The second platoon lined up. The policemen stood under their metal helmets at attention. Lieutenant William R. Fulghum studied the faces until the three sergeants had the men dressed in two rows. This was the Southwest Substation of Dallas; the men patrolled the residential areas of Trinity Heights, South Oak Cliff, Fruitdale, and Oak Cliff. This was a fragment of a police department, one of the outlying fragments which would not be devoted to the big assignment of the day.
Some of them had already listened to the dispatcher calling the brass at headquarters, at Love Field, the Trade Mart, Stemmons Freeway, on the motorcade route. Others had heard the solemn warning of the chief. These men were glad to be out of it. They did not know that the presence of a President for 180 minutes would require a cancellation of days off, a repetitious dry run of the motorcade route, a host of conferences with Secret Service men—a sapping of the city’s law enforcement for the safety of one man.
Sergeant Hugh F. Davis called the roll and the patrolmen hollered “here” to such names as Truman Boyd, Rufus High, J. D. Tippit, and Roy Walker. Dallas had a humorless department. It was composed largely of young “skinheads” with a passion for promotion. The word had been out for years that the men who controlled Dallas demanded a clean city, and these young men, zealous and with little formal education, kept it clean.
They also kept the old jail on top of city hall well populated. Some of the trustees had to peel potatoes all afternoon just to keep the sullen Negroes and loudmouthed whites fed. Every day, batches of new prisoners were being brought in, mugged, fingerprinted, and led upstairs to the dismal rows of cells. Naked bulbs stared down at gray concrete.
Dallas policemen had a deceptive politeness reserved for lawbreakers. They said “yes sir” and “no sir” while writing out a traffic violation, and, if this encouraged a motorist to use bitter and abusive words, he was quickly carried off in a squad car to the prison on an additional charge: resisting arrest. When violence occurred, the Dallas policeman was never afraid to draw his revolver and seldom hesitated to use it. His manner of dealing with known hoodlums who could not be trapped into breaking the law was to make certain that he “fell,” thus converting an ambulatory person into an ambulance case.
Lieutenant Fulghum recited the patrol areas with Boyd, Tippit, and Walker, and reminded all hands that they were to tune in to police Channel Two, because One was being reserved for Curry and the motorcade. They were to be especially vigilant, because all suburban squads were short of men today, and, if trouble developed, they would be moved from area to area, and Fulghum wanted an immediate response.
At police headquarters, Captain Perdue W. Lawrence had his huge detail of police motorcyclists ready, and he again read the orders of the day. This group was to report to Love Field and patrol it to keep people away from the President and his party. No strange planes would be permitted near Gate 24, even if given permission by Love Field tower. The entrances and exits to the field were to be sealed; additional men would patrol the passenger terminal.
When Mr. Kennedy was ready to leave the field for Dallas, the time would probably be 11:45 A.M. A line of motorcycle policemen would follow the first car, which would be a quarter of a mile ahead, and it would be followed by Chief Curry and a Secret Service man in the headquarters car. Four men on two-wheel motorcycles would flank the President’s car, slightly behind him on both sides.
In the event that the crowd broke the police lines at any intersection, the Secret Service would hop off their follow-up vehicle and fend the people off. If they needed help, they would motion the four motorcycles forward. Otherwise, they were to remain slightly behind the President. Captain Lawrence was still reading the order when a thought occurred to him. His men, on three-wheel motorcycles, would close out the back of the parade, but there were too many of them.
Also what should they do in case someone tried to cut in behind the parade and move up past the three-wheelers? The captain got on Channel One and asked Assistant Chief Charles Batchelor, already at the airport, what to do. No, Batchelor said, no regular Dallas traffic should be permitted to overtake the motorcade from behind. Lawrence asked if he had permission to send some of his extra men up on Stemmons Freeway. He wouldn’t need them in the motorcade, and it seemed to him that, when the presidential cars left Dealey Plaza, they would get up on Stemmons for a high-speed ride to the Trade Mart.
Part of the freeway had rises in the roadway and the President’s men might go over one and find a citizen dead ahead at low speed. This would constitute a danger. Batchelor agreed, and Captain Lawrence said that he would send some of his men directly from the airport to Stemmons, and that they would be staggered along the freeway so that they could signal each other to get local traffic out of the way as Kennedy negotiated the last part of the Dallas run.
Lawrence made the changes, but to protect himself he put asterisks on the squad chart, showing where the men had been diverted and why. Someone said it was still raining out, and the captain gave the men permission to wear raincoats. “If the weather clears,” he said, “take those raincoats off and stuff them in the motorcycle bags.”
The department refused permits to all groups which might want to protest anything or anyone on this day. Their spokesmen were asked to return to headquarters on Monday, and permission would be granted. The worst thing that could happen, the superior officers knew, was for some bystander to throw a rotten tomato or an egg at the motorcade. Or someone in a lofty office building might drop an object on the parade. This, Curry knew, would be featured on every front page in America, and on every television news channel. Dallas was jealous of its image as a rich, reactionary city, and it was not going to be baited into cheapening that image by permitting some emotionally unstable adherent to bring the city into national contempt.
The possibility of an assassination attempt had been studied, but this was thought to be a remote possibility. The Secret Service had scanned the police lists of agitators, professional protestors, the insane-at-large, the known communists, and the poison pen writers. Curry’s police worked in concert with the Secret Service in running down every lead. The city was as secure as it could be made. Even those violent ones who had left Dallas were checked at their distant residences to make certain that they would not be in the city on Friday.
And yet, in downtown Dallas, quite often one out of every five local citizens carried a gun. The city, part Southern in character, part Western, believed that it was the right of the citizen to carry a gun if he had a permit and did not use it unlawfully. Thousands of permits had been issued, and the Dallas Police Department had no reason to regret the number of arms bearers.
More young than middle-aged men carried firearms. It seemed, symbolically, to be a part of growing up. Gun play came to life in only two types of cases: too much alcohol or a fight between two men over a woman. It was common for police, in heading off a car full of wild boys, to frisk the occupants and find three or four revolvers. They were the badges of manhood; they gave the young men a strutting walk and a consciousness that they were as big as any man in the world, but their use was considered a violation of the police permit.
Shotguns and rifles were even more common. The outlying areas of the city were good for hunting, and men cleaned and pampered their rifles in the manner of little boys shining bicycles. In the off-season, many of the men took their rifles to local ranges to fire at targets and reset the windage markers and the drift of steel-jacketed shells. This was not equated with violence in Dallas, because the constitution guaranteed citizens the right to bear arms, and Dallas was not too many generations removed from its own frontier settlement days, when the Trinity River, a watering place for cattle, frequently was a battleground.
Tippit, a tall, wavy-haired policeman, was a minute late getting out to his car, number seventy-eight, and moving it away from the Southwest Substation for patrol. At 8:01 A.M. he was on his way.
The Hotel Texas elevator took Vice-President and Mrs. Johnson down to the mezzanine with their Secret Service man, Rufus Youngblood. Mrs. Johnson, who was gifted with the animated face of a happy child, composed her features in rare solemnity as the car slid silently downward. Secret Service men watched them get off the car, nodding good morning. In the dimly lighted Longhorn Room, the Democratic leadership of Texas gathered, whooping loud greetings to each other and falling into whispering groups along the wall.
On the eighth floor, Mrs. Evelyn Lincoln finished breakfast and hurriedly recompleted her makeup. She was a small, dark woman, the adoring private secretary of John F. Kennedy for twelve years. At the White House, it was her function to keep the half dozen daily deliveries of mail coming into the President’s desk between appointments, just as it was expected that she would keep the covey of stenographers in her office busy with outgoing mail. This consisted of more than the President dictated. If he learned that a Democratic politician was ill, it was Mrs. Lincoln’s function to compose a “get well” letter or send flowers or both. On her desk small plates of enticing candies reposed for those who, en passant, felt like reaching.
She kept her door to the President’s Oval Office slightly ajar unless he ordered it closed. This was so that she could hear him if he called to her. It was she who knew when to admit George Thomas to the inner office with freshly pressed suits of clothes, a tie and a shirt, several times each day. He crossed the office noiselessly when the President worked alone and hung the clothing in the little lavatory.
Mrs. Lincoln was also the liaison between the President and Mrs. Kennedy. She could tell Jacqueline when he was too busy to talk to her; she could judge the time that his daily work would be completed and he would be ready for dinner in the President’s eight-room home on the second floor; Mrs. Lincoln kept a secret “log” of every presidential appointment and what was discussed, promised, and refused; she lifted every fiftieth letter from the mass of unsolicited mail and opened it and placed it among the letters the President should read.
She was more than an amanuensis; Mrs. Lincoln was Kennedy’s confidante from the time he emerged on the Washington scene as the junior Senator from Massachusetts. She worked long, exhausting hours because she believed in Kennedy’s “star.” Her office walls were heavy with color photographs of the First Family, and she applied herself with complete loyalty to his every wish.
It wasn’t necessary for Mrs. Lincoln to have made this trip. There were younger stenographers in the White House pool, but Mrs. Lincoln, like Mrs. Kennedy, had a desire to make this one quick trip to Texas. She had written happily to her sister-in-law’s sister, Mrs. Jo Ingram of Dallas, inviting her to breakfast “very early” at the Hotel Texas in Fort Worth, so that Mrs. Ingram might meet the President of the United States briefly after breakfast. Mrs. Ingram, in a burst of feminine enthusiasm, had replied that she would be there, and she was bringing her cousin and her cousin’s daughter.
The four sipped hot coffee and waited for the Secret Service to advise Mrs. Lincoln that the President was ready to emerge from his suite. The anticipation was too much for the ladies. The breakfast was still on the table in the bedroom, and the four rushed up and stood in the corridor near the elevator, watching with excitement as men hurried up and down the hall, screening the waiting elevator and the young Mexican girl who stood at the controls.
In the parking lot, the crowd now numbered more than four thousand. In the rain they looked like a conglomerate of shiny colors. They lit cigarettes; they joshed each other; the mounted police herded them into a large circle around the speaker’s stand and the loudspeakers. Some stood off on the next block, leaning against shop windows which had awnings. Many wore the big fawn-colored Texas hats. These were not the elite of Fort Worth, who would be inside at the breakfast. These, until two days ago, were the forgotten supporters of the President: the railroad brakemen, the clerks, the off-duty policemen, housewives, waiters, mechanics, store managers, also the unemployed.
They did not think of themselves as an “afterthought.” Fort Worth is a lusty, hospitable Western town, and the local citizens were glad of the opportunity to see their hero person-to-person and to see the beauteous Mrs. Kennedy. These, multiplied many times, were the men and women who had given the electoral votes of Texas to John F. Kennedy in 1960. They asked nothing in return but a hearty hello, a few witty expressions to be remembered later, and a “Godspeed.”
At 8:20 A.M. they numbered close to five thousand—double the number sheltered inside against the rain—and some began a good-natured hog-calling shout: “Come on, Jackie. Come on, Jackie.”
The coffee was on, and Troy West watched the excited percolation as he wrapped the first early delivery of books. He had a long shiny counter on the first floor and he could pack the books into cartons, buttress them with old newspapers, seal, and twine them while watching that percolator. Mr. West had been a mail wrapper at the Texas School Book Depository for sixteen years and he always arrived early, put the coffee on, and began the wrapping as though his heavy hands could do the work without involving his mind at all.
The air was aged. It had been imprisoned in the archaic building a long time, like Troy. The floors had been scuffed so long they had concave paths between the counters and the two birdcage elevators. The windows, large and dusty, had rounded tops, reminiscent of Ford’s Theatre in Washington. The Texas School Book Depository had never lifted anyone’s spirit; it was a warehouse of work, with school books coming in by the gross and being mailed out by the dozen. There were seventy-two persons on the payroll, and two were absent this day because of illness.
It was a place where Negroes and whites worked well together. The wits told jokes and perpetrated pranks; the serious ones, fellows and girls, gravitated together and had discussions on their lunch hour; the loners nodded soberly and moved toward the rack with the fresh orders, yanked one out, took the elevator upstairs, filled the order, came downstairs, put it on Troy West’s counter, and went back to the rack for another order.
There were thirteen employees working on the sixth floor. More than half of them were laying a tile floor. It wasn’t easy, as Bonnie Ray Williams learned. He and the others had finished the fifth floor, which entailed starting at one corner of the huge square barn, moving cartons of books out of the way, cleaning a section and laying tiles, then moving the cartons farther away until they became jammed in another corner. At that time, they had to be lugged back to the freshly finished part—hopefully, dry—while the last corner of the floor was worked on.
On the sixth floor, moving the cartons made the work of the order-fillers difficult. Men like Danny Arce and Wes Frazier, Lee Oswald and James Jarman, Jr., had to sort among the pyramids of cartons to locate histories, mathematics books, and grammars. They worked the sixth floor and knew where to find any book, but the floor crew started work at the west end of the room and, on their knees, were working east. Little by little, the boxes of books were being inched toward the front windows of the building.
Some of the fellows were in the habit of disappearing into a small place on the ground floor called the Domino Room to sip Troy’s steaming coffee. Lee Harvey Oswald never chipped in with the others toward the purchase of a pound of coffee and never asked for a cup. He sometimes joined the others merely to rummage through yesterday’s Dallas Times Herald or the current day’s Dallas News. No one ever saw him buy a newspaper, but he often sat alone, running through the news items swiftly, seldom pausing to respond to a greeting.
The Depository faced Dealey Plaza with little confidence. There were new glassy buildings around the perimeter, including the Dal-Tex and county sheriff’s office. The School Book Depository and the old stone county courthouse were all that was left of old Dallas. The plaza itself was dedicated to Joseph Dealey, founder of the Dallas News, and he stood in bronze facing away from what he had wrought.
The grassy square was the funnel for downtown Dallas. Three main streets, Elm, Main, and Commerce, met in the plaza, carrying the bulk of traffic headed south, southwest, west, and northwest out of town. The buildings formed an inverted U at the top of the plaza, and the cars ran downhill for two hundred yards toward a railroad overpass, then disappeared underneath to reach any one of six viaduct speedways.
The final part of the presidential motorcade would come down the middle avenue—Main. When it reached the plaza, it would turn right for one block to Elm, facing the Texas School Book Depository at the top of the hill. The cars would make a left on Elm, pass directly in front of the Depository, and go downhill, the President and Mrs. Kennedy waving to the last few hundred people on the parade route. Once at the underpass, the automobiles would speed up, make a right turn up onto Stemmons, and head for the Trade Mart, less than three miles away.
To those who work hard within small horizons, there is little excitement in seeing a President. There was more interest among the deputy sheriffs on the opposite side of Dealey Plaza than in the School Book Depository. Some of the Negro employees at the Depository said that they wanted to eat their lunches quickly and maybe get a look at Mr. Kennedy, but to the majority of $1.25-an-hour laborers this was a drizzly morning, the day before Saturday’s late sleeping.
Some did not know that the motorcade would pass here; some felt no desire to see the Chief Executive; a few said they had too much to do. Roy Truly, the short, bespectacled manager, sat in his half-glassed office inside the main entrance, thinking nothing at all of the motorcade. At lunchtime he had an appointment to meet one of the owners of the business, and this took precedence over any parade. He hunched over his desk, puffing on a cigarette, now and then looking up at his jacket hanging on a clothes tree without seeing it.
Duty was all. Every morning Mr. Truly made a quiet inspection of the building, getting a head count from his foremen, nodding a soft greeting to old hands, glancing at the order rack to make certain that the merchandise was moving, and getting a fresh feel of the plant.
He knew the good workers and the shirkers. He was aware that his presence spun all hands into bursts of activity, and he knew which ones would loaf when he disappeared. The workers knew that Mr. Truly was fair; he gave a man an even break. Old hands broke new ones into the routine. If an employee didn’t want to work, he was paid according to the clock and dismissed. Six weeks ago, Mr. Truly had hired Lee Harvey Oswald because he liked the quiet, almost uncommunicative attitude of the boy, and especially the way he prefaced his responses with “Yes sir” and “No sir.”
Truly was in his middle years, and he gave his best efforts to everything he undertook. He wasn’t much more of a conversationalist than young Oswald, but he was shrewd. When he was thinking, he pulled on his ear, and his philosophy was that “nothing is going to change my life. No matter what happens, I am not going to get an ulcer.” He had seen this business start small, and now he was shipping school books to five states.
The foreman, Bill Shelley, told Roy Truly that the boys laying the floor were now working the sixth floor, and, while it would not be finished today, it certainly would be by Monday. The only two employees who had a facial resemblance worked that floor that day. Billy Nolan Lovelady, a crew-cut with a lean pale face and a grim mouth, was setting tiles. At the other end of the room, Lee Oswald was filling orders which involved books published by Scott Foresman & Company.
There was a burst of silent activity on the eighth floor. It was electric without the crackle, just a man leaning over a telephone. His whisper could not be heard: “The President is on his way to the mezzanine.” The door to Room 850 opened, the wood gleaming against the lights in the corridor. Mr. Kennedy came out. He looked young and tall and buoyant; his light step made his shoes twinkle.
The elevator was waiting when he saw Evelyn Lincoln and her ladies. At once the President stopped and his secretary introduced them. He shook hands and, in mock surprise, said: “Are these some more of your relatives?” Mrs. Lincoln chuckled and said: “Well, relatives of relatives.” He backed toward the elevator, said, “Good morning” to Elaine San Duval, the operator, and turned to see agents Clint Hill and Muggsy O’Leary and complained that Mary Gallagher was not available when Mrs. Kennedy required her services. He wanted someone to “get her on the ball.”
In the Longhorn Room, agents hurried to the elevator door on the left and asked the politicians and their wives to move back. The door swung open and a polite patter of applause rippled across the room as the President walked from group to group, shaking hands, nodding good morning to the Vice-President and Mrs. Johnson; the Governor and Mrs. Connally; a special word to Congressman Jim Wright; a pause before Senator Ralph Yarborough to freeze the smile and growl: “For Christ’s sake, Ralph, cut it out!”
He was ready to go, and a few joined the President on the elevator. Others hurried down the flight of stairs. In the lobby, a cheer went up from the group permitted to wait beyond the manager’s desk. The President saw the clerks at the drugstore and behind the florist stand staring agape and he smiled and nodded. Lightly he danced down the few steps to Eighth Street, a sizeable entourage behind him, and out into the street. He was one of the few who was bareheaded, and the crowd saw him step into the street and shouts went up: “Here he is!” “Here’s the President!” A Secret Service man ran up to Mr. Kennedy with a raincoat, but he was waved away. Mr. Kennedy began to chuckle. He got up on the buckboard truck and saw the immensity of the crowd, more than twice the size of the one expected at the breakfast, and, although he made no comment, it induced laughter in his throat as he studied the density of human beings waiting in the rain, and there was no doubt that Mr. Kennedy was impressed and encouraged regarding the warmth of Texans.
The roar of the crowd broke against the red brick of the Hotel Texas and, up on the eighth floor, the face of Mrs. Kennedy could be seen for a moment, looking down. In another room Evelyn Lincoln and her women crowded at a window to watch. Behind them the door opened and Mary Gallagher came in to announce that she and Mrs. Lincoln should be getting out to the plane. She wanted to be aboard before Mrs. Kennedy.
The Vice-President and the Governor flanked the President on the truck. Their brows were grim in the drizzle. Up in Dr. Burkley’s room, O’Donnell and O’Brien watched Kennedy’s arms trying to flag the crowd into silence. They had spoken to Senator Yarborough before the President saw him, and their persuasion had been fruitless. Yarborough had his own reasons for not wishing to ride with Mr. Johnson, he said, and, besides, no one was watching who rode with whom; the people of Texas were out to see the President. Besides, he had ridden into town with the Vice-President last night and that ought to be enough.
Like a receding wave, the parking lot welcome began to soften and fall back. The President, smiling and waving, saw more than the crowd. His eyes caught the policemen on the roof of the Continental Trailways Bus Terminal and on the roof of the Washer Brothers Building with riot guns. The big broad smile did not change; it was an irritant which went with the job, like listening interminably to “Hail to the Chief.”
“Mr. Vice-President,” the President said loudly, chin a little high before the microphone, and the crowd shouted again. “Mr. Vice-President, Jim Wright, Governor, Senator Yarborough, Mr. Buck, ladies and gentlemen”: Another cry went up for Raymond Buck, president of the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce. “There are no faint hearts in Fort Worth, and I appreciate your being here this morning.”
Someone yelled: “Where’s Jackie?” and Mr. Kennedy broke into laughter with the crowd. “Mrs. Kennedy is organizing herself. It takes longer, but, of course, she looks better than we do when she does it.” The people whooped. “But we appreciate your welcome.”
For a moment, his thoughts wandered. “This city has been a great Western city, the defense of the West, cattle, oil, and all the rest. It has believed in strength in this city, and strength in this state, and strength in this country.”
He was trying to appeal to their pride and their civic vanity, but the words were not marshaled and clichés boomed through the loudspeakers. In the small bedroom in Suite 850, Mrs. Kennedy could hear the voice of her husband and the shouts of the citizens. She hoped the rain would continue so that the bubbletop would be on the car; even a slow-moving motorcade twisted hair into dissolute tendrils. Besides her mirror told her that her eyes were fatigued.
“What we are trying to do in this country and what we are trying to do around the world, I believe, is quite simple, and this is to build a military structure which will defend the vital interests of the United States.” The President’s right hand was pointing outward now, then back up, and out again as punctuation for an informal talk. No matter what he said, or what the President left unsaid, the crowd permitted the veils of mist to shine its collective face and it endorsed every pause with open throats and enthusiasm for the man.
“And in that great cause, Fort Worth, as it did in World War II, as it did in developing the best bomber system in the world, the B-58, and as it will now do in developing the best fighter system in the world, the TFX, Fort Worth will play its proper part. And that is why we have placed so much emphasis in the last three years in building a defense system second to none—until now the United States is stronger than it has ever been in its history.” He was not telling them anything they did not know; they would have preferred to hear him tell what he was going to do to Senator John Tower and the Texas Republicans next year, but Mr. Kennedy was on a defense topic and found it difficult to separate the bait of federal payrolls and the fish of local workers.
“And secondly,” the President said, “we believe that the new environment, space, the new sea, is also an area where the United States should be second to none.” This was a thought borrowed from his dedication of the Houston Space Center yesterday, but the crowd whistled approval.
“And this state of Texas and the United States is now engaged in the most concentrated effort in history to provide leadership in this area and it must here on earth. And this is our second great effort. And in December—next month—the United States will fire the largest booster in the history of the world, putting us ahead of the Soviet Union in that area for the first time in our history.”
Again he was borrowing from the Houston speech. Mr. Kennedy had fallen into a witty slip of the tongue at the Space Center by calling the booster the “largest payroll in history” instead of the “largest payload.” Mist was now shining on his forehead; the Governor and the Vice-President faced the crowd with neutral expressions. Reporters made notes, even though they knew that the speech at the breakfast and the one at the Trade Mart in Dallas were the ones with built-in impact.
“And thirdly, for the United States to fulfill its obligations around the world requires that the United States move forward economically, that the people of this country participate in rising prosperity. And it is a fact in 1962, and the first six months of 1963, the economy of the United States grew not only faster than nearly every Western country, which had not been true in the fifties, but also grew faster than the Soviet Union itself. That is the kind of strength the United States needs, economically; in space, militarily.”
“And in the final analysis, that strength depends upon the willingness of the citizens of the United States to assume the burdens of leadership.” He was finished. He had to find a thought to get him off the stand. “I know one place where they are, here in this rain, in Fort Worth, in Texas, in the United States. We are going forward. Thank you.”
There was a thunder of applause, shouts, and rebel yells. The President and Vice-President hopped down from the truck, and stood before the American flag and the Seal of the President, pumping hands, trading smiles, studying the awestricken faces which would never forget this moment. The Secret Service began to break through the crowd, back toward the hotel.
Mr. Kennedy stopped a moment to reach up and shake hands with the ponchoed troopers who sat on their horses and kept the lane open for him. Along the corridor on the eighth floor, the word was passed: “He’s on his way back to the hotel.” The police on the rooftops slid their shotguns under their arms and watched him disappear under the big metal canopy which said: “Welcome to Texas.”
The man with the dark wavy hair initialed a paper and placed it in the outgoing box. A cigarette, dying on a tray, was touched to a fresh one and puffed. Gordon Shanklin depressed a button. “Let them come in,” he said. Behind his head was a color photograph of J. Edgar Hoover, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Mr. Shanklin, head of the Dallas office of the FBI, was a well-dressed, low-key man. He administered the field office, in the old Santa Fe Building, in the manner of a confident banker who would rather listen to the depositors than talk.
He was ready to start the biweekly meeting with his agents. They came in and said good morning. Some stood and some occupied chairs against the wall opposite Mr. Shanklin’s desk. He had their reports before him and he went over them, asking a few questions, making suggestions. This morning he wanted to bring up the matter of the President’s visit to Dallas once more. The protection of the President and Vice-President and their families was the province of the United States Secret Service, but there was always a chance that one of his men might have a lead on something, and he had reminded them, at earlier meetings, to mention any they might have in mind, so that such tips could go out at once to Washington and the PRS, and also to Roy Kellerman, who was the Secret Service agent in charge in Dallas today.
They had nothing. “If there is any indication of any possibility of acts of violence,” Mr. Shanklin murmured through his own smoke, “against the President or the Vice-President. . .” He glanced along a row of forty faces. “If you have anything,” he said, “anything at all, I want it confirmed in writing.” Agent James P. Hosty was in the group. He had nothing to offer. Neither did anyone else. Hosty was rated as a solid, non-panic agent, a man who, in the absence of any big cases, kept checking a number of small ones and who often sat in the outer office in the late hours laboriously pecking at a typewriter to keep his reports up to date.
The FBI men listened to Mr. Shanklin’s admonitions. He ran down a list of pending files. Each man involved gave an oral report on the status of the case to support the written work on Shanklin’s desk. Most of them would not see President Kennedy today. Their work was in other areas and, unless they could arrange to have lunch somewhere in the neighborhood, they wouldn’t get to see the reception on television either.
Hosty, for example, had learned by accident last night that there was going to be a motorcade. He was home reading a newspaper. He scanned the story of Big D’s welcome to Mr. Kennedy, and noticed that there was a map diagram of the parade route, but he didn’t study it. Hosty’s path crossed that of the President only indirectly. Yesterday he had seen some street pamphlets with front and side-view pictures of President Kennedy and the words: “Wanted for Treason.”
The matter may have been of small moment, but Hosty had carried them over to the Secret Service office and had given them to Agent Warner. A man in James Hosty’s squad had some information about someone in Denton, Texas, who had made threatening remarks about the President. This, too, was given to the Secret Service. Last night, there had been a tip about a demonstration against Kennedy at the Trade Mart—picketing, perhaps—and this, for whatever it was worth, was passed from FBI to SS.
The only thing that Hosty recalled about the parade route was that it would come down Main Street about noon, and he thought that, when the Friday morning meeting closed in Mr. Shanklin’s office, he might get a window table and have lunch at a restaurant along Main. He had no reason to think of any of his small “follow-up” cases in relation to the safety of the President.
One of them was Lee Harvey Oswald. Mr. Hosty’s most recent report on this matter had been filed with the Washington office four days ago. It said that Oswald had been in communication with the Soviet Embassy in Washington. Oswald was a chronic chore to Mr. Hosty. He had been on it a year. The Federal Bureau of Investigation had interviewed Lee Harvey Oswald when he returned from Russia with Marina and baby June.
Oswald felt he had nothing to hide. He had served his country as a United States marine in foreign service, and his country had rewarded him with a dishonorable discharge. The Soviet Union turned out to be a disappointment because there was no freedom for the workers. He had been employed in a parts factory in Minsk; the trade union meetings had turned out to be dull and doctrinaire. At one time he couldn’t even get permission to leave Moscow. At another, he couldn’t leave Minsk to join his wife at a vacation resort.
The exploitation of the workers, Oswald said, was even worse in the United States, but here he could go where he pleased, and he did not have to answer Mr. Hosty’s questions. If Hosty intended to inform Oswald’s boss of his defection to Russia, then he would be harassed out of work. All Lee expected was to be left to work in peace and support his family. Yes, he was a communist, but he didn’t expect an FBI agent to understand the word. He was a Marxist in the purest sense; not a socialist-despot like Stalin and Khrushchev; a true communist.
Mr. Hosty checked the Oswald case regularly. Oswald was never home. Hosty spoke to Marina Oswald, who resented him, through Mrs. Ruth Paine, who interpreted. To the agent, Mr. Oswald was a chronic complainer who lost jobs regularly. He had no friends. He had no admiration for the Russian expatriates who tried to befriend him and his wife. They detested communism.
There was a small communist cell in the Dallas area, and the FBI had an undercover agent in it, but none of them knew Lee Harvey Oswald and the young malcontent had no desire to join. He felt superior to them and, in the time Hosty kept him under surveillance, Oswald vacillated between wanting to stay in the United States; sending Marina back to Russia with the baby; getting a Soviet visa for himself so that he could get to Cuba and the communist bloc countries. From day to day, he seemed to change his course abruptly, so that even his wife could not understand him.
Hosty was aware that the newest job Oswald had was in the Texas School Book Depository. He worked filling book orders, but there was nothing sinister in this. Another thing: Oswald was not a violent person; he was never seen with firearms; never walked a picket line; never wrote hate letters to newspapers; he never even went to a motion picture.
If Hosty had followed the newspaper diagram of the parade route and noticed that it would pass the Texas School Book Depository, it would have been witless to draw the attention of his superiors to the presence of the defector, because he represented no physical danger to anyone. Hosty made the trips out to the little house in Irving as a matter of duty, but he never met his man. The investigation disclosed Oswald as a sullen braggart—nothing more.
At Love Field, the captain of American Airlines Flight 82 asked for taxi clearance. In a few moments, he would be headed for Idlewild Airport in New York. One of the passengers, a stewardess had told him, was Richard Nixon. Apparently the former Vice-President was not going to remain in Dallas to watch the presidential parade.