The Passage of Power (67 page)

He still couldn’t see anything, so he didn’t see what Youngblood was seeing, as, sitting more erect now, the agent stayed on top of him, shielding his body with his own. He didn’t see what Youngblood was seeing ahead: as the third shot had rung out, a little bit of something gray had seemed to fly up out of Jack Kennedy’s head; then his wife in her pink pillbox hat and pink suit, that seemed suddenly to have patches of something dark on it, was trying to climb onto the long trunk of the limousine, and then was clambering back into the car, where her head was bent over something Youngblood couldn’t see; one of the agents on the Queen Mary’s running board,
Clint Hill, had, a moment after the first shot, sprinted after the limousine as it was accelerating, leapt onto its trunk, grabbed one of its handholds, and was now lying spread-eagled across the trunk of the speeding vehicle, but he managed to raise his head, look down into its rear seat, and then, turning to the follow-up car, make a thumbs-down gesture.

The agents in the Queen Mary were waving at Jacks to stay close. The patrolman, a laconic Texan—
“tight-lipped
and cool,” Youngblood was to call him—pulled up within a few feet of the armored car’s rear bumper, and kept his car there as the two vehicles, with the presidential limousine not many feet ahead of them, roared along the expressway and then swung right at an exit ramp.

The man underneath Rufus Youngblood was lying very quietly, seemingly calmly, except when his body was jolted forward or back as the car braked or accelerated or swerved. His composure would have surprised most people who knew Lyndon Johnson, but not the few who had seen him in other moments of physical danger, including moments when he was under gunfire. Johnson’s customary reaction to physical danger, real or imagined, was so dramatic, almost panicky, that at college he had had the reputation of being
“an
absolute physical coward.” All during World War II he had done everything he could to avoid combat. Realizing, however, that, “for the sake of political future,” as one of President Roosevelt’s aides wrote, he had to be able to say he had at least been in a combat zone, he went to the South Pacific and flew as an observer on a bomber that was attacked by Japanese Zeroes. And as the Zeroes were heading straight for the bomber, firing as they came, its crew saw Lyndon Johnson climb into the navigator’s bubble so that he could get a better view, and stand there staring right at the oncoming planes, “just as calm,” in the words of one crew member, “as if he were on a sight-seeing tour.” Although his customary reaction to minor pain or illness was “frantic,” “hysterical”—he would, says Posh Oltorf, “complain so often, and so loudly” about indigestion that “you thought he might be dying”—when in 1955, in Middleburg, Virginia, a doctor told Johnson that this time the
“indigestion” was the heart attack he had always feared, Johnson’s demeanor changed. Lying on the floor of Middleburg’s “ambulance”—it was actually a hearse—as it was speeding to Washington, he was composed and cool as he made decisions: telling the doctor and Oltorf, who were riding in the ambulance, what hospital he was to be taken to, which members of his staff should be there when he arrived; telling Oltorf where his will was, and how he wanted its provisions carried out. It was a major heart attack—when he arrived at the hospital, doctors gave him only a fifty-fifty chance of survival—and at one point during the trip Johnson told the doctor that he couldn’t stand the pain. But when the doctor told him that giving him an injection to dull it would require stopping for a few minutes, and that “time means a lot to you,” Johnson said, “If time means a lot, don’t stop.” There were even wry remarks; when the doctor told him that if he recovered, he would never be able to smoke again, he said, “I’d rather have my pecker cut off.” Lady Bird was always saying that her husband was
“a
good man in a tight spot.” Oltorf had never believed her—until that ambulance ride. He had thought he knew Johnson so well, he was to say; he had realized on that ride that he didn’t know him at all. This, in Dallas, was a tight spot. Lying on the floor of the back seat with Youngblood still on top of him, Johnson asked the Secret Service man what had happened. Youngblood said that “the President must have been shot or wounded,” that they were heading for a hospital, that he didn’t know anything, and that he wanted everyone to stay down—Johnson down on the floor—until he found out.

“All
right, Rufus,” Lyndon Johnson said. A reporter who later asked Youngblood to describe the tone of Johnson’s voice as he said this summarized the agent’s answer in a single word: “calm.”

A moment later, the voice on the shortwave radio told Youngblood that they were heading to Parkland Hospital, and the agent, shouting, he was to recall, against the noise of the wind and the wail of police sirens, told Johnson what to do when they arrived: to get out of the car and into some area the Secret Service could make secure without stopping for anything, even to find out what had happened to the President. “I want you and Mrs. Johnson to stick with me and the other agents as close as you can. We are going into the hospital and we aren’t gonna stop for anything or anybody. Do you understand?”

“Okay
, pardner, I understand,” Lyndon Johnson said.

T
HERE WAS
another squealing turn—left onto the entrance ramp to the Parkland Emergency Room; the car skidded so hard that
“I
wondered if they were going to make it,” Lady Bird said—and then the brakes were jammed on so hard that Johnson, and Youngblood, were slammed back against the seat. Then Youngblood’s weight was off him; hands were grabbing his arms and pulling him roughly up out of the car and onto his feet. The white carnation was still in his lapel, somehow untouched, but his left arm and shoulder, that had taken the brunt
of Youngblood’s weight, hurt. There were Secret Service men all around; police all around; guns all around. Then Youngblood and four other agents were surrounding him, the hands were on his arms again, and he was being hustled—almost run—through the entrance to the hospital and through corridors; close behind him was another agent,
George Hickey, holding an AR-15 automatic rifle at the ready. He was later to say that he had been rushed into the hospital so fast, his view blocked by the men around him, that he hadn’t even seen the President’s car, or what was in it. Lady Bird, rushed along right behind him by her own cordon of agents, had seen, in
“one
last look over my shoulder,” “a bundle of pink, just like a drift of blossoms, lying on the back seat. I think it was Mrs. Kennedy lying over the President’s body.”

Lyndon Johnson was being hustled, agents’ hands on his arms, down one hospital corridor after another, turning left, turning right; his protectors were looking for a room that could be made secure; then he was in what seemed like a small white room—it was actually one of three cubicles in the Parkland Minor Medicine section that had been carved out of a larger room by hanging white muslin curtains from ceiling to floor. Two of the cubicles had been unoccupied; in the third, a nurse was treating a patient; the agents were pushing nurse and patient out the door; they were pulling down the shades and blinds over the windows. Then he and Lady Bird were standing against a blank, uncurtained wall at the back of the furthest cubicle. Youngblood was standing in front of them, telling another agent to station himself outside the door to the corridor, and not to let anyone in—not anyone—unless he knew his face. Three of the other agents were stationed in the cubicle between this one and the corridor. Someone was saying Youngblood should get to a telephone and report to his superiors in Washington; Youngblood was saying,
“Look
here, I’m not leaving this man to phone
anyone.
” Remembering that a Vice President’s daughters did not normally receive Secret Service protection, he asked Lady Bird where the girls were at the moment (Lynda Bird was at the University of Texas, Lucy at her high school in Washington), told one of the agents to call headquarters and have guards assigned to them immediately, and then to get back to the cubicle as fast as possible.

Someone brought two folding chairs into the cubicle, and Lady Bird sat down in one. Lyndon Johnson remained standing, his back against the far wall. As had been the case in every crisis in his life, a first consideration was to have people loyal to him around him, aides and allies who could be counted on to take his orders without question. He knew the Texas congressmen who had been in the motorcade must be nearby, and he asked Youngblood to have them found, and
Homer Thornberry was brought in, and after a while
Jack Brooks. His aide
Cliff Carter came in and handed him a container of coffee, which he drank.

And then, for long minutes, no one came in. Lyndon Johnson stood with his back against the far wall. It was very quiet in the little curtained space.
“We
didn’t know what was happening,” Thornberry was to recall. “We did not know about the condition of the President.… I walked out once to try to see if I could
find out what was going on, but either nobody knew or they didn’t tell me.” Johnson asked Youngblood to send an agent to get some news, and he returned with
Roy Kellerman, chief of the White House Secret Service detail, but Kellerman didn’t provide much information.
“Mr
. Johnson asked me the condition of the people and the Governor,” he was to relate. “I advised him that the Governor was taken up to surgery, that the doctors were still working on the President. He asked me to keep him informed of their condition.”

There was more waiting.
“Lyndon
and I didn’t speak,” Lady Bird Johnson says. “We just
looked
at each other, exchanging messages with our eyes. We knew what it might mean.” Johnson said very little to anyone, moved around very little, just stood there. Asked to describe him in the hospital, Thornberry uses the same word Youngblood used to describe him in the car.
“All
through the time he was … very calm,” Thornberry was to say. Kellerman’s deputy
Emory Roberts came in and said that he had seen the President as doctors were working over him in the emergency room, and said, as he was to recall, that
“I
did not think the President could make it”—and that Johnson should leave the hospital, get to
Air Force One “immediately,” and take off for Washington. Youngblood agreed. The word “conspiracy” was in the air. Not merely the President but the governor had been shot; who knew if Johnson might himself have been the next target had not Youngblood so quickly covered his body with his own? The Secret Service wanted to get Johnson out of Dallas, or at least onto the plane, which would, in their view, be the most secure place in the city.

But Johnson did not agree. No one had yet given him any definite word on the President’s condition; no one had yet made, in that little curtained room, any explicit statement. In Brooks’ recollection, he said,
“Well
, we want to get the official report on that rather than [from] some individual.” He wouldn’t leave without permission from the President’s staff, he said, preferably from the staff member who was, among the White House staffers in Dallas, the closest to the President: Ken O’Donnell. Youngblood and Roberts continued, in Youngblood’s phrase, to “press Johnson” to leave the hospital “immediately”—they “suggested that he [the Vice President] think it over, as he would have to be sworn in”—but Johnson didn’t change his mind “about staying put until there was some definite word on the President.”

And there was still, for minutes that seemed very long, no definite word.
“Every
face that came in, you searched for the answers you must know,” Lady Bird Johnson was to say. Lyndon Johnson still stood against the wall in that small, curtained space, his wife sitting beside him, two or three men off to one side, standing silent or occasionally whispering among themselves; standing in front of him,
“always
there was Rufe,” Mrs. Johnson says. Johnson stood there for about thirty-five minutes. Then, at 1:20, O’Donnell appeared at the door and crossed the room to Lyndon Johnson, and seeing the stricken
“face
of Kenny O’Donnell who loved him so much,” Lady Bird knew.

“He’s
gone,” O’Donnell said, to the thirty-sixth President of the United States.

When the first calls came into George Hunt’s office at
Life
reporting
“that
Kennedy had been shot—at first, that’s all: just that he had been shot,” Russ Sackett recalls—the meeting broke up immediately, with editors and reporters running back to their offices.

While, during the next few minutes, the news was trickling in from Dallas, one decision was made quickly:
Keith Wheeler’s proposed second article on Lyndon Johnson would not run in the next issue of the magazine: there was obviously going to be so much other news that there would be no room for it. About a week later,
William Lambert went in to see executive editor
Ralph Graves and told Graves that any further investigation into Johnson’s finances should be postponed.
“I
told him I thought we ought to give the guy a chance,” he said about the President, and Graves agreed, saying, in Lambert’s recollection: “If you hadn’t said that, I was going to tell you that.”