The Death of a President

by William Manchester

  At 11:07 P.M. the three planes landed among the hulking gray steel sheds and preposterous Strategic Air Command billboards (“PEACE IS OUR PROFESSION”) of Carswell Air Force Base on the outskirts of Fort Worth. Thursday’s final motorcade formed in a light rain. Yarborough, assuming that there wouldn’t be much of a turnout at this hour and in this weather, asked Agent Youngblood if there would be room for him in the Vice President’s car here. The Senator had guessed wrong. All along the city’s East-West Freeway drenched ranks hailed the Kennedys, and for the first time there were clear shouts of “Lyndon! There’s LBJ!” The Johnsons and Connallys were delighted. Lady Bird recalled that Fort Worth’s Hotel Texas had been the scene of some of the most dramatic moments in her husband’s career. To Nellie Connally, remembering the days when her husband worked for Sid Richardson here, Fort Worth was “like coming home.”

  Outlanders took a different view. A marquee outside the hotel read “WELCOME, MR. PRESIDENT,” but this wasn’t the suave Rice. The quarters set aside for the President were actually smaller and cheaper than the Vice President’s. The lobby was solid with jostling, hooting men in cream-colored five-gallon hats. Agent Lem Johns lost his shaving gear in the confusion; in Room 660 two other members of the party were so crowded that they had to take turns unpacking; Captain Stoughton, who was bunking with the bagman here, had difficulty unlocking his door. One member of the hotel staff, who might have been helpful, ran around mugging for photographers. “The hotel arrangements,” as O’Donnell said later, “were all screwed up.”

  Kennedy conferred with O’Donnell for ten minutes. The political feud was discussed but briefly. There hadn’t been much about it in the evening papers; the stories filed by correspondents covering the trip had reached newsrooms too late. Dick Goodwin had called twice from Washington with a minor problem. The New York Times had learned of his new job and had decided to make him tomorrow’s “Man in the News.” So far he had declined comment; what should he do? The President instructed him to prepare an announcement of his own appointment, dating it for release tomorrow. The First Lady was also being badgered by the press, and through Pam she sent reporters word that Thursday had been “a wonderful day. Texas friendliness was everything I’d heard it to be.” Then she and the President went up to their three-room suite on the eighth floor and found it to be anything but warm. Something was wrong with the air conditioner; it was going full blast. Kennedy ordered it turned off.

  Mrs. Kennedy had been given a drab green room overlooking a neoned parking lot bordered by two loan companies, two bus stations, a garage, a theater. On a table was a medley of messages: a card from the Italian Vice Consul; a telegram from the second vice president of the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs; several religious cards from Catholic well-wishers; the score of a song written by a local composer; a gaudy certificate citing “Jacqueline B. Kennedy” for “Outstanding Community Service” and embellished by a gold foil seal and a broad red, white, and blue ribbon; fresh flowers from the Chamber of Commerce (Gordon Boswell, Florist); and—a stirring from the enemy camp—a file card from a Republican college student bearing a sardonic greeting and the signature “AuH2O.” Beside the table was her luggage. Where was Mary Gallagher? She had been sidetracked. Dead tired, yet aware that the morning would be hectic, Mrs. Kennedy crouched over her bags and started pulling out clothes.

  Before retiring she joined the President.

  “You were great today,” he said.

  “How do you feel?”

  “Oh, gosh, I’m exhausted.”

  His vitality was illusory, like his debonair manner. Half asleep, he was planning ahead. “Don’t get up with me,” he called. “I’ve got to speak in that square downstairs before breakfast, but stay in bed. Just be at the breakfast at nine-fifteen.” She said good night. Before turning out the light she carefully laid out tomorrow’s navy blue blouse, navy handbag, low-heeled shoes, pink suit, and pillbox hat.

  While the Kennedys slept in 850, most of the rest of their entourage were still up, and some were really jumping. Five floors above them, in the more spacious Will Rogers Suite, Lyndon jovially entertained members of his tong. Off the lobby John Connally held court hour after hour in the hotel’s coffee shop, which never closes. Bob Baskin of the Dallas News told him of Yarborough’s snappishness, and Connally issued a ringing call for harmony. Duty kept some Secret Service men awake. The twelve-to-eight shift mounted guard outside 850. Clint Hill instructed Congressman Jim Wright of Fort Worth to join the President promptly at quarter of eight in the morning. Muggsy O’Leary, posted at the hotel entrance, saw a figure lying on a roof diagonally across from Kennedy’s window, and a policeman scurried off to chase him away. As agent in charge Roy Kellerman had special responsibilities. With Hill and Bill Duncan, who had advanced this leg of the trip, he inspected the parking lot; he examined the entrances and exits the President would use and ordered Kennedy’s Fort Worth car secured for the night. Then, after a cup of coffee, he went to bed.

  Others were already asleep: Greer, Emory Roberts, the Vice Presidential Detail. The crews of 26000 and 86970, after leaving guards at the planes—this was routine, even at a SAC base—checked into a nearby motel. But nine agents of the White House Detail, unknown to Kellerman, were out on the town. They started with beer and mixed drinks at the Fort Worth Press Club with Mac Kilduff; then seven of them continued at a colorful establishment called “The Cellar,” ordering “Salty Dicks,” a nonalcoholic specialty of the house. One stayed until 5 A.M.6 Fellow drinkers during those early-morning hours included four agents who were to ride in the President’s follow-up car in Dallas, and whose alertness was vital to his safety. At various times they were joined by three agents of the twelve-to-eight shift—who were officially on duty, assigned to guard the President’s bedroom door—and who chose to break the boredom of sentry duty in this fashion.

  Godfrey McHugh was duty officer. Had unidentified bombers arrived over Canada, the General would normally have been summoned instantly from his room, 831. The General wasn’t in 831, however. Fort Worth happened to be God’s home of record. At midnight he had looked in on General Clifton in 829 and told him he was passing him the baton—“Hold the satchel” was his expression. Clifton then went out for a half-hour, though he was within reach of the local White House operator. McHugh meanwhile had driven a Secret Service car five miles away to the chic suburb of Westover Hills and was visiting his former employers, two oilmen named Robert N. and E. J. McCurdy. The call wasn’t much fun for Godfrey. He was devoted to his Commander in Chief, and the McCurdy brothers were vehemently anti-Kennedy. Each time he tried to talk about petroleum they launched a new lecture, the gist of which was that the President was wrecking the country, using American wheat to feed Red soldiers, and generally selling out to Russia. After two hours McHugh concluded that his trip to Westover Hills had been a mistake and drove back.

  No strange blips had appeared on Canadian radar screens. It was an exceptionally quiet night, here and abroad. The only foreign news of note was a Labour victory in a British by-election and a Soviet note complaining about American convoys to Berlin. At home the Birdman of Alcatraz had died at seventy-three, Jimmy Hoffa’s most recent trial had proceeded smoothly in Nashville, the Dow-Jones industrial average had closed at 732.65, and the American Legion post in Abilene, Texas, had removed a portrait of the President of the United States from its walls on the ground that he was controversial. Change a name here, a figure there, and the same stories could have been published a year earlier.

  In Dallas, thirty miles east of Fort Worth, earlier alarms appeared to have been unfounded. On the surface, at least, everything was serene. Richard M. Nixon, now a Pepsi-Cola attorney, slept soundly after a busy day on the floor of the bottlers convention, across from the Trade Mart. Final preparations for the big parade had been completed that afternoon when Forrest Sorrels of the Secret Service supervised the unloading of the blue Presidential Lincoln and the armored follow-up car—both were
now stored in Love Field’s underground garage—and ordered a fleet of Lincolns and Mercurys from a Dallas Ford agency and buses, for the press and the VIP’s, from the Continental Trailways system. At 11 P.M. U.S. Attorney Barefoot Sanders came home to receive a welcome message: his baby sitter informed him that Sam Bloom of the Citizens Council had left word that several tickets for tomorrow’s Trade Mart lunch were being set aside for admirers of the President. Sanders began parceling them out.

  Half a continent away, the nation’s capital was placid. That wasn’t unusual. Few taxpayers realized it, but the District of Columbia was among the most staid metropolises in the country. Most households retired early. An exception that evening was a dinner party on Highland Place attended by Goodwin and Senator Edward M. Kennedy, but that was because the guests of honor were Goodwin’s Latin Americans, who were accustomed to late hours. There were few other official functions of any consequence. Aircraft 86972 was now in Hawaii—Secretaries Rusk and Dillon and their wives were staying in the guest house of Admiral Harry D. Felt, CINCPAC—and the only Cabinet members left in Washington were Robert Kennedy, McNamara, Celebrezze, and the new man, Postmaster General Gronouski. Apart from the Latin-American fiesta, the liveliest event in official Washington that evening was a movie. Arthur Schlesinger, a film fan, was showing a preview of From Russia with Love in the White House theater. Afterward Ted Sorensen predicted that the President would enjoy it.

  One of the dullest events was a meeting of the National Association for Mental Health in the Shoreham Hotel. The speaker of the evening was Senator Hubert H. Humphrey of Minnesota; his topic was “Mental Health and World Peace.” Reporters understandably avoided it. They had no way of anticipating how topical his speech was to be. Humphrey had been giving Dallas considerable thought and had concluded that communities as well as individuals “can be afflicted with emotional instability, frustrations, and irrational behavior.” He cited “that emotional instability that afflicts a significant but small minority in our midst that some call the extreme right, some the Birchers, some the wild men of reaction.… They still see the world in total black and white. They are looking for immediate and final answers. They are still substituting dogma for creative thought. They are still angry, fearful, deeply and fundamentally disturbed by the world around them.” And on this evening of November 21, 1963, Humphrey warned the behavioral scientists that “the act of an emotionally unstable person or irresponsible citizen can strike down a great leader.”7

  Two floors above the White House theater, in her quarters between the bedrooms of the First Family’s children, Maude Shaw was knitting alone. All day the children had been too busy to miss their parents. Caroline had attended a classmate’s seventh-birthday party in Chevy Chase, and Agent Tom Wells had taken John to a toy shop on Wisconsin Avenue. After dinner John and his sister played with what the agents of the kiddie detail called “blocks” and their English nanny stoutly insisted were “bricks.” Then came their daily baths and their story hour. Caroline brushed her teeth and John pored over picture books until bedtime. Until recently he had slept with a stuffed gray bear. Conscious of being a boy, he now took toy trucks and helicopters into his crib. But Caroline still doted on her soft animals. As Miss Shaw turned out the light she had heard the President’s daughter whispering to them that tomorrow they were going to have an adventure. For the first time in their lives, Caroline had promised, they would sleep away from relatives, and they must be on their best behavior.

  Among the thousands of Fort Worth motorists who crossed the President’s motorcade route Thursday evening was a heavy-jowled practical nurse named Marguerite Claverie Oswald. She had just finished a 3-to-11 P.M. shift at the Hargrove Convalescent Center, turning her sleeping patient over for the last time and leaving a clean bedpan, and she was en route to her own home on the other side of Trinity Park when she saw two policemen barring her usual exit from the East-West Freeway. With characteristic vim she ignored them. Stepping on the accelerator of her blue-gray 1954 Buick, she vanished in the darkness and the rain, and their startled expressions, illumined for a flickering instant in her headlights, provided her, as she later recalled, with a brief sense of satisfaction. It was a smaller triumph than she imagined. She was under the impression that the motorcade had already begun. Had the President been in the vicinity, she would have been diverted. Actually, she parked the Buick outside her two-room frame duplex in the 2200 block of Thomas Place at 11:15 P.M., five minutes before Kennedy left Carswell Air Force Base. But she liked to think she had held things up a bit.

  Marguerite Oswald often saw herself as the target of nameless forces; she was a woman of many resentments and felt them all keenly. Aged fifty-six, she had a reedy, scolding voice, and in conversation she was highly vocal on status and money, each of which she coveted and lacked. Although she had been married three times, she had nothing to show for it. One man had died and the other two had quit her, the last one after accusing her of crippling physical assaults upon him. Physically she was capable of it. She was a powerfully built woman; muscles knotted in her thick neck; she had the complexion of mottled pewter. A jury had agreed with the plaintiff, finding that Marguerite had been “guilty of excesses, cruel treatment, or outrages.” Now she lived on her $9-a-day income as a shifter of bodies and bedpans, husbanding an $80 bank account and hoping her car and her elderly female patient would survive for another year or two.

  She didn’t mind poverty, provided strangers were quite clear about the difference between what she called “poor people” and “poor trash.” The daughter of a New Orleans streetcar conductor (who, she liked to point out, had received “a citation” on retirement), she was proud of her talent for frugality and had passed it along to her youngest son, who had just turned twenty-four. Marguerite and Lee Harvey Oswald were alike in other ways, too. Various acquaintances were subsequently to describe him as tense, withdrawn, maladjusted, waspish, insolent, secretive, and “kind of drawn up,” with a “fixed-focus mind.” In Moscow he had given Commander Hallett the impression that he was “fleeing from a skeleton in the family closet.” Everyone thought him cold and arrogant, and certainly Marguerite was those. Even as a young woman she liked to be known as “the boss.” By her own account she had been fired from “about five” jobs. Of herself and Lee she would later say, “I’ve been persecuted and he’s been persecuted. They’ve all turned their backs on me before and they’ll do it again.”

  Lee’s father was the husband who had died. His fatal heart attack had come two months before the boy’s birth, leaving Marguerite as the sole parent. Under the circumstances mother and son might have formed a tender bond. They didn’t. Lee slept with her until he was nearly eleven years old, but propinquity is not affection. Neither is refusal to discipline a child; when little Lee tangled with adults, and Marguerite snapped that the charges were “trumped up,” she was defending her own reputation, not his. In reality she was in a poor position to evaluate such accusations. She was away during the day, and she had forbidden Lee to call her at work. Because she disapproved of playmates, he spent a remarkable amount of time alone. Very early he became a flagrant truant. He preferred to lounge around the house, watching television and reading comic books. At the age of thirteen his truancy brought mother and son to the attention of a school psychiatrist, who concluded that Marguerite did not grasp that Lee’s withdrawal was a form of “protest against his neglect by her and represents his reaction to a complete absence of any real family life.” To his probation officer Lee said, “Well, I’ve got to live with her. I guess I love her.”

  He wasn’t pressed for a definition of love. It is quite possible that he had no real concept of it. Already he had acquired a violent, brutal personality. Once he chased his half-brother with a knife. (She passed this off as a “little scuffle.”) Another time, brandishing another blade, he threatened his half-brother’s wife. This scuffle was larger, and Marguerite tried to intervene. But it was too late. She had lost control of him. He had grown too
big for discipline, and instead of obeying he turned on her and struck her. Already irrevocable patterns of behavior had formed in him; already he had become truculent with men and inadequate with women—and quick to rage at both.

  Although his I.Q. was high (118), his report cards didn’t show it. On the record he was a dunce, and after completing the ninth grade he dropped out of school. Emulating his brother Robert, he enlisted in the Marine Corps, an unfortunate choice for a youth who resented authority. He baited officers, and they gave him the back of their hand. Fellow enlisted men scorned him as “Ozzie Rabbit.” His three years in uniform became a miserable string of petty infractions and two courts-martial, culminating, after his attempt to defect to Russia, in an undesirable discharge. Yet Marine training leaves marks on the most stubborn recruit. The Corps’s courses in marksmanship are the best in the world, and Private Oswald had qualified as a sharpshooter with the M-1 rifle on the San Diego range. It was his first skill, and his last.

  He had also picked up the habit of sirring older men, a trait that favorably impressed Roy S. Truly, the conservative superintendent of the Texas School Book Depository. Most young men were disrespectful these days, Truly thought. Here was a refreshing exception, and Oswald was hired on October 15, 1963, at $1.25 an hour. Although filling book orders in the dingy warehouse was menial work, he was lucky to get it. His wife was expecting her second baby—five days after the superintendent took him on she was delivered of another daughter at Parkland Hospital—and since his return from Russia he had passed through one cycle of frustration after another. His Soviet adventure wasn’t responsible. He had kept that a secret. The bleak truth was that he couldn’t do anything right. He hadn’t even been able to hold a job as a greaser of coffee machinery. Bit by bit the sickening truth was emerging: no one wanted him, no one had ever wanted him. He had sailed to the U.S.S.R. to escape his disappointments in his own country. Thwarted there, too, he had sailed back. The month before Truly employed him he had tried to run to Havana, which was on bad terms with both Moscow and Washington, but in Mexico City the Cubans wouldn’t even grant him a visa. By then Lee Harvey Oswald had become the most rejected man of his time. It is not too much to say that he was the diametric opposite of John Fitzgerald Kennedy.