The Death of a President

by William Manchester

  Mrs. Kennedy thought Houston a curious city, two blocks of Manhattan in the middle of a prairie. Houston in turn ogled her. When the column of celebrities drew up outside the Rice Hotel forty minutes later, Hugh Sidey of Time scurried up and down curbs, asking people why they had come. “To see the President and Jackie,” they said or, often, just “For Jackie.” Kennedy asked Dave Powers to estimate the crowd. “For you? About as many as turned out the last time you were here,” said Dave, “but a hundred thousand more have come to look at Jackie.” Women naturally wanted to know what she was wearing. The effect on men was more unsettling. Max Peck, who ran the Rice, was a man of the world. Once, while managing a Washington hotel, he had been stuck in an elevator for twenty minutes with President Truman and Agent Jerry Behn and had preserved his aplomb, but now, as his bellboys unfurled a red carpet, he himself turned brick-red. Swinging open the First Lady’s door with a flourish, he babbled idiotically, “Good evening, Mrs. President.”

  Main Street was bedlam. Lyndon was on the loose. He had once taught school two blocks from here; he saw a covey of old friends and bore down on them emitting affable cries as pint-sized Valenti bobbed in his wake. The President strolled to the corner of Main and Travis, and he wanted to go farther. The Houston Police Department, anticipating this, had fashioned an ingenious barricade to discourage him. Directly across from the hotel entrance a hundred motorcycles were parked hubcap to hubcap, facing outward. Trembling hands waggled frantically behind the bikes, but Kennedy couldn’t reach them without vaulting the handlebars. He gave it up. His wife took his hand, and they followed Max Peck across the jammed lobby, into an elevator, up to the $150-a-day International Suite on the fifth floor.

  Max had had it redecorated with Mrs. President in mind. The walls were blue, blue-green, and cream; the carpeting was an arabesque of blue flowers. Except for the tiny bathroom it was exquisite. There was a duplicate of the oval office rocking chair, a basket of fruit in the living room, and Dom Pérignon, pâté de foie gras, and fine caviar. A table supported Jack Daniels, Cutty Sark, and a dozen bottles of Heineken, Kennedy’s favorite beer. In the background a maître d’hôtel was lighting little fires under chafing dishes. The entree, it seemed, was to be quail. Aren’t they nice in Texas? the First Lady thought, and she said aloud, “It’s grand.” “You’re the first to occupy it,” Max murmured, retreating.

  The President removed his coat and soggy shirt and sat in the rocker, leafing through a pile of newspapers. Jackie retired. Toward the end of the flight from San Antonio she had read a magazine while her husband napped, and now she dozed in her room while he, stripping to his shorts, reworked tonight’s speech. Aides ducked in and out. Mac Kilduff brought Texas anecdotes which Sorensen and Bill Moyers had telephoned him. The President considered them and rejected them; he could do better himself. Powers had touched base with the local politicians; for once they were happy. O’Donnell had agreed to bring in a group photograph of schoolchildren for a Presidential autograph. And the usual nuts were abroad. At 6:34 P.M. an eccentric telegram of support arrived from a man who described himself as a former Catholic altar boy who had become a Protestant minister and chairman of his Masonic lodge. He asked that his wire be read “on the air tonight.”

  Awake, Mrs. Kennedy put on a black cut-velvet suit, a double strand of pearls, and diamond earrings. Then the President dressed while Pam Turnure appeared in the suite entrance with a minor emergency. Reporters wanted copies of the First Lady’s address, now imminent. The hotel had put four typists at Pam’s disposal, and she needed to check the original. She did and darted off. The Kennedys then dined alone. They had to eat before any public banquet; once they arrived at the head table there would be too many distractions.

  The rest of the Presidential party was scattered throughout the hotel and city. In the lobby Larry O’Brien was meeting Jack Valenti for the first time. Larry checked the final plans for the dinner and watched Valenti bound off with a dispatch case under his arm, never dreaming that he would ever see him again; then he strolled into the hotel’s Flag Room restaurant with O’Donnell and Powers. Others were resting upstairs, and the room assignment of each offered a clue to his status. Lowly Congressmen were huddled around a communal bar in 301. Albert Thomas, a distinguished exception, had an apartment on the thirteenth floor; the Attorney General of Texas had been given another on the tenth. Ralph Yarborough and John Connally, through an appalling oversight, were sharing the seventeenth floor. (Lookouts were posted, like Hatfields and McCoys. Luckily the two never met in the passage.) Because the testimonial banquet would be routine most of the press, like the mafia, had decided to skip it, and Henry Brandon of the London Sunday Times was dining with an Englishman who lived in Houston. The host painted a dark picture of anti-Kennedy sentiment among Texas rightists. To Brandon his countryman seemed obsessed with the subject. The radicals couldn’t be more vicious, the man said over and over; the situation couldn’t possibly be exaggerated.

  The Rice’s fifth floor, the President’s, was reserved for those closest to him: Larry, Ken, Dave, Evelyn, Dr. Burkley, Generals Clifton and McHugh. The Secret Service arsenal was in 528, the Houston White House switchboard in 514-516. Directly overhead, the Vice President was eating in his sixth-floor Gold Suite ($100 a day) with Lady Bird. His smaller staff was clustered around him. Immediately across the hall, in 625, Liz Carpenter was changing her clothes and reflecting with some despair that she hadn’t had much luck making friends among the President’s staff. They didn’t exactly cut her. They just maintained their distance. Maybe blood is thinner and cooler in Massachusetts, she thought, straightening seams. Liz was at the mirror, inspecting herself, when the Gold Suite door swung open on the other side of the passage and its occupant hurried toward the stairs. Lyndon B. Johnson had an appointment with John F. Kennedy.

  The substance of the meeting—their final conference together—is unclear. According to Johnson’s recollection nineteen months later, “There definitely was not a disagreement.… There was an active discussion” in which the two “were in substantial agreement.” He did not define the nature of the discussion, but if the memories of others are to be credited, the President and his successor had words over the state’s political feud. Precisely what was said is unknown, for one President is dead, and a whirlwind was about to descend upon the other, blurring the sequence of events leading up to it. They were alone. Mrs. Kennedy had withdrawn into the next room to rehearse. Although aware of raised voices in the background, she was concentrating on her speech. The caterer and the hotel servants, who were in and out, heard Yarborough’s name mentioned several times. All had the impression that Kennedy felt the Senator was not being treated fairly, and that he was expressing himself with exceptional force. Johnson controlled his celebrated temper in his chief’s presence, but in the words of one man on duty outside, “he left that suite like a pistol.” Max Peck, watching him shoot into the corridor, long legs pumping, thought he looked furious.

  “What was that all about?” Jacqueline Kennedy asked, coming in after the Vice President had left. “He sounded mad.” The President looked amused. “That’s just Lyndon,” he said. “He’s in trouble.”

  On a sudden impulse she blurted out that she disliked Governor Connally.

  He asked, “Why do you say that?”

  “I can’t stand him all day. He’s just one of those men—oh, I don’t know. I just can’t bear him sitting there saying all these great things about himself. And he seems to be needling you all day.”

  “You mustn’t say you dislike him, Jackie. If you say it, you’ll begin thinking it, and it will prejudice how you act toward him the next day. He’s been cozying up to a lot of these Texas businessmen who weren’t for him before. What he was really saying in the car was that he’s going to run ahead of me in Texas. Well, that’s all right. Let him. But for heaven’s sakes don’t get a thing on him, because that’s what I came down here to heal. I’m trying to start by getting two people in the same car. If the
y start hating, nobody will ride with anybody.”

  So she shook it off. It was nearly time for her appearance, anyhow. The LULACS were waiting downstairs in the Grand Ballroom, and committing her remarks to memory had been unexpectedly difficult. “Oh, Jack, it’s awful,” she moaned as they went to the door. “Something’s happened to me. I used to be able to memorize anything in ten minutes. All through South America I’d just memorize those things five minutes before. I must be cracking up.”

  “No, no, no,” he said soothingly. “You’ll be great.”

  But she wasn’t so sure. She speculated on whether something could have happened to her memory. Fleetingly she wondered whether last August’s tragedy could be responsible.

  Jay Watson, the Rice Hotel auditor, had a clever scheme. The Grand Ballroom was on the mezzanine. Walking there from the elevator, the Kennedys would pass the San Jacinto Room, so Watson had reserved it for a cocktail party. At the proper moment, he thought, he and a group of fellow Houston accountants could step into the mustard-colored corridor for a private viewing of the President. The ruse seemed foolproof, but there was a fatal flaw in it. He had failed to take the Secret Service into account, and the Service’s drill for buildings covered everything. Over the past nine days, for example, agents had interrogated every employee of the Houston Coliseum, where the Thomas dinner was to be held. Each air-conditioning unit in the Rice had been checked for poison gas. Armed sentinels had mounted guard on a low roof just outside the windows of the International Suite, and in the Grand Ballroom itself a Presidential appearance at the LULACS’ head table had been vetoed on the ground that Kennedy would be too exposed there; instead, a temporary podium had been erected on the south side of the hall. The San Jacinto Room plot never had a chance of surviving this kind of vigilance. While the accountants merrily drained martinis, an agent quietly secured all rooms leading to the mezzanine, and when the time came for Watson to move his party he discovered that they were locked in. Kennedy passed within a few feet of the San Jacinto Room, unaware that thirty enraged auditors were pounding on the door.

  He couldn’t hear them because there was so much other noise. The seven hundred LULACS were in full voice, surging forward, jostling one another, hoping for a handshake. The scrimmage became fierce. The President leaned over two muscular-dystrophy patients from Liberty, Texas; Captain Stoughton took a photograph for their campaign; and Max Peck, recovering his balance in the background, was astounded to find that every button on his coat and his shirt had been ripped off. “You’re busy, Mr. President,” a member of Max’s staff said. Kennedy winced. “It’s rough,” he said feelingly. In the ballroom, after his Vice President had spoken, he talked briefly about the Alianza. “In order that my words will be even clearer,” he concluded, “I am going to ask my wife to say a few words to you also.” That was her cue. She suppressed her stage fright, and her classical accent fell quaintly on ears accustomed to Mexican diction:

  “… pero es una tradicián que se mantiene viva y vigorosa. Ustedes estaban trabajando por Texas y por los Estados Unidos. Muchas gracias y viva las LULACS!”

  “Viva!” they roared. It really hadn’t been that great. He had told them more. But she had given it to them in their own tongue. “Jackie spoke in Spanish,” wrote Dave Powers. “They all loved and cheered her.” Leaving the ballroom, Dave noted, the Kennedys “exchanged eyes”—Lady Bird thought the First Lady’s husband “looked beguiled”—and on their way to the car the President collared a bilingual spectator, questioned him closely, and relayed word to her that she had been wonderful. She wasn’t impressed by his witness. What else could the poor man say? But she was pleased by the gesture, touched that he was still waging an all-out Kennedy campaign to sell Texas to her.

  The motorcade in the dark was their fourth of the day, and there were to be two more before they could sleep. Even ovations can become a bore. She asked wearily, “Who organized this testimonial for Albert Thomas, anyway?”

  “Albert Thomas,” the President said quizzically. In detail he gravely explained how Thomas had made the plans, written speeches praising himself, run all over the state selling tickets, cooked the—

  “Jack!”

  At the Coliseum Valenti, the real mastermind, was having almost as much trouble with the Secret Service as an auditor. Agent Emory Roberts demanded to see his White House pass. He didn’t have one, had never seen one. If two Houston patrolmen hadn’t stepped forward to identify Valenti, he would have been escorted out. Once inside, however, he was entirely at home among the labyrinth of concrete passages. Indeed, he contrived to be the only outsider in the backstage lounge that had been set aside for the President and the Vice President—a trick both Yarborough and Connally would have given a lot to know. He lurked there while the Kennedys and Johnsons chatted pleasantly, waiting for the paying customers to finish their Chicken Virginia, and when they took their seats at the head table he crept along in their wake. There was no seat there for him, so he crouched beneath the President’s legs like a Metropolitan Opera prompter. He heard little that was inspiring. It was a typical testimonial. A gigantic sign overhead read, “HARRIS COUNTY SAYS, ‘THANK YOU, CONGRESSMAN THOMAS.’ ” One by one eminent speakers rose, cleared their throats, were reminded of threadbare anecdotes, and paid fulsome tributes to the Congressman. A committee presented him with a Cadillac. The dilemma over introductions might have provided some spice, but Thomas skillfully avoided that by handling them himself, buying time for the peacemakers. The President himself didn’t contribute much eloquence. The finest passages in his speech (and the only ones Mrs. Kennedy would remember later) were Biblical: “ ’Your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions,’ ” and “ ’Where there is no vision, the people perish.’ ” Most of his address was statistical—Texas ranked fifth among the states in prime military contract spending—and the text was a rather crass reminder that a lot of Houston bread was buttered in the Pentagon. But Kennedy had a way of delivering pedestrian prose as though it were classical Latin. And he enlivened the address with a deliberate slip. Next month, he declared, the United States was going to launch the space program’s biggest booster, firing “the largest payroll—payload—into space, giving us the lead.” He added swiftly: “It will be the biggest payroll, too!”

  The President laughed, apparently relaxing. But he wasn’t relaxed. In press conferences he could be at ease, despite the size of the television audience. Question-and-answer sessions were a challenge, a test of intellect. He had never learned to enjoy formal speeches, however, and his casual appearance was a triumph of the will. Unlike Lyndon, he was not an extrovert. To his audiences his easy air seemed unstudied. Very few knew how hard he had toiled to achieve it. On a rostrum the illusion of spontaneity was almost perfect; only his hands would have betrayed him, and he was careful to keep them out of sight. They weren’t out of Valenti’s sight, though. They were just above him, vibrating so violently at times that they seemed palsied. Now and then the right hand would shoot up and out, the index finger stabbing the limelit air to make a point. The moment it dropped the trembling would begin again. Several times he nearly dropped his 5 × 7 cards. Why, the President’s nervous, thought Valenti, dumfounded, and he felt like an eavesdropper, which in a way he was.

  It was after 9:30 when the travelers left the head table, and they couldn’t rest until they had reached another hotel in another city. There was some confusion outside the Coliseum. On the spur of the moment the Vice President decided that he wanted more company on the rest of the trip. Valenti, who was still hanging around, was drafted. He thrust his car keys at his wife and left her frowning on the sidewalk; Mary Margaret Valenti had been Senator Lyndon Johnson’s secretary before she became Jack’s wife, and she wasn’t cowed by the Vice President’s title. She was anxious that Jack not be away overnight because she had just had a baby. Attorney General Carr and his wife were temporarily separated, and she protested tearfully that she wouldn’t fly without him. Congressman Teag
ue was darting to and fro, looking frantically for an empty car, when he heard a heckling voice call, “Hey, Tiger! Why don’t you get Yarborough to ride with you?” It was the President. He was peering out of a closed Cadillac limousine and chuckling.

  Inside were Mrs. Kennedy; John Jones, publisher of the Houston Chronicle; and his wife, Freddie. Thomas had been responsible for their presence, which turned out to be another piece of hard luck for Johnson. Jones told Kennedy that tomorrow’s Chronicle would indicate 57 percent of Texas voters were for Yarborough and 50 percent for Kennedy-Johnson. With that kind of backing, the Senator was no man to cross. Freddie Jones was not an admirer of the Vice President. Freddie also held strong views about various Texas cities. She was fond of Fort Worth. It was small, poor, and proud of being known as Cowtown, Where the West Begins. “But Dallas!” She didn’t think much of Dallas. “It’s a merchant’s town—really, a terrible town.” Jackie liked Freddie, and she wondered vaguely what Dallas would be like.

  At the airport Marty Underwood had lined up Houston’s Presidential police detail; before leaving a community it was a Kennedy custom to shake hands with each officer who had served in his escort. There was another throng here, and though they held back, Underwood was to recall the next day how vulnerable the President had been on that dark airstrip. Then the advance man was called away; Pam Turnure, it developed, had become lost in the bowels of the Coliseum. Air Force One’s take-off was delayed ten minutes while a car fetched her. Aloft the President came forward to call, “Ralph, I’ve just heard about the Chronicle poll—congratulations on how well you’re doing,” and check some reports with Godfrey McHugh.