what has been in secret will come to light
This article originally appeared in the Oct 2013 upshot.
12:thirty P.Thousand., Key STANDARD Fourth dimension
Colonel James Swindal, a handsome forty-half-dozen-yr-old carpenter's son from Alabama and the pilot of Air Force One, sits in the communications shack behind his cockpit, pushing back a roast-beef sandwich. Two million dollars' worth of the latest engineering science buzzes effectually him, teletype machines and radios and three carve up phone patches. He'shalf-listening to the radio, Charlie frequency, to the chatter of Hush-hush Service agents narrating the progress of President John F. Kennedy's motorcade through Dallas. Swindal's copilot, Lieutenant Colonel Lewis Hanson, has left the plane, taking advantage of the short stop at Love Field to pay a quick visit to his ailing mother-in-law. As Swindal waits, he brings on only a light load of fuel for this afternoon'southward scheduled flight to Austin, part of the president's continuing bout of Texas.
Behind Swindal, in the large rider compartment, two secretaries blazon press releases; further dorsum, in the stateroom—with its two fixed tables, Television receiver, and vi chairs upholstered in gold—all is quiet. But in Air Strength One'due south unmarried bedchamber is there action: George Thomas, Kennedy'south valet, lays out a fresh set of dress for the president to alter into when he returns. The day started out rainy and overcast, but at present the sunday is out, and it'south warm for late November. Thomas picks out a lightweight blue suit for Austin, a carefully pressed shirt, and a freshly polished pair of shoes.
Back in the communications shack, Swindal hears the beginning in a series of puzzling radio calls. The Secret Service agents refer to one another past code names, all starting with D. "Dusty to Daylight," the radio crackles. "Have Dagger cover Volunteer." Dagger, Swindal knows, is a laconic agent named Rufus Youngblood, a 30-ix-year-old native of Georgia. Volunteer is the lawmaking proper noun for Vice-President Lyndon B. Johnson.
The radio suddenly drops out. Swindal worries that President Kennedy'south notoriously catchy back has leveled him—he was wearing his cumbersome caryatid when he left the plane—and the motorcade, on its manner to the Dallas Trade Mart for a luncheon, has needed to stop.
Outside on the tarmac, radio operator John Trimble is stretching his legs when a member of the White Firm Communications Agency, listening to the same Undercover Service feed on his portable radio, waves him over. He tells Trimble that someone in the presidential motorcade has been hurt. The plane needs to be readied for takeoff immediately. "My first reaction was that one of the Hugger-mugger Service agents had fallen from a car," Trimble says later.
He runs upward the ramp and onto the airplane. In his wake, the crews from two nearby passenger jets—Air Strength Two, the vice-president's plane, and the Pan American charter for the accompanying press—stream past Air Strength 1's wheels, under its shining silvery belly. They had been grabbing dejeuner inside the final when they wereinterrupted by a PA annunciation: Time to motion.
Swindal asks Trimble to radio the White House switchboard to find out what'due south happened, or is happening yet. He needs a destination. In the meantime, he heads for the stateroom and turns on the TV.
A vague early bulletin hits the screen and so hangs in the air: President Kennedy has been shot. The pilot is soon joined by Thomas, the valet; Sergeant Joseph Ayres, the plane'due south steward; and the 2 secretaries, their easily lifted to their mouths. Thomas retreats to the chamber and begins putting away the clothes he's just laid out. The women beginning to cry.
The White Firm confirms to Trimble the terrible news. Through his headset, he listens to the written report in disbelief.
12:50 P.Thou.
General Godfrey McHugh, President Kennedy'southward topmilitary aide, calls Air Force I from Parkland Hospital. They will be leaving for Andrews Air Force Base, and they volition be leaving shortly.
Trimble radios Andrews and asks that a voice frequency be kept clear of traffic. He does non desire to say why; he doesn't know how far the news has traveled and does not want to be the bearer of it. But Andrews complies with this unusual request immediately—"Roger, sir. The frequency has been cleared"—because the operator likely knows, too.
Swindal orders the fuel tanks topped up. He as well disconnects Beloved Field's mobile ac unit of measurement from the plane. The temperature within Air Force Ane begins to ascent. Swindal idles merely one engine, conserving fuel, providing just plenty ability to keep on some lights and the TV. Hanson, the copilot, rushes into the cockpit, something similar numb. His mother-in-law, who was watching her TV, had yelled the news to him the instant he'd walked through her door. "My mind rejected the idea," he says later on, "every bit though it was some kind of bad dream." He fires up the other engines at to the lowest degree twice, as if wanting to make sure they still work.
Swindal plots a flight plan east to Andrews, over Texarkana, Texas, and Memphis and Nashville. Then the ii men expect and cook, unaware of exactly what's unfoldingat the hospital only a few miles away. At present Swindal sees a pair of unmarked police force cars screaming onto the runway over the morning'southward puddles and discarded welcome signs.
And he knows.
ane:30 P.M.
Lyndon Johnson, trapped somewhere between vice-president and president, is hunched down in the backseat of the beginning car. Jesse Curry, the chief of the Dallas police, is behind the cycle. Rufus Youngblood and Congressman Homer Thornberry pile out of the back with Johnson. Congressman Albert Thomas, who had waved down the automobile when it was peeling away from Parkland Hospital, is in the front end seat. He jumps out with Curry.
Lady Bird Johnson is in the 2d car with Congressman Jack Brooks and three more members of the Surreptitious Service. Together they sew together the Eastern Airlines ramp at the rear of the gleaming Boeing 707.
Youngblood and the other agents brainstorm running through the cabin, quickly closingthe airplane's shades and curtains. There'southward an uneasy, unspoken feeling that Air Force 1 could exist attacked at any moment,driven into past a gasoline truck, strafed by machine-gun fire from a rooftop. At that place are enemies out there. With the shades closed and the ability mostly off, the plane goes dark.
"I'm sticking to you like mucilage," Youngblood tells Johnson.
Through i of the concluding open windows, SergeantAyres, the steward, sees a police motorcar swerving across the runway, its tires screeching, its sirens ringing out. If there's a conspiracy, hither's the rest of it, he thinks. The Secret Service agents come close to opening fire on the speeding car, filling it with bullets. They would have killed Jack Valenti, an unofficial aide of Johnson's; Lem Johns, a young man Secret Service agent; Cliff Carter, one of Johnson's closest advisors; and Cecil Stoughton, the White House photographer.
Other cars, with still more passengers, have already pulled up to the bottom of the steps at the aeroplane's rear entrance. At that place are more Johnson people—Marie Fehmer, his secretary, and Liz Carpenter, a onetime paper reporter turned confidante—and the start wave of Kennedy loyalists: Evelyn Lincoln, the president's secretary, and Pam Turnure and Mary Gallagher, Jackie Kennedy'south ladies-in-waiting. The two camps accept arrived at Air Force One as if by instinct, propelled by dissimilar versions of the aforementioned understanding: This plane is for the president.
1:36 P.Chiliad.
Johnson and Lady Bird spend their start minute or 2 on board in the bedroom—two single beds, a nightstand, a painting of a French farmhouse on the wall. The room's ghosts are too new, and the Johnsons are uncomfortable in their company. On the careening drive to Beloved Field, Lady Bird had looked out a window and seen a flag already lowered to half-mast. "I think that was when the enormity of what had happened fresh struck me," she says later. The Johnsons enquire to get to the adjacentstateroom instead.
Lyndon Johnson appears in the hallway. He is 6 pes 3, filling the passage. Everybody in the room jumps to their feet, including the three congressmen, Texans all. Congressman Thomas is the first of them to speak: "We are ready to carry out whatever orders that you have, Mr. President."
Cliff Carter picks upwardly a white telephone in the rear of the plane. Trimble patches him through to his wife in Austin. He asks her to telephone call Rufus Youngblood's wife. Carter heard radio reports of dead agents on his fashion to Love Field, and he knows these reports are untrue. All of the agents are live. Only the now former president is not.
His chat is interrupted by the sound of hammering. In the small aft motel, backside the bedroom, Sergeant Ayres is removing ii rows of seats to make room for a catafalque.
1:38 P.G.
On the TV in the stateroom, Walter Cronkite puts on his dark-framed reading spectacles. The plane goes pin-drop quiet. "From Dallas, Texas, the flash apparently official, President Kennedy died at i:00 P.K. Fundamental Standard Time. Two o'clock Eastern Standard Time, some thirty-eight minutes ago." Cronkite's voice cracks when he continues: "Vice-President Lyndon Johnson has left the infirmary in Dallas, but we do non know to where he has proceeded. Presumably he will exist taking the adjuration of part presently and become the thirty-sixth president of the The states."
1:40 P.M.
Johnson goes into the relative privacy of the bedchamber, Marie Feh-mer and Youngblood following him in. The oath of office. Johnson takes off his jacket in the rise heat and lies downward on ane of the beds. He picks upwards the phone and asks Trimble to connect him to Robert Kennedy, the chaser full general. The 2 men are not shut, the scars and resentmentsfrom thenasty 1960 race for theDemocratic presidential nomination never having faded.
"I knew how grief-stricken he was," Johnson later tells the Warren Commission, "and I wanted to say something to comfort him. Despite his shock, he discussed the applied problems at hand."
Johnson asks Kennedy whether he's heard any news of plots, of responsibleness. The new president'due south mind has been racing. Was it the communists? Was it the Vietnamese? Behind his airtight curtains, he is certain that something larger is itinerant. Merely Robert Kennedy has the fewest answers of any man in the world.
Johnson then asks Kennedy where he should take the oath of office and what its verbal words are. The questions are metwithsilence before Kennedy repliesthat he will find out and call dorsum. He hangs up.
The new president receives ii calls from Washington in quick succession: The first is from McGeorge Bundy, President Kennedy'due south national-security advisor; the second is from Walter Jenkins, one of Johnson's most trusted aides. Both men tell him he should render to the capital immediately. Johnson says he will not leave without Jackie Kennedy, and she has let it be known that she will non leave without her husband's body. These dominoes must fall in society. Johnson does not desire to be remembered every bit an abandoner of cute widows.
Robert Kennedy calls dorsum. The specifics of this chat volition exist forever debated; several of that day'south calls are recorded, but no recording of this i has ever surfaced. According to Johnson'southward account, Kennedy tells him he should take the adjuration in Dallas, and that it is imperative. Kennedy afterward denies he said anything of the sort.
After those few disputed minutes, Nicholas Katzenbach, the deputy chaser full general, is patched into the call. He has the diction of the oath. It is in the Constitution and probablyin every lawyer's office beyond the state. Fehmer leaves the bedroom and heads into the forepart passenger compartment to pick up some other telephone. Katzenbach dictates the adjuration, and Fehmer types it out. She asks if she can read information technology dorsum to him, and she does, both Johnson and Kennedy still listening in their respective quiets: "I exercise solemnly swear (or assert) that I will faithfully execute the office of president of the United States, and volition to the all-time of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the U.s.a.."
i:43 P.K.
Air Force 1 radios Andrews Air Force Base: "Stand past to have off." It does not accept off.
1:fifty P.1000.
Johnson calls Irving Goldberg, a lawyer and friend. They decide to ask U. Due south. district gauge Sarah T. Hughes—a longtime friend of Johnson's—to administer the oath. Fehmer calls Hughes'soffice; a clerk tells her that the judgeis not in. He believes she's at the Trade Mart, where she wentto come across President Kennedy make his speech. Fehmer hangs up and informs Johnson that Hughes tin can't exist found. He tells her to call the part back. This fourth dimension, he takes the phone.
"This is Lyndon Johnson," he says. "Find her."
1:55 P.M.
Air Force One continues to fill.Although it normally carries virtually twenty-five passengers comfortably, it is now taking on most of Air Force 2'due south original passengers every bit well, nearly twice its usual load.The secretaries who cried before the Telly have been told to leave and board the second plane. In their place, piles of numberless, including Johnson's suitcases, are carried from Air Strength Two beyond the runway. Bill Moyers, a twenty-9-year-old advance man, has chartered a small plane from Austin to Love Field. Now he'due south given permission by Swindal to country and come aboard. Mac Kilduff, President Kennedy's assistant press secretarial assistant, is also on his mode. Only a piddling more than twenty minutes ago, at ane:33 P.M., he had announced the president's decease to the world in front end of a chalkboard in a nurse's classroom. On information technology, a unmarried word had been scrawled: PARKLAND.
When Kilduff start opened his oral fissure, no audio had come out, and the gathered newsmen hollered at him to showtime again. "John F. Kennedy died at approximately 1 o'clock Central Standard Fourth dimension today, hither in Dallas," Kilduff said. "He died of a gunshot wound in the brain."
ii:02 P.Chiliad.
Gauge Hughes has been found. She is on her way.
In the passenger cabin, Stoughton, the White Housephotographer, approaches Liz Carpenter and Marie Fehmer. He is sweating and ashen. "Yous must go in and tell the president," he says, still trying to catch his breath, "that this is a history-making moment, and while information technology seems tasteless, I am here to make a picture if he cares to have it. And I recollect nosotros should accept information technology."
2:14 P.K.
A white hearse pulls up to the ramp at the rear of the plane, followed immediately by another car, so some other. Both are packed with Hole-and-corner Service agents. Amidst them are Neb Greer, the driver of President Kennedy's open-topped limousine; Roy Kellerman, who had been in the front passenger seat; and Clint Loma, who had sprinted forward to climb onto the dorsum of the car, only seconds besides late.
Joining the crowd behind the hearse is President Kennedy'south so-called Irish Mafia, his close network of Boston advisors: Ken O'Donnell, Larry O'Brien, and Dave Powers, a conspicuous bloodstain on his chocolate-brown suit. Dr. George Burkley, Kennedy'southward personal physician, and Full general McHugh also gather around the dorsum of the car. And so does another of Kennedy's military aides, General Ted Clifton, one more member of this mobile army. Together they pull out the expressionless president'due south catafalque, shining statuary in the sun. Minutes before, it was the subject of a fatigued-out fight at Parkland, pushed and pulled between Kennedy'due south men and county officials citing unbreakable Texas laws regarding the autopsies of murder victims. The catafalque's sudden presence on the ramp is proof of a hollow northern victory.The men boom off the casket'south long handles in gild to fit it through the plane's door and settle information technology into the empty infinite in the aft cabin, where the two rows of seats had been.
Jackie Kennedy, who had ridden in the back of the hearse with her husband's body, follows the casket up the steps and heads for the bedroom. She is shocked to find Johnson, Fehmer, and Youngblood inside information technology—with Johnson, depending on the account, either withal on the bed or having just lifted himself off it.
In a 1969 interview with Bob Hardesty, Johnson seemingly confesses to the less graceful of the possibilities: "He wasn't going to sleep in the bed, and I was trying to talk to [Robert] Kennedy and take pills and locate the guess and do all these things I had to do."
In less than a infinitesimal, all four mortified people in the bedroom leave—Jackie retreats to the aft motel, adjacent to the catafalque, while Johnson and his visitor scurry forward, to the stateroom. Johnson finds Lady Bird and together they return to Jackie, convincing her to go dorsum into the bedroom. The Johnsons sit with her on one of the beds. Sergeant Ayres has laid out some blue Air Force One towels on it.
"Oh, Mrs. Kennedy," Lady Bird says, as she volition later call up in her diary, "you know nosotros never even wanted to be vice-president and now, dear God, information technology's come up to this."
Jackie appears in shock. "Oh, what if I had not been in that location. I was so glad I was there," she says.
"I don't know what to say," Lady Bird says. "What wounds me most of all is that this should happen in my beloved state of Texas."
To this, Jackie says naught. She sits in her very item make of silence, her pink outfit stained with gore, flecked with fragments of her husband'due south skull and encephalon. 1 of her stockings is nigh completely lacquered in blood. Her right glove, white that morning, is caked and strong with information technology. Her left glove is missing. Lady Bird asks her if she can get someone to help her change.
"No," Jackie says. "Maybe later I'll inquire Mary Gallagher, just non right now. I want them to see what they have done to Jack."
The Johnsons tell Jackie near their plans for the swearing in. And so they have their get out. Jackie stays in her spot on the bed. She looks around the empty room, begins to unbutton her single glove, and lights herself a cigarette, adding smoke to the shimmering air.
2:twenty P.M.
Ken O'Donnell, desperate to accept off, heads toward the cockpit. He can exist blunt. O'Donnell wasn't Kennedy's gatekeeper; he was the gate. Now he runs into McHugh and orders the general to get the plane in the air. Later on the casket fight at Parkland, O'Donnell fears that Air Force Ane will be refused air clearance or even intercepted by swarms of local cops. (In the defoliation, he is non enlightened that their chief is on the plane.) "I'm concerned that the Dallas law are going to come and take the body off the aeroplane and Jackie Kennedy's going to have a heart attack correct in front of us there," he afterward recalls. "I'm petrified."
McHugh has already spoken to Colonel Swindal, who gave him the message that McHugh now passes along: President Johnson wants the plane grounded until he's sworn in.
O'Donnell takes his case for firsthand departure to Johnson himself, who is still conferring with his Texas associates in the stateroom. "At that place was some difference of opinion betwixt him and me," O'Donnell later tells the Warren Commission. Johnson, citing Robert Kennedy'south alleged advice, will not be moved.
"In that location's no question in [my] mind," O'Donnell says later, "that Lyndon Johnson wanted to be sworn in by Judge Sarah T. Hughes, an old family unit friend, and he was agape somebody was going to take the matter abroad from him if he didn't go information technology quick."
ii:28 P.1000.
Judge Hughes arrives, wearing a brown dress with white polka dots. She is a tiny woman. In photographs, she almost disappears.
Kilduff escorts iii pool reporters onto the plane behind her: Sid Davis of Westinghouse Broadcasting, Merriman Smith of UPI, and Charles Roberts of Newsweek. They run into Johnson in the stateroom. The president has risen out of his gilt-upholstered chair, ready to be sworn in. "If at that place's anybody else aboard who wants to run into this, tell them to come in," he says. The room begins to fill. The temperature continues to climb. "Almost suffocating," are the words Roberts later uses to describe the scene.
2:34 P.Thou.
Marie Fehmer palms the typewritten oath to Judge Hughes. Merely they all the same need a Bible. Larry O'Brien, excusing himself to Jackie, finds a Catholic missal in the bedroom's nightstand drawer. Information technology is in a small box, still wrapped in cellophane. Information technology is possibly a souvenir, something that somebody, somewhere, had thrust into Kennedy's hands, perhaps even on this last trip to Texas. Now O'Brien tears open the box and hands the book to Judge Hughes.
Ken O'Donnell follows O'Brien into the stateroom. Johnson sees him: "Would you ask Mrs. Kennedy to come stand here?" He wants her to stand up beside him.
"You lot tin can't exercise that!" O'Donnell shouts. "The poor little kid has had enough for ane twenty-four hours, to sit down here and hear that oath that she heard a few years ago! You lot just can't do that, Mr. President!"
"Well," Johnson says, "she said she wanted to practice it."
"I just don't believe that," O'Donnell says, even as he heads toward the sleeping room. He paces in the hallway, his easily on his head—hysterical is the word he later uses to describe himself. Finally he walks into the chamber. Jackie is combing her hair.
"Practice yous desire to get out there?" O'Donnell asks.
"Yes," Jackie says. "I think I ought to. At to the lowest degree I owe that much to the country."
ii:37 P.M.
Jackie Kennedy comes out of the sleeping room. The room falls silent. She has taken off her single encarmine glove, but she has non changed her apparel or made use of the blueish towels.
2:38 P.G.
Twenty-seven observers crowd onto the eagle-adorned carpet in the stateroom of Air Forcefulness One. Information technology has been ninety-viii minutes since President Kennedy died. Cecil Stoughton climbs up on a couch, pressing himself confronting a wall. He has a semi-wide lens, a new Hasselblad 50mm, simply he withal has trouble making the shot. "Y'all're going to accept to back off just a fiddling bit if I'm going to become you all in," he says to Johnson, and the foursome at the middle of the portrait pushes back into the watching crowd. Most of them can't hear Judge Hughes over the whine of the engines coming to life.
Johnson chooses to swear rather than affirm, calculation, for practiced measure, 4 words that are not in the oath: "So help me God." He turns to buss Lady Bird, near tears, on the brow. She grabs Jackie'south easily. "The whole nation mourns your married man," she says.
Chief Curry leans toward Jackie. "God bless you lot, trivial lady," he says, "just you ought to get dorsum and lie downward."
"No, thanks. I'm fine," she says before she slowly makes her manner to the aft motel. She drops into a seat beside her husband'due south casket. She will not motion from it.
Johnson shakes easily with the congressmen, the pool reporters, and his staff. In Stoughton's pictures—in the less-seen frames before and after the photograph that volition come to define the moment—some faces are smiling. Lyndon Johnson is the first southern president since Andrew Johnson of Tennessee took over from Abraham Lincoln.
In the crush of the moment, few people notice the man standing in the dorsum, Stoughton's flash lighting upward his spectacles, a steel briefcase in his manus.
ii:41 P.One thousand.
Johnson issues his offset official order every bit president: "Now, let's get airborne."
Chief Curry, Gauge Hughes, Sid Davis, and Stoughton—with his precious film still in the camera around his neck—dash off the plane and down the ramp. Air Strength 1'due south doors are locked shut behind them.
In that location will before long exist stories that have Judge Hughes taking the Catholic missal with her and in her shock handing it to a mysterious man, never to exist seen once more. In fact, the missal ends up in Lady Bird's handbag. She volition evidence it secretively to Liz Carpenter, and they volition worry for a moment that it's a Catholic book, one more than of the twenty-four hour period'southward accidental crossings. Today, the missal is at the LBJ Library in Austin. It looks as new as it did the day information technology was made, its soft black leather cover embossed with a cross.
"When I walked down the steps," Stoughton after remembers, "I was the but living, breathing person who knew what happened." There was the world within the plane and the world outside it, each knowing picayune of what was happening in the other; Stoughton was one of the few who had passed between them. "Not only that, I had the whole tape of it in my hand."
two:47 P.M.
Colonel Swindal lifts Air Force I into the sky. Davis, watching from the tarmac, is shocked past the steepness of the rise—"well-nigh vertical," he says. Information technology's as though Swindal wants to leave not only Dallas just as well the globe.
President Johnson has never been on Air Forcefulness 1—which is lawmaking-named Affections by the Secret Service—at to the lowest degree non in flying. Whenever he and Kennedy were flying to the same urban center, he would ask for permission to come aboard, to be allowed to share a piffling of Kennedy'south spotlight, to wave from the top of the aforementioned ramp. Those requests were e'er refused—Kennedy always citing security concerns, Johnson e'er assertive his exile was for more personal reasons. The Kennedy people dismissively chosen him Rufus Cornpone, the sort of man capable of ruining a good suit but by wearing it. Evelyn Lincoln says later that Johnson'south repeated demotion to Air Force Two "bothered the vice-president more than than anything else." Now here he is, flying on the get-go aeroplane, leaving the second in its wake—not due to the favor of a more powerful man only considering he is the near powerful man. He looks around the stateroom. Jackie Kennedy had helped decorate information technology. Soon he volition have much of it torn out.
2:49 P.M.
The crowded plane is largely silent, muffled by a thick blanket of shock. The smoke-filled air slowly begins to cool.
Only Johnson is active. In the stateroom, he wolfs downward a bowl of bouillon and begins mapping a route, similar a airplane pilot,through the coming hours and days. He calls Walter Jenkins and asks him to brainstorm arranging meetings—with Chiffonier members, with White Business firm staff, with legislative leaders, his old friends and foes in the Senate. "Bipartisan," Johnson tells Jenkins.
It's impossible to know when Johnson starting time begins seeing in his mind's eye the things he will practice, but the opportunity to do them he sees right away.
To the rear of the stateroom, Jackie Kennedy sits side by side to the casket, which lies along the left-hand wall of the cabin, lashed into identify with bracing straps. Crimson bronze and weighing several hundred pounds, it was the all-time ane Clint Hill had found at Vernon Oneal's funeral dwelling in Dallas. It had been delivered polished to Parkland, but at present it's chipped and scratched, scarred by the fight at the hospital and the frantic push up the ramp. There are broken bolts where the handles had been.
Jackie, Full general McHugh, and the Irish Mafia huddle in the cramped space beside it. She cries for the first time. "Oh, Kenny, what's going to happen?" she asks O'Donnell.
"You lot desire to know something, Jackie?" he says. "I don't requite a damn."
"Oh, you're right, you lot know, you're correct," Jackie says. "Just nothing matters but what yous've lost."
Dr. Burkley makes his way back to bring together them. Passing the vacant bedchamber, he notices the door is ajar. On one of the beds, lying on a newspaper, he sees Jackie'southward bloody glove, stale strong as a cast, every bit though her hand were yet in it. He finds Mary Gallagher and brings her back to the chamber, pointing at the glove with his own bloodstained arm. "Put information technology away somewhere," he says. "Don't beat it."
2:55 P.Thousand.
Johnson retreats to the bedroom to alter his sweat-soaked shirt. He summons O'Donnell. While he'southward dressing, Johnson asks O'Donnell to stay by his side—to help with the transition from Kennedy to Johnson, from Massachusetts to Texas, from 1963 to 1964. "I need you more than he always needed y'all," Johnson says, O'Donnell afterwards recalls. "You tin't leave me… . You lot know that I don't know one soul northward of the Mason-Dixon Line, and I don't know whatsoever of those big-metropolis fellows. I need you lot."
O'Donnell is noncommittal. He leaves the bedroom and returns to the aft cabin, to Jackie and the casket. The twenty-four hour period's losses are not only personal; they are also professional. The center of gravity has shifted. Lady Bird hears one of the Hugger-mugger Service agents whisper, in what she later calls "the well-nigh desolate voice," "Nosotros've never lost a president in the Service." Those who were charged with protecting Kennedy now sit together in the forward passenger compartment, responsible only for a box. Roy Kellerman assigns most of his agents to Rufus Youngblood, the new human in charge. Clint Colina volition stay assigned to Jackie. He sits more often than not in silence, going over the day'southward events, the same few seconds that volition play on a loop for the rest of his life.
"I jumped onto the left-rear step of the presidential automobile," Colina later remembers. "Mrs. Kennedy shouted, 'They've shot his head off,' then turned and raised out of her seat as if she were reaching to her right rear toward the back of the motorcar for something that had diddled out. I forced her back into her seat and placed my body above the president and Mrs. Kennedy… . As I lay over the top of the backseat, I noticed a portion of the president'due south head on the right-rear side was missing and he was bleeding profusely. Part of his brain was gone. I saw a office of his skull with hair on information technology lying in the seat."
At some point, Hill visits Jackie at the back of the aeroplane. "Oh, Mr. Hill," she says, reaching out for his hands. "What's going to happen to you lot at present?"
3:00 P.Chiliad.
Johnson asks Moyers, Valenti, and Carpenter to work on the speech he will deliver when they arrive at Andrews. "Nothing long," he says. "Make information technology cursory. We'll have enough of time later on to say more." Fehmer types up the draft on a white card and gives it to Johnson. He reads it to himself:
This is a sad fourth dimension for every American. The nation suffers a loss that cannot be weighed. For me it is a deep personal tragedy. I know the nation, and the whole free world, shares the sorrow that Mrs. Kennedy bears.
I will exercise my best. That is all I can exercise. I enquire God'southward assist—and yours.
Johnson takes out a pen and changes a few words("We have suffered a loss… . The world shares the sorrow… .") and amends the end. At present it reads: "I enquire for your help—and God's." Satisfied, he puts the card in his pocket.
3:17 P.M.
Air Strength One receives a atmospheric condition study alert of storm clouds ahead. Be advised of a astringent weather area from forty miles w of Greenwood, Mississippi, to twenty miles west of Blytheville, Arkansas, extending i twenty miles, one hundred and twenty miles to the east, for tornadoes, tops five cypher grand, fifty 1000 feet.
Colonel Swindal begins a quick climb. He ascends college than he had ever flown with President Kennedy, high enough to see clearly the curvature of the earth, and for the first time it hits him.
In a letter to William Manchester, the author of The Expiry of a President, Swindal describes the moment: "As the dominicus set up on the flight from Dallas, flying over the tempest clouds at twoscore thousand anxiety and darkness coming on so fast considering of our high speed toward the E, of a sudden realizing that President Kennedy was dead I felt that the earth had concluded and information technology became a struggle to keep."
3:19 P.M.
Rufus Youngblood wants Johnson to spend the nighttime in the White House. Johnson is irritated by the proffer. He doesn't want his arrival to look similar a palace coup. "Nosotros're going dwelling to the Elms," he says. "That's where we live. If you can protect united states of america at the White House, past God you can protect united states of america at home, too."
Youngblood radios Jerry Behn, the chief of the Secret Service, in Washington. "Volunteer will reside at Valley for an indefinite time," he says. Moments later, there is some other call from the plane. Someone has remembered that the vice-president had been so powerless that he has only a commercial telephone line to his firm. On the ground, linemen from the White Firm Communications Agency get to work on something more secure.
3:twenty P.M.
Sergeant Ayres makes telephone contact with Rose Kennedy, the mother of PresidentKennedy. The connexion between the airplane and Hyannis Port, routed through the White House, is weak. "Yep, Mrs. Kennedy," Ayres says. "I have"—and here Ayres takes the briefest of pauses, plain unsure whether to introduce Johnson equally President Johnson. "I take, uh, Mr. Johnson hither for you."
Johnson cups the receiver with his hand and looks at his married woman. Like Ayres, he as well doesn't know what to say.
"Mrs. Kennedy?"
"Yes. Yes—"
"Mrs. Ken—"
"—yes, yes, Mr. President. Yes—"
"I wish to God at that place was something that I could do, and I wanted to tell you lot that we are grieving with you."
"Yes," Mrs. Kennedy says. "Well, thanks a mill—cheers very much."
"Hither'due south Lady Bird," Johnson says, hastily handing over the phone.
"Thanks very much," Mrs. Kennedy says. "I know. I know yous loved Jack, and he loved you—"
Lady Bird begins to talk. "Mrs. Kennedy, we experience like we've just had—"
"Aye, all correct."
"—we are glad that the nation had your son—"
"Yes. Aye."
"—as long as it did."
"Aye, well, give thanks you, Lady Bird. Thank you very much. Goodbye."
"Honey and prayers to all of you," Lady Bird says.
"Yes. Thank you very much. Cheerio. Goodbye."
3:23 P.G.
Some of the Kennedy people have asked Johnson to bar the press from Andrews, to make their touchdown every bit invisible as possible. They don't want to make a spectacle of the bronze casket or the blood-soaked Jackie.
"No," Johnson says. "It will look like we're in a panic."
Kilduff, whose code name is Warrior, talks over the radio to deputy printing secretary Andrew Hatcher, code-named Winner, at the White Business firm. "Winner, Winner, this is Warrior," Kilduff says. "Will you please advise the press that normal press coverage, including live TV, will be allowed at the base?"
When Kilduff walks dorsum to tell Jackie of the determination, she seems to approve of it. "I want them to meet what they've done," she says again.
Now Kilduff falters. He knows that Texas was Jackie'south outset political trip since the decease nearly four months ago of her newborns on, Patrick—that President Kennedy thought the sound of auspicious might help wash away some of her grief. Kilduff had besides lost a son, four-year-old Kevin, who drowned while his father was abroad with the president. At present the damaged parents lean into each other, and together they talk nearly loss.
three:24 P.M.
General Clifton calls McGeorge Bundy at the White House and tells him that Johnson wants to meet with secretary of defense Robert McNamara immediately after landing.
Johnson has not ruled out a armed services response to the assassination. "Information technology's the Kremlin that worries me," he says to Full general Clifton, as after reported by Johnson's biographer, Robert Caro. "Information technology tin't be allowed to notice a waver … Khrushchev is asking himself right now what kind of man I am. He's got to know he's dealing with a man of determination." Johnson remains consumed by plots and conspiracies. If the Soviet Spousal relationship is behind the killing, or Cuba, or Vietnam …
A few minutes earlier, Johnson was told about the bespectacled man and the contents of his metallic briefcase. His proper name is Ira Gearhart. His code name is Satchel. His briefcase holds a collection of beefy packets, each bearing wax seals and the signatures of allthe Joint Chiefs. By Manchester's account, one contains cryptic numbers that will let Johnson to talk to the prime minister of Bang-up Britainand the president of France in iv minutes. Another holds the codes to launch a nuclear attack. The residuum contain the infamous Doomsday Books, a range of retaliation scenarios—Retaliation Able, Retaliation Baker, Retaliation Charlie—and the estimated number of casualties that would effect from each. (It is rare for Gearhart not to be almost the president when he is out of the White Firm, though at least twice today, Satchel and his suitcase were separated from both of his presidents, at the Trade Mart and at the hospital.) Now Johnson has the means to guild the country to war.
Full general Clifton wants to brand certain his message to the ground has gone through: A helicopter will behave Johnson to the White House. McNamara should be on it, he says again.
3:47 P.Thou.
Ken O'Donnell rises to his feet. "You know what I'm going to have, Jackie? I'g going to have a hell of a stiff drink. I call up you lot should, as well."
"What will I have?" Jackie asks.
"I'll make it for you. I'll brand yous a Scotch."
She has never had a Scotch in her life. "At present is as practiced a time every bit whatsoever to start," she says.
4:05 P.M.
Colonel Swindal radios ahead to make arrangements for his landing. "We need steps on the right front of the shipping," he says. "The press box will exist on the left front of the aircraft. The … "—and similar so many others, Swindal struggles with the post-obit combination of syllables—"President Johnson will deplane at the front end of the aircraft. And we demand a forklift at the rear of the shipping, and Lace volition deplane from the right front. Over."
Lace—Jackie—will deplane from the right front,away from the forklift, away from the body, away from the cameras and the lights.
Swindal doesn't know that Dr. Burkley has joined the long line of men on their knees in front of her, side by side to the casket. He tells her they volition be landing soon. Maybe she would like to change her wearing apparel, launder away the blood.
"No, permit them meet …" she says. No ane within earshot needs to hear more than. They understand that the ramp at the right front end of Air Force 1 will go unused.
iv:22 P.1000.
The Irish wake continues in the aft compartment. Kilduff gulps dorsum gin. Whole bottles of Scotch are emptied. The men remember the Celtic folk songs loved by the man in the box, and through their tearful smiles they talk about what should happen now, how the president, their president, should exist sent off and how he should exist remembered. They talk nearly Lincoln, about parades and horses pulling black carriages. And they talk about grave sites and eternal flames. The men believe it should be lit in Boston, next to the grave of baby Patrick, father and son and city forever united. O'Donnell tells Jackie not to allow anyone modify her heed about that. But her mind is already making its ain journey, to a hillside in Arlington, Virginia, tracing the steps her hubby will travel from here to in that location.
Jackie sends Dave Powers forward with a bulletin. She wants Bill Greer, the agent who drove the limousine, to drive the ambulance already waiting at Andrews to carry the torso to Bethesda Naval Medical Center. "I want his friends to carry him down," she says.
In that 1969 interview with Bob Hardesty, Johnson talks of the people amassed in the tail of his plane: "It was a peculiar situation that they sat back in the back and never would come and join us," he says. "I idea they were only wine heads."
four:xl P.G.
Charles Roberts and Merriman Smith frantically type their all-important pool reports. Smith had lost his manual portable typewriter somewhere along the way and is stuttering away on one of the plane's electrics—"having a hell of a time writing," Roberts afterwards recalls. Roberts bangs more ably, driving out canvass later on sheet. The reporters receive frequent visitors, by and large men who want the record—this singular historic record—fabricated straight. General McHugh pounds the tabular array in forepart of Roberts: "Ken O'Donnell, Larry O'Brien, Dave Powers, and me spent this flying in the tail compartment with the president—President Kennedy." Dr. Burkley wants it known that he was with the president when he died. Fifty-fifty Johnson comes up to visit with them, two or iii times, asking if they have all the facts they need. Now, during the last visit, Roberts looks up at Johnson and thinks, Mr. President, I know you desire to talk, just I've got a lot of piece of work to do. He manages to keep this thought to himself.
Occasionally, the reporters ask questions of the grief-heavy passengers slumped around them. Roberts talks briefly to Roy Kellerman, the Secret Service agent, his optics brimming with tears. He also watches Evelyn Lincoln weeping and Pam Turnure, her mascara streaked across her cheeks. Other passengers have spent the flight with their foreheads cupped in their easily, disappearing into their ain universes, invaded simply past the occasional sob from elsewhere in the cabin and the chugging of typewriters.
"Information technology was a sinking in," Roberts says later. "Nosotros were all doing second, 3rd, fourth takes, realizing all of the implications of the thing as we rode dorsum."
He notes that no one raises a shade or opens a pall for the unabridged flight. Angel'due south passengers practice not encounter the sunday gear up. Information technology's been night from beginning to end. "Similar going back in a tunnel," Roberts remembers. "And much, much crying."
4:58 P.M.
Air Strength One touches downward at Andrews Air Forcefulness Base of operations. It is now 5:58 P.M., Eastern Standard Time.
6:05 P.One thousand. EASTERN STANDARD TIME
Great banks of floodlights have been set up; they are snapped off so that Colonel Swindal tin can see his fashion. He taxis to a stop within a socket bordered by White House–bound helicopters and Bethesda-jump ambulances and the quiet, somber crowd, thousands potent, that's filled the spaces in between. "I do not believe we will ever completely recover from the daze of this tragedy," Swindal writes afterwards, "and I know that I personally will never again enjoy flight as I did before."
Kennedy's staff members walk from the passenger compartment through the stateroom, on their mode to the back of the airplane. Johnson kisses Evelyn Lincoln once more. He sees Pam Turnure, grabs her paw, and kisses her, too. He expects that he volition walk off the plane with Jackie—it is important to him to testify that the nation's two White Houses, this morning's and this night's, are i, another of his small illusions of seamlessness. Merely the hallway to the back of the plane begins to fill, packed with mourners continuing shoulder to shoulder.
Robert Kennedy has been waiting solitary for Air Forcefulness One, crouched in the back of an Army truck. At present he takes advantage of the darkness. He ducks and runs up the ramp to the plane'south front archway, seconds later on the stairs take been wheeled into place. He pushes his way to the back. Liz Carpenter feels him before she sees him. "He didn't look to the left or the right, and his face looked streaked with tears," she says later. She reaches out and touches him on the back.
"Where'south Jackie?" Kennedy says. "I want to be with Jackie."
He brushes past Johnson, refusing to make eye contact with his brother's successor. The dead president's Hole-and-corner Service agents follow backside Robert Kennedy, and now Johnson is trapped in his stateroom. His face is impassive, simply he later confesses his displeasure. "Well, I don't know that I had thought out all of the logistics of the leaving of the aeroplane," he will tell Walter Cronkite. "But information technology didn't occur to me that the ramp would be removed and we would not be privileged to go downwards the same ramp with the torso."
The floodlights flare-up back on. Despite them, or perhaps considering of them, Johnson will shortly find himself, at least for the moment, among history's well-nigh invisible presidents. "We don't even know Lyndon Johnson is within five one thousand miles of at that place," O'Donnell says after. He and the rest of Kennedy's men surround the casket. "Nosotros carried it on the plane, we're going to bear information technology off the plane," O'Donnell says, and he chokes on the words.
"Hi, Jackie," Robert Kennedy says, reaching her side. "I'g here."
"Oh, Bobby," she says, falling into him.
In the stateroom, Lady Bird Johnson pulls on her coat and hat, looking up at her hubby, the president. This is how information technology begins. Johnson finds the card in his pocket, for now unable to see anything across those first few public sentences of his tenure: I ask for your help—and God'due south. He begins moving toward the back of Air Force One, at the end of the long line, instructing his three Texas congressmen and his skeleton staff—Valenti and Moyers, Carpenter and Fehmer—to walk off the plane behind him. He doesn't want to announced as alone as he is, and never will exist again.
At the weighed-down tail, a truck lift, painted xanthous, has been raised into position. There is a immature Navy lieutenant continuing on top of information technology, his hand in a crisp salute. His will be the first exterior eyes to see inside. O'Donnell, O'Brien, and Powers; Greer, Kellerman, and Hill; Dr. Burkley and Generals Clifton and McHugh gather at the rear. Eight men strain to lift the broken casket off the floor. Robert Kennedy takes Jackie's hand. The door swings open. Cool dark air rushes in, and with information technology a terrible silence and a blinding low-cal.
This content is created and maintained by a third political party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You lot may be able to find more than data almost this and like content at piano.io
Source: https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a24834/flight-from-dallas-1013/
0 Response to "what has been in secret will come to light"
Post a Comment