The Day Kennedy Was Shot (46 page)

Two men wearing small buttons in their lapels walked up the short marble staircase of the old Washington Hotel into the lobby and then to the elevator. They pressed the button marked “6.” When the car stopped, they got off and walked down until they stood in front of the old rosewood door at the corner of the hotel. They knocked. The Speaker of the House of Representatives, Mr. John McCormack, had a lean face with a big nose and the nasal tone of the Boston politician.

They told him that they were Secret Service men. The Speaker was next in line for the presidency. If the plane crashed, killing Lyndon Johnson, this faithful old party warhorse would take the oath as President of the United States. John McCormack never tried to be what he wasn't. He was not a giant intellect nor a skilled debater. He understood his countrymen and their requirements; the old man with the white hair and the slight snarl had an instinct for national government. A strong President could set the policy of the administration and John McCormack would fight for it even though he might not subscribe to some of its measures.

The Speaker refused to admit the two men. He was brusque. It was not necessary for them to tell him he was the next man.
He and Mrs. McCormack were averse to altering their private lives in the shadow of the Secret Service. He would not have these men accompany him in an automobile or stand over Mrs. McCormack in the shops. “Please,” he said as softly as he could, “get out of the hall.”

A block away, Maude Shaw sat in her room on the second floor of the White House. The children still slept, but she knew that they would soon awake. The thoughts of the English nanny were gloomy. She could hear the President calling from his bedroom “John-John” and “Buttons.” In her mind's eye she could see the delight in the faces of the youngsters as they ran down the hall to the bedroom with the open door. Inside, the young President of the United States braced his breakfast tray with both hands as the children leaped upon their father with the lavish love and wet kisses which are its concomitant.

She could, in this interval of lonely introspection, remember the time that John-John disappeared in his father's office. No one could find him and the President called his son's name with sharp petulance. Then, from the panel of the front of his father's desk, a door swung open and the little boy fell out, laughing uncontrollably. The desk had been presented to President McKinley by Her Majesty Victoria of Great Britain. No one knew that, behind the majestically carved Presidential Seal, there was a gateway inside the desk.

Robert Foster tapped on her door. He was a young Secret Service man and his assignment was to break the news to Miss Shaw. The facts did not lend themselves to tact or gentility. “The President is dead,” he said, and the thin, middle-aged woman bowed her head. He nodded toward the children's rooms. “We have to get out of the White House by six o'clock,” Foster told her. “Mrs. Kennedy is flying back and doesn't want the children around. Hurry, we haven't much time.”

The suitcases were in Miss Shaw's room. Foster helped her to pack. “Where are we going?” she said. The phone beside her
bed tinkled softly and the light flashed. It was Mrs. Robert Kennedy, wife of the Attorney General. “I think you had better take the children to meet their mother,” she said. Ethel Kennedy's voice trembled. “She will be at Andrews Field at six.” Miss Shaw did not know what to say. Somehow she felt that the suggestion was wrong. “Oh no,” she said at last. “Surely not. I am sure Mrs. Kennedy would not want to see the children just now. Please don't ask me to do that.”

Ethel Kennedy thought about it. “All right,” she said. “Bring the children here. I can't think of anything else. Can you? Anyway, I'll leave it to you. You know best. . . .” The phones were hung up. Foster was in a hurry. His orders had been to get the Kennedy children out of the White House at once. To where? The Secret Service man was on the floor, jamming clothing into suitcases, looking at Miss Shaw pleadingly, and Maude Shaw thought of the proper retreat: their maternal grandmother's house in Georgetown.

Mrs. Hugh Auchincloss was ideal. She loved the children, and she was gifted with a sweet maternal manner. The children loved her and, in the late afternoons, their mother had taken them to
“Grand-mère'
s” house many times. They would feel less “strange,” less inclined to tension or alarm in her house than anywhere else. Maude Shaw phoned, and, when the two women said “hello,” both burst into tears. Foster was hoping for a quick decision, but the sobs and the intermediate conversation delayed the decision. Mrs. Auchincloss was surprised that the children were not to be with their mother, but she kept saying: “Bring them over. Bring them over to me. This is the place for all of you. Come and stay here. . . .”

The grandmother fought for control of her emotions, then her voice softened. “Miss Shaw,” she said, “there is something I would like you to do, and I know my daughter would too.” “Of course,” the nanny said. “Anything.” “We feel that you should be the one to break the news to the children—at least to Caro
line.” Maude Shaw relapsed in shock. “Oh no,” she said loudly. “Please don't ask me to do that.”

“We feel that you should be the one . . .”

This made it the wish, the command, of the mother as well as the grandmother. “Please, Miss Shaw. It is for the best. They trust you. . . . I am asking you as a friend. . . . Please. . . .” The children's nurse was overwhelmed by a feeling of horror. She stood at the phone as Foster stared at her beseechingly. “All right,” she murmured crisply. “I will tell Caroline when I put her to bed tonight.”

The children were awakened. They were cheered to find that they were leaving at once for the Auchincloss home. Nighties and pajamas and spare dresses and slips and shoes and little suits and blouses were all tucked into the valises. Also a special toy or two, a doll. Foster led the little party out and down the broad dark corridor to the elevator. He had a car on the South Lawn and it had been waiting a long time.

Maude Shaw wondered, “Why me?” The family was full of intelligent people. There were cousins and uncles and aunts aplenty. Could not one of them sit in privacy with these babies and break the news gently? Could not someone explain that God often calls a soul suddenly, one that he wants in heaven at once? Could not someone have told them that death is nothing more than a postponed reunion? That their father would be as happy waiting for them to join him as they were sorrowful at his leave-taking?

Maude Shaw made half a promise. She would tell Caroline only.

The Cabinet plane, a third of the way back from Hawaii to California, was on an almost identical course with
Air Force One
and at practically the same speed, but they were several thousand miles apart. Dean Rusk's 707 begged for additional information, and it arrived, either on teletype or by phone, chopped
in segments. The Secretary of State remained in the private cabin. The others wandered in the public area, brooding, trying to assimilate the fact that Kennedy was gone and trying to decipher what this would mean to each of the careers aboard this plane. The shock to the personal senses was the passing of Kennedy; the shock to the political senses was the accession of Johnson. No one doubted that the new man would achieve a keynote of continuity by announcing that he would adhere to the Kennedy policies; it would be a violation of historical precedent to do it with the same assortment of faces.

Someone suggested a poker game. A table was found and some chairs. There was nothing better to do. Cards would be preferable to thinking. The gentlemen placed money on the table—perhaps the money they had planned to use for shopping in Tokyo. Pierre Salinger, the cigar smoker, enjoyed the game immensely but seldom won. The players agreed on table stakes and, in a moment, the mourning period had been postponed and Kennedy's august appointees were saying: “Here's your ten and ten more.” “Dealer draws three.” “Smiling ladies, like the Andrews Sisters.” “All pink.”

Alone, except for a mess sergeant, Dean Rusk read the teletypes. At last a sketchy story on the suspect, Lee Harvey Oswald, began to click on the plane. It told about his defection to the Soviet Union, his life in Russia, and his membership in the Fair Play for Cuba group. This was difficult to believe, because most knowledgeable persons were certain that the assassin must have been an extremist-right-winger.

A Communist in Dallas, Texas? This would be as difficult to digest as a story that Josef Stalin had been killed by a Russian fascist. “If this is true,” Rusk said to no one in particular, “it is going to have repercussions around the world for years to come.” It is possible that he saw the news as the first evidence of a Communist conspiracy. This would have amused the loner who parried questions in far-off Dallas. When he worked in Minsk,
the Russians couldn't even get him to attend party meetings in the factory.

The biographical material on Lee Harvey Oswald had also passed through the hands of Forrest V. Sorrels, the wandering Secret Service man. He asked Chief James Rowley in Washington whether PRS had been aware of Oswald's Marxist background. PRS—the alert file of persons dangerous to the President—did not have a listing under Oswald. Rowley, hearing of Oswald's defection to Russia, asked his superiors at the Treasury Department to contact the State Department to find out what they knew about the prisoner. Rowley would be interested to know why his agency had never been told about this defector.

Wheels were turning. They spun slowly at first but, with each passing minute, they accelerated. Files which were dusty with time were reopened, and cards of various colors withdrawn, scrutinized, and copied. The State Department had a dossier on one Lee Harvey Oswald. Several agencies became interested. Treasury wanted to relay all possible information on this man to the Secret Service, the agency primarily responsible. They wanted a digest of the dossier. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, which had a small file on the man, now wanted every shred of information. The Central Intelligence Agency, which sensed international complications, asked for copies. Aboard
Air Force One
, the news reached President Lyndon Johnson through Major-General Chester Clifton, who was sorting messages in the communications shack forward. The President asked for a quick check of the Oswald situation to find out if the State Department had erred in permitting this man to return to the United States.

There was blame to be spread, guilt to be impugned, punishment to be meted. No crime as monumental in size as this could be laid at the feet of a sullen ignoramus. It was a blessing that he was a Marxist, because, by negation, it absolved Dallas.
Of course Oswald's brand of Marxism was not related to the despotic socialism practiced in Russia, but the American mind lumps the two in political idealism, even though they are anathema to each other, and both have contempt for Bolsheviks, nihilists, and Mensheviks. It was sufficient to call Lee Harvey Oswald a Communist. The only other question to be resolved was to find out who was responsible for bringing him back from Moscow.

The poker players drank. They spoke in grunts, and Salinger won almost a thousand dollars. The drinks and the money were meaningless. For a time one player or another would break in with a fond recollection of Kennedy, but these sad pleasantries petered out. These were professionals with additional streams to cross and hills to climb, so they concentrated on Lyndon Johnson, wondering aloud what kind of a man he was. Everyone agreed that he was a master politician. Call him a horse trader, a locker-room Disraeli, a compromiser—Johnson was a winner. He was a doer; they knew that.

Some tried to speculate about the Johnson “team.” The Cabinet was surprised at how little it knew. Lyndon Johnson had been Vice-President for almost three years and he worked across the street from the White House in an office in the old State Department Building, where there were baroque doors and high Victorian ceilings laced with heating pipes. They seemed sorry to admit that they had not cultivated him. It was recalled that Johnson had been the youngest majority leader in the United States Senate, but that showed legislative acumen, not judgment.

Secretary of Labor Willard Wirtz, the man with the pepper-and-salt hair, had campaigned for Adlai Stevenson in 1960. At the time, he had no appreciation for the upstart from Massachusetts. Now he said tactlessly: “I gather you don't think the world is at an end?” The poker game broke up. The gentlemen began to bicker. The plane hung between sky and sea and the men of
power accused each other and used words like “rumormonger,” “treachery,” “hearsay.” They were not sure that Johnson had not been shot, too. There was word that a Secret Service man and a Dallas policeman were dead—so the plot must be widespread.

They owed allegiance and each was eager to flex the knee in fealty, but to whom? Even Rusk, meditating in his private cabin, wasn't sure. The big Boeing shrieked through the sunny skies. There was no time for tears. The dry eye of power was focused on power.

The flow of information from Gordon Shanklin's office to FBI headquarters in Washington was steady. Except for a few lapses, the line might have remained open. Shortly after 3
P.M.
the agent in charge spoke to Washington and said he had some news on the rifle found in the Texas School Book Depository. It was not a Mauser or a British weapon, but rather a cheap Italian military surplus rifle called a Mannlicher-Carcano. The caliber was 6.5 and the four-power scope was Japanese. The serial number, Shanklin said, was C2766.

His men had phoned local sports goods houses in Dallas and had learned that they had little call for Mannlicher-Carcanos. However, their catalogues showed that the importer was a firm named Crescent Firearms, Inc., of New York. The New York office should be alerted and start tracking that C2766 at once. There was similar information about the snub-nosed revolver carried by Oswald, but the FBI was much more interested in the genesis of the gun which they believed killed the President. It was almost closing time when the New York FBI descended on Crescent Firearms, but the records were brought out. C2766? That was part of a big shipment of rifles sent to Klein's Sporting Goods, Inc., of Chicago. The trail bent to the Midwest, and the FBI followed it.