The Day Kennedy Was Shot (34 page)

The city and the nation was in a daze. The President had been shot. It was not known that he was dead but the shock spread like mist along a shore. Lyndon Johnson was President but did not know it. To keep him secure in that little cubbyhole, Congressmen and Secret Service agents kept reminding the tall Texan that the assassination could well be part of a much bigger day of terror. Johnson began to believe it. Emory Roberts sug
gested that Johnson leave at once for
Air Force One.
Johnson said he would not leave, and would not board
AF-1
“without a suggestion or permission of the Kennedy staff.” Roberts asked Kenny O'Donnell and he said: “Yes.” Johnson refused to move. Roberts returned to O'Donnell and asked again: “Is it all right for Mr. Johnson to board
Air Force One
now?” “Yes” O'Donnell said, “Yes.”

Mrs. Johnson asked if she could stop a moment and see Mrs. Kennedy again, and Mrs. Connally. Agents formed an advance guard for her. The new First Lady had a cast-iron gentility. She was opposed to violence of any kind, even in speech. She was surrounded by marching men, marching through corridors of silent men and, when the ranks broke, the young widow was standing before her. Mrs. Johnson's opinion of Mrs. Kennedy had been summed up in a sentence years before: “She was a girl who was born to wear white gloves.” Mrs. Kennedy's opinion of Mrs. Johnson had also been summed up long ago: “If Lyndon asked, I think Lady Bird would walk down Pennsylvania Avenue naked.” No one spoke. There was nothing worth saying. No miracle could repair the personal wound, the epicenter of which stood in silence, clasping and unclasping the bloody gloves.

Mrs. Johnson began to weep. She grabbed the young woman and said: “Jackie, I wish to God there was something I could do.” The dazed expression was on Mrs. Kennedy's face. It was on Mrs. Johnson's face. In an hour, it would be on the face of the world. Lady Bird Johnson walked away, looking back and shaking her head and wiping her eyes. She went upstairs to Nellie Connally and the women hugged each other. Mrs. Johnson said: “Nellie, he is going to get well.”

The dark, intelligent head of Malcolm Kilduff was also in the swirling fogs of bewilderment. He met Evelyn Lincoln, Mary Gallagher, and Pamela Turnure near the emergency area entrance. The face of Evelyn Lincoln was stricken. “Mac, how is he?” The three women stared at him, waiting. The assistant
press secretary wanted to tell the truth, but the words hung in his throat. He couldn't even say them to himself. He waved his hands feebly and left them.

He walked dazedly in the opposite direction and met Kenneth O'Donnell. “Kenny” said Kilduff, “this is a terrible time to approach you on this, but the world has got to know that President Kennedy is dead.” The presidential assistant looked surprised. “Well, don't they know it already?” To him, it was as it was to so many others: President Kennedy seemed to have died a long, long time ago. The horror-stricken mind, racing at top speed, seemed to have lived with this melancholy truth for a long time. The assistant press secretary was saying that the world did not know.

“Well, you are going to have to make the announcement.” O'Donnell thought about it. He became conscious of a new order of things. “Go ahead, but you better check it with Mr. Johnson.” The press man nodded, and shuffled off through the rabbit warren of passageways, wondering why he could not say the words: “President Kennedy is dead.” As he approached Johnson's hideaway, Mac Kilduff found himself walking behind Mrs. Johnson.

The new President was sitting on an ambulance cart, his legs dangling. He nodded to Mrs. Johnson and returned to a moody look at the floor. Kilduff swallowed hard and said: “Mr. President. . .” Johnson brought his head up sharply; Mrs. Johnson turned as she was about to sit, and held a hand against her mouth. This was the first time Lyndon Baines Johnson had been so addressed; it was the first time he
knew
that he was the thirty-sixth President of the United States.

“Mr. President,” the young man said, “I have to announce the death of President Kennedy to the press. Is it all right with you?” Johnson hopped off the cart and jiggled a hand in his trouser pocket. “No, Mac,” he said. “I think we had better get out of here and get back to the plane before you announce it.”
Kilduff had not thought of the assassination as anything more widespread than the death of Kennedy. “We don't know whether this is a worldwide conspiracy,” Mr. Johnson said, quoting Emory Roberts and Clinton Hill, “whether they are after me as they were after President Kennedy, or whether they are after Speaker McCormack or Senator Hayden.” He looked up and saw the fresh shock in Kilduff's eyes. “We just don't know,” the President said.

Johnson looked at the Secret Service agents. “I think we had better wait a minute. Are they prepared to get me out of here?” Kilduff thanked the President and went back to discuss the matter with Roy Kellerman. The Secret Service began to lay its plans. If this was a plot, a conspiracy of some dimensions, Kellerman said he would feel better if they got Johnson back on the plane. Roberts and Youngblood wanted him to get aboard
AF-1
and fly at once to the White House. In that building, he could be given the utmost protection. Until then the craft was a sealed edifice with wings. It could be isolated from the rest of the field, from the world, and protected. It also had direct communication with Washington.
Air Force One
—or 26000—had brand-new, highly sophisticated equipment, some of which was directly related to The Bagman and his “football.” The Vice-President's plane did not have this equipment; neither did the third presidential 707, which was en route home with Rusk aboard.

Kennedy's lieutenant, Kenneth O'Donnell, was not a man to quarrel with the political dice. He was sickened, but not to the point of misunderstanding the shift of power. He was a Kennedy man all the way, but there was no Kennedy. It seemed to him that at one minute he was sitting in a car tallying votes along the curb, and that of the next he was chief usher at an Irish wake. He went to visit Johnson.

The new President, the man who had assured Mr. Rubin, the restaurateur that his face would never be among the chased glass squares of the Chief Executives, was frightened. He had
assimilated the doleful counsel around him, and believed it. In a trice, he became the only President who ever witnessed the assassination of a President, and it was too much for one set of shoulders to bear: at times his ideas had been treated with contempt by Kennedy's palace guard; now the palace guard attended him and called him “Mr. President.” He thought of Harry Truman who, on an April day in 1945, chatted with old Senate colleagues and planned late-night poker games, who was asked to report to the White House and, in the blink of an eye, found that he was President of the United States. He thought of another Johnson named Andrew, who was Vice-President to a weary President named Abraham Lincoln, and who found himself at 7:22 of a Saturday morning the new Chief Executive. And Teddy Roosevelt, inaccessible in the Adironack Mountains when McKinley lay dying of a bullet wound; Calvin Coolidge being sworn in beside a kerosene lamp in his father's house in Northampton . . . Johnson knew American history.

The President asked O'Donnell if it might not be better to get to Carswell Air Force Base. It was military; security would be easy. No, it would not be better. Carswell was thirty-one miles away. No, Mr. President. The safest course would be to traverse those two miles from this hospital to that airport. Two miles. O'Donnell also pointed out that the short trip should be all the safer because it was not scheduled. No one knew about it.

Part of Johnson's political philosophy was to seek intelligent help with the utmost candor. He knew O'Donnell was a “take charge” man and the new President looked him in the eye. “I am in your hands now,” he said. O'Donnell misunderstood. He thought that Johnson was asking for a pre-endorsement of his actions by the Kennedy group. To the contrary, Johnson was as dazed as any of the others and was in urgent need of good counsel.

“Well,” Johnson said, “how about Mrs. Kennedy?” The small, thin smile adorned O'Donnell's face. “She will not leave the hos
pital,” he said, “without the President.” There was no doubt about which President. Mrs. Johnson nodded approvingly when her husband said that he would not go back without Mrs. Kennedy and the body of her husband. The smile disappeared and O'Donnell said that he still thought the best move would be for President Johnson and his “people” to get aboard that plane now. “I don't want to leave Mrs. Kennedy like this,” Johnson said. Perhaps, he conceded, it would be just as well to wait for her on the plane.

Had O'Donnell been clearheaded, he would have recognized that, even though Johnson automatically assumed the burden of the Presidency the moment Kennedy was incapacitated by a rifle shot, he had none of the executive powers until he was sworn in. He was President but could not act as one until that oath had been taken. It was printed in almost all almanacs and could be administered by a notary public. This lapse cost the nation the services of a Chief Executive for two hours and five minutes. All Johnson had was the title.

Congressman Homer Thornberry of Texas came into the little room. The silence had thickened. Congressman Jack Brooks stepped inside and thought he was intruding. Someone took his arm and told him to stay. Johnson asked if he could see Mrs. Kennedy for a moment. Agent Clint Hill shook his head negatively. “You should not leave this room, Mr. President.” Kenneth O'Donnell excused himself and left. He would like to get Mrs. Kennedy away from Trauma One before the casket arrived. He needed a good reason.

The Secret Service was, to a man, unsentimental. Their work consisted of protecting the life of the President. Officially they would not be involved in tracking an assassin. The agents were told that, if necessary, they were to place their bodies between a potential assassin and the President. They had lost one today. It was a dark and dismal thing for them to contemplate, and they were going to go “overboard” to protect the new one. They advised Johnson to get aboard
Air Force One
at once and
to take off for Washington. Johnson was shocked. He asked where Mrs. Kennedy and the casket would go.
“Air Force Two,”
they said. Emory Roberts repeated this “suggestion.”

Morally, Mr. and Mrs. Johnson could not consider the proposal. They would not fly back to the capital alone, with a dead President and a grieving widow on a following plane. Johnson said that he would agree to get aboard
Air Force One
, but he would wait “for President and Mrs. Kennedy.” That settled it. Agent Youngblood filled a gap of conversational vacuum by announcing that the Secret Service had located one Johnson daughter, Lynda, in a Texas school and that she was now protected. The younger one had been found in a Washington, D.C., school and an agent was at her side.

The Johnsons, sickened and frightened, realized the country was certain to interpret a quick return to Washington as “fleeing” and leaving the widow alone with the body of her husband. The President solicited advice from everyone around him. He received none from his congressional confreres, plenty from the Secret Service, some from Cliff Carter, his assistant, but no one thought of the oath of office. If it occurred to the President, he did not mention it, for the same reason that he would not depart alone on
Air Force One
—it would look like a precipitous power grab. No one recited the substance of Article 2, Section I (7) of the Constitution of the United States, which is explicit: “Before he enter on the
execution
of his office, he shall take the following oath or affirmation . . .”

Legally Lyndon Johnson was no longer Vice-President and had none of the powers of that office; he was now President of the United States, with none of the powers of that office. He could not have protected the country if, as some surmised, the death of Kennedy was part of a much larger plot to bring the government to its knees.

One Secret Service agent returned to the scene of the crime. Forrest V. Sorrels of the Dallas office had an intuitive feeling that this case could be solved and closed out quickly if the police and sheriff's deputies sealed the Dealey Plaza area and endured the tedium of interrogating everyone. Someone, he was certain, saw something. That someone could be lost within minutes unless a clearing house for affidavits was set up. He had worked with Chief Curry and the Dallas police and with Sheriff Decker and the county officers. Sorrels, respecting both, feared a fatal division of authority or, worse, a conglomerate mass of law officers working without direction.

He was back in the Texas School Book Depository building within twenty-five minutes. Carefully, he had walked on the overpass, down through the parking lot and grassy knoll, and around the railroad yards behind the building. He saw a Negro standing at the loading platform and said: “Did you see anyone run out the back?” The man glanced up from his reverie and said: “No, sir.” Without challenge, Sorrels went into the building at 12:55 and saw groups of officers sifting and questioning employees. The Secret Service agent, who had no police power in a Dallas County homicide, watched for a few minutes and then walked out the front entrance, still without being asked who he was or why he was there.

He saw more policemen on the lawn and more citizens babbling and pointing. Sorrels, raising his voice, said: “Did anyone here see anything?” A man pointed to another in a tin hat. The Secret Service agent was not in communication with Brennan, who had watched the assassin from the low wall in Dealey Plaza. This was an accident because Sorrels did not know where the shots came from and had walked through the Texas School Book Depository only because he thought that one of the employees may have seen gunfire.

Brennan glanced at the Secret Service identification which was flashed at him. “Did you see anything?” Sorrels said. The
pipe fitter pointed to an upper window of the building. He began his story all over again. “I could see the man taking deliberate aim and saw him fire the third shot.” Brennan said that the rifle was then pulled back into the window slowly, as though the rifleman was studying the effect of the shot at his leisure. Brennan pointed to the Negro boy Euins and said that he too had witnessed the shooting.