Lastly, someone had to outline the Presidential plot. The outliner was the Secretary of Defense. He had begun the day with thoughts of Arlington, he believed in thoroughness, and at dusk he was back on the slope—wet, filthy, and wretched, but working effectively. Stewart Udall joined him for a while. The two Cabinet ministers had not yet heard of the attorneys’ discovery. They were under the impression that the tent peg lay on Interior property, and at McNamara’s request Udall left to find out whether a President could be buried in Park land. McNamara further asked the Army Corps of Engineers to send him a team of men equipped with measuring instruments. Secretary Vance led them up the hill, and as the second night after Kennedy’s death fell McNamara showed them precisely what he wanted. He, Vance, and Metzler watched the men place twelve granite markers on the perimeter he had chosen. The torrential rain had by now thinned to a fine drizzle. It was possible to affix a scrawl which would remain legible, and McNamara and Vance signed authorizations setting aside any part of the plot which might belong to them. Since Defense was responsible for all of it, these papers, drawn up in the dank darkness, were binding and final.
McNamara walked back down the slope with a young Park Service employee, a college student who worked part time in Lee Mansion. The Secretary thought that he had never been more miserable in his life. He was nearly fifty, he had spent most of the day under conditions which would have been harrowing for a young infantryman—“I had the impression that it had been raining buckets,” he said later, “raining on me, personally”—and he had concluded his fourth Arlington expedition by demarcating the grave of the leader he had loved. Then the student told him that he had been present during the President’s visit to Lee Mansion and had overheard him say that this was the most beautiful sight in Washington. McNamara had been toiling over the hill site since dawn. For the first time he was learning that Kennedy himself shared his feeling for it. The boy added, “My father works for your department, Mr. Secretary.” At that time the Defense payroll was roughly equivalent to the population of Norway, but after the funeral the Secretary made it a point to find out who the student’s father was and speak to him. For McNamara this was out of character. He was an administrator, not a politician. He did it because he knew that was exactly what John Kennedy would have done.
The groggy country would later remember Saturday as a gap between days, between the shock of yesterday’s assassination and the murder of the assassin on Sunday. The live broadcasts of the dramatic ceremonies in Washington on both Sunday and Monday added to the effect, and so did the improving weather. That one day of dreadful gloom stood alone. The University of Chicago study indicated that the average adult spent ten hours in front of his television set then, the weekend’s peak, but the watchers didn’t learn much. Afterward most of them could recall only a few disjointed fragments: the heartbreaking ballet in the East Room as the Death Watch changed guard each half-hour; the outrageous contrast of the scenes in the Dallas jail, where a sequence showing Oswald changing his shirt was treated as an event of major significance; and, above all, a sense of astonishment that the young President was being mourned, not only by his own countrymen, but by the entire world. Just as Americans were beginning to grasp the extent of their loss—after the funeral the Chicago survey found that a full half of the population rated Kennedy “one of the two or three best Presidents the country ever had”—they discovered that hundreds of millions of people who had never seen the United States were mourning, too.
Many incidents of the global grief were relayed to the national audience Saturday and early Sunday morning. In Westminster Abbey the choir sang “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” Westminster’s archdeacon delivered a eulogy, and every pew was jammed with kneeling Englishmen. Other memorial services were being held simultaneously at Windsor Castle and St. Paul’s. Sir Laurence Olivier, interrupting a performance at the Old Vic, asked the audience to stand while the orchestra played “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The headline of Rome’s Il Giorno simply read: “Addio, John, Addio,” and the taxi drivers of Rome parked an empty cab with a huge black wreath propped against it outside the American Embassy. In Berlin sixty thousand people massed to express their sorrow; the square outside Schöneberg Rathaus was renamed John F. Kennedy Platz. These were understandable, for the President had held the shield of U.S. power over Britain, Italy, and West Berlin. What was harder to absorb was that a Chief Executive had won so much affection in countries hostile to the United States in general and to him in particular. The grief of the Russians was incomprehensible. Nina Khrushchev, whose husband Kennedy had confronted with missiles thirteen months ago, wired her condolences to Jacqueline Kennedy. Andrei Gromyko, one of the toughest of the hard-line Reds, was seen weeping as he left the U.S. legation in Moscow. The mourning of the American networks was fully matched by the Soviet radio, which played nothing but Slavic dirges, hour after hour. New York businessmen setting up textile plants in the U.S.S.R. were approached by peasants anxious to display their sympathy, and at a traveling U.S. graphics exhibit Russian children laid flowers in front of the President’s photograph.
Nina Khrushchev’s message was merely one in a growing file that included anguished condolences to the widowed First Lady from Queen Elizabeth, from the Queen Mother, Gamal Nasser, and a moving telegram bearing the plain signature of Josip Broz Tito. The State Department, presumably an authority on moods abroad, was overwhelmed. Its files for November 23 became choked with cables from U.S. ambassadors describing the profound sadness around them and trying—since each diplomat assumed that his country’s reaction must be exceptional—to account for it. Typically, a consul reported that an African native had walked ten miles through the bush to say, “I have lost a friend and I am so sorry.” The consul was bewildered. How could a nomadic bushman be a Kennedy friend? What had the President done for the Kalaharis? Why should this one grieve? “Not even President Kennedy and his immediate associates,” Dean Rusk subsequently explained, “had understood the extent to which ordinary people around the world had read his speeches and become involved with him. In three years he had established the kind of rapport that FDR had.” Rusk was right; the men who had been close to Kennedy were as taken aback as the Foreign Service officers. Stanislaus Radziwill boarded a transatlantic jet to attend the funeral; the captain came back to sit beside him, said he understood Radziwill had married Mrs. Kennedy’s sister, and then, to the amazement of his passenger, commenced to weep. Godfrey McHugh, whose name had rarely been published, received between five and six hundred letters. Byron White, who was also deluged by mail, later observed that “None of us had dreamt on Friday that the President’s death would cut this kind of swath abroad.” Politicians abroad felt the same way. Prime Minister Douglas-Home confided that he was “amazed at the depth of the British response, especially among our youth.” President de Gaulle told a friend, “I am stunned. They are crying all over France. It is as though he were a Frenchman, a member of their own family.”
Rapid communication undoubtedly heightened the international passion.9 So did the absence of other news; had China invaded India, for example, the attention of Asia would have been quickly distracted. Since there were no diversions and no valid historical parallels, Kennedy’s death was unique, and the most one can say of world repercussions is that they were so fantastic that they were to draw eight heads of state, ten prime ministers, and most of the world’s remaining royalty to St. Matthew’s.
Given time and prompt encouragement from the State Department, the international delegation would have been still larger. Friday afternoon State’s under secretaries had discussed the question and then cabled all American ambassadors to discourage dignitaries from attending the funeral, on the ground that the presence of some might embarrass others. Beginning that evening there were answering rumbles of discontent. Queen Elizabeth was expecting a child and couldn’t come herself, but she wanted to send her husband and her prime minister. Other national leaders notified Washington that they wished
to come as individuals; one cabled that if an official invitation was out of the question he intended to present himself “on a personal friendship basis.” State began to have second thoughts. Early Saturday Rusk called a staff meeting and reaffirmed Friday’s decision. The funeral was only forty-eight hours away. Invitations, he felt, would arrive too late. By now, however, world capitals were beginning to feel mounting pressure from their own citizens, and at noon the dam broke.
It was broken by de Gaulle. De Valera, Ludwig Erhard, and Prince Philip and Sir Alec Douglas-Home had already declared that they would fly over, but de Gaulle’s career and forceful personality had established him as a great symbolic figure. His first inclination had been to remain in Paris. The Americans had said that they wanted it that way, and he was a proud man. Moreover, his differences with Kennedy had been no secret. An abrupt turnabout might be interpreted as hypocrisy. France changed his mind. If the President of the United States had meant that much to Frenchmen, he told those around him, the President of France should go to the funeral, and he personally telephoned Hervé Alphand in Washington to say so. The Quai d’Orsay made the announcement at 12:20 P.M. Washington time. Ten minutes later Brussels disclosed that King Baudouin would come; State hastily cabled formal invitations, and “the telegrams,” in Harriman’s words, “were followed by an extraordinary flood of acceptances”—the Queen of Greece, the Emperor of Ethiopia, the Grand Duke of Luxembourg, the Crown Princess of the Netherlands, the Crown Princesses of Norway and Denmark; the Presidents of Germany, Israel, Korea, and the Philippines; the Premiers of Turkey, Canada, and Jamaica; Anastas I. Mikoyan, First Deputy Premier of Russia; and Prince Norodom Sihanouk of Cambodia. Altogether, ninety-two nations were sending delegations. Ayub Khan of Pakistan was staying home, together with the Presidents of most Latin-American republics, but that was because legally they could not leave home without legislative approval. Even so, their constituents were angry, and it says much for the emotional climate of that weekend that they felt obliged to explain publicly why they couldn’t stand by the grave of a foreign ruler.
On Kalorama Road Nicole Alphand measured every bed in the embassy residency and found that none was long enough for the towering frame of Charles de Gaulle; she telephoned the manager of a Washington furniture store, who volunteered to loan her a long bed without charge. Hanging up, she toured the building a second time, inspecting windows. The French President would bring bodyguards, and his hosts could be counted upon to provide additional protection. Nevertheless she wasn’t taking any chances. Though assassination was new to this generation of Americans—few were old enough to remember the murder of McKinley—de Gaulle had been repeatedly marked for death by agents of the right-wing OAS. Madame Alphand was making sure that each latch was secure. That, too, says something about the temper of the weekend.
The name of one retired diplomat was conspicuously absent from the glittering lists of dignitaries about to converge upon the capital. Joseph P. Kennedy, U.S. Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s from 1937 to 1940, was physically incapable of attending his son’s funeral. Until his stroke two years ago the family patriarch had been the toughest and shrewdest of the Kennedys, and his public critics had been ruthless. Now that he was helpless, overcome by the cruelest blow imaginable, he was left alone. The small band of correspondents standing watch outside the Hyannis Port compound was subdued, apologetic, and reluctant to intrude. Although the television audience was constantly aware of Washington and Dallas on November 23, Cape Cod was rarely mentioned. Coverage there was confined to brief reports about the arrival and departure of relatives and a series of still pictures showing the President’s mother attending the first Mass of the day in Hyannis.
That had been at 7 A.M. Rose Kennedy stayed for the second Mass, but Ann Gargan, who had accompanied her, returned to the compound to breakfast with her uncle. Reading the thoughts of a stricken man is difficult; nevertheless it was becoming increasingly clear to those around the Ambassador that he sensed trouble. Ted Kennedy had told him that he was here for a Senatorial speech, yet Ted had gone off to the eight o’clock Mass with Eunice. With repairmen minutes away, the television set remained inoperable. Joe Kennedy gestured impatiently at Ann, and she realized that he had noticed the absence of any morning newspaper. Feebly she explained that Frank, the family chauffeur, had been unable to pick them up because he had driven Aunt Rose to church. His eyes sharpened. That, too, was unusual. Usually she drove herself. Then he looked out through the dining room’s big picture window and saw his wife emerging from the foggy lawn, dressed all in black, her face obscured by a black veil. He made a queer, jerky movement, which, Ann later believed, was a sign that he had felt the first wave of impending disaster.
The truth couldn’t be kept from him much longer. Ted knew it, and after breakfasting himself the Senator asked Eunice to join him in their father’s bedroom. By now the tension in Joe was alarming. He had been impatient with Ann and the nurse throughout his regular exercise period in his indoor pool. Back in his bed he stirred restlessly and glared at the dark television screen while Ann, in the corridor outside, clenched her hands together. Conceivably the blow could prove fatal. As a precaution his physician, Dr. Russell Boles, had been summoned from Boston and was lurking down the hall, within earshot.
Ted and Eunice entered and sat by the bed. Joe waved indignantly at the screen. The Senator turned toward it, explaining that they had all been at Mass, and his father gazed out at the sea. In aphasia a patient’s mind often drifts that way. One moment you have his undivided attention; a moment later he is off in a private reverie.
Ted said, “There’s been a bad accident. The President has been hurt very badly.”
Joe Kennedy’s head snapped back. He stared directly into his son’s eyes. He was following every word.
“As a matter of fact,” Ted said, “he died.”
Several contemporary accounts declared that the President’s father did not cry—“Joe is a tough old bird,” said Time; “he… took it without visibly flinching.” That was entirely untrue. The retired tycoon was deeply emotional, devoted to his children and fiercely committed to their ambitions. When his oldest son had been killed in action, he had been well. Nevertheless he had wept then, and he wept now. Ted and Eunice did their best to comfort him, but they too had been ravaged; it was a time of unrelieved desolation. After a while Joe recovered sufficiently to ask for details. There were more tears, and Dr. Boles advised Ann that immediate relaxation was imperative.
Unfortunately, that was impractical. There was no way his patient could be diverted now. Ann brought the Boston Globe and the Boston Record American into the bedroom; her uncle saw the pictures from Dallas and collapsed again. The doctor entered and gave him a sedative. Like the drug Dr. Walsh had administered to Jacqueline Kennedy at Bethesda, it had no effect whatever, and the day, having begun with the solemn dignity of religious services, became progressively more unraveled. Ted conferred with his brother by telephone; Bob agreed that he should stay there until their parents had settled down. Eunice, meantime, went to her mother, who was too upset even to see her husband, and who strolled back and forth on the wet, misty lawn, trying to talk to her daughter and her nephew Joe. The news having been broken, Ann thought her uncle might as well watch television. In twenty-five minutes a Hyannis technician had repaired the wires Ted had violently yanked away last evening and the President’s father, propped up on pillows, was looking at his son’s coffin in the East Room, watching the honor guard change shifts. He began to sob again, and for the next several hours—indeed, throughout most of the next two and a half days—he alternated between a yearning for information and a revulsion against it. At his direction Ann and Rita Dallas switched the knob on and off, on and off. It wasn’t good for him, but there was no alternative; he couldn’t be expected to go to the pool or the movie theater downstairs.
The crisis came later in the afternoon. Hyannis Port had reached a strange, unpredictable stage in which nothing seeme
d bizarre. Rita Dallas went home and received an anonymous telephone call telling her she should be ashamed of her name. Word reached the compound of rumors that the President’s father had died of a heart attack, and Senator Kennedy hastily conferred with his cousins, debated the wisdom of calling a press conference to scotch the report, and concluded it was best to say nothing. At the height of this frantic activity Joe Kennedy decided he must go to Washington immediately. Ann stepped into the bedroom and found him struggling with his clothes and fumbling for his wheelchair. There was no way to dissuade him. Another elderly uncle might have been gently pushed back among his bedclothes, but nobody had ever pushed this man around, and his slender young niece didn’t try. Instead she helped him dress and wheeled him to the car. She suggested they just ride around; he vehemently refused and directed her straight to the airport. Had adequate transportation existed, there is little doubt that the President’s father would have appeared in the White House within three hours. He was in an inflexible mood, and none of Ann’s arguments impressed him; he brushed aside the fact that Father Cavanaugh was coming up tonight to be with him. Since his stroke, however, Joe Kennedy had confined his flying to the Caroline. The plane wasn’t there, so the two of them just sat in the gloaming squinting at commercial airplanes until he signaled her to start the car. She drove slowly back to the compound and helped him back into bed. Adjusting covers, Ann had the feeling that in some undefinable way the trip had helped him. He wasn’t resigned. He remained unconsolable, groping in a solitary, unfathomable agony. But he had done something. He had tried.
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