One week later, at 1:39 Eastern Time on the afternoon of November 22, the bells on the long row of teletype machines at the Detroit News started clanging. It was rare for any noise to draw extra attention in a chaotic newsroom, but this was different. The bulletin bells kept ringing, all ten at once, incessantly. A group of reporters walked over to the teletype room to see what was up. UPI URGENT—FLASH—KENNEDY SERIOUSLY WOUNDED—PERHAPS FATALLY BY ASSASSINS BULLET.
Aretha Franklin was strolling through the aisles lined with corned beef and salami at the Broadway Market in downtown Detroit. She had returned to her hometown to spend the week before Thanksgiving with Reverend Franklin and other family members. First she noticed people rushing around, huddling, whispering, then she heard radios blaring, and finally the news reached her that the president had been killed. Ziggy Johnson called his mother in Chicago and asked if she had heard the news. “Yes, son, I have my rosary in my hand and we all must pray,” she told him. Johnson had a difficult time writing his “Zagging with Ziggy” column that week, his sadness about the demise of the Flame now overwhelmed by his grief for the lost president. Paraphrasing the words that Martin Luther King had used in Detroit and then Washington, he said it was the first time in his memory that there was “someone in the White House who believed solely in merit and not color of skin.”
Bob Ankony, the young truant who had witnessed the inferno at the Ford Rotunda, was walking down the sidewalk past the Shirley Manor Apartments near his house on Woodmere at the corner with Sharon. Twice a week he cleaned the incinerators in the building; the tenants knew him. It was Mrs. Douglas, the widow lady who lived in the basement apartment in the southwest corner of the building, who yelled out to him, “Bobby, the president was killed!” His world was too far removed for the news to have much emotional impact, but it did stir his morbid imagination. For a few weeks thereafter, he and a buddy from the Cabot Street gang would reenact the assassination scene in his basement bedroom; Bob would sit on a wooden laundry tub and wave as though he were the president in the open-air limousine, and his friend “would pretend he was the sniper with one of my unloaded rifles.” His obsession with guns led Ankony to a connection with Lee Harvey Oswald, who had fired an Italian-made 6.5 mm Carcano rifle that he had purchased from Klein’s Sporting Goods in Chicago. Ankony by then had bought a few rifles and pistols from Klein’s himself, simply by using their mail-order service and sending along a false note claiming he was eighteen, three years older than his true age.
It was deer hunting season in Michigan, and Raymond Murray, the Detroit cop, was up north that November afternoon deer hunting with four friends between Grayling and Kalkaska off Highway M-72. On the way back to their cabin near Bear Lake, they stopped at a grocery and heard that Kennedy had been shot. By the time they reached the cabin, the president was dead. Murray thought back to the October morning a year earlier when Kennedy had strode right past him, smiling, at the entrance to the Sheraton Cadillac in downtown Detroit, and how it had crossed his mind then that it would be too easy for a sniper to perch on top of a nearby building. It could have happened right in front of me, Murray thought.
Berry Gordy was in his office on West Grand Boulevard. As he later related the story, he had just been told about Kennedy’s death when the phone rang. It was his assistant Barney Ales warning him that Marvin Gaye, in a foul mood, was headed his way. Gaye had stomped out of the sales department complaining that Motown was not sufficiently pushing “Can I Get a Witness.” Now here he was, looming over Gordy’s desk. “They’re fucking with me, BG,” the singer yelled. “I was down in the Sales Department . . . and they’re bullshitting, man.” He was supposed to get more airplay, Gaye complained, but sales was only pushing Martha and the Vandellas and Smokey and his Miracles. Gordy told Gaye that he was being foolish to yell at the salespeople, who could make or break him. In the process of chastising Gaye, he called him “boy,” which only intensified Gaye’s tantrum. The confrontation ended with Gordy himself walking out of the room in frustration, yelling, “Don’t you realize the president has just been killed?” Little Stevie Wonder, who was at the Michigan School for the Blind that day, went home and sat near the television set with his mother, every report from Dallas reinforcing what one biographer called his “early visions of an American apocalypse.”
Out at the Glass House in Dearborn, the news resonated on many levels. Henry Ford II had known JFK socially and politically, and though a lifelong Republican he was moving closer to the Democratic administration as the Detroit auto industry enjoyed its best year ever. Robert S. McNamara, a former president of Ford Motor Company, once one of Ford’s Whiz Kids, was serving as Kennedy’s secretary of defense. And there was one physical detail to the grisly scene in Dallas that would forever be attached to Ford: Kennedy was riding in a 1961 Lincoln Continental, a four-door convertible manufactured by Ford at its Wixom plant in suburban Detroit and customized in Cincinnati by Hess & Eisenhardt.
The X-100, the Secret Service called the car. Ford leased it to the White House for $500 per year, though its value was more than $200,000. Hydraulic rear seat that could be raised ten inches for better viewing of the president. Removable steel and transparent plastic roof panels. V-8 engine with 350 horsepower. Gold thread hand-embroidered presidential seals in special door pockets. Built-in floodlights. Radiotelephones. Flashing red lights and siren. Auxiliary jump seats for extra passengers. And one feature newly added in 1963: trunk lid grab handles for Secret Service agents. “A big beautiful Lincoln,” a Dallas television announcer had declared earlier that day as Jack and Jackie settled in the backseat and the motorcade departed Love Field on its way through the city. Decades later the X-100 would be taken out of storage and put on display at the Henry Ford Museum. Long since analyzed by the Warren Commission and cleansed of scattered brain matter and the gruesomeness of its history, the limousine resided now as another artifact of American mythology not far from the replicas of Thomas Edison’s laboratory and Abe Lincoln’s law office.
David Laurie, ten years old, was watching a cousin deliver a report on oceanography at the Grosse Pointe University School when word reached the class that President Kennedy had been shot. The private school cut short the school day and sent students home. At the modernist Laurie house on Merriweather Road in Grosse Pointe Farms, David found his father, Bill, head of J. Walter Thompson’s Detroit office, lost in front of the television set for most of the weekend. No Saturday morning cartoons, just news about the assassination. David noticed his father was biting his nails, something he did only when he was nervous. David’s mother, Thayer, seemed to be getting increasingly irritated. As the unwavering conservative in the family, she disliked the Kennedys, their politics, and their mythology, and thought the drama was being overdone. In some ways Thayer was a right-wing version of Jackie Kennedy, young and beautiful, from the same social milieu. They both had been debutantes in the Newport summer swirl, when Thayer joined her parents, the B. E. Hutchinsons, in their annual pilgrimage to Jamestown, Rhode Island, and Jacqueline Bouvier accompanied her mother and stepfather, Hugh Dudley Auchincloss Jr., to Hammersmith Farm, the summer estate across the bay. But Thayer Hutchinson Laurie had nothing good to say about Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, and her attitude in the days following JFK’s assassination puzzled her son and remained etched in his memory.
Walter Reuther’s daughter, Lisa, was among the students at the Putney School in Vermont who heard the ominous sound of a sledgehammer striking an old train rail, the school’s way of announcing an emergency. The news of JFK’s death was followed by instructions to carry on as usual. “I couldn’t believe it. I had many strong feelings for President Kennedy. I’d met him personally at several UAW conventions and Labor Day celebrations,” she wrote later. After finishing her next chore, peeling potatoes, she called her parents in Detroit. Her father’s voice “cracked with anger and grief.” As distraught as Walter Reuther was, his daughter said, he somehow “helped me regain my hope for the future.”
/> Reuther had been planning to be in Washington early the next week to attend a November 25 state dinner at the White House for Ludwig Erhard, who had recently succeeded Konrad Adenauer as chancellor of West Germany. A telegram reached him early on the morning of November 23: “The President’s body will lie in repose in the East Room of the White House Saturday. You are invited to join in paying him respects from 2:30 to 5 p.m.—Robert F. Kennedy.”
Ever solicitous in his dealings with President Kennedy, Reuther had been one of the more frequent out-of-town visitors at the White House over the previous three years. A few months earlier, at the request of one of Reuther’s longtime aides, the secretary for White House assistant Ken O’Donnell had compiled a list of Reuther’s meetings with JFK. Gwen King reported that the list was perhaps not complete, but her best attempt. Not including “large functions, lunches, dinners etc.,” Reuther had enjoyed twenty-two meetings with the president “alone or in small groups.” More were to follow after the list was put together. Reuther and Kennedy had last met, alone and off the record, on November 6, when Reuther was in town for an executive board meeting of the AFL-CIO’s International Affairs Department at the Statler Hilton. Seventeen days later he was back in Washington to pay his final respects.
Reuther was in the habit of writing notes to his files, using the initials WPR to identify himself. That day he wrote, “On Saturday, November 23, following my return from the White House where I reviewed the body of President Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey called to advise me that President Johnson had asked him to contact me and tell me that he, President Johnson, wanted to talk to me at the earliest opportunity and would call me at 4:30 p.m. President Johnson phoned me at the Statler Hilton and his first words were: ‘My friend, I need your friendship and support now more than ever.’ He advised me he hoped to see me at an early date. About fifteen minutes later, secretary of labor Willard Wirtz called me to advise me that President Johnson had asked him to give me essentially the same message that Hubert Humphrey had given me. I advised Willard Wirtz I had already spoken to the president.”
This was quintessential LBJ, networking and lobbying for support in the midst of national mourning, but in Reuther he was dealing with someone who understood the new president’s urgency. At the 1960 Democratic convention in Los Angeles, Reuther, skeptical of the Texan’s civil rights commitment, had worked to try to keep Johnson off the ticket, and seemed to be angling for the selection himself. But in the years since, Johnson had done much to show that he was committed and ready to apply his immense political skills to the cause in all of its dimensions, economic as well as legal. Eleven months earlier, Detroit’s 1963 had begun with a memorable LBJ visit, when he had flown in from Washington to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, placing a plaque at the Second Baptist Church, the oldest black Baptist church in Michigan, whose members had been the first in Detroit to celebrate the emancipation news, a few days late, in 1863. Before delivering a strong civil rights speech at Ford Auditorium, Johnson, with Governor Romney at his side, acknowledged the downtown church’s vibrant history, recounted in the plaque that he unveiled. The words, written a century earlier, read in part, “The Negro citizens of Detroit resolved that when in the course of human events there comes a day that is destined to be an everlasting beacon light marking a joyful era in the progress of a nation and the hopes of a people it seems to be fitting the occasion that it should not pass unnoticed by those whose hopes it comes to brighten and to bless.”
Over the tumultuous spring and summer of 1963, as the civil rights movement rolled through the South and Congress began to deal with the administration’s civil rights legislation, Johnson proved to be a valuable ally inside the White House. And now, in the first hours of his presidency, he was pledging to Reuther that he would see that vision through to completion. “Dear Walter,” Johnson wrote a few days later, “I was greatly strengthened by your warm message. I need the support and the help of dedicated, imaginative people like you if the unfinished work is to be carried on, and I find renewed strength in the thought that in the days that lie ahead I can count on you.”
With the assassination of President Kennedy, Mayor Cavanagh had lost not only a party leader but an avatar of his beliefs and ambitions. Irish, Catholic, liberal but pragmatic, a handsome man out of a big, handsome family—Kennedy and his clan were everything Cavanagh wanted to be. He did not have the Kennedy fortune or fame, but he saw in the Kennedy family many traits he wished to emulate. Though heavier than JFK and not much of an athlete, he loved to get his picture taken playing touch football with his staff, a scene evoking the Kennedy vigor. There was more than a hint of Hyannis Port modeling in the way he treated his brood of young sons. He paraded them around in ties and sport coats, promised them a reward if they reached twenty-one without drinking or smoking (something he had heard Joseph Kennedy did), and eventually sent them off to prep schools. (Mark, the oldest, went to Georgetown Preparatory School, eight miles from the White House, where his friend down the hall was Robert F. Kennedy Jr.) In the fall of 1963, JFK acolytes were scattered across America, bright and eager politicians who, with a blend of hope and self-delusion, thought they could be some version of him, and Jerome Cavanagh in Detroit was prime among them. On the Monday after the assassination, the mayor led a local memorial service for Kennedy at noon at the Old City Hall. Again there was a Detroit link to events a century earlier.
“On April 15, 1865, seven thousand Detroit citizens gathered here to mourn Abraham Lincoln—victim of an assassin’s bullet,” Cavanagh said. “Almost a century later, on this same site, we mourn the death of another of freedom’s illustrious warriors. The cruel realization of his passing penetrates our unwilling consciousness through the fog of horror and disbelief of these last fateful hours. Though we would have it otherwise, our beloved leader, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, has been torn from our presence and our hearts are pierced. America needs all its strength as it girds to protect our democracy threatened by this foul, this loathsome act. We shall not be found wanting. We shall continue to serve as vigilant watchmen on freedom’s ramparts. And we shall bend all our efforts to the end that he shall not have fallen in vain.”
A Michigan Chronicle editorial linked the Kennedy assassination to what it called “The American Tragedy of 1963,” a series of violent events that included the assassination of Medgar Evers in June and the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham in September. Rev. C. L. Franklin made a similar connection. There were no indications that race played a direct role in the assassination, but Franklin saw JFK as a victim of the culture of hate that permeated American society. “The sniper did not pull the trigger alone,” he said from the pulpit of New Bethel Baptist that Sunday. “Governor Ross Barnett of Mississippi, Governor Wallace of Alabama, General Walker of the White Citizens’ Council, and all the forces of hate and evil were as surely in Dallas with the sniper as they were in Jackson, Mississippi, when Medgar Evers was felled.”
Malcolm X, a lonely dissenter amid the encomiums to Kennedy, offered a harshly different version of that same concept when asked about the assassination, linking it not only to the American culture of racial violence but the U.S. role in the violent deaths of leaders in Vietnam and the Congo. Kennedy, he said, “never foresaw that the chickens would come home to roost so soon. Being an old farm boy myself, chickens coming home to roost never did make me sad; they always made me glad.” The Chronicle condemned him for that sharp comment, and so did Elijah Muhammad, whose censure of his disciple demarcated Malcolm’s final break with the Nation of Islam. His brother in Detroit, Wilfred X, who had been instrumental in his early understanding of the black Muslim religion, decided to stay with Muhammad.
If there were questions among historians about Kennedy’s commitment to the civil rights struggle, there was no doubt about the emotional depth with which Detroit’s black churchgoing population reacted to his death. Churches were packed throughout the city that first Sunday after the
shooting, reverberating with expressions of respect and grief. Reverend Franklin called Kennedy “the greatest hero of freedom since Lincoln.” At the Warren Avenue Baptist Church, several members of the congregation were overtaken with emotion as the choir sang “Is Thine Heart Right with God?” At Northwest Church of God in Christ, children sat somberly with their parents through the service rather than leave for Sunday school classes. At East Grand Boulevard Methodist, Rev. Woodie Wade set aside his prepared sermon to preach extemporaneously to an overflow audience about the meaning of President Kennedy. Macedonia, Calvary, Mt. Calvary, New Harmony, and St. John held a joint memorial for JFK that drew thousands of mourners.
It was noted that Kennedy had appointed eight African Americans, including Wade McCree of Detroit, to the federal bench during his three years in office, while only ten had been appointed by all the presidents before him. He had also brought influential Detroit blacks to Washington during key moments in his career. Damon Keith, William Patrick, and Horace Sheffield had been part of a Detroit delegation that visited JFK at his Georgetown home in June 1960, when he was attempting to solidify black support for his presidential bid. And Keith, John Conyers, and George Crockett were among the 244 lawyers summoned to the East Room at the White House on June 21, 1963, as the administration sought support from the legal community for its civil rights initiatives, a meeting that led to the formation of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights under Law. (At the time, the American Bar Association was divided on the civil rights cause. Its own Committee on Civil Rights and Civil Unrest included several opponents of federal civil rights action. Historian Ann Garity Connell noted that among them were Thomas G. Greaves of Mobile, Alabama, who accused the federal government of encouraging “the colored people” to break the law and battle police, and Rush H. Limbaugh of Cape Girardeau, Missouri, father of a future right-wing radio talk show host, who said that his community “prided itself on the fact that it never allowed a Negro to live in it and no Negro had lived there permanently.”)
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