The Death of a President by William Manchester

Author:William Manchester [MANCHESTER, WILLIAM]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History / United States - 20th Century
ISBN: 9780316370721
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2013-10-07T16:00:00+00:00

Behind the shack, in the staff cabin, moods ranged from catatonia to heartbreak to estrangement. Muggsy O’Leary crouched apart in a window seat on the port side, staring down at his hands. Evelyn Lincoln sobbed. But the estrangement was dominant. All anyone here knew about Oswald was that “a suspect” had been picked up in Dallas. That didn’t mean much. Even if he were the right man, his provocation remained obscure.

The first wave from Parkland was looking ahead. They had to anticipate tomorrow; that was their duty. The second wave was looking back, yearning for yesterday. Individual recollections of the flight were to vary sharply. Inasmuch as the shades were still drawn, no one knew when daylight ended. It was like living in a void. Each passenger was left with his own troubled thoughts, and each fashioned his own verity, even his own time. Pam Turnure thought this was the longest trip in her life, a journey without a destination. To Marie Fehmer, swamped with work, it was the shortest of rides. Yet nearly everyone in the cabin felt the smoldering animosity. Valenti afterward described those two hours as “absolute chaos,” Chuck Roberts as “soreness.” Mac Kilduff called it “the sickest plane I’ve ever been on.” Clint Hill, discarding his ruined clothes for a crewman’s, looked down the aisle pensively. In his later words, “It was undeniably very, very sick, with a great deal of tension between the Kennedy people and the Johnson people.”

“Fortiter in re, suaviter in modo”—“Be graceful under pressure.” The man who lay in Oneal’s coffin had admired the Roman maxim. Without him his leaderless staff drifted into an ill-concealed enmity. Some made no attempt at camouflage. Ken O’Donnell was particularly vocal. Twice Johnson sent Moyers back to ask O’Donnell and O’Brien to sit with him. They flatly refused, and McHugh strode up to the pool seats, where Chuck Roberts and Merriman Smith were probing each other’s impressions of the hospital, to make certain the reporters knew about it. “I want the record to show,” he said, pounding the table between them to stress each syllable, “that Ken O’Donnell, Larry O’Brien, Dave Powers, and me spent this flight in the tail compartment with the President—President Kennedy.” Ted Clifton entered that rear compartment on an errand for President Johnson. Ken flashed, “Why don’t you get back and serve your new boss?” Clifton asked McHugh, “What’s eating him? I’m just doing my job.”

The Texans, too, had loved Kennedy, and until today they had had greater reason to distrust Dallas. To them the suggestion that they bore any responsibility for the atrocity was unforgivable. They were prepared to discount sorrow, but this rankled, and they, too, felt a recrudescence of the Los Angeles spirit. Among them only Bill Moyers, the most generous of Johnson’s advisers, refused to be aroused. He had long been convinced that O’Donnell’s toughness was an act, that under the sardonic veneer he was a tender man. Realizing how deeply Ken had been hurt, he declined the bait.

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