Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  Still aboard the plane, President Johnson glances at a brief statement on the three-by-five card in his hand. The words were drafted in longhand by Liz Carpenter, the press attaché of Lady Bird Johnson, honed by LBJ aide Bill Moyers, and finally typed up for the president. Studying it on the plane, Johnson reversed the order of the last two sentences.

  “Bird?” Johnson inquires of his wife. She is ready. Bareheaded in the freezing November cold, Lyndon Johnson, Lady Bird at his side, moves down the ramp into the glare of the airport and television lights, steps up to a podium encrusted with microphones, and speaks to the world for the first time as president of the United States, amid the deafening thwacking of helicopter rotors, which await the task of transporting the new president to his next destination.

  “This is a sad time for all people,” Johnson intones solemnly. “We have suffered a loss that cannot be weighed. For me it is a deep personal tragedy. I know the world shares the sorrow that Mrs. Kennedy and her family bear. I will do my best. That is all I can do. I ask for your help—and God’s.”724

  Because of this event, television has taken on an important new dimension. In addition to meting out bits of new information about the day’s events as the drama unfolds, it has now become a vehicle through which the nation’s grief is both shared and amplified. NBC’s cameras, filming people’s reactions to the news on a New York street, caught a middle-aged woman in dark glasses and a fashionable hat at the moment the news of the president’s death came over a nearby car radio. The woman jerked as though hit with a physical object, and cried out loudly in disbelief. Similar responses were caught on camera throughout America.*

  ABC begins rerunning the footage shot by its Dallas affiliate at Love Field earlier that morning in the sparkling sunshine after the rain cleared, showing Jack Kennedy, trailed by Jackie, working his way along the fence to shake some of the hundreds of hands reaching out to him, his enjoyment so obviously unfeigned, his whole being seeming to exemplify a vibrant hope for the future.

  “This,” Jim Hagerty, former President Eisenhower’s press secretary, says, commenting on the ABC footage, “is the president’s way of saying thank you to the people. How can you stop it? I don’t think you want to stop it…It’s rather difficult, while guarding the president, to argue that you can’t shake hands with the American people or ride in an open car where the people can see you.”

  In the world of television, where recording and rebroadcasting somehow erase the distinction between past and present, the event can be shown over and over again, but it remains tragically unstoppable.

  Harry S. Truman, contacted in retirement in Missouri, is reported to be so upset he is unable to make a statement. Dwight D. Eisenhower feels not only shock and dismay but indignation. He angrily mentions this “occasional psychopathic thing” in the American people, but expresses his belief that it is nonetheless a nation “of great common sense” that will not be “stampeded or bewildered.”

  General Douglas McArthur says, “The president’s death kills something in me.”

  Adlai Stevenson, speaking from the UN and for millions, says, “All men everywhere who love peace and justice and freedom will bow their heads,” adding later, “It’s too bad that, in my old age, they couldn’t have spent their violence on me and spared this young man for our nation’s work.”

  There’s footage too of President Johnson being sworn in aboard Air Force One by Judge Hughes, with the stunned but dutiful widow of his predecessor at his side. The nation, as one, sees an orderly transition of government.

  The network anchors—Ed Silverman and Ron Cochran of ABC, Bill Ryan, Chet Huntley, and Frank McGee of NBC, Charles Collingwood and Walter Cronkite of CBS—are addressing the largest television audience in history, unconsciously weaving—out of fact, history, and emotion—a shared experience that will hold the nation in its grip into an unforeseeable future.725

  5:10 p.m.

  In Irving, Texas, at the Paine residence, police are just about finished loading everything they have seized into the police cars.

  It isn’t quite clear to Ruth Paine whether she and Marina are under arrest or not, although it feels as though they are. Earlier, when the officers asked them, as well as Ruth’s husband, Michael, to come down to the police station, Ruth, wanting to cooperate, had gone to see whether she could get a babysitter.

  As Ruth left to walk next door to her neighbor’s house, one of the police officers moved to accompany her.

  “Oh,” she said, “you don’t have to go with me.”

  He said he would be glad to, and she told him to come along, but with a sinking feeling as she realized he was probably assigned to escort her. She called on Mrs. Roberts next door, but Mrs. Roberts was just on her way out and couldn’t help. It was after school by that time, though, so Ruth went to another neighbor’s house and managed to get one of her teenage daughters to come stay with the kids. As she came back to her own house, still under police escort, she saw the other officers carrying boxes of things from the house to their cars. In a backseat she spotted three cartons of phonograph records, her old 78s.

  “You don’t need those,” she protested, “and I want to use them on Thanksgiving weekend. I promised to lead a folk dance conference that weekend. I’ll need those records, which are all folk dance records, and I doubt that you’ll get them back to me by then.”

  They paid no attention to her. The records went. She complained about her 16-millimeter projector too, but her escort took her by the arm and told her they were wasting “too much time.”

  The brusque treatment continued inside the house, and Ruth began to resent it more and more. Now, she changes from her slacks to a suit, but the officers prevent Marina from doing the same.

  “She has a right to,” Ruth explains to them icily, a note of proper Quaker decency in her voice. “She’s a woman, she has a right to dress as she wishes before going.” She tells Marina in Russian to go to the bathroom to change, but while Ruth is talking to the babysitter, one of the cops opens the bathroom door and tells Marina she has no time to change. Ruth’s protests were useless. Marina, her emotions whipsawing, is suddenly angry. “I’m not a criminal,” she says to herself. “I didn’t do anything.”

  “We’d better get this straight in a hurry, Mrs. Paine,” one of the officers says, “or we’ll just take the children down and leave them with Juvenile while we talk to you.”

  Ruth doesn’t take this lying down. She makes a point of saying to her daughter, who, unlike her son Christopher, was up and about, “Lynn, you may come too.”

  For the trip downtown Michael was put in another car, but Marina and Ruth, Lynn, Marina’s little girl, and her baby were all jammed in together with three police officers.

  Marina, who had been shaking all over with fright before they got into the car, calms down as they drive toward Dallas, and the two women speak quietly in Russian. One of the officers, Adamcik, tries a little Czech on them, but they don’t understand him. Marina can tell how shaken Ruth is. Ruth had never ridden in a police car before, had never even envisioned doing so, and the experience is unnerving.

  One of the officers in the front turns back to ask Ruth, “Are you a Communist?”

  “No, I am not,” she replies firmly, “and I don’t even feel the need for the Fifth Amendment.”726

  On the trip downtown, Ruth Paine starts to be tormented by “if only” thoughts. If only she had known that Lee had hidden a rifle in her garage. If only she had appraised him as someone capable of such terrible violence. If only the job she helped him find had not put him in a building overlooking the president’s parade route. If only she had done a dozen things differently, the country might have been spared this tragedy, and Marina, whom she has come to love as a sister, would not have been made into an assassin’s wife, bullied by overbearing policemen in a language she doesn’t comprehend.

  Ruth wonders whether her determination to look for the good in everyone prevented her from seeing Lee clearly. Just t
hree days ago she learned that Lee was using a false name in his Dallas rooming house. How much truth was there in anything he ever told her? What sort of a man was he beyond the confines of Ruth’s house, where he was simply Marina’s husband and Junie’s and Rachel’s father?

  Is it possible that he is a Soviet agent? She finds that impossible to believe. He’s neither bright nor organized enough for such an assignment. Even if he had volunteered his services to the Russians, they wouldn’t have accepted him, or they are bigger fools than she ever dreamed.727

  5:26 p.m. (6:26 p.m. EST)

  Just twenty-eight minutes after Air Force One landed at Andrews Air Force Base, a helicopter delivers President Johnson to the south lawn of the White House. The president, his wife, Secretary of Defense McNamara, and McGeorge Bundy, special adviser to the president, walk in the chilly night through the rose garden on the White House grounds on their way to the Oval Office. When they come to the french doors of the president’s office, all stop except Johnson, who pauses, then walks in, alone, and stays for but a minute.

  After Johnson closed the door behind him and exited the Oval Office, he and his party went across the street (West Executive Avenue, a blocked-off street across from the West Wing of the White House) to his vice presidential office on the second floor of the Executive Office Building, where congressional leaders from both parties stopped by to pledge their bipartisan support for the good of the grief-stricken nation.728

  Before he meets with anyone though, the president takes the time to pen two notes to a little boy and a little girl, the first two letters of his presidency:

  Dear John—It will be many years before you understand fully what a great man your father was. His loss is a deep personal tragedy for all of us, but I wanted you particularly to know that I share your grief—You can always be proud of him.

  He signs it “affectionately,” as he does the next letter.

  Dearest Caroline—Your father’s death has been a great tragedy for the Nation, as well as for you at this time.

  He was a wise and devoted man. You can always be proud of what he did for his country.

  It is 7:30 p.m. as Lyndon Johnson hands the letters to his secretary, gets up, and goes out to the anteroom to meet the men upon whom the continuity of the government of the United States now depends.729

  5:55 p.m. (6:55 p.m. EST)

  It is near dusk as the presidential motorcade, having left Andrews at 6:10 p.m. EST, takes the Suitland Parkway to Bethesda. FBI agent James Sibert, in a car right behind the navy ambulance carrying the president’s body, will never forget the sight of people lining the many bridges over the parkway, holding white handkerchiefs to their eyes. At 6:55 p.m., the navy ambulance with its escort of cars and motorcycle police arrives at Bethesda.730

  By the time the navy ambulance with its escort of cars and motorcycle police arrives at the Bethesda hospital,731 crowds, alerted by the television coverage of the arrival of the president’s body at Andrews, are waiting silently. More than three thousand people have worked their way inside the grounds because of the hopelessly inadequate cordon improvised by Captain Robert Canada Jr., commanding officer of the hospital. Canada had only twenty-four Marine guards at his disposal, so he mobilized all of his off-duty corpsmen, but still hasn’t got nearly enough men to keep the ever-growing crowd from surging toward the ambulance.732 It’s one solid mass of humanity, people standing shoulder to shoulder, between the semicircle drive in front of the hospital (which comes off Wisconsin Avenue and returns) and Wisconsin Avenue a few acres away.733

  The ambulance, now joined by a sedan with a chaplain and nurses, sweeps up to the main entrance. Robert and Jacqueline Kennedy disembark and are met by Captain Canada, Rear Admiral Calvin Galloway, and a chaplain. After a brief exchange, Secret Service agents Clint Hill and Paul Landis accompany RFK and Mrs. Kennedy to one of the two VIP suites on the seventeenth floor of the hospital’s high, stone tower.734 Jackie had been expected to join her children, John-John and Caroline, before their bedtime and tell them of their father’s death, but she decides instead to spend the night at the hospital so as not to leave her slain husband. Although the children were shielded from the news throughout the afternoon, Caroline will be told that evening and John Jr. sometime later (see later text).735

  The hospital suite consists of three rooms—a bedroom and a kitchen facing each other across a small hallway, at the end of which was a long narrow drawing room. While it is comfortable enough, with air-conditioning, wall-to-wall carpeting, and a bedroom television, the walls, furniture, carpet, and drapes were depressing because of their lifeless and uniformly beige color. The entourage is met at the suite by the president’s sister, Jean Kennedy Smith; Jacqueline’s mother and stepfather, Janet and Hugh Auchincloss; and Ben Bradlee, Washington bureau chief of Newsweek and a longtime friend of the president and his family, along with his wife, Toni. Secret Service agents Hill and Landis move quickly to secure the entire floor, taking control of communications and making sure that no one will be allowed to enter without authorization. Since Mrs. Kennedy is determined to wait until the autopsy is over, they know it’s going to be a long night.736

  An overnight bag and makeup case with Jackie’s initials, J.B.K. (B is for Bouvier, Jackie’s maiden name), on it are brought to Jackie, but both remain unopened in the long hours ahead. Among the friends who will come to the seventeenth floor to try to console her are political columnist Charles Bartlett and his wife, Martha. It was they who had contrived to introduce Jackie to JFK at a dinner party in their Georgetown home in May of 1951. At the time, Jackie was a Georgetown socialite with blue-blood roots (like JFK, her schooling had been at the best private schools—Miss Porter’s, Vassar, the Sorbonne in Paris) who was excited to be working as an “inquiring photographer” and celebrity reporter about town for the Washington Times-Herald, and he was a young, dashing war hero who was a member of the House of Representatives from Massachusetts.737 It wouldn’t be until September of 1953, when JFK had become a U.S. senator, that the two would wed in Newport, Rhode Island, the most correct social address at the time. A church ceremony attended by over three thousand guests was followed by a grand, beau monde reception at Hammersmith Farm, an estate overlooking Narragansett Bay. JFK may have been twelve years her senior (ages thirty-four and twenty-two at the time they met two years earlier), but Jackie would later say, “I took the choicest bachelor in the Senate.” Few would disagree that by the time JFK was elected president, “Jack and Jackie were America’s royal couple.”738

  Below the seventeenth floor, at the main entrance, Larry O’Brien, Kenny O’Donnell, General McHugh, and other members of the Kennedy party are standing in front of the hospital talking. The navy ambulance carrying the president’s body is nearby, with Secret Service agent Bill Greer still in the driver’s seat. Secret Service agent Roy Kellerman has gotten out and gone in to find out where the entrance to the morgue is located.739 After several minutes, Baltimore FBI agents James W. Sibert and Francis X. O’Neill Jr., who had been ordered to accompany the procession from Andrews Air Force Base, witness the autopsy, take custody of any bullets retrieved from the president’s body, and deliver them to the FBI laboratory,740 approach the group of men and ask what the delay is all about. Larry O’Brien says they don’t know where the autopsy room is. The FBI men tell them to follow them around to the rear of the hospital.

  When the caravan reaches the morgue entrance, Secret Service agent Roy Kellerman comes out onto the rear loading dock. FBI agents Sibert and O’Neill approach him and identify themselves and their mission.

  “Yes, I’ve already been informed,” he tells them and moves down the stairs toward the rear of the ambulance, where Secret Service agent Bill Greer waits. First Lieutenant Samuel R. Bird’s honor guards quickly assemble and help Secret Service and FBI agents pull the casket out of the back of the ambulance and onto a conveyance cart, and shuffle it toward the steps leading to the small landing at the rear door.741 At the base of the stairs, th
e cart is abandoned and the casket is hand-carried up to the loading-dock entrance.742 Along the way, General McHugh insists on helping to carry the commander in chief into the hospital and relieves one of the casket team members. One end of the casket dips precariously as General McHugh struggles to carry his share of the weight.743 Just inside the loading-dock entrance, the team returns the casket to the cart and wheels it a short distance down the corridor toward a naval attendant holding open a double-door marked “Restricted—Authorized Personnel Only.”

  The Bethesda Naval Hospital morgue is stark and spotless. It was newly renovated just four months earlier. They enter an anteroom equipped with eight refrigerated lockers labeled “Remains.” To their right is a swinging-type double-door, with glass panels, that leads to the main room where the autopsies are performed. The tiled autopsy room is lined with equipment specialized for postmortem work: scales, a sterilizer, a washing machine, and a power saw. Situated near the center of the room are two eight-foot-long, stainless-steel autopsy tables, their tops perforated with hundreds of drain holes that feed into pipes set in the floor. Against one wall, on a two-step riser, is a small gallery section that contains a short tier of bleacher-style benches, enough for thirty to forty medical students and young doctors to observe autopsies being performed. This night, the students and young doctors are absent.744

  The casket team rolls the casket through the doors into the autopsy room and veers to the left, where they come face-to-face with Drs. Humes and Boswell and several other Bethesda personnel dressed in surgical garb, who direct the team to move the casket next to autopsy table number one.745 Major General Wehle orders his aide, Richard Lipsey, “not to leave the body for any reason,”746 as Lieutenant Sam Bird’s casket team takes up guard duty outside the two entrances to the autopsy room, with the assistance of a detachment of marines.747