Non-fiction finalist: Robert A. Caro, The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Volume 4, Alfred A. Knopf. This is about the Sunday after John F. Kennedy was assassinated, on which his body was moved from the White House to the Capitol in the capital. As the sun rose that morning, the rain gone, the blue sky seemingly without a cloud, the broad avenues between the White House and the Capitol were waiting, their roadways completely empty, the crowds lining them on the pavements packed solid, standing in silence in front of the White House. The sounds were of horses' hooves and the creaking of harness and of rolling wooden wheels. A bare black wooden artillery caisson on four black wheels was pulled into the White House driveway and up to the North Portico by six matched gray horses. Two heavy black straps had been attached to the caisson. It stood there in front of the Portico for a while, black and bare, the straps dangling. Then the dress-uniformed men flanking the doorway and the steps down to the driveway came to attention, rifles held high, and eight military pallbearers brought John Kennedy's flag-draped coffin out of the doorway and down the stairs and lifted it onto the gun carriage. The straps were laid across the coffin, black against the bright red and white stripes, and buckled fast so that it couldn't fall off. There was a pause, and suddenly in the doorway there she was. Jacqueline Kennedy was dressed all in black. She wasn't crying; at least there were no visible tears on her face that might have been the model for a portrait of grief. On either side of her was a small figure dressed in a sky-blue coat, and she took her children's hands. Standing behind her, a little to the side, was Robert Kennedy, expressionless, still as a statue. They stood there while the caisson began to move away down the driveway toward Pennsylvania Avenue. A black limousine pulled into the Portico, and the Kennedys walked down the steps and got into it. Behind them, in the doorway, the figures of Lyndon Johnson and Lady Bird came into view and came down the steps. They and the Kennedys were to ride in the same car together. They got in: Jackie and Lyndon in the rear seat with Caroline and John Jr. sitting next to their mother, Lady Bird and Robert Kennedy in the jump seats. The car pulled slowly down the driveway behind the caisson, and as the caisson came out between the gates, the drums began. Few people in Washington, few people in America perhaps, had ever heard the sound of muffled drums. The tension on each drum had loosened so that the resonance was deadened. With a whole corps playing muffled drums as they were playing now, the roll of those drums filled the air — melancholy, ominous, final. And it was to that sound that the caisson came out onto Pennsylvania Avenue to take its place in a column. Ahead of it in the column, after the drum corps, priests marching abreast, three of them, with their black robes billowing behind them; warriors marching abreast, their medals glinting in the sun; the Joint Chiefs of Staff, other generals, other admirals; a company of sailors with fixed, shining bayonets; an honor guard carrying the flag of the dead president's country. And just behind the caisson, bearing the dead president, carried by a single sailor, Jack Kennedy's own flag, the presidential standard. Shielded by the Portico, the standard had hung limp, but as it came out between the gates it was caught by a gust of wind so that it blew straight out, and the golden presidential seal stood out for a moment bold against the navy blue background. Behind that flag came a riderless horse, a magnificent tall black gelding, a sword hanging from the saddle, but in the stirrups boots turned backward to symbolize the fact that his fallen rider would never ride again. Since the days of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane, a riderless horse with boots reversed had followed fallen chieftains to their graves. Blackjack was a restless animal, always hard to control. He was prancing nervously now, tossing his head, trying to rear against the bit. Following him came the limousine carrying the Johnsons and the Kennedys, and then a line of other limousines. After three blocks, the procession wheeled around the corner by the Treasury Building, and suddenly facing the marchers, a mile away, rearing up huge, gleaming, almost dazzlingly white against the clear blue sky, thrusting up out of a base so long that it seemed to fill the horizon, was the dome of the Capitol. Stretching along the Capitol's base were tall white marble columns and the pilasters that are the echoes of columns, and the dome was circled with columns too — circled by columns not only in its first mighty upward thrust, where it was rimmed by 36 great pillars for the 36 states that the Union had comprised when it was built, but circled by columns also high above, hundreds of feet above Pennsylvania Avenue, where just below the Statue of Freedom there was a circle of 13 more slender shafts for the 13 original states, around the structure modeled on a Greek temple in the sky. As the long procession moved down that broad avenue before the packed, silent throng, to the thunderous roll of the muffled drums, it was moving toward columns on top of columns, columns in the sky — a procession carrying the body of a republic's slain ruler in all the stateliness and pomp a republic could muster, toward a structure that represented and embodied all a republic's majesty. For long minutes the drums would roll and the air reverberate with their sad, fateful sound. Then the drums would stop, and so quiet was the watching crowd that in those intervals the clatter of horses' hooves — Blackjack's and those of the matched grays — and the rhythmic tread of the marching sailors echoed down the avenue. Block by block the hush deepened, and, observed General Clifton, marching with the other generals, one was to recall that all you could hear was the drums and the clump of the horses — the drums, those terrible drums. The procession from the White House to the Capitol took about 45 minutes. As the lead limousine came out of the White House gates, there was, Lady Bird Johnson was to recall, a sea of faces stretching away on every side — silent, watching faces. She would remember the flags at half-mast all along the avenue and the sailors marching in front of her, and always there was the sound of muffled drums in the background. But most vivid of all was the feeling of a sea of faces and that curious sense of silence broken only by an occasional sob. Lady Bird sat next to the man her husband hated and who hated him. Robert Kennedy's face was grave, white, sorrowful, she recalls. John John kept jumping back and forth from the back seat to his uncle's lap and back again, until finally Robert said, 'John John, be good, you be good, and we'll give you a flag afterwards.' The only time the attorney general said anything else, Lady Bird recalls, was as the car passed the Old Senate Office Building. The attorney general looked over and said, as though to himself or perhaps to the children, 'That was where it all began. That was where he announced for the presidency.' There was a flinching of his jaw at that moment that almost made — well, it made you, a soul, flinch for him, she says. Thank you.
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