The Death of a President

She was quiet for perhaps an hour. Shortly after six o’clock she asked her maid for orange juice, and then the drug dragged her down for another two hours. That was the limit of its effect, however; too much was on her mind, and she swung up into a sitting position on the side of the bed, determined to resolve two issues before the 10 A.M. Mass. Unaware that Robert Kennedy had agreed with her about the coffin, she asked for him. Meantime she braced herself to talk to her children.

At 7:30 the door of the President’s bedroom, where Jacqueline Kennedy’s mother had just awakened, had swung open and Caroline had entered. In a dreamlike tone the President’s daughter said to her grandmother, “He’s dead, isn’t he?”

There could be no adequate answer, merely a tight nod. But the little girl did not seem to expect details.

To young John Kennedy, Mrs. Kennedy said that a bad man had shot his daddy, then added that he hadn’t been bad really; he had just been sick. The boy looked blank. For him the full meaning of the assassination was impossible to grasp.

Robert Kennedy assured his sister-in-law that the public would not see the President. Then, while she changed to black weeds—it was the only black dress she owned; in five years she had worn it just twice, at the press conference when her husband announced his candidacy for the Presidency on Capitol Hill and, more recently, at John’s christening—he struck off on a lonely walk through the mist-shrouded south grounds. It was just past eight o’clock. In the West Wing Pierre Salinger’s phone was ringing. The operator said, “The President wishes to speak to you.”

Salinger was startled—“I’d had very little sleep, and I was not yet thinking of anyone else as being the President.” Johnson came on the line, gentle and soft-spoken. He understood Pierre’s personal involvement with Kennedy, he said, but he wanted him to stay as press secretary: “I need you more than he needed you.”

The new President’s first problem, upon leaving the Elms, was selecting a destination. As Chief Executive he was entitled to occupy the oval office. One may reason that his duty lay there, that any other course would sap confidence in government at a critical time—indeed, several men stated the issue just that way. On the other hand, grief remained the nation’s dominant mood. His presence in the White House would inevitably become the source of misinterpretation and resentment. There was no clear option, and Johnson was uncharacteristically indecisive. His first choice was to go to the West Wing.

As Head of the White House Detail, Jerry Behn commanded his convoy of agents. Behn’s habitual greeting was, “What’s new?” The gambit was depressingly trite, an office joke. This morning Evelyn Lincoln saw Behn before he saw her, and it is a sign of the widespread antagonism toward the Secret Service that Evelyn looked him hard in the eye and said bitterly, “Jerry, there’s something new.” He turned away without answering.

Evelyn was packing; Mac Bundy had assigned Maxwell Taylor’s old EOB office to her. She knew the Attorney General wanted the West Wing cleared of President Kennedy’s belongings, but she felt no sense of urgency, and she even asked Cecil Stoughton to photograph the newly decorated rooms while JFK bric-a-brac was still there. Then LBJ unexpectedly appeared and asked her to step into the oval office. “Yes, sir,” she said, and obediently followed.

President Johnson sat on one of the two facing divans. Evelyn started toward the rocking chair, veered away, and sank on the opposite couch. According to her recollection he said, “I need you more than you need me. But because of overseas”—presumably a reference to the necessity for shoring up confidence abroad—“I also need a transition. I have an appointment at 9:30. Can I have my girls in your office by 9:30?”

He was giving her less than an hour. She said faintly, “Yes, Mr. President.”

Muggsy O’Leary, who was standing by Evelyn’s desk, admiring the new red carpeting, overheard the conversation. Of Johnson he felt there was “anxiety on his part to get in.”¹

Johnson then said to Evelyn, “Do you think I could get Bill Moyers in Ken O’Donnell’s office?”

She didn’t know how to reply. She lacked any influence with Kennedy’s chief of staff. After an awkward pause she faltered, “I don’t know, Mr. President.”

Withdrawing in confusion, she encountered the Attorney General in her own office. She sobbed, “Do you know he asked me to be out by 9:30?”

The younger Kennedy was appalled. He had just come in from the South Lawn to see how the moving was progressing, but he hadn’t counted on this. He said, “Oh, no!”

In the hall he encountered the new President. This was the first meeting of the two men since the assassination, and it must be viewed in context. Lyndon Johnson was no longer a Kennedy subordinate; it was the other way around. Robert Kennedy had been aroused by the reports of the President’s demeanor on the plane, while Johnson, for his part, was in an impossible position. Nothing he did Saturday morning would have pleased everyone. His first obligations were to his country, and it should be remembered that he met those obligations handsomely. To George Reedy he had said, “There must be no gap; the government must go forward.” It was a wise conclusion. And there was no gap. At the juncture of administrations there would merely be an unsightly scar.

The President was coming out of O’Donnell’s office when he saw the Attorney General. He said, “I want to talk to you.”

“Fine,” said Robert Kennedy. But he didn’t want to talk in the Presidential office. They entered a little anteroom opposite the President’s washroom, and Johnson told him that he needed him more than his brother had. By now a half-dozen members of the administration had quoted this same line to Kennedy. And he did not want to discuss his continuance in the Cabinet now anyhow. He told Johnson that the immediate issue was more prosaic. It was furniture. Crating his brother’s things was going to take time, he explained, and he asked, “Can you wait?”

“Well, of course,” the new President answered, and in the next breath he began qualifying his reply. In effect he said that while he himself did not want to occupy the White House at once, his advisers were insisting upon it.

The Attorney General was not impressed, and his unresponsiveness seems to have triggered Johnson’s prompt decision to switch back to the EOB. The story that he had walked up to the threshold of the new red rug, declared solemnly, “No, this isn’t right,” and spun on his heel rapidly became gospel among lesser Johnsonian aides. It is untrue. Yet he was not exaggerating the pressure upon him to take over—pressure which, after his exchange with Kennedy, he resisted fiercely. He walked down to the Situation Room for a briefing from McCone and Bundy; then, huddled under an umbrella held by an agent, he dashed across West Executive Avenue for meetings with Rusk, McNamara, and the Congressional leadership. To his staff he said tersely, “Marie will handle the phones, Juanita will handle the people.” There was some discussion of a nationwide television address that evening. He shook his head. Colonel William Jackson, his Vice Presidential military aide, argued forcefully that he ought to go back to the White House. The President ignored him. “It would give the people confidence,” the Colonel explained. “People will get confidence if we do our job properly,” Johnson said tartly. “Stop this. Our first concern is Mrs. Kennedy and the family.”²

On the other side of the street Robert Kennedy told Evelyn that she needn’t hurry. Nevertheless she sped along. Two Kennedy rocking chairs were rapidly roped together and rolled across West Executive on a little dolly. Evacuation by 9:30 was an impossibility, but Evelyn was determined to have everything in cartons by 11 A.M., and although she left briefly for the religious service in the mansion, she made it. Alone the task would have required a full day. From the moment she reached for the first box, however, she was surrounded by an eager crew: her husband, Mary Gallagher, Joe Giordano, Boots Miller, and Muggsy. Ken O’Donnell glanced in briefly, said he approved of the rapid removal of the President’s belongings, and slapped his Texas trip folder on her desk. “I’m going home,” he said in his pithy way; she assumed he was quitting. The folder was packed away with the President’s ship models, paintings, the cigar box in front of the Presidential chair in the Cabinet Room, the carved desk from the oval office and the personal mementos on it—photographs of his wife and children, the coconut shell upon which he had carved the news of his survival after the sinking of PT 109, and a silver calendar noting the dates of the Cuban missile crisis. To Giordano, unfastening the wall set of Paul Revere lamps, a gift from the White House Correspondents Association, was the toughest job he had ever tackled. As one Chief Executive’s furnishings departed, another’s arrived. Behind Evelyn’s desk a huge gold-framed portrait of Lyndon Johnson, brought over from his Vice Presidential office, was swiftly hung.³

As Evelyn and her team packed, Schlesinger was completing his letter of resignation in the East Wing, Sorensen was notifying his staff in the West Wing that he intended to quit and that he expected them to do the same, most of the agents who had been in Texas were toiling over their longhand reports, Bill Greer was taking President Kennedy’s Dallas clothing to Protective Research for a scientific check, Miss Shaw was looking out with brimming eyes on the forest of umbrellas in Lafayette Park, Mac Bundy was on duty in the Vice President’s EOB anteroom, Dwight Eisenhower was en route to see Johnson, who was telephoning first Hubert Humphrey, thanking him for his televised tributes over CBS and NBC, and then Ralph Yarborough, to acknowledge his telegram of support. Pierre Salinger wearily screened all the correspondents’ requests to see Sorensen and approved two, from Teddy White and Art Buchwald. Sorensen received White promptly and then completely forgot Buchwald, who was left waiting in the depressing west lobby. A floor below him Ken O’Donnell, on his way to the mansion, paused to tell a group of openmouthed subordinates about the comportment of the coroner and the judge at Parkland. At the eastern end of the same corridor Larry O’Brien stood alone, his stocky neck bowed, blinded by tears.

Despite his woolly head John Kenneth Galbraith decided that someone ought to write a proper obituary for the Washington Post. He called the editor, volunteered to do it himself, and set to work in Kay Graham’s study. In various rooms of Hickory Hill Ethel Kennedy, her children, and Dave Hackett all awoke stunned. Hackett began sobbing before his feet hit the floor; from bed he telephoned his mother. Six miles away the Old Guard (minus five half-hour shifts of the Death Watch, which were at the White House) fell out on Fort Myer’s north parade ground to hear the formal proclamation of mourning the State Department had drawn up for President Johnson. Rain had begun to descend, yet Lieutenant Sam Bird found that every man in ranks had independently reached his own conclusion about raincoats; not a slicker was in sight.

From Texas Byron Skelton telegraphed Robert Kennedy: “I only wish the warning to you in my letter of November fourth against the Dallas visit could have been heeded”; in Dallas Lee Oswald lay in his fifth-floor maximum-security cell. His wife, his mother, and his two daughters were in suite 905–907 on the ninth floor of the Hotel Adolphus. Thomas B. Thompson of Life had whisked them there from the Paine home. The evidence against the assassin had been accumulating through the night. At 4 A.M. CST, executives of Klein’s Sporting Goods in Chicago, after poring over their microfilmed records for six hours, found the American Rifleman coupon with which Oswald had ordered C2766 eight months before. His rest had not improved the behavior of the rifle’s owner. When Oswald was returned to the 11 × 14 interrogation room, Forrest Sorrels felt he was “baiting Fritz, hoping Fritz would beat him up so he’d have a police brutality charge.” On the other hand, police interrogation techniques hadn’t improved either. The tiny room was again invaded by a convention of city, state, and federal officers, and some of the questions put to the prisoner seem scarcely pertinent. Fritz, for example, asked him if he believed in “a deity.” The Captain later recalled that Lee said he “didn’t care to discuss that”—a sensible rebuff. He did offer a pitiful fabric of lies about his past. He insisted that he couldn’t afford a rifle on the Book Depository’s $1.25 an hour. And he was anxious that the standees in the cubicle understand that “I’m not a Communist, I’m not a Leninist-Marxist, I’m a Marxist,” an effort which, considering the absence of a dialectical materialist among his questioners, seems pointless. None of them knew Hegel. But then, neither did their prisoner.

Of the assassination he remarked, “People will forget that within a few days” because there would be “another President.” That, and a passing reference to the Chief Executive’s “nice family,” was about all he had to say about his victim; to Fritz he observed that he didn’t have “any particular comment about the President,” by whom he meant President Kennedy. Sketchy as the record is (apparently he wasn’t asked about Connally), one feels that a full transcript would be equally disappointing. Even when he was allowed to see his wife, mother, and brother he was singularly uncommunicative about the national tragedy. During a five-minute interview with his wife and mother he largely ignored Marguerite. Instead, he asked for news of the children in Russian; at one point his wife laughed aloud and explained to her mother-in-law, “Mama, he say he love me and buy June shoes.” Marina did not ask him whether he had killed Kennedy. Nevertheless it was very much on her mind. Later she said, “I could see by his eyes he was guilty.”

With the Attorney General out of action Nick Katzenbach was, in effect, Acting Attorney General, and he was proposing the investigative commission which the Chief Justice later headed. To his horror, Katzenbach learned that the new President had tentatively decided upon a Texas commission, with all non-Texans, including federal officials, excluded. Katzenbach went straight to Abe Fortas, the Washington attorney closest to Lyndon Johnson. He bluntly labeled Johnson’s idea a ghastly mistake. From Fortas he heard for the first time that the President intended to release the forthcoming FBI report on the assassination the moment it was ready. That, too, would be improper, Nick argued, and he insisted that the report be channeled through the Attorney General and himself.⁵

It was not necessary to be Chief Justice or Deputy Attorney General to discern the ugly shape of events, or to be alarmed by possible consequences. In the Dallas Police Department itself there was concern about Oswald’s safety. One captain telephoned Fritz about threats against the prisoner; he was told that the problem was Curry’s. And Wade’s implication that the widowed First Lady might be asked to take the stand in a Texas courtroom was greeted with general dismay. A widespread Dallas attitude was that “with all the strife she had gone through… she shouldn’t be expected to come back and face trial of this heinous crime.” The words are Jack Ruby’s. Ruby, however, went one step farther. He was convinced that “someone owed it to our beloved President” to make certain that the trip was needless. Obviously the debt could only be paid by a volunteer. All his life Jack had regarded himself as an avenger—an anti-Semitic remark was enough to set him off—and his vengeance had always expressed itself through violence. He was a direct, simple, stunted man, with a childlike inability to foresee the consequences of strenuous physical protest.

Driving back to the mansion after an hour’s cat nap at Timberlawn, the estate he leased in Maryland, Sargent Shriver reviewed Saturday’s “Repose Schedule,” as Colonel Miller had christened the East Room timetable:

1000–1100 Family

1100–1400 Executive Branch; Presidential Appointees; White House Staff

1400–1430 Supreme Court

1430–1700 Senate; House; Governors

1700–1900 Chiefs of Diplomatic Missions at Washington

It was not flawless. No one had included President Johnson, and, as Shriver and Dungan had tactfully explained to Miller, the Kennedy team disregarded all rule books; responding to drill now would be uncharacteristic of them and, in a way, disrespectful of the man for whom they sorrowed. Undeterred, the Colonel had plowed ahead. Some of his details were fantastic. “At 230930 Nov 63” a joint service cordon was to be “positioned on north portico drive… to guide visiting government and diplomatic officials through the Repose Room (East Room)”; the detail would be “dismissed at 231900 Nov 63.” A Merchandise Mart executive responsible for such turgid prose would have found himself in the novelty department. Still, Shriver conceded that the thing was workable: “The family would have Jack first, then the government, and finally there would be the homage of the people on Capitol Hill Sunday and during Monday’s funeral.”

The chief familial occasion on Saturday was the Mass being held at what Miller called 1000 hours. The final telegrams of invitation had been dispatched at 8 A.M. (ironically, Bill Walton, the Repose Room’s decorator, had been the last recipient), and they had been followed by a few last-minute telephoned requests to come; Bob Kennedy called Ted Sorensen during Ted’s farewell staff meeting. The religious ceremony was conspicuously unofficial. Only relatives and close acquaintances had been asked. Several eminent men were coming, but only because a nation’s First Magistrate forms personal ties among the great; the Ormsby-Gores were included as David and Cissy, not as the British Ambassador and his lady. She happened to be a Roman Catholic. It was not a condition. Mrs. Kennedy’s mother, after all, was an Episcopalian. So were the Dillons, who, despite his Jewish background, were about as close to the core of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant establishment as you could get, and Republicans to boot; nevertheless they were at the top of the list.

It was impossible for a Cabinet member to divorce himself completely from his duties—twenty minutes before the service the Secretary of the Treasury was in his office, demanding a full explanation from the Secret Service—but through the long weekend, whenever men like Ormsby-Gore and Dillon were asked which hat they preferred to wear, the invariable reply was: “I’m a friend.” Having known John Kennedy well was the highest possible accolade. David stressed his prized relationship with Kennedy even when other members of the diplomatic corps were present, and while the Secretary of the Treasury was having it out with the Secret Service, Phyllis Dillon was sending a little gold basket of flowers up to Jacqueline Kennedy, a private token of a private affection beyond pomp.

Assistant Secretary Jim Reed followed the Dillons through the White House East Gate—Reed entered the very door he had used Wednesday, when he had brought President Kennedy the Squaw Island lease for next July—at 9:50.⁶ Passing the sentry box he noticed that Lafayette Park was gray with fog. The downpour was steady, and increasing in intensity. Obviously it was going to be a day of high precipitation. The first man Reed saw in the mansion was Walton, his cheeks streaming, and on the floor above, America’s first Catholic First Lady had temporarily lost her spartan control in the presence of a priest. Father John Cavanaugh, an old friend, had come to her room to hear her confession. He was about to celebrate the Mass downstairs. Confession was a familiar ritual. Under these circumstances it seemed inappropriate, however, and Jacqueline Kennedy told him so. Father Cavanaugh was at a loss. Had the 263 Popes since Peter been in that bedroom, they would have been equally tongue-tied, and presently the widow realized that there was nothing the priest could say. Feeling sorry for the man, she regained her poise. They stumbled through the rite—it was really not an orderly doctrinal confession—and then she walked into the hall in her weeds, took Caroline in one hand and John in the other, and headed downstairs staring straight ahead.

A portable altar had been erected in the family dining room, directly across the hall from the State Dining Room. It was not an auspicious setting. The place was jammed with collapsible chairs. The East Room would have been far more appropriate, but everyone responsible agreed that expecting Mrs. Kennedy to attend Mass beside the coffin would be too much. Consequently they were all wedged in here, the President’s sisters, the Auchinclosses, and the Fitzgerald cousins in front; Shriver and Ethel and Joan Kennedy in the second row; and the others ranged behind. Robert Kennedy was dodging about, attending to last-minute details, and so, to the amazement and faint beguilement of the mafia, was Frank Morrissey. Morrissey had brevetted himself house acolyte. Holding a gold ciborium in both hands like a snuffbox, he was strutting importantly from aisle to aisle, lugubriously inquiring who would be taking Communion. Ben Bradlee was furious. He wasn’t a Catholic; he knew that Frank knew that, and when he was asked he glared malevolently. Ben observed that Frank was shaking the sacred vessel nervously. He felt certain that wasn’t done, and he was right; Ken O’Donnell whispered wryly to O’Brien, “I didn’t know Morrissey was ordained.” Larry smiled fleetingly. He whispered back, “We’ll just have to assume that the wafers are in an unblessed state.” Then, to the secret delight of both men, they saw that Frank was miscounting the number of communicants. He was taking charge and confusing everything. O’Brien thought how John Kennedy would have thrown back his head and laughed lustily at the spectacle.

Jacqueline Kennedy entered in a daze. The only person she recognized was her uncle, Wilmarth “Lefty” Lewis, and she wondered what he was doing here. She knew he lived in Farmington and was working on the Walpole papers for Yale; vaguely it struck her that this had been a long trip for an important man. This was a manifestation of the eye-in-the-storm syndrome: the principal mourners, preoccupied with their own grief, were scarcely aware that hundreds of millions of others were grieving with them, or even that a relative might leave his study and drive three hundred miles to pay his respects to the President.

Lewis’ presence, because unexpected, was somewhat startling. Conducting the Mass in this room was another matter. The executive mansion had been Mrs. Kennedy’s home for nearly three years. She had definite feelings about every hall and closet, and sweeping her eyes over the crouched, pallid mob in the family dining room she knew that there had been a mistake. It was unseemly, it was uncomfortable, it would not do. She asked, “Why is this here?” Muffled voices asked back, “Do you want it in the East Room?” She nodded, and Robert Kennedy directed Father Cavanaugh to move the portable altar.

In the muted din—wooden chairs cannot be folded quietly—there were various murmurs, gestures, unspoken tokens of compassion. Angie Duke pressed the widowed First Lady’s hand and assured her that he was on the job. She touched Ted Sorensen’s fingers and looked directly at him, her eyes telling him that she understood his own misery. Cissy Ormsby-Gore spoke to Maude Shaw as one compatriot to another. That was perceptive of her. Kennedy friends tended to take Miss Shaw for granted. She seemed so sturdy and self-reliant, so capable of looking after herself. But today she deserved a little special attention, for her burdens were special. Crossing the threshold of the East Room, young John stepped boldly forward from the nurse’s side—so boldly that, until Mrs. Kennedy restrained him, Lieutenant Sawtelle of the Death Watch was afraid the boy would upset one of the standing candles and set fire to the catafalque’s black velvet pall. Caroline momentarily hung back. Dressed in her simplest white frock, she stood beside Miss Shaw, who was maintaining a nannie’s respectful distance. The girl studied the flag-shrouded coffin and looked puzzled. “Daddy’s too big for that,” she said. “How is he lying? Are his knees under his chin?” The nurse whispered that it was bigger than it looked. Then Caroline inquired, “Why can’t I see him?” “Only grownups can see him,” Miss Shaw whispered.

In many ways the Mass resembled the blessing of five hours earlier. Not all the chairs were brought in. There was a large group of standees at the southern end of the hall, most of them non-Catholics wondering what to do. Cissy Ormsby-Gore mechanically knelt and crossed herself at the proper times, but there was much fidgeting on either side of her. Evelyn Lincoln kept glancing around. Every other woman there, she saw, was wearing black, and she bitterly regretted her choice of color and lack of a hat. Bill Walton, the urbane sophisticate, looked like a Merriwell hero; barrel-chested and jut-jawed, he clasped his arms around Pam Turnure. Pam was making choking sounds; so, despite his liturgical incantations, was Ormsby-Gore; so was Ben Bradlee. Ben finally fled. Although the service was meaningless to him, the crepe-bordered setting was intolerable. His racking sobs were coming in spasms, and rather than disgrace himself he fled into the Green Room—leaving Toni hurt that he should desert her at this of all times. Then, halfway through the Mass, the weepers controlled themselves. An unnatural stillness fell over that end of the huge room, and the standees drew closer to one another, many holding hands. One man commented under his breath: “We have to accept it; it’s God’s way.” In a flash a guttural voice replied, “I can’t accept it.” The quiet returned. Jim Reed, beside Red Fay, became conscious of the room’s darkness. It was midmorning, but the only illumination came from the four candles around the bier, and the sinking barometer was producing a dramatic effect. To Reed everything appeared to be tinged with a sinister hue. He could hear the drumming of the rain outside. The eight-hour downpour was continuing with a hammering frenzy of raindrops. The voice of the priest became inaudible. No one minded; Pam rested her head against Walton’s shoulder and thought, as Taz Shepard had, how right this was, and how wrong sunshine would have been.

These were the spectators. The participants—the family—were to have a quite different memory. En famille recollections of the Mass are dominated by the priest. This was especially true of the women. Robert Kennedy and Sargent Shriver felt the celebrant was able and gifted. They did not think him exceptional. For Jacqueline Kennedy, however, his intonation was eloquent. She was deeply moved by his expression—she thought he looked “so destroyed”—and his every phrase had profound meaning for Joan Kennedy, Ethel Kennedy, and Candy McMurrey.

During Holy Communion there was another episode which President Kennedy would have relished. Jamie Auchincloss, Jackie’s half-brother, had idolized the President. Like many bright sons of Republican businessmen, he had become an ardent Democrat. During his childhood he and his father had argued heatedly about Franklin Roosevelt’s place in history, and to him his half-sister’s husband had become a second FDR. Jamie had just turned sixteen and had been confirmed in the Episcopal Church. Nevertheless, when the moment of the Eucharist arrived, the boy participated, forever endearing him to both the President’s family and his own. It was the one bright moment in what was otherwise a ceremony of utter solemnity. Caroline was affected by the air of gravity, and with what Maude Shaw called the Bouvier intuition she moved to her mother’s support. Early in the Mass the little girl had glanced around at Evelyn Lincoln, her brow arched high in perplexity. Toward the end, however, she seemed to grasp her mother’s need for solace. Shriver was immediately behind them. He saw “Jackie and Caroline kneeling side by side, and when they had finished prayer Jackie rose and turned, her face was a mask of agony. Caroline took Jackie’s left hand in her right hand and squeezed it and then reached over with her other hand and patted her mother’s hand and looked up with an expression of intelligence and compassion and love, trying to comfort her mother.”

Abruptly it was over, and Mrs. Kennedy found herself at the head of an impromptu receiving line, standing in the main doorway debouching from the East Room into the marble hall, thanking the parting guests. It was the first of several similar scenes during those days; an individual would slip into a remote mansion alcove or anteroom and discover that he was formally shaking hands with a respectful, dolorous parade—often a parade of total strangers, like a grotesque scene in a Duerrenmatt play. Since the service had been set up in the family dining room, the denouement of Saturday’s Mass had not been anticipated. The standees could have left just as easily through the Green and Red rooms, but this was the customary exit, and consequently there was a series of what could have been awkward confrontations. They were not awkward here because Jacqueline Kennedy was appreciative of the loyalty of her husband’s friends. For each she had a personal, affectionate phrase. Not everyone was strong enough to take them—rather than face her, Red Fay darted to a corner and buried his face in folds of drapery—and toward the end her own strength lagged. David and Cissy were among the last in the line. When their turn came she was near collapse. Her whisper was so low, of so fine a silk, that it was difficult to understand her. She told them something that neither the President nor she had divulged before: that they had planned to ask Cissy to be Patrick’s godmother. Then she turned to J. Bernard West, the final guest (Fay had succeeded in enveloping his legs in yards of drapes), and gave him the wannest of smiles. “Poor Mr. West,” she whispered. He attempted a reply. It was impossible. “Will you take a walk with me?” she asked. He nodded once, like a dull-witted beast. She asked, “Will you walk with me over to his office?” He nodded once again, and together they set off, Clint Hill gliding in their wake.

With her departure at 10:40 the others drifted off. Special assistants returned to their offices (Sorensen found the patient Buchwald waiting for him) and the family’s closest friends gathered around Robert Kennedy in the State Dining Room. The two children went for a ride with their nurse, the kiddie detail, and Sydney Lawford. In Georgetown Mrs. Auchincloss’ Jaguar briefly joined them. Parking in an Esso station, they fetched cones from a Wisconsin Avenue ice cream parlor and drove off again through the Virginia countryside in what was now a torrential storm. Foster, Wells, and Maude Shaw were trying very hard to be discreet. It was a gallant attempt, and it was doomed. Miss Shaw in particular kept biting her lip, wishing she could recall slips of her tongue; out of habit, she repeatedly started to say, “Your daddy wants you to do this,” or “Your daddy likes that.” Caroline didn’t correct her tenses. The girl had overheard a few fragments of adult conversation. They had been enough. Unlike most first-graders in the East, she knew precisely where Dallas was. Her father’s travels had provided her with an extensive knowledge of geography. She didn’t need a map of Texas. There was a map in her mind.

There was none in John’s; the basic dimensions of the tragedy had not yet swum into focus for him. He sensed that something enormous had happened, but interpreting for him proved to be an insoluble problem. To the dismay of the agents, he would announce in one breath, “A bad man shot my daddy,” and, in the next, “I want to go to the office to see my dad.” Hoping to divert him, they altered course and headed for Andrews Field, holing up in MATS’ VIP lounge. For a while the choice seemed wise. Though Caroline remained unapproachable and Sydney was plainly bored, the boy beamed excitedly at the powerful T-39’s. Foster and Wells had known that Aircraft 26000 would be in its hangar, under guard, out of sight, and they had thought John would have forgotten it. They were expecting too much. His right hand described a dramatic arc, and he cried, “Whoosh! Here comes my daddy, and he’s landing!” Miss Shaw quietly explained that was impossible, that his father had gone to heaven. John asked curiously, “Did he take his big plane?” She said, “Yes, John, he probably did.” He appeared satisfied. Then, moments later, he said, “I wonder when he’s coming back?” The President’s son was still incapable of grasping the concept of heaven.

His mother, meanwhile, was examining the West Wing rooms which had been refurbished during her absence from the capital. Clint Hill was unprepared for the scarlet carpeting, and he averted his eyes, as from a blasphemy. Jacqueline Kennedy, however, had been largely responsible for the renovation. Until today she had considered the Presidential office cozy and Victorian. Now, she thought, it was rather grand. She lingered there only a moment. Packing was in process all around her, and both there and in Evelyn Lincoln’s office she felt that she was in the way. Besides, she could inspect the new rugs just as well in the third of the redecorated rooms, the Cabinet Room.

For ten minutes she sat at the long polished table there with Mr. West, reminiscing and plucking at the ragged fragments of her disordered present. The chief usher, tidy, spruce, and ordinarily phlegmatic, was still unable to respond. At one point she asked him, “Mr. West, will you be my friend for life?” and although he desperately wanted to tell her all that was in his heart, the best he could do was bow his head. She talked about her son and daughter: “They’re good children, aren’t they? They haven’t been spoiled?” Like the rest of the mansion staff, West felt a proprietary interest in Caroline and John. Foster and Wells, for example, had spent twice as much time with them as with their own children, and West would have defended them as zealously as any agent. Assuring their mother that they were unspoiled seemed grossly inadequate, but he couldn’t talk, couldn’t cope, couldn’t think. Mrs. Kennedy shared the President’s talent for putting people at their ease. This was one of her rare failures. The chief usher felt monstrous.

Walking back past the Rose Garden, she reflected that this had been “the cut”—the divider between the two administrations. Because of her highly developed visual sense, she was keenly aware of color and form. A vivid tableau meant far more to her than the intricacies of the Tyler precedent, and she had deliberately made the trip from the mansion to see, really see, the transition. Now she grasped it. The snug old office was gone forever. The elegant new appointments, which she had designed for her husband, were to become the splendid headquarters of President Lyndon Johnson.

The national audience did not know of her visit to the oval office, had not been told of the new rugs, and was scarcely conscious of the existence of the thirty-sixth Chief Executive. Though the iron gates of the White House had been closed as a security precaution, public interest was riveted upon the catafalque. In its century and a half the ballroom had witnessed homage to the coffins of five Presidents who had died in office—Harrison, Taylor, Lincoln, Harding, and Roosevelt—but to contemporaries those had been events which happened elsewhere, and which were read about in newspapers. On November 23, 1963, that lag was gone. The massive joint effort of mass communications brought the nation to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and, through the use of Zoomar varifocal lenses, across the barbered lawn to the rain-lashed steps of the mansion. When a seaman stamped his heels together to salute an arriving dignitary, tens of millions watched the resultant splash and the soggy leggings. Nina Warren’s tears were visible as she left the portico, Shriver and Angie Duke could be seen extending their wet hands in greeting, and in the intervals between calls the shrouded north entrance was shown while Van Heflin, off-camera, read the lines Whitman had written after Lincoln’s murder:

For over seven hours the stately pantomime went on. Occasionally the networks would switch to film clips, memorial concerts, or Dallas, and sometimes commentators spoke. They could not always be heard, however—producers, alert to the wavering pitch which signaled an imminent collapse, would switch them off—and the overriding impression was of the Death Watch’s rigid dignity and the heartbreakingly slow salute as shifts were changed. It was majestic, it was awesome, and like everything else it didn’t quite register. The cut had been too sharp. Associating funereal pomp with Kennedy vitality was asking too much. Afterward Lady Bird was to remember “the solemnity of Saturday in the East Room—the servicemen standing at each corner. At the foot there was a large crucifix. Or was it a candle? All the chandeliers were swathed in black. Or did they have time to do that so soon?” She couldn’t be sure. The new First Lady, ordinarily a keen observer, wasn’t at all certain that she had seen what she had seen.

Yet there was a minimum of confusion. Indeed, there was virtually no movement by the catafalque. The scene was static, the rubrics stylized. Visitors were ushered into the Blue Room, where members of the slain President’s family took turns as hosts and hostesses; then they filed through the Green and East rooms, paused at the foot of the bier, and proceeded downstairs and out to the south grounds. Because of the weather many guests arrived thoroughly drenched, so black rubber matting was placed in the entrance hall, and beginning at 1 P.M. the green-bereted Special Forces replaced the enlisted soldiers in the joint honor guard. These were among the very few digressions from form, and the only ones the audience saw. The rest was offstage. Jean Smith and Pat Lawford had changed dresses after Mass and were discussing the painting the family had planned to give to the White House when Bob Kennedy put his head in the Queen’s Room and asked them to come down and welcome people in the Blue Room. Downstairs the sisters examined one another and flinched. Jean was wearing a gray suit, Pat was in brown. The small lapse went unnoticed; cameras missed them, and this was one broadcast which could hardly be in color anyhow.

During Mass protocol had been revised in deference to the new President. Lyndon Johnson clearly had to be the first man to pass the coffin after the family had retired, and early arrivals were asked to wait for him. There were a lot of them. General and Mrs. Taylor drove in as the service was ending. Two cars were already parked ahead of them, and a young aide, looking half drowned, hurried over and suggested they stay where they were. Dwight Eisenhower and his son John were inside the mansion, seated in the Blue Room. After Mrs. Kennedy left, Mr. West, the usher, was told that the former President had asked for him, and they chatted a while, recalling the days when Eisenhower had been master of this house. Earl and Nina Warren were also there, damp and haggard, speaking in husky whispers.

After Jacqueline Kennedy vacated the Cabinet Room the Cabinet had assembled there, thinking to follow Johnson. Then he appeared and thwarted the plan. He crossed West Executive with the Congressional leadership in tow and brushed past them, and the result was a second unforeseen receiving line. The President and his entourage circled the catafalque; then the Cabinet, having followed them, shook hands with them. Warren’s prompt arrival meant that the Supreme Court later showed up without its Chief Justice. Individual mourners—Ormsby-Gore, Fred Holborn, Dick Goodwin’s wife—were unconsoled by a single tribute and insisted upon returning. Moreover, although John Kennedy had been interested in the families of the men he led, there had been no provision for children. Some were brought anyhow. The Secretary of Defense and Mrs. McNamara approached the coffin with thirteen-year-old Craig McNamara between them. Stephen and Andrew Bundy knelt with their parents, and Schlesinger brought his sons and daughters. Mac Bundy wrote: “By some accident we had him to ourselves for the few moments that we had the strength to linger.” At noon the Galbraiths also found themselves alone with the bier, the candles, and the Death Watch. Both men felt that the absence of others was remarkable, and it was. Usually a crush was waiting, for of the enormous number of friends and officials who had received calls and wires—over a thousand holders of Presidential appointments, both houses of the Congress, all members of the federal judiciary, the governors of the fifty states, and the diplomatic corps—only one conspicuous absentee was noted; Herbert Hoover lay ill in Manhattan. Harry Truman went through. So did the dying Senator Clair Engle of California, in a wheelchair, his arm cradled in a sling; so did Ralph Yarborough and Albert Thomas, their eyes still wild from yesterday’s harrowing hour at Parkland. All day jets were landing at Andrews, Dulles, and Washington National, skidding in through the gray porridge to bring the governors. Ross Barnett brought Mrs. Barnett and Ross Barnett, Jr. An entire delegation of Mississippians arrived. Ethel Kennedy was on duty in the Blue Room when they entered, dripping rainwater and mellifluous Southern compliments. She remembered the violent confrontation between state and national power in Oxford and thought the appearance of so large a retinue was distinctly odd. Ben Bradlee had reached the same opinion. “The people who weren’t good enough to hold his shoes were crawling in,” he bitterly recalled later, “and when Harry Byrd came, I went.”

Kennedy’s enemies came because they had no alternative. A flagrant snub of the White House that Saturday would have been unthinkable for anyone in public life. The haters had been too vocal in the past, and the question of whether the sniper had been part of a larger apparatus was still mysterious. Undoubtedly some of the callers were hypocrites. But a great many who had vehemently differed with the President had been attracted by the warmth of his personality. Politically he and Harry Byrd had been two centuries apart, but the Virginia Senator cherished the memory of the Chief Executive’s helicopter landing in his orchard at the climax of a birthday party honoring him, and Barry Goldwater had been openly proud of his affection for the man with whom he had contested every issue of significance.

The East Room’s crepe struck two groups with almost physical force: the Court, led by Justice Black, and the Assistant Attorneys General. Each had been a guest at Wednesday night’s reception. The contrast was too sharp to be overlooked. Less than seventy-two hours ago this floor had been waxed, the ballroom had been vibrant with the lilt of music, and dancers had moved back and forth across the very place where the great somber catafalque now stood. Joanie Douglas was wearing the same black velvet dress she had worn then, and irrationally she wondered whether it had been a harbinger, a sign of the coming terror.

The silent processions, the set faces, and the ceaseless drumbeat of the rain outside finally broke through Ken O’Donnell’s mask. After praying by the coffin with George Smathers, Hubert Humphrey went over to the West Wing to console Larry O’Brien (“Poor Larry seems so lost,” he confided to his journal. “He has no idea what the future holds, what his role will be in this government”), and in the hall just behind the lobby he met O’Donnell. A few hours later Humphrey wrote, “We put our arms around each other—and I saw a strong, ordinarily taciturn and cool and calm man break down into tears, as did I.… We sat together for quite a few minutes. Kenny was shocked and shaken. He told me how brave Mrs. Kennedy had been through all of this. That she wouldn’t leave the casket for a single moment, that she stayed with it at Bethesda Naval Hospital and, of course, over at the mansion. He was amazed, as he put it, at her calm fortitude and courage.” Later in the day, when the White House correspondents were permitted to file past the bier, O’Donnell embraced Mary McGrory and wept again. Of Ken she had written in the Evening Star that “he would have died for him.” He thanked her. She said, “Everybody knows that, Kenny.”

The working press was one of the last two delegations to pass the catafalque; the other was the White House servants. By then all the famous names had gone. The ambassadors were back on Massachusetts Avenue, the governors in their hotel suites, the Senators on the Hill. Newscasters were not interested in the homage of colleagues, or in the prayers of Master Sergeant Giordano, Maître Fincklin, or George Thomas, and the national audience was not told that they had called. Nevertheless they had, and unlike the officials they had not been inspired by any sense of obligation. The homage of wire service reporters and special correspondents—indeed, that of butlers, carpenters, and upstairs maids—was extraordinary. It was not part of the state funeral plan. Like last night’s crowds at Andrews and Bethesda and the reverent filling station attendants along Wisconsin Avenue at dawn, it was a measure of the extent to which the entire country had been drawn into the vortex of anguish. George Thomas had polished every shoe and pressed every pair of trousers upstairs; he felt he had to be here, too, and on his knees. The newspapermen, never regarded as slavish admirers of any President, walked across the naked floor in absolute silence, and afterward they asked, and were granted, permission to follow the caisson on foot when the coffin would be borne up Pennsylvania Avenue to the Hill tomorrow.

Mary McGrory halted by the two prie-dieux at the foot of the catafalque and knelt. She tried to pray, yet all she could remember were four words, Horatio’s farewell to Hamlet. Like a rondeau they ran through her mind over and over again: Good night, sweet prince.

The East Room was hushed and the oval office naked, but the Vice Presidential suite had never been busier. There was a physical, visible frontier between the two administrations that morning. It was West Executive Avenue, that one-way, one-block street, which actually served as the White House parking lot. On one side of the twin row of cars stood the elegant old executive mansion, haunted by the ghost of the youngest man ever elected to the Presidency; on the other side preoccupied men darted in and out of the Executive Office Building or, as Dwight Eisenhower still called it, “the old State, Army, and Navy Building”—an astonishing reminder that until World War II its French neo-classic façade had been large enough for the offices of both American diplomacy and the national military establishment.

Certain individuals crossed the frontier, Johnson himself among them. All were aware of its existence, however, and the leadership of the Executive Department was split into two camps, those who wished to hurry the day when West Executive was once again a paved strip used for VIP angle parking, and those for whom the very thought of transition was agony. In his office Arthur Schlesinger was once more writing a note to Mrs. Kennedy: “I feel in such a state of total and terrible emptiness—and I know that what any of us feel here can only be a fraction of the vacancy and horror which you feel.” He told her that he expected to devote himself to work on the President’s papers; he had already submitted his resignation to Lyndon Johnson.

That summed up the loyalist position: the President was dead; the work of the Presidency must be carried forward by others. At one end of Saturday’s spectrum were Schlesinger, Sorensen, O’Donnell, and their leader, Robert Kennedy, who despite the gloomy sky had donned dark glasses after the Mass to conceal his swollen eyes. At the other end stood men like Mac Bundy, who repeatedly reminded other members of the Kennedy team that “the show must go on” and who declared that he, for his part, intended to remain as long as he was wanted and needed by the President of the United States. Ted Sorensen saw the issue rather differently. At 7:30 P.M. he went over to the EOB at the invitation of the President, who solicited his advice about personnel. Sorensen said quietly, “You have two kinds of problems: those who will not make themselves available to you and those who will be too available.”

This last point was subtle, but some felt it keenly. As the day grew older, individual resentments deepened. To some, the conduct of those who could think of the Presidency as an impersonal institution was considered callous. Dodging across rain-swept West Executive, Kenneth Galbraith saw a member of the Cabinet, seized his arm, and said urgently, “We’ve got to take care of some of these liberals now, so they don’t go shooting off their mouths”—a curious choice of words from the author of The Liberal Hour. There were those in the administration who felt that such demeanor was correct, but it was undoubtedly controversial.

Some of those whose alacrity was regarded with disapproval were not conscious of the reproachful glances around them. One confided to his diary that he heard “no bitter word, and only encouragement from both sides, in my double loyalty.” He was misinformed. The words were spoken. He just didn’t hear them. Of this same man a colleague was writing in his diary: “I have never seen his instinct for power more naked and ruthless.” The validity of such acrimony is disputable. “To be charitable,” Arthur Schlesinger observed the following spring, “the government would have been paralyzed if everyone had behaved like me and Ken O’Donnell.” And at the time he wrote that “for some people, personal emotion is very difficult.… Bundy has everything under iron control. I do not think that this means that they feel things less than the rest of us.” It didn’t. Schlesinger was a man of generous spirit. Yet even he did not know that McGeorge Bundy, the efficiency expert, the human computer, the robot of tempered steel—that Mac had cried in the night for John Kennedy.

An individual’s attitude toward the shift in power was, in short, almost entirely a matter of temperament. Background was entirely irrelevant. Schlesinger, Galbraith, and Bundy had all been recruited from the Harvard faculty. Ken O’Donnell was not seen in the Vice Presidential suite all day, yet Larry O’Brien went over to discuss a Congressional maneuver which would boost the Russian wheat sale, and Sargent Shriver, President Kennedy’s brother-in-law, was a realist by any standard. Anxious to see an orderly change of government, Shriver walked across West Executive and volunteered his services. When he attempted to bring the two groups together and ran into what he called “a lot of flak,” he was baffled. In retrospect the flak may seem puzzling now. In the context of that Saturday, however, events were very different. The loyalists, swept up in the mightiest current of emotion in their lives, were determined to show proper respect toward the murdered President. The realists played a valuable and difficult role—and history may award them the higher grade, for their service to the national interest was great.

The country, hypnotized by the catafalque, was unaware of any conflict within the government. It was virtually impossible to think beyond yesterday’s death and the coming funeral. Hugh Sidey argued (in vain) that Time should hold its cover portrait of the new Chief Executive for another week’s issue because “Nobody is interested in Johnson yet.” Not many were. Nevertheless, depicting his mood during his first full day in office is a matter of intrinsic interest. A precise delineation is elusive. The man’s chameleon nature had never been more evident. There had never been so many Lyndon Johnsons. It was almost as though a score of identical Texans were holed up backstage in Room 274, each with the same physiognomy and drawl, yet each with his own disposition, ideology, sense of timing, and objectives. George Reedy stepped in, and Lyndon the clairvoyant appeared. “Everything was chaotic,” Reedy said afterward. “Only the President knew what he was doing.” Galbraith was announced and greeted by the left-of-center champion. “I want to come down very hard on civil rights,” Johnson told him, “not because Kennedy was for it but because I am for it. Keep in mind that I want a liberal policy because I’m a Roosevelt Democrat.” Averell Harriman arrived with his Edwardian gait, and Lyndon said: “You know I’ve always thought of you as one of my oldest and best friends in Washington.”

The President was exploiting his great gift for exposing this or that facet of his character so that each visitor would leave with a feeling of warmth and reassurance. Since the visitors entered one at a time, his success was almost universal. The out-and-out loyalists, while remaining distrustful of colleagues who had raced to 274, saw a Lyndon so humble, so shattered by his own anguish, that even Sorensen and Schlesinger were impressed; to David Ormsby-Gore this Lyndon said brokenly, “If my family took a vote on whether or not I’d stay, there’d be three votes for quitting right away—and maybe four.” That Lyndon vanished, and another appeared, shrewdly advising O’Brien on a technical point of parliamentary procedure. There is no way to reconcile the various members of the flexible Presidential cast. The fact is that each played his part superbly and richly deserved applause. Only the naïve would be offended by the variety; John Kennedy would have been engrossed by it. Despite the accuracy of Sidey’s judgment, Johnson was a fascinating man that Saturday. One must merely recognize that the man was many men.

Which was the real Johnson is a question best left to his biographers. This much is certain: he was putting in his most active day in three full years. Last evening he had only been warming up, honing skills grown rusty from disuse. Now he was alive again. Overnight he had acquired fresh momentum, and those who were skeptical of his wisdom couldn’t doubt his stamina. At each briefing or conference he seemed to be tapping fresh reservoirs of energy. Repeated calls were placed to the Connallys at Parkland;⁷ he fenced sharply with the soft-spoken but immovable Nick Katzenbach over whether the assassination should be investigated by a federal or state board of inquiry; he applied the Johnsonian prod to J. Edgar Hoover, who by now was dispatching fleets of agents to Love Field; he proclaimed Monday a day of official mourning; he received Arthur Goldberg; and he took time to pose for still photographs with Rusk, Bundy, McNamara, and Eisenhower, which were released to the networks at 5:13 P.M. (“First Pictures of LBJ at Work as President”).

In lesser jobs there is a direct correlation between effort and results, but as Kennedy could have told Johnson, and as Johnson painfully learned that first day, the ratio is meaningless in the Presidency. Historic achievements may be credited to a Chief Executive while he is fast asleep; awake he may sweat like a slave and accomplish nothing. Johnson’s Saturday was a curve which alternately plunged and zoomed and ended nowhere. After his encounter with Robert Kennedy he had enjoyed an easier interim; the Congressional leadership had come to the EOB to pledge its support. Today, as yesterday, the Senators and Congressmen offered him nonpartisan backing. The GOP’s Charlie and Ev Show had been unsuccessfully attempting to bait Kennedy since his inaugural; this morning Charlie Halleck was the first man to encourage Johnson, and after he had spoken Everett Dirksen said, “We’ll work together for our country. God bless you, Mr. President.” The rest of the delegation echoed, “God bless you, sir.”

It was after this heartening pledge that the President, joined by Lady Bird, led the leadership past the waiting Cabinet, into the East Room. Leaving the catafalque, he sighted Dwight Eisenhower and invited him to cross the street for a twenty-minute talk. Actually, the appointment turned out to be the longest of Johnson’s day. It lasted two hours, and to the thirty-fourth President the thirty-sixth seemed anxious. The President asked General Eisenhower’s advice on a number of current problems ranging from internal matters, such as the tax cut, to foreign policy, specifically Laos and Cuba. At this early stage Lyndon Johnson was chiefly concerned with informing and preparing himself so that he could continue his predecessor’s policies. General Eisenhower saw that President Johnson was determined to come to grips with his new responsibilities.

During the long session Mac Bundy—Mac’s own description of his function was of a “maid of all work” who “fussed around”—tiptoed in and placed Schlesinger’s letter of resignation on the desk. Johnson glowered. “Tell him to take it back,” he said. “I don’t want any such letters. And tell everyone I mean that.” Moyers, who was in the background, slipped out and phoned Schlesinger that the President wanted him to stay. General Eisenhower suggested to Johnson that the new President should choose his own team. Johnson regarded him moodily. After the funeral he was to become adept at shaping his staff, easing out even those advisers who would have preferred to stay; on November 23, however, he treated any suggestion of change with a negative, highly emotional response, and he seemed to regard retirement from the government as tantamount to desertion. At that afternoon’s Cabinet meeting Dean Rusk reminded him that it was traditional for all Cabinet members to submit resignations when a new President took office. Johnson shook his head doggedly; he said that he wanted every man there as a Johnsonian adviser. Rusk pointed out that this was a matter of form, a tradition, the thing to do. Precedent was involved, he observed; some future Chief Executive might not want all his ministers to stay. Still Johnson balked. The Cabinet resignations, which went in anyhow, weren’t even acknowledged. And when he met Sorensen that evening, and Sorensen mentioned his own note, the President replied brusquely, “I know, I got your letter,” and quickly changed the subject.

The new President and the new First Lady attended a memorial service for Kennedy at St. John’s on the north side of Lafayette Square. Twenty-four hours had now passed since the assassination. It was past noon once more, and Schlesinger had arranged what came to be known as “the Harvard lunch” in a private upstairs room of the Occidental Restaurant, on the opposite side of the Treasury Building from the White House. The meal was characteristic of the transition. The diners—the host, Ken and Kitty Galbraith, Bill Walton and his son Matt, Sam Beer and his wife, Paul Samuelson, and Walter Heller—were all enervated and adrift in what everyone considered a national crisis. In attempting to peer into the future, they were failing miserably. They couldn’t even agree among themselves upon a course of action. Afterward Galbraith wrote in his journal that “Arthur was in a rather poor mood.… He was reacting far too quickly to the chemistry of the moment and was dwelling on the possibility of a ticket in 1964 headed by Bob Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey. This of course is fantasy, unless of course Johnson stumbles unbelievably or even then.” (Schlesinger’s own estimate of his guest is instructive: “Like Mac, Ken is a realist. He would infinitely have preferred Kennedy, but he is ready to face facts and make the best of them. Like Kenny and Bobby, I am a sentimentalist. My heart is not in it.”)

The aftermath of the luncheon was equally typical. Schlesinger attended a staff meeting, where Bundy implored everyone to stick to his post, and Galbraith collided with the new President on West Executive. “I’ve been looking for you,” Johnson said—Galbraith doubted that this was true—“I want to see you. Come on up.” Toward the end of their chat Johnson asked him to write a speech for delivery before a joint session of Congress. Galbraith, having finished his Post eulogy to Kennedy that morning, craved another excuse to finger a typewriter keyboard, and was immensely flattered. He needn’t have been. The President was making the same request of a half-dozen men. If you were literate, informed, and empathic, you were being drafted.

In his subsequent notes on this conversation with Johnson, Galbraith referred to “the speech he was to give to the joint session that Wednesday.” This was hindsight. At the time of their conversation the date had not been set. Johnson yearned to speak to the Congress, and understandably so. The people had been badly shaken. The sooner they heard the voice of their new leader in an address of substance, the better. In the State Department that morning Harriman, George Ball, and U. Alexis Johnson had begun work on a seven- or eight-minute speech to be broadcast over all networks during the evening; the President was to deplore “hysteria” and urge support for the United Nations, peace, and continuity. He had vetoed the Under Secretaries’ plan on the ground that he didn’t want “to push myself forward.” He was still holding back, feeling his way. At 2:30 P.M., however, he would have a matchless opportunity to take a real sounding. That was the time set for the Cabinet meeting. Thick yellow pads and sharpened pencils had been laid out at each place along the perimeter of the long table in the Cabinet Room, the Vice President’s chair had been moved around to the President’s spot, and one of the men present would be the new head of the Kennedy family, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy.

“Gentlemen, the President of the United States!” Rusk said at the outset, and they all rose. The meeting was not a triumph. Its prospects were dim from the beginning; the ministers, like the barometer, were in a state of abnormal depression. Johnson had a few things going for him: Bundy had prepared a discreet memorandum on what he “might want to say,” and everyone present was anxious to pull the country together. But the catastrophe had been too recent. They couldn’t forget that the corpse of the man who had appointed them all rested in a wooden coffin on the other side of this same building. The new President was further hampered by his own bearing. A total stranger might have imposed his personality upon them. But Lyndon, as they still thought of him, was a familiar figure who had attended their previous sessions as a subordinate, and who now presided in his meekest manner. Recalling the President’s treatment of his memo, Bundy wrote ten days later that it was “typical of him that he made it his own in action.” Johnson opened with a silent prayer, begged their guidance in the perilous times ahead, and added a short appeal which several of them by now could have recited from memory: he told them that he needed them more than President Kennedy had.

The Attorney General’s participation in the twenty-five-minute meeting must be treated scrupulously, for the friction between the two men may easily be distorted by partisans. Each was under unprecedented pressure. If Johnson’s discomfort seems ungenerous, it should be remembered that to the new Chief Executive Bob Kennedy represented a problem which was unique in the history of Presidential succession. Here was a Cabinet member who looked like, sounded like, and thought like the slain leader; who had been his second self; who was one of his two chief mourners; and who, at times, had—as everyone around this table knew—exercised executive power in his brother’s name. It was as though Edwin Stanton had been Abraham Lincoln’s twin. Historians would be obliged to sympathize with Andrew Johnson, for his contemporaries would have made few allowances, and it is unlikely that Stanton would have been as forbearing as Kennedy.

The Attorney General, for his part, had been preoccupied with the coming funeral. His very presence in the Cabinet Room was something of an accident. After the Mass he had walked over from the mansion with McNamara, Walton, Reed, Spalding, and Lem Billings to see whether all his brother’s belongings had been removed. He had noticed that Giordano had neglected to take President Kennedy’s Cabinet chair, and early in the afternoon he decided to check again. The Cabinet had already convened. Bundy, glimpsing him, persuaded him to enter and sit in his own chair. In Mac’s words of eleven days later, “Bobby was late and perhaps would not have attended if I had not told him he must; his condition was that there should be no pictures—which I now know was as hard for the President as a ban against smoking for a thirty-year addict—though he accepted it readily in the interest of harmony.” Mac’s version that afternoon was more tart. To a colleague he said that he was “worried about Bobby,” that “Bobby was reluctant to face the new reality,” and that he had “had virtually to drag Bobby into the Cabinet meeting.” Kennedy’s own recollection was merely that “I went by and Mac Bundy said it was very important that I come in. So I went.”

His appearance evoked a dramatic response. Several members leaped to their feet, and one clasped his hand and clapped him on the back. Others, including Johnson, did not move. The Attorney General sat back brooding, his heavy eyes hooded. Yet for a man in his position silence itself can be significant. A half-hour earlier one television network had openly speculated that he might resign. His immediate future was being debated in millions of offices and homes, and his laconism was noted and remembered by everyone around the long table—by President Johnson, perhaps, most of all.

After the President had finished, two men spoke: Adlai Stevenson, because of his seniority in the party, and Dean Rusk, as leader of the Cabinet. Their motives were identical; they wanted the record to show that they intended to keep faith with the new administration. Stevenson was surprisingly awkward. The most experienced and eloquent orator there, he had written a five-paragraph testimonial, which he proceeded to read word for word. He reminded them that he had pledged his support at President Kennedy’s first Cabinet meeting, repeated that pledge now, said that “there can only be a moment’s pause in the nation’s business,” and declared to Johnson, “Your unique qualities of character, wisdom and experience are a blessing to our country in this critical hour, and our confidence in your leadership is total.” Rusk was equally generous in his praise of Johnson.

After the Johnson-Rusk colloquy over letters of resignation, the President asked that they all submit departmental recommendations by Monday. They then dispersed. Nothing had been accomplished, and it was impossible for any of them to leave with a feeling of achievement. Even Johnson, who had been delighted by Rusk and Stevenson, appeared to be disappointed; his subsequent remarks that afternoon indicate that he had hoped for more. To Bundy it had been a “drab little meeting.” Willard Wirtz thought it was “awful” and “almost mechanical”; another Secretary, who had expected the President to be “strong and affirmative,” concluded that it was “highly unsatisfactory”; and one member of the Cabinet decided to speak to him about it. Cliff Carter led him into the EOB office, where the Secretary emphatically recommended to the President that he speak first to the people and then to the Congress. To the astonishment of his caller, Johnson’s style had been completely altered in the few minutes since they had adjourned. It was another of those quick-change miracles; sitting in the Cabinet Room he had been hesitant, but now, as the Secretary noted in his journal, “the frustration seemed gone, he seemed relaxed… the power, the confidence, the assurance of Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson seemed to be there.”

To this distinguished diarist the new President spoke frankly of the tension between himself and the Attorney General. He said, “Jackie has been just great. She said she’d move out as soon as she could, and I said, ‘Honey, you stay as long as you want. I have a nice, comfortable home, and I’m in no hurry. You have a tragedy and many problems.’ ” His “real problems,” he indicated, were with Bob. He was convinced that Kennedy’s late arrival at the meeting had been intentional, and he insisted that Kennedy, bent upon humiliating him, had confided to “an aide” that “We won’t go in until he has already sat down.”⁸

The charge was unjust, but it was perhaps an inevitable consequence of the LBJ-RFK relationship, or, to be more precise, of the relationship between certain of their advisers. Since the Los Angeles convention the association of the two principals had been repeatedly damaged by misunderstandings which could usually be traced to this or that “aide.” Thus the Vice President had been convinced that the Attorney General had never forgiven him for Los Angeles remarks critical of Joseph P. Kennedy. Ironically, Robert Kennedy had neither heard the criticism nor read of it. Johnson men were convinced that Bob disliked their leader. Kennedy men repeatedly reassured them, without success, and the Johnson administration had scarcely begun to gather momentum before the press speculated at length on “the feud” between the two men. To be sure, in temperament and in manner they were very unlike. That had also been true of John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. It had not led to a vendetta then, nor did it now.

Yet whatever the source of the strain, its existence was unquestionable. The consequences of Robert Kennedy’s tardiness, Johnson told his caller, had been deeply embarrassing; by entering in the middle of the President’s remarks the Attorney General had destroyed their effect. The Secretary, who was sympathetic—and who immediately afterward conveyed his sympathy to another Cabinet member who had regarded the meeting as a disaster—wrote that “There was real bitterness in Lyndon’s voice on this one.” Clearly he regarded the late President’s brother as a formidable obstacle. He agreed with his visitor that he ought to speak to the Congress as soon as possible. Wednesday, he was afraid, might be too late. Congress was thinking of recessing. Yet Johnson was apprehensive that an earlier address “might be resented by the family.”

Having made what he described as his “pitch” for a quick address, the caller left. In the suite’s anteroom, Sargent Shriver was waiting. Shriver’s visit had been inspired by a sense of duty. He was one member of the family who had felt close to Johnson, and he wanted to wish him well. At the same time, he thought that he ought to touch base with Moyers. Apparently Moyers’ status was about to change, but technically he remained Deputy Director of the Peace Corps, and he was one of Shriver’s closest friends. The two men chatted in subdued tones until Johnson’s visitor had left; then they entered the Vice Presidential office. Shriver thought Johnson “very hospitable.” The new President said, “Well, Sarge, it’s a terrible thing. I’m completely overwhelmed, but I do want to say that I’ve always had a very high regard for you. It hasn’t been possible for me to do anything about it until now, but I intend to.”

There were, he was told, two unsolved questions: the occupancy of the oval office and the timing of the address to the joint session. (Interestingly, Johnson displayed little interest in a nationwide speech during these days; he was concerned first with the Congress. A televised address on the Hill would, of course, reach just as many Americans as a White House fireside chat.) Johnson observed that Rusk and Bundy, among others, strongly believed that he should be meeting his appointments in the West Wing, pointing to the symbolic importance of Presidential residence in the mansion. Furthermore, he observed, he would be much closer to vital communications equipment there. Lastly, both Johnson and Moyers emphasized the urgency of a joint session on Tuesday.

The State Department was pressing him especially hard. Yet if Senators and Representatives were in fact preparing to quit the capital, there was no sign of it. The need for moving across the street is obscure, though here a distinction must be made. The President was in no hurry to evict Mrs. Kennedy. On the contrary; he was content to sleep at the Elms indefinitely. It was the Chief Executive’s office in the West Wing that he wanted, not the pomp of the executive mansion.

A century earlier, Abraham Lincoln’s successor, like John Kennedy’s, had been eager to avoid the impression that he was anxious to take up residence in the President’s house. The resemblances between the seventeenth and thirty-sixth Presidents are uncanny in other respects. “What President has ever had a wider training for the office?” asked Lloyd Paul Stryker, Andrew Johnson’s biographer. Lyndon Johnson’s biographers would quickly vow that the training of the second Johnson was wider. Like Lyndon, Andrew was tactless with men, gallant toward women, and eager to eclipse the record of his predecessor. Andrew had also called a Cabinet meeting the day after the assassination of Lincoln, at which he declared that he merely intended to carry out established policies. It was even raining outside. On the matter of office occupancy, however, the two Johnsons differ sharply. Andrew met his Cabinet in the Treasury Building, where he set up temporary headquarters, and it was not until June 9, 1865, eight weeks after Lincoln’s death, that he took over the White House. As Senator Humphrey explained in his notes, the new Chief Executive was “an action President. He wants to get things done. He is in a sense restless and demanding.…”

Shriver’s position was awkward. He was foggy about precedents, and although he had been related to Kennedy by marriage his devotion to the Peace Corps had left little time to explore other governmental labyrinths. “I remembered that the west basement had been chewed up when Jack was President,” he said later, “and while I hadn’t known what was going on, I had a hunch it had something to do with the hot line.” Shriver, normally quick to make up his mind, couldn’t decide about the oval office. In his words, Bundy, whom the President was quoting to him, “felt that it was first of all the President’s office, while the family naturally felt that it was Jack’s office. I’d been in the Navy, and I was inclined to agree with Bundy; you don’t leave a command post empty because the commander has fallen.” On the other hand, “It seemed unseemly speed to move into that office before Jack was out of the White House. Jack’s body, after all, was still lying in the East Room.” This reluctance from the most sympathetic member of the late Chief Executive’s family appears to have resolved the issue for Johnson; he did not mention the issue again that day.

That left the timing of the address. Once again Johnson cited pressures from “the leadership of the government.” For those who were accustomed to Kennedy’s frontal approach such obliqueness was perplexing. Kennedy had characteristically prefaced an order with the phrase, “In my judgment.” If you disagreed, you debated with him. Johnson presented himself as an entrepreneur of other men’s ideas. In the event that they proved to be bad ideas, the promoter wasn’t at fault; he had merely offered them for consideration. His cautious introductions (“Bundy says,” “Rusk says,” or “McNamara says”) absolved him from responsibility. On this issue, he told Shriver, the voices were unanimous. All agreed that the President should go to the Hill “as soon as possible,” that “it was important to show that the Johnson administration was taking over.” Shriver agreed, though his reasons were his own. Extrapolating from his Peace Corps travels, he had realized that Asia, Africa, and South America would assume that “whoever had killed President Kennedy would now be President.” Dispelling that notion was important. The sooner the world was told that Johnson was not an employer of bravoes, the better off the United States would be, and when both Johnson and Moyers said they preferred a Tuesday talk, Shriver replied, “I’ll speak to Bobby.”

The flak followed. Unknown to Shriver, Bundy had been assigned the same mission, and he had failed. Robert Kennedy had replied crisply, “I don’t like that. I think you should wait at least one day after the funeral.” Bundy had told Kennedy that “they”—he was adjusting rapidly to the Johnsonian ambiguity—“want it on Tuesday.” The Attorney General snapped back, “Well, the hell with it. Why do you ask me about it? Don’t ask me what you want done. You’ll tell me what it’s going to be anyway. Just go ahead and do it.” If Johnson thought a Kennedy relative would make a more effective emissary, he was wrong. He was merely sending Shriver into a trap. Kennedy, exasperated by the new President’s failure to communicate with him directly, listened to the proposal and then said sharply to Sarge, “Why does he tell you to ask me? Now he’s hacking at you. He knows I want him to wait until Wednesday.”

Shriver darted back between the parked cars, was ushered in by Moyers, and discreetly reported that “Bob prefers you wait a day, unless there are overriding reasons for having the address earlier.” Johnson immediately picked up his telephone and began pressing plastic buttons. To his listeners he said tersely, “It will be on Wednesday.” Each of them needed no briefing; every member of his staff was familiar with the background and was awaiting word from him. Shriver swiftly relayed the decision to his brother-in-law, and all that remained was a formal release from Salinger’s office. Shortly before 6:30 the networks broadcast that President Johnson would speak to Congress at 12:30 P.M. on Wednesday, November 27, the day before Thanksgiving; CBS, NBC, and ABC would carry it live. No commentator hinted that the President was being either hasty or a laggard, and only a handful knew of the dissension behind the announcement. Shriver, however, was left with “an inkling of the feeling that was involved.… It was clear that there was a condition which was exacerbating.”

Gauging the degree of exacerbation is difficult. Most of the insiders remained tight-lipped about their Saturday talks in the Vice Presidential suite. Bundy has withheld the larger part of his early assessment of President Johnson; with his uncommon detachment and good sense, he observed on December 4 that “the important thing is to distinguish between what he is trying to accomplish and the specific means he may at first prefer, and to try to serve the real end while arguing against the means, if need be.” McNamara conferred with Johnson in the middle of the afternoon, but his comment—“It was not routine, but I do not feel at liberty to report a conversation of a President of the United States”—is both taut and unsatisfactory, since he has reported other such conversations in detail. It does seem obvious that Johnson felt balked, and that he blamed much of his frustration on Robert Kennedy. That was understandable. The Attorney General was symbolic of the past he had to overcome. It was also unfair. A study of Bob Kennedy’s movements that day reveals that virtually all his time was pre-empted by funeral preparations. A satisfactory solution of the situation was clearly impossible; the need for the government to proceed was at odds with the Kennedys’ grief. The President was being thwarted by something larger than any individual. He was attempting to start a new government, and everyone who could help him, including his own Texans and Washingtonians who had been close to him for a third of a century, was floundering in the greatest surge of emotion ever known.

His talk with Ted Sorensen came just before his departure for the Elms. It was a long session, and representative; the invisible obstacles between them would have existed had Robert F. Kennedy never existed. Although determined to quit quietly, Sorensen took his responsibilities keenly, and he was anxious to be helpful. Before crossing the lot he had prepared a list of exigent Presidential business. With Moyers taking notes, they checked off each item carefully. Ted recalls his own manner as “blunt and tough.” Yet it was not hostile. He recommended a prompt address on the Hill. After brushing off his resignation, the President listened impassively to his evaluation of the White House staff. (Unknown to him, Johnson had been inquiring of others, “Is Sorensen an easy man to work with?” The answers had been mixed.) Early in the session the President asked, “What do you think of the possibility of a foreign government being involved in this?” Ted said instantly, “Do you have any evidence?” The answer was that there were no hard facts. Johnson showed him an FBI memo advising him that the rulers of an unfriendly power had been hoping for Kennedy’s death. The report was too hazy for serious consideration. There were no names or facts, and the name of the FBI’s informant was in code. “Meaningless,” said Sorensen, handing it back. The President said nothing. He asked whether Sorensen thought unusual safeguards would be necessary to protect him during the funeral. Ted shook his head; he didn’t.

Sooner or later—it was to be sooner—the relationship between the new President and the former President’s Special Counsel was bound to deteriorate. As Sorensen had told a Cabinet member shortly after three o’clock, he had invested over ten years in John Kennedy’s career, and now the investment was gone—gone as surely as though he himself had been the victim in Dallas. Kennedy had chosen him because their personalities had meshed perfectly. Both were young, literate, understated men of integrity; Sorensen had been the ideal abrasive for the intellectual facet of the Kennedy prism, just as O’Donnell had been a foil for the President’s political talents, and Llewellyn Thompson a tutor for his Russian studies. But Ted Sorensen could never be an adequate companion for Lyndon Johnson. They were entirely different men. Their styles were a world apart.

Throughout that weekend the President gave every sign of believing that he could preserve the Kennedy team intact. He couldn’t, and when he had grown surer of himself he realized that he had to create his own team. His delusion was a symptom of the Kennedy passion; of the need, as he himself had put it, to retain “the aura of Kennedy.” On November 23, 1963, the nation’s mourning was so intense that no other emotional climate seemed feasible. Afterward, and especially after he himself had become an elected President in his own right, Johnson would forget that he had ever pleaded for the support of Kennedy’s aides. The very mention of their names would annoy him. Within a year he would even resent the aura itself, and become so sensitive to it that any Secret Service man or White House chauffeur who wore a PT 109 tie clip would run the risk of incurring Presidential wrath.

Jacqueline Kennedy was a doodler, and seated at her second-floor Louis Quinze desk, by the casement windows overlooking the Rose Garden and the Presidential office, she filled sheets of White House stationery with lists of people she must call or write and reminders to herself. It is startling to realize that a bereaved First Lady should be obliged to cope with trivia. But like any other widow she had to determine particulars. Even Mary Todd Lincoln, who went to pieces after the murder in Ford’s Theatre and deputized Robert Lincoln as chief mourner, had been obliged to select the place of burial. Mrs. Kennedy could, of course, have retired into seclusion. No one would have criticized her or expressed surprise; that would have been consistent with her innate reticence. But she wanted to share in the planning.

It was good for her. She couldn’t sleep, and she must do something; doodling was better than brooding. Thus she concentrated on tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, devoting herself to the majestic ceremonies which, with her special cachet, were to leave an everlasting impression on the national audience. She was rarely alone. In this sense a First Lady is set apart from other widows. Relatives, social secretaries, her staff, her friends, and her husband’s friends slipped in and out of the West Sitting Hall’s double sliding doors carrying more scribbled paper—more to think about, new barriers between her and sorrow.

Examined now, many of the notes seem either needless or inaccurate. One page is headed in block letters DALLAS POLICEMAN. Beneath is written: “Mrs. Marie Tippitt” (for Tippit), “three children” (correct), and the address “238 Glencairn Street Oak Cliff Texas—Suburb of Dallas” (it was Glencairn Drive, another place entirely). But that is irrelevant. What counted was that Mrs. Kennedy intended to send her condolences to the wife of the slain patrolman; the envelope could be addressed by someone else.

General Wehle afterward declared that “she held all the strings, and we marveled at her clear thinking and sense of command.” There was, and still is, an understandable tendency to idealize the comportment of the President’s widow. She didn’t hold all the strings. No one could. The minutiae of a state funeral are incredible; they require almost as much staff work as an amphibious invasion. Nevertheless, Jacqueline and Robert Kennedy made all the major decisions. Between them they delegated authority to reliable subordinates, and, as her notes attest, spliced together a lot of frayed ends. She was tentatively planning Monday’s services, worrying about the executive mansion’s inundation of house guests (“3rd floor 5 Single 2 Double”), and jotting down telephone numbers and names (“Jane DU 7-2480”; “Alsop, David, Pam, Cushing, Nancy, Margie, Mary”; “SCHLES—DILLON—MEDAL—JACK”; “Salinger, Mr. West, Clifton, Queen, de Gaulle, Bishop Hannan, Taylor, Tish”).

The eminent (“Queen, de Gaulle”) would receive appreciative billets in her own handwriting. For others a handshake, a brief word would do. But in the mansion there was no such thing as informality. Every caller must be scheduled: “Mon 730 McNamara; Tues 530 Katz; 630 Dillon; Wed 530 Grimes.” Reading her scribbles, with their deletions, marginal jottings, cryptic symbols and underscorings, one senses her determination to drive away recollections of yesterday. Certain entries—“Mass Cards”—could be decided by her alone. But “Menus,” “Xmas,” “WH Scrapbook,” and “Dave Powers pants Teddy” could have been put off. She was thinking about everything except the unthinkable, filling her hours with tasks.

Anticipating Christmas, household duties, and her brother-in-law’s funeral attire would have been remarkable had she lacked other duties. In fact, she had never had so many, not even before her own wedding. There was, for example, the problem of her attire. Bridal gowns are easily acquired. During the next two days, she decided, she must wear black stockings and, during Monday’s funeral services, a full mourning veil enveloping her entire head. Mary Gallagher acquired the stockings from Garfinckel’s, but no store had carried mantillas for years, so the White House seamstress had to make one. Ralph Dungan was pressing for a decision about the horses which would accompany the caisson. Fort Myer’s stables had two teams, matched grays and matched blacks. Which would it be? Eventually the word came down from Shriver that the family had settled on the grays. The Kennedy team could protect her from intolerable intrusions—every fraternal association, veterans’ organization, and quasi-religious group was anxious to participate in the ceremony—but if she wanted it to bear the Kennedy imprint, she had to be active, and she even had to develop political finesse; the Church hierarchy had its own notions of ritual, and interservice rivalry was irrepressible. Telephoning Taz Shepard and asking him to provide an escort of seamen for the horse-drawn gun carriage which would bear the coffin wasn’t enough. Colonel Miller had to be satisfied that the Navy really was her choice; otherwise the Army might feel slighted.

She didn’t win every point. From her research on the White House guidebook she had learned that long before bandleaders had adopted the custom of greeting prominent politicians with a sprightly chorus of “Hail to the Chief,” the air had been a Scottish ballad. The Scots played it largo. She remembered the President’s fondness for the melody and thought Scottish bagpipers might pipe it as a dirge. Ted Clifton persuaded her to withdraw the request. Though no one knew just when John Tyler had confiscated the tune as Presidential property, and though the circumstances had been hardly solemn—at Tyler’s direction, the Marine Band had used it to serenade his second wife-to-be—the inalterable fact was that “Hail to the Chief,” had acquired a semiofficial status. An unorthodox performance by foreigners would be regarded as improper.

She lost another musical skirmish to the more formidable Church. She had asked to have a Navy chorus sing during the funeral Mass, and once again the Navy was eager to oblige. At first the possibility of an obstacle seemed remote here. In Annapolis three Academy choirs—Catholics, Protestants, and antiphonal—began rehearsing. None was destined to perform at the service, however, for in Ralph Dungan’s office a priest, overhearing Shepard’s phoned orders, took him aside and said, “You can’t do it. We have our own choir.” Taz protested that the first of the three consisted entirely of Catholic youth, but he was missing the nub; the Church was bent upon its own people. In the end Mrs. Kennedy yielded and directed that the midshipmen sing on the mansion’s North Lawn Monday.

The hierarchy was victorious there. It was defeated in the greater debates over the Mass. Cardinal Cushing was acceptable to everyone, of course, and His Eminence stipulated no preferences of his own. The conflict arose over the designation of the second prelate at the altar. If seniority were observed, the Cardinal would be joined at the altar by Archbishop Patrick A. O’Boyle of Washington. Mrs. Kennedy had no objection to O’Boyle. But if any clergyman except Cushing were to speak, she wanted to see Auxiliary Bishop Philip N. Hannan at the lectern. He was young, gifted, and highly idealistic; she thought of him as “sort of a Jack in the Church.” Shriver braced himself for a bolt of clerical disapproval. Surprisingly there wasn’t even a spark, and Hannan was so assigned.

The real clash came over the selection of the cathedral. To the hierarchy the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in northeastern Washington was the obvious choice. The bishops and monsignors couldn’t imagine a finer tabernacle. The Romanesque Shrine was the largest and most impressive Catholic edifice in the United States; it seated 2,500, was equipped with vast parking areas, and had become something of a tourist attraction—during the spring and summer glut of sight-seers there were scheduled tours, and an efficient basement cafeteria had been installed for them. Jacqueline Kennedy was unimpressed. She had never been inside the Shrine. She disliked the name. To her St. Matthew’s was far more appealing; she particularly treasured the memory of attending a Red Mass with her husband there. If any cathedral were to be identified with the President, this would be it. The hierarchy was dumfounded. Compared to its magnificent Shrine, St. Matthew’s was shabby, aging, unsplendid, unadorned by artistic treasures. The widow and the clerics deadlocked. In Robert Kennedy’s words, “The priests insisted on Immaculate Conception, but she was very insistent about St. Matthew’s.” He told her, “I think it’s too small. It only seats eleven hundred.” She replied, “I don’t care. They can all stand in the streets. I just know that’s the right place to have it.”

Mrs. Kennedy had another, unanswerable reason for her choice, and eventually she disclosed it. She refused to ride to her husband’s funeral Mass “in a fat black Cadillac”; she had resolved to walk behind the caisson, and since the gleaming Shrine was too far away it was automatically eliminated. That settled that. At the same time it raised other, secular dilemmas, some of the first magnitude. Nobody, including Bob Kennedy, had anticipated a phalanx of famous pedestrians. Everyone responsible for security was appalled. Angie Duke envisioned a protocol nightmare, and wasn’t even sure that such homage wasn’t un-American. At his suggestion the Library of Congress ferrets were once more unleashed in the stacks, and they returned staggering under volumes of yellowed newsprint and cartons of microfilm which disclosed that similar processions had followed the coffins of Washington, Lincoln, Grant, and the first Roosevelt. Between 32,000 and 33,000 veterans of the American Revolution had followed George Washington’s body to its Mount Vernon grave. That was the best possible precedent, and Duke threw in his hand.

At first the widow wanted to walk every step—from the executive mansion to the Hill, from there to St. Matthew’s, and from the Mass to the burial site. Independently of her, the Joint Chiefs of Staff were taking the same line. To soldiers and sailors it seemed a fitting tribute to a fallen Commander in Chief. Ted Clifton gently pointed out that the consequences could be catastrophic. Gentlemen would refuse to be seated while a widowed First Lady was on foot, and few of these gentlemen were fit for such a hike. Clifton reminded Mrs. Kennedy that doddering behind her would be the oldest members of the Congress, Supreme Court Justices who were septuagenarians and octogenarians, and the President of Turkey, who had been a major when Dwight Eisenhower—himself seventy-three—had been a cadet at West Point. Conceivably half the nations in the UN could be left leaderless. She meditated and then modified her order. They would walk from the White House to St. Matthew’s, eight blocks away; infirm Chiefs of State could be driven there in advance. Even then the funeral planners murmured dissent, but she declined to budge further. “Nobody has to walk but me,” she said, and when she was told they would insist upon joining her she shrugged. That was their affair, she said; “That doesn’t matter.” A diehard inquired, “What will we do if it rains?” “I don’t care,” she said firmly. “I’ll walk anyway.” Her tone discouraged further argument. It dawned on them that not even a howling hurricane would prevent her from striding up Seventeenth Street and Connecticut to the cathedral at 1725 Rhode Island. Like staying with the body in Dallas, like her refusal to shed her stained clothing until she had been returned home, this was something she had to do.

By now Clifton, Duke, Shepard, Miller, and Shriver had almost become part of Dungan’s office furniture. Each man had left word with a score of colleagues that he could be reached at these extensions. Thus the marathon meeting was really larger than it seemed; the two White House switchboards kept plugging in invisible participants. Dungan felt a strange longing for last night’s simplicity. Today there were innumerable points of control, and they were not nearly so reliable. Bob Kennedy couldn’t always be reached, Jackie frequently changed her mind, and the Church and the military were being mulish. Twenty-four hours hadn’t decreased the sense of shock; if anything the men were more aware of their loss, and broke down more often. At the outset they had at least been rested. The accumulation of fatigue had begun to tell, both in emotional displays and sudden eruptions of temper. The one iron man there, Dungan thought, was Shriver. Except for occasional brief absences he sat hour after hour in front of the desk with a yellow pad in his lap, making meticulous notes and firing off orders.

But Shriver wasn’t the only efficient conferee. Dungan himself was performing ably, and Saturday’s accomplishments suggest that the general standard was very high. Dr. Joseph English, no expert in transportation, arranged a transatlantic dash for Mary Ann Ryan, a distant cousin of the President’s. A terse debate on mourning clothes ended, as Dick Goodwin put it, with the judgment that “If there was any occasion which demanded the highest formality it was the death of a President; therefore we would wear tails.” The preparation of guest lists continued, and had become more orderly—two men worked on the diplomatic corps, two handled the Congress, one chose family friends, one clergymen, one the press—and here, too, the follow-ups were painstaking. Once the selection of St. Matthew’s had become definite, groups of planners traveled there and made preliminary charts of pews and standing room while Sandy Fox dispatched telegrams and spread the word that invited Washingtonians were to pick up the invitations—which Sandy was inscribing with his exquisite calligraphy—in the East Lobby, where Dave Hackett and Dean Markham awaited them. Deciding upon musical titles was another initial step, and it was surprisingly complex. A state funeral is an intricate medley; not counting the national anthem, ruffles, and flourishes, there were to be thirty hymns. The bands had to be marshaled (Army seniority was disregarded; Mrs. Kennedy had requested priority for the Marine Band), and the proper scores had to be distributed to the musicians. There may be a dozen versions of a familiar refrain. For the Kennedy funeral the Kennedy team was exacting, and Irving Lowens of the Library of Congress’ music division was yanking volumes and folders from his own stacks, establishing the history of each composition.

In the case of “Hail to the Chief” he even appointed an ad hoc committee, whose report was filed in the Marine Band library. This may seem like caviling. But the President’s campaigns had taught his campaigners that every line of fine print would be read by someone, and as it happened Lowens’ findings were to be cited more than once. The sheer mass of the television audience meant that the tiniest movement would be witnessed by experts. America has experts in everything. There are people who devote lifetimes to a study of Longstreet’s movements on the morning of July 3, 1863; there are people who can recite the complete works of Robert W. Service; and there are people who make a hobby of “Hail to the Chief.” The strains which Tyler had thought romantic were to be played four times that weekend, twice on the Hill and twice at the church. Renditions were rotated among the service bands, and later letters arrived from vigilant critics who had recorded each beat with stopwatches and wondered why the tempo had varied.

Now and then the planners boggled. At 1930 hours Fort McNair held a full-dress briefing for regular officers, the National Guard, the reserves, the Secret Service, the metropolitan police, and the park police. General Wehle presided, colored chalk in hand. He drew elaborate diagrams and even indulged in whimsey, dryly remarking to Captain William Smith, “This is going to be a golden moment for you; you are going to be the first junior officer in history to issue the order, ‘Joint Chiefs of Staff! Forward March!’ ” Wehle thought nothing had been left to chance. He had told Shriver, “I want everything in writing.” Nevertheless the meeting broke up with no mention of the Presidential flag. Late that evening Seaman Ed Nemuth was watching television at Anacostia when a petty officer informed him that he would carry the huge standard behind the coffin tomorrow and on Monday. It was to be one of the most conspicuous military assignments in the ceremonies; television watchers who never saw Wehle or the Joint Chiefs were to be left with a vivid impression of Nemuth. Yet he had never seen a President’s ensign, had never carried a banner that large, and never dreamed that the pole would be too tall for the Capitol’s bronze doors. He would have to deal with that vicissitude when it arose; the order had come to him too late for rehearsal. Similarly, the President’s family should have reached a definite decision about the Mass card. Mass cards aren’t like newspapers. Printers must devote meticulous care to them. Running one off on a crash schedule is extremely difficult. But after preliminary examination of those which had been used at the requiem Masses for Joe Kennedy, Jr. and Ethel’s parents, the matter was set aside until Sunday.

Of course, there is such a thing as too much efficiency. The White House operators are so good, and their connections so swift, that often neither the caller nor the called knows where the other is. In Chicago Tish Baldridge, who had preceded Nancy Tuckerman as social secretary, had lain awake until 2 A.M. Giving up sleep, she had packed a bag and taken the first plane to Washington. Saturday noon she entered the East Gate, passed by the catafalque, and phoned Shriver on a mansion extension. Sarge didn’t know it was an extension. He assumed she was in Illinois, and when she asked whether there was anything she could do, he suggested she think about the cemetery. This was consistent with the organizational approach Larry O’Brien had perfected for John Kennedy—give every volunteer a job; even if he blunders, he will be left with a feeling of participation. Had Tish been at her Merchandise Mart office her thoughts would have been ineffective. Since she was in Washington (and since she was a strong-minded woman) her presence was quickly felt. She approved the purchase of Joe Gawler’s $700 copper-lined asphalt-concrete vault, and with Angie Duke’s wife Robin she sketched an arbor of flowers for the grave. Tish and Robin were old friends of Mrs. Kennedy, but neither understood her concept of taste. To her a floral arbor was like engraving R.I.P. on a gravestone, and when they set out to buy up every rose in the capital they were embarking on a collision course. Jacqueline Kennedy had her own ideas about flowers.

Seaman Nemuth, the Mass card, and Tish were exceptional. With few exceptions the widow had but to express a desire and the achievement materialized like Aladdin’s jinni. Because she had been expecting Patrick’s birth in two months, she had been unable to accompany her husband to Ireland. Nevertheless he had told her of his affection for the people, had held her spellbound with dramatic tales of the April 1916 uprising in Dublin, and had described President Eamon de Valera’s youthful struggles in Brooklyn. She mentioned how moved he had been by Ireland’s drill of mourning for departed heroes, and that was enough; Clifton, who had been with him there, had previously assigned a picked detail from Fort Myer to study a film showing the solemn salute, but now he knew that would not do. He phoned the Irish Ambassador, who, grateful for the opportunity to do something, declared that he would fly in a team of cadets from Shannon. Dungan’s office made reservations for them at the Mayflower Hotel.

She remembered another, more recent incident; on November 13, during her convalescence, the bagpipers of the Black Watch Regiment had skirled on the south grounds to the delight of John and Caroline. After wittily glossing over Black Watch encounters with American colonists during the Revolutionary War, the President had spoken of his own affection for Scotland. He loved it, he had said, because it was a lost cause which, in the end, had triumphed. Mrs. Kennedy felt that her husband had always had an affinity for lost causes. Now his own life was one. She thought it appropriate for the Black Watch to march behind the gun carriage in groups of three, between the Joint Chiefs and the U.S. Marines. Clifton called Ormsby-Gore’s military aide. The Black Watch was still touring America, and the pipe major and eight pipers were flown up from Knoxville and billeted at Fort Myer. The American funeral pace was a hundred paces a minute, slightly faster than the heartbeat of a man. There was no equivalent in the British Army. The Scotsmen would have to maintain it for a mile, and they began round-the-clock drill.

Fort Myer’s two drill fields were becoming rather crowded. Lieutenant Sam Bird was rehearsing his body bearers. Sergeant Keith Clark was practicing taps. While Clifton had flinched at the idea of a mournful rendition of “Hail to the Chief,” Jacqueline Kennedy’s preference for the melancholy sound of bagpipe music was endorsed. The Black Watch men weren’t the only skirlers; four Air Force pipers had been assigned to the graveside ceremony, and the old red-brick fort was made even more tristful by their plaintive wailing. The stables clattered with the sounds of hoisted harness. Old Guard archivists were familiar with the legends of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane, whose chargers were sacrificed after the burial of a lost conqueror in the Mongol faith that they passed through “the gate of the sky” to serve their master in after-life. Since then the riderless horse had become traditional in all state funerals. Fort Myer veterans knew that a caparisoned steed would follow the gun carriage, with boots turned backward as a sign that the fallen leader would ride no more. At first the widow thought of using Sardar, a bay gelding which President Ayub Khan had given her; then, at 4 P.M., the fort’s twenty-six-horse stable was ordered to pick one of its own.

Two chargers were available. “Shorty” was the more phlegmatic and would be easier to handle, but to the stablemen he looked rather like a fat cow. “Black Jack,” his stablemate, was a magnificent seventeen-year-old. He had the vigor of a young stallion, and picking him was a risk; nevertheless the commanding officer of the Old Guard’s 3rd Battle Group was confident that Pfc Arthur A. Carlson could handle him. Carlson himself was less sure. Black Jack’s temperament was notorious; the crowds, the white traffic lines on Pennsylvania Avenue, and especially the slow progress of the caisson were disturbing prospects. Furthermore, he was even stronger than he looked. Carlson was a sinewy young Alabaman, but if the gelding shied and broke loose, the cavalryman would be left. Both Carlson and the sergeant who would lead the matched grays picked tight cinches, spur straps, and Pelhams (check reins). There was some feeling among old cavalrymen that the horses drawing the gun carriage should be mounted by senior noncoms. They were overruled. The hazards of skittishness were too great. The thought that runaways might gallop across Washington with the Commander in Chief’s coffin was intimidating. Riders were picked for their brawn, horsemanship and experience, and as things turned out the apprehension of the worriers was to be justified.

The vast majority of the infantrymen who were to march had been trained in quickstep cadence. Like the Black Watch pipers, they had to be redrilled. Mrs. Kennedy was unaware of this at the time. Most of the participants were strangers to her. She hadn’t met the marchers, the riders, the musicians, the Irishmen, the Scotsmen, or the generals at Myer and McNair. She didn’t even know the name of the riderless horse. (Had she been told, she would have been startled; her childhood nickname for her father had been Black Jack.) From her eminence in the executive mansion she could only shape broad outlines and leave details to others. Her lieutenants were her husband’s staff; in planning his state funeral she was, in effect, Acting President. She couldn’t have done it alone. The entire Kennedy family, and particularly Robert Kennedy and Sargent Shriver, were indispensable; nevertheless she was the widow, the symbol. She kept a taut check rein on herself. When the pressures on her were at their height, an acquaintance who had been waiting in the second-floor hall outside the oval study noted that “Jackie came out, looking very pale but most composed. She said that an acquaintance had ‘called me to say how wonderful I have been. How did she expect me to behave?’ ” The fact was that her own friends had never fully understood her. Her husband had. Seven years earlier, sitting on the edge of a table in his Boston headquarters, he had remarked to a group of them, “My wife is a shy, quiet girl, but when things get rough, she can handle herself pretty well.” Until now they hadn’t realized that he had been displaying his flair for understatement.

Saturday’s hardest decision had been the choice of a grave site. The dispute was so intense, the feeling so strong on both sides, that lasting bruises appeared to be inevitable. Until the issue was resolved the President’s friends—indeed, the family itself—was divided into two clear-cut factions, with the Bostonians a heavy majority. In fact, several of the funeral planners didn’t even know that an alternative existed. Except for Taft and Wilson, all previous Chief Executives had been buried near their homes. In Dungan’s office Angie Duke glanced up from his FDR precedent book and inquired, “What’s the Hyde Park of the Kennedy family?” “Brookline,” he was told. He instructed his protocol experts to prepare invitations for a funeral train and be ready with alternatives in the event of orders to move the body from St. Matthew’s by destroyer or aircraft. President Johnson’s staff expected him to attend a Mass in Hyannis and graveside services in Brookline. Following the Cabinet meeting Johnson had told a visitor that he couldn’t schedule any appointments early next week because “I don’t know about after the funeral; I may be in Massachusetts.” At 11:37 A.M. a State Department telecom had definitely informed Ambassador Bohlen in Paris, “The burial will be in Brookline.”

O’Donnell, O’Brien, and Powers were unshakable to the end. For them the thought of lowering the President’s coffin anywhere else was unthinkable. They were professional persuaders, they were sure they were right, and they had converted both Salinger and Sorensen. Even Jim Reed, who was from western Massachusetts, couldn’t imagine another cemetery. The President’s sisters were definite; Eunice telephoned from Hyannis Port, “We’re all going to be buried around Daddy in Boston.” Robert Kennedy agreed. The arguments, he thought, were overwhelming: the family had come from Massachusetts, their father had made such a difference in their lives, and “the President obviously felt it because he buried Patrick there.” If Brookline proved unsatisfactory, there was always Boston Common. The mafia had a half-dozen plans, and they were ready to discuss anything except a grave outside New England. To them that was outrageous. Consequently the emergence of a strong Arlington faction “made it,” as Bob Kennedy dryly put it afterward, “rather difficult for me.”

The truth was that none of them was familiar with Arlington. It lay just across the Potomac, and they had seen its markers shining in the sunlight as they drove past, but because of their youth Kennedy men and women were largely ignorant of all cemeteries, national and private. Sorensen pictured Arlington as “a funeral factory.” The sisters felt that it sounded cold and remote. Even the Secretary of Defense, Arlington’s most vehement advocate, was vague about it. His department’s real estate in the continental United States, it must be remembered, was approximately the size of Tennessee. He had reigned over the Pentagon for nearly three years, yet he had scarcely been within the cemetery’s gates. His conviction that the President’s coffin should lie in federal soil would have been quickly dismissed without Jacqueline Kennedy’s support, and her persistence was chiefly instinct. She remembered her intuitive flash of nearly three years ago; she reflected upon how lovely Lee Mansion could be when you drove across Memorial Bridge and saw it all lit up, and recalled that the illuminated pillars had been one of the first Washington sights Caroline had learned to recognize.

The brooding house, with its eight white Athenian columns, belonged to American history. Erected in 1802, it had first belonged to an adopted son of George Washington. There Mary Custis married Lieutenant Robert E. Lee in 1831; there, thirty years later, Lee wrote out his resignation from the U.S. Army, dispatched the letter to the Secretary of War, and assumed command of the Army of Northern Virginia. In 1864 Secretary Stanton confiscated the rolling, 420-acre estate—Stanton simply called it “Lee’s Farm”—as a cemetery for the Union dead. Despite all this Arlington had somehow escaped partisan bitterness. The first man to be buried there was a Confederate soldier who had died in a Union hospital, and in 1883 the Supreme Court set aside Stanton’s confiscation. The federal government then bought the land outright from Lee’s heir for $150,000.

After the Kennedy funeral everyone, including the diehards, agreed that the choice was ideal. Yet the Bostonians were acquiring so much momentum Saturday morning that its chances would have been extremely slight without a freak of human nature, the matutinal habits of Robert S. McNamara. The Secretary had been known to schedule appointments at 6 A.M., which in Washington, a city of late risers, was almost an act of insanity. McNamara was always in his office by eight o’clock, and on Saturdays he came in earlier, because with the brass in the sack he could get more done. November 23, 1963, was a Saturday. He was at his enormous old desk in the E Ring before the mafia proselytized Sorensen, and his first order of business was a self-briefing on the American Battle Monuments Commission and what Defense called “Cemeteries, National.” The man he wanted, he found, was Arlington’s superintendent, John C. Metzler. Jack Metzler was also up, and as ready as he would ever be. That was less than letter-perfect. It wasn’t his fault. The cemetery was a managerial Gorgon. Pyramided atop the complexities of the funeral industry was the rigid caste system of the military: a dead soldier was entitled to taps and a firing party, officers up to lieutenant colonel were given caissons, the caskets of full colonels and generals—and naval captains and admirals—were followed by either Shorty or Black Jack. Men were even buried by rank. That was standard operating procedure in all national cemeteries, but Metzler had special problems. His knowledge of Arlington’s boundaries, for example, was rather hazy. At one time the National Park Service, which maintained the mansion, had been responsible for the hill in front of it. Since then the line had been redrawn, and Metzler didn’t know precisely which blades of grass belonged to Defense and which to Parks—to Interior. There was the further problem of upkeep. Some twenty thousand trees stood on the old estate, and in places the late November leaves were now a foot thick. Raking them all away before Monday was a hopeless task. Untidy foliage would make a bad impression on television, and he had already anticipated the blinding glare of limelight; “I was,” he wrote afterward, “like the proverbial hen on a hot griddle.”

But Metzler wasn’t unprepared. Although he had received no definite word, Friday’s call from the Shriver-Dungan meeting had alerted him to the fact that an Arlington funeral was a distinct possibility, and while most commentators had continued to assume that the coffin would go to Boston, early Saturday Metzler heard two radio announcers speculating about his cemetery. The superintendent “started to get more apprehensive.” In the gloomy dawn he toured his ten miles of winding roads, and by the time McNamara’s inquiring call reached down through the daedalian tiers of the Department of the Army, the Military District of Washington, and the Office of Support Services, and found him, he and Colonel Paul Miller were ready to recommend three plots: Dewey Circle, a section near the Maine Monument, and the hill below Lee Mansion.

Then Robert McNamara arrived, accompanied by General Taylor, Secretary of the Army Cyrus Vance, and the rapidly developing mist. McNamara wordlessly took Metzler’s Arlington map, and they all trooped around the three locations. Colonel Miller said he favored Dewey Circle. The superintendent disagreed; the access roads were tortuous, and besides, there were all those leaves. McNamara also shook his head. He liked the slope beneath the mansion. He asked whether he had authority over it and Metzler said no, that was Park Service land. The Secretary made a note to call the Secretary of the Interior, and as he was jotting down Udall’s name Metzler volunteered, “Of course, it is now standard procedure for everyone buried here to have a grave of the same size.” McNamara absently asked for the specifications and was told “Six feet by ten.” The Secretary looked up, incredulous. “The rules should be changed in this case,” he said sharply. “An exception should be made for the President of the United States.”

That was the first of four visits. He had to leave for the East Room Mass, but the moment it was over he began rounding up Robert Kennedy, Jean Smith, Pat Lawford, and Bill Walton for a second trip. “Let’s go to Arlington,” he said, tugging at Walton’s sleeve, and the two men shared a taxi, for McNamara, with his distaste for special privilege, never thought to order a limousine. Entering Hatfield Gate he was met by a delegation. Udall was waiting by Vance, Metzler, and Miller, and standing off to one side were three ranking officers and their aides. This was one Saturday the brass wasn’t taking off. The Pentagon grapevine had alerted them to the Secretary’s movements. They had drawn the obvious conclusion and were sympathetic. Nevertheless they did form a separate group, and it is a revealing sidelight on the military attitude toward men in mufti that the generals, buttoned up in foul-weather gear, never thought to share their protection with civilians. Two members of the President’s Cabinet were present; the arrival of the Attorney General a few minutes later made three. The cloudburst had been in progress for over an hour. McNamara, lacking both raincoat and rubbers, was not only drenched to the skin; his straight hair was plastered across his face, and at Dewey Circle the soles of his shoes became sodden with mud. Once Metzler attempted to hold an umbrella over him, but the superintendent was another civilian. A poncho briefly sheltered Jean Smith. She was a lady, however, and the officers were being professionally chivalrous. Whatever their political preferences, they were clearly in mourning for a slain Commander in Chief, yet accepting the Secretary of Defense as the Commander’s deputy was something else. They had never been able to bring themselves to cross that threshold. McNamara knew they hadn’t, and he wasn’t surprised that not one of his subordinates—for that is what they were—offered to doff his own oilskin and loan it to him. Bill Walton, an artless taxpayer, was dumfounded. During the past two centuries the United States had established elaborate control of the military by civilian authorities. Everyone paid lip service to it, including West Pointers, but in practice the emotional responses of the soldier hadn’t changed since the Hamites. The man in uniform deferred to only one civilian, his Chieftain.

In the Presidential apartment Mrs. Kennedy was being handed a note from Bob on White House stationery telling her of the brief trip he and others were making to Arlington.

Like Bob McNamara and Bill Walton, Bob Kennedy expressed an immediate preference for the slope, and like McNamara he inquired, “Who owns the rest of it?” To him the bottom of the hill (the part Metzler knew he owned) was unsuitable. “It would make a major difference if we could have it higher,” he said, and though he strode off to examine the other two sites, he came back unmoved. The plot by the Maine Memorial had seemed to him to be particularly poor. It was altogether too small and was “right down on the road [Porter Drive].” He still liked this incline, though not the base of it. It was then that Walton pointed out something which had eluded the others. The artist’s eye had noticed that the place Kennedy favored met a classic architectural definition; it lay squarely on the invisible axis between the mansion and the Lincoln Memorial across the river.

McNamara, delighted, told Udall he would need as much of the “Interior enclave” as possible. He suggested they designate the area on his map and sign it right there. Udall agreed. Unhappily the streaming downpour ruled out any paperwork; signatures would have been washed away. McNamara said, “Have your attorneys examine ownership, Stew, and see if they can make it part of the national cemetery. I’ll have Defense attorneys going over the same problem. We can meet out here this afternoon with plot maps and tapes. I want as much as possible for the sake of safety, and we might as well turn the whole thing over to the lawyers.”

He had forgotten that a lawyer was present. The soggy Attorney General was taking a hard look at that grassy bank. Few men could stare as intently as Bob Kennedy, and none had access to so much legal talent. On his return to the capital the brightest men in the Justice Department’s Lands Division began probing into ownership. Almost simultaneously they and their colleagues in Defense and Interior discovered that the superintendent had been wrong about his frontier; the National Parks line ended twenty feet from the mansion portico. Udall’s consent was, therefore, unnecessary. But the Lands Division didn’t stop there. The young attorneys opened up Arlington’s county courthouse, studied the entire history of the property, pored over the actual deed of March 31, 1883, under which the federal government had acquired ownership of Arlington, consulted all pertinent statutes, carved out a two-and-a-half-acre tract for the President’s grave, and then submitted an airtight brief concluding that “title to the John F. Kennedy cemetery plot is vested in the United States of America in simple absolute fee, without any restrictions or encumbrances of any nature.” While McNamara was rightly considered an actionist, he had left Hatfield Gate, Arlington’s main entrance, with the vague feeling that the cemetery should become a burial ground for national heroes, an American Westminster Abbey. It was Justice which tied and double-knotted every conceivable loose end. The legal craftsmanship was exquisite and fitting; this punctilious attention to particulars had been a JFK trademark.

Jean Smith and Pat Lawford re-entered the executive mansion dripping but converted. Both had abandoned the Boston camp. Jean’s notes on the trip—“Went to Arlington with Bob McNamara, Bobby and Bill Walton to look at site”—carried no suggestion of endorsement. Her greeting to Jacqueline Kennedy did: “Oh, Jackie, we’ve found the most wonderful place!” Jean had gone to Virginia with foreboding, envisioning dreary ranks of grim stones, and the gently sloping lawn had been an inversion of everything she had expected. Even in the rain, with the autumnal grass drab and bleak, it had seemed splendid. Mrs. Kennedy, hearing this and other enthusiastic reports from those who had crossed the Potomac, realized that it was time to decide. The next step was to form a group, headed by her, and at 1:58 P.M., she bade Douglas and Phyllis Dillon good-bye upstairs and left the White House in a black Mercury, accompanied by Jean, Pat, and Bob. A motorcade followed: Walton, Lem Billings, Jim Reed, other house guests, the Secret Service. At the Pentagon they stopped to pick up the Secretary of Defense, who by now looked like the survivor of a shipwreck. His socks gurgled as he walked. He had brought a raincoat from his office, but he never wore it; he gallantly presented it to Jean, and once more his trousers became frigid about his knees and calves. Walton had hurried out to Georgetown and changed—unwisely, as it happened, because he was now wearing his last dark suit, and it was doomed; he would have to attend the rest of the ceremonies in tan gabardine. (At one point Bob Kennedy was to regard him reproachfully and murmur, “No mourning?” Walton spread his hands in a gesture of defeat.)

Jacqueline Kennedy’s first visit to Arlington was like the opening of the final act of Our Town. The steady rain was glacial, numbing. The arrival of the Commander in Chief’s widow raised martial chivalry to a new pitch, and she stood beneath massed umbrellas, contemplating the silent scene for fifteen minutes. Her entourage was quiet. There was little to say. The fact that they were gazing upon the future grave of the President was awesome, and she obviously needed no words of persuasion; her own recollection of that quarter-hour is simple and direct: “We went out and walked to that hill, and of course you knew that was where it should be.” At a nod from her, Walton slogged up the saturated turf and pointed at a tuft. He said, “This is perfect.” Metzler came up and drove a tent peg in the ground. The artist’s eye was uncanny; next morning a team of surveyors found he had been less than six inches off the axis.

The Bostonians had been routed by a fait accompli. The destroyer was still standing by, and an hour and a half would pass before the national audience would hear—from a correspondent covering the State Department, of all places—a report that “a grave site has been picked out in Arlington Cemetery.” Nevertheless it was all over. The Irishmen were dismayed, but this was clearly the widow’s prerogative; they kept their disappointment to themselves. In Dungan’s office the planning team proceeded on the assumption that Monday’s cortege would ride from St. Matthew’s to Arlington’s Hatfield Gate. This is what happened, but Jacqueline Kennedy’s visit and the driving of the stake were not the end of Saturday’s activity on the hillside. The Justice Department lawyers had yet to submit their findings. Angie Duke’s elegant protocol officers had to chart graveside assignments; the military services conferred over who would stand where; Mrs. Kennedy pondered her own wishes, and Shriver translated them into orders.

Lastly, someone had to outline the Presidential plot. The outliner was the Secretary of Defense. He had begun the day with thoughts of Arlington, he believed in thoroughness, and at dusk he was back on the slope—wet, filthy, and wretched, but working effectively. Stewart Udall joined him for a while. The two Cabinet ministers had not yet heard of the attorneys’ discovery. They were under the impression that the tent peg lay on Interior property, and at McNamara’s request Udall left to find out whether a President could be buried in Park land. McNamara further asked the Army Corps of Engineers to send him a team of men equipped with measuring instruments. Secretary Vance led them up the hill, and as the second night after Kennedy’s death fell McNamara showed them precisely what he wanted. He, Vance, and Metzler watched the men place twelve granite markers on the perimeter he had chosen. The torrential rain had by now thinned to a fine drizzle. It was possible to affix a scrawl which would remain legible, and McNamara and Vance signed authorizations setting aside any part of the plot which might belong to them. Since Defense was responsible for all of it, these papers, drawn up in the dank darkness, were binding and final.

McNamara walked back down the slope with a young Park Service employee, a college student who worked part time in Lee Mansion. The Secretary thought that he had never been more miserable in his life. He was nearly fifty, he had spent most of the day under conditions which would have been harrowing for a young infantryman—“I had the impression that it had been raining buckets,” he said later, “raining on me, personally”—and he had concluded his fourth Arlington expedition by demarcating the grave of the leader he had loved. Then the student told him that he had been present during the President’s visit to Lee Mansion and had overheard him say that this was the most beautiful sight in Washington. McNamara had been toiling over the hill site since dawn. For the first time he was learning that Kennedy himself shared his feeling for it. The boy added, “My father works for your department, Mr. Secretary.” At that time the Defense payroll was roughly equivalent to the population of Norway, but after the funeral the Secretary made it a point to find out who the student’s father was and speak to him. For McNamara this was out of character. He was an administrator, not a politician. He did it because he knew that was exactly what John Kennedy would have done.

The groggy country would later remember Saturday as a gap between days, between the shock of yesterday’s assassination and the murder of the assassin on Sunday. The live broadcasts of the dramatic ceremonies in Washington on both Sunday and Monday added to the effect, and so did the improving weather. That one day of dreadful gloom stood alone. The University of Chicago study indicated that the average adult spent ten hours in front of his television set then, the weekend’s peak, but the watchers didn’t learn much. Afterward most of them could recall only a few disjointed fragments: the heartbreaking ballet in the East Room as the Death Watch changed guard each half-hour; the outrageous contrast of the scenes in the Dallas jail, where a sequence showing Oswald changing his shirt was treated as an event of major significance; and, above all, a sense of astonishment that the young President was being mourned, not only by his own countrymen, but by the entire world. Just as Americans were beginning to grasp the extent of their loss—after the funeral the Chicago survey found that a full half of the population rated Kennedy “one of the two or three best Presidents the country ever had”—they discovered that hundreds of millions of people who had never seen the United States were mourning, too.

Many incidents of the global grief were relayed to the national audience Saturday and early Sunday morning. In Westminster Abbey the choir sang “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” Westminster’s archdeacon delivered a eulogy, and every pew was jammed with kneeling Englishmen. Other memorial services were being held simultaneously at Windsor Castle and St. Paul’s. Sir Laurence Olivier, interrupting a performance at the Old Vic, asked the audience to stand while the orchestra played “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The headline of Rome’s Il Giorno simply read: “Addio, John, Addio,” and the taxi drivers of Rome parked an empty cab with a huge black wreath propped against it outside the American Embassy. In Berlin sixty thousand people massed to express their sorrow; the square outside Schöneberg Rathaus was renamed John F. Kennedy Platz. These were understandable, for the President had held the shield of U.S. power over Britain, Italy, and West Berlin. What was harder to absorb was that a Chief Executive had won so much affection in countries hostile to the United States in general and to him in particular. The grief of the Russians was incomprehensible. Nina Khrushchev, whose husband Kennedy had confronted with missiles thirteen months ago, wired her condolences to Jacqueline Kennedy. Andrei Gromyko, one of the toughest of the hard-line Reds, was seen weeping as he left the U.S. legation in Moscow. The mourning of the American networks was fully matched by the Soviet radio, which played nothing but Slavic dirges, hour after hour. New York businessmen setting up textile plants in the U.S.S.R. were approached by peasants anxious to display their sympathy, and at a traveling U.S. graphics exhibit Russian children laid flowers in front of the President’s photograph.

Nina Khrushchev’s message was merely one in a growing file that included anguished condolences to the widowed First Lady from Queen Elizabeth, from the Queen Mother, Gamal Nasser, and a moving telegram bearing the plain signature of Josip Broz Tito. The State Department, presumably an authority on moods abroad, was overwhelmed. Its files for November 23 became choked with cables from U.S. ambassadors describing the profound sadness around them and trying—since each diplomat assumed that his country’s reaction must be exceptional—to account for it. Typically, a consul reported that an African native had walked ten miles through the bush to say, “I have lost a friend and I am so sorry.” The consul was bewildered. How could a nomadic bushman be a Kennedy friend? What had the President done for the Kalaharis? Why should this one grieve? “Not even President Kennedy and his immediate associates,” Dean Rusk subsequently explained, “had understood the extent to which ordinary people around the world had read his speeches and become involved with him. In three years he had established the kind of rapport that FDR had.” Rusk was right; the men who had been close to Kennedy were as taken aback as the Foreign Service officers. Stanislaus Radziwill boarded a transatlantic jet to attend the funeral; the captain came back to sit beside him, said he understood Radziwill had married Mrs. Kennedy’s sister, and then, to the amazement of his passenger, commenced to weep. Godfrey McHugh, whose name had rarely been published, received between five and six hundred letters. Byron White, who was also deluged by mail, later observed that “None of us had dreamt on Friday that the President’s death would cut this kind of swath abroad.” Politicians abroad felt the same way. Prime Minister Douglas-Home confided that he was “amazed at the depth of the British response, especially among our youth.” President de Gaulle told a friend, “I am stunned. They are crying all over France. It is as though he were a Frenchman, a member of their own family.”

Rapid communication undoubtedly heightened the international passion.⁹ So did the absence of other news; had China invaded India, for example, the attention of Asia would have been quickly distracted. Since there were no diversions and no valid historical parallels, Kennedy’s death was unique, and the most one can say of world repercussions is that they were so fantastic that they were to draw eight heads of state, ten prime ministers, and most of the world’s remaining royalty to St. Matthew’s.

Given time and prompt encouragement from the State Department, the international delegation would have been still larger. Friday afternoon State’s under secretaries had discussed the question and then cabled all American ambassadors to discourage dignitaries from attending the funeral, on the ground that the presence of some might embarrass others. Beginning that evening there were answering rumbles of discontent. Queen Elizabeth was expecting a child and couldn’t come herself, but she wanted to send her husband and her prime minister. Other national leaders notified Washington that they wished to come as individuals; one cabled that if an official invitation was out of the question he intended to present himself “on a personal friendship basis.” State began to have second thoughts. Early Saturday Rusk called a staff meeting and reaffirmed Friday’s decision. The funeral was only forty-eight hours away. Invitations, he felt, would arrive too late. By now, however, world capitals were beginning to feel mounting pressure from their own citizens, and at noon the dam broke.

It was broken by de Gaulle. De Valera, Ludwig Erhard, and Prince Philip and Sir Alec Douglas-Home had already declared that they would fly over, but de Gaulle’s career and forceful personality had established him as a great symbolic figure. His first inclination had been to remain in Paris. The Americans had said that they wanted it that way, and he was a proud man. Moreover, his differences with Kennedy had been no secret. An abrupt turnabout might be interpreted as hypocrisy. France changed his mind. If the President of the United States had meant that much to Frenchmen, he told those around him, the President of France should go to the funeral, and he personally telephoned Hervé Alphand in Washington to say so. The Quai d’Orsay made the announcement at 12:20 P.M. Washington time. Ten minutes later Brussels disclosed that King Baudouin would come; State hastily cabled formal invitations, and “the telegrams,” in Harriman’s words, “were followed by an extraordinary flood of acceptances”—the Queen of Greece, the Emperor of Ethiopia, the Grand Duke of Luxembourg, the Crown Princess of the Netherlands, the Crown Princesses of Norway and Denmark; the Presidents of Germany, Israel, Korea, and the Philippines; the Premiers of Turkey, Canada, and Jamaica; Anastas I. Mikoyan, First Deputy Premier of Russia; and Prince Norodom Sihanouk of Cambodia. Altogether, ninety-two nations were sending delegations. Ayub Khan of Pakistan was staying home, together with the Presidents of most Latin-American republics, but that was because legally they could not leave home without legislative approval. Even so, their constituents were angry, and it says much for the emotional climate of that weekend that they felt obliged to explain publicly why they couldn’t stand by the grave of a foreign ruler.

On Kalorama Road Nicole Alphand measured every bed in the embassy residency and found that none was long enough for the towering frame of Charles de Gaulle; she telephoned the manager of a Washington furniture store, who volunteered to loan her a long bed without charge. Hanging up, she toured the building a second time, inspecting windows. The French President would bring bodyguards, and his hosts could be counted upon to provide additional protection. Nevertheless she wasn’t taking any chances. Though assassination was new to this generation of Americans—few were old enough to remember the murder of McKinley—de Gaulle had been repeatedly marked for death by agents of the right-wing OAS. Madame Alphand was making sure that each latch was secure. That, too, says something about the temper of the weekend.

The name of one retired diplomat was conspicuously absent from the glittering lists of dignitaries about to converge upon the capital. Joseph P. Kennedy, U.S. Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s from 1937 to 1940, was physically incapable of attending his son’s funeral. Until his stroke two years ago the family patriarch had been the toughest and shrewdest of the Kennedys, and his public critics had been ruthless. Now that he was helpless, overcome by the cruelest blow imaginable, he was left alone. The small band of correspondents standing watch outside the Hyannis Port compound was subdued, apologetic, and reluctant to intrude. Although the television audience was constantly aware of Washington and Dallas on November 23, Cape Cod was rarely mentioned. Coverage there was confined to brief reports about the arrival and departure of relatives and a series of still pictures showing the President’s mother attending the first Mass of the day in Hyannis.

That had been at 7 A.M. Rose Kennedy stayed for the second Mass, but Ann Gargan, who had accompanied her, returned to the compound to breakfast with her uncle. Reading the thoughts of a stricken man is difficult; nevertheless it was becoming increasingly clear to those around the Ambassador that he sensed trouble. Ted Kennedy had told him that he was here for a Senatorial speech, yet Ted had gone off to the eight o’clock Mass with Eunice. With repairmen minutes away, the television set remained inoperable. Joe Kennedy gestured impatiently at Ann, and she realized that he had noticed the absence of any morning newspaper. Feebly she explained that Frank, the family chauffeur, had been unable to pick them up because he had driven Aunt Rose to church. His eyes sharpened. That, too, was unusual. Usually she drove herself. Then he looked out through the dining room’s big picture window and saw his wife emerging from the foggy lawn, dressed all in black, her face obscured by a black veil. He made a queer, jerky movement, which, Ann later believed, was a sign that he had felt the first wave of impending disaster.

The truth couldn’t be kept from him much longer. Ted knew it, and after breakfasting himself the Senator asked Eunice to join him in their father’s bedroom. By now the tension in Joe was alarming. He had been impatient with Ann and the nurse throughout his regular exercise period in his indoor pool. Back in his bed he stirred restlessly and glared at the dark television screen while Ann, in the corridor outside, clenched her hands together. Conceivably the blow could prove fatal. As a precaution his physician, Dr. Russell Boles, had been summoned from Boston and was lurking down the hall, within earshot.

Ted and Eunice entered and sat by the bed. Joe waved indignantly at the screen. The Senator turned toward it, explaining that they had all been at Mass, and his father gazed out at the sea. In aphasia a patient’s mind often drifts that way. One moment you have his undivided attention; a moment later he is off in a private reverie.

Ted said, “There’s been a bad accident. The President has been hurt very badly.”

Joe Kennedy’s head snapped back. He stared directly into his son’s eyes. He was following every word.

Several contemporary accounts declared that the President’s father did not cry—“Joe is a tough old bird,” said Time; “he… took it without visibly flinching.” That was entirely untrue. The retired tycoon was deeply emotional, devoted to his children and fiercely committed to their ambitions. When his oldest son had been killed in action, he had been well. Nevertheless he had wept then, and he wept now. Ted and Eunice did their best to comfort him, but they too had been ravaged; it was a time of unrelieved desolation. After a while Joe recovered sufficiently to ask for details. There were more tears, and Dr. Boles advised Ann that immediate relaxation was imperative.

Unfortunately, that was impractical. There was no way his patient could be diverted now. Ann brought the Boston Globe and the Boston Record American into the bedroom; her uncle saw the pictures from Dallas and collapsed again. The doctor entered and gave him a sedative. Like the drug Dr. Walsh had administered to Jacqueline Kennedy at Bethesda, it had no effect whatever, and the day, having begun with the solemn dignity of religious services, became progressively more unraveled. Ted conferred with his brother by telephone; Bob agreed that he should stay there until their parents had settled down. Eunice, meantime, went to her mother, who was too upset even to see her husband, and who strolled back and forth on the wet, misty lawn, trying to talk to her daughter and her nephew Joe. The news having been broken, Ann thought her uncle might as well watch television. In twenty-five minutes a Hyannis technician had repaired the wires Ted had violently yanked away last evening and the President’s father, propped up on pillows, was looking at his son’s coffin in the East Room, watching the honor guard change shifts. He began to sob again, and for the next several hours—indeed, throughout most of the next two and a half days—he alternated between a yearning for information and a revulsion against it. At his direction Ann and Rita Dallas switched the knob on and off, on and off. It wasn’t good for him, but there was no alternative; he couldn’t be expected to go to the pool or the movie theater downstairs.

The crisis came later in the afternoon. Hyannis Port had reached a strange, unpredictable stage in which nothing seemed bizarre. Rita Dallas went home and received an anonymous telephone call telling her she should be ashamed of her name. Word reached the compound of rumors that the President’s father had died of a heart attack, and Senator Kennedy hastily conferred with his cousins, debated the wisdom of calling a press conference to scotch the report, and concluded it was best to say nothing. At the height of this frantic activity Joe Kennedy decided he must go to Washington immediately. Ann stepped into the bedroom and found him struggling with his clothes and fumbling for his wheelchair. There was no way to dissuade him. Another elderly uncle might have been gently pushed back among his bedclothes, but nobody had ever pushed this man around, and his slender young niece didn’t try. Instead she helped him dress and wheeled him to the car. She suggested they just ride around; he vehemently refused and directed her straight to the airport. Had adequate transportation existed, there is little doubt that the President’s father would have appeared in the White House within three hours. He was in an inflexible mood, and none of Ann’s arguments impressed him; he brushed aside the fact that Father Cavanaugh was coming up tonight to be with him. Since his stroke, however, Joe Kennedy had confined his flying to the Caroline. The plane wasn’t there, so the two of them just sat in the gloaming squinting at commercial airplanes until he signaled her to start the car. She drove slowly back to the compound and helped him back into bed. Adjusting covers, Ann had the feeling that in some undefinable way the trip had helped him. He wasn’t resigned. He remained unconsolable, groping in a solitary, unfathomable agony. But he had done something. He had tried.

Air travel was possible all day, although it was not recommended. The foul weather was discouraging, and the foreign dignitaries postponed their flights to the capital until Sunday. Even Archbishop O’Boyle and Bishop Hannan lingered in Rome. Lee Radziwill, Jacqueline Kennedy’s sister, made it from London and was met at Dulles airport by her mother and stepfather. Darting down the ramp toward them, she was wrapped in a sheet of drenching rain, which was a common experience; travelers had to expect at least one change of clothes. You didn’t fly unless you had to. Lee felt she had to—at the executive mansion Lem Billings told her it was nice of her to come; she whirled on him and cried, “How can you say that? Do you think that I wouldn’t?”—and so did Mrs. Paul Mellon, whose journey was something of an epic. The fragile patrician took off from Antigua in a tremendous storm; as they gained air speed the captain informed her the field was closed behind them. After circling over Manhattan for two hours he was permitted to land at Idlewild, and she was met by her husband, who said the White House was trying to reach her. Before going through customs she called Mr. West from a phone booth; he asked her to come to the mansion as soon as possible. In her New York apartment she changed clothes rapidly and headed for Washington aboard a Mellon plane manned by her own pilots. They saw no other flights. Peering down she glimpsed “flashing lightning and whipping rain and terrifying gusts—the storm was like the horribleness of the occasion.”

Skidding across the tarmac of Page Airways, that section of Washington National reserved for private aircraft, they parked beside the Caroline. Her chauffeur and limousine were waiting for her and drove her straight to the mansion’s Northwest Gate. Andrew W. Mellon’s daughter-in-law entered unchallenged, not because of her wealth but because every member of the staff knew her as the custodian of the Rose Garden. On the dripping portico West put his arms around her and led her to the Blue Room. “It’s too awful,” he began. He choked up and continued, “Mrs. Kennedy is the most remarkable woman. She has never lost her head and has directed everything. If you should see her and she should want to talk, let her talk.”

Bunny Mellon had only the vaguest notion of what he meant. Her odyssey had isolated her from ordinary channels of communication. In New York she had picked up an afternoon newspaper, but the ferocity of the weather had distracted her; she knew that the President had been killed, and little else. On the portico she had seen the lines of sodden soldiers and heard the clicking of their heels. There was no sound here, however, and she had the peculiar feeling that she and West were alone in the great house. From her purse she drew a calling card and wrote across it, “With my deepest love Dearest Jackie/Sorry to take so long getting back—Bunny.” She handed it to him and said she would wait until Mrs. Kennedy was ready to receive her—all night, if necessary.

“You can’t,” he said. “You have a job tomorrow. She wants you to arrange the flowers at the Capitol, at the church, and at Arlington.”

Bunny looked blank. She knew nothing about the program, hadn’t even heard when the President was to be buried or where. West explained briefly and said, “Be on the Hill at nine in the morning to receive all the flowers that have come in.” At the time neither of them understood how vast a task this would be, nor that two other women were making floral plans. The mix-up was no one’s fault. If a state funeral is scheduled three days after a Chief Executive’s death, confusion, like toil beyond the limits of exhaustion, is inevitable. Bunny wearily nodded assent. West asked whether she would like to see the catafalque, and she nodded again. Alone she went to the foot of the coffin and knelt among the rigid soldiers. “That moment gave me strength,” she said afterward. “There was an overpowering dignity to the East Room. But the strength came after I had left. At the time I felt utterly drained. The tears would not stop. It was like the fall of all the hopes of youth—as though youth had tried and been thwarted. It seemed to me that this country had symbolically killed something.”

By now a dense darkness had gathered over Washington. The doleful guns which had thundered each half-hour since daybreak at Myer, McNair, and Anacostia had fallen silent, though in time zones to the west they could still be heard. The sun, which once never set upon the Union Jack, never set on the Stars and Stripes in 1963; seven thousand U.S. military bases ringed the globe. The artillery salutes, the proclamations, the declarations of Monday as a day of mourning were bits and pieces in the intricate mosaic of formal observances. The bereaved population responded spontaneously, but the bereavement of governments must be stylized. Although the Black Watch pipers insisted on paying their own fare to the capital, Queen Elizabeth had to approve the trip personally, for they were to participate in ceremonies for a foreign chief of state, and precedents were involved. Although Kennedy had been the first Catholic President, and the Pope himself was praying for his soul, it was necessary for the Vatican’s Apostolic Delegate to grant extraordinary permission for one requiem Mass tomorrow in each American Catholic church. Here again the issue was precedent. As a rule requiem Masses are never permitted on Sundays or major feast days. Each movement of former Presidents Truman and Eisenhower was being weighed carefully. After his return to Gettysburg the weather had confined Eisenhower to the farm, but he became involved just the same. As he was to recall, “There were so many people of different ranks in Washington that it was a real problem. They called me and said Harry Truman was there without a driver. I said, ‘Hell, I’ll have my car. He can ride with me.’ ” Truman was staying in Blair House, the nation’s official guest house. It had been his home during his second Presidential term, while the executive mansion was being renovated—the Puerto Ricans’ attempt on his life had been made there—and earlier in the day he had told Averell Harriman that his thoughts were very much with Lyndon Johnson, because he remembered how “uneducated” he had been when Roosevelt died.

Their age and position brought Eisenhower and Truman special consideration. They needed some. Even the eight-block walk to St. Matthew’s was inadvisable for them. The nonstop, round-the-clock vigor of the Kennedy men and women made the quick funeral possible. Yet they, too, had special problems. The problems of parenthood lay beyond the polished skills of Angie Duke’s staff. Taking their sons aside, Nancy Salinger, Margie McNamara, and Orville Freeman did their best to explain what remained inexplicable to adults; understandably the results were frequently bewildering. Bill Pozen’s approach was almost identical to Jacqueline Kennedy’s. He told his daughter that the assassin had been sick, not evil. Agatha said wonderingly, “That means Caroline doesn’t have a daddy, doesn’t it?”—which is precisely what it did mean to her—and then, to his dismay, she began to worry about her own father’s safety. The children of those who had been closest to the President often saw neither parent until two days after the murder. Sargent Shriver’s secretary kept watch over Timberlawn; Barney Ross took Robert Kennedy’s family on little excursions until a strange woman recognized them at a hamburger stand and lurched over, distraught. Senator Kennedy’s wife was the only Kennedy mother who spent Saturday at home, and she was unable to see anyone. Like Montaigne, Joan found the mere contemplation of violence crippling.

Her behavior was normal. The Chicago survey later revealed that the assassination left only one American in nine physically unmoved. It may almost be said that any mode of conduct was normal Saturday. Aldous Huxley died in Los Angeles, and sixty-three patients perished in an Ohio hospital fire. At any other time these would have been major news events. Today editors barely mentioned them. The national grief was the only consistent factor, and it was almost universal; the NORC study reported that even among anti-Kennedy Southerners, the hard core of his opposition, 62 percent “felt the loss of someone very close and dear.”¹⁰ The manifestations of sorrow continued to vary, of course. Among the general population Friday’s most common concern had been anxiety for Jacqueline Kennedy and her children; a sense of shame and unfocused anger had been close behind. In the capital the wrath persisted through Saturday. The Dallas News’s Washington bureau was flooded with threatening telephone calls, and those who knew no Kennedy critics frequently spoke sharply to one another.

That evening Kenneth Galbraith and Arthur Schlesinger met again at the Harrimans’. Galbraith, still convinced that he would be the chief author of President Johnson’s address to the joint session, described his first draft to Schlesinger. It was like putting his hand in a stove. Galbraith had taken the line that the issue was continuity. America must look ahead; the future “was greater than the life of any one man.” That was what the new President had told him, and he had taken the cue. Schlesinger felt this was heartless. He thought the speech ought to come down hard on Kennedy’s achievements. In his journal Galbraith observed that “Arthur was in an appalling mood and spent a considerable part of the evening attacking me.” Uptown in Cleveland Park Pat Moynihan was in an equally aggressive mood. Throughout dinner in Mary McGrory’s apartment Pat continued to brood about the Dallas Police Department. The sooner Oswald was removed from their custody, he argued, the greater the chances of finding the truth. Otherwise, he said, “We may never know who did it. This could cloud our whole history for a century.” None of the others there disagreed. Among Washingtonians Dallas credit could scarcely have been lower. At one point their hostess said tearfully, “We’ll never laugh again.” Pat answered gently, “Oh, we’ll laugh again, Mary. But we’ll never be young again.”

In spite of Bunny Mellon’s impression of solitude, the executive mansion had not been so crowded since President Kennedy’s inauguration. Upstairs every bedroom was occupied. Maude Shaw, leading Caroline and John away from the swarming traffic in the great east-west corridor, plucked at a curtain hem occasionally and peered down at the undiminished mob in Lafayette Park, and in other parts of the White House several men lingered because they wanted to be close to the catafalque. Godfrey McHugh, for example, made up a bed in his office, and while Lieutenant Sam Bird was off duty and should have been asleep in Fort Myer’s BOQ, he stayed all night on the first floor of the mansion, wandering from hall to hall, munching sandwiches from the platters, noticing the little Kennedy touches and thinking in awe, This is the President’s house; this is where he actually lives.

This was where he had lived. Yet hardly anyone switched tenses. His presence was too evident. Even as he lay in state the dinner guests in the White House were his relatives and close friends. Maître Fincklin had set the table in the family dining room for twelve. Among the diners were Bob and Ethel Kennedy, Lee Radziwill, the Smiths, the Dillons, and the McNamaras—Bob McNamara with the blotched pink complexion of one who has lain too long in a bathtub. Dillon thought the younger Kennedy looked awful, and McNamara told Jean Smith, “Bobby should take a rest and go away and forget everything for a while. I’m afraid he’ll get into a fight with Johnson.” This was an aside; the run of the conversation was not grave. The diners had formed a tacit pact to avoid the tragedy, and they succeeded, perhaps because men and women in public life cultivate an iron self-discipline, partly because recoil is part of shock.¹¹ There was even some puckish horseplay. Everyone present knew that when Ethel didn’t have time for a hairdresser she wore a wig; it was snatched off and passed from head to head, winding up, in a pinnacle John Kennedy would have relished, on the slick, wrinkled pate of the Secretary of Defense.

After coffee the false façade crumbled. Suddenly there was nothing to say. In this hush the group stepped into the marble hall and drifted toward the East Room. None needed to be reminded that this would be President Kennedy’s last night in the White House, and they moved up to the catafalque, some individually, some in pairs. Douglas and Phyllis Dillon entered together. They knelt by the coffin, and the Secretary of the Treasury, attempting prayer, could only bow his head and whisper, “Good-bye, Mr. President.”

Jacqueline Kennedy did not attend the dinner. Fincklin kept approaching her with sandwiches, and she kept shaking her head and murmuring, “No thank you, not right now.” The most she would take was a cup of broth. She knew the cortege would leave the executive mansion at noon tomorrow. The pause for final instructions was shortening to hours, and it was now, not Friday night at Bethesda, that those around her felt an incisiveness in her. In the tower suite she had deferred and reserved judgment, even biding her time with her brother-in-law and McNamara on the vital issue of the closed coffin. By Saturday evening, however, her self-confidence was at its height. A State Department functionary protested to Clifton that the invitation to the Black Watch had to be withdrawn; Argentina had requested permission to send musicians and had been turned away, and other nations might offer bands. Mrs. Kennedy said crisply, “Jack loved bagpipes,” and there was no more talk of the Argentine. Shriver again raised the question of Church seniority, pointing out that the laziest Catholic knew an archbishop outranked an auxiliary bishop. She replied tightly, “Just say I’m hysterical. It has to be Hannan.”

Bob rode up from the first floor with Ethel, and they agreed to postpone any discussions of encomia. The one matter which could not be put off was tomorrow’s ceremony. It had to be settled tonight, Shriver reminded them; he was coming down to the wire. Plans for Monday could be redrawn after they had returned from Capitol Hill, but the rotunda was imminent. Momentarily the widow hesitated. Congress was something of a mystery to her. Her husband had understood legislative maneuvers; she had only seen Senators and Representatives on social occasions, and she wasn’t sure what would be appropriate. Then she remembered a small White House party the month before. Ben Bradlee had been there, goading the President about the sluggish progress of the tax cut and the Civil Rights Bill. Kennedy had snapped back, predicting that both measures would pass and even specifying when.¹² He had gone on to say, “Why don’t you put Mike Mansfield on the cover of Newsweek? Mansfield’s the greatest Majority Leader we’ve ever had.…” Then, in a display of Kennedy virtuosity, the Chief Executive had rattled off a series of statistics, citing the high percentage of legislation which had passed under Mansfield. Now Jacqueline Kennedy remembered her husband’s affection for the Senate Majority Leader. She said, “The only person I want to speak in the rotunda is Mike Mansfield.”

Shriver returned to Dungan’s office and announced to the marathon meeting, “Jackie’s decided about tomorrow. She wants Mansfield to deliver the eulogy in the rotunda.” He heard someone cough. It was William M. “Fishbait” Miller, doorkeeper of the House of Representatives, major-domo of the Hill, and legislative liaison man. After shuffling his shoes several times Fishbait flatly told Shriver that Mrs. Kennedy would either have to withdraw her request or settle for a compromise. “That part of the Capitol is under the jurisdiction of the House,” he explained. “It belongs to the Speaker.” Sarge asked in astonishment, “You mean he owns it?” Fishbait swallowed. “He doesn’t exactly own it,” he said, “but if you have any request concerning the rotunda, it will have to be made to the Speaker. It’s just the way things work up there. That’s going to be the Congressional part of the funeral, and you can’t just walk in and say Mike Mansfield’s going to speak, whatever Jackie’s wish. You might hurt the Speaker’s feelings.”

Shriver had the feeling that he was dealing with a foreign potentate. Then someone observed that there was a third branch of the government—that a role must be found for the Chief Justice—and Sarge concluded that it was more like a political convention; each factional leader had to be given his turn at the rostrum. The White House operators put through a series of hurried calls, specialists in parliamentary etiquette were canvassed, and the consensus was that there should be three eulogists: John McCormack, Earl Warren, and Mike Mansfield. “I’ll accept that,” said Shriver. Actually, even this was violation of convention. With the elevation of Lyndon Johnson the ranking officer of the Senate was the President Pro Tempore, Carl Hayden. No legislative body is more sensitive to prerogative than the U.S. Senate. Selecting the Majority Leader could only be justified on the ground that he was the choice of the widowed First Lady, although no one, of course, was prepared to challenge that.

The word went out, and the three men set to work—McCormack and Warren in their hotel apartments, Mansfield in his office. All wrote in longhand; otherwise their evenings differed sharply. The Speaker finished quickly. He had a hazy impression of rain blurring the window by his desk, then he was done. Earl Warren didn’t finish at all. The Chief Judge’s thoughts were incoherent. He fought with a series of soft pencils, scrawled a few ragged passages, read them over, and realized that they were quite unsatisfactory. He abandoned the struggle and turned back to the hypnotic eye of television, making a mental note to rise early in the morning and make a fresh start.

Mansfield was the only one to hear from Mrs. Kennedy herself. He instantly agreed and then, hanging up, strolled restlessly through the rooms of Senate suite S208, poking at the fireplace, peering up at the chandelier, and examining his tall gaunt image in the gilt-framed Victorian mirror. He wondered what on earth he could say. His mind remained vacant until he remembered a broadcast yesterday afternoon. During an interview a Parkland attendant had described how Mrs. Kennedy had placed her wedding ring on the President’s hand. Awaiting Air Force One’s return at Andrews Field the scene had preyed on Mansfield’s mind, and tonight he resolved to make that his theme. Chewing his pipe and fighting back tears, he wrote a first draft on a yellow pad, took it home, and worked it and reworked it. In the early hours of Sunday morning he was still dissatisfied, but it was nearly complete. Then he laid his blunted pencil aside and attempted to read it aloud. He tried several times and never got past the third paragraph. The Majority Leader had been a public speaker since his youth, yet this might as well have been his first speech. He gnawed at his pipe stem until a semblance of self-control returned, then fell into bed exhausted.

Between 1 A.M. and 2 A.M. television channels signed off with the national anthem. In Dungan’s office the ceaseless flow of orders and assignments went on, and on the floor above Mrs. Kennedy prepared to retire. Her sister having moved into the President’s bedroom, the Auchinclosses had returned to Georgetown. As Lee, Jean, and Pat saw Jackie to bed, she thought fleetingly how good it was to have her family around her. She had but to step into the corridor and a familiar figure would spring up, eager to help. Because they knew one another so well their conversations today had not all been solemn and grim. There had been wry asides, tart exchanges, small ironies—echoes of a pleasanter past. Wake? she wondered. Is this what wakes are like? She had never been to one. They had always sounded rather brutal to her. The Kennedys, Bouviers, Auchinclosses, Lawfords, and Smiths had deepened her understanding of mourning; by being themselves they were both supporting one another and honoring the President’s memory. There was no brutality here. She had left that in Texas.

Because her mind was still whirling Dr. Walsh gave her another half-gram injection of Amytal. Once more her constitution fought the drug. She had to talk to her brother-in-law again. Last night the prospect of an open coffin had tormented her; tonight she had to make sure its lid could be raised in private before they left for the Capitol. She sent for him and said, “I have to see Jack in the morning, I want to say good-bye to him—and I want to put something in the coffin.”

He understood. It was a secret of his strength, and a source of the special affection shared by those close to him, that he never asked them for reasons. If you were a relative or a friend, that was enough. He assumed you knew what you were doing, and the franker you were, the better he liked it. He jotted down their Sunday schedule for her and said, “I’ll come for you. We’ll go down there together.”

After he had gone Jacqueline Kennedy wrote her husband a letter. Later she was uncertain about the precise time of composition. Medication and accumulated sleeplessness had blunted her perception, and the servants had drawn her drapes in the southwest corner of the Presidential apartment so tightly that it was impossible to distinguish daylight from night. In her darkened room, she wrote her final impassioned letter, filling page after page. Then she folded the pages and sealed the envelope.

Eight

CROWN