November 22 1963

by Braver, Adam

  The seats had already been given a cursory cleaning, with discolored sponge streaks going against the grain of the leather. At least the Secret Service had tried, but it seemed as though they had just brushed off the seats.

  Vaughn opened the rear left door, Mrs. Kennedy’s side, and scooted along the leather interior. He reached down to the floor for each petal, gathering them into a single pile, not sure what he would do with them when he was finished. Even if it were just a matter of throwing them away, those rose petals deserved better than being left behind as mop-up from the crime scene.

  With the final petal out from under the middle seats, Vaughn scooped them all up with his bare palms. He placed the mound on the garage floor, for some reason compelled to lay them perfectly along the painted yellow line. When he glanced back at the floor mat where his pile had just been, Vaughn noticed a large blood stain matting the mouton. And as he looked at it, he began to smell it. And as he began to smell it, he saw it materialize into some kind of otherly reminder. It became too much to bear, so he pulled out a handkerchief from his pocket and spit into it three times, pushing the kerchief onto the stain before the spit dried. He checked it. The handkerchief was still white. He dabbed a little harder. Still nothing came up. He spit into the handkerchief two more times and scrubbed the stain, thinking he’d develop his own chemical tonight if need be. Anything to lift that stain off the floor.

  Splayed out along the backseat, his whole body leaked sweat. He was trying to catch his breath. Beside him, Vaughn noticed an upholstery button ringed by dried blood. A thin, ridged mound, brown and caked, that seeped below the button itself. He backed himself out of the car, taking out a pocketknife from his trousers. On his knees, leaning into the car, Vaughn saw that all the buttons he’d been sitting on were also soiled by blood.

  He reached back with his free hand to dust off his bottom.

  He leaned back into the interior, pulling his cuff over his left hand as a glove, and lifted up the first button slightly, not wanting to tear the threads. He slowly slid the blade between the button and the seat, scraping back and forth, using just enough of the steel to reflect some light, and moving in quick flits, watching the residue turn to dust. His stomach growled with each swipe.

  He spent over an hour working on those buttons. Cleaning all three and then coming back to the first again. Over and over. Not willing to stop until he’d cleaned them beyond a trace. At one point he thought he might have scratched the leather, even sliced it, and he caught his breath, and it held, trapped in his chest. He wasn’t sure he’d ever be able to breathe again until he looked closer and saw it was just a surface scratch, easily polished out with spit or solution. And when he scraped up the last of what he could find, Vaughn tried to stand on his pinsand-needles legs, which had lost feeling from being cramped so long. He grasped at the car door when his legs forgot how to support him.

  Limping through the garage on his way out, his right leg still dragged a little, not fully awake. He’d once heard a story about a man whose arm had fallen asleep and never come back. At one point the man begged his doctor to amputate the arm, saying that he couldn’t take it anymore, the constant reminder was too much. Vaughn never knew the real ending to the story, only that the man apparently opted to keep the arm in a sling, telling people he had polio, in order to make sense of it.

  He walked slowly down K Street, heading toward his office on Connecticut. Quiet streets. Quiet minds. The moment between amnesia and recall. It reminded him of car accident victims who have had all the memories shocked right out of them. Their stories are always more dramatic when told by others. That is, until they can appropriate the story as their own. They don’t have the key details, only the momentary blurs or the song on the radio or the moment of waking up. Vaughn Ferguson was making sure that everything he would know of these days was clean. Traffic: not very much. Weather: cool and overcast. Streets: breathless and deserted. Washington: the color of the lawns; the pasty government buildings. And the sound of the wind. And the echoes of a hollow city. And the on and on and on. Mental pinches to tell himself he was not dreaming.

  A gust of wind blew open his overcoat, and on the knee of his bum leg he saw a kernel of rose petal pressed into the wool. Probably picked up when he was kneeling to clean the buttons.

  He reached down to pull the petal off his knee. A sniper wind took it from his hand. The petal skipped behind him. He stamped in awkward dance steps to catch it. A street performer alone in Federal Triangle. With the next squall, he lost sight of it altogether. He crouched. Lifted on his tiptoes. The breeze was making his eyes water. Warm tears traced down his cheeks. Far ahead on the sidewalk, alone along Connecticut Avenue and heading toward Pennsylvania, Vaughn Ferguson thought he caught sight of the rose petal pushing along the sidewalk. Confident. With purpose. Like it knew what it was doing. Where it was going. Where it was supposed to be.

  Here are some final thoughts:

  When J. Hyman wrote to President Johnson in January of 1964, he likely was expressing a sentiment that many others felt. Hyman—president of Unitron of California, a company that imported and manufactured home-improvement items, from bamboo shutters to plastic rakes—wanted to share his disappointment upon learning that the bubbletop limousine would be pressed back into service following a series of alterations and refurbishments. In his letter, Hyman praises Johnson for his ability to lead during such a trying time. But still, he questions the judgment of putting the car back into service. He asserts that the United States, being the richest country in the world, “which has some 80 million automobiles and trucks rolling along its highways, is entitled to a brand-new automobile, and should not be called upon to ride in the shadow of the world’s most tragic incident that has occurred during the last twentieth century.”

  Ivan Sinclair, assistant to the president, signed the reply from the White House. On behalf of Johnson, Sinclair expressed his appreciation for Hyman’s concern. He went on to explain that the Secret Service recommended continued use of the limousine, citing time as the main factor. “There are numerous special features in this vehicle,” he writes, “and it would take several weeks—possibly even months—to construct another. Security requirements would not permit such a delay.” He goes on to explain that more features would be added to enhance security, again, “with a minimum of delay.”

  Four months later, on April 27, Douglass Dillon, secretary of the treasury, sent a memo to Johnson informing the president that the modifications and repairs on the limousine were completed and the car would be delivered during the following month. He reiterated that the Secret Service made the recommendation, noting that with “recent advances in the field of armoring and glasswork, it was believed possible to reconstruct the top of the car so it would be both bulletproof and transparent.” As an added feature, there would be an “opaque fabric cover” that could be fitted over the transparent top, allowing the retrofitted car to be used as either a parade car or a standard limousine. However, there was still concern from the Secret Service that the president understand that he needed to stay seated. As Special Agent Behn wrote in a communication whose tone sounds almost parental, “If the president was not agreeable to remaining seated in the car during the parade, it would be a waste of money and effort . . . to build these cars.”

  On June 12, Dillon writes Johnson to say that the rebuilt bubbletop was delivered the previous evening, ready for use. He personally inspected it and found the car to be “comfortable and conservative looking.” Dillon tells the president that he does not expect “that it would draw any unusual attention by its appearance.” At about this same time, Ford Motor Company, which headed the refurbishment, issues a press release announcing the return of the rebuilt “custom version of a 1961 Lincoln Continental [that] retains virtually the same appearance as it did when it was originally delivered to President John F. Kennedy in the spring of 1961.” After explaining some of the changes, it informs the reader that the car was rebuilt both by Ford mechani
cs in Dearborn, Michigan, and in Cincinnati, Ohio, by Hess & Eisenhardt, the same custom-body firm that had been part of the team that originally built the car, in 1961. And in a strange conclusion to the press release, there is an almost upbeat and cheery call for process, telling the reader that revamping White House limousines “has been the rule rather than the exception.” It then gives examples of three eras of cars—Roosevelt’s, Truman’s, and Eisenhower’s—that had been refurbished and upgraded for various reasons.

  But none because someone was murdered in its backseat. When the new limousine was scheduled to be part of a presidential motorcade through Des Moines on October 7, 1964, Johnson’s press people seemed to get a sudden shiver of concern about the perception of the car. The worry was that reporters would recognize the bubbletop, and they might bring up questions about employing it, regarding its history and such. Press Secretary George Reedy and his assistant, Dixon Donnelley, decide that the only information to be furnished to the media will be the press release issued by Ford Motors. Of course, if asked, they will confirm that it is indeed the bubbletop. However, the press secretary and his representatives will be limited to making the “following points: 1. That the President was using the car upon the direct order or urging of the President’s Committee. 2. That in effect this was a brand new car.”

  Perhaps J. Hyman was listening to President Johnson’s news conference on October 3, 1964. Johnson hadn’t yet left for Des Moines. Hadn’t yet sat in his brand-new car. A little after three, in the White House, Johnson is standing before the press pool. It is about midway through that he is asked about his response to the Warren Commission recommendations about safety, specifically whether those recommendations will affect Johnson’s public style. And he sounds testy. He sounds bothered. It’s clear he doesn’t think any of the reporters fully understand the relationship between the expectations of a president’s contact with the public versus policies and procedures. Then he challenges their reading of the recommendations and parses words such as suggestion, as opposed to recommendation. He cites the reports. Cites memos from the Secret Service. And in the end, he relays his trust in the Secret Service and its recommendations. “It is irritating to go in an old car that sometimes roars and you can’t even talk in it,” he states, “but if they recommend it, that is what we do.”

  Maybe J. Hyman is holding his breath, swallowing down every word. Perhaps in his office at Unitron in Hawthorne, California, he wants to throw open the window, lean his head out, and shout among the roar of the planes taking off and landing at nearby Los Angeles International Airport. Scream that history is not just a function of its parts, that you can pave over battlefields but that doesn’t mean people never died there. You can order and reorder the words any way you want, but it can’t change what it describes. He wants to scream until his voice is hoarse, until it becomes part of the history.

  Instead, though, maybe he stays at his desk, clears his throat, and thumbs through the pages of the new Unitron catalog, looking at the garden tools he’ll be exporting. He reviews page after page of rakes, waiting for the bamboo shutters, handling each sheet carefully, sensitive to how easily ink can smudge. Leaf rakes. Bow rakes. Sweep rakes. He turns each page slowly. When he reaches the end, he flips back to the beginning, trying not to think of a widow who didn’t want to remove her bloodied dress, but once she did, and stood naked in front of a mirror, saw she was still stained.

  Acknowledgments

  While this book is written largely from imagination, valuable contributions from among the following cannot be dismissed: transcripts from the Warren Commission and the Assassination Records Review Board; the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum for its archives, helpful archivists, and specifically its Oral History collection, where the following transcripts were accessed: Kenneth Burke, David P. Highly, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Nelson Pierce, Maud Shaw, Cordenia Thaxton, Nancy Tuckerman and Pamela Turnure, and J. Bernard West; the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library and Museum; the White House Historical Foundation; the Museum of Broadcast Communications; the Sixth-Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza; the National Archives; the Assassination Archives and Research Center; the Smoking Gun; History.net; U.S. Army Center of Military History; Cornell Lab of Ornithology; the Handbook of Texas Online; the Henry Ford Museum; the American Presidency Project; American Radio Works; the Washington Post; the New York Times; the Dallas Morning News; Time magazine; CNN; PBS; Vogue; History Matters; U.S. Army Corps of Engineers; Arlington National Cemetery; The White House: An Historic Guide (1963); Susan Bennett and Cathy Trust’s President Kennedy Has Been Shot; James Fetzer’s Murder in Dealey Plaza; Robert Drew’s documentaries Primary, Crisis, and Faces of November; National Geographic’s documentary Air Force One; CBS News’ documentary A Tour of the White House with Mrs. John F. Kennedy; Bruce Halford’s documentary JFK: The Day the Nation Cried; Bobby Hargis, Aubrey Rike, and James Tackach for being generous enough to tell their stories again; all of the Kennedy enthusiasts who have amassed and archived a wealth of unique, important information that is posted on the Internet—a special thanks to those who were willing to answer e-mails in the middle of the night.

  I’m also grateful to all the good, dedicated folks at Tin House (Lee, Michelle, Meg, Deb, and others I don’t even know yet); Nat and Judith, Julie Stevenson, and everyone else at Sobel Weber; friends and colleagues who acted as readers and sounding boards; Howard Norman for injecting confidence, and Amy Hempel for talking me back onto the ledge; Roy Nirschel and Bob Boyers for the gift of time; and of course Alisson, Addison, and the rest of my family for the certainty of unconditional love.

  ALSO BY ADAM BRAVER

  Mr. Lincoln’s Wars

  Divine Sarah

  Crows Over the Wheatfield

  Copyright © 2008 Adam Braver

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced

  in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher

  except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  For information, contact Tin House Books,

  2601 NW Thurman St., Portland, OR 97210.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are

  the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Published by Tin House Books, Portland, Oregon, and New York, New York

  Distributed to the trade by Publishers Group West, 1700 Fourth St.,

  Berkeley, CA 94710, www.pgw.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Braver, Adam, 1963-

  November 22, 1963 / Adam Braver. -- 1st U.S. ed.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-0-982-05399-7

  1. Kennedy, John F. (John Fitzgerald), 1917-1963--Assassination--Fiction.

  2. Onassis, Jacqueline Kennedy, 1929-1994--Fiction. 3. Presidents..

  Assassination--Fiction. 4. Political crimes and offenses--Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3602.R39N68 2008

  813’.6--dc22 2008020190

  First U.S. edition 2008

  Chapters from this book originally appeared in the following publications:

  “Mrs. Kennedy Is Organizing Herself” in Water-Stone Review;

  “The Science of Warmth” in West Branch; “Breaking and Crumbling

  on the Seventeenth Floor” in Harvard Review; “The Oath of Office”

  in Ontario Review; and “The Casket” in Tin House.

  www.tinhouse.com

 

 

 
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