The Day Kennedy Was Shot (88 page)

Lyndon Johnson understood power and its uses. Like a slow and ambitious student, he had studied twice as hard as his competitors in the Congress and at the White House. He had a more practical feel for government than his predecessor because he had watched the wheels of congressional committee spin eccentrically, and he understood the relationship—the true relationship—of the men on the Hill with the men on the High Bench, in relation to the Man in the White House.

Each of these was the right man for his time. The country had been aroused by the youth and exuberance of John F. Kennedy, who admonished citizens and legislators to execute his plans, not because it was politically right, but because it was
good for America. The new frontier, as was true of the new gimmickry, was in outer space. Kennedy could draw more attention shooting his cuffs than Johnson could declaring war.

The country was not prepared to receive Lyndon Johnson. To retreat a step, it was not prepared to lose its Galahad in Texas. In pain, the people acquired guilt. They had felt it, in a similar situation, three times in the past hundred years. This time the scars would be deeper because of the almost instant communication of television. They
saw
what happened in Texas. They saw it again and again, as a repentant slayer relives his crime.

Those who had opposed John F. Kennedy were now prepared to receive him. The people who voted against him wept. The Congressmen who had disarrayed his program, stifled his progressive measures in committee, beat him on the floor of House and Senate with loud “Nays,” worked hard this night on speeches of sanctification and superlatives to be laid reverently in the back of
The Congressional Record.

The mass of people, like lovers who have strayed, desired to touch him. They would pray for him, defend him, buy a color photo of him or an ashtray with his name on it, adore his widow and vote for his brothers, change the names of boulevards, schools, hospitals, capes, and stadia to Kennedy. The people would resurrect him and they could not do this without spiritually rejecting Lyndon Baines Johnson.

The new face was older, tougher, earthbound. The features were not intended for flights to the stars. The accent was Texas. Ironically none of the Texans around the bed could hear it. The new man understood the phrases: to think; to do; to produce. He knew more about them than Kennedy, and he had just completed the first eleven hours of earning his salary. And yet efficiency was not good enough. Grief is not an intellectual exercise. The national heart was depressed; the country was taking its pulse.

“It's getting late, Mr. President,” Cliff Carter said. It was a
hint to close the book for the day. If he said: “Stay,” they would remain seated. The brown eyes opened wide, moving from man to man. “It is,” he said. The President propped himself up on one elbow. “Now you all go to bed and get some sleep.” He looked at the little clock on the night table. It was nine minutes past three. “We'll be leaving here at eight in the morning.” If there was shock, none showed it. They would be up at seven. Moyers asked if he should shut the television set off. “No,” the President said. “I'll take care of that.”

They said “Goodnight, Mr. President.” As they left, he was still awake, still looking.

To the witnesses, the morticians were, in a manner of speaking, magicians. They had been given a broken shell of a man, and they had walked around him many times, whispering incantations to each other, applying the laying on of hands, and the shell began to look more and more like John F. Kennedy. The brows, the cheeks were smoothed outward and downward. The natural complexion of the President seemed to return. Thatches of thick chestnut hair were applied to the head and were combed out.

It had not hurt as much for the Greers and Kellermans and Burkleys and McHughs to stare at him when he was torn and broken. It hurt now. An undershirt, a pair of trousers, a white shirt were put on the unresisting frame and, when the tie was knotted, he had everything but breath. Greer turned away. Kellerman found it difficult to believe. Perhaps McHugh or Burkley might have fleetingly remembered the old story about the genie who could grant but one wish.

The entire evening had been morbid and gruesome, but the government had insisted on having witnesses. Death, in this case, was not a personal matter but an affair of state. From the moment the first shot in Dealey Plaza split the sky until the last volley drifted across the green hill at Arlington Cemetery, ev
erything that happened to this man, everything that was noted, surmised, or conjectured, every conclusion for good or ill would become history.

The dark jacket was put on. It was buttoned and the hands were entwined across the front. The shoes were put on. Hagan and his men walked around the body again and again, tugging at wrinkled cloth, smoothing the hang of the suit of clothes, studying the serene features from the sides, the front, and even from the back of the head. All of it would have to be done again, when the body left the table, but the men wanted to be reasonably sure that they were satisfied with their work.

The long night was running out. There was a morning chill on the stone of Saint Peter's Basilica in Rome. The amber rays from the high windows crossed swords inside the nave. Paul VI knelt at an ornate
prie-dieu
before the main altar, the dark baldachinos lifting a canopy over the Host as the assembled monsignori carried the Pope's heavy brocade vestments forward to cover the prayer bench.

Thus began the pontifical requiem Mass for the repose of the soul of John F. Kennedy, a supplicant Roman Catholic, a sinner. The Pope clasped his hands, the fingertips touching each other, and he began his entreaty to Almighty God by asking forgiveness of sin. The early communicants at St. Peter's Basilica, pious Romans and inquisitive tourists, saw the Pope and knelt on the marble floor in astonishment. Prayers had been assaulting the gates of heaven for John F. Kennedy in many tongues and many temples, but if the credos of the Catholic Church are to be accepted, the real authority, the valid plea for the soul came from the lips of Father Oscar Huber, the little priest who had never seen a live President.

Thousands of miles to the west, Vincent Drain rested his eyes. If he had a prayer to say, it had been said. The tanker was high in the sky and a little smile crossed his lips. The FBI agent
approached the ladder laden with packages of evidence, the military personnel had saluted him.

As he was smiling through the closed eyes, he felt something move at his feet and looked down to find a sergeant removing his shoes. “Hey,” the FBI man said, “what are you doing?” “You look like you need rest, mister.” The shoes came off. The jacket was hung. Then sleep fled, and Vincent Drain went forward with his evidence, to sit behind the captain and await the pink flush of dawn on the flight deck.

In London, Sir Alec Douglas Home knelt in Westminster Cathedral, peering like an emaciated owl over the tops of his spectacles. The first British services for Kennedy had begun. In Paris, groups of blue-clad laborers stood before the window of a television shop, studying the animation of a face which was no more. Down the Kurfürstendamm, past the Kaiser Wilhelm Kirche and the zoo paraded the remnants of the torch carriers of Berlin.

There were torchbearers in Bern, too, but the Swiss started before dawn. In the black velvet of the hills, they had made a glacial river of fire descending toward the old city. Thousands of Britons braved the needle veils of morning rain to stand in reverence before the United States embassy in London. A long time ago, the dead President had called this home. He and young Joe had come here to study and to be at the side of their father, Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr.

The Kennedy boys had complained at wearing homburgs and carrying furled umbrellas, but they had come to know the ambassador as an absolute authority. They had made fun of each other in the embassy when the hats went on. The people who braved the morning drizzle knew nothing of these things, but they paid their homage in rain because they felt they had lost “well, a cousin of sorts.”

Everywhere the hearts of the multitude felt regret at the passing of a man. Governments were different. Official grief
was stereotyped: a wreath; a warm cablegram to a widow; signing a book in an embassy foyer; an emissary at a funeral. Governments are concerned with the living. The morning reaction would be coming in from everywhere. Britain understood Kennedy, but could the United Kingdom depend upon Johnson? Germany believed that the format and policy of the Kennedy regime would remain intact, but would the spirit be alive? Argentina was worried. Italy would appreciate assurances of continued support.

France, well, France would send De Gaulle to find out for himself. America, too, was fearful. It had gone to bed with its confidence shaken. How much did it know about Lyndon Johnson? Didn't he have a heart attack? Who succeeds Johnson? Well, there was old reliable John McCormack, seventy-one years of age, Speaker of the House. He was an excellent politician, an ideal lieutenant—but a captain? Politically and philosophically, he was hardly sophisticated. Behind him, in line of succession, came Senator Carl Hayden of Arizona. He was eighty-six years of age, a man revered by his confreres as a great American. The mileage on his mind was insuperable. In a day, America had lost its youth.

The casket was wheeled sideward toward the table. They touched. The witnesses offered assistance, but Hagan declined. He and his men worked easily. Both lids of the casket were open. On a signal, they lifted the body, kicked the autopsy table away, and held the body over the casket and lowered it gently. The final tender service to the flesh had begun. The men walked back and forth around the box, straightening feet and seams and shirring. The tie was firmly held under a clasp, and the jacket was draped softly downward.

The hair was carefully combed once more. A rosary was carefully laced through the fingers. The morticians examined their work from every side. They rubbed cloths over the dark
mahogany, where hands had touched it. Joseph Hagan looked across the room at the witnesses. “We are ready,” he said softly. The lid came down.

The word reached the seventeenth floor. The Attorney General looked at his watch. It was close to 4
A.M.
Relatives and friends hurried to get coats, women to powder. A pall of cigarette smoke hung in the sitting room and it undulated as the guests made ready. They had served the widow well. Conversations of many hues had diverted her mind from the permanent shock. She had been forced, for a time, to think of other things. She had lapsed into a staring, dull expression, but there was always someone present to ask a question, tell an anecdote, make a suggestion.

Robert F. Kennedy had been heroic. He sublimated his crushing sorrow to serve hers. It is possible that Robert Kennedy had more courage than either Joe or Jack or Ted. Everything affected him more and showed less. He often felt pity, rancor, indignation, contempt, and sorrow—and denied them. His likes were as fierce as his dislikes and as possessive. He was small and tough and shyly sentimental. It was the Attorney General who originally divided the world into “them” and “us.”

Mrs. Kennedy spoke this evening of her husband as though he were living. Bobby spoke of him as dead. He had spent time in the kitchen with McNamara and others discussing the Kennedy regime, the Kennedy policies, as though they had been killed in Dallas, and he wondered aloud if Lyndon Johnson would try to resurrect them. He had loved his brother slavishly, so that if an error was committed, he wanted to take the onus upon himself. When Robert irritated men of lofty station, they complained to the President, and he smiled and said: “I can handle Bobby.”

He could. Jack was dead, and old Joe could not speak, and for a time Robert F. Kennedy would wander in the fields of McLean, Virginia, with his Newfoundland dog, wondering about
himself, asking himself if the attainment of power was worth the result, brooding over Jacqueline's brooding, worried because the face in that majestic office wasn't Jack's. There was no one to handle Robert Kennedy. For several months, he would not be able to handle himself.

At the stone dock, a Navy ambulance was backed tight. Limousines sat in the dark. Ranking naval officers, summoned by subordinates, appeared. The witnesses who had waited all night, stood for a moment. Kellerman met Hill and Landis in the corridor, and led the party to an anteroom. The Attorney General, head down, took his sister-in-law's elbow. Behind them, in slow procession, were the Kennedy sisters, Ted Kennedy, Powers, O'Donnell, O'Brien, McNamara, the old friends, the new Cabinet members—they filed on in greater numbers than anyone had thought.

Naval personnel stood around the casket. Kellerman smiled briefly. “We'll take care of that,” he said. The Secret Service agents wheeled it out onto the dark dock and into the ambulance. The trolley was taken from underneath and pulled back to the autopsy room. Roy Kellerman made the arrangements. He held a whispered conversation with the Attorney General and came back to the dock. “Bill,” he said to Greer, “you drive. I'll sit up with you. Mrs. Kennedy and the Attorney General are going to ride in back with the body. Clint, take the second car.”

There were motorcycle policemen in a wedge on Palmer Road. Kellerman went out and told them the route back to the White House. He wanted no sirens, no noise. They would aim for about thirty miles per hour and hold it. The cops could get the cortege through the red lights. They would go down Wisconsin and then left to the White House. At the northwest gate on Pennsylvania Avenue, the motorcycles would turn away, permitting the ambulance and the automobiles to go through.

Kellerman hurried back to the dock. He saw the widow stooping to get through the back, where, as before, she sat on
one side of the casket and Robert sat on the other. They drew the shades. The doors of the limousines were slamming. Drivers put their lights on. Officers of the United States Navy stood on the dock at salute. The faces, the uniforms, the rank were blurred in the night light. A few enlisted men had put white caps on and stood on the ground, saluting.