His last visitor, Lyndon Johnson, had brought his sister and brother-in-law to shake his hand. “You can be sure of one thing, Lyndon,” he said in front of these witnesses. “We’re going to carry two states next year—Massachusetts and Texas. We’re going to carry at least those two states.”
“We going to carry a lot more than those two,” Johnson promised.
His use of the word “we” had to have caught Johnson’s attention. Perhaps Kennedy had changed his mind about replacing him on the ticket after his encouraging reception in San Antonio, Houston, and Fort Worth, but it is also possible that the “we” was an uncalculated expression of his momentary exuberance.
Before leaving, he disappeared into his bedroom and changed his wardrobe, putting on a blue-striped shirt, a solid blue silk tie, and a newly pressed gray-and-blue lightweight suit. While he was gone, Secret Service Agent Roy Kellerman told O’Donnell that there was a chance of rain forecast for Dallas and asked if they should put the bubble top on the Lincoln Continental limousine taking the president from Love Field to the Dallas Trade Mart. Jackie liked the top because it protected her hair from the wind, but Kennedy loathed it, once telling a friend, “They put me in a bubble top thing and I can’t get to the people. . . . I belong to them and they belong to me.” Knowing how he felt, O’Donnell told Kellerman to leave it off unless it was raining.
Only thirty miles separated Fort Worth and Dallas. It made no practical sense for Kennedy to fly between them, but it made political sense, because newsmen could film him being greeted at Love Field. During the few minutes that he was airborne he changed into his third clean shirt of the day, told Representative Olin Teague of Texas that he would go to Cape Canaveral in December to watch the Saturn launch because he thought the space program “needed a boost,” wrote some last-minute ideas to include in his speech at the Trade Mart, scribbling, “Equal choice / not any reflection / back—govt reform / we are going forward,” and summoned Connally and Yarborough into his cabin, where in three minutes he strong-armed Connally into inviting Yarborough to the reception in Austin and seating him at the head table. As Connally left his cabin he muttered, “How can anyone say no to that man?”
During the flight his Air Force aide Godfrey McHugh overheard O’Brien and O’Donnell telling members of his Secret Service detachment, “Please, when we go to Dallas, don’t sit like you always do in the front seat of the car [the presidential limousine] because we want to give him full exposure. He will win them by his smile. . . . We want him to be seen. It’s enough to have two Secret Service men without having a third body in front.” The agents were not happy with the request, but they complied nevertheless.
When he landed at Love Field in 1961, no one had greeted him except the chief of police. Today he looked out the window, saw several thousand supporters and a line of dignitaries, and told O’Donnell, “This trip is turning out to be terrific. Here we are in Dallas, and it looks like everything in Texas is going to be fine for us.” As he and Jackie waited in the aisle for the door to open, Powers said, “You two look like Mr. and Mrs. America,” and reminded them that he should wave to those on the right hand side of the car while she waved to the left, because “If both of you ever looked at the same voter at the same time, it would be too much for him!”
The weather had turned on a dime: gray and drizzly when they left Fort Worth, sunny and warm when they landed in Dallas. Abandoning protocol, Jackie disembarked first. They may have lined up this way in the aisle, but it is also possible he decided that she should precede him because after yesterday he knew that she would draw the loudest cheers. Intentional or not, it symbolized a slight shift in their marital balance of power.
A reporter watching her emerge from Air Force One compared the bright sunlight hitting her pink suit to “a blow between the eyes.” This was the first time that most at Love Field had seen her and the president in color outside of some magazine photographs. It was an electrifying moment, like the one in The Wizard of Oz when a black-and-white Kansas becomes a dazzling, Technicolor Oz. A Dallas woman said she was amazed at his coloring, “because I had only seen him previously on black-and-white TV. He was very fair, almost pink, and his hair was almost blond in the sunlight.” A television correspondent exclaimed, “I can see his suntan all the way from here!”
Instead of climbing into his limousine, he headed for the crowd lining the airport fence. A local television reporter shouted, “He’s broken away from the program and is shaking hands with the crowd.” The Texas journalist Ronnie Dugger wrote in his notebook, “Kennedy is showing he is not afraid.” Jackie followed him to the fence and also began shaking hands. It was the first time that the New York Times reporter Tom Wicker could remember her working an airport crowd.
Sorensen’s observation that different parts of Kennedy were seen by many people but no one saw them all was correct. But if you assembled those parts of him that were visible at various times and places to his friends and staff, and to people like those greeting him in the brilliant sunshine at Love Field, you not only had Laura Bergquist’s “fascinating human animal” but someone who had also managed to convey his kindness, humor, intelligence, and humanity to those who knew him only from what they read in a newspaper or saw on a television screen or from behind an airport fence.
His friends knew a man who was kind and gregarious, delighted in children, venerated courage, paid excessive attention to ceremony and his appearance, possessed an irreverent sense of humor, and was a secret romantic, yet was also what Sidey called “a serious man on a serious mission.” They knew a man who had brought his competitive spirit to the greatest contest of all—that with other presidents for a favorable verdict from the high court of history. They knew a man who was chronically impatient with anyone or anything that bored him, had a chip on his shoulder about the WASP establishment, lied easily and often about his health and sex life, and could be too cautious politically but too reckless when it came to driving, extramarital affairs, and exposing himself to crowds such as the one greeting him at Love Field. Because of his passion for secrecy and his practice of compartmentalizing his life, few among his friends and aides knew all of this, but they knew enough to know that his courage and mendacity, generosity and sudden rages, idealism and cunning, had made him a very complicated yet appealing human being. And because he had succeeded in communicating some of this to the American people, they sensed that despite his wealth and education, he was not only like them but also genuinely liked them, and really did prefer the workers in the kitchen to the WASPs in the dining room, the middle-class Americans greeting him at Love Field to the businessmen awaiting him at the Trade Mart.
A local broadcaster called his welcome at Love Field “completely overwhelming,” but not everyone was friendly. Some high school students hissed, and a man held up a sign proclaiming, “You’re a traiter [sic].” Another sign said, “Help JFK Stamp Out Democracy.” A large placard announced, “Mr. President, because of your socialist tendencies and because of your surrender to communism, I hold you in complete contempt.”
As Jackie was climbing into the limousine, a reporter asked how she liked campaigning. “It’s wonderful,” she gushed. “It’s wonderful.” As they were pulling away, Kennedy noticed a boy in a Scout uniform. They locked eyes, and he gave the boy a mischievous wink.
• • •
THE SITE OF THE LUNCHEON had determined the route of his motorcade. Connally had wanted him to speak to an invitation-only event at the Trade Mart, but Jerry Bruno, who was advancing the trip, feared it would be too much a rich man’s affair and proposed a larger and less-exclusive gathering at the Women’s Building at the State Fairgrounds. Bruno thought Connally opposed holding it there because the ceiling was too low to accommodate a two-tiered head table, and he wanted to seat himself on the top tier while relegating opponents like Yarborough to the bottom. Connally finally put his foot down, insisting that the president could not come to Dallas
unless he spoke at the Trade Mart, and the White House capitulated. Had Kennedy driven from Love Field to the fairgrounds, he would have taken a different route through Dealey Plaza, traveling at a higher rate of speed. But because he was heading to the Trade Mart, he would have to make a sharp right turn off Main Street onto Houston Street, then drive a block before slowing down for a sharp left onto Elm Street that was almost a hairpin, leaving him traveling around ten miles per hour as he passed the Texas School Book Depository.
His motorcade was configured like the ones in Tampa and San Antonio. At its center were three vehicles: the lead car, a white Ford with no markings driven by the Dallas police chief, Jesse Curry, with Sheriff Bill Decker and two Secret Service agents riding as passengers, then the president’s limousine, a Lincoln Continental driven by Secret Service Agent Bill Greer with Agent Roy Kellerman in the passenger seat, Governor and Mrs. Connally on the jump seats, and the president and First Lady sitting on the rear seat. A contingent of Secret Service agents rode in the third car. Kennedy’s limousine had running boards but he discouraged agents from standing on them. Sometimes he permitted them to stand on the two steps flanking the trunk, but in Dallas, as in Tampa, he had vetoed this.
Aside from the fact that the spectators were more numerous and welcoming than anyone had anticipated, there was nothing unusual or memorable about the first thirty-five minutes of the motorcade. Had he ridden in dozens more like it during the campaign, Connally might have forgotten that as they passed the balcony of a ramshackle house he saw a lone man standing on a balcony with a “Kennedy Go Home!” sign, and that after noticing it the president had said, “I see them everywhere I go. I bet that’s a nice guy.” Yarborough might not have remembered thinking, as he stared up at the tall office buildings lining Main Street, “What if someone throws a flower pot down on top of Mrs. Kennedy or the President?” Nor would John and Nellie Connally have recalled that the president asked Jackie to remove her sunglasses because he thought they made her appear too removed and inaccessible, or that the glare was so blinding that Jackie had absentmindedly put them on twice more before finally burying them in her pocketbook. Nor would it have been remembered that the president and First Lady could raise the volume of the cheering simply by waving, or that he had stopped to greet some children holding up a sign saying, “Mr. President, Please Stop and Shake Our Hands,” or that a teenaged boy had darted into the street and pointed a camera at him before a Secret Service agent tackled him, or that as he waved he kept murmuring, “Thank you, thank you, thank you.” No one could hear him, but he presumably felt that, like writing a sympathy note to the mother of a severely burned child moments before his own child died, it was something he ought to do.
His route took him along Main Street and through the heart of downtown Dallas. The Secret Service did not check the upper floors of buildings unless they had received specific threats, so people stood on rooftops and hung out open windows, cheering and tossing confetti. Spectators were ten to fifteen thick on the sidewalks. In places they had spilled into the street, slowing the motorcade to a crawl and prompting Greer to keep far to the left in order to leave the greatest possible distance between the crowd and the right hand side of the limousine, where the president was sitting.
Where Main Street flowed into Dealey Plaza the crowds thinned and his limousine slowed to make two turns, first the ninety-degree right onto Houston Street, then a block later the even sharper left onto Elm Street past the seven-story School Book Depository. From here, Elm headed down a gentle incline to the Stemmons Freeway and a triple underpass. Jackie, who was perspiring in her pink wool suit, saw it and thought, “How pleasant that cool tunnel will be.” Nellie Connally turned around from her jump seat and said to Kennedy, “You sure can’t say that Dallas doesn’t love you!” Their eyes met, his smile widened, and he said, “No, you can’t.”
The photographer Cecil Stoughton was riding seven cars back. He heard some loud bangs and imagined a cowboy in a ten-gallon hat standing on a rooftop, firing his six-shooter into the air to welcome the president to Dallas.
Kennedy was waving as the first bullet entered his upper back and exited his throat. It missed his vital organs and was a survivable wound. His hands flew up to his throat and his expression went blank. Nellie Connally remembered his eyes being “full of surprise,” and Agent Kellerman thought he said, “My God, I’m hit.” His back brace kept him upright, an immovable target. Another bullet smashed into the rear of his head and Jackie cried out, “They’ve killed my husband! I have his brains in my hand.”
AFTER DALLAS
Jackie wept first, and from her and from Dallas a tidal wave of tears rolled across the nation and around the world. In New York, there was a murmur and then a rising wail as the news jumped between tables at a midtown restaurant. Advertising men in tailored suits hurried into St. Patrick’s Cathedral and fell onto their knees. Outside, drivers hunched over steering wheels, sobbing as dashboard radios broadcast the news. A crowd gathered at the Magnavox showroom on Fifth Avenue, watching on television sets piled two stories high as Walter Cronkite choked back tears before announcing that the president was dead. Chorus girls rehearsing for an evening television show at the Ed Sullivan Theater on Broadway kicked in unison, arms linked around waists as tears streamed down their cheeks.
In Washington, a rookie police officer wept as he lowered the flag on the Capitol dome to half mast and looked down to see that drivers had abandoned their cars and stood in the street, staring up at the flag and crying. In his Senate office, Senator Hubert Humphrey, who had challenged Kennedy for the 1960 nomination, put his head in his arms and wept for thirty minutes. Senator Fulbright jumped up from his table at the F Street Club, threw down his napkin, and shouted, “God damn it! I told him not to go to Dallas.” Adlai Stevenson exclaimed, “That Dallas! Why, why didn’t I insist that he not go there?” Medgar Evers’s widow thought, “I knew it! I knew it!” She had never believed that someone like him—someone like her husband—would be allowed to live. In Chicago, Mayor Richard Daley burst into tears while lunching with his cronies, and across the Pacific in the Solomon Islands, one of the natives who had helped rescue Kennedy sat in his garden, staring at his photograph and crying. At Harvard, a girl wept on the steps of the Widener Library and a boy hit a tree in time to a tolling church bell. When the captain of a transatlantic jet heard that the Jackie’s brother-in-law Stanislaus Radziwill was aboard, he left the cockpit, sat down beside him, and burst into tears. When Rusk announced his death over the public address system of the plane carrying cabinet members to Japan, there was an anguished cry as passengers clapped their hands over their faces. President Truman cried so much when he called on Jackie before the funeral that he had to be put to bed in the White House. A poem by the columnist Art Buchwald began each line, “We weep for,” and concluded, “We weep because there is nothing else we can do.” The cartoonist Bill Mauldin drew the statue of Abraham Lincoln at the Lincoln Memorial, sitting with his head in his hands. A twelve-year-old girl in Oregon who had shaken his hand and shaken her own into a glass jar to “save” his germs, emptied the jar into a shoe box, covered it with a small American flag, and wept as she buried it in her backyard. November 22 would be the first time many children saw an adult cry, and after hearing the news from sobbing teachers they went home to find their mothers in tears. A girl remembered her mother doing the ironing as she watched television, her tears sizzling as they hit the hot iron.
Not everyone mourned. Some white Southerners celebrated, and a wire service story reported schoolchildren in Texas cheering. Schlesinger was appalled by Stevenson’s reaction, writing in his diary that on the night of November 22, Stevenson had walked into the White House “smiling and chipper as if nothing had happened,” and had been the same way later that evening during a gathering at Averell Harriman’s. After discussing Stevenson’s demeanor with others, he wrote, “We agree, I think, that we have practically never heard Stevenson make a gene
rous remark about Kennedy,” and called his behavior something that it would “take a long time to forgive.”
Algeria declared a week of official mourning, and the Nicaraguans held a state funeral. Peasants in the Yucatán slashed a clearing and planted a memorial garden; Liberian woodcutters fashioned a giant wooden carving of his head; and Portuguese men wore black ties and armbands, as if mourning a relative. Thousands of Poles rushed into the Warsaw cathedral following a requiem Mass and kissed an American flag covering a symbolic bier. The CIA reported that “Cuban reaction to the President’s killing and the aftermath have reflected more sensitivity and apprehension than any regime in the world,” and that Soviet leaders had been “as profoundly moved and shocked by the slaying of President Kennedy as were leaders of America’s closest allies.” Soviet interest in maintaining the atmosphere of détente created by the nuclear test ban treaty was demonstrated by the appointment of First Deputy Premier Anastas Mikoyan, the most powerful Soviet official after Khrushchev, to represent the USSR at President Kennedy’s funeral. Khrushchev instructed his wife to write Jackie a personal note, an unprecedented gesture for a Soviet leader that his son believed was meant to stress “the sincerity and personal nature of his sympathy.” The woman narrating a documentary about him on Soviet state television broke down, and tears filled Gromyko’s eyes as he left the residence of the American ambassador. Yevgeny Yevtushenko was reading his poetry in a Moscow hall when he noticed audience members whispering and their faces taking on a tragic expression as if, he said, “that person had just lost a mother or father or brother.” Years later, Yevtushenko would tell the actor Kirk Douglas, “People cried in the street. . . . They sensed that, in him [Kennedy], there might be a chance for our two countries to get together.”
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