The House of Kennedy(34)
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.
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.