The Passage of Power (75 page)

But this time he couldn’t give in to his feelings.
“I
knew I could not allow the tide of grief to overwhelm me,” he was to say. “The consequences of all my actions were too great for me to become immobilized now with emotion.… I knew it was imperative that I grasp the reins of power and do so without delay. Any hesitation or wavering, any false step, any sign of self-doubt, could have been disastrous. The nation was in a state of shock and grief. The times cried out for leadership.… The entire world was watching us through a magnifying glass.… I had to prove myself.”

And, knowing what had to be done, and that only he could do it, he did it.

L
IFTING
A
IR
F
ORCE
O
NE
off the Love Field runway in the takeoff so steep that to
Sid Davis, watching from the tarmac, it seemed
“almost
vertical,” Colonel Swindal turned northeast. He had leveled off at twenty-nine thousand feet when his Air Force command post advised him of tornadoes over Arkansas, dead ahead. Taking the big blue-and-white jet up to forty-one thousand feet, high enough to fly over the storm, he roared toward Washington, with a strong tailwind behind him, at more than six hundred miles per hour. At every Air Force base along his
flight path, jet fighter planes sat on runways with their pilots already strapped into the cockpits, ready to take off at the first hint of danger; in the bases’ radar shacks, men sat watching for any unidentified blip on their screens, for who could know yet whether the assassination had been the first step in some Soviet or Cuban plot, and Air Force One the next target;
“who
knew then,” as
Tom Wicker was to write, “who had pulled the trigger or ordered the shots,” who knew whether Lyndon Johnson, “even while aloft on the way to Washington … might have to confront a fearful challenge?” Along the Rio Grande, the Mexican border was being sealed to keep conspirators from escaping.

A
S THE PLANE
carrying two Presidents, “one alive and one dead,” as a journalist was to put it, flew across the country, beneath it, all along its route, and in a thousand towns and cities from coast to coast, flags were being lowered to half-staff, and the bells of churches were starting to toll.

In Los Angeles, the rush of automobiles on the freeways began to slow, and then to halt, as drivers stopped their cars as they heard the bulletins coming over their radios. Motorists behind them, jumping out of their cars to expostulate, got the news from the drivers ahead, and stood in stunned silence, listening to the bulletins through the windows. In New York, traffic came to a standstill on a
thousand streets and avenues across the five boroughs—and angry horns would start to blare, and then, the
New York Times
reported, “went soundless as word of the President’s death filtered from driver to driver.” On Manhattan’s crowded streets and avenues, at every red light “the cry,” as the
Times
reported, “cascaded from car to car, from pedestrian to motorist: ‘Is it true?’ ” A driver whose car didn’t have a radio stopped in the middle of traffic, walked over to a sidewalk lunch stand, and asked the question of the vendor, who was sitting on a stool, staring down at the sidewalk. “Yes,” was the reply, “he’s dead.” In cars that had pulled over to the curb, radios were playing, and the car windows were open, and around them, knots of people were standing, and as they heard the bulletins, people clapped their hands to their mouths in horror.

Dusk had begun to fall, and marquee lights had been lit at Broadway’s theaters in preparation for the evening’s performances. First at one theater, and then at another and another, the lights went off, and after a while signs were posted that the performances were canceled. At dusk, automatic timers switched on Times Square’s huge, garishly illuminated signs. One by one, the signs went dark. Along Fifth Avenue, stores had already put up their Christmas lighting and installed their spectacular Christmas displays in their windows. They turned off the lighting, and the windows went dark—except for a few: in one of them, at Saks Fifth Avenue, salespeople came into the window and carried away the mannequins, and then carried in a large photograph of President Kennedy, which they placed on a chair, and flanked it with urns filled with red roses. A crowd gathered in front of the window, crying. In the windows of other stores, television sets had been placed, and crowds stood in front of them, watching the news. And over the noises of the avenue came the sound of bells; the chimes of St. Patrick’s Cathedral had begun to toll.

The news came so fast. The first bulletins (
SHOTS FIRED—PRESIDENT HIT—UNKNOWN HOW BADLY
) had begun at about 1:34, Eastern Standard Time—but they were confused, unclear. As Air Force One was turning northeast toward Washington, it was still barely an hour since
Walter Cronkite had said it was apparently official: the President was dead. Pearl Harbor had been, as one historian was to put it,
“the
last thunderbolt of comparable magnitude,” but it had “belonged to another communications era. Radio was in its heyday then.… Now it had been replaced by TV and the transistor.” Speed—together with the fact that the news came as a running account, almost as it was happening—intensified the shock. America was convulsed with grief and horror.

O
NE ELEMENT IN THE UNCERTAINTY
was the fact that for some time the United States did not know the whereabouts of its new President. The exact time John F. Kennedy died—whether he was killed by the bullet that shattered his brain at 12:30 p.m. or whether his time of death was the time, “approximately one o’clock,” at which the doctors at Parkland pronounced him dead—would become the subject of endless dispute, but the time at which it was announced to
the world, by Malcolm Kilduff to the press corps in the nurses’ classroom at Parkland, was 1:36, more than half an hour later than the doctors’ pronouncement. So for a period of time that was at least thirty-six minutes and possibly more than an hour, the world did not know that Kennedy was dead. Lyndon Johnson had been President for at least thirty-six minutes before the world knew it. And when the world found out that he was President, it was still not told where he was. Kilduff told the press corps that, as the
New York Times
reported,
“Mr
. Johnson, who had not yet been sworn in, was safe … at an unannounced place.” Walter Cronkite had to say, on
CBS, that
“Vice
President Johnson has left the hospital … but we do not know to where he has proceeded.” (
“We
began to be concerned about where Lyndon Johnson was, and when—and where—he might be taking the oath of office,” Cronkite was to recall.) The place was not announced for about an hour. At 2:04, when Johnson was back on
Air Force One,
ABC still had to report that
“there
has been no immediate word on when (or where) Mr. Johnson will take the oath of office.” Two thirty-five p.m. was when ABC reported that
“we
have learned from our man in Dallas that Lyndon Johnson will be sworn in shortly at Love Field.” (He was sworn in at 2:38.) So for about an hour, an hour of tension and fear, America was not sure of the whereabouts of its President. During this period, little more than rumors (
“It
appeared Vice President Johnson might have been struck. He walked into the hospital holding one arm as if he had been hit by one of the bullets”;
“We
now have a report that is unconfirmed, I repeat this is unconfirmed, that Vice President Johnson has suffered a heart attack”)—rumors quickly denied—were all the world was told about him. It was not until 2:49, eleven minutes after Johnson had taken the oath from Judge Hughes, and
Sid Davis had left the plane and given a pool report to the press—after Air Force One had taken off—and reporters had raced to find telephones to call their city desks, that the world was given definite information. Then, for more than two hours, while Johnson was on Air Force One, America, except for the handful of people contacted over the plane’s radio, was again out of touch with its President.

Anxiety and uncertainty about more than the new President. As Air Force One flew—eight miles up—across America, the country beneath it was being swept with rumors.

Twenty minutes into the flight, television networks announced the death of the Dallas police officer,
J. D. Tippit, and twenty minutes later that a former Marine named Oswald had been arrested, and then facts, or rather alleged facts, started to emerge about Oswald’s stay in Russia, about his application for Soviet citizenship, and his links with pro-Castro groups. Little was known definitively about him as yet, however, and there was no conclusion about whether one man or several men had fired at the presidential car: according to some reports, two heads had been seen at the window from which the shots were reported to have come; other reports said that shots had been fired not only from that window but from the triple overpass or the grassy knoll.

And these rumors fed deep fears: was the assassination a coup? Was it part of a plot—a wider plot—to take over the government? Might the implications even go beyond a coup?; while Air Force One was aloft, there were vague reports of a troop alert in Germany; the alert was, in fact, only part of a general step-up in the level of defense status ordered for all United States forces by Secretary McNamara, but, as one observer was to write,
“the
German alert seemed especially ominous, hinting at massive troop concentrations throughout Europe.”
“People
were desperately unsure of what would happen next,” Wicker was to write. “The world, it seemed, was a dark and malignant place; the chill of the unknown shivered across the nation.”

Newspapers that sent reporters out into the street to obtain reactions received many comments like the one made by
Ulrick O’Sullivan of Chicago.
“It
could mean an awful change in the world. It all depends on how Johnson handle[s] it.”

A
BOARD
A
IR
F
ORCE
O
NE
, there were, behind the cockpit, three sections, and two of them were so filled with grief that there seemed room for no other emotion. In the front section, the main passenger compartment, the two reporters aboard,
Newsweek
’s
Charles Roberts and the AP’s
Merriman Smith, were sitting in two seats with fixed tables in front of them so that they could type, in the midst of Kennedy staffers and Secret Service men, and Roberts would remember the strangeness of the
flight—with the air-conditioning working now, the oppressive heat was gone, but the window shades remained closed, so “the ride back was,” he says,
“like
going back in a tunnel, flying 650 [
sic
] miles per hour in a plane we couldn’t see out of”—and the sobs.
Evelyn Lincoln and
Pamela Turnure sat together, not speaking but
“sobbing
every now and then,” their faces streaked from the tears that had run down through their mascara; other Kennedy staffers sat silently, with their heads cupped in their hands—Roberts felt they were doing that to hide their tears, but it was obvious that they were crying, too. As he began typing his story, Roberts tried for a while to get more details from
Roy Kellerman, who was sitting across the table from him, but he didn’t have the heart for it. There were no tears on Kellerman’s face, the reporter was to recall, but
“his
eyes were brimming”—he was one of the “strong men crying on the plane that day.”

In the rear section, the part of the plane that contained the President’s bedroom and, behind it, the rear sitting area, Jacqueline Kennedy, sitting in one of the two remaining seats, was with O’Donnell, O’Brien, Powers and General McHugh—and what she was to describe as
“that
long, long coffin.” Her thoughts were on her husband (“This is my first real political trip,” she said. “I’m so glad I made it. Suppose I hadn’t been there with him.”) and on her duty to him: she had appeared beside Lyndon Johnson at the swearing-in; sending for Kilduff now, she told him,
“You
make sure, Mac—you go and tell [Roberts and Smith] that I came
back here and sat with Jack.” When the White House physician, Dr.
George G. Burkley, suggested she change her bloodstained clothes, she repeated what she had said to Lady Bird:
“No
. Let them see what they’ve done.” O’Brien seemed a man resigned, drained of all vitality; Powers couldn’t stop talking about the Celtic songs Kennedy had loved. McHugh kept repeating,
“He’s
my President—my President.” After a while, they decided to drink, and asked Jackie if she wanted one, and she had a Scotch, the first Scotch she had ever had; she felt it tasted like medicine, and she never learned to like it, but in the weeks to come, Scotch was the only whiskey she would drink; it was a sort of reminder of things she felt she shouldn’t forget.

But in the middle section—the President’s stateroom, where the swearing-in had occurred—there was not only grief but an air of decision, of purposefulness, the same feeling that had come over
Liz Carpenter when Lyndon Johnson had come into that room to arrange the swearing-in: the feeling that “someone was in charge.”

He didn’t have much time. The flight was going to take only two hours and six minutes. In 126 minutes, he was going to have to step off the plane as President—and be ready to
be
President. The stateroom was equipped with small notepads, each page embossed with the presidential seal and the words “Aboard Air Force One.” Sitting down in the President’s high-backed chair, Lyndon Johnson pulled a pad toward him, and wrote on it:

The meaning of those words—that there should be meetings, at which he would speak, of the White House staff, the Cabinet, and the congressional leadership as soon as possible after he landed—was apparent when, a few minutes later, General Clifton (“Watchman” in the Secret Service code names assigned to all members of a presidential or vice presidential traveling party) spoke from the cockpit of Air Force One to
Gerald Behn, chief of the President’s Secret Service detail, at the White House (named “Duplex”) to relay instructions Johnson had just given him.