The Day Kennedy Was Shot

by Jim Bishop

  “What were you eating for lunch, Lee?” He said he ate a cheese sandwich, brought from home, and a Coca-Cola. Fritz was afraid to confront Oswald with evidence. He would not display to him the rifle and say: “Yours?” He would not draw to his attention the wealth of eyewitness statements now piling up in an office across the hall. Assuming that the prisoner was the person who shot Kennedy and Tippit and assuming that he was not more intelligent than the combination of hunters surrounding him, the interrogation was fruitless and repetitious. Oswald was not permitted to know what evidence the law had, and thus he was never forced into a defensive posture. He regulated all of these sessions and determined which questions he would answer and which would be met with silence. Had he known the amount of “ammunition” Dallas County had, it is almost certain that he would have tried to explode it to his advantage.

  “Do you own a rifle?” No. “Did you ever own a rifle?” The prisoner said he enjoyed hunting and had owned one a good many years ago. “Did you own one in Russia?” “You know you can’t own a rifle in Russia. I had a shotgun over there.” Again he was asked if he had seen a rifle at the Texas School Book Depository. The answer was again yes, that Mr. Truly and some of the boys were looking at a rifle.

  “What did you do after you left work?” He walked a couple of blocks to get away from the crowds and he caught a bus home. He changed his clothes and decided to go to an afternoon movie. He put his pistol in his belt and left. “Why did you take the pistol?” A small shrug: “Well, you know about a pistol. I just carried it.” He was asked again if he had shot President Kennedy and he again denied it. Oswald began to develop an attitude of confidence. “Did you shoot Officer Tippit?” “No, I did not. The only law I violated was in the show. I hit the officer in the show. He hit me in the eye and I guess I deserved it.”

  The questions followed a sedentary pattern. The responses were the same, sometimes almost word for word with what he had said earlier. As it continued, officers appeared on the far side of the glass partition and Fritz stopped, sometimes turning to the federal men—“You got any questions to ask?”—and walking outside for a brief time to get an oral report on some phase of the investigation, at others to give fresh assignments to teams of detectives.

  Fritz asked if Oswald was a member of the Communist Party. The answer was a shake of the head. He did not bring any package to work this morning. What had the police found on him when he was arrested? Oswald was enumerating the items when he said “bus transfer.” His mind paused. It was as though he detected a chink in his own armor. Again he began the story of how he left work for his room, except that this time he told how he got on a bus, but the crowds were too dense for progress, so he walked until he found a city taxi. He remembered that, as he got in the front seat with the driver, “some lady looked in.” She asked the driver to call a cab for her. He wasn’t sure, but he may have made some remarks to the driver “just to pass the time of day.”

  He was in error in his recollection of the taxi fare. Oswald said it was “eighty-five cents.” At times he sounded like an innocent eager to assist the police with all the miniscule details of the day. At others, he bluntly refused to answer any questions. The employees he had lunch with—the names escaped him; suddenly he remembered one was a Negro called “Junior.” A lot of his personal belongings could be found in Mrs. Paine’s garage, he said, but not a rifle. They were placed in her garage in September—two months ago—when he moved his family from New Orleans back to Dallas.

  Where had he purchased the pistol? “I won’t answer that one.” “How did you feel about President Kennedy? “I have nothing against him personally, but, considering the charge I’m here on, I prefer not to discuss it.” Would he take a polygraph test? No, he would not. It would be better for his counsel to decide, but “in the past I have refused to submit to those tests.” “Do you know that Governor John Connally had been shot?” “No, I do not. This is news to me.” “Do you deny that you shot him?” “Yes, I do.” “Did you tell someone named Wesley Frazier that you would bring curtain rods in his car?” That, said Oswald savagely, was a lie. The truth was that he preferred not to be in the Paine house at any time. He went there last night because there was going to be a party this weekend for the Paine children. Oswald did not want to disturb the household. So, instead of asking Wesley for the usual lift on Friday, he asked on Thursday.

  He was on ice too thin for skating. It could be proved that the party for the Paine occurred last week. At that time, Oswald’s wife had asked him not to visit her in Irving. Fritz toyed with a sharp letter opener. He said that Wesley’s married sister had seen him carrying a long package and watched him put it on the back seat of the car. The prisoner came to life. “She was mistaken!” he shouted. “That must have been some other time he picked me up.” Perhaps it was. The captain replaced the letter opener on the desk.

  Nothing had been opened.

  There was a mounting tension inside of Mrs. Eva Grant. She was a small, bird-like creature and her posthospital convalescence was prejudiced by her brother’s presence. She was emotional, but Jack Ruby was, at times, so unstable that she tried to have a calming influence on him. She was resting in her apartment, as her doctor had ordered, when he arrived for the second time. He was good-hearted; he intended well, but he swung wildly and suddenly between generosity and anger. He was the perpetually defensive Jew, and in another breath Ruby wept for the helpless of the world.

  He flopped in a chair and said he heard that there were going to be services at the synagogue for President Kennedy. He ought to go. Eva thought that it would be a nice gesture. The services would start at eight-thirty. He slumped and made a futile gesture. Jack said he had not been to Friday night services in a long time. It would be good to go tonight, Eva said, somewhat encouraged. People show respect for a dead President. He got out of the chair and made a phone call. Then he sat again and asked her if she had eaten.

  A little, she said. Her brother said she should take care of herself. He should eat a little himself, perhaps. Ruby got up and looked in the refrigerator. He made another phone call. Then he ate, talking all the time about Mrs. Kennedy and the children. They would have to return to Dallas for the trial, of course. He arose and made a short phone call. It would be unfair to force them to come back to Dallas, where Mrs. Kennedy’s husband had been shot. Very unfair. The whole situation had no class.

  He phoned Don Saffron, a columnist of the Dallas Times Herald, and asked him about the amusement page. Were the nightclubs closing in respect to Kennedy? He listened and hung up. “Eva,” he said, underplaying the drama, “what shall we do?” They had two small nightclubs which were doing poor business. What shall we do? Eva Grant wanted to read her brother’s turbulent mind and make the decision he would want her to make. “Jack, let’s close the three days.” He paused. “We don’t have anything anyway,” she said. “We owe to—” Tears began to well in her eyes.

  Ruby picked up the phone. He called Don Saffron again. “Don, we decided to close Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.” Saffron said: “Okay, Jack.” The only reason Ruby phoned Saffron was to have the columnist publish it. The next phone call was to the Dallas Morning News. Ruby said he wanted to cancel the advertising for his nightclubs. He was told that it was too late, the pages were already locked up. He asked his copy be changed to read that his clubs would be closed for the complete weekend.

  The short, taut conversations with his sister could not sustain him. Ruby cudgeled his mind to think of more people to phone. It was as though he felt an emotional burden on his heart. It might be dissipated by talking about it. The assassination had not meant a great deal to him when he had first heard the story at the Dallas News office. It was a thing remote from Jack Ruby’s problems. But when he saw the city swept into an emotional vortex, when he saw friends shake their heads and saw a tear here and there, the nightclub owner began to feel himself swept up in the dust of the storm.

  Anyone who spoke to him this day knew that, if
Jack Ruby could, he would have restored John F. Kennedy to life. The impossibility of a personal resurrection left him to contend with matters as they were—to do something (go to a synagogue); to condemn the prisoner without a trial (the creep has no class). Ruby phoned Cecil Hamlin, an old friend. Jack found he could weep freely. His voice was choked with sobs. Hamlin listened as Ruby told how he had closed his clubs, both of them, for the whole weekend. He felt so sorry for Kennedy’s “kids.”

  He phoned Temple Shearith Israel to ask about memorial services for the President. They would start at eight-thirty, he was told. A moment later, he called the synagogue again. Eight-thirty was the time. He hung up and told his sister: “It starts at eight-thirty. I’m going.” Then he phoned Alice Nichols. The lady was surprised. Ruby, who had never married and who, at times, was suspected of latent homosexuality, had courted Miss Nichols for several years. The faith, the trust he could not grant to others, he reposed in her.

  And yet he had allowed the old friendship to die. On this night, after a long, long time, he thought of phoning Alice Nichols. He told her how dreadful the assassination was, and she agreed. He said that he was going to attend temple services. She thought that was charitable. Miss Nichols may have expected a more personal message. Jack Ruby said good-bye and hung up. He looked at Eva sitting forlornly in a chair, and he said he was glad he had closed the clubs.

  She thought he began to look old. There was a difference, she felt, between the face of her brother this morning and the same face now. He was older. In her mind, she used the word “broken.” The face, which had never been handsome, was deeply etched with furrows and the eyes had retreated into dark and shallow wells. He phoned Larry Crafard at the Carousel. He seldom announced his identity. “Any messages for me?” he said. There were none. He turned back toward his sister.

  “I never felt so bad in my whole life,” Jack Ruby said. “Even when Ma and Pa died.” Eva felt her nervousness increase. “Well,” she said softly, “Pa was an old man. He was almost eighty-nine years.”

  The State Department of the United States has always been a separate church. It has its contemplative monks; parchment scriveners; mitered abbots; bishops who preach the gospel of Pan-Americanism to the heathens in the far corners of the world; a rota of cardinals who dwell within the sacred precincts to perfect a policy of no-decision; and, of course, a lower-case pope. Originally it was intended to be a foreign ministry, but early in the history of the republic the State Department achieved a status of apartheid, which was followed by an air of sanctification. In quarrels with other, lesser departments such as Treasury and Defense, the will of the State Department prevailed.

  Some Presidents learned, to their chagrin, that State was above and hardly beholden to the Chief Executive. Other Presidents joined State and ran it like messiahs. In the century since Seward had been Secretary of State, it had grown in size, in power, in compartmentalized subdepartments, in numbers, and in piety. State had become an august church with many bonzes, and all the prayer wheels emitted dial tones.

  The well-nourished George Ball, Acting Secretary of State until the return of Dean Rusk from Hawaii, received a phone call from the Federal Bureau of Investigation advising that the man arrested at the assassination was Lee Harvey Oswald, of Dallas, an expatriate who had fled to the Soviet Union in October 1959. He had tried to renounce his citizenship and, failing, returned to the United States with a wife and baby on or about June 13, 1962. Mr. Ball might want to check his department records.

  President Lyndon Johnson had appointed the Federal Bureau of Investigation to take charge of the federal government’s interest in the assassination. As the bits and pieces fall into place, J. Edgar Hoover, who had been Director of the FBI since 1924, kept his strong bulldog face behind his desk and surrounded himself with his best advisers so that the flow of information from Gordon Shanklin in Dallas to Washington was smooth, the delivery of evidence by air was swift, and the dissemination of information to responsible parties in Washington was almost instantaneous.

  George Ball learned of the involvement of the State Department, and he decided that it could not be researched by a clerk. He phoned Abram Chayes, legal adviser to the State Department, at his home, 3520 Edmunds Street Northwest, and asked him to return to the department at once. The assignment was simple and formidable. Chayes was told that Dean Rusk would be in Washington by morning at the latest. His function would be to spend the night poring over State Department files to find any which might relate to one Lee Harvey Oswald of Dallas, Texas.

  Mr. Chayes was a good lawyer. He recruited a couple of assistants and turned the lights on in a few dark departments. Some of the old files had red seals on them; some had other colors. It did not matter whether files were secret or not, locked or not, or hidden in vaults. Abram Chayes understood that a high crime had been committed, and his function was not to extricate the State Department from a possible cul-de-sac, but to dredge up anything bearing on the man who might have perpetrated the crime.

  The subordinate sections of the State Department do not relish surrendering their sovereignity to anyone, including superiors, but Mr. Chayes knew that the press would be at the departmental gates by morning, so he had to work fast. The women who cleaned the floors and waste baskets that night saw a man possessed—working to learn all that he could about one man in one night. First he went to the passport file and found the records on Oswald. From there he hurried to the State Department security office to find out if there was any record that this man might be a risk to his country.

  There were records, but Oswald was not regarded as dangerous. Chayes went to the SCS file (Special Consular Services) which covered the issuance of a visa to Mrs. Oswald and the loan of money to Lee Harvey Oswald to transport his family to the U.S. Locating them was not a simple matter in a vast bureau which prides itself on maintaining records. Secondly, the exhausted lawyer would have to start with the first item—an application for a passport in September 1959 by Lee Harvey Oswald in which he stated that he wanted to become a student at a college in Switzerland but wanted a visa for several other countries, including the Soviet Union.

  The whole story would have to start there. Abram Chayes would then have to find the second bit of information, which was a secret report from a U.S. consular official in Moscow that one Lee Harvey Oswald had appeared and demanded the right to renounce his American citizenship. It was a long road of papers, documents, reports. Somewhere in the mountain of material was the final item, where Lee Harvey Oswald had concluded repayment of the loan. When the research was completed, at some small hour, Mr. Chayes would be expected to dictate or type a digest of all he had learned. Dean Rusk would have to be armed with more than press releases; President Johnson was expected to ask some questions, too.

  Lyndon Johnson has two gaits. One, when he wants to talk, is slow, with his head cocked toward the listener, sometimes with one hand in a trouser pocket. The other stride is swift and reserved for when he is doing the listening. He walked with head up and arms swinging. He emerged from the South Lawn of the White House at the head of a small group of people, moving fast. The two at his side were Bundy and McNamara.

  The President had some ideas of his own: 1. He was the only person who could not afford a display of maudlin grief. In tragedy, the people look for strength, not weakness. 2. He must persuade the Kennedy team to continue with him until he acquired full control and understanding of the reins of government. 3. He would need all the bipartisan congressional support he could get. To achieve this, he would be forced to trade on old friendships on both sides of the aisle, but he had to have it. 4. It would be necessary to be briefed at once on all executive matters to which a Vice-President is not privy.

  Bundy was close to trotting. “There are two things I am assuming, Mr. President,” he said. “One is that everything in locked files before 2 P.M. today belongs to the President’s family, and the other is that Mrs. Kennedy will handle the funeral arrangements.” Johnson didn’t
break stride. “That’s correct,” he said. It was a poor assumption because some things in the President’s personal files could be related to official decisions, commitments, and policy. It might have been better for a person like Bundy, or Sorensen, to sift through those files at once and acquaint the new President with matters which might have a bearing on his official conduct. The President of the United States is in the position of a paid government employee whose acts and decisions are the property of the people.

  Silently, Johnson passed the White House policemen who stood in the darkness along the walk. Throughout the White House, Secret Service agents heard the beep on their radios and the word that the President of the United States was about to enter the Executive Mansion. Lyndon Johnson had become the prisoner of protection, and would continue to be for a number of years. He would not make a move, from office to hallway, from bedroom to East Room, from ranch house to front lawn without knowing that the word was being passed. Later, when he moved into the White House, the mere removal of the newspapers from in front of his bedroom at 7 A.M. would cause the night man across the hall to open his microphone and whisper: “Volunteer One is awake.”

  Directly ahead he saw the lighted French windows of the Oval Office. It was now his, but he would not use it. The drapes were half drawn. The inside, in brand-new colors, was as serene and majestic as ever. He had known that office, with awe, from the days when his hero Franklin Delano Roosevelt sat behind the desk, the burnished eyeglasses winking with light, the cigarette holder tilted upward. There had been times when, in a conference with President Kennedy, a government problem had been recited and the handsome young man would turn his stern gaze through a semicircle of advisers, prepared to ask: “Well, what should we do?” and Lyndon Johnson always hoped that the President would not ask him first.

  The door to Evelyn Lincoln’s office was held open for him, and he walked through. Someone said that Johnson should use the office of the President, and the President said: “No. That would be presumptuous.”