The Presidency: The Government Still Lives

Over Nob Hill and the Harvard Yard, across Washington's broad avenues and Pittsburgh's thrusting chimneys, in a thousand towns and villages the bells began to toll. In Caracas, Venezuela, a lone Marine sergeant strode across the lawn of the U.S. embassy while a soft rain fell, saluted the flag, then lowered it to half-mast. At U.S. bases from Korea to Germany, artillery pieces boomed out every half hour from dawn to dusk in a stately, protracted tattoo of grief.

It was the kind of feeling that words could hardly frame. At Boston's Symphony Hall, Conductor Erich Leinsdorf laid down his baton, raised it again for the funeral march from the Eroica.

On a Washington street corner, a blind Negro woman plucked at the strings of her guitar, half-singing, half-weeping a dirge: "He promised never to leave me ..." And, on Commerce Street in Dallas, in an incident little noted at the time but to assume later significance, Jack Ruby silently closed down his strip-tease joint, the Carousel.

In Torrents. Later the words came, torrents of them. But only two were really needed. A Greek-born barber said them in his Times Square shop: "I cry." A woman said them in another way on London's Strand: "My God!" Jacqueline Kennedy said them as her husband pitched forward, dying: "Oh no!" A Roman Catholic priest said them with irrevocable finality outside the Dallas hospital where he had just administered the last rites to John Fitzgerald Kennedy: "He's dead." When it happened, Teddy Kennedy was sitting in the presiding officer's chair of the Senate, and Bobby was lunching at his Hickory Hill home. At the news of his brother's death, the Attorney General stalked outside without a word and, accompanied only by his jet-black, 150-lb. Newfoundland, Brumus, walked head down, hands in pockets, for an hour.

In Hyannis Port, the President's mother had just returned from the country club golf course when Niece Ann Gargan rushed to her with the news. Back at the Kennedy house, Rose decided not to waken her napping husband, instead summoned Boston Physician Russell Boles Jr. to see if Old Joe, who is 75, could endure the shock of the news. Dr. Boles said he could, and Teddy, who had flown up earlier, told his father the next morning. Said Boles afterward, "He took it with characteristic courage." The night of the assassination, Caroline and John Jr. were told that their father was dead. A Cedar Felled. In the U.S. Senate, Chaplain Frederick Brown Harris mounted the rostrum and placed a single sheet of scrawled notes before him. "We gaze at a vacant place against the sky," he said, "as the President of the Republic goes down like a giant cedar." Then he recalled the words that Ohio Representative James A. Garfield spoke on the morning that Abraham Lincoln died in 1865. "Fellow citizens," said Garfield, who was to die by assassination himself 16 years later, "God reigns, and the Government at Washington still lives."

So it does. In such circumstances the change of power is cruel but necessary. Ninety-eight minutes after Kennedy was pronounced dead, Lyndon Baines Johnson, 55, was sworn in as 36th President of the United States.