The matriarch takes a condolence call from now President Lyndon Johnson and his wife Lady Bird, who accompanied Jack’s coffin from Dallas to Washington. “We must all realize,” Lady Bird tells Rose, “how fortunate the country was to have your son as long as it did.”
* * *
On the day of Kennedy’s assassination, Special Agent Mike Howard searches Lee Harvey Oswald’s Dallas apartment. He discovers a green address book—since disappeared from evidence—but records that on page seventeen, under the heading “I WILL KILL,” Oswald has written the names of four men: conservative anti-Communist Edwin Walker; former vice president Richard Nixon; FBI agent James Hosty; and—at the top of the list—Texas governor John Connally. Oswald has already taken a shot at Walker, and Nixon, it turns out, is also in Dallas in November 1963 at the same time as JFK.
Yet although Governor John Connally, who denied Oswald an adjustment to his “undesirable” military discharge, is first on Oswald’s kill list, it is President John F. Kennedy who is first to take a bullet from him.
* * *
By Sunday, November 24, a transfer is in process. Due to death threats against Oswald, who has now been connected to Kennedy’s assassination, police are on guard. At 11:20 a.m. they lead the prisoner—handcuffed to Detective James R. Leavelle—through the basement of the Dallas city jail and into an armored truck bound for the Dallas county jail. There Oswald will await a Monday court hearing.
Dozens of print and television reporters have been waiting all morning to cover the perp walk, and millions of viewers have tuned in to the live broadcast.
“All of a sudden someone steps out, two quick steps,” Dallas Times Herald photographer Bob Jackson recalls. The someone is local nightclub owner Jacob Leon Rubenstein, known as Jack Ruby. “He fired, and I hit the shutter…My big concern was did I get it before the bullet entered [Oswald’s] body.”
Jackson succeeds in snapping the exact moment Ruby’s bullet hits Oswald in the abdomen, his mouth agape in pain, his eyes squeezed tight, his shackled hands slightly raised, as if bracing for the next bullet.
Ruby’s “right hand was contracting as though he was trying to fire another shot,” Detective Leavelle later testifies at Ruby’s 1964 trial. Ruby’s defense? Not murder, but spasms of “psychomotor epilepsy.”
Perhaps. Though Levealle testifies to hearing Ruby say, “I hope the sonof-a-bitch [sic] dies” as he pulls the trigger. “I saw Jack Ruby before he made his move toward Oswald,” Levealle recalls. “I jerked back and tried to pull Oswald behind me. I did manage to turn his body and he was hit about three-four inches left of the navel.”
Asked to explain Ruby’s motivation, Levealle theorizes that the man wanted “to do something spectacular.”
Chapter 22
In the East Room of the White House, Jackie and her brother-in-law Bobby Kennedy stand before Jack’s casket.
The Marsellus Casket Company’s Model 710, “The President,” is closed, in accordance with Jack’s wishes. “I want you to make sure they close the casket when I die,” family aide Frank Morissey remembers Jack saying to him. “He seemed to have a premonition about it, and he asked that eight or nine times.”
A century earlier, another fallen leader lay in state in this very room, the chandeliers identically draped for mourning with black crepe. At Jackie’s request, the White House has modeled the mourning for her husband on what was done for Abraham Lincoln. “Jack really looks, acts, and sounds like young Lincoln,” Rose had once said, proudly describing her son’s performance in his October 1960 debate against Nixon. Now the thirty-fifth and sixteenth presidents have in common their deaths by extremist assassin’s bullet.
Jackie asks Secret Service agent Clint Hill to bring her a pair of scissors so that she can snip a lock of Jack’s hair. When a pair is in her hand, Hill and Brigadier General Godfrey McHugh fold back the American flag that covers the casket—made of five-hundred-year-old solid African mahogany—and raise its heavy lid.
“When I saw President Kennedy lying there, confined in that narrow casket, with his eyes closed so peacefully just like he was sleeping, it was all I could do to keep from breaking down,” Hill recalls. “Mrs. Kennedy and the president’s brother walked over to view the man they had so loved. I heard the sound of the scissors, beneath the painful cries, as she clipped a few locks of her husband’s hair.”
The president is wearing Jackie’s wedding ring. A Parkland Memorial Hospital orderly had helped her slip it on his finger moments after doctors had declared him dead.
George E. Thomas has dressed the president with extra care. The man Thomas calls Jack F. will be buried in his favorite blue suit.
When the somber, private moment is complete, Bobby carefully closes the casket lid. Hand in hand, he and Jackie exit the East Room. The honor guard resumes its vigil around the president.
* * *
The night before, Jackie’s mother, Janet Auchincloss, decides it’s too much to expect Jackie to break the news of their father’s death to her children. She delegates the task to British nanny Maud Shaw, instructing her to tell the children individually, starting with five-year-old Caroline.
Shaw protests, not wanting to be responsible for taking “a child’s last happiness,” but at Auchinchloss’s insistence, she manages a comforting story for Caroline, telling her that her father has gone to look after her baby brother. “Patrick was so lonely in heaven. He didn’t know anybody there. Now he has the best friend anyone could have.”
Caroline and John Jr. know what a fun friend their dad could be, too. Jackie later reminisces how he played with them in the Oval Office, moving along with fitness instructor Jack LaLanne on television. How he “loved those children tumbling around him in this sort of—sensual is the only way I can think of it,” she says.
Before they close the casket, Jackie instructs the children, “You must write a letter to Daddy now and tell him how much you love him.” Caroline dutifully does just that, and John Jr., not yet three, scribbles him a pretend note as well.
* * *
Opinion writer Jimmy Breslin famously reports from Arlington National Cemetery for the New York Herald Tribune, describing the exchange between gravedigger Clifton Pollard and superintendent John Metzler as they worked on Sunday, November 24, the day before the burial.
“He was a good man,” Pollard said. “Yes, he was,” Metzler said. “Now they’re going to come and put him right here in this grave I’m making up,” Pollard said. “You know, it’s an honor just for me to do this.”
That same day, a detail of navy enlisted pallbearers carries the president’s body from the White House to the Capitol Rotunda in preparation for the lying-in-state ceremony. President Johnson lays an honorary wreath at the casket, then Jackie and Caroline kneel there together. Their departure, with Bobby, is the public’s invitation to enter. People form two lines, blocks long. Even with the visitation extended overnight, each mourner is allowed only a glimpse.
In one of the first acts of Lyndon Johnson’s fledgling presidency, he declares a national day of mourning in Jack’s remembrance on November 25, 1963.