Riderless Horses — Make Peace or Die
This story is adapted from Make Peace or Die, by Charles U. Daly.
November 22–24, 1963
“The New Frontier I speak of is not a set of promises — it is a set of challenges.”
— President John F. Kennedy
The first time I was near an American president, he was in a box.
On April 14, 1945, I was eighteen years old. Outside Union Station, I watched a team of six white horses pull FDR’s caisson on his final journey to the White House. I had been an American citizen for less than a decade at that point. Eighteen years later, I had a corner office in the West Wing of the White House as an aide to the first Irish American president. Less than a thousand days after I took that job, President Kennedy was on that same caisson.
Friday, November 22, 1963 was slow for President Kennedy’s congressional relations staff. Most members had completed their Tuesday to Thursday workweek and were in their districts, chasing little white balls or engaged in other vertical and horizontal endeavors.
My boss, Larry O’Brien, special assistant to the president for congressional relations and personnel, was in Texas with President Kennedy, unlikely to call our four-man team for head counts or reports on congressional requests, demands, threats, and promises. Chief of Staff Kenny O’Donnell and Special Assistant to the President Dave Powers were also with Kennedy. Pierre Salinger, the White House press secretary, was over the Pacific, headed to Japan with much of the cabinet.
Ahead of me was a weekend with my wife, Mary, my sons, Michael and Douglas, and our spaniel, chugging along the chilly shores of the Chesapeake in our seven-horsepower wooden outboard. Lunch in the White House Mess was quiet. As I took my seat, a Filipino steward set down my oblong silver napkin ring, engraved with my name, two anchors, and the words “White House Mess.” This is Washington’s most exclusive eatery. For privacy and tradition, it is run by the Navy — hence the anchors. The Mess was reserved for select members of the president’s senior staff. No guests were permitted at the round table in the corner where I was seated. There were four or five smaller tables where members of the staff could flatter the occasional guest with a meal at the White House. The atmosphere in the Mess was one of quiet, untouchable, and seemingly invincible power.
Just after 1:30 p.m., Jack McNally strode in. My first thought was that he must be delighted to be carrying some message from the Executive Office Building that would gain him entry to the Mess and perhaps wreck the weekend with tasks for one or another of us. His usual smile was absent.
“The president’s been shot,” he whispered.
“What?” I said.
“No!” said someone else.
“How bad?”
“I don’t know.”
I went down to the press office. Pierre Salinger’s plane was out of touch. His number two, Mack Kilduff, was off covering the Dallas trip.
In the White House, we didn’t know anything more than the Associated Press’s first bulletin told us:
BULLETIN: DALLAS, NOV 22 (AP) — PRESIDENT KENNEDY WAS SHOT JUST AS HIS MOTORCADE LEFT DOWNTOWN DALLAS.
Sporadic updates followed, then the clacking of the newswire delivered the end of our world:
BULLETIN: DALLAS, NOV 22 (AP) — TWO PRIESTS STEPPED OUT OF PARKLAND HOSPITAL’S EMERGENCY WARD TODAY AND SAID PRESIDENT KENNEDY DIED OF HIS BULLET WOUNDS.
I went back upstairs and sat until dark calling home, ignoring messages, half watching the television chronicling the president’s final flight to the Capitol. Not the new president. Not Lyndon Johnson. The president.
On the Sunday after the assassination, three hundred thousand people lined Pennsylvania Avenue to watch six white horses pull a caisson bearing the president’s flag-draped casket from the White House to the Capitol Rotunda, where he would lie in state. It was the same caisson that had carried FDR and the Unknown Soldier.
There is a haunting photograph of the First Family following the president’s casket up the Capitol steps. In the center of the image, the widowed Jacqueline is looking directly at the camera, a black mantilla on her head, a wisp of hair between her eyes. She is shouldering the despair of the whole country with the same poise that defined her public image as First Lady. Beside her, JFK Jr. is bounding up the steps with his tongue out, too young to fathom what has happened. You hope. Caroline’s white-gloved hand is holding her mother’s in black.
In the foreground of this tableau of grief is the back of Kenny O’Donnell’s head. He’s looking off to the left, out of the frame, at the box containing our president. Kenny had been in the car behind Kennedy’s in Dallas and blessed himself when he saw a chunk of the president’s brain explode out of his skull. Opposite Kenny, that’s me facing the camera: eyes on the First Family, hand on my heart. My hair is cropped short, the mark of a Marine who doesn’t know what to do with the freedom to grow it out. I have on a lapel pin, the red, white, and blue vertical stripes of the Silver Star, which I had received twelve years earlier for my actions as a rifle platoon leader on the other side of the world. I had always been able to keep my memories of war at a safe distance by throwing myself into my work.
I tried to stay too busy to dwell on bad memories. Working for the president was a great way to do that. As I stood on the steps that day, I thought about the killing I had done in the hills around Inje and Wonju, South Korea. I thought about the widows and bereaved mothers of men I had led to their deaths, and the Chinese and North Korean widows I created with my M1 Carbine and my orders. I saw the young faces of friends who came home in flag-draped boxes.
In his inaugural address, President Kennedy had challenged my generation to “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” Standing on those steps with my hand on my heart, I asked myself a question I would go on asking for the rest of my life: What can I do for my country now?
To learn more about Daly’s remarkable life of service you can find Make Peace or Die on Amazon.
Charles U. Daly is the last living member of John F. Kennedy’s West Wing congressional liaison staff. Before that, he led a Marine rifle platoon through some of the most intense combat of the Korean war and was awarded a Silver Star and a Purple Heart. He helped run several American institutions including the University of Chicago, Harvard, and the JFK Presidential Library. He has four sons, ages 28 to 69, and lives on Cape Cod with his wife, Christine. He attributes his long life to tennis, red wine, and Viagra.
Charlie Daly is a freelance writer. He worked on this book as his father’s writing partner. These pages are but a small excerpt from their many tearful and joyous conversations.
