In the turmoil at Washington National some thirty state governors, a score of Harvard professors, and three Roman Catholic prelates reached the capital unobserved. Bishop Hannan and Archbishop O’Boyle split up and drove to their homes while Cardinal Cushing dined with the Most Reverend Egidio Vagnozzi, Apostolic Delegate to the United States. It was not a harmonious meeting. The Delegate had very strong views about how tomorrow’s services should be conducted. A Catholic head of state was entitled to five absolutions at the end of a funeral Mass, Vagnozzi pointed out, and that was what John Kennedy should receive. His Eminence disagreed. The discussion, as he later put it, became “a hassle.” He terminated it by saying sharply, “If there are going to be five absolutions, you’ll have to say them yourself. I won’t do it because they’ll last twice as long as the Mass itself. In the popular parlance, this family has had it.”
That was the Cardinal’s first hassle of the evening. The second, more protracted, began at 10 P.M. He was staying in Archbishop O’Boyle’s home at 4110 Warren Street, and there—after an irking half-hour exploration of the neighborhood, trying to find the house—Ted Sorensen and Sargent Shriver arrived for a conference with the Cardinal, the Archbishop, and, in Sorensen’s dry phrase, “a frustrated archbishop named Francis X. Morrissey.” Sarge and Ted thought Frank Morrissey was with Cardinal Cushing, the Cardinal thought he was with them. Morrissey, in the popular parlance, had crashed the meeting.
“Your Eminence, this is how the family would like it done,” Shriver said, and turned to Sorensen.
Sorensen began his presentation, and His Eminence listened with growing dismay. His chieftain’s face was set, Archbishop O’Boyle was frowning deeply; clearly something was wrong. In point of fact, several things were wrong. Ted and Sarge were overfatigued, and despite the lengthy deliberations in the mansion, Sorensen didn’t know precisely how the family did want it done. His mind was a chaos of suggestions heard there, some of which—Mrs. Kennedy’s determination to have Hannan, not Boyle, at the lectern, and to hear her husband’s favorite Scriptural passages, not Cushing’s—were extremely delicate. The key difficulty, however, was his total ignorance of Roman Catholic ritual. Since this haziness was partly shared by the Catholic laymen who had been instructing him, including Shriver, no one had oriented him properly, and he innocently plunged ahead with proposals which were wholly unacceptable to the Church: secular music in the cathedral, for example, and even Kennedy quotations and Biblical readings “scattered through the service.” Shriver knew that was impossible, but he was too groggy to speak up; coming in the door he hadn’t even been certain whether a Cardinal was addressed as “Your Eminence” or “Your Holiness.” He had simply guessed right.
Sorensen finished, and there was a heavy silence. His Eminence shook his mane of white hair. “Ted, I’ll do anything in the world for Jacqueline Kennedy,” he said, “but I can’t change the text of that Mass. I have to read it exactly as it is in that book on the altar.”
“Jackie wants a Low Mass,” said Sarge, finding his voice.
The white mane nodded vigorously. “That’s in order. Why stretch it out with a long pontifical High Mass?”
“She’d like it to be as simple as possible,” Sorensen said.
The Cardinal eyed him quizzically. “Don’t worry, Ted. We’ll bury him like a Jesuit—” Jesuits are buried in a pine box, with a Low Mass; no one comes—“but we have to do it according to the book.”
The bargaining (that is the only word for it) continued until midnight, with various interruptions. There was a long colloquy between the two prelates over the robes they should wear, and another digression after Ethel telephoned that her husband wanted Communion offered. Cushing and O’Boyle were apprehensive. If a thousand people decided to go to the rail, the delay would be greater than five absolutions; they would never get out of the cathedral. Shriver agreed to spread the word that only the family would take Communion, the robes were chosen—with Morrissey kibitzing—and the prickly issues Sorensen had raised were resolved by compromise. The Cardinal would read an orthodox Low Mass, the Archbishop would handle the music. Bishop Hannan would speak, however, and he would use the material Sorensen had brought.
After Sorensen and Shriver left for the mansion O’Boyle called Hannan at St. Matthew’s to tell him. “They prefer to have his own words and his favorite Scriptural quotations, as an expression of his ideals,” the Archbishop explained. “There are three typed pages. The first two are mostly from Ecclesiastes and Isaiah, including one he was going to deliver in Dallas. The third is from his own inaugural address.”
Hannan replied that he was simply too tired to pick them up now; he would drive over in the morning. Hanging up he fell into bed—falling, as hundreds of others had fallen in the capital, into a sleep so deep that it was indistinguishable from a dead faint. For the third time Mrs. Kennedy received a half-gram injection from Dr. Walsh in the White House and rolled over to her husband’s iron-hard bed board for four hours of fitful slumber. Her sister lay on the President’s four-poster, her brother-in-law on the cot. Out Massachusetts Avenue the crowded embassies were dark and still, and only the spectral figure of Madame Alphand, rechecking window locks, and the shadows of Sûreté guards on the lawn outside, hinted that the French had special reason for concern. Twice during dinner an anonymous caller had warned that the embassy would be bombed tonight. Madame was deeply troubled. Charles de Gaulle was not; he had been through this too many times; he slept soundly on his long borrowed bed.
“Sunday night was less terrible,” Mac Bundy wrote, and the explanation was this numbing, pervasive Dämmerschlaf. Mac couldn’t cry tonight because he was completely enervated. The accumulation of fatigue had reduced all the chief participants in Washington’s farewell to President Kennedy to a comatose condition. They were either sleepers or somnambulists. At Fort McNair General Wehle faced seventy-five red-eyed officers, pointer in hand, taking them through a final briefing with the jerky movements of an automaton. At 2:30 A.M. he asked for questions. A sepulchral voice inquired about a bugler. They had none; the most obvious detail had been overlooked. A Virginia telephone rang, and Sergeant Keith Clark groped for the trumpet that would play taps in Arlington.
There were a few other slips. In St. Matthew’s Angie Duke inspected the seating capacity of pews for the last time and calculated each would hold five people. Unfortunately, his men had shucked their topcoats before the test; the appearance of an overcoated congregation next morning would spark a frantic order for a hundred folding Army chairs. And in Ralph Dungan’s office Dean Markham became involved in a comic misunderstanding with Governor George Wallace’s aide. The aide phoned in the complaint: Wallace hadn’t received his tickets to the funeral. Markham replied tiredly, “King’s got them. Tell the Governor to get them from King.” He meant Sam King of Duke’s staff, and was puzzled by the evident consternation on the other end of the line. Hanging up, he recounted the conversation to two men working on lists. In chorus they cried, “Martin Luther King?” Instantly he realized that if they thought that, Wallace would, too. The next instant he shrugged. Let it stand. There was poetic justice in it.
But oversights and blunders were very rare. Markham toiled through the night with singular efficiency, deciding who would walk behind the gun carriage, supervising the administration of B-1 shots to the exhausted staff, personally inviting the White House servants and gardeners to the Mass—Jack McNally had excluded them by insisting they must wear full dress suits, which they couldn’t afford; Markham, knowing that Mrs. Kennedy would want them there anyhow, told them to come in their Sunday best—and finally walking up to St. Matthew’s with Joe Gargan at 4:30 A.M. to mark off pews for fifty members of the family and two hundred Kennedy friends.
At that hour St. Matthew’s resembled a convention of Interpol. Never in the history of the secret police had such a cosmopolitan group of bodyguards assembled in a house of God. Roy Kellerman, checking security arrangements for President Johnson and the Kenned
y family, had the impression that he was in a new Tower of Babel. The United States had enough men to handle the job alone; in addition to Kellerman’s detail there were squads of FBI agents and the pick of the CIA, some of whom had been flown home from abroad because of their special linguistic talents. But Dallas had understandably shaken foreign faith in American police skills, so the aisles, the balcony, and even the altar swarmed with specialists from Scotland Yard’s Special Branch and the Sûreté, lithe bowlegged Japanese, Puerto Ricans, and West Germans in belted raincoats and sinister bifocals. Kellerman checked them out, as they were checking him and one another—much of the time was spent flashing credentials—and he saw no Russians. They may have been there, though. Offered U.S. protection for Mikoyan, the Soviets had replied, with characteristic evasiveness, that they were making their own arrangements.
There was no catafalque in the cathedral. Instead, a low church truck stood by the entrance. The coffin would be wheeled, not borne, up the center aisle. This was a concession to Lieutenant Bird’s description of his body bearers’ agonizing ascent into the rotunda. “It appeared,” he reported, that “very little consideration” had been given to “the tremendous weight of the casket”; carrying it had “required every ounce of strength that all nine of us could muster to move the casket in an appropriate and respectful manner.” Bird’s plea for a low cart had been approved, though his battalion commander didn’t tell him about it until next morning. It would have been some comfort that evening, though not much; his team still had to bring the coffin back down the Capitol steps. The prospect had them petrified. Ordinarily six men could lift a casket with ease. Today Bird had added a Marine and a sailor, yet they had barely made it, and the descent was bound to be more difficult than the ascent, for they wouldn’t have him bracing them from the rear. One young Army specialist had worked himself into a state of semihysteria; he was convinced that they were going to drop their precious burden on the marble and split it open before the eyes of a hundred million Americans. Only the Lieutenant would argue with him, and his heart wasn’t in it. He himself, he confessed later, was “near panic.” Therefore he decided upon a drastic measure: they would spend the night rehearsing.
The ensuing scene was perhaps the most bizarre of all those played out in the small hours of November 24–25. Borrowing a regulation Army casket from Fort Myer’s honor guard company, the team drove it to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldiers at midnight, filled it with sandbags, and slowly carried it up and down, up and down the tomb’s steps. After sundown the Unknown Soldiers’ guard doesn’t have to walk back and forth, so Bird ordered him to sit atop the coffin. Up, down, up and down the team trudged with the man straddling the lid. Finally the Lieutenant stopped them, told the guard to make room, and he got on, too. Lugging a sand-filled casket and two bodies, the eight bearers made the trip again, again, again, again. It was cruel, but absolutely necessary; his men had been demoralized, and now, sweating in the dark, they felt a flicker of hope.
These, then, were the small sounds of the professionals preparing for America’s greatest state funeral—the rustling cloth of a Georgetown tailor, the scuffling tread of the world’s most famous policemen searching pews, the rattle of dispensary syringes on White House trays, and, across the Potomac, enlisted men grunting over the Unknown Soldiers’ Tomb, Black Watch pipers learning the unfamiliar hundred-paces-a-minute cadence on Fort Myer’s north drill field, and the hum of the CIA press in McLean. Earlier in the evening there had been harsher noises; carpenters had been throwing up new platforms for the network pool cameras and a press stand on the slope beneath Lee Mansion, and in Washington—as in twenty other cities, including Dallas—the billboard industry had stripped hoardings of advertising that afternoon and replaced it with the black-against-white reminder, in Old English lettering, “Friday November 22, 1963.” Now, as the thermometer dipped into the low thirties, freezing the last blossoms in the Rose Garden, the night was unnaturally still. Only by crossing to the Mall and looking eastward could one have seen how deceptive that stillness was. The weekend had reached another of its unexpected, overwhelming climaxes; the Capitol dome was aglow, and beneath its immense beacon a quarter-million Americans were waiting in line.
As early as 3:11 Sunday afternoon, less than an hour after the eulogies, the District police had reported that “a serious problem is developing with people surging toward the Capitol building.” The original plan had specified that the bronze doors should remain open to the public until 9 P.M. “if necessary.” That was obviously unrealistic; some of the first waiters had been there since midnight Saturday, wrapped in blankets. It was at nine that Jacqueline and Robert Kennedy returned to the Hill, and they shared the universal amazement. After kneeling by the bier and genuflecting Mrs. Kennedy had followed Bob to the car, but at the door she abruptly shook her head and said, “No—let me walk.” For ten minutes they strolled down the curving path to First and Constitution. She spoke briefly to a group of nuns, and then, to her astonishment, she recognized a nearby standee, Sherry Geyelin, the wife of a Wall Street Journal writer who had been critical of the administration. The woman began to cry, and the widow, who had never known that she, too, had loved the President, embraced her. A reporter asked the Attorney General what he thought of the multitude. Bob looked around—by now it had reached 200,000 and was growing rapidly—and murmured, “Fantastic, fantastic.”
Martyrdom had transformed John Kennedy so swiftly that even those closest to him found adjustment difficult. Friday morning he had been a popular but controversial young President. Tonight he was controversial only to the alienated. Alive, he had known a Washington inhabited by friends and enemies. Death had swept away both affection and enmity; they had been replaced by idolatry. The endless mass which inched forward, five abreast, was less a crowd than a congregation. Afterward its more sophisticated members retrieved their skepticism, and today it is hard to recapture, or even to credit, the reverence they felt then. But it was real enough at the time. Its essence may be found in the phrases men and women spoke and wrote that Sabbath and in the days afterward. To Mary McGrory he had become “a warrior-chieftain,” to David Bell “a warrior-king,” to Natalie Hemingway “a dear godfather,” and John Steinbeck, in a letter to Jacqueline Kennedy, wrote of “this man who was the best of his people” and who “by his life, and his death, gave back the best of them for their own.”
Veneration is the only explanation for their endurance in that line. The bitter weather and the length of the wait discouraged all except those who felt an uncontrollable compulsion to stay. They knew how brief their time inside would be. They would be permitted a few moments to circle the coffin, to kneel quickly, and to leave flowers with two soldiers; that was all. Yet they would not turn back. By midnight a hundred thousand had passed through, and the line behind them was three miles long—three miles of shivering shoulders and frosting breaths. Still five abreast, it stretched seventeen blocks, then twenty-eight, then forty, and at quarter of six in the morning policemen passed the word to newcomers, “We have to close the doors at 8:30. Go home—only 85,000 more can get in.”
They stood anyhow. A mother knelt on the sidewalk and said to her children, “We can pray right here. God and the President will hear us just as well as inside,” and when a boy told his girl, “Look, honey, this is crazy; we can’t possibly make it,” she answered, “I don’t care, I want to stay in line anyway. It’s the least we can do.” Among those with no chance of reaching the doors were two teenagers who had walked thirty-five miles from Baltimore and forty Yale students who arrived at dawn in a chartered bus. They didn’t complain and they didn’t leave. They were there, they had to be there, and just being there was enough. It was unaccountable, of course, but scarcely anyone even tried to account for it. Russell Baker of the New York Times arrived at his house in Washington and was disquieted to find no one there. He turned on his television set and there, on Channel 4, beheld his wife leading their children around the bier. “It was our duty,
” she said fiercely when she reached home. “Everyone in Washington should go for all the people who can’t get here.”
If you were on the Hill that night, you remember the throng as the nicest you had ever known. Virtually no one shoved, or cut in, or was rude. There were many parents with children—families as large as nine—but even toddlers, sensing the mood of the adults, were undemanding and subdued. It may have been the most democratic occasion in Washington’s memory. Eamon de Valera and a member of Kennedy’s PT 109 crew were admitted to the rotunda without waiting. But de Valera was a head of state, blind and in his eighties, and two other members of the old crew refused to ask for special privilege. Thirty-six nuns from New Jersey arrived on a rented bus and took their place at the end of the line; so did a youth on crutches, a woman in a wheelchair, and another woman, convalescing from a foot operation, who had to be propped up against trees and lamp posts by solicitous strangers. Pierre Salinger’s fifteen-year-old son Marc stood for fourteen hours, right through the night; Jersey Joe Walcott, the former heavyweight champion, waited eight hours. There were Virginia farmers in denim, New York women in mink, and—everywhere, it seemed—groups of students, of Negroes, and of seamen who would square their caps and practice the salute they would deliver when they reached the catafalque where, as one of them put it, there lay “in honored glory a sailor well known to God.”
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