The Death of a President

by William Manchester

  Yet no gunman can be certain that he will not be interrupted by a casual intruder whose memory will later place the killer at the scene. It happened to Oswald. Someone—it was Givens—came back. Downstairs he discovered that he had left his cigarettes in his jacket pocket. Returning, he encountered Oswald on the sixth floor. “Boy, aren’t you coming downstairs?” he asked, surprised. “It’s near lunchtime.” “No, sir,” replied Oswald, respectful as always. Possibly to allay suspicion, more likely to prepare the way for his escape, he said, “When you get downstairs, close the gate to the elevator.” He meant the west elevator, which could be summoned from above only when the gate was down. “O.K.,” said Givens, turning away.

  Now Oswald was alone, with over a half-hour for his final preparations. His own movements excepted, the only sound in the upper part of the building came from the roof above. They were innocent and familiar: the scratching of birds. On the rear of the roof stood a fantastic structure resembling an enormous, deteriorating boxcar. Once it had been a boiler. After the building had abandoned steam heat it had been left to rust, and now it served as home for upwards of a thousand band-tailed blue pigeons who hopped around, preening themselves and blinking sightlessly at the activity in the plaza below. They were ignored here and, though naturally jumpy, they were serene. The traffic below was too far away. Only a sudden, sharp noise very close to them would create a stir in this forgotten flock.

  Charles Givens rode downstairs and discovered that he couldn’t close the west elevator’s gate. The elevator wasn’t there. It was stuck upstairs somewhere. Givens strolled away, thinking no more about it. It is his recollection that the time was 11:55 A.M.

  At 11:55 A.M. the van of Kennedy’s procession moved through a section of Love Field fence which Forrest Sorrels had ordered removed for the occasion. Two motorcycle policemen cleared the way for:

  The lead car, an unmarked white Ford driven by Chief Curry. Agent Lawson sat beside Curry. In the rear, Sheriff Bill Decker was on the left, Sorrels on the right. Three more motorcycles trailed the back bumper and led the rest of the procession by five car lengths.

  SS 100 X, the Presidential car, District of Columbia license number GG 300. Its six passengers were in their usual places: Kellerman beside Greer; the Connallys in the jump seats, John to the right of Nellie; the Kennedys in the rear, with the roses between them. Four motorcycles, two on each side, flanked the rear of GG 300.

  Halfback, the follow-up convertible, District license number GG 678. Agent Sam Kinney, at the wheel, kept his eyes on the back of the President’s head. Emory Roberts, Halfback’s commander, was next to Kinney. Clint Hill stood on the left front running board. Agent Bill McIntyre was behind him. John Ready was on the right front running board, Agent Landis behind him. Dave Powers was in the right jump seat, Ken O’Donnell in the left. Agent George Hickey sat in the left rear, Agent Glen Bennett in the right rear, and on the seat between them lay an AR-15 .223 automatic rifle, with a muzzle velocity so powerful that should a bullet strike a man’s chest it would blow his head off.

  The Vice Presidential convertible. Two-and-a-half car lengths separated it from Halfback, to indicate that the appearance of the Vice President was a separate event. Ralph Yarborough, who loved parades, was under the impression that Lyndon Johnson wasn’t enjoying the distinction. The Senator, in the left rear, was waving jubilantly. Johnson stared glumly ahead.

  Varsity, the follow-up hardtop, was driven by a Texas state policeman. Cliff Carter was in the middle of the front seat. Agent Jerry Kivett was on his right. Agent Lem Johns was in the right rear, Agent Taylor in the left rear.

  The pool car was on loan from the telephone company, and the driver came with it. Kilduff and Merriman Smith of United Press International were in front, Kilduff on the right. As the senior White House correspondent Smith always rode in the middle. Thus he was the newspaperman closest to the radiophone on the transmission hump under the dashboard. Jack Bell of the Associated Press, Baskin of the Dallas News, and Bob Clark of the American Broadcasting Company were in the back. In a crisis they could report nothing from this car unless Smith surrendered the phone, and Smith, with his hard, pocked face, was one of the most competitive men in journalism.

  The photographers’ convertibles came next. The bulk of the motorcade trailed them.

  They passed the airport’s “Spirit of Flight,” a graceful statue of a figure whose arms stretched upward, and turned northeast, or left, at Mockingbird Lane.

  On a map the Love Field–Trade Mart–Love Field motorcade route resembled a crude bottle. Mockingbird was the base. Lemmon Avenue, which ran perpendicular to it, became the left side. Turtle Creek and Cedar Springs sloped inward and then straightened at Harwood, forming the left flank of the neck. The mouth comprised twelve blocks of Main Street, where the heaviest downtown crowds would be. At the end of Main the cars would avoid an awkward traffic island by jogging a block north—here, at the Book Depository, the mouth was chipped—and then cruise westward, on a gently descending incline, into the triple underpass. A sharp right up a ramp here brought them onto Stemmons Freeway, which was the opposite side of the neck. The Trade Mart was at the junction of Stemmons Freeway and Harry Hines Boulevard. After the luncheon the procession was scheduled to move down the boulevard, the bottle’s right side, picking up speed as it passed the straggling, yellow-brown brick buildings of Parkland Hospital. At Mockingbird it would turn right, re-entering the base of the bottle, closing the geometric figure, and returning to Love Field for the hop to Austin.

  At the beginning there wasn’t much to see. John Connally hadn’t expected any people here, however, and there were some. Barefoot Sanders recalled that when Kennedy and Johnson drove down Lemmon Avenue on September 13, 1960, it had been deserted. It wasn’t now. But Kennedy had been only a candidate then. As President he was bound to be a greater drawing card. To O’Donnell and O’Brien the spectators outside the low, flat, automated factories—Haggar Slacks, IBM—looked like curious but indifferent white-collar workers. Nevertheless there were many blank stretches. Mrs. Kennedy found herself waving at billboards advertising “Stemmons Freeway, Market Place of the Southwest,” “Real Sippin’ Whisky,” “Home of the Big Boy Hamburger,” and a raffish sign inviting her to twist in The Music Box.

  She began to wilt. The reading on a thermometer outside a Coca-Cola bottling plant was dismayingly high, and the sunlight was so bright that she instinctively closed her eyes. She slipped on her dark glasses. The President asked her to remove them. People had come to see her, he explained; the spectacles masked her face. Nevertheless she toyed with the lenses in her lap, sneaking them up when the sidewalks were barren of spectators. On Lemmon Avenue the Lincoln passed beneath an underpass. She liked that; the brief bar of shadow was a relief, a chance to catch her breath.

  Twice the motorcade halted at Kennedy’s order. At Lemmon and Lomo Alto Drive a line of very small children stood behind a placard: “MR. PRESIDENT, PLEASE STOP AND SHAKE OUR HANDS.” “Let’s stop here, Bill,” Kennedy called to Greer. He stepped into the street and was nearly swept off his feet by a surge of shrieking youth. The scene was affectionately watched by a loyal couple named Gaudet. Toward the end of it, Mrs. Gaudet had an unsettling recollection: that morning she had heard a local radio program devoted to details of the Lincoln assassination, and now she told her husband about it, saying, “President Kennedy ought to be awarded the Purple Heart just for coming to Dallas.”

  Kellerman and his men gently broke up the demonstration of children. So far the city seemed harmless enough to them. In the lead car Lawson murmured a word of commendation to Chief Curry. Lawson had suggested that underpasses be cleared of everyone except uniformed policemen, and the first underpass indicated that his advice had been followed. Everything, indeed, appeared to be on schedule. When the President dismounted the second time, the agents, though vigilant, avoided a show of force. He wanted to greet a group of nuns. He was always alert for a glimpse of Sisters, and it was a familiar s
cene. Only a tactless bodyguard would have intruded upon it.

  In the Vice Presidential car Lyndon Johnson abruptly leaned forward.

  “Turn the radio on,” he ordered, indicating the dial on the dashboard. Hurchel Jacks did, and a local station blared strongly, broadcasting an account of their progress.

  At Reagan Street, three blocks before the bottle began to narrow, Father Oscar Huber was standing with some young men from his parish. “I know why you’re here,” he was teasing them. “Don’t kid me—you don’t care about him. It’s Jackie you want to see.” Just then he heard the drone of motorcycle engines. Leaping up and down, the elderly priest saw Kennedy’s head. But it was turned the other way. He wanted to see his face, too. The young men were jumping all around him, however, and he sensed defeat; the Lincoln had slowly drawn abreast of them and was passing on. Then—perhaps he had seen the reversed collar in the corner of his eye—the President spun in his seat, looked directly at Father Huber, and smiled. “Hurray!” shouted the priest, completely carried away. He continued to bound until the boys grinned at him. He didn’t care. He trudged back to his rectory, short of breath but contented. At last he had seen a President, and he could scarcely wait to tell those lazy Fathers lounging around the rectory television set.

  Around the corner, in the neck of the bottle, Ted Dealey was watching television in a corner room on the nineteenth floor of his exclusive apartment building at 3525 Turtle Creek. Ted had just returned from a physical checkup and changed into a sport shirt. He was boycotting the Trade Mart luncheon; his son could represent the News. Below him he heard a sputtering of engines. He looked down. The motorcade was passing through Oak Lawn Park. Squinting, he made out a flash of color. Pink, he thought. Some woman wearing a pink hat.

  In the park the lead car passed the statue of Robert E. Lee. Forrest Sorrels felt nostalgic. He thought about the day that statue was dedicated by Franklin Roosevelt. Sorrels had been a young agent then; he had never been charged with the protection of a great man before, and he remembered his anxieties. Now it had become routine. All the same, he wished there weren’t so many open windows today.

  The crowds were thickening now. Every inch of curb was occupied, and up ahead there was a flurry of excitement. On the west side of Cedar Springs Warren G. Harding, the six-foot-one, 225-pound County Treasurer, was standing outside Dallas County’s Democratic party headquarters. The President passed within four feet of Harding, who was struck by what he thought was a preoccupied expression in Kennedy’s eyes. He had just asked a nearby judge whether he had the same impression—the judge confirmed him—when he observed two young men on the opposite side of the street holding a large Goldwater sign. Infuriated, Harding shook his fist at them, and after the motorcade had passed he crossed over and demanded to know why they were injecting partisan politics into a visit by a President of the United States. The men felt equally belligerent. In a few ugly phrases one gave a profane description of this President. Harding stepped forward, crowding him. Then he heard a call. The judge was pointing at his watch. It was 12:15. They were due at the Trade Mart in fifteen minutes; even taking the back way, they were going to have to hurry if they expected to beat the President there. Harding glared at the men, glared at their sign, and turned on his heel.

  At Live Oak Street, two blocks north of Main, the roaring began. People were standing eight, ten, even twelve deep on the sidewalks, and secretaries were hanging out of windows overhead. Every Kennedy voter in the county seemed to be there. Barred from the luncheon, they were paying tribute in the only way left to them. A dense mob to the left, many of them with dark, Mexican faces, surged into Harwood Street. In the crush Greer decelerated from twenty miles an hour to fifteen, then to ten, then to seven. The overflow crowd forced Motorcycle Policeman B. W. Hargis, riding two feet from the left rear fender of the Lincoln, to drop back. It was on Mrs. Kennedy’s side—each time she lifted her white glove her fluttering fingers evoked an undulating “Jackiiieee!”—and Clint Hill, the most active agent in Dallas that day, leaped off Halfback’s running board and dashed up to replace Hargis, shielding her with his body.

  They were at Main. Diagonally across the intersection, to their left, loomed the gray stone pile of the Dallas city jail, Chief Curry’s headquarters. The chief turned right, and as Greer pivoted behind him John Kennedy looked ahead down a twelve-block-long human canyon. This was the mouth of the bottle, fifteen hundred yards of baying office workers, fluttering bunting, and incredible heat. Far above the din the eight skyscrapers of downtown Dallas raised their mammoth shoulders against a stainless sky. Atop the Republic National Bank Building a revolving searchlight, now still, jutted into the blue like an oversized cherry picker. The clock on the glittering new spire of the Mercantile Bank read 12:21 P.M.

  That was Central Standard Time. The qualification is significant. A century earlier, on April 15, 1865, Abraham Lincoln had died in the Tenth Street Washington house of William Peterson, a tailor, at 7:20 A.M., and though Eastern Standard Time as it is now understood was nearly four years old, no one observed the distinction. It would have been irrelevant. Men elsewhere lived in separate worlds then. Time and space had genuine meaning. By the time distant communities learned of the assassination and grasped its implications, local conditions and individual circumstances had altered, and they viewed the President’s death with perspectives quite different from those of Washingtonians.

  By November 22, 1963, all that had changed. Few thought about it, for in the absence of shattering developments people were insulated from events on the other side of the horizon by work, families, and friends. Yet the potential for simultaneous experience was there. Television alone had shrunk the dimensions of the globe until the impact of a great tragedy would be felt coinstantaneously by hundreds of millions of people in the Western Hemisphere and, through Telstar, the relay satellite, by remote Russians for whom Central Standard Time’s twelve o’clock noon was twelve o’clock midnight.

  The age, moreover, was an age of unprecedented mobility. The average nineteenth-century American never left his native state. Often he died without ever having traveled farther than thirty miles from his birthplace. Everything he saw he saw over his harness reins. His great-grandson of a hundred years later had very likely grown up in one part of the country, married a girl from a second, and was employed in a third. During the early 1940’s he had fought in Africa, Europe, or Asia. Now he could easily fly from Boston to New York, say, on the hourly shuttle, or span the entire country during a short summer vacation. Some careers made a man a virtual nomad, and the more powerful and affluent he was, the more he resorted to air travel. Because powerful individuals have strong feelings about any President, and because President Kennedy was a man of great personal wealth, it was inevitable that many whose lives and thoughts were linked with his should have been on the move that Friday noon—in airports, or aloft, or on distant continents which, to them, were scarcely more than overnight stops.

  In London, where it was 6:21 P.M., Jacqueline Kennedy’s sister Lee was in her home at 4 Buckingham Place. Her husband, Prince Stanislaus Radziwill, an exiled Polish nobleman, was at the St. James’s Club. The Radziwills were stationary for the moment. But they also had a home in Manhattan and were accustomed to crossing the Atlantic almost as casually as the Prince’s grandfather had crossed the street. The clock in the lobby of Rome’s Eden Hotel stood at 7:21 P.M. There the Most Reverend Philip N. Hannan, Auxiliary Bishop of Washington, who had flown over for the Council at the Vatican, was chatting with an American Catholic layman. In the United States, Senator Barry Goldwater, the Republican most likely to lose to President Kennedy in 1964, was flying to Muncie, Indiana, for the funeral of his mother-in-law. The idol of the Dallas Right, retired Major General Edwin Walker, was in another airliner halfway between New Orleans and Shreveport, Louisiana, and Democratic Chairman John Bailey was approaching Austin on his Delta flight.

  Friends and antagonists alike, they were far closer than they realized
to the intersection of Harwood and Main, and in a crisis all could move to Dallas, to Washington, or to any other point in the United States in a matter of hours. The most isolated was Mrs. Paul Mellon, a gentle patrician who watched over the executive mansion’s Rose Garden at the President’s request. Bunny Mellon was in the British West Indies. She had gone down to confer with the architect of a new estate she was building. Conditions were primitive, communications were by runner. There were no telephones on the island, and no telegraph. American radio stations were out of range. A rising storm was about to ground the nearest commercial airline. Yet even Bunny Mellon could not escape the rule of twentieth-century concurrent experience. Her radio set could pick up French-language broadcasts from Martinique, which could relay Paris bulletins. And as a Mellon she had her own private plane and pilots in New York.

  At Love Field itself Candy McMurrey, sister-in-law of Senator Edward M. Kennedy, the President’s younger brother, was awaiting the 12:45 departure of American Airlines Flight 58 to Washington. The gigantic wing span of Air Force One was clearly visible from the gate, and Candy, who had flown with the Chief Executive last summer, was describing the lovely interior to her husband, a Houston attorney. He listened attentively; as a Texan he would feel somewhat strange at Ted’s and Joan’s anniversary celebration in Georgetown tonight, and this would serve as a conversation piece. The celebration was to be an elaborate affair. At that moment the Caroline was over New Jersey, winging southward from New York with most of the Senator’s twenty-six guests. In the morning the Caroline would again be airborne. The entire party had tickets to the Harvard-Yale game and were going to spend the remainder of the weekend at Hyannis Port with Mr. and Mrs. Joseph P. Kennedy.

  Hawaiian time, as Bill Greer spun the wheel of the big Lincoln, was 8:21 A.M. The Cabinet plane, Aircraft 86972, had left Hickam Field and was bulling its way through strong headwinds toward Japan. Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman was finishing his breakfast and talking to his wife Jane. Rusk of State, Dillon of the Treasury, Hodges of Commerce, Wirtz of Labor, and Udall of the Interior were poring over their black briefing books. Pierre Salinger gazed absently out the window at the endless blue-gray seascape. In the cockpit the pilot took a reading and made a calculation. The results were annoying. The wind was holding them below 450 mph. He had planned to make Tokyo in one jump; now he realized he would have to refuel at Wake, 1,874 miles away. The change of plan meant little to his distinguished passengers. In Washington each of them was a prisoner of his appointments secretary; if a Cabinet member stepped into the hall for a word with a subordinate, the fact was carefully noted in his official diary. Here they could read and daydream. It was a rare luxury, and they were enjoying it. Even Salinger forgot the silent AP and UPI teletype machines in the communications shack. A White House telephone stood beside it, but there seemed to be no reason why it should ring. In fact, no one had remembered to bring a code book.