Reclaiming History (30 page)

The words catch in his throat, and for a moment, the most respected news anchor in the business is about to lose his composure. Choking back tears, Cronkite clears his throat and continues, “Vice President Lyndon Johnson has left the hospital. We don’t know to where he has proceeded. Presumably, he will be taking the oath of office and become the thirty-sixth president of the United States.”
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During a later break, Cronkite answered a network telephone and heard a snobbish-sounding woman caller say, “I just want to say that this is the worst possible taste to have that Walter Cronkite on the air with his crocodile tears when everybody knows that he spent all his time trying to get the president.” The newsman shot back, “Madam,
this
is Walter Cronkite and you’re a goddamned idiot!” and slammed the phone down so hard he thought for a moment he had damaged it.
⁵¹³

W
ith the news of the president’s death, men and women across the country “sobbed in the streets of the cities and did not have to explain why,” historian Theodore White wrote. “Not until he was dead and all men knew he would never again point his forefinger down from the platform in speaking to them, never pause before lancing with his wit the balloon of an untidy question, did Americans know how much light the young president had given their own lives—and how he had touched them.”
⁵¹⁴
Comedian Bob Hope wasn’t trying to be funny when he said, “The lights had blown out in Camelot and the whole nation was stumbling around in the dark.”
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The
New York Times
’ Tom Wicker wrote, “People were unbelieving, afraid…desperately unsure of what would happen next. The world, it seemed, was a dark and malignant place; the chill of the unknown shivered across the nation.”
⁵¹⁶

Many in America, a nation of 190 million people, “simply stood, stupefied, no longer listening to the staccato voices that sounded unceasingly on the radios. Church bells tolled and the churches began to fill…Strangers spoke to each other, seeking surcease,” wrote Relman Morin, a Pulitzer Prize–winning correspondent who covered the assassination for Associated Press and was a personal friend of the president’s. In Boston, he continued, “the Boston Symphony broke off a Handel concert to play a funeral march by Beethoven. The gong sounded in the New York Stock Exchange, suspending trading. Hundreds of football games to have been played Saturday were postponed. Race tracks closed…Sessions in the United Nations came to a halt…Television and radio networks announced that they were withdrawing all entertainment programs and commercials from their schedules to devote full time to…the assassination; normal programming would not be resumed until after the funeral.”
⁵¹⁷

What happened in New York City is a microcosm of the country as a whole. The
New York Times
reported,

The cry rang across the city, echoing again and again: “Is it true?” Another cry quickly took its place as the news of the death of President Kennedy swept with sudden impact: “My God!”…In all parts of the five boroughs, motorists pulled up their cars and sat hunched over their dashboard radios…Hundreds of thousands reached for so many telephones that the system blacked out and operators had to refuse calls…Uptown, midtown, downtown, work in offices came to an abrupt halt…The biggest city in the nation turned into something of a ghost town. All Broadway theaters and all musical events…were cancelled…One common scene was the tight grasp of one’s hand on another’s arm as they discussed the assassination…Those who had no one familiar at hand walked up to strangers…The grief and the acts of mourning knew no special group, no particular section of the city…The sorrow and shock were unfolded in the human vignette, the collection of individuals who stared as though in a trance from their subway seats, their stools at luncheon counters, their chairs near television sets…A postman…encountered many housewives who wept as they told him the news. They talked about it just as if they had lost their son or daughter…. A dentist, weeping, said: “I can’t work. I’ve sent two patients home and I’ve closed my office.”…A bartender said: “Everybody feels dead, real dead.”…A department store saleswoman declared: “I would do anything to bring him back.”…As dusk came, automatic devices turned on the huge, gaudy signs that normally blot out the night in Times Square. Then, one by one, the lights blinked out, turning the great carnival strip into what was almost a mourning band on the city’s sleeve.
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*

It was not too different in most foreign countries, people weeping in the streets of the world’s great capitals—Berlin, London, Paris, Rome. Even peoples who did not understand a word of English that Kennedy spoke had sensed that he was special, and he somehow touched the heart of these millions. “To them, Kennedy symbolized youth, new ideas, a fresh approach, the New Generation. Indeed, he had sounded that chord himself in his Inaugural Address. ‘Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans, born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace.’” Kennedy had come to power after the greatest and most destructive war ever, “only to be followed by the specter of an even greater war in which new weapons could decimate the human race.” Because of his leadership, soaring oratory, and innate charisma, millions throughout the planet felt that a peaceful resolution to the world’s problems was more likely with him leading the way. People somehow believed in the possibilities of his vision of “a new world…where the strong are just, and the weak secure and the peace preserved…Let us begin.”

“That young man,” Kennedy’s cold-war counterpart, Soviet premier Nikita S. Khrushchev, reminisced in sorrow, without the need to say another word. West Berlin mayor Willy Brandt said, “A flame went out for all those who had hoped for a just peace and a better life.”
*
Eighty-nine-year-old Winston Churchill, hearing the news in London while peering at his TV set with his Clementine, said, “The loss to the United States and to the world is incalculable.” Around the world, “groups divided by deep ideological chasms found common cause in mourning John F. Kennedy…For an hour, at least, he drew men together in universal mourning.”
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In Latin America, grief was pervasive. Brazilian president João Goulart declared three days of official mourning and canceled all of his official engagements. Chilean president Jorge Alessandri Rodriguez declared national mourning, and radio stations replaced all programs with funeral music. Rómulo Betancourt, president of Venezuela, attempting to read to newsmen the message of condolences he had sent to Washington, broke into tears and was unable to go on.
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But if one were to think that grief over Kennedy’s death was universal, they would be wrong. “An Oklahoma City physician,” author William Manchester writes, “beamed at a grief-stricken visitor and said, ‘God, I hope they got Jackie [too].’ In a small Connecticut city a doctor called ecstatically across Main Street—to an internist who worshiped Kennedy—‘The joy ride’s over. This is one deal Papa Joe can’t fix.’ A woman visiting Amarillo, the second most radical city in Texas [after Dallas], was lunching in the restaurant adjacent to her motel when a score of rejoicing students burst in from a high school directly across the street. ‘Hey, great, JFK’s croaked!’ one shouted with flagrant delight, and the woman, leaving as rapidly as she could, noticed that several diners were smiling back at the boy. In Dallas itself a man whooped and tossed his expensive Stetson in the air, and it was in a wealthy Dallas suburb that the pupils of a fourth-grade class, told that the President of the United States had been murdered in their city, burst into spontaneous applause.”
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Similarly, in the fifth grade of a private school in New Orleans, the teacher was called out of the room by another fifth-grade teacher to listen to a transistor radio bearing the news. When he returned to his class to announce that Kennedy had been shot and killed, spontaneously the pupils cheered and applauded—one girl, the exception, cried.
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Because of JFK’s open support for civil rights for the nation’s blacks, as indicated, many in the South had detested him. And when news of the shooting and later the death of the president became known, although most in the South—including those like the former Birmingham police commissioner T. Eugene “Bull” Connor, and John Birch Society founder Robert W. Welch Jr., who opposed Kennedy’s civil rights policies—expressed their profound grief over the assassination, some southern newspapers received anonymous, jeering telephone calls: “So they shot the nigger lover. Good for whoever did it.” “He asked for it and I’m damned glad he got it…trying to ram the damn niggers down our throats.”
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Radio also heard from the racial bigots. Before the announcer cut him off, a man who had called a station in Atlanta got in his belief that “any white man who did what [Kennedy] did for niggers should be shot.”
⁵²⁴
And it wasn’t just in the South. A young man wearing a swastika on his left arm walked around the state capitol in Madison, Wisconsin, proclaiming that Kennedy’s death was “a miracle for the white race” and telling bystanders he was “celebrating.”
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*

Ralph Emerson McGill, publisher of the Atlanta, Georgia,
Constitution
, wrote of the antipathy for Kennedy before his death that spilled over, among some, to his demise: “There were businessmen who, in a time when profits were at an all-time high and the domestic economy booming, nonetheless could speak only in hatred of ‘the Kennedys.’ There were evangelists who declared the President to be an anti-Christ, an enemy of God and religion. This hatred could focus on almost anything the President proposed. When he asked for legislation for medical aid for the aged, for example, there were doctors who succumbed to the fever of national unreason and began abusing the President. In locker rooms and at cocktail parties, luncheons and dinners, it became a sort of game to tell vulgar and shabby jokes about the President, his wife and his family. Most of these were repeats of stories in vogue at the time Franklin D. and Eleanor Roosevelt were in the White House.”
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†

I
n Irving, Texas, Marina Oswald and Ruth Paine are sitting side by side on the sofa watching the television coverage when they hear the news.

“What a terrible thing for Mrs. Kennedy,” Marina sighs, “and for the children to be left without a father.” Ruth walks about the room crying, while Marina is too stunned to cry, although she feels as though her blood has “stopped running.”
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I
n Oak Cliff, police order everyone out of the library at Marsalis and Jefferson, hands high. Officer Walker points out the man he saw run in—Adrian Hamby, a nineteen-year-old Arlington State University student who had dashed into the library, where he worked part-time as a page, to tell friends that the president had been shot. Hamby is terrified as the cops realize the truth. A disappointed Sergeant Owens informs the dispatcher, “It was the wrong man.”
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1:39 p.m. (2:39 p.m. EST)

The FBI dispatches its first Teletype, from Director Hoover, to all fifty-five of its field offices. Stamped “Urgent” it reads:

All offices immediately contact all informants, security, racial and criminal, as well as other sources, for information bearing on assassination of President Kennedy. All offices immediately establish whereabouts of bombing suspects, all known Klan and hate group members, known racial extremists, and any other individuals who on the basis of information available in your files may possibly have been involved.
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M
eanwhile, at Love Field, because he had been alerted to prepare Air Force One for immediate takeoff if necessary, the pilot, Colonel James Swindal, had had the ground air-conditioner disconnected, and the interior of Air Force One is hot and stuffy.
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Since the plane’s own air-conditioning works only when the engines are running, the interior temperature continues to rise slowly but steadily. The shades have been drawn (Agent Youngblood fears a sniper on the roof of the terminal building), the doors locked, and a Secret Service sentinel posted at each one. More agents ring the aircraft on the ground. The Dallas police are patrolling both inside and outside the terminal. Some of them are checking the departure gates for every youngish man who comes close to meeting the broadcast descriptions of the assassin.
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Johnson could have left Dallas three-quarters of an hour ago, but feeling, he said, a “sharp, painful, and bitter concern and solicitude for Mrs. Kennedy,” he resolves not to leave without the president’s widow, knowing that she would not leave without her husband’s body.
⁵³²

He is also anxious to take the oath of office as soon as possible. Johnson’s aides and the congressmen present aren’t quite sure of the procedure. Two of the congressmen, Jack Brooks and Albert Thomas, are in favor of doing it immediately. The third, Thornberry, advises waiting until they get to Washington. No one is clear on the law as mandated by the Constitution, and no one can think where the actual text of the oath might be found. The steadily rising heat in the stateroom
*
makes clear thought increasingly difficult. The men loosen their ties, open their shirt collars, and fan themselves with papers. The question of how to dramatize the presidential succession is more than symbolic—there is already news of a panic on Wall Street that has wiped out eleven billion dollars of stock values in the little more than an hour since the shooting.

Johnson goes into the bedroom of the presidential cabin to make private phone calls. He calls Robert Kennedy at his home in Virginia. Relations between the two men have always been frosty. Johnson offers Kennedy words of condolence, and they briefly discuss what is known and what remains unknown about the assassination. The murder, he says, “might be part of a worldwide plot.” Kennedy is unresponsive. He doesn’t understand what Johnson is talking about.