The Death of a President

by William Manchester

  Salinger, switched back to the Situation Room, was hanging on. Like Sorensen at lunch, he recalled, and nervously mentioned, the twenty-year cycle of Presidential deaths. It didn’t hold, one member of the Cabinet objected—they were actually taking the coincidence seriously—because Roosevelt’s four terms had disrupted it. Suddenly everyone was talking at once. The tone was one of strenuous optimism. Freeman, especially vehement, insisted that a head wound wasn’t necessarily fatal; as a Marine officer he himself had survived one on Bougainville.

  “Wayside, stand by on this line,” Commander Hallett said. “We are trying to verify information.”

  Thirty seconds passed.

  “Situation to Wayside. We are still verifying. Stand by.”

  Thirty seconds.

  “Wayside, stand by.”

  “I’m standing by,” Pierre said.

  It went on and on, every thirty seconds.

  Pierre was remembering all the crises in which he had stood at Kennedy’s side. Now, when he was needed most, he was eight thousand miles away. Rusk’s thoughts were almost identical. He had never felt so helpless. His President and his country were in agony, and he was locked in a sealed tube 35,000 feet above the ocean.

  On the fifth floor of the Justice Department Building at Ninth Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, J. Edgar Hoover had picked up his direct line to the Attorney General’s office. It was answered by Angie Novello, who was staring across a desk at a frayed UPI page held aloft by a weeping press office secretary.

  “This is J. Edgar Hoover.” His delivery, as always, was staccato, shrill, mechanical. “Have you heard the news?”

  “Yes, Mr. Hoover, but I’m not going to break it to him.”

  “The President has been shot. I’ll call him.”

  A White House operator connected him with Extension 163, at the end of the swimming pool behind the Virginia mansion. In response to the ring Ethel Kennedy left the men. The operator told her, “The Director is calling.” Ethel didn’t have to ask which one. In official Washington there were many directors, but only one Director. She said, “The Attorney General is at lunch.”

  At the other corner of the pool her husband had just glanced at his watch. It was 1:45 P.M. They had been away from the office over an hour. He picked up a tuna fish sandwich and said to Morgenthau, “We’d better hurry and get back to that meeting.”

  “This is urgent,” the operator told Ethel.

  Ethel held out the white receiver. She called, “It’s J. Edgar Hoover.”

  Robert Kennedy knew something out of the ordinary had happened; the Director never called him at home. Dropping his sandwich, he crossed to the phone, and as he took it Morgenthau saw the workman with the transistor radio whirl and run toward them, gibbering.

  The Attorney General identified himself.

  “I have news for you. The President’s been shot,” Hoover said tonelessly.

  There was a pause. Kennedy asked whether it was serious.

  “I think it’s serious. I am endeavoring to get details,” said Hoover. “I’ll call you back when I find out more.”

  The Director hung up. The Attorney General hung up. He started back toward his wife and his two mystified guests, who were just beginning to understand the workman’s babbling. Midway toward them Kennedy stopped. It had hit him. His jaw sagged; to Morgenthau it seemed that his every muscle was contorted with horror.

  “Jack’s been shot!” he said, gagging, and clapped his hand over his face.

  Ethel ran over and embraced him, and Morgenthau and his assistant hurriedly withdrew into the house. Their instincts were correct; leaving him alone was the most that anyone except his wife could have done for him. Unfortunately, solitude was impossible. His obligations were too great. Grief was an indulgence which must be postponed, or, more accurately, restrained, for absolute control was impossible. He nearly brought it off. Like the President, he disapproved of public displays of private feeling, and none of the friends who were about to gather in the yard at Hickory Hill saw him break. Nevertheless there were intervals when he had to turn his back and look away toward the bathhouse, the tennis net, the gnarled trees, the tree house—to wherever there were no eyes to gaze back.

  These intervals were brief. His first thought was to fly to the side of his wounded brother, and after alerting McNamara to the need for immediate transportation he darted upstairs to change his clothes. Meantime telephones were ringing incessantly; during the first quarter-hour calls were received or placed at the pool, the court, the upstairs study, and the downstairs library. Taz Shepard offered help in informing members of the family. Kennedy politely thanked him; that was his own responsibility. While instructing Clint Hill to make sure a priest reached the hospital he asked, “What kind of doctors do they have?” and “How is Jackie taking it?” He held several subsequent conversations with McNamara (who had been told that his own information was coming from the DIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and who in the confusion thought that the source was the CIA), and once he took a call from John McCone of the CIA (who was actually watching Walter Cronkite).

  The CIA building was a five-minute drive from Hickory Hill. Kennedy asked McCone, “Jack, can you come over?”

  In his limousine McCone, the governmental director immediately concerned with international plots, wondered, as he had been wondering since a breathless assistant broke the news to him, whether this could be the result of one. He had received no intelligence; he could reach no judgment. All he could do was speculate over the bigotry which had been cropping up in certain American cities, notably Dallas.

  Wandering from extension to extension, Robert Kennedy murmured to himself, “There’s been so much hate.”

  At the Republican end of the Senate lobby the UPI ticker, ignored, had clattered out its lengthening page of historic bulletins. The AP machine stirred and clanged. In the torpor induced by the federal library debate it, too, would have been overlooked had not Senator Wayne Morse’s hunger for news been insatiable. Phyllis Rock of his office was maintaining a vigil near the AP teletype. At 1:41 she checked it and cried out. Richard Riedel tossed down his newspaper, came over, and read:

  … AP Photographer James W. Altgens said he saw blood on the President’s head.

  Altgens said he heard two shots but thought someone was shooting fireworks.…

  In the half-century since he had come to the Senate as a nine-year-old page boy Riedel had never before committed the breach of running out on the Senate floor. Now he raced up to Senator after Senator, spluttering, “The President has been shot—the President—he’s been shot!” Holland of Florida gaped at him, Dirksen of Illinois sagged. His face empty, Riedel looked up to the rostrum for help and saw Kennedy of Massachusetts. In a cloakroom the strained rumors had just reached the Majority Leader, Mike Mansfield. Mike remembered that Ted had been presiding when Patrick Kennedy died, and he moved toward the chair. Riedel beat him there. On the dais he began, “The most horrible thing has happened! It’s terrible, terrible!”

  The Senator had been signing correspondence. His pen wavered. He asked, “What is it?”

  “Your brother.” Riedel remembered that Ted had two brothers. “Your brother the President. He’s been shot.”

  The Senator stared at him as though through a veil, then looked at Holland, who was deftly approaching from the other side to relieve him of the gavel. “How do you know?”

  “It’s on the ticker. Just came in on the ticker.”

  Ted hastily gathered up his papers, and Riedel put his hand on his shoulder. “Maybe you can take a jet to Texas. Is there anything I can do?”

  “No,” said Ted, and quickly departed.

  Behind him he left pandemonium. Parliamentary procedure fell apart. Morse asked Prouty to “yield for a quorum call for an emergency,” and on the other side of Constitution Avenue quorum buzzers sounded in every Senator’s office. (Through this extension of word-of-mouth, supplemented by a secretary’s phone call, Church of Idaho was in
formed while attending a formal luncheon on the eighth floor of the State Department. He then made the announcement to Averell Harriman and the assembled diplomats.) Morse’s move should have prepared the way for an adjournment motion from the Majority Leader. But Mansfield was overcome, he couldn’t speak. Dirksen made the move as Minority Leader. He forgot to provide a reason for the record, however, and so, with Holland presiding, the Senate just stopped.

  In the lobby Ted Kennedy broke his stride between the teletype machines. It was impossible to see anything. Crowds had thickened around both. He swerved toward Lyndon Johnson’s office and dialed the Attorney General’s office from there—government code 187, Extension 2001. Nothing happened. There was no dial tone, no sound at all. He dialed again and received a busy signal. Unaware of his direction, he reeled into the street. There a legislative assistant who had been listening to his own car radio recognized him and drove him the half-block to his suite in the Old Senate Office Building. On the sidewalk Claude Hooten of Houston, a Harvard classmate of Ted’s, was waiting. Hooten had arrived for the Senator’s anniversary celebration. The first reports had reached him, and he led the Senator into the suite, where, it seemed to Ted, countless portable radios were squawking in horrid concert.

  The telephone crisis was growing queerer and queerer. Calls could come in—Martin Agronsky of NBC was inquiring whether the Senator planned a flight to Dallas—but when Ted retired to his private office and tried again to reach his brother, either at Justice or through the White House, all the lines were dead. After a pause one did briefly come to life. The White House switchboard, however, told him that the Attorney General was talking to Dallas, and since Ted Kennedy, unlike Bob, didn’t have an executive mansion extension, there was no way of splicing him into the call. The conversation was with Clint Hill, but Ted didn’t know that. He didn’t even know that the President was in a hospital. Like Bill Pozen at Interior, he was left with a useless black plastic receiver and the task of trying to assess the scope of the calamity. In retrospect its boundaries are clear: there was an assassin at large in Dallas, two victims at Parkland, and reaction everywhere else. That clarity did not exist then. The wounding of John Kennedy was the largest cloud in the sky, but it did not exclude the possibility of others, and the Senator thought of his wife. He wanted to be sure Joan was safe. He asked for his Chrysler. It was unavailable; an aide was using it to run errands. Milt Gwirtzman, another Harvard classmate and a member of his staff, offered his Mercedes, and in it Ted, Milt, and Claude streaked down Pennsylvania Avenue, around the White House on South Executive, out E Street, Virginia Avenue, and the Rock Creek Parkway, into Georgetown. Milt ignored red lights. Beside him Ted pointed warningly to onrushing cars with one hand and, with the other, clutched a transistor radio he had borrowed from a secretary. Claude sat in the back, his head in his hands. As they threaded their way past a jungle of construction outside the State Department, the radio reported that the President was still alive. Milt breathed a prayer of thanks. Claude said, “My God, my God, the President shot—and in my state!” Ted said nothing.

  Twelve minutes after leaving the Hill the Mercedes skidded against the curb outside 1607 Twenty-eighth Street, and the Senator, searching his house for his wife, learned from a maid that she was having her hair done. Milt volunteered to get her. Careening off again, he reached Elizabeth Arden’s Connecticut Avenue studio before anyone there told Joan. They knew. Preparing to pay her bill she had become aware of a sudden quietness around her. Then, before cashier or customers could speak, he appeared. “Why, Milty, what a surprise!” she said. She really was taken aback; it was so odd to see a man in a beauty parlor. She kept glancing at him expectantly until, as they sped away, he explained that the President had been hurt. “It’s a shooting,” he said carefully, trying to keep his voice even. “We have no news except for that.” Thinking of Patrick—it was inconceivable to her that her brother-in-law would not recover—she said, “Oh, they’ve had so much trouble this year!”

  On the Twenty-eighth Street threshold Ted awaited them. His face was taut and drained. “All the phones are gone,” he said. He and Claude had been going through the house, picking up extensions. They had been unable to get a dial tone. The Chesapeake & Potomac Telephone Company was deaf and dumb. It was as though Alexander Graham Bell had never been born. They began to wonder whether the failure of the system could be more than an accident; Joan, scared, said, “There must be some national reason.” Ted decided to conduct a door-to-door search, asking permission of strangers to test instruments until they found one that worked. It seemed to be the only solution. He had turned on his television set, but despite their many excursions since he left the Senate rostrum the commentators were still exasperatingly vague. He had to reach Hickory Hill. Bob had talked to Dallas; he would know something. On the sidewalk Ted said to Claude, “We’ll split up. You try the doors on the right. I’ll take the left. If you get something, let me know.”

  The President had been shot, had been raced to Parkland, and had been in Jacqueline Kennedy’s arms outside the ambulance ramp when, at 1:37 P.M. Washington time, Liz Pozen had drawn up outside the South Portico of the executive mansion. She had switched off her radio as the children jumped in, squealing. Caroline and Agatha climbed toward the rear of the station wagon. “We’re going to sit in the very backest seat,” Caroline called, stowing her suitcase and pink teddy bear there. Counting the children, Liz watched her covertly. Caroline was a sophisticated child; in many ways she carried her emotions as easily as an adult. Obviously she was a trifle nervous about her first night away from home, but she seemed game.

  Behind them Agent Tom Wells switched on the ignition in his Secret Service Ford. Unhooking the microphone under the dashboard, he radioed headquarters control, “Crown, Crown. This is Dasher. Lyric is en route to her destination.”

  The exact route to that destination was up to Liz Pozen, and she was pondering choices. Usually her house on Raymond Street was the first stop on the car pool route. Her first thought was to drop Caroline and Agatha off there and let them play while she continued on with the other children. There was an alternative. Because the school was in Caroline’s house, she had never ridden in the pool before, and she might enjoy the entire circuit. Entering the Rock Creek Parkway, Liz was still debating with herself when she noticed that the giggles and chatter behind her had begun to die down. Caroline and Agatha were no longer babbling excitedly about the prospect of having tea with her this afternoon at Lord & Taylor’s, and the other first-graders had exhausted their small sources of gossip. A pall was settling over the station wagon. Motherly instinct told Liz that this could be the silence before a storm of quarreling. Music might divert them. Remembering that WGMS had scheduled a musical program for this hour, she switched on her radio.

  Watching traffic, trying to decide whether to turn toward her house, Liz heard the voice of an unfamiliar announcer coming on:

  “… shot in the head and his wife Jackie…”

  She instantly switched it off. To the best of her later recollection, the volume was low and those were the only words spoken. The children, she was convinced, heard nothing. Caroline’s subsequent remarks to Tom Wells suggest that there may have been more to the broadcast than Liz thought, but at most it would have been hazy; all bulletins were hazy then. Certainly the President’s daughter could have had no grasp of what had really happened; Liz herself did not know.

  “War of the Worlds,” she thought, remembering the realistic 1938 radio drama of invading Martians. She looked wide-eyed into her rearview mirror and tried to read Tom Wells’s expression. From here it was unfathomable.

  The agent’s commercial radio was on, but he heard nothing from his station until they had left the parkway and turned north on Connecticut Avenue. They were passing the National Zoo when the program to which he was tuned was interrupted for the nebulous flash, “We have an unconfirmed report of a shooting in the area of the Presidential motorcade in Dallas.” In the year sinc
e Wells had joined the White House Detail the possibility of such a situation had never been far from the surface of his mind. Through his windshield he rapidly scanned the station wagon, but Liz, dark and petite, was too small to be seen from here, and the children, below window level, were invisible. It was as though all the occupants had been mysteriously spirited away, leaving the station wagon to cruise madly toward Chevy Chase Circle under its own power.

  Liz Pozen was out of touch. Switching her set on again was unthinkable; she had to remain in the dark until every child, including her own, had been settled down. At the same time, the question of which route she would take had been resolved for her. She would have to pass Raymond Street, keeping Caroline and Agatha with her. The only risk in remaining on the road was that a stranger in a passing car, hearing the news on his own radio, might see Caroline, recognize her from her pictures, and act rashly. She peered out furtively at southbound drivers. Like Wells, they were impassive.

  His station had resumed its regular program. Four blocks beyond the zoo there was another break—the network was speculating that some members of the Presidential party, perhaps even President Kennedy himself, had been shot. Nothing was firm. Station routine was abandoned for a running account of developments in Dallas, but the announcer was being exceptionally guarded.