The Passage of Power by Robert A. Caro

Author:Robert A. Caro
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Tags: Non-Fiction, bought-and-paid-for, Biography, History
ISBN: 9780307960467
Publisher: Knopf
Published: 2012-05-01T04:00:00+00:00

14

Three Encounters

AT ABOUT 4:30 A.M., while Johnson was sleeping, the autopsy was finally completed at Bethesda Naval Hospital, and the coffin was brought by that gray Navy ambulance to the White House, Bobby and Jackie sitting in the back beside it—Jackie was still wearing the pink suit—and was carried into the East Room by a Marine honor guard. Jackie had sent word that she wanted the room to look “as it did when Lincoln’s body lay there,” Dick Goodwin recalls, and sketches from 1865 had been located, and black crepe had been draped in folds over the long gold curtains and the three crystal chandeliers. A catafalque, similar to Lincoln’s, a black stand on a black base, had been found, and set up in the center of the room. A group of Kennedy aides was standing in a far corner of the room when the coffin was carried in. Jackie followed it, Bobby beside her, Kenny and Larry behind. “Her face was fixed straight ahead, lovely, painful to see,” Dick Goodwin says. Walking over to the coffin, she knelt on the floor, turned her face away so that the watching group could not see, and rested her cheek on the flag that draped the long box. Then she put her arms around it. Anyone who hadn’t been crying before was crying now. After a while, she got up; the aides followed the Kennedys out of the room. There was still a decision to be made—Jackie wanted the coffin closed, so that the world would remember her husband as he had been; McNamara said it must be open, because the world would demand to see the body of a head of state—a hard decision, so it was made by the man who made those decisions. Going back into the East Room alone, he had the casket opened so he could see his brother’s face. After a while, he came out, and asked Arthur Schlesinger to go in and look. “For a moment, I was shattered,” Schlesinger recalls; “It was not a good job.” “Close it,” Robert Kennedy said. Tall candles stood flickering at each corner of the catafalque, and at each corner, also, was a man in uniform with his rifle at parade rest, guarding it; at the head of the coffin stood the honor guard’s commander, a Navy lieutenant, of course, rigidly at attention. At two wooden prie-dieux knelt two priests in cassocks, praying.

ROBERT KENNEDY’S FACE had remained pale and sad, but set, resolute, and, apparently, calm. He went up to the Lincoln Bedroom, still seemingly so “controlled,” says Charles Spalding, who went upstairs with him. “There’s a sleeping pill around here somewhere,” Spalding said, found one, gave it to him, and then closed the door. “Then I just heard him break down.… I heard him sob and say, ‘Why, God?’ ”

FOR LYNDON JOHNSON, Saturday could hardly have gotten off to a worse start.

Arising after only a few hours’ sleep, he breakfasted and left for the White House at 8:40, planning to begin working on the agenda he had outlined during the night.

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