CHAPTER 3

“SHOW THESE TEXANS WHAT GOOD TASTE REALLY IS”

To many Americans, there was more to John F. Kennedy’s administration—something intangible—than speeches, world travels, multiple crises, and anti-Communism. He had style. Kennedy possessed a glamorous effervescence that made him seem larger than life and a youthful symbol of a new era of American optimism and spirit. He was the first president born in the twentieth century. With his enchanting wife, who was just thirty-four, and two beautiful young children, the telegenic president cultivated a jaunty, athletic public image of a sailor, touch-football enthusiast, sportsman, and father. The public had nicknamed him JFK.

Jacqueline Kennedy, or Jackie, as she was known—became a star in her own right. Sometimes she even outshone JFK himself. Celebrated for her elegant, trendsetting fashion and understated beauty, she appeared on the covers of magazines looking more like an alluring movie actress than a politician’s wife. She was a world traveler and lover of culture. And yet she remained a reserved, quiet person whose desire for privacy made her all the more fascinating to the public. A strong believer in the preservation of America’s past, she undertook a much-needed historic renovation of the White House, hosted a popular and unprecedented television special on the result, and brought the president’s home alive with artists, authors, and musicians.

President Kennedy claps his hands as his children Caroline and John Jr. dance for him in the Oval Office at the White House.

(Cecil Stoughton, courtesy of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum)

John Kennedy’s sharp wit and ability to laugh at himself enhanced his appeal. But he had a dark side. He loved history for its lessons and inspiration, but he was also drawn to its tragedy, irony, and disappointments. And below the surface of his public image of vigor, his cheer camouflaged a lifetime of physical pain and multiple illnesses, including Addison’s disease. Convinced that the American people did not want to see their president as weak or sick, he battled his ailments in secret. Of all his characteristics, John Kennedy had one more important than all the rest—an ability to inspire people, through words and personal example, to attempt great things. It was the core of his mystique.

In August 1963, death whispered in Kennedy’s ear again when it took the life of his newborn, two-day-old son, Patrick. It was Jackie’s second failed pregnancy. But the emptiness that loss created left one saving grace. It drew Jack and Jackie Kennedy close again. They had kept it hidden from the American people, but theirs was not the picture-perfect marriage. Not until years later would any of that become public. He viewed marriage the way a royal prince might see the institution—necessary and useful but not sacrosanct.

BY LATE September, Marina was fed up with life in New Orleans and with her husband, and on the twenty-third she left New Orleans for Irving, Texas, a suburb of Dallas. She was expecting her second child next month, and her friend Ruth Paine had offered to take her in and care for her.

Ruth drove her station wagon from Irving to New Orleans to retrieve Marina and her simple household goods. Marina was pregnant, so Lee carried the boxes and loaded the car. There was also something he did not want her to see.

He had wrapped the Mannlicher-Carcano in a plaid wool blanket. Then, unbeknownst to her, he carried the rifle to the car and slipped it inside. Marina did not discover it until she got back to Texas: “After we arrived, I tried to put the bed, the child’s crib together.” She searched for the metallic parts. “I looked for a certain part, and I came upon something wrapped in a blanket. I thought that was part of the bed, but it turned out to be the rifle.”

The rifle that Lee had used to try to murder General Walker was now back in Dallas. At the time of the Walker attack, Oswald and the Mannlicher-Carcano were barely acquainted. He had owned it for less than three weeks when he attempted to use it to assassinate the general. Now Lee and his rifle were old friends.

LEE LEFT New Orleans too, but he did not head straight to Texas or to his family. He decided to take a long and mysterious excursion between New Orleans and Fort Worth—out of the United States and into Mexico.

On September 27, four days after his departure from New Orleans, Oswald showed up in Mexico City, where he visited the Cuban embassy and applied for permission to travel to Cuba. The Cubans, scoffing at his wild tales of Fair Play for Cuba activities, gave him no special treatment and told him it would take months. Frustrated, he then went to the Russian embassy for help in getting to Cuba or returning to the Soviet Union. The Russians knew he was an odd duck and were in no hurry to allow him back into their country either. He was furious.

THAT FALL John F. Kennedy was worried about the proliferation of nuclear weapons among the superpowers. The United States and the Soviet Union possessed arsenals of several thousand nuclear weapons. Most of them were more powerful and destructive than the two atomic bombs that the United States dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, in 1945 to end the Second World War. Through the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, the nations that possessed nuclear weapons tested their effectiveness and demonstrated their military superiority by exploding them in their own territory, either underground, in the ocean, or in the atmosphere in remote areas far removed from population centers. Nonetheless, the tests still resulted in radioactive fallout, which winds and weather systems could carry for hundreds of miles and contaminate the food supply or towns and cities.

At a historic speech at American University in June 1963, JFK laid out his quest for peaceful cooperation with the Soviet Union. He did not overlook the differences between the nations but invoked “our common interests.” For in the end, he said, “our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.” Kennedy negotiated with the Russians to end atmospheric testing, and in October 1963, he signed a Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. He considered it the most significant achievement of his presidency.

A CHASTENED and humiliated Oswald returned to the United States on October 3, 1963, and went to Dallas, where he visited Marina at Ruth Paine’s house in Irving and spent the weekend of October 11–13. Paine worried that Oswald was having trouble getting a job, so she told some of her friends he needed work. On the night of October 14, Ruth told him over the phone that a girlfriend of hers said they were hiring at a place called the Texas School Book Depository on Elm Street. The next day, Oswald applied in person. The manager liked that he had served in the Marine Corps and addressed him as “sir.” Lee was hired and reported for work on October 16.

Lee and Marina agreed that he would live at a boardinghouse in Dallas during the week and visit Marina at Ruth Paine’s house in Irving on the weekends. Ruth, who disliked Lee and hated the way he treated his wife, hoped Marina would leave him. A neighbor of Ruth’s named Wesley Buell Frazier also worked at the Book Depository, and he offered to drive Oswald from Dallas to Irving on Fridays after work and to the Book Depository on Monday mornings. Marina threw her husband a surprise birthday party on Friday, October 18, and he seemed touched. Then, on October 20, their new baby daughter, Rachel, was born. Perhaps Oswald’s odd and unsettled life would finally calm down.

On October 23, Lee attended a right-wing political rally where General Walker spoke. Was this a warning sign that he was plotting another assassination attempt? Then the Federal Bureau of Investigation made a couple of visits to Marina Oswald. They told her they would like to speak to Lee. It was nothing serious, she was told, just a follow-up to chat with him since he had returned home from Russia almost seventeen months ago. The visits angered Oswald—he believed the FBI agents were harassing Marina. On November 12, he left an angry note at the FBI headquarters in Dallas for agent James Hosty, telling him to leave his family alone.

But he failed to sign the note with his name.

IT WAS the autumn of 1963, and the presidential election was just one year away. John Kennedy planned to run for a second term and hoped to win by a margin wider than he had eked out in 1960. It was essential that he again win the state of Texas. In 1963, warring factions of the liberal and conservative wings of the Democratic Party in that state were at each other’s throats, fighting over which group would control politics in the state. JFK wanted the dispute to end. To increase his chances for reelection, he planned to travel to Texas in late November to campaign with Vice President Lyndon Johnson.

In 1960 Kennedy had chosen Johnson as his running mate—over the strong objection of his brother Robert Kennedy. It was a savvy move. Without Johnson and the electoral votes of Texas, JFK would not have won that election. Texas was to be a major political trip involving private meetings with Democratic leaders, public speeches, and fund-raising events. The president and first lady would visit five cities in two days—San Antonio, Houston, Fort Worth, Dallas, and Austin—and then head to Johnson’s Texas ranch to rest. It was an ambitious schedule packed with activities.

Jacqueline Kennedy would accompany her husband to Texas. She had traveled with JFK to Paris, and without him on private visits to Italy, Greece, India, and Pakistan. But she had not been on a real campaign trip since the presidential election in the fall of 1960. The Texas events would come only three months after her new baby, Patrick Bouvier Kennedy, had died on August 9—two days after he was born.

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 20, 1963. It was one of those legendary Kennedy parties. And although they did not know it at the time, it was also John and Jacqueline Kennedy’s last night together in the presidential mansion. The occasion was a reception for the federal judiciary, including the justices of the Supreme Court of the United States. Several days earlier, the Kennedys had treated hundreds of guests to a performance by the bagpipes and drums of the Black Watch, the legendary British military unit. Kennedy receptions and dinners were already the stuff of legend. One of the most memorable was a dinner that the president hosted for Nobel Prize recipients. He quipped that never had such talent and brilliance been assembled at the White House—since Thomas Jefferson had dined there alone.

The Kennedys looked forward to more social events the next week. On Monday, November 25, they would host their next dinner party—it was to be a state dinner for the new chancellor of West Germany, Ludwig Erhard. The invitations were already in the mail. They loved to entertain—not just at official events but also intimate, private dinner parties and small dances. Often these evenings concluded with guests being invited upstairs to the private family quarters. It was at a small private dinner party in Georgetown where they had met twelve years earlier.

Earlier in 1963 they had celebrated the tenth anniversary of their marriage. Monday, November 25, would also be their son John’s third birthday. Jackie would organize a little party for him before the adults arrived for dinner.

Then, for Thanksgiving that Thursday, November 28, they would travel to Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, and spend the holiday at a Kennedy family home there. Already on JFK’s calendar for December 6 was a special event over which he was eager to preside—the first ever presentations of the new Presidential Medal of Freedom to a group of distinguished Americans. He had created the award and then vetted the names of potential recipients. The ceremony would epitomize the Kennedy style and its celebration of achievements in literature, culture, and the arts.

Just last month, when he spoke at Amherst College in a tribute to Robert Frost, JFK had paid homage to the arts. It was similar to President John Adams’s famous observation that he studied politics and war so that his grandchildren could study poetry and music. True, Jackie was the more passionate cultural devotee in the family (JFK might prefer a private screening of the Hollywood spectacular Spartacus over a sublime solo performance by Pablo Casals), but the president’s enthusiasm for American achievement in all fields was genuine. He was entranced by excellence. When he nominated former football star and Justice Department lawyer Byron White to be a Supreme Court justice, Kennedy said that one of White’s qualifications was that he had excelled in everything he had ever attempted.

After the Medal of Freedom awards, the Kennedys were looking forward to Christmas in Palm Beach, Florida, at the family compound there. The president and Jackie had just signed the first batch of their Christmas cards for mailing later.

John Kennedy loved his job. He savored every moment of it—even the times of crisis and testing. He was never one of those presidents who complained about the debilitating stress and awesome burdens of the office. He knew how lucky he was—not just to be president of the United States, but to be alive at all. In addition to his own narrow escapes, many of those close to him, even some of his own siblings, had died young. He and Jackie had lost their stillborn daughter, who Jackie would have named Arabella, and their son Patrick, who had lived less than two days. Just as JFK had described Robert Frost in Frost’s own words in that October speech at Amherst, he too was “one acquainted with the night.”

But in November 1963, the Kennedys looked forward to the future. Jackie had emerged from her mourning for Patrick. JFK had started to think about the presidential campaign of 1964. His prospects looked decent. To improve them, he had scheduled the three-day political swing through Texas in the week before Thanksgiving, where he would visit the five cities and make numerous speeches, as many as three in a single day.

Jackie had even agreed to join him on the trip. She had never liked campaigning and had not done it since the election of 1960. But she was eager to make this journey. In the fall of 1963, as unlikely as it might sound to a jaded modern reader with fifty years’ worth of cynicism and hindsight in the wake of all the subsequent revelations about JFK’s private life, John and Jacqueline Kennedy might have been more in love with each other this November than they had been since the year they married.

Once they returned from Texas, they could begin again.

The president had received warnings that he might not be entirely welcome in Texas. In Dallas, various political enemies criticized him as either too liberal on civil rights or too soft on Communism. Weeks earlier, the president’s opponents had protested a visit to the city by Adlai Stevenson, Kennedy’s ambassador to the United Nations. In the auditorium where he spoke, hecklers disrupted his speech. Stevenson did not help his cause when he insulted one of them with a prissy tongue-twister: he might as well have said it to the whole state. “Surely, my dear friend, I don’t have to come here from Illinois to teach Texas manners, do I? . . . I believe in the forgiveness of sin and the redemption of ignorance.”

It was exactly the aspect of Stevenson’s prickly, egghead personality that made JFK dislike him. When, outside, the ambassador asked an angry woman how he might help her, she hit him in the head with a cardboard picket sign. Jackie may have been a fan of Adlai—they enjoyed private dinners in New York City—but the two-time Democratic presidential nominee and two-time loser rubbed Jack the wrong way. Thus Stevenson was never accepted into JFK’s inner circle.

Several people had warned JFK to stay out of Dallas. The previous month, on October 3, Senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas suggested during a meeting with President Kennedy that he not go there. “Dallas is a very dangerous place. I wouldn’t go there. Don’t you go.” The hostile reception that Adlai Stevenson received in Dallas on October 24 seemed to confirm Fulbright’s counsel.

And on November 4, Byron Skelton, Democratic national committeeman from Texas, sent a letter to Attorney General Robert Kennedy that warned him about the hostile political climate in the city.

“I am worried,” he confessed, “about President Kennedy’s proposed trip to Dallas.” He mentioned a prominent figure in the city who had complained that JFK “is a liability to the free world.” The insult troubled Skelton. “A man who would make this kind of statement is capable of doing harm to the President.” Skelton suggested that Kennedy bypass Dallas.

Skelton was so worried, he also wrote a warning to an aide of Lyndon Johnson, and the following week, when Skelton was in Washington, he alerted two other men at the national committee. One woman from Dallas sent a letter to presidential press secretary Pierre Salinger. “Don’t let the president come down here. I’m worried about him. I think something terrible will happen to him.” Others expressed misgivings about the visit.

But no warnings would intimidate John Kennedy enough to stay out of Dallas. First, he was a fatalist. Second, he dismissed such warnings as exaggerations. And third—and this was the most important reason he refused to drop Dallas from his itinerary—JFK believed that no president of the United States should ever be afraid to visit an American city.

Any man who showed such fear was not, in John Kennedy’s opinion, up to the job. He was going to Dallas.

Before the Texas trip, JFK was less interested in threats than he was in what Jackie planned to wear to Texas. In general he was happy to leave such matters to her personal taste—except when he saw the bills. Often she tried to conceal the cost of her purchases. On one occasion, she insisted that reports of her extravagance were so exaggerated they could not be true. “A newspaper reported that I spent $30,000 a year buying Paris clothes and that women hate me for it,” she moaned. “I couldn’t spend that much unless I wore sable underwear.” But aside from occasional spats about the expense involved, JFK did not micromanage Jackie’s wardrobe. Of course he wanted her to look good, and she always did.

But he was concerned how she would look in Texas. “There are going to be all these rich Republican women at that lunch [in Dallas on November 22],” he told her, “wearing mink coats and diamond bracelets, and you’ve got to look as marvelous as any of them.” But don’t, he cautioned, go over the top. “Be simple—show these Texans what good taste really is.”

He need not have worried—Jackie rarely overdid it. In the family quarters of the White House, she began to show him the outfits she had chosen for the trip, holding them up in front of her body one after the other. Three of the most attractive outfits included a black velvet dress, a matching white wool suit, and a matching pink suit.

AT THE White House on the morning of Thursday, November 21, John and Jacqueline Kennedy said good-bye to their daughter, Caroline. On the lawn, three helicopters, their rotor blades spinning, prepared to leave for Andrews Air Force Base, where their jet was waiting. Their son, John, who would celebrate his third birthday in a few days, loved flying in the helicopter; as a special treat, they agreed to take him along for the ride to Andrews. The president sat with his boy and a few Secret Service agents in the first copter. Staff members climbed aboard the other two. But the president’s helicopter could not take off. Jackie was nowhere in sight. Then, dressed in a white two-piece suit, she left the White House and walked to her husband’s aircraft. She was the last person to board.

Awaiting the party at Andrews was Air Force One, the sleek new jet that had become the symbol of the modern presidency. The plane had gone into service on October 21, 1962, making John Kennedy the first and only president to have flown in it so far. It was a beautiful aircraft decorated with two tones of bright blue paint and a big red, white and blue American flag painted on the tail. Raymond Loewy, the famous industrial designer, had given the aircraft his imprimatur, and JFK himself had approved the design.

Kennedy considered the aircraft one of the great perks of the presidency and a big step up from his own private plane—the Caroline, on which he had flown all over the country during his pursuit of the presidency. Kennedy’s blue and white Caroline was a twin-engine Convair 240 that seated sixteen; it had been purchased by the president’s father, Joe Kennedy, in 1959. The plane had a galley and a bedroom, and Kennedy and his staff used it to great effect during the campaign. But it was a puddle jumper compared to the majestic presidential jet.

At Andrews, John Kennedy Jr. wanted to get on the plane and fly to Texas with his parents. The president told his son he could not come on the trip, and explained that he would see him in a few days. His parents would be home before his birthday. The Kennedys said good-bye to their son and boarded Air Force One for the flight to San Antonio. The plane took off, bearing the president and first lady west to Texas and two busy days of back-to-back events. John Jr., accompanied by Secret Service agent Bob Foster, returned to the White House by helicopter.

John Kennedy had left some unfinished paperwork behind on his desk in the Oval Office, including an autographed photograph he intended as a gift for a supporter. After inscribing the photo, he had neglected to sign it. It was of no consequence. He could add his name once he returned from Texas.

THE DAY the Kennedys left the White House for Texas, a man waiting twelve hundred miles away in Dallas was eager for the president to arrive. He was not an important politician who wanted to discuss business with President Kennedy. He was not a supporter who hoped to shake his hand, nor one who had purchased a ticket to the November 22 breakfast to be held for several hundred people in nearby Fort Worth, or for the big lunch scheduled in Dallas that afternoon.

Nor was he a political opponent of John Kennedy’s who planned to protest his policies with a homemade, hand-lettered cardboard sign. No, this man who awaited John Kennedy in Texas had something else in mind. He wanted to kill the president.

But the man’s timing was strange, because these feelings had come on all of a sudden. Just two days earlier, on the morning of Tuesday, November 19, 1963, when Lee Harvey Oswald awoke in Dallas, Texas, he did not know that within the next three days, he would decide to murder the president of the United States. If a fortune-teller had prophesied this future, the twenty-four-year-old married father of two children might not have believed it.

Indeed, among Oswald’s corrosive obsessions—and there were many—John F. Kennedy was not one. There is no evidence that Oswald hated the president. Much evidence suggests he did not think about him much at all. He had no long-standing fixation with Kennedy. He had not made him the primary subject of his everyday conversations. He had not been stalking the president or, as far as can be told, fantasizing about killing him. Among Lee Harvey Oswald’s list of long-simmering resentments, frustrations, and grievances, the Kennedy presidency was not one of them.

This is not to say that Lee did not harbor violent fantasies. From Moscow, he had written to his brother Robert on November 26, 1959, that he would like to see the government of the United States overthrown: “In the event of war I would kill any American who put a uniform on in defense of the American government—any American.” But he had never spoken that way about John Kennedy.

ON THE nineteenth, the Dallas Morning News had published the details of the route President Kennedy’s motorcade would follow when, in three days, Air Force One would lift off from Fort Worth and land at Love Field, Dallas. From there, the presidential limousine—a big, custom-built Lincoln Continental convertible—would take JFK on a long, circuitous motorcade through downtown Dallas to a lunch for more than 2,000 people at the Trade Mart, a huge convention center and wholesale merchandise mart.

The motorcade was unnecessary. There were shorter, quicker routes from Love Field to the Trade Mart. But a parade would allow tens of thousands of Dallas citizens who would not otherwise glimpse JFK to assemble on the sidewalks and streets to see the president in person.

In addition, many people working in office buildings along the route could open windows overlooking the street to enjoy a good, unobstructed view of the president. After the limousine drove through downtown Dallas, it would turn right from Main Street to Houston Street, proceed one block, turn left on Elm Street, and finally, as the crowds thinned in an area known as Dealey Plaza, pick up speed, vanish under an underpass, and follow the Stemmons Freeway for a short trip to the Trade Mart lunch.

Anyone familiar with the streets of Dallas would know that after the president’s car turned left onto Elm, it would pass directly below a seven-story office building and warehouse known as the Texas School Book Depository. Everybody knew the Depository. It had a big, yellow clock atop the roof—put up by the Hertz rental car company—that made it a local landmark.

Lee Harvey Oswald was familiar with Dealey Plaza. Since mid-October, before the president’s Texas trip had been finalized, he had held a job at the Depository as a low-level order filler who moved cardboard boxes of school textbooks around the building and pulled boxes to fulfill customer orders. But he didn’t know that John F. Kennedy would be driving right past the place he worked in three days because he probably failed to read the newspaper on the day the story ran. Too cheap to buy a daily paper, Oswald was in the habit of reading stale, day-old newspapers left behind in the lunchroom by coworkers. Thus, it is possible that it was not until the morning of Wednesday, November 20, two days before President Kennedy was scheduled to arrive in Dallas, that Oswald learned for the first time that the president of the United States would drive past his work-place.

Oswald must have realized the implications of what he had just read: someone with the mind to do it could open a window on one of the upper stories of the Book Depository, wait for the president’s motorcade to drive by, and shoot Kennedy as he passed. The distance between an open window on, say, the fifth, sixth, or seventh floors and Elm Street was too great to fire a pistol at a stationary target below, let alone at a moving car. A pistol’s short barrel could not guarantee sufficient accuracy at that range. But Oswald would have known from his military training that someone would need to use a rifle to hit someone from such a distance.

It had never been attempted before: no American president had ever been assassinated from long distance by a rifle. Three of them—Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, and William McKinley—had all been murdered at close range—no more than several feet—by lone gunmen firing pistols in 1865, 1881, and 1901. But sometimes pistols were not enough to get the job done.

In 1912, former president Theodore Roosevelt had been shot in the chest with a revolver during his campaign for reelection as a third-party candidate, but he survived the wound. On February 15, 1933, an assassin in Miami, Florida, fired a pistol at a convertible car occupied by president-elect Franklin Roosevelt. The gunman missed his target but wounded the mayor of Chicago, Anton Cermak, who was standing next to Roosevelt. Cermak died the next month.

And on November 1, 1950, two Puerto Rican nationalists who wanted complete independence from the United States tried to assassinate President Harry Truman by fighting their way with pistols into Blair House, the government guesthouse where he was living during White House renovations. The terrorists shot three policemen, wounding one fatally. One of the assassins was killed, and the other was captured. The gunmen never got into the president’s residence.

Four years later, on March 1, 1954, while Congress was in session, a gang of four other Puerto Rican nationalists sitting in the visitor’s gallery of the House of Representatives opened fire with semiautomatic pistols wounding, but not killing, five congressmen. To this day, bullet holes from this attack scar the furniture in the House chamber. No, a pistol was not a foolproof weapon for an assassination.

SO ULTIMATELY John Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald were brought together by a staggering coincidence. It is likely that Oswald would never have thought of killing Kennedy at all if the publicized motorcade route had not taken JFK to the doorstep of Oswald’s place of employment. It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity—the president was coming to him!

Earlier in the year, on March 15, less than a month before he tried to assassinate General Walker, Oswald wrote to his brother Robert: “It’s always better to take advantage of your chances as they come along.”

Oswald must have thought about it. He possessed the necessary skill and equipment. He had learned to shoot in the U.S. Marine Corps, and he owned a rifle. He could do it. Yes, he could. But would he? And why?

Sometime between the morning of November 19 and the afternoon of November 21, Oswald decided to assassinate President Kennedy. No one knows exactly when he made that decision. It could have been as early as the morning of Tuesday, November 19, but only if he broke his habit and read the morning paper the same day it came out. If he followed his usual custom, then he would not have read Tuesday’s paper until the following day, the morning of November 20. Once Oswald read the day-old paper, perhaps he also consulted Wednesday’s Dallas Times Herald, the afternoon paper, which confirmed the motorcade route. Then, on Thursday, November 21, to make sure that the public knew where to go to see the president, the morning paper published a map of the route that Kennedy’s limousine would follow.

WHEN AIR Force One landed at San Antonio International Airport, Jackie Kennedy was first to disembark, ahead of her husband. He wanted the crowd to see her first. JFK loved the excitement she caused. Waiting to receive them was Vice President Lyndon Johnson, along with various dignitaries. Johnson had flown from his ranch to San Antonio on his own private plane, arriving about an hour before the president. He killed the time by having lunch with his wife and getting a haircut. A reception committee presented Jackie with a bouquet of yellow roses.

Also waiting was the presidential limousine, flown in the night before from Washington. It was a Lincoln convertible that had been custom-built by the Ford Motor Company. A second car had also been flown to San Antonio—a 1955 open-top Cadillac that followed close behind the president’s car in motorcades and that the Secret Service had nicknamed the Queen Mary.

One hundred twenty-five thousand people lined the motorcade route, including a large number of high-school students carrying flags and friendly signs. At one high school, each student waved an American flag. In honor of the president’s visit, merchants had put up their Christmas decorations one week early. A handmade sign tried to entice Jackie to slip into a swimsuit: JACKIE, COME WATERSKI IN TEXAS. Other signs welcomed the Kennedys in Spanish.

Outside the airport, JFK had spotted one disturbing sign. It did not protest his visit—but warned him of racial injustice: MR. PRESIDENT, YOU ARE NOW IN A SEGREGATED CITY.

Along the whole route, crowds cheered the motorcade. They were loud and would not stop screaming. It was a fantastic welcome that put the president in a great mood.

The motorcade took him to Brooks Medical Center, a United States Air Force facility, where twenty thousand people waited for him to give an outdoor speech on the “New Frontier.” When the Kennedys got out of their limousine, the crowd went wild. People clamored to present gifts. One wild woman broke from the crowd and reached Jackie. “Mrs. Kennedy, Mrs. Kennedy, please touch my hand!”

As in da Vinci’s painting of God touching his fingertip to the form of man to give him life, Jackie touched the woman. In ecstasy the Jackie disciple cried out, “O, my God! She really did touch me. She really did.”

John Kennedy gave an invigorating speech on the challenges of the future.

“We . . . stand on the edge of a great new era filled with both crises and opportunity. . . . It is an era which calls for action, and for the best efforts of all those who would test the unknown and the uncertain in every phase of human endeavor. It is a time for pathfinders and pioneers.”

The president turned to one of his favorite topics.

“This nation has tossed its cap over the wall of space—and we have no choice but to follow it . . . with the help and support of all Americans, we will climb this wall with safety and with speed—and we shall explore the wonders on the other side.”

From Brooks Medical Center, the Kennedys rode in a half-hour motorcade to Kelly Field, a military airfield adjacent to San Antonio International, where Air Force One had been moved. Five thousand people waiting for them there cheered their arrival. They boarded the plane at 3:48 P.M. for the forty-five-minute flight to Houston.

EVEN BEFORE John Kennedy had touched down in San Antonio at 1:30 P.M. on the afternoon of November 21, Oswald had already decided to kill him. A deviation from Oswald’s normal behavior offers an intriguing clue. On the morning of November 21, he ate breakfast at the Dobbs House restaurant. He was not in the habit of eating breakfast out, and he couldn’t afford to do it. Did breaking his routine by treating himself to a special breakfast signal that something was different and that he had decided by the morning of the twenty-first to assassinate the president?

Depending on the exact timing of his decision, Oswald had about twenty to fifty hours to make—and carry out—his scheme. He was a trained and experienced rifleman who would have known that a successful assassination required careful advance planning.

He could not just poke his rifle out of a random Book Depository window on the spur of the moment on November 22 and start shooting, hoping to hit his target. No, a proper sniper attack combined angles, timing, stealth, concealment, and patience. And an escape route. Oswald could not leave these details until the last minute.

Where, Lee Oswald might have asked himself, was the best location in the Texas School Book Depository from which to shoot someone driving by on Elm Street?

One of the upper floors, high over the street, would place him above the sight lines of parade watchers and the passengers in the multicar motorcade. That way he could position himself to shoot down at the president, from an angle that would make it difficult for witnesses to spot him. Oswald chose the sixth floor. It was a floor he knew well. He had spent a lot of time up there wandering around with his clipboard and searching for boxes of books to fill customer orders.

Additional circumstances made the sixth floor an even better choice. A portion of the wood flooring was being refurbished, so workers had moved many heavy cardboard cartons full of books to the south side of the floor, near the row of windows looking down upon Elm Street. There were twice as many boxes on that side of the building as normal. Stacks of them obstructed a clear sight line across the room and would shield anyone who wanted to remain hidden from anyone else on that floor. It would be as easy as a child stacking building blocks to move some of those cartons and arrange them into a wall on November 22. Oswald could set up his position at the window of his choice. He could even shift a couple of boxes to the edge of the windowsill and rest his rifle on the top one to steady his aim.

The large number of boxes on the floor would also make it easy for Oswald to stash his weapon. On November 22, he would need to hide the rifle from other Book Depository workers for four hours, between the time he brought it to work by around eight A.M. until around noon, when he would retrieve it. Then he would take his position behind the boxes and wait for his prey.

After he shot the president, what would he do with the rifle? Oswald planned to leave the weapon behind at the Book Depository. There was almost no chance he could descend five flights of stairs (or take the elevator) without encountering coworkers or any policemen or Secret Service agents who might storm the building after they heard the shots. It wouldn’t look good if he was clutching the rifle in his hands. Even if he didn’t pass anyone while escaping the building, he could hardly expect to stroll unnoticed down Elm Street with a rifle slung over his shoulder. He could try to disassemble it on the sixth floor and stuff it into the same brown paper bag he planned to use to carry it to the Book Depository the morning of the twenty-second, but that would cost too much time, at least one minute and maybe two. Every second would be precious to Oswald’s escape. He would have to abandon his weapon on the sixth floor.

No criminal wants to leave a murder weapon behind at the scene of the crime. A firearm is an incriminating piece of evidence. It can bear fingerprints that identify a gunman. Firearms possess serial numbers that can be traced. The inside grooves of a rifle barrel leave unique marks on a bullet so that a spent round can be identified later as having been fired from that particular weapon. A brass cartridge case ejected from a rifle after the bullet has been fired can bear telltale signs that match it to the weapon from which it came.

It was risky for Oswald to leave his rifle at the Book Depository. Yes, he had purchased it by mail under a false name using a postal money order, not a personal check, and he had directed it to be shipped not to his home address, but to a post-office box, which he had rented using a false name. But even taking those steps did not guarantee secrecy. There was still a chance that law-enforcement officials could trace the weapon to him, but that, he figured, should take a while.

The would-be assassin had now chosen his floor and his method of disposing of his weapon. Now he had to pick his window. Fourteen large, tall double-hung windows ran along the south wall facing Elm Street. President Kennedy would drive within view of all of them. Oswald had a choice of any of them from which to aim his rifle. He selected one, the window at the far southeast corner. At some point he might have rehearsed his plans, performing a walk-through of the assassination.

Perhaps he walked the length of the wall, peering down to Elm Street through each window, assessing the suitability of its angle of view. At the last window on the left, Oswald must have noticed its two advantages over all other windows on the floor. First, it looked straight down Houston Street, the route that Kennedy’s limousine would follow to Elm Street on November 22. As Oswald watched the traffic come up Houston Street, he had to have seen what an easy target a car on that road would be.

The president would follow that identical route. In other words, for one block, the president would drive directly toward the Depository, up Houston Street, and toward that window. From Kennedy’s point of view, the window was the one on the far right end of the sixth floor. From Oswald’s point of view, he would have an unobstructed, head-on look at the president’s car as it drove closer and closer toward the Book Depository.

Second, right below the Depository, the president’s car would have to slow almost to a stop to make the hairpin, tight-angled left turn onto Elm Street. Then, from almost the moment the car made the turn and then continued along the length of the Book Depository, anyone standing in that window would have, for at least ten or fifteen seconds, a perfect view of the back of the presidential limousine. That was plenty of time to get off two to four well-aimed shots. No other window on the sixth floor offered an earlier look at the president’s approach up Houston Street or a longer look at the back of the car once it turned onto Elm. This was where Oswald would build his sniper’s nest.

BY THE afternoon of Thursday, November 21, Oswald was willing but not yet equipped to carry out an assassination the next day. Oswald was spending weekdays at a Dallas rooming house at 1026 North Beckley Street, while Marina lived in Mrs. Ruth Paine’s house in Irving. He kept his .38-caliber snub-nosed revolver and its leather belt holster (designed for concealment) in his room. Police-style revolvers, unlike Oswald’s, had longer barrels, which made them more accurate but harder to hide from view. But he needed his rifle. It was at Mrs. Paine’s house, in her garage, lying flat on the floor, wrapped in a blanket. But it was a Thursday, not a Friday, and he was not supposed to drop in at Ruth Paine’s unannounced. He had never gone to Irving on a weekday. Tonight, he would have to make an exception to that rule. Lee, who did not own a car or have a driver’s license, asked Buell Wesley Frazier for a ride to Irving. Buell had been giving Oswald a lift to Irving every Friday.

Between eight and ten o’clock on Thursday morning, Oswald approached Frazier at a first-floor work table, handling orders.

“Could I ride home with you this afternoon?”

“Sure. You know, like I told you. You can go home with me anytime you want to, like I say anytime you want to go see your wife that is all right with me.”

Frazier’s house, at the corner of Westbrook and Fifth, stood about half a block east from Ruth Paine’s, both on the north side of Fifth. Frazier realized it wasn’t Friday, Lee’s customary day to visit Marina for the weekend.

“Why are you going home today?”

“I am going home to get some curtain rods. You know, put in an apartment.”

“Very well.”

Frazier asked Oswald if he would also like a ride home after work tomorrow afternoon too, on Friday afternoon after work, but Lee said no, he did not need a ride on November 22. He would not be going home to Marina that day. For the rest of Thursday, they did not talk any more about the ride. They got off work at 4:40 P.M., and Buell drove Lee to Irving. It usually took until 5:20 P.M. to 5:35 P.M. to get there, depending on traffic and the length of stops at train crossings. During the trip, neither man mentioned President Kennedy’s visit to Dallas.

Oswald’s morning conversation with Frazier offers a clue that Lee had decided by no later than ten A.M. on Thursday, November 21, to assassinate President Kennedy. And the fact that he did not bring his revolver to work that morning is persuasive evidence that he had not decided by the night of Wednesday, November 20, to commit the murder. If he had, he might have brought the pistol to work the next morning and hidden it overnight in the Book Depository. So Thursday morning was Oswald’s last chance to carry the revolver from his rooming house and sneak it into the Depository. He could not go to his Dallas rooming house on Thursday evening to get it—that night he needed to drive with Wesley Frazier to Irving to get the rifle from Mrs. Paine’s garage.

Lee also wanted to see the babies and Marina one last time. There was something he wanted to ask her.

ABOUT TEN minutes before Lee Oswald’s workday at the Depository ended, Air Force One touched down in Houston at about four thirty P.M. There was another enthusiastic reception committee, another three-dozen gorgeous yellow roses for Jackie, another eager, straining crowd held back by a railing. The Kennedys worked the line, reaching over the top and shaking hands as they walked.

Several women grabbed both of Jackie’s hands simultaneously, making it seem as if they might lift her off the ground and pull her over the railing. She called out to Congressman Albert Thomas, whom JFK would honor that night at a huge dinner. “Don’t leave me!” Jackie pleaded. “Don’t get too far away.” Thomas and some of the other dignitaries rescued her and escorted her toward the car.

In Houston, she and the president would not ride in their Lincoln limousine. It had been flown ahead to Dallas for the big, forty-five-minute motorcade that would happen there tomorrow. About 175,000 people had turned out for the Houston motorcade. When the Kennedys arrived at the Rice Hotel, they retired to their suite.

WHEN LEE Oswald showed up at Ruth Paine’s home in Irving, Marina was surprised, and not too happy, to see her quarrelsome, violent husband. She showed her anger by refusing to speak to him. “He was upset over the fact that I would not answer him. He tried to start a conversation several times, but I wouldn’t answer.”

Then Mrs. Paine came home after shopping for groceries. She was not pleased to find him at her home on a day he was not supposed to be there. Marina was exasperated because she had discovered that Lee was living under an alias at the Beckley Street rooming house. Recently, when she had telephoned there to speak to him, she was told that no one by the name of Lee Oswald lived there. Marina thought all this mystery and secrecy was too much. It reminded her of his behavior when he had attempted to assassinate General Walker. She had demanded that her husband explain why he was using a false name again.

Oswald’s visit was a pretext to go into the garage and retrieve his Mannlicher-Carcano. He planned to spend Thursday night in Irving and then on Friday morning bring it to work. Perhaps the sight of his attractive young wife, his two-year-old daughter, and his newborn baby girl softened his murderous heart. Maybe he would not kill President Kennedy the next day after all. He spoke kind words uncharacteristic of a killer.

Lee told Marina he loved her and asked her to move back to Dallas and live with him there. “He suggested that we rent an apartment [there]. He said that he was tired of living alone.” She said no. He said he would rent a nice apartment for them and the children where they could begin their lives anew. She refused. Then she tested him. “I told him to buy me a new washing machine.”

It was hard for her to keep up with the laundry for two small children. When he agreed to do it, she rebuffed him and said she didn’t want it after all. Marina told him it would be better if he spent the money on something else, for himself.

If Oswald was not reconsidering killing Kennedy, he would have had no reason to find a better apartment or purchase a washing machine.

Like a lot of married couples that day, the Oswalds discussed President Kennedy’s forthcoming trip to Dallas. Marina wanted to see JFK and Jackie. “I asked Lee whether he knew where the president would speak, and I told him that I would very much like to hear him and see him. I asked how this could be done.”

Lee did not tell Marina that she could go to Love Field to watch the president’s plane land. He did not tell her that she could catch the motorcade as it crawled through downtown Dallas. And he did not reveal what he already knew—what he was already counting on—that the president’s motorcade would pass through Dealey Plaza, turn onto Elm Street, and drive right past the Texas School Book Depository, where he had worked for the past six weeks, and that she could meet her husband outside and see the president there. No, to Marina he pleaded ignorance. “He said he didn’t know how to do that,” she recalled, “and didn’t enlarge any further on that subject.”

Marina did not know that Lee knew exactly where to find President Kennedy. Nor could she know that her treatment of him tonight would help him decide to follow through with his plans to see the president tomorrow.

“I was angry,” Marina said about that night. “He was not angry—he was upset. I was angry.” Lee told her that he was lonely because he had not been to visit her the previous weekend. Ruth Paine had planned a family event, and she did not want him there. “He said that he wanted to make his peace with me.” Marina saw that “he tried very hard to please me. He spent quite a lot of time putting away diapers and played with the children on the street.” But Marina would not give in. Perhaps, she wondered later, whether she had been too hard on him.

WHILE THE Oswalds were bickering about their family life, John and Jacqueline Kennedy rested in Houston’s Rice Hotel and dressed for the evening. The president put on a fresh shirt and suit. He liked to look good, and he was in the habit of changing clothes several times a day, even when home at the White House. His personal valet, George Thomas, was with him on the Texas trip and took care of all of his wardrobe needs. Jackie dressed in a black velvet suit. Her dark hair and the dark fabric framed her pale face and seemed to make her skin glow. Then she fastened on a pearl necklace and diamond earrings.

Now, dressed for the big dinner they would attend that night, the president of the United States and his wife sat down together in their hotel suite and dined alone. It was impossible for any president to eat a meal in peace at a political dinner. So many people wanted to talk to him that he never had a moment even to raise a fork or spoon to his mouth, let alone chew the food.

So the Kennedys ate their own dinner before the public one. They did not know it, but this was to be their last private dinner together. So this was John Kennedy’s last gaze across the private dinner table at a beautiful young woman, the mother of his two children, dressed in understated but gorgeous elegance, practicing in her head the speech she would deliver in Spanish that night in the hotel ballroom, to the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC).

John Kennedy could not have known it, but that night another man having his last dinner with his wife was still planning to bring his rifle to work tomorrow.

After the First Couple finished their meal, Lyndon Johnson visited their suite for an animated private talk about the political rivalries and bruised egos that existed among Texas elected officials and were causing some ill will on this trip. Jackie went to another room to practice her speech, but she could hear loud voices on the other side of the door. She thought the two men were arguing, but they were not.

When Johnson left, Jackie came out to see her husband. Jack told her that he and the vice president had not had a fight. Oh no, Jack assured her. Then, apropos of nothing, Jackie said she could not stand Texas governor John Connally.

“Why did you say that?”

“I [couldn’t] stand him all day. He’s just one of those men—oh, I don’t know. I just can’t bear him sitting there saying all these great things about himself. And he seems to be needling you all day.”

The president gave his wife a brilliant piece of advice that revealed what an astute political psychologist he was. “You mustn’t say you dislike him, Jackie. If you say it, you’ll begin thinking it, and it will prejudice how you act toward him the next day.”

Kennedy explained. “He’s been cozying up to a lot of Texas businessmen who weren’t for him before. What he was really saying in the car was that he’s going to run ahead of me in Texas [in the next election]. Well, that’s all right. Let him. But for heaven’s sake don’t get a thing on him, because that’s what I came down here to heal. I’m trying to start by getting two people in the same car. If they start hating, nobody will ride with anybody.”

The Kennedys went downstairs for the LULAC reception. After the president’s remarks, he said to the crowd, “In order that my words will be even clearer to you, I am going to ask my wife to say a few words to you also.” Jackie gave her little talk in Spanish, the crowd loved her, and when she finished they yelled “Olé!” A fugitive piece of lost but recently discovered amateur film footage taken that night with a home movie camera, without sound, shows how excited the audience was.

From the Rice Hotel ballroom, the Kennedys drove to the Houston Coliseum for the huge dinner honoring Congressman Thomas. Tonight the president made no attempt at soaring oratory. Instead he gave more of a bread-and-butter talk designed to flatter local interests and leaders, especially the honoree. But he slipped in an eloquent passage from the Bible. Indeed, it was so fine that it seemed out of place in what was otherwise a pedestrian effort. It sounded prophetic: “Your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions. Where there is no vision, the people perish.”

The Kennedys left the Coliseum at a little after nine thirty P.M. and drove to the airport.

At 11:07 P.M., Air Force One landed at Carswell Air Force Base, outside Fort Worth.

Air Force One had closed the distance in geography and time that separated John F. Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald.

LEE WATCHED television for a while and then went to bed before Marina and turned off the light. But when Marina joined him, she sensed that he was still awake, only pretending to be asleep. And when she, in a gesture of intimacy in the darkness of the night, extended her leg to touch his, he kicked it away.

And now, as the night lengthened on November 21, 1963, he had failed in love. If Marina had told him this evening that she loved him, that he was a good man, that she and their daughters would live together again—then tomorrow Lee might look for a new apartment for his family instead of carrying a long package of “curtain rods” to work. But tonight, without her approval, he was helpless, alone, and drifting toward oblivion. It was Oswald’s habit to copy sentimental Russian-language poetry into journals. Perhaps it was to please Marina. Some evidence suggests that she read some of them and annotated a few of the pages in her own hand. Or maybe Lee just wanted to practice his Russian comprehension and handwriting. From the hundreds of lines he copied into his commonplace books, one phrase leaps out. It reads as though he was describing himself on the night of November 21, 1963. “Not everyone can understand his own life. . . . Life is boring, empty and uninteresting.”

Tomorrow he would change that.

This was the last night he would spend with his wife.

NEAR MIDNIGHT on Thursday, November 21, John Kennedy prepared to turn out the lights in his bedroom in Fort Worth’s Hotel Texas. He was tired. In one day, he had flown from Washington, D.C., to San Antonio, Texas; had driven in a motorcade; had given a speech to twenty thousand people; had toured a hospital; had flown from San Antonio to Houston; had spoken at a reception; had spoken at a major political dinner; and had flown from Houston to Forth Worth, where Air Force One had landed at 11:07 P.M. In Washington time, it was already past midnight. Then he had been driven to the Hotel Texas in Fort Worth, where he found himself now. It was a grueling schedule, typical of a presidential campaign.

Tomorrow, on November 22, the president faced another tough schedule, which included informal remarks on the street outside his hotel; a breakfast and talk at the hotel; the flight to Dallas; the long motorcade from Love Field to the Trade Mart for a big political lunch and speech; then back to the airport for the flight to Austin, another motorcade, and another speech at a major Democratic dinner that evening.

Kennedy was in full campaign mode. In late summer and fall of 1960, he had spent weeks just like this on the campaign trail. This trip to Texas was a dress rehearsal for next year, and it had proven what an asset Jackie was going to be during his second presidential campaign in the fall of 1964.

He wanted her to know that.

“You were great today,” he told Jackie. “How do you feel?”

“Oh, gosh,” she said, “I’m exhausted.”

He told her she did not have to get up early. “Don’t get up with me. I’ve got to speak in the square downstairs before breakfast, but stay in bed. Just be at that breakfast at nine-fifteen.”

They did not know that this was the last night they would spend together.

SOMETIME THAT night, after John and Jackie Kennedy had gone to sleep—no one knows exactly when—Lee Oswald slipped into Mrs. Paine’s garage, turned on the light, and lifted up the blanket and its deadly contents. The Mannlicher-Carcano was still there. Tonight, in addition to his rifle, Lee also needed ammunition. He had depleted his supply during target practice. All he had left in his possession were four bullets. These would have to be enough. He disassembled the weapon, removing the barrel from the stock, and slipped the shorter pieces into a bag he had made at the Book Depository with brown paper and tape.

Later that night, probably not until long after midnight, Lee Harvey Oswald drifted off to sleep.