The Passage of Power (80 page)

Dusk fell, the rain continued, through it the great lantern shone; as each car was pulling up to the stairs, its headlights swept across the white columns; on the second floor of the White House, to the left of the portico, in the living quarters, there was a single lit window.

And television, cutting away from the portico to West Executive Avenue, showed America other pictures that day: of “the removal of the late President’s personal effects from the White House office—cartons of files, a large globe, a model of the aircraft carrier
Enterprise,
” TV newscaster
David Brinkley said in his dry voice. They were taken out the West Wing door and trundled on movers’
dollies across to the EOB, where they would be stored temporarily. Then another artifact came out. When Brinkley had finished explaining to his viewers about the rocking chair, he bit his lip. Television showed the President’s mother, veiled and holding her Bible, supported by two men as she made her way to morning Mass in Hyannis; they couldn’t show the father, for he didn’t come out of his house, but TV told the world that President Kennedy’s youngest brother, Teddy, and his sister Eunice had flown to Hyannis to break the news to the patriarch: “It is said that he took [it] remarkably well,” television reported. Television didn’t get a glimpse of Jack Kennedy’s children that day, and there wasn’t too much information about how they had been told, or about how they had reacted, but television showed a lot of film of John Jr. and Caroline playing in the Oval Office, romping with their father; viewers could imagine how they had reacted.

Over and over on Saturday television showed the scenes that had occurred at the White House during the previous night—at 4:30 a.m. It showed the White House and the marble gates to the horseshoe driveway brilliantly white in TV floodlights, and the Marine honor guard drawn up in the driveway. As the cameras swung toward the gates, a dark shape appeared beyond them in the darkness, and, as it came into the lights, it was seen to be the ambulance bringing the President’s body from Bethesda. Television showed the honor guard marching, rifles high at port arms, in front of the ambulance to the portico—to the tall columns and the hanging lantern behind them, and the doorway draped in black—and it showed the coffin, covered now in a flag, being lifted out by uniformed men and carried up the steps, past other guards, hands at the salute, staring straight ahead when the widow, still in the pink suit, and the brother walked past them. Most of the country had been sleeping when those scenes occurred, but television showed them, over and over, that Saturday, so the country saw them as if they were happening then, that day. And before dawn television crews had been briefly allowed into the East Room, and the film they had taken there was shown over and over again that day, so that over and over again America saw the black catafalque, like Lincoln’s catafalque, the black crepe on the draperies and chandeliers—and America saw, too, two workmen, after finishing some task in the East Room in those pre-dawn hours, start to leave and then stop at the two prie-dieux, and kneel, and cross themselves, and pray.

Interspersed with all this were documentaries of Kennedy’s life—images of his smile, remembrances of his wit; pictures of him with his wife and children. And then there were replays of significant television programs in which he had participated. One of them was an hour-long interview he had held in the Oval Office with the three network correspondents, sitting relaxed and easy in the rocking chair. The country therefore saw him in his rocker, and then saw the rocker being trundled out on a dolly.

There were pictures of Lyndon Johnson, too, that Saturday, of the new President inside his car, face grim, as he left The Elms and as he turned into West Executive Avenue that morning, of him walking quickly into and out of church
from his car, of him walking across West Executive to the Cabinet meeting, a Secret Service agent holding an umbrella over his head.

There were no television cameras in 274, as there were none in the White House; still photographs of him sitting at the conference table with Rusk and then McNamara were shown—“the first pictures … of him at work, as President,”
Brinkley said—but they didn’t have much impact beside pictures of Jackie Kennedy following the coffin, or beside pictures of the honor guard, or beside pictures of what one broadcaster called “the mighty of the land filing into the White House … for a mournful adieu to President John F. Kennedy.” The Cabinet meeting had drama to it, but there were no pictures of that, live or still; indeed television mentioned it only briefly. There was no hint at all of what had happened between Johnson and Bobby Kennedy that morning. The new President did appear on television to read his proclamation establishing Monday as a day of national mourning, but he simply walked up to a makeshift microphone, quickly read the statement in a minute and a half, and left the room without another word. “He apparently decided just to read the proclamation and let it go at that,” a newscaster said. After summing up the day’s dramatic events in the White House, Brinkley added that “President Johnson in the meantime was across in the Executive Office Building … carrying on his business, meeting with the Cabinet.…” “President Johnson,” said another newscaster, “has been shall we say a little bit in the background today.”

Newspapers covered his activities more thoroughly, running long articles about them on the front page. “President Lyndon B. Johnson took firm control of the reins of government,” the
Washington Post
said. “Mr. Johnson’s day was one of brisk activity,” the
New York Times
said. And the headlines about him were banner headlines—all across the top of the front page—just as were the headlines about Kennedy and Oswald. But the headlines about him had none of the drama of the headlines about Kennedy and Oswald. Across the top of the
Washington Post
’s front page, for example, the headlines were:
NATION’S GREAT FILE PAST KENNEDY BIER: BODY LIES IN STATE AT CAPITOL TODAY; JOHNSON MOVES TO CARRY ON POLICIES.
In the
New York Times
the banners were:
KENNEDY’S BODY LIES IN WHITE HOUSE; JOHNSON AT HELM WITH WIDE BACKING; POLICE SAY PRISONER IS THE ASSASSIN.
The stories about him weren’t the lead stories, but only the second lead. And in any event it wasn’t from newspapers, but from television that America was getting its news that day.

A
ND THEN
, the next morning, Sunday morning, began the roll of the drums.

As the sun rose that morning, the rain gone, the pale blue sky seemingly without a cloud, the broad avenues between the White House and the Capitol were waiting, their roadways empty, the crowds lining them on the pavements packed solid, standing in silence.

In front of the White House, the sounds were of horses’ hooves and the
creaking of harnesses, and of rolling wooden wheels. A bare black wooden platform—a caisson, or artillery gun carriage—on four black wheels was pulled into the driveway and up to the North Portico by six matched gray horses in pairs, a rider on the left-hand horse in each pair, the saddle on the right horse empty, as was military custom for a fallen leader. Two heavy black straps had been attached to the caisson. It stood there, in front of the portico, for a while, black and bare, the straps dangling. Then, without ceremony except for the coming to attention, rifles held high, of the dress-uniformed men flanking the doorway and the steps down to the driveway, eight military pallbearers brought the flag-draped coffin out of the doorway and down the stairs, and lifted it onto the gun carriage. The straps were laid across the coffin, black against the bright red and white stripes, and buckled fast so that it couldn’t fall off.

There was a pause, and suddenly, in the doorway, there she was.

Jacqueline Kennedy was dressed all in black; she wasn’t crying—at least there were no tears on a face that might have been the model for a portrait of Grief. On either side of her was a small figure, dressed in a sky-blue coat, and she took their hands. Standing behind her, a little to the side, was Robert Kennedy, expressionless, still as a statue.

They stood there while the caisson began to move away down the driveway toward Pennsylvania Avenue, between soldiers and sailors holding the flags of the fifty states, who dipped them in salute as the caisson passed. The first of a line of black limousines pulled into the portico, and the Kennedys walked down the steps as
Clint Hill opened the back door of the car. Behind them the figures of Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson came into view, and came down the steps; they and the Kennedys were to ride in the same car together. They got in, Jackie and Lyndon in the rear seat, with Caroline and John Jr. sitting next to their mother, Lady Bird and Robert in the jump seats, which faced forward, with Lady Bird in front of her husband. The car pulled slowly down the driveway behind the caisson. It waited at the end of the driveway, so that as the caisson came out between the gates, it came out alone. And as it came out, the drums began.

Few people in Washington—few people in America, perhaps—had ever heard the sound of muffled drums, the tension on each drumhead loosened so that the resonance was deadened. With a whole corps playing muffled drums, as they were playing now, the roll of those drums filled the air—melancholy, ominous, final. And it was to that sound that the caisson came out onto Pennsylvania Avenue to take its place in a column—ahead of it, after the drum corps, priests marching abreast, three of them with their black robes billowing behind; warriors marching abreast, their medals glinting in the sun: the dead President’s military aides, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, other generals, other admirals, a company of sailors with fixed, shining bayonets; an honor guard carrying the flag of his country, and, just behind the caisson bearing the dead President, carried by a single tall sailor, his own flag, the presidential standard. Shielded by the portico, the standard had hung limp, but as it came out between the gates, it was caught by a
gust of wind so that it blew straight out, and the golden presidential seal, with its eagle holding an olive branch in one talon and arrows in the other, stood out for a moment bold against the navy blue background. Behind that flag came a riderless horse, a magnificent tall black gelding, sword in its scabbard hanging from the saddle, but in the stirrups, boots turned backward to symbolize the fact that his fallen rider would never ride again; since the days of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane, a riderless horse with boots reversed in the stirrups had followed fallen chieftains to their graves.
Black Jack was a restless animal, always hard to control; he was prancing nervously now, tossing his head, trying to rear against the bit. Following him came the limousine carrying the Johnsons and the Kennedys and then a line of other limousines with Kennedy relatives and the dead President’s closest aides. None of the cars had its top down this time.

After three blocks, the procession wheeled around the corner by the Treasury Building, and suddenly, facing the marchers a mile away, rearing up—huge, gleaming, almost dazzlingly white against the clear blue sky, thrusting up out of a base so long that it seemed to fill the horizon—was the dome of the Capitol. Stretching along the base, the building that held the two chambers of Congress, were tall white marble columns and the pilasters that are the echo of columns, and the dome was circled with columns, too, circled by columns not only in its first mighty upward thrust, where it was rimmed by thirty-six great pillars (for the thirty-six states that the Union had comprised when it was built), but circled by columns also high above, hundreds of feet above Pennsylvania Avenue, where, just below the Statue of Freedom, a circle of thirteen more slender shafts (for the thirteen original states) made the
tholos,
a structure modeled after the place where the Greeks left sacrifices to the gods, look like a little temple in the sky. As the long procession moved down that broad avenue before the packed, silent throng, to the thunderous roll of the muffled drums, it was moving toward columns atop columns, columns in the sky—a procession carrying the body of a republic’s slain ruler, in all the stateliness and pomp a republic could muster, toward a structure that represented, and embodied, all a republic’s majesty.

For long minutes the drums would roll and the air reverberate with their sad, fateful sound, then the drums would stop, and so quiet was the watching crowd that in those intervals the clatter of hooves, Black Jack’s and those of the matched grays, and the rhythmic tread of the marching sailors echoed down the avenue.
“Block
by block, the hush deepened,” an observer wrote. General Clifton, marching with the other military aides, was to recall that
“All
you could hear was the drums and the clump of the horses”—
“the
drums, the terrible drums,” another marching general was to say.

The procession from the White House to the Capitol took about forty-five minutes. As the lead limousine came out of the White House gates, there was, Lady Bird Johnson was to recall, a “sea of faces stretching away on every side—silent, watching faces.” She would remember the flags at half-mast all along the avenue, and the sailors marching in front of her, “and always there was the sound
of muffled drums in the background.” But “most vivid of all was the feeling of
a
sea of faces … and that curious sense of silence, broken only by an occasional sob.”

Lady Bird sat next to the man her husband hated—and who hated him. Robert Kennedy’s “face was grave, white, sorrowful,” she was to recall. John-John, “in a peripatetic mood,” kept jumping back and forth from the back seat to his uncle’s lap and back again, until finally Robert said, “John-John, be good, you be good and we’ll give you a flag afterwards.” The “only time the Attorney General said anything else,” she says, was as the car passed the Old Senate Office Building. “The Attorney General looked over and said … as though to himself, or perhaps to the children, ‘That was where it all began. That was where he ran for the presidency.’ ”

“There was a flinching of the jaw at that moment that almost made—well, it made your soul flinch for him,” she says.