The Death of a President

by William Manchester

  2:20 P.M. Katzenbach dictates text of Presidential oath to Marie Fehmer. 3:20 P.M.

  2:30 P.M. Interrogation of Oswald begins in Room 317; Sorrels of Secret Service and Hosty of FBI are present. Cabinet plane lands in Hawaii. 3:30 P.M.

  3:15 P.M. Networks broadcast news of a suspect’s arrest. 4:15 P.M.

  3:23 P.M. Networks identify Oswald by name; his age is given as 24. 4:23 P.M.

  3:26 P.M. Networks tell of Oswald’s 1959 application for Russian citizenship; the public links Tippit’s murder with the assassination; Marguerite Oswald, leaving for work, turns on car radio and hears her son has been arrested. 4:26 P.M.

  Marguerite wheeled her ancient Buick 180 degrees, drove the seven blocks back to her house, and telephoned Bob Schieffer, a reporter on the Fort Worth Star Telegram. For the first time since her son’s attempt to turn his coat in Moscow she was a public figure. She was, in her words, “the accused mother.”

  The accused mother’s subsequent movements seem to have been motivated by a remarkable interest in publicity and finance. According to Marina, whom she joined after Schieffer and another newspaperman drove her to Dallas, her “mania” was “money, money, money.” Marguerite afterward remembered how she had tried to bargain with them. “Mamma wants money,” she told Marina. She extended her hand toward the men and rubbed the thumb against the fingers. “Boys, I’ll give you a story—for money,” she told one of them, who had identified himself as “Tommy” Thompson. Mamma was not as shrewd as she appeared to be. She was not paid for the pictures. To make things worse, they were unflattering. The photographer neglected to warn her when he was going to snap his shutter, and while she was making herself comfortable he shot her sitting with her stockings rolled down, exposing her fleshy legs. She never forgave him for that. A year later the memory still rankled.

  In the first hours it was hard for Marguerite to know what approach she should take. She hadn’t found her bearings. Unexpectedly she had become a celebrity, but she had no agent, and dealing with mass media was exasperating. There was little time for other details; when Lee telephoned from jail and asked to speak to Marina, his mother curtly terminated the conversation. To Ruth Paine, who was taken aback by this episode, she explained her dilemma: “Well, he’s in prison, he doesn’t know the things we are up against, what we have to face. What he wants really doesn’t matter.”

  Marguerite Oswald is the most implausible individual in her son’s life, himself excluded, and she may be sui generis, but then they are all implausible. It would be too facile to dismiss the public’s desire to quarantine Lee as mere smugness. The men and women he knew are odd. Indeed, Oswald is rather like a Dickensian caricature. He bears a striking resemblance to the title character in Barnaby Rudge. Born on the day of his father’s death, Barnaby was twisted by the maternal blunders of Mary Rudge, a woman whose life, like Marguerite’s, had been one of hardship and sorrow. Half-witted and highly susceptible to his environment, the youth was swept up in the No Popery mob that marched on Parliament, hooted at Edmund Burke, and burned most of London in 1780. Rudge, like Oswald, was friendless—his only confidant was a raven—and Oswald, like Rudge, was unable to cope with the most obvious consequences of his actions. Leaving Tippit’s corpse, he fled into a movie, thinking that he would find asylum in its sheltering darkness. It never occurred to him that the flick of a switch could turn up the house lights, exposing him there in the tenth row.

  The film was War Is Hell, a bad B-movie. Oswald’s own incredible tale is authentic, and America knows it, for the national audience was there. Because television squeezed a hundred million people under the canopy of that theater marquee as he was being led out and then took them to Captain Fritz’s Room 317 while newscasters fed the country scraps of data about his past, that authenticity was established during his first hours in custody. The nation knew as much as the interrogation team. Some individuals knew more; Commander Hallett heard the suspect’s name and said, “I wonder if that’s the guy I knew in the Soviet Union,” and Hallett’s sixteen-year-old daughter Caroline, arriving home from Stone Ridge School, saw Oswald’s picture on their set and cried, “He was in Moscow!” The Halletts had recognized him before the networks put his Soviet record on the air. When it was broadcast, George Ball turned away from his twenty-four-inch screen on the eighth floor of the State Building. The Acting Secretary was worried. He checked the department’s files to see whether there was anything there, and found there was a lot.

  Oswald’s Russian adventure was avidly seized upon. If America couldn’t shuck him, the Reds could be saddled with him. In reality his absence from Texas had been brief. He had been in the U.S.S.R. thirty-two months, and during most of that time he had been trying to get out; after the first year he wrote in his diary: “I am starting to reconcider my desire about staying. The work is drab. The money I get has nowhere to be spent. No nightclubs or bowling allys, no places of recreation acept the trade union dances. I have had enough.” So he returned to the state which must accept the fact that it was his home, just as Americans must learn to accept him as a figure in American history.

  Dallas was especially anxious to forget that the assassin had prowled its streets, read its leading newspaper, watched the patriotic programs on WFAA, and listened to the anti-Kennedy stories of his fellow employees in Dealey Plaza. Bernard Weissman testified afterward that when he heard Oswald had called himself a Marxist—that he hadn’t been “one of Walker’s boys” after all—he “breathed a sigh of relief,” and Bob Baskin of the Dallas News was “relieved that he was not of the right wing.” Yet even then there were Dallasites who were afraid that the world would be skeptical. A Parkland physician said warily, “Dallas has had several incidents that have been very unfortunate”; a Texas Ranger said, “Dallas will have a real black mark now”; a salesman told a Newsweek correspondent, “I hope you guys don’t think too bad of Dallas”; and Merriman Smith, riding from Parkland to Love Field, heard the police driver say, “I hope they don’t blame this on Dallas.” Someone in the car replied, “They will.”

  The fact that they would troubled Dallas. Big D brooded about its image, unaware that the watching country would regard that very anxiety as suspect. In the Baker Hotel’s Club Imperial and in the Republic and Mercantile Bank buildings there was a deepening worry that the bad publicity might get worse. Civic leaders were glum. The Dallas Chamber of Commerce issued a statement of regret over the President’s death. Later Friday afternoon District Attorney Henry M. Wade, the man responsible for the assassin’s prosecution, departed his office for a social function and failed to leave a number at which he could be reached, but his second assistant, William F. “Bill” Alexander, prepared to charge Oswald with murdering the President “as part of an international Communist conspiracy.” Perhaps that canard would have absolved Dallas. The indictment could have had grave repercussions abroad, however, and although it had already been drawn up, when Barefoot Sanders heard of it from the FBI he phoned Nick Katzenbach, who persuaded two members of the Vice President’s Washington staff to have their Texas contacts kill it.10

  Mayor Earle Cabell’s first reaction to the arrest was sanguine. That Friday he expressed confidence that the assassination “would not hurt Dallas as a city.” The News, on the other hand, was saturnine. In an editorial which would be published in its next edition the paper declared, “It cannot be charged with fairness that an entire city is in national disgrace, but certainly its reputation has suffered regrettable damage.” Actually, no thoughtful critic was prepared to fault the entire city. At noon Main Street had been solid with liberal Kennedy Democrats, and the riders in the motorcade would never forget their enthusiasm. What was suspect was the cult of absolutists whose polemics could have swayed a deranged mind. The leader writer for the Dallas Times Herald understood this. He reminded his readers that before the shots could have been fired, “first there had to be the seeds of hate—and we must pray that Dallas can never supply the atmosphere for tragedy to grow again.”
Yet any criticism, even self-criticism, was rejected by many in Dallas. “What on earth did we do to deserve this?” a bewildered man asked Warren Leslie, a New Yorker who had become a member of the city’s mercantile elite—he would soon resign from it—and in the Club Imperial there were complaints that the city was being victimized, that left-wing Eastern liberals and intellectuals were ganging up on Dallas conservatism.

  There was no remorse among the city’s rightists on the afternoon of November 22. At 3:05 P.M., when 80 percent of the American people were in deep grief, an NBC camera panned toward a group of spectators outside Parkland’s emergency entrance and picked up a young man with a placard that read, “YANKEE, GO HOME.”11 Barefoot Sanders was astounded to learn that although next day’s Harvard-Yale game had been called off, interrupting the oldest football rivalry in the country, most Dallas County high schools were going ahead with plans to play under lights that Friday evening. When Warren Harding arrived home, a child who lived in his block said, “Mr. Harding, I’m sorry your President died.” Harding didn’t know what to say. He puckered and then replied, “Son, he was your President, too. He was everybody’s President.” The child shook his head. “He wasn’t ours,” he said. “My Mom and Daddy didn’t vote for him. He didn’t mean anything to us.”

  In the White House Ralph Dungan removed his pipe. He leaned forward against his desk and buried his head in his arms.

  “And the hell of it is, they’ll blame it all on that twenty-four-year-old boy,” he told Pat Moynihan.

  Five

  GO, STRANGER

  “Liz Carpenter, please come to the administrative office,” Parkland’s PA system had barked for the last time and then quit, coughing static. In the lull that had followed, President Kennedy’s wife sat outside Trauma Room No. 1 in unique isolation. An hour ago she had been America’s First Lady, encompassed by panoply and special privilege, all of which had vanished in the speed of a full-jacketed cartridge. Officially she no longer existed. Every other member of the Presidential party had retained his title and gauds of power. Her own secretaries were still White House secretaries, but she herself was a widow, and the government had no G.S. classification for that. Everything that she had been had stemmed from John Kennedy’s position. Ted Clifton and Godfrey McHugh had stayed at Parkland; Roy Kellerman was keeping the four-to-twelve shift at the hospital—six agents and Bill Greer—but the generals and Roy were acting without authorization and, technically, without justification. Their commissions and commission books did not mention her. There was no provision in either the U.S. Constitution or the U.S. Code for a dead President’s wife. Indeed, had the law been observed literally, even Kennedy’s closest lieutenants, Ken O’Donnell, Larry O’Brien, and Dave Powers, should have been aboard Aircraft 26000. The entire apparatus of the Executive Branch of the federal government belonged to Lyndon Johnson now. When he left for Love Field at 1:26 P.M., it was their legal duty to follow. Jacqueline Kennedy was entitled to neither aides nor bodyguards. She wasn’t a Chief Executive, and wasn’t related to one.

  “I’m not going to leave here without Jack,” she whispered to Ken.

  “Let’s get a coffin,” he said to Clint Hill, Andy Berger, and Dr. Burkley, and Burkley said to Jack Price, “I want the best undertaker in Dallas and the best bronze coffin.”

  “You don’t mean it,” a woman’s voice moaned.

  It was Mary Gallagher. No one had told her of the death. She was standing on the other side of the green line, clutching the pillbox hat with the tuft of Jackie’s black hair and the stain in back. “I mean it,” the doctor said. He saw Evelyn Lincoln crying in the next cubicle; he kissed them both and told them, “Don’t change your expression for Mrs. Kennedy.”

  They were all thinking of her, wishing they could do something to ease her pain. Wouldn’t you like some more water? she was asked. Would you like a cup of coffee? A pill? A place to lie down? In the softest of voices she declined. The door of the trauma room was closed. Inside, Doris Nelson was washing the body with Margaret Hinchcliffe while David Sanders, an orderly, mopped the floor and removed the dirty instruments. Even they wanted to cosset the widow. Doris put her head out and said, “Can I get you a towel?” Jackie shook her head politely. “Why don’t you remove your gloves?” Doris persisted.

  “No, thank you. I’m all right.”

  Those who had been in the motorcade were racking their brains with if only this, if only that. One of them came to her. Bill Greer, his face streaked with tears, took her head between his hands and squeezed until she thought he was going to squeeze her skull flat. He cried, “Oh, Mrs. Kennedy, oh my God, oh my God. I didn’t mean to do it, I didn’t hear, I should have swerved the car, I couldn’t help it. Oh, Mrs. Kennedy, as soon as I saw it I swerved. If only I’d seen in time! Oh!” Then he released her head and put his arms around her and wept on her shoulder. Henry Gonzalez also wept. Henry hadn’t meant to; he had come to pay his respects and had every intention of behaving with dignity. But when he came up she looked so alone, and so frail, that he choked and cried, “Oh, Mrs. Kennedy! Is there anything I can do?” She shook her head and bowed it. As she did he saw the blood, and he knelt at her feet, praying, the soggy bag containing half of Governor Connally’s clothing in his hands and his face in her stained skirt. Then he crept back, retreating across the green line. After that no visitors got by O’Donnell until 1:30, when the undertaker arrived. Ken, once more at the peak of his efficiency, stood before the folding chair as a sentry. Some of the women, notably Dearie Cabell, were bent upon consoling her, but he diverted them all. After a time they stopped trying. He had an intimidating look about him. His head was cocked to one side, and there was a curious puckered expression on his face, as though he were constantly wincing.

  Stiff-faced, the young widow sat as thin and straight as a spire of smoke from a dying fire. She still felt faint—three times she swayed slightly and nearly lurched to the floor—but that was physical weakness; she retained her heightened sense of awareness. She was thinking clearly, and she was thinking ahead. There was one thing that someone could do for her. After the nurses had finished she wanted to be with the President’s body a moment, to touch him and give him something. It would have to be something of hers, something that would stay with him.

  Ken would see to it.

  “You just get me in there before they close that coffin,” she said to him quietly, and he nodded.

  Juggling the paper bag, Gonzalez thought of John Kennedy in the antiseptic little cell and Jacqueline Kennedy in the drab passage, separated from him by the closed door, each in utter solitude, and he remembered a line he had learned as a boy from the works of Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer:

  ¡Dios mío, que solos se quedan los muertos!

  (Oh God, how alone the dead are left!)

  Jack Price was being cagey. He didn’t want to show preference toward any mortician, and when Dr. Burkley requested his advice he stalled. “Well, you can get a casket from a military installation or a private home,” he answered noncommittally. Burkley said, “We just want a casket or a basket—something you can carry a body out with.” Steve Landregan passed by, and Clint Hill caught his arm. “We’ve got to get a casket,” Clint told him. Price said to Steve, “Hold up; they haven’t decided what they want yet.” The President’s physician was becoming impatient. “Just get us one as fast as you can,” he said grittily. Still evasive, Price inquired, “What kind should I ask for?” Exasperated, Burkley said, “I don’t give a damn! Just get one!”

  “Get one,” Price echoed to Steve.

  Trailed by Clint, Steve hurried to the hospital’s Social Service department.

  “Where’s the nearest funeral home?” he asked a woman there.

  “Oneal’s, in Oak Lawn,” she replied and gave him the number.

  “We can make the call here,” Steve said.

  He couldn’t. Bales had released lines, but Dallas’ Southwestern Bell, like Washington’s Chesapeake & Potomac, was crippled by overloaded
exchanges and circuits. Steve ran from office to office, picking up receivers, and he didn’t get a dial tone until he reached Price’s private office upstairs.

  “Now,” he panted to Clint, dialing Oneal’s LAkeside 6-5221.

  Vernon B. Oneal is an interesting figure in the story of John Kennedy. Squat, hairy, and professionally doleful, with a thick Texas accent and gray hair parted precisely in the middle and slicked back, he was the proprietor of an establishment which might have been invented by Waugh or Huxley. It had a wall-to-wall-carpeted Slumber Room. There was piped religious music, and a coffee bar for hungry relatives of loved ones. There was the fleet of white hearses—white, because the owner felt that death should never be depressing—which doubled as ambulances. The transformation was easy and ingenious. A driver put a red “AMBULANCE” sign in a side window, turned on his siren, and he was ready to haul the living. Identical vehicles conveyed the same individuals to Parkland and, after slumber, to memorial parks. A hustling businessman, Oneal had seven radio-equipped ambulance-hearses and his own dispatcher. The dispatcher was tied into the police network, because the concern had a contract with the city. In effect, it was a concession. Vernon Oneal handled tragedies east of the Trinity River, and Dudley M. Hughes, his chief competitor, worked the west bank. That was how the maimed were moved to emergency rooms in Dallas, and the only thing wrong with the arrangement was that on the early afternoon of November 22 seventeen of Oneal’s staff of eighteen men were out to lunch. The exception was his dispatcher. The two of them had stayed behind to mind the store. They had anticipated that the Presidential parade would reduce traffic and, therefore, automobile accidents. There had been no reason to expect a big job.

  “You’re kidding!” Oneal had gasped when the dispatcher told him that 601 was reporting a Code 3. The undertaker had yanked out a transistor radio from a desk drawer and had been following bulletins like everybody else when his phone rang.