FORT WORTH AND DALLAS
Kennedy woke to hear George Thomas knocking gently on his bedroom door. He said, “Okay,” his signal that Jackie had slept in a different room and Thomas could come in, pull the curtains, draw his bath, and drop off the morning papers.
He shaved, bathed, and put on his back brace—pulling straps, fastening buckles, and wrapping a long Ace bandage in a figure-eight pattern around the brace and his thighs that left him sitting up ramrod straight on his bed. Then he slipped on the white shirt with narrow stripes that he had ordered from Pierre Cardin in Paris after admiring it on Ambassador Alphand.
His bedroom did not face the parking lot where he would be speaking at 8:00 a.m., so he tiptoed into Jackie’s room and looked down. Several thousand people had already gathered in the half-light in raincoats and under umbrellas. “Gosh, just look at the crowds down there!” he exclaimed. “Isn’t that terrific?” When Larry O’Brien arrived to discuss how to persuade Yarborough to ride with Johnson in today’s motorcades, he led him to the window and said, “Just look at the platform. With all those buildings around it the Secret Service couldn’t stop someone who really wanted to get you.”
He showed O’Brien the front page of the Dallas Morning News. A banner headline proclaimed “Storm of Political Controversy Swirls Around Kennedy on Visit.” A headline farther down the page said “Yarborough Snubs LBJ.” “Christ, I come all the way down here to make a few speeches—and this is what appears on the front page,” he said, adding in a harsh voice, “I don’t care if you have to throw Yarborough into the car with Lyndon. Get him in there.”
He flipped through the newspapers and found a more encouraging article in the Chicago Sun-Times. It reported, “Some Texans, in taking account of the tangled Texas political situation, have begun to think that Mrs. Jacqueline Kennedy may turn the balance and win her husband the state’s electoral votes.”
He asked Dave Powers if he had seen the crowd downstairs. “And weren’t the crowds great in San Antonio and Houston,” he added. “And you were right, they loved Jackie.”
He had been told to expect 2,500 people at the early morning rally. Twice that number cheered as he mounted the flatbed truck serving as a platform. He disliked overcoats as much as hats and shook off the Secret Service agent offering him a raincoat. He shouted, “There are no faint hearts in Fort Worth!” and the crowd roared. The rally had been scheduled early because many in the audience would be union members who had to punch time clocks. He looked down to see clerks and housewives, men in work clothes, and nurses and waitresses in uniforms—a crowd like the one in Boston that had prompted him to say, “These are my kind of people.”
He made a joke of Jackie’s absence, saying, “Mrs. Kennedy is organizing herself. It takes longer, but, of course, she looks better than we do when she does it.”
He praised the defense industries that employed many of them and promised his commitment to “a defense system second to none.” He spoke about space, another field where he would not accept second place, announcing that “next month the United States will fire the largest booster in the history of the world, putting us ahead of the Soviet Union in that area for the first time in our history.” Achievements like these, he said, depended “upon the willingness of the citizens of the United States to assume burdens of citizenship.” He concluded, “Here in this rain, in Fort Worth . . . we are going forward!”
The audiences in Billings and Salt Lake City had proved that he had anticipated their weariness with the cold war. The cheers and applause in Fort Worth confirmed that he understood that working-class Americans hungered for a noble cause. As he left for the Chamber of Commerce breakfast in the Hotel Texas ballroom, he told Henry Brandon of the London Times, “Things are going much better than I had expected.”
As Jackie walked into the ballroom, the businessmen and their wives leaped to their feet. Some stood on chairs, cheering and filling the room with deafening whistles. Kennedy said, “Two years ago, I introduced myself in Paris by saying that I was the man who had accompanied Mrs. Kennedy to Paris. I am getting somewhat that sensation as I travel around Texas.” The head of the Chamber of Commerce gave Jackie a pair of boots, and presented him with a ten-gallon hat. “We couldn’t let you leave without providing you some protection against the rain,” he said. Someone shouted, “Put it on!” He smiled, waved it in the air, and said, “I’ll put it on in the White House on Monday. If you come up, you’ll have a chance to see it there.”
Jackie was so delighted by her reception that she told O’Brien, “I’m going to be making a lot of these trips next year.” Back in their suite she said, “Oh, Jack, campaigning is so easy when you’re president. I’ll go anywhere with you this year.”
“How about California in the next two weeks?”
“I’ll be there.”
“Did you hear that?” he asked O’Donnell, who had just walked into the room.
He opened the Dallas Morning News and saw a full-page advertisement placed by a right-wing group calling itself the “American Fact-Finding Committee.” It was bordered in black like an obituary, headlined “Welcome Mr. Kennedy to Dallas,” and listed twelve charges against him framed as questions, among them: “Why have you scrapped the Monroe Doctrine in favor of the ‘Spirit of Moscow’?” “Why did you host, salute and entertain Tito . . . ?” and “Why has Gus Hall, head of the U.S. Communist Party, praised almost every one of your policies . . . ?”
In 1961, the publisher of the Morning News, Ted Dealey, had come to the White House for a conference and accused Kennedy and his appointees of being “weak sisters,” telling him to his face, “We need a man on horseback to lead this country, and many people in the Southwest think that you are riding Caroline’s tricycle.” Kennedy fired back that the difference between them was that “I was elected president of this country and you were not and I have the responsibility for the lives of 180 million Americans, which you have not,” adding, “I’m just as tough as you are . . . and I didn’t get elected president by lying down.” He answered Dealey again in a speech he gave several weeks later. Knowing that Dealey had not fought in World War II, he said that he had observed that men tend to like the idea of war until they have tasted it, and speaking of people on the fringes of society (like Dealey) who looked for scapegoats and simple solutions, he said, “They call for a ‘man on horseback’ because they do not trust the people. . . . They equate the Democratic part with the welfare state, the welfare state with socialism, socialism with communism.” The solution, he said, was to “let our patriotism be reflected in the creation of confidence in one another, rather than in crusades of suspicion.”
He handed the Dallas Morning News to Jackie, open to the nasty advertisement. “Oh, you know, we’re heading into nut country today,” he said. “But, Jackie, if somebody wanted to shoot me from a window with a rifle, nobody can stop it, so why worry about it?”
Some residents of “nut country” had woken this morning to find a flyer on their doorstep with two photographs of Kennedy, straight on and in profile. They resembled police mug shots and announced that he was “Wanted for Treason.” He was accused of “betraying the Constitution,” “turning the sovereignty of the U.S. over to the Communist controlled United Nations,” giving “support and encouragement to the Communist inspired racial riots,” and appointing “anti-Christians to Federal office.”
Pacing around the room as he spoke, he said, “You know, last night would have been a hell of a night to assassinate a president. I mean it. There was the rain and the night, and we were all getting jostled. Suppose a man had a pistol in a briefcase.” (At this, he pantomimed someone pulling out a gun and pointed his index finger at the wall, jerking his thumb to simulate a trigger.) He continued, “Then he could have dropped the gun and the briefcase and melted away in the crowd.” The performance was more Walter Mitty than Hitchcock, probably an attempt to put Jackie at ease by making fun of the advertisement.
He and Jackie had been in the suite for almost twelve hours but only now did they notice that they had been surrounded by original works of art, including paintings by Monet, Picasso, Dufy, and Van Gogh. They had also overlooked a catalog on the coffee table titled “An Art Exhibition for the President and Mrs. John F. Kennedy.” It listed the titles and provenance of the artworks and explained that they were on loan from local collectors and museums. The Kennedys had arrived late and exhausted and had been busy that morning, but it was still odd that a president who had made the arts a signature issue and a First Lady who had studied art history had failed to recognize that, for example, Dufy’s whimsical Bassin de Deauville, with its gaily colored sailboats zipping across a harbor, was an original and not a print. “Isn’t this sweet, Jack,” she said. “They’ve just stripped their whole museum of all their treasures to brighten up this dingy hotel suite.” The wife of a Fort Worth publishing executive had organized the show, and he could have easily written her a note after returning to Washington. Instead, he grabbed a telephone book, looked up her number, and called. After they spoke, he handed the phone to Jackie, who said, “They’re going to have a dreadful time getting me out of here with all these wonderful works of art.”
His last visitor, Lyndon Johnson, had brought his sister and brother-in-law to shake his hand. “You can be sure of one thing, Lyndon,” he said in front of these witnesses. “We’re going to carry two states next year—Massachusetts and Texas. We’re going to carry at least those two states.”
“We going to carry a lot more than those two,” Johnson promised.
His use of the word “we” had to have caught Johnson’s attention. Perhaps Kennedy had changed his mind about replacing him on the ticket after his encouraging reception in San Antonio, Houston, and Fort Worth, but it is also possible that the “we” was an uncalculated expression of his momentary exuberance.
Before leaving, he disappeared into his bedroom and changed his wardrobe, putting on a blue-striped shirt, a solid blue silk tie, and a newly pressed gray-and-blue lightweight suit. While he was gone, Secret Service Agent Roy Kellerman told O’Donnell that there was a chance of rain forecast for Dallas and asked if they should put the bubble top on the Lincoln Continental limousine taking the president from Love Field to the Dallas Trade Mart. Jackie liked the top because it protected her hair from the wind, but Kennedy loathed it, once telling a friend, “They put me in a bubble top thing and I can’t get to the people. . . . I belong to them and they belong to me.” Knowing how he felt, O’Donnell told Kellerman to leave it off unless it was raining.
Only thirty miles separated Fort Worth and Dallas. It made no practical sense for Kennedy to fly between them, but it made political sense, because newsmen could film him being greeted at Love Field. During the few minutes that he was airborne he changed into his third clean shirt of the day, told Representative Olin Teague of Texas that he would go to Cape Canaveral in December to watch the Saturn launch because he thought the space program “needed a boost,” wrote some last-minute ideas to include in his speech at the Trade Mart, scribbling, “Equal choice / not any reflection / back—govt reform / we are going forward,” and summoned Connally and Yarborough into his cabin, where in three minutes he strong-armed Connally into inviting Yarborough to the reception in Austin and seating him at the head table. As Connally left his cabin he muttered, “How can anyone say no to that man?”
During the flight his Air Force aide Godfrey McHugh overheard O’Brien and O’Donnell telling members of his Secret Service detachment, “Please, when we go to Dallas, don’t sit like you always do in the front seat of the car [the presidential limousine] because we want to give him full exposure. He will win them by his smile. . . . We want him to be seen. It’s enough to have two Secret Service men without having a third body in front.” The agents were not happy with the request, but they complied nevertheless.
When he landed at Love Field in 1961, no one had greeted him except the chief of police. Today he looked out the window, saw several thousand supporters and a line of dignitaries, and told O’Donnell, “This trip is turning out to be terrific. Here we are in Dallas, and it looks like everything in Texas is going to be fine for us.” As he and Jackie waited in the aisle for the door to open, Powers said, “You two look like Mr. and Mrs. America,” and reminded them that he should wave to those on the right hand side of the car while she waved to the left, because “If both of you ever looked at the same voter at the same time, it would be too much for him!”
The weather had turned on a dime: gray and drizzly when they left Fort Worth, sunny and warm when they landed in Dallas. Abandoning protocol, Jackie disembarked first. They may have lined up this way in the aisle, but it is also possible he decided that she should precede him because after yesterday he knew that she would draw the loudest cheers. Intentional or not, it symbolized a slight shift in their marital balance of power.
A reporter watching her emerge from Air Force One compared the bright sunlight hitting her pink suit to “a blow between the eyes.” This was the first time that most at Love Field had seen her and the president in color outside of some magazine photographs. It was an electrifying moment, like the one in The Wizard of Oz when a black-and-white Kansas becomes a dazzling, Technicolor Oz. A Dallas woman said she was amazed at his coloring, “because I had only seen him previously on black-and-white TV. He was very fair, almost pink, and his hair was almost blond in the sunlight.” A television correspondent exclaimed, “I can see his suntan all the way from here!”
Instead of climbing into his limousine, he headed for the crowd lining the airport fence. A local television reporter shouted, “He’s broken away from the program and is shaking hands with the crowd.” The Texas journalist Ronnie Dugger wrote in his notebook, “Kennedy is showing he is not afraid.” Jackie followed him to the fence and also began shaking hands. It was the first time that the New York Times reporter Tom Wicker could remember her working an airport crowd.
Sorensen’s observation that different parts of Kennedy were seen by many people but no one saw them all was correct. But if you assembled those parts of him that were visible at various times and places to his friends and staff, and to people like those greeting him in the brilliant sunshine at Love Field, you not only had Laura Bergquist’s “fascinating human animal” but someone who had also managed to convey his kindness, humor, intelligence, and humanity to those who knew him only from what they read in a newspaper or saw on a television screen or from behind an airport fence.
His friends knew a man who was kind and gregarious, delighted in children, venerated courage, paid excessive attention to ceremony and his appearance, possessed an irreverent sense of humor, and was a secret romantic, yet was also what Sidey called “a serious man on a serious mission.” They knew a man who had brought his competitive spirit to the greatest contest of all—that with other presidents for a favorable verdict from the high court of history. They knew a man who was chronically impatient with anyone or anything that bored him, had a chip on his shoulder about the WASP establishment, lied easily and often about his health and sex life, and could be too cautious politically but too reckless when it came to driving, extramarital affairs, and exposing himself to crowds such as the one greeting him at Love Field. Because of his passion for secrecy and his practice of compartmentalizing his life, few among his friends and aides knew all of this, but they knew enough to know that his courage and mendacity, generosity and sudden rages, idealism and cunning, had made him a very complicated yet appealing human being. And because he had succeeded in communicating some of this to the American people, they sensed that despite his wealth and education, he was not only like them but also genuinely liked them, and really did prefer the workers in the kitchen to the WASPs in the dining room, the middle-class Americans greeting him at Love Field to the businessmen awaiting him at the Trade Mart.
A local broadcaster called his welcome at Love Field “completely overwhelming,” but not everyone was friendly. Some high school students hissed, and a man held up a sign proclaiming, “You’re a traiter [sic].” Another sign said, “Help JFK Stamp Out Democracy.” A large placard announced, “Mr. President, because of your socialist tendencies and because of your surrender to communism, I hold you in complete contempt.”
As Jackie was climbing into the limousine, a reporter asked how she liked campaigning. “It’s wonderful,” she gushed. “It’s wonderful.” As they were pulling away, Kennedy noticed a boy in a Scout uniform. They locked eyes, and he gave the boy a mischievous wink.
• • •
THE SITE OF THE LUNCHEON had determined the route of his motorcade. Connally had wanted him to speak to an invitation-only event at the Trade Mart, but Jerry Bruno, who was advancing the trip, feared it would be too much a rich man’s affair and proposed a larger and less-exclusive gathering at the Women’s Building at the State Fairgrounds. Bruno thought Connally opposed holding it there because the ceiling was too low to accommodate a two-tiered head table, and he wanted to seat himself on the top tier while relegating opponents like Yarborough to the bottom. Connally finally put his foot down, insisting that the president could not come to Dallas unless he spoke at the Trade Mart, and the White House capitulated. Had Kennedy driven from Love Field to the fairgrounds, he would have taken a different route through Dealey Plaza, traveling at a higher rate of speed. But because he was heading to the Trade Mart, he would have to make a sharp right turn off Main Street onto Houston Street, then drive a block before slowing down for a sharp left onto Elm Street that was almost a hairpin, leaving him traveling around ten miles per hour as he passed the Texas School Book Depository.
His motorcade was configured like the ones in Tampa and San Antonio. At its center were three vehicles: the lead car, a white Ford with no markings driven by the Dallas police chief, Jesse Curry, with Sheriff Bill Decker and two Secret Service agents riding as passengers, then the president’s limousine, a Lincoln Continental driven by Secret Service Agent Bill Greer with Agent Roy Kellerman in the passenger seat, Governor and Mrs. Connally on the jump seats, and the president and First Lady sitting on the rear seat. A contingent of Secret Service agents rode in the third car. Kennedy’s limousine had running boards but he discouraged agents from standing on them. Sometimes he permitted them to stand on the two steps flanking the trunk, but in Dallas, as in Tampa, he had vetoed this.
Aside from the fact that the spectators were more numerous and welcoming than anyone had anticipated, there was nothing unusual or memorable about the first thirty-five minutes of the motorcade. Had he ridden in dozens more like it during the campaign, Connally might have forgotten that as they passed the balcony of a ramshackle house he saw a lone man standing on a balcony with a “Kennedy Go Home!” sign, and that after noticing it the president had said, “I see them everywhere I go. I bet that’s a nice guy.” Yarborough might not have remembered thinking, as he stared up at the tall office buildings lining Main Street, “What if someone throws a flower pot down on top of Mrs. Kennedy or the President?” Nor would John and Nellie Connally have recalled that the president asked Jackie to remove her sunglasses because he thought they made her appear too removed and inaccessible, or that the glare was so blinding that Jackie had absentmindedly put them on twice more before finally burying them in her pocketbook. Nor would it have been remembered that the president and First Lady could raise the volume of the cheering simply by waving, or that he had stopped to greet some children holding up a sign saying, “Mr. President, Please Stop and Shake Our Hands,” or that a teenaged boy had darted into the street and pointed a camera at him before a Secret Service agent tackled him, or that as he waved he kept murmuring, “Thank you, thank you, thank you.” No one could hear him, but he presumably felt that, like writing a sympathy note to the mother of a severely burned child moments before his own child died, it was something he ought to do.
His route took him along Main Street and through the heart of downtown Dallas. The Secret Service did not check the upper floors of buildings unless they had received specific threats, so people stood on rooftops and hung out open windows, cheering and tossing confetti. Spectators were ten to fifteen thick on the sidewalks. In places they had spilled into the street, slowing the motorcade to a crawl and prompting Greer to keep far to the left in order to leave the greatest possible distance between the crowd and the right hand side of the limousine, where the president was sitting.
Where Main Street flowed into Dealey Plaza the crowds thinned and his limousine slowed to make two turns, first the ninety-degree right onto Houston Street, then a block later the even sharper left onto Elm Street past the seven-story School Book Depository. From here, Elm headed down a gentle incline to the Stemmons Freeway and a triple underpass. Jackie, who was perspiring in her pink wool suit, saw it and thought, “How pleasant that cool tunnel will be.” Nellie Connally turned around from her jump seat and said to Kennedy, “You sure can’t say that Dallas doesn’t love you!” Their eyes met, his smile widened, and he said, “No, you can’t.”
The photographer Cecil Stoughton was riding seven cars back. He heard some loud bangs and imagined a cowboy in a ten-gallon hat standing on a rooftop, firing his six-shooter into the air to welcome the president to Dallas.
Kennedy was waving as the first bullet entered his upper back and exited his throat. It missed his vital organs and was a survivable wound. His hands flew up to his throat and his expression went blank. Nellie Connally remembered his eyes being “full of surprise,” and Agent Kellerman thought he said, “My God, I’m hit.” His back brace kept him upright, an immovable target. Another bullet smashed into the rear of his head and Jackie cried out, “They’ve killed my husband! I have his brains in my hand.”