The Death of a President

by William Manchester

  The priest was already chattering a paternoster, swinging his green bag by its drawstring as he tuned up his voice. But he was about to be surprised. His second appearance was to be a damp squib. He had exposed himself earlier inside. The piety of the mafia had been sorely tested, and they weren’t going to give him another opportunity to come near Mrs. Kennedy. Everyone here was a stranger to them, and every hand seemed to be against them. Just as there was no way of ascertaining that the assassin had been a stray dog, so was it impossible to tell that Rose was not a representative of Texas authority acting under instructions. It was hard to believe that a minor functionary would take so much on his shoulders. They had heard a lot of static; they had seen a great deal of muscle and a policeman’s gun. There might be worse to come. To the Presidential staff—Kennedy’s lieutenants, aides, and agents were unanimous in this—it appeared highly probable that a superior force was on the way to intercept them. If they loitered in Dallas, they couldn’t put anything in the field to match it. Their only chance was to hurry. They had temporized too long as it was. Perhaps that had been Rose’s purpose, some of them thought; perhaps he had been sent to delay them. They had to move quickly, and Father Cain was no help. As Catholics the Irishmen were grateful for his blessing, but his timing was most inopportune.

  At the wide door O’Donnell had been the strong man. On the dock it was O’Brien. During his years with Kennedy he had become so suave that even his wife Elva had forgotten that Larry’s glibness was a veneer, that he was the son of a Springfield, Massachusetts, bartender. Underneath he hadn’t changed, however; he had the ovoid torso of a bouncer. In his present frenzy he was capable of bouncing a priest, and in essence that is what he did. Dugger and the agents were exchanging grimaces and rolling their eyes; O’Brien acted. “I was in a panic to get out of there,” he recalled afterward. “That little lady just couldn’t stand there with her husband’s body that way.” Father Cain was propelled to the dock edge, where he continued his incantations while the staff, coached by Oneal, eased the President into his ambulance-hearse’s cargo compartment. There was a door on the right-hand side, leading to a jump seat beside the coffin. Dugger, who was nearest, opened it for Jacqueline Kennedy.

  “Thank you,” she whispered.

  The sergeant started, and he began to weep. He still felt tongue-tied, but by speaking to him the President’s wife had given him a feeling of identity. He remembered that he had a name. He looked at her as directly as his clouded spectacles would permit; he held out his clumsy hand, she touched it lightly, and he said, “Bob Dugger, ma’am.”

  Then he closed the door. It was exactly 2:08 P.M. Burkley, who entered the hearse by the rear doors, squeezed his chunky frame behind Mrs. Kennedy. He had to make himself very small. Clint Hill and Godfrey were there, too, and three agents were cramped in front. Kellerman was on the right as usual, but Andy Berger was behind the wheel. This was the only time in these last days that Bill Greer did not chauffeur the President. Preoccupied by paper bags, he was temporarily lost in the warren of halls, and Kellerman was unwilling to wait. The prospect of a pitched battle in the presence of the young widow had intimidated them all. They were determined to reach the airport and take off before the imaginary reinforcements could arrive and overpower them.

  “Do you know the way to my mortuary?” the undertaker called to Roy. “I’ll meet you there.” Roy replied, “We’re not going there. We’re going to Love Field. Follow us and you can pick up your ambulance.” “Hearse,” Oneal instinctively corrected him. Then he turned to Hugh Sidey and expressed concern over who would pay him.

  Sidey just stared at him. The correspondent had no way of knowing that the long weekend ahead was to demonstrate just how splendidly the memory of a President could be extended beyond death. Sidey glanced from the funeral director and the small semicircle of curiosity seekers in front of the tangled parking lot to the wintry pile of the hospital overhead and then out to the neoned boulevard, where the six-lane stream of blatting traffic halted and moved, halted and moved as the signal lights mechanically turned red, amber, green. Sordid, he thought, what a sordid place for the glory of the Kennedy era to end.

  The passengers in the white Cadillac and the four-car column that trailed it felt the first stirrings of relief as they tore out Harry Hines and Mockingbird. The vehicle immediately behind the hearse was a convertible, a relic from the motorcade which now seemed to belong, not merely to another day, but to another age, as in a sense it did.3 Pam Turnure was there with Mac Kilduff, Evelyn Lincoln, Mary Gallagher, and several others—nearly a dozen people sardined together. It’s like a circus car, Pam thought, fighting for air. But the greater the distance between them and the hospital, the safer they felt. Their apopemptic ride was an escape, and because pursuit was assumed—because the men at the door to Major Medicine had been told that they were fugitives from Dallas justice—it took on the character of a stampede. At breakneck pace they passed a Slick Airways hut, spun right, and right again. Braniff and American Airlines hangars came into view, shimmering in the midafternoon heat on the opposite side of the concrete and tarmac desert of Love. There were two warning signs:

  RESTRICTED AREA

  And:

  Slow

  DANGEROUS

  Trucks

  Andy Berger was inattentive. No hearse had ever traveled at such speed. They were traveling at least as fast as the Johnson party had, and they took the unpaved patch by the fence gap as though it were as hard as a highway. Greer, with his Old World courtesies, had never given them such a ride,

  Jacqueline Kennedy, talking to Clint, became conscious of a movement behind her, and pivoting in the jump seat she saw Burkley, squeezed in his meager space. He was burrowing into his clothing. She peered back, wondering what could be the matter with him. Then his hand appeared with the two roses intact. “These were under—were in his shirt,” he panted, red-faced, and she took them and put them in the pocket of her suit.

  At Gate 28 Berger was braking beside Aircraft 26000, which they still thought of as their plane. There was no discussion as they disembarked. Kennedy was going aboard first; everyone knew that. Early in his administration he had held a door for Eleanor Roosevelt, “No, you must go first,” she had said. “You are the President.” He had laughed and said, “I keep forgetting.” And she had said gently, “But you must never forget.” He had never really forgotten, but sometimes protocol had become a bore and had been disregarded. Not now, though; the Secret Service, Ken, Larry, and the military aides prepared to carry the coffin up. “It’s awful heavy,” Ted Clifton said anxiously, and looking at the steep steps of the ramp leading up to the rear door, he said, “Do you suppose we can get it up there?” The others were silent. It was going to go, they were going to do it, that was all.

  In their haste they damaged the Elgin Britannia. Not being undertakers, they did not know that a device automatically pins a coffin to the floor of a modern hearse. There was a catch which released the lock, but they didn’t see it. The four-to-twelve shift bounded for the doors and unlatched them in double-quick time, and when the coffin wouldn’t budge they made it budge. Heaving and straining, they felt a tremor. They yanked together and heard two brittle cracks. Vernon Oneal’s most expensive coffin had been damaged; a craggy piece of trim from the lower hinge and the entire top of the handle housing behind the head had snapped off. Dave Powers stepped into position to bear his share of the weight. He wrote:

  220 I helped carry casket aboard Air Force #1.4

  To Pam, standing beside Jackie, the manhandling seemed to take forever, but the men were holding nearly half a ton and going straight up, with scarcely an inch on either side of the narrow steps for maneuver. It was an exercise in desperation and brute strength. Yet there were no grunts, scarcely any words at all; the airport, Pam noted, had become “strangely quiet.” Colonel McNally wrote that people were standing about awkwardly, that Air Force personnel saluted, and that some policemen bowed their heads. “Give us a hand,
” Roy Kellerman called to Joe Ayres, and the stewards and Colonel Swindal ran down to help. Dave Powers, realizing that he was really too old for this, stepped to one side and signed himself with the Cross. Mary Gallagher saw him and fingered her rosary. Foot by foot the coffin rose, Godfrey in front twisting it for the turn, and though the men in back were doing everything they could to keep it level, the smashed handle housing presented a serious obstacle; they couldn’t find a grip. Their mighty burden tilted a little in the back and then tilted quite a lot. Evelyn Lincoln worried. She thought, He’s wedged down, it’s so uncomfortable for him.

  The refitting of the tail compartment was complete. Ayres and two master sergeants, Joe Chapel of Air Force One and Deroy Cain from the backup plane, had finished removing the partition and the four seats from the port side. Larry O’Brien felt almost absurdly grateful—it was the first sign of planning he had seen—and the exhausted body bearers, with Godfrey McHugh acting as foreman, eased the coffin over until it lay flush against the bulkhead. Godfrey’s uniform and Ted Clifton’s were splotched with dank patches of perspiration; their ribands and gold and silver left-shoulder aiguillettes were askew. They stood back with Larry, Ken, Dave, and Roy, surveyed the results, and then leaned down to make small symmetrical adjustments.

  The cabin was dark and suffocating. The effect of the closed shutters and the disconnecting of the air conditioning had been cumulative. In the semidarkness there were shufflings and mutterings, and for a moment the pallbearers were unaware of another passenger across the aisle. In one of the two light plaid seats on the starboard side Mrs. Kennedy sat alone, watching intently. She had slipped in right behind them. Evelyn, Pam, and Mary had entered afterward, and Pam had fallen back to embrace her, but now at 2:18 P.M. all the secretaries were in the staff cabin; of the Kennedy women, only the President’s widow remained. Her resolve held: she was as near her husband as she could be.

  They saw her, and Clifton and McHugh exchanged a look.

  “One of us should stay,” Clifton said. To the others this meant nothing; to the two generals it was obvious. Since the beginning of written history military tradition has required that should a Commander in Chief be slain, a high-ranking officer must remain with the body until burial as a guard of honor. “I will,” Godfrey said, and they explained the custom to O’Donnell, who nodded.

  Few guardians have been more faithful than McHugh was to be. He couldn’t begin his vigil quite yet, however. He had another pressing duty; he was the Air Force aide, and this was a plane.

  “Should we get airborne?” he inquired of O’Donnell.

  Ken added, “Are we ready?”

  “I’ll check the fuel,” Clifton said.

  “It’s done,” said Godfrey. “I did it by phone.” Turning toward the cockpit, he broke into a run.

  As the stewards locked 26000’s rear door, Jacqueline Kennedy quietly rose. She wanted to be by herself for a few minutes. She wouldn’t leave the coffin, but the bedroom was adjacent to the tail compartment. The last time she and Jack had been alone together, she remembered, they had been in that private cabin. A recollection of the happiness they had known there swept over her, and she decided that would be the right place for her to compose herself. Stepping softly, she moved down the dim dark corridor. Because she regarded the bedroom as hers, she did not knock; she simply grasped the latch and twisted it. Facing the door, in the desk chair, sat Marie Fehmer. Reclining on the bed was Lyndon Johnson, dictating to her.

  Mrs. Kennedy came to a dead stop. The new President heaved himself up and hastily lumbered past her. Marie swiftly gathered her notebooks and pencils and followed Johnson out.

  The widow stared after them. For an instant she paused indecisively on the bright blue carpet with the golden Presidential eagle worked into it; then she returned to the corridor and took a blind step toward them. Again she wavered. Sergeant Ayres stood at the forward end of the corridor. He was looking directly at her, and his heavy face, she saw, was ashen. The relentless tension of the past two hours was beginning to lift. The galley had been opened, and someone had ordered vegetable soup. Immediately it had become a fad. A half-dozen others had agreed that vegetable soup was just the thing. Now Johnson called for a bowl. In Marie Fehmer’s words, he “just inhaled the soup and crackers—they were gone in a flash.” Putting the dish aside he sighed, “It’s been a year since I got up.”

  Mrs. Kennedy returned to the tail cabin. Godfrey McHugh, meantime, had reached the nose of the aircraft. Johnson had been behind the closed door of the bedroom as the General passed there, and in the murk Godfrey had not noticed Lady Bird or any of the other new passengers. The General was preoccupied with the need for immediate departure. Entering the staff cabin, he was relieved to hear a familiar whine; Jim Swindal, on his own, had started the No. 3 engine, the sign that a hop was imminent. Calling ahead Godfrey shouted, “Take off! The President is aboard!”

  Two Presidents were aboard, though Godfrey had not thought of it that way. Once Johnson had made up his mind to return to the capital in the Presidential plane (and it cannot be denied that this was his right and perhaps his duty, because of Air Force One’s symbolic significance) there was no way strain could have been avoided between the Kennedy and Johnson people. His decision to take a second oath of office in Dallas was to make it more pungent. During the past two hours the Kennedy staff had lost a President and battled to remove his coffin from the hospital—more buffeting than most people experience in a lifetime. Their tempers were tinder. If Johnson had directed them to take the plane parked alongside, they would have been spared the climax of their anguish. Yet perspective suggests compassion. Johnson was the President, whether or not they could bring themselves to acknowledge him as such. And as Robert McNamara observed later, “You must remember that he was in a state of shock, too.” To his credit, he was now acting decisively. To theirs, they concealed their scars, realizing that any public rift with the emerging administration would be a disservice to the country and, in consequence, to the man they mourned.

  Had the man they mourned arrived on 26000 alive, his very appearance would have been the signal for an instant take-off. He nearly did it in death. That was why Jim Swindal cranked up engine No. 3. The moment the President boarded the aircraft and Joe Ayres latched the rear door behind him they were supposed to depart. The Chief Executive’s time must not be wasted. Swindal’s crew was enormously proud of the speed with which they could become airborne, and drilled constantly to shave seconds. Godfrey McHugh assumed that the first engine whine would be followed by a quick taxiing into position and a lifting sensation. It had always been that way. This was to be an exception, however. Swindal couldn’t leave yet. He was just warming up. The forward hatch had been left open; the ramp there had yet to be withdrawn.

  The Johnson party and the Kennedy party were milling around in the staff cabin. Godfrey was diverted by aisle traffic, and in that interval he was primed for a collision of authority. His antagonist, oddly, was Mac Kilduff, a Kennedy man who had ridden to the airport in the breakneck caravan behind the hearse. Kilduff wasn’t looking for trouble. He had been summoned and commissioned by the new President. During the positioning of the coffin in the tail compartment Mac had been standing at the foot of the forward ramp, talking to Agent Lawson and the two secretaries from Salinger’s office. “I’m the first Secret Service advance man ever to lose a President,” Lawson had said heavily, and the girls had been trying to console him.

  A crewman had called down the steps to Kilduff: Johnson wanted to see him at once. Mac had run up the steps. He was baffled. Unlike the secretaries, he hadn’t heard that Lyndon was aboard, and he couldn’t imagine what he was doing here. Larry O’Brien was similarly perplexed. O’Brien had just seen the President emerging from the bedroom with Marie Fehmer. Remembering the rhubarb at the hospital, Larry had wondered, How did he know we would appear? What would he have done if we hadn’t come?

  Johnson had been incisive with Kilduff. Watching him in the sta
teroom, his wife had thought him “absolutely a graven image. His was a face that looked carved in bronze.” He had known exactly what he wanted: he wanted the acting press secretary, whose calmness at Parkland had impressed him, to take the lead in setting things up for Sarah Hughes. To the new President he seemed an ideal liaison man, a vigorous Kennedy aide and an expert in mass media. As Vice President he hadn’t been told that this trip was supposed to be Mac’s swan song.

  Johnson had sketched his plans. He had said, “I’ve got to be sworn in here. I’ve talked to the Attorney General.”

  Mac had reacted quickly. The flight to Washington, he realized, would have to be postponed. He had headed for Swindal, and as he darted forward he must have passed McHugh—one of several near misses for Godfrey, which can only be understood in the light of the turmoil in the staff area.

  “Cut it off!” Mac had told Swindal. He offered no explanation, but he was a member of the Presidential staff. The pilot had obediently reached for his instruments.