The Death of a President

by William Manchester

  She felt, she told Nicole Alphand, “like a wounded animal. What I really want to do is crawl into a corner and hide.” What she really had to do was keep turning from one task to the next. The family helped as much as possible. Her sister and Pat Lawford stayed with her through the winter, and her mother and Ted Kennedy brought the bodies of her two dead babies back for reburial with their father. But she dealt with most matters herself. She had refused to delegate her responsibilities during the funeral preparations, and in the aftermath, too, she wanted to make each touch her own. Frequently she had no choice. If she was determined to support the new President, her physical presence was absolutely necessary; no one could act for her there. And she was determined. Whatever her personal feelings, the office Lyndon Johnson now held exerted its own demands. Until he had acquired the country’s confidence and felt confident himself there could be no substitute for a display of unity. The day after the burial she came down to the East Room to stand among the Latin Americans while he read the speech Goodwin had written, promising continued support of the Alianza. During that first week she telephoned him and wrote him encouraging letters, and while he could not grasp why she persisted in addressing him “Mr. President,” he understood and appreciated her show of the flag. The Sunday after the funeral he wrote her:

  Dear Jackie:

  How could you possibly find that extra moment—that extra ounce of strength to call me Thanksgiving evening. You have been magnificent and have won a warm place in the heart of history. I only wish things could be different—that I didn’t have to be here. But the Almighty has willed differently, and now Lady Bird and I need your help. You have for now and for always our warm, warm love.

  Affectionately,

  Lyndon

  She was evacuating the mansion for him as quickly as she could. Here again, this could have been left to servants and secretaries, but the White House had special significance for Jacqueline Kennedy. She had left her mark on nearly every room in it, and before walking out for the last time she wished to leave more tokens for her husband. In retrospect her anxiety that he might be forgotten seems odd. (“She wrote me not to forget him!” said one of her correspondents of those days. “As though I could pass a single hour without remembering!”) The scope of his legacy was not apparent then, though. He had been cut down after less than a full term, with his mightiest ambitions unrealized; in newspapers she read that he had not been in office long enough to achieve greatness. There was no way of knowing that the very brevity of his Presidency would add poignancy to his story. Therefore she made certain it would be pondered by future Presidents. First the family chose the picture which would be donated to the mansion in his name. Jim Fosburgh, the chairman of her committee on art, appeared from New York with a truck of priceless cargo—the treasures of six galleries—and lined up the paintings in the second-floor hall and along the walls of the Oval Room. The selection was narrowed down to a Courbet and a Monet of water lilies. Both were taken down to the Green Room, where the gift was to hang, and the choice settled when Eunice, ordinarily so matter-of-fact, said of the Monet, “That picture makes you want to dream, doesn’t it?”

  The widow’s most striking farewell gesture was entirely her own. Among the sheaf of reminders to herself which survive from those days (“Goodbye operators”) (“Goodbye staff”) are several with the various headings “Our Room,” “J’s Room” and “On side of mantel in JFK Room.” After several false starts she wrote in her spidery handwriting, “In this room lived John Fitzgerald Kennedy with his wife Jacqueline during the two years, ten months and two days he was President of the United States.” It was carved directly beneath the old inscription, “In this room Abraham Lincoln slept during his occupancy of the White House March 4, 1861—April 13, 1865.”

  She met her self-imposed deadline. Eleven days after the funeral she was in the Harriman house. The following morning the new First Lady wrote her:

  THE WHITE HOUSE

  WASHINGTON

  Dear Jackie—

  We have just spent our first night

  here. I’m still lost—but will find my

  way!

  How dear of you to leave for us

  the lovely lilies of the valley—Nancy

  put your note in my hand, and its reassurance

  I treasure.

  Thank you and

  love

  Lady Bird

  President Johnson pinned the Treasury’s highest award on Rufe Youngblood, hailing him as “one of the most noble and able public servants I have ever known.” At Mrs. Kennedy’s insistence Secretary Dillon also decorated Clint Hill. Though both agents had performed admirably—Clint’s dramatic leap in particular could not be ignored; everyone in the country had seen photographs of it—the ceremonies left an undercurrent of dissatisfaction in much of official Washington. The central fact was that the Secret Service had failed, and there was feeling that the first reaction ought to have been one of collective shame and not of pride in exceptional men—that the medals should have followed investigation of the failure. Investigations had begun, of course, but here, too, the first steps were disquieting. The FBI assigned fifty agents to a crash study, wrote a skimpy report which dismissed thorny questions with the recurring phrase “There is no evidence”—and then leaked the report to a news magazine. The episode was a dismaying example of how threatened bureaucracies, turning a blind eye to the national interest, rise in defense of themselves.

  The new President having been persuaded that a Texas inquiry would be doomed in advance as a whitewash, Nick Katzenbach and Solicitor General Cox called upon the Chief Justice four days after the funeral and urged him to head a federal commission. Warren refused. He had, he pointed out, repeatedly spoken out against extracurricular activity by judges; he suggested they ask one of the Court’s two retired justices instead. His visitors left and advised the White House of their failures. This was the kind of circumstance in which Lyndon Johnson was at his most effective. The Chief Judge hardly had time to relay his decision to two of his colleagues before his phone rang. The President wanted to see him at once. In Warren’s words,

  I saw McGeorge Bundy first. He took me in, and the President told me how serious the situation was. He said there had been wild rumors, and that there was the international situation to think of. He said he had just talked to Dean Rusk, who was concerned, and he also mentioned the head of the Atomic Energy Commission, who had told him how many millions of people would be killed in an atomic war. The only way to dispel these rumors, he said, was to have an independent and responsible commission, and that there was no one to head it except the highest judicial officer in the country. I told him how I felt. He said that if the public became aroused against Castro and Khrushchev there might be war.

  “You’ve been in uniform before,” he said, “and if I asked you, you would put on the uniform again for your country.”

  I said, “Of course.”

  “This is more important than that,” he said.

  “If you’re putting it like that,” I said, “I can’t say no.”

  That same afternoon Johnson signed Executive Order 11130, appointing the six other members and charging them all to evaluate FBI material, make further investigations of their own, and to appraise “all the facts and circumstances surrounding” Kennedy’s murder, “including the subsequent violent death of the man charged with the assassination.” As is customary with such ad hoc panels, the lustrous names of the seven appointees were for public consumption. The real work was done by the general counsel and his fourteen assistants, and especially by the younger lawyers. Over a six-month period ninety-four witnesses appeared at sessions attended by one or more members of the Commission itself. Individual staff men, on the other hand, questioned 395. Sworn affidavits were accepted from sixty-one people, and two—the President and Mrs. Johnson—sent statements. On September 24, 1964, the full report was submitted to the Chief Executive and made public.

  In the United States
it was received with general approval. There were fewer endorsements abroad, where it was frequently dismissed as the “official version” of the two crimes—a sly inference that another, true version was being suppressed. That was unjust. The Commission had met its mandate. Oswald was correctly identified as the assassin; the absence of a cabal was established. The treatment of related questions was less satisfactory. This was especially true of the findings on Presidential protection. Although the conduct of the Secret Service, the FBI, and the Dallas police was found to have been less than admirable, they were handled gingerly, and corrective suggestions lacked clarity and force. Their subsequent fate was disheartening. J. Edgar Hoover, furious that his bureau should be criticized at all, protested so vehemently that the public overlooked the report’s harsher censure of the Secret Service (which wisely laid low); by the time the Director had finished disciplining his Dallas agents, including the unfortunate Hosty, a great many newspaper readers had forgotten which agency had really been accountable for John Kennedy’s safety. As for the Commission’s specific recommendations, the most important were filed and forgotten. Cabinet-level supervision of the Service was proposed; nothing was done about it. The Commission felt that the Head of the White House Detail ought to be an administrative officer with no personal ties to the President. Johnson replaced Behn with Youngblood. Few agents envied Youngblood; the new Chief Executive turned out to be far more difficult to protect than his predecessor. He plunged into crowds, invited swarms of passing tourists into the White House, and reprimanded bodyguards who came too close to him. The Service rebuilt the Presidential Lincoln in which Kennedy had died, adding a souped-up motor, two and a half tons of new steel plating, three-inch glass, and bulletproof tires, but Johnson rarely used it.

  On the issue of small-arms control the report was silent; the commissioners debated among themselves and decided this question lay outside their province. In the wake of the assassination the pressure for such legislation seemed irresistible; a Gallup poll revealed that eight out of ten Americans favored new laws requiring police permits of weapons buyers. Robert Kennedy asked Congress to outlaw the mail-order traffic, supportive mail engulfed the Hill, and in the weeks after the funeral Senator Thomas Dodd of Connecticut introduced a sensible bill to ban mail-order sales, bar weapons from abroad unsuitable for sporting use, forbid sales to people under twenty-one, and require all purchasers to identify themselves so police could later trace them. The American Bar Association endorsed it and was ignored. The Director of the U.S. Bureau of Prisons pointed out that “After all, cars have to be registered and drivers licensed” and was unheard. Indeed, though eighteen such measures were introduced on the Hill, none of the gun laws went off. The United States remained the only modern nation in the world without firm regulation of the sale and use of firearms—Oswald couldn’t have assassinated Khrushchev in Russia—and in 1964 some 600,000 cheap firearms were brought into the country.

  A great many men seemed to regard all proposals for tighter controls as a challenge to their virility. The powerful National Rifle Association urged its half-million members to write Washington, and its lobbyists went to work on Congressmen with the specious reasoning that “It’s the man that kills, not the rifle.” They demanded passage of another (Hicken-looper) bill, which would merely prevent the importing of guns not made by American firms. Katzenbach pointed out in vain that the association was protecting, not sportsmen’s rights, but the profits of commercial gun dealers. “Anti-Gun Extremists Are at It Again,” Field and Stream warned its readers, and Outdoor Life declared that “Gun Owners Should Switch to the Offense.”1 They did. In Texas they were especially militant. Elsewhere in the country courts took a benign view of some twenty thousand gun-control laws enacted on municipal and state levels. In Dallas an ordinance restricting the possession of weapons had been struck down by a local judge in 1962 on the ground that it would have been an “unauthorized invasion of a natural right the citizens of this state have never relinquished to their rulers.” Presumably “their rulers” meant the government of the United States, and the assassination didn’t change that feeling. Once his arm had healed Governor Connally called upon Texas’ Congressional delegation to oppose the Dodd bill, and Texas Republicans, meeting in Dallas, passed a resolution opposing any limitation whatever on the right of private individuals to buy and use guns.

  Big D continued to be a peculiar community. During the last week in November there had been those in the liberal underground who had hoped the city’s agonizing reappraisal might arouse its mass conscience. The watchman had wakened but in vain. The more Dallas changed, the more it remained the same. As the “So Long, Pal” wreaths withered in Dealey Plaza the self-consciousness hardened into defensiveness, an uneasy What-will-New-York-think-of-us? attitude summed up by a local psychoanalyst: “Dallas is very, very proud of Dallas. In an individual it is almost a narcissistic thing. Instead of worrying about the grief of others, he worries about the image of the city.” In the eyes of such people a long step toward rehabilitation was taken in the first month of the new administration. At the end of the 1963 college football season sportswriters had picked the University of Texas and the U.S. Naval Academy as the country’s No. 1 and No. 2 teams. They met in the Cotton Bowl. The midshipmen were thoroughly trouched. Dallas was elated.

  The mood of civic penitence evaporated quickly. Jesse Curry’s policemen became resentful, not of their local leadership, but of the U.S. Supreme Court, whose insistence that the rights of prisoners be safeguarded had, they argued, hamstrung them in their interrogation of Oswald. In the first shock of November 22 Superintendent W. T. White had vowed that he would dismiss the teacher who had told her pupils she wanted to spit in the President’s face. Over the weekend he changed his mind. Two weeks later, however, he suspended another teacher for writing Time magazine that she had seen “the seed of hate being planted by our newspapers and many of the leaders of Dallas” and believed this had paved the way for the assassination. The vice president of a Dallas oil company and a department store executive published sharp criticisms of the city’s Radical Right. Both resigned under pressure. Of course, the majority of Dallas citizens deeply regretted it, and while public officials declined to contribute toward any Kennedy statue or marker (using public funds for such a purpose would be illegal, they explained), a committee of private citizens did plan to convert one of the rundown blocks near the courthouse into a memorial plaza. Somehow the work lagged. Eventually a monument was unveiled in the Trade Mart. There was nothing near the assassination scene, though, and the lack was most conspicuous the week before the release of the Warren Report, when the American Legion held its annual convention in Dallas. For six hours drum majorettes and uniformed formations marched past the Texas School Book Depository. No one stopped; there was nothing to indicate that anything out of the ordinary had happened there.

  Then, in the spring of 1966, a year after the dedication of the Runnymede shrine, official Dallas re-examined its position and reversed itself; $20,000 was set aside from the park fund for a marker in the plaza. As originally worded, the inscription was ten paragraphs long. It began by noting that the square was dedicated to G. B. Dealey (no mention of the WPA) and went on to describe the first Dallas log cabin, built nearby in 1841; an act of the Texas legislature creating Dallas County in 1846; the erection of a toll bridge over the Trinity River in 1855; the incorporation of Dallas in 1856; early navigation of the river in 1868; the completion of a railroad from Dallas to the Gulf in 1872; and, in 1873, the building of the Dallas train terminal. “With this background of constructive growth,” the inscription then declared, “this site unfortunately became the scene of a tragedy which plunged the world into a state of shock.” Upon reading it Times Herald editorial writers were plunged into a state of shock. Glossing over the assassination in this fashion, they noted acidly, would merely confirm outsiders who regarded the city as a defensive community preoccupied with its own navel. The Park Board then approved a simple t
ext, omitting the recital of “constructive growth.” At the same time, however, Dallas leaders were quietly discussing the possibility of razing the Book Depository on the pretext that it was a traffic obstacle. The warehouse was a disquieting reminder. They looked at it as seldom as possible.

  Overlooking Jack Ruby was clearly impossible. His trial disconcerted everyone, with the possible exceptions of the defendant, who was in a daze, and his chief counsel, a pyrotechnic lawyer with an insatiable lust for publicity. At times the proceedings became a circus. To the discomfiture of Judge Joe B. Brown it was revealed that he himself had sponsored Jack’s admittance to the Dallas Chamber of Commerce in 1959. Brown declined to disqualify himself, explaining that he hadn’t really known him. He further ruled that people who had watched the killing of Oswald on television weren’t witnesses—the Texas Supreme Court upheld him—and an all-white, all-Protestant jury was seated. Once a recess was required because of a jail break elsewhere in the building. Twice spectators at the trial itself had to be disarmed. (One of them had been a stripper for Jack.) The judge decided to admit TV cameras to the courtroom for the verdict, and on March 14, 1964, Ruby was found guilty of murder. Since the jury had not recommended mercy he was sentenced to death. Ruby tried to kill himself three times. Thereafter he languished in the county courthouse until, in October 1966, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals reversed his conviction on the basis of judicial errors and ordered a new trial. The victory turned to ashes; in the first week of 1967 Ruby, stricken with incurable cancer, died at Parkland. The autopsy was performed by Dr. Earl Rose.