The Death of a President

by William Manchester

  The oath is another matter. The U.S. Attorney should have been able to provide that. But Barefoot had become so immersed in 18 U.S.C. 2385, 18 U.S.C. 1114, and 18 U.S.C. 372 that he had become overwhelmed by finer points of law. He couldn’t imagine where the Presidential pledge could be, and was rummaging through statute volumes from three libraries—his own, Sarah’s, and that of Judge Joe Estes—when a clerk said, “Hey, what about the Constitution?” “Of course,” said Barefoot, feeling foolish. He needn’t have blushed, though. As U.S. Judge for the Northern District of Texas Sarah had more legal rank than he did, and she not only had forgotten the Constitution; she had decided that since the essentials of every oath are pretty much the same, the exact wording didn’t matter. “I was not afraid,” she recalled afterward. “I could do it without a formal oath—I could make one up.” Driving toward the airport in her red sports car, she was more concerned about speed. She had known Lyndon Johnson since 1948 and “I knew he would want things in a hurry; that’s the way he is.”

  He also liked things to be done properly, however, and, fortunately for those who do not view the wording of the U.S. Constitution so lightly, he was covering all bases. At 2:20—3:20 in Washington—Nick Katzenbach’s phone rang. It was the Dallas White House, continuing its tireless search for a lawyer who knew precisely what a President should say on assuming office. “Hold on,” Nick said, “and I’ll dictate it.”

  Aboard the Presidential plane Cliff Carter told Marie Fehmer, “Get on the phone in the staff cabin and read it back to him.”

  Laying down his receiver, Katzenbach crossed to a bookcase, opened the glass doors, and took a heavy blue volume from the lower shelf. It was the Government Printing Office’s 1953 edition of the annotated Constitution, edited by Edward S. Corwin. Riffling through it, Nick put his finger on the bottom of page 384.

  Back at his desk he read, “I do solemnly swear, parenthesis, or affirm, unparenthesis, that I will faithfully execute the, capital, Office of President of the United States, comma, and will to the best of my ability, comma, preserve, comma, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States period.”

  Marie’s fingers moved lightly over a pad, and as she wrote, Lyndon Johnson, who had remained in the bedroom, moved into the stateroom. Valenti, Carter, and Congressmen Thomas and Thornberry had been sitting with Lady Bird, watching television. Glimpsing the tall figure in the entrance, they rose together. Now it had hit them. Now they knew who he was, and now Albert Thomas became the second man to call him by his correct title.

  “It’s a terrible burden, but we all know you can do it, Mr. President.”

  Valenti heard the title; it made him “all goose-bumpy.” Then he heard Johnson speaking to him.

  “I’ve just talked to the Attorney General, and he has advised me that I should be sworn in here.” He pointed toward Marie. “I want you to check the oath.”

  Swiftly cranking a blank 3 × 5 file card into one of the aircraft’s two electric typewriters, she had already transcribed her notes. Valenti bounced in from the stateroom, took both card and phone from her, and read the text back.

  “That’s it,” said Nick.

  Marie joined the group in the stateroom. The television announcer’s voice was indistinct, and she gradually became aware of the reason. Someone was hammering in the plane’s tail compartment.

  “What’s that noise?” she asked Cliff.

  “They’re taking out seats to make room.” He came to a full stop.

  “Oh,” she said uncomprehendingly.

  His eyes looked poached. He averted them and finished, “Room for the casket.”

  “Oh.”

  There was a momentary silence; the sound of the television set a few feet away became conspicuous, as though someone had just turned up the volume. At present the commentators were confused, but in downtown Dallas the news had just taken a dramatic turn. The police had entered a theater and arrested a man for the killing of Policeman Tippit. Five minutes before Katzenbach began dictating the oath to Marie, the homicide squad had learned that their new prisoner worked as a stockman in the Texas School Book Depository and was, in fact, the only Depository employee to have been missing when Superintendent Truly counted heads a half-hour after the assassination. The first faint light was entering what had, until now, been a pitch-black maze.

  The flight and arrest of Lee Oswald must be seen in context, which is asking a lot. The mind instinctively rejects any connection between him and the nation’s martyred Chief Executive. One feels that he slew in the criminal hope that reflected glory from the Kennedy nimbus might brighten his own anonymity—“Everybody will know who I am now,” he told a police captain after he had been caught—and justice demands that while the deed cannot be undone the spoils should be destroyed. He shot the President of the United States in the back to attract attention. Noticing him, and even printing his name in history books, therefore seems obscene. It is an outrage. He is an outrage. We want him Out.

  Still, there he is. He will not go away, any more than John Wilkes Booth and Vidkun Quisling will go. They stain the pages of our texts, and so will he. Crucified and the crucifiers, Balder and Loki, Eichmann and his Jews are united in time’s unscrupulous memory, and righteousness cannot divorce them. Yet inspecting opposite sides of a coin is difficult, especially when they must be examined at the same time, and in this crime coeval observation is necessary. The events of November 22, 1963, were synchronic. It was as though the Axis powers had surrendered and Adolf Hitler and Franklin Roosevelt had died in the hours between noon and midafternoon in Washington of a single day in 1945.

  People can absorb just so much, no more. On November 22 the assassination blotted out nearly everything else. The announcement of Kennedy’s death was a saturation point, and the scattered patches of consciousness left were reserved for thoughts of those who had been closest to him, concern for the country, and feelings of personal deprivation. Even Lyndon Johnson was discordant. One surveyor of feeling among college students found that many reported “an immediate reaction of resentment against Johnson, partly because of his Texas background, partly because he seemed (‘irrationally,’ the students acknowledged) to be somehow usurping the presidential role.” The transition was accepted in the way an unpleasant cathartic is accepted. Americans had learned the facts of succession—or, more precisely, the accepted version of those facts—as schoolchildren. They knew the thing had to be done, and were reconciled to it. But they didn’t want to think about it. The slain President’s successor was thrust into the background, behind his widow, his children, his parents, his brothers and sisters, and his chief aides, all of whom were more familiar than his relatively colorless Vice President. Johnson was expected to mumble “I do” at the end of the oath and then retire into the scenery. Having acknowledged his induction into office, the public quickly moved on to matters which, at the moment, seemed far more compelling.

  If the new President was relegated to a walk-on role and then rudely hustled into the wings, the murderer was shoved straight out the stage door. He wasn’t even the object of much curiosity. Later, after a decent interval (and, incidentally, his own murder) he was readmitted. The sequel was dismal. In death as in life he conformed to type. His ghost put on a vulgar performance, mugging, upstaging, and hogging the limelight with, regrettably, the cooperation of the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy. That was unavoidable. Under the terms of its mandate the Commission had no choice. Yet the Warren Report might be subtitled “The Life of Lee Harvey Oswald.” It is largely a biography of him, and he would have gloated over it; the index lists nearly four times as many references to him as to Kennedy and Johnson combined.

  Among those who keep faith with the myth that murderers are more fascinating than their victims, Oswald was eventually assigned the star role in his own existentialist extravaganza. Reality requires ventilation of the compartment in which he has been sealed, and, after the airing, a sense of perspective. Perspect
ive doesn’t do much for his stature. In panorama he shrinks to his former size (which is extremely small), while his environment, having been nothing before, can only grow (its magnitude depends upon the spectator). Nor does his aberrance diminish. He is more of a gargoyle than ever, and the barbarous obbligato he played that Friday measures, as Tomás de Torquemada and Lazarillo de Tormes measured in other ages, the potentialities of human depravity. A man can set any course. His capacities are boundless, and the coexistence of Oswald and the Kennedys in the 400 block of Elm Street at 12:30 P.M. provides an unparalleled illustration of the uncharted spaces within the human soul.

  Lee Oswald has been repeatedly identified here as the President’s slayer. He is never “alleged” or “suspected” or “supposed” or “surmised”; he is the culprit. Some, intimidated by the fiction that only judges may don the black cap and condemn, may disapprove. The managing editor of the New York Times apologized to his readers for a headline describing Oswald as the murderer, and four months after the appearance of the Warren Report the Washington Post continued to refer to him as “the presumed assassin.” But enough is enough. The evidence pointing to his guilt is far more incriminating than that against Booth, let alone Judas Iscariot. He is the right man; there is nothing provisional about it. The mark of Cain was upon him. From the instant he dropped his mail-order rifle on the top floor and fled down the enclosed stairwell—leaving a tuft of fibers from his shirt wedged in the butt plate and a profusion of finger and palm prints on the weapon, on the paper bag which he had used to conceal the gun during the drive from Irving with Wesley Frazier, and on one of the cartons he had stacked as a gun rest—there could be no doubt of his ultimate conviction.

  … Provided, of course, he was brought to trial. On November 22, his speedy arrest had been considered an achievement. What is really remarkable is that he managed to elude Jesse Curry’s men for an hour and twenty minutes. When he opened fire, uniformed officers were standing on the sidewalk below and riding in the street. One of them, Marrion L. Baker, was directly under the gun. As Oswald left the Mannlicher-Carcano between two rows of boxes and headed down the stairwell, Baker abandoned his motorcycle and headed up with Superintendent Roy Truly. Arriving on the second-floor landing, the policeman saw the assassin twenty feet away, entering the warehouse lunchroom. Oswald was walking away from him, and Baker had the impression, doubtless correct, that he was in something of a hurry. Drawing his revolver, the patrolman commanded, “Come here.” Oswald came. Baker asked Truly, “Do you know this man? Does he work here?” The superintendent vouched for him, and the policeman turned away. “Truly okayed Oswald,” a Dallas inspector explained to this writer, “and Baker naturally assumed that anybody who worked there was O.K.”

  Because of Oswald’s epic stupidity—and his panic; it is highly likely that he lost his head when Officer Tippit beckoned to him—the assassin’s movements after the murder can be reconstructed with precision. Placing them in rough context, however, requires another cyclic chart:

  Dallas Time Oswald Dallas Police Activity Developments Elsewhere Washington Time

  12:30 P.M. Shoots JFK from 6th floor of Book Depository. Chief Curry orders Parkland alerted, orders search of triple underpass area. 1:30 P.M.

  12:31½ P.M. Is halted at gunpoint by Motorcycle Officer Marrion L. Baker in Depository’s 2nd floor lunchroom; Superintendent Truly explains to Baker that Oswald is an employee. 1:31½ P.M.

  12:32 P.M. Depository’s clerical supervisor speaks to him on 2nd floor by front stairway, saying “Isn’t it terrible?” and he mumbles a reply. Baker continues on to the Depository roof, convinced from the sound of the pigeons that the shots have come from there. 1:32 P.M.

  12:33 P.M. Leaves Depository by front entrance, pausing to tell NBC’s Robert MacNeil he can find a phone inside; thinks MacNeil is a Secret Service man. 1:33 P.M.

  12:34 P.M. Police dispatcher on one channel mentions Depository as a possible source of the shots; cruisers hear sirens and garbled transmissions on other channel. Robert MacNeil reaches NBC by long distance from Depository. First UPI flash about shooting. 1:34 P.M.

  12:35 P.M. Motorcyclist Clyde Haygood radios headquarters he has “talked to a guy who says the shots were fired from the Texas School Book Depository with a Hertz Drive-a-Car sign on top.” 1:35 P.M.

  12:36 P.M. JFK reaches Parkland. 1:36 P.M.

  12:37 P.M. Officer Haygood radios, “Get men to cover the building, Texas School Book Depository—believe the shots came from there…” Inspector Herbert Sawyer arrives and orders front door of Depository sealed off. Caroline Kennedy leaves the White House with Liz Pozen. 1:37 P.M.

  12:40 P.M. Boards bus at Elm and Murphy, seven blocks from Depository in downtown Dallas. Kellerman tells Behn of the shooting; says, “Look at your watch”; agent Jack Ready calls for a priest. 1:40 P.M.

  12:44 P.M. Asking for a transfer, leaves traffic-bound bus. Code 3 emergency is broadcast—all downtown cruisers ordered to proceed “to Elm and Houston with caution.” 1:44 P.M.

  12:45 P.M. Oswald’s description, based on observation of eyewitness Brennan, is broadcast over Channel 2 by Inspector Sawyer from a radio car in front of Depository. Officer Tippit ordered to patrol Oak Cliff area. J. Edgar Hoover tells Attorney General President has been shot. 1:45 P.M.

  12:47–12:48 P.M. Enters cab at Greyhound bus station, 3½ blocks from bus. Rides in silence beside the driver, who thinks he’s “a wino 2 days off the bottle.” Rebroadcast of Oswald’s description to all cruisers. Hoover establishes contact with Dallas FBI office. 1:47–1:48 P.M.

  12:50 P.M. Secret Service Agent Sorrels finds rear door of Depository unguarded by police; asks Truly to draw up a list of his employees. 1:50 P.M.

  12:54 P.M. After 2½-mile ride leaves cab at Beckley and Neely, a 5-minute walk from his rooming house. Tippit reports in from his cruiser; dispatcher orders him to be “at large for any emergency.” 1:54 P.M.

  12:55 P.M. Third broadcast of Oswald’s description to all cruisers. 1:55 P.M.

  12:57 P.M. Father Huber arrives at Parkland. 1:57 P.M.

  12:59–1:00 P.M. Arrives at rooming house, unresponsive to housekeeper’s greeting. JFK is pronounced dead.

  Joint Chiefs begin emergency meeting.

  2-hour phone crisis begins in Washington. 1:59–2:00 P.M.

  1:03 P.M. Leaves rooming house with pistol, zipping up his jacket. 2:03 P.M.

  Back at Depository, Superintendent Truly notices his absence. Truly tells policeman, “We have a man here that’s missing”; officer says, “Let’s go tell Captain Fritz”; Fritz cannot be found.

  1:05 P.M. (approx.) Hill tells Behn JFK is dead; Shepard tells Att’y. Gen.; DIA tells McNamara; Stranger tells Salinger on Cabinet plane. 2:05 P.M. (approx.)

  1:10 P.M. McNamara joins meeting of Joint Chiefs. 2:10 P.M.

  1:12 P.M. Deputy Sheriff Luke Mooney finds 3 empty cartridge cases near the 6th-floor window. 2:12 P.M.

  1:13 P.M. LBJ, in shock, is told JFK is dead; says, “Make a note of the time.” 2:13 P.M.

  Caroline Kennedy is returned to the White House.

  1:15 P.M. Is stopped by Tippit less than a mile from his rooming house, beside a drugstore; Oswald kills him with 4 revolver bullets; 9 witnesses subsequently identify Oswald. Joint Chiefs broadcast alert to all U.S. world commands. 2:15 P.M.

  1:16 P.M. A pickup truck driver breaks in on Tippit’s radio to say, “Hello, police operator—we’ve had a shooting out here.…” 2:16 P.M.

  1:18 P.M. AP circulates report LBJ wounded; Speaker McCormack believes he may now become President McCormack. 2:18 P.M.

  1:22 P.M. Still carrying pistol in hand, cuts through Patton St. to West Jefferson Blvd.; comes out by a Texaco Station across from a parking lot and drops his jacket there. Dispatchers broadcast fresh description of Oswald based on observations of 2 women who saw him. 2:22 P.M.

  Rifle is found by police on Depository’s 6th floor by Deputy Sheriff Eugene Boone; Truly reports to Captain Will Fritz, “I have a man
missing.”

  1:26 P.M. LBJ leaves Parkland. 2:26 P.M.

  1:27 P.M. Father Huber says: “He’s dead, all right.” 2:27 P.M.

  1:30 P.M. First flags are lowered to half-mast. 2:30 P.M.

  Joint Chiefs resume meeting with Germans.

  1:32 P.M. Father Huber is quoted on teletypes: “He’s dead, all right.” 2:32 P.M.

  1:33 P.M. LBJ arrives at Love Field. 2:33 P.M.

  1:35 P.M. Runs past the Bethel Temple and the accompanying signs—“PREPARE TO MEET THY GOD” and “JESUS SAVES.” UPI flash confirming JFK’s death. 2:35 P.M.

  1:36 P.M. MacNeil of NBC broadcasts, “Shots came from the building called the Texas School Book Depository”; Ruth Paine tells Marina this; Marina quickly checks the garage, sees the blanket roll is still there, and thinking the rifle is inside, whispers to herself, “Thank God.” 2:36 P.M.

  1:40 P.M. Runs into the Texas Theater, 8 blocks from Tippit’s body, without buying a ticket. 2:40 P.M.

  1:45 P.M. Police dispatcher on Channel 1 broadcasts: “Have information a suspect just went into the Texas Theater on West Jefferson.” Cruisers begin converging on the theater. Dean Markham picks up David Kennedy. 2:45 P.M.

  1:50 P.M. Oswald is seized in movie after a scuffle in which he tries to shoot a second officer; cries, “Well, it’s all over now!” and then shouts, “I protest this police brutality,” as he is taken out. 2:50 P.M.

  1:51 P.M. Sergeant in Cruiser No. 2 reports: “Suspect in shooting of police officer is apprehended and en route to station.” 2:51 P.M.

  2:00 P.M. Dispatcher on Channel 2 orders Code 2 escort (red lights and sirens) to Parkland for Jacqueline Kennedy. Marina Oswald finds husband’s wedding ring in china cup. 3:00 P.M.

  LBJ calls Attorney General about oath; he calls Katzenbach.

  2:08 P.M. JFK’s body leaves Parkland. 3:08 P.M.

  2:15 P.M. Capt. Fritz returns from Depository to homicide bureau and orders arrest of Oswald, missing Depository employee; is told, “There he sits.” 3:15 P.M.