The morning light was weak and somber, seeping in diffused grays across the north Texas plain, walking along Route 80 from Marshall to Big Sandy to Edgewood, not pausing, not hurrying, through Mesquite and between the granite headstones of downtown Dallas to Arlington and Fort Worth, inexorably scouring the night from Ranger and Abilene, walking westward always westward, bringing to focal life the clustered communities, the all-night lunchrooms, the laced highways with ribboned loops, jogging trucks, flat farms with tepees of corn shucks, the quiet, shallow streams swimming to bottomland, the pin oaks huddled in hummocks hanging on to old leaves, the land smelling spongy and good in the warm wind and a mist that matched its gray with the walking dawn.
The clouds were low, kneading themselves into changing figures as they swirled in slate against the red clay below and the sandwich of electric lights between. It was a day that would be much rainier, or much brighter, a capricious time when the glimmering sky flowed on a well-muscled wind, and then, an hour or two later, might be sawed into shafts of sunlight.
At the Continental Trailways terminal a big bus slowed, headlights glowing saffron along the shiny pavement of Commerce Street, and the brakes sighed as the vehicle inched into the terminal, on time. Some passengers slept. A few, sleepless, squinted drowsily at the tall brown-brick Hotel Texas diagonally across the street. As the bus inched into the terminal, the hotel disappeared and the driver said: “Fort Worth, Fort Worth. Fifteen minutes.” Time for an egg sandwich and a mug of coffee; time for a morning paper; time to return to the uneasy sleep of the traveler.
Time.
The elderly lady stared at the ceiling. She had lived in the Hotel Texas a long time. For Helen Ganss, this room on the eighth floor was home. Yesterday there had been much excitement. Liston Slack, the manager, had been conferring for days—maybe weeks—with men who wore sunglasses and everybody on the eighth floor had been moved out. The whole L-shaped corridor had been emptied of guests. All except Mrs. Ganss. She hadn’t been shrill about it, but she was an old widow and the men in the sunglasses had been perfect gentlemen. They had thought it over and had told Mr. Slack: “Okay.”
The President of the United States was down the hall in the corner suite, 850, but Mrs. Ganss wondered how he could possibly sleep. All night long she had heard the march of feet up and down that green rug with the big flowers, and now, in daylight, the feet had voices. Sleep was impossible. Some feet walked. Some ran. The voices ranged from a loud call the length of the corridor to sibilant whispers outside her door. Sadly, there was nothing exciting about the ceiling. Mrs. Ganss stared at it because a lady of years and frailty has so few options.
The noise in the corridor grew by solitary decibels. One of the three hotel elevators was reserved for presidential traffic and waited on the eighth floor. On the opposite side, Rear Admiral Dr. George Burkley, the President’s physician, was up and had phoned for breakfast. He is a short, gray man of considerable reserve, and he looked out the window and then peeked down the hall toward Suite 850. The Secret Service men nodded good morning. The doctor knew that everything was all right.
George Thomas, a chubby valet, came down the corridor with an arm full of clothing. As he was admitted to Suite 850, a Secret Service man picked up a phone near the fire hose and said: “The President is awake.” Thomas walked through a small foyer, shifted some Texas newspapers from one hand to the other, and tapped lightly on the door. Inside, there was a moment of silence, and President John F. Kennedy muttered, “Okay.”
The word had meaning which only the President and his valet would appreciate. In the White House, when Mrs. Kennedy shared her husband’s bedroom, a light tap by Thomas would elicit a small cough as response. The tap and cough were designed not to disturb Mrs. Kennedy’s slumber. The word “Okay” would signify that Mrs. Kennedy had slept in another room.
Thomas opened the bedroom door, deposited the clothing on the back of a chair, dropped the newspapers on the bed, and exchanged greetings with the tousle-haired sleeper who was turning the sheets back from the left—and window side—of a big double bed. The President sat up, swung his long slender limbs over to the floor, and picked up the packet of newspapers. Mr. Thomas was already in the bathroom, mixing the water and drawing a bath.
On the mezzanine floor, Master Sergeant Joseph Giordano completed the work of screwing the Seal of the President of the United States to the lectern as Secret Service men, stationed around the big room with its long rows of breakfast tables, watched him. He took another Presidential Seal downstairs to the parking lot across the street. Mr. Kennedy would make two speeches this morning. The formal one would be at the Chamber of Commerce breakfast around 9:30. These people, Mr. Kennedy had learned, were largely Republicans. The Democrats of Fort Worth had protested that the workingmen had not been invited. So the President had agreed to meet them in the parking lot before the breakfast.
The handsome General Ted Clifton, military aide to the President, rapped on the door of 804. The man who answered was The Bagman. “You packed?” Clifton said. The man said he was. Behind The Bagman stood Cecil Stoughton, the White House photographer. He, too, had plenty of gear to pack, and he knew that he had to keep several cameras ready with film of varying speeds. The Bagman, Ira Gearhart, was important. He carried the small suitcase with the safe dial. It was his job never to be more than a few seconds from the side of the President, because inside The Bag was the electronic apparatus with which Mr. Kennedy could call, in code, for a nuclear strike.
It was assumed by all knowledgeable persons in the White House, and the Pentagon, that The Bag would never he used. Still, in the event that the Continental Army Command tracked flights of “birds” coming in across the top of the world and over the DEW line, a decision would have to be made at once. The Bagman was never far from Mr. Kennedy. The function of the man was to remember the combination to the dial; the function of the President was to order one of several types of retaliatory attacks.
In the hotel was a “White House switchboard.” This was usually manned by the military. It, too, moved in the wake of the President. It provided instantaneous communication between Mr. Kennedy and Washington. Coded information that the President had awakened was already in Washington. At Carswell Air Force Base, Colonel James Swindal, commander of Air Force One, had called in five minutes ago that the craft had been inspected, tested, and was ready.
On the seventh floor, a teletype machine chattered and the daily information report began to come in from the Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA, with its finger on sensitive pulses around the world, was giving the President a morning rundown on the political climate of the world. General Godfrey McHugh, the only American officer of rank with a French accent, signed a receipt for it and walked up to the eighth floor, to be confronted by a Secret Service agent who blocked his path at the head of the stairs until the general was recognized. Then he went on to Suite 850, to be studied momentarily by another man with a key in his hand.
McHugh would wait until summoned, then give the report to the Commander-in-Chief. The general’s strength was his weakness. He was a perfectionist in all his work. The general even maintained a record of the precise minute that the report came off the machine, and he would duly note the moment it left his hands for Mr. Kennedy’s.
Two Secret Service agents were at Fort Worth Police Headquarters examining two limousines. The cars had been rented for the Kennedys and the Secret Service for the four-mile drive from the Hotel Texas to Carswell Air Force Base. Everything, including ballrooms, parking lots, bedrooms, bathrooms, parade routes, stairwells, lobbies, kitchens, cooks, waiters, telephones, local personnel, from food to forks, had to be “sanitized” by the Secret Service.
Three weeks prior to this visit, Manager Liston Slack was surprised to learn that the Secret Service declined use of the Will Rogers Suite on the thirteenth floor. It would be more difficult to “protect,” the agents had said. So Kennedy was now in a smaller suite in a corner of the eighth floor, and the Will Rogers Suite was being used by Vice-President and Mrs. Lyndon Baines Johnson. The President’s quarters cost $106 per day, but the management would not send a bill. Even though normal life at the hotel had been cruelly upset, Liston Slack would not send charges to the government.
The measure of Fort Worth’s excitement was in the lobby and the parking lot. The first was jammed with men wearing fawn-colored cowboy hats; in the lot, five hundred men and women stood waiting in the misty rain, even though the President was not expected for more than an hour. A half dozen mounted sheriff’s deputies patrolled their horses in and out of the growing crowd, herding them toward the lectern.
Presidential assistants Kenny O’Donnell and Larry O’Brien—the first lean and grim with a pulsing mandible, the second a myopic redhead with a gift for solving political puzzles—walked into Dr. Burkley’s room and said: “We can’t see anything from the other side of the hotel.” They raised the Venetian blinds and studied the crowd. O’Donnell murmured: “They’re waiting for him in the rain. And there will be more of them.” They thanked the doctor and left.
O’Donnell went back to his room to shave. He glanced at the presidential itinerary. Two speeches in Fort Worth, one in Dallas, a flight to the capital at Austin, two cocktail parties, a speech at a banquet, a slow motorcade late at night, and a flight to Lyndon Johnson’s ranch for a two-day rest. O’Donnell was the watchdog, the harrier. As the man who, except Attorney General Robert Kennedy, was closest to the President, Kenneth O’Donnell managed the show, made many of the peremptory decisions, kept Mr. Kennedy close to his schedule, tried hard to please Mrs. Kennedy, ordered the White House staff to its appointed duties, and, when necessary, compressed his lipless mouth and said “No” to senators and congressmen.
Agent O’Leary, under the marquee of the hotel, kept his eyes roving from the sidewalk to his left, across the Bus Terminal, down the emptiness of the parking lot, across Main Street with its Century Building and Fort Worth National Bank, and down the sidewalk to his right. The eyes began the searchlight progression again, and midway, O’Leary saw a man reclining on a roof diagonally opposite Suite 850. The Secret Service man called a policeman and pointed. “Get him off that roof.”
Clinton Hill, assigned to Mrs. Kennedy, had inspected all the entrances and exits to the hotel last midnight. Now he did it again. He reported to Agent-in-Charge Roy Kellerman that everything was all right. On the thirteenth floor, the Johnsons dressed swiftly, and the Vice-President sipped coffee, sans caffeine. Lady Bird glanced out the window at the dismal weather and noticed the people in the lot. She knew that her husband was expected to be at the President’s side, but she wasn’t informed whether Mrs. Kennedy would be with her husband. If so, Mrs. Johnson should be there, too. She didn’t want to phone 850 and ask because, if the First Lady wasn’t going, the call would point up her absence.
Mrs. Johnson phoned the Connallys and spoke to Nellie. Yes, the Governor’s wife would be at his side in the parking lot. Nellie said that she and John regarded Fort Worth as home because, years ago, he had worked for the rich Sid Richardson in this town. Lady Bird decided to go along with her husband.
In the Arlington Heights section, the stout face of the martyr, Mrs. Marguerite Oswald, peered from behind curtains in her small apartment on Thomas Place. The weather matched her mood. She turned the kitchen light on and puttered with the coffeepot. The gray hair was tight in a bun, but skeins of it hung loose. In common with other citizens of Fort Worth, she was aware that the President of the United States was in town, and she planned to watch the event on television.
Mrs. Oswald was a hardworking saleswoman and practical nurse. She was fifty-six years of age, stout, and full of outraged righteousness. The mouth was thick and pursed. She enjoyed conversation but, except for chronically ill patients, she had no social life. Years ago she had married three times and had three sons. One of the husbands died. The others left her. The sons enlisted in military service early. None of them ever came back.
In Dallas, seventeen men lined up before Deputy Chief W. W. Stevenson. The patrolmen were told that their function would be to “seal” the Trade Mart. None of them could understand why the work had to begin at 7 A.M., but they knew that Chief Jesse Curry and the Secret Service had been in conferences for three weeks and had driven slowly, in squad cars, along several routes to and from Love Field.
Stevenson glanced over the enormity of the interior, where 2,500 persons would greet the President at 12:30 P.M. The Secret Service had studied the overhead catwalks and had shaken their heads disapprovingly. But from this moment on those catwalks would be denied to everyone except the fluttering blue parakeets that darted from the huge fountain at the back of the building to the rafters overhead. The big head table was placed inside the main entrance. The interior “side streets,” which featured shops, would be closed off.
The policemen listened to their individual assignments and were told how to recognize Secret Service men by the tiny orange pins in their coat lapels and to deny access to anyone without a luncheon invitation, even if the policemen recognized the intruder. Stevenson placed the last of his men at the receptionist’s desk in the big front lobby. This one would assist the ticket takers to screen guests.
The head table had already been “sanitized,” flowers and all. The chefs in the kitchen had petitioned the Secret Service to permit them to select a fine marbled steak for the President of the United States. The request had been denied. When the huge platters of steaks began to come from the kitchen, the Secret Service said, one would be selected at random for Mr. Kennedy.
The men posted at the freight entrances and along the sides of the structure were told that no one was to be permitted to enter, unless Mr. Saich, the caterer, came to the door personally and identified the person as an employee. One man stood in the rain on the roof over the entrance. He carried a rifle and had a good field of vision, not only along the feeder lane leading to the Trade Mart, but also behind him, along Stemmons Freeway from downtown Dallas to Parkland Hospital. He didn’t have to worry about the freeway. Other men would be patrolling the route. The Dallas Police Department had canceled all leaves, and all personnel except a handful of squad cars and some detectives were working the Kennedy assignment. The dispatcher had been told to keep Channel One open for superior officers with the President and to use police Channel Two for all other business.
At 7:08 A.M. the police chief, a mild, spectacled man who maintained a clean city, appeared on television and announced that the President would be in Dallas today and that Dallas wanted no incidents. He knew that the citizens desired to give the Chief Executive a cordial welcome, but there was always a chance that some “extremist” planned to demonstrate. If so, Chief Jesse Curry was putting such people on notice that the police department would brook no nonsense today. Curry did not mention the whacking of Adlai Stevenson with a placard a short time before, or the shrieking, shouting crowd which once chased Mr. and Mrs. Lyndon Johnson into a hotel lobby. Dallas had an articulate rightist group which was obsessed with the notion that all others in the political spectrum were Communists or “fellow travelers” plotting against the Republic.
The words came off the television screen calmly, but, by the nature of the appeal, they exposed the helplessness of law enforcement in the face of a sneak. Chief Curry concluded by asking all good citizens to please report to the Dallas Police Department anyone who had voiced violent opinions against the President or who had boasted, publicly or privately, of plans to demonstrate today.
The television set in the modern little four-room house at 2515 Fifth Street in Irving was shut off. The owner, Mrs. Ruth Paine, was still in bed. The suburb, off the western edge of Dallas, is a collection of small ranch homes astride Route 183 to Fort Worth. In several thousands of these houses, men were up, preparing to leave for office and plant; children were up, breakfasting on hot cereal for school.
In the kitchen of the Paine home, a young, slender man poured boiling water into a cup with instant coffee and sat at the table. He was alone and he sipped his coffee, as he always did, with the fingers of both hands around the cup. He had pale eyes, thinning brown hair, and a mouth which pursed itself in a permanent pout. Anyone who knew Lee Harvey Oswald was aware that he did not mind being alone and he enjoyed long silences.
He would not turn the television set on to listen to Chief Jesse Curry. Mr. Oswald was having trouble with his wife. She had awakened to feed their infant, Rachel, at 6:30, taken a look at the other little girl, June, and closed her eyes. Mr. Oswald had said: “Don’t get up.” Marina Oswald thought this was funny, because she never got up to make breakfast for him. It wasn’t sarcasm. She was sure of that. He whispered softly, in that throaty, bobbing-Adam’s-apple manner, that she should buy shoes for June. She opened her eyes, watching him dress, and grunted before returning to unconsciousness.
The baby had awakened several times in the night. The blonde head on the pillow tried to concentrate on what he was saying, and some of it remained with her, and some didn’t get past her ear. Lee told her to buy a pair of shoes for herself. That registered. He donned a tan-gray work shirt, gray slacks, and an old zipper jacket. Without opening her eyes, she could feel him stop beside the dresser, and she knew that he wanted to start a friendly conversation. “Maybe someday June will remember me,” he said.
Mrs. Oswald kept her eyes closed. She did not want to be friendly. Mr. Oswald removed his wedding ring from his finger and lowered it carefully into a Russian cup on his wife’s dresser. He opened a drawer carefully and placed his wallet inside. It contained $170. He kept $13.87, insufficient for a man who might wish to leave the area. And yet the gesture of the wedding ring and the sum of money for his wife—more than he had ever given her—are symbols of a marital break.
Last night, he had tried to restore the marriage. He had come to Mrs. Paine’s house unasked, unwelcome, unexpected. On previous occasions when he visited his wife, he had left his tiny room in the Oak Cliff section of Dallas on Friday evenings and had remained with her until he could get a free lift to the plant where he worked, on Monday mornings. This time he came in on Thursday, played out front with his gladsome idol, little June, and had tried to have a private chat with Marina.
Her respect for him was dead. Sweet words would not resurrect it. He had personality flaws which she could not understand. Marina, a Soviet pharmacist, had met him in Minsk and married him after a short courtship. He was an American defector with ideals unattainable. He was, he proclaimed, a United States marine who wanted to renounce his citizenship and embrace the Soviet Union. In the next breath, he said he was disillusioned with Russia, because the government was deviationist from the principles of Karl Marx. The inference was that his politics was pure communism; Russian socialism was opportunistic and despotic.
When the Soviets denied citizenship and, for a time, even sanctuary, he had cut his wrists in Moscow and, as in most other crises in his life, had failed. He asked Marina if she would like to return to the United States with him—particularly to Texas—and she said yes. He had extolled the virtues of his mother, Marguerite, and then later forbade his wife to see her. He spurned the friendliness of the Russian expatriate group in Texas, and refused to teach his wife to speak English.
He talked big but couldn’t hold onto a job. When he had one, he doled out small sums to his wife and told her she would have to get along as best she could. At night he read library books about Marxism and others concerned with history, and there were long silences. He brooded sullenly and appeared to have trouble making love to his wife. The average attempt occurred once a month, and Marina, bristling, told her husband he was not a man.
Sometimes, in his frustration, he beat her with his fists. At others, he became the supplicant and begged her forgiveness. The man who seldom spoke could weep. He bought a mail order rifle and a revolver, and these were anathema to Marina. To a young man whose father had died two months before he was born; to a boy who had slept with his mother until he was eleven years of age; to one who had, of necessity, spent time in orphanages, one who was now accused of lacking manhood, the weapons may have made him as big as the biggest man.
He told her that he had tried to kill General Edwin Walker, an avowed reactionary, but had missed. On another occasion, he announced that he was going out to kill the Vice-President of the United States—Marina had thought of Richard Nixon, although the reference was probably to Lyndon Johnson—and he had permitted her to lock him in a bathroom, supplied with books, until the storm of violence had left him.
Nor had he complained when Mrs. Paine, a student of the Russian language and a dark, pretty Quaker, had offered Marina and June a home until “Lee could get on his feet.” It had happened before in other homes. A few weeks ago, a second child, Rachel, had been born. Marina had still felt that the marriage might be “saved” for the sake of the children, but when Mrs. Paine had phoned him at his rooming house the woman who answered said that there was no Lee Harvey Oswald there. They had a young man named O. H. Lee.
Marina, in anger, lost all confidence in her husband. He, in turn, was angry to learn that Mrs. Paine had tried to contact him. His unexpected arrival on Thursday evening did not endear him to his wife. She had busied herself in the kitchen with Mrs. Paine, fed the babies and him, and chilled all his Russian entreaties. In bed she had turned away from him. She was tired. She didn’t want to talk.
It is possible that Marina Oswald misjudged Lee. She saw the current situation as another dispute. She might have relented in her own time. The punishing wife was conscious of the needs of her children. But the ring and the money showed that Lee Harvey Oswald was at the end of his tether. Day by day his affection had turned more toward June, and, according to the inexorable law of transference, away from his wife.
He needed someone more helpless than himself. His personal inadequacy was known to him. In school he had shunned the friendship of boys. He played by himself. For years he had submitted to the scourging of his mother’s domination and, like John and Robert before him, had left her as soon as the U.S. Marine Corps would take him. The military gave him training, discipline, foreign service and a marksman’s medal.
At the age of fifteen, books taught him what the United States symbolized as a democracy, and he chose the role of dissenter. Furthest removed from what his country stood for was the Soviet Union, and he chose that, with reservations. In time, his studies of Karl Marx made Oswald feel equipped to explain it in theoretical terms, but he could draw the attention only of those who did not understand it at all. Friends who had studied political science exposed him in conversation as superficial and for using communist terminology without understanding it.
He had left the Marine Corps as a “hardship discharge” to take care of his mother in Texas. He gave her three days of his time and left for New Orleans and a long trip to Russia. Marina, a shrewd, intelligent girl, was not a helpless person, but he could make her so by returning to the United States. She would be dependent on him just so long as she did not speak English. But she was not compliant. At Texas parties given by Russians, she asserted herself and agreed with those who said that life in the United States was far better than “at home.”
Oswald threatened to send her back to Russia and ordered her to write notes to the Soviet Embassy asking for repatriation. His frustrations mounted as he lost job after job. Recently he had taken a bus to Mexico and had appealed to the Cuban Embassy for a visa. He had formed a Fair Play for Cuba Committee in New Orleans, been arrested, told his story on radio, and tried to “enlist” in the Castro forces. They did not want him.
The young man who seldom responded to a friendly “good morning” found himself at the end of his particular blind alley. He was friendless, homeless, “hounded by the FBI,” as he said, and now he knew he was a cipher. He aspired above all other things to be big, to be known, to be respected or feared (equal values).
The coffee cup went into the sink. He went out into the garage and turned the ceiling’s naked bulb on. He opened a rolled blanket on the floor, slipped a rifle out without disturbing the convolutions of the blanket, and closed the flap. He took some wrapping paper, placed the rifle in it, and wrapped it in such a way that one end appeared to be thick, the other thin. He went back into the kitchen, forgetting to turn the light off. Oswald left quietly.
The President, standing in the green tile bathroom, finished toweling himself and began to shave. He could hear someone rolling up his special hard mattress in the bedroom and, without looking, he knew that the black leather chair with the thick backrest would leave with it. Wherever he went, they went. He saw his plump, slightly jowled, and tan face in the mirror. It was a good strong face—many would call it handsome—but a man seldom dwells on features as he shaves. The pull of the razor is automatic, done without conscious thought, furrowing the white mantle of shaving cream in a pattern which is peculiarly the shaver’s own.
It gives a man freedom to dwell on other matters—the day’s schedule; the minutiae of business; the problems, if any; the triumphs—if any. Mr. Kennedy had a sturdy, almost youthful, body with patches of hair on the chest, and legs a bit slender for the bulk of the torso. It never got a good grade from the President.
His back was in pain constantly. Long years ago, in a football scrimmage at Harvard, the spine and adjacent musculature had twisted, and it was beyond repair. A delicate and protracted operation did not help. Massages and medication made him feel better, but, as he sometimes said, the pain was never eliminated. It was lessened. It became bearable.
He combed his thick brown hair and moved to his right to the vanity set. There he donned his underwear and a surgical corset. The President had them in different sizes. He put on a large one and yanked the laces tightly. The vanity chair had a concave seat and the President sat to pull a long elastic bandage over his feet. He twisted it so that it formed a figure eight, then slipped it up over both legs. When it was adjusted over the hips, the Ace Bandage supported the bottom of the torso, as the back brace held the lower spine rigid. The figure eight constricted the natural long stride, but today was going to be a “backbreaker”—sitting, standing, walking, making speeches, handshaking, and spine-creaking climbs up airplane ramps.
He accepted help from George Thomas in slipping on a white shirt with a blue pinstripe, a plain blue silk tie, and a gray-blue suit with a half inch of kerchief showing in the breast pocket. Mr. Kennedy nodded toward the window. “How does it look, George?” George Thomas was picking up night gear from the bed, preparing to pack. “It’s raining out,” he said. The President said, “That’s too bad” and left the bedroom for the large sitting room.
The elegant little family dining room on the second floor of the White House was never brighter than when it was filled with the morning chatter of Caroline and John. She would be six next week, and already she was accustomed to the serious business of being a lady. She knew how to keep a pretty frock tidy and unwrinkled in the back, how to wear white gloves and keep them white, how to flick the well-brushed brown hair back off her shoulders, how to apply herself to study.
John would be three years old in a few days, part baby, part boy. He enjoyed running through the White House corridors, hitching a skip in his stride and he could make it at top speed to his father, falling against the parental knees, and wrapping both arms around the tall legs. He understood little about his father’s work, but he was willing to extend his complete confidence to the many strangers he saw in his home, men and women who stooped to hug him or to say hello.
The children spent ten minutes with their father shortly after 7 A.M. When he was eating from a tray in his bedroom, he could hear the typewriter speed of the little feet coming down the corridor from their bedroom, and the President of the United States grasped both sides of the tray and held on, bracing against the assault of morning kisses and hugs.
The routine of conversation seldom varied. The President asked his daughter for a report on her current schoolwork. Shyly she would hold out a sheet of paper on which the alphabet had been printed in large block letters. Mr. Kennedy would study it and fall back against his chair in mock surprise. “Caroline,” he would say, “did you do this? All by yourself?” The child was girlishly embarrassed by lavish praise and often hung her head and twisted her laced fingers.
Then, noting that John was waiting, Mr. Kennedy would crook his finger at his son and say: “John-John, tell me a secret.” This too was a morning ritual and, even before the familiar routine began, the little boy laughed and held his stomach. He went to his father’s side, stood on tiptoe and whispered: “Bzzzz-bzzzzzzz—bzz-bzz.” The President threw both hands in the air, reared back with surprise, and whispered: “You don’t tell me!” The effect on the boy was to cause him to fall to the floor, rolling over with laughter. It was repeated almost every morning.
The Kennedy children were accustomed to having one parent home. When father went on a trip, quite often mother remained with them. When mother flew away for a rest, father was in the White House. This morning, neither was home and they sat in the dining room with Miss Maude Shaw, their British nanny. The lady was slender and middle-aged.
She slept in a small alcove bedroom between theirs, and time and understanding had built a solid edifice of affection among the three. The children were well behaved and tractable. Sometimes, when they awakened before seven in the morning, they would ask respectfully: “Good morning, Miss Shaw. May we get up now?”
She permitted them to chatter for a longer period this morning, and there was still plenty of time. It was 8:15 A.M.* and Miss Shaw said that Caroline had time to wash her hands before going upstairs to the little private school composed mostly of children of old Georgetown friends of the Kennedys. It was a bright room with a ramp leading upward toward the shafts of morning light, and the other students arrived by vehicle at 8:45 A.M. and waited in the front lobby of the White House until schooltime.
Then, said Miss Shaw, she would take John-John for a walk around the White House grounds. His happy hope was to be on the South Grounds when a helicopter landed or took off. The only better one he could think of was to be in one.
The big cellar kitchen of the Hotel Texas was charged with excitement. The chefs and waiters had arrived early, and breakfast orders were being filled quickly and carried up by service elevator to the members of the most important group ever to grace the sedate edifice. An order had come in from 850, and everyone paused to listen. Peter Saccu, the short, dark, jovial man who supervised all the catering and food, took the order.
“The President,” he said, “wants a large pot of coffee, some extra cups and saucers, orange juice, two eggs boiled five minutes, some toast and marmalade on the side. Come on now. Let’s move.” Saccu turned to a tall, dignified Negro waiter. “George Jackson will handle it.” Some of the other faces relaxed in resignation; Mr. Jackson began to beam. At once, he got a rolling table, a pad, a snowy tablecloth, some napkins, knives, forks, spoons, cups and saucers, and his expert fingers flew as the tools were placed on the table. He kept shaking his head. “Man,” he murmured. “I have never even seen a President of the United States. Now I’m going to walk right into the room with him.”
In five minutes, the steaming snowy eggs were lifted out of boiling water and placed in a side dish. The table moved off with George Jackson behind it. When he arrived on the service elevator at the eighth floor, a man stood in the doorway of his elevator. He lifted the covers of dishes, stooped to look at the underside of the table, gave Mr. Jackson a cursory study, and nodded for him to proceed.
A silent man outside the door of 850 studied the table and the waiter and gave him a small orange pin to wear in the lapel of his white jacket. George Jackson pushed the breakfast tray inside the small foyer and into the living room to the right. He said, “Good morning, Mr. President” at once, and Mr. Kennedy, chatting with Kenny O’Donnell near the coffee table, said, “Good morning.”
The Chief Executive appeared to be bright and forceful to the waiter. A “take-charge” man. Mr. O’Donnell was explaining that the rancorous battle between Senator Ralph Yarborough and his liberal Texas Democrats and Governor John Connally and his conservative Democrats had not been resolved by the President’s visit. It was worse, in a way. The Senator had refused to ride in the same car with Vice-President Lyndon Johnson in the San Antonio motorcade and at Houston, in spite of a presidential request to do so.
“Get on that phone,” Mr. Kennedy said, pointing a finger at the instrument, “and tell him he’s riding with Johnson today or he’s walking.” O’Donnell asked the President if he had seen the crowds waiting in the rain. Mr. Kennedy strode to a couch near the window and put a knee on it, but he couldn’t get a satisfactory look so he went to his wife’s room, rapped lightly with his fingernails, and entered.
Mrs. Kennedy, who had promised to sleep late, was awake. Her husband hurried through the room to the window and parted the closed Venetian blinds with two fingers. “Look at that crowd,” he murmured. “Just look.” His wife pulled a robe around her and peeked. It was still raining, and the large parking lot, with its diagonal white lines, was filling with a happy-go-lucky crowd. There were two thousand people down there, jostling and joshing. It was easy to pick the women out; they carried colored umbrellas.
“Take your time,” the President said, as he left the room. “The breakfast is at nine or nine-fifteen.” Mr. Kennedy was enthused about that crowd. So far, the crowds in Texas had been larger than expected and more cordial. He sat down to his breakfast, cracking the eggs and talking brightly to O’Donnell, when Dave Powers walked in. Mr. Powers was the balding gnome of the Kennedy inner circle.
It was he who had first managed John F. Kennedy’s campaign for Congress in 1946; it was he who had taught him the little tricks of choosing topics for speeches; it was Dave Powers who followed his young man on the long run to the White House, telling Irish stories, making the candidate smile, swimming with him in the Executive Mansion pool (“I had to learn to breast stroke because it’s the only way to swim and talk”); sleeping in the same room with the President when Mrs. Kennedy was away on a trip (“My family calls me John’s Other Wife”); a confidant, a buddy, a lead pony for a race horse, but never a topflight political strategist as Kenny O’Donnell was and as Larry O’Brien was.
“Have you seen the square?” Kennedy said, waving the toast. Dave Powers nodded. “Weren’t the crowds great in San Antonio and Houston?” Mr. Powers peeked out at the square again. “They were better than expected,” he said sagely. “Listen,” the President said, “they were terrific. And you were right—they loved Jackie.”
The waiter was in the foyer. He paused a moment to speak to George Thomas. Could Thomas ask the President for some little souvenir? Any little thing that he could keep as a remembrance? George said he would see. He walked back into the living room and whispered to the President. Mr. Kennedy reached into his jacket pocket and arose from the table. In the foyer, he handed George Jackson a PT-109 tie clasp. They shook hands.*
The two confidants who sat in the room with the President were anxious to resolve three pressing problems: How to secure Texas for Kennedy in 1964; how to resolve the fight between Texas Democratic liberals and Texas Democratic conservatives and get both to work for a second term for John F. Kennedy; how to raise money from Texas dinners—half of which would remain in the state, the other half of which would go to the Democratic National Committee.
The President was talking about the contents of the morning newspapers when Mrs. Kennedy came into the room. Even without makeup, she had a dark radiance, a female mystique which attracted men of all ages and forced women to emulate her careless coiffure, her big soft mouth, her street clothes, even her hats. Mr. Kennedy, more than anyone else, knew that Mrs. Kennedy was a co-equal in marriage. There was nothing suppliant about her. Submissiveness was anathema.
She was a woman of will and intellect; a charming conversationalist obsessed perhaps with what she referred to as “good taste”; a wife who tried to draw her husband’s attention to fine arts, ennobling music, schools of painting. She professed to distrust the press and her attitude toward politics was that it was a dreary game infested by untrustworthy persons. “I wish,” she once said, “that my husband was still a United States Senator. We would be living in Georgetown with our friends.”
Still, a trip to Paris had been welcomed, because there Mrs. Kennedy drew more attention and more admiration than the President. Jacqueline Kennedy had enjoyed that trip. Before and since, she had expressed feelings of guilt because she managed to remain out of campaign trails. In late October, 1963, she had said, almost happily: “You know I’m going to Texas with Jack. It’s the first real political trip for me.”*
It was obvious that she was doing this to please her husband. He was so acutely aware of it that he had asked General Godfrey McHugh for a forecast of Texas weather so that Mrs. Kennedy could properly plan a wardrobe. McHugh had contacted the Air Force meterologists and they guessed it would be chilly. The weather was unseasonably warm and McHugh had been dressed down venomously by the President. One of Mr. Kennedy’s major considerations on this trip was to help his wife enjoy herself so that she might be cajoled into making further political excursions. She was an asset.
In public, the Kennedys were a happy, gracious family. In private, there was room for disagreement and asperity. This is not to say that it was not a happy marriage, but rather, like others, there were times when the wife disagreed with her husband. Mrs. Kennedy, for example, had once worked as an inquiring photographer for a Washington newspaper, but she felt little empathy for the press and often used her Secret Service guards to prevent newspaper photographers from taking her picture. The President, on the other hand, had once been an International News Service reporter, and cultivated a public aura of patience with his editorial detractors. In private, he was not above writing furious notes to editors and publishers about the “inaccuracies” of certain White House reporters. Now and then, as though to beard the enemy someday, he vowed to buy the Washington Post after completing his second term of office.
The difference between public and private opinions seeped down to the press corps, and they were often at variance. After the Vienna Summit Conference with the Russians, Mr. Kennedy spoke well of the conversations. In private, he said of Nikita Khrushchev: “Why, that son of a bitch won’t pay any attention to words. He has to see you move.” In 1959, when he was in California fighting Richard Nixon for the presidency, he was aroused by motion picture star John Wayne’s efforts for the Republican party. On a notepad, he scribbled: “How do we cut John Wayne’s balls off?”
The opposition in Congress were often “bastards.” He made a mental note to criticize Mary Gallagher this morning. Miss Gallagher, as private secretary to Mrs. Kennedy, might have seemed an insignificant item for presidential attention, but the young lady had volunteered to be Mrs. Kennedy’s personal maid on this particular trip, and the First Lady told her husband that she could not find Mary when she was needed. So the President was going to tell O’Donnell, “For Christ’s sake, keep Mary Gallagher on the ball.” Anything which irritated Mrs. Kennedy aroused the President.
The newspapers of Texas irritated him. Aloud, he read headlines from this morning’s Dallas News: “President’s Visit Seen Widening State Democratic Split”; “Yarborough Snubs LBJ”; “Storm of Political Controversy Swirls Around Kennedy on Visit.” The paper was cast aside. He finished eating the eggs, picked the paper up and turned it inside out. “Have you people seen this?” It was a full-page advertisement headlined “Welcome Mr. Kennedy to Dallas.” Around the page was a quarter-inch black mourning border. It was signed by “The American Fact-Finding Committee, Bernard Weissman, Chairman.” The copy asked twelve questions of the President, each slanted toward the arch-conservative attitude of oil-rich Dallas.
“WHY do you say we have built a ‘wall of freedom’ around Cuba when there is no freedom in Cuba today? Because of your policy, thousands of Cubans have been imprisoned, are starving and being persecuted—with thousands already murdered and thousands more awaiting execution and, in addition, the entire population of almost 7,000,000 Cubans are living in slavery?
“WHY have you approved the sale of wheat and corn to our enemies when you know the Communist soldiers ‘Travel on their stomachs’ just as ours do? Communist soldiers are daily wounding and/or killing American soldiers in South Viet Nam.
“WHY have you urged greater aid, comfort, recognition, and understanding for Yugoslavia, Poland, Hungary, and other Communist countries, while turning your back on the pleas of Hungarian, East German, Cuban and other anti-Communist freedom fighters?
“WHY has Gus Hall, head of the U.S. Communist Party, praised almost every one of your policies and announced that the party will endorse and support your re-election in 1964?
“WHY have you ordered or permitted your brother Bobby, the Attorney General, to go soft on Communists, fellow-travelers, and ultra-leftists in America, while permitting him to persecute loyal Americans who criticize you, your administration and your leadership?
“WHY have you scrapped the Monroe Doctrine in favor of the ‘Spirit of Moscow’?”
Why, why, why . . . Mr. Kennedy poured a little fresh coffee. “How can people write such things?” he said. To Mrs. Kennedy, he said, with obvious disgust: “We’re really in nut country now.” To the others, he spoke with contempt about oil millionaires, reactionaries who peddled hate but had no alternatives to the program of the Administration. He had not seen the Dallas News of the morning before, in which a sports columnist had written glibly: “If the speech is about boating you will be among the warmest of admirers. If it is about Cuber, civil rights, taxes or Viet Nam, there will sure as shootin’ be some who heave to and let go with a broadside of grapeshot in the presidential rigging.”
Nor had he seen the handbills which spun across the clean sidewalks of Dallas for the past few days. These had not been signed, nor was the printer’s signature on them, but they featured a solemn front and side view of the President with the words, in large type:
It was a typical sheriff’s poster. The copy read:
“This man is wanted for treasonous activities against the United States:
“1. Betraying the Constitution (which he swore to uphold):
“He is turning the sovereignty of the U.S. over to the Communist controlled United Nations.
“He is betraying our friends (Cuba, Katanga, Portugal) and befriending our enemies (Russia, Yugoslavia, Poland.)
“2. He has been WRONG on innumerable issues affecting the security of the U.S. (United Nations—Berlin Wall—Missile Removal—Cuba-Wheat Deals—Test Ban Treaty, etc.)
“3. He has been lax in enforcing Communist registration laws.
“4. He has given support and encouragement to the Communist inspired racial riots.
“5. He has illegally invaded a sovereign state with federal troops.
“6. He has consistently appointed anti-Christians to Federal office;
“Upholds the Supreme Court in its anti-Christian rulings.
“Aliens and known Communists abound in Federal offices.
“7. He has been caught in fantastic LIES to the American people (including personal ones like his previous marriage and divorce.)”
In Section Four of the Dallas News, the President read a story by Carl Freund which raised the hackles on his neck: “Former Vice-President Richard M. Nixon predicted here Thursday that President Kennedy will drop Lyndon Johnson from the No. 2 spot on the Democratic ticket if a close race appears likely next year. Nixon said Johnson is becoming a ‘political liability’ to the Democratic Party.”
Mr. Nixon had been narrowly defeated for the presidency in the autumn election of 1959. Since, he had been defeated in a race for the governorship of California by Mr. Pat Brown. Nixon moved to New York and became an attorney for a firm which bottled soft drinks (Pepsi-Cola). He was in Dallas to promote business and, to keep his personal political ambitions alive, often submitted to interviews which concerned themselves more with “gut and gutter” politics than with bottling beverages.
The President was still fulminating against the press when a Secret Service man said he had a call from the Dallas office, asking if the bubbletop should be put on the car. A negative headshake came from Kenny O’Donnell. Mr. Kennedy said he didn’t want it on. Furthermore, he said, he wanted the Secret Service men told to stop running beside the car and hopping on the rear bumpers. His convictions were firm about this and had been restated many times. “The people come to see me, not the Secret Service.” Besides, the bubbletop offered no protection except from rain. It wasn’t bulletproof, nor would Mr. Kennedy permit himself to use it even if it was.
No one ever had the temerity to introduce the subject of assassination to the President. But there were occasions when he dragged the ugly subject into focus.* Mr. Kennedy’s feelings were that a President is conscious of sudden death only when he first assumes office. He learns that he cannot expose himself to crowds without prior warning; he is surrounded, in the White House and out, by silent faceless men who are always looking in another direction; his family cannot go shopping without notifying the agent in charge of the White House detail; the heating units in his office are tested daily for radioactivity. So is his jewelry, his watch, his telephone.
After being in office awhile, the President loses his personal fear and it is replaced by irritation. He feels overprotected. Often, he orders Secret Service agents away. In a slow-moving motorcade, the President sees ocean swells of smiling faces; the Secret Service watch for a sudden movement, a flying object. The function of these men is, when necessary, to place their bodies between the President and potential danger. This becomes difficult in a follow-up automobile.
Mr. Kennedy said that his feelings were the same as President Abraham Lincoln’s. “Any man who is willing to exchange his life for mine can do so,” he said. Leaving church, with two Secret Service men in front of him and two behind, Mr. Kennedy used to crouch lower and lower. His joke was to whisper to the two men in front: “If there is anybody up in that choir loft trying to get me, they’re going to have to get you first.”
When he was a United States Senator, in the spring of 1959, Kennedy received a note from Mr. Harry A. Squires of Lakewood, California. The reply is revealing:
“The historical curiosity which you related in your letter of May 4th is, indeed, thought-provoking: ‘since 1840 every man who has entered the White House in a year ending with a zero has not lived to leave the White House alive.’ . . . On face value, I daresay, should anyone take this phenomenon to heart. . . anyone, that is, who aspires to change his address to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue . . . that most probably the landlord would be left from 1960—1964 with a ‘For Rent’ sign hanging on the gatehouse door.”
In addition, Kennedy had personal courage. It was something he felt honor-bound to display. A warning from the Secret Service that it would be dangerous to attend a Harvard football game without prior screening guaranteed the President’s presence. A reminder not to pause to shake hands with citizens behind police lines was almost always ignored. Nor did he appreciate seeing law enforcement men on rooftops with riot guns. The possibility of losing his life by violence occurred to this bright young man, but it never deterred him nor did he believe that it would happen.
Philosophically, to Mr. Kennedy, death was a state of abrupt termination. It stopped everything: thought, ideals, projects, progress, love, action. There is a Hereafter; there is a Heaven; there is a God sitting in judgment; there is a religious code through which these happy states may be attained, but the President was in no hurry to attain any of them. When Caroline brought a dead bird into his office, Mr. Kennedy averted his head. Against his will, he had shot a deer on the Lyndon Johnson ranch and it offended him to think about it. The news that a friend or acquaintance died brought Kennedy’s activities to a halt. The dreadful finality of death stopped his thinking and momentarily numbed him. The previous summer, at Hyannis Port, he had taken an afternoon cruise with his father, victim of a cerebral accident, and when the President returned he had dashed angrily into the bedroom, ripped his tie off, and growled to Mrs. Kennedy: “Don’t ever let me get like that.”
The room was now quiet for a moment. Mrs. Kennedy returned to her bedroom as the waiter, George Jackson, wheeled in a second table with scrambled eggs and crisp bacon for her. Mr. Kennedy sat sipping coffee. Then, glancing at Kenny O’Donnell, he murmured: “Anyone perched above the crowd with a rifle could do it.” The President’s assistant slipped off the windowsill and reminded him to phone Mrs. J. Lee Johnson of Fort Worth. She had hung several original paintings in Suite 850. Mr. Kennedy also wanted to phone congratulations to former Vice-President John Nance Garner at Uvalde, Texas. He was ninety-five. It was time to start the business of the day. The phone calls were made.
In the corridor, Secret Service Agent Roy Kellerman spoke to Agent Winston Lawson in Dallas. The bubbletop was to remain off the car unless, of course, there was heavy rain at the time of arrival. Kellerman also advised that the President had again requested that Secret Service men remain away from the lead car. “He wants everybody to remain on the follow-up,” said Kellerman.
The Kennedys drew no joy from Suite 850. The management had redecorated and painted the three rooms, but, when the President arrived shortly after midnight, he and Mrs. Kennedy had looked the place over with little appreciation. The first remark was: “Get that damned air conditioning off. I can’t sleep with air conditioning.” The suite had been selected by the Secret Service because, as it stood in an elbow of the corridor, it was the easiest to protect.
The paintings, the appointments drew no huzzahs from the sophisticated. The rooms seemed small, almost dowdy, to the Kennedys. To Fort Worth, a friendly, old-fashioned cattle town, the suite was lavish. The large bedroom on the left had a double bed, or rather two singles pressed together under a broad walnut headboard. There was a chest of drawers, a pineapple bridge lamp, a green-tiled bathroom with a recessed formica vanity and chair. The walls were painted blue; a portable television set was on casters near the bathroom door. Under a glass top was a message: “Hotel Texas. Check out time is 12:30 P.M. If you plan to stay after this time please contact Assistant Manager.”
There was also a green upholstered chair on the opposite side of the room from the bed, a small coffee table, a golden lamp with a shantung shade. A couch reposed against the far wall with checkered upholstery; a phone, an ash tray, and a phone book reposed on the small table. An extra phone had been placed in this room. It was hooked up to the Secret Service men in the corridor. A few colored throw pillows were on the bed. Mr. Kennedy glanced out the window. Fort Worth was quiet. He saw lighted signs proclaiming: “Hotel Texas Official Parking Lot.” “The Fort Worth Press.” In the distance, the yards of the Texas & Pacific Railroad and “Bewley Mills.”
This bedroom, the larger, had been set up for him. He glanced into the bathroom. The tub, judging from the breadth of the shower curtain, appeared to be small. None of it was spectacular; still the management and the scions of the Amon Carter family, who owned it, had worked hard to display Western hospitality to the First Family of the nation.
The sitting room faced south and east. Mrs. Kennedy, fatigued, walked through it glancing left and right and rubbing her arms against the chill of the place. There were three windows facing south, toward the parking lot. On the opposite side of the room was a recessed bar. Radio music was coming from the ceiling somewhere. A green Chinese cabinet, which had no relation to anything else, held a television set behind gold-ornamented doors. At the corner window was a black-topped table with four chairs upholstered in blue.
In the ceiling were two chandeliers with electric candles. Proceeding toward the second bedroom, there was a long tan couch against the windows. A low serving table stood before the couch. A Gideon Bible and a lamp reposed on a cabinet. Walking slowly, Mrs. Kennedy pushed open the door to her bedroom. It was smaller than her husband’s.
The bed was small, with a brass headboard designed like harp strings. End tables on each side were adorned with Oriental base lamps. She saw a blue easy chair, a leather chair, and one window. There were two framed crests over the bed. The closet was small. Two snack tables were folded inside. The bathroom was small. The tub was small. The glass shelf over the basin was not big enough for lotions and unguents.
The caterer, Peter Saccu, arrived in the suite and turned the air conditioning off. Mr. Kennedy asked if a window in his room could be raised “halfway.” Saccu lifted the window and noted that the President might be awakened by the slamming of freight trains in the Texas and Pacific yards. Mr. Kennedy smiled for the first time. It wouldn’t bother him, he said.
The word flashed up and down the hall that the President and Mrs. Kennedy had retired. The sudden relaxation of tension hit the Secret Service. Stiffly erect bodies sagged. The agents standing out in the drizzle on Eighth and along Main began to chat with each other. In the corridor, the soft whirl of elevator cables started and stopped. Some off-duty agents went to bed. Others looked for an hour or two of relaxation.
They asked the clerk behind the desk if there was any place open after midnight. The clerk pointed up Main. “The Cellar,” he said. A group of agents walked up three blocks and saw a flashing sign. They entered, but The Cellar was not in the cellar. It was up a flight of dark stairs with a red light at the top.
A young man asked them for a dollar apiece entry fee. They gave it and he stamped the backs of their hands with invisible ink which shows up under ultraviolet light. This was to identify customers who might depart and return or non-customers who claimed that they had already paid.
The Cellar was a huge square room lighted in perpetual dusk. The walls were painted flat black. In a corner on the right, a combination of young men with long hair hooked their guitars to loudspeakers and lyrics roared. The waitresses, young and slender, with opera-length stockings, and breasts which appeared to float on top of corset stays, took orders for “setups.” In Fort Worth no one can buy an alcoholic drink. Customers bring their own in paper sacks and buy ginger ale, Coke, and ice in a glass.
The Secret Service men found seats at a long straight board table in the rear. They shouted their orders as the country rhythm pulsed against the walls. The only lights were small red bulbs in the ceiling. A waitress, noting that they were strangers, tried to tell them that soft drinks would cost sixty cents. No one could understand her.
It was too dark to read a small legend in white on the far wall. It said: “Tomorrow is cancelled.”
A sweet, sad face was framed in the window. Mrs. Linnie Mae Randall was washing the dishes in the kitchen sink and looking out at the veiling of rain, at the same time partly listening to the breakfast chatter of her younger brother, Buell Wesley Frazier, her mother, and the children. The house is on West Fifth Street in Irving, but the kitchen faces Westbrook Drive.
She saw Lee Harvey Oswald, bare head down, coming up Fifth Street with a long package in his hand. He held the fat part under his arm; the tapered end was pointing at the sidewalk. The rain didn’t seem to bother him. He walked steadily, up Fifth, across the corner lot, toward Mrs. Randall’s garage. She kept watching him, a dark, pretty woman with shoulder-length black hair. By rote, she set the dishes upright in the drain.
Mrs. Randall did not know Mr. Oswald, but in a way she had gotten a job for him. In early October her neighbor, Mrs. Ruth Paine, had asked about employment for the husband of the Russian woman, and Mrs. Randall had said that her brother Wes worked at the Texas School Book Depository, and they were looking for people. It wasn’t much; if a man earned a dollar or a dollar and a quarter an hour, it was as good as he could expect. The work was digging book orders out of the warehouse on the upper floors and bringing them down for shipment to school districts in Texas.
Lee Oswald got the job. He wasn’t at it long, but he didn’t like it. There was nothing to it but drudgery. He picked up book orders on the main floor, took one of two elevators to the sixth or fifth floors, dug out the proper number of copies of the right book from the right carton, and brought them back downstairs. Lunch was 12 to 12:45. A ten-minute coffee break could be worked into the afternoon. Mr. Roy Truly, the boss, expected all hands to be on time, 8 A.M., and he was a fair and firm man who expected a day’s work and no trouble.
Oswald had been there six weeks. Mrs. Randall watched him walk toward her garage and she wiped her hands on her apron and opened the kitchen door in time to see him open the right rear door of Wes’s old car and drop the bundle on the back seat. He stood waiting under the shelter of the overhead garage door. He was alone, but not lonely; friendless and solemn. Wes had helped him get the job, and it was Wes who gave him a free lift to Irving on weekends and a free lift back to Dallas.
Her brother was sipping his coffee and talking about some kiddie program that the little ones had watched earlier this morning. Wes was a tall, dark Alabaman with the twang of the back country heavy on his tongue. He took the easy way with people, work, and problems. He enjoyed getting along with people, and so he was often given to conversation in which he said what he thought the other person might want to hear. It didn’t cost anything.
Mrs. Randall was peeking out her kitchen window when she saw that Mr. Oswald had changed his position. He was staring in at her. This irritated Mrs. Randall. “Wes,” she said. “Somebody waitin’ on you out there.” Her brother left the table, donned his jacket, snatched a bag of lunch, and went out to the car. He hopped into the driver’s side and turned the windshield wipers on as Lee got into the front seat with him. Frazier kicked the old car and it started. The battery was low, and the teenager knew that it would either start at once or die with a moan.
Wes turned to look behind him. “What’s in the package, Lee?”
“Curtain rods,” Oswald said, looking at the glistening pavement along Fifth Street. The drive from there to the Texas School Book Depository was about ten miles and required about a half hour in the morning flow of freeway traffic. “Oh yeah,” said Wes. “You told me about them yesterday.” Lee didn’t nod. Most conversations were closed abruptly. Yesterday, when some of the fellows had lain dozing on the ground floor counters at lunch time, Lee had borrowed a Dallas Herald and had read the story about Kennedy’s visit. He had seen the chart showing that the motorcade would end as it passed the Texas School Book Depository. After that, according to the newspaper account, the group of cars would go under the overpass, turn up onto the Stemmons Freeway, and get off at the Harry Hines cutoff for the Trade Mart.
Two hours after lunch, Oswald had met Frazier in the rear of the ground floor at the Depository and asked if he could get a ride to Irving. Wes nodded. “Sure, Lee. But I thought you usually go out Friday.” Lee said he wanted to visit his wife to pick up some curtain rods for the little room he had in Dallas. “Sure, Lee,” said Wes. “Any time.” Oswald’s room at 1026 North Beckley, across the Trinity River in the nearby Oak Cliff section, had four small windows on one side. The landlady, Mrs. A. C. Johnson, had long ago equipped them with Venetian blinds and filmy curtains. She did not permit roomers to make changes.
The car hit speed and swung east on Carpenter Freeway. As the traffic melted onto Stemmons Freeway, the two young men could see the skyscrapers of downtown Dallas. Wesley Frazier stared through the snapping wipers, and he tried to think of something to say. He knew he had to be careful, and he was aware that Oswald felt at ease with children. “Did you have fun with the little ones?” he said. Oswald nodded. “Yeah,” he said. Then he smiled. “Yeah we had fun playing around.”
Lee always carried a little brown bag with a sandwich and an apple. “Didn’t you bring lunch today?” Wes said. Oswald said no. “I’m going to buy some in the lunchroom.” Wes did not understand Lee, and he was abashed by the total absence of male conversation. For example, he would not dare ask where Lee had a room. Nor did he understand how a man could have a wife and children living with a lady in Irving, while the man had a small place in Oak Cliff. It was none of Frazier’s business, and any allusions to Oswald’s private life would elicit a dead stare.
Once, about a year before, Mr. Oswald began to write a book about Russia called The Collective. It was not finished, although he paid a typist to render one part of the manuscript into the printed word. At the time, he thought that it was “literary” to include a short biography of the author, and Wes would have learned more in the one written paragraph than in all the weekend trips to and from Irving:
“Lee Harvey Oswald was born in Oct 1939 in New Orleans La.,” it read, “the son of a Insuraen Salesmen who early death left a far mean streak of indepence brought on by negleck. Entering the US Marine corp at 17 this streak of independence was strengthed by exotic journeys to Japan the Philippines and the scores of odd Islands in the Pacific immianly after serving out his 3 years in the USMC he abonded his american life to seek a new life in the USSR full of optimism and hope he stood in red square in the fall of 1959 vowing to see his chosen course through, after, however, two years and alot of growing up I decided to return to the USA. . . .”
The sun was kind to the pale beauty of the White House this morning. The day was cloudy, but the yellow shafts of light poured through the holes and fingered the great building in Braille. The men in the Situation Room in the cellar of the West Wing worked on the next précis to be sent to the President through the military switchboard. The policemen at the East and West Gates stopped cars, counted and studied faces, examined passes, and waved the vehicles on. Two presidential assistants were in the barbershop. Others, young lawyers, worked at their desks on the multitudinous tasks of legislation, studying it, writing it, rewriting it, condensing it. For Bernard West, the urbane chief usher, it was an easy day in his between-floors office. The President’s personal secretaries—with the exception of Mrs. Evelyn Lincoln, who was with him—had a backlog of letters to write, some to be stamped with Mr. Kennedy’s signature, others to wait on his desk for his personal scribble.
The Rose Garden, outside the President’s office, dozed behind stiff, unyielding leaves, waiting for winter. The swimming pool remained heated at ninety degrees, even though no one, including the Kennedy children, would use it today. The long melancholy corridors, flanked with the faces of history in frames, were empty except for the stations where Secret Service men stood. The huge East Room was in semi-darkness, with an ornate grand piano at one end and a Stuart painting of George Washington at the other.
A crowd queued up outside the East Gate. These were citizens. They would tramp through all the public rooms on the ground floor, and some would pluck a piece of gold fringe as a souvenir, and others would stare gaping at the deep rugs, the damask wall covering, the gold pen and ink sets, and the dishes of many administrations. The White House was, at this time, looking better. Jacqueline Kennedy had assumed the burden of calling in decorators and going over the White House warehouse inventory to see what furniture, what paintings, what bric-a-brac might be restored.
She had brought such color and beauty and life to the old mansion that it was being compared to the elegant palaces of the Old World. The work had been arduous, and sometimes she was forced to beg an owner of an historical chair or bust to please donate it. She had even established a President’s personal library in a small room on the ground floor, near the South Grounds. The magic of her work showed in the brightness and dignity of the rooms. There was an historical lift to the mansion; visitors who had once shouted carelessly now whispered. Guides passed out ornate pamphlets explaining the significance of the items in each room. President Kennedy so admired the result that, instead of holding all formal dinners in the state dining room, he now preferred to use the Blue Room for small parties and both for big ones.
In the East Wing—“the female section”—a necklace of offices held ladies who responded to social mail and Mrs. Kennedy’s personal mail; here the invitations to White House galas were executed in script; seating arrangements were worked out with the care of a good chess game, and the First Lady’s ballroom gowns were on display in half-lifesize renderings. On the second floor, there were some men. Not many, but a few.
This was the Secret Service office of the White House detail. It had a female receptionist, but this was the only concession to the frilly wing of the White House. Inside there were three desks. They were plain and uncluttered, unlike the men who used them. Gerald A. Behn, special agent in charge of the White House detail, sat here to plot the safekeeping of the First and Second Families of the nation with the care someone else might plot their undoing. His work began a full three weeks before each presidential trip.
The moment the President made a commitment to go somewhere, Behn’s work was under way. In the case of Dallas, he followed procedure by pulling a PRS (Protective Research Section) file on the city, and this card, in Secret Service headquarters, would list any persons in the area thought to be potentially dangerous. All persons who were psychiatrically homicidal were listed; all cranks who wrote threatening letters; all persons who had been involved in political riots or arrested and detained for political violence.
Every street the President planned to traverse in each city had to be “sanitized” long in advance by agents. Every name on the PRS list had to be checked for whereabouts and security. Every building Mr. Kennedy might step into had to be screened and searched. The day before the President arrived, men had to be posted at every entrance and exit to each of those buildings. Through Chief James J. Rowley of the Secret Service, liaison had to be established with other governmental investigative agencies, such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the CIA so that, if they had any information which might augment the safety of the President, it would go into Jerry Behn’s hopper.
The agencies worked well together. So well, in fact, that Chief Rowley often sent some of his Secret Service men to the FBI to take short courses in investigative procedures and the newer and more bizarre devices of detection. In late October 1963, the word that went out from Behn’s office was “San Antonio, Houston, Fort Worth, Dallas.” The PRS file didn’t have much material. The FBI and the CIA had very little.
The name of Lee Harvey Oswald did not come up. Nor would it. He was a defector who had gone to the Soviet Union and had returned with a wife and child. The State Department had a file on him, but it was a file of insolent correspondence, closing with the department’s lending him money to come home. The Navy Department had a short dossier on Lee Harvey Oswald. He was a onetime Marine who, after fleeing to Russia, had been court martialled and his honorable discharge changed to a dishonorable discharge. The young man had protested to the Secretary of the Navy, Mr. John Connally, but the DD was allowed to stand. The FBI was aware of him, but only as a “Marxist” who appeared to be “clean.” He had never attended a Communist Party meeting, never consorted with Reds, never tried to get employment in a sensitive defense area, appeared to have considerable trouble with his marital life, and bounded from one cheap laboring job to another.
Most of the people Behn had to worry about were emotionally disturbed. A history of assassins is a glossary of persons sick and obsessed. Lee Harvey Oswald never got drunk, never wrote threatening letters, and once told his wife that if the President was killed, he would be replaced by another man who “thinks the same and will keep up the same program.”
What worried Gerald Behn was that the Secret Service has no authority over the actions of the President. They had the responsibility but could not make the decisions. Word had already come over the teletype that it was raining in Fort Worth but that Mr. Kennedy did not want the bubbletop on and asked that the Secret Service men remain on the follow-up car. The first part created no anxiety in the White House. The second part did.
President Kennedy was becoming increasingly irritated with the Secret Service. Behn recalled that the Chief Executive had told him, forcefully, to keep his men away from the lead car. On another occasion, in the midst of a motorcade, he had excitedly waved off the men who trotted beside the car. It had reached a stage where Behn and his assistant, Floyd Boring, were no longer popular with the President. He saw them as the leaders of the intruders. Sometimes he almost bumped into an SS man outside his office door. He felt that he was seeing SS men everywhere.
One afternoon, when the President’s eyes blurred, he asked to see an ophthalmologist. The Secret Service asked him to please remain in the White House until they could send men to the doctor’s office, clean out the waiting room, study the examining room, the doctor, and his nurse, and “sanitize” the sidewalk and the buildings on the opposite side of the street. After all this was done, Kennedy left the South Grounds with a Secret Service car ahead of him and one behind. For the President, it was beyond bearance. At the doctor’s office, he had had to sit in the car until the men in the sunglasses nodded to him that it was safe to emerge.
Gerald Behn had been running beside the President’s car in Mexico City in June 1962, amid the din of a full-throated Latin welcome, when a “beatnik” broke the police lines and planted himself squarely before the President’s car. When he saw that it would not stop, he skirted the fender with a twist of the hip like a matador avoiding horns. As the car passed, the bearded one approached President Kennedy, and Mr. Behn had knocked him down with a punch. The man had been arrested by the Mexican police and was found to be an American with a police record. The President was angry. He told Mr. Behn that he should not have hit the man.
In a Berlin motorcade, enthused youths broke police lines and the Secret Service agents dropped off the follow-up car to interpose themselves between the President and his admirers. This also incurred presidential wrath. In Seattle, Phoenix, and Bonham, Texas, in November 1961, Mr. Kennedy ordered the Secret Service to stop riding the rear bumpers of his car. Only four days ago, in Tampa, Florida, the President looked over his shoulder and saw Special Agents Donald Lawton and Charles Zboril on the rear steps of his car and he ordered them off. The motorcade was moving too fast, so Floyd Boring radioed the follow-up car and the President’s driver to slow down. The Secret Service men got off.
It was not that the President did not appreciate the protection. He didn’t want it to be obvious. When he was in a good mood, he said: “Protection is Jim Rowley’s job. He has never lost a President yet.” Mr. Kennedy knew as well as the Secret Service did that 100 percent protection is impossible. “Any man who wants to trade his life for mine . . .” The percentage of protection decreases with the daring of the “boss.” If he waves his personal police force away, he hampers its work. If he departs from schedule, or stops the motorcade to shake hands, or leaves a welcoming group to walk along the edge of a crowd shaking hands, or even if he stands still in a street of tall buildings, his percentage of protection drops to the danger point.
Now Gerald Behn had the news from Fort Worth. He could sit at his desk and worry. He could call his Chief and win understanding and sympathy. Or he could proceed with the small tasks of his office, knowing that Mr. Kennedy had always been proved right before, and the Secret Service wrong. Nothing had ever happened to him that could be called dangerous. In a dozen hours, the President would be at the LBJ ranch for a day or two, and the place was a cinch to secure. It was off the main road, and the entrances and exits were easily sealed. The nearest town, Johnson City, was about fourteen miles away. The two families would rest up, enjoy a Texas barbecue, invite some of the Johnson friends over, then take a plane back to Washington. A simple and safe procedure.
On the wall of Mr. Behn’s office hung a framed poem:
Fame is fleeting, fitful flame
Which shines a while on John Jones’ name
And then puts John right on the spot;
The flame shines on
But John does not.
The President took a call from the White House. It was Richard Goodwin, an assistant, who said that The New York Times was about to write an article about him. Goodwin had told the Times “No comment,” but he wanted presidential advice in the matter. Mr. Kennedy ordered his man to go ahead and write a release about him. At the same time, Pamela Turnure, the dark, attractive secretary to Mrs. Kennedy, was issuing a press statement in the name of the First Lady that Texas had turned out to be just as warm and hospitable and friendly as she had always heard. Yesterday had been “a wonderful day.”
The White House press corps was stacked in rooms all over the big U-shaped hotel. The dean, gray-haired Merriman Smith of United Press International, had filed some overnight copy; Seth Kantor made notes that the crowd in the parking lot had started to collect “before dawn.” Charles Roberts of Newsweek; Tom Wicker of The New York Times; Robert Donovan of the Los Angeles Times; Jim Mathis of the Advance Syndicate; Jack Bell of the Associated Press; there were correspondents accredited from Washington, from New York, from Fort Worth, Dallas, Chicago, and there were newspaper photographers, television cameramen, radio and TV reporters, Western Union telegraphers and, in some cases, editors-on-the-scene to correlate the efforts of groups of reporters.
The importance of the press was never underestimated by the Kennedys. The President, having served his apprenticeship as a reporter, understood professional jargon such as “overnight,” “bulldog,” “lead to come,” and “folo-up.” In a manner of speaking, he was his own press secretary. The post was nominally filled by a stout, jolly man named Pierre Salinger, a onetime investigator for the Senate McClellan Committee, whose counsel was Robert Kennedy. The President dealt with the press through Salinger, and the reporters heard only what Mr. Kennedy wanted them to hear, without exposing himself to charges of “managing” the news.
The attitude of the President was that the press, in a real sense, was akin to a fire: it can warm a man, but it can also burn him. At morning conferences, he and Salinger tried to anticipate the questions—especially “the curves”—which might be asked at Salinger’s daily briefings. The increasing importance of the press to presidential aspirations is seen in the fact that, in the Woodrow Wilson administration, his personal secretary, Joseph Tumulty, dealt with the newspapers when he was so disposed, whereas in the Kennedy administration, Mr. Salinger, assisted by Malcolm Kilduff and Andrew Hatcher, occupied a suite of White House offices full of researchers and stenographers.
It is possible that the Kennedys (Mrs. Kennedy feared press coverage and especially unflattering photographs of herself) attributed more importance to the press than it deserved. Mr. Kennedy began his Administration by trying to seal the sources of news and information. He demanded that ministers of Cabinet rank and less, even servants in the White House, agree not to take notes and write tracts, magazine articles, or books about their experiences. He also asked bureau and department heads not to write articles of major importance or make speeches without first submitting the copy to the White House for endorsement.
On the surface, Mr. Kennedy handled the press with urbane wit and a first-name camaraderie. As a minority President, one who had won election by the narrowest of margins, he was aware that he needed the goodwill of these questing men and women who, by the nature of their daily work, had to fear being used by a charming man and his attractive wife. The breakfast speech on this particular morning was of no moment if addressed solely to the 2,000 members of the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce and their guests. It must be directed more to the press, which could funnel the words and their import to 180 million Americans outside the area.
Under the surface, the President was chagrined to find that the goodwill of the press had to be solicited anew every day. No warm handshake, no inscribed photograph, no off-the-cuff confidence could keep the press loyal to Kennedy. Their words flogged his hide after the Cuba Bay of Pigs disaster. Their attitude after the Vienna Summit Conference was that the Russians had tweaked the young man’s nose. The current trip to Texas was assessed as a two-day whirlwind to sweep up the 25 electoral votes of Texas for the Democratic Party. To Mr. Kennedy, the smiling faces he saw everywhere represented 9.25 percent of the 270 electoral votes required for reelection.
The intraparty fight between Senator Ralph Yarborough and Governor John Connally assumed no great importance in John Kennedy’s mind until he read the Texas press. He had been misinformed about the depth of the schism and, when he left the White House yesterday, the President had been certain that a presidential knocking of heads together would settle the dispute and align all Democrats behind him. He was pained to find that Governor Connally had arrogated to himself all arrangements for the trip, and invitations, too. The conservative side of the party, which would never support the President with enthusiasm, got all the choice seats, while Yarborough’s liberal followers, who would and did endorse Kennedy, were cast in the role of pariahs and outcasts.
Kennedy became increasingly irritated. This morning he had read in the Dallas papers that, far from healing the Connally-Yarborough breach, he was widening it. Governor Connally, who had postponed this visit several times because, even though Kennedy had heeded the intercession of Vice-President Lyndon Johnson and appointed Connally, who was Johnson’s onetime assistant, as Secretary of the Navy, the Texas Governor was never a “Kennedy man.” As host, he was in the position of a man who could manipulate the luncheons, dinners, and cocktail parties in such a manner that his following sat in the places of honor while Yarborough’s liberal wing was either ignored or confined to the back of the hall.
Kennedy found it impossible to bring the Governor and the Senator together for a smile and a handshake, so he settled for asking that Yarborough ride with Vice-President Johnson. In this instance, Johnson was tractable, but Yarborough declined. The President, increasingly incensed at what might become a Connally trap, stopped requesting that the Senator ride with the Vice-President and demanded it. Yarborough rode with the Vice-President and Mrs. Johnson on the final short midnight leg of the trip from Carswell Air Force Base to the Hotel Texas. Few people were in the streets to witness the demonstration of party unity.
This morning, the Washington press corps, which had featured the President’s unexpected welcome from Texas, began to read the Fort Worth Telegram and the Dallas Herald. The sophisticated wire services had been aware of the party fight, but had not pinned their leads on it because, like Kennedy, the press assumed that Kennedy’s personal charm would bring the contentious ones together. They were changing their minds.
That is why the President, through Kenny O’Donnell, ordered Yarborough to ride with Johnson “or walk.” In effect, he was working the easy side of the street. The proper move would have been to thrash the matter out alone with Connally and Yarborough, but Kennedy was too insecure a party leader to risk a state ultimatum. The Governor, as O’Donnell and O’Brien should have known, was not even sympathetic to the President. Connally, facing reelection in the next year, felt no desire to be seen with the President or to be his host. Connally was a handsome man with a long splash of white backing away from the temples, but he had a stubborn jaw and a thin lip. He and Nellie had come a long way, and he had no relish for sitting in the jump seat of anybody’s car.
In Texas, the Governor was accustomed to the comfort of the big seat. He knew his people and he felt that his star was ascending, while that of Kennedy had dissipated its light in a shower of sparks. A national political poll had dropped the President to his lowest point of popularity less than a month ago, and Congress had felt no mandate from the electorate to push the Kennedy reforms. In a test of loyalty, the Governor felt much closer to Vice-President Johnson than to the President. He was also aware that Johnson and Yarborough had fought each other “bare knuckle” for federal patronage in Texas; it was also true that Yarborough had fought the Texas leadership of Lyndon Johnson, even though the Vice-President had a majority of the party faithful in his corner.
At times, it seemed that the President didn’t understand Texas at all. “Lyndon thinks we’ll carry Texas next year,” he had said to the Governor, “but he says it will be hard. Texas is Democratic country; we shouldn’t have a hard race in Texas.” It seemed pointless to explain the situation again. Instead, the Governor hoped that Mrs. Kennedy would be with her husband in Texas. At the White House, Mr. Kennedy had glanced up sharply from his reverie and said: “I agree with you. I would hope that she would come.”
Obviously he was in no position to pledge the presence of his wife. He would consult her about it. But it was Johnson who remained in the most awkward position. He had vowed, when he was nominated, to subscribe with enthusiasm to everything his President proposed, and he had been caught, time and again, doing things and saying things which were opposed to his best political judgment. To keep peace in the family, Johnson had to agree to share an automobile with Ralph Yarborough, even though every student of Texas politics would know that Mr. Johnson, a master assessor of the practical, would not share any part of the state with him. The two men in one car might be worth a photograph, but it would be like tossing two cocks in a pit.
On the thirteenth floor of the Hotel Texas, Rufe Youngblood, the Vice-President’s bodyguard, asked: “Anything new from PRS?” There was nothing new from the Protective Research Section of the Secret Service. On the eighth floor, Clint Hill asked the man in front of 850 if Mrs. Kennedy was going across the street with the President. The answer to that was no, so Hill got a cup of coffee and a biscuit and leaned against a corridor wall.
Mrs. Johnson had finished dressing and felt a sudden uneasiness. Her hand was shaking. She had a poetic passion for her native state, but Dallas was the only city which had ever frightened her. Once, just once, an unruly mob of people had chased her and her husband across a street and into the lobby of the Hotel Adolphus, and the lady had never quite forgotten it. No real harm had come to them, but Mrs. Johnson knew that “Big D” took its politics seriously, and the extremely conservative side of it was not timid about demonstrating. She wasn’t worried about her husband this time; it was the President. She wished that it was all over and they were at the ranch. She kept thinking: “There might be something ugly today.”
On the eighth floor, Mrs. Kennedy had finished breakfast earlier than she had planned. This would give her more time to dress. She might have been happier (Mrs. Connally, too) if the President had decided to put the bubbletop on the car. Men didn’t seem to realize what an open car could do to a coiffure, even a slow-moving automobile. The decision had been made, and Mrs. Kennedy had laid out a street outfit the night before. It consisted of a strawberry pink suit with a burl weave and a grape-purple collar. She would comb her shoulder-length dark hair down straight and part it in front toward the left side of her head. She had a matching pillbox hat to be worn well off the forehead. She would wear a small gold bracelet on the left wrist and white gloves. It was a good cool-weather open-car ensemble. In addition, Mrs. Kennedy dropped a pair of sunglasses into her purse.
The nine-year-old Chevrolet came off the freeway. Wes Frazier wished he could think of something to say, but he couldn’t. The big trucks had tossed mud and mist at his windshield, and the old wipers smeared the mess so that Frazier had to stare around the arc of the wipe to see. Now he turned them off and said: “I wish it would rain or clear off altogether,” but Lee kept his pouty mouth closed.
The car was driven around behind the Texas School Book Depository. The area was flat and open, full of railroad tracks and sidings. Wes pulled the car into a space and put the clutch in neutral. Then he revved the engine to restore a little strength to the battery. Oswald said nothing. He opened the door and got out, reached in back for his curtain rods, and left. The back of the Depository building was two hundred yards ahead.
Frazier was saying something, but Oswald could not hear him over the roar of the old motor. He kept walking toward the loading platform. Wes shut the engine off and followed, calling to Lee, but he didn’t pause. On top of the building was a big flashing Hertz Rent-a-Car sign. The clock on it proclaimed the time to be 7:56 A.M. Under the sign, a cote of gray pigeons nested, waiting for the rain to stop, so that they could swoop along the railroad tracks, looking for spilled grain.
Lee Harvey Oswald didn’t say “thank you” for the free ride. This was not unusual. But Wesley Frazier kept asking himself why, for the first time, Lee was walking ahead of him? They always walked the last few yards together, watching the diesels yanking and shoving strings of cars back and forth. This time, Lee Harvey Oswald reached the loading platform fifty feet ahead of Wes, and didn’t hold the door for him.