The Day Kennedy Was Shot

by Jim Bishop

  The screen door swung open and a good-looking man walked in. He smiled at Ruth and said: “As soon as I heard about it I hurried over to see if I could help.” The police asked who this was. It was Michael Paine, husband of Ruth, an aircraft executive. The marriage was a friendly estrangement, difficult to define. The police studied the man and wondered why he would “hurry over” as soon as he heard about it. Mr. Paine meant that the airwaves were laden with the name Lee Harvey Oswald and he knew that Oswald was a weekend boarder at his wife’s house.

  The cops found Russian books and, not knowing whether they were significant or not, stacked them in the pile with the wedding ring, the rifle blanket, Mrs. Oswald’s passport, her birth certificate, immigration card, the birth certificates of the children—June and Rachel. There were some letters written in Russian from Marina’s family in Minsk, a diploma, a few communist tracts. From Mrs. Paine’s bedroom the officers removed a large assortment of vacation color slides, a Sears Tower slide projector, a metal filing box.

  With no advance knowledge of what to take, they began to outdo each other in picking up material to be assessed at headquarters. Within a few minutes, they had a second slide projector, three boxes of high fidelity records, a telephone index book, even a wall bracket with instructions for mounting. A policeman riffled through a magazine, and, being mystified about its contents, tossed it onto the pile. It was Simplicity, a sewing periodical.

  The chief walked into headquarters like an intruder. He came up out of an array of vehicles storming in and out of the basement, screeching brakes, and shouts, and Jesse Edward Curry took the elevator up to the third floor feeling that he had never known a day like this and wouldn’t want to see another like it. As he stepped off at the third floor, he took a step and stopped. Ahead of him was a mass of male humanity jammed and murmuring. There were cameras, huge staring lights, and microphones.

  Someone yelled: “Let the chief through!” and he bent his head and started toward his office, at the opposite end of the cross. Here and there he recognized a detective trying to buck the tide, working along the edge of glassy offices toward the elevator. Some men thrust microphones under the chief’s chin and yelled: “Come on. Give us a statement. Did he kill the President? Did he?”

  Curry kept moving slowly toward his office. He passed Fritz’s Robbery and Homicide, but he couldn’t see over the tops of all the heads. He remembered General Order 81, and he recalled how well Glen King had cooperated with the press. But what the hell was this! This was insanity, madness, bedlam. This was an aggressive group of strangers gone berserk. They were taking over headquarters.

  He fought his way to his office. There wasn’t time to look for messages. Cables were coming in thick and black over windowsills, curling across the floor and out into the hall. Curry saw Batchelor and Lumpkin, but they too were helpless. The chief learned that a policeman had had to be posted at Fritz’s door to keep the press from crushing in on the interrogation itself.

  Obviously police headquarters had been overrun by the press. The control points at elevators and staircase were worthless because the nation’s reporters were descending on Dallas with credentials, and the European journalists were en route. It was a time to make a decision. The word must come from Curry. The situation was so bad that he had but two choices: either call his reserves and have the press dispossessed from the third floor en masse or permit them to remain there and hope that the situation would improve.

  Curry was a “cooperation” chief. Editors and writers can be venomous. The story of the assassination was now bigger than anything Dallas could remember; it would go down in history as one of the major stories of the twentieth century, possibly the most dramatic. If Curry threw them out, there would be wails and protests and phone calls from men in high places. The chief and his department could assume a defensive posture in the assassination. It had happened in his city. Dallas, which had done its best, could be charged with according the President token protection.

  It would be a lie. But it could be written. It could gain credence. These were not local reporters, men whom Curry knew by their first names. They were from big city dailies and wire services in San Francisco and Seattle and Salem and New York, Omaha, Philadelphia, Chicago, Atlanta, Miami, Washington, Baltimore . . .

  If Curry weighed the matter, he confided in nobody. This was a day for people to be shocked and stunned for one reason or another, and it was his turn. He could not believe what he saw in the hall, but he would do nothing about it. A word from Curry and the harassed police would have been delighted to order everybody off the floor. A press room could have been set up on the first floor, where the courts and the traffic violations bureau were through with their work. Captain King could have reported to the press every half hour or every hour. He could have given them whatever Curry and Fritz wanted to tell. The reporters would have more space to set up their portable typewriters, their telephones. The photographers could have been allowed to see and photograph the suspect at the successive lineups which would be held several times for witnesses today.

  There would be no scoops, no newsbeats. A sergeant and four officers could have maintained order on the first floor. But the word never came. The chief wanted to be a “good guy” and he was. But the press always had trouble spelling the word gratitude. It took what it wanted; it hanged whom it pleased; it unmanned officials who stood in its way.

  Curry left his office and fought his way to the Homicide Bureau. The situation was intolerable. The chief couldn’t understand men who were shouting in his ear. He got to Fritz’s office and went by the cop at the door and inside to see what the captain was doing.

  He looked at the prisoner, who looked up from his chair at the corner of the desk. Then he nodded to Fritz and the others. Curry’s stomach began to sicken. This, too, was all wrong. This was no way to interrogate a prisoner. The proper way was to have him alone in a quiet room, with perhaps one other person—a witness or an interested party. He looked at the Secret Service men, including Inspector Thomas J. Kelley, the two men from the FBI, the Texas Rangers lounging against a wall, and two detectives from the Homicide Bureau. There was barely room to stand in the office. The air seemed to have left the place.

  The chief of police looked at the young man with the bruise over one eye and a small laceration under the other. He didn’t look like much, to have caused such a commotion. Curry left the office without asking a question.

  The most positive person was Mrs. Marguerite Oswald. She had the righteously folded face of a woman who knows her rights. She arrived in Dallas dry-eyed. If there were tears for her son, she was saving them. Behind the glittering eyeglasses, her gaze was as steady as the flight of a bullet. She said she did not wish to speak to the police. She would not speak to them if she was brought into their presence. The custard jowls shimmered with determination. “I want to speak to the FBI,” she said.

  People by the thousands all over the world may have wept, may have wrung their hands at this time. Many who were totally unrelated to the crime were overcome by hysteria and could not continue their tasks. This woman dominated everything within her purview. All her life she had fought for a foot or two of living space, and the enormity of this crime, even the possibility that her son might be charged with it, would not alter her loud and indignant attitude toward the world.

  She had dominated her husbands. She had dominated her sons. Marguerite was easily affronted and could nourish pain for a long time. The husbands, one by one, had died or divorced her. The oldest son, John Edward Pic, lived in Staten Island, New York, and did not communicate with her. The second one, Robert Edward Lee, Jr., lived in nearby Denton. She had not seen him in a year. The baby, Lee, had left her to run off to Russia. Marguerite had made trips to Washington, demanding to see highly placed officials, because her Lee had changed his mind and desired to come home. It was not a poor mother’s duty to bring him back. That was the government’s job. He had served his country as a United States marine. He ha
d been overseas in the Far East. If, in Moscow, he had demanded the right to renounce his American citizenship, it had nothing to do with his present frame of mind, which was to come home with his Russian bride and their baby.

  Marguerite Oswald was taken to a room where she was introduced to two men. They said they were FBI agents, although they showed no I.D. cards. Strangely they had the same name: Brown. Mrs. Oswald said she had something important to tell them—something they should know before this assassination investigation got out of hand. “I want to talk with you gentlemen,” she said, sitting, “because I feel like my son is an agent of the government, and, for the security of my country, I don’t want this to get out.”

  The men glanced at each other. They appeared to be shockproof. “I want to talk to FBI agents from Washington,” she said. One of them nodded. “Mrs. Oswald, we are from Washington.” The lady wasn’t certain that these were the right men. “I understand you work with Washington,” she said, “but I want officials from Washington.” They told her that she had the right men. “I do not want local FBI men,” she said. Her manner bespoke one who wants to reveal a hyper-secret which will climax the events of the day.

  “Well,” one of the Mr. Browns said, “we work through Washington.” This did not mollify Mrs. Oswald. “I know you do,” she said, pursing her lips and staring candidly at them. “I would like Washington men.” The conversation ground to a geographical stalemate. They were not quite from Washington but they would not produce FBI agents who were.

  She decided to tell them who she was. Mrs. Oswald, as was her right, always emphasized her mother role. Throughout her life, when minor debates appeared to be lost because of logic, she often said: “I am a mother. You do not know how a mother feels. . . .” The lady got a lot of mileage from pathos.

  “For the security of the country,” she said at last, “I want this kept perfectly quiet until you investigate.” They nodded rapidly. “I happen to know that the State Department furnished the money for my son to return back to the United States, and I don’t know, if that would be made public, what that would involve, and so please will you investigate this and keep this quiet.” They looked at each other as though they weren’t certain what weight to apply to the statement. The money of which she spoke had been lent to Oswald on his plea that he was broke. He had promised to repay the State Department, and he had, to the last penny.

  “Congressman Jim Wright knows about this,” Marguerite Oswald said. She also gave them the names of four officials of the State Department whom she had badgered to help her son. The two Browns left her. They thanked her and said they would contact Washington. She might have added that her son Lee, on his return from the Soviet Union, had protested a dishonorable discharge from the United States Marine Corps. He had addressed this demand for a hearing to the Secretary of the Navy, who was John Connally. Mrs. Oswald did not mention this, although it seemed to some outsiders that Oswald’s protest had merit, inasmuch as he had served his hitch in the Marines honorably and had earned an honorable discharge. What he did afterwards as a defector to the Soviet Union occurred after his military service.

  Marguerite Oswald had given the FBI something to think about. In a little while she left for Dallas Police Headquarters. She wanted to see her boy.

  4 p.m.

  The cold night wind swept the face of Europe. It came strong and steady out of the northwest, combing through the hedgerows of the Scottish moors, swinging the street lamps in Antwerp. There was a chill in it and pedestrians walked the Ring of Vienna with heads down and collars up to find that the opera had been canceled. The shops along the Champs-Elysées were bright with light, but the doors were locked. Under the Arc de Triomphe the eternal flame was whipped by a night wind which had no gusts but which pulled steadily at the crisp leaves along the Bois de Boulogne.

  Radio Eireann canceled its programs as though anything more frivolous than Brahms would be sacrilegious. A Dublin commentator said: “It’s as if there was a death in every family in Ireland.” In the little Wexford town of New Ross, Andrew Minihan remembered that John F. Kennedy stood in the square and said: “This is not the land of my birth, but it is the land for which I have the greatest affection, and I certainly hope to be back again in the springtime.”

  Out in the hills beyond Dublin, Sean O’Casey, eighty-three and finished, the eyes dim beyond repair, sat under a bright light, the blue-brooked hands trembling, and wrote: “Peace, who was becoming bright-eyed, now sits in the shadow of death; her handsome champion has been killed. Her gallant boy is dead. We mourn here with you—poor sad American people.” In London, the great bell of Westminster Abbey began the solemn bass tone which reverberated across the bridge and up toward The Strand. No one paid much attention until it passed the count of ten. It would toll for a solid hour, a tribute reserved for royal dead.

  In Burdine’s store in Miami, Mrs. Christine Margolis sobbed on the phone behind the cosmetics counter. Her daughter was trying to tell her what had happened, and Mrs. Margolis moaned: “Honey, don’t cry. Don’t cry.” A Marine sergeant in Caracas, Venezuela, had an hour of daylight left. He strode smartly to the flagstaff in front of the United States embassy, saluted, and pulled the halyards until the banner was at half-staff. A Greek barber in New York said: “I cry.”

  Richard Nixon reached his home in New York and dialed J. Edgar Hoover. The FBI Director said that the Dallas police had picked up a suspect named Lee Harvey Oswald. He was a member of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee and a self-proclaimed Marxist, Mr. Hoover said. Nixon sat thinking of his Texas statement that Lyndon Johnson might be dropped from the Kennedy ticket. In the East, three race tracks closed—Aqueduct, Narragansett, and Pimlico—“in memory of President John F. Kennedy.” Many of the bettors did not know that he was dead.

  At Andrews Air Force Base the order went out to don “dress uniforms.” The Air Force posted a ceremonial cordon of honor guards on the hard stand where Air Force One would stop. The Army sent three squads of men from Fort Myers, men properly drilled in a deathwatch. Helicopters coming in from the White House with distinguished mourners were requisitioned and ordered to stand by in case Mrs. Kennedy and the new President wanted to use them. The Marines, the Navy, the Coast Guard sent representatives. Someone suggested that it would be fitting if one or two men from each branch of service was used. They began to learn to drill together within the hour.

  Nuns in convents all over the world knelt in dim chapels—no matter what the hour—intoning the rosary for the repose of the soul of a Roman Catholic chief of state. Dr. Russell Boles, Jr., was summoned from Boston to the side of Joseph P. Kennedy at Hyannis Port to ascertain whether the father, convalescing from a cerebral hemorrhage, could withstand the shock of the news. At the United Nations in New York, the news was whispered to the pink bald head of General Dwight D. Eisenhower. For a moment, he showed outrage. “There is bound to be a psychotic sort of accident sometime,” he said and put on his topcoat and left.

  There was an astonishing river of flame in West Berlin. It started with students holding torches, parading toward the Rathaus. The parade picked up volunteers on each street. By the time it reached the big square with the rough-stoned buildings, 300,000 Germans were carrying torches, and a band began the slow sad strains of Ich hatt’ einen Kameraden. In Bonn, Chancellor Erhard proclaimed a military alert; the German government feared a Soviet invasion.

  An advice was received by the U.S. Naval Hospital at Bethesda, Maryland, that an autopsy would be performed there. Doctors were summoned to the administration office by flashing numbers in the corridors, and teams were made ready for the work. A suite of rooms on the seventeenth floor, including kitchen and sitting room, was prepared for the Kennedy family. The doctors at Bethesda were aware, from radio and television reports, that the dying President had been taken to a place called Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas. No Navy doctor thought of phoning Parkland to ask what procedures had been tried, what wounds had been treated, to ask to what surgi
cal abuses the body had been submitted. Nor did it occur to Parkland, when the news was broadcast that the remains were headed for Bethesda, to phone with a summary report of Texas procedures.

  Shortly after 4 P.M. in Dallas, Dr. James Carrico completed a two-page summary of medical findings and procedures at Parkland. It encompassed only the emergency work of Carrico and his confreres. No one had time to examine the President thoroughly before he died. Or after. In another office, Dr. William Kemp Clark completed a two and three-quarter page medical summary in his own rapid scrawl. It might have helped Bethesda to know that the extruding hole in the President’s neck had first been a small exit wound and that it had been enlarged surgically to permit a tube to be inserted into the bronchial area to assist breathing.

  It was not a good day for professional thinking of any kind.

  There is a penalty for being the so-called “good boy” in a family. Robert Oswald was the good boy. He wore the attributes of a responsible citizen when he was very young. His mother put him and his brothers into an orphanage. Robert understood unquestioning obedience, respect to elders, how to face misery, to live in hardship and poverty, and to protect a younger brother. Robert Oswald was born old. The only time he ever boasted, he said: “I do not go to pieces.”