The Death of a President

by William Manchester

  The Cabinet plane faced the longest journey. Its initial leg, from the Pacific turnaround to Hawaii, was an hour and forty minutes, almost the length of Swindal’s entire flight. Aircraft 86972, like Aircraft 26000, carried on a ceaseless stream of conversation, first with Honolulu and then, after refueling at Hickam Field, with the capital. Like the messages from Angel, these were guarded, because there was no way to scramble voices. On 86972 there was another reason for hesitation. The men aboard were uncertain of their new status. President Kennedy once observed that a number of governmental institutions have grown independently of the Constitution. His favorite example was Congressional seniority, but the Cabinet is another. Both are rooted in precedent; they are part of our unwritten constitution, and in time of crisis their status is equivocal. Until Truman’s law of 1947 the President’s foreign minister had been the Vice President’s legal successor. Now the position of Rusk and his airborne colleagues differed from those of O’Donnell, O’Brien, Sorensen, and Bundy only in that their appointments had been ratified by the Senate. All were the servants of a national leader who no longer existed.

  Throughout this maddening interregnum—and it must be remembered that the presence of an AP teletype in the communications shack meant that during much of the first lap the passengers thought co-conspirators had killed a Secret Service agent and a Dallas policeman, and were under the impression that Lyndon Johnson might also be a casualty—they could only act on the assumption that they were principal advisers of the American Chief Executive, whoever he might be. Most of them could wait for clarification from President Johnson or, if it should come to that, from President McCormack. Rusk couldn’t. The nature of events required that he be the busiest man in the conference room. As their senior he drafted missives of condolence for Jacqueline Kennedy and support for Kennedy’s successor; as Secretary of State he had to weigh implications abroad.

  Lacking a secure line he wisely decided against placing a call to McNamara. Instead, he filled a yellow ruled page with instructions for George Ball, to be relayed as soon as they reached CINCPAC on Oahu. Some directions were obvious. The diplomatic corps must be reassured, and formal notes must be sent to each of the fifty state governors—the United States is, after all, a federal union. One directive arose from the uncertainty of the moment. Anticipating the needs of the thirty-sixth President, Rusk requested a country-by-country “inventory” from his department’s desks assessing precisely what the assassination would mean “externally and internally” in every world capital, with a breakdown of danger spots. One apprehension was so delicate that the Secretary didn’t even commit it to paper. To those around him he wondered “who has his finger on the nuclear button.”

  Pierre Salinger and Douglas Dillon were bent over identical pads. Pierre was drafting a joint statement for the correspondents he knew would be waiting at Hickam; Dillon, the one Cabinet member here who had been close to the First Family, was preparing a personal wire to Mrs. Kennedy. Among others, Luther Hodges, Orville Freeman, and Walter Heller were also writing, though not for transmission. Each was struggling to frame his own thoughts. It was a kind of therapy, entirely understandable for public men who dealt in words. Yet critical eyes watched them. The tensions of 26000 and 86970 were here in diluted form. The most absonant of human emotions had been uncaged; it was impossible for any given individual to please everyone. The note-takers were resented by those who were not taking notes, one of whom felt that “this was no time to compose memoirs.” Really they weren’t memoirs. They were inchoate attempts to measure the pervasive anguish. Heller noted a “complete grief-stricken silence… for a period that no one can measure by the clock.” Even as Secretary Wirtz, a nonwriter, was silently reflecting that they all seemed to be “under a blanket,” Secretary Freeman was scrawling:

  Dead silence—Tears—Mostly stunned

  Gloom

  … deep affection I hold—tragedy. As Jane said the sense of firm progress and direction of last 3 years meant so much.… what a crime.… My thought: What a diff. place the W.H. will be.… What an incredible unbelievable tragedy.

  They landed in flawless Honolulu sunshine. Five time zones to the east darkness was approaching, but here it was still midmorning. Admiral Harry Felt came aboard with what Hodges described as “some of the terrible details,” telling them that the assassin had used “a high-power rifle and scope”—Freeman, the ex-Marine, had guessed this—while Rusk, Salinger, and Bob Manning hurried across the airstrip. The others kept their belts fastened. The men wanted to refuel as quickly as possible, and they were anxious to shield their distraught wives from staring strangers. Manning handed Salinger’s statement to Felt’s press officer for distribution to reporters; the Secretary talked to his Under Secretary (and discovered that Ball had anticipated most of his orders); the Situation Room informed Pierre that Johnson had been sworn in. Thirty-five minutes later they took off with three new passengers—two members of the press and a physician.

  The physician had been Rusk’s idea. The Secretary believed he detected signs of emotional collapse in several of the women, and pausing in his descent of the ramp he had requested a Navy doctor of the ascending admiral. Felt ran a trim ship. Twenty minutes later a Navy doctor scooted up, black bag in hand. As it turned out, Rusk was to be the only man to know that medical attention was available, because one of the Secretary’s colleagues was so worried about him that he put him asleep. In Rusk’s thirty-four months at State he had never taken a sedative. The chances of sudden shifts in the world situation were too great. He could not risk grogginess. He had had to be ready to carry out Kennedy’s commands at any instant. Now, however, Douglas Dillon decided that a sleeping pill was imperative. Dillon knew that Kennedy had largely acted as his own foreign minister, giving Rusk the lead. Studying the Georgian’s posture, normally so erect, he thought he could almost see the weight of responsibility coming down on his shoulders. Obviously he was very, very tired. On a gesture from her husband Phyllis Dillon dug out a capsule, and together they persuaded Rusk to swallow it and curl up under a blanket in the tail compartment. Later, when a low-priority call came through from Ball, Dillon went up to the shack and handled it.

  For the Secretary of the Treasury to double as Secretary of State was an act of exceptional thoughtfulness. Conflicting themes were clashing wildly: passengers were indignant with one another for jotting down impressions, and, simultaneously, were solicitous of one another. Mental collages were dreamlike, incongruous; Freeman wept and, while contemplating the Oahu beach below, wrote:

  Waikiki beautiful as we took off—surf break & diff. color blue & green. But no heart to take a picture as Rusk, Hodges, Dillon & I sit in compartment in heavy silence & sorrow—

  It doesn’t seem possible—

  Enroute 1:50 Hawaii time—I just completed a little cry, hanky under glasses.…2

  There was surrealistic behavior here, too. Liquor was no more effective over the Pacific than over Appalachia, but there was several heroic attempts at oblivion. Among the men Dillon and Salinger were the most upset. The others had been acquainted with the President; they had been his friends. So Pierre did something which at first seems wondrous. He beckoned to five other men and organized a poker game. The stakes, Josephy noted with amazement, were “$100 worth of chips each to start.” Actually, it wasn’t at all fabulous; it was a passkey to Salinger’s raddled personality. Behind his Levantine façade lay the sensitive pianist who had been a child prodigy. In politics he had camouflaged sensitivity with a tough manner. Tough men smoked strong cigars, drank deeply, and gambled, and these became part of Pierre’s virile masquerade. The true index to his internal agony on November 22 was the way he played his cards. Throughout the eight-hour flight to Andrews he tossed out money with senseless abandon. He had never done that before, he never would do it again. This once, however, recklessness seemed important. And it was. It worked; it preserved his sanity. Between hands he would turn his back and bury his head in his hands (everyone did t
hat; those pauses were the bad moments; in this extraordinary game no one watched the dealer); yet he never cracked. The makeup of the game changed—at its height there were seven players, with Mike Feldman, Manning, and the two correspondents, John Scali of ABC3 and a Time man, staying longest—but Pierre never missed a bet. At the end of the journey he was to survey a crumpled mass of bills and silver. In a semicoma he counted it out. He had won over $800, and he was appalled.

  While Dean Rusk slept and the poker players bluffed and raised, another group of men sat in the conference room, fumbling for the future.

  Here, too, the number of participants varied; the maximum was ten and included the five wakeful Cabinet members and Walter Heller. There was a period of settling down. After the teletype had spiked the false rumors, after Dillon had voiced the Cabinet’s general fear that Americans might demand retribution from Russia and/or Cuba, and after all available facts were in (when the first bulletins had arrived, Heller noted with astonishment, they hadn’t even known “where the Vice President was”), a serious, constructive conversation began. They talked, Hodges wrote, “in pairs and threes and groups,” and the central topic became “the new President’s desires and plans.”

  This was probably the first thoughtful assessment of the Johnson Presidency. Angel’s passengers were disabled by the horror they had seen, most of official Washington was preoccupied by the imminent return of the Presidential plane, but in this landless void the murder was an abstraction, and for eight hours there was nothing the nongamblers could do except talk. The sense of strain remained. They had the futile sensation of swimming in clear glue with weighted arms. These were civilized men, but anger showed its fist, and in the beginning there were a few sharp skirmishes. Wirtz, who had campaigned for Stevenson in Los Angeles, said wryly, “I gather you don’t think the world is at an end? I thought so when Kennedy was nominated.” The others bridled at this tactlessness, and when Luther Hodges insisted that the Attorney General had denounced Lyndon Johnson at a recent meeting of the Kennedy family—and then conceded that this was only hearsay—he himself was denounced as a rumormonger. Immediately Hodges stumbled into another pitfall. He declared that “the South” regarded Johnson’s support of civil rights legislation as treachery. Pressed, he admitted that his informants were all Southern businessmen.

  Gradually the level of the conversation rose. There was long deliberation over the Gordian problem of Presidential disability and another sober review of the line of succession. When the prospect of either McCormack or Hayden in the White House was raised, two Secretaries winced in unison, as though on signal. Then, having skirted the edges of the real issue, they grappled toward the core. In the improvised shorthand of one Cabinet member, they talked “re LBJ & what kind of Pres.” This Secretary’s own view was that LBJ was a “strong man & will rise occasion… this is a strong take-charge man.” Heller declared that Johnson was ignorant of the balance-of-payments problem. There was a pensive silence. No one could say much for LBJ’s grasp of economics. They weren’t even sure he understood the Keynesian theory behind the proposed tax cut. But Dillon pointed out that a State Department representative, acting on Kennedy’s instructions, had provided the Vice President with a daily summary of incoming cables. The note-taker scribbled: “Up on int’l affairs.”

  Again he scrawled, using capitals, “WHAT KIND PRES.” For they were back on the fringes. The essential question was how Johnson would act, not what he knew, and the answer lay in the tortuous logogriph of his personality. Hodges had scarcely spoken to the man. The Secretary of Commerce threw up his hands. He couldn’t even make an educated guess. Wirtz was better informed, but that merely meant that he knew the dimensions of the enigma; he confessed that he had no idea what direction the new President would take. Like Wirtz, Udall knew Johnson and could assure them that whichever way he went, he would be decisive. Over the past three years he and Freeman had been the two Cabinet members who had seen the most of the Vice President. In fact, as Freeman remarked, they were the only ones who really knew him. The Secretary with a pencil reminded them of Johnson’s devotion to Kennedy, his parliamentary ability, and his party loyalty (“Lyndon skilled in pol.… his best compliment—he got on train and stayed”). In addition, he said aloud, he thought Johnson had benefited from Kennedy’s “magnificent training.”

  They listened attentively, hoping he was right. Lyndon Johnson was the only President they had, and unlike McCormack and Hayden he was at the height of his faculties. Yet none of them responded enthusiastically. The writing Cabinet member himself had doubts. In his notes to himself he observed that Lyndon “does not have this sense of the time and the age and the forces which John F. Kennedy had to such an unusual degree.” The cachet was gone. It had been odd: “Jack Kennedy was never really outgoing in a sense with people that you felt close to him, but yet he had that peculiar quality that so endeared him and commanded such loyalty and devotion… that quality was there until I could almost say that you love that man [despite] his somewhat taciturn New England attitudes.” And undeniably his administration had been brilliant: “We were making progress and the national economy was moving ahead. In the international field we were making progress. There was enlightenment.… He would have won that election in ’64.” The writer felt closer to Johnson, and had sympathized with the Vice President, who “wasn’t… completely accepted by the illustrious crowd around Pres.” Nevertheless he concluded: “Hard to tell what he will do.”

  On that agreement was universal. Yet even as they parried and probed they were reaching for their dispatch cases. To them this seemed entirely natural. In reality it was a remarkable achievement in the chronicles of government, and during the following weeks observers abroad, usually so quick to chide the United States, admitted to astonishment at this aspect of the transition. On this point foreigners had reason to be impressed. Here were John Kennedy’s ministers quietly contemplating the administration of a man they hardly knew under circumstances which, if the lessons of world history meant anything, clearly pointed, not to a lone killer, but toward a savage lunge for power.

  The difference was that these were Americans. They weren’t thinking of the world’s past. Bred to insularity by the remoteness of their continent, they were interpreting the violence in Dallas in the light of the American experience. At times this insular quality is a weakness. Here it was strength, reflecting the continuum of the U.S. Presidency. In the six generations since George Washington’s first inaugural on Wall Street the government had never been comminated by a coup. Each of the three previous assassinations had been a psychotic deed—Booth’s “plot” was no plot by European standards; it had been a cabal of impressionable weaklings led by an Oswald with charm. The union had been threatened by secession, but it had never been menaced by Jacobins or Carbonari, and the possibility of such a conspiracy occurred to no one on Aircraft 86972. When Castle and Acrobat relayed Angel’s directive for a Cabinet meeting at 2:15 P.M. the following day, men in the conference room thumbed through their papers. In Hodges’ words, they were preparing “as a matter of custom and courtesy to submit resignations, as I understand is done at the end of a President’s first term, but we will await President Johnson’s reaction and comment.”

  Like Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy had been a man of wealth and a zealous defender of capitalism. Neither had won much gratitude from capitalists. In the early 1960’s, as in the 1930’s, the men in Manhattan’s financial district had regarded the White House with captiousness and enmity. Kennedy was no more a traitor to his class than Roosevelt had been. But as the son of a financial buccaneer who had become one of FDR’s ablest advisers on fiscal reform—the Securities and Exchange Commission and the integrity it brought modern markets were largely creations of Joe Kennedy—JFK had been alert to the vulnerability of the economy to blind panic. During his first week in the executive mansion he had designed an intricate prearrangement to safeguard against such panic. On February 3, 1961, he had sent his proposal to
the Congress as a major message, and on the afternoon of November 22, 1963, it lay on the desk of Joe Fowler, Douglas Dillon’s surrogate.

  Historically the relationship between the Treasury and the mansion had always been intimate. The United States was, after all, the oldest and greatest capitalistic democracy, and the two great buildings, standing on either side of East Executive Avenue, were actually linked by an underground tunnel. Since 1902 the Secret Service, as an arm of the Treasury Department, had tightened the bond. Fowler thought first of the Service; he called Chief Rowley and asked that adequate security arrangements be made for the Vice President and the Speaker of the House. Rowley assured him that this was being done. Fowler’s second call was to Robert McNamara, the ranking Cabinet member in Washington.4 Like the men in the White House, he wanted to be sure that 86972 was reversing course. The Secretary of Defense was talking to the Attorney General on another line, but an aide relayed word that the aircraft was on its way back. They hung up, and it was then that Fowler remembered the plan Kennedy had drafted for just such an extremity as today’s.

  To prevent them from turning world markets into casinos, with the United States as the heavy loser, Kennedy had set up what he called a “swap arrangement” with the central banks of other countries. The U.S.A. literally swapped its money for theirs. He had ordered the Treasury to accumulate enormous stocks of pounds, marks, lire, yen, pesos, rands, guilders, French francs and Swiss francs—of every form of international currency. These had then been locked up. They constituted a kind of insurance: the President left a standing order that in any emergency they should all be released at once, with massive offers of foreign exchange being made to counter any dollars thrown on the table. The first occasion for the measure was to be his own violent death.