The House of Kennedy(33)
She can’t believe what she’s hearing. Her husband, Stephen Smith, is at the Kennedy campaign office in the Pan Am building, strategizing for Jack’s reelection. Stephen, Jean thinks, will know if the news is true.
*
Patricia Kennedy Lawford is at her oceanfront home in Santa Monica, California, a magnificent property previously owned by studio head Louis B. Mayer. Her husband, actor Peter Lawford—whom she will divorce in 1966, the first (but not the last) Kennedy to ever divorce—is away in Lake Tahoe performing with comedian “Ragtime Jimmy” Durante, but her best friend and neighbor, Judy Garland, makes sure Pat won’t be alone. (Sociable Judy occasionally vacations with the Kennedy family in Hyannis Port, and sings to Jack over the telephone. “He’d request ‘Over the Rainbow,’” Judy’s third husband, Sid Luft, recalls. She “obliged the president with several renditions of his favorite melodies.”)
*
Senator Ted Kennedy is sitting in the Speaker’s chair presiding over the day’s business, a job relegated to junior senators during quiet legislative stretches. Around 2:00 p.m., aide Richard Riedel rushes in with the news from Dallas. Ted is devastated, but his first thought is how his wife, Joan, will react. They’ve been married for five troubled years, and she’s been numbing the pain of Ted’s infidelities with alcohol. Ted locates Joan in Washington’s Elizabeth Arden salon and has her brought to their Georgetown home. A terse call from Bobby—“He’s dead”—unleashes in Joan a demonstrative grief that is too much for Ted to handle. “Just go to bed,” he tells his wife. “Take a pill or something.”
*
Rose Kennedy ventures out, bundled in “the same old but warm coat I had worn through the snows when I went to Mass the morning of Jack’s inauguration.” She walks on the Cape Cod beach both alone and with her nephew Joe Gargan, telling him that they “must go on living.”
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.