the president’s body is laid inside. Oneal is concerned that the president’s blood will permanently stain the satin lining.
Almost an hour after being declared dead, John Kennedy is now ready to leave Parkland Hospital and fly back to Washington.
Yet ironically, the city of Dallas, which once wanted him to stay away, now will not let JFK leave.
It is a little-known fact that it is not a federal crime to kill the president of the United States. It is against federal law to initiate a
Thus Dallas officials won’t let John Kennedy’s body leave the state of Texas until an official autopsy has been performed. The Dallas medical examiner, who has now arrived at Parkland, will not budge on this matter.
Veteran Secret Service special agent Roy Kellerman, who has now taken charge, is livid. “My friend,” Kellerman makes it clear to Dallas medical examiner Dr. Earl Rose, “this is the body of the president of the United States and we are going to take it back to Washington.”
“No. That’s not the way things are,” Rose replies. “Where there is a homicide, we must have an autopsy.”
“He is going with us,” Kellerman tells Rose.
“The body stays,” insists the medical examiner, an upright man fond of wagging his finger in people’s faces.
Meanwhile, Lyndon Johnson and Air Force One are stuck on the ground because of this legal wrangling. Jackie Kennedy won’t leave without JFK’s body, and LBJ won’t depart without Jackie, fearing he would be considered insensitive if he did.
The argument now becomes an old-fashioned Texas standoff—a physical showdown between the Secret Service, Dr. Rose, and members of the Dallas Police Department. There are forty men present. Pushing and shoving break out. The Secret Service is determined to have its way, but the Dallas police won’t back down. Finally, Kennedy’s close friends Kenny O’Donnell and Dave Powers order Secret Service agents to grab JFK’s coffin and bull their way through the police. “We’re getting out of here,” O’Donnell barks as the undertaker’s cart on which the casket rests is rolled toward the exit door. “We don’t give a damn what these laws say. We’re leaving now!”
The president’s body is loaded into Vernon Oneal’s 1964 white Cadillac hearse. Jackie Kennedy sits in the rear jump seat, next to her husband’s body. Clint Hill and other agents jam themselves into the front seat. Bill Greer is still inside the hospital, but Roy Kellerman isn’t waiting for him. Secret Service special agent Andy Berger takes the wheel and races for Love Field at top speed. As he watches the hearse peel out, Vernon Oneal wonders aloud how and when he’s going to be paid.
There is no stopping when the Cadillac reaches the airport. Tires squealing, Special Agent Berger races the hearse onto the tarmac, ignoring the signs reading “Restricted Area” and “Slow—Dangerous Trucks.” He speeds past the Braniff and American Airlines hangars, oblivious to all dangers until the hearse screeches to a halt at the back steps leading up to Air Force One. Kennedy’s friends and bodyguards then personally manhandle the six hundred pounds of coffin and president, banging it off the stairwell leading up into the plane and tilting the casket at awkward angles. They load the body onto Air Force One through the same rear door John Kennedy stepped out of three hours earlier. That moment was ceremonial and presidential. This moment is morbid and ghastly.
Jackie Kennedy waits until her husband’s body is on board before climbing up the steps. The inside of Air Force One is like an inferno; the air-conditioning has been off for hours. The blinds are down, and the cabin is dark out of fear that more assassins are on the loose and will shoot through the plane’s windows. Yet Lyndon Johnson insists on being sworn in before Air Force One leaves the ground. So it is that the Kennedy staff and the Johnson staff stand uncomfortably next to one another as federal judge Sarah Hughes, who was personally appointed to the bench by LBJ and now has been hastily summoned to the presidential jet of which John F. Kennedy was so fond, administers the oath.
“Do you, Lyndon Baines Johnson, solemnly swear…”
“I, Lyndon Baines Johnson, solemnly swear…”
LBJ stands tall in Air Force One. To his left, still wearing the bloodstained pink suit, is Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy. The former First Lady has not changed clothes. She is adamant that the world have a visual reminder of what happened to her husband here.
Standing before Johnson is the judge.
Several feet behind them, in the rear of the plane, lies the body of John F. Kennedy.
After the swearing-in ceremony, Jackie sits down in a seat next to the coffin as the long ride home begins.
It is Sunday morning, November 24. The nation is devastated by the assassination of John F. Kennedy and is riveted to the television with depressed fascination as events unfold. Jackie Kennedy is now out of sight, privately mourning her husband’s death. So the eyes of America turn to Lee Harvey Oswald. The assassin has become infamous since Friday, particularly after telling a crowd of reporters, “I’m just a patsy.”
That impromptu midnight press conference at Dallas police headquarters was surreal. Reporters were allowed to physically crowd the handcuffed Oswald. Many in Dallas, and across America, are so infuriated by JFK’s death that they would gladly exact revenge. Yet the Dallas police do little to shield Oswald.
One of those enraged is Jack Ruby, who worked his way into the press conference unmolested, with a loaded Colt Cobra .38 in his suit coat pocket.
The lack of security around Oswald continued throughout the press conference. He told reporters that the police were after him only because he had lived in the Soviet Union. He denied shooting the president. His tantalizing words “I’m just a patsy” hung in the air, suggesting that he was some sort of scapegoat.
To some, those words brought to mind another such incident, thirty years earlier.
On February 15, 1933, in Miami, Florida, Giuseppe “Joe” Zangara emptied a .32-caliber handgun at President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Zangara missed his target, instead hitting and killing Chicago mayor Anton Cermak. The trial was amazingly quick, and Zangara was executed by the electric chair just five weeks later.
There are some who insist that Roosevelt was not the intended target. Instead, they believe that the point all along was to kill Cermak, as part of a Mafia conspiracy.
In mob slang, Zangara was a “patsy”—someone whose guilt was set up to advance a crime coordinated from behind the scenes.
Lee Harvey Oswald’s public statement that he is a patsy fuels the flames that John Kennedy’s death is part of a greater conspiracy.
There are still Americans who believe Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone in killing John F. Kennedy. Some came to this belief thanks to Oswald’s comments and J. Edgar Hoover’s insistence that there was a conspiracy. Even Bobby Kennedy believed that Oswald did not act alone.
The world will never know the answer.
After saying just a few words to the press on Sunday morning, Lee Harvey Oswald is led through the basement of the Dallas Police Department to a waiting armored car, where he will be transferred to the county jail. In actuality, the armored car is a decoy—for security measures, Oswald will be led to a police car instead.
A crowd of journalists watches a handcuffed and smiling Oswald as he makes his way down the corridor, his right arm handcuffed to the left of Detective J. R. Leavelle.
Between forty and fifty journalists and more than seventy policemen are waiting as Oswald is brought out. Three television cameras roll.
“Here he comes!” someone shouts as Oswald emerges from the jail office.
The newsmen press forward. Microphones are thrust at Oswald and questions shouted. Flashbulbs pop as photographers capture the moment for posterity.
