The recent death of former Lyndon Johnson presidential aide Bill Moyers removes from history quite possibly one of the last eyewitnesses of the swearing in of Johnson aboard Air Force One on Nov. 22, 1963, following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
It was presidential aide Kenneth O’Donnell who stepped into a small cubicle at Parkland Hospital in Dallas, Texas, where Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson anxiously awaited with his wife to learn the condition of President Kennedy who had been shot as his motorcade traversed city streets on a warm fall afternoon.
“He’s gone,” O’Donnell said to Johnson, who because of an assassin’s bullet, had become the 36th president of the United States.
“What was going through Lyndon Johnson’s mind as he stood there, history will never know,” writes Robert A. Caro in “The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Passage of Power,” the fourth volume of his five-part biography of Johnson.
“The only thing clear is that if, during those long minutes of waiting, he was making decisions — this man with the instinct to decide, the will to decide — by the time O’Donnell spoke and the waiting was over, the decisions had been made,” he writes.
Johnson’s first decision was he was not leaving Dallas without Kennedy’s body and his widow, Jacqueline Kennedy, and the oath of office would be administered aboard Air Force One.
Racing through the streets of Dallas with the slain president’s remains, over the objections of the police because what had happened there was a crime scene, they arrived at Love Field and boarded the presidential airplane.
Calls were made to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, the president’s brother, who wanted him to return to Washington as president, but that was legally impossible.
The oath would be administered aboard the plane. A call was made to Kennedy regarding the wording of the presidential oath, and it was eventually dictated to Johnson’s secretary, Marie Fehmer, by Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach who had advised that any federal judge could swear in Johnson, and Johnson knew which one he wanted.
“Get Sarah Hughes,” Johnson ordered Fehmer.
Sarah Tilghman Hughes who was born in 1896 and raised on Myrtle Avenue in West Baltimore, graduated from Western High School in 1913.
She was also descended from the Tilghmans who settled in Maryland in 1660, and one of her ancestors was Tench Tilghman, an aide-de-camp to Gen. George Washington, during the Revolutionary War.
It was Tench Tilghman, in a 1781 ride that has been compared to that of Paul Revere, who rode from Yorktown, Virginia to Philadelphia in four days, to deliver the news to the Continental Congress that British general Lord Cornwallis had surrendered.
A 1917 Phi Beta Kappa Goucher College graduate, Hughes had earned her law degree from George Washington University.
During law school days, Hughes worked as a police officer, and in 1922, married George Hughes, a law school classmate.
The couple moved to Texas where she established a law practice and served as a member of the Texas House of Representatives from 1931 to 1935.
When she was appointed the first and only female district judge in Texas in 1936, at a time when women couldn’t serve on juries, critics said she “should be home washing dishes.”
In the 1930s, she had become an outspoken advocate for women’s rights and penal reform. She lost a bid in 1946 for Congress and during the 1952 Democratic Convention her name surfaced as a possible vice presidential candidate.
President Kennedy appointed her in 1961 to a federal judgeship in Texas, and along with many in the president’s inner and congressional circles, she was wary of his visit to Dallas because of its widespread hostility toward him.
In the building hectic tension and reverberating sadness of the afternoon, it seems Hughes’ whereabouts were unknown.
She had gone to meet Kennedy at the Trade Mart luncheon, and after word had erupted of the president’s motorcade being fired upon, she had left the event.
Fehmer, Johnson’s secretary, was on the phone to Hughes’ chambers and with John Spinuzzi, her law clerk, when Johnson took the phone.
“This is Lyndon Johnson,” the new president intoned sternly. “Find her.”
It was U.S. Attorney H. Barefoot Sanders who located Hughes.
“Where do I go?” Hughes asked.
“Love Field. I’ll clear you with the Secret Service. How soon do you think you can get here?” Sanders asked.
“Ten minutes,” she replied.
The judge’s car roared to a stop at gate 28, where she was escorted aboard Air Force One to the main cabin whose shades had been drawn and was jammed with staff.
Air Force Col. James Swindal, the plane’s pilot, had kept one engine turning to bring in some level of comfort, but the cabin was hot and humid.
The president’s widow, dressed in the blood-stained pink suit she had worn to Dallas that morning, sat calmly with Lady Bird Johnson in the presidential stateroom, waiting for Judge Hughes to arrive.
Johnson asked White House photographer Cecil Stoughton, “Where do you want us, Cecil?” who stood on a sofa in order to get a better vantage point to record the administration of the oath.
Moyers can be seen in the upper right of this historic photo standing next to a bulkhead in the crowded room
“Judge Hughes arrived, a tiny woman in a brown dress decorated with white polka dots, and Johnson showed her to the place Stoughton had selected, in front of the sofa on which the photographer was standing, and someone put a small Catholic missal in her hands,” Caro writes.
The two witnesses Johnson wanted were Jacqueline Kennedy and Evelyn Lincoln, who had been JFK’s secretary.
Johnson’s hands were so large they engulfed the missal as Hughes nervously began to recite the oath that would swear in the 36th president, which took 28 seconds.
“The thing took no more than 10 minutes,” Hughes told The Sunday Sun Magazine in a 1972 interview.
Once he removed his hand from the missal, Johnson gave the order to Swindal, “Let ‘er roll.”
Hughes recalled barely being off the plane before Swindal pulled back the plane’s throttles on its engines and it began making its sad journey through the darkening skies and constellations making their nightly appearance to what is now Joint Base Andrews.
Hughes, who often returned to Goucher for reunions and lectures, was 88 when she died in 1985, and was interred in Hillcrest Mausoleum and Memorial Park in Dallas.
