McNamara walked through the suite and reached a decision: “She was in that suit with the bloody skirt and blood all over her stockings, and it was fantastic, but she just wanted someone to talk to. I felt I had to be calm for her and listen to her. We were in the kitchen, Jackie sitting on the stool and me on the floor. It went on for hours. I was concentrating entirely upon her, because she needed me and I felt, the hell with the others; let them take care of themselves.”
She talked about the murder. Finally she asked, “Where am I going to live?”
The executive mansion was no longer a Kennedy residence, and she remembered that she didn’t own the Georgetown house either. Late in 1960 the President-elect had said, “Why sell it?” It was ideal, and after two terms they would need a permanent home. But eight years seemed such a long time. It was practically a decade, so he had put it on the market. Now she needed it, or might. She was indecisive. Sleeping in that bedroom alone would be unbearable, she thought, and then she reflected, I must never forget Jack, but I mustn’t be morbid. So: she would move back to Georgetown, preferably into the same address.
“I’ll buy it back for you,” McNamara said.
Later that scene excluded everything else in the Secretary’s memories of the hospital. It would seem to him that he had never left the kitchen. In fact, he did more. When Shriver encountered a snag in acquiring a detail of ceremonial troops for the North Portico, McNamara issued an order, and he joined the debate which was shaping over the burial site. The mafia’s position had become firmer. Jean also preferred Brookline, and the Attorney General, who hadn’t committed himself, remarked to Bradlee, “Everybody from Boston favors there.” Ben said, “I’m from Boston, and I’m not in favor of it.” Bob studied him quizzically. “Our people don’t think of you as a Bostonian,” he said. Ben was nonplused—Bradlees had lived in Beacon Street when O’Briens and O’Donnells were across the sea—and then McNamara drew Kennedy aside and said forcefully that he agreed with Ben. Bob replied, “If you feel that strongly, why not say something to Jackie?”
McNamara did. He returned to the kitchen and explained to her that while he understood the tie to Massachusetts, the President shouldn’t belong to one section of the country. He wasn’t arguing for Arlington. At that time he really didn’t know much about it; to him it was merely one of several national cemeteries. But he was convinced that any one of them would be more fitting than the Brookline plot. “A President, particularly this President, who has done so much for the nation’s spiritual growth and enlarged our horizons, and who has been martyred this way, belongs in a national environment,” he said. “I feel this is imperative. Boston is just too parochial.”
Although she had been thinking along the same lines, she reached no final judgment that night. Bethesda was ill-suited to deliberation. The dismal furnishings; the unreal, almost stately mazurka in the drawing room; the efficiency apartment kitchenette; the sea of spectators below; the suddenness of it all—every concomitant blurred resolution. The very floor plan was congesting. At one point Toni felt a sealed coffin was important, but she couldn’t get through to Mrs. Kennedy; there were too many people in the intersection of the T. Early editions of the following afternoon’s newspapers created the impression that the widow had been a superexecutive, issuing rapid-fire commands in the manner of her husband. They erred. She did ask Jean, “Where are you staying? Where did they put you?” and after her sister-in-law had replied that her bag was in the Lincoln Room she suggested Jean have it moved across the hall to the Queen’s Room—so called because Queen Elizabeth had once stayed there—because the Attorney General was the President’s brother; having him there seemed appropriate. And early in the evening she also solved the lying-in-state question. Few of the million tourists who filed through the mansion’s first-floor rooms each year knew that the White House Historical Association’s dollar guide had been largely the work of the First Lady. At the bottom of page 39 she had had reprinted an engraving of Lincoln’s body on its catafalque, and when Bob gently pointed out to her that they would have to think about what they were going to do when they left here, she answered, “It’s in the guidebook.” That was the basis for the myth that she had made a series of snappy judgments. According to one widely published version she had been busy as a whipsaw during the flight from Dallas, starting parade plans the moment Air Force One left Love Field. “From the hospital,” the Associated Press reported, “she asked artist William Walton to find a certain book on a certain shelf in the White House library containing sketches and photographs of Abraham Lincoln lying in state.” She didn’t speak to Walton, and there was no such book. “From Bethesda Hospital during that first long night,” wrote Life, “she began a series of astonishingly detailed plans and decisions, many drawn from history, the rest of them of her own devising… she remembered her husband’s keen interest in the Special Forces, the guerrilla-trained troops he had sent to the jungles of Vietnam. She asked, ‘Couldn’t the honor guard include a member of the Special Forces?’ ” She did not remember her husband’s keen interest in the Special Forces; she did not ask such a question. Her sole contribution at the hospital was her reference to the White House guide, and even there her memory was vague. Later she rechecked the engraving and was appalled to see that Lincoln had lain on what appeared to be a teratoid, golden oak, four-poster bed.
The Kennedy who was really in charge in the tower suite was the Attorney General. He made the call about the catafalque. He requested a representative from the Special Forces. He asked that the President’s personal possessions be removed from the West Wing before their return, so that Jackie would not see them and be upset, and he was responsible for the strains of the Navy hymn, which would haunt the President’s countrymen long after the eulogies had been forgotten. To them two passages would endure—the opening “Eternal Father, strong to save,” and the concluding:
O hear us when we cry to Thee
For those in peril on the sea.
He remembered a third. In 1945 he had served as an apprentice seaman aboard the destroyer Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr., christened in recognition of his oldest brother’s heroism. Young Joe had been a Navy flier. Earlier in the war the military services had revised their traditional music to include pilots. The Marine hymn’s “on the land as on the sea” was changed to “in the air, on land and sea,” and sailors sang:
O God, protect the men who fly
Through lonely ways beneath the sky.
The national tragedy of November 22 made the long-ago death of another Kennedy seem remote to most of those who knew of it, but it wasn’t remote to his brothers. Young Joe had been the Kennedy destined for a political career; because Joe had been killed, Jack had run for Congress; Jack’s murder meant that the staff had fallen into Bobby’s hands; should he die, Teddy would be next. The President had never forgotten Joe. Bob, knowing that, and knowing that he would have approved, asked for the hymn. Like nearly everything else, it was attributed to the widow. Men who talked to Bob Kennedy subsequently convinced themselves that they had spoken to Jackie; men who had heard Bob’s wishes relayed through Shriver told the press that they were acting at the request of Mrs. Kennedy. On the plane she had displayed unsuspected stamina, eclipsing O’Donnell and O’Brien, and that strength would reappear after they had returned to Pennsylvania Avenue, but on the night of November 22–23 the commanding figure in Bethesda Naval Hospital was Robert Kennedy.
As Ralph Dungan put it, there were “two circuits that night: here and there.” “There” was Bob Kennedy. “Here” was Dungan’s office, where Shriver continued to preside over the marathon meeting, discussing preliminary arrangements for the funeral Mass with Richard Cardinal Cushing and trying to absorb Colonel Miller’s copy of the turgid State, Official and Special Military Funeral Policies and Plans. Both the tower suite and the West Wing were vexed by an exasperating uncertainty: no one knew when the President’s body would be ready to be moved from the morgue. From a telephone on the nurse’s desk o
utside the suite Clint Hill periodically checked with Roy Kellerman; Ted Clifton, at Shriver’s elbow, called Godfrey McHugh. Kellerman and McHugh weren’t doctors, so they asked Dr. Burkley, who repeatedly replied, “It’s taking longer than they thought.” The first estimated time of arrival at the White House was 11 P.M. This then became midnight, 1 A.M., 2 A.M., 3 A.M., 3:30 A.M., and 4 A.M. The reason it was taking longer was never specified, but since even laymen could guess what “it” was, they didn’t inquire.
At the hospital the two most impressive men were the Attorney General and the Secretary of Defense; in the mansion they were Shriver and Walton, both of whom joined in the response triggered by Mrs. Kennedy’s recollection of the guidebook.
Shriver, juggling telephones, turned the lying-in-state task over to Dick Goodwin. Goodwin phoned Schlesinger at the Harriman house, and at approximately 10 P.M. Roy Basler of the Library of Congress received a call from Schlesinger, who said he was “relaying an urgent personal request from Mrs. Kennedy.” This was typical; three men—Kennedy, Shriver, and Goodwin—stood between him and the widow, but Schlesinger gave Basler the definite impression that he had just talked to Jacqueline Kennedy. In this case, however, the deception was doubtless wise; as an historian Schlesinger knew how refractory archival bureaucracies could be. Further dialing summoned David C. Mearns, the chief of Basler’s manuscripts division, and James I. Robertson, a scholar of the Lincoln funeral. Mearns, Robertson, and a third librarian met in the cavernous library. The library’s master switch was off, locked in that position by a timing device. Flashlights were fetched, and the three men ran up and down the gloomy warrens, assembling a truckload of reports from century-old newspapers and magazines. The most precise accounts were delivered to the Northwest Gate of the White House, and on a table in the mansion’s marble entrance hall Goodwin laid out two, from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper and the May 6, 1865, issue of Harper’s Weekly. Walton riffled through them, found an Alfred Waud sketch in Harper’s, and went to work.
There was little wasted motion in Dungan’s office. There was some: on his arrival from Boston, Frank Morrissey, a roly-poly friend of the Kennedy family and something like a character out of The Last Hurrah, did begin a night-long series of long-distance calls which began boomingly, “This is Morrissey at the White House,” and the point of which eluded those within earshot. The Democratic National Committee did send a man to the marathon meeting, though the need for a professional politician was unexplained. And General Clifton was misinformed about the Lincoln catafalque. The original was stored in the Capitol basement, and a replica was available, but Clifton was frantically attempting to get the White House carpenters to build a new one. These, however, were exceptions. The Jackie-Bob-Sarge-Goodwin-Schlesinger-Library-Walton chain was the rule. At 1 A.M. Pierre Salinger showed up, red-eyed, his pockets stuffed with the $800 in unwanted bills and change, and immediately began holding press briefings. (Pierre assigned himself to the President at Bethesda; he told Kilduff to serve as press secretary to the President in Spring Valley.) Dean Markham was notifying Kennedy friends that a short Catholic service would be held in the East Room at 10 A.M., and that the Rev. J. J. Cavanaugh was planning it.
Down in the executive mansion’s theater, where Lieutenant Sawtelle’s honor guard had resumed rehearsals, Special Forces men were being integrated into the Death Watch. This was a greater challenge than Lieutenant Bird’s reshuffling of body bearers at Andrews. The Attorney General’s recognition of the guerrilla fighters moved them deeply. As one of their officers told Clifton, “These boys regard the President as their godfather.” They came anxious to serve with dignity. But the Death Watch was unusual duty. Refitting them in Army dress blues, leaving them their distinctive green berets, was relatively easy.3 And the visual signals were swiftly learned. The real problem would come in the morning, when the men stood by the coffin. Experience had taught Sawtelle that the fragrance of wreaths could be nauseating, that a soldier who kept his eyes fixed on one point could become hypnotized and swoon, and that a man’s greatest struggle would be with his own emotions. It was hard enough to remain rigid when visitors wept over the coffin of a stranger. All the men in the joint guard of honor had held the young President in special regard, however, and the reverence of the elite Special Forces made them particularly vulnerable. The Lieutenant cautioned them never to look directly at a candle, the quickest mesmerizer. He warned them that they must think about other things—about anything except the murdered President. Even so, he was worried. Obviously the husky guerrillas were tense. They were primed for combat, but standing motionless hour after hour required a different sort of discipline. Sawtelle decided to hold them back until the East Room watch had been established for some time, and then to assign an additional soldier to each shift as insurance against fainting.
The chief activity in the corridor outside Dungan’s anteroom was the drawing up of ad hoc lists, and it was to continue all weekend. There were guest lists for each phase of the funeral: seating plans, standing plans, marching formation, lists of lists—the Executive Branch, the Legislative Branch, the Supreme Court; Special Assistants to the President; visiting heads of state; the diplomatic corps; friends of the family; former Presidents; distinguished Americans. The average member of the national television audience never gave this aspect of the burial a thought, but the speedy solution of it baffled the Duke of Norfolk more than anything else, because in any state funeral the most harrying problem is whom to exclude. Markham began by telephoning Steve Smith for names of intimate friends, and Ken Galbraith was asked to submit a list of Presidential acquaintances in the academic community. He resolved upon a summary solution: only professors who had been invited to White House dinners would be invited. Markham began to accumulate mounds of paper—he had a master list of lists of lists—and plunging into them he was resigned to the fact that some feelings would be ruffled. He comforted himself with the reflection that those who really loved the President would understand. If they didn’t, they weren’t worth worrying about.
By late evening, Angie Duke said later, “We began to feel the presence of Mrs. Kennedy” (i.e., Robert Kennedy). They knew that the family wished a Navy escort for the caisson, four men from each service flanking it, and muffled drums. Apparently the demand for drummers was going to be great. Clifton wondered whether he could mobilize enough qualified military musicians to accompany the caisson from the mansion to the Hill. The past three years had taught him much about Kennedy improvisation, however, and he was prepared to fill the ranks by issuing uniforms to drummers who weren’t entitled to wear them.
The prickliest issue was the question of religious services. Colonel Miller was of no help whatever here; the funeral of a Roman Catholic President was without precedent. For hours they skirted the topic. At midnight Angie Duke artfully raised it. He suggested the possibility of a secular funeral, observing that, “The President believed in the separation of church and state, and I believe he would want a service in the White House.” Duke wasn’t serious. Himself a Catholic, he knew it was unthinkable. His purpose was to provoke a serious discussion, and he succeeded brilliantly. As he put it, “At once I could feel the electricity.” He dwelt upon the advantages of a nondenominational ritual until he began to sound like a Unitarian, and the more he talked, the more Shriver and Dungan bridled. Sarge cut him off. He said tautly, “The family will not permit a nonreligious funeral.”
Duke had antagonized them, but had made his point. “When he suggested a burial service in the White House,” Shriver said afterward, “I realized that we would have to have a Mass for Jack, and I felt that it would be inappropriate to have a funeral Mass in the White House.” Because the line between the things of God and the things of Caesar had been sharply drawn in 1960, the Kennedy men were far more aware of it than the aides of any Protestant President would have been. John Kennedy must be buried as a Catholic. Nevertheless, as Chief Executive he represented all Americans, and Shriver ordered two prie-dieux
for the East Room, manned by pastors from all faiths, including the Greek Orthodox. To his surprise, Clifton spoke up and said the clergymen were here—actually in the mansion, ready to kneel. Chaplains representing every denomination had called him and volunteered. Each had read Kennedy’s Houston declaration; they understood his position perfectly. They had thought of him, not as a Catholic President, but as the President of the United States, and each of them wanted to pray to his God for his President. To Bill Walton they seemed to be “nice, kind, gentle men, trying not to be in the way and not knowing quite what to do, because there wasn’t anything for them to pray over yet.” In fact, they had already done something remarkable just by coming; in death John Kennedy had convened a kind of spontaneous ecumenical council.
“Trying to fight off the appalling reality,” Schlesinger noted jerkily. Yet the work was more than therapy. Already the broad outlines of the funeral were clear: the East Room on Saturday, the great rotunda of the Capitol on Sunday, and the funeral Mass and burial on Monday. Thousands of details were still unresolved. No one knew, for example, just what sort of Mass Cardinal Cushing would celebrate or even where it would be held. The merits of St. Matthew’s, St. Stephen’s, the Shrine at Catholic University, and the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception had been reviewed again and again. Dungan was strong for Immaculate Conception: “What was bugging me was space; I was already thinking about foreigners, and then there was the Congress.” Since everyone in the meeting, including the man from the National Committee, had his little list, Dungan didn’t have to elaborate the point. He won it. As matters stood at midnight, when Duke left to meet the Cabinet plane, a Pontifical Requiem Mass was to be held for the President on Monday at the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. The fact that the Shrine was not within walking distance occurred to none of them, and had it been raised, it would have been disregarded as an inapt démarche; no one then dreamed that Mrs. Kennedy would want to walk.
The Death of a President Page 62
