The cold night wind swept the face of Europe. It came strong and steady out of the northwest, combing through the hedgerows of the Scottish moors, swinging the street lamps in Antwerp. There was a chill in it and pedestrians walked the Ring of Vienna with heads down and collars up to find that the opera had been canceled. The shops along the Champs-Elysées were bright with light, but the doors were locked. Under the Arc de Triomphe the eternal flame was whipped by a night wind which had no gusts but which pulled steadily at the crisp leaves along the Bois de Boulogne.
Radio Eireann canceled its programs as though anything more frivolous than Brahms would be sacrilegious. A Dublin commentator said: “It’s as if there was a death in every family in Ireland.” In the little Wexford town of New Ross, Andrew Minihan remembered that John F. Kennedy stood in the square and said: “This is not the land of my birth, but it is the land for which I have the greatest affection, and I certainly hope to be back again in the springtime.”
Out in the hills beyond Dublin, Sean O’Casey, eighty-three and finished, the eyes dim beyond repair, sat under a bright light, the blue-brooked hands trembling, and wrote: “Peace, who was becoming bright-eyed, now sits in the shadow of death; her handsome champion has been killed. Her gallant boy is dead. We mourn here with you—poor sad American people.” In London, the great bell of Westminster Abbey began the solemn bass tone which reverberated across the bridge and up toward The Strand. No one paid much attention until it passed the count of ten. It would toll for a solid hour, a tribute reserved for royal dead.
In Burdine’s store in Miami, Mrs. Christine Margolis sobbed on the phone behind the cosmetics counter. Her daughter was trying to tell her what had happened, and Mrs. Margolis moaned: “Honey, don’t cry. Don’t cry.” A Marine sergeant in Caracas, Venezuela, had an hour of daylight left. He strode smartly to the flagstaff in front of the United States embassy, saluted, and pulled the halyards until the banner was at half-staff. A Greek barber in New York said: “I cry.”
Richard Nixon reached his home in New York and dialed J. Edgar Hoover. The FBI Director said that the Dallas police had picked up a suspect named Lee Harvey Oswald. He was a member of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee and a self-proclaimed Marxist, Mr. Hoover said. Nixon sat thinking of his Texas statement that Lyndon Johnson might be dropped from the Kennedy ticket. In the East, three race tracks closed—Aqueduct, Narragansett, and Pimlico—“in memory of President John F. Kennedy.” Many of the bettors did not know that he was dead.
At Andrews Air Force Base the order went out to don “dress uniforms.” The Air Force posted a ceremonial cordon of honor guards on the hard stand where Air Force One would stop. The Army sent three squads of men from Fort Myers, men properly drilled in a deathwatch. Helicopters coming in from the White House with distinguished mourners were requisitioned and ordered to stand by in case Mrs. Kennedy and the new President wanted to use them. The Marines, the Navy, the Coast Guard sent representatives. Someone suggested that it would be fitting if one or two men from each branch of service was used. They began to learn to drill together within the hour.
Nuns in convents all over the world knelt in dim chapels—no matter what the hour—intoning the rosary for the repose of the soul of a Roman Catholic chief of state. Dr. Russell Boles, Jr., was summoned from Boston to the side of Joseph P. Kennedy at Hyannis Port to ascertain whether the father, convalescing from a cerebral hemorrhage, could withstand the shock of the news. At the United Nations in New York, the news was whispered to the pink bald head of General Dwight D. Eisenhower. For a moment, he showed outrage. “There is bound to be a psychotic sort of accident sometime,” he said and put on his topcoat and left.
There was an astonishing river of flame in West Berlin. It started with students holding torches, parading toward the Rathaus. The parade picked up volunteers on each street. By the time it reached the big square with the rough-stoned buildings, 300,000 Germans were carrying torches, and a band began the slow sad strains of Ich hatt’ einen Kameraden. In Bonn, Chancellor Erhard proclaimed a military alert; the German government feared a Soviet invasion.
An advice was received by the U.S. Naval Hospital at Bethesda, Maryland, that an autopsy would be performed there. Doctors were summoned to the administration office by flashing numbers in the corridors, and teams were made ready for the work. A suite of rooms on the seventeenth floor, including kitchen and sitting room, was prepared for the Kennedy family. The doctors at Bethesda were aware, from radio and television reports, that the dying President had been taken to a place called Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas. No Navy doctor thought of phoning Parkland to ask what procedures had been tried, what wounds had been treated, to ask to what surgical abuses the body had been submitted. Nor did it occur to Parkland, when the news was broadcast that the remains were headed for Bethesda, to phone with a summary report of Texas procedures.
Shortly after 4 P.M. in Dallas, Dr. James Carrico completed a two-page summary of medical findings and procedures at Parkland. It encompassed only the emergency work of Carrico and his confreres. No one had time to examine the President thoroughly before he died. Or after. In another office, Dr. William Kemp Clark completed a two and three-quarter page medical summary in his own rapid scrawl. It might have helped Bethesda to know that the extruding hole in the President’s neck had first been a small exit wound and that it had been enlarged surgically to permit a tube to be inserted into the bronchial area to assist breathing.
It was not a good day for professional thinking of any kind.
There is a penalty for being the so-called “good boy” in a family. Robert Oswald was the good boy. He wore the attributes of a responsible citizen when he was very young. His mother put him and his brothers into an orphanage. Robert understood unquestioning obedience, respect to elders, how to face misery, to live in hardship and poverty, and to protect a younger brother. Robert Oswald was born old. The only time he ever boasted, he said: “I do not go to pieces.”
He was a medium-dark young man who married early and was a steady provider. He worked in a brick plant in Denton, Texas, and the company sent him to Arkansas for additional training. Life was exacting, but Robert and his wife knew that in time, they would own a little house and be able to stake out fifty feet of grass as their own. He kept away from his mother because she whined and had little tact. His older half-brother, John Pic, was in the same situation and managed to remain aloof from Marguerite except for the time, years ago, when she left Texas and tried to move in with the Pics in New York. Inevitably, there had been trouble between the women; inevitably, there had been maternal ultimata; the mother had taken the sullen little brother, Lee, and moved to another apartment. The boy was a truant, and the school authorities in New York had put him away for psychiatric evaluation. Marguerite managed to escape the courts of New York by running back to Texas with the little one.
Robert could not divest himself of the responsibility he felt for Lee. The publicity in the newspapers when Lee sailed for the Soviet Union fell on Robert. When Lee came back to Texas, Robert was at the airport to meet him. Lee said: “Hi!” and slapped his brother on the back. Then he looked around and said: “Where are the reporters?” There weren’t any, and Robert hoped that the family name would not get into the newspapers again. He couldn’t understand his younger brother’s disappointment at not seeing newsmen at the plane.
Today, late in the afternoon, the name Oswald boomed from a small portable radio set in the plant. Robert had been at work and had heard about the assassination. Like his co-workers, he felt badly, doubly so because it had happened in Big D. It did not stop him from applying himself to his job. The radio could be heard as the men worked. There were bulletins about the hospital, about the death, about Johnson, the finding of a rifle. Much of it was sporadic and incoherent. Robert hoped that the police would get whoever was responsible.
Then the blow fell and Robert stood nodding dumbly. Men were around him saying that the police had arrested someone named Lee Harvey Oswald. They had him for shooting a policeman and the commentators said that maybe the same man shot the President. Robert nodded. That was his brother’s name. Sure. Not just a relative; a kid brother. The men wanted to know what Robert was going to do. Young Mr. Oswald stood in the middle of the shop, thinking. What to do? The first thing to do was not to “go to pieces.” The second thing would be to see the boss and ask for some time off to go to Dallas.
There was never any doubt about the second move. Didn’t Robert always protect Lee from the big kids in the orphanage? Wasn’t Robert the one who used his meager spending money to buy Lee a toy, a game, a ball to bounce? Robert could do anything except pry that kid loose from mother. Nor did he try. He knew, all along, and even when he was too young to know, that there was something wrong in an existence where a mother worked all day and ordered a little boy to play by himself in a room. There seemed to be something overly protective in having the little fellow sleep with mother until he was eleven. There was something wrong in that deep silent stare that the kid turned toward the world. When Lee returned from Russia, Robert and his wife tried to be friendly, but Lee talked about political doctrines which Robert could not comprehend. The two couples experimented with a friendship which died almost at once. The Russian bride could not be understood. Lee kept his family at Robert’s house, but the younger brother immersed himself in books. He was not interested in old memories or discussions about mother. Robert said he might speak to some people and try to get Lee a job. His brother’s eyes came up from a book and they were remote. Lee said he could handle his affairs.
The office phone was nearby. Robert Oswald called his wife. “Vada,” he said, “you been listening to the television?” Yes, she said. The news was awful. Had she heard Lee’s name mentioned? No, she hadn’t. His name had been mentioned. He was arrested. “I’m leaving here for home,” Robert said. It was said in a calm tone. As he hung up, the phone rang again. It was for Oswald. The credit manager, Mr. Dubose, was calling from the Forth Worth office. “Bob, brace yourself,” he said. “Your brother has been arrested.”
“Yes, Mr. Dubose. I know. I just heard.” Robert Oswald felt a fear. He could steel himself against the words, “Your brother has been arrested,” but he felt that he could not stand to hear such words as “for the assassination of the President of the United States.” He took a deep breath, and Dubose said, “Your mother has been trying to reach you.” Oswald said, “Thank you” and hung up.
In a moment, he was back on the phone. Oswald called William Darwin at the main office of the Acme Brick Company and asked permission to leave for Dallas at once. Mr. Darwin was sympathetic. “I know,” he said. “I just heard. You go ahead and do whatever you have to do, Robert. Don’t worry about the office.” Oswald felt the security in the tone, and he was grateful. Had he studied American history he might have recollected that, when John Wilkes Booth shot President Lincoln, John’s famous brother Edwin, the Shakespearean actor, was barred from stages all over America, even though he had no knowledge of his brother’s deed. Disconsolately, Robert Oswald said that he thought the best thing to do would be to phone the Federal Bureau of Investigation first. They would know what he should do.
He was indeed panic-proof. At a time when competent minds were being swept up and fragmented in a vortex of fear, Robert Oswald disciplined himself to accept the deepest sorrow of his life.
The boy, a little too straight, his jaw a bit too grim, strode through the emergency area and, in spite of the arms which reached out to inquire where he was going, he kept in motion, got on the elevator, and went up to the second floor. He was seventeen, a time when the adolescent sees a man in a mirror, and he went past the guards, the Texas troopers in the corridor, as though he had no time for greetings.
He tried the most guarded door and it opened to his touch. Inside was Mrs. John Connally. He threw both arms around her and said: “It’s going to be all right, mother.” Mrs. Connally rocked in the embrace of her son John and, between sobs of joy, demanded to know how he could possibly have come all the way from Austin in so short a time. He wanted to know about his father. “I hitched a ride on an airplane,” he said. He was man-like, offering courage and support to his mother and, in the same breath, insisting that he be permitted to see his father.
Mrs. Connally brought him through a door into the next room. There, the chief executive of the State of Texas reposed, looking like a scientific octopus. Plastic tubes ran into his body from overhead positions; others drained downward toward the floor. The fractured right wrist was suspended halfway over the bed. An oxygen mask was over his mouth, and the eyes turned to see the wonderment in the face of his son and the smile of pride shelving the tears on the face of his wife.
An old Navy roommate came barging through the door. This was the huge figure of Henry Wade, district attorney. Mr. Wade was most of all a practical man. He had seen death at close hand many times and he had no time for mourning or thumping his chest. Tonight he had a social appointment, and he planned to keep it. He stopped at Parkland to say hello to the living.
The Governor could not speak with the mask on his face, so Wade and young John wished him well. Mrs. Connally thought that this would be a good time to tell her husband some bad news. She was dwelling on it when Connally lifted the mask off with his left hand and said: “How is the President?” Nellie Connally said: “He died.” The white head on the pillow nodded. “I knew,” he said. “I knew.” The mask snapped back on the mouth and nose.
They left as Doctor A. H. Giesecke, Jr., came into the room. The external signs, skin, lips, fingernails, had improved. The Governor emitted a groan with each breath and said he felt restless. His right shoulder was sore. It was impossible to get into a position of comfort. The doctor knew that all of this was unimportant. The Governor said that he felt a constant urge to urinate. Dr. Giesecke explained that a catheter was in him, and that this would cause urethral discomfort, but to bear with it for a while. Throughout the operation, the Governor had lost 1,296 cc. of blood and 450 cc. of urine.
He was dehydrated, even though whole blood had replaced what he had lost. As Doctor Giesecke concluded his examination, he noted minor signs of cyanosis, pink complexion, pulse 110, blood pressure 120 over 70, and the extremities were “warm and dry.” It was too early to give the patient a sleeping potion. He would have to bear the pain until later in the evening.
The first aid room was a quiet place. The woman moaned and sobbed without control, and then she stopped and talked rationally for a while. Detective James Leavelle reasoned with Mrs. Helen Markham, and she sat on the white enameled chair listening and nodding. Suddenly she would see again the young fellow in the jacket waiting for the policeman to come out of the car, and she would hear the shots and watch the cop fold toward the road in slow motion. She clenched her hands between her knees and rocked back and forth with uncontrolled hysteria. The screams were high-pitched and steady.
Leavelle and his partner, C. W. Brown, kept reasoning softly, and the screams diminished. Mrs. Markham required time to resume control. Then, when she had wiped her eyes with a handkerchief once more, she said she was afraid to look at the man who fired the shots. Leavelle reminded her that the Dallas police were not sure they had the right man; they thought they did. It would be up to her and the cab driver and the Davis sisters to identify the man. Mrs. Markham wasn’t sure she could do it; the episode had made her hysterical with fear and she wasn’t certain that she could stand in a lineup room and look at anyone.
Leavelle smiled. He picked up a phone on the other side of the basement room and called the third floor. To Captain Fritz, he said: “Mrs. Markham is ready.” Word also went to the fifth-floor jail. Sergeant Duncan looked around to find young slender men who would approximate the build and age of the suspect. He ordered the jail clerk, Don Ables, to go to the basement showup room. Patrolman W. E. Perry was also young and slender. He reported to the basement. Richard Clark was another candidate. They passed muster as reasonable facsimiles of Lee Harvey Oswald, but he had something none of them had: a bruise over one eye and another under the other eye.
Fritz and his Homicide detectives brought Oswald from the office through the press mob. Questions were shouted; responses were mumbled while other questions were heard. Radio reporters with microphones were thrust away from the prisoner by detectives who wore their cowboy hats indoors. Leavelle watched Mrs. Markham. Her head moved birdlike from Detective Sims to the so-called prisoners, and the woman began to wring her hands. Ables was first, as Number Four, then Clark, Oswald as Number Two, and Perry as Number One. The moment Oswald began to climb the steps, Mrs. Markham began to weep. She held her hands to her mouth and said: “That’s the man I saw.” Lieutenant Leavelle, conducting the lineup, didn’t ask her which man.
He ordered each of the four to turn profile, each side, then slowly completely around, and he asked questions like “What is your name?” “Where do you live?” “What is your occupation?” of each one except Oswald. The suspect stared toward the screen, then began to look upward as the others answered questions. He listened to the obviously spurious replies. Each man was referred to by his number and, when Leavelle completed the questions, he turned to Mrs. Markham and she tried to calm herself to say: “He is the one. Number Two is the one.”
To make certain, she asked Leavelle to have the number two man turn sidewards again. “The second one,” she said. “Which one?” the police said. “That second one—the one you called Number Two.” Mrs. Markham began to feel weak. “Number Two from which end?” the police asked. Mrs. Markham pointed. Then she fell over in a faint.
The prisoner was returned by jail elevator to the third floor. Boyd and Sims cleared a path through the shouting press. Once Oswald tried to respond to a question, but the words were engulfed in sound. He was returned to Captain Fritz’s office. In the hall, Ferd Kaufman, an Associated Press photographer, had to hold his camera high and aim slightly downward to catch the swift appearance and disappearance of the suspect.
Behind him someone said: “Eddie.” It was not Mr. Kaufman’s name, but he turned and a stout, middle-aged stranger said: “Excuse me. I thought you were Eddie Benedict.” Kaufman knew that Benedict was a Dallas freelance photographer. He said: “That’s all right,” and the stranger gave him a card. “My name is Jack Ruby,” he said. “I own the Carousel Club. This card will entitle you to be my guest at the club anytime.” Kaufman nodded his thanks, watching to see if there was going to be any more immediate action with Oswald. Ruby broadened his smile, as though he didn’t feel that he was making a sufficiently deep impression. “I’ll be the only businessman in Dallas who will have an ad in the morning paper saying that his place will be closed for three days in memory of the assassination of the President.”
Kaufman looked at his watch. “I don’t know,” he said. “There is still time to change an ad in the morning paper. Up to five o’clock,” he said. They talked for a moment, and the photographer excused himself. He stuck the Carousel Club card in his pocket. Most newsmen would not wonder what a nightclub owner might be doing at police headquarters at a time such as this. To the contrary, one of the indexes to the truly big story is to count the number of outside individuals—politicians, department store executives, local characters afflicted with “copitis,” social lions—who are impelled to be at the scene of a major crime or disaster.
Ruby had “copitis.” Many times, he had bought the smiles of hardened police officers by bringing bags of cole slaw, cold cuts, seeded rye bread, rolls, and coffee. He had repeated his act at many big Dallas fires. He was never truly “in” with the officers of the law, but Ruby could get in and out of most places where the public might be excluded. A large number of cops had been his guests at his nightclubs and, though he might be a pest, no one wanted to order the man to leave.
Night fell quickly in Washington, as though for an event as solemn as this, darkness was de rigueur. The capital, always gifted with an acute sense of the proprieties, demanded the mood of the long shadows. Sometimes, in the bronze sunsets of autumn, the city clutches dusk to its bosom, but not on this day. The sun, so it seemed, had been there a moment ago, and now the great dome of the Capitol stood bright and pale against the black of the sky.*
Taxis returning to the city from across the Potomac spun the circle from behind the Lincoln Memorial and slowed to study the bronze face in meditation, the knuckles shiny on the arms of a granite chair. On the front porch of the White House, the great glass vial was alight, shedding its radiance between the great columns. Pedestrians peered between the tall iron pickets of the fence, sensing the historic majesty of the building which had lost a tenant. Inside, an usher carried the late newspapers to the table behind the President’s desk. Among them was The London Daily Express. On its front page was a photo of Barry Goldwater. The caption read: “The Man Who Is Gunning for Kennedy.”
Everywhere the dismay of the people was indoors. There, too, the lights were bright, but spirits were dark. The cocktail lounges were patronized. Office workers sipped drinks and talked of the event, both actions of therapeutic value. For some, it would be an excellent night to remove dinner from the list of events and place a bottle on the table.
There were a few happy people left. At 3044 O Street, in Georgetown, two of them scrambled upstairs and down, chattering about the things which please children. Neither John-John nor Caroline appeared to notice that Grand-mère, waiting inside the front door, stooped to give them an extra fervent kiss and a long hug. She had dried her eyes and caressed the lids with a powder puff, and they had not noticed. Mrs. Hugh Auchincloss disciplined herself to face the children with a smile, but she could not bear to engage glances with an adult such as Maude Shaw, their nurse.
She wanted the children to eat early, so the dining room table was being set, but there had been no time to make preparations for an overnight stay. Grand-mère, a handsome woman who knew Washington as she knew the handrail on the staircase, led everyone up to a guest room. It was going to be awkward, she thought, because this room had twin beds. Miss Shaw could use one; Caroline was accustomed to a youth bed, but John-John needed a crib.
There was one in the attic, an old one with sideboards kicked by energetic feet, but it was in disrepair. Maude suggested that she could make it do. They went up to the attic, while the youngsters spun with the happiness of an unexpected visit to a loved one who granted them small liberties denied by their mother. For them, this was a good day. Caroline, who was usually sensitive to the moods and demeanor of others, did not even notice the shocked silence of the people at the South Entrance when she left the White House. They stared; some averted their eyes; one wept and turned to study a wallpaper of ancient ships.
The women brought the crib down. It was in sections, and something might have been done with it if some of the long screws and washers had not been mislaid. They sat on the floor of the guest room, trying to hold the pieces together. A maid brought some cord, and they tied the parts together. It was a sorry vehicle, but when the women shook it, the crib held.
Bedclothes and a mattress for the crib were found. It seemed good, in a way, to have many small things to do. When the guest room was ready, Mrs. Auchincloss led the way down to the dining room. There it was bright and cheerful, and the children consumed what was placed before them and kept up a running brook of comment. After a little play, they would be undressed and helped with their nightclothes. Mrs. Shaw kept telling herself that she couldn’t do it; she just couldn’t tell them.
The mood inside the White House was demanding and uncompromising. Men from bureaus and departments were impressed into service. Some, who did not have credentials, had to be endorsed by phone at the West Gate. They were planning a funeral for a President. He was still on his last flight and was still to be autopsied and embalmed, but the gentlemen acted as though there was not a moment to lose. They had yet to hear the wishes of the widow and those who were acquainted with Jacqueline Kennedy were aware that her wishes were adamant and positive.
Robert Sargent Shriver, Jr., handsome wavy-haired head of the Peace Corps, was the ranking officer. His wife was Eunice Kennedy, sister of John F. Kennedy. He had walked into the White House, selected a sizable office, and begun to recruit assistants. At the time, the government of the country was being directed by assistant secretaries and undersecretaries of the several ministries and it would limp along sans decisions until the new President reached the White House and began the true assumption of power. However, in the matter of a funeral, Sargent Shriver could and did make decisions all afternoon and evening.
The room in which he sat had the trappings of a dispatcher’s office. Men came and went; no one seemed to stay for more than a moment. The commands were enunciated; the arguments were given brief ear; the alternatives were examined. At one time or another, Ted Sorensen, Kennedy’s myopic speech writer, was present; McGeorge Bundy, who was handling the Situation Room in the basement, appeared and departed; Jerry Behn, Secret Service agent in charge of the White House, helped in whatever way he could; Ted Reardon, Kennedy politician, volunteered; so did Walter Jenkins, a Johnson assistant; old Averell Harriman, the elder ambassador; Dick Goodwin, writer; Captain Taz Shepard, the president’s Navy aide; a priest from St. Matthew’s Procathedral; numerous dragooned public relations men from several bureaus; and Lieutenant-Colonel Paul Miller, the U.S. Army’s chief of ceremonial affairs. In addition, stenographers trotted in and out with phone calls to make, messages to type or deliver orally. The curving white hallway, with its Secret Service agents and White House police, was jammed with men who thought of this matter or that in connection with the impending funeral and who had to see Shriver about it at once.
Some men were there merely to keep other men out. The area generated an enthusiasm akin to a campaign. Words, ideas, suggestions, and questions flowed and ebbed through the room as though history was being made here and the participants wanted it to be flawless. It was possible that Mrs. Kennedy might desire to bury her husband in Brookline, Massachusetts, beside their infant son Patrick Bouvier Kennedy. This was the most likely choice. And yet Shriver thought of the National Cemetery at Arlington and phoned Superintendent John Metzler to resolve some of the difficulties attendant on such a matter.
Roman Catholics are admonished to be interred in consecrated ground. Shriver had to know whether Arlington could be considered such. Mr. Metzler said it could. How about children? Could they be buried with their parents? Yes. Would there be any objection to the interment of a President there? Had the matter ever come up before? No. Yes. Was suitable space available in case the family made a decision in favor of Arlington? Yes, there was. In fact, the men who administered the cemetery were prepared to offer a three-acre plot for John F. Kennedy. As a serviceman, even as a President, Kennedy was not entitled to such a large allotment of space, but this was not a time for anyone to be rational.
Colonel Miller told Shriver that a private funeral home would be necessary to prepare the remains. Everyone within earshot bristled. The colonel said that the military could not embalm and dress the body. It would have to be done by the family. This led to a discussion of Washington funeral homes. A firm decision was made to try Gawler’s. Someone phoned Bethesda and the Navy hospital agreed to embalm Kennedy but could not dress him. Colonel Miller alerted Gawler’s. A moment later, someone said that Bethesda could do the whole job. Shriver ordered the other arrangements canceled. All hands listened, and no one did it.
Miller also ordered a funeral detachment of ceremonial soldiers to report to Gawler’s at once and commence rehearsing the Deathwatch. In the press room, second-stringers from the newspapers asked what was going on, and there was no one to keep them informed. Some were filing stories that the body was coming directly to the White House by helicopter; some followed the lead of the National Broadcasting Company, which announced solemnly that Kennedy would be buried in Massachusetts.
McGeorge Bundy ordered an assortment of top-priority filing cabinets emptied and locked. He sealed them in the name of President Lyndon Baines Johnson and thrust the keys into his pocket. The tall, spare figure of Angier Biddle Duke, chief of protocol, was almost grafted to a telephone as the embassies of many nations phoned and asked the proper means of expressing condolences, whether it was possible to pay respects at Andrews Air Force Base, should the minister wear mourning clothes, and who would greet him. It was necessary to find a large silver tray for the State Department, so that cartes de visite could be dropped.
The atmosphere was not mournful. The White House had no time for tears. Dozens of men of governmental second, third, and fourth rank hurried into the office with terse questions, listened to the battle orders, and rushed out to execute them. The chief had fallen on his shield. America was going to see a funeral designed to scar the conscience of every citizen.
In the Fish Room, a small radio was on and a few secretaries listened to NBC’s McGee announce: “At no time has Mrs. Jacqueline Kennedy lost her composure, although her clothes were spattered with President Kennedy’s blood.”
The elevator was slow. It slid upward with Oswald and his guards as though their weight was overwhelming. The operator sat behind heavy wire mesh in a private prison. At the fifth floor, the door opened and the prisoner was taken to a counter at the left. A clerk and a policeman stood behind it. They were casual. Lee Harvey Oswald was asked to empty his pockets. A detective said that his pockets had been emptied twice.
The handcuffs were removed. The prisoner rubbed his wrists. He talked softly to one detective as though this man was a solitary exception to the enmity of the world. Oswald spoke briefly about his wife. He had two children; how many did the detective have? He did not feel abused because the policeman in the theatre punched him in the eye. After all, Oswald had lashed out first. He had no objection to anything except the damned questions about a dead policeman and President Kennedy. The suspect felt that the Dallas Police Department should start looking elsewhere for guilt. The FBI men didn’t like him.
There was an exchange about life in Minsk, Russia. Oswald assured the officer that the Soviet Union, while severely disciplined, was better than most people would believe. The detective decided to capitalize on the friendly attitude. Did Oswald have a rifle in Russia? No, he didn’t. There is a law in Russia that rifles and revolvers cannot be sold or bought. He had purchased a shotgun, which is permissible, but he found only small game in the forests around Minsk, and the weather was too cold for hunting.
The man behind the counter asked one of the detectives to go back down to Robbery and Homicide and fetch the items taken from the prisoner. They had to be placed in an envelope and signed for. Deputy Chief Lumpkin phoned to the fifth-floor jail and ordered Oswald placed in maximum security cell F-2 with two guards on duty twenty-four hours a day. A policeman frisked Oswald once more and said laconically: “No necktie. No shoelaces.” The belt was taken from him.
The sergeant behind the counter glanced at Oswald. “Okay, son,” he said. “Let’s have the clothes.” Oswald looked to his detective for help. “What clothes?” he said. The man leaned over the counter patiently. “Are you wearing underwear?” he said. Yes, he was. “Shorts; no undershirt.” “O.K. Everything comes off but the shorts and socks.” Lee Harvey Oswald began to retreat into one of his belligerent I-know-my-rights attitudes. “I don’t have to undress.”
The officer shrugged. “How is it going to be—the easy way or the hard way?” Oswald began to unbutton his shirt. “They told me I can use a phone,” he said. The clerk pointed behind Oswald. “It’s around that corner,” he said. “Two men are using the phones now.” Oswald removed his shoes and trousers. He could see two men behind glass, with the door locked, using the phones. One man had stretched the receiver so that he could lie on the floor and talk. A guard stood outside the booth with the key to the door. The Dallas Police Department had a sense of honor. It never tapped this line.
The clothing was shoved into a large paper bag. “When they want you downstairs again,” the clerk said, “you just come out here and pick up your duds.” Lee Harvey Oswald stood quietly in shorts and socks. The socks were falling down. The prison was warm, but the act of degradation was not lost on Lee Harvey Oswald. The brownish hair was wispy. The angry face tapered to a chinless point. The neck was long with a lumpy Adam’s apple. The shoulders were polished knobs. The arms and wrists were well muscled. The belly was flat and hard. As a human he was, for a moment, as insignificant as John F. Kennedy under a hospital sheet.
The guard took him by the arm and led him back toward the elevator and past it and across a broken concrete floor. “I want a lawyer,” the prisoner said. “I know my rights.” The guard nodded. They walked through a heavily barred door. They were now in a narrow alley with a wall on the right and three prison cells on the left.
The first two were empty and open. In the third, a Negro was head down on a bunk. Oswald was herded into the second cell.* The door clanged behind him. He examined the square space which was now his, and the perpetual pout returned to his pursed mouth. There were four bunks, two on each side of the door. The lower ones were wooden and partly bare of paint. The upper ones had springs and skimpy mattresses. Across the top of the cell there were bars. Above them he could see the ceiling, lumpy with coats of pale paint.
Four light bulbs, screened by wire, lit the little alley. In the back of the cell, a porcelain sink with chipped sides entertained the steady drip of one faucet. Near it a sloping hole in the floor was ready for functions of the body. There was no flushing system, no bucket for water. Oswald looked around. His steady eyes fell on the Negro in the next cell. The head had not lifted. He must have heard the exchange of words as Oswald was brought into the maximum security area. And yet, whatever crime they had pinned on him, whatever despondency had been induced by stripping him to his underwear and putting him in here, he would not raise his head to look.
Oswald glanced out into the alley. At one end, an officer sat in a round-backed chair with his arms folded across his chest. His eyes were on the vertical prisoner. At the other end of the alley, only eight or nine steps away, another man sat. The eyes fastened themselves onto the prisoner’s skin. “How about that phone?” Oswald said in his aggrieved tone. The man at the far end of the alley did not move. His lips said, “Soon as we get the word.” “I want New York,” the thin body said. The policeman seemed to have an allergy to conversation. He took his time. “In a little while,” he said.
The dialogue ended. He knew and they knew that he would be brought downstairs for more interrogation. The next time he was guided through the press, he would have sense enough to make a cause celebre out of the matter of legal counsel. All he would have to do is to tell the world that he was being denied the right to an attorney of his choice. It would put the police department on the defensive. Not that a lawyer could alter matters for Oswald on this particular day; Texas law would not permit bail in a capital case. The lawyer would be of little assistance in the matter of interrogation because Oswald’s attitude was that he could do well by himself. He responded to the questions which he felt were innocuous; he roared defiance and lapsed into sullen silence when the questions became dangerous.
A lawyer might press the district attorney’s office either to file a charge against Oswald or to admit that it did not have sufficient evidence to hold him. He had not been booked for any crime, nor had he been charged with being an accomplice, a conspirator, or a material witness. He did not know that Helen Markham had been behind that screen a short time back. No one told him that, with her affidavit, they could hold him in the murder of Officer Tippit. The evidence was far from overwhelming but it was sufficient.
For Oswald, the real hurt was in being silenced. Here he could shout and no voice would respond. For a little while, he had been a celebrity, a curiosity worthy of the attention of ranking police officers, Federal Bureau of Investigation agents, and Secret Service men. His was a face on television. How could anyone look at Kennedy without also seeing the unknown who was charged with bringing him down? He was, in every sense, a figure of history. As an omnivorous reader, Lee Harvey Oswald was aware of this, and it may have been responsible for whatever exalted feelings he had. Guilty or not guilty, the name of Oswald would not die.
The two policemen had lazy eyes. They watched him flip himself onto the upper bunk. The hands were cupped behind his head. From the prison kitchen, he could hear the babble of voices. Prisoners were cutting chunks of meat to be cooked for supper. Potatoes were being peeled and halved for boiling. The friendly derisions of the damned flew back and forth. The giggles of the Negro prisoners lasted the longest. None of them had a radio or a newspaper. None of them knew who Lee Harvey Oswald was.
The cordial atmosphere in the Paine household dissipated into something akin to rancor. There had been a come-on-in-we’ve-been-expecting-you attitude when the police arrived, but it had not been reciprocated. The cops were still searching and piling their findings on the living room floor. In response to suggestions or questions, they grunted or did not reply. Out front, three automobiles were parked. This was sufficient to attract the neighbors who had been listening to television and who knew that a Russian woman named Oswald lived at 2515 Fifth.
They stood in gossipy groups on the sunny sidewalk, waiting, perhaps, to witness a mass arrest. The estranged husband, Michael Paine, was both gentlemanly and sophisticated and he could not understand why these men walked around his home for an hour with big cowboy hats on. His wife Ruth was a devotee of patience, but she was running out of it. The police were ransacking her bedroom. Her cheerful demurrers fell on blank stares. They told her to get ready to accompany them back to police headquarters in Dallas. She asked what she was going to do with her two children, and the police said they didn’t have the faintest idea. Nor could they be convinced that Mrs. Paine had no connection with the case at all, except that she gave shelter to Marina Oswald and the babies and, with some reluctance, permitted Lee Harvey Oswald to board free on weekends and use her garage for the Oswald furnishings and bric-a-brac.
The phone calls to find a babysitter became desperate as the minutes ticked on. Michael Paine saw his file of musical recordings dropped on the pile of “evidence” and said: “Don’t take that. It’s just records.” The policeman looked at him and went back into the bedroom. Paine, with some exasperation, said that anyone could see that the box contained recordings which could be purchased anywhere. The screen door was still ajar and the neighbors outside could hear the raising of voices.
Whenever anyone suggested that an item on the pile was insignificant and of no value to such an investigation, it was certain to remain on the pile to be taken to Dallas. The cops were opening bureau drawers, ransacking personal effects, returning aimlessly to the garage where the rifle blanket had been found, digging into cartons and boxes with no notion of what they were searching for. Ruth Paine asked if she could go to the home of her babysitter nearby. Permission was granted with police escort.
Marina sat with Rachel in her arms, watching the action but saying nothing. June still slept in the bedroom, although it would be difficult to understand why the sound of heavy feet and the deep tones of the strange men did not awaken her. Christopher Paine also slept. Lynn Paine sensed the excitement and ran to her father’s arms. Mrs. Paine asked a neighbor, Mrs. Roberts, if she could stay with the children while the adults went to Dallas Police Headquarters, but Mrs. Roberts said she was sorry, she was on her way out.
The woman and the policeman walked to the next block, where a teenage girl worked part-time as a babysitter. Mrs. Paine watched the officer dogging her steps and she said: “Oh, you don’t have to go with me.” He said: “I’ll be glad to.” The mother of the babysitter felt that it would be all right if two of her daughters babysat but not one. They brought their schoolbooks with them.
At the front of the house, Mrs. Paine, whose airy innocence seemed to unman the cops, saw the great assortment of material being carried into one of the automobiles. When she saw three cases of recordings, she smiled and shook her head negatively. “You don’t need those,” she said forgivingly to one of the policemen. “I want to use them on Thanksgiving weekend. I have promised to lead a folk dance conference. I will need all those records, and I doubt that you will get them back on time.” She peeked inside the car. “That,” she said pointing, “is a sixteen-millimeter projector. You don’t want that.”
The cop grabbed her arm. He too was running out of patience. “We’d better get down to the station,” he said. “We’ve wasted too much time as it is.” There was ominous authority in the tone. They stood on the curb a moment, and Mrs. Paine said: “Well, I want a list of everything you are taking, please.” The police had no search warrant, nor bench warrants for arrest or detention, but they were tired of the hour-long dialogue. “We better get down to the station,” they said.
She insisted on going back into her house. Mrs. Paine had already changed from slacks to a dress. Mrs. Oswald said she wanted to don a dress. This brought a flat no from the police. Acrimony was beginning to show. “She has a right to,” Mrs. Paine said, voice rising. “She is a woman.” The two babysitters watched openmouthed. In Russian, Ruth Paine told Marina to go into the bathroom and change. An officer barred the door and said, “No.” Marina Oswald looked down at her checked slacks.
One of the policemen pointed to the children. “We’d better get this straight in a hurry, Mrs. Paine,” he said, “or we’ll just take them down and leave them with juvenile while we talk to you.” The Quaker snapped at her daughter: “Lynn, you may come too.” The threat backfired. The police took Michael Paine in one automobile, piled the Oswald and Paine effects in another, and put Mrs. Paine and Mrs. Oswald, in addition to Lynn, June, and Rachel, in a third. In the house, the two babysitters watched one child.
The women began to speak rapidly in Russian. A policeman in the front seat said he grew up understanding some Czech, but he couldn’t decipher the conversation. The three cars rolled back down the highway toward Dallas. The Czech-descent cop said to Mrs. Paine: “Are you a communist?” “No,” she said. “I am not, and I don’t even feel the need of the Fifth Amendment.”
Roanoke and Lynchburg stood still in the darkness below, embers in a dead fireplace. The big plane seemed to have no forward motion. Far below, the government trackers watched it and listened to Swindal and his first officer ask instructions for descent. The code names of beacon stations, the radio call wavelengths, the rate of descent were heard and repeated. Air Force One was two hundred miles out. The earth was black; the sky at forty thousand feet was still deep blue; the dying sun lingered behind, over Dallas. They had seen each other this day, that sun and this man, and he had gloried in the effusion of warmth and light. Behind the huge blue and white tail, the sun was still up. It had outlived him by four hours and more, but no one marked it or cared. Night was a fitting mask for faces.
He had wanted to say something while the sun was high. To him, San Antonio was romance; Austin was political friction; Houston was a muscular giant; Fort Worth was war planes, and Dallas was a snob. There was something to be said in each of those places and much of it was superficial and pedestrian, but he had polished the stone of the Dallas speech with his own hands. He had rubbed the words and refashioned the phrases. The knowledge that he needed Dallas but Dallas didn’t need him raised the hackles on the back of his neck. It was necessary to bow deferentially to the self-sufficient when he would have preferred to use the words to whip these people.
Mr. Kennedy had no patience with those who could not see. To his way of thinking, they were mournful apostles trying to resurrect a world which died when the last cannon cooled in 1945. America could not shirk its responsibilities to a world which could look in but one of two directions for leadership. Never again could it withdraw in safety to its shores. The cost of leadership would have to be borne by the taxpayers who cried for relief. In peace the cost of the military machine became more expensive. Man’s metal arced across the skies of space, and so did man.
To a young President with a lifted chin and one hand in his jacket pocket, it was a new world with new geopolitics, chronic tensions, and internal convulsions. The civil rights decision had been handed down by the United States Supreme Court in May, 1954, but it had waited for the Young Knight to implement it. To some he was too young, too swift; to others he was the sunny smile of tomorrow; to the politicians he was the leader of the liberal wing of his own party; to Dallas he was a radical.
Had he spoken, Kennedy would not have appeased Dallas. The speech, fired in ringing phrases over the heads of luncheoners at the Trade Mart, would have attempted to divorce the reactionary voters from their reactionary leaders.
Three paragraphs into the body of the speech, he wanted to say: “America’s leadership must be guided by the lights of learning and reason—or else those who confuse rhetoric with reality and the plausible with the possible will gain the popular ascendancy with their seemingly swift and simple solutions to every world problem.” He did not say who, but a discerning ear might conjure the voices of the Murchisons, the Hunts, the Algers, the Walkers, the Governor who sat beside him. “There will always be dissident voices in the land, expressing opposition without alternatives, finding fault but never favor, perceiving gloom on every side and seeking influence without responsibility. Those voices are inevitable. But today,” he wanted to say, “today other voices are heard in the land—voices preaching doctrines which apparently assume that words will suffice without weapons, that vituperation is as good as victory, and that peace is a sign of weakness.”
Would Dallas have understood the shaft or smelled the blood? It is doubtful. The words, high-flown and as incandescent as bubbles, might have drawn applause from those who were bleeding. “We cannot expect that everyone, to use the phrase of a decade ago, will ‘talk sense to the American people.’ But we can hope that fewer people will listen to nonsense. And the notion that this nation is headed for defeat through deficit, or that strength is but a matter of slogans, is nothing but just plain nonsense.”
Deftly his oratory danced from subject to subject: military strength backed by national will; foreign aid; Polaris submarines; to paraphrase a paragraph, he desired to tell his audience that “our successful defense of freedom is due not to the words we use, but to the strength we stand ready to use on behalf of the principles we stand ready to defend.”
The words hung dead like a clapper in a bell. No one heard them; no one clamored to hear them. Makeup editors of afternoon newspapers cursed their luck as they replated editions which said: “Today at the Trade Mart in Dallas, President John F. Kennedy said . . . Swindal eased the engines and the pitch subsided to a murmur. It meant nothing to the man of the many words. He lay wrapped in plastic, the face puffy and discolored.
It meant something to others. Stomachs had asserted themselves and the stewards brought soup and sandwiches, coffee, cheese, and liquor. Especially liquor. General McHugh had ordered the kitchen closed. Someone else had ordered it opened. The empty fifths of Scotch and bourbon tumbled into bags of refuse. A few passengers were sadly drunk and maudlin. They talked of better days and better times and remembered the day Jack Kennedy said . . . The electricity of shock was in others so deep that liquor sharpened the grief. Some passengers penciled notes as though time might prove to be anesthetic. Many, confined to the plane and the presence, regressed a little and, like children, wished it all away; it never happened.
The road to safety, for Lyndon Johnson, lay in immersing himself in work. He had spent a time of terror in that hospital, but it would not happen again. He had Valenti, Clifton, Kilduff, Moyers, and Marie Fehmer running. They manned phones, made calls. He made decisions and took the more important messages. The Kennedy minions asked that the press be barred from Andrews. Johnson said no. “It will look like we’re in a panic,” he said. He called the Situation Room and told McGeorge Bundy that he wanted to call a series of meetings tonight and tomorrow morning. “Bipartisan,” he said.
In the back of the plane, the Irish had finished a few rounds of whiskey and the conversation became sporadic. Each was deep in thought for periods of time. O’Brien, Powers, and Burkley were fatigued from the long period of standing, but Godfrey McHugh and Kenny O’Donnell kept a wary eye on those who kept the faith. Somewhere in mid-flight, Mrs. Kennedy voiced a thought about the similarity of martyrdom between Lincoln and her husband. It may have been uttered to O’Donnell or Burkley. By the time Air Force One began to descend, Abraham Lincoln had become the theme, the motif of the three-day “wake” of John F. Kennedy. It was an understandable and exalted thought on the part of the widow, and, in the acute distress of sudden mourning, the others thought that Kennedy had been every bit as great as Lincoln.
Someone suggested that the Kennedys could avoid the glare of lights and cameras by debarking from the starboard side of the plane; a fork lift could be raised to the level of the galley entrance. The casket and Mrs. Kennedy would be in the shadow of the plane, and the sanctity of privacy could be maintained. Jacqueline Kennedy looked up from her empty glass in the breakfast nook. “We will go out the regular way,” she said in that odd, litany-like manner. “I want them to see what they have done.”
In the forward cabin, the President was revising a short statement written by Liz Carpenter. It had the correct note of humility without being slavish. He said to Merriman Smith and Charles Roberts—still writing their impressions of the trip for the pool reporters—“I’m going to make a short statement in a few minutes and give you copies of it. Then when I get on the ground, I’ll do it over again.”
The confinement of the Johnsons and the Kennedys in the plane for a period of one hundred and fifty minutes was sufficient to cleave the families in permanent schism. Johnson, the burly, earthy Texan, lost the battle for unity by succeeding to the presidency. He was not, and could not aspire to be, Kennedy people. He could be tolerated as a Vice-President because his loyalty to John F. Kennedy was complete and unquestioned. Within the family, only Bobby and Kenny O’Donnell could not abide him as Vice-President. To them, he was a rumpled wheeler-dealer, part Southerner, part Westerner with cowdung on his heels. He lacked what they might refer to as “class.”
To those among the Kennedys who felt neutral, or apathetic, about Lyndon Johnson, his tragic ascendancy to the presidency tipped their opinions against him. He was not worthy to follow their fallen hero, and his every act lent itself to two interpretations so that, among themselves, they could make him look mean and avaricious. He did not belong on Air Force One, they felt. The least he could have done was to permit the widow and her dead husband the privacy of the plane for the trip home. He should not have burdened Bobby—even though he was the Attorney General—with a question about being sworn in as President. It was a crass grab for power.
On the plane—her plane—he violated her privacy by offering condolences, taking over the private bedroom, issuing statements, holding the plane until a judge swore him in, thus imperiling the remains of Kennedy which might have been impounded by Dallas County at any moment. He was a crude, impossible man. At a time of stunning shock, he had the nerve to call Kennedy’s top lieutenants and offer to keep them on, to give them “blank checks” to carry on the Kennedy tradition.
Lyndon Johnson must be charged with a lack of understanding of the Kennedy mentality. They required a villain for their rancor. The world lay shattered in their hands and no one could put it together again. When their chief fell among the dead roses, the heart of their political cult stopped. They had no standing anymore, no prestige. Among the politically and socially dead were Bobby Kennedy, David Powers, Kenny O’Donnell, Larry O’Brien, General McHugh, McGeorge Bundy, Dean Rusk, Robert McNamara, Jacqueline Kennedy, Arthur Schlesinger, Ted Sorensen, Mrs. Lincoln, Pierre Salinger, Orville Freeman, Major-General Clifton—a host of men and women. They were dead and they were aware of it. Many of them held Johnson in such contempt that they could not endure his offer of resurrection.
In the first moments of Johnson’s presidency, he did not feel strong enough to go alone. He needed these people. He was willing to bury his pride in the bottom of his pocket and tell them that he required their counsel, their guidance. In spite of his own considerable ego, Lyndon Johnson lacked the confidence of a John F. Kennedy. “When the going gets tough,” Kennedy used to say, “the tough get going.” Most of all, in the cold loneliness at the summit of power, Johnson needed a feeling of continuance of administration. And this is what the Kennedy clan would deny him.
As Air Force One began to surrender to the forces of gravity, the small group in the back of the plane began to plot ways and means of keeping the President of the United States out of the casket photos. The world would be watching, and the Kennedys did not want the Johnsons in their mourning pictures. At one point, when Major-General Ted Clifton went aft to ask a question, O’Donnell, sitting opposite the grieving lady, curled his lip and said: “Why don’t you hurry back and serve your new boss?” It was less a question than a declaration of the honorable thing—that all must go down with the ship and the captain.*
The Secret Service suggested that the new President spend the night at the White House. There was lots of room without disturbing the Kennedy family. This was declined at once. Johnson was irritated by it. “We are going home to The Elms,” he said. “That’s where we live. If you can protect us at the White House, by God you can protect us at home too.”
The long rays splashed red against the broken comb of downtown Dallas, and a timid westerly breeze swept the confetti of the parade against the curbs on Main Street. Lights went on at the burlesque house off Ackard, and homeward traffic bounded on the elevated highways. For Dallas, this was going to be a long night. The city, afflicted with a monumental ego, flinched. As Lieutenant Jack Revill had said: Big D died.
At the end of the maximum security alley, the last rays of sunlight splashed against the dirty opaque window. By glancing at it, Lee Harvey Oswald could detect the difference between daylight and dark but nothing else. He heard the clang of the security door and looked up to see jail guard Jim Poppelwell coming in. The guards on the chairs became alert. “All right,” Poppelwell said, “he can make his phone call.”
Oswald dropped down off the bunk. Poppelwell was turning a dime over in his hand. The cell door was opened, and the prisoner emerged in his shorts and socks. As Oswald was led out, the Negro prisoner was awakened and told that he was being transferred to another wing. The three cells would be exclusive for Lee Harvey Oswald.
The two telephones in the glass booth were also exclusive. Guard Poppelwell placed his man inside and prepared to lock the door after handing the prisoner a dime. Oswald asked how he could phone New York with that. The guard shrugged. That was not his department. Oswald has thirteen dollars somewhere in this jail. Poppelwell explained that he had nothing to do with the matter except to follow orders—give Oswald a dime and permit him to make a phone call. It was a patent injustice to grant the right of a telephone and deny the prisoner the right to use his money to make it, but Oswald realized that a protest would be fruitless.
He deposited the dime and asked for long-distance information. The operator asked, “Where?” and he said: “New York.” He was told that he could deposit his dime and dial 212-555-1212. He did. When he was asked whom he wanted, the young man spent considerable time saying and spelling John Abt. He might have asked for the law firm of Freedman & Unger, at 320 Broadway, but he didn’t know. Besides, it was close to 6 P.M. in New York, and attorneys would be homeward bound with their briefcases.
The operator said she had a John J. Abt at 299 Broadway. He said that would do. The number was AC 2-4611. Oswald repeated it and hung up. Then he looked back at Poppelwell and asked him to open the door. He had forgotten the number. Could he have a piece of paper and a pencil? Jim Poppelwell considered the matter gravely. He could not think of a prison regulation against supplying a prisoner with a pencil and a bit of paper.
Oswald was locked in while the guard went for it. Poppelwell tore the corner from a telephone contact slip and handed it in with a pencil. The prisoner was locked in and the process started again. This time he wrote “John J. Abt, 299 Broadway, New York” and, underneath: “212 AC 2-4611.” Then he redialed the long-distance operator and asked to place the call collect. In a moment, the operator was back with him. She wanted to know who was calling collect from Dallas, Texas. He told her “Lee Oswald.” It turned out almost as he must have divined; the call was refused.
Could he call again later? Poppelwell took him out of the booth and said he would ask Captain Fritz. Oswald said that he would call home and ask his wife to call Abt. On the third floor, reporters were asking police officers if Oswald had asked for a lawyer. “He’s phoning one now,” they were told. None of the cops could recall the name of the lawyer, except that he was a New York man.
At Andrews, the drill team came to attention. The distinguished gentlemen of the United States, and the equally distinguished gentlemen of many foreign countries, were organized in disorganized knots on the concrete. Outside the fence, thousands of faces peered through the metal links, as a similar crowd had six hours ago in Dallas. The overhead lights in a big hangar tossed a pale carpet on the apron. Military officers in blue and in gold, bedecked with ribbons and fourragères, stood at ease, watching the television cameras being set up on wooden stands.
The company was impressive and strained. Conversation was whispered. Now and then a platoon of military in gleaming boots and steel hats would march out of the darkness into the light, the rows of feet lifting rhythmically and setting down hard on the strip, to come to a loud halt in the area of the lights. The White House helicopters, green bugs with pinwheel hats, sat on the edge of the night.
Someone said: “Here he comes.” Eyes lifted to the night sky. The word was passed. “Here he comes.” A youthful voice roared: “Ten-shun!” Fire trucks astride the runway turned their lights on. The revolving beacon on top of the control tower snapped green. A small brown staff car took off with a burning of rubber. The word having been passed, all eyes looked in varied directions. To the west, a yellow star above the horizon was the only thing that moved.
Air Force One was on its base leg. It could be seen, not heard. The small yellow light descended slowly. It moved toward the city of Washington. All aircraft aloft or on the strip at Washington International Airport remained in aeronautical limbo. The tower cleared them out with “V.I.P.” warnings, but the captains and the first officers, usually unconcerned, searched the skies from their flight decks looking for the last moment of John F. Kennedy’s last flight. Some were in a holding pattern as far off as Friendship Airport at Baltimore.
The big plane was low coming over the Potomac basin. The Pratt and Whitney fans were down to a whisper. Under the silver wings passed the pale vision of the White House, the Capitol dome, scenes of triumph. The big plane made the final turn. Those waiting at Andrews Air Force Base could see nothing for a moment. Then the plane’s star-bright wing lights came on, and the vision looked like a steady yellow candle standing in the sky. It remained there, seeming not to move, then the engines could be heard and the plane dropped down and down, louder and louder, over the fence and holding its rubber feet a foot or two over the blue-ribboned runway, then it touched and the engines gathered their breath for one final shriek of protest.
Air Force One ran down the runway, the windows bright with lights, and came to a pause at the far end. A woman in the group of silent men dug into her purse for a kerchief. She caught her husband’s stern glance and snapped it shut. The long night had begun.