STAR-BULLETIN / 1963
President John F. Kennedy visited Hawaii just months before he was slain.
Sen. Inouye recalls
eerie calm after
JFK’s death
Like any American over the age of 50, Hawaii's senior senator has a vivid memory of the moment on Nov. 22, 1963, when he learned that President John F. Kennedy was shot.
But the stronger memory for U.S. Sen. Daniel Inouye is of the stillness in the U.S. Capitol rotunda as the body lay in state while thousands of people passed by.
"All I heard was shuffling of feet and sniffling," he said yesterday. "I have gone through the rotunda hundreds of times, and it is never still. The acoustics are strange, it is a noisy place, people talking, tour guides giving the pitch. On that day it was eerie."
Six members of Kennedy's staff -- including Secretary of State Dean Rusk and press secretary Pierre Salinger -- had left Honolulu that morning for an economic conference in Japan. For Big Island attorney John Goemans, who headed a U.S. State Department office in Waikiki at the time, the anniversary brings a sense of the security and freedom that has been lost to American leaders ever since.
When Goemans got the news in a telephone call, he headed to Hickam Air Force Base to meet the flight, which returned two hours after taking off. "I was able to just drive through gates and to planeside," Goemans recalled yesterday. "When you compare that to security today, it's unbelievable."
An "extra" edition of the Star-Bulletin 40 years ago told readers of the shooting.
Just five months before his death, the president rode in an open convertible from Pearl Harbor to a speech in Waikiki to American mayors, shaking hands and accepting leis from people who lined the curb.
The weekend after the slaying was a sleepless one for retired Army Col. Albert Turner, of Honolulu, and his colleagues in the military district of Washington, D.C., who had the task of organizing the ceremonial farewell for the fallen leader which would face the scrutiny of a grieving nation and the world.
Turner said the unit regularly rehearsed state funerals with details right down to the number of paces it takes to march from the White House to the Capitol. Specific plans were already in the works for former Presidents Herbert Hoover, Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower and retired Gen. Douglas MacArthur. "For example, Truman was in Missouri. We had an aircraft designed to carry horses in a paddock and the caisson back for burial in Missouri," Turner recalled. "Truman got a kick out of it, but Ike got angry whenever our folks wanted to discuss the ceremony.
"Suddenly we had one we hadn't planned for," Turner said. "We went into high gear." He was eating lunch at his desk when his boss Maj. Gen. Philip Wehle broke the news and set in motion plans that wove whatever Jacqueline Kennedy requested into the established protocol. She wanted the body to lie in state at the White House as had Abraham Lincoln's before being moved to the Capitol. She added Army special forces members to the honor guard and included an Irish unit in the procession. With less than 24 hours' notice, the unit found a way to install a torch to meet her demand for an eternal flame at the Arlington National Cemetery grave site, Turner recalled.
Inouye was a freshman senator, lingering in a room adjacent to the Senate chamber when he read the bulletin from Dallas on a news wire teletype. He said his first impulse was to get a message off to Ted Kennedy, also in his first Senate term.
The senator joined other members of Congress for a private service before the rotunda was opened to the public. "I recall that while the ceremony was in progress, we got word that Lee Harvey Oswald had been killed. There was a stir. I could hear the buzz, but I didn't know about it until we walked out. It was much more unbelievable than a movie, that the killer was killed."
Goemans, a Kennedy family friend since rooming with the president's youngest brother, Ted, at University of Virginia law school, sought a ride from Honolulu to Washington on the Cabinet airplane, but Rusk said no. What did go aboard for the flight were copies of a Star-Bulletin extra edition with news of the slaying.
"I got on the next commercial flight for Washington," said the attorney. The flight stopped in Los Angeles where Kennedy's sister Patricia Lawford and her actor husband, Peter Lawford, boarded. "They sat a row ahead of me. Pat was just wiped out. It was just awful being in that proximity."
Inouye is concerned that younger generations of Americans will not be able to sort out fiction from fact in media coverage this week, which features unproved speculation about conspiracy and the spin of hindsight about the roles individuals or groups played 40 years ago.
"I am a firm believer that Americans should spend more time studying history," Inouye said. "I am reminded here that if you have no foundation to question anything, then you take it as the truth because the presentation sounds very real. Someone with less background, viewing this for the first time ... he may decide to alienate himself and not take any interest in the government."
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