These Few Precious Days (2 page)

With the 190-pound Hill now sprawled over her, trying to act as a human shield for both the president and the first lady, Jackie cradled her husband’s shattered head in her lap. She pressed down on the top with her white-gloved hands, she said later, “to keep the brains in.”

Jackie’s head was down, her face only inches from the president’s. She was struck by the “pink-rose ridges” inside his broken skull, she later said, and the fact that despite everything, from the hairline down, “his head was so beautiful. I tried to hold the top of his head down, maybe I could keep it in . . . but I knew he was dead.” So did the crowds that lined the street. “He’s dead! He’s dead!” she could hear people shouting as the motorcade sped to Parkland Memorial Hospital.

Jackie clung to the slimmest hope that maybe there was life there still, a latent if quickly ebbing consciousness. “Jack, Jack, Jack! Can you hear me?” she whispered over and over into his ear. The president’s blue eyes were wide open in a fixed stare. “I love you, Jack,” Jackie said. “I love you.”

Although she later said it “seemed like an eternity,” it took just seven minutes before the car screeched to a halt outside the emergency room entrance at Parkland. Hill, a fellow Secret Service agent named Roy Kellerman, and JFK’s longtime aide Dave Powers were about to lift the president onto a waiting stretcher, but Jackie, still cradling Jack’s head, refused.

“Please, Mrs. Kennedy,” Hill said. “We must get the president to a doctor.”

“I’m not letting him go, Mr. Hill,” she said. “You know he’s dead. Leave me alone.” Hill understood what was happening: Jackie did not want the world to see the gaping crater in her husband’s skull. Struggling to control his own emotions, Hill whipped off the jacket of his black suit and wrapped it around the president’s head.

Jackie ran alongside the gurney as her husband was wheeled into the hospital; she held Hill’s jacket in place so that it wouldn’t slip to reveal the gruesome truth. “It wasn’t repulsive to me for one moment,” she said. “Nothing was repulsive to me, and I was running behind with the coat covering it . . .”

Incredibly, Jack had a faint pulse and was still breathing when he was admitted to Parkland Hospital, simply as “Case 24740, white male, gunshot wound.” Inside Trauma Room 1 a team of doctors, soon joined by White House physician Admiral George Burkley, immediately began administering massive blood transfusions.

Suddenly two burly men in scrubs blocked Jackie’s path and began trying to pull her away. “Mrs. Kennedy,” one of them said, “you come with us.” But Jackie had other ideas. Nine years earlier, she had been kept away from Jack when he nearly died following one of his back surgeries. “They’re never going to keep me away from him again,” she told herself then.

This time, Jackie was standing her ground. The “big Texas interns wanted to take me away from him,” she later said. “They kept trying to get me, they kept trying to grab me.” This time things would be different. “I’m not leaving him,” she declared, softly at first. Then she raised her voice only slightly—but just enough to make the interns back away. “I am
not
leaving,” she told them.

No one seemed to notice that during all this time, Jackie had her left hand cupped over something she held in her right. As Parkland’s chief anesthesiologist, Dr. Marion Jenkins, stood outside Trauma Room 1, the first lady nudged him with her left elbow. Then, carefully, she handed Jenkins what the doctor could only describe as “a good-sized chunk of the president’s brain. She didn’t say a word. I handed it to the nurse.”

One of the uniformed Dallas police officers who had escorted the motorcade offered Jackie a cigarette. She had always managed to conceal her heavy smoking habit from the press and never smoked in public, but none of that mattered now.

Ten minutes later, the same patrolman fetched folding chairs for the first lady and Nellie Connally, whose husband was being treated for his nonfatal bullet wounds in Trauma Room 2. The two women sat in total silence while Powers and White House Chief of Staff Kenneth P. O’Donnell paced the floor.

The night before as they were going to bed, Jackie had told her husband that she “hated” John Connally because he had been bragging about how he was more popular in Texas than the president. “I just can’t bear his soft, weak mouth and his sitting there saying all these great things about himself,” she complained. “It seems so rude. I really hate him.” But Jack, who unlike Jackie never held a grudge, rubbed her back and tried to calm her down. “You mustn’t say that,” he told her. “If you start to say or think that you hate someone, then the next day you’ll act as if you hate him. You mustn’t say that about people.” What struck Jackie about that moment, she recalled, was that he “said it so kindly . . . Jack never stayed mad at someone. Never!”

Powers, “too numb” to say anything himself, choked back tears at the sight of Jackie sitting in her gore-splattered pink wool suit. Staring straight ahead, she periodically brought the cigarette to her mouth, revealing that the president’s blood had stained her white kid gloves a deep crimson.

Suddenly she was gripped by the possibility that Jack might survive. “Maybe he isn’t dead,” she thought. “He’s going to live!” After all, Jack had cheated death at least three times during their marriage. Of course, if he survived this time, he would be severely brain-damaged. When a stroke left his father, Joseph P. Kennedy, partially paralyzed and unable to speak, Jack let Jackie know in no uncertain terms where he stood. “Don’t ever,” he told her, “let that happen to me.” Now faced with options that were far worse, Jackie began bargaining with the Almighty: “Please, don’t let him die. I’ll take care of him every day of his life. I’ll make him happy.”

The moment of self-delusion passed as swiftly as it came. She didn’t want to be sitting in a corridor waiting; Jackie wanted to be at her husband’s side. She got up and headed for Trauma l, only to encounter the hulking presence of head nurse Doris Nelson standing in the doorway. Nelson grabbed Jackie by both shoulders. “You can’t come in here,” she said.

“I’m going to get in that room,” Jackie replied firmly. Admiral Burkley came out of the room and offered her a sedative. “No,” she said without hesitation. “I want to be in there when he dies.”

Burkley relented. As they pushed through the swinging door into the trauma room, Jackie witnessed the medical team’s final, futile effort to revive the president. The floor was covered with Jack’s blood. Looking up from the operating table, chief surgeon Dr. Malcolm Perry shouted, “Get her out of here!”

“It’s her prerogative,” Burkley argued. “It’s her prerogative.”

“No,” Perry shot back. “She has got to leave. Mrs. Kennedy, you must leave.”

For the first time that day, the preternaturally cool Mrs. Kennedy lost her temper. “I will
not
leave,” she said. “It’s my husband. His blood, his brains, are all over me.” Then, as Perry returned to his work, Jackie dropped down on one knee and said a brief, silent prayer. When she got back up, the front of her skirt was drenched with blood from the floor.

At 1 p.m., Dr. Jenkins pulled a white sheet over Jack’s face while another member of the medical team, Dr. Kemp Clark, was given the onerous task of informing Jackie that the president was dead. “Your husband,” he told her, “has sustained a fatal wound.”

Unable to speak, Jackie mouthed two words in response: “I
know
.”

The room fell silent as Jackie walked up to Jack’s body. She scanned the length of the operating table, and noticed one of his feet was sticking out, looking “whiter than the sheet.” Instinctively, she took the exposed foot in her hand, knelt down, and gently kissed it.

What happened next stunned everyone. Jackie pulled the sheet back to expose Jack’s face and shoulders. His eyes were open, she later said, “and his mouth was so
beautiful
.” According to Dr. Jenkins, Jackie then began kissing Jack again—starting with his exposed foot and then, through the sheet, slowly, deliberately, working her way up. “She kissed his foot, his leg, thigh, chest, and then his lips.” During this entire process, Jenkins recalled, “she didn’t say a word.” The process had left everyone in the room “feeling as if the wind had been knocked out of us. It was the most moving thing,” Jenkins said, “any of us had ever seen.”

Father Oscar Huber had rushed to the hospital from nearby Holy Trinity Church and now feared he might pass out at any moment. Steeling himself, Huber stepped up to perform the last rites. Another physician guided Jackie’s hand to her husband’s under the sheet, and she held it while Father Huber annointed the slain president’s forehead with holy oil and bestowed the Apostolic Blessing in Latin. When he was finished, the priest dabbed the oil with cotton, then tried to conceal it from Jackie when he realized the swab was drenched in the president’s blood.

She returned to the hallway and settled back into her little folding chair with a cigarette while orderlies washed Jack’s body so it could be placed in a bronze coffin for the trip back to Washington, D.C. aboard Air Force One. A nurse materialized with a cold towel, and Jackie held it to her forehead to keep from passing out. “You must make sure,” she told O’Donnell, “that I get in there before they close the coffin. I must see him.”

O’Donnell led Jackie back into Trauma Room 1 just a few minutes later. There was still blood on the floor, but Jack’s pale skin had been wiped completely clean. Four orderlies carefully lifted the president’s naked body off the table and slowly lowered it into the coffin lined with white satin.

She was struck by how Jack, who had always seemed so much larger than life, now seemed “so small and fragile.” She also noticed that, as one of his longtime physicians had pointed out, the left side of his body was smaller than the right. “The left side of his face was smaller,” said back specialist Dr. Janet Travell. “His left shoulder was lower, and his left leg appreciably shorter”—a congenital condition that may have been the root cause of his lifelong back trouble.

Jackie’s eyes widened as she began tugging at the white kid gloves that were now caked with her husband’s blood. Finally, one of the policemen there stepped forward to help her pull them off. JFK never wore a wedding ring, so Jackie slipped hers over the bare finger on his left hand. The ring was also smeared with blood, and a nurse stepped forward to quickly sponge off the ring and the president’s hand. “It’s the right thing to do,” O’Donnell reassured her. (Almost immediately Jackie began doubting whether she could bear parting with the simple gold band she had worn for a decade. Later that night at Bethesda Naval Hospital, O’Donnell instructed Admiral Burkley to remove the ring from Jack’s finger and return it to Jackie.)

Before the casket was closed, Burkley handed Jackie two blood-soaked red roses that had fallen inside the president’s shirt after the bullets struck. She handed one of the bloody stems back to Burkley. “This,” he told her as he held up the rose, “is the greatest treasure of my life.”

It would not be until Air Force One was winging its way back to Washington with Lyndon Baines Johnson sworn in as the new president that she finally began to unravel. She was seated next to Kenny O’Donnell at the rear of the plane, just opposite the casket, when Burkley came back and asked yet again if Jackie didn’t want to change out of her bloody clothes.

“No!” she insisted. “I want them to see what they’ve done. I want them to see what they’ve done.”

Once Burkley had slunk back to the front of the cabin, Jackie and O’Donnell looked at each other and, O’Donnell said, “she finally lost it. For the very first time that day, she allowed herself to cry.”

Jackie sobbed for a full ten minutes, her poignant cries audible to the other passengers over the whine of the jet engines. Regaining her composure, she turned to O’Donnell. “Oh, it’s happened,” Jackie said.

“It’s happened,” answered O’Donnell, who with Powers was a leading member of Kennedy’s fabled “Irish Mafia” of political cronies. Powers had already broken down several times in front of Jackie, but O’Donnell, whose eyes were red-rimmed from crying in private, struggled to hold it together.

“Oh, Kenny,” Jackie said, choking back her tears, “what’s going to happen?”

“You want to know something, Jackie?” O’Donnell answered. “I don’t give a damn.”

“Oh, you’re right, you know,” she said. “You’re right. Just nothing matters but what you’ve lost.”

“Well, I know what I’m going to do,” O’Donnell said. “I’m having a Scotch, and I think you would have one, too.”

Jackie’s drink of choice was champagne; as the daughter of an alcoholic with a special fondness for hard drink, she had always been wary of whiskey. She remembered that Jack preferred beer—Heineken—but when he did drink Scotch he always asked for Ballantine’s. “I’ve never even tasted Scotch before,” she told O’Donnell. “Now,” she added, “is as good a time as any to start.” Staring at what she later described as “that long, long coffin,” Jackie and O’Donnell both downed one triple, then another. “A lot of people were drinking,” LBJ aide Jack Valenti recalled. “But honestly, everyone on that plane was in such a state of profound shock and disbelief the alcohol seemed to have no effect.”

Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy was having lunch with guests at Hickory Hill, his Virginia estate, when FBI director J. Edgar Hoover called with the news that the president had been shot. Thirty minutes later, Clint Hill telephoned Bobby to confirm that his brother was dead.“Those poor children!” Bobby’s wife Ethel cried when he told her that Jack and Jackie’s children, Caroline and John, were now fatherless.

That afternoon five-year-old “Lyric” (Caroline’s code name; the president was “Lancer,” Jackie “Lace,” and John, “Lark”) sat beaming in the backseat of a family friend’s station wagon, headed for her very first sleepover. Behind the wheel was the mother of Caroline’s best friend. As soon as the terrible news blared over the radio she pulled to the side of the road. “We have a news bulletin,” the announcer said. “This just in—President Kennedy has been shot.” The driver switched off the radio and checked out her daughter and Caroline in the rearview mirror.