Reclaiming History (39 page)

Powers told Jackie about the president’s last visit to the Kennedy family compound at Hyannis Port on October 30, when he spent the whole day with his crippled and speechless father. The next day, when the president’s helicopter arrived, Jack kissed his father on the forehead, started off, and then went back to kiss him again—almost, Dave thought, as though he sensed he would never see his father again. They told how they had accompanied Jack to his son Patrick’s grave in Brookline that same afternoon and how they heard him remark, “He seems so alone here.”

“I’ll bring them together now,” Jackie said quietly. At first, Dave and Ken thought she was thinking of burying the president in Boston, but she had already decided on Arlington and planned to have Patrick’s body moved from Massachusetts for reburial beside his father.
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They told her about their trip to Ireland in June, which Jack had described to her as the most enjoyable experience of his whole life. He was impressed by the drill of the Irish military cadets at Arbour Hill when he placed a wreath on the graves of the leaders of the Easter Rising of 1916. Jackie decides to have them attend the funeral too, if they can, along with the pipers of the Royal Highland Black Watch Regiment, who performed for the president and his family only last week on the grounds of the White House.

Now, as the plane begins its descent into Andrews Air Force Base, O’Donnell, Powers, and O’Brien learn that a detachment of military pallbearers is waiting to carry the coffin from the plane. Overcome with Irish sentiment, Ken O’Donnell speaks up.

“We’ll carry him off ourselves.”
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I
n a quiet Maryland suburb of the nation’s capital, Naval Commander James J. Humes strolls purposefully toward the entrance of Bethesda Naval Hospital. There is a cordon of marines and military police around the hospital, with additional guards stationed at all three entrance gates to the grounds with instructions to admit only employees, patients in serious condition, their relatives, and cars with White House clearance. The thirty-nine-year-old Humes senses that the president’s body must be en route.

Earlier, around noon, he had left Bethesda, where he is director of laboratories of the Naval Medical School, and had gone home to help his wife, Ann, get ready for a dinner party they were having that evening for twenty-four people, almost all of them military colleagues. In addition to the dinner party, they were busy taking care of last-minute details related to their son’s First Communion, scheduled to take place the following morning at their parish church. Both Jim and Ann were far too busy to listen to the radio, and neither had any idea of the tragedy gripping the country until a couple of their older children—they have five in school and two at home—came home on the school bus and told their mother, “The president’s been shot.”

“That’s a terrible thing to say,” she scolded, only to switch on the television and find that it was true. Jim and Ann both knew the dinner party was off, which meant they had a lot of telephoning to do. But the Washington telephone system had given out, overloaded by thousands of people wanting to talk about and share their grief over news of the tragedy, and Ann was finding it impossible to reach any of their guests.
*
In the interim, Jim decided to take his son out for a haircut. They had just returned when his wife was finally able to get an open line, only to have an operator interrupt her for an emergency call from Admiral Edward Kenney, surgeon general of the navy. “Jim,” Kenney told him, “you better hurry over to the hospital.”

Humes could hardly have imagined at this time that he would someday be accused by many conspiracy theorists as being an accessory after the fact to Kennedy’s murder, and indeed, by necessary extension from their arguments, a part of a plot to murder the president.

Now Humes bounds toward Admiral Kenney’s office, where the surgeon general gives the commander his orders: “Be prepared to do an autopsy on the late president.” As the words sink in, Humes is told that Commander J. Thornton Boswell, the forty-one-year-old chief of pathology at the Naval Medical School, will be assisting him. He can add anyone else to the team he deems necessary in helping him to determine the cause of death, but he’s instructed to limit the personnel as much as possible.
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Retiring to the solitude of his office, Commander Humes gets a phone call from his friend Dr. Bruce Smith, acting deputy director of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology (AFIP), who offers whatever help he might need. Humes is grateful and tells him he may call him later.

A short time later, Humes gets in touch with Dr. Boswell and together they decide that Dr. Humes should be the senior autopsy surgeon, considering that he was Boswell’s superior at the hospital.
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Both men have performed autopsies, although neither has been trained or certified as a forensic pathologist, a fact that will ultimately be used to great advantage by conspiracy theorists.
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*

4:58 p.m. (5:58 p.m. EST)

At two minutes before the hour in the East Coast darkness, Air Force One, the superb blue and white plane of the nation’s chief executive, touches down at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, about fifteen miles southeast of the nation’s capital.
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The plane taxis into the glare of the reception area, now thronged with hundreds of government officials and other VIPs.

The first person to board Air Force One is President Kennedy’s brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, who bounds up the ramp and races from the front of the plane to the rear, ignoring President Johnson’s outstretched hand as he passes. Johnson is miffed, but O’Donnell, realizing that Bobby’s only thought is to get to Jackie as quickly as possible, doubts whether he even saw the president’s gesture.
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In the tail compartment, Bobby Kennedy rushes to Jackie’s side.

“Hi, Jackie,” he says quietly, putting an arm around her. “I’m here.”

“Oh, Bobby,” Jackie sighs. It is so like him, she thinks. He is always there when you need him.
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Most of the civilized world is riveted to the live television coverage of the arrival. A huge “catering bus”—an outsized forklift, roofed and painted a garish yellow, used to load meals aboard military transports—is brought to the left rear of the plane and attached to the exit twelve feet above. A military casket team moves forward to secure the casket but is pushed out of the way by the dead president’s friends and aides, who, along with the assistance of Secret Service agents, start to move the casket onto the compartment of the catering bus.
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The compartment containing both the casket and the Kennedy entourage slowly begins to descend, then comes to a stop five feet above the ground. Not being designed for such uses, it’s the lowest the forklift can go. It is almost impossible to unload the casket from this height, even with two teams of pallbearers, one on the ground, the other on the lift. Television cameras relentlessly record the awkward scene in black and white. The men struggle to move the cumbersome burden into the rear of a gray U.S. Navy ambulance, its rotating beacon throwing flashes of light over their faces, and finally succeed after several minutes. Meanwhile, the men in the Kennedy entourage begin jumping off the catering bus to the ground below. Robert Kennedy, one of the first on the ground, turns back to help Mrs. Kennedy down to the tarmac.
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*

Jackie Kennedy walks toward the navy ambulance. Clint Hill assumes she’ll ride in the front seat, but she makes her way to the rear door. She tries to open it but can’t. Fastened from the inside, the driver quickly reaches back to release the lock. She and Robert Kennedy climb into the back with General McHugh. Secret Service agent Bill Greer takes the wheel, while Kellerman, Paul Landis, and Dr. Burkley crowd into the front seat beside him.
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Still aboard the plane, President Johnson glances at a brief statement on the three-by-five card in his hand. The words were drafted in longhand by Liz Carpenter, the press attaché of Lady Bird Johnson, honed by LBJ aide Bill Moyers, and finally typed up for the president. Studying it on the plane, Johnson reversed the order of the last two sentences.

“Bird?” Johnson inquires of his wife. She is ready. Bareheaded in the freezing November cold, Lyndon Johnson, Lady Bird at his side, moves down the ramp into the glare of the airport and television lights, steps up to a podium encrusted with microphones, and speaks to the world for the first time as president of the United States, amid the deafening thwacking of helicopter rotors, which await the task of transporting the new president to his next destination.

“This is a sad time for all people,” Johnson intones solemnly. “We have suffered a loss that cannot be weighed. For me it is a deep personal tragedy. I know the world shares the sorrow that Mrs. Kennedy and her family bear. I will do my best. That is all I can do. I ask for your help—and God’s.”
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B
ecause of this event, television has taken on an important new dimension. In addition to meting out bits of new information about the day’s events as the drama unfolds, it has now become a vehicle through which the nation’s grief is both shared and amplified. NBC’s cameras, filming people’s reactions to the news on a New York street, caught a middle-aged woman in dark glasses and a fashionable hat at the moment the news of the president’s death came over a nearby car radio. The woman jerked as though hit with a physical object, and cried out loudly in disbelief. Similar responses were caught on camera throughout America.
*

ABC begins rerunning the footage shot by its Dallas affiliate at Love Field earlier that morning in the sparkling sunshine after the rain cleared, showing Jack Kennedy, trailed by Jackie, working his way along the fence to shake some of the hundreds of hands reaching out to him, his enjoyment so obviously unfeigned, his whole being seeming to exemplify a vibrant hope for the future.

“This,” Jim Hagerty, former President Eisenhower’s press secretary, says, commenting on the ABC footage, “is the president’s way of saying thank you to the people. How can you stop it? I don’t think you want to stop it…It’s rather difficult, while guarding the president, to argue that you can’t shake hands with the American people or ride in an open car where the people can see you.”

In the world of television, where recording and rebroadcasting somehow erase the distinction between past and present, the event can be shown over and over again, but it remains tragically unstoppable.

Harry S. Truman, contacted in retirement in Missouri, is reported to be so upset he is unable to make a statement. Dwight D. Eisenhower feels not only shock and dismay but indignation. He angrily mentions this “occasional psychopathic thing” in the American people, but expresses his belief that it is nonetheless a nation “of great common sense” that will not be “stampeded or bewildered.”

General Douglas McArthur says, “The president’s death kills something in me.”

Adlai Stevenson, speaking from the UN and for millions, says, “All men everywhere who love peace and justice and freedom will bow their heads,” adding later, “It’s too bad that, in my old age, they couldn’t have spent their violence on me and spared this young man for our nation’s work.”

There’s footage too of President Johnson being sworn in aboard Air Force One by Judge Hughes, with the stunned but dutiful widow of his predecessor at his side. The nation, as one, sees an orderly transition of government.

The network anchors—Ed Silverman and Ron Cochran of ABC, Bill Ryan, Chet Huntley, and Frank McGee of NBC, Charles Collingwood and Walter Cronkite of CBS—are addressing the largest television audience in history, unconsciously weaving—out of fact, history, and emotion—a shared experience that will hold the nation in its grip into an unforeseeable future.
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5:10 p.m.

In Irving, Texas, at the Paine residence, police are just about finished loading everything they have seized into the police cars.

It isn’t quite clear to Ruth Paine whether she and Marina are under arrest or not, although it feels as though they are. Earlier, when the officers asked them, as well as Ruth’s husband, Michael, to come down to the police station, Ruth, wanting to cooperate, had gone to see whether she could get a babysitter.

As Ruth left to walk next door to her neighbor’s house, one of the police officers moved to accompany her.

“Oh,” she said, “you don’t have to go with me.”

He said he would be glad to, and she told him to come along, but with a sinking feeling as she realized he was probably assigned to escort her. She called on Mrs. Roberts next door, but Mrs. Roberts was just on her way out and couldn’t help. It was after school by that time, though, so Ruth went to another neighbor’s house and managed to get one of her teenage daughters to come stay with the kids. As she came back to her own house, still under police escort, she saw the other officers carrying boxes of things from the house to their cars. In a backseat she spotted three cartons of phonograph records, her old 78s.

“You don’t need those,” she protested, “and I want to use them on Thanksgiving weekend. I promised to lead a folk dance conference that weekend. I’ll need those records, which are all folk dance records, and I doubt that you’ll get them back to me by then.”

They paid no attention to her. The records went. She complained about her 16-millimeter projector too, but her escort took her by the arm and told her they were wasting “too much time.”

The brusque treatment continued inside the house, and Ruth began to resent it more and more. Now, she changes from her slacks to a suit, but the officers prevent Marina from doing the same.

“She has a right to,” Ruth explains to them icily, a note of proper Quaker decency in her voice. “She’s a woman, she has a right to dress as she wishes before going.” She tells Marina in Russian to go to the bathroom to change, but while Ruth is talking to the babysitter, one of the cops opens the bathroom door and tells Marina she has no time to change. Ruth’s protests were useless. Marina, her emotions whipsawing, is suddenly angry. “I’m not a criminal,” she says to herself. “I didn’t do anything.”