The Death of a President

by William Manchester

  Together the President’s widow and brother knelt by the open coffin. This was the first time Mrs. Kennedy had seen her husband since Parkland. It isn’t Jack, it isn’t Jack, she kept thinking; and she was so glad Bobby had agreed to keep it shut. She put the three letters, the scrimshaw, and the cufflinks in the coffin. Bob Kennedy took off his PT tie pin. He said, “He should have this, shouldn’t he?”

  “Yes,” she whispered. Then he drew from his pocket an engraved silver rosary Ethel had given him at their wedding. Bob placed this with the letters.

  Then, with a lock of her husband’s hair, she went out with Bob. To all of those awaiting the motorcade’s departure for the rotunda it was clear that the widow was in agony. Mary Gallagher, standing with Dr. Walsh, thought that “I had never seen her look worse. Bobby was leading her by the arm, holding her up; she was limp, with her head down, weeping. She looked as though she were ready to fall.” She was swaying visibly; Clint Hill was afraid she might faint.

  She didn’t. Beyond consolation, wrenched by a torsion of pain which was tightened by the knowledge that in less than twenty minutes her children, whom until now she had fiercely sheltered from publicity, would become the center of an unprecedented spectacle under the worst circumstances conceivable, she nevertheless retained the sense of purpose which had kept her going for two days.

  The schedule was now inflexible. Sam Bird and his casket team had wheeled the coffin into the entrance hall. The Lieutenant was watching the electric clock on the stairway to the basement—he had been told that the gun carriage must leave at exactly 1 P.M., and obviously they weren’t going to make that. Already a band on the lawn outside had begun to play “Abide With Me.” Glancing about nervously, Bird saw a stocky woman in a white nurse’s uniform and a black-and-white check coat. On either side of her were children in blue coats and red shoes, and with a sense of shock he recognized them. In the next moment Jacqueline Kennedy appeared, and Miss Shaw stepped back. Young John, watching the body bearers, asked, “Mummy, what are they doing?” His mother said, “They’re taking Daddy out.” John asked, “But why do they do it so funny—so slow?” She said, “Because they’re so sad,” and the Lieutenant looked away, and forgot the clock.

  Colonel William Jackson, the Air Force officer who had been Vice Presidential military aide, had been especially agitated by the delay. Before the reappearance of Mrs. Kennedy, Dave Powers had drawn the boy aside and was diverting him with stories when Jackson came up and said briskly, “Mr. Powers, you tell Mrs. Kennedy that the President and the First Lady are here and are in the Blue Room.” Dave’s reply illustrates the irreconcilable conflict between the staunchest of loyalists and the most uncompromising of realists. Moving up until his eyes were inches from the Colonel’s, he answered starchily, “That’s impossible. The First Lady is in her quarters, and the President is in the East Room.”

  President Johnson entered, departed, and re-entered a deeply disturbed man. After attending services at St. Mark’s Episcopal church with his wife and Lucy he had arrived at the mansion, and had been told by an usher that Dean Rusk wished to speak to him immediately on the telephone. He had heard from the Secretary of State what the entire country was learning—that Oswald had just been shot “on television.” In the Blue Room Jean Smith whispered to Lady Bird that she had overheard a servant say the assassin was dying. Johnson greeted the Attorney General, who knew nothing of this, with “You’ve got to do something, we’ve got to do something. We’ve got to get involved. It’s giving the United States a bad name around the world.”

  Three television cameramen were in Dallas’ underground garage that noon. A comparison of their video tape reels (NBC-66, WFAA-16, KRLD-13), of Vernon Oneal’s dispatcher’s log, of Parkland’s records, and of Secret Service shift reports establishes a chronology which, although it makes events no more believable, does provide some perspective:

  Washington Time The White House Dallas Dallas Time

  11:47 A.M. Mass for JFK ends. Oswald jail transfer begins amid extraordinary confusion. 10:47 A.M.

  12:17 P.M.–12:18 P.M. Ruby leaves Western Union office for Dallas jail. 11:17–11:18

  12:20 Oswald reaches jail garage. 11:20

  12:21 Ruby shoots Oswald—televised on NBC. 11:21

  12:24 Oneal ambulance arrives at jail. 11:24

  12:32 Oswald is wheeled into Parkland’s Trauma Room No. 2. 11:32

  12:34 Jacqueline and Robert Kennedy enter East Room to see the coffin opened. 11:34

  12:44 Operation on Oswald begins. 11:44

  12:46 Jacqueline and Robert Kennedy ascend to Presidential apartment. 11:46

  12:55 The Kennedys meet the Johnsons in the Blue Room. 11:55

  1:08 The gun carriage leaves the North Portico for the Capitol. 12:08 P.M.

  1:47 Cortege reaches the Hill. 12:47

  1:52 Band plays “Hail to the Chief” and Navy hymn. 12:52

  2:07 Oswarld is pronounced dead.

  2:17 Mrs. Kennedy and Caroline kneel by catafalque in rotunda. 1:07

  2:19 Kennedy party leaves Capitol. 1:19

  2:25 NBC announces Oswald is dead. 1:25

  2:28 Kennedy party returns to White House. 1:28

  Oswald almost died in the same chamber where the President’s body had lain; the cart was headed that way when a doctor reminded Jack Price that that would be wrong; Price swiftly saw the point and directed the attendants to swerve leftward into Trauma Room 2. The fact is that three of Parkland’s trauma rooms had been readied over two hours before the shooting against precisely this calamity. In the words of Nurse Bertha L. Lozano, “At 11:00 A.M. I was informed by Jill Pomeroy, the ward clerk, that we might prepare for an emergency because there was a large crowd at the city jail.” The attack was anticipated, everyone in authority had been alerted, and still it was successful. Nellie Connally, on the hospital’s second floor, became aware of what she called “a sudden tightening of the security around us”; she asked for the reason, and a Texas Ranger said, “Lee Harvey Oswald was just killed.” From the bed Governor Connally stared about, bewildered. This was his first day of complete consciousness—for several hours he thought it was Saturday—and the name Oswald meant nothing whatever to him.

  In both Friday’s assassination and Sunday’s murder two vivid threads are evident: warnings of disaster had come from responsible sources, and peace officers, in weighing them, had miscalculated gravely. Actually, the Dallas Police Department’s original plan had been to move Oswald at ten o’clock Saturday evening, and J. Edgar Hoover, among others, had retired under the impression that it was being carried through. At 2:15 A.M. Sunday Hoover’s Dallas office began receiving anonymous telephone calls threatening the prisoner’s life. The Dallas FBI urged a 3 A.M. transfer—in vain. Sunday morning Forrest Sorrels suggested to Captain Fritz that Oswald be taken out at an unannounced time, when no one was around, but all federal advice, and some from within the department itself, was rejected in deference to the fourth estate. Chief Curry, in Captain Fritz’s words, “wanted to go along with the press and not try to put anything over on them.”

  Curry and Fritz were apprehensive, however. Accordingly, they had taken elaborate measures to deflect danger. The difficulty was that they were attempting to second-guess vigilantism, and their error was almost exactly the opposite of Friday’s. Those responsible for the protection of the President then had assumed that any attack on him would be made either at the airport or the Trade Mart. The motorcade route had been slighted. While Kennedy was in motion, it had been assumed, he would be relatively safe; in any event, little could be done to shield him from a sniper. From the very first discussions of the Oswald transfer the Dallas police were thinking in terms of what they were calling “the Committee of One Hundred”—a hundred men, it was rumored, were going to abduct the captive during the drive to Dealey Plaza. Curry and Fritz felt they were ready for this. Oswald was to be handcuffed to a detective and surrounded by officers with tear gas; the use of a very large armed force was cont
emplated. What was not contemplated was that a lone individual, with no credentials, might penetrate the security screen before the movement from the jail basement had begun. As they walked toward the fifth-floor elevator James Leavelle, the plainclothes man to whom Oswald had been manacled, said, “If anybody shoots at you, I sure hope they are as good a shot as you are.” According to Leavelle, Oswald “kind of laughed” and said, “Nobody is going to shoot at me.”

  Somebody was; Jack Ruby was. Ruby’s presence in the basement is utterly confounding. To some it will remain forever mystifying, to others it will always provide positive proof of police collusion in a complex conspiracy, and even those who have sifted all the evidence are left with a vague impression of a Houdini effect. A jail, after all, ought to be as secure from invasion as from escape. Curry’s department had been put on stern notice, and beginning at 9 A.M. Sunday morning his leading subordinates had begun intricate precautions to avoid the very fiasco which was imminent. The basement had been completely cleared. Guards were stationed at the two automobile ramps leading into the garage from Main and Commerce streets, and fourteen officers searched the entire area, including air-conditioning ducts and the trunks of automobiles already parked in the garage.

  Nevertheless, Ruby was there when Oswald emerged from the elevator. How did he manage it? Part of the answer lies in the fact that he was not there during the search. Indeed, as late as 11:17 A.M., three minutes before Oswald stepped down into the garage, Ruby was in the Western Union office on Main Street, 350 feet from the top of the Main Street ramp. He was sending a $25 money order to Karin Carlin (“Little Lynn”), a twenty-year-old stripper; a time stamp on the order places him at the counter then. From the counter to the murder scene was a minute-and-a-half walk. Of course, had security been as thorough as in the earlier search, he would never have been permitted to enter the ramp. Even Sorrels, who had been Dallas’ Secret Service agent for twenty-eight years, was asked to identify himself before being admitted to the building that morning. Ruby had acquired no credentials since Friday, and his achievement in slipping past the ramp guard—Patrolman Roy E. Vaughn—was largely a matter of chance. It must be added that that chance arose because of incompetent police trimmers.

  Pleasing every member of the press and removing any possibility of vengeance were mutually exclusive, and the debate between law enforcement officers over how they might best be reconciled was still continuing when Oswald, upstairs, donned a sweater for the trip. The obvious solution was to provide some sort of decoy. In 1901 the Buffalo Police Department had moved McKinley’s assassin, Leon F. Czolgosz, from jail to jail by a simple trick; they had dressed him in a patrolman’s uniform. That sort of ingenuity was missing in Dallas on November 24. The best Jesse Curry could come up with was an armored car or truck, a vehicle normally used by banks for the transport of large sums of cash. The choice was neither imaginative nor practical, for when the truck showed up (its appearance was immediately noted by all members of the press), it was found to be too big for the ramp. The driver was reluctant to back it down into the basement garage from Commerce Street, and so, lacking adequate clearance, he left it at the top of the ramp.

  This, then, was the scene in the last moments of Oswald’s life. His killer was in the Western Union office. He himself was in Captain Will Fritz’s office, wriggling into a sweater. Chief Curry was preparing to take him down to the cellar on the jail elevator, through the jail office, and into the garage. At Oswald’s left, as he stepped forward, would be the ramp leading toward Main; to his right, the ramp toward Commerce, with the tanklike armored truck at the top, its blunt snout protruding onto the sidewalk. Between the truck and the jail office were two cruisers, unmarked four-door Ford Galaxie sedans. They were to accompany the truck, one of them leading it to the county jail.

  Astonishingly, the chief had communicated none of this to Captain Fritz, in whose custody Oswald would remain until the sheriff took over. Fritz first learned of it when he, Sorrels, and FBI agents were concluding their final effort to break through the prisoner’s arrogant façade—a façade which Sorrels, for one, thought had begun to crumble. Curry thrust his head in to inquire how long the questioning would continue. They were, he said, ready to move. When Fritz was told of the method of conveyance, he objected vehemently. Instead, he proposed that Oswald be carried in the second of the two unmarked Galaxies. The order of the parade would be: the truck; then the first cruiser, occupied by detectives; then the second cruiser, with Oswald. The parade would only last one block, however. At the first intersection the second Galaxie would veer away and drive directly to the county jail while the other two vehicles leisurely wound through downtown Dallas. This was deception; some members of the press might resent being misled. But Curry agreed.

  Word of the change in plan was telephoned to the basement. With it went instructions to obtain a new lead car from the garage pool and station it on Commerce Street, in front of the truck; Fritz assigned this task to Lieutenant Rio S. Pierce. Lieutenant Pierce’s way was blocked by the truck. He had to drive out the Main Street ramp—violating an ironclad departmental regulation, for the ramp was one-way—and circle the block. As Pierce approached Main from the depths of the garage, Patrolman Vaughn stepped off the curb to hold back other traffic. Vaughn was absent from his post for approximately ten seconds. During those ten seconds there was no sentinel at that entrance to the basement, and it was then that heavy-set Jack Ruby, wearing a hat and a business suit, strolled in unchallenged.2

  In Ruby’s right hip pocket was a .38 caliber revolver. He habitually carried the weapon—this was Dallas, not New York; there was no Sullivan Act—and today he was also carrying over $2,000 in cash. He had left another $1,000 in the trunk of his car, parked directly across the street from the Western Union office. His behavior was in character. He was Jack the big spender, Jack the tough; and he was about to become Jack the vindicator. According to his own account, his trip downtown had a “double purpose.” The first was to wire the money to Karin. She was at home with her husband, who wasn’t working steadily. Saturday should have been her payday, and she had been left in financial straits by his decision to close his clubs in mourning; Little Lynn was four months pregnant, owed rent, needed groceries, and had less than fifty cents in her purse. It was Ruby’s second purpose, of course, which was to assure him his footnote in history.

  Its inspiration is obscure. Perhaps he would never have gone downtown if his pregnant stripper hadn’t phoned him with her plight, although according to her subsequent recollection he had replied, “Well, I have to go downtown anyway.…” Given his restless temperament, it is unlikely that he would have spent the morning brooding in his apartment, and “I have to go downtown anyway” should not be interpreted as premeditation. Ruby was probably incapable of craftiness that Sunday. Everyone who saw him later remembered his evident distress. He had become a creature of events. On every side he saw the debris of mourning, and an internal pressure was rapidly building up within him. Afterward he was to recall his acute response to Rabbi Seligman’s televised elegy; to a mawkish, two-column “Letter to Caroline” in Sunday’s Dallas News (“the most heartbreaking letter,” he called it); and, as he drove down Main Street, to wreaths which had been left on the grassy slope beside the assassination site by Dallas citizens (“I saw them and started to cry again”). Passing the jail he noticed the sidewalk crowd, but he “took it for granted,” he later insisted to Earl Warren, that Oswald “had already been moved.” Ruby repeatedly declared that the killing was entirely impulsive. He may have been lying. Certainly he had every reason to lie, for by then his own life was at stake. Yet an intensive study of his Sunday movements fails to reveal a single flaw, or even the suspicion of a flaw, in his story. All signs point to murder by whim.

  Of Oswald’s fatal ride downstairs it can only be said that the trip, like everything in his life, proceeded against a background of tastelessness and vulgarity. Handcuffed to Leavelle, he left the sickly green walls of Fritz’s
Room 317, passed a row of shabby straight-backed chairs, and entered the dark brown jail elevator, whose operator was walled away in a cage of sturdy bars. In the basement Fritz and four detectives led their prisoner along a semicircular route through the cluttered jail office and debouched into the gloomy garage, a tan-walled vault whose roof was supported by pillars which had once been painted yellow and which, after years of gusting exhaust, had become tawny, drab, and flecked with particles of oil. Oswald paused by a sign warning, “DO NOT SIT ON RAIL OR STAND IN DRIVEWAY.” He couldn’t have seen it. Too much was happening; two score newsmen pushed forward, thrusting microphones in his face and shouting questions; flash bulbs were exploding; the entire scene was bathed in a klieg glare. Tugged forward by the handcuffs, the captive moved approximately ten feet forward toward the cruiser. Then Ruby approached him from his left front. Shouldering forward through the straining crowd, the burly gunman passed between a reporter and a plainclothes man, his .38 in his right hand. As he shoved it forward he shouted, “You killed the President, you rat!” Then he fired. The bullet passed through Oswald’s liver, spleen, and aorta, and in the next instant the murderer of the murderer lay on the basement floor, being pummeled by officers. In dismay, almost in plaintive reproach, he wailed, “I’m Jack Ruby, you all know me!”

  Bleeding internally, the mortally wounded assassin was carried back into the jail office, and there, if the memories of Forrest Sorrels and Jesse Curry are to be credited, he was deprived of whatever chance he had to live by clumsy first aid. Sorrels and Curry had remained upstairs; the chief was on the telephone, reporting to the mayor that the transfer had begun. Curry’s subordinates shouted up news of the shooting, and the two men raced down to the office, where Sorrels, to his amazement, saw a plainclothes man kneeling between Oswald’s thighs, administering artificial respiration. Sorrels did not recognize the man; later Curry would merely identify him as “a detective.”3 Artificial respiration is the worst conceivable treatment for abdominal injuries. It is like applying a bellows to a fire. The chances of hemorrhage multiply in proportion to the pressure applied. Ten minutes after his arrival at Parkland Oswald was on the operating table, with three of the same doctors who had attended Kennedy—Mac Perry, McClelland, and Jenkins—beside him. Now, as then, they went through the correct surgical motions, but in Jenkins’ words, “The trauma which patient Oswald had sustained was too great for resuscitation.” Two days and seven minutes after the President had been pronounced dead the sheet was drawn over his killer’s face.