The Day Kennedy Was Shot

by Jim Bishop

  Physically, downtown Dallas is as clean and unpolluted as any business area in the country. The leaseholders are rich in natural gas, and everything but the sewers are air-conditioned.

  Old, sunbaked buildings come down and edifices with tinted glass go up. Dallas will decline a government loan for downtown improvement but accept $50 million or $100 million from one or two of its own families, such as the Murchisons and the Hunts.

  Nightlife in Dallas is superficial. There are three choices: a cultural binge at the symphony in a black tie and strands of pearls; a private party at a palatial home where husbands and wives mingle only at dinner; strip joints, where the biggest thrill is amateur night and the moist-eyed customers sit at darkened tables pouring drinks from a bottle which remains in a brown paper sack. Of the latter, Jack Ruby’s Carousel Club was one of the poorest. By midnight, downtown Dallas is dead, except for the lights used by the women who scrub the office floors and the drunks who stagger along the dark walls looking for a taxi.

  Dallas is out of bed early and to work early. The executive and the elevator operator are often in that skyscraper before 8:00 A.M. and the men work hard to find new ways of forcing money to make more money. Nor are the giants of industry above quarreling over the price of a steak or a tip to a waiter. The desire not to be swindled forced one man to buy eight automobiles for his family so that he could postpone trading the vehicles in at a loss. The same man would donate a million dollars for a new laboratory at the University of Dallas or buy a $100,000 ranch house as a wedding present for his daughter.

  The group he represented, The Establishment, built two small cities within Dallas—Highland Park and University Park. They abut influential North Dallas and have their own taxes, police departments, and fire departments. No Negro lives among the 35,000 residents, but Negroes commute to Highland Park and University Park as servants. Separating the two communities is a boulevard called Lovers Lane.

  The Establishment could be vague, but the Dallas Citizens Council never is. It has been denounced as the political instrument of the rich, but it works hard and unselfishly for a bigger, better Dallas. A long time ago, men who could make decisions without recourse to corporate stockholders or to voters took over. These men could fire a lax police chief or allocate funds to an opera company. Each man had to be powerful enough in his own right to win the endorsement of the Citizens Charter Association, which is the political body which selects candidates to the council.

  It is easy to refer to the Citizens Council as the rulers of Big D, but they are individually and collectively responsible for maintaining the pride and the self-respect of a community which is defensively egocentric. The membership comes to about two hundred men, and there are no doctors, clerics, writers, or lawyers among them. All of them are corporate heads and their hobby is Dallas. Once, when Chance Vought Aircraft was contemplating a move from Connecticut to Dallas, it was found that Love Field’s runways were too short. Mr. D. A. Hulcy called a special meeting of the Citizens Council the same afternoon, voted $256,000 to lengthen the runways, and the aircraft company moved to Texas and employed twenty thousand Dallasites.

  The city government, oriented around the dollar, must, to be consistent, be conservative Republican. It was anti-union, anti-centralized government, anti-liberal, anti-welfare state, anti-foreign involvement. The political pendulum swung so far to the right in Dallas that the city symbolized conservative extremism in the eyes of the nation. Actually the description was inaccurate but the Birch Society members and the adherents of Major General Walker—small in numbers—were loud in public relations. The Dallas Council, which thinks of business first in relation to politics, was annoyed when Adlai Stevenson, Democratic liberal and nominee for the presidency, was hit on the head by a woman holding a rightist placard.

  The story hurt Dallas. Too late, the Citizens Council tried to dam the extreme right. The community was alive with thirtyish to fiftyish couples who were hospitable but who, once the topic of politics was introduced, became hysterical fanatics. They shouted intemperate extremist doctrine and would not listen to a dissenting voice. The women, as Warren Leslie pointed out in his book, Dallas City Limit, were louder and more violent than the men. To them, the enemy was Washington, D.C. When they paused for breath, they decried and denounced any conversation which might support another view. These were the scores of thousands of voters who infused fascist hysteria throughout Dallas in 1963. This is what John F. Kennedy meant when he said: “We’re in nut country.” The council endorsed the extremists with the left-handed animadversion: “They go a little too far.”

  The cloistered attitude of Dallas, which makes its citizens feel alien and separate even from Fort Worth, extends indeed to its legal values. Here drunken driving can be most reprehensible, but murder is often condoned. Some European countries do not average a hundred homicides per year, but Dallas sustains more. A stripteaser was sentenced to fifteen years in prison for possessing marijuana; several murderers won suspended sentences.

  It is legal for a Dallas husband to kill a rival if he believes the other man “is about to commit adultery on his wife.” And yet, in comparison with other communities, Dallas is a law-abiding city. Crooked policemen are few and are dealt with mercilessly. Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer did not violate any law, but it was never sold in Dallas because the authorities requested the bookshops not to sell it.

  One must return to the Dallas News to capture the metropolitan conscience. The news columns cover the same stories as the evening Times Herald and both are as fair in the treatment of national and local news as can be expected from writers who know that the publishers are conservative. It is on the editorial page that the News becomes cutting, sarcastic, inaccurate, and unfair. Here the drums beat in unison. Warren Leslie, who once worked for the paper, said: “Its editorial page has been not just dissenting, but insulting.”

  At a publishers conference at the White House, most of the owners of newspapers accorded respect, if not admiration, to the President. Only E. M. Dealey of the News criticized Mr. Kennedy face-to-face. He said that the country was looking for a man on a horse to lead it but that Kennedy was trying to do the job “on Caroline’s tricycle.” Kennedy seethed. Later, he asked government agencies to “check up on Ted Dealey.”

  A perusal of News editorials discloses another facet of its Dallas character: the writers seldom approve of anything or anyone. Their motif is negation and anger. The United States Supreme Court is a kremlin; the State Department harbors “perverts”; the White House plays the Soviet game; this morning, it published the full-page hate advertisement: “Welcome Mr. Kennedy to Dallas . . .” The Times Herald spurned the same ad.

  An exultation began to take hold of John F. Kennedy. The crowds grew heavier, street by street. All along, the Texas receptions had been bigger and friendlier than the predictions. San Antonio had been great; Houston was greater. But Dallas—Dallas was incredible. In the backup car, O’Donnell and Powers turned on a pair of Gaelic grins to match the sun. They knew that, if this continued, one million Texans would have seen the President by the time he reached the LBJ Ranch. One million persons who left home or business to see JFK. And this, of course, not counting the other millions who would see it on television or hear it on radio.

  The motorcade was at Craddock Park when the President saw a long, limp sign held by little boys and girls. It read: “Mr. President, Please Stop and Shake Our Hands.” Mr. Kennedy leaned between Governor and Mrs. Connally. “Let’s stop here,” he said to Bill Greer. The car stopped. The motorcycle cops braked down and swung away. The President leaned out and shook a lot of little hands. The bigger boys, yelling: “Our sign worked! It worked!” followed the little ones, and then the police tried to step in between. The Secret Service men on the backup car got off the running boards to herd the children away.

  Curry, who was at the junction of Lemmon and Turtle Creek Boulevard, received word of the unexpected stop and brought his vehicle to a slow walk. He asked if
there was any problem and a voice said: “No.” The motorcade started again. Once, near Reagan, the President tried to turn around, probably to see whether O’Donnell and Powers were reacting to the welcome. Powers was standing, half crouching, making home movies. O’Donnell was racking up votes mentally.

  The bank clocks flicked to 12:08, Temp: 68. 12:09, Temp: 68. 12:10, Temp: 68. In Washington, D.C., the clocks read: 1:08; 1:09, and John F. Kennedy, Jr., was not interested in them because time means little to a child who will enjoy his third birthday in three more days, and whose sister Caroline will be celebrating her sixth the day after tomorrow. Their British nanny permitted a great deal of birthday talk at lunch because their cousins, Teddy and Kara, the children of Uncle Ted Kennedy, were luncheon guests.

  Miss Shaw made certain that the children ate well, then she slowly turned down the lamp of excitement so that little heads might nap on downy pillows. There was no nap for J. D. Tippit this day. He was alone in a squad car, touring Post 78 in Dallas. He had Fruitdale and Cedar Crest to himself. It was a quiet sector, with two country clubs, some sparsely settled streets leading to Trinity River, and a veterans hospital.

  So quiet that Officer Tippit reported on Channel One that he was going to drive home for lunch. If he had any interest in Kennedy, Tippit was sure he could be seen on television in the house. But this assumption was mistaken, because local television coverage did not include the major portion of the motorcade; the sound portion described the welcome to the President, but the camera remained rooted to the interior of the Trade Mart.

  In thirty-five minutes, Tippit was back. He moved across Kiest Boulevard toward Illinois on his lonely vigil. Tippit was the good cop—big, duty-conscious, a robot who put in his time without complaint, listened to the dispatcher, and was seldom reprimanded. His boss, Sergeant Owens, thought of Tippit as a reliable policeman who would not advance in position. The rumor had gone around that Tippit may have taken the tests for promotion to sergeant more than once, but lack of sufficient formal education tripped him in the written examination.

  Tonight, after supper, he would go to Stevens Park Theatre and work a part-time job keeping order among the youthful moviegoers. At other times, he put in hours at Austin’s Barbecue to make a few extra dollars. Mrs. Tippit and the children needed everything he could bring in. The rest of today’s schedule was monotonous: keep patrolling 78, keep a lookout for stolen cars. If more patrol cars were needed for the downtown festivities, a few outlying patrols would be called in closer to the city. Other than that, keep the car moving slowly along the curbs until 3:50 P.M. Then turn in to Oak Bluffs substation and report off duty.

  Others were disappointed in the television coverage of the parade. Marina Oswald and Ruth Paine, in Irving, sat watching, but there wasn’t anything to see. They listened to the vocal report, and Mrs. Paine translated the substance of the story into Russian. Mrs. Oswald felt excited about this because, as she said, her husband was a chronic critic of all things American, but he had read several favorable articles about Kennedy, aloud and translated them in his pidgin Russian. When the rare mood to read was upon him, young Mr. Oswald was fond of reading a section and then giving his wife what he called the “real truth” about the story.

  Now, as she waited for the Trade Mart speech, Mrs. Oswald recalled that, when speaking about the President of the United States, her husband had once observed that eliminating him would do no good, because the American system was so devised that the man who took his place would continue the same political policy. Marina’s interest was not in Mr. Kennedy’s politics. It was in his family.

  Jack Ruby had a similar interest. Politics, at its simplest, consisted of top dogs and underdogs. Mr. Ruby had an inordinate interest in any “underdog.” He had been one, a ghetto Jew from Chicago, as he described himself, and Mr. Ruby became emotional when an underdog was hurt. President Kennedy was an underdog. He was Roman Catholic and a regular guy with a nice wife and two youngsters, but the Dallas News had insulted this wealthy and powerful young man. Ruby would like to have fought someone with his fists to protect the President’s good name, but he was not interested to the point of watching a parade.

  He was in the advertising department of the Dallas News and he had told his sister Eva that he was going to repeat what he had said on the phone to someone at the News: Were they hungry for the money that dirty ad brought in, and who was this Bernard Weissman? Don J. Campbell, salesman, returned from early lunch and conferred with Ruby. Somehow Kennedy was forgotten. Business was a more imperative topic, and Ruby told Campbell that, for his information, business was lousy.

  The space salesman listened. The account wasn’t big, but it was regular. Ruby showed Mr. Campbell the copy for two ads, one for the Carousel Club, the other for the Vegas Club. Ruby wrote a check for $31.87 on the Merchants State Bank (leaving a balance of $199.78) and began to boast about the fistfights he had engaged in to keep obstreperous customers from his nightclubs. He told Campbell that, when he saw trouble coming, he always carried a gun.

  The President’s car was at Reagan, and the crowds bulged from the building line to a point off the curb. The President held his right hand up and out, kept grinning at the crowd, and flexed his wrist in a gesture half flirty and part benediction. Softly, he kept saying: “Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.” Governor Connally could barely hear it from the back seat, and he wondered if the people knew what the President was saying. Back in the crowd, the small figure of Father Oscar Huber hopped up and down as he strained to look over many shoulders to see the President of the United States. So many people were waving back to Mr. Kennedy that the task became impossible. After the President had passed, Father Huber jumped once more and saw the back of the familiar head and the right side of the face. The priest waved, but he felt ridiculous because he knew that the President could not see him, so he turned away from the crowd for the walk back to the rectory. Father Huber reminded himself that he had not seen Mrs. Kennedy at all.

  At Hood, the cars made a slow right turn onto Turtle Creek. The Kennedys were now in the section of North Dallas where greenery and parks and a statue of Robert E. Lee created a different and aloof world. Some people lined the righthand side of the street, but they were neither deep in numbers nor loud in enthusiasm. They watched; they squinted in the hot sun. Some waved. Some did not.

  Mrs. Kennedy foraged in her purse and withdrew sunglasses. She put them on and smiled. The President, without losing his smile, said: “Jackie, take your glasses off.” She seemed surprised, but they came off, and rested on her wool skirt. Nothing, the President felt, masks a face and its individual personality more than sunglasses. He never admonished the Secret Service men, who were addicted to them, but they were not present to be seen in any case. A few moments later, Mrs. Kennedy absentmindedly slipped the glasses over her eyes. Her husband did not notice it at once, but when he did, he turned to her and said: “Take off the glasses, Jackie.”

  A nun in black habit stood on a corner with some small children, and the President ordered Greer to stop the car again. He didn’t get out. The long arm reached, the smile was polite and deferential, and he said a few words to the nun and waved the motorcade into motion. For Mrs. Kennedy, it was a long, hot ride, made a bit more aggravating by the fact that the breeze was out of the northwest at ten miles per hour, which matched the speed and direction of the car and left the occupants in a breezeless vacuum. Unless the honored guest feels a kinship for the people, a motorcade can be fatiguing, and the incessant need to smile becomes an aching monstrosity.

  Someone held up a homemade sign that spelled: “Kennedy Go Home!” The President nudged the Governor. “See that sign, John?” he said. “I see them everywhere I go.” The voice became tinged with bitterness. “I’ll bet that’s a nice guy,” he said. Riding through the Turtle Creek area, Greer moved the car up to twenty-five miles per hour and a cool breeze curled around the corners of the windshield. The First Lady held one hand on her hat. The spectators were sparse.<
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  Mr. Kennedy said: “John, how do things look in Texas?” He did not expect an optimistic response because he knew that the state had been split into three political entities: Republican; Democratic conservative; Democratic liberal. The President was also aware that John Connally, in spite of a Kennedy appointment as Secretary of the Navy, was not an ally. The Governor turned to his right, and squinted back toward the President. “There will be a Houston Chronicle poll out tomorrow,” he said. “That should give us some ideas.”

  It was a noncommittal reply, neutral at best. Mr. Kennedy was in a mood to press Mr. Connally. “What’s it going to show?” he said, aware that if the Governor placed any credence in the poll, he would have advance knowledge of its findings. “I think it will show that you can carry the state,” the Governor said guardedly, “but that it will be a close election.”

  The President seemed to be pleasantly surprised. Knowing that Connally was also running for reelection next year, he said: “Oh? How will it show you running?” The Governor grinned. “Mr. President,” he said, “I think it will show me running a little ahead of you.” Kennedy said, “That doesn’t surprise me” and closed the conversation. The President did not address the Governor again.