The Residence - Inside the Private World of The White House (36 page)

Within ten minutes of leaving Dallas, Mrs. Kennedy’s personal secretary, Mary Gallagher, called Pierce from Air Force One and told him that Jackie wanted her husband’s funeral to be as much like President Lincoln’s as possible. Pierce wasn’t sure what that would entail, but he immediately set to work. “We had no training for anything like that. It was just something you fell into automatically—we were doing what the first lady wanted,” he said. He quickly got in touch with the Curator’s Office, and they in turn worked with the Library of Congress to figure out how best to replicate Lincoln’s lying in state and funeral.

Curator Jim Ketchum found an old engraving of the East Room draped in black for Lincoln’s funeral. To re-create the effect, West called Lawrence Arata, the White House upholsterer, who proposed using black cambric, a thin black material stretched across the bottom of chairs to disguise their springs. As it happened, Arata had ordered a new hundred-yard roll just a few days before.

Arata and his wife quickly got to work, hanging the fabric exactly as instructed by the president’s brother-in-law, Sargent Shriver, who supervised funeral preparations at Robert Kennedy’s request. The Aratas hung the black cloth over chandeliers, windows, and doorways. They worked with the help of their grief-stricken colleagues from late in the evening until the president’s body returned in the early-morning hours.

“A lot of people thought it was silk material, but it was plain black cambric. Mrs. Kennedy wanted it very, very humble, the same as Lincoln’s funeral. Nothing fancy,” Arata said. “I pinned the cambric on the draperies and tried to drape the material to give it a custom appearance.”

A grief-stricken Preston Bruce directed friends and family who were arriving in shared disbelief to begin preparations for the president’s funeral. He helped drape the black fabric on the main floor of the White House as the first lady instructed. In the East Room, Bruce and Maître d’ Charles Ficklin placed giant tapers—long, slim candles—next to the platform that would support the president’s casket. From the moment Bruce arrived at the White House at 2:22
P.M.
on November 22 until the hearse pulled under the North Portico after four the next morning, Bruce said he had “only one idea in my mind. I would wait for Mrs. Kennedy. I wanted to be there when she came back to the White House.”

Chief Usher J. B. West was at home when he heard the news on the radio, and he rushed to the office. He writes in his memoir about the following hours: he directed the butlers to prepare coffee and the maids to start readying all the guest rooms, “little meaningless gestures, but a signal that our work must go on.”

“We were told originally that the president’s body would arrive at the White House about 10:00
P.M.
Well, we got the call at 10:00
P.M.
that they didn’t know what time it would be so it was about 4:25
A.M.
when the president’s body arrived at the White House,”
Pierce said with sadness sweeping over his face. “We were up all night and all the next day.”

Pierce helped the butlers settle Kennedy family members into their rooms at the residence. Over the next four nights, he and the other ushers slept on folding cots in the basement. There was an area there that they used to change into tuxedos for state dinners, and there was at least a bathroom and a shower for them to share.

When Pierce saw Jackie for the first time in the early morning on November 23, he nearly froze. “When Mrs. Kennedy and Ted and Robert came around the corner from the hall to the elevator I was wondering what I would say to Mrs. Kennedy. Our eyes met as she came around the corner and we had a rapport that I had never had with anybody that I knew—I didn’t have to say anything,” he recalled, tearing up when he talked about seeing her suit caked in her husband’s blood. The traumatized first lady was only thirty-four years old. “We lost a friend, a very close friend,” Pierce said as he thought back to the mood among the residence workers that fateful day. Social Secretary Letitia Baldrige remembered being asked by Robert Kennedy to select a coffin; she decided on a midpriced casket, since it would forever be hidden underneath the American flag.

“Hundreds of people were walking around those corridors silently, numbly,” she recalled. “They used to be such happy, bustling, noisy corridors. Now people moved slowly, bowed, and when they spoke, they whispered, as if afraid their emotions would burst forth.”

Within fifteen hours, by the time the president’s body was back at the White House, the staff was able to arrange for the casket to rest on the same catafalque used for Lincoln nearly one hundred years earlier. President Kennedy’s body was returned after hours at Bethesda Naval Hospital, where the president’s autopsy was performed while Jackie paced the halls smoking cigarettes. Representatives of each of the armed services carried the coffin up the North Portico stairs. Father John Kuhn of St. Matthew’s Church offered
a short prayer. Only after the flag-draped coffin was in the East Room did the first lady leave her husband’s side. In the coffin she placed a letter she wrote to her husband, a pair of gold cuff links she had given him, the presidential seal carved on a whale’s tooth, and a note from Caroline and John-John to their slain father.

For Mrs. Kennedy, the president’s loss was compounded by the couple’s renewed intimacy after the devastating death of their baby, Patrick Bouvier Kennedy, on August 9, 1963, less than four months before the president’s assassination. About ten days before Patrick’s premature birth, Jackie wrote Head Housekeeper Anne Lincoln and asked her to go out and buy some baby hangers. Lincoln was putting off the errand, since the baby was not due for several more weeks.

The boy died just two days after he was born five and a half weeks early. “The whole room was fixed up, and I know the second when Patrick died [that] we got up there just as fast as we could and took everything out and put it all away,” she recalled. They didn’t want the president and first lady to be reminded of their gut-wrenching loss when they returned. J. B. West called the Carpenter’s Shop immediately upon learning of Patrick’s death, and ordered them to get rid of the rug, crib, and curtains in the blue-and-white nursery. Now Jackie was being forced to endure another life-changing death.

Bill Cliber had just started as an electrician at the White House that year. He helped drape the black cloth over the chandeliers, and when Jackie Kennedy came to review her husband’s body, he quietly walked to the opposite side of the room to give her privacy.

“We knew how to disappear,” he said. And this was a moment when the residence staff were especially aware of the first lady’s need for privacy.

For twenty-four hours, the president’s family and friends paid their respects in the East Room. After a small mass that Saturday,
Jackie walked up to Chief Usher J. B. West and threw her arms around him. “
Poor
Mr. West,” she whispered.

“I couldn’t speak. It was all I could do to stand,” West said. “I just held her for a moment.”

Knowing that she and her children would have to leave the White House soon, Jackie asked him to take her to see the Oval Office one last time. Shockingly, it was already being taken apart. Model ships, books, and the president’s rocking chair were being carted away by the residence staff. “I think we’re probably in the way,” she murmured, trying to take in every last detail of the room.

She walked the short distance to the Cabinet Room and sat at the imposing mahogany table. “My children. They’re good children, aren’t they, Mr. West?” she asked the chief usher, who had become a friend.

“They certainly are.”

“They’re not spoiled?”

“No, indeed.”

“Mr. West, will you be my friend for life?” the first lady, who had seemed to have it all just a day earlier, pleaded.

He was too upset to speak. He could only nod. The Sunday after the assassination, the flag-draped coffin was carried on a horse-drawn caisson, the same one that had carried the bodies of Lincoln, FDR, and the Unknown Soldier, to the Capitol Rotunda where it laid in state for twenty-one hours. The procession mirrored Lincoln’s so closely that there was even a riderless black horse just as there had been almost a hundred years earlier. Two hundred and fifty thousand people went to pay tribute to the president. The state funeral was held on Monday, November 25.

“We were standing out on the North Portico, and it was just a quiet day, couldn’t hear nothing but those horses—
click, click,
” longtime residence worker Wilson Jerman vividly recalls. “It was a very sad day.”

Shortly before the funeral, Usher Rex Scouten called Preston Bruce into his office, where Robert Kennedy was waiting for him. Kennedy told Bruce that Jackie wanted him to walk in the funeral procession to St. Matthew’s Cathedral. A car would drive him to the cemetery for the burial.

The funeral service “went by like a dream,” Bruce recalled. He remembered seeing John-John salute his father’s casket, and remembered that that night Jackie had arranged for cake, ice cream, and candles to go with the little boy’s dinner to celebrate his third birthday.

The great-grandson of slaves, Bruce had never gone to college, so he was astounded to find himself standing feet away from General Charles de Gaulle and Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie, dressed in their full regalia, at the president’s funeral at Arlington National Cemetery. They were just some of the dignitaries from more than one hundred countries who came to Washington to share in the nation’s grief. For Bruce, Jackie Kennedy had done him the honor of a lifetime: positioning him alongside heads of state and including him among the president’s family and closest friends.

J
IM
K
ETCHUM HAD
just left the Oval Office, where he had been working all morning with a crew from the Smithsonian. It was less than a year before the 1964 presidential election, and Kennedy was already making plans for his presidential library in case he was defeated. The president insisted that his library have an accurate copy of the ornate
Resolute
desk that was carved from the timbers of a British Arctic Exploration ship named the H.M.S.
Resolute.
Kennedy was the first president to have it installed in the Oval Office, and it became world-famous because of a playful photo of John-John peeking his head out from a built-in panel underneath it as his father worked. That morning Ketchum and the
team from the Smithsonian were examining every square inch of the iconic piece of furniture.

As soon as he sat back down in his office, he heard a police officer talking in the hallway. “We just had word from Dallas that the presidential motorcade has been hit and we think the president was involved.”

Ketchum and two other people in the Curator’s Office took the elevator to the third floor and rushed to find a guest room with a TV to watch the news. Not long after, Ketchum got a call from Mrs. Kennedy herself, on board Air Force One. She repeated the order her secretary gave to the ushers: she wanted him to find books describing how the East Room was decorated during Lincoln’s funeral.

Around dusk that evening, helicopters started landing on the White House lawn in quick succession. Looking back on that terrible day, Ketchum told me that he could only liken the sight to a scene from the epic Vietnam film
Apocalypse Now
, released years later. The copters were coming from Andrews Air Force Base, carrying some of the people who had been on the flight back from Dallas and others whom Johnson had asked to come meet him to discuss the transition. Ketchum spent the next several hours preparing the East Room. He didn’t leave to go back to his northern Virginia apartment until Sunday morning. After getting a few hours of rest at home, he got a phone call at around six-thirty on Monday morning, the day of the president’s state funeral. It was Mrs. Kennedy. “She was obviously getting next to no sleep,” he said. She was calling about a small detail, showing her almost obsessive focus on appearances even as she faced the enormity of losing her husband.

“She was going to receive most of the visiting dignitaries in the Red Room, but she wanted to have people like [French president] de Gaulle and a handful of other individuals who would really be
considered the top of the ranking, in the Yellow Oval Room just above the Oval Blue Room,” he said.

Jackie was worried that they would see the painting by French post-Impressionist painter Paul Cézanne in the Yellow Oval Room. “I’d really like to have something more American to share with these people,” she told Ketchum resolutely. “Would you, and could you, as soon as possible, get into the White House and take down the Cézanne?” By 8:15 that morning, the Cézanne had been replaced by a newly acquired series of large prints of American cities. “They were the perfect substitute,” Ketchum said proudly.

Ketchum was surprised that Chief Usher J. B. West, who was so close to Mrs. Kennedy, didn’t show more emotion after the assassination. West explained to the grief-stricken Ketchum: “I came to the White House in 1941 and my president [Roosevelt] died in April of 1945. If the first president under whom you’ve served in the White House dies, it is a much more trying experience than those that come after.”