"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.

And even as the presidential jet, Air Force One, winged over the sere plains of Texas and the jagged peaks of the Ozarks, over the Mississippi and the Alleghenies, bearing not only the new President but the body of the one just past, the machinery of government was still working.

In the West Wing of the White House, Presidential Aide McGeorge Bundy began drafting briefing papers for the new President. Hurrying to the capital after a flight from Hawaii, Secretary of State Dean Rusk paused just long enough to say, "We have much unfinished business."

In his office, House Speaker John W. McCormack conferred with Democratic leaders. For a time rumors had whipped wildly through the city that Lyndon Johnson had also been shot, that he had suffered a heart attack, that he was dying. That would have made McCormack, a 71-year-old Massachusetts Irishman who never set his sights higher than the House, the new President. And until the 1964 election, McCormack remains first in the line of succession, with 86-year-old Arizona Democrat Carl Hayden, president pro tempore of the Senate, right behind him.* A Sense of Continuity. At Andrews Air Force Base, television cameras captured the sense of change, and the sense of continuity, that are part of the nation's strength. First, the bronze casket bearing John F. Kennedy's body was placed aboard a U.S. Navy ambulance. Then, as it drove out of range, the cameras panned to the ramp of Air Force One as the new President stepped into view for his first public statement. As he did so, the U.S. and the world could reasonably, and indeed necessarily, look to the future.

Johnson seems sure to retain, at least for a while, most of the men around Kennedy. Eventually Bobby Kennedy may resign as Attorney General; he and his brother were blood-close, and Bobby's heart can hardly stay in the job. But Johnson is close to both Rusk and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, will probably lean on both for some time. Kennedy's White House staff, an even more personal instrument than the Cabinet, will probably break up after a decent interval, but Johnson needs it at least until he can assemble one of his own.

In domestic and foreign policy some changes of emphasis can be expected, but Johnson is not about to disown his predecessor's program. He will fight harder for space appropriations, perhaps less hard for a tax cut. He is solidly behind the Administration's civil rights bill, medicare and job retraining programs. A superior congressional strategist, he may have more success in getting them through than did Kennedy. He has supported the nuclear test ban treaty and the wheat deal with Russia, and he said in Manhattan only last month, "It is possible to lower world tensions without lowering our guard." He is committed to NATO and the multilateral nuclear force, but as the newest head of state among the allied Big Four and the third to take the helm in the last month, he may be in for some rough times with the senior partner, France's Charles de Gaulle.

A Time for Mourning. Politically, Kennedy's death turned both parties topsy-turvy. Only nine months remain before the Democratic Convention in Atlantic City, but Johnson will have the prestige and power of the White House working for him if he wants the nomination--and few doubt that he does. As a moderately conservative Southerner, his chief worry is the party's Northern liberal wing.

The G.O.P. is even more wide open and more hopeful about '64. With Kennedy in the White House, Republican politicians were willing to think about gambling with Arizona's Senator Barry Goldwater as a dramatic alternative. But now 1964 is anybody's race, and the G.O.P. may well enlist a middle-of-the-roader to challenge Johnson--Nelson Rockefeller, Richard Nixon, even Pennsylvania's Governor William Scranton or Michigan's Governor George Romney. Those who had been shunning the race because they figured it was a lost cause anyway may now be entertaining second thoughts. The tip-off should come when the early-bird New Hampshire primary is held in March, for the G.O.P. nominee is likely to be one who enters and wins several primaries.

But for the time being, at least, this was not a time for overt politicking. The night of the assassination, Lyndon Johnson stepped uncertainly into the Oval Office of the President, then went to the three-room suite in the nearby Executive Office Building that he had used as Vice President. Across the street, he could see the lights beginning to go out in the White House.

Just before dawn, an ambulance drew up to the White House portico, and U.S. servicemen carried Kennedy's casket into the East Room. On a blackshrouded catafalque, John F. Kennedy lay in state. His sleepless wife viewed him for the last time, and then the bier was sealed.

A Last Trip Home. This week Cardinal Gushing would celebrate the Requiem Mass in Washington's St. Matthew's Cathedral. France's De Gaulle would be there, along with Britain's Prince Philip and Prime Minister Douglas-Home, Greece's Queen Frederika, Japan's Crown Prince Akihito, Belgium's King Baudouin, Russia's Deputy Premier Mikoyan, Ireland's President De Valera, Canada's Prime Minister Pearson, Germany's Chancellor Erhard, the Philippines' President Macapagal, and many more.

Then, at the family's request, John Kennedy would be buried amid the wooded hills of Arlington National Cemetery across the Potomac. It would be on his son's third birthday.

* After that, under the 1947 Presidential Succession Act, come the Cabinet members in order of rank: the Secretaries of State, Treasury and Defense, the Attorney General, the Postmaster General, and the Secretaries of the Interior, Agriculture, Commerce and Labor. The Health, Education and Welfare Department was only created in 1953, has not yet been written into the law.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.