JFK's Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President (42 page)

Instead of climbing into his limousine, he headed for the crowd lining the airport fence. A local television reporter shouted, “
He’s broken away from the program
and is shaking hands with the crowd.”
The Texas journalist Ronnie Dugger
wrote in his notebook, “Kennedy is showing he is not afraid.” Jackie followed him to the fence and also began shaking hands.
It was the first time
that the
New York Times
reporter Tom Wicker could remember her working an airport crowd.

Sorensen’s observation
that different parts of Kennedy were seen by many people but no one saw them all was correct. But if you assembled those parts of him that were visible at various times and places to his friends and staff, and to people like those greeting him in the brilliant sunshine at Love Field, you not only had
Laura Bergquist’s “fascinating human animal
” but someone who had also managed to convey his kindness, humor, intelligence, and humanity to those who knew him only from what they read in a newspaper or saw on a television screen or from behind an airport fence.

His friends knew a man who was kind and gregarious, delighted in children, venerated courage, paid excessive attention to ceremony and his appearance, possessed an irreverent sense of humor, and was a secret romantic, yet was also
what Sidey called “a serious man
on a serious mission.” They knew a man who had brought his competitive spirit to the greatest contest of all—that with other presidents for a favorable verdict from the high court of history. They knew a man who was chronically impatient with anyone or anything that bored him, had a chip on his shoulder about the WASP establishment, lied easily and often about his health and sex life, and could be too cautious politically but too reckless when it came to driving, extramarital affairs, and exposing himself to crowds such as the one greeting him at Love Field. Because of his passion for secrecy and his practice of compartmentalizing his life, few among his friends and aides knew all of this, but they knew enough to know that his courage and mendacity, generosity and sudden rages, idealism and cunning, had made him a very complicated yet appealing human being. And because he had succeeded in communicating some of this to the American people, they sensed that despite his wealth and education, he was not only like them but also genuinely liked them, and really
did
prefer the workers in the kitchen to the WASPs in the dining room, the middle-class Americans greeting him at Love Field to the businessmen awaiting him at the Trade Mart.

A local broadcaster called his welcome
at Love Field “completely overwhelming,” but not everyone was friendly.
Some high school students
hissed, and a man held up a sign proclaiming, “
You’re a traiter
[
sic
].” Another sign said, “
Help JFK Stamp Out
Democracy.” A large placard announced, “
Mr. President, because of your
socialist tendencies and because of your surrender to communism, I hold you in complete contempt.”

As Jackie was climbing into the limousine, a reporter asked how she liked campaigning. “
It’s wonderful
,” she gushed. “It’s wonderful.”
As they were pulling away, Kennedy noticed
a boy in a Scout uniform. They locked eyes, and he gave the boy a mischievous wink.

•   •   •

T
HE
SITE
OF
THE
LUNCHEON
had determined the route of his motorcade.
Connally had wanted him to speak
to an invitation-only event at the Trade Mart, but Jerry Bruno, who was advancing the trip, feared it would be too much a rich man’s affair and proposed a larger and less-exclusive gathering at the Women’s Building at the State Fairgrounds. Bruno thought Connally opposed holding it there because the ceiling was too low to accommodate a two-tiered head table, and he wanted to seat himself on the top tier while relegating opponents like Yarborough to the bottom. Connally finally put his foot down, insisting that the president could not come to Dallas unless he spoke at the Trade Mart, and the White House capitulated. Had Kennedy driven from Love Field to the fairgrounds, he would have taken a different route through Dealey Plaza, traveling at a higher rate of speed. But because he was heading to the Trade Mart, he would have to make a sharp right turn off Main Street onto Houston Street, then drive a block before slowing down for a sharp left onto Elm Street that was almost a hairpin, leaving him traveling around ten miles per hour as he passed the Texas School Book Depository.

His motorcade was configured like the ones in Tampa and San Antonio. At its center were three vehicles: the lead car, a white Ford with no markings driven by the Dallas police chief, Jesse Curry, with Sheriff Bill Decker and two Secret Service agents riding as passengers, then the president’s limousine, a Lincoln Continental driven by Secret Service Agent Bill Greer with Agent Roy Kellerman in the passenger seat, Governor and Mrs. Connally on the jump seats, and the president and First Lady sitting on the rear seat. A contingent of Secret Service agents rode in the third car. Kennedy’s limousine had running boards but he discouraged agents from standing on them. Sometimes he permitted them to stand on the two steps flanking the trunk, but in Dallas, as in Tampa, he had vetoed this.

Aside from the fact that the spectators were more numerous and welcoming than anyone had anticipated, there was nothing unusual or memorable about the first thirty-five minutes of the motorcade. Had he ridden in dozens more like it during the campaign,
Connally might have forgotten
that as they passed the balcony of a ramshackle house he saw a lone man standing on a balcony with a “Kennedy Go Home!” sign, and that after noticing it the president had said, “I see them everywhere I go. I bet that’s a nice guy.”
Yarborough might not have remembered thinking
, as he stared up at the tall office buildings lining Main Street, “What if someone throws a flower pot down on top of Mrs. Kennedy or the President?”
Nor would John and Nellie Connally have recalled
that the president asked Jackie to remove her sunglasses because he thought they made her appear too removed and inaccessible, or that the glare was so blinding that Jackie had absentmindedly put them on twice more before finally burying them in her pocketbook. Nor would it have been remembered that the president and First Lady could raise the volume of the cheering simply by waving,
or that he had stopped to greet some children
holding up a sign saying, “Mr. President, Please Stop and Shake Our Hands,”
or that a teenaged boy had darted
into the street and pointed a camera at him before a Secret Service agent tackled him, or that as he waved he kept murmuring, “
Thank you, thank you
, thank you.” No one could hear him, but he presumably felt that, like writing a sympathy note to the mother of a severely burned child moments before his own child died, it was something he ought to do.

His route took him along Main Street and through the heart of downtown Dallas. The Secret Service did not check the upper floors of buildings unless they had received specific threats, so people stood on rooftops and hung out open windows, cheering and tossing confetti. Spectators were ten to fifteen thick on the sidewalks. In places
they had spilled into the street
, slowing the motorcade to a crawl and prompting Greer to keep far to the left in order to leave the greatest possible distance between the crowd and the right hand side of the limousine, where the president was sitting.

Where Main Street flowed into Dealey Plaza the crowds thinned and his limousine slowed to make two turns, first the ninety-degree right onto Houston Street, then a block later the even sharper left onto Elm Street past the seven-story School Book Depository. From here, Elm headed down a gentle incline to the Stemmons Freeway and a triple underpass. Jackie, who was perspiring in her pink wool suit, saw it and thought, “
How pleasant that cool tunnel
will be.” Nellie Connally turned around from her jump seat and said to Kennedy, “
You sure can’t say that
Dallas doesn’t love you!” Their eyes met, his smile widened, and he said, “
No, you can’t
.”

The photographer Cecil Stoughton was riding seven cars back.
He heard some loud bangs
and imagined a cowboy in a ten-gallon hat standing on a rooftop, firing his six-shooter into the air to welcome the president to Dallas.

Kennedy was waving as the first bullet entered his upper back and exited his throat. It missed his vital organs and was a survivable wound. His hands flew up to his throat and his expression went blank.
Nellie Connally remembered his eyes
being “full of surprise,” and
Agent Kellerman thought he said
, “My God, I’m hit.”
His back brace kept him upright
, an immovable target. Another bullet smashed into the rear of his head and
Jackie cried out
, “They’ve killed my husband! I have his brains in my hand.”

AFTER DALLAS

J
ackie wept first
, and from her and from Dallas a tidal wave of tears rolled across the nation and around the world.
In New York, there was a murmur
and then a rising wail as the news jumped between tables at a midtown restaurant.
Advertising men in tailored suits hurried
into St. Patrick’s Cathedral and fell onto their knees. Outside, drivers hunched over steering wheels, sobbing as dashboard radios broadcast the news. A crowd gathered at the Magnavox showroom on Fifth Avenue, watching on television sets piled two stories high as Walter Cronkite choked back tears before announcing that the president was dead.
Chorus girls rehearsing
for an evening television show at the Ed Sullivan Theater on Broadway kicked in unison, arms linked around waists as tears streamed down their cheeks.

In Washington,
a rookie police officer wept
as he lowered the flag on the Capitol dome to half mast and looked down to see that drivers had abandoned their cars and stood in the street, staring up at the flag and crying.
In his Senate office, Senator Hubert Humphrey
, who had challenged Kennedy for the 1960 nomination, put his head in his arms and wept for thirty minutes.
Senator Fulbright jumped up
from his table at the F Street Club, threw down his napkin, and shouted, “God damn it! I told him not to go to Dallas.” Adlai Stevenson exclaimed, “
That Dallas
! Why, why didn’t I insist that he not go there?”
Medgar Evers’s widow thought
, “I knew it! I knew it!” She had never believed that someone like him—someone like her husband—would be allowed to live.
In Chicago, Mayor Richard Daley
burst into tears while lunching with his cronies, and across the Pacific
in the Solomon Islands
, one of the natives who had helped rescue Kennedy sat in his garden, staring at his photograph and crying.
At Harvard, a girl wept
on the steps of the Widener Library and a boy hit a tree in time to a tolling church bell.
When the captain of a transatlantic jet
heard that the Jackie’s brother-in-law Stanislaus Radziwill was aboard, he left the cockpit, sat down beside him, and burst into tears.
When Rusk announced
his death over the public address system of the plane carrying cabinet members to Japan, there was an anguished cry as passengers clapped their hands over their faces.
President Truman cried so much
when he called on Jackie before the funeral that he had to be put to bed in the White House.
A poem by the columnist
Art Buchwald began each line, “We weep for,” and concluded, “We weep because there is nothing else we can do.”
The cartoonist Bill Mauldin
drew the statue of Abraham Lincoln at the Lincoln Memorial, sitting with his head in his hands.
A twelve-year-old girl in Oregon
who had shaken his hand and shaken her own into a glass jar to “save” his germs, emptied the jar into a shoe box, covered it with a small American flag, and wept as she buried it in her backyard. November 22 would be the first time many children saw an adult cry, and after hearing the news from sobbing teachers they went home to find their mothers in tears.
A girl remembered her mother
doing the ironing as she watched television, her tears sizzling as they hit the hot iron.

Not everyone mourned. Some white Southerners celebrated, and a wire service story reported
schoolchildren in Texas cheering
.
Schlesinger was appalled by Stevenson’s reaction
, writing in his diary that on the night of November 22, Stevenson had walked into the White House “smiling and chipper as if nothing had happened,” and had been the same way later that evening during a gathering at Averell Harriman’s. After discussing Stevenson’s demeanor with others, he wrote, “We agree, I think, that we have practically never heard Stevenson make a generous remark about Kennedy,” and called his behavior something that it would “take a long time to forgive.”

Algeria declared a week of official mourning
, and the Nicaraguans held a state funeral. Peasants in the Yucatán slashed a clearing and planted a memorial garden; Liberian woodcutters fashioned a giant wooden carving of his head; and Portuguese men wore black ties and armbands, as if mourning a relative.
Thousands of Poles
rushed into the Warsaw cathedral following a requiem Mass and kissed an American flag covering a symbolic bier. The CIA reported that “Cuban reaction to the President’s killing and the aftermath have reflected more sensitivity and apprehension than any regime in the world,” and that Soviet leaders had been “as profoundly moved and shocked by the slaying of President Kennedy as were leaders of America’s closest allies.” Soviet interest in maintaining the atmosphere of détente created by the nuclear test ban treaty was demonstrated by the appointment of First Deputy Premier Anastas Mikoyan, the most powerful Soviet official after Khrushchev, to represent the USSR at President Kennedy’s funeral.
Khrushchev instructed his wife
to write Jackie a personal note, an unprecedented gesture for a Soviet leader that his son believed was meant to stress “the sincerity and personal nature of his sympathy.”
The woman narrating a documentary
about him on Soviet state television broke down, and
tears filled Gromyko’s eyes
as he left the residence of the American ambassador.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko was reading
his poetry in a Moscow hall when he noticed audience members whispering and their faces taking on a tragic expression as if, he said, “that person had just lost a mother or father or brother.” Years later, Yevtushenko would tell the actor Kirk Douglas, “
People cried in the street
. . . . They sensed that, in him [Kennedy], there might be a chance for our two countries to get together.”

Sir Laurence Olivier interrupted
a performance at the Old Vic and asked the audience to stand while the orchestra played “The Star-Spangled Banner.” An Englishman told an American friend, “
There has never been anything like it
here since Trafalgar, and the news of Nelson’s death reached London, and men cried in the streets.” Big Ben tolled every minute for an hour, lights dimmed in Piccadilly Circus, and Prime Minister Alec Douglas-Home reported that distraught British teenagers were “
openly crying in the street
.” Danes carried bouquets to the American embassy and left behind a six-foot-high wall of flowers.
Sixty thousand West Berliners
held an impromptu torchlight procession and gathered in the square where Kennedy had said “
Ich bein ein Berliner
.”
Workmen in Nice
laid down their tools and wept, and at the dedication of the Avenue du President Kennedy, the president of the Paris city council said, “
Never, perhaps, has the death
of a foreign chief of state so profoundly moved every Frenchman and every Parisian.” President Charles de Gaulle told a friend, “I am stunned. They are crying all over France. It is as if he were a Frenchman, a member of their own family.” As the French statesman Jean Monnet walked to Arlington in Kennedy’s funeral procession, he told Walt Rostow that the French had reacted so emotionally because “
he [Kennedy] reestablished
the credibility of American strength and vitality after the Eisenhower years—and then showed in 1963 [that] he would use that power compassionately, and for peace.” This, Monnet said, had “touched the life of every family in France.”

A postman in a Connecticut
suburb reported housewives on his route speaking about Kennedy’s death “as if they had lost a son or daughter.”
A Detroit housewife said
, “I feel as if a member of my family had died, I really do.” Future president
Jimmy Carter cried
for the first time since his father had died, and
McGeorge Bundy admitted
that he had mourned Kennedy more than his own father, who had died in October.
Roswell Gilpatric believed
he was so shattered because “I felt about him as I’ve never felt about another man in my life.”
The columnist Joe Alsop said
, “I had never known I loved the president,” and believed that nothing had ever moved him more, “not even the death of my own father.”
In a condolence letter
stained by tears, David Ormsby-Gore wrote Jackie, “I mourn him as though he were my own brother.”

When Elaine de Kooning
heard the news, she was working on her favorite portrait. It showed him wearing a sweatshirt, sailing pants, and sneakers, and squinting in the sunlight, looking just as he had that first day in Palm Beach. “
The assassin dropped
my brush,” she said. “I was traumatized. I had identified painting with painting Kennedy. For a full year, I couldn’t paint at all.” Later, she explained, “
I felt that I had lost a brother
or a lover. . . . I can’t believe the gunshots obliterated that brain, that personality. I was crushed. It was a personal loss.”

A poll conducted within a week
of his assassination by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago reported that 53 percent of Americans, ninety million people, had shed tears during the four days between his death and funeral. Blacks and Northerners were most likely to have wept, but even one in three Southern whites admitted crying. A majority of Americans said his assassination had been a “unique event” in their lives, more traumatic than Pearl Harbor or President Franklin Roosevelt’s sudden death. Seventy-nine percent reported mourning him like “someone very close and dear.”

Because Americans felt they knew him almost as well as someone sitting across the breakfast table, they wanted more than a distant grave. Once their tears had dried, or before, they began naming roads and bridges, tunnels, highways, and buildings for him, creating
a grief-stricken empire of asphalt
, mortar, brick, and bronze so extensive that if you extinguished every light on earth except those illuminating something named for him, astronauts launched from the Kennedy Space Center would have seen a web of lights stretching across Europe and North America, and others scattered through Africa and Asia—and if proposals to stamp “Land of Kennedy” on every Massachusetts license plate, or to rename West Virginia “Kennedyiana” had been approved, they would have seen even more.

George Orwell believed it was impossible
to “prove” that William Shakespeare had been a great author, writing, “There is no test of literary merit except survival, which is in itself an index of majority opinion.” By that standard, Kennedy was a great president.

A grieving nation installed plaques marking where he had slept, lived, campaigned, ate, and prayed, creating an instant biography in bronze. There were markers at the Hitching Post Inn in Cheyenne and at the Carpenter Hotel in Manchester, where he had slept, and at the U.S. Post Office on State Line Avenue in Texarkana, where he had delivered a campaign speech with one foot planted in Texas and the other in Arkansas. A plaque showed where he stood while giving a 1962 address in Independence Hall, and others marked the building at the University of Michigan where he proposed the Peace Corps, and the booth at the Union Oyster House in Boston where he sat on Sunday mornings, reading newspapers and eating chowder.

Fifty years later, millions of people a day still cross Kennedy bridges in Niamey, Vienna, Liège, Mumbai, Bonn, Minnesota, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Kentucky, and drive down Kennedy boulevards, avenues, drives, expressways, causeways, and highways in Chicago, Maryland, Antibes, Tampa, Jersey City, San Francisco, Montreal, Key West, Waterville, Luxembourg, Humboldt, Curaçao, Casablanca, and Corpus Christi, to name a few. They play in Kennedy memorial playgrounds and parks; swim in Kennedy pools; stroll through Kennedy squares, plazas, and platzes in Providence, Utica, Bonn, Berlin, Iowa City, Atlantic City, Antwerp, Detroit, Seattle, and Syracuse; and pass Kennedy sculptures, fountains, busts, and memorial flagpoles. Students attend more than a hundred John F. Kennedy elementary, middle, and high schools in the United States. Their parents attend meetings in Kennedy Democratic clubs and union halls; belong to a Kennedy American Legion or Kennedy Knights of Columbus post; send letters from Kennedy post offices; conduct business in Kennedy civic centers; arrive or depart from Kennedy airports in New York and Ashland; attend concerts in Kennedy auditoriums; sail on Kennedy ferries, tugboats, and lifeboats; and play at golf courses, exercise in recreation centers, live in nursing homes or public housing developments, or are patients at hospitals carrying his name.

There are forty Kennedy schools in Argentina, and his name is on a boys’ club in Uganda; a recreational center in Copenhagen; the largest sport center in Italy; a memorial park in Miraflores, Peru; an island in an ornamental lake in Melbourne; a youth center in the Ivory Coast; and three high schools, a college dining room, and a secondary school in Kenya. You can shop in the Kennedy Mall in Dubuque, and study at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. Every Saturday before Thanksgiving, thousands of competitors run between Boonsboro and Williamsport, Maryland, in the JFK Fifty Mile Marathon. Teams from around the world enter the JFK Field Hockey Tournament in Virginia Beach, sailors compete in the John F. Kennedy Memorial Regatta at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, and long-distance swimmers race in the PT109 Memorial Swim, held in the Solomon Islands on the anniversary of the day that he swam to tiny Plum Pudding Island, since renamed “Kennedy Island.”

You can wander through the John F. Kennedy Peace Forest in Jerusalem, navigate the Kennedy Passage in Alaska, hike through the Mojave to the JFK Mountain profile, admire the Kennedy Rose in Stirling Forest Gardens, watch birds in the Kennedy Wildlife Sanctuary in Oyster Bay, climb Mount Kennedy in the Yukon or Kennedy Peak in the Dolomites, worship at a church in Parma whose cornerstone contains an urn filled with the earth from his grave, and study in the John F. Kennedy Library in Addis Ababa, and then drive an hour and drink beer with prostitutes at the J. F. Kennedy bar in Wolkite—or at least you could have a few years ago. You can visit the Kennedy Memorial at Runnymede, an acre of English ground that Parliament transferred to the United States, and look up from underneath the American scarlet oak, planted here because every November it weeps its red leaves onto the seven-ton black Portland stone commemorating him, and see planes leaving Heathrow for John F. Kennedy International Airport.