As Jackie “organized herself,” Mary Gallagher did an inventory of the contents of her boss’s handbag: lipstick, comb, handkerchief, dark glasses, and Newport menthol cigarettes, which Jackie now smoked instead of L&Ms. Peering into the mirror, Jackie inspected her face for wrinkles, found one, and told Mary, “One day in a campaign can age a person thirty years.”
Ten minutes after Jackie’s scheduled 9:15 arrival, Kennedy sent word that she should come downstairs immediately. She was still undecided about her choice of gloves, finally opting for a short white pair instead of more formal long ones. She was focused on the trip to Dallas and had forgotten the breakfast. When the elevator stopped at the lobby, she said to Clint Hill, “Aren’t we leaving?” and he reminded her of the breakfast. As she entered the ballroom through the kitchen, two thousand Texans burst into applause. In his remarks, Kennedy sounded a somber note. “This is a dangerous and uncertain world,” he said. “No one expects our lives to be easy—not in this decade, not in this century.”
Back in their suite to rest before flying to Dallas, the President and First Lady had time to inspect their personal art exhibit. At JFK’s suggestion, they called Ruth Carter Johnson, the first name listed in the catalogue. Jack expressed his gratitude, and Jackie said, “They’re going to have a dreadful time getting me out of here with all these wonderful works of art. We’re both touched—thank you so much.”
The President and First Lady worked the fence at Dallas’s Love Field, shaking a multitude of extended hands. Lady Bird observed approvingly as Jackie took on “something quite new in her life and very old in ours . . . and she was doing it gracefully and sweetly and making a lot of people happy. I thought, ‘How nice.’” CBS correspondent Bob Pierpoint was struck that Jackie “suddenly had decided to become the good political wife, trying very hard and even managing to make it appear that she was enjoying this political jaunt. She really looked and acted like one who was very much in love with her husband and even in love with the fact that he’s a politician.”
For the motorcade to the Dallas Trade Mart, the Kennedys and Connallys rode together in an open convertible. Pam Turnure had earlier suggested they use a bubbletop to shield Jackie’s hair. “Never satisfactory,” Kennedy said, explaining that the people needed to see the President and First Lady clearly. When Roy Kellerman, the lead Secret Service agent, had asked in Fort Worth about using a top, O’Donnell said only if there was rain in Dallas.
The sun was blazing as the motorcade pulled away, the temperature an uncomfortable 76 degrees for Jackie’s wool suit. She put on her sunglasses, but Jack quickly asked her to take them off so that her face would be fully visible. She held on to them anyway, slipping them on periodically whenever the crowds were sparse. As the motorcade advanced slowly down Main Street, spectators thronged the route, screaming their approval.
“The motorcade is one of the hardest things for people to do,” recalled John Connally’s wife, Nellie. “All the people staring, and you have to look pleasant, and you can’t be carrying on too much of a conversation in the car, so we would banter.” Kennedy asked Nellie what she would do if someone in the crowd said something ugly to her husband. “If I’d get close enough I’d scratch their eyes out,” she said, and he laughed. Moving at a crawl, the motorcade turned onto Elm Street and Nellie said, “Mr. President, you can’t say Dallas doesn’t love you.” “No you can’t,” Kennedy replied.
Thirty seconds later, at 12:30 p.m., three shots rang out, fired by Lee Harvey Oswald from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. Within six seconds, one bullet had passed through Kennedy’s back and out through his throat—not a mortal wound. A second bullet smashed into the rear of the President’s head, exploding his brain and sending a piece of his skull flying. Connally was hit in the back, although not fatally. “My God, they’ve killed Jack,” Jackie wailed. “They’ve killed my husband, Jack, Jack!” As the car sped to Parkland Hospital, Kennedy slumped in his wife’s lap, his blood and brain fragments splattering her Chanel skirt.
Kennedy was rushed into the trauma bay within minutes. As a practical matter, he was already dead, but his heart was still beating. Doctors inserted tubes in his trachea, chest, ankle, and arm, gave him blood and fluids, administered 300 milligrams of hydrocortisone for his Addison’s disease, and applied close cardiac massage. When they abandoned their efforts, Jackie approached the gurney, kissed her husband’s foot, and held his hand as a priest gave him extreme unction. The doctors pronounced John Fitzgerald Kennedy dead at 1 p.m. central standard time.
Jackie asked a policeman to pull off her blood-caked gloves. She wanted to give her husband something meaningful, just as she had placed a treasured bracelet in her father’s coffin and Jack had left his St. Christopher’s medal with Patrick. She decided it would be the simple gold wedding band she had worn for a decade.
Jackie tugged at the blood-stained ring but couldn’t pull it free. Vernon Oneal, the “squat, hairy, and professionally doleful” undertaker, came to her rescue with a jar of Lubafax, massaging her finger so that she could slip off the ring. She placed it on Kennedy’s finger. Unable to push it beyond the knuckle, she let his hand drop. Kenny O’Donnell was watching from the doorway, and several other people were milling about. Wishing she could be alone with Jack, she kissed his hand and his lips and wanted to embrace him, but did not. Outside in the hallway she took O’Donnell aside. “The ring,” she said. “Do you think it was right? Now I have nothing left.” “Yes,” O’Donnell replied. “You leave it right where it is.”
THIRTY-ONE
After the horrifying six seconds on Elm Street, the Kennedy court rallied round for an extraordinary three days—grieving, comforting each other, making arrangements for Kennedy’s funeral and burial on Monday, November 25. “It was like the fall of all hope and youth,” Bunny Mellon said.
On the plane to Washington, O’Donnell, Powers, and O’Brien stayed with Jackie near Kennedy’s body, loyal sentries who earned her gratitude and new appreciation. They told her stories about Jack. She talked of Abraham Lincoln’s funeral and her need to find “the book” about it. As she spoke, Jackie had “a way of not looking at you,” Powers recalled.
Bobby was first on the plane at Andrews Air Force Base. “Hey Jackie,” he said, putting his arms around her. “He was so understated, as always,” said Pam Turnure. “Oh Bobby,” Jackie whispered. “I just can’t believe Jack has gone.”
Watching television at his home in McLean, Dr. Frank Finnerty, Jackie’s secret therapist, realized when he saw her disembark in her blood-spattered pink suit “the degree of shock she was in . . . I had heard her say many times how fanatical she was about changing a blouse or skirt with a small spot.” This time, though, Jackie had emphatically deflected suggestions that she change clothes. “No,” she said. “Let them see what they’ve done.”
Jackie and Bobby rode together in the ambulance with the casket to Bethesda Naval Hospital. In the illuminated interior, they could be seen talking nonstop—an image sadly evocative of the limousine that Jackie, Walton, and Jack had taken to the inaugural gala. (“Turn on the lights so they can see Jackie.”)
At Bethesda, family and friends converged for eight hours in a suite of rooms on the seventeenth floor as doctors performed an autopsy and morticians did what they could to reconstruct Kennedy’s shattered head. Joining Jackie were her mother, Hughdie, the Bradlees, McNamaras, Bartletts, Nancy Tuckerman, Ethel and Bobby, Pam Turnure, Evelyn Lincoln, Jean Smith, Kenny O’Donnell, Larry O’Brien, Mary Gallagher, and Dave Powers, who made Manhattans and scotches for anyone who needed them.
Bradlee spotted Jackie huddling with O’Donnell, talking about her wedding band. “Now [she] had decided she wanted to keep it,” recalled Bradlee. “Jackie, I’m going to get that ring back for you,” O’Donnell said. He found White House physician Dr. George Burkley, who retrieved the ring from the morgue and gave it to Jackie.
There had been a mixup of messages as Caroline and John were shuttled f
irst to the Auchincloss home in Georgetown and then back to the White House at Jackie’s direction “to be in their own beds.” Ben and Tony had initially rushed to the White House to help with the children. Ben had been on the verge of telling Caroline and John about their father when Tony stopped him, saying, “That is not a decision for you to make.” Later in the evening, Jackie would instruct Maud Shaw to break the news, which the devoted nanny did with sensitivity and sympathy. As they nodded off to sleep, she told them, “Your father has gone to look after Patrick. Patrick was so lonely in heaven. . . . Now he has the best friend anyone could have. . . . God is making your father a guardian angel over you and your mother, and his light will shine down on you always.”
When she first embraced her mother, Jackie briefly broke down, but quickly righted herself. “Poor Nancy,” she said, turning to Tuckerman, her oldest friend. “You came down all the way from New York to take this job. Now it’s all over. It’s so sad. You will stay with me a little while, won’t you?” In those hours at Bethesda, “Jackie was astounding,” Ethel Kennedy recalled. “She was so warm and loving to everyone.” Ethel tried to reassure her that Jack “went right to heaven, no stopovers.” After Jackie told Ethel how wonderful Bobby had been, Ethel said, “I’ll share him with you.”
In graphic images, Jackie described the Dallas horror over and over to the intimates she greeted at the hospital. “I was so startled and shocked she could repeat in such detail how it happened,” said Ethel. “I thought it was such torture, so clinical.” Reflecting back, Jackie said she had been “sort of keyed up in a strange way.” Her elaborate concern for those around her, she said, “was part of her masque.”
When Bradlee saw Jackie, he hugged her—a “totally doomed child,” he thought—and said, “Don’t be too brave, cry.” She sobbed but with few tears. “Oh Benny, do you want to hear what happened?” she said, followed by her instinctive wariness: “But not as a reporter for Newsweek, okay?” She told Ben of watching “the whole front of his head jump out,” adding, “With that instinctive grace of his he reached for it, and it wasn’t there.” “Gallic,” Ben said to Ethel, explaining that Jackie was “trying to get rid of it by talking of it, by emptying herself.”
Bradlee was most impressed by Bobby’s strength: “subdued, holding Jackie together.” McNamara was “the second towering figure,” in Bradlee’s view. “No subterfuge, no special smiles. The naked strength. A man without guile.” McNamara spent hours sitting on the floor of a small kitchen, listening to Jackie. “She just wanted someone to talk to,” McNamara recalled. “I had to be calm for her and the hell with the others.” Ethel Kennedy saw parallels between her husband and McNamara. “I was trying to think what in his philosophy made [McNamara] so strong and sympathetic,” Ethel recalled.
By the time Charley and Martha Bartlett arrived late in the evening, Ben Bradlee decided, “suddenly we had been there too long.” Charley’s reaction to Jackie’s outpouring mirrored Ben’s. “That French imagination,” he thought. He was also struck that Jackie was most concerned about Dave Powers and Evelyn Lincoln. “I’m not going to cry until the next three or four days are over,” Jackie told Bartlett. In an effort to entertain the group, she tried to talk about the last White House dinner party she and Jack had hosted.
“Will you sleep tonight at the White House?” Jackie asked her mother, insisting she and “Uncle Coo” (Caroline and John’s name for Hughdie) stay in Jack’s bedroom. “Anywhere you like,” Janet said, “but I felt sacrilegious.” Still, Janet was “touched” that Jackie wanted her near.
Over in Georgetown, Mary Meyer asked Anne Truitt to spend the night at her house. “She was so sad,” recalled Truitt. “I tried to comfort her. We cried, but we didn’t talk that much.” Helen Chavchavadze had been standing by her ironing board when she heard the news. “I stood there ironing and crying,” she recalled. But she also had to admit, “When he was killed a tiny part of me felt freed.”
When it was time to leave Bethesda at around 4 a.m., Jackie put her arms around a tearful Pam Turnure. “Poor Pam,” Jackie said. “What will become of you now?” On the arrival of Jackie and the flag-draped casket at the White House gates, the driveway was lit with small flaming pots, a surprisingly dramatic and decorative touch conceived by Sarge Shriver. Inside, Walton had prepared the East Room with Nancy Tuckerman. After studying a book about Lincoln’s funeral that he found in Jackie’s sitting room, Walton had decided that the elaborate mid-nineteenth-century style for the catafalque was too “lachrymose and sentimental.” He directed Bunny Mellon’s upholsterer, Larry Arata, to create simple black swags. At Walton’s instruction, vases in each corner were filled with boughs from Andrew Jackson’s grand magnolia tree near the South Portico.
As Jackie passed by, Chuck Spalding caught her eye, “and we stood staring at each other. The stains of the accident were on her clothes, and the shock of the day had frozen her face in grief . . . I thought of all the things planned for, all the things fought for, all the things achieved, all the things to do, all the things suddenly lost.”
Showing the strength of her upbringing and character, Jackie Kennedy managed to gather herself and oversee the preparations for the funeral. She drew on her knowledge of history and on her innate feel for what was tasteful and appropriate. “Jackie has a great sense of the dramatic,” her mother said. “There were no wrong notes.”
Jackie collected treasured items to put in Jack’s casket: her first anniversary gift to him of inlaid gold cufflinks, the scrimshaw with the presidential seal she had given Jack the previous Christmas, a sapphire bracelet from Lee, the silver rosary Ethel had given Bobby at their wedding, and Bobby’s PT boat tiepin.
Jackie also included three letters. Caroline neatly printed two sentences expressing her love and saying she would miss her daddy. Jackie sat on a small nursery chair and helped John Jr., who would turn three on the day of his father’s funeral, make his scribbles. Her own letter began “My darling Jack,” her “special salutation” that she considered a “rare endearment.”
She wrote that the previous night she had slept in his bed, the hard mattress like a concrete slab, and sobbed for hours. She told him about his children and reminded him that after losing Patrick she had said that “the blow she could not bear” would be his death. As she scrawled page after page, her tears obliterated most of the words on her pale blue stationery. “She also knew it didn’t matter,” Manchester wrote. “She knew it would never be read by anyone.”
Jackie and Bobby took the items and letters down to the East Room where they placed them with Jack. Jackie kissed her husband, caressed his hair and cut some off with J. B. West’s scissors. Back in her dressing room, she divided the hair and put each half in a small ceramic frame. One she gave to Bobby, and she kept the other.
It fell to trusted friends and family to carry out her wishes. Sarge Shriver proved a master of detail and logistics, assembling guest lists, setting timetables. “Sarge had a tough job,” Sorensen noted. “But it all seemed awfully efficient.” Jackie wanted the Black Watch Highlander Regiment that had performed at the White House the previous week, and Tish Baldrige finally tracked them down in Knoxville, Tennessee. Another request was for the honor guard of thirty cadets of the Military College of Ireland. JFK had been impressed in Dublin by the drama of their performance, and their brass buttons—one of Jackie’s anniversary gifts—now adorned his favorite blazer.
Bob McNamara strongly believed that JFK should be buried at Arlington National Cemetery, arguing his case against tough opposition from the Kennedy family and “Irish mafia.” They favored Holyhood in Brookline, where Patrick had been buried just fifteen weeks before. But the defense secretary found a perfect spot, below the Custis-Lee Mansion that Jack and Charley Bartlett had visited the previous March on a Sunday afternoon. McNamara would later say that a Park Service employee told him that during the visit he had heard the President call the view “the most beautiful sight in Washington”—a remark that became mythol
ogized as Kennedy’s wish to “stay here forever.” “All sorts of people are remembering all kinds of things Jack Kennedy never said,” Bartlett told Katie Louchheim. “I never heard him say he’d like to stay there forever. That was NOT like him—out of character.”
In a series of visits on Saturday in a drenching rain, McNamara persuaded Walton, Billings, Reed, Bobby, Jean, Eunice, and finally Jackie that the hillside site was the most fitting resting place. Jackie was won over by the beauty of the setting, as well as its historical importance. With his artist’s eye, Walton located the precise placement for the grave that would line up with the mansion. He turned out to be only six inches off.
Bobby inherited the mantle of paterfamilias from his fallen brother and helped Jackie with all the major decisions. One of the first was whether to have an open casket. Jackie seemed to want it closed, so Bobby polled the views of various intimates. Spalding went into the East Room and peered under the lid. “The face looked like the rubber masks stores sold as novelties,” Spalding recalled. “I said to close the casket.” Arthur Schlesinger agreed, as did Nancy Tuckerman and Bill Walton. “One felt the face had been rebuilt,” said Schlesinger. “It looked less and less like him.” Walton was stunned by the “wax dummy” with the “false hair” and “silly expression.”
Teddy and Eunice flew to Hyannis to tell their father. Eunice spent most of her time with Rose, taking long walks to Squaw Island. “We talked about Jack as if he were still alive,” said Eunice. Joe sensed something was wrong, but they waited until Saturday night to break the news. “He had been looking out to the sea,” Teddy recalled. “He looked right into my eyes. He followed every word. ‘As a matter of fact, he died.’” Joe was unable to speak, but he wept. “Daddy got it,” said Eunice. “He and Ted cried and that was it. He did not collapse. Twenty-five minutes later he had the TV on watching the East Room.”
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