The Day Kennedy Was Shot (53 page)

The phone calls to find a babysitter became desperate as the minutes ticked on. Michael Paine saw his file of musical recordings dropped on the pile of “evidence” and said: “Don't take that. It's just records.” The policeman looked at him and went back into the bedroom. Paine, with some exasperation, said that anyone could see that the box contained recordings which could be purchased anywhere. The screen door was still ajar and the neighbors outside could hear the raising of voices.

Whenever anyone suggested that an item on the pile was insignificant and of no value to such an investigation, it was certain to remain on the pile to be taken to Dallas. The cops were opening bureau drawers, ransacking personal effects, returning aimlessly to the garage where the rifle blanket had been found, digging into cartons and boxes with no notion of what they were searching for. Ruth Paine asked if she could go to the home of her babysitter nearby. Permission was granted with police escort.

Marina sat with Rachel in her arms, watching the action but saying nothing. June still slept in the bedroom, although it would be difficult to understand why the sound of heavy feet and the deep tones of the strange men did not awaken her. Christopher Paine also slept. Lynn Paine sensed the excitement and ran to her father's arms. Mrs. Paine asked a neighbor, Mrs. Roberts, if she could stay with the children while the adults went to Dallas Police Headquarters, but Mrs. Roberts said she was sorry, she was on her way out.

The woman and the policeman walked to the next block, where a teenage girl worked part-time as a babysitter. Mrs. Paine watched the officer dogging her steps and she said: “Oh, you don't have to go with me.” He said: “I'll be glad to.” The mother of the babysitter felt that it would be all right if two of
her daughters babysat but not one. They brought their schoolbooks with them.

At the front of the house, Mrs. Paine, whose airy innocence seemed to unman the cops, saw the great assortment of material being carried into one of the automobiles. When she saw three cases of recordings, she smiled and shook her head negatively. “You don't need those,” she said forgivingly to one of the policemen. “I want to use them on Thanksgiving weekend. I have promised to lead a folk dance conference. I will need all those records, and I doubt that you will get them back on time.” She peeked inside the car. “That,” she said pointing, “is a sixteen-millimeter projector. You don't want that.”

The cop grabbed her arm. He too was running out of patience. “We'd better get down to the station,” he said. “We've wasted too much time as it is.” There was ominous authority in the tone. They stood on the curb a moment, and Mrs. Paine said: “Well, I want a list of everything you are taking, please.” The police had no search warrant, nor bench warrants for arrest or detention, but they were tired of the hour-long dialogue. “We better get down to the station,” they said.

She insisted on going back into her house. Mrs. Paine had already changed from slacks to a dress. Mrs. Oswald said she wanted to don a dress. This brought a flat no from the police. Acrimony was beginning to show. “She has a right to,” Mrs. Paine said, voice rising. “She is a woman.” The two babysitters watched openmouthed. In Russian, Ruth Paine told Marina to go into the bathroom and change. An officer barred the door and said, “No.” Marina Oswald looked down at her checked slacks.

One of the policemen pointed to the children. “We'd better get this straight in a hurry, Mrs. Paine,” he said, “or we'll just take them down and leave them with juvenile while we talk to you.” The Quaker snapped at her daughter: “Lynn, you may come too.” The threat backfired. The police took Michael Paine in one automobile, piled the Oswald and Paine effects
in another, and put Mrs. Paine and Mrs. Oswald, in addition to Lynn, June, and Rachel, in a third. In the house, the two babysitters watched one child.

The women began to speak rapidly in Russian. A policeman in the front seat said he grew up understanding some Czech, but he couldn't decipher the conversation. The three cars rolled back down the highway toward Dallas. The Czech-descent cop said to Mrs. Paine: “Are you a communist?” “No,” she said. “I am not, and I don't even feel the need of the Fifth Amendment.”

Roanoke and Lynchburg stood still in the darkness below, embers in a dead fireplace. The big plane seemed to have no forward motion. Far below, the government trackers watched it and listened to Swindal and his first officer ask instructions for descent. The code names of beacon stations, the radio call wavelengths, the rate of descent were heard and repeated.
Air Force One
was two hundred miles out. The earth was black; the sky at forty thousand feet was still deep blue; the dying sun lingered behind, over Dallas. They had seen each other this day, that sun and this man, and he had gloried in the effusion of warmth and light. Behind the huge blue and white tail, the sun was still up. It had outlived him by four hours and more, but no one marked it or cared. Night was a fitting mask for faces.

He had wanted to say something while the sun was high. To him, San Antonio was romance; Austin was political friction; Houston was a muscular giant; Fort Worth was war planes, and Dallas was a snob. There was something to be said in each of those places and much of it was superficial and pedestrian, but he had polished the stone of the Dallas speech with his own hands. He had rubbed the words and refashioned the phrases. The knowledge that he needed Dallas but Dallas didn't need him raised the hackles on the back of his neck. It was necessary to bow deferentially to the self-sufficient when he would have preferred to use the words to whip these people.

Mr. Kennedy had no patience with those who could not see. To his way of thinking, they were mournful apostles trying to resurrect a world which died when the last cannon cooled in 1945. America could not shirk its responsibilities to a world which could look in but one of two directions for leadership. Never again could it withdraw in safety to its shores. The cost of leadership would have to be borne by the taxpayers who cried for relief. In peace the cost of the military machine became more expensive. Man's metal arced across the skies of space, and so did man.

To a young President with a lifted chin and one hand in his jacket pocket, it was a new world with new geopolitics, chronic tensions, and internal convulsions. The civil rights decision had been handed down by the United States Supreme Court in May, 1954, but it had waited for the Young Knight to implement it. To some he was too young, too swift; to others he was the sunny smile of tomorrow; to the politicians he was the leader of the liberal wing of his own party; to Dallas he was a radical.

Had he spoken, Kennedy would not have appeased Dallas. The speech, fired in ringing phrases over the heads of luncheoners at the Trade Mart, would have attempted to divorce the reactionary voters from their reactionary leaders.

Three paragraphs into the body of the speech, he wanted to say: “America's leadership must be guided by the lights of learning and reason—or else those who confuse rhetoric with reality and the plausible with the possible will gain the popular ascendancy with their seemingly swift and simple solutions to every world problem.” He did not say who, but a discerning ear might conjure the voices of the Murchisons, the Hunts, the Algers, the Walkers, the Governor who sat beside him. “There will always be dissident voices in the land, expressing opposition without alternatives, finding fault but never favor, perceiving gloom on every side and seeking influence without responsibility. Those voices are inevitable. But today,” he wanted to say, “today other
voices are heard in the land—voices preaching doctrines which apparently assume that words will suffice without weapons, that vituperation is as good as victory, and that peace is a sign of weakness.”

Would Dallas have understood the shaft or smelled the blood? It is doubtful. The words, high-flown and as incandescent as bubbles, might have drawn applause from those who were bleeding. “We cannot expect that everyone, to use the phrase of a decade ago, will ‘talk sense to the American people.' But we can hope that fewer people will listen to nonsense. And the notion that this nation is headed for defeat through deficit, or that strength is but a matter of slogans, is nothing but just plain nonsense.”

Deftly his oratory danced from subject to subject: military strength backed by national will; foreign aid; Polaris submarines; to paraphrase a paragraph, he desired to tell his audience that “our successful defense of freedom is due not to the words we use, but to the strength we stand ready to use on behalf of the principles we stand ready to defend.”

The words hung dead like a clapper in a bell. No one heard them; no one clamored to hear them. Makeup editors of afternoon newspapers cursed their luck as they replated editions which said: “Today at the Trade Mart in Dallas, President John F. Kennedy said . . . Swindal eased the engines and the pitch subsided to a murmur. It meant nothing to the man of the many words. He lay wrapped in plastic, the face puffy and discolored.

It meant something to others. Stomachs had asserted themselves and the stewards brought soup and sandwiches, coffee, cheese, and liquor. Especially liquor. General McHugh had ordered the kitchen closed. Someone else had ordered it opened. The empty fifths of Scotch and bourbon tumbled into bags of refuse. A few passengers were sadly drunk and maudlin. They talked of better days and better times and remembered the day Jack Kennedy said . . . The electricity of shock was in others so
deep that liquor sharpened the grief. Some passengers penciled notes as though time might prove to be anesthetic. Many, confined to the plane and the presence, regressed a little and, like children, wished it all away; it never happened.

The road to safety, for Lyndon Johnson, lay in immersing himself in work. He had spent a time of terror in that hospital, but it would not happen again. He had Valenti, Clifton, Kilduff, Moyers, and Marie Fehmer running. They manned phones, made calls. He made decisions and took the more important messages. The Kennedy minions asked that the press be barred from Andrews. Johnson said no. “It will look like we're in a panic,” he said. He called the Situation Room and told McGeorge Bundy that he wanted to call a series of meetings tonight and tomorrow morning. “Bipartisan,” he said.

In the back of the plane, the Irish had finished a few rounds of whiskey and the conversation became sporadic. Each was deep in thought for periods of time. O'Brien, Powers, and Burkley were fatigued from the long period of standing, but Godfrey McHugh and Kenny O'Donnell kept a wary eye on those who kept the faith. Somewhere in mid-flight, Mrs. Kennedy voiced a thought about the similarity of martyrdom between Lincoln and her husband. It may have been uttered to O'Donnell or Burkley. By the time
Air Force One
began to descend, Abraham Lincoln had become the theme, the motif of the three-day “wake” of John F. Kennedy. It was an understandable and exalted thought on the part of the widow, and, in the acute distress of sudden mourning, the others thought that Kennedy had been every bit as great as Lincoln.

Someone suggested that the Kennedys could avoid the glare of lights and cameras by debarking from the starboard side of the plane; a fork lift could be raised to the level of the galley entrance. The casket and Mrs. Kennedy would be in the shadow of the plane, and the sanctity of privacy could be maintained. Jacqueline Kennedy looked up from her empty glass in
the breakfast nook. “We will go out the regular way,” she said in that odd, litany-like manner. “I want them to see what they have done.”

In the forward cabin, the President was revising a short statement written by Liz Carpenter. It had the correct note of humility without being slavish. He said to Merriman Smith and Charles Roberts—still writing their impressions of the trip for the pool reporters—“I'm going to make a short statement in a few minutes and give you copies of it. Then when I get on the ground, I'll do it over again.”

The confinement of the Johnsons and the Kennedys in the plane for a period of one hundred and fifty minutes was sufficient to cleave the families in permanent schism. Johnson, the burly, earthy Texan, lost the battle for unity by succeeding to the presidency. He was not, and could not aspire to be, Kennedy people. He could be tolerated as a Vice-President because his loyalty to John F. Kennedy was complete and unquestioned. Within the family, only Bobby and Kenny O'Donnell could not abide him as Vice-President. To them, he was a rumpled wheeler-dealer, part Southerner, part Westerner with cowdung on his heels. He lacked what they might refer to as “class.”

To those among the Kennedys who felt neutral, or apathetic, about Lyndon Johnson, his tragic ascendancy to the presidency tipped their opinions against him. He was not worthy to follow their fallen hero, and his every act lent itself to two interpretations so that, among themselves, they could make him look mean and avaricious. He did not belong on
Air Force One
, they felt. The least he could have done was to permit the widow and her dead husband the privacy of the plane for the trip home. He should not have burdened Bobby—even though he was the Attorney General—with a question about being sworn in as President. It was a crass grab for power.

On the plane—her plane—he violated her privacy by offering condolences, taking over the private bedroom, issuing
statements, holding the plane until a judge swore him in, thus imperiling the remains of Kennedy which might have been impounded by Dallas County at any moment. He was a crude, impossible man. At a time of stunning shock, he had the nerve to call Kennedy's top lieutenants and offer to keep them on, to give them “blank checks” to carry on the Kennedy tradition.

Lyndon Johnson must be charged with a lack of understanding of the Kennedy mentality. They required a villain for their rancor. The world lay shattered in their hands and no one could put it together again. When their chief fell among the dead roses, the heart of their political cult stopped. They had no standing anymore, no prestige. Among the politically and socially dead were Bobby Kennedy, David Powers, Kenny O'Donnell, Larry O'Brien, General McHugh, McGeorge Bundy, Dean Rusk, Robert McNamara, Jacqueline Kennedy, Arthur Schlesinger, Ted Sorensen, Mrs. Lincoln, Pierre Salinger, Orville Freeman, Major-General Clifton—a host of men and women. They were dead and they were aware of it. Many of them held Johnson in such contempt that they could not endure his offer of resurrection.