The Day Kennedy Was Shot

by Jim Bishop

  The most forlorn figure left on the concrete was Chief Jesse Curry. Once, a long, long time ago, he had been a truck driver. Then, by study and application, he had become a policeman, a good one who was rewarded by Dallas with promotion. Now he was the chief of police, with no ambition for higher office. His sole desire was to “keep his nose clean” and retire with honor.

  He sat behind the wheel, a man alone. He had worked hard and earnestly with the Secret Service, preparing for this day. All of it, including his career, died in an instant at Dealey Plaza. Someone—he didn’t know who—had disgraced Dallas in the eyes of the world. It didn’t matter, Curry knew, whether they found the guilty man or punished him—Dallas was going to need a goat.

  Curry picked up the telephone and called Channel Two.

  In any situation, there are usually two ways to turn. Lee Harvey Oswald, dogtrotting down Patton, reached the main street of Jefferson and turned right. The police turned left. They had an urgent call from Officer C. T. Walker that a suspect fitting the description of the man who had shot Patrolman Tippit was seen entering the basement of the library at Jefferson and Marsalis. It didn’t require much time to surround the building. Red-blinking squad cars winked all over the thoroughfare. Shotguns and revolvers were at the ready.

  Oswald kept trotting along Jefferson in the opposite direction, toward Crawford, Storey, and Cumberland. He was in no panic. Pedestrians and car salesmen saw him run by, and he turned into a filling station, trotted into the parking lot, unzipped his white Eisenhower jacket, and tossed it under a car. Whatever description had been given of him, he was now a slightly different man. He wore a burgundy plaid shirt. To hide the gun in his belt, he pulled the tails out, came out of the filling station, and continued trotting on Jefferson.

  Nick McDonald and the other policemen at the library ordered everybody in the library basement to come out with their hands up. The door opened, and a few frightened people came out. They came out slowly, including the young man in the white Eisenhower jacket—the suspect. It required only a minute or two to ascertain that this was the wrong young man. He had been spotted running at top speed into the basement of the library—true. But what had impelled him to do it was that he had just heard that President Kennedy had been shot in downtown Dallas, and his friends were in the library. He wanted to tell them. Also, he worked there.

  The police scattered. A half dozen squad cars began to comb the side streets of Oak Cliff. How far can a man on foot run in three minutes? Four minutes? Five minutes? Six minutes? How far? Which way? Often a car swung into a little street and found another police group already prowling the sidewalks and alleys. C. T. Walker, who had seen the young man run into the library, was now cruising slowly up a narrow thoroughfare. Ahead he saw a man in a white shirt and long sleeves walking behind a low fence. Walker, who had a newspaper reporter in the car with him, could only see the man from the thighs up. He placed his revolver on his lap and approached slowly.

  When he was within thirty feet of the man, Walker stopped the car. White Shirt kept approaching. Walker’s nerves were taut. He fingered the revolver and said: “What’s your name?” The man looked at the police officer and bent down behind the fence. Walker swung his revolver out the window. The man slowly raised up, with a small dog in his arms. “What did you say?” he asked.

  In a radio shop on Jefferson, the loudspeaker was turned up loud and some shoppers stopped to listen. On NBC, Robert MacNeil in Dallas was speaking to Bill McGee in New York: “Last rites of the Roman Catholic Church have been administered to President Kennedy,” he said. “This does not necessarily mean that his condition is fatal. Vice-President Lyndon B. Johnson walked into the hospital where the President is being treated. Mrs. Johnson said that her husband is all right. She did not want to say anything about the President; she is in a state of shock. A blood transfusion is being prepared for President Kennedy. . . .”

  The press was told, in groups outside the emergency room, that a conference had been called. The White House chief of records, Mr. Wayne Hawks, asked them to go to a nursing classroom on the ground floor of an adjacent wing. Kilduff would make an announcement. “What announcement?” the reporters demanded. “Is he badly hurt?” “Is he dead?” “We have deadlines.” “If I leave this spot, I lose the only telephone.”

  No one noticed the hospital flag at half-staff. Kilduff came out, tough and businesslike, but inwardly unstrung. He strode across empty lots and the journalists followed like disenchanted apostles. In the doorway, a nurse was sobbing. The assistant press secretary was looking for classrooms 101 and 102. Tom Wicker of The New York Times was loafing in the rear of the group when he heard the radio in the limousine which had been used by the Vice-President. “The President of the United States is dead,” the voice said. “I repeat—it has just been announced that the President of the United States is dead.”

  It was untrue. It had not been announced. The death story had started when a reporter insisted that the two priests had said that Kennedy had died. Father Huber said Mr. Kennedy had been “unconscious” when the last rites of the church had been administered. Still, to Wicker, instinct counted for something. The announcement lacked authority, and yet it carried the same stinging reality as those loud cracking sounds in Dealey Plaza. Wicker hurried a little and caught up to Hugh Sidey, of Time magazine. “Hugh,” he said, puffing, “the President is dead. Just announced on the radio. I don’t know who announced it but it sounded official to me.”

  Sidey paused. He looked at Wicker and studied the ground under his feet. They went on. Something which “sounds official” meets none of the requirements of journalism. The press did not know the story. The nearest anyone had come to it was Smith’s UPI phrase, “wounded, perhaps fatally . . .” In Washington each man had “sources” through which he might check a supposition. Seth Kantor was the only one with connections in Dallas and he had no more information than the others. All of them were first-rate reporters, men accustomed to the respect of the White House, men who not only recorded the news but who often tried to analyze it, shading the story a little this way or that, depending upon their inner beliefs and confidential opinions from their “sources.”

  They filed into the nurses’ classroom, with its desk and chalkboard, shouting for the announcement. They wanted it now. Some were demanding telephones. Jack Gertz of American Telephone and Telegraph Company was installing instruments as fast as he could. A few of the writers interpreted this as bad news. Why would they require special installations unless they were going to be stationed at this hospital for some time? And why would that be necessary unless President Kennedy was dying—or dead?

  Kilduff walked from the back of the room to the front and stood behind a clean greenish desk with the blackboard behind him. The reporters sat at desks or lounged against the walls. The folded sheaves of copy paper, the pencils and pens were ready. The assistant press secretary appeared to be flustered. His eyes were red. On his cheeks there was a hint of tears or sweat. Before him he had the sheet of paper with the precisely worded announcement.

  He was going to say: “Well, this is really the first press conference on a road trip I have ever had to hold.” What he heard himself say was: “Excuse me, let me catch my breath.” He was rolling an unlighted cigarette in one hand. The faces confronting him were familiar to him; some were his friends. They waited patiently now. Some were afraid that Kilduff was going to faint. There was an uneasiness in the room. General Chester V. Clifton, the President’s handsome military aide, took a silent stance near “Mac.” Flashbulbs were going off; a camera crew was trying to plug in some “frezzy” lights. Kilduff lifted the piece of paper and spoke mechanically: “President John F. Kennedy died at approximately 1 P.M. Central Standard Time today here in Dallas. He died of a gunshot in the brain.” A reporter roared: “Oh, God!” Some scrambled for corridors and telephones. One said: “Give us the details, Mac.” Kilduff began to breathe heavily. “I don’t have any other information,” he said.r />
  A cameraman glanced at his watch. The time was 1:33 P.M. A few of the writers did not move from the desks. They had just acquired the dazed, stunned expression which was spreading outward from Dallas. Good writers do not permit a story, not matter how heartbreaking, to touch them. Some of these men were re-creating the days of repartee with the President, the barb of Irish wit, the lucidity of his thoughts, the short era of youth which had permeated the White House with laughter, sweeping out the ghosts of solemn men of affairs—the Boston-accented words when the President said: “When the going gets tough, the tough get going.”

  This was a time for a clear, unsentimental head. Few of the writers could muster one. Any one of them could have thought of a dozen things he had postponed saying to President Kennedy, and time had run out. This morning there was nothing but time. Some of them, to keep the trip on the front pages, had to dig for the Yarborough intraparty fight. Until then, the journey through Texas had been small-town political huckstering on the fundamental level, praising each city, promising it more federal funds for more projects, endorsing its local Democrats, waving the flag of local patriotism, and closing with the hackneyed You-and-I-will-march-forward-together.

  Each of these men knew, better than most, the permanence of the word “dead,” and each riffled through his mental files for memories and unfinished business. The story was so monumental in size that they would be writing all day and half the night, trying to sew a literary crepe. A man in surgical white walked into the room. It was Bill Stinson, aide to Governor Connally, and he wanted to report on the condition of the Governor. Kilduff almost pinned him to the blackboard. “One o’clock, one o’clock,” he whispered loudly. The Governor’s public relations expert, Julian O. Reed, came into the room and, in answer to a reporter’s question, began to draw on the blackboard the seating in the President’s limousine. This became confused, corrected, and redrawn, until at last all hands agreed that this was where the Kennedys were sitting, and here, in the jump seats, the Connallys sat.

  One of the writers started to ask a question and burst into tears. In the hospital hall, a woman married to a United Press International man dropped a dime into a public telephone. In one minute, teletype machines chattered everywhere:

  FLASH

  PRESIDENT KENNEDY DEAD

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  “We must get her out of there,” O’Donnell said. “If she sees that casket, it’s going to be the final blow.” Mr. David Powers, small and bald and close to tears, said that he would give Mrs. Kennedy some kind of a story to get her away from Trauma One right now. It would help, O’Donnell said, if they could both get her into a room on a pretext that they had to talk over something confidential. Then let the Secret Service sneak the box into the room and it would spare her an additional shock.

  It would have to be done quickly, because Oneal was expected at the emergency entrance. The plotters decided to do it together. They sauntered over to Trauma One and started the little whispers about the need for a private chat. At first, Mrs. Kennedy stared at her husband’s dear friends, the mouth still half open with shock, the dark eyes pooled with grief. Suddenly she shook her head negatively. “No,” she said firmly, “I want to watch it all.” She spurned the easy way.

  Vernon Oneal and two assistants rolled the four hundred-pound bronze casket down the long corridors, between the rows of faces awaiting medication or treatment and around the narrow corner to Trauma One. It was on a carriage and, as they passed Mrs. Kennedy, the three men glanced at her and mumbled their sympathy. Inside they turned it over to Nurse Hutton and offered their assistance. The casket, as Kenneth O’Donnell said, may have been the final blow to the widow, but she did not whimper. She saw the gleaming bronze sides and the silver handles and the huge convex lid, but she didn’t flinch. She studied it.

  Miss Hutton had a problem. The brains of the President were still oozing from the massive hole in his head. She had lifted the body by the neck, and wrapped four sheets around it, but it was still leaking through. Obviously it would stain the casket, with its white satin shirring. She asked Supervisor Doris Nelson for instructions. “Go up to Central Supply,” she was told, “and get one of those plastic mattress covers.”

  The cover was placed in the casket, so that the edges hung over the sides. Then the nude body of the President, covered with sheets, was lifted inside. The plastic was folded over him and the lid was closed. Nurse Bowron sighed. The British girl had never been to America before, but this was a day she would never forget.

  The mayor’s wife wished to be sympathetic. “Mrs. Kennedy,” she said softly, “I am Elizabeth Cabell. I wish there was something—” “Yes,” Mrs. Kennedy said, “I remember you gave me the roses.” The tone was soft and musical, but the mind retreated from reality. “I would like a cigarette,” Mrs. Kennedy said. Mrs. Cabell looked for her purse. When she glanced up again, the young widow had disappeared. She was in one of the trauma rooms. Mrs. Kennedy found her pocketbook on a carriage and dug into it looking for cigarettes. The mayor’s wife said: “I have a cigarette for you.” She held them out but Mrs. Kennedy did not see. When she found her own, she stuck one in her mouth and stared at Mrs. Cabell as though seeing her for the first time. “I don’t have a match,” she said.

  They were back in the chairs, waiting for the casket to come out of Trauma One, when a priest came around the corner. He was the Catholic chaplain at the hospital, too late to be of any assistance, but not too early to irritate Mrs. Kennedy with pious platitudes and hand-patting. It is possible that she wanted to ask him where he was when her husband needed him so desperately; it is possible that the man was not in the hospital at the time, or, if he was, no one informed him that a Christian was expiring. It is even possible that his approach was too unctuously friendly. Mrs. Kennedy needed some assistance to break the conversation.

  In the outer hall, a Negro preacher arrived and said that he had been called to comfort a dying President of the United States. No one asked him the name of his church or who called him. He was ushered out by the Secret Service, who assured him that the matter had been taken care of. Mrs. Kennedy, hostile to the living, stamped her cigarette out and went into Trauma One and sat in a chair with her head leaning against the cold side of the casket.

  The forward door on Air Force One was closed by Clint Hill. He turned the handle inside and locked it. A Secret Service man was stationed there and another at the rear ramp. On the concrete below, Secret Service men stood quietly, facing away from the aircraft. City police details patrolled the airport, and detectives walked from counter to counter, looking over young men who were departing from Dallas. Uniformed policemen patrolled the fence and Gate 24.

  When Lyndon Johnson got aboard, he ordered all the shades drawn. The interior was hot and stuffy. The air conditioning had been shut down when the engines stopped. Mr. Johnson and his party threaded the aisle through the communications shack, where sergeants with headsets crouched, looking up in wonderment as their new President passed. The group went through the galley and the crew’s quarters, all forward of the wing, then into the staff and press area, where the seats faced the back of the plane. In the middle of the silvery wing was the door to the President’s private stateroom. An attendant held the door open, and the Seal of the President shone in white.

  The first sound inside was from the television set. Lyndon Johnson looked up to see the face of Walter Cronkite, in New York, discussing a dark deed in Dallas. The President shhh’d everyone, hoping to hear something new about the extent of the assassination plot. A commentator in Dallas told Cronkite that Mr. Kennedy had been pronounced dead; the shots came apparently from a school book building near the end of a lively motorcade; the police had clues and were looking for a suspect; Vice-President Johnson had left Parkland Memorial Hospital but no one knew his whereabouts.

  The big stateroom with its wall-hugging couches and ornate desk and rug was just as John F. Kennedy left it, except that the Texas newspapers were now crumpled in a ra
ck. Mrs. Johnson walked aft to the bedroom with tears in her eyes. She alone had noticed the hospital flag at half-staff and it had crushed her with its finality as the sight of the bronze casket had Mrs. Kennedy. The bedroom has a walkway on the port side of the plane. Outside the bedroom another Secret Service agent stood. In the tail of the plane was a small area near the ramp door for the President’s staff and Secret Service men. There were two lavatories, a small galley, and a breakfast nook.

  The President left the television set and walked toward the back of the plane. He instructed the stewards to hold the private bedroom for Mrs. Kennedy’s use. However Mr. Johnson quickly discovered that there was no other place from which he could make a private phone call, so he removed his jacket, tossed it on a clothes tree, and signaled the communications crew that he would be using this phone for a while.

  There were many phone calls; the shocked man had to know that, beyond this little hell of terror, there was a normal, sunny world which was still official and still functioning. One of the first calls was to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. This one required some thought. Words of sympathy sound superficial no matter how well intended. Johnson wanted to convey the depth of his personal loss as well as offering his hand to the Kennedy family; he also wanted to ask the Attorney General for a legal opinion on when to take the oath of office as President.

  Neither of these was easy to say. Robert Kennedy, on the phone, was less emotional than the President. He had no report from the FBI or any other government agency that there was a broad plot against the leading officers of government; he knew that Governor Connally had been hit, but it could be an accident, because he was in the same car with Robert’s brother. So far as the oath of office was concerned, he wasn’t sure when it should be administered or by whom. He promised to have Assistant Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach call back with the correct answers.*