“It’s the President of the United States!” Burkley cried.
“That doesn’t matter. You can’t lose the chain of evidence.”
The dispute spread outside the nurse’s station. Dave Powers heard about it and came over, incredulous. Rose explained everything to him in detail, then shook his head impatiently when Powers urged him to make an exception in this case.
“Regulations,” the examiner said, his voice frozen in B-flat.
Godfrey McHugh approached Rose and was told, “There are state laws about removing bodies. You people from Washington can’t make your own law.” Godfrey appealed to Mayor Cabell, who said that he had no authority to intervene; then to a member of Parkland’s administrative staff, who said that Rose was absolutely right; then to a policeman in civilian clothes, who suggested that a justice of the peace might be able to do something. “How long will that take?” Godfrey asked. “Ten or fifteen minutes,” the man said. “When we’re ready, we’re leaving,” Godfrey said indignantly.1
Burkley suggested that Rose come along on the plane. Rose shook his head; the law made no provision for such a trip. Ted Clifton remembered that he had talked to Attorney General Waggoner Carr of Texas on Aircraft 26000 during the flight to Dallas from Fort Worth, and he asked that he be paged over the PA system. The page was broadcast. Carr did not materialize. Although the party which had landed at Love Field less than three hours earlier had included virtually every Texan of rank, all of them had dispersed or headed for Love Field except the Governor, who was in surgery (and who, when he heard of Rose’s position ten months later, found it astonishing). In retrospect the furor that the medical examiner raised seems remarkable. He was a man of authority, but there ought to have been some way of diverting him. His strength was largely a strength of will. He was firm; while other Texans floundered or shrank from responsibility, he knew exactly what he wanted. The only Parkland doctor to side openly with the dead Chief Executive’s staff was Kemp Clark. “Jack, is there a JP in the building?” he asked Price. “Earl Rose has raised the question.” Clark explained the dilemma and added, “For God’s sake find someone—I’m trying to calm them down.”
The PA system inquired whether there were any justices of the peace within earshot. None stepped forward. Mayor Cabell and individual members of the staff began calling outside on their own initiative. JP after JP was reported to be out to lunch. The first caller to reach one was a woman in the admittance office. At Dallas County Precinct 3 she found Judge Theron Ward in his office. She sketchily filled him in and said, “We need you here immediately.”
Theron Ward could not comply immediately, or anything like it. Precinct 3 was in Garland, Texas, fourteen miles away. Pushing all the way, he made Parkland in twenty minutes. Had anyone there been in the mood to make allowances, he should have been congratulated. He wasn’t; by then no one there was making allowances for anyone. The row around Earl Rose had grown in intensity, and nearly everybody had become involved in it. Dr. Rose had talked to District Attorney Wade, who had advised him to step aside and let the Secret Service handle everything. A less combative man would have welcomed the escape hatch, but Rose didn’t want to escape. Instead, he became if anything more vehement. Burkley and McHugh were hopping up and down with frustration. O’Donnell and O’Brien, to whom Powers had reported everything, were standing off to one side and eying the medical examiner icily. But the mafia wasn’t going to intervene unless all the others had failed, and they were confident that would be unnecessary. Surely, they felt, there must be someone in Texas who could dispose of this prodigy.
Kemp Clark was still trying. He and Rose had exchanged bitter words, and afterward Clark had taken the worried Price aside and advised him that he favored using force. “It may come to pinning him down and sitting on him,” he warned, adding that he would be delighted to be among the sitters. He was one of many. If Rose had intended to pre-empt the center of the stage, he was meeting with spectacular success. Except for Jacqueline Kennedy, whose human shield had grown more dense since Father Cain’s intrusion, every eye was upon him. Even Vernon Oneal briefly left his Britannia casket to see what was going on. The medical examiner’s inflexibility surprised Oneal. Rose had always cooperated 100 percent with Dallas funeral directors, providing them with quick service and immediate autopsies. The undertaker, who was under the impression that the President was going to be cosmetized by him and conveyed to a local memorial park in one of his funeral coaches, couldn’t understand what the cavil was all about.
Outside Parkland, Theron Ward added his tan Buick coupé to the tangled junkyard. He might as well have arrived in a tumbrel. He was on his way to an execution of sorts. A justice of the peace could make no peace between the militants in Major Medicine; he could only mangle his own reputation. Ward was nearly saved from his fate—at the entrance he introduced himself to a Secret Service man as “the JP” and was promptly ejected. The misunderstanding arose from his title. On the Eastern seaboard a JP was a minor functionary, a rung or two above a notary public. In Texas he was an elected magistrate, with a courtroom and a daily docket. Judge Ward was accustomed to a more dignified reception, and when he presented himself at another entrance he got it, from a nurse who led him to the nurse’s station. She knew about the battle there. She looked grateful to see him and said so, which was the last kind word he was to hear for some time.
Earl Rose recognized him. His eyes lit up; he crooked his finger “peremptorily”—the adverb is Ward’s—and cried, “Judge Ward, you are under the gun! This case must be handled as no other case in history has been handled. If you allow this body to be moved, it will be moved illegally.”
During the hasty introductions which followed, Ward attempted to explain his role to the glowering federal officials who flanked the medical examiner. “I’m the JP who will be handling the case,” he said to Dr. Burkley, attempting to take Burkley’s arm. The arm was withdrawn. The President’s physician, in tears, was too outraged to debate legal points. Rose’s attitude had discredited Ward in advance, creating a violent revulsion toward local law. To the Washingtonians, moreover, the judge didn’t seem to be much of a jurist; Kellerman, like the agent who had turned him away, was unimpressed by the title of JP. Ward’s physical presence was no help. In primitive situations, and this one had become stark, physique may count for a great deal. A prepossessing newcomer—a Texan with the lordly bearing of a Connally—might have dominated the quarrel. The judge was short, slight, sandy-haired, and young. Finally, he appeared to be indecisive.
“I’ll handle everything as quickly as possible,” he assured Kellerman and Burkley. They eyed him skeptically and felt vindicated when, in the very next breath, he marched back down the hill. He begged for “a few minutes to check a point of law.”
Actually, his request was entirely reasonable. He was in strange country and plainly needed a guide. He would have been a remarkable magistrate had he been able to act without one. Even in Texas a justice of the peace is far down the bar, an arbiter of petty misdemeanors. The issue here would have taxed a Supreme Court Justice. Elsewhere in the same city at that very moment a federal judge and the U.S. Attorney for a hundred counties were vexed by the relatively simple question of the Presidential oath. During his debut, at least, Ward deserved a sympathetic hearing.
He didn’t get it. The men with whom he was pleading were in a fever of resentment. Their tempers couldn’t take another degree of heat. Shattered by the murder, antagonistic toward all Texans because of it, they had been harried past endurance by the inimical medical examiner. They looked upon Ward as Rose’s confederate until he proved himself otherwise, and to them an appeal for time was anything but proof.
Kellerman displayed his commission book. “My friend—Your Honor—isn’t there something in your law that makes a waiver possible?”
“I’m sorry,” Ward said unhappily. “I know who you are, but I can’t help you under these circumstances.”
“I’m sorry, too,” Roy said
grayly.
As Ward was talking Kellerman had noticed that the church truck was being rolled into view. He quickly paced across the green line to lead it out. Jacqueline Kennedy was standing behind it, her hand resting lightly on the bronze top. Clint Hill, Godfrey McHugh, Dugger, and Oneal were bunched around her; O’Donnell, O’Brien, Powers, Clifton, Gonzalez, and Andy Berger flanked the church truck.
Earl Rose stood at the wide door, embattled. It had come to that.
At this point, everything becomes confused. Judge Ward, who watched the beginning of the scene from the nurse’s station, afterward believed that the encounter was over in a matter of moments. In fact, it was prolonged. According to the nurses who were watching Parkland’s IBM clocks, Rose’s last stand lasted ten minutes. Since it was a direct confrontation between a diehard defender of state sovereignty and the representatives of the national government, with the body of the thirty-fifth Chief Executive lying between them, and since the medical examiner’s vehemence generated a sense of panic in the Presidential staff which persisted after they left Parkland and led to fresh scars at Love Field, the episode is worth a detailed chronological account. Regrettably, that is impossible. Only the highlights are clear. Each man has his own story, and all clash, because all are saturated with emotion. Mrs. Kennedy, who had the clearest eye there, would be an invaluable witness, but she was deliberately sequestered. Ken O’Donnell saw Rose’s arms defiantly akimbo and huddled with Powers.
Rose spotted the coffin. Gonzalez saw him hold up one flat hand, like a traffic cop. “We can’t release anything!” he said. “A violent death requires a post! It’s our law!”
Ken O’Donnell, the leader of Rose’s opposition, had been in the nurse’s station with Burkley, trying to get District Attorney Wade on the phone. Wade’s secretary had stalled and Ken had hung up. He thought he was the angriest man there. Then he glanced at Dugger. The huge sergeant was in a heavyweight’s crouch; his eyes were damp with tears; his fists were knotted and arching back and forth, like the warm-up swings of a batter. He’s going to belt him, Ken thought, he’s really going to do it. Dugger was thinking the same thing. “I like to have hit him,” he said later.
Rose himself looked as though he were ready to hit someone. The Dallas medical examiner seemed to be in a tantrum. His arms were flapping, his shirt was disheveled. The blood had left his freckled face, giving him the complexion of cold oatmeal. He was speaking rapidly in a shrill, animated voice, which to Gonzalez sounded like a screech. Following the thread of his thought was hard, but he appeared to be lecturing them on the protection of the innocent, the accused’s day in court, the credo of the physician and—he always returned to his central theme—the sanctity of the Texas statutes which federal employees were attempting to profane.
The men around the coffin decided to adopt Kemp Clark’s suggestion; if necessary, they would hold him down. A signal was passed, O’Donnell to Kellerman to the four-to-twelve shift. Rose was surrounded by muscle.
“You can’t leave now!” he said to Ken, bounding up and down to keep the coffin in view. “You can’t move it!”
Ken was beginning to doubt that anything could move. A crush of sweating men had developed around the wide door. The door had been forced open, and people were wedging their way in from the red-striped corridor beyond; Theron Ward estimated the crowd at forty. Until now Rose had been a lonely figure, but this was still Dallas, he was still a public official, and despite Sergeant Dugger’s defection a medical examiner’s natural allies were Dallas policemen. One of them was among the arrivals from the outer hall. He took up a position at Rose’s side. It looked as though they might have to hold more than one man down, and if the patrolman intervened actively, he would be no pushover; he was wearing a pistol and was fingering it.
As O’Donnell and O’Brien were shouldering their way toward Rose they were stopped by Burkley and McHugh, who proposed another solution. They explained that a local justice of the peace was present. He had the power to overrule the medical examiner. Everyone waited while the judge was summoned; then he arrived and disappointed them. He could do nothing, he said. If a JP suspected a homicide, it was his duty to order an autopsy. There were plenty of grounds for suspicion here, and he couldn’t overlook them. Ergo—he guessed the procedure wouldn’t take more than three hours.
O’Donnell asked that an exception be made for President Kennedy.
Although the din was atrocious, both he and O’Brien heard the justice of the peace say, with what they regarded as a distinctly unsympathetic inflection, “It’s just another homicide case as far as I’m concerned.”2
The effect on O’Donnell was instantaneous. He uttered a swart oath recommending monogenesis. Thrusting his head forward until their noses nearly grazed, he said, “We’re leaving.”
The policeman beside Rose pointed to the medical examiner and the justice of the peace and told O’Brien, “These two guys say you can’t go.”
“One side,” Larry said cuttingly. Jerking his head, Ken said, “Get the hell over. We’re getting out of here. We don’t give a damn what these laws say. We’re not staying here three hours or three minutes.” He called to Dave, who had backed Jackie into a cubicle, “We’re leaving now.” To Kellerman he snapped, “Wheel it out!”
At this juncture, in O’Donnell’s words, “it became physical—us against them.” Kellerman, who hadn’t even heard Ken, had begun to pull the church truck on his own, butting flesh with his shoulders; the agents and Dugger were pushing. It is impossible to say who was obstructing them, because in the melee several men who seemed to be barring their progress had been daunted and were simply trying to get out of the way. Earl Rose wasn’t among them. His patrolman had capitulated, and he had been shoved away from the threshold. Neither was Theron Ward. He was in the nurse’s station, calling the District Attorney. As the number rang he saw Mrs. Kennedy emerging from the cubicle behind Dave. He had a vivid impression of the bloodstains on her clothes, and then he was talking to Wade. To Ward, as to Earl Rose earlier, the District Attorney explained that he had no objection to the removal of the body. Holding the receiver with his right hand, the judge waved toward the puddled humanity at the door with his left hand, motioning them to go ahead. The value of the gesture is doubtful. It was like signaling to a bowl game scrimmage from a cheap seat. The scrap was already resolved. The last havering human obstacle faded away, and the coffin rolled into the corridor. The widow was walking directly behind it, her gloved right hand once more on the gleaming cover.
As they approached the ambulance dock an orderly raced up and handed an agent a blank certificate of death, signed by Kemp Clark. It was swiftly pocketed. By now the formation was moving forward in a rush, and in the disarray two Kennedy men had been left behind. Dr. Burkley and Bill Greer had separately returned to the trauma room, each with the thought that something might have been forgotten. Quite a lot had been left. Greer arrived before Burkley. Margaret Hinchcliffe gave him the two paper bags containing the President’s personal effects, and while he was folding the tops over, Doris Nelson handed him Clint Hill’s stained blue suit coat. After he had hurried out Diana Bowron thrust her hand in her uniform and encountered an unfamiliar lump. It was Kennedy’s gold watch, still covered with his dried blood. Fleeing down the hall, she turned it over to an agent.
The President’s physician entered the deserted room alone. He inspected it carefully and found nothing until he reached the stainless-steel trash can. In tidying up David Sanders had crammed the container to the brim with the debris of emergency surgery—intravenous material, gauze, sponges, plastic vials, empty cartons bearing the labels of pharmaceutical houses. The doctor was pressed for time. He didn’t have time to sift through the rubbish, but strewn through it, he saw, were bright red petals of what had been Jacqueline Kennedy’s bouquet of welcome from the city of Dallas. Two dying blossoms were within reach. The orderly had left one lying on the floor beside the can pedal; the other stuck out from the lid. Burkley picked u
p the first rose, broke off the stem of the other, and carefully slipped both into an envelope.
Earl Rose, swept aside, nursed the galling conviction that he had been bilked by everyone, including Theron Ward, who he felt had been pusillanimous. Ward himself departed to complete a batch of official forms with his registrar. In his precinct log he docketed the inquest he had never held as No. 210; “Burial-Transit No. 7992,” authorizing “the removal of John F. Kennedy, male, white,” was belatedly drawn up and sent, for some reason, to Oneal’s, Inc.; Kemp Clark’s death certificate turned out to be inadequate under state statutes, so Ward signed another. Accuracy was not a forte of official Dallas that afternoon. On the new document—the deceased’s “usual occupation” was given as “President of the U.S.”—Kennedy’s Washington address was erroneously recorded as 600, not 1600, Pennsylvania Avenue. The transit permit incorrectly listed his age as forty-four. The Dallas Police Department completed a homicide report later in the day and it, too, was imprecise, stating that headquarters had received word of the shooting at 5:10 P.M. With that the local rites were over. Ceremonial homage had been paid to the letter of the law.
The forms were filed; the medical examiner and the JP, meanwhile, had lurched off history’s stage. Father Cain, however, had remained. He had dodged ahead of the procession in the corridor and stationed himself on the loading dock. He continued to vibrate with prayers. Over the past half-hour he had scored a complex litany—scales, harmonics, and full chords of benedictions: Cum spiritu tuo sursum corda; Dominus vobiscum; Gratias agamus Domino Deo nostro; Dignum et justum est—and he was standing between the emergency area entrance and Oneal’s spotless vehicle awaiting his cue.
Different participants saw the coffin’s emergence variously. The White House press corps, clustered below, completely missed the priest. Chuck Roberts scribbled that Mrs. Kennedy was “still wearing the raspberry-colored suit in which she had started the day’s campaigning—and still looking beautiful.” Hugh Sidey noticed that Godfrey McHugh, who had joined Kellerman in front, came to attention as the sunlight struck him, and that a single tear rolled down Larry O’Brien’s cheek. To Tom Wicker they were all “stunned, silent, stumbling.” Jacqueline Kennedy, above the reporters, saw only the casket top. Her head bowed, she stood apart. Sergeant Dugger knew that this was the zero-hour of his life. Now, now he must reveal some shred of his grief to her. Vernon B. Oneal was annoyed. His driver had neglected to remove the red ambulance sign from the side window of the Cadillac. Nobody would be able to identify it as a hearse. The correspondents would misreport it. The undertaker shook his head waspishly, and as he did his attention was distracted by Father Cain, who had become a cynosure for O’Donnell, O’Brien, and Powers. There was no way around him. Dave Powers took a deep breath and invoked the name of the Saviour.
The Death of a President Page 45
