Darkness was stronger than light. There was a faint roar to the city, a sound which seemed to emanate from within the ear. The pigeons were in repose on the roof. Their claws made scratching polyphonics, mixed with cooing and the reshuffling of feathers as jealous males met. They could hear the contrapuntal click of the Hertz clock snapping the minutes like matchsticks. There were whistles, too, but these were irregular sounds from the street. In front of the Texas School Book Depository, young men in metal helmets addressed themselves to pedestrians with whistles.
The confluence of Elm, Main, and Commerce at Dealey Plaza made a traffic sink. It was slow this evening. Dallas was fascinated by it. Some people jumped on the macadam and said, “This is where he was shot.” Students romped on the grass. Elders looked up at the Depository windows and saw the lights wink off one at a time. A police car parked on the grass squawked the tinny dialogue of assassination.
Deputy Chief N. T. Fisher, was leaving Love Field for police headquarters. It had been a bad, bad day. “Has there been any developments that you can tell me on the suspect that shot the officer,” he asked the dispatcher. “Was there any connections with the shooting of the President?” “At this time,” the dispatcher said, “it is my understanding that he is the same person. He is in custody.” Fisher said: “Ten four. Thank you.” “That’s not official,” the dispatcher said. “That’s just the rumor up here. . . .” The dispatcher returned in a moment. “Four . . . hold the presidential cars at the location. 508 is en route to print them.” Fisher was sure that there would be no fingerprinting of the presidential cars. “As far as I know,” he said, “these cars were loaded on an Army transport. I don’t know whether they are still there or not. I’ll check.” It didn’t take long. “For your information,” Fisher said, “they have been loaded and left on the other transport.”
A postal employee at the terminal annex was sorting mail, scanning and skipping it into bins. He kept muttering, “Oswald” to himself. He had seen the name or had heard it. “Oswald.” It wasn’t common. The envelopes flicked into air and managed to drop into the proper bins. He kept thinking about the name and the shocking murder and suddenly, without trying, he remembered.
He had rented a post office box to a man named Oswald. That was where he had heard the name. He got the list of owners of boxes. The card was found. Three weeks ago a man who had called himself Lee H. Oswald had rented Box 6225. The business of the applicant, as signed on the back of the card, was “Fair Play for Cuba Committee, Chairman.” The post office clerk took the card to his supervisor, who called the postmaster. They examined 6225. There wasn’t much in it, but what there was was suspicious: a Russian magazine addressed to Lee H. Oswald.
No one seemed to know who had charge of the assassination investigation, so the postmaster called the Secret Service, the Dallas police, the FBI, and the sheriff. Then they posted an unobtrusive guard over 6225 to see if an accomplice might come in and claim the magazine. The clerk returned to sorting letters, satisfied that he had a pretty good memory.
Seth Kantor had a superior memory. He was using it under adverse circumstances while trying to find a place on the third floor to stand still. Of the out-of-town reporters, Mr. Kantor was the one who knew Dallas, Fort Worth, and Lee Harvey Oswald. Well, not precisely. He had not met Oswald, but he knew him. Kantor had some of the jadedness of the effete big-time reporter, but it wasn’t so long ago that he had been a young and energetic innocent on the Fort Worth Press.
He had read about a United States marine who had defected to Russia. One day—was it in 1960?—the boy’s mother had come to the Fort Worth Press. The paper had agreed to pay for a phone call to her son in Moscow. Kent Biffle had arranged a three-way hookup between the son, the mother in her apartment, and himself at the city desk of the Fort Worth Press. Everyone had been disappointed. Biffle had trouble getting the overseas operator in New York. Then he had to go on to Europe and from there to Moscow. Operators were cutting in and out of the line, and the minutes dissolved into hours.
Seth Kantor had watched Biffle from the other side of the city desk. When the call had finally gone through, the Press operator rang Mrs. Oswald at home, and she picked up the phone and gushed her love at her wayward boy and told him how nice the Fort Worth Press people had been to arrange the three-way call. Oswald hung up. He wasted no time telling his mother that he loved her, or missed her, or would write to her. She had been willing to forget that he had obtained an early discharge from the Marine Corps as a “hardship” case because his mother was ill and he was her sole support. He had come home and left at once for Russia without telling her anything. In truth, the only contact he wanted with his mother was to remind her that she owed him some money.
As Kantor recalled, the call ended abruptly. As he leaned against a partition in the busy third-floor corridor, looking at the anxiety-swept faces of his confreres, he remembered this phone call. The reporter had gone on to a better position, and he had picked up a newspaper a year ago which stated that Lee Harvey Oswald was due home at Fort Worth with a Russian bride. Kantor worked in Washington. He had clipped that story and made a note that if Lee Harvy Oswald ever came to Washington Mr. Kantor would try to interview him.
Today the reporter had been part of the motorcade in his own Fort Worth and Dallas. It had been exciting, almost emotional seeing old friends and a best man at one’s wedding at a crossroads. It was not a time, considering the familiar faces and streets, the places where a man had once found stories worth space in a newspaper, to think of a defector who had been home over a year. And now Lee Harvey Oswald was once more the story, a bigger and more catastrophic one than anyone might dream. For the first time, among the craning heads, the lights and the shouts, Seth Kantor saw the sullen face, the bruised eyes, the manacled wrists, and he wondered what warped mechanism ticked in that head.
The big-time reporters worked the running story hard. They took notes on everything, even journalistic rumors, and they fired questions at policemen all day and all night. They had “leg men” out in the city picking up material on the Texas School Book Depository; the scores of witnesses who had gone through Sheriff Decker’s office; the Irving angle with Mrs. Oswald and Mrs. Paine; the bits and pieces from Jack Price at Parkland Hospital; Governor John Connally’s condition; the reaction of Dallas. There were men in Washington covering parts of the story, and there were others at American embassies in Europe picking up bits and pieces to add to the whole. The men on the morning sheets had to keep writing fresh material marked “Add Kennedy.” Those on the afternoon papers had time, and they inundated the file rooms and “morgues” of the Dallas Times Herald and Dallas News asking for the professional courtesy of a free look at old clippings and pictures on Lee Harvey Oswald.
The story had a stunning beginning but no end. The words were dropped into the huge maw of public curiosity, were masticated, and the maw opened for more. City editors were on the phones asking for copy. They suggested fresh angles, some of which were worthless. When they had exploited the death of John Fitzgerald Kennedy to the fullest, the world was aware of it, and the only way to keep the story alive was to keep fresh material coming in on Oswald. If Oswald was the assassin, then the story centered on the Who? What? When? Where? and Why? of the Book Depository order clerk. Reporters were urged to keep on the necks of the police. The cops must be reasonably certain that they had the right man—or didn’t—and a good reporter would keep badgering the officers or else run the risk of having one of them “leak” the story to a local favorite.
The story had too many parts. It was impossible to fit together all the small pieces which make a large and dismal mosaic. At the moment the reporters were racing up and down the hall with a rumor that Oswald would soon be coming down from the jail for another session with Captain Will Fritz. At Love Field, no reporter saw an agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation board an airliner for Washington. He carried a small box and put it on his lap as he fastened his seat belt. In it were two pieces of the President’s skull found inside the car and one found beside the curb at Elm Street.
On the fifth floor, a guard came into the maximum security alley with a plate. He handed it to Oswald along with a cup. The plate had beans and stewed meat and boiled potatoes. On the side of the plate were two buttered pieces of bread. The prisoner took the cup of steaming coffee. He looked at the plate. The guard said it was dinner. There would be nothing more until morning. Two meals a day in jail. Oswald said he wasn’t hungry.
The guards told him to finish the coffee. He was going to get his clothes back in a few minutes.
The plane was always awkward on the ground. It came back up the taxiway slowly, whining and rocking. President Johnson had read his short statement to Smith and Roberts and had put it into a pocket in his jacket. He had issued an order for a ramp to be brought to the plane. The order stated that the Secret Service men aboard would carry the body of President Kennedy down the ramp. The casket would be followed by Mrs. Kennedy on the arm of President Johnson.
The President looked around as the plane waddled toward the big circle of light and he wondered where everyone had gone. The cabin, except for a few of his staff, was empty. Mrs. Johnson sat gazing out the window at the darkness. In the back of the plane, Kenneth O’Donnell issued his orders. They too were explicit. As soon as the aircraft stopped, he wanted the Kennedy group to crowd the rear doorway. They and the Secret Service men would take the body out of this exit, down a forklift. President Johnson was not a party to this plan.
Mr. Johnson felt that the symbol of unity was important. As the new President, he should stand behind his fallen chieftain, and he should offer his widow the protection of his person. To the contrary, the Kennedy people felt that this was boorish and overbearing. The plane was still in motion when they formed an unbreakable clot at the rear exit. They knew what was expected of them. In the group were David Powers, Lawrence O’Brien, Ken O’Donnell, General McHugh, Mrs. Evelyn Lincoln, Mrs. Kennedy and her secretary, Pamela Turnure. Flanking them were the Secret Service men.
When the President came down the aisle, an engine was still idling and he found his progress blocked. A male voice from somewhere said: “It’s all right. We’ll take care of this end.” He recognized the humiliation. The plane stopped and he walked back to the presidential cabin slowly, to join his wife. He was about to take the arm of Mrs. Johnson when he saw his Attorney General, Robert F. Kennedy, running from the front of the plane to the back. Sadly, the President stuck his hand out and said: “Bob!” The Attorney General ignored the hand and kept running toward the aft section.
It was evident that Kennedy understood the situation. He ran so that he would not have to pause and recognize the new President. He made it down the aisle of the front cabin, squirming past the people who stood in the aisles, opened the door to the private cabin, and ran straight through. At the human knot, people stepped aside so that Jacqueline could fall into Robert’s arms.
The communications shack passed a final message to Roy Kellerman from Secret Service headquarters ordering him to accompany the dead President to Bethesda Hospital. Colonel Swindal looked down on the small dark pools of people. Air Force One, in the glare of lights, was a dead moth. An honor guard of service men followed the Attorney General up the front ramp. They were there to carry the casket. The silence at Andrews Air Force Base was so deep that, when Colonel Swindal and his first officer, Lieutenant Colonel Lewis Hanson, hurried down the ramp, the sound of their feet on the metal-tipped steps beat an irregular tattoo into the darkness outside the pool of light.
Merriman Smith and Charles Roberts, one with a typewriter under his arm, hurried off the plane and stood under the giant wing, looking aft. In the silence there was disbelief. The men of lofty station who were there; the television cameramen in the darkness; the friends, the officers, the strangers of rank, the ambassadors, could not believe that Caesar was dead. They had heard the radio; they had seen the story on television; the late afternoon papers carried mourning rules under the headline: KENNEDY ASSASSINATED. And yet the human mind rejects the image of catastrophe as the eyes hunt for irrevocable truth. The slender face of Secretary of Defense Robert J. McNamara stood almost alone, the eyes watching the rear hatch behind the frozen light caught by his glasses. The breeze caught the wavy hair of the Chief Justice of the United States, Earl Warren, and he studied the aircraft as though, legally, he entertained a reasonable doubt.
The forklift, on small yellow wheels, circumnavigated the plane and pulled up at the port hatch aft. The operator placed it snugly and then pulled the small elevator upward. It was at least three feet short. Inside someone was opening the hatch lug and the door swung backward and away. The unseen eyes from the darkness looked. They saw a group of people squeezed together in the doorway, and five Secret Service men, stooping and pushing, shoved the edge of the casket into the doorway. It was caught in the light, and everyone below knew that John F. Kennedy was truly dead. He was gone and they would never see him again, never see him step out of a crowd with hand outstretched, never hear the flat, twangy Boston wit, see the square pearly teeth as the head rocked back in laughter, never again see that stabbing left index finger as it punctuated his argumentative shouts above the roar of a crowd.
He was dead. He was gone. And there was something that each man had forgotten to say to him. It was not a moment for tears. There was a succession of swallowing and an unspoken accusation in three thousand hearts: “What did you expect?” Whatever the expectation of magic, it was over and the unseen eyes began to focus on the woman in the doorway with the slab of dark hair down over one eye. Her expression had the shock of a little girl who has just heard the colored balloon break. She still held the string.
A few men jumped down on the lift. They pulled on the forward handles. Others, at the rear, pushed. The honor guard found itself caught in the rites of the warrior. The Secret Service wanted to carry the man. So did Larry O’Brien and Ken O’Donnell and David Powers and General McHugh. Everybody could not find room around the casket. The men pushed each other. The heavy bronze instrument teetered off the edge of the plane and began to wobble in air. Out of the darkness the sibilant voices of the television commentators could be heard. The Attorney General watched the bronze rock in air, saw the men on the lift catch and steady it, and he dropped nimbly onto the platform with his brother. With arms outstretched, he reached up for his sister-in-law.
She crouched and dropped and Kennedy held her. The big iridescent lens of the cameras caught the scene, saw the pink burled suit, the stains of blood, the twisted right stocking. In a trice, the nation knew. The horrifying picture of the gleaming bronze casket and the handsome young widow and the blood was mirrored in seventy million homes. The guilt was upon them and their children. Dinner stopped. Plates were pushed away. The picture on the screen would never be scrubbed off. It was there and scores of millions of people would date their lives with this day. Things happened before this time or after.
“Will you come with us?” Mrs. Kennedy whispered to her brother-in-law. He nodded. She knew he would. Admiral Burkley was the last to jump on the small platform. It began the slow slide to the bottom. The Bethesda ambulance had backed up, and, before it left, Robert Kennedy wanted to hear the wishes of his sister-in-law in regards to the funeral, and he wanted to use a Secret Service beep phone to speak quickly to Sargent Shriver at the White House.
He walked her slowly toward the ambulance. He took her arm and bent and whispered and nodded at the responses. She was in the full glare of the lights and her head was down. Faces were in requiem all around her, but they knew that this was no time for greetings or even condolences. McNamara stood at attention. Acting Secretary of State George Ball followed her with his eyes. Postmaster John Gronouski could not bear to watch. Franklin Roosevelt, Jr., had witnessed similar scenes. Senator Hubert Humphrey may have been the only man who wept. His eyes were red holes. Senator Mike Mansfield kept his teeth clenched. Everett Dirksen hunched his great head into his topcoat collar and turned away. McGeorge Bundy, the bright mentality behind the self-effacing features, seemed nailed to a place on the concrete.
Under the wing, Swindal and Hanson stood at salute. The tall, slender chief of protocol, Mr. Angier Biddle Duke, approached Mrs. Kennedy. He coughed and she looked up. “How can I serve you?” he said. She knew. “Find out how Lincoln was buried,” she said. Mr. Duke turned away. He had an assignment. He would require researchers and admission to the Library of Congress, which was closed, and a long night of labor to find out exactly how Lincoln was buried.
In silence, she walked to the ambulance and reached for a door handle. It was the wrong one. Mrs. Kennedy did not want to sit up front. She would remain at her husband’s side. For a moment, she was indecisive. Then Robert Kennedy approached and opened the rear door. They stooped and climbed inside. At the rear, the honor guard, the Secret Service, and Kennedy friends carried the casket and slid it in. General Godfrey McHugh hopped in with it.
Roy Kellerman was in charge. He waved William Greer, who had driven the death car, into the driver’s seat. Kellerman sat next to him. Agent Paul Landis squeezed in on the right side. Admiral Burkley said he had told Mrs. Kennedy that he would stay with the body until it was returned to the White House. Kellerman waved the doctor into the front seat and he sat on the lap of Landis. Standing beside the ambulance were the cardiologist, the nurse, and driver sent hours ago by Captain Canada of Bethesda in case President Johnson sustained a heart attack. They were told that there was no room for them.
The car started to move forward. Mrs. Kennedy and General McHugh sat on one side of the casket. Opposite, leaning across the bronze to speak, sat the Attorney General. The lights of the base flickered by, lighting up the mourners and plunging them back into darkness. Directly behind, Secret Service Agent Clint Hill had requisitioned an automobile. He was driving Dr. John Walsh, Mrs. Kennedy’s physician. A third car carried the O’Donnell group. Behind that were some women in a fourth car and the forgotten man. This was George Thomas, the president’s valet. For almost three years, he had worked hard on the third floor, pressing fresh suits most of the day for the President’s several changes. He would not need that ironing board anymore nor the iron. George Thomas sat silently among the women, wondering what was to become of him.
America sat before the altar of the image, murmuring “mea culpa, mea culpa.” No event in the history of the country—perhaps in the history of the world—was tendered so quickly, with such exquisite agony, as the shooting of a man in Dallas. It was totally unexpected; it was darkly tragic; it was exploited by the television cameras to the fullest. The facets of the somber story were revealed at the instant they were discovered by the camera.
In New York, Martin Isaacs of the Department of Welfare watched with fascination and horror, a man mesmerized by the incredibility of the credible, numbed by a succession of shocks. The magnetism of the opaque screen ruled the land. He had seen the School Book Depository from which the shots were supposed to have been fired; he had heard that a young clerk named Lee Harvey Oswald had been arrested; he had seen the big bird come to a stop with two Presidents aboard. At times, the unfolding of the story became so emotional that people who had not voted for Kennedy and were alienated by his politics broke and cried.
Mr. Isaacs could not think of dinner. He sat. He heard the solemn announcement that the networks would preempt their regular television fare for the rest of this day, perhaps until after the funeral. On the screen came a short shot of the third floor of police headquarters in Dallas, and Lee Harvey Oswald held his manacled hands up complaining. The shock on the face of Mr. Isaacs deepened into a stunned, bloodless expression. “That,” he said, “that’s the man I helped get back to Texas last year.”
It was. The State Department had granted Oswald’s request for a loan to bring his family back to the United States. They had traveled by train across White Russia, through Poland, and on to Holland. They had boarded a Holland-America liner and Oswald had used the time negotiating the Atlantic Ocean to write a draft of his personal Marxist manifesto. They debarked at Hoboken and, after some travail, had appealed to the Department of Welfare to put them up overnight at a Times Square hotel and to see them on to Dallas by commercial aircraft. Martin Isaacs had been the official Good Samaritan.
The nation was becoming absorbed in the story. The cameras were again on Air Force One. It sat in its own halo. There was some movement in the front door and a commentator murmured, almost in an awesome whisper: “Here comes the new President of the United States, Lyndon Johnson.” Mrs. Johnson and her husband emerged. He stood in the doorway, glancing around grimly, the mouth compressed. They started down the steps.
The statesmen, still in small dark groups, remained immobile. The eyes, scores of pairs, were jaded. They understood the Washington power structure, and this man, tall and twangy had this day risen from a position of sufferance to take it all. The gentlemen had involuntarily swapped a gifted idealist for a party wheelhorse; youth for middle age; grace for awkwardness; adroit phrasing for hyperbole; a commander for a committee chairman; a Galahad for a hillbilly.
They knew. The heavy-lidded eyes watched him reach the foot of the ramp and the reassessment began. One perhaps, Defense Secretary McNamara, may have been overcome by personal grief and not been able to equate the new chieftain with the pluses and minuses of practical politics. The others turned from their several positions around the area of light to face Lyndon Johnson. McNamara, close enough to do so, shook hands with him. “It’s terrible. Terrible,” the new President said. The rheumy brown eyes glanced around the circle of knots.
He nodded curtly to a few. Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield had an arm around his wife, who was sobbing. Chief Justice Earl Warren reached out silently and shook Johnson’s hand. Arthur Schlesinger, who had been retained by Kennedy as a day-to-day journalist-historian, a Boswell to Kennedy’s Samuel Johnson, stepped forward to grasp Johnson’s hand at the moment that the President saw the row of microphones in the powdery light. His momentum carried him through the handclasp. It is doubtful that he heard Schlesinger’s offer of assistance.
With Mrs. Johnson, he stood before the microphones and rustled a piece of paper. The spectacles were adjusted. Mrs. Johnson seemed to look, not at her husband, but toward the darkness and the red-eyed cameras banked in wooden tiers. There were no loudspeakers at the base, so that only the television audience heard the hushed and halting words:
“This is a sad time for all people. We have suffered a loss that cannot be weighed. For me it is a deep personal tragedy. I know the world shares the sorrow that Mrs. Kennedy and her family bear. I will do my best. That is all I can do. I ask for your help—and God’s.”
It was the wrong voice; the tone was that of the supplicant when America hungered for a leader. The last few sentences made of Johnson an average man and those who feared for themselves did not want to hear “That is all I can do. I ask for your help—and God’s.” The irony of the moment is that Lyndon Johnson was not a humble man; politically and personally he was a boss and it suited his personality to arrogate to himself all decisions. Had he said: “Even in its grief, this nation, this leader of nations, must move forward and, toward that end, I have lifted the banner which fell in the streets of Dallas and will carry it honorably and forcefully, as he did . . .” he might have subdued the fears, infused confidence where confusion lay.
He took his wife by the arm and turned away. The big sleek head was bent forward. The stride was the step of the athlete, toes slightly turned in. He asked McNamara to come with him. Then he saw the slight figure of McGeorge Bundy and nodded his head for him to follow. Acting Secretary of State George Ball watched, and the President asked him to join the group. Johnson shook hands with the congressional leadership of both parties. He had worked with these men well and truly, and they respected his judgment. The professional politicians had much more faith in Johnson than the electorate. To the people he was a twangy Texas braggart.
There were many men of rank who were not asked to join Mr. Johnson. They maintained their secure knots of topcoats and windswept hair in the night. Arthur Goldberg remained alone, the onetime labor lawyer cum statesman who was present, not to curry favor with the new source of power, but to say farewell to the old. Major General Ted Clifton, a mature mind with a sense of duty, stood at hand salute as his Commander-in-Chief walked by toward the idly slapping blades of a helicopter. He was no longer a Kennedy man; he had not been invited to join the Johnson Administration. He was alone in the light, the neutral soldier.
Another man stood alone. He wore a gray topcoat. The back of it was turned up against the sudden chill. James Rowley, Chief of the United States Secret Service, had lost a President. It did not matter that he had not been in Dallas; it was of no moment that, given a second chance, his men could not do more than they had done to protect the precious life; he had lost his man. He and Behn, Kellerman, Hill, Youngblood, Landis, Greer had failed one day out of a thousand. Mr. Rowley, the hair grayer, the eyes riveted on the man now walking out of the circle of light, had advised several Presidents and was accustomed to the abrupt and irritable “No!” Sometimes Rowley had felt like saying: “In that case, Mr. President, I cannot be responsible for you,” but the words had remained in his throat because Rowley was responsible. He was paid to protect. The study of many assassinations in many countries had taught him new techniques; from each he had learned a little more. Today a mental misfit in a high window had crumpled all the techniques of protection and tossed them away.
Mr. Rowley stood alone. If, as often happened, the Congressmen on the Hill held an investigation and looked for a goat, James Rowley would insist on donning the horns. He would not permit Jerry Behn, head of the White House detail, or Roy Kellerman, the agent-in-charge, to assume the burden. The chief himself would be responsible, and he would be the first to say that, even if John F. Kennedy had allowed the bubbletop to be placed on the limousine, “it was not bulletproof.”
In the helicopter, the President sat wearily. The overhead light was on. He squinted up at it and flagged the others to be seated. Mrs. Johnson sat on the couch opposite. George Ball and McNamara and Bundy sat around the President. James Rowley stood inside the door. A crewman waited. The President said, “Go on” with his hand. The hatch was slammed and dogged. The President cinched his seat belt and leaned with elbows on knees. When tense, he made a chewing motion with his lips. He was doing it now.
The advisers leaned forward, as he was, and the fore and aft rotors sped until they fought gravity successfully and the people at Andrews Air Force Base saw the greenish craft lift straight up, bow its nose downward, and move forward in an awkward humpbacked manner. Johnson’s hearing was never acute, and he leaned against the thwacking racket outside to hear better and to watch lips.
He spoke of Dallas as though he was talking to himself. The speech was disjointed. “It was an awful thing . . . horrible . . . that little woman was brave . . . who would have thought that this could happen . . . you fellows know I never aspired to this . . .” Below, the patchy darkness of Anacostia flats surrendered to the brilliant effulgence of Washington ahead. Mr. Johnson was going directly to the White House. “Kennedy could do things I know I couldn’t. He gathered a fine team of men,” he said, gesturing at the group. The deep-pooled brown eyes again moved from face to face as they had on Air Force One: “I need you. I need you more than he did.”
The chopper was moving past the Lincoln Memorial, ablaze with light, as it began to blink its way down to the South Grounds. “Anything important pending?” he said. It was a congressional phrase, one he had used many times in his career. No matter what the agenda, he had to know the acute problems, the matters which required a presidential decision today. The three advisers studied their own faces. This was a thought, a question which had occurred to each of them this afternoon. Each man had gone over the affairs of state and, to put it bluntly, a transfer of power could hardly have occurred at a better time: there were no important decisions to be made; there was nothing of consequence for the new President to consider for the next couple of days.
The helicopter turned sideward in the chill breeze, and the pale whiteness of the Executive Mansion was visible to Johnson. This was now his. Not really his; it had not been Kennedy’s or any man’s. It was the office, the home, the museum of the current President. He would have sole and exclusive responsibility for the conduct of American affairs; the fourteen Cabinet departments; the one hundred fifty-four bureaus, administrations, and departments; the entire military establishment; the execution of the will of the Congress.
On the left, in the glare of the lights, were the playground swings and slides belonging to Caroline and John-John. The lights were on in the office John F. Kennedy had left two days ago. Inside, harassed workers were completing the change of rug and decor which Mrs. John F. Kennedy had ordered as a surprise for her husband. No one had told these men to stop working and so they continued with a grisly surprise.
Somewhere among all those lights, Sargent Shriver was working. The Secret Service told him that the new President was arriving, but no one moved to greet him because these men had much work to do with his predecessor. The director of the Peace Corps knew that he would receive many phone calls and orders tonight from Mrs. Kennedy, from Robert Kennedy, from both. The task was to translate the random wishes into action.
David Pearson, a minor public relations man, was among those who had been summoned and he was standing in the office watching the tides of ideas flow and ebb. Shriver heard the first word from Jacqueline Kennedy via Robert. He made some notes on a desk pad and turned that gray graven face to the young men, many of whom he had never seen before, to pass the order of battle: “I’d like you all to know,” he said, “in a general way, what Mrs. Kennedy’s and the family’s wishes are. Mrs. Kennedy feels that, above all, these arrangements should be made to provide great dignity for the President. He should be buried as a President and a former naval officer rather than as a Kennedy.”
There was nothing startling or new. Of course the family desired dignity in the obsequies. For Kennedy to be buried as a President of the United States, rather than as a private citizen, could also be anticipated. Those who listened asked no questions, but the matter of being buried as a naval officer probably meant that Mrs. Kennedy would have him dressed in the uniform of a senior lieutenant.
A priest from St. Matthew’s Procathedral, a man who served as liaison between the Kennedy’s and the Roman Catholic hierarchy—in this case Archbishop Patrick O’Boyle of Washington, D.C.—suggested to Sargent Shriver that the church celebrate a pontifical Mass of requiem. Shriver was shaking his head no, gently but firmly, as he listened to the priest. He glanced at Dr. Joseph English, a Catholic psychiatrist and friend of the family. “Let’s take the low road, Sarge,” the doctor said.
No one consciously offended the Church. The collective will of the Kennedys was iron. “Look,” Shriver said, “he made it a point to attend a low Mass himself every Sunday. Why should we force a high Mass on him now?”* It would be a low Mass. Fresh problems accrued to Shriver. He and his capable young men thought of them, articulated them, cultivated the pros and cons, and made the decisions. The first tentative list of distinguished personages to be invited was already being drawn up. Angier Biddle Duke was on his way back from Andrews to request that the Library of Congress be reopened. Researchers would have to be recruited to sit inside the cavernous dark stone building studying every historic reference to the Lincoln funeral so that Mrs. Kennedy could decide which items would be appropriate to this one. It was already known that the catafalque on which the Great Emancipator’s body had rested was in a dusty warehouse of White House treasures.
In a space of fifteen feet there was a soup bowl of faces. The word had been passed to the press that Oswald was on his way down from the jail. They crouched, stood, and, in the rear ranks, elevated themselves on chairs in the small space between the jail elevator and the office of Captain Will Fritz. In the Homicide office, an FBI agent studied a notebook to ascertain how much information the prisoner already had given to the law. The items:
He said his true name was Lee Harvey Oswald. His race was white; sex, male; date of birth, October 18, 1939; place of birth, New Orleans, Louisiana; height, 5 feet 9 inches; weight, 140; hair, medium brown, “needs haircut”; eyes, blue-gray; no tattoos or permanent scars; mother, Mrs. Marguerite Oswald, address, unknown; her occupation, practical nurse; father was Robert Lee Oswald, expired two months before birth of Lee Harvey.
Refused to explain Selective Service card with name Alex James Hidell; denied shooting Officer Tippit; denied shooting John F. Kennedy; admits employment at Texas School Book Depository as order clerk; admits defecting to Soviet Union; says he has Russian wife, Marina Oswald, two small children, June and Rachel; lives apart from wife except for weekends. . . .
It wasn’t much. The information did not tie the man to crime. The increasing certainty of the Dallas Police Department that they had the right man would be worthless in court. Fritz needed more eyewitness affidavits like that of Helen Markham. He sat behind his desk, facing the half-glass door, and a roar could be heard in the corridor. Oswald came off the elevator with his guards, blinking at the bank of hot lights, and squeezing his way through the bouquet of microphones held under his nose. Except for the bruise marks, which were more pronounced, he had the attitude of a man prepared to protest his innocence forever.
He heard the hoarsely shouted questions, but he was not in a mood, this time, to respond. His intelligence might have told him that he was now the center of focus; he was the story. The world had seen the gleaming bronze casket, the distraught widow. These were facts which time could not alter. The world, through the magnetism of its journals, its radios, its cameras, wanted to study the prisoner, perhaps to judge for itself whether a young man alone, without motive except for the notoriety involved, could perpetrate a crime so monumental and unexpected that hundreds of governments and billions of people paused in their tasks to dwell upon it. The almost instantaneous reaction was identical with that of Lyndon Johnson and the Secret Service: it was probably a broad plot involving another country.
Oswald was seated near the corner of the desk. Fritz nodded, but Oswald offered no greeting. The captain started by asking his target what he was doing when the motorcade passed the School Book Depository. Fritz was a low-key man and he asked the question softly, as though it had not been asked before. The suspect placed his manacled wrists on top of the desk, looked around at the FBI, the Secret Service, the two Texas troopers, and the Dallas detectives. Then he started his response as though he did not recall the three times the same question had been asked earlier.
He was having lunch with some employees. He was in the commissary on the second floor. When they heard the echo of the shots and the subsequent excitement, the others ran out. Lee Harvey Oswald remained, and put some coins in the soft drink machine as Mr. Truly and a policeman came up the stairway. The captain wanted to know why Oswald had left the building after the shooting. “I didn’t think there would be any work done that afternoon,” he said, “and we don’t punch a clock and they don’t keep very close time on our work and I just left.”
“How did you get your job at the Texas School Book Depository?” Oswald said that a woman down the street from where his wife lived in Irving had a brother who worked there. They were looking for order clerks at a dollar an hour. Oswald had rented a room at North Beckley and had been looking for a job, tracing bus routes on a map he kept in his room, and, when he had been interviewed by Mr. Roy Truly, he got the job.
“What were you eating for lunch, Lee?” He said he ate a cheese sandwich, brought from home, and a Coca-Cola. Fritz was afraid to confront Oswald with evidence. He would not display to him the rifle and say: “Yours?” He would not draw to his attention the wealth of eyewitness statements now piling up in an office across the hall. Assuming that the prisoner was the person who shot Kennedy and Tippit and assuming that he was not more intelligent than the combination of hunters surrounding him, the interrogation was fruitless and repetitious. Oswald was not permitted to know what evidence the law had, and thus he was never forced into a defensive posture. He regulated all of these sessions and determined which questions he would answer and which would be met with silence. Had he known the amount of “ammunition” Dallas County had, it is almost certain that he would have tried to explode it to his advantage.
“Do you own a rifle?” No. “Did you ever own a rifle?” The prisoner said he enjoyed hunting and had owned one a good many years ago. “Did you own one in Russia?” “You know you can’t own a rifle in Russia. I had a shotgun over there.” Again he was asked if he had seen a rifle at the Texas School Book Depository. The answer was again yes, that Mr. Truly and some of the boys were looking at a rifle.
“What did you do after you left work?” He walked a couple of blocks to get away from the crowds and he caught a bus home. He changed his clothes and decided to go to an afternoon movie. He put his pistol in his belt and left. “Why did you take the pistol?” A small shrug: “Well, you know about a pistol. I just carried it.” He was asked again if he had shot President Kennedy and he again denied it. Oswald began to develop an attitude of confidence. “Did you shoot Officer Tippit?” “No, I did not. The only law I violated was in the show. I hit the officer in the show. He hit me in the eye and I guess I deserved it.”
The questions followed a sedentary pattern. The responses were the same, sometimes almost word for word with what he had said earlier. As it continued, officers appeared on the far side of the glass partition and Fritz stopped, sometimes turning to the federal men—“You got any questions to ask?”—and walking outside for a brief time to get an oral report on some phase of the investigation, at others to give fresh assignments to teams of detectives.
Fritz asked if Oswald was a member of the Communist Party. The answer was a shake of the head. He did not bring any package to work this morning. What had the police found on him when he was arrested? Oswald was enumerating the items when he said “bus transfer.” His mind paused. It was as though he detected a chink in his own armor. Again he began the story of how he left work for his room, except that this time he told how he got on a bus, but the crowds were too dense for progress, so he walked until he found a city taxi. He remembered that, as he got in the front seat with the driver, “some lady looked in.” She asked the driver to call a cab for her. He wasn’t sure, but he may have made some remarks to the driver “just to pass the time of day.”
He was in error in his recollection of the taxi fare. Oswald said it was “eighty-five cents.” At times he sounded like an innocent eager to assist the police with all the miniscule details of the day. At others, he bluntly refused to answer any questions. The employees he had lunch with—the names escaped him; suddenly he remembered one was a Negro called “Junior.” A lot of his personal belongings could be found in Mrs. Paine’s garage, he said, but not a rifle. They were placed in her garage in September—two months ago—when he moved his family from New Orleans back to Dallas.
Where had he purchased the pistol? “I won’t answer that one.” “How did you feel about President Kennedy? “I have nothing against him personally, but, considering the charge I’m here on, I prefer not to discuss it.” Would he take a polygraph test? No, he would not. It would be better for his counsel to decide, but “in the past I have refused to submit to those tests.” “Do you know that Governor John Connally had been shot?” “No, I do not. This is news to me.” “Do you deny that you shot him?” “Yes, I do.” “Did you tell someone named Wesley Frazier that you would bring curtain rods in his car?” That, said Oswald savagely, was a lie. The truth was that he preferred not to be in the Paine house at any time. He went there last night because there was going to be a party this weekend for the Paine children. Oswald did not want to disturb the household. So, instead of asking Wesley for the usual lift on Friday, he asked on Thursday.
He was on ice too thin for skating. It could be proved that the party for the Paine occurred last week. At that time, Oswald’s wife had asked him not to visit her in Irving. Fritz toyed with a sharp letter opener. He said that Wesley’s married sister had seen him carrying a long package and watched him put it on the back seat of the car. The prisoner came to life. “She was mistaken!” he shouted. “That must have been some other time he picked me up.” Perhaps it was. The captain replaced the letter opener on the desk.
Nothing had been opened.
There was a mounting tension inside of Mrs. Eva Grant. She was a small, bird-like creature and her posthospital convalescence was prejudiced by her brother’s presence. She was emotional, but Jack Ruby was, at times, so unstable that she tried to have a calming influence on him. She was resting in her apartment, as her doctor had ordered, when he arrived for the second time. He was good-hearted; he intended well, but he swung wildly and suddenly between generosity and anger. He was the perpetually defensive Jew, and in another breath Ruby wept for the helpless of the world.
He flopped in a chair and said he heard that there were going to be services at the synagogue for President Kennedy. He ought to go. Eva thought that it would be a nice gesture. The services would start at eight-thirty. He slumped and made a futile gesture. Jack said he had not been to Friday night services in a long time. It would be good to go tonight, Eva said, somewhat encouraged. People show respect for a dead President. He got out of the chair and made a phone call. Then he sat again and asked her if she had eaten.
A little, she said. Her brother said she should take care of herself. He should eat a little himself, perhaps. Ruby got up and looked in the refrigerator. He made another phone call. Then he ate, talking all the time about Mrs. Kennedy and the children. They would have to return to Dallas for the trial, of course. He arose and made a short phone call. It would be unfair to force them to come back to Dallas, where Mrs. Kennedy’s husband had been shot. Very unfair. The whole situation had no class.
He phoned Don Saffron, a columnist of the Dallas Times Herald, and asked him about the amusement page. Were the nightclubs closing in respect to Kennedy? He listened and hung up. “Eva,” he said, underplaying the drama, “what shall we do?” They had two small nightclubs which were doing poor business. What shall we do? Eva Grant wanted to read her brother’s turbulent mind and make the decision he would want her to make. “Jack, let’s close the three days.” He paused. “We don’t have anything anyway,” she said. “We owe to—” Tears began to well in her eyes.
Ruby picked up the phone. He called Don Saffron again. “Don, we decided to close Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.” Saffron said: “Okay, Jack.” The only reason Ruby phoned Saffron was to have the columnist publish it. The next phone call was to the Dallas Morning News. Ruby said he wanted to cancel the advertising for his nightclubs. He was told that it was too late, the pages were already locked up. He asked his copy be changed to read that his clubs would be closed for the complete weekend.
The short, taut conversations with his sister could not sustain him. Ruby cudgeled his mind to think of more people to phone. It was as though he felt an emotional burden on his heart. It might be dissipated by talking about it. The assassination had not meant a great deal to him when he had first heard the story at the Dallas News office. It was a thing remote from Jack Ruby’s problems. But when he saw the city swept into an emotional vortex, when he saw friends shake their heads and saw a tear here and there, the nightclub owner began to feel himself swept up in the dust of the storm.
Anyone who spoke to him this day knew that, if Jack Ruby could, he would have restored John F. Kennedy to life. The impossibility of a personal resurrection left him to contend with matters as they were—to do something (go to a synagogue); to condemn the prisoner without a trial (the creep has no class). Ruby phoned Cecil Hamlin, an old friend. Jack found he could weep freely. His voice was choked with sobs. Hamlin listened as Ruby told how he had closed his clubs, both of them, for the whole weekend. He felt so sorry for Kennedy’s “kids.”
He phoned Temple Shearith Israel to ask about memorial services for the President. They would start at eight-thirty, he was told. A moment later, he called the synagogue again. Eight-thirty was the time. He hung up and told his sister: “It starts at eight-thirty. I’m going.” Then he phoned Alice Nichols. The lady was surprised. Ruby, who had never married and who, at times, was suspected of latent homosexuality, had courted Miss Nichols for several years. The faith, the trust he could not grant to others, he reposed in her.
And yet he had allowed the old friendship to die. On this night, after a long, long time, he thought of phoning Alice Nichols. He told her how dreadful the assassination was, and she agreed. He said that he was going to attend temple services. She thought that was charitable. Miss Nichols may have expected a more personal message. Jack Ruby said good-bye and hung up. He looked at Eva sitting forlornly in a chair, and he said he was glad he had closed the clubs.
She thought he began to look old. There was a difference, she felt, between the face of her brother this morning and the same face now. He was older. In her mind, she used the word “broken.” The face, which had never been handsome, was deeply etched with furrows and the eyes had retreated into dark and shallow wells. He phoned Larry Crafard at the Carousel. He seldom announced his identity. “Any messages for me?” he said. There were none. He turned back toward his sister.
“I never felt so bad in my whole life,” Jack Ruby said. “Even when Ma and Pa died.” Eva felt her nervousness increase. “Well,” she said softly, “Pa was an old man. He was almost eighty-nine years.”
The State Department of the United States has always been a separate church. It has its contemplative monks; parchment scriveners; mitered abbots; bishops who preach the gospel of Pan-Americanism to the heathens in the far corners of the world; a rota of cardinals who dwell within the sacred precincts to perfect a policy of no-decision; and, of course, a lower-case pope. Originally it was intended to be a foreign ministry, but early in the history of the republic the State Department achieved a status of apartheid, which was followed by an air of sanctification. In quarrels with other, lesser departments such as Treasury and Defense, the will of the State Department prevailed.
Some Presidents learned, to their chagrin, that State was above and hardly beholden to the Chief Executive. Other Presidents joined State and ran it like messiahs. In the century since Seward had been Secretary of State, it had grown in size, in power, in compartmentalized subdepartments, in numbers, and in piety. State had become an august church with many bonzes, and all the prayer wheels emitted dial tones.
The well-nourished George Ball, Acting Secretary of State until the return of Dean Rusk from Hawaii, received a phone call from the Federal Bureau of Investigation advising that the man arrested at the assassination was Lee Harvey Oswald, of Dallas, an expatriate who had fled to the Soviet Union in October 1959. He had tried to renounce his citizenship and, failing, returned to the United States with a wife and baby on or about June 13, 1962. Mr. Ball might want to check his department records.
President Lyndon Johnson had appointed the Federal Bureau of Investigation to take charge of the federal government’s interest in the assassination. As the bits and pieces fall into place, J. Edgar Hoover, who had been Director of the FBI since 1924, kept his strong bulldog face behind his desk and surrounded himself with his best advisers so that the flow of information from Gordon Shanklin in Dallas to Washington was smooth, the delivery of evidence by air was swift, and the dissemination of information to responsible parties in Washington was almost instantaneous.
George Ball learned of the involvement of the State Department, and he decided that it could not be researched by a clerk. He phoned Abram Chayes, legal adviser to the State Department, at his home, 3520 Edmunds Street Northwest, and asked him to return to the department at once. The assignment was simple and formidable. Chayes was told that Dean Rusk would be in Washington by morning at the latest. His function would be to spend the night poring over State Department files to find any which might relate to one Lee Harvey Oswald of Dallas, Texas.
Mr. Chayes was a good lawyer. He recruited a couple of assistants and turned the lights on in a few dark departments. Some of the old files had red seals on them; some had other colors. It did not matter whether files were secret or not, locked or not, or hidden in vaults. Abram Chayes understood that a high crime had been committed, and his function was not to extricate the State Department from a possible cul-de-sac, but to dredge up anything bearing on the man who might have perpetrated the crime.
The subordinate sections of the State Department do not relish surrendering their sovereignity to anyone, including superiors, but Mr. Chayes knew that the press would be at the departmental gates by morning, so he had to work fast. The women who cleaned the floors and waste baskets that night saw a man possessed—working to learn all that he could about one man in one night. First he went to the passport file and found the records on Oswald. From there he hurried to the State Department security office to find out if there was any record that this man might be a risk to his country.
There were records, but Oswald was not regarded as dangerous. Chayes went to the SCS file (Special Consular Services) which covered the issuance of a visa to Mrs. Oswald and the loan of money to Lee Harvey Oswald to transport his family to the U.S. Locating them was not a simple matter in a vast bureau which prides itself on maintaining records. Secondly, the exhausted lawyer would have to start with the first item—an application for a passport in September 1959 by Lee Harvey Oswald in which he stated that he wanted to become a student at a college in Switzerland but wanted a visa for several other countries, including the Soviet Union.
The whole story would have to start there. Abram Chayes would then have to find the second bit of information, which was a secret report from a U.S. consular official in Moscow that one Lee Harvey Oswald had appeared and demanded the right to renounce his American citizenship. It was a long road of papers, documents, reports. Somewhere in the mountain of material was the final item, where Lee Harvey Oswald had concluded repayment of the loan. When the research was completed, at some small hour, Mr. Chayes would be expected to dictate or type a digest of all he had learned. Dean Rusk would have to be armed with more than press releases; President Johnson was expected to ask some questions, too.
Lyndon Johnson has two gaits. One, when he wants to talk, is slow, with his head cocked toward the listener, sometimes with one hand in a trouser pocket. The other stride is swift and reserved for when he is doing the listening. He walked with head up and arms swinging. He emerged from the South Lawn of the White House at the head of a small group of people, moving fast. The two at his side were Bundy and McNamara.
The President had some ideas of his own: 1. He was the only person who could not afford a display of maudlin grief. In tragedy, the people look for strength, not weakness. 2. He must persuade the Kennedy team to continue with him until he acquired full control and understanding of the reins of government. 3. He would need all the bipartisan congressional support he could get. To achieve this, he would be forced to trade on old friendships on both sides of the aisle, but he had to have it. 4. It would be necessary to be briefed at once on all executive matters to which a Vice-President is not privy.
Bundy was close to trotting. “There are two things I am assuming, Mr. President,” he said. “One is that everything in locked files before 2 P.M. today belongs to the President’s family, and the other is that Mrs. Kennedy will handle the funeral arrangements.” Johnson didn’t break stride. “That’s correct,” he said. It was a poor assumption because some things in the President’s personal files could be related to official decisions, commitments, and policy. It might have been better for a person like Bundy, or Sorensen, to sift through those files at once and acquaint the new President with matters which might have a bearing on his official conduct. The President of the United States is in the position of a paid government employee whose acts and decisions are the property of the people.
Silently, Johnson passed the White House policemen who stood in the darkness along the walk. Throughout the White House, Secret Service agents heard the beep on their radios and the word that the President of the United States was about to enter the Executive Mansion. Lyndon Johnson had become the prisoner of protection, and would continue to be for a number of years. He would not make a move, from office to hallway, from bedroom to East Room, from ranch house to front lawn without knowing that the word was being passed. Later, when he moved into the White House, the mere removal of the newspapers from in front of his bedroom at 7 A.M. would cause the night man across the hall to open his microphone and whisper: “Volunteer One is awake.”
Directly ahead he saw the lighted French windows of the Oval Office. It was now his, but he would not use it. The drapes were half drawn. The inside, in brand-new colors, was as serene and majestic as ever. He had known that office, with awe, from the days when his hero Franklin Delano Roosevelt sat behind the desk, the burnished eyeglasses winking with light, the cigarette holder tilted upward. There had been times when, in a conference with President Kennedy, a government problem had been recited and the handsome young man would turn his stern gaze through a semicircle of advisers, prepared to ask: “Well, what should we do?” and Lyndon Johnson always hoped that the President would not ask him first.
The door to Evelyn Lincoln’s office was held open for him, and he walked through. Someone said that Johnson should use the office of the President, and the President said: “No. That would be presumptuous.”
He passed it, went out into the curving white hall, kept walking down through the West Wing, out past the Press Room, into the night air again, and down the walkway to East Executive Avenue, then across the street into the dismal old structure which had once been the State Department, but which was now called the Executive Office Building or EOB. Any department which had no White House priority, from telephone operators to mail room to Vice-President, was jammed in among the old high ceilings and exposed heating pipes.
Johnson went upstairs to his office and said hello to his private secretary, Mrs. Juanita Roberts. They were always in excellent balance: he roared, she whispered. He looked around and learned that he had picked up some men on the way from the helipad. He went behind his desk, moved all the pending papers to one side to clear the blotter and looked up at the men who stood. He told Ted Reardon that he wanted a Cabinet meeting at 10 A.M. He was going to require a lot of service tonight and he wanted no excuses. Reardon left to begin phoning the Cabinet ministers—some of whom were on a plane coming in from Hawaii.
Johnson was not in doubt. He knew the necessary steps but to prod these people he put on his son-of-a-bitch face. Kilduff, who had worked so hard for the new President, was dressed down for not having the casket leave by the front ramp. The President didn’t care for excuses; it would have been proper for him to leave the plane with Mrs. Kennedy and the body of John F. Kennedy. Who the hell’s idea was it to get that forklift at the back of the plane?
A Secret Service man informed him that his home phone number at The Elms had been changed. It was now hooked into the White House. “Luci Johnson was picked up at school and is at the house. Lynda is at the home of Governor Connally with the Connally children.” It eased the worriment in his mind to know that the girls were protected by agents; it made him feel better to know that Mrs. Johnson was on her way home. He knew that the scar of noon would never heal in his wife. The house would be a warm refuge for her.
All evening long highly placed men would come to this second-rate office to reassess the new Chief Executive and to be reassessed by him. To all, he enunciated the same battle order: “There must be no gap in government. We must go forward in unity.” He sent for soup. He took phone calls. He made phone calls. At one point he was dictating a memo, and the President lapsed into reverie. His eyes stared at the far wall. “Rufe did a heroic thing today,” he murmured, almost to himself. “He threw me down in that car and threw himself on top of me.”
There was one facet of Johnson’s character which few people knew. He was genuinely surprised when someone did something for him gratuitously.
A few automobiles were in the lot, parked against the wall of Holy Trinity Church. The big starry lights at the entrance were lighted, though few attended the first solemn high Mass for the repose of the soul of John F. Kennedy. It was fitting that it should be celebrated by the last priest to see him alive and the first to see him dead. Father Oscar Huber, looking smaller than usual in the enormous chasuble, holding the gold chalice under its cover, ascended the brilliantly lighted altar and felt a weariness in his body.
His acolytes held his garment up the three steps, then stepped back as Huber set the chalice down and touched the altar stone with both hands. The few communicants in the dimness of the pews arose with a shuffling of feet. Others, who had come only to say the Stations of the Cross, decided to stay. No one told them that this Mass was for a President. It had not been announced in the parish bulletin, and the few in the church assumed that it must be for the dead President.
It would have pleased the President. The Church, the Sacraments, Mass, religious love and fear were instilled in the Kennedy children early. Their mother retained the faith of a child. In Palm Beach, Jack Kennedy was an usher at the Catholic church and helped to take up the Sunday collection. When he went to Washington as President, a wry monsignor, leaning over the pulpit one Sunday, said: “And now let us say an Our Father and a Hail Mary for an usher who has left us. I’m not allowed to mention his name, but he got a new job in Washington.”*
The Roman Catholic Church is always more of a joy to a sinner than a saint because within its gates lie forgiveness and love. The President, if his friends can be believed, was closer to being a merry sinner than a saint. He was attracted to the sins of the flesh and found them difficult to resist. In this, he joined hands with the average man everywhere. In his church, in his conscience he was a silent penitent. He seldom discussed religion and was never known to permit his Catholicism to influence his thinking as a statesman. Some thought that, as President, he was slightly antagonistic to his church.
Father Huber turned to the gospel and opened the big book, tilted on a stand, to the red ribbon which bisected a page. It was opened to the Twenty-fourth Sunday after Pentecost, Matthew 24, verses 15 to 35. “ . . . for as the lightning comes forth from the east and shines even to the west, so also will the coming of the Son of Man be. Wherever the body is, there will the eagles be gathered together . . .”
On the third floor, Detective Guy F. Rose was busy working a neglected angle. A woman neighbor of the Oswalds had said her brother had driven Oswald to work with curtain rods. The cop flipped the pages of his notebook. That was Linnie Mae Randall; Linnie Mae Randall, who said her brother’s name was what? Frazier. Wesley Frazier. She had volunteered that her brother was at some hospital if the police wanted him.
Rose wanted him. It had occurred to Will Fritz and his overworked Homicide squad that Frazier might be a party to a plot to take the life of the President. Frazier worked with Oswald. Frazier and Oswald were buddies of a sort. Where did the Frazier boy go after the assassination? Where was he during the shooting?
Guy Rose phoned Parkland Hospital. The operator had no patient named Frazier. She would connect the policeman with the record room. He waited for a response. Rose could have taken Mrs. Linnie Mae Randall to headquarters with him while taking the Paines and Mrs. Oswald. Also, when she mentioned that her brother was at some hospital, Rose could have phoned Fritz and asked a detective to pick him up. They could be most important witnesses; anyone who had studied the Lincoln assassination might see a parallel between the Fraziers and the Surratts.
Parkland was sure that it had no record of a Frazier. Calls were placed to other hospitals, to sanitariums, to clinics in and around Dallas. The detective made a list of doctors in Irving Professional Center. He did not want to think that young Wesley Frazier had slipped through his fingers. It could be most important; it could be nothing at all. As he made the phone calls, Detective Rose watched Detective Senkel herding Marina Oswald and the Paines out of the Forgery office. He dialed the Irving Professional Center and identified himself. A nurse supervisor said yes, they had a Mr. Frazier senior as a patient.
Rose said, “Thank you,” and hung up. He phoned Irving police headquarters. Rose said he was working on the Kennedy thing and he thought that there was a wanted man in the Irving Professional Center. He was put on the phone with Detective J. A. McCabe, who said he would go out to the clinic at once and try to pick up Wesley Frazier. “We understand that this boy brought our suspect to work this morning—drove him in,” Rose said.
“Call me back in fifteen minutes,” Detective McCabe said. Guy Rose agreed. “Just take him into custody,” he said. “If you get him, we’ll send a man out right away.”
The ambulance and its entourage of cars moved out Massachusetts Avenue in the dark of night, but there was a feeling in Washington that the lights were on; the people were present, but there was a mood of solemn meditation. The ambulance drew abreast of slow-moving cars. Greer tapped the siren lightly, and the cars moved to the side. The movie marquees proclaimed their wares, but few Washingtonians looked for entertainment. The meat markets, the supermarkets were open with Friday night sales on hams and loins of pork. Few automobiles cooled in the parking lots.
The ambulance passed Woodley. In the dark hush, the tall and dignified stone of Washington Cathedral rolled by. Inside, Woodrow Wilson lay in a crypt. He, too, had had lofty ideals. In death, two Democratic Presidents were close, and then the distance opened up. No bullet had cut Wilson down; the assassins of the United States Senate had sabotaged his dreams for a League of Nations and he had died slowly, defeated. The car followed Wisconsin Avenue and Route 240.
In the back, Robert Kennedy tried to console his sister-in-law. At one point, he had pulled back the glass partition which separated them from the driver’s section and he asked Roy Kellerman if any of them knew that a suspect had been arrested in Dallas. Kellerman said no. “They think he’s a communist,” the Attorney General said. The widow was shocked. To be killed by a Red seemed, to her, to rob her husband’s demise of significance. She thought he had been killed by a white supremacist; she had been sure he had given his life for civil rights. The martyr Abraham Lincoln had been cut down by a Southern sympathizer; the Negroes, free and slave, had wept. A warped, misguided communist could, in her mind, rob her husband’s death of meaning.
The ambulance barely rocked. The highway was flat and smooth, and Chevy Chase slid by the big windows as a series of flashing lights through the curtains. The darkness of the hummocks of trees came again, and the two who loved this man so fervently stared at each other in the barely perceptible gloom. It was a macabre scene—morbid indeed—and yet they understood, without mentioning it, that they must be as close to Jack as possible; the hours were numbered. General McHugh sat with them, but he could not be a member of this triumvirate. Like a good soldier, he sat quietly, trying not to listen unless a remark was addressed to him. The Attorney General said that everything would be done as she wished it. He would help in every possible manner; right now Sarge was in the White House drawing up preliminary plans and he had a sizable team working with him.
She had time to tell her brother-in-law about the triumphal motorcade, the happy faces in bright channels of sunlight. She had time, if she chose, to tell the brother of her cherished husband about the sharp, clear crack of the shots; the dreamy expression on Jack’s face as he slowly leaned toward her; the spasm of the body as the back of his head flew off. There was time to tell the one man to whom she could bare her feelings. The interminable whipping speed of that car to Parkland; the bloody roses; the strange, cold faces of doctors and nurses and the long fight for something already lost.
That man, that execrable man who wanted to confiscate her Jack; the running flight to cars to the airport. The agony, the horrifying, lonely agony of it and then to find that the President had hardly died before the Johnsons were there in Air Force One—no privacy, no respect—waiting for a judge to swear him in and then asking her, actually asking her, to step forward to be photographed with him. There were things that Jacqueline Kennedy would never forget or, for that matter, understand. A kindred mind across the curving lid absorbed her words, her shock, her spite. Robert Kennedy, tense, taut, could sympathize with her position, feelings of grief, and rancor. He could husband a hate for a long time.
At Glenbrook the ambulance slowed. Three thousand people leaned on the double-railed fence around the huge skyscraper and adjacent hospital buildings. This was the Naval Medical Center at Bethesda, Maryland. The people were quiet. They saw the ambulance. There was no movement toward it. The faces watched the vehicle with that speculative look which said: “Up to now, I didn’t believe it happened.” Greer moved the vehicle toward the main entrance.
The commander of the institution, Captain Canada, was in uniform silhouetted against the lights of the main entrance. Admiral Calvin Galloway was at his side. For the United States Navy, the situation was sensitive. It would be dangerous to say or do the wrong thing. Canada had been wrong inadvertently all along, so far. He had sent the ambulance and cardiologist in case Lyndon Johnson had a heart attack. The bus was returning to the curving driveway with a dead President.
The captain had been advised that Kennedy would arrive by helicopter. He had placed an honor guard at the helipad; two helicopters arrived, but they carried the Andrews Air Force Base honor guard, which wanted to be on hand at Bethesda when the body arrived. Both honor guards were standing at attention at the pads. Canada had been told about the crowd collecting around the big institution. A short fence made of two rows of pipe would not keep them off the grounds. He had called General Philip Wehle of the Military District of Washington, asking for soldiers. The general was still at Andrews.
Smartly, Canada, accompanied by Admiral Galloway and junior officers, stepped down and approached the three cars. They helped the people to alight. Captain Canada had a chaplain with him in case Mrs. Kennedy needed comforting. She didn’t. Her brother-in-law took her arm and led the group toward the towering entrance. They may have appeared to be reasonable people, but Canada soon learned that the Kennedys were in no mood to dicker.
General McHugh told Galloway that the Kennedys were here for an autopsy and embalming. The admiral said that Bethesda did not have the means of embalming a body. Godfrey was adamant. He demanded to know if the admiral was telling him that it was impossible. Galloway kept his temper. It was not impossible; it might be unsatisfactory work, which could be worse. McHugh called up his reserves. O’Donnell and O’Brien were flagged to his side. The general said that the Navy did not want to do the embalming—the admiral had recommended a funeral director. “You heard the general’s decision,” Kenny O’Donnell snapped. The admiral and the captain stood as O’Donnell and the general left for a sixteenth floor.
In a moment, McHugh was back. Most of the others, except for Roy Kellerman and his Secret Service group, had gone up in the elevators. The body was driven to a rear entrance. It was taken out of the ambulance and placed in an empty and well-lighted corridor. There it reposed. McHugh stood by it and wondered what had happened. Kellerman and Greer stood looking around. No one spoke. No one appeared. They waited.
The headlights of the solitary car lit the quiet street momentarily and the low branches of the trees looked greener. The car turned into the driveway of a Walnut Hills home, and Dr. Malcolm Perry turned the ignition off and went into his house. His day’s work at Parkland Hospital was done. The thoughtful face, wiped clean of expression, brightened when he saw his daughter, Jolene, and his son, Malcolm.
Malcolm was three and chattered his joy at the sight of his father. Jolene held out her school work for approval. There were some papers covered with large printed letters. “Say,” he said, “that’s good work.” Dr. Perry brought the school papers up for one more look, and his world shattered into fragments.
The papers dropped from his hand. “I’m tired,” he said to Mrs. Perry. “I’ve never been this tired in all my life.”