Truman and his daughter Margret, Ike and Mamie Eisenhower in front of President Kennedy‘s coffin.

Like millions of people across the globe, there was horrified shock among those who had once held the position of President of the United States and First Lady, and most of those who would someday follow, when they heard the news that President Kennedy had been assassinated.

Hoover and JFK 1960.

The dean of former Presidents at the time was 89 year old Herbert Hoover. Although a Republican Hoover not only knew Kennedy well but liked him.

The former President was a longtime friend of Kennedy’s father Joe. Hoover even served as a liaison for him to Richard Nixon after JFK defeated the Vice President in the 1960 election.

When Hoover heard the news at the his apartment in the Waldorf-Astoria he was so shaken that his son feared for his health and rushed to stay overnight with him.

Former President Hoover with then-Senator John F. Kennedy.

Unable to attend the President’s funeral, Hoover asked his two sons to represent him, one at the service in the U.S. Capitol, the other at the funeral. He died just eleven months later.

In Missouri, former President Harry Truman was at lunch in Kansas City’s Muehlebach Hotel when he was told of the shooting. He immediately headed home and heard on the car radio that Kennedy had died.

JFK meeting with Truman in the Oval Office, 1961.

“I was very much shocked and hurt when I heard,” Truman told reporters. “He was a good man, an able President, and he did a good job. And it’s too bad these things have to happen particularly by some good-for-nothing fella who didn’t have anything else to do than to try and take the head of state away from us.

Bess Truman was recuperating in bed from a serious bout of influenza when she heard the news on the radio. She would be risking a relapse if she flew in the late November weather to Washington to participate in the public funeral and events, especially around so many thousands of others.

The Trumans with the Kennedys.

In her stead, daughter Margaret Truman Daniel came down to Washington to meet and escort her father. They arrived on Saturday, November 23 and made their headquarters at Blair House, the presidential guest house which had served as their executive mansion during the renovations on the White House from 1949 to 1952.

Luckily, Blair House was directly across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House so the former President, with his cane to steady him and without Secret Service agents, was able to stride over to pay his respects to the late President in his flag-draped coffin in the East Room and call on Mrs. Kennedy.

Truman arrives at the White House, escorted by Sargent Shriver.

On Sunday, he was able to apparently hitch a ride to the U.S. Capitol and simply walked into the rotunda without any fanfare for the public service attended by the Kennedy family and President Johnson and his family.

Former President Truman, at far left, among mourners in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda when Mrs. Kennedy entered.

How he would get to the funeral service at St. Matthew’s Cathedral and then to Arlington Cemetery for the burial, however, would be a serious problem.

With so many heads of state coming into Washington, all of the government cars were already spoken for.

Eisenhower arrives at the White House.

There were conflicting accounts later written about how former President Dwight D. Eisenhower learned that his immediate successor had been assassinated.

Many accounts, including the one recorded by historian William Manchester in his book, The Death of a President, stated that he learned of it while on the streets of New York from a policeman.

However, at the time of the event, Eisenhower himself described being in a United Nations meeting when someone there was called out for a moment, receiving the message of the shooting. It is likely that it was news of his death from the policeman.

He recalled that each individual fell into silent prayer. Eisenhower had strong, even angry words that the assassination had taken place. Here is a video of his reaction:

With Eisenhower in New York was his wife Mamie, then at lunch with friends. She rushed back to her hotel where she was joined by her husband.

The Eisenhowers and Kennedys at a July 1961 dinner hosted by the President of Pakistan.

They decided to immediately return to their home in Gettysburg, driving themselves. At the time, former Presidents and First Ladies were given no Secret Service agents. As a result of the assassination, President Johnson would insist that they now also receive the protection.

Unlike the Eisenhowers, Harry and Bess Truman balked at the offer and found a clause permitting them to turn it down. However, as they aged and then the former President had a fall they eventually accepted it.

President Eisenhower didn’t tarry at Gettysburg, going to Washington at once, that Saturday. Mamie Eisenhower had to select, press and pack a black winter dress and coat for the funeral and joined him there on Sunday. She spoke by phone to her brother-in-law, especially upset at “those little children” who would now have to live without a father.

She made the short drive to Washington, this time with their aide John Moaney behind the wheel of their car. The Eisenhowers were lucky enough to find a room at the Statler Hilton, there being so many foreign delegations being booked for hotel rooms.

JFK and Nixon at the traditional Al Smith dinner, during their 1960 race against each other, with Cardinal Spellman between them.

The former Vice President and future President Richard Nixon, who had been defeated in the 1960 election by JFK was then in private practice as an attorney. He had actually just left Dallas the morning the Kennedys arrived there. Nixon was concluding a business trip on behalf of his client Pepsi Cola, and recalled seeing the flags and bunting in the airport, in preparation for Kennedy’s arrival.

At the airport in New York when he landed, Richard Nixon went into a taxi as “Do you have a radio in your cab? I just heard that Kennedy was shot.” Nixon’s cabbie had no radio and proceeded into Manhattan. All during the ride Nixon kept telling himself the man might have been deranged or making a sick joke, or that if there was a shooting that it may have missed the President or that he had survived it.

The Nixons in 1963.

When the cab pulled up to his apartment building, however, the doorman opened the door for him and blurted out, “Oh Mr. Nixon have you heard, sir? It’s just terrible. They killed President Kennedy.”  By the time he got upstairs, Pat Nixon already knew. The television show she’d been watching had been interrupted with a news flash. Nixon penned a poignant letter to Jackie, acknowledging his rivalry and political differences with JFK but pointing out that they’d always remained personally friendly.

And that she had been a remarkable, unforgettable First Lady whom the nation loved.

Jacqueline Kennedy invited Dick and Pat Nixon to the President’s funeral in St. Matthew’s Cathedral where they joined national leaders which ranged from Martin Luther King, Jr. to Alabama governor George Wallace. The Nixons also walked with the sea of humanity that then made its way to Arlington National Cemetery for the burial.

Betty Ford, 1962.

Congressional spouse Betty Ford was in the kitchen in her family’s suburban Virginia home when the wall telephone rang.

It was her husband, then the House Minority Leader, calling from his Capitol Hill office. She was shocked, assuming he was still with their son at George Washington University Hospital where he had taken his son Jack to be treated for a minor injury from a sports competition.

Jerry Ford, 1963.

Ford had been there when he’d been told about the shooting and rushed to his office and she had to drive over to the hospital to fetch their son.

A dozen years after the funeral, Jackie Kennedy Onassis and Betty Ford once again saw each other at a 1976 Kennedy Center event.

As a ranking member of Congress, Ford and his wife were in attendance at the Capitol Rotunda service, the private service at the White House, the funeral and the burial.

Betty Ford found she was “too deep in shock to cry,” at the Capitol service. At Arlington, she stood watching as everyone “came pouring over the slope,” feeling more an observer than participant. She waited until after the service until practically all except the groundskeepers were there to finally go up to the casket, now without its flag. Suddenly a button was pushed and the late president’s remains were lowered into the ground. Now, suddenly, it struck her emotionally that “he was really dead.” She began shaking and turned to leave.

Rosalynn Carter also learned about it from a phone call from her husband. She was then sitting in the hairdresser’s and then sprang up from beneath a dryer with her hair half-undone to rush home and be with Jimmy Carter, where they both sat watching the events unfold on television.

Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter, 1963.

Carter had only just won a hard-fought election to the Georgia state senate and racial integration was becoming a heated issue there. When their son Chip’s high-school teacher snapped, “Good!” upon hearing of the pro-civil rights President being killed, the boy became so enraged he stood up – and threw his chair across the room. Suspended for three days as a result, his otherwise strict parents refused to criticize or punish him.

The Reagans at the 1960 Screen Actors Guild Awards. (pinterest.com)

By then largely retired from film work but still doing some television commercials and other appearances, Nancy Reagan had the radio on, “driving my car along San Vicente Boulevard,” in Los Angeles when the news broke about the assassination. She rushed to pick her daughter up at school. Like millions of other families, the Reagan watched the events unfold on television. The 11 year old recalled that her parents did not give way to the sobbing grief that she did, but that when her father wondered why Mrs. Kennedy had not changed from her bloodied clothes, her mother was empathetic in understanding the shock the widow was going through.

The Reagans in 1961 with their daughter Patti and son Ron.

Although Ronald Reagan did not mention the Kennedy assassination in his memoirs, he was then in a transition. The television series he had successfully hosted for many years, sponsored by General Electric had cancelled the show in 1962.

By then, Reagan had signed on to the American Medical Association’s public lobbying effort to defeat JFK’s Medicaire Bill and many Republicans were already encouraging him to join their party and run for national office.

Not dismissing the idea, he had begun cultivating powerful business figures as potential supporters, often hosting social events at their home; when a cocktail party the couple had scheduled fell on the same day as the Kennedy funeral they decided to go ahead as planned.

In the coming years, when Reagan hosted his own weekly radio show, he devoted one program to the question of whether there had been a far wider plot of support for the alleged assassin by a communism network.

George and Barbara Bush in 1963.

George and Barbara Bush, she recalled, were in Tyler, Texas. As Harris County Republican Party chairman, Bush was already gearing up for a U.S. Senate seat in the following year’s election. He would be defeated by incumbent and Democrat incumbent Ralph W. Yarborough, one of the state political figures then feuding with Governor John Connally and part of President Kennedy’s entourage at the time of the assassination. Ironically, just like Rosalynn Carter, Barbara Bush was in the beauty parlor having her hair done when she heard the news. They immediately met up to catch the next possible flight back to Houston, “to be with our children.” First they had to change planes in Dallas, however. There Mrs. Bush recalled how they had to wait to land until the backup plane which followed the one taking the Johnsons, Mrs. Kennedy and President Kennedy’s coffin, had also departed. She found at least some relief in hearing that the assassin had not acted out of domestic political differences with Kennedy, but rather with believed interests in communism versus democracy.

George W. Bush, high school senior in 1963.

Their eldest son, the future President George W. Bush, was then entering his senior year at Phillips Academy boarding school in Concord, Massachusetts. He has not stated where he was when he heard about the news.

Laura Welch Bush in 1963.

Laura Bush, was also then a high school senior, in Midland, Texas. She came from a Democratic family and the Kennedy assassination was particularly upsetting. It was, however, an unusually painful time overall in her life, for she was already numb with grief. Just two weeks earlier, she had driven in a dark, remote area on a country road when her car hit that of a driver who turned out to be one of her closer friends and he was killed.

Hillary Rodham Clinton, 1963.

Young Hillary Rodman was in her high school geometry class when another teacher stormed in and whispered to her teacher, who then told the class. Everyone went home.

Hillary found her mother in front of the television set watching the events unfold – and admitting that she had voted Democratic for Kennedy in 1960, in defiance of Hugh Rodham’s staunch Republicanism.

Bill Clinton meeting Presdient Kennedy. (colorized by Michael Catanachapodaca)

Ironically, her future husband was also in a math class, studying calculus when his teacher was called out of the room by a colleague. The teacher returned and broke the news to the stunned class. For Bill Clinton, the loss felt more emotionally personal than it did for his classmates.

Just four months earlier he had gone as a representative of Boy’s Nation to Washington. There, the group was invited to the White House to meet President Kennedy – and Clinton made sure he got to the front to shake his hand. The Kennedy Administration’s pro-civil rights and Peace Corps initiatives proved to inspire his own political course and the assassinated President had become a genuine hero for him.

When he heard a girl he knew well express the thought that perhaps the loss was better for the country, Clinton recalled it as his first exposure to bold political cynicism. Still, he would soon use JFK as a role model as he began pursing a political career several years later.

Barack Obama in 1963 with his mother, was two years old.

President Obama was only two years and three months old and thus too young to have personal recollections of learning about the event. If another President or First Lady will be able to recall the Kennedy assassination, it would potentially only be the next one elected. Michelle Obama was born less than two months after President Kennedy’s assassination.

When the elderly former Presidents Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower turned up to honor their assassinated successor John F. Kennedy by attending his state funeral it had been over sixty years since a President had been assassinated.

Yet at the Washington funeral of his successor William McKinley, the ailing former President Grover Cleveland had made sure he was in attendance.

Truman and Eisenhower.

Cleveland followed a tradition first set at the Washington funeral of assassinated President Garfield, which former President Grant attended with the new President Chester Arthur. At Garfield’s services in Cleveland, Ohio where he was buried, former President Rutherford Hayes attended.

In their coming together in that same tradition for the Kennedy funeral, one of those moments of connection between those who’ve lived in the White House managed to blossom. When Eisenhower learned that Truman still had no car at his disposal, he offered to share the one he and Mamie were using. The two former Presidents, until recently such acrimonious political foes, not only rode to the funeral but sat together.

Truman and the Eisenhowers at the Kennedy funeral.

On the steps of St. Matthew’s Cathedral, Mamie Eisenhower emerged holding Harry Truman’s hand – and then kissed him on both cheeks. They went to the burial together but finding their seating was impossible and Ike said they were standing out “in left field.” Truman asked if they were hungry – and invited them for sandwiches and coffee at Blair House. Then the two old men broke out the bourbon.

A breathless messenger came over from the White House, profusely apologizing for a mortified Mrs. Kennedy who insisted they come to the reception she was hosting for foreign guests, having forgotten to invite them. Eisenhower gently expressed their mutual feeling that she had more important things to worry about and need not be concerned. It was absolutely understandable, but he and Mrs. Eisenhower would be leaving shortly for Gettysburg. The message was conveyed.

And then Harry and Ike had a few more drinks, their feud of an entire decade over, the hatchet buried. They had a lot of catching up to do.

Related articles

• JFK death news sent ‘wave of grief’ around world (sacbee.com)
• JFK’s limo served three other presidents after assassination, Cuban hitman maybe JFK’s second assassin (dnaindia.com)
• Obama, First Lady, and Bill & Hillary Clinton to Visit JFK’s Grave this Week (blackchristiannews.com)
• Five false facts about JFK (stuff.co.nz)
• The One JFK Conspiracy Theory That Could Be True (ktla.com)
• Losing JFK: 50 years ago, a president died and the nation was thrown into tumult – San Jose Mercury News (mercurynews.com)

Categories: First Ladies, Presidents, Presidents Together, The Bushes, The Carters, The Eisenhowers, The Fords, The Hoovers, The Kennedys, The Nixons, The Reagans, The Trumans

Tags: Bill Clinton, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Gerald Ford, Herbert Hoover, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, John F Kennedy, Mamie Eisenhower, Richard Nixon