Where Were You?: America Remembers the JFK Assassination (14 page)

He got out and took my arm. As we approached the room, he tensed a little bit because he saw President Truman in there. I remembered
hearing that they weren’t on the best of terms. I thought I’d excuse myself to get him some coffee, but he said, “You stick right with me, son.” It’s very difficult to turn down a five-star general, let alone a former president of the United States.

President Truman was aware that somebody had come in. He turned around and was a bit surprised to see President Eisenhower, who then said to him, and I’ll never forget it, “Harry, what are us two sons of whatever standing here alive with that young man down the hall dead? You and I have seen too many young men die.” Then they hugged.

Needless to say, I made my exit. I don’t know whether they had had any prior encounters, but that was an extraordinary one. You could see how the death of this president, which produced so many things, brought them together.

I was trying to get a ride to the funeral Mass when Mr. Shriver said, “Get into your mourning coat.”

I said, “What do you mean?”

He said, “We’ve got a mourning coat there for you. We want you to march in the procession.”

I asked, “Sarge, why would I do that?”

He explained, “We’re not sure the emperor’s going to make it. It’s kind of a long walk, so we want you to walk behind the emperor and help him out if anything happens.” I got into the mourning coat and did walk behind him. He started to fade back, but he did finally make it.

The walk was a little bit scary. There were rumors that there was an assassin out for de Gaulle. We heard rumors that they took someone off the roof of one of the buildings during the march. Obviously there were great security concerns. But Mrs. Kennedy decided she was going to march with those children. The minute President Johnson heard that, that
settled everything; the president was going to march with her, and therefore everybody followed.

President Johnson was extraordinarily sensitive, and I think here he had a lot of help from Bill Moyers. The president felt that, not only in this country but around the world, the perception of this whole event would in some ways be determined by the funeral. Which is why he made it perfectly clear to Bill—and Bill really made it clear to me that I was to be down there while Sarge was trying to organize things—to be sure the family got anything they wanted, that the funeral could be as they wished, and it would be moving.

Because of President Kennedy’s military background, Mr. Shriver was asking that there be troops along the road. I think the commanding general of the District at that time thought that Mr. Shriver’s rank was sergeant because he didn’t seem to be too accommodating and mentioned that it would take more troops than they had available. I thought that was my cue, so I bolted out of the room and went down. The cabinet meeting was going on. I knocked on the door; when Bill came out I said, “Bill, we’ve got a problem. You know, troops.”

Bill said, “I get it.”

Next thing I knew, Mr. McNamara came out, put his arm around me, and said, “I understand Sarge is having a problem.” I said, “Yes, as a matter of fact, a number of them.” He said, “Come on; let’s go down.”

Down he went. He sat on the arm of the chair, put his arm around Sarge, and said, “Sarge, I understand we have some problems here.”

Sarge said, “I’d like to have an honor guard, but it seems we don’t have enough troops.”

It was very clear that the general knew who the secretary of defense was, and he stood like a rod. McNamara said to him, “General, if it takes five hundred troops, they shall be there. If it takes five thousand, they shall be there. If it takes fifty thousand and you have to mobilize the reserves, do it immediately.” The guy was just—needless to say, he got the message.

Then he turned to Sarge and asked, “Is there anything else?”

Sarge said, “I think the president would have liked the Air Force to have a chance to participate as well. But they say there can’t be a flyover because it will scare the horses; they’re very concerned about that.”

This time, McNamara’s gaze went to the Air Force aide. He said, “General, I want on my desk by the end of the afternoon the exact altitude at which a flyover can occur without scaring horses,” and it was done.

That’s the kind of thing that went on. I think when you put it all together, there was an extraordinary attention to detail. The troops were there; the flyover was perfect. So many things, and a lot of that was because the new president was so sensitive. I think he was aided a lot by Bill Moyers in this regard, to recognize the fact that the world would grieve.

Another question came up that demonstrated this to me. The new president, in the course of his first cabinet meeting, was raising questions about the Peace Corps: Would the volunteers return from all over the world as a result of this? The last thing he wanted was for it to appear that the wonderful things Kennedy started were over. So he wanted to know if they would come home. I was the Peace Corps psychiatrist and supposedly should know something about that. Bill came out and asked me, and I said, “Oh, they’re not going to come home.”

He said, “I’d like you to come in here and tell the president that in front of the cabinet.”

Sometimes you have to know when to say no. I said, “Bill, I can’t do that.” I couldn’t imagine going in there in that circumstance.

He said, “You’ve got to think of something, because it’s on the president’s mind.”

I found out the power of a White House phone. A great professor at Harvard by the name of Gerald Caplan had helped us develop the mental health program of the Peace Corps and had seen almost as many Peace Corps volunteers as I had around the world. I told the White House
operator, “I need to talk to Gerald Caplan at Harvard.” Within ten minutes, she had him on the phone.

The sense I got then was that the whole world was watching that White House for the first time. Not only in this country but all over, people were watching. To get a call from the White House during that time was extraordinary.

I asked Dr. Caplan, “Will the volunteers come home?”

He said, “Absolutely not.”

I asked, “How do we convince the president of this?”

He said, “That I can’t tell you.”

I asked, “Would you be willing to go to Bogotá, Colombia, tonight?” —where the first group of volunteers in Latin America had landed—“and talk to them?” He was gotten down to Colombia
that evening
. I don’t know how it happened, but they arranged transportation for him.

He met with the Colombia volunteers and was able to cable us back that not only were they not coming home but they were going to be rededicated. But they had a problem: Out in the boondocks where they were working there was no television. They wouldn’t be able to grieve the way the rest of the world and the rest of the country would. If we could figure out some way to help that happen, that would be the best thing we could do.

Mr. Shriver—and I’m not sure whether he asked the president to do this or whether he did it himself—got in touch with Punch Sulzberger and asked if the four-page coverage the
New York Times
was going to have of the event could be made into a special edition. He said, “Of course.”
That four-page edition went to every Peace Corps volunteer in the world within a week after the funeral. It was one of the few things Peace Corps Washington did that those volunteers were grateful for. That was the way they grieved, reading those editions together.

I keep thinking of the tremendous things that lived long after Kennedy was buried there in Arlington. For example, we had one hundred young doctors taking care of the Peace Corps volunteers. If anything, I think their spirit and dedication were increased by the world’s reaction to what they were doing and the association with President Kennedy.

They came back; one of them became the first medical director of the Job Corps. Another one, Lee Macht at Harvard, developed the mental health program of the Peace Corps. Another developed the Alaskan Health Care Federations. They became the leaders of the health centers that developed under President Johnson’s administration as a part of the War on Poverty. There were so many good things. These were people who, as a result of that experience, were so imbued with [a sense of] public service that instead of doing what they would normally do after their tour of duty—going back into private practice, whatever—they did great things. Thinking about this documentary stirred up a lot of things. For example, look at the effect that period had on the mentally ill in this country and the mentally retarded. President Kennedy was interested in helping the retarded, as was his sister.

He made two ten-year commitments. One was that we would be on the moon; he kept that one. The other one is less well known: that the state hospitals, which were not the best places to be—and the mental retardation centers even worse—would be diminished by half within ten years, which was something nobody ever thought was possible. It was done. It wasn’t done as perfectly as Kennedy would have wanted it, but it started the process. The Community Mental Health Center program, the Community Mental Retardation program—all those things came out of that period. President Johnson continued them, and they go on today. That’s an example of the way President Kennedy’s legacy continues.

Richard Goodwin and Doris Kearns Goodwin

In 1963 Richard Goodwin was a thirty-two-year-old advisor and speechwriter for President Kennedy, having joined his staff in 1959 when the commander in chief was a senator. Goodwin became Kennedy’s deputy assistant secretary of state for Inter-American Affairs and helped develop the Alliance for Progress, which aimed to bind the US and Latin America closer together. He later served as secretary-general of the Peace Corps, remained in the Johnson White House as an advisor, and coined the phrase “the Great Society” for Johnson’s reform program. Since leaving politics, Goodwin has authored numerous books, plays, and articles. Future Pulitzer Prize–winner Doris Kearns was a twenty-year-old student at Colby College in Maine, soon to graduate magna cum laude. She also worked in the Johnson administration and then taught at Harvard before writing several widely acclaimed books on American presidents. She appears regularly on
Meet the Press.

R
ICHARD: Kennedy had been in World War II. He’d been wounded badly, and he had suffered, and all that suffering and pain really made him much more aware of people who didn’t have those privileges. During his campaign for the presidency, he was probably most moved by going into the coal mines of West Virginia and seeing real poverty. He had taught himself that a lot of people were suffering, and he might be able to do something for them.

DORIS: Adversity is a great teacher. Just as FDR wouldn’t have been the same empathetic president had it not been for his polio; he shared a fate of hurt with lots of other people. The war was a huge binder of people—a
common mission, with people from different parts of the country, different economic backgrounds—that a lot of our politicians don’t have today, that shared background of having been in war together. He had pain, it was said by Bobby, almost every day in his life, so he knew how to get through difficulties and could project that onto other people to whom fate had also dealt an unkind hand, whether it was poverty, discrimination, or racial problems.

RICHARD: We knew he was often in pain; you could see that by the way he moved. He was taking medication of various kinds, but I don’t think any of us—not me, anyway—knew the extent to which he was suffering most of the time from medical problems. His adrenal gland insufficiency almost killed him. He had been through a lot of pain and suffering. That tempered him a lot, changed his outlook on the world—if you think you’re about to die, as he did many times on his way up the ladder.

DORIS: There was a sense, just while growing up in the 1960s, that there’d been a big divide between then and the ’50s, which was my high school years, when there was Eisenhower, when there was a sense of lack of forward movement on domestic progress. I was part of the civil rights movement. I’d gone down South. I’d been at Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. There was now a sense of this decade promising real change.

There also was a sense, for me, having been at that “I Have a Dream” speech, of wishing that JFK would come there and feeling disappointed that he hadn’t. There was a sense that the civil rights movement was ahead of JFK at that time. It’s not as if I looked upon him as a great hero, but I did feel that time was an exciting time to be alive, to be in college, to be
one of those young people, to be a part of the civil rights movement. It was a sense of knowing that you’re in an era that’s going to change the country and feeling proud to be young at that time.

The presidents who have made a mark on our country’s history have understood the technology of their time and what the moment of communication was. Lincoln understood that speeches would be printed in pamphlets and read in their entirety, so he worked on those speeches endlessly. Teddy Roosevelt understood that it was time for mass media, so you had to have shorthand phrases like “Carry a big stick, speak softly” that would make headlines in the country. FDR understood the power of radio. JFK understood the power of television, the power of photography, and the power of the moving picture. Those have kept him alive ever since.

RICHARD: The private Kennedy had a lot more humor. He could joke about what was happening. He also said he was “going to go get” guys who opposed him on something. He was vindictive that way, but he was always cool about it. Really, the modern phrase “cool” probably applies to him better than anyone else who’s ever occupied the White House. Tough. Cool, but tough. He could swear. He’d swear a lot. We all did. He was leading a very active social life while he was in the White House, as we all know now. We had a pretty good idea about it, but I never knew the dimensions of it. But that something that was going on, yes. We saw every beautiful woman hanging around. We were all young ourselves too, and we had that terrible reaction you do to sexual beings.

DORIS: No guilt seemed to transfer from one part to the other. That’s an extraordinary thing, to be able to know that you’re risking—or maybe he doesn’t know that he’s risking—the country’s image of him by the girls he’s bringing into the White House. The reporters weren’t covering it in those days, so you weren’t taking the same risks. They didn’t write about it. Everybody was doing the same thing.

RICHARD: The reporters and the White House staff, all of us knew. What you couldn’t do today, we did. Now there’s too much of a spotlight on it, but that really seemed trivial at the time, and we all partook.

Kennedy had had successes for his entire life, and then he ran into the Bay of Pigs, which was a disastrous failure and which caused him, I think, to cry in his bedroom that night after a brigade had been defeated. But I think the job did enlarge him. He got more tolerant of other people and other views. Failure’s a great teacher, and he was a man who was capable of learning. At the time he was killed, he had expanded himself and was much more tolerant of other people.

I was home, at my house in Virginia. I had talked to Kennedy the night before, when he was down in Texas, and I knew he was going to appoint me to another job in his administration. I called him and told him the news had leaked and that the
New York Times
had it, and he said, “We better announce it right away.”

I was at home writing that announcement for myself, having been partying with Teddy the night before with a group of Latin American people. We were up pretty late, and I was probably a little hung over. I had to check on something, and I called Kenny O’Donnell to clear some of the names with him. His secretary answered; I asked for Kenny, and she just said he wasn’t there. He was in Texas of course. Then she said, “Haven’t you heard, Mr. Goodwin? The president’s been shot, and he’s dead.” I hadn’t been listening to anything because I’d been writing. It was a terrific shock to me because, I think, like everyone else who worked for him, I loved the guy.

I got in my car; I didn’t know what to do about it, so I drove down to the White House. I figured there, at least, I could find out what was going on. The streets were all silent. I was silent. I walked into the White House, and the mourners were sitting there. Arthur Schlesinger was there. Kay Graham was there, Ken Galbraith. They’d all heard the word that Kennedy had been killed. We just sat down and talked and grieved together.

But then we had to prepare for the return of the body from Texas, and we had some very explicit instructions on how to do that from Jackie. She
wanted the East Room made up as it had been when Lincoln was shot. I didn’t have any idea where that was, so I just scrambled around. I called the Library of Congress and got a description of the East Room as when they had Lincoln’s body there. We instructed the people who were working with us that they should set it up exactly the same way. That’s what they tried to do and what I tried to do as much as we could. We were just racing about frantically trying to be true, literally true, to what Jackie said she wanted.

My initial reaction was just grief—wailing, “How could they do this to him?”—and disbelief. Then we all kept busy arranging for the funeral that was going to happen in the next day or two. That’s the best thing when you’re experiencing a grief reaction, if you keep yourself busy doing things. We brought in a catafalque for the body, and Jackie had said something about getting an eternal flame. Of course I had no idea what that was. She said it was like the flame at the Arc de Triomphe. That task was delegated to me. I thought the only people who might know about it would be the military. I called the Pentagon and told the general in charge, and he said, “We don’t have an eternal flame.”

I blew up. I said, “You guys can blow up the world, but you can’t find a little eternal flame for the president’s body?” They got something, using piped-in gas. Then we just worked through the night on details of the funeral and what the White House would look like. They put an honor guard in front of the White House, waiting for the body to come. I don’t know if it was surreal. Actually it was too real.

I don’t think I had much thought about Johnson, whom I had known a little, but I could feel the loss of Kennedy. Kennedy’s great contribution to the country was that he made us all feel a little better about ourselves and that there was movement on things. He had a youth, and he had humor. He had become much better at directing things since the Cuban Missile Crisis, and that was now gone. I knew nothing much about Johnson except that the Kennedys didn’t like him. [To them] he was just a
hanger-on basically, even though he was vice president. Kennedy always made sure Johnson had something to do, sending him on foreign trips and that kind of thing. Kennedy never joined any talk about Lyndon being crude. We had a sense that we were going through a big transition, but that wasn’t the concern on that night. We just knew Kennedy was gone, and he had been the center of our lives.

DORIS: Dick has an amazing story from having written a campaign speech for JFK. He and [Ted] Sorensen were in the plane together for the whole time of the 1960 election, and Dick had written a line for JFK talking about his programs and what might be accomplished. The line had read, “All this will not be accomplished in one hundred days.” Kennedy slashed it out. “I don’t want to be measured by one hundred days, the New Deal.” He changed it to a thousand days, which turned out to be the number of days of his life as president.