The Flight From Dallas

Published in the October 2013 80th Anniversary issue

12:30 P.M., CENTRAL STANDARD TIME

Colonel James Swindal, a handsome forty-six-year-old carpenter's son from Alabama and the pilot of Air Force One, sits in the communications shack behind his cockpit, pushing back a roast-beef sandwich. Two million dollars' worth of the latest technology buzzes around him, teletype machines and radios and three separate phone patches. He's half-listening to the radio, Charlie frequency, to the chatter of Secret Service agents narrating the progress of President John F. Kennedy's motorcade through Dallas. Swindal's copilot, Lieutenant Colonel Lewis Hanson, has left the plane, taking advantage of the short stop at Love Field to pay a quick visit to his ailing mother-in-law. As Swindal waits, he brings on only a light load of fuel for this afternoon's scheduled flight to Austin, part of the president's continuing tour of Texas.

Behind Swindal, in the large passenger compartment, two secretaries type press releases; farther back, in the stateroom—with its two fixed tables, TV set, and six chairs upholstered in gold—all is quiet. Only in Air Force One's single bedroom is there activity: George Thomas, Kennedy's valet, lays out a fresh set of clothes for the president to change into when he returns. The day started out rainy and overcast, but now the sun is out, and it's warm for late November. Thomas picks out a lightweight blue suit for Austin, a carefully pressed shirt, and a freshly polished pair of shoes.

Back in the communications shack, Swindal hears the first in a series of puzzling radio calls. The Secret Service agents refer to one another by code names, all starting with D. "Dusty to Daylight," the radio crackles. "Have Dagger cover Volunteer." Dagger, Swindal knows, is a laconic agent named Rufus Youngblood, a thirty-nine-year-old native of Georgia. Volunteer is the code name for Vice-President Lyndon B. Johnson.

The radio suddenly drops out. Swindal worries that President Kennedy's notoriously tricky back has leveled him—he was wearing his cumbersome brace when he left the plane—and the motorcade, on its way to the Dallas Trade Mart for a luncheon, has needed to stop.

Outside on the tarmac, radio operator John Trimble is stretching his legs when a member of the White House Communications Agency, listening to the same Secret Service feed on his portable radio, waves him over. He tells Trimble that someone in the presidential motorcade has been hurt. The plane needs to be readied for takeoff immediately. "My first reaction was that one of the Secret Service agents had fallen from a car," Trimble says later.

He runs up the ramp and onto the plane. In his wake, the crews from two nearby passenger jets—Air Force Two, the vice-president's plane, and the Pan American charter for the accompanying press—stream past Air Force One's wheels, under its shining silver belly. They had been grabbing lunch inside the terminal when they were interrupted by a PA announcement: Time to move.

Swindal asks Trimble to radio the White House switchboard to find out what's happened, or is happening still. He needs a destination. In the meantime, he heads for the stateroom and turns on the TV.

A vague early bulletin hits the screen and then hangs in the air: President Kennedy has been shot. The pilot is soon joined by Thomas, the valet; Sergeant Joseph Ayres, the plane's steward; and the two secretaries, their hands lifted to their mouths. Thomas retreats to the bedroom and begins putting away the clothes he's just laid out. The women start to cry.

The White House confirms to Trimble the terrible news. Through his headset, he listens to the report in disbelief.

12:50 P.M.

General Godfrey McHugh, President Kennedy's top military aide, calls Air Force One from Parkland Hospital. They will be leaving for Andrews Air Force Base, and they will be leaving soon.

Trimble radios Andrews and asks that a voice frequency be kept clear of traffic. He does not want to say why; he doesn't know how far the news has traveled and does not want to be the bearer of it. But Andrews complies with this unusual request immediately—"Roger, sir. The frequency has been cleared"—because the operator likely knows, too.

Swindal orders the fuel tanks topped up. He also disconnects Love Field's mobile air-conditioning unit from the plane. The temperature inside Air Force One begins to rise. Swindal idles only one engine, conserving fuel, providing just enough power to keep on some lights and the TV. Hanson, the copilot, rushes into the cockpit, something like numb. His mother-in-law, who was watching her TV, had yelled the news to him the instant he'd walked through her door. "My mind rejected the idea," he says later, "as though it was some kind of bad dream." He fires up the other engines at least twice, as if wanting to make sure they still work.

Swindal plots a flight plan east to Andrews, over Texarkana, Texas, and Memphis and Nashville. Then the two men wait and cook, unaware of exactly what's unfolding at the hospital only a few miles away. Now Swindal sees a pair of unmarked police cars screaming onto the runway over the morning's puddles and discarded welcome signs.

And he knows.

1:30 P.M.

Lyndon Johnson, trapped somewhere between vice-president and president, is hunched down in the backseat of the first car. Jesse Curry, the chief of the Dallas police, is behind the wheel. Rufus Youngblood and Congressman Homer Thornberry pile out of the back with Johnson. Congressman Albert Thomas, who had waved down the car when it was peeling away from Parkland Hospital, is in the front seat. He jumps out with Curry.

Lady Bird Johnson is in the second car with Congressman Jack Brooks and three more members of the Secret Service. Together they run up the Eastern Airlines ramp at the rear of the gleaming Boeing 707.

Youngblood and the other agents begin running through the cabin, rapidly closing the plane's shades and curtains. There's an uneasy, unspoken feeling that Air Force One could be attacked at any moment, driven into by a gasoline truck, strafed by machine-gun fire from a rooftop. There are enemies out there. With the shades closed and the power mostly off, the plane goes dark.

"I'm sticking to you like glue," Youngblood tells Johnson.

Through one of the last open windows, Sergeant Ayres, the steward, sees a police car swerving across the runway, its tires screeching, its sirens ringing out. If there's a conspiracy, here's the rest of it, he thinks. The Secret Service agents come close to opening fire on the speeding car, filling it with bullets. They would have killed Jack Valenti, an unofficial aide of Johnson's; Lem Johns, a fellow Secret Service agent; Cliff Carter, one of Johnson's closest advisors; and Cecil Stoughton, the White House photographer.

Other cars, with still more passengers, have already pulled up to the bottom of the steps at the plane's rear entrance. There are more Johnson people—Marie Fehmer, his secretary, and Liz Carpenter, a former newspaper reporter turned confidante—and the first wave of Kennedy loyalists: Evelyn Lincoln, the president's secretary, and Pam Turnure and Mary Gallagher, Jackie Kennedy's ladies-in-waiting. The two camps have arrived at Air Force One as if by instinct, propelled by different versions of the same understanding: This plane is for the president.

1:36 P.M.

Johnson and Lady Bird spend their first minute or two on board in the bedroom—two single beds, a nightstand, a painting of a French farmhouse on the wall. The room's ghosts are too new, and the Johnsons are uncomfortable in their company. On the careening drive to Love Field, Lady Bird had looked out a window and seen a flag already lowered to half-mast. "I think that was when the enormity of what had happened fresh struck me," she says later. The Johnsons ask to go to the adjacent stateroom instead.

Lyndon Johnson appears in the hallway. He is six foot three, filling the passage. Everybody in the room jumps to their feet, including the three congressmen, Texans all. Congressman Thomas is the first of them to speak: "We are ready to carry out any orders that you have, Mr. President."

Cliff Carter picks up a white phone in the rear of the plane. Trimble patches him through to his wife in Austin. He asks her to call Rufus Youngblood's wife. Carter heard radio reports of dead agents on his way to Love Field, and he knows these reports are untrue. All of the agents are alive. Only the now former president is not.

His conversation is interrupted by the sound of hammering. In the small aft cabin, behind the bedroom, Sergeant Ayres is removing two rows of seats to make room for a casket.