Zero fail, p.7
Zero Fail, page 7
In the trauma room, the attending surgeon, Dr. Perry, saw that the situation was dire. The patient lying on the metal cart was unconscious. He had lost a lot of blood, he had widely dilated pupils and a gaping head wound. Most patients like this don’t survive, Perry thought. This patient, though, was the president. The medical team set to work to save him, performing a tracheotomy to try to get oxygen flowing to his brain while also working to stop the bleeding.
A minute later someone came out of the Kennedy trauma room gasping that the president was breathing.
Mrs. Kennedy stood up from her chair and cried out, “Do you mean he may live?”
The agents waited. No one answered.
Doctors called for nurses to bring an electrocardiogram machine into the trauma room. Dr. Kemp Clark, the chief neurosurgeon, arrived as they were connecting Kennedy to the machine. He couldn’t find a pulse in Kennedy’s neck. Perry had begun giving the president closed-chest compressions to try to get his heart beating. Over five minutes, he roused a few feeble pulse beats, then nothing. The flat thin line on the machine didn’t change. Kennedy had no heart activity.
“It’s too late, Mac,” Clark told Perry.
President Kennedy is dead, Clark announced to the room. It was 1 p.m.
With that, the agents found themselves in an awkward, foreign role. They were no longer protecting a man’s life but helping carry out the rituals to mark his death.
Kellerman, his face drained, emerged from the trauma room. He walked up to Hill. “Clint, tell Jerry that this is not for release and not official,” he said quietly, “but the Man is dead.”
Hill looked down and nodded. He relayed the news to Behn, who now had Chief Rowley in his office. Hill urged Behn to call the attorney general and key family members so they wouldn’t hear the news over the television or radio first.
Kennedy aide Dave Powers found agent George Hickey in the hallway and gave him a time-sensitive task. “Get a priest,” he said. “Quickly.”
Few agents knew it, but Mrs. Kennedy had instructed the hospital doctors not to pronounce her husband dead until a priest could administer last rites. When Father Oscar Huber arrived in the next ten minutes, he found Kennedy dead, covered by a white sheet. The priest was taken aback by Mrs. Kennedy’s composure. He began to administer the last rites, knowing he would get no response from his penitent but unsure whether Kennedy’s soul had yet left his body. In Latin, he quietly recited the final words: “I absolve you from your sins in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.”
Meanwhile, the Johnsons awaited word in the hospital office. Kennedy’s detail shift leader, Emory Roberts, hurried in to tell Johnson, “The president is dead, sir.” Johnson himself was now the president.
Roberts told Johnson he and his shift had to leave the hospital for Air Force One right away, and certainly before the White House confirmed Kennedy’s death. Mrs. Kennedy would bring the president’s body to join them on the plane as soon as possible. The Johnsons followed Roberts’s advice, departing so quickly that they left one of Johnson’s agents behind. In an unmarked car driven by Police Chief Curry, Johnson flattened himself on the backseat below the windows at Youngblood’s instruction. The men who had tried to protect Kennedy that day by riding in his follow-up car—Bennett, McIntyre, and Ready—now rode in an unmarked police sedan behind the new president in hiding.
Hill and Kellerman stayed behind with their original charges. Kenny O’Donnell, a Kennedy aide and friend, asked Hill to find a casket immediately. Hill had the closest mortuary send their best, a bronze-encased Britannia model.
At 1:36 p.m., assistant press secretary Mac Kilduff entered a nurses’ classroom where reporters had swarmed to get an update on the president. The junior spokesman’s eyes were red from tears, and he asked the clamoring press to give him a second to catch his breath. He started two or three times before he could get out the word “President.”
“President John F. Kennedy died at approximately 1:00 CST today, here in Dallas,” he began. “He died of a gunshot wound to the brain. I have no other details regarding the assassination of the president.”
A few reporters gasped. They asked when and where Johnson would be sworn in. Then they ran through the hospital halls to grab an empty pay phone or beg for an office line to dictate their reports.
* * *
—
IN THE HOURS after Kennedy was pronounced dead, the president’s protectors raced through new, unfamiliar tasks, so numb that they would forget some of what they did. Their immediate assignment was to commandeer an assortment of cars to rush the Washington visitors to Love Field to fly home. Kellerman and his team with the First Lady were delayed in leaving the hospital when the Dallas County medical examiner blocked them from taking the president’s body, insisting that the law required they conduct an autopsy first, given that the president had been murdered. But Jackie Kennedy wasn’t leaving without her husband, and President Johnson wasn’t leaving without Jackie Kennedy. Kellerman cursed the doctor and snorted at the law, even after a local judge insisted the medical examiner was right. “We’re removing it,” he said. The agents loaded the casket into a hearse outside as Jackie Kennedy took her seat in the back row. A hospital functionary tapped on the driver’s window, which the driver rolled down: “I’ll meet you at the mortuary,” the hospital official said. Kellerman replied, “Yes, sir.” But the agents then directed that they drive the hearse and the Kennedys to the airport. The agents won the standoff, a small victory in a day of horrific loss.
They arrived to find that a flight steward and an agent had hacked out two rows of seats in the rear of Air Force One to make room for the casket. The agents carried Kennedy’s coffin up the ramp, only to find that the entryway was too narrow for the elaborate Britannia. The agents broke the handles off the casket and scarred its sides while jamming it through. A federal judge, personally summoned by her friend Lyndon Johnson to the plane, swore him in as president at 2:38 p.m. Nine minutes later, at 2:47 p.m., Col. Jim Swindal lifted AF 26000 into the air, bound for Andrews Air Force Base. Mrs. Kennedy sat in the back next to her husband’s coffin, joined by Kennedy’s two closest friends on his staff as they offered one another sips of whiskey.
The detail agents slumped in their seats in the forward compartment. Most were silent. Landis, the youngest on the detail, broke down crying. He thought of the Kennedy children he’d spent so much time with.
Though Hill would eventually be considered a hero by generations of agents after him for his leap onto a moving car, on this plane ride he was racked by unremitting pangs of guilt that would continue to trouble him for most of the rest of his life: If I’d only been on the rear steps of the car! I would have been close enough to get to him before the third shot, he thought. If only I’d been faster.
Lawson, who had laid the security preparations for the day, wondered what might have happened if the rain hadn’t quit: If they had put the bubble top on, maybe the assassin would never have tried to shoot, he thought.
It dawned on Lawson and the rest of the detail that they now represented a historic marker for professional failure. “I’m the first agent in Secret Service history to lose a president,” Lawson said aloud.
Greer, hysterical about his own failure to react when driving the president, had already confessed his sins to the First Lady. Back at Parkland Memorial Hospital, he cried into her shoulder. “Oh, Mrs. Kennedy, oh my God, oh my God. I didn’t mean to do it. I didn’t hear, I should have swerved the car, I couldn’t help it,” he told her. “Oh, Mrs. Kennedy…if only I had seen in time.”
Greer’s words stuck with Jackie in her coming year of grief. The shots echoing in the plaza, the bloody bits, and the desperate, pointless dash to the hospital replayed in her mind again and again. Though she would always be grateful to her agent Clint Hill, the widow nursed a private disappointment in the Secret Service.
Two weeks after her husband’s funeral, Jackie complained to her personal secretary that some agents seemed ill prepared that day for precisely the kind of danger they should have been trained to tackle. If only Greer had simply hit the gas when the first shot rang out, she sighed.
“He might just as well have been Mrs. Shaw!” Mrs. Kennedy said bitterly, referring to John and Caroline’s British nanny. “You should get yourself a good driver so that nothing happens to you.”
CHAPTER 4
NO TIME TO GRIEVE
A stout, gentle-faced Irishman stood apart from the others on a cement tarmac, silently scanning the evening sky to the west of the military runway. James Joseph Rowley wore the trench coat of an unfussy workingman. His brown hair, frosted with gray, hinted at the twenty-five years he had spent in law enforcement. For twenty-three of them, he had been an agent with the U.S. Secret Service, protecting presidents all the way back to the Great Depression and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Everyone who waited at Andrews Air Force Base that evening—the secretaries from the White House, the young airmen preparing for Air Force One’s evening return, the grim-faced lions of the cabinet and Congress—shared a similar numb grief. They had all lost their leader, the president. But failure magnified Rowley’s mourning. A man he had admired, and a man who had entrusted Rowley with the job of leading the Secret Service, was dead. And he had died on Chief Rowley’s watch.
Just two weeks before that grim evening, the fifty-five-year-old Rowley had run into a longtime friend, the journalist and historian Jim Bishop, not far from the White House. Rowley peppered Bishop with questions about his new book, The Day Lincoln Was Shot. The author was amused that Rowley seemed to have “studied the book more intensely than I had written it.”
“I counted them,” Rowley told Bishop. “Fifty odd coincidences that day caused the assassination. If just one of them had happened the other way…”
Now, almost a century after Lincoln’s death, Rowley wondered about the small and large moments that might have gone another way in Dallas. A few dozen extra Secret Service agents would certainly have helped things. Over the last two years, the chief had pleaded with Congress to let him hire ninety-six more agents. But lawmakers had slashed his requests, sometimes with a sneer. Republican lawmakers questioned whether Rowley would use extra agents to help lead little Caroline Kennedy’s ponies. Or perhaps, they offered, the agents were needed to organize the Kennedys’ recreation as the family repaired to their “ancestral homes.”
“Do you suppose I could get some Secret Service men to tow me around if I wanted to water-ski?” Iowa Republican representative Harold Gross asked the chief in an Appropriations Committee hearing. Gross had been incensed by a glossy magazine picture of a Secret Service agent driving a boat while Mrs. Kennedy skied behind.
Even Vice President Johnson had been part of the effort to block Rowley from adding even thirty-five new agents. He privately urged lawmakers to repeal the law that gave him full-time protection. He simply didn’t want to be the cause of adding staff and increasing spending and thus drawing voters’ ire. Now Johnson was the president.
The president’s plane touched down softly at just about 6 p.m. and taxied to a stop near the assembled crowd. A hatch on the side of the plane’s silver hull opened. Rowley saw five agents, all of whom he had personally hired, holding a seven-hundred-pound bronze casket hip-high. Their chief stepped forward to help his agents struggling to place the casket on an awkward truck lift. The Service wanted the late president’s body and his widow to disembark Air Force One with dignity.
Meanwhile, alone in the central aisle of the plane, the new president steamed. No agents or staff consulted him on how and when he wanted to exit the plane. Jackie and Bobby Kennedy and their staff and agents focused solely on the former president. As vice president, Johnson felt Kennedy had always kept him in the shadows. Now, after nearly four hours as president, Johnson still felt second string. This moment would bother him for a long time. “They paid no attention to me whatsoever,” Johnson remarked later to his press secretary. He felt they had shown the new president no courtesy.
Kellerman and Hill accompanied Kennedy’s body to Bethesda Naval Hospital for the autopsy. After a few minutes, Johnson deplaned and gave a short address. “We have suffered a loss that cannot be weighed,” he said. “I know the world shares the sorrow that Mrs. Kennedy and her family bear. I will do my best. That’s all I can do. I ask for your help—and God’s.”
A helicopter airlifted President Johnson to the White House, and he conferred about next steps with his aides. They found it odd that Johnson said almost nothing about the shooting in Dallas, except this: “Rufe did a very heroic thing today. He threw me on the floor of that car and threw himself on top of me.”
Rowley also returned to the Executive Office Building. There he found agents and White House staffers from the Dallas trip in the foyer, wordlessly retrieving their suitcases. They moved like robots. “There were maybe seventy-five people in that room,” said agent Larry Newman, who came over to check on his shell-shocked friends. “And there wasn’t a sound. Nobody was going to ask ‘Hey, how are you?’ They were still absorbing and reeling.”
Rowley told Jerry Behn to collect all the available agents from the trip in his office. Once they arrived, the chief told the men they should each write an account of what they had seen and done in Texas immediately that night while the memories were still fresh. He told the men they were professionals who must continue to do the very best job. He told them they and the Service would not only survive this tragedy, but would even improve.
It was the first time he’d articulated it, but Rowley meant what he said. The agents were too numb to believe in anything just yet. Still, the chief’s calm speech gave them their first moment of comfort. “There was no feeling that he blamed anyone or that the assassination could somehow have been prevented,” agent Blaine said. “It was therapeutic for many of the men, and was the closest thing to counseling they would receive.”
When alone with the shift supervisors, Rowley debated and reviewed everything that had gone wrong. He saw no reason to retraumatize the agents with those details that night.
A devout and stoic man, Rowley had spent a lifetime protecting people, starting with his widowed mother and younger siblings. It hurt to think history would remember him as the Secret Service chief who lost a president. That night he began, in small steps, crafting a fuller legacy. He determined he would protect his agents and, to be sure, himself. He would protect his beloved Secret Service by making a stronger one.
* * *
—
JAMES JOSEPH ROWLEY, Jr., grew up in a working-class Catholic parish in the Bronx, the firstborn son of Irish immigrants. His father, a city inspector, died when part of a deteriorating city bridge he was examining collapsed.
At the time, Rowley was seventeen. He and his younger brother were just finishing the school year and had been plotting a carefree summer. Instead, the eldest Rowley got a menial job after the funeral, taking over as the head of the house supporting his mother, younger brother, and sister. He worked during the day and finished his last year of high school attending night classes at Fordham Evening High School.
After getting his diploma, Rowley Junior took night classes again at a local Catholic college to earn his law degree. During the days, he worked as a messenger, a brokerage firm runner, and then a state banking assistant who helped defunct banks quickly sell off their assets in the Depression.
In 1936, his law degree landed him what many would consider a dream job: as an FBI agent. He got high marks for his investigations in the Charlotte field office. But his career was interrupted the next year, after he testified in a trial in Philadelphia. A judge asked him to speak up over the street noise coming in the open windows. The FBI director himself, J. Edgar Hoover, read a news clipping about the judge’s request and fumed that any agent would appear mealymouthed or weak in court. He ordered his deputies to tell the young man to find another job.
Disappointed, Rowley applied elsewhere, and he soon had two offers: from a law firm and the Secret Service. He signed up as an agent in 1938 and joined President Roosevelt’s detail the next year. His tireless work ethic showed. They put Rowley in charge of advances for Roosevelt’s historic wartime meetings in Casablanca, Tehran, and Yalta. He rose quickly in supervisor jobs—as a shift leader on the Roosevelt detail, and then as the special agent in charge of Truman’s detail.
But it was a newly arrived President Kennedy who entrusted Rowley with the Service’s top job. The retiring chief gave the White House three names for possible replacements. Kennedy chose the one he knew best: a fellow Irish Catholic whose genial, direct style he had seen firsthand on the campaign trail. Kennedy chuckled remembering when Rowley was the far more important man in Washington. Agents had once blocked Kennedy from approaching President Eisenhower, and Rowley stepped in to vouch that the boyish Kennedy was actually a congressman. The president liked to tell the story of how they first met: Kennedy was campaigning in Brookline, Massachusetts, in 1948, when Rowley marched in and “pushed me aside to clear the way” for President Truman.
* * *
—
ROWLEY KNEW HE had to shore up the protective net his agents provided around the new president. But first he had to rally his broken men to stand guard for the riskiest public event of their careers.
Mrs. Kennedy set the tone. She refused to ride in what she called a “fat black Cadillac.”
In the tower suite of Bethesda Naval Hospital late that Friday night, the former First Lady began planning her own vision for the funeral. She would walk with Jack’s family and dignitaries behind her husband’s horse-drawn coffin in a miles-long procession—from the Capitol to a downtown cathedral and then to his grave site across the Potomac River at Arlington National Cemetery.
