The Death of a President

by William Manchester

  “… and defend the Constitution of the United States,” her husband repeated after the judge, his voice almost inaudible.

  Those were the last words on the card, because that was all the Constitution required. Sarah felt something was missing. Impulsively she added, “So help me God.”

  “So help me God,” Johnson repeated slowly, his lidded eyes searching hers.

  The words were almost lost in a jet scream. Jim Swindal had vaulted through the communications shack, affixed his seat belt, and revved up No. 3 again.

  The President embraced his wife and Jacqueline Kennedy. Lady Bird, her eyes brimming, stepped over and squeezed Mrs. Kennedy’s hand. “Now sit down here, honey,” Johnson said to the widowed First Lady, steering her toward the seat Stoughton had just vacated. Sarah Hughes put her arms around him and stammered, “We’re all behind you.” Her congratulations had to be quick, because it was obvious that departure was a matter of seconds. Swindal’s engines were shrieking, and Johnson, sinking into the Presidential chair, said to Lem Johns, “Let ’er roll.” Three passengers fled down the front ramp as it was wheeled away: Sarah, Chief Curry, and Cecil Stoughton. Mac Kilduff had flipped out the pink Dictabelt and slipped it over the extended left fingers of Stoughton’s left hand. In his right hand the captain was gripping the odds and ends of photographic equipment. Audio and video, he thought, tottering down the steps with his two cameras swinging from his neck; he was the sole repository of the records of the ceremony.

  It was 2:47 in Dallas when Jim Swindal lifted 26000’s hundred tons from Love’s yellow-striped concrete and braced himself for an initial six-hundred-feet-a-minute climb over the hooded blue and yellow airstrip lights. Swindal’s head was splitting; it was as though a gigantic sledgehammer was pounding his skull. He marked the time in his log, Dave Powers jotted it down, and on the ground Emory Roberts, holding the line to Behn, told him the plane was up. Hugh Sidey and Colonel McNally, standing near Roberts, glanced at their wrists and consulted their notes. For all of them it was a moment of extraordinary poignancy. Sidey, watching the Presidential plane gain momentum, felt that a part of himself was leaving. He had never been so lonely in his life. McNally, coming to the end of his chronicle, observed that the hissing blast from the four engines rippled the surface of the oily puddles near the chain fence. In the turbulence a half-dozen discarded signs, remnants of the morning’s jubilant reception, struggled to rise. One made it. It stood erect for a fraction of a second, long enough for McNally to copy the neat hand lettering—“WELCOME JFK,” it read. Then the gust passed, the four jets passed, and the placard slid back into slime.

  The plane was picking up momentum. The shaded cabins deprived the passengers of a view, but from the nose Swindal looked down on hangars, a parked cluster of privately owned Jetstars, a complex of rust-red gantries, and, in the distance, the phallic skyline of downtown Dallas. Though the sky was of palest blue, the jumbled landscape below took no hint of gentleness from it. Under Swindal’s right wing three distinctive buildings loomed. The first read “Ramada Inn,” the second “Executive Inn.” The third bore no sign; though vastly larger than the others, it was colorless from this height and as shapeless as a Rorschach blot. The Colonel, who hadn’t been there, couldn’t identify it as Parkland Memorial Hospital.

  In the stateroom Johnson said with satisfaction, “Now we’re going.” He rang for Joe Ayres and ordered a bowl of bouillon. Lady Bird had crackers.

  Mrs. Kennedy rose. She said politely, “Excuse me.”

  She didn’t want to offend the Johnsons, but a refrain kept running through her mind: I’m not going to be in here, I’m going back there. Scurrying down the corridor, she saw Ken, Larry, Dave, and Godfrey standing around the coffin; she sat in one of the two seats opposite, and Ken joined her on the other. Their eyes met, and unexpectedly she began to cry. It was the first time she had wept; the tears came in a flood, and for a long time she couldn’t speak. When she straightened out her voice she said, as though this were 12:30 and the blow had just fallen, “Oh, it’s happened.”

  “It’s happened,” O’Donnell repeated in a dead voice.

  “Oh, Kenny,” she cried, “what’s going to happen…?”

  “You want to know something, Jackie?” Ken said. “I don’t give a damn.”

  She took a deep breath. “Oh, you’re right, you know, you’re right. Just nothing matters but what you’ve lost.”

  It was a tiny vestibule, the smallest on the plane. Because it was in the tail it was the compartment most affected by sudden shifts in the airstream. On any other trip it would have lacked status, but President Kennedy was here, and Mrs. Kennedy was with him, and everyone aboard knew it. In effect, this was to be the stateroom until they debarked at Andrews. All the Kennedy men and women in the staff cabin wanted to be there. That was impossible—there wasn’t room—so a series of individual pilgrimages began, each individual moving slowly back past the Presidential chair now occupied by President Lyndon Johnson.

  Dr. Burkley came first, or, more accurately, his was the first attempt; he wanted to see how Jacqueline Kennedy was bearing up, but on this trip he halted a few feet short of her. Whatever her state, he sensed, George Burkley would only make it worse. The change in him had been a sudden thing. He had been composed enough as he set out and passed Johnson. Then, in the corridor, something caught his eye. The bedroom door was ajar. Inside, lying on a newspaper, was her second glove. It was as though she had never removed it, for in two hours the blood had completely dried; the glove was like a cast of her hand. To him it depicted “all the anguish and sorrow and desolation in the world.” He began to shiver, as though caught in a frigid draft. Returning to the staff cabin, he beckoned to Mary Gallagher, who became the second pilgrim. In the bedroom he raised an arm, exposing a shirt sleeve—itself bloodstained—and pointed to the stiff gauntlet. “Put it away somewhere,” he said. “Don’t crush it.”

  Mary plucked a fistful of Kleenex. As she lifted it from the newspaper she saw the headlines beneath. It was the front page of the Times Herald’s first edition.

  DALLAS GREETS PRESIDENT

  Security Boys

  Play It Cool Jackie Sparkles, Crowds Cheer

  Ladybird Too Wildly For JFK

  In the staff area Mary handed the shaped glove to Clint Hill, who sheathed it in a manila envelope. Remarkably, almost none of the Kennedys’ objects had been mislaid. In spite of the two-hour anarchy virtually every article they had brought to Dallas was leaving with them; the President’s clothes, wallet, and watch, and Mrs. Kennedy’s gloves, hat and handbag were all safely stowed aboard. There was one exception. Tripping down the ramp steps toward Earle and Dearie Cabell, who were waiting on the field, Sarah Hughes was hailed by a self-assured man—she remembers him as “rather officious”—who pointed at the black binding in her hand and asked, “Do you want that?” She shook her head. “How about this?” he inquired, fingering the 3 × 5 card with the text of the oath. Neither belonged to her, and so she surrendered them, assuming that he was some sort of security man.

  He wasn’t. His identity is a riddle. How a cipher could have penetrated Jesse Curry’s cordon is difficult to understand, but he did. The venture required enterprise and luck. The spoils, however, were priceless; he left the airport with a pair of unique souvenirs. The file card is the less valuable of the two. It is an archivist’s curiosity, of interest only to collectors and museums. The book, however, is something more. It was private property, and at this writing it remains untraced. President Kennedy’s family is entitled to it and would give a lot to have it back. By now, however, the anonymous cozener may have disposed of it. Either way, the fact remains that the last item of Kennedy memorabilia to be left in Dallas, his most cherished personal possession, was his Bible.

  The stragglers at Gates 27 and 28 dispersed slowly. The Cabells shook hands with the Texas Congressional delegation who had been left behind and rode off in a station wagon. Ralph Yarborough, five Congressmen, and the Kennedy staf
f members who had been ejected from 26000 entered the vacant cabins of the backup plane, where, as on the Presidential aircraft, there was friction between the Texans and the non-Texans.

  Apart from the jabbering of reporters in a row of portable glass phone booths which had been quickly set up for them by the Signal Corps, Love Field’s eastern concourse was unnaturally quiet. In this hush, broken only by the creaking of gears, a crane hoisted SS 100 X aboard a C-130 cargo plane to be refitted for future Presidential motorcades, and Kennedy’s seal and Presidential flag were brought from the Trade Mart and laid, furled, in a compartment on the press plane. By 3:35 P.M., when the C-130 departed for Andrews, the field had begun to return to normal. The correspondents flew away; the confetti and the hand-lettered placards that littered the fifty-yard stretch where the crowds had cheered wildly for JFK four hours earlier were dumped in metal containers beside the terminal building; the dignitaries who had wished LBJ Godspeed forty-eight minutes before had returned to their offices and homes. Among the last to go was Vernon Oneal. The undertaker wanted to inspect his Cadillac thoroughly. He checked every inch of the upholstery to make certain that it had been left in trim condition. It was tidy. Nevertheless he drove back to Oak Lawn Avenue dissatisfied.

  Win Lawson was driving downtown with Chief Curry. As they approached the triple underpass the traffic thickened, and in the plaza vehicles were bumper to bumper. Before entering the Secret Service Lawson had been a salesman of carpets and Carnation milk products. He was unwise in the ways of crowds; the dense mass puzzled him, and he said so. Curry explained it. Dallasites who hadn’t been downtown at 12:30 naturally wanted to look at the scene of the crime, he said. Their headlong charge toward the center of the city had prevented motorcade spectators from leaving, and the congestion had been building up steadily. Curry guessed that this was just about the worst glut of automobiles he had ever seen. It didn’t diminish. An hour later, when Managing Editor Krueger persuaded the federal judge to release him from jury duty, Krueger thought it “incredibly bad”; the nosing cars reminded him of “worms crawling around in pain.”

  The chief and the editor looked forward to reaching their offices, anticipating sanctuary. Both were deceived, and for the same reason. Journalism is the fastest of businesses. Every American publisher knew that this was the biggest story of his lifetime and wanted a man on the spot; Felix McKnight of the Times Herald, who had been handling press arrangements for President Kennedy’s visit, later estimated that as Air Force One took off over three hundred out-of-town reporters and newscasters were converging on Dallas. The New York Times alone was flying in six men to reinforce Tom Wicker. Since the Times Herald, an afternoon paper, didn’t close until 3:15 P.M., it was too busy for visitors, so they headed either for the News or police headquarters. In the chief’s words, his office was “just pandemonium.” The hubbub had begun while he was at the airport, and when he stepped off the elevator at the third floor he saw television cables snaking across the corridors.

  Krueger’s experience was much the same. As he walked into his city room telephones were jangling incessantly. Here the messages were different, however. At headquarters the outsiders were asking insiders what was going on; in the city room the phoners were telling them, sometimes profanely. To the consternation of the staff, the News was being subjected to unprecedented, spontaneous abuse. Big out-of-state advertisers were canceling contracts, and local readers were dropping their subscriptions. The chain had begun: Dallas was blaming the News; Texans were blaming Dallas; Americans were blaming Texas; and the world was blaming the United States. Yet not all links in the chain were identical. Some people, and some cities, were searching their own souls. The editor of the Austin American was writing: “Hatred and fanaticism, the flabby spirit of complacency that has permitted the preachers of fanatical hatred to appear respectable, and the self-righteousness that labels all who disagree with us as traitors or dolts, provided the way for the vile deed that snuffed out John Kennedy’s life.” That sort of self-criticism found no echo in the Dallas establishment. The Times Herald was the more reflective of the city’s two dailies, but the publisher’s tribute to his staff when November 22’s final edition was locked up was a singular exhibition of complacency. “Today you performed superbly,” he declared in a statement posted as the Presidential aircraft flew toward Washington. “No newspaper in this country could have done a better job within the severe time limitations. All of you took difficult assignments and came through without faltering.” As an afterthought he added, “It is a sad day.”

  He added something else which illuminates the haze of Dallas Angst: “We must handle this story with the best of taste in the next few days. We are sort of on trial because it happened in our city.” They were very much on trial, and painfully aware of it. Civic pride was in jeopardy. Big D was in danger of becoming little d. It felt that it had, in the words of a Times Herald sports writer, “been penalized half the distance to the goal line.” Under the circumstances there was no point in protesting that the referee had made a mistake; the crowd wouldn’t understand. The only solution was to get back in there and regain the lost yardage. Re-establishing the city’s prestige would take a lot of doing, but the big businessmen who lived in the northern suburbs were big doers. Certain sacrifices would have to be made. The local fringe groups must be publicly disowned. Bruce Alger would have to be led to the altar—a forfeiture easily borne, because he could be replaced next fall by Cabell, a Guelph for a Ghibelline. And for the present Dealey’s editorial voice must speak sotto voce. The people who were landing at Love Field with each incoming flight weren’t wanted, but telling them that was unthinkable; they must be shown how hospitable Dallas could be. Outside correspondents would be accommodated with News desks, News phones, and introductions to people who could tell them what the city was really like.

  President Kennedy had been a reader of Thucydides. One of his favorite quotations was a comment on the weakness of the Peloponnesian policy-making body, each member of which, the Greek historian related, “presses its own ends… which generally results in no action at all… they devote more time to the prosecution of their own purposes than to the consideration of the general welfare—each supposes that no harm will come of his own neglect, that it is the business of another to do this or that—and so, as each separately entertains the same illusion, the common cause imperceptibly decays.” Kennedy had also observed that in Goethe’s great poem Faust lost his soul because of his preoccupation with the passing moment. Dallas was preoccupied with the moment, Dallas was concerned with its own purposes, Dallas was pressing its private ends. The heat—the scorching heat which only the city’s mercantile elite could generate—was on every public servant in the country. They were expected to toe the mark, and they were told exactly what that mark was.

  The man most likely to be caught offsides was Chief Jesse Curry. Curry had already bruised the treasured image, and now he was entrusted with the custody of Lee Oswald. Any affront to the journalists who were swarming through the five police bureaus on his third floor would be intolerable. Both he and District Attorney Henry M. Wade were expected to put up with intruders and bear inconvenience. No information about the prisoner in the maximum-security cell block on the fifth floor must be withheld. None was. Trapped in this deadly fire, Curry and Wade acquiesced, and in so doing they ran into an institutional difficulty. The trouble with surrendering to reporters is that there are never any terms. Capitulation is total. You are lucky if your birthmarks are unnoted. The conflict between due process and freedom of the press has been going on since the trial of John Peter Zenger. Neither side can yield, and neither should. As events in Dallas were to demonstrate, the abdication of authority can lead to a slough. Veteran reporters there were appalled—“You have the nicest policemen to the press I have ever seen,” Henri de Turnure of France-Soir told a Neiman-Marcus executive. “God help you!”—and so were experienced lawyers. By evening the official cooperation with newspapermen and telecast
ers had become so enthusiastic that in Washington the Deputy Attorney General, staying at his post during the Attorney General’s absence, began to entertain serious doubts that any conviction of the suspect could survive appeal. Curry and Wade were trying the case over the networks, with no opposing counsel. Their drawing card was displayed to the press on fifteen occasions; Jim Hosty of the FBI compared the resultant crushes to “Grand Central Station at the rush hour” or to “Yankee Stadium during the World Series games.”

  It was a travesty of justice, and Katzenbach phoned his forebodings to Barefoot Sanders. He told him, “It would be a nightmare if the President’s assassin were found guilty and the Supreme Court threw the case out because he had not had a lawyer. That would be about as low as we could sink.” Sanders tried to intercede. But a federal official had no status at the jail. While the red carpet had been rolled out for every freelance writer, the U.S. Attorney did not belong to the fourth estate, and he was virtually ignored. The pageant went on. As long as Aircraft 26000 remained airborne it had no competition; commercials had been canceled until after the President’s funeral; there had never been so many viewers. Suddenly Curry’s force was the most famous police department in history.

  The most remarkable aspect of the spectacle was unknown to those outside headquarters. Katzenbach, mulling over the legal rights of an accused man and the ghastly contingency of a subsequent reversal, assumed that all the unfamiliar figures romping around the uniformed men on his screen were bona fide correspondents and commentators. But November 22, 1963, was the first of four days during which anything was possible, and as it turned out Katzenbach was taking too much for granted. Avid for approval, fearful of incurring displeasure, Curry had suspended what is standard operating procedure in any police station when public interest in a crime is at fever pitch; his men weren’t checking press credentials. It was open house. Video tapes preserved by NBC-TV, WFAA-TV, and KRLD-TV resemble an M-G-M mob scene. The extras included complainants and witnesses who happened to be in the building, prisoners, relatives of prisoners, relatives of police officers, known criminals, and drunks who wandered in off Harwood Street. Any crank who wished to ogle the most famous department’s most famous captive could have attended the Curry-Wade-Oswald press conference which was set up in the jail basement late Friday, when Oswald was displayed on a platform for better viewing, and one crank did attend it.