The Day Kennedy Was Shot (33 page)

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 impedimenta 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.

The wound on the left thigh, where the bullet stopped after passing through the President and the Governor, was about the size of an eraser on the end of a pencil. As Doctor Gregory examined it, he surmised that the energy of the bullet was near exhaustion because the injury was barely surface deep. Dr. Shaw, assisted by Doctors Boland and Duke, spent considerable time on the exit wound in the chest. It was under the right nipple, about five centimeters in diameter, and the torn edges had to be snipped away. Dr. Giesecke, who monitored the anesthesia, had also worked on President Kennedy.

On the first floor of the big hospital, Trauma Two was being scrubbed by Audrey Bell. When she got to the nurses' working table, she found a group of bullet fragments and turned them over to police. Outside the door to the elevator, where the cart of Governor Connally was parked, a bullet bounced on the floor and was handed to Security Officer O. P. Wright. He put it in his pocket to be given later to the Secret Service or the Dallas Police Department.
^*

Admiral Burkley opened the door of Trauma One and edged inside. The place was clean and gleaming; the rows of instruments on sterile napkins sparkled. Only the contour of the sheet on the table spoke of another presence. The clay of John F. Kennedy was cooling. The admiral glanced across the floor and saw a wastebasket. In it were the bent and broken roses which the wife of the mayor had given to Mrs. Kennedy—how long ago? Eighty minutes ago at Love Field.

Two flowers had fallen out of the basket. The admiral-physician picked them up and placed them tenderly in his jacket pocket. Perhaps later, he would give them to Mrs. Kennedy. She might want to treasure the flowers on which the President had fallen and died. In the corridor, Mrs. Kennedy kept the vigil over the door to the room. Doris Nelson asked the Secret Service men what arrangements would be made for the body, and they told her that an undertaker and casket were en route to the hospital. She began to fill out the blanks in the death certificate. It would be signed by Dr. Kemp Clark, the neurosurgeon; the patient died of a brain injury.

Men began to do things by rote. Landrigan phoned Norris Uzee and asked him to lower the hospital flag to half-staff. It was done at once, but no one waiting outside noticed it. Dr.
Clark gave the signed death certificate to Dr. Burkley, and the doctor tried to place it in the pocket with the roses. An FBI man grabbed hospital administrator Price by the arm and whispered: “Don't let anybody know what time the President died—security.” Senator Ralph Yarborough, stunned by the situation, began to realize that a President had been assassinated and he moaned loudly and staggered to an upright column. He required treatment for hysteria and kept muttering: “Horror! Horror!”

In Washington, the tragic, secret word went from Jerry Behn's office to Secret Service Headquarters to Robert F. Kennedy. The phone rang. The voice of J. Edgar Hoover informed the Attorney General that his brother was “in critical condition.” Robert Kennedy listened politely and said: “You may be interested to know that my brother is dead.” Then he called his brother Ted and asked him to please break the news to “mother and our sisters.” It could not be told to the President's father: Joseph P. Kennedy was convalescing from an extensive cerebral hemorrhage.

Mrs. Joseph Kennedy, as small as a vase of violets, took the news standing. “We'll be all right,” she said. Then she put on her coat and walked out of the Kennedy compound on the Massachusetts shore, and paced the beach. The November winds were coming east and the breakers climbed up out of the green troughs white, falling in thunder on the sand. She walked, hands in pockets, the gusts tearing at her hair, with time to dwell on the hardships which can be imposed on a family by the will of God.