Looking back over the shoulder, one gains perspective. The further back, the more the mind focuses on infinity. Five years after the assassination of President Kennedy, it is clear that America immersed itself in an emotional bath on November 22, 1963. It soaked a long time but emerged no cleaner. In June 1968, President Kennedy’s brother, Robert, was assassinated. Between those events, other crusaders had been killed. Others will be killed.
These sorrows are not the symptom of a sick society. To the contrary, the health of the community is displayed by the increasing amount of mass shock which follows each assassination. America is deluded by a veneer of gentility and sophistication. The country feels that it is “above” violence. No culture, no country is. Man husbands hate as he does love. It is mundane for one person to wish another person dead. Some kill symbolically with an anonymous letter or a threatening phone call. A few stick pins in dolls. The coward misses on purpose. The fanatics, the sick, transform their hate and frustration into a final, physical act.
This book was written for two reasons. One is that, for a number of years, the minute-by-minute account of an event has been my forte, and that day in that city lends itself to this kind of writing. The second is, as the list of source material will show, a great number of writers have spent a lot of energy bending these events to preconceived notions. And yet I cannot claim complete and unqualified accuracy for myself because I have never written anything which, in the final analysis, is exactly as I had hoped.
The nonfiction writer, unlike the novelist, is stuck with facts. They can be, collectively, undramatic and antidramatic. Solid facts have ruined good scenes.
My feelings about the people in the book and those, like the members of the Warren Commission, on the perimeter of events are turbulent. There are liars and second-guessers in the cast, and self-hypnotists too. I cannot believe that Mrs. John F. Kennedy said: “I love you, Jack!” as her husband fell dead in her arms. She doesn’t even remember crawling out on the trunk of the car. Those riding with her can recall everything they heard her say. “I love you, Jack!” is not one of them.
Will Fritz was a good, plodding cop, but I do not admire him as Inspector Kelley of the Secret Service does. Fritz kept no record of his interrogations of Oswald. A pool of police stenographers was available to him. Also, for a few dollars, he could have rented a tape recorder from a shop near police headquarters. His questioning was cautious and repetitive. I am left with the impression that Fritz was afraid of alienating his prisoner. The book does not reveal him in this light because the known facts are counter to it.
I felt, at times, that Chief Jesse Curry wanted to hide from the assassination. He remained at Love Field until 4:05 P.M. although Oswald was arrested at 1:40 P.M. The chief spent much of his time in his office worrying about the press and the possible indictment of his department. The district attorney had the impression that the chief did not know a great deal about the case. Nor do I believe that Fritz and Curry were solicitous of the rights and welfare of Lee Harvey Oswald. Every time the prisoner entered or left the office of Captain Fritz he ran a gamut of vicious reporters. He also pleaded for “John Abt or a lawyer from the American Civil Liberties Union.” The police department told the ACLU that Oswald had declined the services of an attorney.
Fritz has said that if his men were close to the President when the shots were fired, they might have picked off the assassin in the sixth-floor window or, at the worst, sealed the building against escape. When the shots were fired, Dallas policemen fell off motorcycles, drew revolvers, and ran in diverse directions as the echo chamber of Dealey Plaza tossed the explosions back from three walls. In addition, they were unable to seal the Texas School Book Depository building until at least 12:34 P.M., at which time Mr. Oswald was sauntering back up Elm Street to board a bus.
The press was abominable. Reporters were demanding, hysterical, and abusive. It was within the power of Captain Glen King and his superiors to seal the third floor against cameras and journalists at any time. The reporters could have been evicted to the first floor where, once an hour, Captain King could have appeared before them with a typewritten report of progress. The police were afraid of the press. The midnight conference with Oswald was a mockery of justice. The lion was thrown to the Christians.
A good case can be made out for any theory about the three shots. As a mediator on television, I have listened to some which induced laughter. The best procedure is to work backwards. The vast majority of witnesses agree that they heard three shots. Zapruder’s film proves that the third shot blew the top off of John Kennedy’s head. This leaves two for accounting. Governor John Connally, who remained alert and conscious through the ghastly scene, is a hunter. He heard a rifle shot and swung toward his right, then toward the left to look at the President. Mr. Kennedy was lifting both hands upward. A second shot rang out, and the President grasped the throat area and began to fall toward his left. At the same time, the Governor felt as though someone had slammed him in the back. This would indicate that the second shot hit Mr. Kennedy, furrowed between the strap muscles of the neck, nicked his tie, emerged pristine, having hit no bone, punctured Connally’s rib cage, and emerged exactly where the films show Connally’s right wrist to be—coming up toward his chest. It hit the wrist, fractured it, and was spent in a shallow furrow on the left thigh and remained there until it fell off a stretcher.
If there is a mystery—and I don’t think there is—it lies in the first shot. A direct line from Oswald’s window, down to the position of SS-100-X, and straight to the underpass at Commerce, will show that this is the one which hit the pavement on the right side of the car, sending up a shower of gravel from the pavement. A woman on the curb opposite the car was hit by a “spray.” President Kennedy’s seat in the car was elevated three feet higher than the Connally jump seats. Undoubtedly Kennedy heard the first shot; undoubtedly he felt the spray of concrete and realized that someone had taken a shot at him. The bullet is believed to have tumbled upward off the pavement, nicked a curb, and sprayed the face of James Thomas Tague standing beside his car at the underpass—on a straight line from that sixth-floor window.
Marina Oswald has my sympathy, not my esteem. She was ready to tell about her husband’s rifle and the blanket in which it was wrapped. Why did she not volunteer the information she had about her husband’s attempted assassination of Major General Edwin Walker? Why not tell about how she locked him in the bathroom because he vowed to kill the Vice-President on a visit to Dallas? I cannot quarrel with the posture of a mother who wishes to protect her babies and herself, but if she proposes to reveal some truths and withhold others, she does not qualify as reliable.
Lee Harvey Oswald’s mother makes the perfect portrait of the permanently aggrieved woman. When I was in Dallas and Fort Worth, she was one of the few persons I could not locate. And yet I feel that I know her. She has one-way eyes and a mind to match. Marguerite Oswald formulates logic so illogically that it becomes predictable. As long as she lives, Lee Harvey has a friend at court.
My conversations with Judge Joe B. Brown and the host of anonymous men he sent to my hotel suite at the Dallas Statler Hilton were the most revealing. Brown was the judge who presided at the trial of Jack Ruby for the killing of Lee Harvey Oswald on Sunday, November 24, 1963. He had sustained several heart attacks and had an ardent desire to write a book defending his conduct of the trial. He sat smoking a pipe, a man with an excellent memory for names and events. The people he sent remained “anonymous” because many of them—for example, police department employees—had been ordered not to discuss the assassination with anyone. The material given me by the judge and his faceless friends filled many of the blank spots of that bad day in Dallas. The judge took me to the jail one night so that I could see the “old” maximum security cell in which Oswald reposed for two days.
The management at the Hotel Texas in Fort Worth was kind in permitting Mrs. Bishop and me to occupy Suite 850 which had been occupied by the Kennedys on November 21 and 22, 1963. We were in it on November 21 and 22, 1967, the fourth anniversary of their stay. In all cases, I photographed everything—interiors, furniture, lobbies, exteriors, the parade route—all in color. The only time I was forbidden the use of a camera was when Mr. Roy Truly of the Texas School Book Depository took me up to the window used by the assassin. He pointed to the Nikon and said: “Leave that thing down here.”
I am certain that, without the unqualified assistance of Chief James Rowley and the Secret Service, and Cartha de Loach and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, this book would have been a guessing game. The agents of both services who worked on this case in Dallas or in Washington were made available to me for individual questioning. Their report sheets showed exact times on events, even small ones. At the National Archives, I hefted the cheap rifle Oswald used, examined the revolver used to kill Officer Tippit, and counted the bits of bullets which have been recovered.
I am grateful to President Lyndon Johnson for a private interview on the assassination. It was the first time he had discussed it and, from the manner in which it affected him, it may be the last. Mrs. Lyndon Johnson, always gracious, is the only person I interviewed who wept. Malcolm Kilduff, assistant press secretary, and Jack Valenti, President Johnson’s most confidential aide, cudgeled their heads to recall every scrap of pertinent information.
William Greer, who drove SS-100-X, has retired from the Secret Service. I visited him at his home in Maryland. His wife was ill and it was not a time to badger a man with ugly memories, but he sat and said: “Go ahead. It will take my mind off other things.” The men of Gawler’s Sons were discreet and ethical. Cliff Carter, who sat with President Johnson that night at The Elms, has a long and accurate memory.
Father Oscar Huber would not have seen me except that he was so angry at an earlier book about the assassination. This was also true of Roy Truly and others—some of whom assert that they were listed as having been interviewed but weren’t. Father Huber, a spiritually complacent man, becomes feverishly angry when he considers an author who claims that the priest, leaving Parkland Memorial Hospital, said: “He’s dead.” “I did not!” Father Huber says, “and I wrote that guy a letter and offered to pay his airfare back to Dallas to prove it to him. He never answered my letters.”
All of the interviews helped to add chips and bits to the research. But the 10,400,000 words of the so-called “Warren Commission Report” is and must remain the primary source of all material on the assassination. It is often repetitious and disorderly, and it required two years for me to read and annotate, but it was worth it. Two sets of the twenty-six volumes were used for cutting out affidavits and placing them in the right minute of the eighteen loose-leaf notebooks I kept on November 22, 1963.
Others who helped to make this book as complete as time and diligence can make it are: My wife Kelly, who helped with interviews, stenographic notes, copying documents, and retyping the manuscript; my daughters Karen and Kathleen, who helped to paste notes in the proper book, sometimes placing a “2:05 P.M.” note in the “2:05 A.M.” book; Mrs. Deloris Goldaker, who typed notes off and on for four years; and Miss Millicent Harrison, who separated the originals from the four carbon copies.
To assist the future researcher, following is a list of the sources used in researching and writing this book.