The Day Kennedy Was Shot (55 page)

The big-time reporters worked the running story hard. They took notes on everything, even journalistic rumors, and they fired questions at policemen all day and all night. They had “leg men” out in the city picking up material on the Texas School Book Depository; the scores of witnesses who had gone through Sheriff Decker's office; the Irving angle with Mrs. Oswald and Mrs. Paine; the bits and pieces from Jack Price at Parkland Hospital; Governor John Connally's condition; the reaction of Dallas. There were men in Washington covering parts of the story, and there were others at American embassies in Europe picking up bits and pieces to add to the whole. The men on the morning sheets had to keep writing fresh material marked “Add Kennedy.” Those on the afternoon papers had time, and they inundated the file rooms and “morgues” of the
Dallas Times Herald
and
Dallas News
asking for the professional courtesy of a free look at old clippings and pictures on Lee Harvey Oswald.

The story had a stunning beginning but no end. The words were dropped into the huge maw of public curiosity, were masticated, and the maw opened for more. City editors were on the phones asking for copy. They suggested fresh angles, some of which were worthless. When they had exploited the death of John Fitzgerald Kennedy to the fullest, the world was aware of it,
and the only way to keep the story alive was to keep fresh material coming in on Oswald. If Oswald was the assassin, then the story centered on the Who? What? When? Where? and Why? of the Book Depository order clerk. Reporters were urged to keep on the necks of the police. The cops must be reasonably certain that they had the right man—or didn't—and a good reporter would keep badgering the officers or else run the risk of having one of them “leak” the story to a local favorite.

The story had too many parts. It was impossible to fit together all the small pieces which make a large and dismal mosaic. At the moment the reporters were racing up and down the hall with a rumor that Oswald would soon be coming down from the jail for another session with Captain Will Fritz. At Love Field, no reporter saw an agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation board an airliner for Washington. He carried a small box and put it on his lap as he fastened his seat belt. In it were two pieces of the President's skull found inside the car and one found beside the curb at Elm Street.

On the fifth floor, a guard came into the maximum security alley with a plate. He handed it to Oswald along with a cup. The plate had beans and stewed meat and boiled potatoes. On the side of the plate were two buttered pieces of bread. The prisoner took the cup of steaming coffee. He looked at the plate. The guard said it was dinner. There would be nothing more until morning. Two meals a day in jail. Oswald said he wasn't hungry.

The guards told him to finish the coffee. He was going to get his clothes back in a few minutes.

The plane was always awkward on the ground. It came back up the taxiway slowly, whining and rocking. President Johnson had read his short statement to Smith and Roberts and had put it into a pocket in his jacket. He had issued an order for a ramp to be brought to the plane. The order stated that the Secret Service men aboard would carry the body of President Kennedy
down the ramp. The casket would be followed by Mrs. Kennedy on the arm of President Johnson.

The President looked around as the plane waddled toward the big circle of light and he wondered where everyone had gone. The cabin, except for a few of his staff, was empty. Mrs. Johnson sat gazing out the window at the darkness. In the back of the plane, Kenneth O'Donnell issued his orders. They too were explicit. As soon as the aircraft stopped, he wanted the Kennedy group to crowd the rear doorway. They and the Secret Service men would take the body out of this exit, down a forklift. President Johnson was not a party to this plan.

Mr. Johnson felt that the symbol of unity was important. As the new President, he should stand behind his fallen chieftain, and he should offer his widow the protection of his person. To the contrary, the Kennedy people felt that this was boorish and overbearing. The plane was still in motion when they formed an unbreakable clot at the rear exit. They knew what was expected of them. In the group were David Powers, Lawrence O'Brien, Ken O'Donnell, General McHugh, Mrs. Evelyn Lincoln, Mrs. Kennedy and her secretary, Pamela Turnure. Flanking them were the Secret Service men.

When the President came down the aisle, an engine was still idling and he found his progress blocked. A male voice from somewhere said: “It's all right. We'll take care of this end.” He recognized the humiliation. The plane stopped and he walked back to the presidential cabin slowly, to join his wife. He was about to take the arm of Mrs. Johnson when he saw his Attorney General, Robert F. Kennedy, running from the front of the plane to the back. Sadly, the President stuck his hand out and said: “Bob!” The Attorney General ignored the hand and kept running toward the aft section.

It was evident that Kennedy understood the situation. He ran so that he would not have to pause and recognize the new President. He made it down the aisle of the front cabin, squirm
ing past the people who stood in the aisles, opened the door to the private cabin, and ran straight through. At the human knot, people stepped aside so that Jacqueline could fall into Robert's arms.

The communications shack passed a final message to Roy Kellerman from Secret Service headquarters ordering him to accompany the dead President to Bethesda Hospital. Colonel Swindal looked down on the small dark pools of people.
Air Force One
, in the glare of lights, was a dead moth. An honor guard of service men followed the Attorney General up the front ramp. They were there to carry the casket. The silence at Andrews Air Force Base was so deep that, when Colonel Swindal and his first officer, Lieutenant Colonel Lewis Hanson, hurried down the ramp, the sound of their feet on the metal-tipped steps beat an irregular tattoo into the darkness outside the pool of light.

Merriman Smith and Charles Roberts, one with a typewriter under his arm, hurried off the plane and stood under the giant wing, looking aft. In the silence there was disbelief. The men of lofty station who were there; the television cameramen in the darkness; the friends, the officers, the strangers of rank, the ambassadors, could not believe that Caesar was dead. They had heard the radio; they had seen the story on television; the late afternoon papers carried mourning rules under the headline:
KENNEDY ASSASSINATED.
And yet the human mind rejects the image of catastrophe as the eyes hunt for irrevocable truth. The slender face of Secretary of Defense Robert J. McNamara stood almost alone, the eyes watching the rear hatch behind the frozen light caught by his glasses. The breeze caught the wavy hair of the Chief Justice of the United States, Earl Warren, and he studied the aircraft as though, legally, he entertained a reasonable doubt.

The forklift, on small yellow wheels, circumnavigated the plane and pulled up at the port hatch aft. The operator placed it snugly and then pulled the small elevator upward. It was at
least three feet short. Inside someone was opening the hatch lug and the door swung backward and away. The unseen eyes from the darkness looked. They saw a group of people squeezed together in the doorway, and five Secret Service men, stooping and pushing, shoved the edge of the casket into the doorway. It was caught in the light, and everyone below knew that John F. Kennedy was truly dead. He was gone and they would never see him again, never see him step out of a crowd with hand outstretched, never hear the flat, twangy Boston wit, see the square pearly teeth as the head rocked back in laughter, never again see that stabbing left index finger as it punctuated his argumentative shouts above the roar of a crowd.

He was dead. He was gone. And there was something that each man had forgotten to say to him. It was not a moment for tears. There was a succession of swallowing and an unspoken accusation in three thousand hearts: “What did you expect?” Whatever the expectation of magic, it was over and the unseen eyes began to focus on the woman in the doorway with the slab of dark hair down over one eye. Her expression had the shock of a little girl who has just heard the colored balloon break. She still held the string.

A few men jumped down on the lift. They pulled on the forward handles. Others, at the rear, pushed. The honor guard found itself caught in the rites of the warrior. The Secret Service wanted to carry the man. So did Larry O'Brien and Ken O'Donnell and David Powers and General McHugh. Everybody could not find room around the casket. The men pushed each other. The heavy bronze instrument teetered off the edge of the plane and began to wobble in air. Out of the darkness the sibilant voices of the television commentators could be heard. The Attorney General watched the bronze rock in air, saw the men on the lift catch and steady it, and he dropped nimbly onto the platform with his brother. With arms outstretched, he reached up for his sister-in-law.

She crouched and dropped and Kennedy held her. The big iridescent lens of the cameras caught the scene, saw the pink burled suit, the stains of blood, the twisted right stocking. In a trice, the nation knew. The horrifying picture of the gleaming bronze casket and the handsome young widow and the blood was mirrored in seventy million homes. The guilt was upon them and their children. Dinner stopped. Plates were pushed away. The picture on the screen would never be scrubbed off. It was there and scores of millions of people would date their lives with this day. Things happened before this time or after.

“Will you come with us?” Mrs. Kennedy whispered to her brother-in-law. He nodded. She knew he would. Admiral Burkley was the last to jump on the small platform. It began the slow slide to the bottom. The Bethesda ambulance had backed up, and, before it left, Robert Kennedy wanted to hear the wishes of his sister-in-law in regards to the funeral, and he wanted to use a Secret Service beep phone to speak quickly to Sargent Shriver at the White House.

He walked her slowly toward the ambulance. He took her arm and bent and whispered and nodded at the responses. She was in the full glare of the lights and her head was down. Faces were in requiem all around her, but they knew that this was no time for greetings or even condolences. McNamara stood at attention. Acting Secretary of State George Ball followed her with his eyes. Postmaster John Gronouski could not bear to watch. Franklin Roosevelt, Jr., had witnessed similar scenes. Senator Hubert Humphrey may have been the only man who wept. His eyes were red holes. Senator Mike Mansfield kept his teeth clenched. Everett Dirksen hunched his great head into his topcoat collar and turned away. McGeorge Bundy, the bright mentality behind the self-effacing features, seemed nailed to a place on the concrete.

Under the wing, Swindal and Hanson stood at salute. The tall, slender chief of protocol, Mr. Angier Biddle Duke, approached Mrs. Kennedy. He coughed and she looked up. “How can I serve you?” he said. She knew. “Find out how Lincoln was buried,” she said. Mr. Duke turned away. He had an assignment. He would require researchers and admission to the Library of Congress, which was closed, and a long night of labor to find out exactly how Lincoln was buried.

In silence, she walked to the ambulance and reached for a door handle. It was the wrong one. Mrs. Kennedy did not want to sit up front. She would remain at her husband's side. For a moment, she was indecisive. Then Robert Kennedy approached and opened the rear door. They stooped and climbed inside. At the rear, the honor guard, the Secret Service, and Kennedy friends carried the casket and slid it in. General Godfrey McHugh hopped in with it.

Roy Kellerman was in charge. He waved William Greer, who had driven the death car, into the driver's seat. Kellerman sat next to him. Agent Paul Landis squeezed in on the right side. Admiral Burkley said he had told Mrs. Kennedy that he would stay with the body until it was returned to the White House. Kellerman waved the doctor into the front seat and he sat on the lap of Landis. Standing beside the ambulance were the cardiologist, the nurse, and driver sent hours ago by Captain Canada of Bethesda in case President Johnson sustained a heart attack. They were told that there was no room for them.

The car started to move forward. Mrs. Kennedy and General McHugh sat on one side of the casket. Opposite, leaning across the bronze to speak, sat the Attorney General. The lights of the base flickered by, lighting up the mourners and plunging them back into darkness. Directly behind, Secret Service Agent Clint Hill had requisitioned an automobile. He was driving Dr. John Walsh, Mrs. Kennedy's physician. A third car carried the O'Donnell group. Behind that were some women in a fourth car and the forgotten man. This was George Thomas, the president's valet. For almost three years, he had worked hard on the
third floor, pressing fresh suits most of the day for the President's several changes. He would not need that ironing board anymore nor the iron. George Thomas sat silently among the women, wondering what was to become of him.

America sat before the altar of the image, murmuring
“mea culpa, mea culpa.”
No event in the history of the country—perhaps in the history of the world—was tendered so quickly, with such exquisite agony, as the shooting of a man in Dallas. It was totally unexpected; it was darkly tragic; it was exploited by the television cameras to the fullest. The facets of the somber story were revealed at the instant they were discovered by the camera.

In New York, Martin Isaacs of the Department of Welfare watched with fascination and horror, a man mesmerized by the incredibility of the credible, numbed by a succession of shocks. The magnetism of the opaque screen ruled the land. He had seen the School Book Depository from which the shots were supposed to have been fired; he had heard that a young clerk named Lee Harvey Oswald had been arrested; he had seen the big bird come to a stop with two Presidents aboard. At times, the unfolding of the story became so emotional that people who had not voted for Kennedy and were alienated by his politics broke and cried.