End of Days

by James L. Swanson

  (from the author’s collection)

  As a politician’s wife, Jacqueline Kennedy knew how her husband’s defeat of Johnson in the race for the 1960 Democratic presidential nomination must have been a humbling experience for the powerful master of the Senate. It had not been easy for LBJ to live with the door prize of the vice presidency. And, Jackie now wrote to Johnson, she knew it: “But you were Jack’s right arm—and I always thought the greatest act of a gentleman that I had seen on this earth—was how you—the Majority Leader when he came to the Senate as just another little freshman who looked up to you and took orders from you, could then serve as Vice President to a man who had served under you and been taught by you.”

  Jackie planned to move out of the White House in ten days, on December 6. She confided to Johnson that after she had gotten home yesterday from the funeral, and after she had greeted the last guest, she went in search of memories. “It was so strange—last night I was wandering through this house.” She walked through the Treaty Room, the library and more, and finally the Oval Office in which her husband had risen from his chair for the flight to Texas just four days earlier. She wanted to tell Johnson about the room: “Your office—you are the first President to sit in it as it looks today. Jack always wanted a re-doing and I had curtains designed for it that I thought were as dignified as they should be for a President’s office.”

  In the aftermath of the assassination, publishers issued dozens of Kennedy tribute magazines.

  (from the author’s collection)

  Even Lee Harvey Oswald got his own magazine.

  (from the author’s collection)

  Even in her profound sorrow, Jackie could not suppress one of the traits essential to her nature—her love of design and aesthetics. When she was a twenty-one-year-old college senior at George Washington University, her winning essay in the Prix de Paris competition for a prestigious junior editorship at Vogue magazine revealed her aspiration to be “a sort of Overall Art Director of the Twentieth Century, watching everything from a chair hanging in space.” How, wondered this art director, hours after her husband’s funeral, should LBJ decorate the presidential office? “Late last night,” her letter continued, “a moving man asked me if I wanted Jack’s ship pictures left on the wall for you (they were cleaning the office to make room for you)—and I said no because I remembered all the fun Jack had those first few days hanging pictures of things he liked, setting out his collection of whale’s teeth, etc.” She did not want to deny LBJ the same pleasure. “But of course, they are there only waiting for you to ask for them if the walls look too bare. I thought you would want to put things from Texas on it—I pictured some gleaming long horns—I hope you put them somewhere.”

  The letter closed on a melancholy note. Jackie had run a little White House school for a small group of children, including her own. Johnson told her that it must go on, assuring her it was not an imposition. “It mustn’t be very much help to you,” Jackie sympathized, “your first day in office—to hear children on the lawn at recess. It is just one more example of your kindness that you let them stay—I promise they will be gone soon.” She signed her letter, “Thank you Mr. President. Respectfully, Jackie.”

  IT WAS done. Four days of blood and death, of mourning and drums, were over. But America would never be the same.

  The people refused to forget. As after the murder of Abraham Lincoln ninety-eight years earlier, the American people coveted souvenirs and relics of the assassination. All over the country, people saved newspapers from November 22, 23, 24, 25 and 26, and in no city was any newspaper more desirable than the first edition that announced the assassination.

  Entrepreneurs manufactured celluloid, pin-back memorial buttons by the millions, as well as JFK banners that were printed on black felt or on white fabric. One brazen opportunist in Dallas created a three-dimensional Dealey Plaza desk ornament, complete with ballpoint pen and paper-clip tray. In this miniature architectural model, the sixth-floor Book Depository window is always open; the Hertz clock on the roof is frozen at 12:29 P.M., one minute before the assassination; and an X marks the position of President Kennedy’s limousine at the moment of the fatal shot.

  Another company, inspired by the eternal flame at Arlington National Cemetery, manufactured an electric-powered, plastic JFK night-light—an “Eternal Flame of Light to Remember,” guaranteed to be a “new Electronic Innovation providing 50,000 hours or more (six years) of continuous use at an approximate cost of 3 Cents per year.” So the little plug-in light was not “eternal” after all.

  Publishers flooded newsstands with dozens of different John Kennedy commemorative magazines. Others published Jackie tribute magazines. A record company released an album containing Lee Harvey Oswald’s strange August 1963 New Orleans radio station interview (alluding to his communist ties, it was titled Oswald: Portrait in Red), while others issued dozens of memorial albums of JFK’s speeches or of the radio and television coverage of the assassination. Even Oswald’s unstable mother, Marguerite, tried to cash in. She sold a bizarre booklet featuring photographs of her son’s funeral. She called it Aftermath of an Execution: The Burial and Final Rites of Lee Harvey Oswald as Told by His Mother. There was little demand for it, and few copies sold.

  Two days after the funeral, on November 27, 1963, President Lyndon Johnson addressed a joint session of Congress.

  All I have I would have given gladly not to be standing here today. The greatest leader of our time has been struck down by the foulest deed of our time. Today John Kennedy lives on in the immortal words and works that he left behind. He lives on in the mind and memories of mankind. He lives in the hearts of his countrymen. . . . An assassin’s bullet has thrust upon me the awesome burden of the presidency. . . . I profoundly hope that the tragedy and torment of these terrible days will bind us together in new fellowship, making us one people in our hour of sorrow. So let us here highly resolve that John Fitzgerald Kennedy did not live—or die—in vain.

  The new president vowed to carry on the dead president’s work.

  On November 29, Johnson appointed a special presidential commission, chaired by Chief Justice Earl Warren, to “study and report upon all facts and circumstances relating to the assassination of the late President, John F. Kennedy, and the subsequent and violent death of the man charged with the assassination.” LBJ instructed the special commission to “satisfy itself that the truth is known as far as can be discovered, and to report its findings to him, to the American people, and to the world.”

  Speed was also of the utmost importance. Johnson wanted the commission to finish its work well before November 1964, so that no uncertainties plagued him during the presidential election.

  If Lyndon Johnson wanted to discover the truth about John Kennedy’s death, Jacqueline Kennedy wanted to preserve her version of the truth about his life. On the same day that LBJ created the Warren Commission, Jackie unveiled an enduring myth that forever defined her husband’s presidency. The November 29 Washington Star newspaper carried an article by Jack and Jackie’s old friend Charlie Bartlett. Up until then, most journalists had focused on the late president in their editorial tributes. Yes, the press had heaped praise on Jacqueline Kennedy for her brave and dignified behavior during the four days from November 22 to 25. But Bartlett did not want to dwell on the widow Jackie. He wanted to write about the woman he knew.

  So the man who wrote “We had a hero for a friend” published a piece titled “The Impact of Jacqueline Kennedy: Fidelity to Her Own Individuality Was Enormous Asset to President.” Little did Bartlett know that Jackie’s impact was just beginning. That night, during a drenching New England storm, just a week after her husband was slain in her arms, Jacqueline Kennedy had a plan to transform her husband into a legend.

  CHAPTER 10

  “ONE BRIEF SHINING MOMENT”

  The day after Thanksgiving, on Friday, November 29, Jackie called Theodore White, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of the bestselling book The Making of
the President: 1960. White and John Kennedy had gotten to know each other, and the president had admired him.

  When Jackie called, White was not home. As he remembered, he “was taken from the dentist’s chair by a telephone call from my mother saying that Jackie Kennedy was calling and needed me.” He called her back. “I found myself talking to Jacqueline Kennedy, who said there was something that she wanted Life magazine to say to the country, and I must do it.”

  She told White she would send a Secret Service car to fetch him in New York and drive him up to Hyannis Port. But when White called the Secret Service he was, he wrote, “curtly informed that Mrs. Kennedy was no longer the President’s wife, and she could give them no orders for cars. They were crisp.”

  It was impossible to fly that weekend. A northeaster or a hurricane was coming up over Cape Cod. So White hired a car and driver and headed north into the New England storm. He called his editors at Life to tell them about his exclusive scoop, but they told him the next issue was about to go to press. They warned him it would cost $30,000 an hour to hold the presses open for his story. It was unprecedented. But they would do it.

  This meant that the most important photojournalism magazine in America would be standing still and delaying the printing of its next issue for a story that had not yet been written and would be based on an interview that had not yet even been conducted. Still, an exclusive interview with First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy was so coveted, Life was willing to do almost anything.

  WHITE ARRIVED, he recalled, “at about 8:30 in the driving rain.” Jackie welcomed him and instructed her houseguests, who included Dave Powers, Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr., and JFK’s old pal Chuck Spalding, that she wanted to speak with him alone. As soon as she sat down, White began taking notes as fast as his hand could scribble: “Composure . . . beautiful . . . dressed in trim black slacks . . . beige pullover sweater . . . eyes wider than pools . . . calm voice.” Then she spoke.

  “She had asked me to Hyannisport,” White discovered, “because she wanted me to make certain that Jack was not forgotten by history.”

  White was stunned. How could anyone ever forget John F. Kennedy? White was now ready to be hypnotized by a master mesmerist. Jackie complained that “bitter people” were already writing stories, attempting to measure her husband with a laundry list of his achievements and failures. Jackie hated that. They would never capture the real man.

  White asked her to explain, and then, for the next three and a half hours, she delivered a jumbled, almost stream-of-consciousness narrative about Dallas, the blood, the head wound, the wedding ring, the hospital, and how she kissed him good-bye.

  It was only a week after the assassination.

  Then she got to the reason she had summoned White: “But there’s this one thing I wanted to say . . . I kept saying to Bob, I’ve got to talk to somebody, I’ve got to see somebody, I want to say this one thing, it’s been almost an obsession with me, all I keep thinking of is this line from a musical comedy, it’s been an obsession with me.”

  She confided to White. “At night, before we’d go to sleep, . . . Jack liked to play some records . . . and the song he loved most came at the very end of this record, the last side of Camelot, sad Camelot.”

  She was talking about the popular Broadway musical fantasy about King Arthur’s court. “The lines he loved to hear,” Jackie revealed, were “Don’t let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot.”

  In case White failed to understand, she repeated her story. “She wanted to make sure,” the journalist remembered, “that the point came clear.” Jackie went on: “There’ll be great Presidents again—and the Johnsons are wonderful, they’ve been wonderful to me—but there’ll never be a Camelot again.”

  White wanted to continue to other subjects, “But [Jackie] came back to the idea that transfixed her: ‘Don’t let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief moment that was known as Camelot.’ ”

  She was determined to convince White that her husband’s presidency was a unique, magical, and forever lost moment. “And,” she proclaimed, “it will never be that way again.”

  President Kennedy was dead and buried in his grave, and she told the journalist she wanted to step out of the spotlight. “She said it is time people paid attention to the new President and the new First Lady. But she does not want them to forget John F. Kennedy or read of him only in dusty or bitter histories: For one brief shining moment there was Camelot.”

  Around midnight White went upstairs to write the story—Life needed it tonight, before he left Jackie. He came down around 2:00 A.M. and tried to dictate the story over a wall-hung telephone in her kitchen. He had already allowed her to pencil changes on the manuscript. As White spoke over the phone, Jackie overheard that his editors in New York wanted to tone down and cut some of the “Camelot” material. She glared at White and shook her head. One of his editors caught the stress in his voice and suspected Jackie. “Hey,” he asked White, “is she listening to this now?”

  It was Jacqueline Kennedy’s tour de force, her finest hour—actually more than five hours—of press manipulation. She had summoned an influential, Pulitzer Prize–winning author to do her bidding—and like so many men she had mesmerized before, he did it. White violated all standards of journalism ethics by allowing the subject of a story to read it in advance—and edit it. But he was not acting as a journalist that night—he was serving as the awestruck courtier of a bereaved widow.

  And it worked. Thanks to Theodore White’s essay “For President Kennedy: An Epilogue,” which ran in the December 6 issue of Life, Camelot and its brief shining moment became one of the most celebrated and enduring myths in American politics. To Jackie, the assassination symbolized an end of days, not just for her husband, but also for the nation.

  UNBIDDEN, OTHER journalists placed themselves in the service of the newborn Kennedy legend, offering their own personal contributions to the story. In the December 2, 1963, issue of Newsweek magazine, editor Ben Bradlee—a close friend who had socialized with John and Jackie Kennedy—published a mythologizing essay, “He Had That Special Grace . . .”

  History will best judge John Kennedy in calmer days when time has made the tragic and grotesque at least bearable. And surely history will judge him well—for his wisdom and his compassion and his grace. John Kennedy was a wonderfully funny man, always gay and cheerful. . . . John Kennedy was a hungry man, ravenous sometimes for the nourishment he found in the life he led and the people he loved. . . . John Kennedy was a graceful man, physically graceful in his movements—walking, swimming, or swinging a golf club—and had that special grace and the intellect that is taste. . . . John Kennedy was a restless, exuberant man, always looking forward to the next challenge. . . . John Kennedy was a blunt man, sometimes profane, when it came to assessing rivals. . . . He loved his brothers and sister with a tribal love. John Kennedy loved his children with a light that lit up his world. . . . And John Kennedy loved his wife, who served him so well. Their life together began as it ended—in a hospital—and through sickness and loneliness there grew the special love that lights up the soul of the lover and the loved alike. John Kennedy is dead, and for that we are a lesser people in a lesser land.

  The tributes did not stop. That month, Look, the Saturday Evening Post, and the Saturday Review all published worshipful JFK tributes. Today it is difficult to fathom or exaggerate the cultural influence these now vanished, oversize-format, photo-news magazines once had. But no publication became more synonymous with the “Four Days” the nation had suffered than Life magazine.

  And in television broadcasting, no network was more celebrated for its coverage of the tragedy than CBS. On December 12, CBS presented to its employees as a memento a nineteen-page pamphlet documenting their hard work over the past three weeks. The pamphlet was illustrated with forty-eight small television screens depicting iconic images from the time of the assassination to the president’s fun
eral. The images were taken from the CBS special The Four Dark Days: From Dallas to Arlington, broadcast to the nation on the night of Monday, November 25.

  It was time, thought CBS president Frank Stanton, for some tasteful self-congratulation. The pamphlet contained his full-page, single-spaced letter addressed “To all CBS Employees”: “The assassination of President Kennedy . . . brought to electronic journalism the most demanding challenge in its history—demanding because wholly unexpected and, while a public event of world-wide impact, profoundly moving in an exceptionally personal way to every American.”

  Stanton summarized what the network had done. “The first CBS News bulletin was by Walter Cronkite on the CBS Television Network at 1:40 P.M. . . . There followed, for the next four days, what was certainly the longest uninterrupted story in the history of television and possibly all broadcasting. Before the fateful events ended on Monday night, 55 hours of news reports, bulletins, memorial concerts and special broadcasts had been presented over the CBS Television Network. . . . The cost to CBS, including loss of revenue, was $4 million; the aggregate cost to our more than 400 radio and television network affiliates about as great.”

  No event in history had ever called for a more supreme effort. “More than 660 CBS people—newsmen, producers, editors, writers, researchers, cameramen and technicians—worked steadily throughout the crisis. From CBS Films, jet transports carried film totaling more than 13 hours of running time to 38 countries all over the world. . . . To estimate . . . the full significance of this, one has only to recall . . . the wild rumors, the abrasive bitterness, the divisive recriminations that followed the shooting of another President on another Friday, nearly a century ago, when a nation was kept in ignorance of the full facts surrounding President Lincoln’s death for weeks, and in some respects for months.”

  EVEN BEFORE the funeral, Jacqueline Kennedy had decided she did not want to remain living in the White House for long. Mindful perhaps of public gossip about Mary Lincoln’s drawn-out, emotional, post-assassination occupancy of the Executive Mansion, Jackie was determined to avoid similar criticism. And her memories of happier times there haunted her. She wanted distance from them. Despite President Johnson’s gracious invitation to remain as long as she wished, Jacqueline Kennedy wanted to be out of the mansion within two weeks of the assassination.