The Death of a President

by William Manchester

  We’re singing,

  “Heart of My Heart,” I love that melody,

  “Heart of My Heart” brings back a memory,

  When we were kids

  On the corner of the street,

  We were rough and ready guys,

  But oh! How we could harmonize.…

  Bob Kennedy fled out the door. It was, Stas thought, “a terrible moment.” This was not a blithe yarn with a comic twist at the end; it brought back too much—summer evenings in the compound, singing on the beach after the sails had been furled, and that last night in the ’58 campaign, when Senator John Kennedy, too played out to speak in Dorchester, had sung these very words with his two brothers to an enthusiastic crowd. But the children, not old enough for nostalgia, were delighted. And Ted, who had murdered harmony in Dorchester, joined his strong baritone to Dave’s tenor for the last lines:

  … friends were dearer then,

  Too bad we had to part.

  Now I know a tear would glisten

  If once more I could listen

  To the gang that sang “Heart of My Heart.”5

  The children were led to bed. The Auchinclosses left, the Smiths retired, Ethel took her brood to Hickory Hill, Ted and Joan returned to their home. Stas was stifling yawns. The rest didn’t want the occasion to end, though—there was, after all, nothing to look forward to tomorrow—and Mrs. Kennedy asked the Bradlees to come in from Georgetown. They arrived apprehensive. In Toni Bradlee’s words, “It was not something to walk into.” Their hosts tried valiantly to be cheerful, but their fatigue was evident. Even Kennedy energy had its limits. Mrs. Kennedy’s red eyes were painful to see. Both Ben and Toni thought Bob was displaying the best self-discipline, yet in a way he was the hardest to take. His voice was so much like the President’s that they found themselves whirling about each time he spoke. Dave Powers, carrying on, had Lee captivated. The others weren’t quite real. Stas tottered off to bed like a man already in a dream. Pat Lawford’s face was a mask of agony, and Peter wandered in and out with his peculiar marionette gait; it was as though a gigantic invisible hand were clutching the cloth between his shoulder blades and hoisting him up—his legs actually seemed to dangle. The television set was on, endlessly recapitulating the long weekend. Toni asked if she might take one last look at the President’s bedroom. She regretted it. So many private parties had ended in that room, with the last guests bidding one another witty farewells, that Toni’s final glimpse of it should, she had thought, become a treasured keepsake. But it had changed. The personal bric-a-brac had already disappeared. Even the pyramid of pill bottles had vanished from the bedside table, and Stas, slumbering on the little cot, appeared to be an outrageous incongruity.

  The Bradlees left quickly. All but Bob and Jackie drifted away, though Lee, before joining her husband, pinned a note to her sister’s pillow. As children the Bouvier girls had had secret nicknames for one another. Lee had been “Pekes,” Jackie “Jacks.” The note of love and admiration which she left for “Jacks” only a sister could have written.

  And so, at the last, the two chief mourners were left alone on the second floor of the mansion. Five evenings ago, before riding across Memorial Bridge to attend his own birthday party, the Attorney General had talked to the First Lady here for nearly forty-five minutes, inquiring whether she was sure she had recovered sufficiently from Patrick’s death to endure the strain of the Texas trip and the campaigning ahead. Now, preparing to cross the river again, he needed no assurance; like him, he knew, she could survive anything except the thought that the yesterdays binding them together might be forgotten. Therefore, with that understated manner which, as much as his voice, stirred sudden memories of the President, he said quietly, “Should we go visit our friend?”

  She always kept lilies of the valley in a little gold cup on a hall table, and she stopped to gather a spray. Clint Hill phoned ahead to Arlington. Jack Metzler’s house was inside the cemetery grounds; he dressed quickly and met their black Mercury by Hatfield Gate. Parking on Sheridan Drive, they walked up between cedar and oak to the new fence. Once more the scene was sharply altered. The vast throngs had disappeared. Standing by the white pickets were only the Kennedys, two military policemen, and the superintendent. The fake turf had been carted away. Inside the fence the wicker basket Bunny Mellon had placed by the grave had been obscured by ostentatious chaplets tied with gaudy ribbons. The night mercifully hid them. It was, Clint noted, “very damp and dark and quiet.”

  One of the military policemen unlatched the gate. Jacqueline and Robert Kennedy stepped inside, and under the flickering torch he saw the green beret. Sergeant Major Ruddy’s gesture had been noticed by two other soldiers. An MP in the afternoon shift had left his black and white brassard on the evergreens; beside it a soldier of the 3rd Infantry had propped his buff strap and Old Guard cockade, the symbols of a military tradition which went back to the Revolutionary War. Bob silently pointed to them, and she nodded. Together they dropped to their knees. The tongue of flame, quite blue at night, flickered in the night wind; its ghost-candle flare danced unevenly on their bowed heads and averted faces, on Clint and the two guards, on the chauffeur waiting below. As widow and brother offered their prayers the clocks of the capital struck midnight, and rising she carefully laid her bouquet on the branches, a last gallant plighting of her troth. Then they turned from the scarred earth, leaving the beacon, and walked down into darkness.

  Epilogue

  LEGEND

  In early April of 1960, during the lull that followed the Wisconsin Presidential primary, Senator John F. Kennedy read Mary Renault’s The King Must Die in his Georgetown home. Although fictive, this novel is based on a custom which Sir James Frazer found in every early society: the ritualistic murder of the folk hero. The noble victim went by various names. In Britain he was Arthur, in Germany Siegfried, in France Roland, in Scandinavia Balder the Beautiful; Mediterranean tribes knew him as Apollo, Attis, Moses, Adonis, and Osiris, and ancient India had loved and lost Vitramaditya. These epics were more than fables. Undoubtedly all their protagonists existed under one name or another, and one heroine whose identity has survived was burned at a Rouen stake in the fifteenth century.

  It is worth noting that Jeanne d’Arc was betrayed by the French on November 21, 1430. For what Miss Renault did not mention is that the martyrdom of heroic figures nearly always occurred in the waning days of autumn. The end of summer terrified men. Winter lay ahead, and the fear of starvation. Watching the corn die and the bitter days grow short, they believed that they were being punished. Unwittingly, they felt, they must have offended the omnipotent God who brooded over the land. What was needed was a powerful emissary, an ally in the skies. And so, over the ages, a solution evolved. They would sacrifice their most cherished possession, their prince. It would be agony, but it would also be a sign of contrition, and after the execution their mighty friend would ascend into heaven, to temper the wrath of the Almighty and assure a green and abundant spring.

  In the twentieth century that legend is vestigial. Yet no one familiar with world religions can doubt its viability, and the nature of its atavistic power must be understood if one is to grasp what happened to the memory of John Kennedy after his burial. Folk heroes, for example, have no more to do with democracy than riderless horses and funereal pageantry. The origins of their appeal lie deep in the past, before written history or the emergence of the nation-state. But this much seems clear: no society had achieved cohesion without them. The yearning they satisfy is that basic. The United States of America, as the newest societal entity in the world (emerging nations are discounted here; they were established communities centuries before their colonizers recognized them as such), long felt this need. The spectacular murder of Abraham Lincoln was the first sacrifice to fill it—Lloyd Lewis suggested as much a generation ago in his brilliant Myths After Lincoln—and the martyrdom of John Kennedy was the second.

  Once a leader becomes a martyr, myth naturally follows. The he
ro must be clothed in raiments which he would have found strange, but which please the public eye. As Edmund Wilson has pointed out, the Lincoln to whom Americans are introduced as children, and whom Carl Sandburg has done so much to perpetuate, has little in common with the cool, aloof genius who ruled this nation unflinchingly as the sixteenth President of the United States. That man was destroyed on the evening of April 14, 1865. The urbane scholar who became his nineteenth successor shared his fate. The Kennedy we knew in life vanished forever on November 22, 1963. That Lincoln and Kennedy shared an abiding faith in a government of laws thus becomes an irrelevant detail; legends, because they are essentially tribal, override such details. What the folk hero was and what he believed are submerged by the demands of those who follow him. In myth he becomes what they want him to have been, and anyone who belittles this transformation has an imperfect understanding of truth. A romantic concept of what may have been can be far more compelling than what was. “Love is very penetrating,” Santayana observed, “but it penetrates to possibilities, rather than to facts.” All the people ask of a national hero is that he have been truly heroic, a great man who was greatly loved and cruelly lost. Glorification and embellishment follow. In love nations are no less imaginative than individuals.

  Those who had traduced John Kennedy and many who had admired him were puzzled by the surge of emotion which followed the state funeral and which was to grow year after year. The derisive dismissed it as “the Kennedy cult,” as though the death of every extraordinary man were not followed by a consolidation of devotion. The nub of the matter was that Kennedy had met the emotional needs of his people. His achievements had been genuine. His dreams and his oratory had electrified a country grown stale and listless and a world drifting helplessly toward Armageddon. Lincoln—“Father Abraham,” his troops called him—had been paternal. Kennedy had been young, princely, dashing, handsome, charming, and the woman he had loved, and in whose arms he had died, had contributed enormously to the spectacle. “I feel suddenly old without Mr. and Mrs. Kennedy in the White House,” a correspondent wrote James Reston after the funeral. “Not only by ability but by sheer verve and joy, the Kennedys imparted their youth to everyone, and put a sheen on our life that made it more youthful than it is. Mr. Johnson now seems Gary Cooper as President—High Noon, the poker game, the easy walk and masculine smile. But even Gary Cooper was growing older, and the companions around the poker table reflect a less fresh, if no doubt practical and effective mood. All will be well, I feel sure, but it is August, not June.…” The magic, in other words, was gone.

  In the third year of the Johnson administration an exasperated aide was to complain that the public had come to think of the Kennedy administration as a Golden Age of Pericles. “He wasn’t Pericles,” he said, “and the age wasn’t golden.” No, it wasn’t. (Pericles’ wasn’t either.) Yet as the same aide conceded, “That doesn’t matter—it’s caught hold.” In point of fact, it had begun to take hold that midnight when Jacqueline and Robert Kennedy arose from beside the fresh grave and walked down the hill hand in hand. By the following day the green beret had been joined by caps of all the armed services. John C. Warnecke was commissioned to design a permanent memorial, with the passages the Attorney General was to have read during the graveside services engraved on tablets, but the pilgrims did not wait. The plain picket fence was enough for them. On Christmas Day 1963 a steady procession passed it all day, five abreast; a six-inch snow lay on the ground, yet the waiting line stretched the equivalent of several city blocks. Reston observed that “the Kennedy Legend grows and deepens. It is clear now that he captured the imagination of a whole generation of young people in many parts of the world, particularly in the university communities. Even those who vilified him now canonize him, and many of his political opponents who condemned him are now seeking a candidate who looks and sounds like him.”

  Officially the period of mourning was to last thirty days, and that merely meant flags at half-staff and no social functions. Outside the government business opened as usual the morning after the funeral. Television commercials resumed, the stock market rebounded sharply, theater marquees lit up. Those who had felt the impact of the tragedy more deeply quietly set about straightening out their lives. Mr. West readied the White House for tourists. Henry Gonzalez packed John Connally’s clothes and sent them back to Nellie. Jack Valenti took up temporary residence at the Elms until his family could join him. Colonel McNally kept trying to put in permanent telephone lines for the new President—it was to be six months, to the day, before Johnson was off the phone long enough—and Angie Novello carefully retaped to the walls of the Attorney General’s office all the children’s drawings she had removed on the day of the assassination while cleaning the office, in the forlorn hope that the room would seem normal to him when he returned. He flew off for a Thanksgiving rest with the Dillons; Mrs. Kennedy took her children to the Cape.

  The thirty days ended, the flags went up, the piano was moved back into the East Room, Washington hostesses began entertaining again—and then one realized that the mourning hadn’t ended at all. To be sure, the fever of November 22–25 was over. That condition had been unnatural; between Wednesday and Saturday of the week after the assassination, the NORC survey found, three out of four adults had returned to normal behavior patterns. A kind of nationwide scar tissue had begun to form, and it thickened so quickly that anyone attempting to reopen the wounds encountered evasiveness or downright hostility. Still, the residue of sadness remained. In New York a thousand people walked slowly up Fifth Avenue, each holding a candle in memory of President Kennedy. Christmas shoppers were struck by the melancholy in city shops. Magazines began issuing JFK memorial editions, and every book store in the capital had its corner of memorial albums. Auctioneers of Americana found that handwritten Kennedy letters were as valuable as Lincoln letters. An autographed copy of Profiles in Courage was worth $375. Fragments of the platform from which he had delivered his San Antonio speech the day before the assassination became collector’s items, and the “Suite 850” plaque outside his last bedroom in the Hotel Texas disappeared.

  To emphasize the transition the White House staff began distributing photographs of both Presidents during Johnson’s trips outside Washington, but the practice was quickly discontinued; for every picture of the new Chief Executive, the public would take ten of Kennedy. The Secret Service seethed when Johnson rebuked an agent for wearing a PT tie clip, sharply reminding him that administrations had changed, yet Johnson’s pique was entirely understandable. He was plagued by a ghost. Even the 1964 Presidential convention, which had been carefully planned as a Johnsonian feast, was stolen from under his very eyes. A month earlier he had scratched Robert Kennedy from his list of Vice Presidential possibilities. Nevertheless the most moving moment in Convention Hall was not his; it came when the Attorney General stepped to the podium to introduce a film about his brother’s thousand days in the White House. For fifteen minutes the delegates gave Robert Kennedy a roaring, standing ovation, and then, in tears, they heard him softly quote Shakespeare in that inimitable voice:

  … When he shall die,

  Take him and cut him out in little stars,

  And he will make the face of heaven so fine

  That all the world will be in love with night

  And pay no worship to the garish sun.

  The more men pondered the legend, the less they understood it. The young Kennedy had done nothing to encourage the demonstration; he tried repeatedly to interrupt it, then smiled slightly and, biting his lip, lowered his head as against a storm. David Brinkley concluded that the assassination and its aftermath were unfathomable: “The events of those days don’t fit, you can’t place them anywhere, they don’t go in the intellectual luggage of our time. It was too big, too sudden, too overwhelming, and it meant too much. It has to be separate and apart.” All the same, people couldn’t stop attempting to incorporate it in their lives. The most obvious approach was to name something afte
r the President. Mrs. Kennedy asked Johnson to rechristen Cape Canaveral Cape Kennedy. He immediately complied, and presently she wondered whether she would be driving “down a Kennedy parkway to a Kennedy airport to visit a Kennedy school.” New York’s Mayor Wagner renamed Idlewild, Congress changed the National Cultural Center to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Treasury began minting fifty million Kennedy half-dollars—and couldn’t keep them in circulation because they were being hoarded as souvenirs. In every part of the country committees and councils were voting to honor the President by altering local maps. The Tobay Wildlife Sanctuary in Oyster Bay became the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Memorial Wildlife Sanctuary; the Padre Island Causeway, the John F. Kennedy Causeway. A bridge across the Ohio River, a New Hampshire recreation center, a waterfront project in Yonkers, and an Arkansas highway were rebaptized. Canada had its Mount Kennedy—the first man to climb it was Robert Kennedy, by then U.S. Senator from New York—and the climax was reached when England set aside three acres of the historic meadow at Runnymede, where the Magna Carta was signed, as a Kennedy shrine. It was Queen Elizabeth’s idea. On May 14, 1965, she presided at the ceremony, dedicating the tract to the President “whom in death my people still mourn and whom in life they loved.” Mrs. Kennedy replied that it was “the deepest comfort to me to know that you share with me thoughts that lie too deep for tears.”

  By then her own situation had reacquired some semblance of order, and she had begun studying plans for the tomb and the design of the library at Harvard which would house her husband’s papers and memorabilia. In the days which followed the funeral, however, life had been a chaos. She had to cope with all the heavy tasks of the bereaved widow: cleaning out his bureau drawers, sorting through his belongings, which, because of the manner of his death, repeatedly brought stabbing reminders of Dallas—a week after the funeral the Secret Service delivered the wristwatch she had last seen in Trauma Room No. 1—and dealing with the bewildering, often callous mail which confronts wives whose husbands have always handled their joint affairs (e.g., the letter from the U.S. Finance Center regarding the pay of “your husband, the late John F. Kennedy, Lieutenant, United States Naval Reserve, Retired, from the period of 9 December 1953 through 22 November 1963”). In addition she faced urgent demands as a mother, as a symbol of the transition, and as her husband’s representative. Meanwhile she was moving.