The Day Kennedy Was Shot

by Jim Bishop

  This was the second of two meetings of the Organized Crime Committee. United States attorneys had been called in from many parts of the country to attend. Robert Kennedy’s desire was to exploit a break in the Cosa Nostra—an FBI prisoner named Joseph Valachi, a minor member of the Mafia group, had secretly revealed more about his organization than the authorities had known. He had, under FBI persuasion, named names and places and events. In return, the Bureau had promised to protect his life, even if they had to arrange security in a federal prison.

  Kennedy sat behind his desk, dropped the papers on the blotter, and removed his jacket. He loosened his tie from its collar moorings and unsnapped his cuff links and rolled his sleeves up. Before him was a long list of members of the Cosa Nostra who lived in many cities. Now he wanted to know what these federal prosecutors and assistants had been able to do with the information he had given them.

  The city of Washington was bland with a cool majesty of purpose. The sun was strong now. The morning work, from Pentagon to Post Office to Patents, was orderly and routine. Perhaps it seemed dull because this was a time for football games and chilly air, a hoar frost on the grass and invitations to the galas of the social season. In hundreds of offices, workers sipped coffee and wondered whether it would be worthwhile—this being Friday—to take the family to the shore once more.

  The dark sedan made the turn off Harry Hines Freeway and onto the small service road. Detective R. M. Sims did the driving, and he pulled by the main entrance to the Trade Mart and stopped it in the east parking lot. Captain Will Fritz, head of the Homicide Division of the Dallas Police Department, was not assigned to murder today. He and the two men who drove with him, Sims and E. L. Boyd, had nothing to do from 10:15 A.M. until 2:30 P.M. except watch a table.

  Fritz was a big bifocaled man with hyperthyroid eyes who wore a cowboy hat. He was shrewd as captain of Homicide, but he had the potential pensioner’s attitude of obeying the boss without question. No one ever found fault with Will Fritz, because the captain lived by the book. He was not a man for browbeating prisoners or bludgeoning confessions from the sullen. It is characteristic that his office on the third floor at police headquarters had walls of glass.

  He walked back to the front of the Trade Mart with his men and, once inside, stood behind the President’s table to study the layout. He saw the flowers, the speakers table spreading across two thirds of the Trade Mart, the solid ranks of long tables with their snowy tablecloths, the waiters, armed with knives and forks, dogtrotting from the kitchen to the tables, the overseers, who shouted orders to the waiters, the green and yellow parakeets, excited by the noise, flitting from rail to rail on the overhead crosswalks, the fountain, swelling to show the color red, receding into a pale blue.

  Agents Grant and Stewart saw Fritz and came over to brief the Dallas cops. Fritz was to safeguard the President’s table. He knew almost every person of note in the Dallas area; he also knew most dangerous persons at sight. If Sims could flank one side of the table, and Boyd the other, then Captain Fritz would be free to cross behind the table to assist either of them. Of course, Secret Service men would also be assigned to the head table.

  The captain noted that directly behind him was the main entrance. He asked the Secret Service who would meet the motorcade out front, who would escort the presidential party inside, and who would clear the big lobby before the arrival. “Now,” said Fritz, “when he gets inside, how does he approach this head table. From which side?”

  The Secret Service answered all the questions and gave the police little orange buttons for their lapels. Robert Stewart said that the back and sides of the building were already secured. Local policemen were all over the place, under Deputy Chief M. V. Stevenson, and, except for a possible emergency delivery of more bread and rolls, no one would enter the block-and-a-half-long building except by the canopy at the front. The men stationed there, uniformed motorcycle police and Secret Service agents, would funnel the guests through the main door into the lobby where, as a matter of course, they would be properly screened by ticket-takers, local politicians, and more agents.

  As the guests passed the back of the head table to find their places in the gigantic room, it would be up to Fritz and his men to keep them outside the roped area of the head table. No one, even if properly identified, was to be permitted to pluck a flower from one of the many vases at the table nor to leave an object or package for anyone.

  The front of the head table would be guarded exclusively by Secret Service agents from the President’s party, but Stewart wanted to make certain that the flanks and the rear were secure at all times. He asked Fritz if he and his men had experience with explosives. The captain nodded. Stewart asked if Fritz would make a complete inspection of the entire head table and under it in about forty-five minutes and again when the word reached the Trade Mart that the President was five minutes away.

  Fritz said yes. The assignment was going to be easy. There was a shout from the lobby and a few of the men ran out. Lieutenant Jack Revill of the Dallas Subversive Unit, had been checking Trade Mart merchants in and out with the assistance of Detective Roy Westphal. It was Westphal who decided to frisk a merchant at random and found a small Cuban flag in his pocket. This had led to a complete fanning of the merchant, who protested. He insisted that he was anti-Castro. Chief Stevenson came running and settled the matter by reminding the merchant that the Dallas Council had just passed a special ordinance about signs, picketing, protests, thrown objects, and threatening language during the visit of the President. This would include anything, he said, which might tend to embarrass or intimidate the President. The merchant would have to surrender the flag temporarily or leave the building. He gave up the little banner.

  Up at Elm and Houston, Officer W. B. Barnett was a lonely man. He had nothing to do but stand in uniform against a wall and try to keep the drizzle from soaking him. Barnett was a traffic cop. Today he was to stand at the corner where the motorcade would make its final turn. His superior, Captain Lawrence, had told the traffic men that they were to divert all traffic five or ten minutes before the motorcade passed, and they were to scout the crowds and the windows overhead for thrown objects.

  Barnett stood on the corner opposite the School Book Depository, looking down at the railroad overpass, where donkey engines, small and energetic, shoved strings of freight cars back and forth. A man came over from the School Book Depository, trotting in the rain, and asked the police officer what time the motorcade would be passing. Barnett asked him why he wanted to know. “Because,” he said, “our building is full of people who would like to see President Kennedy go by.”

  “Tell him to come out around 11:45,” the cop said. The stranger dogtrotted back to the front entrance, and Barnett walked toward the statue of Joseph Dealey to get a better look at the old red brick building. All the windows were closed.

  At police headquarters, Lieutenant D. H. Gassett strode down the cross-hall on the third floor and entered the dispatch room. The big antennae on top of the municipal building would carry heavy traffic today. At 10 A.M. three operators had reported for duty. Two were on Channel One of KKB 364, and one was on Channel Two. Gassett went over the situation with them once more, explaining that the two operators on Channel One, facing each other with the console between them, would handle the heavy traffic. The operator on Two had a separate console and faced the others. There was to be no foul-up, men reporting in were to do so by number, and Gassett would tolerate no friendly conversation. The motto was: “Get ’em on, take the message, get ’em off.”

  As he left the room, Lieutenant Gassett whacked one of the time stamps. There were three, one for each operator, but they never agreed on the time of day. One operator, looking at the little clock from a low stool, read the time one way; another, sitting high or leaning over the clock, saw it a minute later or a minute earlier. It was odd, Gassett thought, that in a business where time was so important, that the clocks of the three radio operators, if stamped simultan
eously, would probably be a minute apart.

  At the Sheraton Hotel, crouching in the shadow of the huge Southland Life Building in downtown Dallas, the President’s communications headquarters was now complete. Anyone who called in from the parade route, or the plane, could be hooked in with the White House in Washington or, for that matter, to anyone in the world. This was the most sophisticated telephone equipment to be found anywhere. No conversation would go through the Sheraton switchboard; no operator could listen because there were voice scrambler attachments on both ends. A master sergeant, who was also a master electrician, sat in a small room and said: “Ready in Dallas” and asked for a few tests.

  The code names for people and places were before him. President Kennedy was Lancer; Mrs. Kennedy was Lace; Vice-President Johnson was Volunteer; Mrs. Johnson was Victoria; the White House was Castle; Air Force One was Angel; the President’s car was SS-100-X; Chief of the Secret Service James Rowley was Domino; the LBJ Ranch was Volcano; The Bagman was Satchel; the Pentagon was Calico, and the FBI was Cork.

  It seemed involved, but Colonel George McNally and his communications men made it function almost instantaneously. The President, in his car, could lift a phone and say “Lancer to Lyric” and, in a breath, his daughter Caroline, at class in the White House, would be on the phone. The Vice-President, smiling to crowds, might hold a phone to his ear and say: “Volunteer to Daylight” and be talking to Secret Service Agent Jerry Kivett at the ranch hundreds of miles away.

  At the moment, the sergeant at the switchboard was listening to Colonel Swindal, command pilot of Air Force One, call in from Carswell that he was ready to go and had cleared flight plans with Love Field, Dallas. The long checks had been run through by the crew; the fan jets had been tested; fuel was aboard, and the colonel had alerted the brass at Carswell that the President of the United States was expected at the base in half an hour. An honor guard was sent to the entrance gate.

  Not all communications were as wrinkle-free. Mr. Jack Ruby, a worn face in a disorderly apartment, had dialed his sister’s number. He could hear it ring and he knew she must be home because she had been ill. At last the receiver in Apartment I at 3929 Rawlins Street, Dallas, was lifted, and a small voice said hello. Mr. Ruby did not say: “This is Jack.” He assumed she recognized her brother’s voice. He was upset, he said, over a full-page ad in the Dallas News. Mrs. Eva Grant said she was sorry, but she had not seen it.

  Her brother began to shout. She should look on page fourteen; it was awful. It asked the President of the United States a lot of insolent questions. Worse, it was signed by Bernard Weissman. This sounded Jewish. Mr. Ruby was a Jew. Eva Grant, his sister, was a Jew. All the difficult tenement growing up in Chicago was not enough; Adolf Hitler was not enough; now a Jew had to get fresh with the President.

  “He’s a son of a bitch,” said Mr. Ruby. “The News was wrong to accept the ad.” Jack knew a lot of nice guys in the ad department at the News and he was going to ask them about this so-called Weissman. Who was he? Where had he come from?

  Mrs. Grant listened. She was too ill to argue or to soothe ruffled feelings. Of her brothers and sisters, this one was strange. He had never married, and now he was in the middle years, talking about exercising in the YMCA, taking sauna baths, making a full-time hobby of being friendly to policemen, trying to run a brace of cheap nightclubs with strippers and dirty filthy masters of ceremonies who seldom heeded Mr. Ruby’s warning to “clean up them jokes—especially the ones with the Jewish dialect.”

  The listening continued. Lately, the conversations between the two had been one-sided. Once, when Eva and Jack were full partners in the nightclub business, she had been shrill and inexhaustible and she kept track of every dollar that came in or went out. But they had bounced from one place to another, always failing or tempting failure, always a step ahead of the bill collectors, trying to fight competition which was using “amateur stripteasers,” which seemed to draw more male customers and heavier drinkers than the professionals. Now the woman who, perhaps was more mother than sister, more hamisher than Jack, was tired.

  Tuesday morning—three days ago—he stopped in, not to ask her how she felt after hospitalization and an operation, but to show her a newspaper photograph of President John F. Kennedy and his son John. The more Jack Ruby studied the photo, the more emotional he became. “That man,” he had said, choking, “doesn’t act like a President. He acts like a normal everyday man with a family.”

  Mr. Ruby seldom permitted anyone to get off a telephone easily. He had phoned the Dallas Times Herald, he said, and they told him that they had refused the ad. That, thought Mr. Ruby, was class. Further, he thought that the ad should not have been addressed to “Mr. Kennedy.” They might at least have called him “Honorable Mr. President.” At least, Mrs. Grant was small and middle-aged and patient.

  He had phoned the News and, after making certain that he had a minor advertising executive and not an editor, had asked: “Where the hell do you get off taking an ad like that? Are you money hungry or something?” Mr. Ruby groused a little more and then told his sister: “If that guy is a Jew they ought to whack the hell out of him.”

  In this, Mr. Ruby, average citizen, was crying aloud against the slurs and slanders which had smashed against his sensibilities in Chicago and in Dallas. This was his real gripe. His admiration for President Kennedy was genuine, but his fear of being a defensive Jew was paramount. Sometimes, in the company of friendly goyim, he had to force a wry smile when he was patted on the back and referred to as a “white Jew.” Always Mr. Ruby had tried to be twice as nice to them as they were to him, but on occasion, especially in his strip joints, his temper deserted him and he lashed out with his fists, knocking a customer to the floor and kicking him down a flight of stairs. Or listening to one too many Jewish jokes and yanking the master of ceremonies off the tiny stage and hurling him across the floor.

  Why did such a thing have to be signed “Weissman”? Why, Eva?

  The President strode back into the sitting room and gave his wife a big smile. Yes, she was ready. Mary Gallagher had gone on ahead with Mrs. Lincoln and some of the others. Mr. Kennedy told the Secret Service he was ready to leave. The word was whispered through the partly open door of Suite 850, and it passed down the hall and men became even more alert. On the telephone near the fire hose went the final message. “Lancer is leaving the Hotel Texas.” And, as it always did, the message spread downstairs to men with walkie-talkies, to others on rooftops, to Carswell Air Force Base, to Washington, D.C., to Love Field in Dallas, to the communications center at the Sheraton, to interested parties in many places. Lancer was leaving.

  Eighth Street was choked with vehicles and mounted policemen. The crowd had been herded to the far curb and, for a moment, a shaft of sunlight brightened the scene. The automobiles were in three rows—congressmen’s cars along the outer edge; press buses and staff cars in the middle; the big limousines rented for the President and his personal party at the curb.

  Between the Secret Service follow-up car and Lyndon Johnson’s limousine, Larry O’Brien stood bareheaded, entreating Senator Ralph Yarborough to please get in the vice-presidential car. The reporters in the buses could not hear the conversation, but they could see O’Brien’s hands making the plea, and they could see the small silky wisps of red hair lift and fall on O’Brien’s head, and they could see Yarborough, studying the curb and shaking his head negatively.

  Mr. O’Brien could not exert the blunt, brutal pressure which was available to the President. He tried persuasion and the Senator found that tack easy to resist by stating that nobody cared where he rode or with whom. To the contrary, O’Brien said softly, nodding toward the press bus with its array of eager faces pressed to the windows. Yarborough barely looked up. He knew that his presence in that car, or his absence, could be the big story in the nation’s press tomorrow morning.

  It could darken the Kennedy triumph and hide it in shadow. The trip, thus far, had been bigger, warmer, frie
ndlier than Kennedy had expected and was a surprise to the knowledgeable and conservative Governor. Now it was threatened by personal pique. The man to send to balm the raw sensitivities was not Lawrence O’Brien. The redhead was a peacemaker for those intelligent elements which did not set themselves against peace; he was a compromiser, a friend, a buddy, a favor-doer before becoming a favor-maker, a collie dog trotting along the perimeter of congressional sheep, urging the stragglers onward, bringing the wanderers back into line, looking to the shepherd in the White House for a compass heading aimed toward greener pastures for all.

  But this was a personal vendetta. O’Brien was not a man to threaten. Mr. Kennedy might have sent Mr. Kenneth O’Donnell, who could have turned on his Humphrey Bogart peel of lips and who might have whispered: “You will get in that car, Senator, or you will wish you were dead. The President says that if we have to get a few guys to lift you up and toss you in the back seat, we’re to do it. Which way would you like to have it?” If Mr. Robert Kennedy had been in Texas, he would probably have summoned Yarborough to his presence yesterday, in San Antonio, and he might have said: “Senator, we are going to have unity in this goddamn party and we’re not going to have the boat rocked by you. We demand that you sit with the Vice-President on every occasion for the next two days. You don’t have to make love to him; just sit beside him so that you are not in the position of handing ammunition to the press. After we go back to Washington, if you want to continue your childish quarrel, go to it, but while my brother is in this state you and Lyndon and John Connally are going to smile like brothers. If you don’t, we think your support is too expensive for us and we may have to dump you.”

  Yarborough desired to compromise with O’Brien. All right, he said, I won’t ride in the car but I’ll issue a statement. Larry O’Brien wagged his head no. The sun was back behind the billowing, slate sky, and the faces at the bus windows were less distinct. The Vice-President and Mrs. Johnson emerged from the hotel and, smiling at the applause, got into their car. Yarborough felt that the situation must be abrasive to the President to warrant all this attention, and with head down he said: “Well, if it means that much—.” O’Brien permitted himself a grin of relief.