In early April of 1960, during the lull that followed the Wisconsin Presidential primary, Senator John F. Kennedy read Mary Renault’s The King Must Die in his Georgetown home. Although fictive, this novel is based on a custom which Sir James Frazer found in every early society: the ritualistic murder of the folk hero. The noble victim went by various names. In Britain he was Arthur, in Germany Siegfried, in France Roland, in Scandinavia Balder the Beautiful; Mediterranean tribes knew him as Apollo, Attis, Moses, Adonis, and Osiris, and ancient India had loved and lost Vitramaditya. These epics were more than fables. Undoubtedly all their protagonists existed under one name or another, and one heroine whose identity has survived was burned at a Rouen stake in the fifteenth century.
It is worth noting that Jeanne d’Arc was betrayed by the French on November 21, 1430. For what Miss Renault did not mention is that the martyrdom of heroic figures nearly always occurred in the waning days of autumn. The end of summer terrified men. Winter lay ahead, and the fear of starvation. Watching the corn die and the bitter days grow short, they believed that they were being punished. Unwittingly, they felt, they must have offended the omnipotent God who brooded over the land. What was needed was a powerful emissary, an ally in the skies. And so, over the ages, a solution evolved. They would sacrifice their most cherished possession, their prince. It would be agony, but it would also be a sign of contrition, and after the execution their mighty friend would ascend into heaven, to temper the wrath of the Almighty and assure a green and abundant spring.
In the twentieth century that legend is vestigial. Yet no one familiar with world religions can doubt its viability, and the nature of its atavistic power must be understood if one is to grasp what happened to the memory of John Kennedy after his burial. Folk heroes, for example, have no more to do with democracy than riderless horses and funereal pageantry. The origins of their appeal lie deep in the past, before written history or the emergence of the nation-state. But this much seems clear: no society had achieved cohesion without them. The yearning they satisfy is that basic. The United States of America, as the newest societal entity in the world (emerging nations are discounted here; they were established communities centuries before their colonizers recognized them as such), long felt this need. The spectacular murder of Abraham Lincoln was the first sacrifice to fill it—Lloyd Lewis suggested as much a generation ago in his brilliant Myths After Lincoln—and the martyrdom of John Kennedy was the second.
Once a leader becomes a martyr, myth naturally follows. The hero must be clothed in raiments which he would have found strange, but which please the public eye. As Edmund Wilson has pointed out, the Lincoln to whom Americans are introduced as children, and whom Carl Sandburg has done so much to perpetuate, has little in common with the cool, aloof genius who ruled this nation unflinchingly as the sixteenth President of the United States. That man was destroyed on the evening of April 14, 1865. The urbane scholar who became his nineteenth successor shared his fate. The Kennedy we knew in life vanished forever on November 22, 1963. That Lincoln and Kennedy shared an abiding faith in a government of laws thus becomes an irrelevant detail; legends, because they are essentially tribal, override such details. What the folk hero was and what he believed are submerged by the demands of those who follow him. In myth he becomes what they want him to have been, and anyone who belittles this transformation has an imperfect understanding of truth. A romantic concept of what may have been can be far more compelling than what was. “Love is very penetrating,” Santayana observed, “but it penetrates to possibilities, rather than to facts.” All the people ask of a national hero is that he have been truly heroic, a great man who was greatly loved and cruelly lost. Glorification and embellishment follow. In love nations are no less imaginative than individuals.
Those who had traduced John Kennedy and many who had admired him were puzzled by the surge of emotion which followed the state funeral and which was to grow year after year. The derisive dismissed it as “the Kennedy cult,” as though the death of every extraordinary man were not followed by a consolidation of devotion. The nub of the matter was that Kennedy had met the emotional needs of his people. His achievements had been genuine. His dreams and his oratory had electrified a country grown stale and listless and a world drifting helplessly toward Armageddon. Lincoln—“Father Abraham,” his troops called him—had been paternal. Kennedy had been young, princely, dashing, handsome, charming, and the woman he had loved, and in whose arms he had died, had contributed enormously to the spectacle. “I feel suddenly old without Mr. and Mrs. Kennedy in the White House,” a correspondent wrote James Reston after the funeral. “Not only by ability but by sheer verve and joy, the Kennedys imparted their youth to everyone, and put a sheen on our life that made it more youthful than it is. Mr. Johnson now seems Gary Cooper as President—High Noon, the poker game, the easy walk and masculine smile. But even Gary Cooper was growing older, and the companions around the poker table reflect a less fresh, if no doubt practical and effective mood. All will be well, I feel sure, but it is August, not June.…” The magic, in other words, was gone.
In the third year of the Johnson administration an exasperated aide was to complain that the public had come to think of the Kennedy administration as a Golden Age of Pericles. “He wasn’t Pericles,” he said, “and the age wasn’t golden.” No, it wasn’t. (Pericles’ wasn’t either.) Yet as the same aide conceded, “That doesn’t matter—it’s caught hold.” In point of fact, it had begun to take hold that midnight when Jacqueline and Robert Kennedy arose from beside the fresh grave and walked down the hill hand in hand. By the following day the green beret had been joined by caps of all the armed services. John C. Warnecke was commissioned to design a permanent memorial, with the passages the Attorney General was to have read during the graveside services engraved on tablets, but the pilgrims did not wait. The plain picket fence was enough for them. On Christmas Day 1963 a steady procession passed it all day, five abreast; a six-inch snow lay on the ground, yet the waiting line stretched the equivalent of several city blocks. Reston observed that “the Kennedy Legend grows and deepens. It is clear now that he captured the imagination of a whole generation of young people in many parts of the world, particularly in the university communities. Even those who vilified him now canonize him, and many of his political opponents who condemned him are now seeking a candidate who looks and sounds like him.”
Officially the period of mourning was to last thirty days, and that merely meant flags at half-staff and no social functions. Outside the government business opened as usual the morning after the funeral. Television commercials resumed, the stock market rebounded sharply, theater marquees lit up. Those who had felt the impact of the tragedy more deeply quietly set about straightening out their lives. Mr. West readied the White House for tourists. Henry Gonzalez packed John Connally’s clothes and sent them back to Nellie. Jack Valenti took up temporary residence at the Elms until his family could join him. Colonel McNally kept trying to put in permanent telephone lines for the new President—it was to be six months, to the day, before Johnson was off the phone long enough—and Angie Novello carefully retaped to the walls of the Attorney General’s office all the children’s drawings she had removed on the day of the assassination while cleaning the office, in the forlorn hope that the room would seem normal to him when he returned. He flew off for a Thanksgiving rest with the Dillons; Mrs. Kennedy took her children to the Cape.
The thirty days ended, the flags went up, the piano was moved back into the East Room, Washington hostesses began entertaining again—and then one realized that the mourning hadn’t ended at all. To be sure, the fever of November 22–25 was over. That condition had been unnatural; between Wednesday and Saturday of the week after the assassination, the NORC survey found, three out of four adults had returned to normal behavior patterns. A kind of nationwide scar tissue had begun to form, and it thickened so quickly that anyone attempting to reopen the wounds encountered evasiveness or downright hostility. Still, the residue of sadness remained. In New York a thousand people walked slowly up Fifth Avenue, each holding a candle in memory of President Kennedy. Christmas shoppers were struck by the melancholy in city shops. Magazines began issuing JFK memorial editions, and every book store in the capital had its corner of memorial albums. Auctioneers of Americana found that handwritten Kennedy letters were as valuable as Lincoln letters. An autographed copy of Profiles in Courage was worth $375. Fragments of the platform from which he had delivered his San Antonio speech the day before the assassination became collector’s items, and the “Suite 850” plaque outside his last bedroom in the Hotel Texas disappeared.
To emphasize the transition the White House staff began distributing photographs of both Presidents during Johnson’s trips outside Washington, but the practice was quickly discontinued; for every picture of the new Chief Executive, the public would take ten of Kennedy. The Secret Service seethed when Johnson rebuked an agent for wearing a PT tie clip, sharply reminding him that administrations had changed, yet Johnson’s pique was entirely understandable. He was plagued by a ghost. Even the 1964 Presidential convention, which had been carefully planned as a Johnsonian feast, was stolen from under his very eyes. A month earlier he had scratched Robert Kennedy from his list of Vice Presidential possibilities. Nevertheless the most moving moment in Convention Hall was not his; it came when the Attorney General stepped to the podium to introduce a film about his brother’s thousand days in the White House. For fifteen minutes the delegates gave Robert Kennedy a roaring, standing ovation, and then, in tears, they heard him softly quote Shakespeare in that inimitable voice:
… When he shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
And pay no worship to the garish sun.
The more men pondered the legend, the less they understood it. The young Kennedy had done nothing to encourage the demonstration; he tried repeatedly to interrupt it, then smiled slightly and, biting his lip, lowered his head as against a storm. David Brinkley concluded that the assassination and its aftermath were unfathomable: “The events of those days don’t fit, you can’t place them anywhere, they don’t go in the intellectual luggage of our time. It was too big, too sudden, too overwhelming, and it meant too much. It has to be separate and apart.” All the same, people couldn’t stop attempting to incorporate it in their lives. The most obvious approach was to name something after the President. Mrs. Kennedy asked Johnson to rechristen Cape Canaveral Cape Kennedy. He immediately complied, and presently she wondered whether she would be driving “down a Kennedy parkway to a Kennedy airport to visit a Kennedy school.” New York’s Mayor Wagner renamed Idlewild, Congress changed the National Cultural Center to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Treasury began minting fifty million Kennedy half-dollars—and couldn’t keep them in circulation because they were being hoarded as souvenirs. In every part of the country committees and councils were voting to honor the President by altering local maps. The Tobay Wildlife Sanctuary in Oyster Bay became the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Memorial Wildlife Sanctuary; the Padre Island Causeway, the John F. Kennedy Causeway. A bridge across the Ohio River, a New Hampshire recreation center, a waterfront project in Yonkers, and an Arkansas highway were rebaptized. Canada had its Mount Kennedy—the first man to climb it was Robert Kennedy, by then U.S. Senator from New York—and the climax was reached when England set aside three acres of the historic meadow at Runnymede, where the Magna Carta was signed, as a Kennedy shrine. It was Queen Elizabeth’s idea. On May 14, 1965, she presided at the ceremony, dedicating the tract to the President “whom in death my people still mourn and whom in life they loved.” Mrs. Kennedy replied that it was “the deepest comfort to me to know that you share with me thoughts that lie too deep for tears.”
By then her own situation had reacquired some semblance of order, and she had begun studying plans for the tomb and the design of the library at Harvard which would house her husband’s papers and memorabilia. In the days which followed the funeral, however, life had been a chaos. She had to cope with all the heavy tasks of the bereaved widow: cleaning out his bureau drawers, sorting through his belongings, which, because of the manner of his death, repeatedly brought stabbing reminders of Dallas—a week after the funeral the Secret Service delivered the wristwatch she had last seen in Trauma Room No. 1—and dealing with the bewildering, often callous mail which confronts wives whose husbands have always handled their joint affairs (e.g., the letter from the U.S. Finance Center regarding the pay of “your husband, the late John F. Kennedy, Lieutenant, United States Naval Reserve, Retired, from the period of 9 December 1953 through 22 November 1963”). In addition she faced urgent demands as a mother, as a symbol of the transition, and as her husband’s representative. Meanwhile she was moving.
She felt, she told Nicole Alphand, “like a wounded animal. What I really want to do is crawl into a corner and hide.” What she really had to do was keep turning from one task to the next. The family helped as much as possible. Her sister and Pat Lawford stayed with her through the winter, and her mother and Ted Kennedy brought the bodies of her two dead babies back for reburial with their father. But she dealt with most matters herself. She had refused to delegate her responsibilities during the funeral preparations, and in the aftermath, too, she wanted to make each touch her own. Frequently she had no choice. If she was determined to support the new President, her physical presence was absolutely necessary; no one could act for her there. And she was determined. Whatever her personal feelings, the office Lyndon Johnson now held exerted its own demands. Until he had acquired the country’s confidence and felt confident himself there could be no substitute for a display of unity. The day after the burial she came down to the East Room to stand among the Latin Americans while he read the speech Goodwin had written, promising continued support of the Alianza. During that first week she telephoned him and wrote him encouraging letters, and while he could not grasp why she persisted in addressing him “Mr. President,” he understood and appreciated her show of the flag. The Sunday after the funeral he wrote her:
Dear Jackie:
How could you possibly find that extra moment—that extra ounce of strength to call me Thanksgiving evening. You have been magnificent and have won a warm place in the heart of history. I only wish things could be different—that I didn’t have to be here. But the Almighty has willed differently, and now Lady Bird and I need your help. You have for now and for always our warm, warm love.
Affectionately,
Lyndon
She was evacuating the mansion for him as quickly as she could. Here again, this could have been left to servants and secretaries, but the White House had special significance for Jacqueline Kennedy. She had left her mark on nearly every room in it, and before walking out for the last time she wished to leave more tokens for her husband. In retrospect her anxiety that he might be forgotten seems odd. (“She wrote me not to forget him!” said one of her correspondents of those days. “As though I could pass a single hour without remembering!”) The scope of his legacy was not apparent then, though. He had been cut down after less than a full term, with his mightiest ambitions unrealized; in newspapers she read that he had not been in office long enough to achieve greatness. There was no way of knowing that the very brevity of his Presidency would add poignancy to his story. Therefore she made certain it would be pondered by future Presidents. First the family chose the picture which would be donated to the mansion in his name. Jim Fosburgh, the chairman of her committee on art, appeared from New York with a truck of priceless cargo—the treasures of six galleries—and lined up the paintings in the second-floor hall and along the walls of the Oval Room. The selection was narrowed down to a Courbet and a Monet of water lilies. Both were taken down to the Green Room, where the gift was to hang, and the choice settled when Eunice, ordinarily so matter-of-fact, said of the Monet, “That picture makes you want to dream, doesn’t it?”
The widow’s most striking farewell gesture was entirely her own. Among the sheaf of reminders to herself which survive from those days (“Goodbye operators”) (“Goodbye staff”) are several with the various headings “Our Room,” “J’s Room” and “On side of mantel in JFK Room.” After several false starts she wrote in her spidery handwriting, “In this room lived John Fitzgerald Kennedy with his wife Jacqueline during the two years, ten months and two days he was President of the United States.” It was carved directly beneath the old inscription, “In this room Abraham Lincoln slept during his occupancy of the White House March 4, 1861—April 13, 1865.”
She met her self-imposed deadline. Eleven days after the funeral she was in the Harriman house. The following morning the new First Lady wrote her:
THE WHITE HOUSE
WASHINGTON
Dear Jackie—
We have just spent our first night
here. I’m still lost—but will find my
way!
How dear of you to leave for us
the lovely lilies of the valley—Nancy
put your note in my hand, and its reassurance
I treasure.
Thank you and
love
Lady Bird
President Johnson pinned the Treasury’s highest award on Rufe Youngblood, hailing him as “one of the most noble and able public servants I have ever known.” At Mrs. Kennedy’s insistence Secretary Dillon also decorated Clint Hill. Though both agents had performed admirably—Clint’s dramatic leap in particular could not be ignored; everyone in the country had seen photographs of it—the ceremonies left an undercurrent of dissatisfaction in much of official Washington. The central fact was that the Secret Service had failed, and there was feeling that the first reaction ought to have been one of collective shame and not of pride in exceptional men—that the medals should have followed investigation of the failure. Investigations had begun, of course, but here, too, the first steps were disquieting. The FBI assigned fifty agents to a crash study, wrote a skimpy report which dismissed thorny questions with the recurring phrase “There is no evidence”—and then leaked the report to a news magazine. The episode was a dismaying example of how threatened bureaucracies, turning a blind eye to the national interest, rise in defense of themselves.
The new President having been persuaded that a Texas inquiry would be doomed in advance as a whitewash, Nick Katzenbach and Solicitor General Cox called upon the Chief Justice four days after the funeral and urged him to head a federal commission. Warren refused. He had, he pointed out, repeatedly spoken out against extracurricular activity by judges; he suggested they ask one of the Court’s two retired justices instead. His visitors left and advised the White House of their failures. This was the kind of circumstance in which Lyndon Johnson was at his most effective. The Chief Judge hardly had time to relay his decision to two of his colleagues before his phone rang. The President wanted to see him at once. In Warren’s words,
I saw McGeorge Bundy first. He took me in, and the President told me how serious the situation was. He said there had been wild rumors, and that there was the international situation to think of. He said he had just talked to Dean Rusk, who was concerned, and he also mentioned the head of the Atomic Energy Commission, who had told him how many millions of people would be killed in an atomic war. The only way to dispel these rumors, he said, was to have an independent and responsible commission, and that there was no one to head it except the highest judicial officer in the country. I told him how I felt. He said that if the public became aroused against Castro and Khrushchev there might be war.
“You’ve been in uniform before,” he said, “and if I asked you, you would put on the uniform again for your country.”
I said, “Of course.”
“This is more important than that,” he said.
“If you’re putting it like that,” I said, “I can’t say no.”
That same afternoon Johnson signed Executive Order 11130, appointing the six other members and charging them all to evaluate FBI material, make further investigations of their own, and to appraise “all the facts and circumstances surrounding” Kennedy’s murder, “including the subsequent violent death of the man charged with the assassination.” As is customary with such ad hoc panels, the lustrous names of the seven appointees were for public consumption. The real work was done by the general counsel and his fourteen assistants, and especially by the younger lawyers. Over a six-month period ninety-four witnesses appeared at sessions attended by one or more members of the Commission itself. Individual staff men, on the other hand, questioned 395. Sworn affidavits were accepted from sixty-one people, and two—the President and Mrs. Johnson—sent statements. On September 24, 1964, the full report was submitted to the Chief Executive and made public.
In the United States it was received with general approval. There were fewer endorsements abroad, where it was frequently dismissed as the “official version” of the two crimes—a sly inference that another, true version was being suppressed. That was unjust. The Commission had met its mandate. Oswald was correctly identified as the assassin; the absence of a cabal was established. The treatment of related questions was less satisfactory. This was especially true of the findings on Presidential protection. Although the conduct of the Secret Service, the FBI, and the Dallas police was found to have been less than admirable, they were handled gingerly, and corrective suggestions lacked clarity and force. Their subsequent fate was disheartening. J. Edgar Hoover, furious that his bureau should be criticized at all, protested so vehemently that the public overlooked the report’s harsher censure of the Secret Service (which wisely laid low); by the time the Director had finished disciplining his Dallas agents, including the unfortunate Hosty, a great many newspaper readers had forgotten which agency had really been accountable for John Kennedy’s safety. As for the Commission’s specific recommendations, the most important were filed and forgotten. Cabinet-level supervision of the Service was proposed; nothing was done about it. The Commission felt that the Head of the White House Detail ought to be an administrative officer with no personal ties to the President. Johnson replaced Behn with Youngblood. Few agents envied Youngblood; the new Chief Executive turned out to be far more difficult to protect than his predecessor. He plunged into crowds, invited swarms of passing tourists into the White House, and reprimanded bodyguards who came too close to him. The Service rebuilt the Presidential Lincoln in which Kennedy had died, adding a souped-up motor, two and a half tons of new steel plating, three-inch glass, and bulletproof tires, but Johnson rarely used it.
On the issue of small-arms control the report was silent; the commissioners debated among themselves and decided this question lay outside their province. In the wake of the assassination the pressure for such legislation seemed irresistible; a Gallup poll revealed that eight out of ten Americans favored new laws requiring police permits of weapons buyers. Robert Kennedy asked Congress to outlaw the mail-order traffic, supportive mail engulfed the Hill, and in the weeks after the funeral Senator Thomas Dodd of Connecticut introduced a sensible bill to ban mail-order sales, bar weapons from abroad unsuitable for sporting use, forbid sales to people under twenty-one, and require all purchasers to identify themselves so police could later trace them. The American Bar Association endorsed it and was ignored. The Director of the U.S. Bureau of Prisons pointed out that “After all, cars have to be registered and drivers licensed” and was unheard. Indeed, though eighteen such measures were introduced on the Hill, none of the gun laws went off. The United States remained the only modern nation in the world without firm regulation of the sale and use of firearms—Oswald couldn’t have assassinated Khrushchev in Russia—and in 1964 some 600,000 cheap firearms were brought into the country.
A great many men seemed to regard all proposals for tighter controls as a challenge to their virility. The powerful National Rifle Association urged its half-million members to write Washington, and its lobbyists went to work on Congressmen with the specious reasoning that “It’s the man that kills, not the rifle.” They demanded passage of another (Hicken-looper) bill, which would merely prevent the importing of guns not made by American firms. Katzenbach pointed out in vain that the association was protecting, not sportsmen’s rights, but the profits of commercial gun dealers. “Anti-Gun Extremists Are at It Again,” Field and Stream warned its readers, and Outdoor Life declared that “Gun Owners Should Switch to the Offense.”1 They did. In Texas they were especially militant. Elsewhere in the country courts took a benign view of some twenty thousand gun-control laws enacted on municipal and state levels. In Dallas an ordinance restricting the possession of weapons had been struck down by a local judge in 1962 on the ground that it would have been an “unauthorized invasion of a natural right the citizens of this state have never relinquished to their rulers.” Presumably “their rulers” meant the government of the United States, and the assassination didn’t change that feeling. Once his arm had healed Governor Connally called upon Texas’ Congressional delegation to oppose the Dodd bill, and Texas Republicans, meeting in Dallas, passed a resolution opposing any limitation whatever on the right of private individuals to buy and use guns.
Big D continued to be a peculiar community. During the last week in November there had been those in the liberal underground who had hoped the city’s agonizing reappraisal might arouse its mass conscience. The watchman had wakened but in vain. The more Dallas changed, the more it remained the same. As the “So Long, Pal” wreaths withered in Dealey Plaza the self-consciousness hardened into defensiveness, an uneasy What-will-New-York-think-of-us? attitude summed up by a local psychoanalyst: “Dallas is very, very proud of Dallas. In an individual it is almost a narcissistic thing. Instead of worrying about the grief of others, he worries about the image of the city.” In the eyes of such people a long step toward rehabilitation was taken in the first month of the new administration. At the end of the 1963 college football season sportswriters had picked the University of Texas and the U.S. Naval Academy as the country’s No. 1 and No. 2 teams. They met in the Cotton Bowl. The midshipmen were thoroughly trouched. Dallas was elated.
The mood of civic penitence evaporated quickly. Jesse Curry’s policemen became resentful, not of their local leadership, but of the U.S. Supreme Court, whose insistence that the rights of prisoners be safeguarded had, they argued, hamstrung them in their interrogation of Oswald. In the first shock of November 22 Superintendent W. T. White had vowed that he would dismiss the teacher who had told her pupils she wanted to spit in the President’s face. Over the weekend he changed his mind. Two weeks later, however, he suspended another teacher for writing Time magazine that she had seen “the seed of hate being planted by our newspapers and many of the leaders of Dallas” and believed this had paved the way for the assassination. The vice president of a Dallas oil company and a department store executive published sharp criticisms of the city’s Radical Right. Both resigned under pressure. Of course, the majority of Dallas citizens deeply regretted it, and while public officials declined to contribute toward any Kennedy statue or marker (using public funds for such a purpose would be illegal, they explained), a committee of private citizens did plan to convert one of the rundown blocks near the courthouse into a memorial plaza. Somehow the work lagged. Eventually a monument was unveiled in the Trade Mart. There was nothing near the assassination scene, though, and the lack was most conspicuous the week before the release of the Warren Report, when the American Legion held its annual convention in Dallas. For six hours drum majorettes and uniformed formations marched past the Texas School Book Depository. No one stopped; there was nothing to indicate that anything out of the ordinary had happened there.
Then, in the spring of 1966, a year after the dedication of the Runnymede shrine, official Dallas re-examined its position and reversed itself; $20,000 was set aside from the park fund for a marker in the plaza. As originally worded, the inscription was ten paragraphs long. It began by noting that the square was dedicated to G. B. Dealey (no mention of the WPA) and went on to describe the first Dallas log cabin, built nearby in 1841; an act of the Texas legislature creating Dallas County in 1846; the erection of a toll bridge over the Trinity River in 1855; the incorporation of Dallas in 1856; early navigation of the river in 1868; the completion of a railroad from Dallas to the Gulf in 1872; and, in 1873, the building of the Dallas train terminal. “With this background of constructive growth,” the inscription then declared, “this site unfortunately became the scene of a tragedy which plunged the world into a state of shock.” Upon reading it Times Herald editorial writers were plunged into a state of shock. Glossing over the assassination in this fashion, they noted acidly, would merely confirm outsiders who regarded the city as a defensive community preoccupied with its own navel. The Park Board then approved a simple text, omitting the recital of “constructive growth.” At the same time, however, Dallas leaders were quietly discussing the possibility of razing the Book Depository on the pretext that it was a traffic obstacle. The warehouse was a disquieting reminder. They looked at it as seldom as possible.
Overlooking Jack Ruby was clearly impossible. His trial disconcerted everyone, with the possible exceptions of the defendant, who was in a daze, and his chief counsel, a pyrotechnic lawyer with an insatiable lust for publicity. At times the proceedings became a circus. To the discomfiture of Judge Joe B. Brown it was revealed that he himself had sponsored Jack’s admittance to the Dallas Chamber of Commerce in 1959. Brown declined to disqualify himself, explaining that he hadn’t really known him. He further ruled that people who had watched the killing of Oswald on television weren’t witnesses—the Texas Supreme Court upheld him—and an all-white, all-Protestant jury was seated. Once a recess was required because of a jail break elsewhere in the building. Twice spectators at the trial itself had to be disarmed. (One of them had been a stripper for Jack.) The judge decided to admit TV cameras to the courtroom for the verdict, and on March 14, 1964, Ruby was found guilty of murder. Since the jury had not recommended mercy he was sentenced to death. Ruby tried to kill himself three times. Thereafter he languished in the county courthouse until, in October 1966, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals reversed his conviction on the basis of judicial errors and ordered a new trial. The victory turned to ashes; in the first week of 1967 Ruby, stricken with incurable cancer, died at Parkland. The autopsy was performed by Dr. Earl Rose.
To the continuing embarrassment of civic leaders who wanted outsiders to pay some attention to Big D’s urbanity, other grotesque sideshows kept cropping up. Klein’s Sporting Goods received 150 orders for Mannlicher-Carcanos from souvenir-hunting citizens, though Mr. Klein refused to fill any orders for the weapon from anywhere in the world. A local entrepreneur set up “Historical Enterprises, Inc.” and marketed a novel desk set—a $3.75 bronze-colored replica of the assassination site, with a slot for a ballpoint pen—and insensitive executives bought them. Vernon Oneal, the undertaker, was even more enterprising. After the President’s funeral he invested in a duplicating machine, borrowed Judge Ward’s death certificate, and mailed copies to fellow Texas morticians as souvenirs. On January 7, 1964, Oneal submitted his bill to the Kennedy family: “Solid double-wall bronze casket and all services rendered at Dallas, Texas—$3,995.” A CPA representing Robert Kennedy requested a breakdown. On February 13 Oneal offered to deduct $500 on the ground that he had not provided certain items which were ordinarily thrown in, e.g., embalming and “use of chapel.” The new total was $3,495. Actually, as he conceded to this writer, he was hoping for a return of the coffin. He made two trips to Washington in the hope of retrieving it. Word of this reached the right quarters, and to avoid an exhibition he was paid. The wholesale prices of coffins are a closely guarded trade secret, but at the request of the author a licensed funeral director and a cemetery manager made discreet inquiries at the Elgin Casket Company about its Britannia model. Both were quoted an identical figure: $1,150. Thus Oneal’s fee represents a markup of $2,345.
The plight of Marie Tippit and Marina Oswald appealed to American generosity; mailbags of checks and cash descended upon them. Mrs. Tippit handled herself admirably. She thanked contributors for the $643,863 she had received, put half in trust for her children, and spent almost none on herself. In her living room she kept a photograph of the Kennedy family inscribed by the President’s widow: “There is another bond we share. We must remind our children all the time what brave men their fathers were.” Marina, who could hardly do that, led a more colorful career. With $70,000 in donations she engaged a series of business agents. Her husband’s Russian diary brought $20,000 and a picture of him holding the Mannlicher-Carcano carbine $5,000. Then she went after the gun itself, arguing that since Oswald was dead it could not be held as evidence. A Denver oil man who wanted it as a souvenir sent her a $10,000 down payment—about 49,900 percent profit on Lee’s original investment—and then sued Katzenbach for possession. Early in 1966 a federal court threw the case out. Late that autumn the Justice Department took title to C2766.
Marina had spent the money long ago. With affluence she had acquired mobility. At first she had told the press that the strongest force in her life was her love for the father of her children; she only wanted to live near his grave. This quickly changed. First she became a coed at the University of Michigan. Returning to Dallas, she bought an air-conditioned house, a wardrobe of Neiman-Marcus clothes, and membership in the Music Box, a private club. She became a chain-smoker and a drinker of straight vodka. In the Music Box she spun through a series of romances. Then, in 1965, in a Texas town called Fate, she became a June bride. The groom was a six-foot, twice-divorced drag racer. Eleven weeks later he was in jail. His bride had a string of complaints. In an affidavit she charged that “He slapped me in the face and tried to get me to put the children outside so he could be alone with the gun he carried. I’m afraid he might try to do me bodily harm.” He replied, “It’s just time for her to have some more publicity.” A JP reunited them. “Love triumphed,” the JP said. Marina said, “I don’t want these things to happen. I had too much of this with Lee.”
Neither Ruth Paine nor Marguerite Oswald saw Marina after November 1963. Marguerite grew increasingly critical of her former daughter-in-law. She read that the girl was dyeing her hair, using lipstick, and smoking, all of which, she felt, were bad examples for her dead son’s children. Marguerite’s chief grievances, however, lay elsewhere. She resented the Warren Report’s treatment of Lee and the fact that she, unlike Marina, Mrs. Tippit, and Mrs. Kennedy—her information about the Kennedy wealth was astonishing—remained comparatively poor. Of the first she said, “Publicwise we have not had the truth”; of the second, “Moneywise I got took.” By failing to pay her for her testimony, she reasoned, the Commission had taken “the bread and butter out of my mouth.” Actually, she sold letters Lee had written her to Esquire and refused to talk to magazine writers until she had been paid. With the money she bought a new two-tone Buick, an enormous reproduction of Whistler’s “Mother” framed in brass, which she hung in her living room, and a gold statuette of the Virgin Mary, which she wore around her neck. She kept her number in the Fort Worth telephone directory and was always ready to talk to journalists, though the phone rang less and less.
During the 1964 Presidential campaign the assassin’s mother read a lot of right-wing literature, which doesn’t mean much; the Goldwater forces had monopolized the state’s paperback outlets, and shrill propaganda was everywhere—in newsstands, drugstores, hotels. The election results showed how ineffective it all was. In Texas as elsewhere the Republican candidate was thoroughly routed. The Senatorial race, however, was more complicated. In February the Connally-Yarborough feud had flared up again—even as national leader of the party Lyndon Johnson was unable to arrange a lasting truce—and the Governor quietly threw his weight behind the Senator’s Republican opponent. Ironically, the assassination had severely damaged the prospects of Yarborough, the one avowed Kennedy man in the state’s Democratic leadership. His handicap was that he hadn’t been shot in Dealey Plaza. Before that Friday the Senator had been running ahead of Connally in Texas polls, but in the election the Governor ran away from all opposition.
The $350,000 which had been collected from ticket sales for the November 22 banquet in Austin was kept (though one man did ask for his $100 back on the ground that he had not been fed) and divided equally between the national and state parties. The Senator had trouble getting funds. On September 14 a preposterous situation arose: at seven o’clock that evening there were two testimonial dinners in Dallas, one at the Sheraton-Dallas for Yarborough and the other, for Connally, at the Trade Mart. Every Democrat was asked to choose sides. Byron Skelton threw up his hands and stayed home; later a Connally man replaced him as National Committeeman. Against all advice, Yarborough refused to ride on President Johnson’s coat tails. Instead, his literature stressed his identification with President Kennedy, and on November 3 he squeaked through.
But not in Dallas. He lost the county by nearly 27,000 votes, the worst local drubbing he had ever taken in any election. Even Goldwater in defeat won more Dallas votes than the Senator. Earle Cabell unseated Bruce Alger, and Connally led the ticket, outrunning the opposition two to one. Here the influence of the Dallas News was evident; the Governor was the only candidate Dealey backed strongly. One might have expected that the ardor of the right-wing Texans would be dampened by Goldwater’s eclipse, but they were undiscouraged. Locally their prestige had survived the assassination, they had a new Public Enemy No. 1 in Earl Warren (their literature now referred to the U.S. Supreme Court in lower case, viz., “the warren court”), and whatever the image-makers of the Citizens Council said they saw no reason to revise their opinion of John Kennedy. Each season brought fresh testimony of the animosity they still bore toward the President who had been murdered on Elm Street. The week the Warren Report was published a book store on Commerce Street displayed Legacy of an Assassination, a 479-page tract which pictured Kennedy as a traitor who had led a sordid private life. The morning of the first anniversary of his death copies of Thunderbolt, the organ of the National States’ Rights party, were hawked downtown with a front-page headline libeling the late President. The following May 29, which would have been his forty-eighth birthday, Texas radicals in the state legislature defeated a bill which would have renamed the state school for the mentally retarded in Kennedy’s honor. The Governor’s brother voted against it, and the Texas Observer quoted some of the reasons given by others who had voted in the majority: “It’s the politics of the man—the dead man”; “Not well thought of”; “Don’t want to get hurt politically”; “Just wouldn’t be popular back home”; and “I didn’t like him.” That autumn, on the second anniversary of the assassination, a Lou Harris survey showed that the percentage of people who mourned President Kennedy in Dallas was dramatically below the national average. The following autumn William M. Henry reported in the Los Angeles Times that the USIA’s deeply moving film tribute to JFK, Years of Lightning, Day of Drums—which was drawing enormous audiences elsewhere in the country—“has been a complete flop in Dallas.”
During the winter of 1963–64 several people who had played peripheral roles in the events of the previous November died unexpectedly or fell victims to strange violence. Warren Reynolds, a used-car lot employee who had witnessed Lee Oswald’s flight after the shooting of Tippit, was himself shot in the same Dallas lot on the evening of January 23. The rifleman was seen but never found; one man was picked up but released on the testimony of a woman who, after her subsequent arrest on a charge of disorderly conduct, hanged herself in a Dallas cell. The general who had welcomed Kennedy to San Antonio in behalf of the Air Force, the waiter who had served him his last breakfast in Fort Worth, and the advertising director of the Dallas News all dropped dead. The advertising director, forty-five years old, had been in excellent health. So had the twenty-seven-year-old captain who had been Lieutenant Sam Bird’s superior officer throughout the capital’s ceremonial farewells to the President. The previous September he had passed his regular Army physical; his cardiogram had been normal. Ten days after the burial in Arlington he took a day off and toppled over at his dinner table, the victim of a heart attack. Two years later the odd toll took another jump: Earlene Roberts, Oswald’s landlady, died of stroke, and Bill Whaley, his taxi driver, was killed in a traffic accident.
In the wake of the funeral every principal figure except Marguerite Oswald was troubled by physical discomfort of some sort. The complaints ranged from Lady Bird’s persistent chills to Dave Powers’ headaches—violent pains which were confined to the back of his skull, where he had seen the last bullet strike the President. For six months Ken O’Donnell suffered from violent nausea. Several people required extensive medical help. The doctor’s bills of Howard Brennan, who had watched Oswald fire that final shot, reached $2,700, and Roy Truly, Oswald’s boss, was ill nearly a year. Nearly everyone suffered from insomnia. Forrest Sorrels would start up from a bad dream. It was always the same one, and it always took him a while to realize it hadn’t been a dream at all. Jesse Curry awoke each night between 2 and 3 A.M. and reached for his Bible; troubled also by hypertension, rising dissatisfaction among his subordinates, and the city council’s decision to have outside experts investigate the police department, he resigned in February 1966 for “medical reasons.”
In the innermost circles of official Washington emotional stress was heightened by the prolonged extension, from week to week, of the air of unreality which had begun on the afternoon of November 22. Each morning’s newspapers brought news of some fresh Johnsonian triumph. As the Kennedy legend flourished, the profile of the new President emerged and took shape. It was, Reston wrote, “almost a Texas ‘tall story’—Johnson conquering George Meany and Henry Ford, Martin Luther King and Harry Byrd, the savers and the spenders, Wall Street and Main Street.” Most of Washington wanted to be conquered; that is the only explanation for the near unanimity with which the press corps agreed that Johnson’s joint session speech differed significantly from the addresses Kennedy had written with Sorensen. After the long weekend of grief the capital desperately wanted continuity to be an unqualified success, and so men who ought to have known better persuaded themselves that the government could move ahead with no significant changes of personnel—that the galaxy of talent which Kennedy had brought to the city could remain and serve effectively under Johnson.
The day after his predecessor’s burial in Arlington Johnson summoned Arthur Schlesinger to the oval office. “I just want to say that I need you far more than John Kennedy ever needed you,” he began. “He had the knowledge, the skills, the understanding himself. I need you to provide those things for me.… You have a knowledge of the program, the measures, the purposes, of the history of the country and of progressive policies, you know writers and all sorts of people.… I have your letter of resignation, and that is fine as a gesture, but I reject it as a fact.” Arthur interrupted to remark that he felt every President ought to have his own people around him. Johnson replied that he considered Arthur one of his people. “The men who have been working with me are good men,” he said, “but they aren’t in a class with you men here in the White House. I shall blend three or four of them into the staff, but I am counting on all the present members of the staff to stay.” He wanted them to remain for at least a year; by then, he said, he was confident that he would have convinced them he was worthy of their loyalty.
Back in the East Wing Schlesinger wrote this down and added: “He said all this with simplicity, dignity, and apparent conviction. I am a little perplexed as to what to do. I am sure that I must leave, but I can see the problem of disengagement is going to be considerable.” His intuition was correct: no marriage between Johnson and Kennedy’s men could have lasted long. He had to become his own President. Yet the new President’s instincts were right, too. Despite the glowing praise from a sympathetic press, the inescapable fact was that he could not really become a national leader until he had been elected to the office. Meanwhile he must shore up Kennedy’s selection of him three years earlier as Vice Presidential nominee by creating the impression that the entire Kennedy team had believed him to be the second-best man in the country.
In his second week in office the President summoned the Attorney General to the West Wing. He mentioned misunderstandings over his presence in this office Saturday morning and the departure of the Presidential aircraft from Dallas Friday. Of the first he repeated that Rusk and McNamara had urged him to move in swiftly, which was true; of the second he insisted that “We took off as soon as Jackie got there,” which was not. “People around you are saying things about me,” he went on. “I won’t let people around me say anything about your people, and don’t let any of your people say anything about me.” Robert Kennedy didn’t want to argue with the President, and he couldn’t bargain with him either. It was an impasse. The meeting lasted about five minutes, and apart from formal occasions and an exchange of telegrams at Christmas it was virtually the only contact between the two men that winter.
Early in December Pierre Salinger announced that he, Ted Sorensen, Ken O’Donnell, and Larry O’Brien would remain as long as they were needed. It was an empty gesture. No one working in the West Wing expected that the line could be held for long, nor was it. On January 16 Sorensen became the first man out. Jerry Wiesner returned to academic life two days later, Schlesinger made his resignation stick January 29, and Ted Reardon quit February 5. Next month Salinger himself left Johnson to seek a seat in the Senate. Andy Hatcher followed him to California. Godfrey McHugh resigned from the Air Force, Taz Shepard went to sea, Ralph Dungan was appointed Ambassador to Chile. In the East Wing the drawls of Liz Carpenter and Bess Abell replaced the finishing-school accents of Nancy Tuckerman and Pam Turnure, who ran Mrs. Kennedy’s temporary office on the first floor of the Executive Office Building. Evelyn Lincoln was given another EOB suite to catalogue Kennedy’s Presidential papers; Mary Gallagher was next door. During Christmas week the White House school had been moved behind the black wrought-iron gate of the British Embassy on Massachusetts Avenue. Clint Hill, Muggsy O’Leary, and Provi Parades joined the President’s widow in the Harriman house.
Lyndon Johnson held on to most of the big names through the campaign: Shriver, Bundy, and the leaders of the mafia. Shriver and the Irishmen were priceless assets in preserving the illusion of harmony. Kennedy’s brother-in-law reigned over his kingdom, of course; he wasn’t a member of the White House staff. O’Donnell and O’Brien were, though, and Ken’s attitude during the flight back from Love Field had scarcely encouraged hope that he might stick it out more than a few days. His decision to stay surprised nearly everyone, including, in private, Johnson himself. Like the President, Robert Kennedy was moving toward independence. He resigned from the Cabinet, went into New York, and, in November 1964, he ran on the ticket with Lyndon Johnson. On June 19 Ted had been gravely injured in a plane crash. Joan campaigned for him and was charming, which was all that was necessary; St. Patrick couldn’t have defeated a Kennedy in Massachusetts that year. The Republicans offered only token opposition, and Ted was swept back into office by over 909,000 votes. Salinger lost, but on Capitol Hill the two brothers inevitably came to be regarded as the nucleus of a government-in-exile.
The President, running against the most inept Republican of all, won the greatest victory of all: the highest percentage (61.3 percent) of the popular vote in American history. The Radical Right’s dreams of national power were annihilated on the night of November 3. Johnson interpreted the results as a personal mandate; running the government, in the words of one of his aides, had become “a new ball game.” The first inning was to be the inauguration. The inaugural chairman was the Washington representative for the Dallas Chamber of Commerce. The celebrations of January 20, 1965, were advertised in advance as “a Texas-style gala.” Texas bands led the parade down Pennsylvania Avenue, the slogan was “Y’all come and see us,” and so many did show up at the inaugural balls that there was little room for anyone except the jubilant President, who looked as though he could have danced all night and nearly did.
The change in Washington’s mood was startling. The Ivy League army which had occupied the city four years earlier was rapidly disintegrating. One by one its field marshals and enlisted men deserted or were picked off. Ken O’Donnell, Douglas Dillon, Ted Clifton, Mike Feldman, Dick Goodwin, Jack McNally, Colonel McNally, Dave Powers, Pat Moynihan, Cecil Stoughton—once they had all been familiar figures in the west lobby, and now they belonged to history. Larry O’Brien was appointed Postmaster General. O’Donnell ran for public office in Massachusetts and was defeated. Mac Bundy became president of the Ford Foundation. He was the last of Kennedy’s special assistants to go. Only one Cabinet member who had been close to Kennedy was left. As Vietnam loomed larger and redder, the Secretary of Defense became Washington’s No. 2 man, or, in Texasese, Número Dos. Both Uno and Dos surged with vitality. Nevertheless, they presided over a city which couldn’t seem to stop looking over its shoulder. For two centuries the capital had been blasé toward changes in administrations, but this one was different. The shot from the sixth floor of Roy Truly’s warehouse had turned back the clock. The new men had first come to Washington in the heyday of the New Deal. Toward the end of a farewell dinner for two New Frontiersmen at Hickory Hill, a guest said thoughtfully, “You know, we’re too young to be holding reunions.”
Jacqueline Kennedy attended no reunions in Washington. The autumn after the assassination she took up temporary residence in New York’s Carlyle Hotel and then bought a $200,000 apartment at 1040 Fifth Avenue, near others owned by her sister and her husband’s relatives. Her life came to revolve around Manhattan, Hyannis Port, Palm Beach, and her mother’s summer home in Newport—a world of elegance and a culture which, in the eyes of most of her countrymen, was more European than American. Perhaps the move was inevitable. She had been a child of the East. Had she not met the young Massachusetts Senator with his eyes on the stars, the Brahmin establishment would probably have been the background of her middle years. It was familiar to her, sparkled with wit, was inhabited by celebrated members of the Democratic patriciate, and it was an environment in which she was accepted as a human being, not a museum piece.
Yet it was not what she had had in mind when she buried her husband in Arlington. The early years of her marriage had been spent in Georgetown, and there, she then thought, she would raise Caroline and John. Their future was her new focus. She had no illusions: growing up without a father could not be the same for them. But her husband’s brothers and friends would provide a vigorous masculine influence, and the capital, with all its historical associations, appeared to be the natural setting in which to raise the President’s daughter and son.
Despite their two moves in Washington—first to the Harriman home and then, five weeks later, to a fawn-colored, three-story brick house she bought diagonally across N Street, at No. 3017—the rituals of their young lives were scrupulously observed. The joint birthday party was held the day before they left the White House. The men guests were Dave Powers, Godfrey McHugh, and Taz Shepard; Godfrey brought John a model of Air Force One, and from Nancy Tuckerman Taz acquired a huge soft bear for Caroline. Caroline had returned to first grade the morning after the state funeral. Miss Grimes kept the class occupied with rehearsals for a simple nativity play; they learned Christmas carols and recited Biblical verses. The season, so sad in other ways, was useful here. Caught up in its excitement, the small girl laboriously printed an envelope “To Santa from Caroline” and dictated to her mother a plea for a Nancy Nurse set and a puppy.
She had, Maude Shaw thought, inherited Jacqueline Kennedy’s flair for the fitting touch. Miss Shaw escorted her out for the selection of the presents she herself would give. Caroline went straight to a display of Van Gogh prints and studied them at length, picking an appropriate gift for each person—a woman and child for her mother, sailboats for her brother, and, for her nurse, a painting of a room much like the one that had been Miss Shaw’s in the executive mansion. The girl’s air of reserve had become more apparent. She had something of that remote look which was so pronounced in Robert Kennedy during those months. John was easier to reach. All he needed was Dave Powers. Each morning Dave left the White House and rode to 3017 N Street for two hours of romping. John would be Davy Crockett, his playmate a bear. During the most solemn conference on the first floor one could hear the hapless bear frantically fleeing among the zoo of stuffed toys, begging in his Boston accent, “Have a haaht, Davy, a haaht!”
Mrs. Kennedy drove Caroline to the hill in Arlington first. “We’re going to visit Daddy’s grave,” she told her, “and we won’t take John.” Because of the vast crowds the visit had to be at night, after the gates were closed. As Clint Hill arrived with a station wagon the girl asked, “Couldn’t we take the dogs? Because Daddy loved them so much.” Taking all five would be impractical, but her mother and Clint loaded three in the back of the station wagon: Clipper and Wolf and little Shannon, their Irish cocker spaniel. On Sheridan Drive Mrs. Kennedy paused to leash the two big dogs while Shannon scampered ahead. It was cold and wet; they trudged up through slush. Suddenly they heard a menacing growl ahead, and a furious yelping. Clipper and Wolf strained on their rein. There was some sort of row in front of the picket fence.
It was almost a dogfight—given a few more seconds, it would have been one. A soldier had been posted by the gate with a massive police dog. Shannon was barking away, and the soldier was hard put to keep them apart. Clint took the leash from Mrs. Kennedy while she scooped up the Irish cocker and put him back into the car. Caroline said, “Well, Daddy always loved Shannon the best because he was so brave.” It was true. Her father had been allergic to dogs; they made him sneeze. But the cocker had arrived from Ireland at the right time. Patrick had just died, and the sight of the scrappy little puppy challenging all the mastiffs and boxers in Hyannis Port had diverted the President. Shannon would fight in the fields, he would fight on the beaches, he would never surrender; even when driven into the ocean he would yip defiance from the waves, and the President would cheer him on. So the near clash in the cemetery wasn’t as upsetting as a stranger might have thought. The soldier, being a stranger, assumed it was a catastrophe. Here was the President’s daughter visiting the grave for the first time, and his dog had spoiled it. He withdrew to one side, crying.
Mrs. Kennedy had brought another bunch of lilies of the valley; Caroline had a mixed nosegay plucked from various vases at home. Mother and daughter knelt in the cold mud. They prayed, they crossed themselves, they laid their flowers beneath the eternal flame. Then they saw the soldier. If young John’s salute outside St. Matthew’s had left an indelible picture on the memories of millions, his sister’s compassion here would never be forgotten by one man. It was really a little thing. Seeing him weeping and understanding why, she walked over and patted his dog. Looking up she asked, “What’s his name?” He said, “I call him Baron, Caroline.” “Baron,” she repeated, stroking the smooth fur. Back in the station wagon she sat close to her mother. All the way home they held hands, gripping tight and saying nothing until they were nearly there. Then Caroline remembered that at the birthday party she had been given a cardboard dollhouse with punch-out figures. One was of a big dog—a police dog, she recalled excitedly. She said, “Oh, Mummy, I’m going to name him Baron, after the dog who’s watching Daddy.”
In her six-year-old way she had found a simple peace that adults struggled toward in vain. Men and women often suffered when with the President’s children, but the suffering lay within themselves. The son and the daughter had accepted their loss with the enviable resignation of small boys and girls. They never meant to cause pain in grownups. Nevertheless certain moments could be shattering. “Davy Crockett had a rifle,” Dave Powers casually told John. “A bad man shot my daddy in the head with a rifle,” John replied, and Dave didn’t sleep that night. In Montrose Park a newspaper photographer recognized the boy, stepped around Agent Wells, and raised his camera. Hearing the click, John glanced up from a water fountain. “What are you doing?” he asked. “I’m taking your picture, John,” the man said. The boy stared. “What are you taking my picture for? My daddy’s dead,” he said, and Wells saw the man’s shoulders heave as he ran off. On O Street, young Janet Auchincloss offered to split a wishbone with Caroline. “Can I have any wish I want?” asked Caroline. “Any one,” said Janet, not seeing the trap. The little girl said, “I want to see my daddy.”
That could have happened anywhere. What made Washington different for them and, in the end, impossible for their mother was the character of the Kennedy legend. During the funeral none of the people directly involved in it had thought much about the national audience. They had been too weary and too busy. The fact that a million people had been standing vigil on the curbs had been startling enough once it had registered. It was weeks before they realized that for every spectator in the District that Monday a hundred others had been watching in the fifty states, and it was months before the implications of this sank in. The pilgrims to Arlington were appreciated. The tourists were another matter. It happened to be a big tourist year; there was a world’s fair in New York. Families from other parts of the country detoured south to include the N Street house on their itineraries. In dismaying numbers they stood across the street and gawked. They accosted friends of the widow who came calling. They took snapshots of one another on her steps, and rode by in buses which now included N Street in the capital’s Points of Interest. The mansion became unlivable. Mrs. Kennedy apologized to her neighbors and fled across the river with the children to Ethel’s backyard.
She had asked Fort Myer for Black Jack’s boots and saddle. Indeed, any sign that the President’s sacrifice would not be forgotten was cherished. That was why she had held herself together for three days after Dallas. She had not counted on the fact that she herself, by her performance then, had become unforgettable. At the age of thirty-four she was a national institution. Archibald MacLeish epitomized her new position. Asked to write a dedication for the new cultural center he forwarded, instead, a paean to “Jacqueline Kennedy, wife of the thirty-fifth President of the United States, who shared the ardor of his life and the moment of his death and made the darkest days the American people have known in a hundred years the deepest revelation of their inward strength.” Everyone wanted to honor her. She was proposed as ambassador to France, designated a life member of the National Geographic Society, and was swamped with flags; John McCormack alone presented six which had flown over the capital that weekend. At Runnymede the common people of Britain referred to their guest as “her American majesty.” The Senate passed a resolution of admiration and sent it, framed. She became the first widow of a President to receive Secret Service protection and a secretarial staff—which she needed, because bales of letters addressed to her were arriving in Washington. Nancy Tuckerman and Pam Turnure struggled to see that each was acknowledged. The file marked “Especially Touching” grew to encyclopedic thickness, and only a few were beyond the pale. One was from Dallas. A committee of businessmen, concerned about their sagging out-of-state trade, wanted her to sign a testimonial to Dallas hospitality. She passed it along to Robert Kennedy, who managed to forget what he did with it.
Each step she took, it seemed, was being preserved for history. On St. Patrick’s day she left shamrocks on her husband’s grave. The cemetery planted them there and was immediately deluged with requests for transplants. On what would have been her husband’s forty-seventh birthday she took the children to St. Matthew’s. It was November 25 all over again: the Choir sang the Navy hymn, and outside a horde of tourists made Rhode Island Avenue impassable. She couldn’t even take her daughter into a drugstore, because every issue of every movie magazine carried her photograph outside. The captions were inexcusable: “THE MAN IN JACKIE’S LIFE” (the story inside identified him as John F. Kennedy), “THE MAN JACKIE CHOSE” (he was, it developed, the author of this book), “IS JACKIE SEEING TOO MUCH OF BOBBY?,” “HOW LADY BIRD HURT JACKIE AND DIDN’T MEAN IT,” “THE SECRET IN JACKIE’S LIFE”—so it went, month after month. Salinger begged the pulps to stop, but they kept rolling, knowing she would never sue because that would merely bring more detested publicity. Even slick periodicals behaved questionably. Anything about her was news. A Hyannis Port stringer reported that she was considering attending the Democratic National Convention to stampede the delegates into nominating Robert Kennedy for Vice President. It was absurd. She had been reluctant enough to attend conventions when her husband was alive. All the same, it went out on the wire—and was taken seriously in the White House.
On N Street Mrs. Kennedy reached the depths of grief. By spring she could no longer take refuge in work; Nancy and Pam were handling that efficiently. She was tormented by ifs: if only she had insisted on a bubbletop that morning, if she had just turned to her right sooner, if the Secret Service had put two men on the back of the car…if, if, if. Brooding was pointless now. Nevertheless she couldn’t cut it off. She would nap afternoons and lie awake throughout the night, turning things over and over in her mind. She considered Oswald and hoped he had been part of a conspiracy, for then there would be an air of inevitability about the tragedy; then she could persuade herself that if the plotters had missed on Elm Street they would have eventually succeeded elsewhere. What was so terrible was the thought that it had been an accident, a freak, that an inch or two here, a moment or two there would have reversed history. “I should have known that it was asking too much to dream that I might have grown old with him and see our children grow up together… so now he is a legend when he would have preferred to be a man,” she wrote later in the year.
I must believe that he does not share our suffering now. I think for him—at least he will never know whatever sadness might have lain ahead. He knew such a share of it in his life that it always made you so happy whenever you saw him enjoying himself. But now he will never know more—not age, nor stagnation, nor despair, nor crippling illness, nor loss of any more people he loved. His high noon kept all the freshness of the morning—and he died then, never knowing disillusionment.
Her own disillusion with the life she had tried to piece together on N Street was complete. She would receive her husband’s political friends and wish his brothers every success, but she took no interest in the Presidential campaign that should have been John Kennedy’s. Although she was too recent a resident of Manhattan to vote there, she was still registered in Boston, and she could have flown there on November 3 or mailed an absentee ballot. She did neither, nor did she send President Johnson a congratulatory telegram. She had said good-bye to all that. Her adventure in national politics had begun with young Senator Kennedy. Now it was forever finished; the burden had fallen on the two Senators Kennedy. Henceforth the public would read of her at the Cape, on the Adriatic, in Rome, or—her preference—not at all. Only in obscurity could she heal. She, too, had known high noon. She wanted to forget that sun.
Unknown to her, the clothes Mrs. Kennedy wore into the bright midday glare of Dallas lie in an attic not far from 3017 N Street. In Bethesda that night those closest to her had vowed that from the moment she shed them she should never see them again. She hasn’t. Yet they are still there, in one of two long brown paper cartons thrust between roof rafters. The first is marked “September 12, 1953,” the date of her marriage; it contains her wedding gown. The block-printed label on the other is “Worn by Jackie, November 22, 1963.” Inside, neatly arranged, are the pink wool suit, the black shift, the low-heeled shoes, and, wrapped in a white towel, the stockings. Were the box to be opened by an intruder from some land so remote that the name, the date, and photographs of the ensemble had not been published and republished until they had been graven upon his memory, he might conclude that these were merely stylish garments which had passed out of fashion and which, because they were associated with some pleasant occasion, had not been discarded.
If the trespasser looked closer, however, he would be momentarily baffled. The memento of a happy time would be cleaned before storing. Obviously this costume has not been. There are ugly splotches along the front and hem of the skirt. The handbag’s leather and the inside of each shoe are caked dark red. And the stockings are quite odd. Once the same substance streaked them in mad scribbly patterns, but time and the sheerness of the fabric have altered it. The rusty clots have flaked off; they lie in tiny brittle grains on the nap of the towel. Examining them closely, the intruder would see his error. This clothing, he would perceive, had not been kept out of sentiment. He would realize that it had been worn by a slender young woman who had met with some dreadful accident. He might ponder whether she had survived. He might even wonder who had been to blame.