On the afternoon of November 22nd, 1963, a blue and white Boeing sat parked on the tarmac at Lovefield, Dallas.
Inside the hot, cramped cabin, Jacquellyn Kennedy stood silently in a pink suit still stained with blood, right beside Lynden B.
Johnson [music] as he raised his right hand and took the oath of office as President of the United States.
Just a few steps from the ceremony, behind the passenger cabin, sat the coffin of John F.
Kennedy, the 35th president, whom this same aircraft had just flown into Dallas and was about to carry back to Washington.
More than six decades later, a lot of people still remember it wrong.
They picture that Air Force One as the Boeing on display at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in California.
But that plane never carried Kennedy, not even [music] once.
The real one, the one that witnessed that hurried oath, sits somewhere else.
And it went on to serve eight more presidents through the escalating years of the Vietnam War, [music] through secret diplomatic negotiations, and through a state visit that reshaped relations between two superpowers before it finally reached its resting place.
Where is it now?
And how much of what it witnessed over all those years still hasn’t been told.
The answer starts in the fall of 1962 when it was still a fresh airframe just off the line at Boeing’s plant in Reton, Washington.
On October 10th of that year, the Air Force took delivery of this specially modified Boeing 707 320B carrying the military tail number 62 6 0 and the designation VC137C.
Though the name that stuck for more than three decades was SAM 26000, [music] short for Special Air Mission.
It wasn’t the first jet to carry an American president, but it was the first one built specifically for that job.
And whenever the president was aboard, it flew under the call sign Air Force One.
It could cross oceans and carried communications gear that let the president stay in touch with the Pentagon [music] and the entire military chain of command.
And in the middle of the Cold War, the ability to keep running the country from the air mattered more than any comfort it offered its passengers.
Kennedy also wanted the plane to project an image of America.
So at his request, Jacqueline Kennedy and designer Raymond Loey [music] came up with its pale blue and white livery with United States of America running the length of the fuselage [music] and the flag painted on the tail.
A look that would become the familiar image of every American presidential aircraft since.
But a modern Boeing with state-of-the-art communications still needed someone experienced enough to fly [music] it.
And the man given that job was Colonel James Barney Swindle.
He was born in 1917 [music] in West Blockton, a small mining town in Alabama into a workingclass family.
His father a carpenter.
And before World War II broke out, he made his living running a crane at a cast iron pipe plant with no family background in politics or aviation at all.
But the attack on Pearl Harbor changed the course of his life.
In February 1942, he joined the army, trained as a pilot, and was sent [music] to the China Burma, India theater, where he flew transport runs over the Himalayas on the route known as the hump, where thin air, ice, high peaks, and weather that could turn in an instant, brought down hundreds of planes.
He survived and kept serving.
And by 1948, [music] he was flying the Berlin Airlift, hauling supplies into a blockaded West Berlin.
By 1960, when Kennedy needed a pilot of [music] his own, the man chosen was a veteran who’d already flown through some of the most dangerous transport [music] missions of the war and the years after it.
Swindle was a quiet man who never made much of what he’d done, and he kept a Bible on Air Force One throughout his years of service.
The man sitting behind him carried a war of his own.
Just as heavy, in 1943, [music] the PT 109 under Kennedy’s command was rammed and sunk by a Japanese destroyer in the Solomon Islands.
And Kennedy pulled the survivors together, towing his badly burned crewmate, Patrick McMahon, through the water himself.
A year later, his older brother, Joe Kennedy Jr., was killed on a secret air mission over England.
The man at the controls [music] up front and the president seated behind him then had each faced war and loss in his own way.
In June 1963, Swindle flew SAM 26000 [music] into West Berlin with Kennedy aboard 15 years after he’d [music] flown supply runs into the same city.
And there Kennedy stood before the crowd and declared, “All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin.”
And therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words.
5 months later, the same pilot flew the president to Texas on a trip still scheduled to continue on to Austin after its first stop, Dallas.
That morning, SAM 26000, took off from Carwell Air Force Base in Fort Worth, flying a short hop of about 13 minutes to Lovefield and landed before noon.
Kennedy and Jacqueline came down the stairs into the Texas sunshine.
And instead of heading straight for the motorcade, the two of them walked over to the fence to shake hands with the people waiting there while the cameras on hand caught the Boeing standing right [music] behind them.
Swindle stayed back at the airport with the crew to prep for the next leg.
And it was there over the radio that he learned about the shooting at Dy Plaza.
The president had been shot and the whole schedule suddenly meant nothing.
From Dallas, Texas, the flash, apparently official, President Kennedy died at 100 p.m.
Central Standard Time, 2:00 Eastern Standard Time, some 38 minutes ago.
Not long after, he got the order to ready the plane for the flight back to Andrews [music] near Washington.
But that order brought with it a problem nobody had ever planned for.
Kennedy’s body would have to go aboard the very aircraft that had only ever been fitted out to serve him alive, and the passenger cabin had no room for a full-sized casket.
The cargo hold could have handled something that bulky, but Swindle and the crew didn’t want to bring the president [music] they’d served home that way.
So together with flight engineer Joe Chapel, they pulled out seats and worked on the rear bulkhead to open up enough space, all of it finished in the short [music] window before the return flight could leave.
Just after 2 in the afternoon, the casket was loaded from Parkland [music] Hospital with Jacqueline riding along beside her husband’s body.
And the same Boeing that had flown him into Texas to continue a state visit now had to carry him home in an [music] entirely different shape.
On that same aircraft, Lynden Johnson still had one more formality to get through before leaving Texas.
Federal Judge Sarah T.
[music] Hughes was brought to Love Field to administer the oath.
And at 2:38 in the afternoon inside the cramped cabin, Johnson raised his right hand and was sworn in as President of the United States [music] with Lady Bird Johnson and Jacqueline standing beside him.
Jacqueline was still in that same pink suit, not yet changed despite being urged to [music] White House photographer Cecil Stodden caught the moment in a photograph that would go on to become one [music] of the most famous images in American political history.
Swindle wasn’t in that photo.
He was up front in the cockpit still working through the pre-flight [music] checks while outside ground crews got everything ready for departure.
And at 2:47 [music] in the afternoon, SAM26000 lifted off from Lovefield so it could stay airborne for a long stretch if the assassination turned out to be part of a larger attack.
In the middle of the Cold War, the crew couldn’t rule anything out.
Swindle climbed to roughly 41,000 ft, higher than its usual cruising altitude as a precaution.
While in the cabin behind him, Johnson worked [music] the phones, handling the urgent business of the new administration, and Jacqueline sat quietly beside her husband’s casket just hours after the two of them had walked down that same staircase [music] together in the Texas sun.
Around 6:00 in the evening, Washington time, [music] SAM 26000, landed safely at Andrews, closing out a flight Swindle would later call one of the hardest experiences of his life.
3 days later at Kennedy’s funeral at Arlington National Cemetery, 50 Navy and Air Force fighter jets flew over the burial site in formation.
[music] And when that formation peeled away, SAM 26000 flew over alone, dipping its wings to say goodbye to the president, who had once [music] sat just behind its cockpit, while aviation records credit Swindle himself as the pilot on that memorial flight.
By 1966, [music] hundreds of thousands of American troops were serving in Vietnam, many of them just 18 or [music] 19 years old, far from home, in a war that kept dragging on with no end in sight.
That October, following the Manila conference, Johnson took SAM 26000 to Camran Bay in South Vietnam, where he met with servicemen from several branches and explained that he couldn’t come to the region without visiting the people serving there in person, [music] then spoke, mingled, and handed out medals.
More than a year later, on December 23rd, 1967, the same Boeing carried him to Camron again.
This time on the way back from Australia just two days before Christmas.
[music] And this time he didn’t just address the troops.
He also visited the military hospital to see the wounded, shaking their hands right at [music] their bedsides and pinning purple hearts on some of them.
For young men being treated thousands of miles from [music] home, the visit came just before a holiday that many of them could only wish they were spending with their families.
And photographs still held by the LBJ Presidential Library capture that exact moment to this day.
The machine that carried Johnson to them was the same plane that had flown Kennedy’s body home to Washington 4 years earlier.
And when Richard Nixon became president in 1969, SAM 26000 [music] kept flying.
Except now its missions were tied to a different side of the war.
The negotiations aimed at finding a way to end the conflict.
Starting in 1970, National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger began using that same plane for undisclosed trips to Paris, where he met with North Vietnamese representatives to try to work out a deal ending American involvement in the war and bringing US troops home.
According to records held by the National Museum of the United States Air Force, SAM 26000 flew 13 missions tied to these secret negotiations, and each one demanded a level of discretion.
The aircraft itself could barely offer.
The words United States of America painted large across its fuselage along with a look the public already recognized [music] forced the crew to plan routes and stops carefully for every sensitive mission.
In 1971, in the middle of all this, Nixon gave it a new name, Spirit of 76, [music] in anticipation of the country’s bsentennial.
Still a few years off.
In February 1972, [music] the plane carrying that name made the trip most remembered from the Nixon years, carrying him and first lady Pat Nixon across the Pacific through Hawaii and Guam before landing in Beijing on February 21st, where Premier Zhao Enli was already waiting at the foot of the stairs to shake his hand in front of the world’s press.
It was the first visit [music] by an American president to the People’s Republic of China.
And that handshake marked a turning point after decades of hostility [music] between the two countries with no full diplomatic relations between them.
In the photographs that captured the moment, [music] the blue and white Boeing stood right beside the stairs 9 years after it had stood in that exact same spot at Love Field on the day Kennedy was shot.
And this time it was carrying a different president into an [music] entirely new chapter for America.
But even as it served as the primary presidential aircraft on that historic trip, it was also nearing the end of a decade at the top.
[music] By the close of 1972, the Air Force took delivery of another new Boeing VC 137C tail number SAM27000.
In December [music] 1972, it officially became the backup aircraft as SAM 27000 [music] took over as the primary presidential plane.
Even though the Nixon family still preferred the older Boeing’s [music] more private cabin layout whenever they traveled together.
But just a few weeks after the handover, it was given a mission that echoed right back to its earliest years of service.
On January 22nd, 1973, former President Lyndon Johnson died at his ranch in Texas and SAM26000 [music] carried his body to Washington for the state funeral.
After the services on January 25th, the same Boeing [music] flew Johnson back to Texas, landing at Bergstrom Air Force Base [music] near Austin so he could be laid to rest on family land.
Nearly 10 years earlier, Johnson had become president aboard this very aircraft [music] in the middle of a chaotic afternoon at Love Field.
Now it was the one carrying him to his final resting place.
Even though it was no longer the primary [music] presidential aircraft, it kept carrying vice presidents, secretaries of state, and American delegations to countries around the world in the years that followed.
In October 1981, [music] after the assassination of Egyptian President Anoir Sadat, it carried three former presidents, [music] Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter, together to Cairo for the funeral, putting men who’d led America in very different eras, side by side on the aircraft originally built for Kennedy.
Across all those changes of administration, eight sitting presidents in all had flown on SAM26000.
[music] Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, George [music] HW Bush, and Clinton.
After more than 36 years in service and over 13,000 flight [music] hours logged, it was retired.
And on May 20th, 1998, it made its final [music] flight to Wright Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio.
It wasn’t the first time it had [music] been there.
Back in September 1971, while still serving as [music] Nixon’s primary aircraft, it had flown him to Wright Patterson for the dedication of the very museum building that now stood there.
And nearly 27 years later, the plane returned to that same spot to end its flying career.
On that last flight, the crew brought it in low over the museum [music] grounds so people below could catch one more sight of it in the sky before it touched down on the old right field [music] runway and taxied into the hangar.
The engines shut down for good.
And with them, every presidential trip, [music] every military mission, every diplomatic journey this aircraft had ever made came to [music] an end.
The Boeing on display at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Semi Valley, California, carries the tail number SAM27000, the newer aircraft brought into service after Kennedy’s time and later used by Reagan and other presidents.
Kennedy never once set foot on that plane.
The Boeing [music] that flew him to Dallas and carried his body home was SAM26000.
Now preserved at the National Museum of the United States Air Force in Dayton, Ohio.
For years [music] after its retirement, it sat on display in a hanger set apart from the main museum, where visitors had to take a shuttle bus and clear security just to get close to it.
But in June 2016, the museum opened its fourth building [music] and moved SAM26000 into the Presidential Gallery, where visitors can now [music] walk straight onto the plane.
The interior changed many times over its years of service, especially under [music] Nixon.
So, not everything inside still looks the way it did in 1963.
But one mark [music] has survived intact.
The cut made in the bulkhead to make room for Kennedy’s coffin.
And visitors today can walk through the very fuselage that witnessed Johnson’s oath and Kennedy’s final flight home from Dallas.
After SAM 26000 [music] reached the museum, James Swindle, by then in his 80s, came back to see it and sat in the cockpit once more.
In the same seat that had carried [music] him across the Atlantic into Berlin and out of Dallas that afternoon.
Now resting in an aircraft that would never fly again, he’d retired from the Air Force [music] in 1971, lived quietly, rarely spoke of what he’d done, and according to his family, hardly wanted to fly at all anymore, unless he was the one at the controls.
After retiring, he flew only once more to attend a relative’s funeral.
He died on April 25th, 2006 at the age of 88.
Kennedy lies beneath the eternal flame at Arlington, and the pilot who flew him home has passed as well.
But the Boeing, the two [music] of them once shared, still sits in Dayton, its door open to visitors.
And amid all the spaces that have changed over the years, a cut in the bulkhead still marks exactly what the crew did on the afternoon of November 22nd, 1963 when they found a way to bring their president home to Washington.
