The Kennedy Half-Century (6 page)

Once taken from Air Force One, JFK’s body—accompanied by Jackie, Bobby, and other relatives and family friends—was transported to Bethesda Naval Hospital. Mrs. Kennedy had chosen this autopsy location because of her husband’s service in the Navy.
⁶⁷
John Stover, the commanding officer of Bethesda’s medical school, ordered thirty-nine-year-old James J. Humes to perform the procedure. Humes supervised the school’s research labs and had a background in pathology. Lieutenant Commander J. Thornton Boswell, another Navy pathologist, and Colonel Pierre Finck, an army ballistics expert, were selected to assist with the autopsy.
⁶⁸
The autopsy was limited in scope and competence—another aspect of a terrible day that would haunt the nation for decades to come.

Having spent Friday night in a jail cell on the fifth floor of the Dallas police station, Lee Oswald was moved downstairs to the homicide bureau offices at ten thirty Saturday morning. Reporters he passed in the hallway kept quiet;
they were under strict orders from police not to ask questions. Behind closed doors, Captain Fritz resumed the interrogation. “Lee, did you bring curtain rods to work with you yesterday morning?” he twice asked. Oswald said he had not. “Well…,” began the captain, “the fella that drove you to work yesterday morning tells us that you had a package in the backseat. He says that package was about twenty-eight inches long, and you told him it was curtain rods.” “I didn’t have any kind of package,” Oswald replied. “I don’t know what he’s talking about. I had my lunch and that’s all I had.”
⁶⁹
The more Fritz pressed, the more Oswald denied. Toward the end of the session, Fritz sharpened his questions: “Mr. Oswald, did you view the parade yesterday?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Did you shoot the president?”

“No, I did not.”

“Did you shoot the governor?”

“No, I didn’t know that the governor had been shot.”
⁷⁰

Fritz then ended the session and sent Oswald back to his cell. By the end of the day, the Dallas police were even more convinced that they had JFK’s killer. Early Saturday morning the FBI had tracked down an order for an Italian rifle that had been filled out by Oswald and sent to a mail order house in Chicago; the Dallas police found several photos of Oswald holding what appeared to be the assassination weapon along with two left-wing magazines; Oswald’s Russian-born wife, Marina, had confirmed that her husband kept a rifle in a friend’s garage; police discovered the rifle on the sixth floor of the Book Depository and found Oswald’s palm print on a box inside the “sniper’s nest.” District Attorney Henry Wade, later remembered for his role in the controversial
Roe v. Wade
abortion case, told the press Friday night that he planned to seek the death penalty. It seemed like a classic open-and-shut case. Few observers in November 1963 could have imagined the tangled web that would be revealed in time.
⁷¹

On Saturday a steady rain fell on the streets of Washington. Inside the White House, Lyndon Johnson opened his first cabinet meeting with a moment of silent prayer for JFK. The president’s broken body lay in a flag-draped closed coffin in the East Room, surrounded by soldiers, sailors, and airmen. The black bunting that had been hung by Robertson’s crew gave the room an additional air of solemnity. Earlier in the day, former presidents Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower had stopped by to pay their respects. Now Johnson was asking the assembled members of the Kennedy cabinet to remain at their posts. The country needed continuity, and he said he needed them more than John Kennedy ever had.

What Johnson didn’t know was that a few of JFK’s most loyal staffers were actively plotting to replace him with Bobby Kennedy. Earlier that day, Arthur Schlesinger had convened a private lunch with John Kenneth Galbraith, Walter Heller, and other officials to discuss the 1964 Democratic Convention—
would it be possible to dump LBJ in favor of an RFK-Humphrey ticket?
they wondered.
⁷²
Bobby Kennedy would have likely supported such a move. He despised Johnson, whom he viewed as a modern-day Cassius. Yet Bobby wanted to stick around long enough to see his brother’s legislative proposals enacted to ensure a Kennedy legacy. Johnson, who nursed an enmity for RFK greater than for any other person, would have preferred a cabinet without him. But the Kennedys were now, more than ever, America’s royal family, and the “usurper” could not cut loose the dead king’s brother without jeopardizing his own reign.

Instead, Johnson moved to honor John Kennedy, ordering the closure of all federal offices on Monday, November 25, for President Kennedy’s funeral. “I earnestly recommend the people to assemble on that day in their respective places of divine worship,” said Johnson, “there to bow down in submission to the will of Almighty God, and to pay their homage of love and reverence to the memory of a great and good man. I invite the people of the world who share our grief to join in this day of mourning and rededication.”
⁷³
A national day of mourning was born, and it was observed in many countries around the world.

Men and women across the globe were already deeply grieving. James Michener, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author, was visiting Israel when news came over the radio of the assassination. “It was the Israelis who started to weep,” he wrote, “for they had come to think of Kennedy as a trusted friend, and to lose him in this way was both intolerable and dangerous. ‘What will happen now?’ they asked me, and for the first time, I heard the comment that would be uttered frequently that night: ‘I hope to God the assassin wasn’t a Jew.’ ” Kusum Singh was riding a train across India when he heard that Kennedy had been shot. A hush fell over Singh’s compartment, and when the train stopped, people got off to make sure that the news was accurate. One passenger compared JFK to Mahatma Gandhi—both leaders, he said, had been taken before their time. In Ireland, the scene of a triumphant visit by the Irish American president just a few months prior, people canceled weekend activities and crowded into churches to offer prayers for their transnational hero. In Mexico City, small business owners placed busts and pictures of the president in their windows. Mexico’s head of state, Lopez Mateos, declared a three-day period of national mourning. Even America’s enemies were moved by the events of November 22. Americans in Moscow “were stopped in the
street by Soviet citizens wishing to express sympathy, and American students at the university reported that a number of their Soviet colleagues were in tears.” Marina Tempkina was a high school student in Leningrad when she learned of the assassination. “I was deeply saddened by Kennedy’s death because I liked him personally, and even more because he seemed to offer hope for a better world,” she said. “When he died, I thought we had lost much of such hope.”
⁷⁴

Americans everywhere were stunned, from the mightiest to the most humble. House Speaker John McCormack exclaimed, “My God! My God! What are we coming to?” Senator Ted Kennedy was presiding over the Senate, a task often assigned to junior senators, when he got word and quickly slipped out of the chamber. Every town, city, and school had its own story. At Temple University, students stared with “blank, expressionless faces” at a sign posted in the window of the school’s communications building that read PRESIDENT KENNEDY IS DEAD. Some students cried while others prayed. Temple’s faculty tried to cope with the crisis by offering instant analyses of the Kennedy presidency. “Not since Roosevelt has there been a president who had such a firm hold on his followers as well as his opponents,” opined William McKenna, an associate professor of economics. “Even after his term of office, whether it might have been four or eight years, he still would have been able to perform valuable service for the United States,” offered Professor Harry Tinckom, chairman of the history department.
⁷⁵

Bob Schieffer, now the host of CBS’s
Face the Nation
, was a police beat journalist for the
Fort Worth Star Telegram
in 1963. Because of Kennedy’s arrival in Fort Worth the night before and some wee-hours schmoozing with national reporters and Secret Service agents, Schieffer was still in bed when he learned from his brother that the president had been shot. “I didn’t know what else to do so I just got dressed and rushed down to the office,” Schieffer remembers. “By the time I got downtown it came over the radio that the president was dead and I really just lost it. It was total mass confusion. They closed the borders to Mexico. We didn’t know if this was the beginning of World War III. We didn’t know if there was some sort of attempted coup. And people were terrified. I never felt again the way I felt during those days until 9/11.” Schieffer says that the traumatic event changed his personality for a time. “I had been a police reporter for a while and had seen about everything you could see. And about a week or so after this happened I covered this horrible automobile accident where an entire family… had run under a load of pipe [and] it literally sawed them in half along with the car. And I’m standing there looking at it and I realized I had no emotion whatsoever. None! I was like a dog watching television.”
⁷⁶

Like most people of his generation, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell—then a twenty-one-year-old college student at the University of Louisville—remembers precisely where he was when he first learned of the president’s death. “I was watching a flag football game between my fraternity and another one and it had just ended,” McConnell recalls. “As I was walking away from the [playing field], someone came up to me and said, ‘the president’s been shot.’ I was obviously not a Kennedy supporter but it made no difference. It was such a stunning and traumatic event for the country.” McConnell spent the whole weekend at his parents’ house “glued to the television set” and saw “Jack Ruby shoot Lee Harvey Oswald in real time” while he was “sitting there eating a sandwich.”
⁷⁷

LBJ’s daughter, Lynda Bird Johnson, was a college student at the University of Texas-Austin, and was looking forward to attending the dinner with President and Mrs. Kennedy in Austin that evening. She had just arrived at her dorm room for lunch after class when a “former roommate called me and said, ‘stay where you are, I’m coming to get you.’ She had just heard from somebody that the president had been shot in Dallas. She took me to a room where they had a radio. Nobody had a television and I didn’t even have a radio in my room. And so we went there and I listened and I just fell on my knees and started praying that it wasn’t so. I loved President Kennedy, and I also loved John and Nellie Connally. They had been like parents to me. We called him ‘Uncle Johnny.’ I had spent many summers with them and their oldest daughter had spent summers with me. So I was scared for them. There were even some things on the news that maybe my father had had a heart attack. Just like a lot of people I didn’t know what had happened.”
⁷⁸

Joe and Rose Kennedy, JFK’s aging parents, received an avalanche of sympathy letters and telegrams. “He asked not what his country could do for him,” wrote astronaut John Glenn. “He gave his all. We draw an increased devotion from his example. May God grant you faith, understanding and courage.” Actress Marlene Dietrich cabled a single, poignant sentence: “Cannot express the depth of my sadness.”

Even J. Edgar Hoover, the strong-willed FBI director who had frequently crossed swords with the Kennedys, sent a sympathy letter to JFK’s father. “It is impossible to express the depth of my sorrow,” Hoover wrote. “I regret I have only condolences to offer since I know they can do but little to ease your grief.”
⁷⁹
Of course, it was Hoover’s bureau that failed to keep close tabs on Lee Harvey Oswald. The director learned four days after the assassination that Oswald’s name had never even been on the FBI’s Security Index, a watch list of potential subversives with a history of violent tendencies.
⁸⁰
In truth, despite his defection to Russia and various runins with military and civilian authorities over the years, there was nothing in Oswald’s known
background to suggest he was a violent threat to anyone. But in the hothouse of finger pointing following the assassination, the FBI would try to put as much distance as possible between itself and Oswald.

Average citizens poured their pain onto paper. Carolyn Williamson wrote about the reaction of the men who were serving on board her son’s naval vessel. “The Captain of the ship ordered them to assemble on deck where he announced that he had ‘grievous news’ for them—their Commander-in-Chief had been taken. Their faces, my son wrote, were as wet as the waters of the Pacific.” Williamson closed with a heartfelt good-bye to JFK: “We needed our president. I wish he could have been spared to us longer.”
⁸¹

Catholics were especially devastated by the president’s death and sought solace in their faith. Gerald J. Murray, commander of a World War I veterans group in Scranton, Pennsylvania, assured Rose Kennedy that the “people of the world” would miss her son and expressed his desire to see JFK canonized as a saint. “May the good Lord take him to Paradise … where his great reward will be waiting him,” Murray wrote tenderly. “And may God bless you and your family and his to carry on and bear your burdens with grace.” It was not uncommon in Catholic homes, for years after 1963, to see photos of JFK next to images of the pope and Jesus Christ. “Dear Mrs. Kennedy,” wrote Elaine Mc-Cluggage, “I am writing this letter as another mother who has a son named John, whose middle name is my maiden name, and who is also American, Irish and Catholic.” McCluggage wanted Rose to know that she attended mass “most mornings” and would remember JFK “each morning for as long as I am able.” Theresa Twaddle was just seventeen years old when she mailed a letter to the “finest parents of the finest president.” “As a Catholic I have offered all my masses, communions and prayers for your son and you,” Twaddle assured them.
⁸²