The Death of a President

by William Manchester

  Kilduff had trotted down the ramp steps in pursuit of reporters. Godfrey approached the nose of the aircraft seconds later, and it was at this point that he called, “Take off! The President is aboard!”

  “No, we can’t,” Swindal called back.

  “Let’s go.”

  “Mr. Kilduff says we can’t.”

  “It doesn’t matter what anybody says. Move,” McHugh commanded. He was a general, Swindal was a colonel. He returned aft assuming that he would be obeyed.

  Johnson’s bags had just been delivered from the backup plane. Mrs. Kennedy had resumed her seat across from the coffin, and the new President, who had been inquiring of Kilduff whether there were any photographers present, entered the bedroom’s powder room to change his shirt and comb his hair. For the second time Godfrey missed an encounter by seconds, though it is doubtful that his attitude would have changed much if they had met. To him Lyndon Johnson was still Lyndon—the Vice President—and Vice Presidents, far from issuing decrees to the men surrounding Presidents, defer to them. Johnson had tacitly acknowledged this at Parkland when he turned a deaf ear to Youngblood and Roberts, refusing to leave what they regarded as a potential death trap until O’Donnell had given him permission to go. Since then he had grasped the enormity of what had happened and had become President Johnson in his own eyes. But Godfrey McHugh saw things differently. He was an emotional man—he had already decided to renounce his Texas citizenship—and under the present circumstances he would regard an instruction from Johnson as an impertinence.

  The cabin in the tail grew more humid. Jacqueline Kennedy said, “It’s so hot. Let’s leave.”

  “Didn’t you tell them?” Ken asked McHugh.

  “Yes, but Mac Kilduff told them something else. I’ll go up again.”

  In the communications shack he ran into Kilduff. Mac was out of breath. He had been attending to assorted details, assembling a makeshift press pool—two of the men had flipped a coin to see which would go—and rehearsing Cecil Stoughton and his cameras for the ceremony. Even so his unintelligibility with Godfrey is remarkable. He could hardly have been more obscure had he tried.

  “What’s going on?” McHugh demanded.

  “We’re waiting for newspaper people.”

  “The hell with newspaper people! We’re going to go.”

  “We have to wait for Lady Bird’s luggage; it’s not here yet.”

  “What? She’s on her own plane.”

  “No, she’s here, and we’re waiting for a Texas judge. A lady.”

  Back to the rear compartment. Ken asked, “Well?”

  “I don’t know what’s happening. We’re waiting for a woman judge, some reporters, and Mrs. Johnson’s baggage,” Godfrey reported. He knew it sounded idiotic, but that was what he had been told.

  O’Donnell’s face drew to a point, as though the muscles had been tightened by a single drawstring within. “You leave right now.”

  “This time we’re going,” McHugh promised grimly. He could replace Swindal and fly the plane himself if he had to.

  In the corridor outside the bedroom he hesitated. Mac had specifically mentioned Lady Bird. It seemed preposterous to Godfrey, but perhaps something had happened to the backup plane; perhaps Johnson was here, too. On his two round-trip sprints Godfrey had seen no sign of him. Maybe the Vice Presidential agents were hiding him somewhere. The safest course was to check. He went in and looked around. Nobody was there. It never occurred to him that Johnson might be behind the closed powder room door, and he sped ahead, convinced that Kilduff was mistaken.

  By now Godfrey had become part of a task force. He had struck out twice, so while he was inspecting the bedroom O’Donnell had dispatched Ted Clifton, Roy Kellerman, and Clint Hill to the front of the plane. As it turned out, all three learned the correct explanation before McHugh. Valenti, Stoughton, and Homer Thornberry crowded around Clifton, saying, “We can’t go yet,” “We’ve got to find a federal judge,” “Lyndon has word from the Attorney General, he called Washington.” Kellerman and Hill heard none of this; they were barging up the aisle after Swindal. Roy burst into the communications shack and saw the ramp. Wondering why it hadn’t been wheeled away, he descended the steps. Just then Kilduff flashed by.

  “You’d better get aboard, we’re going to take off,” Roy warned him.

  “No, we can’t, we have to have the oath,” Mac replied. Over his shoulder he called to Clint, who was standing at the stair head, “A judge is going to swear in Johnson. Bobby requested it.”

  He had justified the delay to everyone except Godfrey McHugh. There is something marvelous about the General’s continuing ignorance. By his own account he made five journeys through the length of the aircraft before he found out why they weren’t moving. Even O’Donnell and O’Brien knew before Godfrey did. Wandering into the staff cabin, Larry heard someone ask Marie Fehmer if she had typed the Presidential oath of office. She nodded and he comprehended everything. At about the same time, O’Donnell overheard a discussion in the stateroom, and when someone called out, “We need a photographer and we’re waiting for a judge,” Ken, though he disapproved, understood what was meant. McHugh alone remained in the dark. Ted Clifton would have enlightened him. Somehow they missed connections. Clint and Roy could have quickly briefed him, but they had become bogged down in Secret Service details; Johnson’s decision to travel on 26000 meant that Roy’s shift assignments were fouled up. The four-to-twelve Trade Mart men, whom he had designated as the new President’s bodyguards, were on 86970; the weary eight-to-four agents were here. Roy threw up his hands. A reversal now would add to the muddle; it was safer to stand pat.

  Roy had another problem. Passing through the staff cabin he had been struck by the unusually large number of passengers and by the unfamiliarity of their faces. On any other trip he would have recognized them all—would, in fact, have known who they were in advance. The one difference between Air Force One and Air Force Two was that Air Force One always carried a passenger manifest. It was a basic security precaution; no matter how short the flight, a Presidential guest could not mount either ramp unless his name had been typed on that sheet. Stepping into the cockpit with Clint, Roy worriedly said to Swindal, “There are a lot of people on this plane.” The Colonel said, “We can carry them.” Kellerman saw Rufus Youngblood entering the communications shack. He asked him, “Do you know all these people here?” Youngblood assured him that Lem Johns had already started a manifest.

  This was a confrontation between opposites—between Kellerman, Kennedy’s chief bodyguard, and Youngblood, head of the Johnson detail. Mystified by the bustling around him, Roy felt thwarted, while Rufus’ briskness had continued unabated. He had dealt with the manifest. He had sent Jack Ready to the gate to meet Sarah Hughes, and he had asked Chief Curry to accompany Ready and identify Sarah when she drove up. But no one could anticipate every problem that afternoon, and the Youngblood men were as worried about possible overload as the Kellerman men. Before the arrival of the hearse Emory Roberts had carefully calculated the probable number of passengers. He reckoned on a coffin and Jacqueline Kennedy, and that was all. As he later confessed, he hadn’t realized that Mrs. Kennedy would bring her husband’s aides with her; the presence of O’Donnell, O’Brien, and Powers dismayed him. Counting both waves, there were twenty-seven people, and despite the pilot’s assurances the Johnson agents became anxious. As a consequence Johns asked several minor members of the Kennedy party to leave, and other passengers who had ridden on 26000 since leaving Washington were turned away before they could mount the ramp. One was Ralph Yarborough. For two days everyone had been trying to lure Yarborough to the Vice President’s side. Suddenly he was an outcast. He asked for a reason, and Ted Clifton told him, “Maximum security.”

  Clifton had swiftly adjusted to the transition. His reasoning was clear. As a general he held the “special trust and confidence” of the President. The occupant of the Presidency had changed, and Clifton had to change, too. His duty was
to the office, not to the man. Following a talk with Valenti and Thornberry he functioned as President Johnson’s military aide.

  Meanwhile McHugh, who felt otherwise, was building up steam. The conflict had become irreconcilable. The Kennedy party, on the one hand, believed that Air Force One’s chief passenger was their fallen leader; since he could not give them orders, they looked to Mrs. Kennedy, who shared their feeling that they must quit Dallas, and who was bewildered by the delay. The attitude of the Johnson party, on the other hand, was summed up by Youngblood, who drew Lem Johns aside during the turmoil and emphatically told him, “When the boss says we go, then we go.”

  After the Kellerman-Youngblood huddle had broken up Godfrey had reached the front of the plane for the third time. He spotted Mac Kilduff. Bounding toward him—Kilduff had the impression that he was “galloping”—he said hotly, “We’ve got to take off immediately.”

  “Not until Johnson has taken the oath,” said Kilduff.

  “Johnson isn’t here. He’s on the backup plane.”

  “Then you go back and tell that six-foot Texan he isn’t Lyndon Johnson,” Mac said. “We’re not going to Andrews until the President has been sworn.”

  McHugh flushed. Pointing toward the tail compartment he cried, “I have only one President, and he’s lying back in that cabin.”

  It was a dramatic remark, and the plane was small enough so that his words were quoted to virtually every passenger before they landed at the capital. Ken O’Donnell heard them and was proud of the General. “This morning you were this tall,” he said, holding his hand a few inches from the floor. Then he raised it as high as he could reach and said, “Now you’re up here.” But Lyndon Johnson had ears, too. That brief exchange in the communications shack altered the destinies of the two men; Kilduff, whom O’Donnell had dismissed, had laid claim to a job in the new administration, while the General had forfeited his hope for another star. Indeed, even Godfrey’s days in uniform were numbered.

  After the new President had changed his shirt and combed his hair, Joe Ayres laid out some blue Air Force One towels for Jacqueline Kennedy. She thanked him and entered the bedroom, and the Johnsons came in to offer their condolences. He felt that words were inadequate; he called her “Honey,” put his arm around her and shook his head, but he left expressions of commiseration to his wife. Mrs. Johnson was a woman, and Mrs. Kennedy liked her.

  Her face crumpling with tears, the new First Lady said, “Oh, Jackie, you know, we never even wanted to be Vice President and now, dear God, it’s come to this!”

  “Oh, what if I hadn’t been there!” Jacqueline Kennedy said. “I was so glad I was there.”

  Johnson’s instinct had been correct. Words were inept. Lady Bird was ordinarily the essence of tact, yet here she slipped. “I don’t know what to say,” she sobbed, and then she said it: “What wounds me most of all is that this should happen in my beloved State of Texas.”

  She had scarcely finished before she realized that her tongue had tripped. “Immediately,” as she said later, “I regretted it.” This was no day for Texas chauvinism; Kennedy’s death should be what wounded her most. Her eyes wavered and fell, and she saw the stained glove. She had always envied the way Jackie wore gloves. She herself usually felt awkward in them, and couldn’t wait to take them off. As always, this one seemed a part of Jackie. And it was caked with her husband’s blood. Bird filled up. She suggested, “Can we get someone to help you put on fresh things?”

  “Oh, no,” Mrs. Kennedy replied. “Perhaps later I’ll ask Mary Gallagher. But not right now.”

  The three of them sat on the bed, Mrs. Kennedy in the middle. After a pause Johnson said uncertainly, “Well—about the swearing in.”

  “Lyndon,” she began, and took a quick breath. Of all those who had been with her husband, she was the first to accept the future. “Oh, excuse me. I’ll never call you that again,” she said. “I mean, Mr. President.”

  “Honey, I hope you’ll call me that for the rest of your life,” he said.

  She was silent. Words were difficult for her, too. The fact was that he was now the Chief Executive, and she resolved never again to address him by his first name.

  “About the swearing in,” he repeated, trying again.

  “Oh, yes, I know, I know,” she said quickly. She thought she knew. She, too, had seen the old engravings, and she remembered that during her televised tour of the White House for CBS she had pointed out that Rutherford B. Hayes, whose inauguration day fell on a Sunday, had taken the oath in the Red Room. The ceremony didn’t have to be on the east steps of the Capitol. It could be anywhere. It could be held right here, and evidently it was going to be. She said, “Yes. What’s going to happen?”

  “I’ve arranged for a judge—an old friend of mine, Judge Hughes—to come,” he answered. “She’ll be here in about an hour. So why don’t you lie down and freshen up and everything? We’ll leave you alone.”

  “All right,” she said mindlessly, and they went out, closing the bedroom door.

  Alone, she smoked a cigarette, staring vacantly into space. Then the full force struck her. An hour, she thought. My God, do I have to wait an hour?

  In the stateroom a note awaited Johnson: “Mr. President, I am here if I can be of any help—Bill Moyers.”

  Moyers was one of two passengers whose presence seemed almost supernatural. The other was Marty Underwood, who had advanced Houston and who, when Oswald opened fire on the blue Lincoln, had been sound asleep 250 miles away in the Rice Hotel, exhausted by his ten days of politicking there. One of Max Peck’s assistants had entered the room with a passkey, told Underwood of the shooting, driven him to the airport, and put him aboard a Braniff plane which was just leaving for Dallas. Love’s control tower had given the scheduled flight a green light; Underwood had sprinted to the eastern concourse and was sitting groggily in the staff area. Afterward he would have only the haziest recollection of how he got there. The shock had left him in a state of semiamnesia. There was really no reason for him to be aboard. He was nowhere near as important as the Rice management had thought him to be. Except as a dazed witness to the coming ceremony he was useless.

  Bill Moyers was most useful, and his trip had been more remarkable, because he had come by a more unorthodox route. Two hours ago, when the first UPI bulletin had been broadcast, he had been lunching in Austin’s Forty Acres Club with Frank Erwin, Chairman of the State Democratic Executive Committee. An hour later he had been over Waco, Texas, in his hastily chartered plane when he heard Bob Trout announce Kennedy’s death. Acquiring permission to land, the pilot had parked right beside the two huge 707’s, but Moyers, ignorant of Johnson’s whereabouts, had vaulted into a state police car and peremptorily ordered the trooper to take him to Parkland—he had heard the hospital’s name from Trout. Halfway there the police radio revealed that the new President was at Love. Executing a tight U-turn at top speed, the trooper returned him to the airport. There Moyers hesitated. He couldn’t tell 26000 and 86970 apart. Their wings were almost touching. Neither had been moved since noon, but he assumed that the similarity was a security maneuver, designed to outwit anyone stalking Johnson. He saw a Texas Congressman at the foot of 26000’s front ramp, bounded aboard unchallenged, was stopped at the stateroom door by an agent who didn’t know him, and rapidly scribbled his note at a staff cabin desk.

  Johnson promptly sent for him—a Texan who was also a friend of the Kennedy family was an invaluable ally—and nodded slightly as Moyers entered. They didn’t speak. The President seemed pale and wan. There was a distant look in his eye, and he was subdued, which was unlike him. Moyers’ description of his demeanor is very like the accounts of those who had been in Booth 13. It was only a momentary relapse, however, triggered, perhaps, by his encounter with Mrs. Kennedy. Johnson was gaining confidence and momentum, and within the next few minutes he began dealing with Kennedy’s chief lieutenants.

  Like the widow, they were bewildered. Unlike her, they had not been brough
t up to be courteous in adversity, however, and the meeting was strained. McHugh was there. Seeing Johnson, he guessed correctly that he had erred in not opening the powder room door earlier. Lyndon was aboard. If an oath had to be administered on the plane, the General now inquired, why couldn’t the ceremony be held in the air?

  It was a reasonable question. He received no satisfactory answer. Instead, a maddening discussion about lens angles and closeups had begun. The concern was arising in several minds that they were about to witness a spectacle which was bound to involve President Kennedy’s widow. Independently of them she was reaching the same conclusion; after the Johnsons’ departure she noticed that her Austin clothes had been carefully laid out on the other bed: a white dress, white jacket, and black shoes. A number of people could have removed them from the hang-up closet—Mary, Evelyn, Ayres, George Thomas—but none had, and she was left with the feeling that they wanted her to look immaculate in the inaugural picture.

  Johnson had given careful attention to his own appearance. But this preoccupation may easily be misinterpreted. If the oath was to dramatize the stability of the American system of government, both for Americans and for allies and antagonists abroad, then the show had better be a good show. And if continuity was to be the theme, Jacqueline Kennedy’s presence was desirable, however tormenting it might be for her.

  In the stateroom O’Donnell and O’Brien were sitting opposite the new President and First Lady. “The Constitution puts me in the White House, but you two are free to make your own choices,” he said to Ken and Larry. “I want to urge you to stay and stand shoulder to shoulder with me. I need you more than you need me—and more than Kennedy needed you.”

  O’Brien was squirming. He had been chivied enough. Hell, let’s talk about this later, he thought. Larry was beset by the vision of Earl Rose storming aboard with the Dallas Police Department and carrying off the body of his fallen leader at gunpoint. But Johnson, as he recalled afterward, “was very definitely in a take-charge mood.” Lady Bird, who was to have no memory of the contretemps, felt that “everybody was doing his utmost best in a difficult situation.” The others were to recollect that they did their best to interrupt her husband and that he, wound up, continued to steamroller ahead. But the Irishmen were skilled politicians, too. They perched tensely, awaiting an opening. O’Brien found one first. He broke in to describe the coroner’s behavior and the need for immediate departure.