There was a sound of revelry by night,
And Belgium’s capital had gathered then
Her beauty and her chivalry, and bright
The lamps shone o’er fair women and brave men;
A thousand hearts beat happily; and when
Music arose with its voluptuous swell,
Soft eyes look’d love to eyes which spake again,
And all went merry as a marriage bell.…
The Brussels ball of June 14, 1815, had ended in a peal of Napoleonic cannon, the roll of drums, the hot clatter of mustering squadrons, and terror-stricken whispers of an approaching enemy. The judicial reception of November 20, 1963, continued undisturbed. Secret Service agents gaily two-stepped across the waxed boards, unaware that within three days the corpse of the President they had sworn to protect would lie in a wooden box on the very floor where they now pirouetted. Had they but known, they would have given their lives for his. There was no inkling. Officers also whirled, while their constitutional Commander in Chief slept above them. The mightiest military force in history was powerless to avert the disaster. Its sentinels reported nothing; they had nothing to report. Cannon were mute, steeds stabled, drums hushed. Every frontier was as silent as fate.
And yet…
Warp and woof, the pattern of fate, cast invisible shadows. In the White House that Wednesday Commander Oliver S. Hallett, USN, was toiling over late dispatches from the President’s Situation Room. The messages were unimportant, but the assistant naval aide’s presence in the mansion was an extraordinary irony. Too new to be invited to the reception, Commander and Mrs. Hallett were nevertheless linked by an uncanny destiny to the event that now lay less than forty hours away. Hallett had been posted here nine months ago. Previously he had been on submarine duty, and before that both he and his wife had worked in the ten-story Moscow apartment building which served as the U.S. Embassy to the U.S.S.R. He was the naval attaché; she was the embassy’s receptionist. On the last day of October 1959, a spindly youth with eyes oddly set, as though they belonged to two different faces, strode into the front hallway and slammed his green passport on Joan Hallett’s desk. In a Southwestern accent he informed her that he had come to renounce his American citizenship.
Receptionists don’t handle such matters. Neither do attachés. The legation was a small world, however, and the Halletts saw the embittered young man repeatedly as he returned for interviews with Ambassador Llewellyn E. Thompson and members of the U.S. consulate. The consuls gave him a lot of argument; it was their policy to woo would-be defectors, on the ground that American misfits were less dangerous back in the United States. In time the Commander and his wife lost track of the case. Their orders were cut and recut; like Llewellyn Thompson, who became Ambassador at Large in October 1962, they were brought home. Hallett joined the President’s official family at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and the young Halletts were enrolled in Stone Ridge parochial school with the children of the Robert F. Kennedys and the Sargent Shrivers. The Soviet apartment house, with its bugging devices and its exasperating intrigue, lay in the past. They were glad to be free of it. Yet they still talked of Moscow, and sometimes the Commander, his wife, and their sixteen-year-old daughter Caroline wondered what had become of the weedy malcontent. They recalled him vividly: his arrogance, the peculiar density in his eyes, the way he would snatch the New York Herald Tribune from Joan’s desk and then—for he had been a great reader—devour every word. He had been obnoxious, but he had made a distinct impression. All three Halletts remembered the face and the name of Lee Harvey Oswald, though they had no recent information about him. In their fireside discussions they assumed he was still in the Soviet Union.
And yet…
Oswald wasn’t in Russia. He had notified the consulate that he had seen the light, and in June of 1962, with the help of a State Department loan, he had returned to Texas, bringing with him a lynx-eyed young Russian wife and an infant girl. His subsequent movements became a matter of intense interest after his death, but after the chaff had been sifted only two significant facts remained: he had stumbled from failure to failure, and he had finally returned to Dallas, Texas.
Much of the later confusion was to arise from his political pretensions. Oswald liked to characterize himself as a Marxist. Really he hadn’t the ideals of a cat, and in his lucid moments he knew it. He was against democracy, Communism, the world. In an autobiographical sketch written before his return to America he acknowledged “a mean streak of indepence brought on by negleck,” and during his voyage home he wondered what would happen if somebody—obviously himself—would
stand up and say he was utterly opposed not only to the governments, but to the people, too the entire land and complete foundations of his socially. I have heard and read of the resugent Americanism in the U.S., not the ultra-right type, but rather the polite, seemingly pointless Americanism expressed by such as the “American fore group” and the freedom foundation, and yet even in these vieled, formless, patriotic gestures, their is the obvious axe being underground by the invested intrests of the sponseres of there expensive undertaking. To where can I turn? to factional mutants of both systems, to odd-ball Hegelian idealists out of touch with reality religious groups, to revisinist or too abserd anarchism. No!
His ravings stamp him as an incoherent hater, nothing more. Looking for doctrine in them is like looking for bone in a polyp. Yet he had tried to defect, and both his conduct in Russia and his bizarre behavior after his return brought him under the active surveillance of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Inasmuch as the Bureau’s handbook charged agents to be on the alert for information “indicating the possibility of an attempt against the person or safety of the President,” one might have assumed that the seventy-five-man FBI office in Dallas would have relayed word of his presence to the five-man Secret Service office there. Nothing of the sort happened. His file was in the hands of FBI Agent James P. Hosty, Jr., a husky, thirty-five-year-old Notre Dame graduate and an outspoken admirer of John F. Kennedy. Since November 4, 1963, Hosty had known that Oswald was employed as a laborer in the Texas School Book Depository at the corner of Houston and Elm streets. This warehouse provided the deadliest sniper’s roost on the Presidential motorcade route, because the motorcade was scheduled to first zig and then zag directly beneath its windows. A gunman could size up the President’s car as it approached the building from the front, wait while it pivoted sharply at his feet, and fire as it crept slowly out of the turn to his right. Hosty, however, didn’t make the connection. He had received no official notification of the route, and when local newspapers published a map of it, his sole concern was whether or not Jim Hosty would catch a glimpse of Kennedy. “I noticed that it was coming up Main Street,” he said five months later. “That was the only thing I was interested in, where maybe I could watch it if I had a chance.”
But the Secret Service should have inspected the building anyway.3
But it didn’t.
On November 18 Lawson, the Service’s advance man, rode over the motorcade route with Dallas Police Chief Jesse Curry and Forrest V. Sorrels, the agent in charge of the local Secret Service office. Sorrels was the most impressive of the three. He was a native of Red River, Texas, and looked it—lean, stooped, and craggy, with the piercing eye of an old cop. Once in Tucson he had counted the cash taken from a thief named John Dillinger. In 1935 he had joined the SS, as younger agents now called it, and when Franklin D. Roosevelt had dedicated the Robert E. Lee statue on Dallas’ Turtle Creek Boulevard, Sorrels had led him over these same streets. He didn’t have to be reminded of the danger from snipers. As Curry, who was driving, swung from Cedar Springs Road into Harwood Street, Sorrels glanced up at the Dallas skyline, saw his own dentist’s office, and said aloud, “Hell, we’d be sitting ducks.” The other two concurred and shrugged. There were over twenty thousand windows overlooking the route; obviously they couldn’t have a man in every one. It would take an army, and would defeat the very purpose of the mot
orcade. Therefore no windows were inspected, and when the police car turned from Main into Houston, and Lawson asked, “Say, what’s the Texas School Book Depository?” Curry and Sorrels explained that it was just a warehouse for textbooks.
Conceivably the FBI and the Secret Service did do all that could have been done. Possibly Curry’s department met its responsibilities by deciding to end supervision of Friday’s crowd at Houston and Main, a block short of the ambush, on the ground that traffic would begin to thin out there. Maybe it too was too much to ask those Dallas patrolmen who were in the vicinity of the warehouse to follow the example of New York policemen by turning their backs on the President to scan overlooking windows—in which event they, like the pedestrians around them, would have seen the waiting rifleman in the window. Perhaps every man did his duty. Perhaps the blow could not have been averted. Perhaps it is hindsight to suggest otherwise.
And yet, and yet…
Even hindsight, if it be that, has its uses. In time all fate’s shadows emerge and become visible. One lurked in Hosty’s FBI file, a second in Sorrels’ instincts. Because Commander Hallett worked in his East Wing office, a third shade of memory lay in the White House itself that Wednesday evening in 1963. And a fourth appeared briefly, unseen, in the Attorney General’s home at 4700 Chain Bridge Road, McLean, Virginia, later that same night.
Like the judicial reception it was a strange occasion for portents. The old mansion behind the oversized mailbox marked “R. F. Kennedy” was ablaze with cheer. Nearly sixty close friends had gathered to salute the owner’s thirty-eighth birthday. During the dinner Acting Secretary of the Navy Paul B. “Red” Fay, Jr., another genial veteran of the President’s PT career, acted as toastmaster. At ten o’clock the party moved into the next room and danced to the subdued strains of an accordion. The outstanding event of the evening, it then seemed, was the limping cakewalk of Barney Ross, who was showing off. The dancers went home a half-hour after midnight. After staying up two hours longer talking to Gene Kelly in the library, Bob Kennedy retired, and Ethel arose with a start. It had just come to her: her birthday present to him, a Finnish bath, lay unopened in the basement. In the excitement she had completely forgotten it. There was just too much going on, life was too full; as she had told Byron White before he had left, “It’s all going too perfectly.”
But another guest, Ken O’Donnell, had departed with two fragmentary memories which would lie dormant and then arise phantom-like over the weekend. David Brinkley’s wife had inquired about the unrest in Dallas. O’Donnell, taciturn as always, said little.
Later Bob Kennedy had asked him, “Did you see that letter from Byron Skelton?”
O’Donnell had nodded. He had seen it.
All month the Democratic National Committeeman from Texas had been troubled by a premonition. This in itself was unusual, for no one had ever accused Byron Skelton of being skittish. Now in his late fifties, he was senior partner of the law firm of Skelton, Bowmer, and Courtney; director of the First National Bank of Temple, Texas; and past president of Temple’s Chamber of Commerce. With his neat black suits, soft voice, and abundant gray hair he was a poster of Southern respectability, and three years earlier he had played a leading role in staging the historic confrontation between the Roman Catholic Kennedy and skeptical Protestant preachers of the Greater Houston Ministerial Association. Skelton’s performance in Houston had earned the respect and gratitude of the President. Now Kennedy was returning for a grand tour of the state’s urban centers. The National Committeeman should have been proud, even elated.
He wasn’t. He was disturbed. The Presidential schedule included a stop in Dallas, and lately Skelton had been eying that city with growing uneasiness. The atmosphere there had become so highly charged by inflammatory statements that he was genuinely concerned. An unstable, suggestible individual—“a nut,” as he put it to his friends—might easily be incited. And so, on November 4, he had decided to act. “Frankly,” he had written the Attorney General that morning, “I am worried about President Kennedy’s proposed trip to Dallas.” Quoting a famous Dallas resident who had recently declared that “Kennedy is a liability to the free world,” Skelton commented that “A man who would make this kind of statement is capable of doing harm to the President,” and concluded that he would “feel better if the President’s itinerary did not include Dallas.” He asked that cancellation of the stop receive “earnest consideration.”
Nor did he stop there. Two days later he wrote Walter Jenkins, Lyndon Johnson’s right-hand man, expressing further misgivings about the city. He would, he told Jenkins, prefer that the President and the Vice President omit it from their itinerary, and to make certain he had touched all bases he flew to Washington the following week and talked to John Bailey and Jerry Bruno at the National Committee. In a long session with Bruno he carefully reviewed the political climate in Dallas and his own apprehensions about it. It wasn’t safe, he repeated; regardless of previous commitments it should be avoided.
The upshot of all Skelton’s efforts was an enormous zero. On November 8 the Attorney General, who knew him and took him seriously, forwarded his letter to O’Donnell, who decided it was an unsupported hunch. Both Jenkins and Bruno concluded that Skelton was merely annoyed because he and Mrs. H. H. Weinert, Democratic National Committeewoman for Texas, were not included in the Presidential party. In fact they were entitled to feel slighted. The failure to consult either of them about the trip (they had learned about it from newspapers) was a singular breach of political etiquette, arising from Connally’s insistence that the White House deal with no one but him. Bruno conceded as much to Skelton, and Jenkins took the matter up with the Governor. Yet the snub was comparatively trivial. Presidential security was, or should have been, the overriding consideration. Skelton had felt so, and he had tried very hard to make his point.
Had the President known of Skelton’s anxiety, he would doubtless have gone to Dallas anyhow. The visit had been announced. The city expected him. Backing out at this late date would have been extremely awkward. He was not a man to hide. Like Churchill, he believed that courage was the one quality which guaranteed all the rest. And as he had reminded Hale Boggs, a President of the United States is President of all the states. He cannot permit himself to be intimidated in any one of them. Threats are like “Hail to the Chief”; they are part of the office. Even before Kennedy could be inaugurated a deranged man named Richard Paul Pavlick had wired seven sticks of dynamite on his own body in an attempt to blow up both himself and the President-elect, and during the first year of the new administration the White House had received nearly a thousand menacing letters. Some were quite frightening. Yet there was an air of unreality about all of them, for the confrontations with cheering crowds were so very different. It was true here, it was true abroad; everywhere Jacqueline Kennedy had gone with her husband he had been bathed in bright waves of affection. She couldn’t even imagine anyone throwing a tomato at him.
Kennedy, of course, knew that the Presidency was a vulnerable position. Every chief of state is aware of the special hazards he faces. As the King of Italy remarked in 1897, after dodging the dagger thrust of a would-be assassin, “Sono gli incerti del mestiere”—“These are the risks of the job.” Later the King was, in fact, shot to death; it was a newspaper clipping about the deed which inspired the murderer of William McKinley. Franklin Roosevelt told his wife, “If a man doesn’t mind getting caught, he can make an attempt on the President’s life,” and Eisenhower believed anyone could kill him, provided the killer was willing to forfeit his own life. Kennedy joked about it. In California an admirer of John F. Kennedy had tossed a tiny life jacket into the Chief Executive’s car. There had been no advance notice. Thump—there it was on the seat between the President and Dave Powers. “If anyone wanted to kill you, you wouldn’t be around,” he told Dave. And shortly before the Texas trip, when a speeding motorist passed the car in Virginia, he remarked to Bartlett, “They shouldn’t allow that. He could have shot
you, Charlie.” Powers and Bartlett had dutifully laughed. The subject really wasn’t funny. Yet what else could you do?
Security, it seemed, rested in the strong, competent hands of the Secret Service. In the sixty-two years since the assassination of McKinley the Service had become a legend. No one suspected that it might be living on that legend, that some of its procedures had become stagnant or obsolescent. Yet they had. On any trip outside Washington, for example, Secret Service agents were obliged to rely heavily on cooperation from local law enforcement officers. Frank Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Secret Service Chief, had carefully evaluated the efficiency of police departments in every major American city. (Dallas, he had found, was one of the least efficient.) That practice had been discontinued. The Service now kept itself posted on only one municipal police force, New York’s. In Chief Wilson’s day, as in 1963, fear of snipers had been a constant headache. But in Roosevelt’s motorcades agents standing on running boards had provided the President with a human shield. Fixed running boards were no longer practical. The Secret Service retained a follow-up car with them; on modern, low-slung automobiles, however, they looked absurd. The last Presidential car to have them, a 1949 Lincoln Cosmopolitan, had been retired on July 1, 1953. Kennedy’s car, a custom-built Lincoln which had been delivered to the White House on June 14, 1961, was equipped with hydraulic side steps which could be swung out from a dashboard control. They were supposed to serve as running boards. Unfortunately, the Secret Service design of them was faulty. Jutting out, they became lethal; they would have turned bystanders into casualties, so they were never used. In their absence the key agent in the car was the man behind the wheel. If the driver in Dallas had been provided with an emergency drill—cut the wheel and stand on the accelerator at the first sign of trouble—a gunman might have been limited to one shot. There was no such drill. Indeed, in a city like Dallas the Presidential chauffeur had to keep a sharp eye on the car immediately in front of him. He didn’t know the route himself; he had never driven it before.
The Death of a President Page 6