The Death of a President

by William Manchester

  He had come equipped with horn-rimmed spectacles, a notebook, and the lie that he was a translator for the Israeli press. Lying was unnecessary. It was first come, first served. There was no room for Captain Fritz of Homicide, who arrived late, but the impostor mounted a table top unchallenged. Once he even participated in the questioning, and the tapes reveal that he had a close look at the suspect. The watcher and the watched were unalike physically, but emotionally they bore a certain resemblance. Both were misfits with twisted personalities, outcasts who craved attention, nursed grudges, were prey to wild impulses and fits of murderous temper, couldn’t relate to other people—women especially—and were indifferent to public affairs. Later the bogus translator insisted that he had idolized the President. He may have convinced himself that this was true, but it is hard to credit it. At 12:30 P.M. he had been at the Dallas News, placing weekend advertisements for his two striptease joints yet he hadn’t bothered to walk over and see the motorcade four blocks away. His professed admiration of Kennedy, like Oswald’s simulated Marxism, was a patent fraud, a figment of self-delusion designed to dignify his motive. In reality neither of them had the civic conscience of a cat. Each man’s absorption with his ravaged inner self eclipsed any other interest; each was terribly alone.

  While the horn-rimmed humbug had come to see one individual, the performance in Curry’s cellar offered other diversions. It is not too much to call Henry Wade’s question-and-answer session a broad farce. Indicating Lee Oswald, he told the listeners of radio station KLIF and the viewers of television sets tuned to KRLD, WFAA, and the NBC network that “I figure we have sufficient evidence to convict him”; that Curry’s sleuths had lined up “approximately fifteen witnesses”; that there were no other suspects; that the prisoner was mentally competent and had been formally charged. One man asked him whether or not the prisoner was represented by a lawyer. The District Attorney of Dallas County replied, “I don’t know whether he has one or not.” Wade revealed that the accused man would be transferred to the county jail—he would keep viewers posted on details—and he slyly suggested that Oswald had been in Dallas “only two months.” A man called, “That’s a good job, Henry.”

  It was not a good job. It was an atrocity. It was inaccurate and misleading—Oswald had lived in Dallas as a boy and had landed at Love Field when he had returned from Russia with Marina, for example, if that was relevant—and the review of specific items of evidence and the assertion of guilt by a district attorney were flagrant violations of principles sacred to the courts. Wade, speaking into the battery of microphones in front of him, was addressing the men and women from whom a jury would have been chosen had not police blundering led to another murder and rendered the trial unnecessary. It was unbelievable at the time; it is even less believable now.

  The District Attorney noticed the mooncalf face of the counterfeit Israeli translator in the audience and placed it. He had seen him within the past three days while trying a sex case. After the klieg lights had been darkened and the prisoner had been led back to his fifth-floor cell the intruder ran up to the stage. “Hi, Henry!” he cried. They shook hands. The man said, “Don’t you know me? I’m Jack Ruby, I run the Vegas Club.” Possibly out of curiosity, Wade inquired, “What are you doing here?” Ruby waved his hand about and said grandly, “I know all these fellows.” Those fellows were Dallas patrolmen. This time he wasn’t shamming. He really did know them. After Sunday Europeans were to puzzle over the ease with which Ruby had strolled in and out of Curry’s headquarters. The men and women who had surrounded President Kennedy were equally baffled; they were unacquainted with the maggoty half-world of dockets and flesh-peddlers, of furtive men with mud-colored faces and bottle blondes whose high-arched overplucked eyebrows give their flat glittering eyes a perpetually startled expression, of sordid walkup hotels with unread Gideon Bibles and tumbled bedclothes and rank animal odors, of police connivance in petty crime, of a way of life in which lawbreakers, law enforcement officers, and those who totter on the law’s edge meet socially and even intermarry. There is no mystery about Jack Ruby’s relationship with Dallas cops. His type is depressingly familiar in American police stations. All police reporters know at least one Ruby. He worships patrolmen and plainclothes men, and the fact that he is occasionally arrested doesn’t dim his ardor. Often he is proud of his record. It is proof of his virility. He is usually overweight, middle-aged, has puffy eyes, wears broad lapels and outrageous neckties, and decorates his stubby fingers with extravagant costume jewelry. He is recognized by the spicy smell of his shaving lotion, and by the way he keeps touching officers, and handing them things, and combing his hair in front of them like an oarsman sculling.

  That Friday Ruby, having abandoned the pretense that he had been entitled to attend the conference, was busy handing out cards giving officers free privileges at his two striptease establishments. The cards were wordlessly pocketed. The policemen saw nothing improper in this. Like their District Attorney, they knew Jack, and when off duty they frequently dropped into the Vegas or the Carousel in mufti, occupying reserved seats and consuming free setups—usually rye and 7-Up, the wine of that strange country—while hoarsely urging mascaraed women to peel off black net lingerie. One thirty-year-old detective, August Eberhardt, had been acquainted with Ruby for five years. The detective had met the strip boss while a member of the vice squad, and although he kept a professional eye on the Vegas and the Carousel, and had booked one of Jack’s trulls for drug addiction, he was a regular patron of them. He had, indeed, taken his wife to both joints. Mrs. Eberhardt preferred the entertainment at the Vegas. You could always start a debate about that on Harwood Street, but while each of the two enterprises had its partisans, and every girl out of stir was followed by her claque, there was general agreement on the force that Jack could always be counted on to provide a lively performance.

  Eberhardt glimpsed Ruby at the press conference. They gossiped; among other things, Ruby inquired about Mrs. Eberhardt. Jack trotted out his yarn about being a translator. As an old friend the detective knew Ruby spoke Yiddish, though he didn’t think much about it. Jack said he had brought coffee and sandwiches for the reporters—“Nothing but kosher stuff is all I bring.” After that, according to the detective, he “talked a little bit about the assassination.” Jack said, “Mike—” he always called Eberhardt by his middle name—“it is hard to realize how a complete nothing, a zero like that, could kill a man like President Kennedy was.” He remarked dolefully that Kennedy’s death was unfortunate for the city of Dallas, “and then,” in the detective’s words, “he left.” As Eberhardt recalled later, “I didn’t notice where he went.” Nor did other officers pay much attention to the departure. They knew Jack Ruby would be back, and they were right.

  Book Two

  CASTLE

  Six

  ANGEL

  Goaded by a mighty tailwind, the Presidential aircraft hurtled eastward at a velocity approaching the speed of sound. Beyond the airport Jim Swindal had looked down on a flat tan-and-green plain crisscrossed by parallelograms of cyclone fences and highways, a tract blank as a plate. Ahead lay a navy blue blob of water and, in the distance, a crinkling of mountains. The pilot radioed Andrews Air Force Base his estimated time of arrival—“2305Z”: Air Force “Zulu Time”—Greenwich Mean Time. It would be 6:05 P.M. in Washington when they breasted Andrews. In the old propeller-driven flying boxcars Jim had shuttled over the Hump against the Japanese the thirteen-hundred-mile flight would have taken at least five hours, but in the great flagship he could make it in scarcely more than two.

  He reset his watch; 3 P.M. in Texas (2100 Zulu) was 4 P.M. in Washington. Then, spitting flame, Angel climbed steeply. Swindal’s rate of ascent leaped from 600 feet a minute to 4,000: he was burning a gallon of fuel every second. The colonel was cleared to 29,000 feet. He was determined to go as high as he could, however, higher than anyone had ever taken President Kennedy, and reaching out he spun his small black trim-tab wheel clockwise, r
ising another 12,000 feet before leveling off. At this tremendous altitude, nearly eight miles straight up, the sky overhead was naked and serene. Its tranquillity was deceptive. Andrews was relaying reports of tornadoes below—he leaned over and saw black combers of wind-swept scud freckled with hurrying rain—and behind him a cold front was moving in from Arizona. Already wild squalls were lashing the Panhandle. At Love Field the temperature was plunging, and the western sky was livid. Kennedy weather had left Dallas with him.

  Instinctively Swindal ticked off the landmarks which he knew lay under the churning clouds: the scribbly banks of the Mississippi, the tartans of Memphis and Nashville. He was glad he couldn’t see them. He wanted to flee every familiar cairn, and his instruments seemed to offer a way to improve upon nature. He poured on the oil, riding the tailwind. He soared, and by his very celerity he hastened the end of illusion. There could be no escape, nor even a healing lacuna under the sun, for he was going the wrong way, racing away from it.

  At 535 mph, night approaches swiftly. Less than forty-five minutes after their departure shadows began to thicken over eastern Arkansas. In the southern sky he saw a waif of a moon, a day and a half off the quarter, hanging ghostlike near the meridian. At the outset he thought of the darkness as a blessing. Returning this way it would be best to land in gloom. The inkier Washington was, the better. But as the light failed, the crescendo of the day hit him harder and harder. He and John Kennedy had been exactly the same age. John and Jacqueline Kennedy, he reflected, had been “the best we as a country had to offer.” He had brought the President to Texas in exuberant spirits, at the height of his remarkable powers; and now he was ferrying him back in a box. Swindal slumped in his harness. Since boyhood he had been in love with airplanes. He had progressed to flight school, to MATS, to the post of personal pilot for the Secretary of the Air Force, and then to this, the ultimate accolade. Now the spell was broken. The passion of his life had been spent. Henceforth flying would be commuting, like driving a bus. His deracination deepened as the sky deepened until, over Tennessee, he “felt that the world had ended.” Behind him (as he thought of it then) were the President, the First Lady, the Vice President, and Mrs. Johnson. No aircraft commander had ever been charged with so grave a responsibility, yet he wondered whether he could make it to Andrews. He was near collapse. “It became,” in his words, “a struggle to continue.”

  His copilot was, if anything, in worse shape. Lieutenant Colonel Lewis Hanson was normally a buoyant young New Englander. His mother-in-law lived in Dallas; she had been recovering from a stroke, and he had decided to call on her during the motorcade. When she had greeted him with the cry, “Kennedy’s been killed!” he had thought she had lost her reason. Then, after turning on her television set, he had begun to doubt his own. Back at the airport he had become obsessed with the desire to leave Texas immediately—at any moment he had expected the fuselage to be raked by machine-gun fire—and twice during the wait for Sarah Hughes he had started the engines on his own. Now, as Swindal manipulated the controls, Hanson mechanically fingered his headset, pinpointing 26000’s rapidly changing position for Andrews. The fliers didn’t speak to one another. Roy Kellerman came up briefly and sat in the jump seat. The three men started to speculate about motives behind the assassination and gave up. The fliers didn’t trust their voices. They fell silent again, and Roy quietly crawled back.

  The magenta twilight turned to olive gloaming and became dusk. The last thin rays of sunlight glimmered and were succeeded by early evening. The colonels looked out upon the overarching sky. There was a lot to see. In the last ten days of autumn the firmament is brilliant. Saturn dogged the moon. Jupiter lay over the Carolinas, the Big Dipper beyond Chicago. Arcturus was setting redly behind Kansas; Cassiopeia and the great square of Pegasus twinkled overhead. But the brightest light in the bruise-blue canopy was Capella. Always a star of the first magnitude, it seemed dazzling tonight, and as the Presidential plane rocketed toward West Virginia it rose majestically a thousand miles to the northeast, over Boston.

  Aft of the cockpit Signalman John Trimble was too busy to brood. He had three phone patches going in the communications shack, and he was using Hanson’s UHF and VHF sets, yet it wasn’t enough. Every official in Washington, it seemed, wanted to talk to Air Force One. Usually Signalmen here were technicians, airborne switchboard operators. From the instant Swindal had retracted his landing gear, however, the unprecedented demand for lines meant that Trimble had to decide who would speak to whom, regulating voice traffic between Angel here and Acrobat and Crown and Castle in the capital. At his elbow were requests from Market, Digest, Wing, Warrior, Watchman, Dazzle, and Dagger; in Washington there was a backlog from Duplex, Vigilant, Domino, and Witness. Trimble had a good knowledge of the Kennedy team. He knew which members of the old administration carried rank, and he knew Lyndon Johnson. Johnson’s people, however, were strangers to him. He couldn’t tell which ones could be fobbed off with excuses. All he could be sure of was that they were members of the new President’s staff, that each said that his business was urgent—and that Trimble, an enlisted man, had to choose among them. It was an impossible quandary. All he could do was to play it literally by ear; the thicker a man’s Texas drawl, the better were his chances of getting through.

  Several conversations were trivial. Congressman Albert Thomas wanted his secretary to leave his apartment key under the doormat; Congressman Jack Brooks wanted to get in touch with Mrs. Brooks. Some messages dealt with Johnson’s plans. Lem Johns was forwarding instructions to the White House Communications Agency, and Bill Moyers was talking to Walter Jenkins and Mac Bundy. (Ted Clifton talked to Bundy, too, asking again whether an international plot was emerging. It was not a discreet inquiry. Trimble’s patches were not secure. They could be bugged. Bundy replied crisply that the Pentagon was taking its own steps.) But the bulk of the verbal traffic was about President Kennedy. Clifton had examined the broken handle housing on Oneal’s Britannia; the damage made manhandling the coffin down another ramp impossible, he said, and he asked Andrews to have a lift ready on the airstrip. Clint Hill told the kiddie detail to take Lyric and Lark to Hamlet, Mrs. Auchincloss’ home at 3044 O Street. Dr. Burkley suggested that Mrs. Kennedy be met by Dr. John Walsh, her physician. Behn instructed Kellerman to remain with the coffin until it arrived at the executive mansion, and there was much talk about “choppering,” because the White House assumed that Kennedy would be moved by helicopter.

  The assumption was incorrect—it had been decided that Kennedy should be moved by ambulance—and the muddle was compounded by the question of who should move him. Not even a President’s death can muffle inter-service rivalry. Burkley directed Taz Shepard to alert Bethesda Naval Hospital; Clifton advised Dr. Leonard Heaton, the Army’s Surgeon General, that the autopsy would be performed at Walter Reed. (Heaton, sensing conflict, called General Eisenhower and asked his advice; Ike replied that “since there is no way of knowing who is giving orders,” the Surgeon General had better play it safe, go to Andrews, and stand by.) The Air Force didn’t have a hospital in the capital, but Godfrey McHugh seemed fated to be in the thick of any fray that arose that afternoon. Godfrey placed the call requesting an ambulance. From somewhere in the Stygian depths of minor bureaucracy a seneschal rejected the request on the grounds that District law prohibited the transfer of corpses by ambulance; the widow would have to settle for a hearse. It was impossible to know who the official was. The voice was being relayed by a chain of operators. McHugh didn’t really care. “Just do it,” he snapped. In the most corrosive tone he could summon he added, “And don’t worry about the law. I’ll pay the fine.”1

  Behind the shack, in the staff cabin, moods ranged from catatonia to heartbreak to estrangement. Muggsy O’Leary crouched apart in a window seat on the port side, staring down at his hands. Evelyn Lincoln sobbed. But the estrangement was dominant. All anyone here knew about Oswald was that “a suspect” had been picked up in Dallas. That didn’t mean much. Eve
n if he were the right man, his provocation remained obscure.

  The first wave from Parkland was looking ahead. They had to anticipate tomorrow; that was their duty. The second wave was looking back, yearning for yesterday. Individual recollections of the flight were to vary sharply. Inasmuch as the shades were still drawn, no one knew when daylight ended. It was like living in a void. Each passenger was left with his own troubled thoughts, and each fashioned his own verity, even his own time. Pam Turnure thought this was the longest trip in her life, a journey without a destination. To Marie Fehmer, swamped with work, it was the shortest of rides. Yet nearly everyone in the cabin felt the smoldering animosity. Valenti afterward described those two hours as “absolute chaos,” Chuck Roberts as “soreness.” Mac Kilduff called it “the sickest plane I’ve ever been on.” Clint Hill, discarding his ruined clothes for a crewman’s, looked down the aisle pensively. In his later words, “It was undeniably very, very sick, with a great deal of tension between the Kennedy people and the Johnson people.”