The Cataclysm
The day began in triumph for John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
Riding through the sunny streets of downtown Dallas in
an open convertible, his young wife, Jacqueline, beside him, the president
of the United States beamed at the cheering crowds. Two cars back in the
motorcade, Lyndon Baines Johnson, who knew he had been Kennedy’s
choice for vice president principally to keep the South in the Democratic
fold, felt vindicated by the warm reception in his home state. Both men
had been apprehensive about open hostility from angry southerners in
the wake of Kennedy’s call for a new civil rights law.
Instead, thousands of ebullient Texans applauded and waved at their
handsome young president and at their own Lyndon Johnson. In the
front car, Nellie Connally, wife of Texas governor John Connally, turned
back toward John Kennedy. “You can’t say Dallas doesn’t love you,” she
beamed.
An instant later, Nellie Connally heard a loud noise, followed rapidly by
several more explosions. She saw President Kennedy grip his throat with
both hands and heard her husband moan, “Oh, no, no, no,” and then, “My
God, they are going to kill us all!” Kennedy was slumped over, bleeding, as
was Governor Connally, whom she cradled in her arms as the convertible
sped away.
Two cars behind them, Secret Service agent Rufus Youngblood yelled,
“Get down!” and shoved Lyndon Johnson to the floorboard. The agent
threw his own two hundred-pound body across Johnson to protect the
vice president. Pinned down and unable to see, Johnson heard tires
screeching as he felt the car accelerate. He heard the radioed voice of agent
Roy Kellerman from Kennedy’s car shouting, “Let’s get the heck out of
here!” Then he heard still another agent’s voice: “The President has been
shot. We don’t know who else they are after.”
Moments later, Secret Service men rushed Johnson and his wife, Lady
Bird, into Parkland Memorial Hospital, where they huddled silently together
in an examining room with the shades drawn. In an adjoining
room, Secret Service agent Henry Roberts spoke into his radio to
headquarters in Washington. “We don’t know what the full scope of this thing
is,” he said. “It could be a conspiracy to try to kill the president, vice president
– try to kill everybody.”
Less than an hour after the shots were fired, at 1:22 p.m. Central Standard
Time, November 22, 1963, White House aide Kenneth O’Donnell
came into the Johnsons’ room. “He’s gone,” he told them. At that moment,
fifty-five-year-old Lyndon Baines Johnson became the thirty-sixth
president of the United States.
In his two-story frame home on Auburn Avenue in Atlanta, the Reverend
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. struggled awake late that November morning,
physically and mentally exhausted from too much travel and too little
sleep. During the previous seven days, King had been constantly on the
road, first for a rally at Danville, Virginia, where the sparse turnout of
supporters suggested that the civil rights leader would have trouble
launching a planned major campaign there. The young minister was
deeply worried that the civil rights movement was losing momentum and
perplexed about where he should now direct the energies of his Southern
Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to pressure Congress into approving
civil rights legislation. If not Danville, where should King go next? With
conflicting advice coming from his aides, King did not know
what to do.
After Danville, he had flown to New York to meet privately at Idlewild
Airport with two key advisers, attorneys Clarence Jones and Stanley David
Levison, who both urged him to launch a new campaign, lest the
mantle of civil rights leadership pass to younger, more radical men. He
then stopped off at a resort in New York’s Catskill Mountains at the national
convention of United Synagogues of America to receive its annual
leadership award. Next, he flew to Chicago to speak to the annual convention
of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, representing Reform
Jews. Such speeches, more than 150 a year, left him constantly tired.
They were necessary to build support and raise the funds needed to keep
the SCLC afloat, yet aides constantly reminded King that those activities
were no substitute for the kinds of direct-action demonstrations that
had catapulted him to prominence. It had been just such an action in
Birmingham, Alabama, six months earlier that had prompted President
Kennedy to introduce a civil rights bill, after two years of urging from
movement leaders. His proposed bill would outlaw segregation in public
accommodations, forbid discrimination in employment, and withdraw
federal aid from state and local governments that discriminated against
anyone because of race, national origin, or religion. But now the legislation
faced poor prospects in Congress, and King feared that Kennedy’s
enthusiasm for the bill had waned as his 1964 reelection campaign drew
nearer.
A television set flickered in the background as King tried to rest in his
upstairs bedroom. At the first news bulletin, he shouted downstairs to his
wife, “Corrie, I just heard that Kennedy has been shot, maybe killed!”
Coretta Scott King, who had been writing notes at her desk, rushed upstairs
to her husband’s side. Horrified, the couple stared at scenes of the
Dallas motorcade and the vigil at Parkland Memorial Hospital.
“This is just terrible,” cried King. Death threats had become a constant
in the King home. “I hope he will live…. I think if he lives – if he pulls
through this, it will help him to understand better what we go through.”
Moments later, the television news anchor announced that the president
was dead.
“This is what’s going to happen to me,” an agonized King told his wife.
“This is such a sick society.”
Lyndon Johnson’s first fear was that the Soviet Union might have unleashed
an attack against the United States. If the Soviets had shot the
president, he thought, who would they shoot next? And what was going
on in Washington? And when were the missiles coming? With these
thoughts racing through his mind, Johnson ordered the Secret Service to
delay public announcement of Kennedy’s death until he and Lady Bird
had left Parkland Hospital.
As they prepared to leave, Johnson urged his wife to go see “Jackie and
Nellie.” In a narrow hallway outside the main operating room, Mrs. Johnson
found Jacqueline Kennedy standing alone, her face frozen in horror,
her pink suit spattered with her husband’s blood. “God help us all!” Lady
Bird said, embracing John F. Kennedy’s young widow. Lady Bird next
went to her old friend Nellie Connally, who was being reassured by doctors
that her husband would live.
The Johnsons then were rushed out a side door of the hospital and into
separate unmarked police cars. Eight minutes later they arrived at Love
Field. Scrambling up the ramp into Air Force One, Lyndon Johnson faced
his first decisions as president. General GodfreyMcHugh and other White
House aides had been urging that the president’s official plane take off for
Washington the moment the Johnsons came on board, but Lyndon Johnson
countermanded the general’s order.
He would not leave Dallas without Jacqueline Kennedy and the body of
her husband – then en route to Love Field – nor without first taking the
oath of office as president. With that ceremony, he meant to show the
world that the government of the United States was still functioning in an
orderly manner. U.S. district judge Sarah Hughes, an old Johnson friend
and supporter, was summoned from her office in Dallas. Hughes boarded
the Boeing 707, and as Lyndon Baines Johnson placed his hand on a Bible,
she administered the oath of office. Lady Bird Johnson and Jacqueline
Kennedy stood at his side. After kissing each woman on the cheek, President
Johnson commanded Colonel James Swindall, the pilot of Air Force
One, “Let’s be airborne!”
As the plane sped toward Washington, Johnson telephoned Rose Kennedy,
mother of the murdered president. “I wish to God there was something
I could do,” he said. “I wanted to tell you that we were grieving with
you.” Choked with emotion, Johnson handed the telephone to Lady Bird
to try to console Mrs. Kennedy.
Over the jet’s sophisticated communications system, Johnson then arranged
for congressional leaders and national security advisers to meet at
the White House upon his arrival in Washington. And he instructed six
members of the Cabinet aboard an airplane bound for Japan to change
course and return to the capital. A few minutes earlier, Secretary of State
Dean Rusk had informed that planeload of Cabinet members, reporters,
and their party that President Kennedy had been shot, but they had not
been told his condition. The delegation sat in stunned silence. When the
airplane began to make a slow U-turn over the Pacific and head back toward
the United States, they knew that their president was dead.
Two hours and ten minutes after leaving Dallas, Johnson stood in darkness
on the tarmac at Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington. His
craggy face illuminated by klieg lights, the new president spoke to the nation:
“This is a sad time for all people. We have suffered a loss that cannot
be weighed. For me it is a deep personal tragedy. I know the world shares
the sorrow that Mrs. Kennedy and her family bear. I will do my best. That
is all I can do. I ask for your help and God’s.”
Touching down on the South Lawn of the White House after a tenminute
helicopter ride from Andrews, Johnson strode deliberately toward
the entrance of the Oval Office. Then, abruptly changing his mind, he
walked through the White House basement to his vice presidential suite
in the Executive Office Building. There he asked the assembled congressional
leaders for their support. He approached each member of Kennedy’s
Cabinet and staff and asked them all to stay on. “I need you more
than the President needed you,” Johnson told them. He called Keith
Funston, chairman of the New York Stock Exchange, to thank him for
shutting down the market as soon as news broke of the assassination. He
phoned Richard Maguire, treasurer of the Democratic National Committee
and chief fundraiser for the expected 1964 Kennedy presidential campaign,
and asked him to continue his work. He contacted former presidents
Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower to request their advice. He
arranged to meet Eisenhower in Washington the following morning.
FBI director J. Edgar Hoover called the new president with disquieting
information about Lee Harvey Oswald, who had just been arrested and
charged with Kennedy’s murder, a story that hinted at Cold War conspiracy.
A former U.S. Marine, Oswald had lived for several years in the Soviet
Union, where he had married a Russian woman and tried to become a Soviet
citizen. Oswald had worked for a group supporting Cuban Communist
leader Fidel Castro and recently had visited the Soviet consulate in
Mexico City.
The news could hardly have been more ominous. The Cold War between
the United States and the Soviet Union was raging across the world
– from the divided city of Berlin to Vietnam. Only thirteen months had
passed since the United States and the Soviet Union had come within an
eyelash of nuclear war over the presence of Soviet missiles on the island of
Cuba, ninety-two miles from the American shore. After a nerve-wracking
thirteen-day standoff, the crisis had ended when the Soviets agreed to remove
the missiles.
Despite his own fears about Soviet involvement in the assassination,
Johnson knew that the nation needed his reassurance. Concerned that
Dallas district attorney Henry Wade might rush to a public judgment involving
Oswald in a Communist plot, the new president asked his longtime
adviser Horace Busby to assign Texas attorney general Waggoner
Carr to take command of the assassination investigation.
For most of his life, Lyndon Johnson had dreamed of becoming president.
Now, under nightmarish circumstances, his wish had been fulfilled,
and he faced a nation stunned by sorrow, fear, and troubling questions:
Who had killed Jack Kennedy and why? And who was this hulking Texan
with the deep southwestern twang who had suddenly taken Kennedy’s
place as president of the United States?
Congressman Hale Boggs of Louisiana, the deputy majority leader of the
House of Representatives, raced toward the Capitol from his office across
the street in the Cannon House Office Building as soon as he heard the
news, nearly crashing into Representative William Colmer, a Mississippi
Democrat and diehard segregationist. “Your people killed that man!”
Boggs shouted at a startled Colmer. “Your Ross Barnetts!”
The grief-stricken Boggs was not the only person to leap to the conclusion
that Kennedy’s murder was related in some way to racial strife in the
South. In late September 1962, Governor Ross Barnett of Mississippi had
fueled a deadly riot by defying President Kennedy’s order making James
Meredith the first African American admitted to the University of Mississippi.
22 Barnett’s Mississippi had produced more civil rights-related violence
than any other state. Civil rights activists had been beaten and murdered,
black churches had been burned, and Ku Klux Klansmen had
waged a campaign of terror with virtual immunity from state and local
law enforcement.
Senator Richard Russell, a Georgia Democrat and leader of the southern
segregationist forces in the Senate, stood in his usual spot in the Senate
Marble Room reading the news wires as they came out of a ticker tape
machine. Russell’s eyes welled with tears as he read of the “dastardly crime
… which had stricken a brilliant, dedicated statesman at the very height
of his powers.” Russell took solace in knowing that his friend and protg
Lyndon Johnson would be taking over the reins – a man he had long believed
had “all the talents and abilities to be a strong president.”
Senator Hubert Humphrey, a Minnesota Democrat and deputy majority
leader of the Senate, heard the news as he was attending a luncheon at
the Chilean embassy in Washington. Overcome by emotion, Humphrey
wept openly, then steadied himself to announce the sad news to the
assembled guests. As he left the embassy, Humphrey worried about the
health of his friend Lyndon Johnson – about his earlier heart attack and
how he might have been shaken emotionally by the trauma of the day. But
that evening Humphrey felt reassured by Johnson’s measured calm when
he saw Johnson in his office. Putting his arm around Humphrey, Johnson
told him that he desperately needed the help of his friend from Minnesota
– who had been the Democrats’ point man on civil rights since 1948.
Most Americans, regardless of their political beliefs, reacted to the
assassination with a profound sense of shock and grief. The attractive
young president and his glamorous wife had charmed the nation, and indeed
people throughout the world, with their vitality, graciousness, and
style. But race had become a dominant, divisive issue in American public
life. In disturbing ways, feelings about race influenced immediate reactions
to Kennedy’s murder.
Continues…
Excerpted from Judgment Days
by Nick Kotz
Copyright © 2004 by Nick Kotz.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Houghton Mifflin Company
Copyright © 2004
Nick Kotz
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-618-08825-3
