The Day Kennedy Was Shot

by Jim Bishop

  At 12:59, Mrs. Kennedy went back into the room. She kissed her husband’s ankle and reached under the sheet for his hand. Miss Hinchcliffe and her assistants stood back. They watched. They were professionals, and professionals are not supposed to weep.

  1 p.m.

  It is doubtful that Earlene Roberts ever knew a great joy. She was fat and unpretty and middle-aged, a housekeeper who wheezed when she walked. Even the small pleasures—a gumdrop—were denied to her because she had diabetes. She wore oversized house dresses and spent a great deal of time alone in the little house at 1026 North Beckley, in the Oak Cliff section of Dallas. If she lifted a curtain from the front window, she saw a few struggling shrubs and a sign: “Bedroom for Rent.” If this was not enough, Mrs. Roberts could look diagonally across the street at the filling station.

  She maintained the little house for Mr. and Mrs. A. C. Johnson. They had a small restaurant which kept them busy all day, so Earlene took care of the dusting and cleaning and counted the towels and face cloths the roomers turned in. Mr. Johnson seldom had much to say. He worked hard and kept his mouth shut. “Mizz” Johnson was alert and in her middle years and could look through a person if she had a mind to. The roomers were mostly men who worked for a while in Dallas; then, one at a time, they dropped off and new ones saw the sign on the lawn.

  It was exactly 1 P.M. when Earlene Roberts heard the phone, and she got herself up from a chair by degrees and went to it. There was a girlfriend on the other end. “Roberts,” the voice said with the pretentious tone of one who has a secret, “President Kennedy has been shot.” The housekeeper was never short of words. She had lots of them if there was only someone around to use them on. And yet all she said was: “Oh, no.” The woman said: “Turn on your television set.” To Earlene Roberts nothing bad could happen to the mighty. “Are you trying to pull my leg?” she said. Her friend had no patience. “Go turn it on,” she said and hung up.

  The legs were slow, and Earlene had to walk around the curving couch in the living room, because the furniture was grouped around the square opaque eye of the television set. She turned it on and backed up to sit and then, when the sound came, it was all a babble of excitement as though too many people were talking at the same time. She stepped forward to adjust the volume and the front door swung open and one of the boarders came in.

  She seldom saw one in the middle of the day, and she never saw this one in such a hurry. His name was Mr. O. H. Lee and sometimes she said hello and he said nothing. She backed up to the couch and glanced at him and said: “Oh, you are in a hurry.” Mr. Lee didn’t look at her. He strode swiftly across the living room area to the left, where he had a small room. The picture came on the set and the camera kept switching from a hospital to people who were babbling about what they saw, and a young woman and a baby got on and Earlene could see that the woman was excited as she told about shots and where she had been standing and how awful it was.

  The roomer had double doors leading into what once must have been an alcove. He opened one and disappeared inside.

  The space was five feet by twelve, and an iron bedstead occupied most of it. The walls were pale green. Four windows adjoined each other. They were screened by venetian blinds and lace curtains. The bed had a chenille spread. One window held an air conditioner; the floor had space for a small heater.

  There was a pole for hanging clothes, but the roomer didn’t have much apparel. He yanked a white zipper jacket from the pole and put it on over his work shirt. On the wall was a solitary naked electric bulb. A fresh towel was lying on a chifforobe. He took his revolver and jammed it down inside the belt of his trousers. It was a .38 caliber snub-nosed weapon, seven and a quarter inches from barrel to butt. He thrust a few extra shells into his pocket.

  He came out of the tiny room and closed the door. Mrs. Roberts looked up from the television and might have spoken, might have communicated a fragment of the mass shock radiating out of Dallas, but, as Earlene thought, Mr. O. H. Lee “zipped” out the front door. She had never seen this particular boarder move so fast, so, a moment or two later, she got up, walked to the front window and drew the curtain back. There he was, down on the corner where Beckley, Ballard, and Elsbeth meet, standing at the bus stop. Mrs. Roberts was inquisitive, but the shooting of the President was much more exciting than watching Lee, so she returned to the set. She kept thinking that she never saw him come in and go out so fast.

  The lean and pale face of Maude Shaw pulled itself up into a smile when she heard the voice of Nancy Tuckerman on the phone. Like Earlene Roberts, Miss Shaw felt lonely at times, especially when the Kennedy family was away. Her job involved the care and feeding of Caroline and John, and what made it bearable to this British nanny was the innate good manners of the youngsters.

  She left both of them in the family sitting room on the second floor of the White House to answer the phone. “Yes,” she said when Mrs. Kennedy’s secretary said: “Miss Shaw?” There was a silence on the phone, as though Nancy Tuckerman was trying to think of a way of saying something. “I have some bad news for you,” she said. “I’m afraid the President has been shot.” Sometimes, when words induce horror, the mind refuses to accept and assimilate and, like an overloaded fuse, it shuts down all service. “Will you repeat that, please?” Miss Shaw said quietly.

  It was repeated. “Oh, dear,” Miss Shaw said. “I do hope it isn’t serious.” Miss Tuckerman, who was in the East Wing, said: “That’s all we know right now. I’ll call you back as soon as I hear how he is.” Maude Shaw put the phone on its cradle and stood. She walked back down the long corridor with the uneven floor, passing the dimly lighted portraits of past Presidents and their ladies, and walked through the double door to the living room. Her eyes swept the array of odd chairs, the couch, the end tables with silver-framed portraits of the great men of the world, the small cathedral window, and, under it, Caroline, the prim, willful child who was just learning how to ride a pony. At the moment, she was reading a small book with big block capital letters and small words. On the floor, John was on his stomach. Before him he had a crayon book and an assortment of penciled pigments.

  He had the patience to begin placing the right colors on the right flowers and the docile animals, but, if the crayon slipped outside its appointed place, he tended to scribble carelessly. The woman watched the children for a moment. She knew something they didn’t. The eyes blinked, and she thought that a nap would be a good thing. It would be a good thing in any case, because Nurse O’Dowd had just left, taking with her the children of Senator and Mrs. Edward Kennedy—Teddy and Kara.

  “Come along, children,” she said. “It’s time for your rest, now.” They were not the type to plead for clemency or an extra minute. Caroline smiled and kept her place in her beginner’s book. John began to round up the crayons from the floor. Miss Shaw had never had an occasion to feel sorry for them before. They were wealthy, they were handsome, they were “as good as gold,” and their father was the President of the United States. Suddenly a sorrow welled in her heart as she watched them smile and hurry to obey.

  She took Caroline’s hand, and John danced on ahead, the little white shoes skipping in the dark corridor. In her room he received a little assistance in undressing, and he talked as volubly as ever, the flame-red little mouth busy with excitement. He loved helicopters and John was at his finest when he received permission to stand on the South Lawn and watch one come in or take off with his father and mother. Sometimes—on very rare occasions—his father permitted him to get on the helicopter and sit next to him and look out the window as the overhead blades slashed the air and the grass drifted away and the big White House grew smaller and smaller. When this happened, John squealed with delight and pressed his knees together. Caroline asked if she could rest “on top of the bedspread” and Miss Shaw said yes.

  The nursemaid went to her small room, between those of the children, and waited for a second phone call which never came.

  The clock hesitated between 1
P.M. and 1:05 P.M. as though, realizing the horror it had perpetrated, it desired to stand still so that it would not entertain fresh regret. The drag of time was so pronounced that, around the world, hundreds of millions of people heard the stunning news and consulted the time—for no purpose at all. Some would recall with clarity everything that was done or said at this moment; many who could not re-create the moment of marriage would recite this moment as though their powers of absorption had been speeded enormously and the second hand had begun to beat time in milliseconds.

  A mile east of the White House, the Senate was in session under the big dome of the Capitol. The House of Representatives, except for two clerks studying their notes, was empty and dark. Senator Edward Kennedy had left the upper chamber. The Democratic leader, Senator Mike Mansfield of Montana, as thin-lipped as Kenny O’Donnell, contained his emotions and leveled the tone of his voice and asked that the august body of the United States Senate “recess at once, pending developments.” There was no dissenting voice from the other side of the aisle. There was no voice anywhere. The gentlemen left their desks in twos, like aging schoolboys, whispering that there must be some mistake, a damned big mistake.

  Nobody in an elightened century shoots at Presidents and Prime Ministers. Senator Wayne Morse, the mean, mustached maverick of the West, stared almost scornfully at the clock over the President’s rostrum. “If ever there was an hour when all Americans should pray,” he intoned, “this is the hour.” It was a wry irony of politics that a body so powerful a moment ago could be reduced to the mystique of prayer as a means of sparing the life of one citizen.

  In Wall Street, the Friday wave of selling was in full flower and the pale sun of a chilly day seeped to the street. Brokers in linen dusters crumpled bits of paper and dropped them to the floor. The bell clanged and there was a stunned silence, as though a hive of bees had been enclosed in a glass bell. The greatest tribute the Stock Exchange could ever accord to any man was to close. It closed.

  The huge octagonal building on the Virginia side of the Potomac kept its hard face neutral, but, inside, men of rank were running. The vast Department of Defense was like a deadly snake touched. With the first news came reaction. The Army, the Navy, the Air Force reared back into a coiled position. No man knew whether this was an opening shot in a plot by a foreign power to assassinate the ranking ministers of the United States as a prelude to attack. It could hardly be accidental that, at this moment and this moment only, the President and the Vice-President were both out of Washington and the Secretary of State and other ranking dignitaries were on a plane westbound from Hawaii.

  Who was left, not merely to direct the burden of defense but to grasp the reins of power? Who? Secretary of the Treasury Fowler? Who? Robert McNamara of Defense, who was barely back in his office from a trip to Honolulu? Who? House Speaker John McCormack, the old party wheelhorse who had devoted a lifetime to getting the proper legislation out of the proper committees to the floor for a vote?

  The power was not in Washington, nor was there any man who could command it. If the President was injured, where was The Bagman? No one knew. Had anyone told Mr. Johnson that, should the wound render Mr. Kennedy unconscious, the frightful decision to launch a nuclear counterattack was now his? Had General Clifton told the Vice-President that it was now within his power—with that Bag—to dial any one of several types of attack? Did he know? Was he aware? Had anyone ever briefed this big, burly man in the matter of awesome and irrevocable decisions?

  No. As the clock hung silent, the United States of America stood, for a little time, naked. As the radicals of the Republican Party had kept Abraham Lincoln from briefing his Vice-President, Andrew Johnson, on matters of war and peace, so, too, the men around Kennedy had kept the doctrines of power from Lyndon Johnson. He knew there was a Bag. He knew there was a man several booths away, standing with a Bag. But, if this shooting was a particle of a larger threat to the security of the United States, Mr. Johnson had neither the combination to The Bag, nor the exact knowledge of what to do with it.

  McNamara ordered the Joint Chiefs of Staff to send a signal to all American military bases, domestic and foreign:

  “1. Press reports President Kennedy and Governor Connally of Texas shot and critically injured. Both in hospital at Dallas, Texas. No official information yet, will keep you informed.

  “2. This is the time to be especially on the alert.

  “JCS.”

  In the archiepiscopal residence in Boston, the aged, asthmatic Richard Cardinal Cushing heard the news as a father might hear an ugly rumor about a promising son. To His Eminence, it was unthinkable. He had christened Kennedys; he had married them; he had buried them. To him they were not to be viewed as a rich or powerful Catholic clan; they were his children. At a dinner with them, he could raise his codfish voice in louder dissent than old Joe or young Bobby or laugh more heartily at the antics of the family than they could.

  One, through some strange transmutation of baser metal, had turned to gleaming gold and was now leading the nation as the first Roman Catholic President. The Cardinal did not subscribe to all of “young Jack’s” measures, but it was a benevolent blessing to have lived to see this boy run the country, not as a partisan Catholic, but as a patriotic President. The news that he had been shot and wounded was unfair and—please God—possibly untrue.

  His Eminence, wearing the long black cassock which made him seem so much taller, led the nuns of his housekeeping staff into the little chapel. He was ready to sink his bone-weary frame onto a prie-dieu, when he called his secretary. He ordered the word to be sent out to all Catholic parishes in the New England states at once: “Pray, pray for the President.”

  For Mrs. Kennedy, the unbearable had to be borne. She sat. She stood. The pitifully whispered words of friends and strangers had to be acknowledged. She sat. She stood. At one time or other, the word death must have reminded her of Patrick Bouvier Kennedy. He had died last summer, thirty-nine hours old. His father, sleepless, had stared through thick glass into a pressure chamber as the infant fought valiantly against the fluids which seeped into his lungs. When the baby died, the young President pounded his fist against the metal chamber because he had not been able, in his strength, to breathe for his flesh and blood.

  The impotence of his grief robbed Mr. Kennedy of his disciplined control. He broke down and cried. Alone he had knelt beside the small casket in the chapel of Cardinal Cushing, alone to pray for a son who, in the faith of his fathers, was in the serene company of heavenly hosts. The President had tried hard to reach that baby, to touch his hand. From his neck he had taken the gold St. Christopher Medal his wife had given him and thrust it inside the white casket beside the newborn.

  A similar thought must have crossed Mrs. Kennedy’s mind in the lonely cruelty of grief. She stepped back into Trauma One and walked around the contoured sheet and lifted it. She took his left hand and kissed it. Then she removed her wedding ring and put it on his dead finger. It could be worked up only to the second knuckle. She placed the hand back at his side and pulled the sheet down.

  In the corridor, she saw Ken O’Donnell and told him what she had done. “Do you think it was right?” she said. “Now I have nothing left.” The impassiveness of Mr. O’Donnell’s face broke a little. “You leave it where it is.” Silently he reminded himself to get that ring back later and return it to her.

  The short trip was swift. The door to Trauma Two opened and the carriage came out, making the short turn on its casters, and the man under the sheet was whisked down the hall to the elevator, pushed by doctors who were taking him to the second floor, to Operating Room Five. The elevator was small. Some ran the stairs. Governor Connally’s right lung had collapsed. In the operating room, the talented minds and hands and eyes of the doctors blended to their duties. At one time, twelve hands were over the patient. Orderly R. J. Jimison helped lift him from the carriage to the operating table and pushed the table outside, soiled with bloody sheets and the medical impedimen
ta of an emergency.

  Dr. Robert Shaw established anesthesia and pushed an endotracheal tube into the patient to ensure positive pressure. The bullet, in traversing the downward plunge across the axis of the fifth rib, had lacerated the right lung and induced a pneumothora. Another pair of hands was busy shaving the chest and belly. The entrance wound in the area of the right shoulder was small and elliptical and looked like a black wart.

  Dr. Gregory had the most difficult of the assignments. He was going to take a compound comminuted fracture of the right wrist and put all those small bones, and all the little pieces of them, back together again. The work of salvaging a life and restoring the full use of the body was under way by 1:05 P.M. Shaw was surprised to find that the intercostal muscle bundles, between ribs, appeared to be undamaged. Jagged ends of a fifth rib were cleaned with a rongeur. Two hundred cubic centimeters of blood and clot were pumped from the pleura; there was a tear in the right lung, but all the major blood vessels had escaped damage. Running sutures were employed and, on pressure from the anesthetic bag, the lobe of the lung expanded well with little peripheral leak.

  The lower lobe sustained a large hematoma from a flying rib fragment. Bit by bit the repairs were made. The Governor’s executive assistant, Bill Stinson, stood in surgical gown, watching. The patient had a strong, lean, well-nourished frame and, unconsciously, he was initiating a part of the fight to return to life on equal terms. Jane Carolyn Webster, a registered nurse, had her people ready with instruments and types of sutures before the doctors called for them. She had the Governor’s clothing—all of it—placed in a bundle and put under the cart at the elevator. It was going to require a couple of hours of work before Connally would be ready for bed. When he was, Stinson asked that guards be posted and that the room next to the Governor’s be reserved for the use of Nellie Connally.