The Secretary nodded. The General rounded up Sam Bird and six members of his second team and led them aboard the helicopter. Having failed to provide a proper military escort here, he was determined to be on hand when the coffin reached Bethesda. The enlisted men were awestruck—they had never ridden on an H-21 with cushioned seats—and the pilot raced across the capital (passing directly over the Greenlawn Drive home of Barney Ross, who ran out in time to see its familiar belly lights); then, with a cough of engines, the rotors settled down on the hospital’s heliport. In 1961 Burkley had requested the pad, hoping he could persuade the President to inspect Washington’s naval hospital. Kennedy had never found time. This was the first time the heliport had been used, and like so much else between 6 and 6:30 it was an occasion for bizarre misunderstanding. As Lieutenant Bird stepped to the ground, a score of Speed Graflex bulbs exploded together. Newspaper photographers assumed that the casket was right behind him.
During the seething movement of humanity at Andrews Jacqueline Kennedy had been temporarily stranded. Clint Hill assumed she would sit on the ambulance’s front seat and went that way. She balked. “No, I want to go in the back,” she said, and pivoted aside. She tried the rear door, tried again and wrestled with it. It was fastened from the inside. Why doesn’t somebody help her? Mary McGrory wondered. Jim Swindal saw the difficulty and sprinted over, but just as he arrived the driver reached back and released the lock. Mrs. Kennedy wrenched it open and scrambled in.
Beside the driver, gaping, were the heart specialist and nurse who had been sent to attend Lyndon Johnson. At Roy Kellerman’s request all three slid out wordlessly and Greer, Kellerman, Landis, and Burkley scrambled in, Burkley on Landis’ lap. The Attorney General entered the back, sitting opposite his sister-in-law; Godfrey perched beside her. The rest of the Bethesda cavalcade lined up swiftly, Clint and Dr. Walsh in the second car; the mafia in the third; Evelyn, Pam, Mary, Muggsy, and George Thomas in the fourth. Before the truck lift could be removed and a ramp brought up for the new President, the body of President Kennedy had begun its forty-minute drive to the hospital.
Bob Kennedy slid open the plastic partition separating the rear of the ambulance from the front and asked, “Roy, did you hear they’d apprehended a fellow in Dallas?”
Roy hadn’t. For two hours Lee Oswald had been news in the rest of the nation, but of 26000’s passengers only those who had been watching the stateroom television set knew of it.
“That’s good,” Kellerman said.
“It was one man.”
“At the hospital I’ll come up and talk to you.”
“You do that,” said Bob, and closed the partition.
Jacqueline Kennedy told him, “I don’t want any undertakers. I want everything done by the Navy.”
He asked Godfrey to see to that. Then a disjointed discussion ensued, touching upon the probable future of Kennedy aides, the delayed take-off from Love Field, McHugh’s role in that, and the explanation which the new President had offered at the time. “He said he’d talked to you, Bobby,” Jackie told her brother-in-law, “and that you’d said he had to be sworn in right there in Dallas.” The Attorney General was startled. There must be some misunderstanding, he said; he had made no such suggestion.1
Leaning gently on the coffin, Mrs. Kennedy whispered, “Oh, Bobby—I just can’t believe Jack has gone.”
Her eyes fixed on a gray curtain over his shoulder, she described the motorcade, the murder in the sunlight, and the aftermath. For twenty minutes he listened in silence. Afterward he said, “It was so obvious that she wanted to tell me about it that whether or not I wanted to hear it wasn’t a factor.… I didn’t think about whether I wanted to hear it or not. So she went through all that.” Still, it could only have been an ordeal for him. Jacqueline Kennedy and Robert Kennedy were different, too. She was entirely feminine, he masculine; she was Gallic, he a Celt; she had to share her grief, he had to camp alone with his. But he could take hers, too. It was part of being the new head of the family, and so, without comment or expression, he heard the full horror of Dallas; heard the tale told in that husky voice which came to him softly across the scarred casket.
So she went through all that.…
He looked out between the curtains. Until now the landscape had been either nondescript or coarse. Leaving the base Bill Greer had taken Westover Drive and Suitland Drive, driving through forested land to Suitland Parkway’s four lanes. Except for the rolling hills they might have been on a Texas superhighway. “Speed Limit 45, Speed Radar Checked,” the signs had warned; “No Trucks,” “Keep Right,” “Caution Construction Work Ahead,” “Entering Washington.” Crossing into the District they had passed through a labyrinth of viaducts and industrialization: a gasworks, a trumpery of motels, package stores, billboards, and Gulf and Esso (“Happy Motoring!”) filling stations. A few people had been waiting for them—Pam Turnure saw children standing in pajamas—but the groups were random, because the motorcade to Bethesda had been unexpected right up to the moment of its departure.
At the South Capitol Street Bridge the first downtown landmark appeared, the jutting Washington Monument, and Bob Kennedy saw it. To the right, and then dead ahead, shone the Capitol. The open circuit of his consciousness picked up another line; Jackie retained his attention, but part of his mind turned inward in retrospect. He was remembering the late 1950’s on the Hill when Senator John F. Kennedy sat on the McClellan Committee and Robert F. Kennedy had served as chief counsel with Kenny and Pierre as staff assistants. Greer turned west from Canal down Independence and the Mall. Now everything was evocative. The Federal Trade Commission: Big Steel. NASA: Glenn. The red gingerbread of the Smithsonian: his brother’s love affair with America’s past. His own office at Justice: Oxford, the Cuban prisoners. Internal Revenue: the tax cut. The Labor Department: Reuther and the March on Washington.
They passed between the twin wings of Agriculture. Greer swung north toward Seventeenth Street, and Bob peered north across the Mall and the Ellipse. On the left the unlovely mansard roof of the Executive Office Building hulked briefly, a bad Ronald Searle joke. Then, through the spidery late autumn foliage of Grover Cleveland’s maples and Theodore Roosevelt’s daimio oak, the Attorney General saw the gleaming South Portico of the executive mansion. For 1,036 days it had been the home of President John Kennedy. But this was the last of them. The thousand dawns were memory. The light had glimmered and died, and as Greer began the tortuous approach to the construction around the State Department, the Pan American Union Building intervened, eclipsing the pale vision.
Leaving the Mall, Greer had twisted his wheel to avoid a tall, narrow green truck parked by an open drain, into which a party of workmen were feeding coils of thick metal rope. Television technicians were already preparing funeral coverage; the Chesapeake & Potomac had begun laying what ultimately became nearly six miles of temporary video cable. By the following evening, when Bunny Mellon returned from the Caribbean, she would have the impression that “all Washington was being wired.” Certainly all downtown Washington was. Ultimately everything from the Hill to the Potomac was to be under electronic surveillance, with a CBS producer coordinating tripartisan network broadcasts. The forerunner of all this had been the brief scene at Andrews, when the national audience glimpsed for the first time the principals in the drama which had begun four and a half hours before. Unknown to the passengers in the Pontiac ambulance, each of the public buildings they passed was crowded with officials who had watched the descent of the truck lift—Guthman and the Assistant Attorneys General at Justice; the Assistant Secretaries of Freeman, Wirtz, and Hodges; and the Interstate Commerce Commission at Twelfth and Constitution.
That was the federal triangle. It had been no different elsewhere; Bill Greer took the Rock Creek Parkway, then Waterside Drive to Massachusetts Avenue, then Massachusetts to Wisconsin, and there was hardly a home in northwest Washington which did not know as much about the history of the day as he did—which did not, in fact, have m
ore information about the assassin who had observed Greer through the cheap telescopic sight five hours earlier. At Jacqueline Kennedy’s mute appearance in 26000’s doorway the Ormsby-Gores had wept in the British Embassy, the Alphands in the French. They had known the President well, but there were also tears in the legations of nations so small that most of John Kennedy’s constituents couldn’t have placed them on a map. Out Massachusetts and along Kalorama Road this was normally the prime hour for weekly cocktail parties. There had been none today. Ambassadors hadn’t even advertised the fact that they were canceling them; that in itself would have been considered undiplomatic. In a state of semihypnosis the envoys who hadn’t driven to the MATS terminal had beheld the black and gray images flitting across the squares of glass. Indeed, it is possible to divide almost everyone in the District at that time into two groups: those who went to Andrews and those who monitored broadcasts of it. Lucy Johnson cried at the Elms, Mrs. Harriman in Georgetown, Mrs. Greer—with relief—in suburban Maryland. Even Agents Foster and Wells had seen some of it. Storing their shotguns on a high shelf in the Auchincloss kitchen, they had carried Caroline’s old crib down from the attic, rapidly improvised substitutes for two missing parts, and set it up for John. While the children played with young Jamie Auchincloss the men had hunched furtively over a set, keeping the volume knob down until, when Caroline ran in with a question, they had to switch it off altogether.
The capital was typical of the nation. Colonel Swindal had approached his landing strip at six o’clock there, five o’clock in the Midwest, four o’clock over the Rocky Mountains, and three o’clock on the West Coast. All America had been out of touch with the Presidency since the take-off from Love Field, and those who could feign disinterest or suppress curiosity were exceedingly rare. In Houston the staff of the Rice Hotel had assembled in Max Peck’s office, identifying among the Andrews pallbearers their Secret Service advance man, who had been among them twenty-four hours before (they had been worried about him; the denial that an agent had been killed had not yet caught up with the story), and in Dallas Marie Fehmer’s family saw her come down the MATS ramp after the new President and embraced one another, certain now that she was safe.
Seven screens had been alight in the White House alone: Nancy Tuckerman’s, Salinger’s, the Fish Room’s, the Situation Room’s, and, in the Presidential apartment, those in the West Sitting Room, the Treaty Room, and the third-floor hall. In the absence of the First Family and its retinue they were watched by servants. After Andrews the help continued to gaze. It was part of the national fever. Television, in Justice White’s words, had become “a hypodermic, an emotional bath.” Men who never watched regularly scheduled programs became helpless witnesses of whatever was shown; Justice Goldberg had hardly used his set before, yet all weekend he was either participating in funeral functions or at home, staring at shadows. At the time few doubted the wisdom of the networks’ policy. One did; Dwight Eisenhower thought the experience was upsetting to the American people. Eisenhower considered the renunciation of commercials a proper gesture of respect, but felt that a five-minute hourly summary of recent developments would have provided adequate news coverage, and that the familiar television diet would have been less disturbing. Perhaps the people needed to be disturbed. There is no doubt that they were. The marathon went on and on until White’s little daughter asked him, “Daddy, when are we going to be happy again?”
One unforeseen consequence of the ban on commercials was that programmers were hard-pressed to fill the time. Almost anyone with a eulogy to the slain President, or a memorial concert, or the haziest recollection of his assassin was instantly put on camera. Lacking those, producers dug into their video-tape libraries, running and rerunning every reel which was remotely relevant. One minute a viewer might see a still photograph of Jack Kennedy, Harvard ’40, in his black silk swimming suit. Moments later Lieutenant (jg) Kennedy would be decorated for valor in the Pacific (1943), Congressman Kennedy would be campaigning in Boston (1946), Senator Kennedy would be moving for Estes Kefauver’s Vice Presidential nomination by acclamation (1956), and President Kennedy would be informing the nation that the Soviet Union was installing a billion dollars’ worth of warheads in Cuba and that he had therefore ordered the island blockaded (1962). The sequence might be reversed, scrambled, or interrupted by films of Franklin Roosevelt’s funeral, which, in turn, might be succeeded by an amateur cameraman’s record of the abortive attempt on President-elect Roosevelt’s life in 1932. Since announced distinctions between tape and live camera were infrequent, and since television was the chief—sometimes the sole—tie with reality, individual recollections of that weekend are often an idiotic pastiche; Ted Sorensen returned from Andrews, walked into the Fish Room, and found himself listening to familiar words spoken by a familiar voice: it was the President delivering his Houston speech of yesterday evening, the text of which Kennedy and Sorensen had reviewed here in the West Wing yesterday morning.
Upstairs one picture was dark. The Oval Room had been deserted since 6 P.M. Twenty minutes before Air Force One landed, a small group of friends and relatives had been bracing themselves to console Jacqueline Kennedy there. After seeing the children off Nancy Tuckerman and the Bradlees had received Janet and Hudi Auchincloss. The strain had been conspicuous; all five had sat in constricted postures. Unsummoned waiters had arrived with chicken sandwiches, which were unwanted, and drinks, which were drained. Conversation had been spasmodic, schizoid. Mr. West, dignified and discreet, had entered occasionally to tell Nancy of the plane’s progress. Abruptly Jean Kennedy Smith, unheralded, appeared in the doorway holding the overnight bag in which she had packed her black mourning dress. She looked about uncertainly, her face white and pinched. Conversation stopped entirely. There really hadn’t been anything to say anyhow, and now they abandoned pretense and retired into private reveries. Less than a minute later Mr. West glided in behind Jean with word that the widowed First Lady would be going directly to Bethesda.
Nancy wavered. To Toni Bradlee she seemed unsure of her position; despite her long friendship with Mrs. Kennedy, Nancy had only been White House social secretary since early summer. “You don’t want to intrude,” she said hesitantly. “But maybe everyone will take that attitude and no one will go.” Then, decisively: “I’ll order a car.”
Jean left her bag in the Lincoln Room; Provi Parades hurried down from the third floor, where she had been listening to Frank McGee’s description of her mistress’ defiled suit over NBC, with a makeup case and a suitcase of clean clothes initialed “J.B.K.” Nancy took them, though neither was destined to be opened that night. Squinting down they saw that the Rose Garden was thick with reporters who had guessed that the coffin might be brought directly here. To avoid the press Nancy ordered Carpet (the White House garage) to take her party out through the East Gate.
Carpet, the garage; Crown, the mansion; and Castle, the White House headquarters where all Signal Corps ganglia met, were straining at the tether, and their eagerness to be of service to the family is the only rational explanation for the wild ride which followed. Everything was overdone. It was sensible of Castle to warn Captain Canada that “the First Lady’s parents” were on their way, but the rest of it was entirely unreasonable. A platoon of white-helmeted motorcycle policemen led the car to the District line, where Maryland state troopers took over. Every officer was winding his siren, and from passing cruisers and firehouses, some of them blocks away, other sirens echoed the strident wails. It was baroque. It was Ray Bradbury. It was a perpetual fire alarm—if every house in greater Washington had been ablaze, the noise would have been identical.
At the approach to Bethesda the sidewalks were solid. Because of the passengers’ stupor the dense crowds made little impression. The instinct of self-preservation is unquenchable, however, and their speed was as fantastic as it was needless. None of them had seen an automobile travel this fast on urban streets. As Greer moved steadily up Suitland Parkway, observing the 45 mph limit out
of habit, they were hurtling along Wisconsin at over 90. Ben and Hudi in front and the four women cowering together in the back were literally frightened for their lives. They saw one near fatality. A motorcyclist overturned, sailed over his sidecar, landed on his feet, and scrabbled into the silent mass of curbside witnesses. “That ride was so bad,” Ben recalled later, “that it took your mind off everything else. It was an assault on a man’s senses. It added a new dimension. Before there had been sadness and the suffering with the children. Now there was darkness and this unbelievable velocity. The gaping bystanders began to look like ghouls to me; I had the feeling that we were racing toward our doom.”
The chauffeur chose one of the hospital’s three gates at random, and they were met by a civilian guard and a sedan bearing a Catholic chaplain and a senior nurse who had been told to watch for Mrs. Kennedy. The reception at either of the other two gates would have been the same. Since the Secret Service had dislodged the regular driver at Andrews, Captain Canada had no idea where the ambulance would enter. Therefore he had stationed chaplains and nurses at all of them. The guards were under orders to admit no one except employees, patients in serious condition, their relatives, and cars with White House clearance. Canada was worried about crowds. Minutes after the televised announcement that President Kennedy was en route here multitudes had begun to surround the grounds. Their sheer numbers were overwhelming, and unprecedented; Bethesda had not had this many visitors in all its history. Effective precautions were impossible. The sole barrier linking the gates was a low fence of four parallel green pipes. A child of six could scale it. Children did, and so did the infirm. The lawn was covered with a shapeless blur of onlookers.
The Death of a President Page 58
