Where Were You?: America Remembers the JFK Assassination (4 page)

Johnson was the great legislative magician. He passed bills no one else could pass. In fact, in 1957 he passed the first civil rights bill that had been passed since Reconstruction. But under the Kennedys he isn’t allowed to participate in the legislative process at all. Part of it is simply that they’re afraid of Lyndon Johnson. They had seen him in his days of power, how he was the most powerful man in Washington. They want to keep Lyndon Johnson on a very short leash because if they let him off the leash, who knows what he’s going to do? Second, Johnson is always interested in publicity for himself. They’re afraid that if they let him run the legislative program, it will become Lyndon Johnson’s program and not Jack Kennedy’s program. Third is simply the hatred between Johnson and Robert Kennedy.

The Kennedys do everything during that presidency to humiliate Johnson. He’s not allowed to have a plane to go to an event unless Robert Kennedy personally approves it. Every speech, even a minor speech, has to be approved by the Kennedys. They leave him with no power at all. Of
all the things that bothered Johnson, nothing bothered him as much as not being allowed to ride on Air Force One with the president. At one point Kennedy says to Evelyn Lincoln, “You don’t mean he’s asking to ride on Air Force One again? I’ve told him that for reasons of security, the vice president and the president should never travel on the same plane.”

When they get off the plane [in Dallas], the second car of the motorcade is a Secret Service car. They call it the
Queen Mary
because it’s so heavily armored and jammed with Secret Service men with their automatic rifles hidden on the floor and four agents on the running boards. In the first car are Kennedy and Connally, with his leonine head, and Nellie Connally, the former sweetheart of the University of Texas. Then there’s a seventy-five-foot gap. The Secret Service insists there be a seventy-five-foot gap between the president’s cars. Then there’s the Johnson car, which is an open convertible with Johnson sitting on the right in the backseat, Ladybird in the center, and Senator Yarborough on the left; in the front is Secret Service agent Rufus Youngblood.

Suddenly there’s a crack—a sharp, cracking sound. People think it’s a backfire from a motorcycle, or they think it’s a balloon popping. But Connally told me, “I was a hunter. I knew the moment I heard it that it was the crack of a hunting rifle.”

Rufus Youngblood in Johnson’s car hears the noise, doesn’t know what it is, but he says, “I suddenly saw not normal”—those are his words—“not normal movements in the president’s car. The president seemed to be tilting to the left.” At the same moment he sees in the
Queen Mary,
the Secret Service car, an agent jump to his feet with a rifle in his hands; he’s looking around, trying to find out what’s going on. Then the other shots crack out. It’s only eight seconds between the first and the last shot. Everyone knows what they are now.

Youngblood whirls around in his seat. He grabs Johnson by the right shoulder and says, “Get down. Get down.” Youngblood shouts in a voice that Ladybird says she had never heard him use before. He pulls Johnson to the floor and sort of falls over the back of the front seat and lies on top of Johnson, shielding him from bullets. As they’re lying there, Youngblood
has a radio strapped to his shoulder. The radio is basically in Johnson’s ear, and he hears the words, “He’s hit. He’s hit,” and he hears the words, “Hospital, hospital.” Not only has the president been wounded but the governor’s been shot. Who knows if Johnson was the next target or not?

Youngblood tells him to keep down, and he realizes his best chance of protection is to put his car as close to that Secret Service car in front of him as he can. So he tells the driver, a Texas highway patrolman named Hershel Jacks. A typical Texas patrolman—laconic, cool—Jacks puts the car just a few feet from the bumper of the Secret Service car. The three cars—Kennedy’s, the Secret Service’s, and Johnson’s—roar up a ramp onto the expressway, roar down the expressway, and squeal off the expressway and into the emergency bay at Parkland Hospital.

Youngblood says to Johnson, “When we get to that hospital, don’t stop for anything. Don’t look around. We’re taking you to find you a secure place.” So they yank him out of the car. His car is right next to Kennedy’s. He never has a moment to look to the left to see what’s in Kennedy’s car. What’s in Kennedy’s car is the president’s body. They haven’t taken it out yet, with the blood pooling from his head on Jackie’s lap as she’s sitting there. But he doesn’t know this. He doesn’t know what’s happened to the president. They run Johnson—four agents with the agent behind them carrying a rifle in his hand—looking for a secure place.

The Secret Service agents sort of lift Johnson out of the car and run him down one corridor, down another one, and finally they get to what they call the medical section. They find a cubicle that’s been divided into three sections. Johnson is put against a back wall. They close the blinds on the windows. For forty-five minutes, Johnson stands there. They bring in a chair, and Ladybird sits beside him. But Lyndon Johnson is standing there. Then Ken O’Donnell suddenly walks through the door. Ladybird was to write in her diary: “Seeing the stricken face of Kenny O’Donnell, who
loved him, we knew.” A moment later, another Kennedy aide, Mac Kilduff, runs into the room and runs over to Johnson and says, “Mr. President.” It’s the first time he knows he’s president. This is one of the pivotal moments in American history.

I was a reporter for
Newsday,
a Long Island newspaper. I was in the middle of Arizona. Actually I was in the middle of the Mojave Desert. I was doing a series on elderly retirees who were trying to live on retirement homesites in the middle of the Mojave Desert, and we found out they were basically being gypped by their companies. The Senate had sent an investigator out with me. I had found that the elderly women who were trying to live there didn’t have water or anything and had to drive to get water. We were trying to get the names and addresses of these women so that the Senate could bring them to Washington. We were there all of November 22. We had been staying in Las Vegas and driving down to the Mojave Desert. You couldn’t get reception on our car radio. There was so much static early in the day that we turned off the radio. In the evening we were driving back to the main highway. I think it was Route 66. It went up to Las Vegas. As we got to the intersection and turned on the radio, the first words we heard were, “Doctors are operating on Governor Connally at this moment,” something like that.

What is this about?
and then there was static. All of a sudden we came up to Route 66, and there was a big truck—as I remember, a big trailer truck—with a driver sitting in the window. He was crying and said something like “Have you heard?” and told us the news. This was already evening or close to evening of that day, hours after the assassination. I didn’t hear about it until then.

Johnson is transformed. The Kennedys had almost broken his spirit; he had changed in appearance from the mighty majority leader to this guy with a hangdog look. Suddenly he’s back in charge. The moment he’s addressed as Mr. President, he is giving orders. The Secret Service runs into him, and Youngblood says, “We have to get you back to Washington. The place we can keep you secure is the White House.”

Remember, we’re only thirteen months from the Cuban Missile Crisis. Was Russia behind this? Was Cuba behind this? Who was behind this?

They say, “We have to get you back to the White House.”

Johnson says, “No. I’m not leaving the hospital without Mrs. Kennedy.”

They say, “Mrs. Kennedy won’t leave the hospital without her husband’s body.”

Johnson says decisively, “We will go back to Air Force One, and I’ll wait there for her to come with the body.” He directs them: “Get cars. Let’s go to the airport by a different route than the one they expect us to go. No sirens in the car.” They speed to the airport, and Johnson literally runs up the steps with the Secret Service onto Air Force One to wait for Kennedy’s body.

Talk about scenes in American history. Johnson goes into President Kennedy’s bedroom [on the plane], and he takes off his jacket. According to different accounts, he either lies down on the bed, sprawls on the bed, or sits on it and calls Robert Kennedy. Robert Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson hate each other. Hatred is not too strong a word to describe the feeling between Robert Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. For three years Robert Kennedy has done everything he can to humiliate Johnson, and in a moment, in the crack of a rifle shot, the tables are completely turned. Now Johnson has the power. He calls Robert Kennedy and asks him, “Should I be sworn in here in Dallas before I get back to Washington?” and “What’s the wording of the oath?”

Robert Kennedy is having lunch that day with his wife, Ethel, and Robert Morgenthau, the district attorney for the southern district in New York, at History Hill, the Kennedy house. It’s this old white frame colonial house in McLean, Virginia, with a long lawn that slopes down to the
swimming pool. The house is being painted. Suddenly two things happen at once. Morgenthau sees one of the painters clap a transistor radio to his ear with a look of shock and horror on his face and start running down the lawn toward the swimming pool as fast as he can. The same moment, the telephone rings on a table on the other side of the swimming pool. Ethel Kennedy goes to answer it, and it’s J. Edgar Hoover. He has Robert Kennedy come over to the phone and tells him that his brother has been shot and perhaps killed.

A few minutes later, the phone rings again. It’s Lyndon Johnson, whom Robert Kennedy hates, fifteen minutes or so after he learns his brother is dead, asking him for the wording of the oath of office and the exact procedure for taking over the presidency. Two people heard that call. Kennedy’s deputy, Nicholas Katzenbach, is patched into it. He’s the number-two man, the deputy attorney general of the United States.

I asked Katzenbach. He said, “Johnson could’ve asked any one of a hundred officials for the wording of the oath. He could’ve asked me; we worked together a lot. It’s appalling that Johnson called Robert Kennedy. He shouldn’t have done it.”

Marie Fehmer is Johnson’s secretary. She is in John Kennedy’s bedroom [on Air Force One] with Johnson, and she hears Johnson’s end of the call. Johnson says to her, “Get on an extension, and take down the exact wording of the oath.”

I asked her, “What were the voices like on the phone?” She said, “Katzenbach’s voice was like steel. Bobby Kennedy’s wasn’t. I kept thinking,
You shouldn’t be doing this.
But the call is made.”

Another thing happens that increases the tension. While this is all going on, Jacqueline Kennedy is coming onboard with a heavy bronze coffin containing her husband’s body. They put the coffin in the compartment next to the president’s stateroom, and Jacqueline Kennedy wants to go into the stateroom—basically her and the president’s bedroom. She opens the door, and there’s Lyndon Johnson in his shirtsleeves. Depending on whose account it was, he is either sprawled on the bed or sitting on it. But Marie Fehmer says, “It was a horrible moment, and we rushed out of the stateroom.”