The Death of a President by William Manchester
Five thousand miles to the east, in Washington, half the men on the streets wore topcoats, half did not. The decision was a tossup. In the capital November 22, 1963, was a day out of season, filled with echoes of summer and warnings of fall: a day of musk, tang, sunlight, and sudden chill, for the wind had a slight bite. The White House had enjoyed one of the quietest mornings in memory. It was 1:21 P.M. in Washington, and the mansion’s outstanding event of November 22 appeared to be the logging in of 1,339 tourists. The East Gate had been closed on the last of them at noon. With the President and Mrs. Kennedy away, J. Bernard West, the chief usher, was spending the afternoon at home with his children. Provi Parades, the First Lady’s maid, was Christmas shopping in Silver Spring, Maryland. In the State Dining Room Charles Fincklin, the maître, had mobilized his six butlers to clean the gold vermeil tableware for Monday’s Erhard dinner, and on the second floor of the East Wing Nancy Tuckerman and Sandy Fox were frowning over the dinner’s seating plan. Protocol on such occasions was thorny, and Nancy, with the last dozen cards in her hand, was worrying over where they should go. At the opposite end of the mansion, in the west basement’s staff mess, Captain Taz Shepard and Dr. Jim Young, George Burkley’s assistant, were eating alone. The room’s big round corner table was more noisy. It had been reserved for Kennedy’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, and Clark Clifford, salad fork in hand, was presiding over an intense debate.
There were perhaps a thousand similar colloquies in progress, each of which would be a subject of official interest to the handsome young President now making the slow turn into Dallas’ Main Street. In Washington—indeed, along the entire Atlantic seaboard—this was the hour of the working lunch. Nearly every Kennedy appointee, ally, or adversary was leaning over a plate somewhere, canvassing a matter of policy. At 1:21 Acting Secretary of State George Ball was on the telephone with Acting Secretary of the Treasury Henry Fowler, discussing the wheat sale; Fowler hung up and entered the Treasury dining room to review fiscal reports with his aides. In State’s eighth-floor dining room, the Ambassador for Indonesia was Deputy Under Secretary U. Alexis Johnson’s guest at one table while Under Secretary Averell Harriman, at another, entertained a Congressional delegation. Across the Potomac John McCone, Director of the CIA, was eating with several spies. The Chilean Embassy was host to Senator Hubert Humphrey, whose aspirations for national office had been crushed by John Kennedy in the West Virginia primary of 1960, and to Ralph Dungan, one of Kennedy’s ablest aides. On the Hill John McCormack, the second man in line of succession to the Presidency, had just entered the House restaurant with a group of cronies.
Most of the luncheons weren’t official. Whenever possible men liked to get away from the office early in the afternoon and hole up for an hour or two in a club, a hotel, or a private home. Former Secretary of State Dean Acheson and Former Ambassador to Russia Llewellyn Thompson were in the Metropolitan Club. Fred Holborn was at the Statler, Ted Reardon at the Continental, Chief of Protocol Angie Duke at the Carlton. Nick Katzenbach, the Deputy Attorney General, ate in a cheap seafood restaurant on Pennsylvania, between Ninth and Tenth streets. At O’Donnell’s, Washington’s seafood shrine, Secret Service Chief James Rowley had begun speaking to a class of new agents. Ted Sorensen, at 1:21 P.M., had just left the hotel suite of Roy Roberts of the Kansas City Star. Roberts, though a Republican, was an admirer of John Kennedy. He had pressed Sorensen about the rumors that Lyndon Johnson would be dropped from the ticket. All month Presidential aides had been denying this gossip; it was becoming something of a bore. Ted emphatically told Roberts that Johnson was Kennedy’s choice. Then, in the back of his mind, he remembered something. Once Kennedy had pointed out to him that beginning in 1840 every President elected in a twenty-year cycle—Harrison, Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, Harding, and Franklin Roosevelt—had died in office. It was an historical freak; Kennedy had laughed at it. That was one tradition, he had said, that he intended to break. Sorensen didn’t take it seriously either—it was merely a striking series of coincidences—but Roberts’ mention of the Vice Presidency did trigger a flickering, peripheral recollection of it.
That world of 12:21 was astonishingly uniform. A Telstar camera poised in the sky with a magical Zoomar lens would have photographed identical patterns of behavior in men who thought they had nearly nothing in common. It was almost as though society, in contracting, had mysteriously imposed a rigid conformity upon its leaders. As Dwight Eisenhower, a critic of the administration, lifted a spoon at a “UN We Believe” luncheon in New York, Steve Smith, meeting with an Ohio politician who had become convinced that Kennedy was going to carry the state next fall, was laying down a knife in La Caravelle restaurant a few blocks away. Fidel Castro had no use for either Republicans or Democrats. He would cheerfully have sent both Smith and Eisenhower to the wall. The mere reminder that he shared the same time zone with them would have irritated him. Nevertheless, there he was, and as a North American executive he was entertaining a visiting French journalist at a business lunch seventy-five miles from Havana. They were talking about President Kennedy.
An exception to the culinary rule was Richard N. Goodwin, the New York Times Man in the News that November 22. Goodwin was the victim of last night’s Latin-American party. He had awakened with a hangover and elected to stay home, drafting the announcement of his new appointment. Goodwin was among those Presidential advisers whose memorandums and aide-mémoire would require executive action today, over the telephone, or shortly after Kennedy’s return to the capital. They were a large company. In the Georgetown house of Bill Walton the host had spread sketches for the President’s proposed renovation of Pennsylvania Avenue on a luncheon table and was inspecting them enthusiastically with Charlie Horsky of the White House staff and Assistant Secretary of Labor Pat Moynihan. Walton, about to leave on a cultural mission, had booked a 5 P.M. seat to Moscow; in his absence he expected Kennedy to approve this triumvirate’s decision. In the E Ring of the Pentagon the indefatigable Robert S. McNamara, his ball-point at the ready, was advancing resolutely on a fifty-billion-dollar defense budget. Around him Mac Bundy, Kermit Gordon of the Budget Bureau, and Jerry Wiesner, Kennedy’s scientist-in-residence, were loading adding machines and checking fields of fire in their special sectors. By Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, they had to be in Hyannis Port with final proposals.
Some men, of course, were eating simply because they were hungry. David Ormsby-Gore, the British Ambassador, was dining alone on Massachusetts Avenue; so were the French Ambassador and Madame Alphand, on nearby Kalorama Road. Hale Boggs, famished after a grueling House Ways and Means session, and Walter Jenkins, Lyndon Johnson’s right-hand man, were on their way to quick meals. George Reedy, the Vice President’s aide on Capitol Hill, was still in his office. He thought he would take a break in about a half-hour. (It was to be twenty-four hours before he could spare a minute for a sandwich.) Other Washingtonians were using the lunch hour for personal affairs. Mary McGrory of the Washington Star and Frank Wilson, Roosevelt’s retired Secret Service chief, were in doctors’ offices for checkups. Ben Bradlee, Newsweek’s chief capital correspondent and a close Kennedy friend, was browsing in Brentano’s book store. Angie Novello, the Attorney General’s private secretary, had decided to clean his office. It had, she thought, become altogether too junky. Every paneled wall was adorned with the crayoned drawings of Robert Kennedy’s children, and Angie was carefully peeling off their Scotch tape and filing them away.
Another Kennedy, the President’s sister Eunice, was savoring an unexpected delight. She was actually lunching with her husband. Eunice, expecting another child in February, had come downtown with her four-year-old son Timmy; she had just left the office of Dr. John Walsh. On a sudden whim she called Sargent Shriver. Shriver rarely had time for a break, but today he made the time, and they were sitting quietly with Timmy in the dining room of the Hotel Lafayette. Eunice was wearing a black knit suit. She always wore black during pregnancies; she thought it slimming.
At 1:21 Army and Navy posts around the capital had already messed. In Anacostia a young seaman named Ed Nemuth was decorating a hall for an enlisted men’s ball. At Fort Myer a husky blond private named Arthur Carlson, who had been told that he would lead a riderless horse behind a caisson when the next distinguished general died, was stuffing his soiled uniforms into a coin-operated laundromat, and behind the great gates of Arlington itself First Lieutenant Sam Bird was conducting a colonel’s funeral on a plot in the cemetery’s Section 35, near the Tomb of the Unknown Soldiers. A lean, sinewy Kansan, Sam Bird was the kind of American youth whom Congressmen dutifully praise each Fourth of July and whose existence many, grown jaded by years on the Hill, secretly doubt. The Lieutenant was a square, unsophisticated patriot. The strains of the national anthem still thrilled him. He had joined the Regular Army because he wanted to serve his country, and he considered it an honor to be stationed in the national capital. As a tourist he had visited the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial, and the White House, and he had gazed down reverently at the original copy of the Constitution in the National Archives. The routine of a military burial was never routine to him. He treated each one with gravity and solemnity, and as taps sounded and the clock crept toward 1:30 he watched the colonel’s elderly widow slowly descend the slope beside his grave. Her two sons were assisting her. In her arms she carried the flag from the coffin, folded in its traditional triangle. One son, thinking to lighten her burden, offered to take the colors from her. Wordlessly she shook her head and hugged the banner to her breast. Lieutenant Bird was proud of her.
Not all executives were dining. Some preferred to eat early and plunge quickly into the afternoon’s work, which, for key men, often extended until nine or ten o’clock in the evening. J. Edgar Hoover had been back at his desk for twenty minutes. The U.S. Supreme Court had moved into the long, paneled conference room in the rear of its marble temple behind the Capitol. The justices were pondering ten reapportionment cases. Since 1 P.M. they had been in their high-backed green leather chairs, each with a brass nameplate on the back. At the head of the baize-covered table sat the Chief Justice. Arthur Goldberg, the newest member of the Court, was nearest the door. No outsider was permitted to intrude upon these conferences under any circumstances. If an urgent message arrived, it would be written out and brought to the door by a page. Goldberg would answer the knock.
Tight security was also enforced in the Pentagon’s Gold Room, down the hall from McNamara, where the Joint Chiefs of Staff were in session with the commanders of the West German Bundeswehr. General Maxwell Taylor, the Chiefs’ elegant, scholarly Chairman, dominated one side of the table; opposite him was General Friedrich A. Foertsch, Inspector General of Bonn’s armed forces. Everyone was dressed to the nines—the Germans out of Pflicht, the Americans because they knew the Germans would be that way—and the meeting glittered with gay ribbons and braid.
For sheer color the generals would have put the Supreme Court in the shade; in pageantry the military takes second place only to the Church. There, however, the brightest martial baubles are hopelessly outclassed, and at 1:21 P.M. that afternoon a Prince of the Church was preparing to make precisely that point. Richard Cardinal Cushing was waiting to receive the new naval commander of Boston. The admiral was about to make a courtesy call, and His Eminence was going to receive him in full splendor. Surrounded by golden holy statues, ornate prie-dieux, and oil paintings rich in medieval imagery, the Cardinal stood erect in his magnificent robes. With his warrior’s shoulders, square jaw, and penetrating eyes, he looked more like a Cherokee than a saint. He carried himself like an ancient Hamite chieftain, and he spoke in the imperious tones of command. He only hoped he didn’t have to talk too much. He suffered much from asthma and emphysema, and had to sleep with two tanks of oxygen in his bedroom. “Don’t tell me. I know,” he growled to a lay sister. “I sound like Lazarus after four days in the tomb.”
Of all the Kennedy acquaintances who were toiling at that hour, the man with the least ostentatious office (and the most mellifluous voice) was David Brinkley of NBC. Brinkley’s workshop wasn’t much larger than a washroom in a filling station, and he was bowed over an old-fashioned rolltop desk. He wasn’t on the air; there were no network programs at that hour. The local NBC station, whose manager was out to lunch, was running what Brinkley regarded as a remarkably silly fashion show. Unlike Cardinal Cushing, General Taylor, and Chief Justice Warren, Brinkley was not a maker of history; he merely commented upon it. His presence on the job is worth noting because eighteen years earlier, as a twenty-five-year-old correspondent, he had been alone in NBC’s Washington office when word arrived that Franklin Roosevelt had died in Warm Springs, Georgia. He still remembered mispronouncing the word “cortege” during the Roosevelt funeral and being reprimanded for it.
The weekday lives of most women had nothing to do with offices and working luncheons. They were busy with housewifely chores—feeding children, shopping—or amusing themselves. Mary Ann (“Andy”) Stewart, in Washington, and Pat Kennedy Lawford, in Santa Monica, California, were changing dresses with the help of their maids. Jacqueline Kennedy’s mother, Mrs. Hugh Auchincloss, had just returned from the Chevy Chase Country Club and was seated at her desk in her golf clothes, catching up on correspondence. Joanie Douglas was packing; tonight Justice Douglas would address New York’s Yale Club on the eve of the game. Metzler’s wife, in Arlington; Nina Warren, in the Chief Justice’s Washington apartment; and Rosemary Kennedy, in a Wisconsin home for the retarded, were watching television. Jean Kennedy Smith was with Lem Billings, who had been the President’s roommate at Choate, in downtown Manhattan. Jean had just selected three Christmas presents, identical paintings of the Kennedy boat Victura, for the President, the Attorney General, and the junior Senator from Massachusetts. The Senator’s wife Joan was in the Elizabeth Arden beauty parlor on Washington’s Connecticut Avenue, putting on a face for tonight’s anniversary dinner. In Hyannis Port a cousin, Ann Gargan, had just put Joseph P. Kennedy down for his afternoon nap. They had watched the one o’clock news together—though an invalid, the tough old Ambassador wanted to know which of his children were making headlines—and Ann was about to leave the Cape for a visit with her sister in Detroit. The President’s mother was also lying down. Ann was being zipped up by the Ambassador’s nurse, Mrs. Rita Dallas.
Four hundred miles to the south the United States Senate was dozing through a soporific debate on the need for federal library services, and the floor, at present, belonged to bespectacled Senator Winston L. Prouty of Vermont, who looked a little like a librarian himself. Occasionally he glanced up from his gleaming mahogany desk toward the great chair of the President of the Senate, which, framed dramatically against a background of red Levanto marble pilasters and a heavy blue velvet drape embellished with a gold embroidered border, stood beneath the white marble motto “E Pluribus Unum.” Since the President of the Senate was also the Vice President of the United States, he was out of earshot. At the moment he was hunched in the convertible on Harwood Street, listening to the Dallas radio as Hurchel Jacks prepared to make the ninety-degree swing into Main Street. In his absence his seat on the rostrum was occupied by President Kennedy’s younger brother, Senator Edward M. Kennedy.
Just off the fluted Senatorial chamber was the President’s Room, so c