Kennedy had won his race, he had been borne here shoulder-high; now President Johnson was arriving in a tragic time of mourning. It was without doubt the most painful assumption of power in American history.

Crossing the lawn he talked to McNamara and Mac Bundy. Even Bundy, the most precise man in the government, seems to have been unclear whom he meant by “the President.” He said, “There are two things I am assuming, Mr. President. One is that everything in locked files before 2 P.M. today belongs to the President’s family, and the other is that Mrs. Kennedy will handle the funeral arrangements.” Johnson said, “That’s correct.” He strode past the Rose Garden, past Evelyn Lincoln’s office and the Cabinet Room, through the entire West Wing and over West Executive Avenue to his Vice Presidential office on the second floor of the Executive Office Building. Juanita Roberts, his chief secretary, was waiting for him, and he went straight to work. Ted Clifton, arriving at the EOB fifteen minutes later, suggested to Bill Moyers that Johnson should use Kennedy’s oval office. Moyers mentioned it, and Johnson sharply vetoed it. “That would be presumptuous of me,” he said. He reached for his telephone, remembered that Marie Fehmer had the little book with all his numbers, and he asked Juanita, “Where’s Marie?”

She was lost. In fact, the bulk of his party had disintegrated between the pad and the mansion. His aides were bewildered by the enormous house. George Reedy entered the Diplomatic Reception Room, took several wrong turns, and finally asked a White House policeman for directions. Jack Valenti and Cliff Carter were avoiding guards. Neither had a White House pass, and they raced frantically up and down the red-carpeted basement corridor until they blundered outside and sighted the Executive Office Building. But Marie had the worst time; like them she was painfully aware that “I had no clearance, no identification, no way of proving who I was. I had worked in Lyndon’s Capitol office, so I didn’t even have EOB clearance. The only time I’d been in 274 was during the Cuban crisis.” Utterly lost, she explored the White House carpenter shop, florist shop, swimming pool, and theater before she, too, found the way out to West Executive. When Marie returned to her Washington apartment late that night, her roommates told her that during her period as a missing person the President had phoned there twice, trying to locate her.

The new First Lady didn’t pause at her new home. Anxious about her younger daughter, she asked to be driven straight to the more familiar house at 4040 Fifty-second Street, NW. Lucy Baines was waiting for her on the front steps. “Oh, Mother, I go to the most wonderful school!” she cried. “We all said prayers in the gym when it happened, and then they took me aside and told me the President was dead.” Inside, the Elms was crowded with people. Lady Bird was surprised and touched; she had forgotten that they had so many friends. She had also forgotten that the house had this many television sets. Screens seemed to be in every corner of every room, blaring away. Excusing herself, she went upstairs with Liz Carpenter, telephoned her older daughter in Austin, and changed her clothes. Hugging a dressing gown to her, she looked speculatively at Liz. “How do you feel?” “Chilly,” Liz answered. “I’m freezing,” Lady Bird said. She switched on the bedroom television—it was really the only way to find out what was going on—and lay down, heaping coverlets and blankets on herself. They didn’t help. Her teeth were chattering. She couldn’t remember a November this cold.

McNamara and Ball had dropped out of Johnson’s wake in the West Wing. He told them he had invited the Congressional leadership to join him here when they returned from the airport, so they swerved right, into the Cabinet Room, and sat talking for twenty minutes. It was the first time they had discussed the Kennedy Presidency together, and they found that they had been thinking along the same lines since the inaugural. Both felt that his narrow mandate in 1960 had been a cloud, that the driving force in his first administration had been a desire to unite the country. Each had cherished great hopes for the autumn of 1964. They had believed that Kennedy would win by a large margin, and that if the opposition nominated Goldwater the landslide would be unprecedented. Then, they had believed, the President’s vision would guarantee four of the most exhilarating, innovative years America had ever known.

They parted as the last of Johnson’s staff members were assembling on the second floor of the EOB. Awaiting them, the President told Jenkins and Ted Reardon, the Kennedy aide responsible for the Cabinet liaison, to set up a Cabinet meeting for tomorrow. Kilduff was told of Presidential displeasure with the Andrews debarkation; Lem Johns was instructed to fetch soup from the White House staff mess. Johnson, Reedy noticed, hardly mentioned Dallas. At one point he did murmur, “Rufe did a very heroic thing today. He threw me on the floor of that car and threw himself on top of me.” But that was an aside. He was concentrating on the future. “There must be no gap,” he said emphatically, and “The government must go forward,” and “We’ve had a tremendous shock, and we have to keep going.”

Marie entered, breathless; the phoning started, with Moyers placing the calls. At 7:05 the President talked to Harry Truman. At 7:10 he spoke to Eisenhower in New York, offering to send a plane for him. Eisenhower explained that he had his own plane and could fly down immediately. But that, they agreed, would be unnecessary; they could meet in the mansion tomorrow morning. At 7:20 Johnson expressed his sorrow to Sargent Shriver, who was still toiling by Ralph Dungan’s desk. Hanging up, the President wrote the first of two notes on White House stationery, and at 7:25 he telephoned J. Edgar Hoover. The Director was home. Unaware that regular programs had been suspended, he had waited until seven o’clock before turning his television on, thinking to catch NBC’s nightly newscast on Channel 4. He was watching a rerun of Kennedy’s October 22, 1962, missile speech and wondering whether this was the best Huntley and Brinkley could do when the phone rang. His old neighbor said he wanted a complete FBI report on the assassination. Depressing the receiver, Hoover called his office, ordering a special assistant and thirty agents to Dallas.

Juanita Roberts reported that the Senators and Congressmen were waiting in the anteroom. The President murmured that they would have to wait a little longer. He had to finish that second note. In each of them the bold, angular Johnsonian scrawl was missing. His handwriting was cramped and diminished—some words were so small they seemed microfilmed.

November 22, 1963

7:20 Friday Night

Dear John—

It will be many years before you understand fully what a great man your father was. His loss is a deep personal tragedy for all of us, but I wanted you particularly to know that I share your grief—You can always be proud of him—

Affectionately

Lyndon B. Johnson

The second was a little longer. Himself the father of two girls, he had been particularly fond of the President’s daughter.

Friday Night 7:30

November 22, 1963

Dearest Caroline—

Your father’s death has been a great tragedy for the Nation, as well as for you, and I wanted you to know how much my thoughts are of you at this time.

He was a wise and devoted man. You can always be proud of what he did for his country—

Affectionately

Lyndon B. Johnson

He would never be a simple man. He was capable of tactlessness and tenderness, cunning and passion. Wordlessly he handed the letters to his secretary, heaved himself up and strode into the anteroom to greet the leadership.

The meeting was brief and accomplished little. They discussed no legislation. Turning deliberately from face to face, the President said that he was speaking to them “as one friend to another.” He asked for their cooperation, counsel, and assistance; and it was warmly pledged. To Mike Mansfield and Everett Dirksen he expressed the hope that a new, stronger bipartisan leadership group could be forged. “Then,” in Mansfield’s words, “we broke up.” But one Senator remained. As Hubert Humphrey observed in his memorandum to himself the following morning, he

stayed back for just a moment and had a private word with President Johnson. I think of him as Lyndon, as a dear friend. I assured him of my wholehearted cooperation, of my desire to be of all possible assistance, and asked him to feel free to call upon me. He put his arm around me and said that he needed me desperately. A little later, Bill Moyers, who is close to Lyndon Johnson, told me that the President would need me very, very much. He thought even more so than President Kennedy had ever needed me, if that was the case. I told Bill Moyers, who is close to President Johnson, that I stood ready to serve in any capacity, however he wanted me.

Jean Kennedy Smith had been looking out a window of the tower suite at Bethesda, watching the darkness press hard against the cold panes, when a muted voice said, “She’s here.” She turned, and Mrs. Kennedy was standing in the center of the drawing room. “There,” in Ben Bradlee’s words, “was this totally doomed child, with that God-awful skirt, not saying anything, looking burned alive.” She crumpled into Ben’s arms with a moan, half-sob; he had never heard a sound like it before. Under his breath he said, “Cry. Cry. Don’t be too brave,” and transferred her to Toni, who didn’t really believe it was happening. But despite the unreality Toni was capable of coherent thought, and she felt that Janet Auchincloss was being ignored. “Here’s your mother,” she murmured. Jackie turned to Mrs. Auchincloss with a wan smile and kissed her. Her mother said, “Oh, Jackie, if this had to happen, thank God he wasn’t maimed.”

The widow embraced Nancy Tuckerman. “Poor Tucky,” she said quietly. “You came all the way down from New York to take this job, and now it’s all over. It’s so sad. You will stay with me for a little while, won’t you?”

Nancy was stricken: Jackie was thinking of her. In the little hall between the bedroom and kitchen, where the others had hung back, Canada whispered to Burkley, “Does she always speak in that soft voice?” “Always,” Burkley whispered.

Behind her stood Robert Kennedy. He stepped to the telephone, made a brief call, and quickly returned. To Bradlee he was “the strongest thing you have ever seen. He was subdued, holding Jackie together, keeping everyone’s morale up when his own couldn’t have been worse. He was just sensational.”

Beckoning Jackie aside, Bob told her, “They think they’ve found the man who did it. He says he’s a Communist.”

She stared. Oh, my God, she thought, but that’s absurd. Later she would think about hatred and the highly charged atmosphere of Dallas; at the moment, however, she just felt sickened. It was like existentialism, entirely purposeless, and she thought, It even robs his death of any meaning. She returned to her mother. “He didn’t even have the satisfaction of being killed for civil rights,” she said. “It’s—it had to be some silly little Communist.”

Janet Auchincloss invited her daughter to stay with her in Georgetown. There was no response. Then Mrs. Auchincloss said casually, “You know that the children are at O Street.”

“I sent no message. They should be in their own beds. Mummy, my God, those poor children; their lives shouldn’t be disrupted, now of all times! Tell Miss Shaw to bring them back and put them to bed.”

Mrs. Auchincloss called Maude Shaw, but the nurse already knew. The softest whisper traveled fast in that suite; Clint Hill had overheard the exchange and phoned Agent Wells from the nurse’s desk outside.

Agatha Pozen had already left. At 6:15 Foster had put her in a black White House Chrysler with a policeman. Now the Auchinclosses’ Italian butler, who had been clearing the dinner table, whisked the unused crib back to the attic while the kiddie detail loaded Caroline, John, Miss Shaw, and the cased shotgun into another car. At 7:43 they left Hamlet, and at 7:56 they were back inside the mansion grounds. Foster and Wells escorted the nurse and children to the second floor; they rode down to F-5, where a White House policeman handed Foster a heavy brown paper bag. “Joe Giordano gave me this,” the policeman said. “He told me to turn it over to you and to nobody else.” Foster stepped into Franklin Roosevelt’s old map room and opened it. He needed only one glance. Inside was a pink pillbox hat spattered with blood. Rapidly folding over the bag’s top, he examined the side. Printed there, in large capital letters, was “HILL.” Foster called the guard. In bitter fury he asked, “What do you think my name is?” “Clint Hill,” the man said positively. He saw Foster’s expression and became less positive. “Why, I always thought you were Hill—aren’t you Hill?” “No.” Furious, Foster gave him his own and added another for the guard.

Upstairs Maude Shaw faced a far more difficult trial. At Bethesda Mrs. Auchincloss had confronted her daughter with the fact that the news must be broken to Caroline and John.

“Jackie, are you going to tell the children or do you want me to, or do you want Miss Shaw?”

“Well… John can wait. But Caroline should be told before she learns from her friends.”

“Oh, yes, Mummy. What will she think if she suddenly…” She thought a moment and then said something which her mother thought wise. “I want to tell them, but if they find it out before I get back, ask Miss Shaw to use her discretion.”

Janet Auchincloss didn’t quite do that; she used her own discretion. Jacqueline Kennedy’s mother was determined to remove one last—perhaps crushing—duty from her daughter’s shoulders today. Phoning the nurse again, she began, “How are the children doing?”

They were fine, Miss Shaw replied. A trifle confused, perhaps, but at their age they were resilient; they had been fed and were drowsy. She herself was not at all fine. Self-control had become an iron struggle. Sometimes she lost it and would have to turn her back until she had regained composure.

Miss Shaw was speechless. She couldn’t cry aloud—the children were in the next room—but she wanted to. Instead, she said in a low, desperate voice, “Please, no. Let this cup pass from me.”

“I can’t take a child’s last happiness from her. I don’t have the heart—I can’t destroy her little happy day.”

Until today the nurse had thought that last August was the low tide in her life. In the first hours of Patrick’s life Caroline had been ecstatic at the thought of having another baby brother. Then the blow had fallen. Mrs. Kennedy had been in the hospital, the President had been too griefstricken to speak to his daughter, and so it had been left to the nurse to look into those wide eyes—“the Bouvier eyes,” as she always called them—and say that Patrick had gone to heaven. She had been convinced then that nothing could be harder. This, however, was on another plane entirely. They hadn’t known Patrick. Neither Miss Shaw nor Caroline had ever seen him. But the President had been the most important figure in their lives. He and his daughter had been particularly close; remembering how proudly he would introduce “My daughter, Caroline” to visitors, the nurse begged Mrs. Auchincloss, “Please, please, can’t someone else do it?”

Miss Shaw was probably the best choice. There was no real substitute for Caroline’s mother, of course. Next to her was Robert Kennedy. With his discipline, his feeling for children (he was far warmer among them than with adults), and his resemblance to his older brother he would have been admirable. Miss Shaw, however, was there. Moreover she had been with Caroline since the President’s daughter was eleven days old.

She put John to bed. Now it was the girl’s turn. In Caroline’s bedroom Miss Shaw said slowly, “Your father has been shot. They took him to a hospital, but the doctors couldn’t make him better.”

“So,” she continued, “your father has gone to look after Patrick. Patrick was so lonely in heaven. He didn’t know anybody there. Now he has the best friend anyone could have.”

“God gives each of us a thing to do,” she said. “God is making your father a guardian angel over you and your mother, and his light will shine down on you always. His light is shining now, and he’s watching you, and he’s loving you, and he always will.”

The little girl buried her face in the pillow, crying. Miss Shaw stood by the bed, her rough hands fighting one another, until the child slept. Then she tucked her in, crossed to John’s room, tucked him into his crib, and sat alone in her room between them. She tried to knit. It was no good. Her fingers wouldn’t work properly. She laced them together and sat rocking in the dark, alert for the slightest movement from the yellow bedroom, throughout the night.

On the second floor of Parkland Hospital John Connally slept soundly under the orange tile walls, watched by Dr. Jenkins, Nellie, and twenty members of the Connally family, and guarded by a troop of armed Texas Rangers. The Governor’s operation had been successful. It had been a surgical feat, however, and the possibility of a downturn was very real. To assure recuperation Jenkins had placed him next to his office. The Rangers approved. None of the windows faced out; a second gunman could not penetrate here.

This concern over other assassins later seemed like the belated shutting of a barn door, but it was impossible to be certain that Friday evening, and everything with hinges was being closed. In his White House office Arthur Schlesinger was writing: “No one knows yet who the killer is—whether a crazed Birchite or a crazed Castroite. I only know that the killer has done an incalculable disservice to this country and to all mankind. It will be a long time before this nation is as nobly led as it has been in these last three years.” Oswald had then been under interrogation for over five hours. That he alone could be responsible for his act appeared highly unlikely, and in the context of the time Schlesinger’s uncertainty and the vigilance of the Rangers made excellent sense.

The sleep of children and patients, like the floodlit high school football games, was abnormal. America’s nerves had never been tauter; the networks’ national audience did not diminish, even though the commentators had little to report. A man wearing a swastika was arrested in the state capital at Madison, Wisconsin, after he had announced that he was “celebrating Kennedy’s death.” It was A-wire news on every ticker. Almost anything became the occasion for a chime of teletype bells. The family’s desire that floral tributes be omitted and the money be contributed to charity, and the announcements that a special Mass was being held at Georgetown University, that Washington’s Episcopal Cathedral would remain open all night, and that Cardinal Cushing would celebrate the funeral Mass in Washington Monday were treated as flashes. When the Cardinal’s decision was broadcast at 8:30 P.M., the bulletins about Oswald had already begun to be stale. Nearly everything of significance had been learned so quickly. What was left was an intolerable vacuum.

Now, as at Parkland six hours earlier, men with jobs were lucky. Under Secretary Johnson presided all night over a State Department task force assembling scraps of data about Oswald (a scene he would have relished). At Gawler’s the Death Watch rehearsals continued with an innovation; their commander, First Lieutenant Donald W. Sawtelle, had been informed that Mrs. Kennedy wanted members of the honor guard to stand with their backs to the coffin. It couldn’t be done. The watch was silent; the enlisted men moved on visual signals. They had to be stationed so that they could see the officer in charge out of the corner of their eyes. But trying it was something to do, and Sawtelle persisted. In the basement of the EOB Joe Giordano and Boots Miller furled and refurled Kennedy’s Presidential flag before storing it with his seal of office in Room 89½; then they went to work on his silk American flag, carefully adjusting each fold. Chief Rowley assembled his Texas agents in the White House staff mess. He grilled them individually and issued an order that they and the men still on duty with Johnson or with Kennedy’s body must submit detailed reports before leaving for home. In the mansion Charles Fincklin told his six butlers that in view of Mrs. Kennedy’s uncertain plans they would all remain on duty throughout tonight and tomorrow. The staff would pass the time by making sandwiches. He hadn’t counted on the servants’ eagerness. By 9 P.M., when Sawtelle transferred his command post from Gawler’s to the White House, all available space in the State Dining Room was covered with towering platters, and tables were being cleared in the President’s theater downstairs for more of them.

Again, as in the hospital, some of those without work invented it. Policemen couldn’t sit idle, so they crisscrossed the capital in tight motorcycle formations, and it became a quite ordinary thing to see these grim V’s of helmeted men roaring aimlessly across the city. The firehouses continued to scream. Even in Georgetown, normally so quiet, one heard their banshees till dawn; had there been a real fire, one felt, every unit in the District, southern Maryland, and northern Virginia would have responded pell-mell. The writers wrote. In Schlesinger’s office he and Ken Galbraith drafted separate letters to Mrs. Kennedy. Galbraith’s note was brief but poignant in its pledge of devotion.

Friday evening

Dearest Jackie:

Nothing I can say can mitigate the shame and horror of this day. Your husband was the most brilliant, able and inspiring member of my generation. He was the one man to whom this country could confide its destiny with confidence and hope. He animated everything he did with passion and gaiety and wit. To have known him and worked with and for him is the most fulfilling experience I have ever had or could imagine—

Dearest Jackie, the love and grief of a nation may do something to suggest the feeling of terrible vacancy and despair we all feel. Marian and my weeping children join me in sending you our profoundest love and sympathy. I know that you will let me know when I can do anything to help.

With abiding love

Arthur

Others drank, and learned what those who had been aboard the Presidential aircraft could have told them: there were no intoxicants on November 22. Pat Moynihan and a friend split a fifth of whiskey. Their senses remained undulled; they examined the label with astonishment. Jim Swindal pushed aside a glass at Andrews, telephoned his wife in Falls Church and encountered another aspect of the assassination: the countless women who had loved Kennedy from a distance were inconsolable. The Colonel’s wife was among the few who had met him. A Stoughton photograph of her with the President was her most treasured possession, and she was hysterical. So was Marie Fehmer; so was Marie Harriman. Mrs. Harriman was valiantly trying to serve as hostess to a brilliant group of guests which was headed by Adlai Stevenson and which later included Schlesinger and Galbraith, but she wasn’t up to it. In the thirty-three years of their marriage Harriman had never seen her so upset. His wife was caught up in a terrible, vindictive rage. She had been one of those who had dreaded the Dallas Right, and now she was beyond comfort.

Many men who had thought themselves at loose ends became busy answering telephones. The chief telephoner was the new Chief Executive. The Johnsonian era had begun. With the two White House switchboards at his disposal he found fulfillment; one hand was wrapped around the receiver in a stranglehold—no one has succeeded in covering so many inches of plastic—while the other played deftly over the colorless buttons of the Signals console. Two of the men he reached Friday evening were Arthur Goldberg and Ted Sorensen. Justice Goldberg’s home phone rang at 9 P.M. The President had recognized him at Andrews; he asked why Goldberg hadn’t come forward to shake his hand. The justice explained that he had gone to meet the coffin of President Kennedy. He agreed to come to Johnson’s office tomorrow for a further talk. Sorensen heard from the President at approximately 9:30, just as he was finishing dinner. Like Goldberg, Sorensen was asked to call tomorrow. Automatically Ted replied, “Yes, Mr. President.” Then the implications of what he had just said reached him. He would never call John Kennedy “Mr. President” again. He replaced the receiver and collapsed.

Lyndon Johnson was perhaps the most active telephoner in the city, which is saying a lot, because Chesapeake & Potomac records indicate voluminous activity in every exchange. These were the hours when long-distance dialing began to climb steeply. Congressmen were especially in demand; their constituents were calling them. The Texans were out of action, knocked out by exhaustion. After long-distance conversations of their own, to relatives, they went to bed and sank into a deep sleep from which they could not be roused. Any Senator or Representative in the buildings flanking the Capitol was almost certain to hear from home, however. He would find himself listening to members of his party, of the opposition; even to foreigners who felt a compelling need to speak to someone in public life.

Hubert Humphrey had the impression that he had half the state of Minnesota on the line. After discussing Lyndon Johnson with George Smathers (who “thought I was going to be needed very much by the President”) Humphrey went to his desk in Suite 1313 of the New Senate Office Building. He felt forsaken. Then the ringing began. The callers were

people who merely wanted to tell me how sorry they were… plain people who would weep over the telephone. I recall one particular phone call from a Minneapolis or St. Paul cab driver who had just finished work, and he wanted to tell me that his whole family wanted to be remembered to… Mrs. Kennedy and the children and how sorry they were that they had lost their great friend President Kennedy. That was characteristic of all the calls. Not a single one was anything but filled with sorrow and sympathy and understanding. How wonderful it is that the people of the country felt so close to the President.

Reaching Senators was relatively easy. Barney Ross was obscure. Nevertheless he heard from two former crewmen of PT 109, one in Louisiana and one in New Hampshire. Twenty years after their shipwreck they remembered the young officer who had rescued them, and they wanted Barney, the other officer who had been aboard, to know that they were on their way to the funeral. Fitful, Barney herded his wife and children into the car and drove slowly around Bethesda, observing the crowd. The Rosses thus joined the capital’s army of roamers—those who had gathered at Andrews Field or outside the hospital or in Lafayette Park, who went to the office or explored strange taverns, who walked the streets. Humphrey abandoned his suite and showed up on three network broadcasts. Sorensen had encountered Burkley’s chief petty officer in the West Wing. “Did he suffer?” he asked. Chief Hendrix assured him that the President couldn’t have felt anything; death had been instantaneous. Ted nodded silently and wandered off, winding up in his brother’s apartment. The wife of the French Ambassador paced West Executive Avenue with her husband in tow. Hervé Alphand had come reluctantly. It was against his professional intuition; he never came to the President’s residence unless formally invited. But Nicole was adamant. She must be at Jackie’s side, she insisted, and she gave up only after Taz Shepard, on his way to brief Johnson in the EOB, told her Mrs. Kennedy was remaining at the hospital with the President’s body. At about the same time there was a flurry of activity on the opposite side of the mansion; a car was stuck in the middle of East Executive Avenue. Behind the wheel was Ed Guthman. A writer, like Schlesinger and Galbraith, he had been trying to set down his impressions of the day in his Justice Department office, and had just quit. The language had never seemed so inadequate. So now he was here. Anything odd in that sensitive neighborhood stirred suspicion Friday evening, but the explanation was embarrassingly simple. Guthman’s car was out of gas.

The legitimate workers, those who invented busy work, the telephoners and writers and wanderers, were a minority. The majority maintained its television vigil, and late in the evening their new President rejoined them. Leaving George Reedy to prepare tomorrow’s agenda, Johnson raced out MacArthur Boulevard to Spring Valley with Moyers, Valenti, Cliff Carter, and Horace Busby, a former Texas newspaperman who subsequently joined his staff. Behind the wrought-iron gates of the Elms, patrolled by agents with shotguns, the President restlessly strode from set to set. Lady Bird came down to the terrace and sat beside her husband for a while. Then Busby left and everyone else trooped up to the master bedroom and studied the screen. Their comments were sporadic. Once the President said softly of Mrs. Kennedy, “At a time when we showed the world our seamy, ugly side, she revealed and symbolized our nobler side. We should always be grateful to her.” But most of the time he just looked. Later Valenti recalled that the networks “were re-enacting scenes of Dallas and of Texas, and of the world-wide reaction to the assassination; they would show the parade and the motorcade and then they would show films of John Kennedy making statements and speeches in the past. Lyndon Johnson watched this with interest.”

Eventually the man of the house turned off the light, and the conversation continued in the dark until he fell asleep. His three aides then tiptoed out. The first night of the Johnson administration was one of the few in which the President was not the most rapt viewer in the capital; many Washingtonians remained attentive through the night, switching from television to radio and back. The nonstop broadcasts of that weekend were to leave Americans with the feeling that news coverage could not have been more complete. Actually, it was random. Some of the most significant developments were deliberately (and wisely) concealed, and insignificant sidelights were ignored by the press, not because of their unimportance but because broadcasters were unaware of them. The public did not know, for example, that President Kennedy and Officer Tippit were not the only people killed in Dallas on November 22. At 10:40 that evening there was a third murder, unrelated to the others. The victim, a thirty-two-year-old woman, was stabbed to death by her lover. In police language he “picked up and grabbed a butcher knife and started cutting up on the deceased.” She was pronounced dead at Parkland.

The arrival of the Kennedy party in Bethesda’s suite had set in motion a strange ritualistic dance. Groups formed, parted, and re-formed; partners were changed; speaking in metallic voices, the participants watched each other covertly and swiftly glided to the side of anyone who displayed signs of distress. Certain individuals detached themselves. Evelyn Lincoln sat on a window sill clutching the President’s worn black alligator briefcase, drifting in a private world of thought; Jean Smith, similarly withdrawn, stood off to one side; and Bob Kennedy was frequently on the telephone, talking to Officer Tippit’s widow, to Nellie Connally, to Lee Radziwill in London, to Shriver. Otherwise the drawing room ballet was continuous. Dave Powers had set the stage by ordering drinks, beer, and coffee. The hospital galley sent up sandwiches—thick, crusty cheese sandwiches, the antithesis of the dainty wafers which were traditional at the White House—and with these props the show went shakily on. At one point the Attorney General even ordered a record player. That was too much for Ben Bradlee. He protested. Kennedy looked around vacantly. “She’d like it,” he said, pointing at Toni, and instructed a yeoman to bring the music. Ben waited anxiously, but the yeoman did not return. Bob apparently forgot about it.

In the danse macabre certain themes recurred. At one time or another nearly everyone present urged Mrs. Kennedy to change her clothes. To each such suggestion she shook her head tightly. Then it was felt that she ought to take a sedative, and attempts were made to enlist Captain Canada’s support. Here, too, she was inflexible, and Dr. John Walsh supported her. He said, “If she doesn’t want it, O.K. Leave her alone, let her talk herself out.” She was talking a great deal—he thought she was “on a talkathon.” To him she recounted her recollection of what had happened in the Presidential Lincoln. She told Ben and Toni the story of the ring at Parkland and recalled the death of Patrick. Always the two deaths were intertwined. For the country the assassination of the President stood alone; for her the two acts of the double tragedy were inseparable.

All afternoon her mother had been afraid that she would feel a revulsion against the United States. Since the age of twelve Jackie had lived most of her life in the capital. Washington, Janet Auchincloss believed, was the proper home for her older daughter, and she wanted her grandchildren brought up as Americans. In the bedroom she said, “I hope you will never live any place but in this country, because Jack would want that.” Mrs. Kennedy looked amazed. She replied, “But of course. I’m going to live in Georgetown, where Jack and I were.”

In Mrs. Auchincloss’ words, “Jackie knew how the President’s funeral should be, and there were no wrong notes in it.” At Bethesda the widow seemed to be conscious of her new responsibilities. She was, as she recalled afterward, “sort of keyed up in a strange way.” Seeing Pam Turnure in tears, she put her arms around her and said, “Poor Pam, what will become of you now?” She worried about all of them and worked at bracing their spirits, even those of Dave Powers, the professional jolly. “Do you know what we should have in the Kennedy Library?” she asked, smiling faintly. They waited cautiously. “A pool,” she said, “so Dave can give exhibitions of how he swam with the President.” Powers was delighted, and envious. He could not have done so well.

The specters shifted partners, the brittle talk continued. Between calls the Attorney General reaffirmed to Ken O’Donnell and Larry O’Brien that he had not urged Johnson to take the oath on the plane. They exchanged wondering looks, not appreciating the possibility that Johnson may have wished to emphasize the continuity of the Presidency. It was one more piece of “senselessness,” which, to them, was the dominant theme of the tragedy. Throughout that weekend Mac Bundy could not get the German word “Unsinn”—“absurdity”—out of his head. Ken had much the same thing in mind when he asked those around him, over and over, “Why did it happen? What good did it do? All my life I’ve believed that something worthwhile comes out of everything, no matter how terrible it is. What good can come out of this?” The meaninglessness threatened the anchor of Ken’s faith.

O’Donnell asked questions. Ethel Kennedy asked none. Ethel had lost both her parents in the crash of a private plane. Extreme Unction had been impossible. For a woman of her piety the raising of the faintest shadow of doubt would be disastrous. Therefore she did not inquire. She simply accepted. At 7:15 she arrived in the suite after an unpleasant ride—Dave Hackett had slowly driven her over in the Attorney General’s Cadillac, whose controls he didn’t understand, and at the gate a Bethesda guard had flashed a bright light in her face to identify her. Running up to the widow, she embraced her and cried, “Oh, Jackie!”

Her sister-in-law told her she felt certain that the President had gone straight to heaven and “is just showering graces down on us.”

“Oh, Ethel, I wish I could believe the way you do.” Then: “Bobby’s been so wonderful.”

Really there was no option. The President’s widow and the new head of the Kennedy family had to make decisions jointly. With a single exception, which arose later in the evening, they were of one mind. They certainly never disagreed about the issue of an undertaker. She repeated to him, “I don’t want Jack to go to any awful funeral home,” and he nodded vehemently.

Toni had never wanted anything less. Still she assented. Like Bob Kennedy, she felt that what she wanted was irrelevant. And so she heard.

Shortly before 7:30 the Secretary of Defense reached the hospital. Bob Kennedy had talked to him at his home minutes after his return from the White House, and his arrival at the hospital was typical of McNamara; to the annoyance of Admiral Galloway and Captain Canada, who thought the Secretary should travel in an official limousine, with an escort, he drove a dark blue Galaxie, the last model manufactured by the Ford Motor Company before he resigned its presidency to come to Washington. He had bought it in October of 1960, he was proud of it, and he refused to be shunted into a gleaming Cadillac. Expecting to stop in for a few minutes, he left Mrs. McNamara in the front seat. Discovering that Mrs. Kennedy wanted him to stay, he rode down and reminded his wife that their thirteen-year-old son must be picked up at his Boy Scout meeting before 8:30. The Navy was speechless. No panoply, no color—he might as well have been an accountant. The McNamaras didn’t care; like Ethel Kennedy, Margie McNamara drove her own car pool shift, and she and her husband were active in civic activities and parent-teacher groups. To Ben Bradlee the Secretary’s very presence in the suite was electrifying: “After Bobby he was the second towering person there. There was no subterfuge in that man, no special smile; just naked strength. He was a man without guile, and it was that kind of occasion.”

McNamara walked through the suite and reached a decision: “She was in that suit with the bloody skirt and blood all over her stockings, and it was fantastic, but she just wanted someone to talk to. I felt I had to be calm for her and listen to her. We were in the kitchen, Jackie sitting on the stool and me on the floor. It went on for hours. I was concentrating entirely upon her, because she needed me and I felt, the hell with the others; let them take care of themselves.”

The executive mansion was no longer a Kennedy residence, and she remembered that she didn’t own the Georgetown house either. Late in 1960 the President-elect had said, “Why sell it?” It was ideal, and after two terms they would need a permanent home. But eight years seemed such a long time. It was practically a decade, so he had put it on the market. Now she needed it, or might. She was indecisive. Sleeping in that bedroom alone would be unbearable, she thought, and then she reflected, I must never forget Jack, but I mustn’t be morbid. So: she would move back to Georgetown, preferably into the same address.

Later that scene excluded everything else in the Secretary’s memories of the hospital. It would seem to him that he had never left the kitchen. In fact, he did more. When Shriver encountered a snag in acquiring a detail of ceremonial troops for the North Portico, McNamara issued an order, and he joined the debate which was shaping over the burial site. The mafia’s position had become firmer. Jean also preferred Brookline, and the Attorney General, who hadn’t committed himself, remarked to Bradlee, “Everybody from Boston favors there.” Ben said, “I’m from Boston, and I’m not in favor of it.” Bob studied him quizzically. “Our people don’t think of you as a Bostonian,” he said. Ben was nonplused—Bradlees had lived in Beacon Street when O’Briens and O’Donnells were across the sea—and then McNamara drew Kennedy aside and said forcefully that he agreed with Ben. Bob replied, “If you feel that strongly, why not say something to Jackie?”

McNamara did. He returned to the kitchen and explained to her that while he understood the tie to Massachusetts, the President shouldn’t belong to one section of the country. He wasn’t arguing for Arlington. At that time he really didn’t know much about it; to him it was merely one of several national cemeteries. But he was convinced that any one of them would be more fitting than the Brookline plot. “A President, particularly this President, who has done so much for the nation’s spiritual growth and enlarged our horizons, and who has been martyred this way, belongs in a national environment,” he said. “I feel this is imperative. Boston is just too parochial.”

Although she had been thinking along the same lines, she reached no final judgment that night. Bethesda was ill-suited to deliberation. The dismal furnishings; the unreal, almost stately mazurka in the drawing room; the efficiency apartment kitchenette; the sea of spectators below; the suddenness of it all—every concomitant blurred resolution. The very floor plan was congesting. At one point Toni felt a sealed coffin was important, but she couldn’t get through to Mrs. Kennedy; there were too many people in the intersection of the T. Early editions of the following afternoon’s newspapers created the impression that the widow had been a superexecutive, issuing rapid-fire commands in the manner of her husband. They erred. She did ask Jean, “Where are you staying? Where did they put you?” and after her sister-in-law had replied that her bag was in the Lincoln Room she suggested Jean have it moved across the hall to the Queen’s Room—so called because Queen Elizabeth had once stayed there—because the Attorney General was the President’s brother; having him there seemed appropriate. And early in the evening she also solved the lying-in-state question. Few of the million tourists who filed through the mansion’s first-floor rooms each year knew that the White House Historical Association’s dollar guide had been largely the work of the First Lady. At the bottom of page 39 she had had reprinted an engraving of Lincoln’s body on its catafalque, and when Bob gently pointed out to her that they would have to think about what they were going to do when they left here, she answered, “It’s in the guidebook.” That was the basis for the myth that she had made a series of snappy judgments. According to one widely published version she had been busy as a whipsaw during the flight from Dallas, starting parade plans the moment Air Force One left Love Field. “From the hospital,” the Associated Press reported, “she asked artist William Walton to find a certain book on a certain shelf in the White House library containing sketches and photographs of Abraham Lincoln lying in state.” She didn’t speak to Walton, and there was no such book. “From Bethesda Hospital during that first long night,” wrote Life, “she began a series of astonishingly detailed plans and decisions, many drawn from history, the rest of them of her own devising… she remembered her husband’s keen interest in the Special Forces, the guerrilla-trained troops he had sent to the jungles of Vietnam. She asked, ‘Couldn’t the honor guard include a member of the Special Forces?’ ” She did not remember her husband’s keen interest in the Special Forces; she did not ask such a question. Her sole contribution at the hospital was her reference to the White House guide, and even there her memory was vague. Later she rechecked the engraving and was appalled to see that Lincoln had lain on what appeared to be a teratoid, golden oak, four-poster bed.

The Kennedy who was really in charge in the tower suite was the Attorney General. He made the call about the catafalque. He requested a representative from the Special Forces. He asked that the President’s personal possessions be removed from the West Wing before their return, so that Jackie would not see them and be upset, and he was responsible for the strains of the Navy hymn, which would haunt the President’s countrymen long after the eulogies had been forgotten. To them two passages would endure—the opening “Eternal Father, strong to save,” and the concluding:

He remembered a third. In 1945 he had served as an apprentice seaman aboard the destroyer Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr., christened in recognition of his oldest brother’s heroism. Young Joe had been a Navy flier. Earlier in the war the military services had revised their traditional music to include pilots. The Marine hymn’s “on the land as on the sea” was changed to “in the air, on land and sea,” and sailors sang:

The national tragedy of November 22 made the long-ago death of another Kennedy seem remote to most of those who knew of it, but it wasn’t remote to his brothers. Young Joe had been the Kennedy destined for a political career; because Joe had been killed, Jack had run for Congress; Jack’s murder meant that the staff had fallen into Bobby’s hands; should he die, Teddy would be next. The President had never forgotten Joe. Bob, knowing that, and knowing that he would have approved, asked for the hymn. Like nearly everything else, it was attributed to the widow. Men who talked to Bob Kennedy subsequently convinced themselves that they had spoken to Jackie; men who had heard Bob’s wishes relayed through Shriver told the press that they were acting at the request of Mrs. Kennedy. On the plane she had displayed unsuspected stamina, eclipsing O’Donnell and O’Brien, and that strength would reappear after they had returned to Pennsylvania Avenue, but on the night of November 22–23 the commanding figure in Bethesda Naval Hospital was Robert Kennedy.

As Ralph Dungan put it, there were “two circuits that night: here and there.” “There” was Bob Kennedy. “Here” was Dungan’s office, where Shriver continued to preside over the marathon meeting, discussing preliminary arrangements for the funeral Mass with Richard Cardinal Cushing and trying to absorb Colonel Miller’s copy of the turgid State, Official and Special Military Funeral Policies and Plans. Both the tower suite and the West Wing were vexed by an exasperating uncertainty: no one knew when the President’s body would be ready to be moved from the morgue. From a telephone on the nurse’s desk outside the suite Clint Hill periodically checked with Roy Kellerman; Ted Clifton, at Shriver’s elbow, called Godfrey McHugh. Kellerman and McHugh weren’t doctors, so they asked Dr. Burkley, who repeatedly replied, “It’s taking longer than they thought.” The first estimated time of arrival at the White House was 11 P.M. This then became midnight, 1 A.M., 2 A.M., 3 A.M., 3:30 A.M., and 4 A.M. The reason it was taking longer was never specified, but since even laymen could guess what “it” was, they didn’t inquire.

At the hospital the two most impressive men were the Attorney General and the Secretary of Defense; in the mansion they were Shriver and Walton, both of whom joined in the response triggered by Mrs. Kennedy’s recollection of the guidebook.

Shriver, juggling telephones, turned the lying-in-state task over to Dick Goodwin. Goodwin phoned Schlesinger at the Harriman house, and at approximately 10 P.M. Roy Basler of the Library of Congress received a call from Schlesinger, who said he was “relaying an urgent personal request from Mrs. Kennedy.” This was typical; three men—Kennedy, Shriver, and Goodwin—stood between him and the widow, but Schlesinger gave Basler the definite impression that he had just talked to Jacqueline Kennedy. In this case, however, the deception was doubtless wise; as an historian Schlesinger knew how refractory archival bureaucracies could be. Further dialing summoned David C. Mearns, the chief of Basler’s manuscripts division, and James I. Robertson, a scholar of the Lincoln funeral. Mearns, Robertson, and a third librarian met in the cavernous library. The library’s master switch was off, locked in that position by a timing device. Flashlights were fetched, and the three men ran up and down the gloomy warrens, assembling a truckload of reports from century-old newspapers and magazines. The most precise accounts were delivered to the Northwest Gate of the White House, and on a table in the mansion’s marble entrance hall Goodwin laid out two, from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper and the May 6, 1865, issue of Harper’s Weekly. Walton riffled through them, found an Alfred Waud sketch in Harper’s, and went to work.

There was little wasted motion in Dungan’s office. There was some: on his arrival from Boston, Frank Morrissey, a roly-poly friend of the Kennedy family and something like a character out of The Last Hurrah, did begin a night-long series of long-distance calls which began boomingly, “This is Morrissey at the White House,” and the point of which eluded those within earshot. The Democratic National Committee did send a man to the marathon meeting, though the need for a professional politician was unexplained. And General Clifton was misinformed about the Lincoln catafalque. The original was stored in the Capitol basement, and a replica was available, but Clifton was frantically attempting to get the White House carpenters to build a new one. These, however, were exceptions. The Jackie-Bob-Sarge-Goodwin-Schlesinger-Library-Walton chain was the rule. At 1 A.M. Pierre Salinger showed up, red-eyed, his pockets stuffed with the $800 in unwanted bills and change, and immediately began holding press briefings. (Pierre assigned himself to the President at Bethesda; he told Kilduff to serve as press secretary to the President in Spring Valley.) Dean Markham was notifying Kennedy friends that a short Catholic service would be held in the East Room at 10 A.M., and that the Rev. J. J. Cavanaugh was planning it.

Down in the executive mansion’s theater, where Lieutenant Sawtelle’s honor guard had resumed rehearsals, Special Forces men were being integrated into the Death Watch. This was a greater challenge than Lieutenant Bird’s reshuffling of body bearers at Andrews. The Attorney General’s recognition of the guerrilla fighters moved them deeply. As one of their officers told Clifton, “These boys regard the President as their godfather.” They came anxious to serve with dignity. But the Death Watch was unusual duty. Refitting them in Army dress blues, leaving them their distinctive green berets, was relatively easy.³ And the visual signals were swiftly learned. The real problem would come in the morning, when the men stood by the coffin. Experience had taught Sawtelle that the fragrance of wreaths could be nauseating, that a soldier who kept his eyes fixed on one point could become hypnotized and swoon, and that a man’s greatest struggle would be with his own emotions. It was hard enough to remain rigid when visitors wept over the coffin of a stranger. All the men in the joint guard of honor had held the young President in special regard, however, and the reverence of the elite Special Forces made them particularly vulnerable. The Lieutenant cautioned them never to look directly at a candle, the quickest mesmerizer. He warned them that they must think about other things—about anything except the murdered President. Even so, he was worried. Obviously the husky guerrillas were tense. They were primed for combat, but standing motionless hour after hour required a different sort of discipline. Sawtelle decided to hold them back until the East Room watch had been established for some time, and then to assign an additional soldier to each shift as insurance against fainting.

The chief activity in the corridor outside Dungan’s anteroom was the drawing up of ad hoc lists, and it was to continue all weekend. There were guest lists for each phase of the funeral: seating plans, standing plans, marching formation, lists of lists—the Executive Branch, the Legislative Branch, the Supreme Court; Special Assistants to the President; visiting heads of state; the diplomatic corps; friends of the family; former Presidents; distinguished Americans. The average member of the national television audience never gave this aspect of the burial a thought, but the speedy solution of it baffled the Duke of Norfolk more than anything else, because in any state funeral the most harrying problem is whom to exclude. Markham began by telephoning Steve Smith for names of intimate friends, and Ken Galbraith was asked to submit a list of Presidential acquaintances in the academic community. He resolved upon a summary solution: only professors who had been invited to White House dinners would be invited. Markham began to accumulate mounds of paper—he had a master list of lists of lists—and plunging into them he was resigned to the fact that some feelings would be ruffled. He comforted himself with the reflection that those who really loved the President would understand. If they didn’t, they weren’t worth worrying about.

By late evening, Angie Duke said later, “We began to feel the presence of Mrs. Kennedy” (i.e., Robert Kennedy). They knew that the family wished a Navy escort for the caisson, four men from each service flanking it, and muffled drums. Apparently the demand for drummers was going to be great. Clifton wondered whether he could mobilize enough qualified military musicians to accompany the caisson from the mansion to the Hill. The past three years had taught him much about Kennedy improvisation, however, and he was prepared to fill the ranks by issuing uniforms to drummers who weren’t entitled to wear them.

The prickliest issue was the question of religious services. Colonel Miller was of no help whatever here; the funeral of a Roman Catholic President was without precedent. For hours they skirted the topic. At midnight Angie Duke artfully raised it. He suggested the possibility of a secular funeral, observing that, “The President believed in the separation of church and state, and I believe he would want a service in the White House.” Duke wasn’t serious. Himself a Catholic, he knew it was unthinkable. His purpose was to provoke a serious discussion, and he succeeded brilliantly. As he put it, “At once I could feel the electricity.” He dwelt upon the advantages of a nondenominational ritual until he began to sound like a Unitarian, and the more he talked, the more Shriver and Dungan bridled. Sarge cut him off. He said tautly, “The family will not permit a nonreligious funeral.”

Duke had antagonized them, but had made his point. “When he suggested a burial service in the White House,” Shriver said afterward, “I realized that we would have to have a Mass for Jack, and I felt that it would be inappropriate to have a funeral Mass in the White House.” Because the line between the things of God and the things of Caesar had been sharply drawn in 1960, the Kennedy men were far more aware of it than the aides of any Protestant President would have been. John Kennedy must be buried as a Catholic. Nevertheless, as Chief Executive he represented all Americans, and Shriver ordered two prie-dieux for the East Room, manned by pastors from all faiths, including the Greek Orthodox. To his surprise, Clifton spoke up and said the clergymen were here—actually in the mansion, ready to kneel. Chaplains representing every denomination had called him and volunteered. Each had read Kennedy’s Houston declaration; they understood his position perfectly. They had thought of him, not as a Catholic President, but as the President of the United States, and each of them wanted to pray to his God for his President. To Bill Walton they seemed to be “nice, kind, gentle men, trying not to be in the way and not knowing quite what to do, because there wasn’t anything for them to pray over yet.” In fact, they had already done something remarkable just by coming; in death John Kennedy had convened a kind of spontaneous ecumenical council.

“Trying to fight off the appalling reality,” Schlesinger noted jerkily. Yet the work was more than therapy. Already the broad outlines of the funeral were clear: the East Room on Saturday, the great rotunda of the Capitol on Sunday, and the funeral Mass and burial on Monday. Thousands of details were still unresolved. No one knew, for example, just what sort of Mass Cardinal Cushing would celebrate or even where it would be held. The merits of St. Matthew’s, St. Stephen’s, the Shrine at Catholic University, and the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception had been reviewed again and again. Dungan was strong for Immaculate Conception: “What was bugging me was space; I was already thinking about foreigners, and then there was the Congress.” Since everyone in the meeting, including the man from the National Committee, had his little list, Dungan didn’t have to elaborate the point. He won it. As matters stood at midnight, when Duke left to meet the Cabinet plane, a Pontifical Requiem Mass was to be held for the President on Monday at the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. The fact that the Shrine was not within walking distance occurred to none of them, and had it been raised, it would have been disregarded as an inapt démarche; no one then dreamed that Mrs. Kennedy would want to walk.

At 12:35 A.M. November 23, the first full day of the Johnson administration, Aircraft 86972 ended the twenty-four-hour flight which had begun when the Cabinet plane left Oahu for Tokyo and taxied up to the MATS terminal. As the plane entered its glide pattern Dean Rusk walked the length of the fuselage, giving detailed instructions on the order of disembarkation. Cabinet members would leave first in a body, and he would make a statement in their behalf. Wives and lesser officials would follow; then assistants with security material. The scene at the wire fence might have been a rerun of Angel’s pantomime six and a half hours earlier. There was the gigantic 707; the dazzling klieg lights and microphones; the press in its pen; clusters of waiting Under Secretaries and Assistant Secretaries, and chauffeurs standing by cars. Many of the greeters were the same—Angie Duke, George Ball, Frank Roosevelt. But this time there was no crowd and, of course, no yellow truck lift.

Standing where President Johnson had stood, the Secretary of State said that he and his colleagues fully shared “the deep sense of shock, the grievous loss we have suffered. Those of us who had the honor of serving President Kennedy value the gallantry and wisdom he brought to the grave, awesome, and lonely office of the Presidency. President Johnson needs and deserves our fullest support.”

Ball whisked Rusk into a limousine. The Freemans rode home to watch television, the Dillons to their medicine cabinet—both the Secretary of the Treasury and his wife took sleeping pills and then lay awake through the night, listening to the sirens on Massachusetts Avenue, wondering where the fire was. At Andrews the Under Secretaries and Assistant Secretaries who weren’t needed dispersed slowly. Among them was Pat Moynihan. Moynihan was glum, and troubled by foreboding. Drinking black coffee in the MATS mess before the plane landed, he had overheard several other members of the subcabinet anxiously inquiring of one another whether anyone there knew George Reedy. One reminded the others that the Cabinet was meeting tomorrow; he expressed the hope that “some of the more important Under Secretaries will be invited.” Pat turned away in disgust. The conversation, he thought, confirmed his suspicions about the New Frontier’s second echelon. Too many of them were ambitious young men who were greedy for American power without understanding America itself.

He didn’t belong with them. It is difficult to say where he did fit. A child of New York’s worst slums, a self-taught intellectual and author with a Ph.D. from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, he was a stranger to Washington’s elite. He was Irish but something of an outsider; no one had thrown him into a swimming pool or even invited him to Hickory Hill. Young, handsome, and highly articulate, he could have been mistaken for a Kennedy intimate, but he wasn’t one; he found Lyndon Johnson attractive because he felt that both he and Johnson had started from the bottom. Moynihan had been a Manhattan longshoreman, a saloon owner, a tough. He had been arrested on New York’s West Side and beaten up in a police station. He remembered several unpleasant encounters with Boston patrolmen, and extrapolating from experience he was entertaining grave doubts about the Dallas Police Department.

Before the arrival of 86972 he had spoken heatedly to Under Secretary Ball; afterward he talked to Secretary Wirtz. With each he made the same point. “We’ve got to get on top of the situation in Dallas,” he said. “American cops are emotional. They don’t believe in due process, and they are so involved in corruption that they overcompensate when they run into something big. You can’t depend on them. The most profound national interest can’t be left in the hands of policemen. The facts here are so confused that if we don’t move quickly there will be no trouble later establishing a case against the Communists, against fascists, against the President himself, against anybody. It might be an anti-Khrushchev faction, it might be a Chinese faction out of Cuba—you couldn’t construct a cast with a wider range of possibilities. But you can be sure of one thing. Nobody can predict what the Dallas police will do, and their saying a man is a Commie doesn’t make him one.”

George Ball replied, “You’re right, I’ll talk to Rusk.” Yet Moynihan had the impression that Ball hadn’t understood what he had been talking about. Wirtz also promised to speak to Rusk, and he was equally hazy. Moynihan wouldn’t quit. At Andrews he cornered Bob Wallace, an old friend and the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in charge of the Secret Service. Defensively Wallace replied, “We are in charge of the situation. My best man is in Louisville or Nashville, on his way to Dallas.” Unsatisfied, Moynihan pressed his case with others. Most of them misinterpreted his concern. They thought he was arguing the existence of a right-wing plot. He wasn’t. “I only want to know the facts,” he kept saying. “I have no convictions of any kind, but what keeps a republic together is procedure, and we have chaos in Dallas; we have to move fast.” One man replied, “That’s far out.” Pat exploded: “You stupid son-of-a-bitch! The freely elected President of the United States is lying dead in a box, and you’re telling me I’m far out! It’s the far-out events that make history. It’s far out to say that Caesar is going to be stabbed in the forum today.”

At the airport and back in the capital he kept trying, making a pest of himself without results. A few, like Ball and Wirtz, agreed that something must be done. Nothing was done, and from their evasiveness and the vagueness of their assurances Moynihan guessed that nothing would be. This, he thought, was the Achilles’ heel of most of the Kennedy team. They had been prepared for anything except this. They had everything but direct knowledge of the brutal side of the United States. Their grace and their airy flânerie had removed them from the world of police stations, trouble, and an understanding of how rough Americans could be to one another. Never having encountered it, they couldn’t believe in it. Pat had; he could; he did; and since he went on record with everyone who would listen to him, there is no doubt that he, like Byron Skelton earlier in the month, felt an uncanny premonition. He was convinced that unless the federal government acted vigorously the country must expect a second catastrophe in the Dallas jail.

At 7:10 P.M. Dallas time Lee Harvey Oswald had been formally charged in the third-floor office of Captain Will Fritz with the murder of Patrolman Tippit. Justice of the Peace David L. Johnston presided. At 1:30 A.M. (2:30 in Washington), following repeated parades before newspapermen, including his basement press conference, he was arraigned in the fourth-floor identification bureau for the assassination of John Kennedy. David Johnston was again the officer of the court; on both occasions he had come to the police station for the closed session. The definition of a star-chamber proceeding, it will be remembered, is one held in secret.

After the first arraignment Oswald told correspondents that he had protested to the justice of the peace (whose name he hadn’t quite caught) “that I was not allowed legal representation during that very short and sweet hearing. I really don’t know what the situation is all about.” It was a lie. Oswald certainly knew what the situation was about. Circumstantial evidence, the very best kind, convicts him ten times over. He was merely playing the scene for all it was worth. Thanks to local authority, however, it was worth a great deal, and what he may have really meant was that he could not believe petty officials anywhere could be this clumsy. Even the Russians had been smoother. Pat Moynihan, when he learned the truth, was aghast. He realized that he had been wrong to extrapolate from New York and Boston. Dallas was in another league entirely.⁴

Here was the greatest crime in the city’s history, and here were myrmidons in complete charge. The District Attorney was available for television appearances; otherwise he was out of touch, even for the United States Attorney. Friday evening a delegation of American Civil Liberties Union lawyers visited headquarters to ascertain whether Oswald was being deprived of counsel. Policemen and the justice of the peace assured them everything was on the up and up. But they weren’t permitted to see Oswald. Despite relentless pressure from the Deputy Attorney General in Washington—and the pressure of the Johnson men he enlisted—the Dallas Bar Association was inactive that night. Meanwhile the chaotic questioning continued. Its casualness even exceeded the insouciant standards which are customary during the investigation of petty crimes in the Southwest.⁵ Oswald was being simultaneously interrogated by Dallas homicide men, county sheriffs, Texas Rangers, FBI agents, and the Secret Service. For all the wealth in Dallas, the city budget was niggardly. With a tiny fraction of the sum spent each year on the Cotton Bowl festival, Will Fritz might have been provided with a recording device, but his repeated requests for one had been turned down. (The department also lacked modern photographic equipment; each time officers wanted to see Abe Zapruder’s film of the assassination they had to go to his office.) For some reason which has never been satisfactorily explained the department’s secretaries had been sent home. Thus the historian is deprived of even a shorthand transcript of these vital sessions. The best we have is a composite recollection of the interrogators.

The following afternoon, when the Bar Association’s president drove to the station, Oswald declined his assistance, declaring a preference for John Abt, a New York lawyer celebrated for his defenses of political prisoners, or for an American Civil Liberties Union attorney. No one told him that the ACLU had attempted to see him the previous evening and had been turned away.

The Attorney General became impatient. At 10 P.M. Godfrey McHugh assured him they would be ready to leave Bethesda at midnight, but at midnight the embalming hadn’t even begun. During the delay several occupants of the tower suite roused from their stupor. Jean Smith told George Thomas to bring the President’s favorite suits and ties from the White House; he left for the mansion with two agents. Ken O’Donnell gave Bob Kennedy the President’s wallet. Then Ken said determinedly—it had been preying on his mind since Parkland—“Jackie, I’m going to get that ring back for you.” Down in the morgue he spoke to Dr. Burkley, who worked the ring free and brushed past him. On the seventeenth floor Burkley explained to the Attorney General, “I want to give it to her myself, so I can be sure she has it.” Wordlessly Bob Kennedy stepped aside, and in the little bedroom the Presidential physician handed her the ring and tried to voice his anguish.

The fact was that he had never been quite sure of his position with the Kennedys. Janet Travell had overshadowed him in the newspapers, and being Navy he had sometimes appeared preoccupied with fussy service routine and interservice rivalry. Last spring it had been assumed that the infant she was expecting would be delivered in Washington, and the issue was whether she should be confined at Bethesda or Walter Reed. Dr. Walsh had been in the Army, so Walter Reed was the obvious choice. But Burkley had been obtuse. He had set about reserving this very suite for the expectant mother until she, hearing about it, wrote him a sharp letter. Though the public never saw it, Jacqueline Kennedy’s temper could be formidable. Burkley therefore had maintained a respectful distance until today. But she was also capable of instinctive compassion, and when he handed her the ring and awkwardly attempted to express himself—he could think of nothing but clichés—she told him how much his attentiveness had meant to the President and her. Then she reached into her jacket pocket, took out one of the red blossoms the doctor had handed her in Oneal’s ambulance-hearse, and held it out.

Burkley bowed his head. He mumbled, “This is the greatest treasure of my life.”

The population of the suite reached its peak during Friday’s penultimate hour. At 10 P.M. Margie McNamara returned from the Boy Scout meeting. John Nolan, Robert Kennedy’s administrative assistant, came up. Ethel had called Charlie and Martha Bartlett, and with a score of occupants crammed into it the suite was approaching capacity. To Charlie “Jackie was poised, unreal. She was talking about the murder—I gathered she had been talking about it for some time. She told me about red roses and the new red rug they were to have put in the President’s study that day and the blood. She wasn’t sobbing. Tears were just a breath away, but they never came. Bobby was watching, silent, ready. He was terrific, low-key as always.”

The bedroom television was on, nobody knew why. There were the endless film clips of the President’s past, deep organ music, selections from a massive orchestra; a lugubrious encomium from Governor George Wallace of Alabama; a smug, infuriating video tape of Jesse Curry, made that morning, describing Dallas’ airtight security precautions; pictures of Oswald’s press conference; and, at 11:35, NBC’s announcement that “Mrs. Jacqueline Kennedy and her two children went to the Naval Hospital and will remain there overnight.” The sensible thing would have been to switch the set off. Since no one knew who had turned it on, however, no one would take the responsibility. Instead the bedroom was evacuated.

The men and women tended to segregate, the men congregating in the kitchen, the women around the large drawing room table. McNamara leaned against the refrigerator and talked, as he had to George Ball, about how splendid Kennedy’s second four years would have been. Charlie Bartlett asked him whether he knew that he was supposed to be Secretary of State in that term—Charlie had heard it from the President. The Secretary of Defense nodded slowly. “I don’t know what I could have done about policy, but I could have helped with the administration,” he said. Jackie, at the big table with Martha, Margie, Toni, Jean, and Ethel, had stopped speaking of Dallas. She was trying valiantly to entertain them, to act as the gracious hostess while declining fresh offers of sedatives and shaking off her mother’s renewed suggestions that she change her clothes. Martha thought, It’s almost as though she doesn’t want the day to end.

“Suddenly,” Ben Bradlee said later, “we’d been there too long.” He and Toni drifted toward the door. Mrs. Kennedy urged Evelyn, Nancy, Mary, and Pam to drive home and get some sleep. “Somehow we’ve got to get through the next few days,” she told them. Mary’s lips framed the question, “How?” “Be strong for two or three days,” she was told. “Then we’ll all collapse.” Of herself Jacqueline Kennedy said to Martha, “I’m not leaving here till Jack goes. But I won’t cry till it’s all over.” Dr. Walsh was also escorting people out. He had been worrying about “the big, nebulous, indefinite something—when they’d be ready downstairs.” The postponements were provoking. Given sufficient strain any constitution will snap. The widow, he decided, must have some rest. Only Bob Kennedy seemed reluctant to see the number of guests dwindle. “Why go?” he inquired as they moved in a group toward the big elevator. They murmured excuses; they fled.

“Anywhere you like,” Mrs. Auchincloss said. But she felt it was sacrilegious. Tentatively she suggested they use a sitting room couch instead.

Then it struck Janet: her daughter wanted company. The southwest corner of the second floor was very large. The President’s bedroom, the First Lady’s bedroom, the First Lady’s sitting room, and the passages linking them formed a separate apartment, cut off from the rest of the mansion by the Oval Room and the bisecting east-west hall. With the President gone, his wife would be there all alone; Miss Shaw, the children, and Bob and Jean might as well have been in a separate building. Mrs. Auchincloss said to her husband in an undertone, “We’ll stop in Georgetown for toothbrushes,” and they slipped away.

Ken, Larry, and Dave, like Mrs. Kennedy, weren’t leaving without the President. There was no discussion. It was understood. They withdrew from the apartment and stood behind Clint Hill. The nurse showed Ethel and Jean to other rooms down the hall. Dr. Walsh gave Jean a sleeping pill, and he, Bob McNamara, and Bob Kennedy remained with Jackie. An hour later Jean was back. The pill had been ineffective, and she had forgotten something. Bob went into the kitchen with McNamara, and the President’s wife and his sister wandered aimlessly through the drawing room, into the bedroom. The television was broadcasting a Mass. The two women knelt by the screen until the service was over. Abruptly the images altered and became unbearably familiar—the channel was starting one of those long sequences of Kennedy’s life. Mrs. Kennedy rose with one motion and twisted the knob. The light shrank to a square point and vanished, and Jean stumbled back to her room.

In the drawing room Dr. Walsh prepared a syringe; he detected signs of utter exhaustion in her. Considering the past two days, it was incredible that she should still be on her feet—Bob Kennedy and Bob McNamara were men of extraordinary stamina, but they hadn’t been in Texas—and while the doctor had no way of knowing how much more would be expected of her, he suspected that it would be a lot. At a bare minimum she needed one hour of complete relaxation. She hadn’t been able to talk it out. Just before Jean arrived Bob had suggested she return to the mansion; she had shaken her head and said she would lie down. Now she wasn’t even doing that. He loaded the needle with 100 milligrams of Visatril, a formidable dose, and showed it to her.

She eyed it dubiously, then wavered. “Maybe you could just give me something so I could have a little nap,” she said, holding out her arm. “But I want to be awake when we go home.”

Walsh had complete confidence in the drug; he felt sure she would coast off within thirty seconds. Settling her down, he returned to the drawing room, sat in a chair, and instantly fell asleep.

Mrs. Kennedy waited and waited. Ten minutes passed and nothing happened. She looked around for a cigarette. There weren’t any here, so she strolled into the living room in search of a package. As she passed the doctor’s chair he awoke and looked up in disbelief. His astonishment was so evident that it was comic. She smiled down at him and strode on with a firm step. Walsh stared after her, thinking, I might just as well have given her a shot of Coca-Cola.

Major General Wehle raced home, changed from greens to blues, raced back and was confronted by Lieutenant Sam Bird, who reported that the Dallas coffin was marred. He advised the general that the family be notified.

The call to the seventeenth floor was made by Godfrey McHugh. He said, “Bob, the casket we have is cheap and thin, it’s really shabby. One handle is off, and the ornaments are in bad shape.”

McHugh refused; he was, he explained, a guard of honor. “But I know a place near here. It’s only a few blocks down Wisconsin. It’s Gawler’s.”

Kennedy had heard of Gawler’s. A friend of his had been buried from there recently. McHugh suggested a bronze or mahogany coffin. But Robert Kennedy was tenacious, too; both he and his sister-in-law had rejected a private funeral home on principle, and upon reflection he decided that the military ought to handle the whole thing. There was no reason to bring in an undertaker. This conversation, like all others, was being screened through Clint Hill, and the mafia was listening. Ken O’Donnell and Larry O’Brien huddled and agreed that Bob was in a daze. He was going through enough; he shouldn’t be asked to worry about this, too.

Thus Gawler’s, which had been vetoed by the Kennedy family, became part of the Presidential funeral. The damaged coffin was largely responsible—largely, but not entirely, for the issue of whether or not it was to be closed had not been resolved, and should the coffin have been open during the lying in state, the special arts of the undertaker would have been essential. Quite apart from that, however, the Attorney General was in a dilemma. He could scarcely permit a state funeral to proceed with a battered casket. A subsequent examination revealed that the Lieutenant and the two Generals had exaggerated the extent of the damage to Oneal’s Britannia, and that the casket was neither cheap nor thin, but Kennedy could not have guessed that, nor could he have been expected to come down and make his own inspection. He had been right the first time; they must get another. And O’Donnell was also correct: the mafia must spare him the actual choice.

Dave omitted another Irishman. Muggsy O’Leary had been summoned from the morgue. In a night sated with sentiment the journey of this quartet was especially touching. Dave was naturally reminded of a story; it was about himself. “You know, the Irish always measure the importance of people by the number of friends who come to their wakes,” he said in the car. “All my life I’ve thought of my wake being held in a Boston three-decker tenement. I just assumed he’d live longer than me, and I’d be so proud to have the President of the United States at my wake. And now here I am, going to get a casket for him.”

Gawler’s selection room contained thirty-two coffins that night, each of them mounted on a velvet-skirted estrade which in turn stood upon thick, cream wall-to-wall carpeting. Flush overhead lights gleamed softly; a tape recorder provided appropriate background music. Joe Gawler led them in. According to O’Brien, “I said to the man at the display room, ‘Would you show us the plainest one you have in the middle price range?’ I don’t know why I asked him that, but I think it was because I wanted the coffin to represent the American people. Therefore I thought it should be plain. And that’s what we got. He said, ‘Here.’ He showed us several, and we took the one with the simplest interior. I never asked the price.” According to O’Donnell, “The coffin we chose was the second one we looked at. I know that Larry and I had both reached the same decision simultaneously—that that would be the one we would use. It was plain.”

Tampering with their moving account is a pity, but the Irish, as John Kennedy once noted wryly, are not noted for their accuracy, and the casket in which he was to be buried is obviously a matter of some historical interest. Undoubtedly O’Brien’s recollection of their intention is correct. Robert Kennedy was thinking along the same lines. He believes he spoke to O’Donnell about price while Ken was at the funeral parlor, and he has a clear memory of talking to a girl who told him, “You can get one for $500, one for $1,400, or one for $2,000.” She went on about waterproofing and optional equipment. Influenced by the Mitford book, he shied away from the high figure. He asked for the $1,400 coffin, and afterward he wondered whether he had been cheap; he thought how difficult such choices must be for everyone.

But all this is mysterious, because no one on Gawler’s staff recalls talking to the Attorney General about price or anything else. Moreover, the casket O’Donnell and O’Brien picked—it was immediately to the left as they entered the selection room—could hardly be called plain. Known to the trade as a Marsellus No. 710, it was constructed of hand-rubbed, five-hundred-year-old solid African mahogany upholstered in what the manufacturer described as “finest new pure white rayon.” Gawler believed his visitors wanted “something fitting and proper for the President of the United States,” which does not gibe with O’Brien’s impression that they had purchased an ordinary coffin. It was unusual, and it was very expensive. In 1961 Jessica Mitford had found that the average bill for casket and services in the United States was $708. Muggsy O’Leary thought the price mentioned in the selection room was $2,000. Even that was low. Gawler’s charged $2,460. In a subsequent decision, the most expensive vault in the establishment went with it. The total bill, as rendered and paid, was $3,160.

Joe Gawler and Joe Hagan, his chief assistant, supervised the loading of the coffin in a hearse, or, as Hagan preferred to call it, a “funeral coach.” The firm’s young cosmetician accompanied them to Bethesda. The two caskets, Oneal’s and Gawler’s, lay side by side for a while in the morgue anteroom; then Oneal’s was removed for storage and the undertakers, Irishmen, and George Thomas were admitted to the main room. The autopsy team had finished its work, a grueling, three-hour task, interrupted by the arrival of a fragment of skull which had been retrieved on Elm Street and flown east by federal agents. The nature of the two wounds and the presence of metal fragments in the President’s head had been verified; the metal from Oswald’s bullet was turned over to the FBI. Bethesda’s physicians anticipated that their findings would later be subjected to the most searching scrutiny. They had heard reports of Mac Perry’s medical briefing for the press, and to their dismay they had discovered that all evidence of what was being called an entrance wound in the throat had been removed by Perry’s tracheostomy. Unlike the physicians at Parkland, they had turned the President over and seen the smaller hole in the back of his neck. They were positive that Perry had seen an exit wound. The deleterious effects of confusion were already evident. Commander James J. Humes, Bethesda’s chief of pathology, telephoned Perry in Dallas shortly after midnight, and clinical photographs were taken to satisfy all the Texas doctors who had been in Trauma Room No. 1.

The cosmetician then went to work. In Hagan’s words, “He was really under the gun. There were about thirty-five people, led by General Wehle, breathing down our necks. We were worrying about skull leakage, which could be disastrous. We did not know whether the body would be viewed or not.” The application of cosmetics required nearly three hours. It was quite unnecessary, but that was not the undertakers’ fault. Neither McHugh nor Burkley, who were in constant touch with the tower suite, could guarantee that the coffin would be closed. McHugh told Hagan it was better to take the time and be on the safe side. “The family may change their minds at any time,” he said. Burkley had spoken to Mrs. Kennedy. He knew her wishes, “but,” he explained afterward, “I was determined that the body be fully dressed and that the face be just right in case people opened the coffin a thousand years hence.”

Dave Powers picked the clothes. From the eight suits and four pairs of shoes George Thomas had brought Dave chose a blue-gray suit, black shoes, and, after an extensive debate between Ken and Larry, a blue tie with a slight pattern of light dots. Lieutenant Sam Bird, standing beside General Wehle, saw the embroidered “JFK” on the white silk shirt sleeve; then it was hidden by the coat. The Presidential valet recalled that his dislike of flamboyant monograms had extended to handkerchiefs. Kennedy had carefully folded them so that the initials would not show, and Thomas did it for him now, slipping the handkerchief into his coat pocket. Completely dressed, the body was wheeled into the anteroom, beside the waiting coffin. A naval officer told Lieutenant Bird, “Clear the area. We don’t want anybody in here under any circumstances. The Secret Service are going to put him in.” Even General Wehle left, but the body was transferred by physicians and undertakers, not agents. Joe Hagan arranged the President’s hands and placed a rosary in them, and Godfrey McHugh, ignoring a naval officer who had ordered him out, carefully watched Joe Gawler close the coffin. The lid latched, he noticed, with a faint, almost imperceptible click. Should it ever be reopened, Godfrey wanted to do it himself.

In the corridor outside the morgue one of the undertakers handed Lieutenant Bird an American flag. It was standard Veterans Administration issue, 5½ by 9 feet; funeral parlors regularly acquired them from the VA for veterans’ burials. Because so many military families used Gawler’s, the firm had a stock of them, and this one had been kept on hand for the funeral of the next man who had worn the uniform. The flag was folded, as usual, in a triangle. The Lieutenant didn’t have to be told what to do with it. Flag drill is as familiar to men stationed at Arlington as the manual of arms is to Marines. After the casket team had carefully packed the floor of the ambulance with blankets—the ambulance lacked the rubber pins and rollers of a hearse, and Gawler was determined that his coffin not share the fate of Oneal’s—the team formed two facing ranks. When the casket had been wheeled between them, the flag would be neatly handed from man to man, unfolding as it went until, fully unfurled, it was being held above the lid. Then it would be draped over the coffin and all hands would salute.

Waiting there, Lieutenant Bird suddenly recalled the colonel’s widow in Section 35 of Arlington the previous noon. He remembered her stumbling down the slope just before he heard the President had been shot, and how she had refused to let her son relieve her of the flag. She had clutched it tight against her heart with both forearms. He realized that he was holding this one the same way.

During General Wehle’s absence from his customary command post at Fort McNair, the Military District of Washington was gripped by a strange inertia. A martyred Chief Executive was about to be returned to the executive mansion. Every soldier at McNair and Myer, every sailor at Anacostia, every Marine from Quantico should have been alert. They weren’t. They were either in their bunks or watching the atypical late shows. The Secretary of Defense, with two and a half million men under arms, hadn’t been able to muster an appropriate guard for the White House. He was bewildered. The Attorney General, also puzzled, said icily, “If we can get twenty thousand troops to Oxford, Mississippi, we can get enough troops to Washington, D.C., for this.”

It was a reasonable assumption. It didn’t work. Sargent Shriver, who was keeping Kennedy and McNamara posted, was frantic. This was not, after all, Valley Forge; it was peacetime, and the Pentagon was maintaining the largest standing army in history. Yet the only standees at 3 A.M. were Lieutenant Sawtelle’s Death Watch and Lieutenant Bird’s casket team. The smoothly oiled military establishment had inexplicably clanked to a halt. Orders were issued, but not obeyed. The businessman in Shriver was choleric. “We have a fifty-billion-dollar defense budget,” he barked at Taz Shepard and Paul Miller. “The guy in charge of it is coming home. Can’t you find somebody?”

The Navy Captain and the Army Colonel squirmed, exchanged uncomfortable looks, and hurried off to make calls. They returned. No troops arrived.

In Bethesda Mrs. Kennedy finished her cigarette and turned the television on again. More organ music. More pictures of her husband. Another glimpse of the swearing in. Scenes of thousands of Americans praying in churches. She watched a while, crying alone, and then crossed to the kitchen, where Bob Kennedy and Bob McNamara were talking quietly.

Her brother-in-law mentioned Officer Tippit’s widow. “Do you want to speak to her?”

She didn’t; it was so hard to concentrate on anything except the President who lay below. Perhaps Mrs. Tippit’s loss had been as great as hers, but she couldn’t think so. She could only marvel at Bobby’s thoughtfulness.

Muggsy O’Leary, just back from Gawler’s, peered in. She asked, “Please, Muggsy—don’t ever leave me.”

While Bob was telephoning in the drawing room, she broached the issue of the open coffin with McNamara. It was now urgent. Friday had become Saturday. Dawn was approaching. In a few hours President Kennedy would be lying in state. The memory of her father’s funeral returned again, and she said, “I want the coffin closed so badly. You can’t have it open.”

He disagreed. “It can’t be done, Jackie. Everybody wants to see a Head of State.”

“I don’t care. It’s the most awful, morbid thing; they have to remember Jack alive.”

The Attorney General came back, and the three of them perched where they would go—he on top of the refrigerator, McNamara on the sink, Jackie on the floor. She said again that she couldn’t stand the idea of what undertakers called “viewing the remains.” Bob Kennedy, like Bob McNamara, said that this was an exceptional situation. He didn’t see how a President’s funeral could disregard the public; private preferences had to be set aside. She had always listened to men. These two had been among that select handful whom her husband had trusted completely, and eventually she lapsed into silence—as she put it, “I just sort of accepted that with such misery.” She didn’t really accept it. It was clear that she felt something precious to her was at stake. Womanlike, she was waiting. “The tension in that kitchen,” McNamara said later, “was unimaginable.”

Behind the North Portico, still undistinguished by the presence of a single soldier or sailor, the decoration of the East Room was proceeding in an atmosphere of controlled frenzy. As the number of people in the tower suite had dwindled, the decorating force had grown. Bill Walton commanded a manifold crew: Shriver, Dungan, Schlesinger, Goodwin, Taz Shepard, Dean Markham, Colonel Miller, Mr. West, General Clifton, Dr. English, Maître Fincklin and his six butlers; Cecil Stoughton; Traphes L. Bryant, the President’s dog handler; Lawrence Arata, the White House upholsterer; and Mrs. Arata. Pam Turnure and Nancy Tuckerman had come here from Bethesda, and the Auchinclosses looked on briefly.

“How do you like it?” Walton called down to them. He was standing on a steep stepladder, engulfed in crepe.

He looked startled. He said, “Of course! A flag!” and swayed on, looping great bolts of cloth around a massive crystal chandelier.

Upstairs Janet Auchincloss tapped on Miss Shaw’s door. She anticipated that Caroline and John might run into their father’s bedroom when they awoke, expecting to find him there. She said, “Tell the children Uncle Coo and I will be in the President’s room.”

The Auchinclosses retired to the President’s four-poster. They did not rest. The bed was board and horsehair. Janet had heard about these boards. Contact with one was something else. There was no resilience whatever. It actually hurt, and she thought of the President sleeping all these years in constant pain, bearing the strain of office each day and then stretching out on this. She had been his mother-in-law, but she had not known; it still did not seem possible.

Downstairs the volunteers toiled on, fueled by vats of coffee. Afterward their task looked easy. Few appreciated how staggering it had been. “I was supposed to be a pro about this sort of thing, and I didn’t even know how to start,” said Nancy Tuckerman. The East Room of the White House is the largest room in the mansion. Originally known as “the Public Audience Chamber,” it is paneled in white-enameled wood and illuminated by five great windows and three gigantic chandeliers, any one of which would mash a man to pulp. The sheer dimensions of the room are defeating. To relieve its bare aspect, Andrew Jackson had spent over $9,000, a remarkable sum then, and all Jackson did was fill it up. Walton’s challenge was quite different. He had to transform this gay ballroom into a funeral hall.

At the outset he didn’t think it possible. He studied the Library of Congress engraving and doubted there was that much crepe in Washington. Luckily that much was unnecessary. The closer Walton examined the sketch, the more he realized that Mrs. Kennedy would recoil from such a display. It resembled a grotesque carnival of death. Everything had been overdone. If the engraver had been accurate (it was possible, of course, that he hadn’t even been in the capital), the chandeliers had been wholly enveloped in crepe, transforming them into horrid beehives. Borders of crepe would be more appropriate, provided it was available. It was; thick bolts miraculously appeared. Lawrence Arata had been storing them for chair upholstery, and when his supply was exhausted he sent out for more from a shop. Because of the uncertain deadline, the decoration proceeded in phases. Clifton’s first word from McHugh had been that the body would be brought through the Northwest Gate before eleven o’clock. Between then and McHugh’s next call Walton ignored everything except the chandeliers. After the first postponement he turned to the windows, fashioning curtains of black. As delay followed delay Walton, Shriver, and Arata dashed about brandishing cloth and hammers, carpet tacks gripped in their teeth, darkening the mantel and the door. The mansion entrance and the North Portico were to be left until last; they would do them if they had time.

Schlesinger, who was writing more than he was tacking, noted: “It is now twenty minutes to two. The casket will arrive at the White House around 3:30.” He overheard “forlorn scraps of conversation” about “the rooms in which we had had such happy times, filled with memory and melancholy.” The estimated time of arrival was then changed from 4 to 4:30. That proved correct, though down in the theater the rehearsing Death Watch received the news with soldierly skepticism, and those upstairs were too busy to give it much thought. Between crepe-looping sessions they were dealing with artifacts. Considering the protean group and its lack of experience with funerals, there was remarkably little discussion. Most were intimidated by Walton and Shriver. Walton was the New Frontier’s artist-without-portfolio. And Shriver had his own notions about taste. He frowned down at the monstrous East Room piano, which was designed by Franklin Roosevelt and which looks rather like a Byzantine altar. “We’ll move it,” he said briskly. The men around him sagged. It was a Herculean job—what was really needed was a crane—but groaning and perspiring they somehow managed it.

The catafalque replica, which had been arriving in pieces since midnight, was uncrated and erected. It should have been majestic. It looked barren. Accouterments were needed. Lincoln had had them; they must be provided for Kennedy. Walton thought first of flowers, and pointing to one of Jacqueline Kennedy’s East Room urns he told West, “Fill it with magnolia leaves.” West said he hadn’t any. “Yes, you do,” Walton said. “Cut them off Andy Jackson’s trees, they’ll grow back.” Two men from Gawler’s arrived, bearing various objects. Walton, a Mitford reader, gave them a walleyed stare. Two prie-dieux were accepted. The rest—rich satin backgrounds, ornate candlesticks, a five-foot cross of natural wood—was immediately rejected. Walton studied them and then said quietly, “Well, it’s just hideous, Sarge.” Sarge agreed that it was pretty bad, and the undertakers crept out.

Candlesticks fetched from St. Matthew’s turned out to be even worse than the undertakers’, and while wooden sticks from St. Steven’s were presentable and were adopted, a crucifix from the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, a gold Saviour affixed to a silver cross, was so dreadful that Walton began to wonder whether they needed any cross at all. He checked the Lincoln engraving. A crucifix was clearly visible. Furthermore, it had lain at the foot of the bier; it would be conspicuous to every visitor. “Doesn’t anyone have one that would fit?” he asked in despair. “I’ll get mine,” said Shriver. He dispatched a White House car to his home in Maryland, and his secretary, who had been watching the Shriver children, gave the driver the Benedictine cross from his bedroom—black, hand-sculpted, with a realistic, Germanic figure. “Perfect,” said Walton when he saw it. “It could have been ordered for the occasion.”

Sarge walked out to the portico with Goodwin, West, and Dr. English. Across Pennsylvania Avenue the huge, eerie crowd was milling about. They would never see the crepe-bordered East Room, Shriver thought, and the occasion should be made memorable for them, too. Remembering White House parties when the President and Mrs. Kennedy had had the grounds lit with little flaming pots, he called a council of the military men present. “This funeral for a President is going to vary a little bit from the manual,” he said. “I know he isn’t really coming home, but I want it to look that way.” He explained the need for light. They replied that they had none. “None?” Sarge repeated sarcastically. “Not even flashlights?” Hurt, one officer suggested helicopter lights. “Ridiculous,” Shriver fumed, and telephoned the District Highway Department. He recalled seeing tiny flambeaux set out to warn night drivers of highway construction. They weren’t used any more, he was told. The department had been completely converted to electrical equipment. He hung up, abandoning hope. But the old equipment had not been discarded. The right warehouse was located, the man with the key was found, and at 3:30 A.M. pots were situated on either side of the entrance drive and ignited.

Meantime Shriver had turned to the door. It was one of his greatest problems, and he never completely solved it. The entrance to the mansion was handsome. Unfortunately it was obscured by a storm door and framework; both were aluminum, which seemed to him to be cold and ugly. Bill Walton agreed. He further pointed out that in the event that the coffin should be cumbersome, the storm door might not be wide enough for it. Sarge waved his arm. “Take it off,” he said. The mansion staff huddled. The answer came back to him: “It won’t come off.” Sarge glowered at them. “Goddamn it, I was in the Merchandise Mart and I know it will come off,” he said. He was partly right. The three-sided glass enclosure could be dismantled, and West supervised its removal. But the frame was embedded in concrete. It had to stay. Lawrence Arata and his wife mounted stepladders and tacked crepe around it, and nobody noticed the frame. Shriver and Walton thought it was gone.

Among them they had created a scene of indescribable drama: the flame-lit drive, the deep black against the white columns, the shrouded doorway, the East Room in deep mourning, the catafalque ready to receive the coffin. There was only one omission, and Shriver was now free to concentrate on it. He said to Shepard, “All right, where are they?”

He didn’t identify them. It was unnecessary. Shepard spread his hands. He just didn’t know.

“The President of the United States is going to be here any minute,” Sarge said flintily, “and there’s nobody to meet him. Goddamn it, Taz, we want some soldiers or sailors who will walk slowly and escort him to the door, reflecting the solemnity of the occasion.”

“Get the Marines,” Dean Markham suggested. Markham had served in the Marine Corps in World War II, and he knew that the Corps’s crack drill teams were garrisoned at Eighth and I streets, southeast of the Capitol.

Colonel Miller thought it was an excellent idea. “That’s closer than any Army or Navy post,” he said. “I’ll send a bus.”

Shepard phoned the barracks’ duty officer. Under pressure himself, he spoke with exceptional force: “Break out the Marines. The Commander in Chief has been assassinated, and I want a squad at the White House double-quick. You better move!”

They moved. At the time of Shepard’s call they were in their bunks. Exactly seventeen minutes later they appeared on the South Portico in immaculate dress blues, each man trailing a glossy rifle at order arms. The entire squad had dressed in the bus. Unquestionably the men of any other service would have responded eagerly, but the selection of the leathernecks was particularly fitting for two reasons. Thomas Jefferson had ordered the construction of the barracks at Eighth and I, but John Kennedy had been the first President to inspect them. The Marines remembered that. They remembered something else. Every one of them knew where Lee Harvey Oswald had learned to shoot.

Double-timing through the Diplomatic Reception Room, the squad appeared on the North Portico. Under his breath Shriver said to English, “They made it.”

Their officer, First Lieutenant William Lee, formed them in ranks, dressed the ranks, and then strutted them down the drive toward the gate. At mid-point he ordered a halt and began speaking to them in a low voice. From the mansion it was inaudible, and after the vexing delay those on the portico were afraid the squad might be lost. Shriver squinted toward the gate. In the flickering torchlight he had an indistinct impression of glittering brass buttons, buffed shoes, choker collars, and visored white caps. Lieutenant Lee’s sword shimmered, but the comforting thump of boots had stopped; they were making no sound at all.

“Where’s he taking them?” Goodwin asked uneasily. “What are they doing?”

Lieutenant Bird’s pallbearers saluted the flag-draped coffin, and Dr. Burkley headed for the seventeenth floor. Ethel and Jean, roused by light knocks, remained in the background with Burkley and McNamara while Jacqueline Kennedy and the President’s brother headed the group from the tower suite. Mrs. Kennedy was uncertain about their destination; she was under the impression that they would go to another room and wait there—that had been the pattern for fourteen hours. Instead, it seemed, they were going to walk awhile. Leaving the elevator on the third floor, she followed the bobbing hat of a naval officer for nearly two hundred strides over seemingly endless stretches of rolling, red-tiled corridor to a second, push-button lift which carried them down to the basement. The hat bobbed to the right, past an out-patient clinic, left beneath a sign flashing physicians’ call numbers, and then she saw the flag outside the morgue and knew they were really going home now.

The purpose of the long trip had been to shield her from photographers. The cameramen were undeceived. They had scouted every exit and spotted the ambulance parked beside Gawler’s hearse. She saw them beyond the concrete platform, dim figures prancing behind ropes, and again she murmured to Clint Hill, “Don’t keep them away. Let them see.” They didn’t see. Everything happened too quickly. The coffin slid in; she sat on the jump seat beside it; Robert Kennedy crouched on the floor, and at 3:56 A.M. Clint told Bill Greer to pull out. Greer followed General Wehle’s staff car in a rapid tour of the hospital grounds, back out the main gate, and down Wisconsin to Massachusetts.

It was the smallest hour of the morning. Hardly anyone spoke. Everything had been said, and they were exhausted. Bob Kennedy saw that they were passing Gawler’s and remembered that the new coffin had come from there, but he remained mute. So did his wife, in the car behind the ambulance, though Ethel looked sideways at McNamara and wondered “what his philosophy could be, what made him strong and sympathetic like Bobby.” Except for the red roof light on the staff car, the cavalcade did not announce itself. Nevertheless the silent witnesses were there. Wehle, McHugh, Dave Hackett, and Lieutenant Bird looked out wearily and saw men in denim standing at attention beside cars halted at intersections, and in all-night filling stations attendants were facing the ambulance, their caps over their hearts. To Hackett this hushed trip back to the mansion was the most moving moment of the weekend, because the roughly dressed workmen heading for the 5 A.M. shift, the attendants and the bareheaded Negroes on the sidewalks were, he thought, “the people the President had been working for hardest.” They knew it, and they were here. And although traffic was thinnest at this time of day, a tremendous escort had sprung to life. The casket team rode in the last car of the procession. Yet as they turned off Massachusetts at Twentieth Street, Lieutenant Bird looked back up embassy row and saw “hundreds of automobiles following us, bumper to bumper as far back as the eye could see, their headlights flashing.”

In Lafayette Park the naked elms and beeches above the crowd there glistened with dew and stirred faintly in a southerly breeze as the General turned off his roof light. He radioed a brief report to the rest of the cars that they were entering the Northwest Gate and slowing down to pick up an honor guard of Marines. The report couldn’t reach the rear of the ambulance. Mrs. Kennedy heard “a slow clank-clanking” outside. The Attorney General thought he could hear the roll of drums, and perhaps the distant strains of music. In reality there was only Lieutenant Lee’s squad, moving ahead at port arms, in flawless formation, in that heartbreaking cadence of mourning which the Marine Corps learned at the turn of the century.

The two chief mourners stepped out; Shriver silently clasped their hands. The casket team moved up to the ambulance. Normally the officer commanding military body bearers does not touch the coffin, because he would throw it off balance, but on the portico steps Lieutenant Bird’s six men began to lurch alarmingly. Stepping up swiftly, he slid his fingers beneath the coffin and felt a wrenching strain in his arms. The soldier in front of him rolled his eyes back and whispered, “Good God, don’t let go,” and the seven of them carried it across the marble hall, into the East Room, onto the catafalque. Maître Fincklin and a doorman lit the tall candles. The hands of both Negroes were trembling violently, and in attempting to ignite the fourth taper the doorman extinguished his torch and had to begin again. Bill Walton handed a sheaf of flowers to Godfrey McHugh, who laid them against the coffin. McHugh did the job awkwardly, but Walton decided that rearrangement could wait. He tiptoed away; he was anxious not to intrude upon the family’s grief. Everyone who had joined in the redecoration felt that way. They bunched together on the south side of the room, from time to time looking at the casket almost furtively. Among them was Pierre Salinger, who wrote: “Our Chief was home. And for the first time since I peered at the yellow piece of paper in the hand of the Secretary of State, I began to believe he was really dead.”

Standing in the doorway of the elegant room she had loved, whose history she knew so well, and which she had last left at the height of Wednesday’s judiciary reception, the widowed First Lady recognized the tallest of the men—gaunt, pocked Chuck Spalding. Their eyes met. During that fleeting exchange she saw the harrowed lines of suffering in his face and thought of Abraham Lincoln; Spalding himself thought “of all the things planned for, all the things fought for, all the things achieved, all the things to do, all the things so suddenly lost.”

“A priest said a few words,” Schlesinger noted. It was a brief blessing. Those at the far end of the chamber could not hear it. Father John Kuhn of St. Matthew’s was reading the De Profundis, Psalm 130:

Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord; Lord, hear my voice!…

My soul waits for the Lord more than sentinels wait for the dawn.…

For with the Lord is kindness and with Him is plenteous redemption;

And He will redeem Israel from all their iniquities.

To the widow the blessing, like the yards of exquisitely folded crepe, was supremely appropriate. She had been through so much that was sordid and tawdry since her departure from the mansion. Now she knew she was home. Kneeling by the veterans’ flag, she buried her face in the field of stars.

They trooped out to the hall. She mounted the stairway to the second floor, and they stood about uncertainly, awaiting some instruction from the Attorney General. Bob had one. During their moments together beside the catafalque he had whispered to Jackie that he would settle the coffin issue before retiring. To do that, however, he must return to the East Room and ask that the lid be raised for him. While Lieutenant Sawtelle’s Death Watch ceremoniously relieved Lieutenant Bird’s body bearers, the top was lifted and cocked open on its small hinge by Godfrey McHugh or Joe Gawler. Either could have done it; each recalls it; the recollection of neither is persuasive. Gawler remembers a conference by the bier between Robert Kennedy and Eunice Shriver, who was, of course, in Hyannis Port. McHugh’s memory is more circumstantial, but in his mind the incident seems to have blurred together with an almost identical scene Sunday, when Jacqueline Kennedy was present. It was really not a time of clarity. Her spontaneous gesture with the bunting had shattered them all.

The President’s brother requested that the servicemen withdraw from the catafalque, and approached it alone. It was the first time he had seen the body. He made up his mind then: Jackie had been right. Yet it couldn’t be entirely a personal decision. McNamara’s argument still carried force. John Kennedy had been a husband and a Kennedy, but he had also been the American Chief of State, and others who had been close to him—including O’Donnell and O’Brien—felt a sealed top was improper. Therefore Bob Kennedy solicited several opinions. Emerging into the hall, his cheeks damp, he requested those who were waiting there to go in and return with their impressions. He explained, “Jackie wants it covered.”

Perhaps this was leading them. Had he not indicated her preference, the results might have been different. This is possible, though hardly probable, for the Secretary of Defense came out a minority of one. Indeed, of those who entered—McNamara, Schlesinger, Spalding, Walton, Nancy Tuckerman, Frank Morrissey, and Dr. English—only the doctor and the Secretary considered the President presentable. English said he was opposed to an open coffin on principle, but was “surprised that his appearance was as good as it was, that he looked well.” He merely wondered why the President’s body was “tilted somewhat to the right, if that was because of the shell and what it had done.” (Actually, tilting is standard undertaking practice. In “casketing,” to quote a trade journal, “natural expression formers” should always “turn the body a bit to the right and soften the appearance of lying flat on the back.” This avoids “the impression that the body is in a box.”)

The verdict of the others was vehement, and because they knew Robert Kennedy’s tough fiber, they did not soften it. Arthur Schlesinger and Nancy Tuckerman went in through the Green Room. “It is appalling,” Arthur reported. “At first glance it seemed all right, but I am nearsighted. When I came closer it looked less and less like him. It is too waxen, too made-up.” Nancy echoed faintly, “It really is not like him.” Spalding said bluntly that the face resembled “the rubber masks stores sell as novelties.” He urged Bob to “close the casket.”

His eyes full, the Attorney General turned to Bill Walton and whispered, “Please look. I want to know what you think.” Walton looked as long as he could, with a growing sense of outrage. He said to Bob, “You mustn’t keep it open. It has no resemblance to the President. It’s a wax dummy.”

Schlesinger, anticipating questions about a Head of State—the McNamara argument—assured Kennedy he would be acting on the best of precedents. The Roosevelt coffin had been closed.

“You’re right,” Kennedy said incisively. “Close it.” Turning away, he went upstairs with Spalding.

Salinger broke the news to the press, and although the networks were almost at their wit’s end for scraps of information they displayed admirable taste in playing the announcement down. Even so it aroused curiosity. Innumerable members of the national audience were convinced that the casket was sealed because there was something to hide. At NBC David Brinkley was “flooded by letters and wires demanding an explanation. I was repeatedly asked to provide one, and usually I refused, though I sometimes said it was at the request of the family, or for reasons which seemed obvious. To me it was obvious. I feel strongly that the coffin should be closed at all funerals.”

One magazine offered a gratuitous elucidation. Time (December 6, 1963) reported that “The casket… was never to be opened because the President had been deeply disfigured.” This was wholly untrue. Neither wound had damaged the President’s face. His features, intact when his wife examined them at Parkland, had been treated with cosmetics, and this was what gave offense. Her impressions of Sunday morning, when she next saw him, are chronologically out of place here. Yet one of them is pertinent: “It wasn’t Jack. It was like something you would see at Madame Tussaud’s.”

Dawn was unmemorable, which is unsurprising, because the moment of daybreak is imprecise anyhow. In the U.S. Naval Observatory at Massachusetts and Thirty-fourth N.W. sunrise was recorded at 6:50 A.M. That was determined by scientific instruments. It is arbitrary on any day, but meteorologically November 23, 1963, was about to smother the Eastern seaboard. Between dawn and dusk not a single ray of sunshine would be discernible to the trained scanners at the observatory at Dulles, or at Washington National. The overcast was solid, an unbroken blot.

Yet even the dimmest sunrise is preceded by what infantrymen call morning twilight. At 4:34, when President Kennedy had been carried up the steps of the North Portico on the aching fingertips of six enlisted men and one junior officer, the sky had been swarthy. Pale streaks were lacing the eastern horizon as the first shift of the Death Watch mounted guard, however, and that first light was oddly translucent. The grayness was not entirely gray. The penumbra was tinged with a sickly yellow which any seaman would have recognized and distrusted. Already storm signals were flapping on the Chesapeake and the lower Potomac. It was going to blow, hard.

An abrupt barometric drop from 29.76 to 29.44—those were the early readings—induces an atavistic tension in people and animals. Farmers know the signs as well as sailors. With the charge of negative electricity that precedes the deluge barnyards become restless. Sheep bleat. Cattle low. It is a primitive warning; trouble is on the way. But Washingtonians who were awake in Saturday’s seventh hour don’t remember that either. Their nerves were incapable of withstanding another turn of the screw. They couldn’t imagine greater trouble, and therefore as the darkness outside merged unobserved into gloomy daylight, the darkness within them went on and on. Once—it had been yesterday noon, a staggering thought—life had been normal. At lunchtime one had looked forward to the office, home, dinner, children, sleep. Since then routine had been ruptured and displaced by a grotesque abnormality. Though a full night had passed since then, there had been neither normal work nor meals nor repose.

Only a handful slept at all. Ken Galbraith induced insentience with a mild overdose of sleeping pills; he was shortly awakened by a punishing headache. Mac Kilduff stretched out on the press room cot he had used during the Cuban missile crisis. Chief Usher West tossed on a mansion couch for an hour, General Wehle in his Fort McNair CP for two hours, Lieutenant Bird dozed forty-five minutes in Fort Myer’s Bachelor Officers Quarters. Bill Walton drifted off in “a skin-thin, foxhole sleep; I had been thrust back twenty years into the 82nd Airborne.” An unnatural trance was the best the most phlegmatic could manage. The sensitive couldn’t close their eyes, and genuine slumber was a phenomenon. Lieutenant Bird leaped to his feet at the first spatter of rain. His first thought was that he was going to get thoroughly drenched, because he was “too proud to wear a raincoat.” Taz Shepard heard the drizzle and approved. Any other weather, he felt, would have been an affront. In Georgetown Ben Bradlee lay through the ominous gloaming, listening to the dying of the last sirens. Beside him Toni sprawled weeping, and not because she was a woman or especially emotive; it had been a night of tears; Mac Bundy, the Kennedy-Johnson aide who had made the swiftest transition, later noted tersely, “Friday and Saturday I cried at home—after that not.”

Bundy then rose and summoned a White House car. “Jobs,” he wrote, “were our only comfort.” And a job was not a task performed during specified hours; it was a substitute for void. The impact of the tragedy did not strike everyone with equal force, of course. Though Mac described it as “deep and general,” he also observed that “The shadings of grief were varied—and the sense of sharing seldom complete. Jackie and Bobby were in a circle all their own; near them were the family; then—in different ways—Kenny and Bob McNamara—and then for different things a lot of us. And in different ways each circle of hurt found it easy to forget that others were also in grief. In particular it was easy to forget that the new President and his circle were hurt, too.”

There were no closed planes; total immunity was almost unknown. With absolutely nothing to do at that unearthly hour, Washington had seldom been busier. Bundy, wretchedly attempting to set up a staff conference, reflected that “The real sadness… was not at predictable moments—but whenever one got hit at some unguarded opening by a fresh thought of loss and change. I remember such states in passing the Rose Garden, in coming to the elevator to the second floor, in admiring the new red rug in his office which he never got to see.” Nor were the afflicted confined to those who had known John Kennedy. It would be hard to find a less susceptible crew than Joe Gawler’s undertakers. They were so accustomed to death that they maintained a scoreboard in the funeral parlor basement to keep track of each day’s remains. Yet Gawler and his men couldn’t go home after the East Room ceremony. Leaving Pennsylvania Avenue, they picked up their unused hearse at Bethesda, repaired an S iron on its side, and began preparations for Saturday’s funerals.

On the third floor of the Executive Mansion George Thomas inspected the President’s Texas luggage, which had been deposited on a rack outside his room. He couldn’t bear to open it, so he became a kind of community valet, polishing shoes and pressing suits for any man who would have him, including, later in the day, another gentleman’s gentleman whom he mistook for a distant Kennedy relative. Godfrey McHugh sat alone in his East Wing office, fumbling through dull Air Force orders. He had considered himself relieved by the Death Watch, but since he didn’t know what else to do he greeted Saturday by struggling through unreadable military prose. Dr. Burkley decided to resign—Arthur Schlesinger subsequently regarded himself as the first Kennedy appointee to try to quit, but the physician beat him. Leaving the mansion after Father Kuhn’s blessing, Burkley crossed West Executive and notified Walter Jenkins that he wished to retire. Neither man thought it extraordinary that the other should be functioning at five o’clock in the morning.

The writers went on writing. In crisis literacy may eclipse every other passion. Drunks were sober, lechers chaste, and aspirants for the Presidency—including every Republican who had been mentioned as a candidate—were free of Potomac fever; but the stream of words swelled hourly. By 5:15 A.M. Schlesinger was back at his East Wing typewriter, banging away. With pencil and White House stationery Charlie Bartlett dashed off, not a column, not a letter, but an extraordinary unaddressed tribute:

We had a hero for a friend—and we mourn his loss. Anyone, and fortunately there were so many, who knew him briefly or over long periods, felt that a bright and quickening impulse had come into his life. He had uncommon courage, unfailing humor, a penetrating, ever curious intelligence, and over all a matchless grace. He was our best. He will not be replaced, nor will he be forgotten, for in truth he was a kind of cheerful lightning who touched us all. We will remember him always with love and sometimes, as the years pass and the story is retold, with a little wonder.

One deciphers Bartlett’s handwriting with wonder. He had rarely written so well for publication. He was, of course, as close to Kennedy as any writer; he and Martha, “shamelessly matchmaking,” as Jacqueline Kennedy later said, had introduced the future Mrs. Kennedy to the future President. Yet those who had met John Kennedy but once or, more often, not at all were setting down panegyrics as moving. From Torquay seventy-nine-year-old Sean O’Casey was writing a friend in New York:

What a terrible thing has happened to us all! To you there, to us here, to all everywhere. Peace who was becoming bright-eyed now sits in the shadow of death: her handsome champion has been killed as he walked by her very side. Her gallant boy is dead. What a cruel, foul, and most unnatural murder! We mourn here with you poor, sad American people.

André Malraux cabled Mrs. Kennedy: “Nous pensons à vous et nous sommes si tristes.…” A Frenchman who had never seen either member of the First Family wrote the widow: “Madame, La mort de votre mari m’a fait un très grand coup au coeur.… Votre mari était un grand homme qui restera pour toujours [word illegible] dans ma mémoire.” In the American Embassy in London, where it was now 11 A.M., an unknown Englishman set down in halting script: “With the death of President Kennedy every man in the Free World is a Kennedy,” and an eleven-year-old British schoolboy wrote Jacqueline Kennedy, “I thought that he was a peace loving, brave and kind man. In fact, all that a man should be. One day I hope that I will follow his example.”

The English had a special affection for the great-grandson of an Irish potato farmer who had seemed to them to have become the apotheosis of their own moribund aristocracy, a regency figure miraculously reborn. But the glow had spread everywhere; in Italy, which had learned overnight that the assassination weapon was a product of Terni Arsenal, C2766 was already known as “il fucile maledetto”—“that accursed gun.” Even those who had chivied, traduced, and fought Kennedy were also awake and scribbling. Charles de Gaulle was groping for the right words. So was Nikita Khrushchev. So was Fidel Castro. And so, at 810 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, was the Republican presidential candidate of 1960.

None of the homage was easy. For this man, however, every stroke of the pen must have been excruciating. It was not generally known, but Richard Nixon had admired the President extravagantly. He wrote of his and his wife’s thoughts and prayers for Mrs. Kennedy and mentioned the role of fate in making the two men enemies. Somehow, the letter conveyed a spirit of what Nixon himself might have called Americanism. It was civil, and it was touchingly gentle.

It is notable that the one man who enjoyed absolute peace that night—the best, he confided to his brother next day, that he had ever known—was the assassin. To Robert Oswald and to his interrogators Lee Oswald trumpeted that he was refreshed. Certainly he looked spry. In Dallas another Texan, a bystander who had witnessed the assassination, also slept soundly. Young Ron Fischer, the bookkeeper who admired Barry Goldwater, said afterward, “Sure, I had a reaction. It took me several minutes to drop off. That may have been my digestive system, though. I’d had a real big meal, and I always eat too fast. It’s the one thing that’s really wrong with me.”

Nevertheless Oswald and Fischer were unusual. America was not a fit nation early Saturday. Across the country, millions, including many who had voted Republican in 1960, arose feeling drugged. Ken Galbraith’s hangover may not be attributable to pills. His lethargy was widespread. It was quite ordinary for an individual to stir awake with the sensation that he had just been rescued from a dreadful nightmare. Roy Truly didn’t experience it because he was one of the true insomniacs. The Book Depository superintendent had wrestled vainly through the night with a clammy sheet. He had the feeling that his stomach was “tied up in a huge knot.” He was suffering from violent nausea and diarrhea and was under medication. Howard L. Brennan, the pipefitter who had seen Oswald fire the fatal shot, was even sicker. Although Brennan, like Truly and Fischer, had violently disapproved of the Kennedy Presidency, he was deeply disturbed. Obsessed with the fear that the assassin’s co-conspirators would kill his two-year-old granddaughter, he commenced the first of a long series of therapeutic sessions.

In the White House guest rooms even fitful rest was exceptional. Dr. John Walsh was flitting from threshold to threshold doling out red ovoid Seconal capsules, two to a customer. They were gulped obediently, if cynically. Hardly anyone expected results. The ineffectiveness of barbiturates and alcohol had been repeatedly demonstrated; they had become a bad joke; in lieu of narcotics the guests conversed with one another. Like Jacqueline Kennedy at Bethesda, they were trying catharsis. Bob Kennedy talked to Chuck Spalding. Sargent Shriver and Jean Smith knelt together by the closed coffin and then talked in the hall. Jean transferred her bag to the Rose, or the Queen’s, Room, thinking to nap there. She didn’t stay long. At 6:25 Pat Lawford and six-year-old Sydney descended an American Airlines ramp at Dulles Airport, and Peter and Milt Ebbins, his theatrical manager, arrived at about the same time. Pat walked in on Jean, and the first moves in a weekend of musical bedrooms were made: Jean, Peter, and Milt went to the third floor, and Pat and her daughter lay down in the room adjoining the Queen’s so Sydney would be close to Caroline. First, however, the sisters had to compare notes, and just as they had wound up and Jean was settling down on her new mattress, her husband arrived on the new day’s first shuttle from New York and whizzed in through the Southwest Gate. He wanted to talk.

Elsewhere on the third floor O’Donnell and O’Brien, who had been assigned adjoining bedrooms, were not in them. They were combining their persuasive talents to enlist Salinger, who had no bed—not that it mattered—in the faction supporting a Boston burial. Pierre capitulated quickly. Ken and Larry then told of the tensions of the flight from Dallas while the three men, attended by George Thomas, shaved. The 10 A.M. Mass in the mansion for intimate friends and associates of the President was their first real commitment, and busy work and cat naps were broken off to tidy up. Inevitably they were inefficient. They were—literally—sleepwalking. In the President’s bathroom Hudi Auchincloss’ ablutions were interrupted by the Attorney General. Robert Kennedy stepped in, apparently looking for something, and stepped out. He hadn’t said a word. Auchincloss crossed to his wife, who lay wide-eyed on her rack. He said wonderingly, “You know, I don’t think he even saw me.”

The ceaseless, repetitive dialogues went on in bathrooms, dressing rooms, by the catafalque, anywhere. Dave Powers went home to change his blemished suit and told his wife the most remarkable yarn of his life until the clock warned him he must return to the mansion for the Mass. Nancy Tuckerman and Pam Turnure hurried home, changed, hurried back to the White House, and joined new conversations. In an apartment just off the 6100 block of Sixteenth Street Evelyn Lincoln’s husband had greeted her with “Do you remember what I said about Texas?” She replied groggily, “You said something was liable to happen in Dallas.” He nodded, and they were off. “I’ve got to be at the office at eight,” she finally said—forgetting that her employer was no longer alive. Marie Fehmer, whose employer had become the most active man in the world, alternately wept and chatted with her two roommates until the hour struck. Then she dressed with such speed that she didn’t notice her choice until she had reached the EOB. To her horror she saw that on this atrabilious day she was wearing a skirt of gay Kelly green—at about the same time that Evelyn realized that she had absently dressed in pink.

Marie and Evelyn wrung hands, as Nellie Connally had twenty-four hours before, and as pointlessly. Friday morning Jackie had been the only woman anyone had noticed, and on this Saturday nothing short of indecency would have raised an eyebrow. With a forty-six-year-old President lying in a coffin, the world was transformed. Westminster Abbey’s tenor bell tolled each minute in a tribute reserved for monarchs, Brazilian television technicians terminated a bitter strike to transmit news from America, the Japanese captain who rammed PT 109 was inconsolable, the Chairman of the Soviet Union sat dazed in the American Embassy, Norodom Sihanouk of Cambodia ordered his anti-American posters hauled down, and the ruling junta in the Dominican Republic, which the Dallas News had endorsed but which President Kennedy had refused to recognize, proclaimed nine days of official mourning.⁷

Under these circumstances, and particularly at this early hour, decorum had no meaning. One of the most searching assessments of the days ahead was held by a Cabinet Secretary and a Special Assistant to the President in the front seat of a private automobile. Arthur Schlesinger, a fast writer, left the mansion to drive Robert McNamara home. As the serpentine murk spread grayly along the stately little complex of residential streets beyond Dupont Circle, Schlesinger parked. According to his journal, McNamara told him that the country had “suffered a loss which it would take ten years to repair, that there is no one on the horizon to compare with the President as a national leader.” McNamara thought that “Goldwater was out, that Nixon would be the likely Republican candidate, and that a party fight among the Democrats would be suicidal. He said that he did not know Johnson well and did not know his habits of work but supposed that he would concentrate above everything else on the 1964 election.”

Concern over the new President grew, and like the dawn their image of Lyndon Johnson was muddled and smudgy. The Secretary described the helicopter ride from Andrews. Although Johnson had urged him to stay, he said, he was “uncertain whether the relationship would work.” As he left the car—it was now daytime, soupy but light—Schlesinger declared that he himself would leave the administration immediately. He felt that “the whole crowd of us should clear out—that is, those of us in the White House,” leaving Johnson with “his own people around him.” Schlesinger observed that “The Cabinet is different from the White House staff, which is personal. Even there Mac Bundy is an exception and has created his own job.” He was convinced that President Kennedy’s official family could not become President Johnson’s. The Kennedy Cabinet might become the Johnson Cabinet; that was a separate issue.

For a former Harvard professor Arthur Schlesinger was foxy. The Secretary had speculated innocently about next November, but his driver, usually voluble, had listened with the laconism of an O’Donnell. McNamara was a registered Republican. Schlesinger was a zealous Democrat, and despite his silence on this point his convictions about the campaign were far more partisan than the Secretary’s. He wondered whether Lyndon Johnson should be his party’s candidate in the coming election. Already he was looking ahead to the convention in Atlantic City. After leaving Dupont Circle he conferred with Chairman John Bailey, asking him whether it would be possible to deny the new President the nomination. John, according to his account, replied that “it might be technically feasible, but the result would be to lose the election for the Democrats.” Schlesinger suggested that the party was likely to lose anyway, that either Rockefeller or Nixon would win by carrying “the big industrial states.” He then added perceptively, “But I suppose that Johnson is astute enough to recognize this too, which means that he may be driven to an aggressive liberal program.” This judgment was reached on the thirty-sixth President’s first full day in office, before he had made a single move in any direction, and it came from a Democrat who was pondering the wisdom of forfeiting the election, “regardless of merits,” to beat him. Yet it would be hard to find a shrewder appraisal of the Johnsonian domestic program that would later emerge.

The daylight was as broad as it would ever be. In the aoristic haze oak leaves lay in sodden arabesques beside Eisenhower’s old putting green, and beneath the three windows of the First Lady’s bedroom a lone, bedraggled squirrel scolded his paws. Jacqueline Kennedy did not see him. She was unconscious. That is the only adequate word to describe her condition. She was not asleep; no one in the mansion was as incapable of rest as the hostess. But Dr. John Walsh had resolved upon a drastic step. She could not go on this way. He would have to knock her out with powerful medication, administered intramuscularly.

Leaving the East Room, she had debouched in a second-floor vestibule and stumbled into the arms of her maid. Provi was weeping; the two women had embraced and then, in her private quarters, Mrs. Kennedy had finally shed her stained clothing. By now the President’s blood was no longer damp; the blemishes had darkened as they dried. Even so, the maid was overcome by the extent of the blood. Nothing she had seen or heard on the television reports had prepared her for this. While her mistress bathed, Provi packed the clothes and hid the bag.

Walsh came in after the bath. In the tower suite Walsh had administered one shot to his star patient. It had been worthless. Now he grimly armed another needle, this time with the strongest weapon in his arsenal. She lay down on her side of the double bed, the soft side (the other side was board and horsehair), and he injected a full half-gram of Amytal. He didn’t tell her what it was, but it was formidable enough to knock out a prizefighter, and as he and Provi slipped out into the West Sitting Room they were convinced that she was insensible.

She wasn’t yet. She could cry, and did, but she could not cry herself to sleep. Eventually, the sedative reached her. For the first time since rising in Fort Worth’s Hotel Texas, when her husband’s voice had drifted up from the parking lot eight stories below, she was out.

Seven

LACE