EDITORIAL

THE LONG VIGIL

Marya Mannes

There are moments of such magnitude that they must be clearly remembered.

And it might serve a purpose, if not now then later, to record what one American-- and surely multitudes more--saw and felt and thought sitting before the television set on a Friday and a Saturday and a Sunday and a Monday in this November.

This was not viewing. This was total involvement.

I was out when the President was shot and saw only the replayed tape, first of him waving and smiling to cheering Dallas faces, mostly young, and then the wild, careening moment of the murder: the insane kaleidoscope in the camera’s eye as it swung and jolted from a photographer running through chaos to commotion. From then on, with few intervals away, I stayed before the set, knowing -- as millions knew -- that I must give myself over entirely to an appalling tragedy, and that to evade it was a treason of the spirit.

It is hard to remember the exact sequence of events that Friday: incredulity and shock at this immense unreason left no place for an orderly succession in the mind. It was all ambulances and police cars and corridors and bewildered newsmen holding up microphones to bewildered people, and once in a while the small figure of the President's wife, briefly recognized and then eclipsed.

The sunny streets of Dallas were cruel and ugly, the warehouse walls with those terrible open windows were cruel and ugly, there was a glaring tawdriness

Later there was the scene in the plane when a woman judge swore in the big man with the scored face as President of the United States, and Mrs. Johnson and Mrs. Kennedy stood by; and you tried to take it in, and you tried to find solace in the orderly quiet succession., brief and simple, but you could not: it was too much to take. Through those hours too you saw the face of Lee Oswald, thin and pasty and small-mouthed, and you thought what a miserable worm he was and how even hate for him was overwhelmed by horror of his act. And then when you heard them say he was a Marxist you thought oh God, it is bad enough without this, here we go, from now on the old hysteria has fuel to burn on again. And you thought of the smugness and relief of the rightists and the wise shaking of many heads over leftist subversives, and what this would do to us in the time to come.

In the partly sleepless nights that followed, the distorted echoes of an ancient

It was only later, much later, when the plane that carried the President's and the President's wife and their successors arrived in Andrews Air Force Base,

I sat there watching men struggling through the door of the plane's hydraulic lift with the casket and I thought, there he is, and I thought of that shattered head underneath and the high shoulders and long legs and how he looked when he walked into press conferences with a quick step and his thick-haired head slightly bent forward and his down-slanted eyes slightly quizzical. And I watched Mrs. Kennedy being helped down to the ground by two men and follow the casket to the ambulance and step into it with her brother-in-law; and I wondered what made it possible for a woman so like a girl to look at this long metal box.

As for us, the millions, we could not take our eyes from the metal box. It was

I followed the caisson every step it went down the broad avenues from home to Hill, from Hill to home, and from home to earth. The simplicity of that box with the flag on it, the great loneliness of the executive in death as in life, were made just bearable by the sturdy gray horses, nuzzling and jerking against their

And I, like millions, was immeasurably proud of the President' wife. Nothing will ever erase from my mind the sight of that small erect black figure with the

Hour after hour, wherever the President lay, I watched the people who came to

honor him. The familiar faces of senators and judges, of Cabinet members, of the family itself were made less familiar by the shock and strain that ennobled them. Most of them looked years older.

Hour after hour I watched the people without names file past the catafalque in the Rotunda, the elders looking at the bier, the children distracted by the lights and guards. And then Mrs. Kennedy came with Caroline tightly holding her hand and John fidgeting as she looked before her. I saw Caroline flapping her free white gloved hand and I wondered what was growing in her mind, and I saw John taken away, and I watched Mrs. Kennedy and Caroline, now still and grave, kneel at the bier while Mrs. Kennedy kissed the flag on it. Every movement she made was right; and hard to bear.

And during all this -- the shuffle of the feet, the tolling of bells, the beating of drums, the cropping of horses’ hooves, the click of the honor guard's rifles, the shrilling of whistles -- during all of this, for four interminable days, I listened to the familiar voices of those men whom we are highly privileged as a people to have as interpreters of events: Edward P. Morgan and Howard K. Smith, Walter Cronkite and Eric Sevareid and Charles Collingwood, Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, Marvin Kalb and Robert Pierpoint and so many more who never failed us or history during their greatest possible ordeal. Shaken as they visibly were, infinitely weary as they became, they maintained calm and reason and insight throughout the marathon of madness and mourning.

And as we heard some of the answer, incredulity was supplanted by disgust and fury, and these in turn by a sense of the insanely grotesque: a strip-tease proprietor, a small-time crook, had deprived the American people and the accused murderer of their President of justice on the actual premises of law: police headquarters. Then outrage took over again: outrage at the enormity of the act, at violence so close to the surface, at the boundless bungling of those fat Texas police. It was in relief that we came back to the President's body and the muffled drums. Sorrow, however vast, was better than outrage. That could wait till later.

By Monday a great silence had settled over the nation as the last act of the tragedy was played. I had watched the leaders of the nations of the world arrive the night before at Dallas Airport as a drawn Dean Rusk, waiting and pacing, greeted each in turn: the towering President de Gaulle, the small Asians and Africans, the tall Nordic princes, the Arabs and the Israelis, the Italians and the Dutch. Now I watched them assemble at the White House for that walk to the Cathedral of St. Matthew.

Now, in the brilliant cold November light, they gathered behind the President’ wife and the President’s two brothers who once more were behind the caisson bearing the President’s body and the fretting Blackjack and the seven gray horses. You could see her features under the heavy black veil only enough to know that they were still composed; her arms hung straight at her sides. Robert Kennedy'’s face bore, as always during the four long days, the bleakness of devastation together with, it seemed to me, a mighty anger.

Slowly the cortege and the leaders of the nations walked in the winter sun to the Cathedral, and then we -- all of us again -- were in the church. Millions, to be sure, were deeply moved by what transpired there. Unhappily I felt Cardinal Cushing not as an assuager of my grief but as an intruder into it: the grating cadences of his loud voice, the harshness of his Latin and English speech, took from the service much that would have been beautiful. I told myself that this old man was a lifelong friend of the President and his family, that if they loved him there was much to love, and that his sorrow was boundless. But I wanted his talking to end in the church as I wanted it to end later at Arlington, and as, so few years ago, I wanted it to come to an end at the inauguration of the man he now mourned. The silence was the balm.

And now we went with the President to Arlington; every step of the way. The

We heard the skirl of bagpipes, we walked close to the grave, we watched the honor guard take the flag from the casket and hold it taut between them, we saw the standing mourners still as stone. Then we saw the flag folded over and over and placed in the hands of Jacqueline Kennedy. And with tears now uncontainable we heard the high and lonely bugle notes of taps.

The light had gone out, the lights were lit; not only on the grave of the murdered President but in the halls of state where the new President, only hours later, received the leaders with whom, from this moment on, he would have to treat.

Only this scene, a sort of social sarabande unreal in its conventionality, could have finally stemmed our tears and bridged the chasm between death and life. Here was the big new President pumping hand after hand, smiling and nodding; here were, except for de Gaulle, much smaller men trying to impress themselves on the mind of the new executive; here were old allies and old adversaries and the new men of new countries coming to pay court in the hopes of being courted, anxious to tell their people what this new leader was like; how he looked and talked, how he behaved to them.

And then, finally, there were the lights in the private apartments of the White House; and when we saw these we turned the set off and left Mrs. John F. Kennedy to the protective cover of darkness, and ourselves -- the millions and millions of us- to the respite denied her.