John and Jackie Kennedy with John Connally in Automobile.Photo: Bettmann Archive
David Pearson was a second-level Peace Corps press officer filling in for out-of-town White House press staffers on Nov. 22, 1963 — a day that at first only seemed significant because of his newfound responsibilities in his temporary role.
By 3 p.m. that day, Pearson got a call requesting his assistance as arrangements were made for the slain president.
“I was there,” Pearson wrote. “I tacked black crepe. I fetched sandwiches. I wrote press releases. I emptied ash trays. I ran errands. I also watched and I listened. And I remember what has now become history and legend.”
Pearson also remembered watching the group of men who were closest to the president — Sargent Shriver, the first-ever director of the Peace Corps (and Kennedy’s in-law); aide Arthur Schlesinger Jr.; National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy; along with other military staffers — translate the first lady’s “wishes into substance, form and effective action.”
It was Shriver, Pearson wrote, who greeted the pallbearers carrying President Kennedy’s casket into the East Room of the White House at 4:30 in the morning — after working straight through the night.
As a priest sprinkled holy water and said prayers in Latin and English, the Kennedy family began to trickle in. That included the first lady, still clad in thepink designer suitshe had been wearing when her husband was shot, now splattered in his blood.
Mrs. Kennedy, Pearson wrote, “appeared out of nowhere, an apparition standing in that characteristic pose of hers that would become so well-known to the world in the ensuing days. Feet apart, the slight lean forward. Stiff and awe-struck. Her lips are parted slightly. Her eyes are as if she had just been surprised, only they stay that way. A wrinkle of disbelief on her brow.”
“I look at her suit and am surprised that she hasn’t changed clothes,” Pearson continued. “The dark stains are all over her skirt and her stockings.”
At that point, Pierson recalled that the priest nodded to the first lady to move to the casket, where she pressed her forehead against its side.
In his recollection, Pearson wrote that press coverage over the ensuing days would accuse Mrs. Kennedy of being stoic — “people would actually wonder whether she could have loved him very much because she didn’t seem to mourn the way people mourn who love deeply” — but those in the East Room saw her emotion firsthand.
JFK Funeral.
The first lady would go on to shape her late husband’s legacy, famously quoting the musicalCamelotto describe their White House. “She wanted to be sure he was remembered as a great president,” her longtime Secret Service agent Clint Hill previously told PEOPLE.
But the assassination continued to take its toll as shestruggled with depressionand, sometimes, thoughts of suicide. (In one letter to a priest, she wrote of feeling “bitter against God.")
source: people.com
