Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis: The Untold Story (18 page)

Jackie remembered that that initial gunshot, when she heard it, had seemed to be just some random backfire from one of the many police escort motorcycles. In the scorching sunlight, she had been sitting in the rear of an open midnight-blue Lincoln Continental convertible, smiling and waving to the crowds on her left. She had on a line-for-line copy of a pink wool Chanel suit with navy lapels, and white kid gloves buttoned at the wrist. A gold bracelet flashed and glittered on her left arm. Jack, seated beside her in the limo, had insisted that she not wear her sunglasses in order that the people of Dallas might see her face. The red roses she had been handed earlier at the airport lay on the seat between her and her husband.

When the initial shot was fired, Jack stopped waving and peered into the crowd. Briefly he turned to the left and glanced at his wife. By the time Jackie looked to her right, he had already resumed waving to onlookers. Then, like the president, she too turned back to the people on her side of the car and began to wave again. The sound of the first shot had been ambiguous. Secret Service agents traveling in the motorcade had similarly taken it for the gunning of motorcycles, or perhaps a firecracker. But there could be no mistaking the character of the second shot, which ripped through the back of the president’s neck, exited below his Adam’s apple, and hit the right shoulder of the governor, who was seated in front of Kennedy. Connally’s cries, “Oh, no, no, no … My God, they are going to kill us all,” caused Jackie to turn. Jack seemed to be reaching for his throat. First with her right, then with both hands, she tugged at his raised left arm in a desperate effort to pull him down, as Nellie Connally had succeeded in doing for her husband. Both of Jack’s arms, however, were locked in place, and for five seconds Jackie struggled in vain.

She was looking directly into Jack’s face when a third shot tore into the right side of his head. Upon contact, there was a loud thump, like a melon exploding on a pavement. A diaphanous pink cloud of brain and bone matter burst out of the wound, raining on Jackie’s hair, face, and clothes. As he fell toward her, she screamed: “My God, what are they doing? My God, they’ve killed Jack, they’ve killed my husband, Jack, Jack!” Rising on her knees, she continued: “I have his brains in my hand.” She might have been killed had the bullet’s trajectory been slightly different, or she could easily have been slaughtered in the open vehicle afterward. Though she survived, deep, distinct memories of the interval between the first and third shots, and of certain of the incidents that followed, would color the rest of her life in ways over which she had no, or at best little, control, and which few observers appeared even to begin to comprehend. From then on, everything would be different for her because of a total of eight and a half at once evanescent and indelible seconds.

At the time of the second shot, Jackie’s lead Secret Service agent, Clint Hill, had leapt off the sideboard of the follow-up car and begun running toward the presidential limousine. He had been struggling to climb onto the rear of the limo when the third shot split the president’s head asunder. Suddenly, Jackie was crawling on hands and knees along the trunk of the now-speeding Lincoln. She appeared to be reaching futilely for a shard of her husband’s head that had flown out the back. Dave Powers, in the follow-up vehicle, feared she was about to fall off and be ground under the advancing motorcade. Hill, as he drew near, sensed that she had no idea he was there. At last, he successfully propelled himself onto the trunk and pushed her into the rear seat, where he shielded her and the catastrophically wounded president with his own spread-eagled body.

Jackie cradled her husband in her lap. Tightly she held his head in both hands in a conscious effort to keep the brains from leaking out. “He’s dead, he’s dead,” she heard someone shout. The pale blue interior of the limousine had been transformed into an abattoir. A hairy skull fragment lay beside Jackie’s roses. As sirens roared and the car radio crackled, she muttered to Jack, asking if he could hear and repeating that she loved him: “Jack, Jack, what have they done to you?”

Six minutes later, the car halted at the emergency admitting platform in the rear of Parkland Hospital. Another agent, Paul Landis, found Jackie still holding her husband in her lap. Landis took her by the shoulders, attempting to help her up, but she refused to let go of the president’s head. “No, I want to stay with him.” Meanwhile, a hospital resident had appeared with a gurney. Surveying the interior of the car, he judged that the president was dead. He had never encountered anyone with a head wound of that magnitude, with so much brain matter strewn about, who survived. Finally, Clint Hill, sensing that Jackie did not want her husband to be seen like this, removed his own suit jacket and draped it over Kennedy’s head and the upper portion of his chest. Thus reassured, she let go. A few ensanguined red roses clung to Kennedy’s body as the agents removed it from the vehicle. Jackie’s eyes gave the appearance of looking but not seeing. Yet when a nurse reached for the president’s head in anticipation of lifting it onto the cart, Jackie pushed her out of the way and insisted on doing it herself.

As hospital staff raced the gurney to Trauma Room 1, Jackie dashed alongside, grasping her husband’s hand. En route, the suit jacket dropped off his face. Initially, she refused suggestions that she wait in the hallway. In the belief that Jack was dead or dying, however, she did eventually allow herself to be lured out of the room, but shortly thereafter when a medic emerged with the information that the president was still breathing, she demanded to be allowed to return. Nurses had covered the floor around the cart with sheets to prevent slippage. Ignoring a Niagara of blood, Jackie dropped to her knees and prayed.

Doctors, meanwhile, were performing closed chest massage on the president, who had been stripped down to his undershorts and a back brace. Every time Kennedy’s heart was compressed, a red geyser erupted from his skull and streamed down the right side of the table onto the floor. Neither chest massage nor a tracheotomy, which had been performed earlier, did much to improve his breathing. In any event, it was the head that had sustained the mortal wound, and when Dr. Kemp Clark, a neurosurgeon, saw the damage, he told Dr. Malcolm Perry, who was doing the cardiac massage, that there was no need to go on. When Perry continued notwithstanding, Clark stressed: “No, Malcolm, we are through.” Jackie by this time had taken to pacing the trauma room, her hands clasped before her. Poking an anesthesiologist with her elbow, she hopefully presented him with a fragment of the president’s brain.

Finally, Dr. Charles Baxter, the emergency room chief, told her that her husband was dead. She held Jack’s hand beneath the sheet and softly joined in the prayers as a priest performed the last rites. When everyone else had left, she sat with Jack for a bit. Afterward, she waited in the hallway while nurses prepared his remains for the journey back to Washington. Since he was still oozing, they wrapped his head in four sheets, and when blood persisted in leaking through, they further insulated the casket with a plastic mattress cover. Jackie returned with the intention of depositing her wedding ring in the coffin. But when she attempted to remove her gloves, she discovered that the blackened white leather was so stiff with dried blood that she could not get them off without a policeman’s assistance. Escorted by Dr. Baxter, she approached the dark red bronze casket, where she kissed Jack’s toe, stomach, and lips. Then she attempted to put the wedding ring that she had worn for the past ten years on his hand. The ring too was bloody, and she managed to push it down no further than the joint of his little finger.

The corridor outside the emergency room was “deathly still” as the door opened and the casket appeared on a rubber-tired dolly. Jackie walked alongside, her left hand resting on the coffin. There was, said an observer, “a completely glazed look in her face.… If somebody had literally fired a pistol in front of her face … she would just have blinked. It seemed that she was absolutely out of this world.” In the belief that any delay in removing the body from Dallas would have an incalculable effect on Jackie, Kenny O’Donnell and Dave Powers were eager to get the casket to Air Force One before local authorities enforced a state law that prescribed that an autopsy be performed in the jurisdiction where the homicide had taken place. The Dallas county medical examiner had already appeared at the hospital to warn that the body must stay where it was. Jackie was unaware of the controversy and thus, said O’Donnell, “perhaps confused as to the speed with which we were attempting to depart.”

In the rear of the hospital, agents lifted the casket into a hearse and closed the vehicle’s curtains. Declining suggestions that she ride in a follow-up car or even in the front seat of the hearse, Jackie insisted on sitting next to the coffin. The race to remove the remains continued at the airport. “We arrived … and we’re all punchy now,” O’Donnell recalled. “I’m concerned that the Dallas police are going to come and take the body off the plane and Jackie Kennedy’s going to have a heart attack right in front of us there. I’m petrified.” But when O’Donnell sent word to the pilot, urging him to take off immediately, the reply came back that Kennedy was no longer commander in chief. President Johnson was, and it turned out that he was already on the plane waiting to be sworn in prior to takeoff. In the meantime, when Jackie went to her bedroom for a moment, she found her husband’s successor there. Immediately she repaired to the rear compartment, where Jack’s coffin had been placed. At length, though Johnson had been assigned the presidential quarters when he boarded, he insisted that they ought properly to be occupied by the widow. Initially reluctant to return, Jackie finally acceded to the urgings of Lady Bird Johnson. Prior to the swearing-in, therefore, she had her first bit of privacy since the assassination.

In her absence from the presidential quarters, someone had laid out a white dress and jacket and black shoes, a tacit invitation to change her clothes. Gazing in the bathroom mirror, Jackie surveyed the blood on her face. No sooner had she wiped it off with a tissue than she sensed she had made a mistake. “Why did I wash the blood off?” she later remembered asking herself. “I should have left it there, let them see what they’ve done.” This flash of anger points to one emotion the body had not shut down in its effort to allow her to do what she had to, both for her husband’s sake and her own, in a situation of maximum stress. Presently, when Jackie appeared at the swearing-in, she was still defiantly wearing the bespattered suit. Her stockings, as one observer described them, were “almost saturated with blood.” Even her gold bracelet was horrifically encrusted. Jackie had just emerged from a kind of war zone where detachment, like anger, can be key to survival, operating as they both do to tamp down emotions that might diminish the warrior’s single-minded focus. Thus, to Liz Carpenter, Lady Bird Johnson’s press secretary, it was as though the murdered president’s widow “were in a trance.” Such was the figure who stood at Johnson’s side during the ceremony in the sweltering stateroom, where a single jet engine’s insistent low moan could be heard throughout. Afterward, the new president embraced the widow “by the elbows.” Lady Bird Johnson pressed her hand and quietly declared: “The whole nation mourns your husband.” Whereupon Chief Jesse Curry of the Dallas Police addressed Jackie for all to hear: “God bless you, little lady, but you ought to go back and lie down. You’ve had a bad day.”

Lady Bird accompanied Jackie to the presidential quarters, where the new first lady pondered the incongruous sight of that “immaculate … exquisitely dressed” woman, as she said, still covered with JFK’s blood. Also incongruous to Lady Bird was the ferocity with which Jackie refused her offer to send in someone to help her change. Echoing her private thoughts before the swearing-in, Jackie said: “I want them to see what they have done to Jack.” Thereafter, she sat near the coffin with JFK aides for the duration of the flight.

When at length Air Force One reached Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, Bobby Kennedy suddenly, mysteriously materialized on board. Having waited for some thirty minutes in the rear of a military truck out of sight of the press, he dashed up the ramp to the aircraft with all of the “raging spirit” that had long been associated with him. The sources of Bobby’s fury on this occasion were manifold. He was grieving, of course, his face, as a witness described it, “streaked with tears.” But he was also fuming at what he perceived to be the colossal affront of Johnson’s having insisted on being sworn in before takeoff, when to Bobby’s mind it would have been so much more fitting and respectful to the Kennedy family had Jack been allowed to return to the capital as president. Ignoring the fact that, even in the absence of a swearing-in ceremony, the presidential mantle would have instantly transferred to Johnson when his predecessor died, the attorney general regarded Johnson as a usurper who had been in an unseemly rush to take over from JFK. Bobby’s rage in this regard was not simply the product of a mind deranged by grief. Unlike Jackie, who had had a good relationship with the vice president, Bobby had long conceived of Johnson as an antagonist, and LBJ had loathed him in turn. The antipathy between the two men had been, in Joe Alsop’s description, “a kind of chemical thing.” And now the reality that Johnson was president seemed to offend Bobby’s sense of prerogative. Said Alsop: “It was as though a ruling family had been displaced by unjust fortune.” On Air Force One, Bobby pushed past Johnson and other passengers as though he did not see them or, LBJ feared, simply did not care to see them.

“Where’s Jackie?” Bobby said. “I want to be with Jackie.” Finally, recalled Liz Carpenter, “he pushed through and we got him to her.” “Hi, Jackie,” he said at last, wrapping his arm around his brother’s widow. “I’m here.” Bobby had a helicopter waiting to transport her to the White House while the remains were driven to Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland for an autopsy, but Jackie persisted in her refusal to be parted from the coffin. When at length she emerged into the lights and cameras on the tarmac, onlookers wept at the sight of her befouled garments and thousand-yard stare. The blood on the pink wool spoke to the suddenness of the tragedy and the impermanence of earthly dominion. Everything she had painstakingly created and made herself known for had been snatched away in an instant. This was a woman whose costumes always calculatedly drew attention, and never more so perhaps than now.