The Death of a President

by William Manchester

  Ordinarily the Secret Service was as precise about time as Colonel Swindal. This time a muddle arose over that, too. The two men at F-5 were under the impression that they had just ten minutes in which to act—that Mrs. Kennedy and the coffin would arrive at the mansion within a quarter-hour. John and Caroline were still in their nap clothes. Miss Shaw had to change them and quickly pack an overnight bag. Meantime Foster and Wells were organizing transportation. Four hours had now passed since the assassination without fresh developments, and the possibility of a coordinated conspiracy was steadily diminishing. Nevertheless they had to remain on full alert. Taking the children from the sanctuary of the mansion was clearly hazardous. They checked their .38 caliber side arms, packed a twelve-inch shotgun in a case, and laid the case on the front seat of Wells’s Ford. Foster put Miss Shaw and the children in a Country Squire station wagon; the Ford followed. Before turning on the ignition, Wells unlatched the case to make certain the shotgun’s pistol grip would be within quick reach. At 5:33 P.M. they glided behind the EOB for the eleven-minute drive to Mrs. Auchincloss’ house.

  But Mrs. Auchincloss, unaware of the signal from Clint, was en route to the White House with her husband. And the ten-minute estimate was a fantastic error. At that moment the Presidential aircraft was above the Guyandot River, over three hundred miles to the west. Swindal had slowed to cruise speed. He wanted to be sure he didn’t land early. He had just been told that a large delegation was gathering at Andrews.

  That was what the helicopter fleet had been all about. The subcabinet, the Supreme Court, and the Congressional leadership were arriving at the airport in relays. Some were being ferried by chopper and some by limousine, and all were going against the advice of Robert Kennedy. At 4:30 P.M. the Attorney General had been on the telephone with Sargent Shriver, discussing how the President’s body should be moved from Andrews. Shriver favored a helicopter; a chopper would avoid curious crowds in downtown Washington, which, he pointed out, would be especially distressing for the widow. Bob said, “Have both things ready and she can decide.” Then Shriver called again. Everybody wanted to go to Andrews, he reported; they were discussing which officials had priority. Kennedy was appalled. He didn’t think anybody should be there except himself, McNamara, and General Taylor. The prospect of a crowd hadn’t occurred to him, and he said, “I don’t think it’s a very good idea. It’s unnecessary.”

  Consternation at the White House. Arthur Goldberg came on the line.

  “Bob, this is not right. This is something more than personal. This is the President of the United States. I think we should all go.”

  “The last thing Jackie wants to see is a lot of people.”

  “We owe this gesture to the President—and even to her. It can’t be private. Newsmen will be there in any event, and so will the diplomatic corps. How will it look if only foreigners are there—no Americans?”

  Silence. Then: “If you want to go, go. I’m not going to get into an argument about it.”

  Unknown to him, there had already been a heated argument about it at the mansion. Angie Duke, as the official arbiter of protocol, had first ruled that no one should go to Andrews. That word was passed, and immediately there were repercussions. Harriman characteristically decided to ignore it. Humphrey phoned Duke from the East Wing. “The hell with you,” he said. “I’m going to the airport.” Dungan thought Jenkins, Reedy, and those who had worked with Kennedy had to be there. Ted Sorensen was undecided over the propriety of going, but if the others went, he would too. Bundy pointed out that he had to be at the ramp; Clifton had called him from the plane and told him the new President wanted him there. Duke had begun to have second thoughts. He realized that Goldberg was right; you couldn’t stop the ambassadors. So he reversed himself.

  By now Fairfax County police had surrounded Hickory Hill. The press was staying beyond their lines. The children were subdued, but Dave Hackett had contrived to engage them in a game; he lay beside the jungle gym, his eyes shut, and let them creep up on him. At twilight the Attorney General made a final call to McNamara, changed his shirt once more, and set out for the Pentagon with Ed Guthman. On the front lawn Nicole Alphand was thinking of Jacqueline Kennedy. A refrain was running through her mind: Her husband, the father of her children, her President—three losses in one for her. As Kennedy and Guthman drove off Nicole noticed that the day, which had been beautiful, was touched by a sudden chill. Taking Ethel by the arm, she led her inside.

  In the car with Guthman Robert Kennedy talked about every aspect of the disaster except one—his own incalculable loss and shattered career. He discussed the enormity of the tragedy, the impact on Jackie, the blow to his parents, and the country’s uncertain future. The liberal convictions of Attorney General Kennedy, like those of President Kennedy, were far more deeply held than most liberals had suspected, and they surfaced during the drive. “People just don’t realize how conservative Lyndon really is,” he said as they rode up in the Secretary of Defense’s private elevator. “There are going to be a lot of changes.”

  McNamara greeted them in shirt sleeves. The two Cabinet members gripped hands in a long, tight handshake, and the Secretary slipped on a coat. Taylor joined them—another silent greeting—and Guthman remained in the E Ring while they walked out to the Pentagon’s south helipad and flew across the Potomac to Andrews. There was no conversation in the helicopter. The three passengers were men of identical, anthracite temperament. They didn’t have to lean on others; they were strong enough to lean on themselves. What each really wanted was to be alone, and despite their friendship they separated at the airport. In Taylor’s words, he “wandered about aimlessly, thinking gloomy thoughts.” There was one brief exchange between Kennedy and McNamara. The Attorney General suggested that the Secretary board 26000 with him when it landed. McNamara shook his head. “It’s not my place to do that, Bob,” he said gently. “I’m not a member of the family.” Then he walked away, seeking asylum in shadows.

  Air Force One was thirty minutes away, maneuvering over the Shenandoah, as Bob Kennedy looked out across the plain of oil-stained concrete. Andrews had never been an attractive base. The hangars were exceptionally squat, the bulbous red and white water towers were ungainly, the grass by the wire fence was unmowed crabgrass. Most of the field was now cloaked by night, but Kennedy glimpsed a group of television cameramen by the MATS gate. He resolved to avoid them. Yet he was equally determined to be at Jackie’s side the instant the plane stopped rolling. Casting about, he saw a deserted Air Force truck and vaulted over the tailgate. Sitting in almost total darkness among pieces of unfamiliar gear, he remembered the last time he had been here. It had been at noon on Saturday, October 20, 1962. The missile crisis had just begun; U-2 reconnaissance had confirmed the presence of Russian sites in Cuba, and the President, alerted by phone, had flown home from Chicago on the pretext that he was suffering from a cold. The Attorney General had stood on this same barren stretch, waiting for his brother. But that had been morning. Now he was hiding in the back of a truck, and it was night.

  To those who had known President Kennedy intimately everything, even inanimate objects, seemed to kindle memories of him. Sargent Shriver, arriving at the mansion, had hung his topcoat in Dr. Travell’s outer office and left it there while he saw Ted and Eunice off. When he returned it was gone. His thought was that theft was impossible in the White House. Doubtless a guard had put the coat in a closet. Later in the afternoon, when it developed that it really had been stolen, he began to fume. It was irreplaceable, superbly woven of charcoal gray cashmere, and it was less than three years old. Then he remembered with a pang—he had bought it for the inauguration.

  He remembered. And then he forgot. As the family’s representative-in-residence at the White House he had become wholly engrossed in details and decisions. Americans, accustomed to swift action, saw nothing remarkable in the announcement that the President would be buried Monday. Europeans who specialized in pomp were astonished. In London the Duke of
Norfolk had been working on arrangements for Winston Churchill’s state funeral since the early 1950’s, and he had allocated a week for rehearsals once Churchill did succumb. After Kennedy’s interment in Arlington the Duke repeatedly inquired of visitors from the United States, “Three days—how?”

  The answer lay partly in America’s national temperament, partly in the fiber of the men who had gathered around Shriver and Ralph Dungan that Friday afternoon. They were not automatons. For an hour and a half after the first bulletins from Dallas they had been immobilized by grief. The group in McNally’s office clustered ineffectually around Behn, listening in a stupor as he repeated reports from Kellerman and Hill. Most of their colleagues were down in the Situation Room, watching television on the room’s wall-sized, Orwellian screen. The only aide then functioning at the peak of his proficiency was McGeorge Bundy.

  At three o’clock Washington time, when President Johnson was calling Robert Kennedy for the first time, McNally saw Shriver returning from the helicopter take-off. He approached him, told him of the gathering in the East Wing, and suggested that he join it. Shriver shook his head. “I’ll use Ralph’s office,” he said. That was the beginning of the metamorphosis. Dungan brooded behind his desk, sucking on an unlit pipe; Sarge sat in front on a straight-backed chair. Between them they reached the first funeral decisions during the next two hours. They were never alone. One of their fellow planners described the meeting—which was to continue nonstop through three successive nights—as “Jack’s last campaign.” It was a lot like a campaign; a man almost had to be a political veteran to function in it. The room filled up quickly Friday. At one point the standees included Mac Bundy, Ted Sorensen, Jerry Behn, Walter Jenkins, George Reedy, Jack McNally, Fred Holborn, Taz Shepard, Averell Harriman, Angie Duke, Bill Walton, Ted Reardon, Dick Goodwin, Arthur Schlesinger, Ken Galbraith, Kay Graham, Jerry Bruno, Dr. Joseph English, Dean Markham, Chief Stover of the White House Police, Monsignor Cartwright of St. Matthew’s Cathedral, and Lieutenant Colonel Paul Miller, MDW’s short, spare ceremonies officer. It was difficult to breathe; secretaries would eavesdrop on conversations and relay the gist of them to other secretaries.

  The right of several individuals to be there was clearly marginal. Galbraith, for example, was a former member of the administration. Kay Graham had never belonged to it. And Bruno was simply trying to find out what was going on. As the man who had advanced Texas, he had been monitoring the progress of the motorcade over the telephone from his office at the Democratic National Committee. Shortly after 12:30 the Signal Corps operator had broken in to say, “Somebody’s been shot—I’ve got to cut you off.” Since then he had grasped the essential facts, but he was anxious for details. He wasn’t learning much—short and stubby, he couldn’t even see over Galbraith’s shoulders by leaping in the air—and he was one of the first to be motioned out.

  It was Shriver’s special talent to find a job for every volunteer. Several men were sent off to draw up separate lists of the President’s friends; Adlai Stevenson, when he arrived later, was asked his views on protocol. The key advisers there were Angie Duke, who had brought State’s book on the Roosevelt funeral, and Colonel Miller. At 3:42 P.M. Shriver and Dungan knew that Aircraft 26000’s destination would be Andrews; by 4:30 they had begun specifying who should go to the airport and Duke was dispatching a protocol officer to handle foreign diplomats there. Then they held the first tentative deliberations on the burial itself. Colonel Miller explained that state funerals are reserved for Presidents, Presidents-elect, and anyone designated by a President.10 The chief difference between them and other official funerals is lying in state, and Miller had drawn up plans for this in both the mansion’s East Room and the Capitol’s great rotunda. In the event of a Boston burial, he said, three possible departures had been laid out: “rail, air, and destroyer.” The Navy, he added, was already holding a destroyer in readiness. It remained on stand-by throughout the next day, though from the tempo of the meeting Miller had already concluded that a sea voyage was unlikely; if President Kennedy were taken to Massachusetts, it would probably be by air. The prospects of any long-distance movement appeared dim to the Colonel, however, and he was right. Unlike his wife, Shriver never seriously considered Boston. Independently of Mrs. Kennedy he was focusing on Arlington. Shortly after 5:30, at about the time Robert Kennedy found haven in the truck at Andrews Field, Shriver phoned Metzler to ask whether there was any rule prohibiting “a Catholic burial in a national cemetery or the burial of children.” The superintendent answered, “Negative to both. We have Catholic ceremonies almost every day, and minor children are with their parents.” With this call Metzler was convinced that his hunch was justified, and he proceeded on the assumption that Arlington would be chosen.

  That was a good guess. There were bad guesses, too. Clint Hill and Ken O’Donnell weren’t the only men to misinterpret Jacqueline Kennedy’s mood during those first hours. Shriver, Dungan, and Metzler, for example, were sure she would want the funeral mass held in the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, Washington’s largest and most prestigious Roman Catholic church. They erred; she was vehemently against it. They were also guilty of one conspicuous oversight. Captain R. O. Canada, Jr., Bethesda’s commanding officer, wasn’t informed of the role his hospital would play. And Godfrey McHugh’s tart order for an ambulance had been ignored. Canada did send one to Andrews, but that was sheer chance. Because Lyndon Johnson had served in the Navy, he had been Canada’s patient after his massive heart attack on July 2, 1955; the ambulance was dispatched against the possibility that the new President might be stricken again during the flight. The Captain learned from his office television set that it would carry President Kennedy.

  The White House had talked to Canada’s staff about another matter which was almost unknown at the time, even among members of the Kennedy family. One would have thought that Vernon Oneal would be the last undertaker to see the President’s body—that once it had been landed it would become the sole responsibility of the government. Not so. The funeral industry had attained a kind of metapsychic domination over all who dealt with death. They had even adopted its jargon; Metzler, Miller, and the doctors at Bethesda referred to “the remains,” not “the body,” and Fort Myer’s Old Guard had abandoned the more dignified “pallbearers” for “casket team.” All of them had been seduced by the curious myth that only licensed morticians could prepare “the remains” for burial. It was untrue, and there should have been no undertaker in Washington. But everyone at a responsible position at Arlington, MDW, Fort Myer, and Bethesda was under the impression that there had to be one. Indeed, so unanimous were they that the issue would never have arisen had it not been for the publication of Jessica Mitford’s The American Way of Death six months earlier. Robert Kennedy had read Miss Mitford’s carefully documented exposé of the gouging of bereaved relatives, and so had Dr. Joseph English, the Peace Corps psychiatrist who stood at Sargent Shriver’s elbow Friday afternoon.

  Among the immediate concerns in Dungan’s office had been questions of who would receive the body, whether or not an autopsy would be held, and, if so, where it would be performed. Dr. Burkley solved these by relaying Mrs. Kennedy’s instructions to Taz Shepard. Captain Canada was in the dark, but his staff wasn’t; Bethesda was getting ready. Then Colonel Miller told Shriver that a private funeral home would be necessary.

  Shriver bridled. “Why? Why can’t the government do it?”

  “There are precedents,” said the Colonel, visibly disturbed. “It has to be private. The military isn’t equipped to prepare the remains.”

  Shriver hesitated. He asked Miller to recommend an undertaker. The Colonel shook his head.

  “Why not?” Sarge demanded.

  “I’d be offending the other sixty-seven morticians,” the Colonel said. Then, after an awkward pause, he said, “Gawler’s.”

  “Why Gawler’s?”

  “It’s among the best. It’s been used in other official funerals.”

&nbs
p; Someone suggested that everything could be done at Bethesda. Shriver stared at Miller. “I thought you said the military couldn’t do it.”

  Miller squirmed. Taz Shepard said to him, “Paul, let’s check on another line.” They did, and Shepard reported back to the meeting, “Bethesda says they can do the embalming, but not preparing the remains.”

  “Colonel, I guess you feel a lot better,” Shriver said.

  “I sure do,” said Miller, and at 4:25 he alerted the funeral home.

  In his absence, however, Dr. English reported to Shriver that he had made inquiries of his own and discovered that the first suggestion had been correct; there was no need to offend any of the morticians or involve them in any way. “Cancel the arrangements that have been made,” Shriver snapped. He and English thought this had been done. Nine months later they were startled to learn that they had been wrong—that the funeral home had, in the words of one of its executives, “cosmetized, clothed, and casketed the remains.”

  Colonel Miller’s alert had been received by Bill Gawler, a cousin of Joe and the head of the firm. Bill entered it on his “first call sheet” and spread the word. The funeral home felt deeply honored. Within an hour the house—a huge red brick edifice on Wisconsin Avenue—was occupied by a detail of troops in dress blues. The soldiers were members of the Old Guard’s ceremonial outfit. They called themselves the Death Watch, because in state funerals they took up positions at the corners of the coffin. On watch, they stood at rigid attention; approaching and leaving the bier they moved in double-slow cadence. By 5:30 P.M. they were rehearsing in what the funeral home advertised as its “French,” “Green,” and “Georgian” rooms.