ORONO, Maine — Reg Bowden walked past the Thanksgiving decorations in his tidy home Tuesday and stepped into his old-fashioned office.
There, the 80-year-old man reached into a filing cabinet and pulled out a piece of history: two telegrams sent on the afternoon of Nov. 22, 1963, from Washington, D.C., to Maine Gov. John Reed. The first alerted Reed of the death of President John Kennedy. The second, sent a short time later, was Maine’s official notification that Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson had taken the presidential oath.
Bowden had been Reed’s press secretary, and after the telegrams crossed his desk, he hung on to them. And on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of JFK’s assassination, he feels that he — and the telegrams — have a story to tell. He said he plans to donate them to the Maine State Archives.
“I won’t be around for the 75th anniversary,” Bowden said. “It’s not a story about me. A year ago on Halloween, Gov. Reed died. I started getting phone calls from reporters. I wondered — why are people calling me? Well, I’m the only one left.”
‘Someone’s shot the president’
The story of how the president’s murder reverberated around the Maine State House and beyond begins in Reed’s office. Bowden described Reed as a “moderate, liberal Republican” who kept his three staffers hopping. That Friday afternoon was quiet. The Maine Legislature wasn’t in session and Reed took the opportunity to duck outside to get a haircut. Bowden was working at his desk when another of the governor’s staff came in to announce that something had happened to the president.
“‘They think someone’s shot the president — you’d better get up to the pressroom,’” Bowden remembered administrative assistant Steven D. Shaw telling him. “I bounded up the stairs.”
In the pressroom, The Associated Press news ticker clacked and bells rang. Bowden heard Walter Cronkite announce on television that Kennedy was dead, and ran back downstairs to his office. On the way, he bumped into a janitor.
“I said, ‘I think you’d better go up on the State House roof and lower the flag,’” Bowden recalled. “He looked at me like I’d lost my mind. I told him the president was shot. He still wouldn’t believe it.”
Bowden called down to the Maine state librarian to find out how the state had officially responded during previous presidential assassinations. Then the governor came running back from his haircut and tried to reassure the shaken staffers.
“He said, ‘Don’t worry. Lyndon Johnson’s a good man. He’ll make a good president.’”
‘A bevy of Kennedy women’
Then, the staff sprang into action. The governor wrote a statement to send to Johnson and then a proclamation to the state of Maine declaring a 30-day period of mourning.
“My fingers were going so fast they were jamming up the keys to the typewriter,” Bowden said.
He kept a copy of a first draft of the telegram to the brand-new president, complete with words scratched out and changed by Reed.
“The citizens of the state of Maine stand behind you in this tragic hour as we grieve for our fallen President,” the governor wrote. “May almighty God be with you, now and in the future.”
Some of the official communication flying back and forth via telegram from the nation’s Capitol to Augusta included an invitation for Reed to view the body of the late president on Saturday afternoon and then to attend the funeral services on Monday. Bowden accompanied Reed, U.S. Rep. Clifford McIntire and Adjutant General Edwin W. Haywood of the Maine National Guard to the capitol.
At the White House, Reed told his press secretary to hop out and open the door for the Maine officials.
But the driver took off with Haywood still in the car and Bowden standing outside with Reed and McIntire. So Bowden accompanied the governor and congressman to see Kennedy’s casket in the East Room. The coffin was covered with the American flag and lay in state in the nearly empty room, guarded by four military officers who stood at attention on the highly polished floors.
“Words could not describe it,” Bowden said. “I was awed.”
When they left, they ran through a “terrible” rainstorm to the car and caught sight of something that’s stuck with him for a half-century.
“There was a whole bevy of Kennedy women standing in the rain. Their makeup was running,” he recalled, adding that he didn’t know their first names.
Bowden also remembered going to the U.S. Capitol Rotunda the next day. He was in the circle of somber, dark-suited officials who watched as Jacqueline Kennedy kneeled at her husband’s casket, her small daughter Caroline beside her.
“Everybody was very quiet,” Bowden said.
Some moments stand out as dark comic relief in those first days after the assassination. Jackie Kennedy decreed that officials must wear formal morning dress to attend the funeral, and Reed did not bring a top hat and tails with him on the plane from Maine. The governor hurried to send Maine’s adjutant general to the lone store renting formal wear and got him a suit but not a hat. Bowden went to work, searching the capital-area funeral homes for an available top hat, finally locating one in Maryland.
On Tuesday, the band of Mainers returned to the Pine Tree State, exhausted by the four days of mourning and unusual activity. Bowden headed to his family’s home in Blue Hill that night, but fell asleep at the wheel on a dark road in Belmont. He woke up just in time to avoid an accident.
“That’s how tired I was,” he said. “That’s how I remember the death of the president.”