The Day Kennedy Was Shot

by Jim Bishop

  Time.

  The elderly lady stared at the ceiling. She had lived in the Hotel Texas a long time. For Helen Ganss, this room on the eighth floor was home. Yesterday there had been much excitement. Liston Slack, the manager, had been conferring for days—maybe weeks—with men who wore sunglasses and everybody on the eighth floor had been moved out. The whole L-shaped corridor had been emptied of guests. All except Mrs. Ganss. She hadn’t been shrill about it, but she was an old widow and the men in the sunglasses had been perfect gentlemen. They had thought it over and had told Mr. Slack: “Okay.”

  The President of the United States was down the hall in the corner suite, 850, but Mrs. Ganss wondered how he could possibly sleep. All night long she had heard the march of feet up and down that green rug with the big flowers, and now, in daylight, the feet had voices. Sleep was impossible. Some feet walked. Some ran. The voices ranged from a loud call the length of the corridor to sibilant whispers outside her door. Sadly, there was nothing exciting about the ceiling. Mrs. Ganss stared at it because a lady of years and frailty has so few options.

  The noise in the corridor grew by solitary decibels. One of the three hotel elevators was reserved for presidential traffic and waited on the eighth floor. On the opposite side, Rear Admiral Dr. George Burkley, the President’s physician, was up and had phoned for breakfast. He is a short, gray man of considerable reserve, and he looked out the window and then peeked down the hall toward Suite 850. The Secret Service men nodded good morning. The doctor knew that everything was all right.

  George Thomas, a chubby valet, came down the corridor with an arm full of clothing. As he was admitted to Suite 850, a Secret Service man picked up a phone near the fire hose and said: “The President is awake.” Thomas walked through a small foyer, shifted some Texas newspapers from one hand to the other, and tapped lightly on the door. Inside, there was a moment of silence, and President John F. Kennedy muttered, “Okay.”

  The word had meaning which only the President and his valet would appreciate. In the White House, when Mrs. Kennedy shared her husband’s bedroom, a light tap by Thomas would elicit a small cough as response. The tap and cough were designed not to disturb Mrs. Kennedy’s slumber. The word “Okay” would signify that Mrs. Kennedy had slept in another room.

  Thomas opened the bedroom door, deposited the clothing on the back of a chair, dropped the newspapers on the bed, and exchanged greetings with the tousle-haired sleeper who was turning the sheets back from the left—and window side—of a big double bed. The President sat up, swung his long slender limbs over to the floor, and picked up the packet of newspapers. Mr. Thomas was already in the bathroom, mixing the water and drawing a bath.

  On the mezzanine floor, Master Sergeant Joseph Giordano completed the work of screwing the Seal of the President of the United States to the lectern as Secret Service men, stationed around the big room with its long rows of breakfast tables, watched him. He took another Presidential Seal downstairs to the parking lot across the street. Mr. Kennedy would make two speeches this morning. The formal one would be at the Chamber of Commerce breakfast around 9:30. These people, Mr. Kennedy had learned, were largely Republicans. The Democrats of Fort Worth had protested that the workingmen had not been invited. So the President had agreed to meet them in the parking lot before the breakfast.

  The handsome General Ted Clifton, military aide to the President, rapped on the door of 804. The man who answered was The Bagman. “You packed?” Clifton said. The man said he was. Behind The Bagman stood Cecil Stoughton, the White House photographer. He, too, had plenty of gear to pack, and he knew that he had to keep several cameras ready with film of varying speeds. The Bagman, Ira Gearhart, was important. He carried the small suitcase with the safe dial. It was his job never to be more than a few seconds from the side of the President, because inside The Bag was the electronic apparatus with which Mr. Kennedy could call, in code, for a nuclear strike.

  It was assumed by all knowledgeable persons in the White House, and the Pentagon, that The Bag would never he used. Still, in the event that the Continental Army Command tracked flights of “birds” coming in across the top of the world and over the DEW line, a decision would have to be made at once. The Bagman was never far from Mr. Kennedy. The function of the man was to remember the combination to the dial; the function of the President was to order one of several types of retaliatory attacks.

  In the hotel was a “White House switchboard.” This was usually manned by the military. It, too, moved in the wake of the President. It provided instantaneous communication between Mr. Kennedy and Washington. Coded information that the President had awakened was already in Washington. At Carswell Air Force Base, Colonel James Swindal, commander of Air Force One, had called in five minutes ago that the craft had been inspected, tested, and was ready.

  On the seventh floor, a teletype machine chattered and the daily information report began to come in from the Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA, with its finger on sensitive pulses around the world, was giving the President a morning rundown on the political climate of the world. General Godfrey McHugh, the only American officer of rank with a French accent, signed a receipt for it and walked up to the eighth floor, to be confronted by a Secret Service agent who blocked his path at the head of the stairs until the general was recognized. Then he went on to Suite 850, to be studied momentarily by another man with a key in his hand.

  McHugh would wait until summoned, then give the report to the Commander-in-Chief. The general’s strength was his weakness. He was a perfectionist in all his work. The general even maintained a record of the precise minute that the report came off the machine, and he would duly note the moment it left his hands for Mr. Kennedy’s.

  Two Secret Service agents were at Fort Worth Police Headquarters examining two limousines. The cars had been rented for the Kennedys and the Secret Service for the four-mile drive from the Hotel Texas to Carswell Air Force Base. Everything, including ballrooms, parking lots, bedrooms, bathrooms, parade routes, stairwells, lobbies, kitchens, cooks, waiters, telephones, local personnel, from food to forks, had to be “sanitized” by the Secret Service.

  Three weeks prior to this visit, Manager Liston Slack was surprised to learn that the Secret Service declined use of the Will Rogers Suite on the thirteenth floor. It would be more difficult to “protect,” the agents had said. So Kennedy was now in a smaller suite in a corner of the eighth floor, and the Will Rogers Suite was being used by Vice-President and Mrs. Lyndon Baines Johnson. The President’s quarters cost $106 per day, but the management would not send a bill. Even though normal life at the hotel had been cruelly upset, Liston Slack would not send charges to the government.

  The measure of Fort Worth’s excitement was in the lobby and the parking lot. The first was jammed with men wearing fawn-colored cowboy hats; in the lot, five hundred men and women stood waiting in the misty rain, even though the President was not expected for more than an hour. A half dozen mounted sheriff’s deputies patrolled their horses in and out of the growing crowd, herding them toward the lectern.

  Presidential assistants Kenny O’Donnell and Larry O’Brien—the first lean and grim with a pulsing mandible, the second a myopic redhead with a gift for solving political puzzles—walked into Dr. Burkley’s room and said: “We can’t see anything from the other side of the hotel.” They raised the Venetian blinds and studied the crowd. O’Donnell murmured: “They’re waiting for him in the rain. And there will be more of them.” They thanked the doctor and left.

  O’Donnell went back to his room to shave. He glanced at the presidential itinerary. Two speeches in Fort Worth, one in Dallas, a flight to the capital at Austin, two cocktail parties, a speech at a banquet, a slow motorcade late at night, and a flight to Lyndon Johnson’s ranch for a two-day rest. O’Donnell was the watchdog, the harrier. As the man who, except Attorney General Robert Kennedy, was closest to the President, Kenneth O’Donnell managed the show, made many of the peremptory decisions, kept Mr. Kennedy
close to his schedule, tried hard to please Mrs. Kennedy, ordered the White House staff to its appointed duties, and, when necessary, compressed his lipless mouth and said “No” to senators and congressmen.

  Agent O’Leary, under the marquee of the hotel, kept his eyes roving from the sidewalk to his left, across the Bus Terminal, down the emptiness of the parking lot, across Main Street with its Century Building and Fort Worth National Bank, and down the sidewalk to his right. The eyes began the searchlight progression again, and midway, O’Leary saw a man reclining on a roof diagonally opposite Suite 850. The Secret Service man called a policeman and pointed. “Get him off that roof.”

  Clinton Hill, assigned to Mrs. Kennedy, had inspected all the entrances and exits to the hotel last midnight. Now he did it again. He reported to Agent-in-Charge Roy Kellerman that everything was all right. On the thirteenth floor, the Johnsons dressed swiftly, and the Vice-President sipped coffee, sans caffeine. Lady Bird glanced out the window at the dismal weather and noticed the people in the lot. She knew that her husband was expected to be at the President’s side, but she wasn’t informed whether Mrs. Kennedy would be with her husband. If so, Mrs. Johnson should be there, too. She didn’t want to phone 850 and ask because, if the First Lady wasn’t going, the call would point up her absence.

  Mrs. Johnson phoned the Connallys and spoke to Nellie. Yes, the Governor’s wife would be at his side in the parking lot. Nellie said that she and John regarded Fort Worth as home because, years ago, he had worked for the rich Sid Richardson in this town. Lady Bird decided to go along with her husband.

  In the Arlington Heights section, the stout face of the martyr, Mrs. Marguerite Oswald, peered from behind curtains in her small apartment on Thomas Place. The weather matched her mood. She turned the kitchen light on and puttered with the coffeepot. The gray hair was tight in a bun, but skeins of it hung loose. In common with other citizens of Fort Worth, she was aware that the President of the United States was in town, and she planned to watch the event on television.

  Mrs. Oswald was a hardworking saleswoman and practical nurse. She was fifty-six years of age, stout, and full of outraged righteousness. The mouth was thick and pursed. She enjoyed conversation but, except for chronically ill patients, she had no social life. Years ago she had married three times and had three sons. One of the husbands died. The others left her. The sons enlisted in military service early. None of them ever came back.

  In Dallas, seventeen men lined up before Deputy Chief W. W. Stevenson. The patrolmen were told that their function would be to “seal” the Trade Mart. None of them could understand why the work had to begin at 7 A.M., but they knew that Chief Jesse Curry and the Secret Service had been in conferences for three weeks and had driven slowly, in squad cars, along several routes to and from Love Field.

  Stevenson glanced over the enormity of the interior, where 2,500 persons would greet the President at 12:30 P.M. The Secret Service had studied the overhead catwalks and had shaken their heads disapprovingly. But from this moment on those catwalks would be denied to everyone except the fluttering blue parakeets that darted from the huge fountain at the back of the building to the rafters overhead. The big head table was placed inside the main entrance. The interior “side streets,” which featured shops, would be closed off.

  The policemen listened to their individual assignments and were told how to recognize Secret Service men by the tiny orange pins in their coat lapels and to deny access to anyone without a luncheon invitation, even if the policemen recognized the intruder. Stevenson placed the last of his men at the receptionist’s desk in the big front lobby. This one would assist the ticket takers to screen guests.

  The head table had already been “sanitized,” flowers and all. The chefs in the kitchen had petitioned the Secret Service to permit them to select a fine marbled steak for the President of the United States. The request had been denied. When the huge platters of steaks began to come from the kitchen, the Secret Service said, one would be selected at random for Mr. Kennedy.

  The men posted at the freight entrances and along the sides of the structure were told that no one was to be permitted to enter, unless Mr. Saich, the caterer, came to the door personally and identified the person as an employee. One man stood in the rain on the roof over the entrance. He carried a rifle and had a good field of vision, not only along the feeder lane leading to the Trade Mart, but also behind him, along Stemmons Freeway from downtown Dallas to Parkland Hospital. He didn’t have to worry about the freeway. Other men would be patrolling the route. The Dallas Police Department had canceled all leaves, and all personnel except a handful of squad cars and some detectives were working the Kennedy assignment. The dispatcher had been told to keep Channel One open for superior officers with the President and to use police Channel Two for all other business.

  At 7:08 A.M. the police chief, a mild, spectacled man who maintained a clean city, appeared on television and announced that the President would be in Dallas today and that Dallas wanted no incidents. He knew that the citizens desired to give the Chief Executive a cordial welcome, but there was always a chance that some “extremist” planned to demonstrate. If so, Chief Jesse Curry was putting such people on notice that the police department would brook no nonsense today. Curry did not mention the whacking of Adlai Stevenson with a placard a short time before, or the shrieking, shouting crowd which once chased Mr. and Mrs. Lyndon Johnson into a hotel lobby. Dallas had an articulate rightist group which was obsessed with the notion that all others in the political spectrum were Communists or “fellow travelers” plotting against the Republic.

  The words came off the television screen calmly, but, by the nature of the appeal, they exposed the helplessness of law enforcement in the face of a sneak. Chief Curry concluded by asking all good citizens to please report to the Dallas Police Department anyone who had voiced violent opinions against the President or who had boasted, publicly or privately, of plans to demonstrate today.

  The television set in the modern little four-room house at 2515 Fifth Street in Irving was shut off. The owner, Mrs. Ruth Paine, was still in bed. The suburb, off the western edge of Dallas, is a collection of small ranch homes astride Route 183 to Fort Worth. In several thousands of these houses, men were up, preparing to leave for office and plant; children were up, breakfasting on hot cereal for school.

  In the kitchen of the Paine home, a young, slender man poured boiling water into a cup with instant coffee and sat at the table. He was alone and he sipped his coffee, as he always did, with the fingers of both hands around the cup. He had pale eyes, thinning brown hair, and a mouth which pursed itself in a permanent pout. Anyone who knew Lee Harvey Oswald was aware that he did not mind being alone and he enjoyed long silences.

  He would not turn the television set on to listen to Chief Jesse Curry. Mr. Oswald was having trouble with his wife. She had awakened to feed their infant, Rachel, at 6:30, taken a look at the other little girl, June, and closed her eyes. Mr. Oswald had said: “Don’t get up.” Marina Oswald thought this was funny, because she never got up to make breakfast for him. It wasn’t sarcasm. She was sure of that. He whispered softly, in that throaty, bobbing-Adam’s-apple manner, that she should buy shoes for June. She opened her eyes, watching him dress, and grunted before returning to unconsciousness.

  The baby had awakened several times in the night. The blonde head on the pillow tried to concentrate on what he was saying, and some of it remained with her, and some didn’t get past her ear. Lee told her to buy a pair of shoes for herself. That registered. He donned a tan-gray work shirt, gray slacks, and an old zipper jacket. Without opening her eyes, she could feel him stop beside the dresser, and she knew that he wanted to start a friendly conversation. “Maybe someday June will remember me,” he said.

  Mrs. Oswald kept her eyes closed. She did not want to be friendly. Mr. Oswald removed his wedding ring from his finger and lowered it carefully into a Russian cup on his wife’s dresser. He opened a drawer carefully and place
d his wallet inside. It contained $170. He kept $13.87, insufficient for a man who might wish to leave the area. And yet the gesture of the wedding ring and the sum of money for his wife—more than he had ever given her—are symbols of a marital break.

  Last night, he had tried to restore the marriage. He had come to Mrs. Paine’s house unasked, unwelcome, unexpected. On previous occasions when he visited his wife, he had left his tiny room in the Oak Cliff section of Dallas on Friday evenings and had remained with her until he could get a free lift to the plant where he worked, on Monday mornings. This time he came in on Thursday, played out front with his gladsome idol, little June, and had tried to have a private chat with Marina.

  Her respect for him was dead. Sweet words would not resurrect it. He had personality flaws which she could not understand. Marina, a Soviet pharmacist, had met him in Minsk and married him after a short courtship. He was an American defector with ideals unattainable. He was, he proclaimed, a United States marine who wanted to renounce his citizenship and embrace the Soviet Union. In the next breath, he said he was disillusioned with Russia, because the government was deviationist from the principles of Karl Marx. The inference was that his politics was pure communism; Russian socialism was opportunistic and despotic.

  When the Soviets denied citizenship and, for a time, even sanctuary, he had cut his wrists in Moscow and, as in most other crises in his life, had failed. He asked Marina if she would like to return to the United States with him—particularly to Texas—and she said yes. He had extolled the virtues of his mother, Marguerite, and then later forbade his wife to see her. He spurned the friendliness of the Russian expatriate group in Texas, and refused to teach his wife to speak English.