by Bryce Zabel
Pierre Salinger visibly winced from the sidelines. Particularly when reporters shouted the obvious question: “When you say ‘guilty parties,’ are you saying you believe this was a conspiracy?”
“I’m withholding judgment until the facts are clear. It’s irresponsible to speculate,” concluded the President, even though that is exactly what he and his inner circle had been doing almost nonstop for two days.
Jackie Kennedy, seeing Salinger’s discomfort, pulled at her husband’s arm. “If you’ll excuse us,” she said to the press in her now trademark whisper, and she pulled the President away, allowing herself to be used as a human shield.
At this point, Salinger was set upon by the reporters. He clarified that President Kennedy had been using the term “guilty parties” only in a generic sense, that they were aware that the early investigation seemed to be focusing on Lee Harvey Oswald as a lone gunman. He promised a news conference where the President would take all questions. Pressed on a date, he offered Tuesday as a likely candidate, buying time under the pretext of needing to bury the dead.
The federal marshals around President and Mrs. Kennedy were a collection of clean-cut men in off-the-rack suits, eyes constantly shifting. As several escorted the first couple toward a waiting Lincoln limousine, others moved quickly to put themselves in front of the pack of reporters, roughly shoving them back.
The President and First Lady got into the waiting Lincoln. It was a closed car, not a convertible like the one in Dallas. Never again would such an exposed vehicle be used by an American president. Motorcycle cops fore and aft, it sped away. Even those uniformed officers had been personally approved by RFK’s right-hand man at the Justice Department, Nicholas Katzenbach, that morning before church. He had asked for a dozen local police officers to be sent over, from which he randomly selected four at the last possible minute. When it came to personal security, no one was taking any chances.
Johnson Agonizes
Across town, Vice President Lyndon Johnson, a member of the Disciples of Christ, sat in the front pew of the National City Christian Church with his wife Lady Bird Johnson. The Vice President looked ravaged. Every so often, Lady Bird would touch his hand or pat him on the arm. He kept shaking her off. His outsize features showed outsize anxiety. Years later, it seems clear he was not concerned for the Kennedys or the Connallys but for himself.
Later, at his own impromptu news encounter, Johnson was asked about his emotions and said, “I am sadder than I know how to tell you.” Johnson’s fleshy face twisted into a Texas mask of tragedy. “John Connally was a friend. I’ve known him since he was a very young man, and liked him and admired him, too. He worked for me for a spell and he made a wonderful, just a wonderful, governor of Texas. I looked to see him on the national stage one day before too long. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see him run for President, and I wouldn’t have been surprised to see him win.”
More than a few reporters noted Johnson’s focus on Connally without mentioning Kennedy but reasoned that Connally was dead and the President still among the living. It was an oversight that could easily be made by a man enduring profound grief for a friend and fellow Texan. And they noted Johnson’s invoking the presidential chances of his protégé when his own were always on his mind. All in all, it felt tone deaf but, to those who knew him, that was LBJ.
Was Johnson upset because he had come within half a second of being the President of the United States? Or was he aware that with Kennedy’s survival and continued viability in the 1964 presidential election that, he, Johnson, might now more easily be dumped from the ticket he had blackmailed his way onto in 1960?
Or did it go beyond even that?
An astute politician, LBJ knew that if he was now going to run for President, he’d have to wait until 1968 whether JFK kept him on the ticket or not. He’d be sixty by then — not too old, but not young either, particularly with his record of heart troubles. If he ran, he probably wouldn’t run unopposed. Bobby Kennedy seemed unlikely to wait in line while somebody else succeeded his brother. “That ruthless little shit doesn’t wait for anybody, except maybe Jack,” LBJ had told his young assistant, Bill Moyers. “Bobby Kennedy's the kind of guy who gets into a revolving door behind you and comes out in front.”
All that was interesting, but not for today. Even the 1964 election lay almost a year away, and a politician’s year was longer than a dog’s.
Johnson did not need a heart attack or an imposing opponent to cause him concern, however. There was also the growing scandal that had begun last summer over Johnson’s protégé, Bobby "Little Lyndon" Baker, one that involved trading money and women for votes and government contracts. And if that weren’t enough, another Johnson associate, Billie Sol Estes, was up to his ears in a scandal from the year before that threatened to send Johnson to jail amid charges involving suitcases of money and implications of being an accessory to murder.
As it turned out, on the very day that LBJ was watching the carnage from his own limo in the presidential motorcade, a Senate Rules Committee in Washington, D.C. was hearing testimony in closed session from a Donald B. Reynolds about a $100,000 payoff that had been made to Bobby Baker intended for Johnson.
Possibly just as threatening for LBJ was the fact that in the New York offices of Life magazine, managing editor George P. Hunt had convened a gathering of nine reporters, all working on a story about Johnson’s path from poverty to wealth while pursuing a life in politics. Several of these reporters had just returned from Texas with information that was going to be split up and investigated by the entire team.
The news of the assassination attempt in Dallas had refocused priorities in both the Senate committee and at Life magazine. Suspicious financial practices by the Vice President hardly merited attention when the President’s life had just been threatened.
Change of Plans
With the world watching what was happening at the Dallas Police Department, Chief Jesse Curry fretted in his office on Sunday morning about a promise he’d made to the media that wasn’t sitting well with him. He had agreed to allow them to film the transfer of Lee Oswald to the county jail. In order to do that, the accused assassin would be led through the parking basement of the headquarters on Sunday at 12:30 p.m., nearly two days to the hour that he was alleged to have shot at the presidential motorcade. Curry sat in his office, drinking coffee from a thermos that his wife had handed him on his way out the door at 6 a.m. After watching all the morning news shows, he'd started to have buyers’ remorse. After all, the White House was treating security as a national priority. Could he do any less?
Detective James Leavelle presented himself at the chief’s door and asked if he could have a moment. Leavelle was to be the man handcuffed to Oswald for the transfer, something that didn’t bother him nearly as much as the logistics. He made a strong case to Curry that the elevator at the Dallas Police Department should be stopped on the first floor where they should take the prisoner off, put him in a car on Main Street, and whisk him off to the county jail before the media in the basement even realized he’d been moved.
Curry considered this carefully. “You want me to lie to the press?”
“Only if our priority is to keep the prisoner alive long enough to give him the death sentence,” answered Leavelle.
Curry thought about it. He’d been an all-district tackle for Dallas Technical High School and led their football team all the way to the state finals back in 1933. “A feint might be just what we need here.” Curry gave Leavelle the go-ahead and they agreed that the press would be told only after Oswald was already on the way. Sure, the TV networks with their live cameras down in the basement would be furious but they didn’t run the show, he thought. He was still in charge.
The decision to move Oswald in this way may have saved the accused gunman’s life. A Dallas bar owner, Jack Ruby, was apprehended in the basement with a loaded handgun at the exact moment Oswald was supposed to be coming out of the nearby elevator. The officers who det
ained Ruby did not immediately arrest him. Instead they called Chief Curry.
Ruby, it turned out, was no stranger to the Dallas Police Department. He ran a local nightclub, and he made sure police officers felt comfortable there. He was friendly enough with local cops that no one had thought to stop him from watching the prisoner transfer that day.
Under questioning, the nightclub operator said he’d come to the basement on the spur of the moment, wanting to kill Oswald for darkening the good name of Texas and terrorizing the Kennedy family. Curry would normally have let Ruby go with a warning and thanked his lucky stars that things had gone no further. But there were so many reporters who witnessed Ruby’s detention that it could not be ignored — particularly since the fifty-two-year-old was described as waving the gun in a way that most reporters and officers on the scene found impossible to miss. Curry ordered that Ruby be arrested and booked.
Only one thing bothered Curry. Ruby had a reputation for being mobbed up with deep contacts in the organized crime underworld. What if he wasn’t telling the truth about his motives? What if Jack Ruby had been sent to silence Lee Harvey Oswald from talking?
A Tale of Two Funerals
Through circumstance, bad planning and, possibly, political motivations, both the funerals of Secret Service agent Clint Hill in Washington, D.C. and Governor John Connally and police officer J.D. Tippit in Texas were scheduled at the same time on Monday. Based on long-established protocols of rank, the original plans called for President Kennedy to return to Texas to be at the funeral of the governor and for Vice President Lyndon Johnson to cover Hill’s funeral at Arlington National Cemetery. LBJ made no secret of his displeasure at being forced to miss out on the funeral of a man he had known since 1939. Coming on the heels of being escorted off Air Force One, this new slight left him “sucking hind tit again,” as he told several friends.
Both Kenny O’Donnell and Pierre Salinger confronted the President and his brother about this plan and told them it must be stopped immediately. There was no way that Kennedy could go back to Texas so soon. That was a non-starter. And there was no way he could miss the funeral of the Secret Service agent who gave his life to save him, particularly when the Kennedys had rewarded that sacrifice by banishing the Secret Service from the White House. Protocol made no difference in this situation.
Both Kennedys felt the analysis was correct. They accepted the reality of the situation and made it work for them. If you get to deliver good news to someone, take credit for it if you can.
JFK called LBJ first. “Lyndon, I just told these people that you have to represent this administration back in Texas at the funeral for Governor Connally,” said the President. “I need you get on Air Force Two and return there now so you can pay all our respect to your friend on behalf of the United States of America. Will you do that for your country, Lyndon?” Johnson barked out a fast yes and effusively thanked the President he had been cursing all weekend.
The President then called the head of the Secret Service, Chief James J. Rowley, and told him there was no way that protocol would keep him from Arlington National Cemetery on Monday and that he would like to say a few words, if Rowley would allow it. He knew that the situation in the past day had been “misinterpreted” by some of his political opponents, said Kennedy, but this was a good way to send the message that there was “no daylight” between the President and the brave agents who put their lives on the line to protect him. Rowley also effusively thanked the President he had been cursing since the day before.
Figuring they had caught a break, Robert Kennedy returned to Hickory Hill under escort of the federal marshals to shower, shave and change into some clean clothes. John Kennedy took lunch with his wife and children.
Monday in Washington, D.C. was raw and chilly, with a biting wind blustering down from the north. Across the Potomac River in Virginia was Arlington National Cemetery, at one time Robert E. Lee’s mansion and grounds, which had now become the chief military burial ground for the country Lee fought so hard to defeat. Most of the leaves today were off the trees at the cemetery. The grass was starting to go yellow. The waiting grave stood open, a new wound in the earth. By the grave, the Secret Service had set up a portable lectern with a bulletproof glass shield in front.
Secret Service Special Agent Clint Hill was to be buried here based on having served in the U.S. Army from 1954 to 1957. A special presidential order had waived any other issues that might have been raised under normal circumstances. Hill, in the view of almost everyone, had given his life on the field of battle at Dealey Plaza.
The U.S. Secret Service had a staff of nearly two hundred agents working for it nationwide. Thirty-four of them had been in the presidential detail, responsible for protecting John F. Kennedy around the clock. They worked in eight-hour shifts, rotating the duty times every two weeks.
Clint Hill had been assigned to the Jacqueline Kennedy detail as the special agent in charge. He had been positioned in the follow-up car behind the one with the Kennedys and the Connallys when he saw something and leaped instinctively to shield the President and First Lady, saving their lives and giving up his own in the process. While the President and the attorney general had strategized and acted over the past forty-eight hours, Jackie Kennedy had been left alone with her grief. Ever since the attack in Dallas, there was speculation among a few wags that Hill and the First Lady had been involved in an extramarital affair, something that has never been confirmed and was, in fact, denied by both parties while they were alive. What is clear, however, is that Clint Hill had become Mrs. Kennedy's close friend, and she found the pain of his loss unbearable.
The assistant special agent in charge in Dallas had been Roy Kellerman, who was advised to stay there to recuperate from a shoulder wound that had required extensive surgery. Kellerman refused this advice and came to Arlington, where he sat with the contingent of Secret Service agents who had come to mourn their fallen friend. These men were easy to spot, and not just because they sat together. They were fairly young and tough and clean-cut. Many of them had to be wondering if, faced with identical circumstances, they would have responded as quickly and as bravely as Clint Hill did.
President and Mrs. Kennedy were seated strategically out of view of any potential line of fire. For this event, the Secret Service had been allowed to provide security, even though the attorney general had seen to it that a generous contingent of federal marshals was also on the job to watch the watchers. While it was obvious that fence- mending needed to be done, the President being at the service was seen as a clear sign that his rearranging of White House security was temporary, as he’d said all along through his spokesmen, including his brother. Regardless of the politics, security was heavy. Some carried pistols, some tommy guns, and some scope-sighted rifles. They all wore don’t-tread-on-me expressions. All agents regarded anyone they were unfamiliar with through hard eyes. To a man, they looked jumpy as hell.
The surprise of the event, however, was yet to come. After Chief James Rowley spoke about courage, self-sacrifice and duty, it was expected that President Kennedy would speak briefly. He did not. Instead, it was the First Lady who walked to the lectern. All three networks had TV cameras on hand to record the emotional moment.
A good man is dead. A man I call my friend. Clint Hill gave his own life so that my husband and I might live. Agent Hill knew there were dangers when he joined the Secret Service. No one made him jump up on the trunk of our car. No one would have thought less of him if he didn’t do it, but he did, and now he is gone. If God ever needs a bodyguard up in Heaven, He will find one in Clint Hill. He protected us as he would his own family. He made the whole country his family in Dallas on Friday afternoon. Thank you.
The entire speech by Jackie Kennedy was so short that it was replayed in its entirety over and over on November 25. Her husband did not speak, but after the service he presented Hill’s wife with a folded, cased flag, the kind any veteran’s widow was entitled to have. He gave her a warm, long hug
and in an image made famous, he removed his white pocket handkerchief to dry the tears from Mrs. Hill’s eyes. After that, Kennedy and his wife walked over to the Secret Service contingent and spoke to agents for seventeen minutes.
Those pictures of the Kennedys offering grief counseling in the shadow of their own brush with death seemed for the moment to completely eliminate the issue of the Secret Service. What the First Lady did not know but surely suspected, was that a number of these agents knew a great deal more about her husband's activities when he was not with his family than she did. If they were to speak, the damage to the reputation of the First Family simply could not be calculated.
Another Profile in Courage
By Tuesday, the initial shock had worn off, the bodies of the dead had been buried, and the White House knew that the President of the United States needed to speak to the American people. John Kennedy had made statements — at the airport, after church and at Arlington Cemetery — but they were limited in scope and general in information. It was time to say more in a press conference, an art form he had mastered in sixty-four different appearances before Dallas.
Normally, press secretary Pierre Salinger would have introduced the President, but Kennedy told him to hold off. It was not like he was an unknown quantity. Asked what his strategy would be, the President shrugged: “Kennedys smile, Pierre. That’s how we do it.”
Far more reporters than usual crowded the East Room for Kennedy’s sixty-fifth press conference, and many others had been turned away, put into a room with a closed- circuit feed in the Executive Office Building next door. As the event was being televised live, JFK entered precisely on cue at 9 p.m., primetime on the East Coast and dinnertime on the West Coast. He looked tanned and fit as usual. Seeing him enter, so masculine, so presidential, and so alive, the White House press corps burst into authentic and spontaneous applause out of the sheer spirit of it all.
