The Happy Things, Not the Sad Things

JFK’s Final Trip Across America

As the sun went down and the crystal-clear blue of the afternoon turned to the brooding magenta of the evening, Colonel James B. Swindal could see the twinkling lights of America down below. Across the plains of the Mississippi Delta, the hollers of Tennessee, and the hills of Appalachia, in rows and patches, little homes were swallowing that day’s news on their radios and RCA television sets. In front of Swindal lay the dashboard of the Boeing 707 of which he was in charge. Behind him lay the body of the 35^th President of the United States, John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

Burning a gallon of fuel every second, at 41,000 feet—higher than Air Force One had ever flown—Swindal could’ve looked beyond the buttons, switches and screens in front of him, out the window, and seen the curvature of the Earth. If he looked to the Northeast, he could have seen Capella, the brightest star on the horizon that evening, shining just above Boston. If he imagined the crooked streets of the neighborhoods below, his mind could have wandered to 83 Beals Street in Brookline where Jack Kennedy had been born the second son to Joseph and Rose. Further off in the distance, at the far edges of the curvature, Swindal could’ve seen the edges of the Atlantic and Europe, where a young Jack Kennedy took a road trip in the Summer of 1939 on the eve of World War Two. There, Kennedy toured England, where his father was Ambassador (meeting a 12-year-old Princess Elizabeth, and attending speeches by Winston Churchill), stopped in Poland on the eve of invasion, visited Third Reich Germany, and even took in a Mussolini rally in Italy, all in a green Ford convertible.

Swindal could have looked even further off, and imagined the other side of that curvature, to Tulagi, a tiny island off Guadacanal in the South Pacific, where Lieutenant Jack Kennedy landed in the Spring of 1943. There, on the night of August 1^st of that year, Kennedy’s boat, PT109, collided with a Japanese destroyer, Amigiri, in the Blackett Strait—throwing Kennedy and ten men into shark-filled waters on a moonless, starless night. Over the next seven days and nights, Kennedy would lead his men to survival, and eventually rescue, at times swimming with the life vest of his injured comrades in his teeth.

Now those memories—memories of youth, wonder, and the halcyon days of the American Century—sat in an 800 pound, double-welled, hermetically sealed hunk of mahogany and bronze in the back of the plane.

Colonel Swindal was 46—born just 81 days after Kennedy, in West Blocton, Alabama. His first major task shortly after volunteering for the military in late 1941 was to ferry soldiers and supplies over “The Hump” from Assam, India to Kungming, China. The Hump referred to the Himalayas, the highest and most harrowing mountain range on Earth, through which Swindal combatted high winds and freezing temperatures, landing on runways constructed just weeks and months prior. A few years later, after WWII ended, he flew C-47’s and C-54’s during the Berlin Airlift. Now, it was November 22, 1963, and Colonel Swindal was flying the most difficult mission of his career. “It became a struggle to continue,” he later recalled.

The day’s schedule was straight forward in presidential terms: a quick, minutes-long flight from Fort Worth where Kennedy had slept the night prior, onto Dallas, where he would ride in a motorcade through the city to the Dallas Trade Mart, and finally, another flight to Austin, where he would spend the weekend at LBJ Ranch. In his speech scheduled for the Trade Mart—amid rising rightwing fanaticism in the country—President Kennedy was supposed to warn that “America’s leadership must be guided by the lights of learning and reason or else those who confuse rhetoric with reality and the plausible with the possible will gain the popular ascendancy with their seemingly swift and simple solutions to every world problem.” He was to continue, “There will always be dissident voices heard in the land, expressing opposition without alternatives, finding fault but never favor, perceiving gloom on every side and seeking influence without responsibility. Those voices are inevitable.” That speech was never given, and that message never heard.

Swindal first received word of a problem over his radio in the cockpit of Air Force One, shortly after shots rang out from Dealey Plaza at exactly 12:30 PM. It was Roy Kellerman, the Secret Service agent riding in the front seat of the presidential limousine. “Lancer is hurt,” Kellerman relayed, referencing President Kennedy’s codename. “It looks bad. We have to get to the hospital.” The moments that followed were a blur. After the President was shot, he was taken to Parkland Memorial Hospital, where aide Malcolm Kilduff informed the press at 1:36 PM that the President was dead. Then came the question of how to transport Kennedy’s body—and then how to swear-in Vice President Lyndon Johnson as president. Both questions centered around Air Force One.

Soon, a call was made to a man named Vernon O’Neal of O’Neal’s Funeral Home, in the Oak Lawn neighborhood of Dallas. It was a beautiful Friday afternoon in the late Fall and most of the office was out to lunch. But this caller was adamant, frantic even. A casket was needed, the best one he had. “This is Clint Hill of the Secret Service. I want you to bring a casket out here to Parkland. I want you immediately.” Hill had been in the follow-up car behind the President and Mrs. Kennedy. Like the First Lady, he too was covered in the President’s blood as he made the call from inside the bowels of Parkland Memorial.

“Hold on—hold on!” O’Neal said. “We’ve got merchandise at all prices.”

“Bring the best one you have,” Hill said. “Any questions?”

In a moment, O’Neal and his bookkeeper, Ray Gleason, loaded an Elgin Casket Company “Britannia” model casket into the back of a brand-new, snow-white Cadillac hearse that O’Neal had purchased the month prior at the National Funeral Directors Convention in Dallas. The car had exactly 900 miles on it. But before the casket left the hospital, there was confusion: Dallas officials, with a police officer in tow, told Kennedy aides and the Secret Service that any murder in Dallas had to be examined in the city by an approved coroner. The aides and Secret Service men literally pushed the city officials aside. By then, Lyndon Johnson had already returned to Air Force One, where Swindal was being told conflicting orders as to whether to take off immediately or to wait for President Kennedy’s casket.

Swindal kept one engine running, enough to supply power to the plane but not enough to power the air-conditioning, creating a stuffy heat inside the plane with the backdrop of the lone engine’s low din. Swindal’s co-pilot, Lieutenant Colonel Lewis Hanson, was panicked: amid the waiting, he started the engines of the plane twice on his own, fearful that all aboard might be the target of a larger conspiracy. Soon, at 1:56 PM—20 minutes after President Kennedy was announced dead—Johnson called Attorney General Robert Kennedy to confirm the language required for the oath of office. It was a clerical call in one sense, and a vindictive, personal call in a much larger sense. Johnson and Robert Kennedy hated one another, from the moment they met in the Senate Cafeteria nearly a decade prior. Even though Robert Kennedy’s brother was dead, or even perhaps because his brother was dead, Lyndon Johnson wanted him to understand who his boss was now. Robert Kennedy, speaking from a phone near the pool of his Hickory Hill home in Virginia, confirmed the language of the oath of office to the new President. As they spoke, at 2 PM, the O’Neal’s Funeral Home casket was carried on board with President Kennedy’s body inside.

Swindal briefly left his post to salute the casket of the fallen Commander In Chief.

Now—with the casket and Mrs. Kennedy aboard—Colonel Swindal waited on takeoff orders. In fact, General Godfrey McHugh ordered he so do immediately. However, he was soon told by Malcolm Kilduff that Lyndon Johnson—mere minutes into his presidency—had different plans. Even though Johnson was told an immediate swearing-in was unnecessary, he insisted on one, right there on Air Force One. And after being told that any federal judge could do the oath, he insisted on using Judge Sarah T. Hughes, an old Texas ally whose appointment to the federal bench Robert Kennedy had tried to block the prior year. After she was called at her Dallas home, the new President, the dead President, and the entire free world waited on a small, 67-year-old woman wearing a brown dress with white polka dots to board Air Force One.

Finally, Judge Hughes arrived. With everyone in a daze, Johnson was in command, telling photographer Cecil Stoughton and everyone else in the cabin where to stand. But one person was missing. He instructed Kennedy aide Ken O’Donnell—who had worked for JFK since 1946—to find Mrs. Kennedy. “Why don’t you see what’s keeping her.” O’Donnell then went to the back of the plane, to the bedroom, where Jacqueline Kennedy sat in stunned silence, her husband’s blood now drying into her pink, Chanel jacket. He asked if she indeed would like to be in the photo. She told O’Donnell, “I think I ought to. In the light of history, it would be better if I was there.” She parted the narrow aisle, as 28 people crammed into the main cabin. Johnson then placed Mrs. Kennedy at his left side, for all the world to see, nodded to Hughes and took the oath of office. “I, Lyndon Baines Johnson, do solemnly swear…” The 36^th President of the United States then put his hand down and turned around toward Swindal and the cockpit.

“Now, let’s get airborne.”

Swindal took off with the plane’s nose almost straight up. When he touched down at 6:05 PM, the United States was a different nation than it had been that morning. In a few days it would be Thanksgiving, and in each of those homes Swindal flew over, families would be a little more thankful, a little more reflective on what they had. Whether the Thanksgiving football game was won or lost, whether the turkey dry or moist, the President—46 years old and the father of two—was dead. As Mrs. Kennedy, just 34 herself, stepped off Air Force One and into the motorcade that evening, she turned to Clint Hill. “Let’s remember the happy things, not the sad things.”

This Thanksgiving, I’d encourage you to do the same. If you’re new here—and many of you are—I want to thank you for subscribing and taking time from your busy lives to step back and uncover the threads of the American fabric. These are not easy times, but if we remember who we are—and the happy things, not the sad things—we can better appreciate our families, our friends, and this great country we call the United States of America.

…Happy Thanksgiving.

Sources:

William Manchester. The Death of a President. 1967.

Robert Caro. The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Passage of Power. 2012.

Fredrik Logevall. JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century, 1917-1956. 2020.