The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [479]
“You know, last night would have been a hell of a night to assassinate a president,” Kennedy said, almost as an aside. “I mean it,” he continued. “There was the rain, and the night, and we were all getting jostled. Suppose a man had a pistol in a briefcase.” He pantomimed a phantom killer, pulling out his gun and firing away. “Then he could have dropped the gun and the briefcase and melted away in the crowd.”
The president and first lady set out in the motorcade to journey from Dilles’ Love Field to his speech at the Texas Trade Mart. Kennedy had both a politician’s savvy and a husband’s pride in his wife. He knew nothing of dress designers other than the bills that he paid, but Jackie looked exquisite in her pink suit, pink pillbox hat, and white gloves.
The top was down on the presidential limousine so that the people could see their president and first lady. Jackie reached to put on sunglasses against the glaring Texas sun, but Kennedy asked her to put them back in her lap, telling his wife that the onlookers wanted to see her eyes. Kennedy liked to shield himself from the throngs that sought in him something they did not have and he could not give, but each time he drove in a motorcade through an American city he looked out into those restless faces as a gauge of his own political future. Whatever doubts he had when he set out this morning, as Kennedy scanned the faces this day, he had reason to believe that these people loved him, shouting his and Jackie’s names, pleading with him to look their way, waving at him, celebrating not only the president but also the presidency.
For Jackie, it was often a blur of faceless humanity out there on the streets, but Kennedy seemed to look at each face, locking in his gaze so that thousands would walk away feeling that they had connected with their president. At Lemmon and Lomo Drive a group of little children stood holding a sign: MR. PRESIDENT. PLEASE STOP AND SHAKE OUR HANDS. “Let’s stop here, Bill,” Kennedy told Bill Greer, the driver. As Kennedy descended from the limousine, the crowd surged forward, pressing around him. Spectators wanted nothing more than a handshake, an autograph, a touch, but they would have drowned him in their adulation.
As the motorcade crawled through the downtown streets, the crowds were at times a dozen deep, pushing against barricades, surging into the streets, pressing for a glimpse of their president. Kennedy waved and smiled, and yet as always there was a dispassionate quality to him, as if he were watching himself watching the crowds watching him. Though the crowds could not possibly hear him, he kept saying, “Thank you, thank you, thank you.” He was president, and he needed the votes of the Mexican-Americans shouting his name, the secretaries leaning out of the windows waving at him, the businessmen standing there clapping. If he was to win reelection, he needed Texas, and he rightfully saw these crowds as a good omen.
In the summer he had doodled on a sheet of paper, “To govern is to choose.” He might as easily have written, “To live is to choose.” That was the axiom of his life. As a boy lying in a hospital bed, he had chosen health over illness, refusing to live as a near-invalid. Today, as the motorcade moved through the downtown streets, Kennedy looked like a vital, youthful president. No one in these cheering crowds knew that to protect his back he wore a brace of canvas and steel that held him supernaturally erect. No one knew about the drugs that he took, the pain that he felt, and the price that he paid to maintain the illusion of heath.
Kennedy chose to enter politics and to stand for Congress, the Senate, and the presidency. He chose the issues he thought mattered and those that did not. In his press conferences as president, he tried to educate Americans about the hard choices they and he faced, to make them realize that men made war and peace by