The Death of a President by William Manchester
The door beside it yielded, and in the great east-west corridor which bisects the mansion’s ground floor he wandered into the office of Dr. Janet Travell. The doctor offered him a sedative. He declined; what he really needed was a reliable telephone. She turned her examination room over to him, and there, after an odyssey that had begun on Lyndon Johnson’s rostrum and led him halfway across the District of Columbia and back, the President’s younger brother began to establish contact with reality. Signals gave him Hyannis Port; he talked briefly to his mother, who said that she had heard from television. “I’m worried about your father,” she told him, and he said, “I’ll come right home.” Taz Shepard stepped in for a moment and told Ted that Jean, Pat, and Eunice already knew and were safe.
Eunice, indeed, was entering the next room. The Shrivers, violating the most hallowed of White House traffic rules, had entered one-way West Executive Avenue from the wrong end and parked on the south grounds outside the Diplomatic Reception Room. Ted spoke to his sister privately, together they held the first of several telephone conversations with Bob, and Eunice attempted to place a call to Pat—who had left word with her maid that she could not talk to anyone. Eunice then phoned Lem Billings in New York, because Lem was the sort of person you lean on in a time of trouble.
“I’ll fly out and bring Pat back,” he said instantly.
“She’s on the Coast!”
“It’s only four or five hours.”
“Oh, I don’t think that will be necessary.”
It wasn’t; Bob had reached Pat, and she had booked a flight to Washington. Since their emergence on the national scene the Kennedys had attracted affection and vehement criticism. No one, however, had challenged their stamina, and in this ultimate test the President’s brothers and sisters were standing up. The critics had accused them of behaving like royalty (a charge which had also been familiar during the Roosevelt years), but in time of calamity the lot of the public patrician is unenviable. All the Kennedys were denied privacy when they needed it most. Exceptional poise was expected of them, and was forthcoming. In Dr. Travell’s office Eunice consoled members of the mansion staff and solicitously inquired of Bundy about Governor Connally’s condition; while checking airline schedules to Hyannis Ted bucked up the spirits of aides who had rushed downstairs upon hearing that he was here. Since talking to his mother the Senator had recovered. The blow in Dallas could scarcely have been greater. Yet now, at least, he knew its boundaries. There was a picture once more, and he was in it.
Most important, he, his sister, and his brother-in-law here were receiving a sense of direction from Hickory Hill. The new head of the family was crisp. Plans for a commercial flight were abandoned; at this hour they were impractical. Major Mike Cook, Godfrey McHugh’s executive officer, was instructed to set up immediate helicopter transport from the South Lawn to Andrews for Ted and Eunice, and Jetstar transport from Andrews to the Cape. The Cape, Eunice thought fleetingly as Bob’s voice crackled over the line. They would continue to go back each year, but this, she realized, would be her last departure for there in a helicopter.
Bob Kennedy had been dressing for Dallas when he received word that the brilliant world he had known and loved was finished. He had been struggling with his necktie in the upstairs library, pacing beside a wall of photographs of his father, his wife, and his children; of Joe Kennedy, Jr. and Kathleen Kennedy, taken before both of them had died in Europe during his youth; of himself, looking quizzical in an Indian headdress; of the President addressing a joint session of Congress; of the President and Jackie—reminders, all of them, of the Kennedy legacy. Ethel had been standing to one side, squeezing her hands, and John McCone had just entered the room. They had stared at him, he at them.
“Do you know how serious the wound is?” he had asked.
“No, I don’t.” Kennedy affixed a PT boat tie pin, the tiny golden symbol of the New Frontier. “Do you?”
The White House extension on the desk rang. He dove for it.
“Oh, he’s dead!” he cried.7
“Those poor children,” said Ethel, in tears.
“He had the most wonderful life,” Kennedy said.
Later that would be his wife’s most vivid recollection of his response—how, in the starless night, he remembered how bright the sun had been. McCone was struck by the fact that “through this ordeal, as severe a trial as a man can go through, he never cracked. He was steely. Obviously he was seriously affected, but at no time did he lose his composure.” They descended the stairs in a rank of three and walked to the rear porch. Kennedy poked his head in a window of the living room, where Morgenthau and several others were watching the television commentary.
“He died,” he said in a low voice and walked toward the pool.
The extension there rang. It was J. Edgar Hoover again. Since 1:48 P.M. he had been on the phone with Gordon Shanklin, the agent in charge of his Dallas office. Until a moment ago he hadn’t been learning much (he was among those who thought Parkland was called Lakeland), but the most important of the details which he had promised that he would endeavor to get had just come through.
“The President’s dead,” he said snappily and hung up.
He expressed no compassion; he did not seem to be upset. His voice, as the Attorney General recalled afterward, was “not quite as excited as if he were reporting the fact that he had found a Communist on the faculty of Howard University.” Ordinarily garrulous, he had suddenly turned curt with his superior. It would be charitable to attribute the swift change to the stresses of that afternoon. Yet although Bob Kennedy continued in the Cabinet for over nine months, Hoover, whose office was on the same floor, never walked over to offer his condolences. He sent notes of sympathy to Bob and Ted, to the President’s widow and to Joseph P. Kennedy, but in person the Director, unlike the director of the CIA, remained sphinxlike. He did speak to Bob one day when they happened to enter the Justice Department together, and he accepted a Christmas gift from him, a pair of cufflinks bearing the Justice seal, but those were their only contacts.
It was his brittle consistency which made Hoover unique. The typical reaction to the murder resembled a sine curve, or a parabola. People went one way and then reversed themselves. Ethel Kennedy was crushed at first and righted herself after the funeral. The brooding, Celtic agony that was to darken her husband’s life the following spring was postponed that Friday; in his back yard he lost himself in action, attempting to call Ken O’Donnell, who was still unavailable, and getting through to five members of his family and to Steve Smith in New York and Lee Radziwill in London. He touched every base he could think of, weighing the possibility of flying out to Dallas to join Jacqueline Kennedy in accompanying the President’s body back and even raising the question of his brother’s personal papers with Mac Bundy, who checked with the State Department and learned that when a President dies in office his personal files belong to his relatives. (Bundy ordered the combinations on the locked files changed at once.) In his talks with Pat and Jean, and in the conference call to Dr. Travell’s office. Bob became, in effect, a kind of family personnel manager, matching talents with assignments. Jean was the sister closest to Jackie; she would come to Washington. Eunice was closest to her mother; she would fly to Hyannis Port. Pat was a continent away and had been unwell; she would come here. Shriver, the born administrator, was to organize the funeral arrangements; Ted was to break the news of the President’s death to his father—the most painful task of all.
The calls went on and on. Meantime the number of visitors to Hickory Hill had grown and become a crowd. Morgenthau and his assistant slipped away and were succeeded by successive waves of friends, neighbors who wanted to be helpful, the press, and plain Nosy Parkers. Women reached the house first: Sue Markham, Marian White, Nancy Brown, Anne Chamberlin. Then the cars from downtown Washington turned in from Chain Bridge Road: Dean Markham, Justice White, Dave Hackett, Ed Guthman. A priest stopped in to ask whether he was needed. A lieutenant of the Fairfax Count
Outwardly Kennedy was more collected than his callers, most of whom had rushed here on impulse and found on arrival that they didn’t know what to say. Byron White touched his shoulder, said vaguely, “It’s hard to understand how these things happen,” and drifted off. Nicole Alphand threw up her hands. “Bob, there are no words,” she said. Then, being a Washington hostess, she found some: “You must be brave because you are the chief of the clan now and all the hopes rest on you.”
He nodded. Privately he was wondering what the wife of the French Ambassador was doing here, but it was more polite to look understanding. He had to be the diplomat here, and he was; to some of his friends his manner suggested that he was more concerned with their loss than with his own, an attitude which was to be characteristic of Jacqueline Kennedy throughout the weekend and which, for many, was shattering. “We don’t want any gloomy faces around here,” he told Hackett lightly, and his greeting to Guthman, ten minutes after the calls from Shepard and Hoover, was almost casual.
“How are you doing?” he asked.
“I’ve seen better days,” Guthman replied, adopting his low key.
“Don’t be sad.”
“Pretty hard not to.”
Kennedy took him aside. Guthman was what Shriver called one of the administration’s blue-chip men—a Pulitzer Prize winner, a Nieman fellow, and a veteran of the rioting in Oxford, Mississippi. He was a good man to talk to, and Bob told him of Byron Skelton’s warnings about Dallas, recalling that although he had sometimes worried about possible assassination attempts, the President never had, and that both brothers had agreed that RFK, not JFK, would be the likelier target for a fanatic.8
“Maybe this will reduce hate,” said Guthman, searching desperately for a bright thread.
Kennedy shook his head. “In a few months it will be forgotten.”
It was 2:40. The networks had just confirmed the President’s death, and Ethel was due to leave on her daily car pool route. Little David Kennedy’s school ended at 2:45. His older brothers and sister were to be picked up an hour later. Ethel wanted to remain at her husband’s side and let others take her place, but he felt she should go. They were bound to have heard the news, he explained. They would be disturbed and would need their mother. In the end there was a compromise. Dean Markham met David in the family station wagon; Ethel went for the others. At David’s parochial school—where the nuns refused to release him until Markham had produced his White House pass—Ethel’s substitute became the first New Frontiersman to anticipate a facet of the assassination which was to give the next three days added poignancy. This had been an administration of young men, and it was small children who were to give the parents their cruelest moments. David climbed in sturdily, clutching a toy telephone. He dialed a number, dialed another. Encountering no more success than adults in Georgetown, he suddenly looked over. “Jack’s hurt,” he said with seven-year-old innocence. “Why did somebody shoot him?” Markham realized that the child didn’t know his uncle was dead. He looked away. At Harvard he had been known as the Crimsons’ meanest lineman, but he wasn’t that tough.
In spite of their inner turmoil the thoughts of individuals turned outward; they pondered the loss to the nation and the world and wondered how the great gap could be closed. On the far side of the Atlantic, Stanislaus Radziwill, the only man in the London club with a PT boat clasp, was thinking back a quarter-century to the ravaged autumn of 1939. He had been a Polish Army officer then, and when Poland was submerged in the Nazi tide and he was captured, he had felt that the Dark Ages were returning. Now he had the same feeling; if the President of the United States could be slain on a crowded street at noon, Western civilization as he had known it must be in great peril.
Dean Markham’s first words to Ethel on reaching Hickory Hill had been “What about the country?” and in New York Dwight Eisenhower’s thoughts, like Markham’s, had been of America. Like Radziwill, Eisenhower contemplated his own past. He remembered applying for a permit to carry a concealed weapon in 1948, when he became President of Columbia University and had often crossed Central Park evenings with a derringer in his pocket as insurance against the violence that lurked around nearly every American corner. Ranging farther back, to the 1930’s, he recalled a sunlit afternoon in Haiti when, as a young major, he had strolled alone through a great hall in Port-au-Prince’s national palace. The walls had been lined with busts of former chiefs of state, and studying the dates beneath each he had calculated that two-thirds of them had been killed in office. Haiti, he had thought then, was a land of voodoo and savagery; his own country wasn’t at all like that. Now he wasn’t so sure, and he felt heartsore.
In the British Embassy on Massachusetts Avenue David Ormsby-Gore wrote a note to Bob Kennedy. By the time it was finished the lines were tear-stained, but he blotted it as best he could and sent it off to Hickory Hill by hand anyhow:
22. Nov. 63
Dear Bobby,
This has been a horrible, tragic day—for me, for the world but—above all for Jack’s family. Knowing the feeling of abject misery, numbness and fury which at the moment consumes my whole body I think I have a [word indecipherable] idea of what you must be going through.
Jack was the most charming, considerate, and loyal friend I have ever had, and I mourn him as though he were my own brother.
He still had great things to do and he would have done them. Mankind is infinitely poorer.…
That poverty weighed heavily upon those whose duty it was to snatch up the fallen torch. The nation beyond Washington, and the millions abroad who had regarded the murdered President as one of their own, could sink into the umbra of deep mourning. They could disregard tomorrow. The Executive Branch of the federal government could not. Already its leaders were speculating about the character of the executive mansion’s incoming tenant, and on the whole they were uneasy. Until the inaugural, when he had quietly slipped into the obscurity of the Vice Presidency, Lyndon Johnson had been a creature of the Congress. On the Hill he was admired and respected, but at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue he was an enigma. During John McCone’s five-minute drive from the CIA to Hickory Hill he had totted up everything he knew about the new Chief Executive. The sum was little more than a cipher, and to McCone the prospect of a new leader was frightening.
In the State Department’s carpetland Llewellyn Thompson was brooding over Johnson’s capacity for foreign affairs. State considered Thompson the nation’s Russian expert. He himself did not. Increasingly he had come to lean upon John Kennedy. The President had set out to master the intricacies of Sovietology, and in Thompson’s opinion his success had been astounding—“He had drained me dry of all I knew,” he said later, “and on the rare occasions when there was a difference of opinion between us, he was right and I was wrong.” In a flash that wisdom had disappeared, and the new President didn’t have his predecessor’s consuming interest in governments abroad.
The anxieties of General Maxwell Taylor were more immediate. Keeping his masklike expression in the Gold Room, riffling through German proposals and NATO charts, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs had inwardly seethed over the satchel in Dallas. It was there, and it would be safe; he could count on the Signal Corps to put the bagman somewhere near the new Commander in Chief. That wasn’t the problem. The difficulty was that Johnson had no idea of what was in the bag. He knew that it existed, but he hadn’t been briefed about the contents, and if the thunderbolt of all-out war struck that afternoon, the country’s retaliatory arsenal could be spiked until he had been led through Taz Shepard’s primers for the first time.
The General’s fears appear to have been justified. Had Russia attacked across the DEW line on the afternoon of November 22, 1963, the greatest military establishment in the history of the world might easily have been musclebound during the fifteen fateful min
He did not take hold in Texas. It is highly unlikely that he could have done so. He was reaching hard, and he had a long arm, but it wasn’t a thousand miles long. The setting conspired against an instantaneous shift in authority; as long as he remained at Love Field his grasp would be limited. When Jack Valenti entered the stateroom of Air Force One, the attention of the Vice President, as everyone continued to call the new President, was riveted on the television screen. Johnson was hoping that Walter Cronkite would tell him what was going on. Those who have never been in the eye of an historic storm may find this hard to believe, but the value of even the most perceptive eyewitnesses comes later, when their recollections can be matched against one another in tranquillity. As long as events are still unfolding, the observations of each individual are as meaningless as a single jagged fragment in a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle.