LOOKING BACK IN SORROW
By Elizabeth Forsling Harris
Washington Post – November 20, 1988
FOR YEARS AFTER NOV. 22, 1963, I WOULD WAKE in a
cold sweat, convinced that something I had done, or had not done, had killed John
F. Kennedy.
His was only supposed to be a three-hour stay in
Dallas. But still, there were so many details for that brief visit -- details
that I personally was responsible for. And I would afterward wake in horror to
think that his death was the result of something I had done, in the plans that
were made, in the arrangements that were hammered out, in the schedule that was
so carefully gone over, minute by minute. The bubble-top. The publicity. The
route maps of his motorcade through the city. Everyone remembers where they
were on that tragic day in history, but I was there and can still recall it
now, in every detail.
DURING THE YEARS I LIVED IN DALLAS, I HAD COME TO
KNOW John Kennedy well. He, on the other hand, did not know me at all. In 1956,
I had worked in those frantic final hours at the convention to help him get the
nomination for vice president over Estes Kefauver. Until 1960, I ran
"Kennedy errands" for Democratic National Chairman Paul Butler, whose
fervent but necessarily confidential aim was to secure the presidential
nomination for Kennedy. In 1960, I helped to set up the Citizens for
Kennedy/Johnson committee in Dallas County. In January 1961, I worked on the
inaugural preparations and struggled to be sure that the five inaugural balls went
off as scheduled.
In 1961, I went to work at the Peace Corps, where I
met Bill Moyers. He had come to Washington from Texas as one of Sen. Lyndon
Johnson's brightest staffers. But in 1961, he had somehow managed to extricate
himself from Johnson's grasp and joined President Kennedy's perhaps most
provocative program. He became deputy director, and I was the only ranking
female in the hierarchy.
In 1963, I moved back to my home in Dallas with the
intention of resuming a successful business career.
Moyers, only 29 but already a veteran of politics,
reached me at home on the afternoon of November 13, 1963. He had just gotten
back from the White House. He was excited and in a hurry. President Kennedy had
asked him, indeed ordered him, to go to Texas and smooth the way for an
upcoming trip to San Antonio, Houston, Fort Worth, Dallas and Austin. In just
eight days, Air Force One would take off on the trip during which Kennedy
intended to raise both votes and money for his 1964 presidential campaign.
Would I help with the preparations in Dallas?
Like Moyers, I was familiar enough with Texas
politics to want to avoid spurious encounters. The local political atmosphere created
by the pending Kennedy visit was rancorous, a condition brought on by the
infighting between the liberal and the conservative wings of the Texas
Democratic Party. Most of the many people I knew in Dallas took their politics
very seriously; I did not want to jeopardize my new line of work by unduly
antagonizing some of my more conservative friends for what seemed to be a
gratuitous political favor. So I refused Moyers. At first.
However, I did offer to give him a written rundown
on the situation in Dallas pertinent to Kennedy's scheduled three-hour stay --
a sort of Who's Who and What's What of the city. It took 17 typewritten pages
to spell out the convoluted details.
The next day, Moyers flew down on the "mail
plane," a government aircraft dispatched daily to take documents and mail
to Vice President Johnson when he was in residence at his Texas ranch. Moyers
stopped overnight in Dallas to pick up my memo and talk over the whole
situation and then went on to Austin, the state capital, from which he would
operate for the next seven days.
THE REPUBLICAN PARTY HAD only begun to emerge in
Texas, and in 1963 the major political figures were Democratic: Gov. John
Connally, conservative; Sen. Ralph Yarborough, liberal; and Vice President
Johnson, officially neutral, but now, as Kennedy's man, with a loyalty
unofficially suspect in both camps.
As senators, and even earlier, Johnson and
Yarborough had been arch-enemies; Johnson's elevation to the vice presidency
changed nothing. Connally and Yarborough were natural antagonists, given
Connally's longtime service as Johnson's chief lieutenant, a status extended by
Connally's boisterously declared conservative posture.
The only person who had been able to keep these
three gladiators in some semblance of behavioral order was Sam Rayburn, speaker
of the House, but Rayburn had died in 1961. His charges were on their own,
scarcely the better for it.
By mid-November of 1963, the competition between the
two factions was beginning to threaten the success of the Kennedy trip.
Traditionally, when a president visits one of the 50 states, the terms of the
visit are set by the White House, with details filled in by the local party
leaders. Not necessarily, however, in Texas. Connally wanted the Kennedy trip
run the Connally way. Kennedy had expressed a desire to be heard by as many
people as possible who had voted against him in 1960 and seen by as many as
possible, no matter how they had voted. Connally was up for reelection himself
in 1964, and the last thing he wanted was to be perceived as openly allied with
John Kennedy. Particularly, he didn't want to be seen as parading Kennedy
through Texas on a vote-getting expedition. Still, he didn't want to be seen
without his president either.
So Connally came up with a plan to have it both
ways. There would be, he suggested to Kennedy, "political" events.
And then there would be "non-political" events. Austin, as the state
capital, was the one city in which liberals and conservatives were accustomed
to meeting together. It was Austin that Connally chose for the one
"political" event -- a fund-raiser, with the money from the sale of
tickets to be split between the state organization and the Democratic National
Committee. Elsewhere, the sponsors would be "non-political," and the
tickets would be "invitations" handed out by the sponsor hosts of
each event. Specifically, Connally planned for Kennedy to visit the School of
Aerospace Medicine at Brooks Air Force Base near San Antonio on Nov. 21, where
Kennedy would make a speech and dedicate six new buildings. In Houston, Kennedy
would star at the testimonial dinner for Rep. Albert Thomas, whose support of
Kennedy earned Houston what was to be known as the Johnson Space Center. On
Friday, Nov. 22, the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce would host a breakfast.
Afterward, the three-hour stop in Dallas would center on a luncheon sponsored
by the Dallas Citizens' Council.
On paper, it looked great. In every city except
Austin, the sponsoring organizations were made up of Connally partisans. They
were, therefore, the people who could be presumed to have voted against
Kennedy. The only major change the White House made was to insist on a
motorcade in every city. Kennedy wanted to see and be seen by as big a public
as possible, and he would have Mrs. Kennedy in the car, seated beside him --
the best attraction yet.
The vice president, meanwhile, did not cotton to
Kennedy's coming to Texas in the first place. It was too easy for Kennedy to
observe what little influence Johnson now had in his own state. Nor did he take
kindly to Connally's hustling all the press attention. So he was holed up at
his ranch, waiting to join the official party when it landed in San Antonio.
To top off the political squabbling, Yarborough was
loudly refusing to ride in the motorcades with the vice president, the seat
political protocol had dealt him; declaiming the injustice of cutting the flow
of "non-political" invitations to his liberal supporters; protesting
Connally's failure to invite his wife and him to the pre-dinner reception at
the governor's mansion in Austin; and demanding to be seated at the head table
for the dinner with Kennedy.
For his part, Connally was protesting the
motorcades, notably the one in ultra-conservative, pro-Connally Dallas;
claiming total innocence in regard to the "mix-up" in the
distribution of tickets; regretting that his wife, Nellie, had refused to
extend to Yarborough an invitation to the reception and asking just what was a
man to do in a situation like that; readying himself with Mrs. Connally to
escort the president and Mrs. Kennedy through the five Texas cities. Indeed, he
was to cite the presence of the ladies as one of his chief objections to
motorcades, notorious as the open cars were for mussing the ladies' hairdos.
AND WHAT OF MOYERS? BY THE TIME HE ARRIVED IN AUSTIN
on Friday, Nov. 15, the Democratic liberals were in full throat. Surely it was
they who had given Kennedy the 46,000-vote plurality by which he squeezed Texas
into the electoral column. So how come they were virtually excluded from the
distribution of tickets to the "non-political" events for
"their" president?
Moyers called me again in Dallas on Saturday
afternoon and asked if I would do him just one small favor. Could I, on Sunday
morning, run down to see this one fellow whom Moyers assured me I knew better
than anyone else, and try to get him to help a little on the ticket situation?
Wouldn't take but a minute. But it surely would be of great help, to do that
one little thing for the president.
The man Moyers wanted me to see was Sam Bloom. I
knew him well. Tall, generous in girth and usually gentle of manner, Bloom ran
the Bloom Advertising Agency. In the skillful hands of Sam's son, Robert, it
has since grown into the largest independent agency in the United States. But
in 1963, while it earned a living for the Bloom family, the agency was also
Sam's means of playing a major role in the management of the city of Dallas.
Dallas was run by the Dallas Citizens' Council, a
group organized by a bank president and described in the book Dallas Public and
Private by Warren Leslie as "a collection of dollars represented by
men." Membership was composed of 100 or more CEOs. Specifically excluded
were proxies, scholars, doctors, clergymen, professors or others who had to ask
permission to spend a corporate dollar.
At the time of Kennedy's visit, those in charge
included Sam Bloom.
What those men, or their predecessors, decided had
enabled the council to do much to finance the city's improvements from airports
to art museums. And acting through its subsidiary, the Citizens' Charter
Association, they also nominated and financed most of the candidates for the
City Council, which in turn elected the mayor.
Whenever Citizens' Council policies needed public
enunciation, the Bloom Agency did the job. So it was that when Connally asked
his friends to host a luncheon for President Kennedy, the Bloom agency
undertook the arrangements -- including the distribution of invitations.
This was the problem Moyers wanted me to discuss
with Sam. The Dallas liberal Democrats were outraged at being short-changed on
invitations; Yarborough was protesting from Washington, and the conservative
media loved the story. At a minimum, the job was to dampen the din.
Bloom was not surprised to see me walk into his
office, even on a Sunday morning. Ten years earlier, I had left New York for
Dallas, a city in which I knew not a soul. I had had a successful career in New
York, first as an editor for Newsweek and then as director of talent and
creative programming at ABC television. I was sure finding work in Dallas was a
mere matter of asking.
Hardly. The city had little interest in an
expatriate New Yorker who was also a female looking to do a man's work. Sam
Bloom, however, became a mentor. One of the directions in which he steered me
was political. I was soon working on Yarborough's first gubernatorial campaign,
then doing jobs for Johnson and Rayburn.
If Sam was not surprised to see me, he certainly was
not happy when I told him my mission. "Goddam it," he yelled.
"I'm sick and tired of those people in Washington sending one guy after
another in here claiming they are working for the White House. They come in,
look around and then disappear. All they want to do is put their noses in our
business and get tickets. I'm sick of hearing about tickets. Now what do you
want?"
At that moment, I changed my mind. I would spend the
rest of that day and the 4 1/2 days thereafter working to make a successful
trip. To this day, I have rued that moment when I changed my mind and became
ipso facto the political advance man for the Dallas leg of the trip.
SAM INTRODUCED ME TO THE MAJOR MEMBER OF THE PLAN-
ning team, the Secret Service advance man, Winston Lawson. In Dallas, as in all
cities, Lawson's main resource was the local police department, headed by Chief
Jesse Curry. Lawson had arrived in Dallas on November 8, and by the time we met
he had done the preliminary work of indoctrinating the police department and
host committee (via the ubiquitous Bloom), checking out the two possible luncheon
sites and the alternative routes from the airport. He even had to arrange for
the motorcade cars through a local dealer. All told, it was a heavy assignment
for one man.
Sunday night, Lawson and I had dinner. He brought me
up to speed on all details of the three hours Kennedy would be in Dallas on
Friday. I learned that the next morning he would reexamine the two potential
sites for the luncheon and send the details back to the White House for final
selection. If it were to be the Trade Mart, the motorcade would follow the
usual parade route from the airport through town. There was not time for Lawson
to check each building along the route, nor was that expected.
I learned, too, at dinner that Kennedy disliked the
bubble-top on the big blue Lincoln that was used for parades and flown in ahead
as needed. At the slightest opportunity, he would order that the top be
removed. (Not until this year did I learn that the top kept out only rain and
wind. It was not designed to stop or even deflect a bullet.) And I smiled at
the not-very-new news that the president liked to stop his motorcades along the
route and get out to shake hands, particularly with children.
We also talked about the dark cloud of conservatism
that hung over Dallas -- specifically, the "Johnson episode" of
November 1960 and the "Adlai Stevenson incident" a little more than a
month earlier.
Less than a week before election day in 1960, vice
presidential candidate Lyndon Johnson and his wife, Lady Bird, came to Dallas
from a campaign appearance in Fort Worth. He was speaking at a luncheon in one
downtown hotel and staying at another hotel across the street.
By coincidence, Republican women had staged a Tag
Day in the same area. Turned out in fetching red and white uniforms, a number
of young socialite women were at the same hotel corner, putting tags in the
lapels of passing businessmen in return for a contribution to the Nixon/Lodge
ticket.
The unexpected had occurred. Bruce Alger, a
Republican candidate for Congress, had arrived at the same corner and,
realizing that the Johnsons were on their way to the hotel, had grabbed a
Republican placard and led the ladies there. All this noise and pulchritude
attracted the boozy bums who hung out on a nearby Bowery-like street. They
enthusiastically joined the crowd.
When Johnson undertook to walk Mrs. Johnson across
the street to the luncheon, I offered to get him a bullhorn to work his way
through the crowd.
"No," he said. "I don't need a
bullhorn to walk my lady across a Dallas street."
The Johnsons were severely jostled, and somewhere
along the way, somebody spat on Mrs. Johnson.
When Johnson learned that the episode had been
filmed by an NBC cameraman and would be used on the network news, he altered
the line a little. For the four days remaining in the campaign down through the
heart of Texas, the senator would blame Bruce Alger and Richard Nixon for
making it impossible for "a man to walk his lady across a Dallas street
without being spat upon."
There are a lot of people, including me, who think
that episode and Johnson's adroit use of it earned much if not all of the
46,000-vote plurality. Alger won. But Nixon lost.
The second incident occurred in October 1963. U.N.
Ambassador Adlai Stevenson had come to Dallas to make a speech on United
Nations Day. On the way out of the hall, a woman with an anti-U.N. placard
pushed her way through a small but jeering crowd as Stevenson neared and the
placard hit him. She would claim it was an accident. Stanley Marcus, the
merchant prince of Neiman Marcus, and one of the few liberals on the Citizens'
Council, was escorting Stevenson. The incident so unnerved him that he was
moved to suggest that Kennedy cancel his trip. Stevenson suggested the same.
The cumulative effect of these events and the
attendant national media coverage was to make the city fathers sick with
embarrassment, bestow the title of "Dallas Disgrace" on the
conservative factions, horrify the liberals and put a nervous law enforcement
force on the alert.
LAWSON, CHIEF CURRY, SAM BLOOM AND I WORRIED ABOUT
another embarrassment on November 22. Using the files, Curry's men located all
of the known conservative troublemakers in the Dallas area, and saw to it that
each was told to stay at home on November 22 -- under police surveillance if
not formal guard. The city pushed through a quick ordinance authorizing arrest
for anyone threatening the president with a placard or a vocal disturbance. The
purpose of this action was to prevent more "embarrassment." Nobody
used the word "assassination," nor, I believe, did any of us ever
think specifically of that awful possibility.
Bloom and his staff worked hard to gather statements
from Dallas' leaders, admonishing the citizens to avoid further embarrassment
to the city by either word or action. The two Dallas newspapers shared the task
of publicizing the statements, adding their own editorial advice.
For my part, later in the week, I put up a stiff
argument to Chief Curry's "Black Maria" plan. A Black Maria is a
police department van used to haul prisoners between jails. Curry wanted to
park one at every corner along the route where the motorcade would change
direction. I was very concerned that the TV cameras would pick up the black
vans, making it look as if Kennedy were so unpopular in Dallas he had to be
guarded literally at every turn. It smelled to me of "police state,"
and I didn't want the president charged by some radical of either the right or
left with invoking same. The Black Marias were not on the street that Friday.
On Tuesday, there was a meeting with the governor
for a final review of his plans for Friday, Nov. 22. Sam Bloom came to report
on his activities together with a representative from the Citizens' Council.
Lawson was late getting there and missed the fireworks: Connally was still
trying to cancel the Dallas motorcade. He was adamant that Kennedy be taken
directly to the luncheon from the airport. Clearly he did not want to encourage
the Dallas voters to be overexposed to the Kennedys and their charms.
Connally was so vociferous to me that I was moved to
call Moyers who was in touch with Kenneth O'Donnell at the White House. I knew
that O'Donnell, who was Kennedy's appointments secretary and overseer of
political activities including the Texas trip, was releasing the route that
day, and that he had, in fact, ordered that we have a motorcade. Still,
Connally, whom I'd known for eight years or so, was a very impressive fellow,
and Bloom and the Citizens' Council wanted to please him.
"The president is not coming down,"
O'Donnell told Moyers, "to be hidden under a bushel basket. Otherwise, we
can do it from here by television."
That settled that.
There was still the matter of publicity. Although
the route had been described in detail as early as November 15 by the Dallas
Times Herald's well-informed Washington correspondent, I still wanted the two
Dallas papers to run maps of the route. It was the best way, I thought, to
encourage a large turnout to see the Kennedys. The maps ran on Thursday
afternoon in the Herald and on Friday morning in the News.
I was pleased.
DURING THE WEEK, I SPENT A GOOD DEAL OF TIME WITH
Lawson, as we checked out the thousand details that would assure a safe and
successful trip.
I had come to have enormous admiration for Lawson.
At 35, he had had only five years' experience in the Secret Service. But his
dedication, his thoroughness and his niceness made one feel that the president
was in excellent hands.
The Secret Service manual dictates that the agents
be ready to put their bodies between the threat of danger and the president. It
is a unique job requirement. One knew that Lawson would not hesitate.
This fall, Win told me about an earlier trip he had
planned for Kennedy, this one to Niagara Falls where Lawson had family who were
invited to attend the event. As the president passed the Lawson relatives, the
agent escorting Kennedy paused and said, "Mr. President, this is Lawson's
family."
Kennnedy smiled, shook hands and said, "Well,
he must be doing a good job. Nobody's shot me yet."
IT WAS RAINING FRIDAY morning, November 22. A slow drizzle.
That meant the bubble-top.
I drove to the airport, parked my car and went to a
revamped Quonset hut at the airport near where Air Force One would land. The
local welcoming party, including Mayor Earle Cabell and his wife, Elizabeth,
were waiting there. Although the luncheon committee had flown in 5,000 yellow
roses from California to decorate the Trade Mart, Mrs. Cabell boasted a bouquet
of Texas red roses that she planned to give Mrs. Kennedy. Everybody in the hut
seemed happy.
When I moved out on the tarmac, Lawson came up to
me. He had neglected to get himself a little brown lapel pin that we had had
made to identify those with close access to the presidential party, a routine
procedure on trips like this. "Could I have yours?" he said. Because
I was going in the back door of the Trade Mart, I wouldn't really need it.
Air Force One was starting its engines at the Fort
Worth airport for the 30-mile flight to Dallas. Overhead, the clouds were
breaking, and suddenly the sun shone through. Hurray, I said to Forrest
Sorrels, the director of the regional Secret Service office. Let's get the
bubble-top off.
It was years before I knew that Lawson had already
given that order.
Air Force Two with Vice President and Mrs. Johnson
and their party landed. I met the Johnsons and walked them over to where the
Air Force One ramp was set up. The press plane was on the ground and unloading,
and I moved over to say hello to some friends who were on it. I didn't show it,
I thought, but I was as nervous as the mother of the bride.
And then, there it was, Air Force One, wheels down,
touching the runway. Watching that sight when the president is aboard is a
wonderful experience. I get tears in my eyes still, just seeing it on
television. That day, my heart almost burst with pride.
There was a big crowd at the airport, far larger
than we had anticipated, and the welcomers hung over the fence, screaming with
glee as the smiling Kennedys moved down the ramp. The president and Mrs.
Kennedy made a beeline for the fence. Ken O'Donnell, Dave Powers, the
president's close friend and political factotum, and Lawrence O'Brien, then
Kennedy's assistant for congressional liaison, had been scheduled to ride with
me on the so-called VIP bus in the motorcade. But, frisky as young goats, they
jumped into seats in the open Secret Service car that would tail the president
as closely as possible. I frowned. I didn't like script changes. Malcolm
Kilduff, the assistant press secretary, got in the pool reporters' car that
followed the Secret Service car behind the president.
Then the two cars carrying the Texas congressmen
swung around in front of my bus before we started. There was no point in
fussing. Relax and enjoy the ride.
The Johnsons got in their car, where they were
finally joined by Sen. Yarborough. The president himself had ordered Yarborough
to-stop-acting-like-a-spoiled-child-and-get-in-the-car-with-Lyndon, or words to
that effect. Yarborough was smiling and waving before the car started. The vice
president was still glum. Maybe more so.
Riding with me were, among others, the president's
doctor, Rear Adm. George Burkley; Kennedy's secretary, Evelyn Lincoln; Mrs.
Kennedy's secretary, Mary Gallagher, and her press secretary, Pamela Turnure;
U.S. Attorney Barefoot Sanders; Jack Valenti, acting as a walking tape
recorder, who had been brought along from Houston by Johnson and equipped to
record whatever the vice president had to say that day; Liz Carpenter, a close
friend and longtime member of the Johnson staff; and Luther Holcombe, a Methodist
minister who was to deliver the luncheon benediction.
Despite what seemed to me to be rampant confusion,
we actually got away from the airport on time at 11:35. Lunch was set up for
12:30 at the Trade Mart, where nearly 2,000 people were beginning to arrive to
find their seats.
The crowds were big, the downtown streets were
packed and the Texans were warm and cheering and obviously just very glad to
see the Kennedys.
My bus was too far behind the presidential car to
hear the shots. But I saw the car speed up and assured Mrs. Lincoln, who seemed
concerned, that they were just trying to make up the five minutes we were now
behind time. Unlike the press buses, our bus pulled up to the back door of the
Trade Mart, where I would take the guests through the kitchen to the seats that
had been saved for us.
As we got to the door, a frazzled man pushed by us
on the way out saying, "The president has been shot. The president has
been shot."
Then we couldn't get in. I needed the brown lapel
pin I had given to Win Lawson. The Dallas policeman on the door had been told
to accept no other identification. Not even Mrs. Lincoln's White House pass.
What had that man meant? Shot? The policeman knew
nothing. I feared that Mrs. Lincoln would collapse. Then I spotted a pay phone
on the wall and called the city desk at the Dallas News. Yes, the president was
being taken to Parkland Hospital.
Later I would learn that Dr. Burkley had immediately
left, found a taxi and headed for Parkland. Where the others had gone I never
quite knew, but I was left with Evelyn Lincoln, Mary Gallagher, Pamela Turnure,
Liz Carpenter and Jack Valenti.
As a group we moved outside, automatically, blindly,
toward the parking lot and the entrance to the highway. We had to find
transportation. The next day my left arm was badly bruised. Only then did I
realize that Liz had beat on me as hard as she could. "Do something. Do
something," she kept saying.
Suddenly a Texas Ranger appeared, walking toward us.
His name tag read "Goodfellow," I remember. He had his own car there.
He would take us. The six of us. The other women sat in the back. I sat on
Valenti's lap in the front, my head pressed against the windshield.
Goodfellow's uniform got us through the blockades the police were setting up to
manage the heavy traffic already moving toward Parkland. Nobody said anything.
Not a word.
At Parkland, the blue Lincoln sat where it had
stopped. The red roses were on the floor. The doors were open. Liz Carpenter
and Jack Valenti disappeared into the building, gone to look for the Johnsons,
I guessed. My concern was for the three women on the Kennedy staff. Mrs.
Kennedy would need them.
I was not unfamiliar with Parkland, having been to a
number of meetings with the director and the staff on the development of the
medical complex of which it was the core. So I took the women up to the
executive offices. In the halls, all was chaos. Hospital care had simply come
to a stop. Doctors, nurses, patients, orderlies lined the halls. Scared.
Curious. Very polite to us. Finally, I asked the women to sit down while I
tried to find where the president was. Heading for the emergency area, I
spotted Gen. Godfrey McHugh, the president's Air Force aide, a handsome man
resplendent in his blue uniform. We returned to Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Kennedy's
two staff women and together proceeded to the emergency suite where the
occupants of the presidential and vice presidential cars and their Secret
Service escorts were. Mayor Cabell was also in the suite.
Mrs. Kennedy was seated on a folding chair just
outside Trauma Room 1, into which the best doctors at the hospital were
crowding. Gov. Connally was in Trauma Room 2, but I have no recollection at all
where Mrs. Connally was. The Secret Service had hustled the Johnsons into a
secluded area where the vice president could be heavily guarded. McHugh and I
got three chairs and put them behind Mrs. Kennedy for Evelyn Lincoln, Mary
Gallagher and Pamela Turnure. Mrs. Kennedy's pink suit was splashed with dried
blood. She sat unmoving. She did not acknowledge the presence of the three
women. I noticed that she seemed to be wearing printed gloves. How strange, it
seemed to me, in one with such taste in clothes. And then I realized that they
were white gloves, "printed" with a substance that even then I knew
was the blood and gore from a dreadful wound. For the first time, I understood
what the phrase "and then her heart froze" meant.
Dave Powers stood by Mrs. Kennedy, often with his
hand resting gently on her shoulder.
Nobody said much. O'Donnell and O'Brien were simply
out of it. They could not talk.
Loud, anguished sobs came from Yarborough. He was
totally consumed with grief, and with something like fear. Nobody knew then
just how badly the president had been hurt. But Yarborough seemed to feel there
had been a transition. He and I were not very friendly, but I went over to him
and pulled his head down on my shoulder, as one would a terrified child. I
meant to ease his pain. "Tell him I'll do anything," he kept saying. "Tell
him I'll do anything." I finally realized he meant Johnson. Yarborough's
longtime political enemy had become -- was it possible? -- his president. I
tried to assure him that John Kennedy was still living.
Win Lawson was in a supervisory room at a desk that
overlooked the waiting area where we sat. He was a stricken man going about the
work, whatever it was, that had to be done. He beckoned to me and asked if I
would please find his luggage. He hated to bother me, but the bags had been
checked to Washington on a 4 p.m. commercial flight. Win knew he would not be
on that flight. Part of his job was to stay in Dallas and try to find the
person who had committed this awful crime.
I handled it by phone. Everybody wanted to help. To
do something. To do anything.
While I stood in the emergency area, waiting, I saw
Dr. Kemp Clark come out of Trauma 1. A tall man, Clark was the chief
neurologist at Parkland. I watched him walk over to Mrs. Kennedy, bend down and
say a few words. Nothing clicked in my head. Clark walked over to me. "How
badly was he hurt?" I asked. "It was lethal," Clark said.
Ordinarily, I know the meaning of the word lethal. Not then. "What does
that mean?" I asked Clark. "It means the president is dead."
In my hands I was holding a pair of beige, cloth
gloves, and I twisted them so hard I split the seams in both. Then I turned
away and started to cry. Earle Cabell reached out to comfort me. "Don't
cry," he said. "He'll recover." Which is how the mayor heard
that the city and the country had lost their president. "It's a tragic
day," Cabell said. "A tragic day -- for Dallas and for the
world."
Afterward, when the coffin had left the hospital, I
helped the Texas congressional delegation get itself organized into cars and on
the way to Washington on Air Force Two. Then I got back into my own car and
found the VIP bus. As originally instructed, the driver had gone to the airport
from the Trade Mart, running almost empty. There were still various briefcases,
sweaters, coats, books belonging to the Washington VIPs. "Could you get
these back to Washington?" I asked the American Airlines airport manager.
Not only would he transport them, he said, but he would see that they were
hand-delivered to each owner. Finally, I drove to the home of some close friends
in Dallas and went into a state of shock from which I did not fully emerge for
several days. Two months later, I gave up my apartment in Dallas and moved back
to Washington.
EPILOGUE
Win Lawson and I met again in Washington this fall,
25 years later. Lawson is deeply loyal to the Secret Service, which, he feels,
treated him with unspoken but great sensitivity. "They never transferred
me out of Washington," he says. "And they knew {in 1963} how to treat
me. Right after I got home, they kept me working. Not a day off. Even on the
day of the funeral, I was detailed to the Memorial Bridge." Lawson stood
there on duty with tears streaming down his face as the president's cortege
passed.
He retired from the Secret Service in 1982 (to help
care for a father with Alzheimer's disease). And although he has not forgotten
Dallas, he doesn't like to talk about it.
Elizabeth Forsling Harris, formerly a TV executive
and publisher, is now at work on a biography of Gloria Steinem.
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