From the WSJ Opinion Archives
TASTE COMMENTARY
A Day to Remember
A reporter recalls the scene of JFK's assassination.
On Thursday, Nov. 21, 1963, President John F. Kennedy misread his own text in a speech to a Houston audience. He was supposed to say that the following month the U.S. would launch the biggest rocket "payload" in history. Instead, he said "payroll." He stopped and broke into a big smile. "It will be the biggest payroll too," he said. The crowd roared.
Crowds almost always roared for Jack Kennedy. Say what you will of him, he was a great campaigner.
Those who were traveling with President Kennedy those two fateful days 40 years ago remember little things. I remember Thursday night, when he appeared with Jackie at a meeting in the Rice Hotel in Houston of the League of United Latin American Citizens. "I am going to ask my wife to say a few words to you also," the 46-year-old president said. Mrs. Kennedy began speaking, very slowly, in Spanish. "Estoy muy contenta de estar en el gran estado de Texas." As far as we could tell, she did, indeed, seem to be happy in the great state of Texas. The crowd roared again. "Olé! Olé!"
We flew late that night from Houston to Fort Worth. All the high-rises in Fort Worth had been trimmed in yellow lights to welcome the Kennedys. They didn't get to their Texas Hotel suite until 12:30 a.m. It amused all of us to discover that Vice President and Mrs. Lyndon Johnson, traveling with the first couple, had managed to secure the hotel's most expensive suite. It cost $100 a day, we were told, $25 more than the Kennedys'.
The president and Mrs. Kennedy made the short flight the next morning from Carswell Air Force Base to Love Field in Dallas. The press plane had flown to Love Field earlier and we were lined up, in the usual sloppy fashion of all traveling reporters, on the tarmac. Standing with us were some of the Pan Am flight attendants from our plane; one was a strikingly beautiful Scandinavian. As President Kennedy walked down the ramp from his plane, Air Force One, he did a slow double-take as his eyes came to rest on our spectacular Swede and lingered there for a moment or two.
We then piled into our buses (one for the national press, one for the local) and open limousines (one for the Kennedys and Texas Gov. and Mrs. John Connally, one for the Johnsons, and one for liberal Texas Sen. Ralph Yarborough).
The president had hoped that during his trip he would be able to do something about the rift between the conservative Connally and the liberal Yarborough, each representing a faction in Texas politics. I had come to Texas as a reporter for the National Observer, a Dow Jones weekly newspaper, to get some idea of how he was doing with the folks in the big, bustling space-age state.
As the motorcade approached downtown, the crowds began to grow. We passed Neiman Marcus and began bearing right on the Triple Underpass, where Main Street ends and the Stemmons Freeway begins. We were now only minutes away from the Trade Mart, where Mr. Kennedy was scheduled to talk to local businessmen and women.
I was looking out the window, daydreaming about the friendly reception, when I heard two sharp reports, with only a few seconds in between. Looking out my window, on the right side of the bus, I saw a woman crying on the grass along the curbside. A policeman, standing at the curb, had his hands covering his face. A black man was on his knees on the grass, two little children at his side. He was beating his fists into the grass.
Some reporters in the bus said the noise might have been backfires. Others among us knew better. Those had been rifle shots, and we all realized something terrible had happened when the police cars and limousines ahead of us streaked away at very high speed.
Our bus kept on going, right on schedule, to the Trade Mart. We all tumbled out the bus doors, raced through the building, past an astonished crowd of Texans in the middle of lunch, and collected in the press room, demanding to know what was going on. Someone seemed to think the president had been taken to Parkland Memorial Hospital. We raced back through the building, past the same astonished crowd, and climbed into the bus. The driver told us he couldn't take us to the hospital because no one whose authority he recognized had ordered him to do so, at which point two very large TV technicians began moving him out of his seat. The driver quickly agreed to drive us there.
Sen. Yarborough was standing in the driveway of the emergency entrance. "It is," he told us, "too horrible to describe."
We were herded into a nursing classroom and told to wait. Malcolm Kilduff, Mr. Kennedy's third-ranking press secretary, made the announcement at 1:30 p.m. "President Kennedy," he said, "died at approximately 1 o'clock Central Standard of a gunshot wound in the brain. I have no other details of the president."
For reasons I can no longer remember, I decided about 2 p.m. to return to the bus. I passed a number of Dallas police cruisers, their radios chattering. The talk was speculation about what had happened to Gov. Connally, dramatic evidence of the old nostrum that all politics is local.
It was during this trip to and from the bus that I saw the casket containing the president's body being placed in a Cadillac hearse. Mrs. Kennedy, no longer wearing her hat, the stocking on her left leg streaked with blood, climbed into the back of the hearse, taking a seat near the casket. I watched as the hearse pulled away for the airport and the final trip home on Air Force One.
By the time we got to the airport, Lyndon Johnson had been sworn into office as president and Air Force One had already lifted off. Sid Davis, a Westinghouse Broadcasting reporter and a member of the small pool of reporters traveling on Air Force One, had stayed behind to brief the rest of us on those extraordinary events that had occurred before takeoff. It ranks as one of the most generous acts by a reporter I can remember.
In the horror of Mr. Kennedy's assassination, hardly anyone remembered what he was planning to say at the Trade Mart. It was a good speech (we had been given a text), and one part of it rings down through the years.
"We in this country, in this generation," he would have said, "are--by destiny rather than by choice--the watchmen on the walls of world freedom. We ask, therefore, that we may be worthy of our power and responsibility--that we may exercise our strength with wisdom and restraint--and that we may achieve in our time and for all time the ancient wisdom of 'peace on earth, good will toward men.' That must always be our goal--and the righteousness of our cause must always underlie our strength. For as was written, 'Except the Lord keep the city, the watchmen waketh but in vain.' "
Mr. Perry's latest book is "Touched With Fire: Five Presidents and the Civil War Battles That Made Them."
