John Jr.’s third birthday will forever be the same day as his father’s funeral. Caroline will turn six before the month is out.
Military body bearers place the president’s remains on the same caisson that had carried FDR and the Unknown Soldier. It’s drawn by seven gray horses and Black Jack, a riderless horse fitted with the saddle, stirrups, and backward-turned boots that symbolize a fallen leader. Twelve hundred troops cordon the route to St. Michael’s Cathedral, eight blocks distant.
The temperature hovers at just over forty degrees, yet a crowd of one million people gathers in the open air. Private Arthur Carlson, Black Jack’s handler, recalls, “I’ve never seen that many people be that quiet. It must have been eight or ten people deep, the whole way, and they were all as still as statues.”
The silent crowd watches a procession of international leaders and dignitaries who, despite intense security concerns, walk nearly a mile from the White House to St. Michael’s, where Cardinal Richard Cushing prepares to perform yet another Catholic rite for the Kennedy family. He married Jack and Jackie, said the funeral Mass for their son Patrick, and will now say Jack’s as well.
Assembled in the pews are prime ministers and presidents—de Gaulle, Eisenhower, Truman—alongside generals and royalty. All listen as Bishop Philip Hannan recites Kennedy’s 1961 inaugural address with the solemnity of scripture.
When Mass ends, Jackie stands with Caroline and John Jr. on the steps of the cathedral. The honor guard carries the coffin past them as a military band plays “Hail to the Chief.” Jackie bends down and whispers in her son’s ear, “John, you can salute Daddy now and say goodbye to him.”
A photo of the salute the small boy gives his fallen father stands among some of the most indelible images ever taken.
The procession continues along the three-mile route from St. Matthew’s Cathedral to Arlington National Cemetery. Jackie walks between Bobby and Ted, her sisters-in-law Ethel and Joan protectively shadowing them. The Kennedy sisters—Eunice, Jean, and Patricia—walk three abreast, holding a place for Rosemary in their hearts. The fatherless children, Caroline and John, ride in the motorcade.
Rose alone represents the senior Kennedys. Joe is too frail to leave Hyannis Port. His health has been so poor following his stroke nearly two years earlier, Rose has long thought her husband near death already. “Not only did she expect him to die,” Kennedy chauffeur Frank Saunders says, “she even bought the dress. How awful that she had to wear it for her son’s funeral.”
Joe’s nurse, Rita Dallas, says the rosary for him. “So it was,” she recalls, “while a nation watched their President laid to rest with fitting pomp and ceremony, his father prayed alone.”
As the pallbearers carry the casket from the caisson to the grave, the United States Air Force Pipe Band plays “Mist Covered Mountain.”
Fifty military fighters, thirty Air Force F-105s, and twenty Navy F4Bs pass overhead in three V formations, with one missing from the last V in tribute. Air Force One makes an honorary flyover, piloted by Colonel James B. Swindal, who only days before flew the president’s body home from Dallas.
Swindal speaks for many in the military when he recalls the shock surrounding the loss of the president who had so memorably served among them. “I didn’t belong to the Johnson team. My President was in that box.”
“Those drumbeats, I’ll tell you,” recalls the US Army specialist Douglas Mayfield of the funereal walk down Pennsylvania Avenue. “That presidential drumbeat was so different and haunting. For days, I could hear those drums.”
Sergeant Jim Felder, one of two black pallbearers, held an upper corner of the president’s flag-draped casket. “At the time, I was so intent on doing my job that I refused to feel any emotion,” he recalls in an interview with South Carolina’s newspaper the State. “It must have been about two weeks later that I was standing at my locker and it hit me. I realized that I had lost someone I respected, admired and loved. I sat down on my bunk and cried.”
In addition to the million mourners there in person, millions more watched on TV.
David Bianculli, a radio host, recalls being among the unprecedented television audience of 175 million as a ten-year-old schoolboy. “I locked the TV in my room, turned it on, and watched. Alone. And kept changing channels and watching some more, until my dad and sister came home. Then we all watched, for days, and grieved together. When Ruby shot Oswald, we were watching; when John-John saluted his father’s coffin, we were watching—just like, at that point, almost everyone else in the country.”
* * *
Down in Texas, there is another funeral occurring. President Kennedy and Officer Tippit are buried on the same day, November 25, 1963. The words of the Baptist pastor C. D. Tipps Jr., who leads Tippit’s funeral service, describe the shared sacrifice of the World War II heroes. “He was doing his duty when he was taken by the lethal bullet of a poor, confused, misguided, ungodly assassin.”
Marie Tippit and Jackie Kennedy are strangers brought together by tragic circumstance, two women widowed on the same day—by the same killer.
“This great tragedy prepares me to sympathize more deeply with you,” Marie Tippit telegrams the White House, to which Jackie replies by letter, “You and I share another bond—reminding our children all their lives what brave men their fathers were.”
* * *
Just before midnight, an exhausted Bobby and Jackie are alone in the White House residence. The family has dispersed, following a subdued birthday party for John Jr.
Bobby, whose own birthday was only five days before, on November 20, asks, “Shall we go visit our friend?”
Agent Hill escorts them by light of the eternal flame specially constructed by military engineers at the head of Jack’s grave, the flame that Jackie lit for the first time only hours before, and that will never be extinguished.
On bended knee, they pray together.
* * *
“During those four endless days,” between Jack Kennedy’s assassination and his burial, Jackie “held us together as a family and as a country,” her brother-in-law Ted Kennedy later declares. “In large part because of her, we could grieve and then go on.”
Part of what Jackie ensures, too, is “to make certain that Jack was not forgotten by history.”
To that end, on Friday, November 29, in the midst of a nor’easter, Jackie summons a writer to Hyannis Port. He is Theodore H. White, whose political chronicle The Making of the President 1960 won the 1962 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction.
In a congratulatory note to White, President Kennedy had written, “It pleases me that I could at least provide a little of the scenario.”
Now he is the entire scenario.
White later recalls the directness of Jackie’s instruction. “There was something she wanted Life magazine to say to the country, and that I must do it.” Foremost in Jackie’s mind are the “bitter people” intent on negatively defining the Kennedy presidency, as had happened at a July 1963 press conference. “The Republican National Committee recently adopted a resolution saying you were pretty much of a failure,” a reporter stated, then asked, “How do you feel about that?”