The Day Kennedy Was Shot

by Jim Bishop

  It made an ideal landing at 11:33 and was parked before AF-1 came in at 11:39. The Johnsons and their guests had disembarked and been greeted by the Dallas mayor and council before the striking blue and white of aircraft 26000, gleaming in sunlight, came to a stop on runway 31 and watched the little “Follow Me” truck lead it to the nest. The crowd behind the turnbuckle fence was bigger than anticipated, and Channel One of the police department was busy reassigning men to the congested areas.

  All of it seemed to be leisurely and jolly, but there was a surge of excitement which permeated even the jaded. This was the event, and it was a predictable one, but it carried a thrill which could not be suppressed. The crowd behind the fence was screaming and the people were jumping up and down. In the tower, Jove told himself that it was an uneventful landing, but his stomach convulsed when he thought: here is the President of the United States. The press hurried to places behind a roped area on the field. Secret Service men coming off the first plane were met by Winston Lawson, who sent some directly to the Trade Mart.

  Along the airport fence was a long line of silent limousines, peopled with chauffeurs. The three monster birds stood almost together as they disgorged people, some of whom ran while others walked. Inside the rear of AF-1, the President fingered the knot of his tie and Kenny O’Donnell threaded his way toward him with good news. He whispered that Governor Connally had been impressed by the crowds and had said of Kennedy: “If he wants Yarborough at the head table, that’s where Yarborough will sit.”

  Mr. Kennedy was pleased. “Terrific,” he murmured. “That makes the whole trip worthwhile.” Mrs. Kennedy, hearing the news, smiled. If it was good news for Jack it was good news for her. Down on the hot concrete, Vice-President Johnson led the state and local delegation over to AF-1. A runner rug was rolled to the ramp; Mrs. Johnson had a bouquet, and all faces turned up to the curved door of the plane. A flick of the hand from the White House advance man, Winston Lawson, and the drivers started the engines of the automobiles.

  The door opened and Mrs. Kennedy, radiant in pink, stood in view. Air Force personnel at the foot of the ramp came to attention and saluted. The crowd shouted from behind the fence as she inched carefully down the thirteen steps, a gloved hand on the railing, the other holding the pink handbag, the dark face alight with appreciation. Behind her, the President stepped slowly, glancing down at Lyndon Johnson with a “What? You again?” grin. There was no smile on the face of Connally as he held his big cowboy hat in his left hand and assisted Nellie with his right.

  Behind them, Agent-in-Charge Roy Kellerman preceded the congressional delegation. He had to remain close to the President and, at the same time, establish immediate contact with Lawson. Mr. Kennedy was shaking hands with the Johnsons. The press was protesting that the ropes represented too small an enclosure to see anything; television cameras, like boxy turtles, slowly followed the action; Mrs. Kennedy was presented with a bouquet of velvet-red roses; Governor Connally walked swiftly ahead of Mr. Kennedy to shake hands with the Dallas politicians; Secret Service agents moved from group to group, saying: “Please get in your car. Please get in your car.” Mrs. Connally smiled her sweetest as she accepted a bouquet.

  Kennedy was given two charcoal portraits, one of himself and one of his wife, and he glanced at them with a studied esteem and gave them to Paul Landis, an agent. Congressman Henry Gonzalez, from the San Antonio area, walked around patting his chest and studying the crowd: “I haven’t got my steel vest yet.” Dignitaries began to hurry to the automobiles and sit in the wrong ones. Kellerman got to Lawson, who said: “Your program is all set. There should be no problem here.”

  Police Chief Jesse Curry stood beside the lead car, calling in that there was a slight delay in starting, but it would be less than estimated. The President drew his wife’s attention to an elderly woman who sat in a wheelchair, and they paused for a moment, stooping to chat. Mr. Kennedy looked up to see the people jammed against the other side of the steel fence and he led his wife toward it, bowing and smiling. It was a friendly crowd, shouting to be seen and acknowledged, but some of the members of the press sensed hostility and a few reporters and still cameramen tried to follow the Kennedys.

  Congressmen and local officials joined the President and, in a moment, he was lost to view. Roy Kellerman elbowed his way through the throng; Clint Hill was pushed away from Mrs. Kennedy. Hundreds of hands were sticking through and over the fence and it was obvious that Mr. Kennedy, far from feeling a sense of danger, was surprised and elated at the warmth of the greeting. He “walked” his hands along the fence. His wife felt that the people were friendly but that they were “pulling” her hands. Some of the writers assumed that the President was trying to show the press that he was not afraid. Vice-President and Mrs. Johnson were part of the eddy which swirled along the fence, shaking hands. Johnson, tall and solid, looked over heads to make certain that the President had not left the fence for the car.

  He was now fifty feet ahead of the motorcade, and Secret Service driver William Greer, a stocky veteran who derived pleasure from driving the President, began to inch the vehicle forward so that the Kennedys would not have far to walk. The President was tiring of the handshaking; the reaching through and over the fence would sharpen the ache in his back. He could not see that, beyond the foremost fringe of people, some high school students were holding aloft unfriendly placards: “Help Kennedy Stamp Out Democracy”; “In 1964, Goldwater and Freedom”; “Yankee Go Home”; “You’re a Traitor.”

  The elevator came down with the noise of an off-center disc rotating slowly. Some of the workers on the ground floor were stalling. It was almost lunchtime and they could see the people gathering all over the sunny plaza. Often, a game of dominoes proved to be exciting at lunch, but today was special. White and Negro, they took a few orders, filled them hurriedly, and prepared to finish a sandwich and coffee before the parade arrived. The elevator arrived at the ground floor and Lee Harvey Oswald got off.

  He did not join the group nor seem to notice the people gathering outside the Texas School Book Depository. He scouted the order box and picked out three. The first was from Mrs. Hazel Carroll of the Reading Clinic at Southern Methodist University. It asked for a copy of Parliamentary Procedure at $1.40. The second was from M. J. Morton of the Dallas Independent School District asking for ten copies of Basic Reading Skills for High Schools, Revised, at $1.12 per copy. The third came from M. K. Baker, Junior High School, Reynosa, New Mexico, requesting one copy of Basic Reading Skills for Junior High Schools. All were published by Scott, Foresman & Company.

  They were snapped onto the clipboard Oswald carried and, with the monotonous attitude of a mine mule, he went back to the elevator and started up to the sixth floor. Some of the employees went to the second floor to the little commissary to get bottles of Coke and cookies from machines. The small office force on that floor had practically quit, with the exception of a woman clerk, because the excitement of the Kennedy visit now permeated areas which had been immune to it. As Bonnie Ray Williams, Negro employee, said: “We always quit five or ten minutes before lunchtime, but today, well, all of us is so anxious to see the President—we’re quitting five or ten minutes ahead of that so that we can wash up quick and not miss anything.”

  Some of the fellows played the daily game of manning the two elevators—which were back to back in the middle of the Depository—and racing each other to the main floor. Today Charlie Givens had the east elevator and Bonnie Ray had the west one. At the sixth floor, each called to his friends. Givens saw Lee Harvey Oswald on the fifth floor and he yelled: “Come on, boy,” and Lee shook his head negatively. “It’s near lunchtime,” Givens said.

  The sullen clerk said: “No, sir. When you get downstairs, close the gate to the elevator.” This was the only elevator which could be called back up if both doors were closed at the ground-floor level. Charlie looked to make sure that his group was inside the car, and he could hear Bonnie Ray’s car moving down ahead of him,
picking up other clerks. “Okay,” he said to Lee Harvey Oswald. “Okay.”

  The two elevators completed their race to the main floor, and Givens patted his pockets and found that he had left his cigarettes in a jacket upstairs. Alone, he rode back up. When he reached the sixth floor, he saw Lee Harvey Oswald walking along the panel of windows facing Elm Street and the crowds below. There was nothing uncommon about it, except that Charlie Givens thought that, a moment ago, Lee had been on the fifth floor. It made no difference and they did not exchange greetings.

  When Charlie got his cigarettes and ran back to the elevator, the fifth, sixth, and seventh floors of the Texas School Book Depository were, for a time, empty except for the presence of Oswald. The foreman, William H. Shelley, who had been busy supervising the laying of the sixth floor, was down in his small office next to Roy Truly’s eating half his lunch. It was his habit to eat part and to finish it in mid-afternoon.

  Shelley had ordered the workers to move the small book cartons along the Elm Street side of the sixth floor but had left some First Grade Think and Do cartons along the back wall. These cartons were four times as large as the others. Lee Harvey Oswald now moved the big cartons diagonally across to the Elm Street side, making a wall about four and a half feet high. Smaller cartons were placed inside the “wall” so that, if a man chose, he could sit on them, recessed from the window but be able to look out. As a spyglass on the motorcade, this sixth-floor window in the east corner of the building was one of the best in Dallas.

  Looking straight out, across the top of Dealey Plaza, a Kennedy enthusiast could see the motorcade approaching head on along Houston Street. Then, immediately below the window, the cars would make a left turn and run westerly, down the slope to the triple underpass, and, from the window, the happy couple in the car would veer neither to left nor right—merely grow smaller. This window was one of the rare places where a citizen could look down with a grand view of the parade on two streets, one northbound, one west.

  Lunch had never been suffered with such silent speed. The men ate and hurried outside to find elevated positions on the Depository steps or on the lawn at the opposite curb for an unobstructed view. Bonnie Ray Williams thought he heard some of the fellows, like Danny Arce and Billy Lovelady and Charlie Givens and some of the other sociable “guys” say that they were going back upstairs to watch the parade.

  Williams got his sandwich, and ran to the second floor and got a bottle of Dr. Pepper, then back to the elevator and up to the sixth floor. He looked around the vast barn-like floor and saw no one. It was silent. The sun sifted its beams through the rows of double windows and picked up motes of dust in the air. Bonnie Ray looked around, but none of the fellows was on the floor. He saw the everlasting cardboard cartons stacked in mounds here and there, and the cleared space where the floorworkers had knocked off for lunch, and it just seemed funny that he had beat everybody back up.

  He saw the new high wall of cartons near the Elm Street windows and he walked beyond them to another set of windows. He laid the bagged lunch on the dusty windowsill and took the top from the bottle of soda. The sandwich wasn’t much. It was a piece of chicken with the bones still in it, imprisoned by two pieces of spongy bread. “Just plain old chicken on the bone,” Bonnie Ray called it. He looked out and down and saw the warm, friendly sun and the green of the plaza, and the police herding people this way and that, and the whistles blowing for cars to get moving before all traffic was closed, and couples on the grass adjusting cameras and looking up at the Depository building, and a final diesel locomotive yanking a small string of freight cars across the overpass as a policeman trudged to the top to keep unauthorized personnel off the property.

  It was a good view, but Williams didn’t want to see the parade alone. Directly below him, a few order clerks watched from the fifth floor. Bonnie Ray finished the soda, and left the remains of his sandwich on the windowsill. If anyone else was in that big room with him for those ten minutes, Williams did not hear him.

  All along the tawny concrete, men were running to and from vehicles in controlled panic. The President had told Kellerman that each person should have the same seat in the same numbered car as in Fort Worth, but now there were twenty-four vehicles and some occupants did not bother to count; some, finding an empty seat, tried to squeeze in with friends; others, consigned to the buses in the rear, tried to use empty cars closer to the President’s position. Lawson and his men were urging one and all to please be seated. Mr. Kennedy had broken away from the crowd at the fence, saying, “Thank you. Thank you. I’m happy to be in your city today. Thank you. Thank you. This is a real Texas welcome. . . .”

  Few heard him because the crowd shouted its individual exhortations and imprecations. The congressmen were elbowing each other for preferred positions, and the Dallas mayor and council felt its lack of sympathy for Kennedy congeal when the Secret Service pointed to the seventh car in the line. The President helped Mrs. Kennedy into the big Lincoln. She sat hard on the left side of the rear seat and dropped the bouquet of roses between them. This was a hot day. The hypocrisy of politics was that the young lady had to smile while sweltering in a merciless sun.

  The President, grinning at one and all from the right side of the car, assisted Mrs. Connally to the jump seat in front of his wife, and watched John Connally, still dour, unfold the seat in front of the President. Senator Yarborough was spotted, over the Kennedy shoulder, walking past the Vice-President’s car and the President caught Larry O’Brien’s eye and pointed. At once, the President’s special assistant ran along the line of cars and came abreast of the senator at the time that Special Agent-in-Charge Kellerman flagged the motorcycles in front to start. Yarborough was brought back, protesting a little, and was shoved by the back of the trousers into the Johnson car. The door slammed behind him and Yarborough dropped into the left side, next to Mrs. Johnson. O’Brien, watching the cars start out, studied the faces and seats and hopped into the first one which had space for him.

  Two motorcycle policemen swung their vehicles through a hole in the fence and motioned to patrolmen to keep the people back. The two cops moved slowly at first, glancing back over their shoulders toward the pilot car. The motorcycles and that car should open a lead of at least a quarter of a mile in front of the procession. Deputy Chief G. L. Lumpkin, in the pilot car, had policemen Jack Puterbaugh, F. M. Turner, and Billy Sinkle with him. If there was going to be trouble of any kind, this was the car to raise the alarm.

  None was expected, but four pairs of trained eyes would be watching the curbside crowds and the overhead windows all the way. If trouble did come, the policemen expected that it might be in the form of a crowd at a particular intersection which would break through police lines and engulf the President’s car. At worst, some fanatic might carry an insulting sign or shout a curse at the Chief Executive of the nation. Lumpkin was in touch with Chief Curry all the way, and he kept reporting monotonously everything he and his men saw.

  The two motorcyclists were ordered by radio to increase their speed coming out of the airport, and Lumpkin and his men lengthened the distance between them and the rest of the motorcade. In police headquarters, it was announced that, at 11:55 A.M. the President was leaving Love Field. The word was passed by walkie-talkie radio among Secret Service men. It reached the White House switchboard at the Sheraton Hotel and was passed to Washington, D.C. Jack Jove in the tower heard it on short wave and returned to his office. Colonel Swindal heard it. The word was hammered into newspaper offices on the police radio band; it went to the radio stations, and the local television directors heard it and placed camera crews at strategic areas to pick up the glistening cars as they turned off the airport road at Mockingbird Lane. The President, for the first time, could see the huge cluster of modern buildings which comprised rich, conceited Dallas.

  The main section of the motorcade was led by Chief Jesse Curry in a white car. He drove it. The radio speaker was open and the volume was turned up. The chief was never a sh
irker. He was a hardworking, eye-blinking martyr to his job. He wanted to stay on as chief, and he knew that he could stay just as long as he executed the will of the Dallas Citizens Council. The city fathers wanted no incidents today, and there would be none because Curry and his men had researched, planned, and rehearsed this assignment so deeply that today it seemed anticlimactic.

  The chief sat with Sheriff Bill Decker, an old political fighter, Special Agent Forrest Sorrels, and Agent Winston Lawson. This was called the “lead car,” and Curry had four motorcycles in front of him to trim the curbside crowds. Three car lengths behind was the big Lincoln. Agent William Greer had the presidential standard and the American flag snapping from the foreward fenders. Beside him sat Roy Kellerman, and they listened to Lumpkin and Curry on the police channel. The Kennedys and the Connallys nodded and smiled passing the filling stations and the big Coca-Cola plant and the restaurants where lunchers poured out, wiping their mouths and waving.

  Behind the Lincoln were four motorcycles, one on each side of the rear bumper. They were ordered not to pull up on the President unless he was endangered. Next was the big Secret Service car, full of men in sunglasses. Sam Kinney drove; Emory Roberts manned the communications set, which called this particular automobile Halfback. Mrs. Kennedy’s guardian, Clint Hill, stood in the forward position of the left running board, directly behind her. John Ready had the opposite position on the right. Behind them stood Bill McIntyre and Paul Landis. Glen Bennett and George Hickey occupied two-thirds of the back seat. The seat also cradled a powerful automatic rifle. It was in a better position than Kenneth O’Donnell and Dave Powers, who occupied two jump seats. In front of their knees was a compartment holding a shotgun.