by Jim Bishop
There were three former Presidents alive: Herbert Clark Hoover, who lived in the Waldorf Towers in New York City; Harry S. Truman, of Independence, Missouri; Dwight D. Eisenhower, of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Hoover was convalescing from an illness. Lyndon Johnson phoned Truman. The men exchanged feelings of shock, and Truman promised the President all the support he might need. Truman was asked to come to Washington; he said he would arrive on Sunday. Johnson said he needed help.
The President saw Juanita Roberts stick her head inside the office. He raised his face inquiringly. She said that a group of Senators and Representatives were in the outer office. Johnson said to ask them to wait. He needed them, too; he needed these men most of all. They had power. Some political honeymoon would have to be hurriedly arranged between the Chief Executive and the Congress. The whole world was watching the United States, and there would have to be unity of purpose on display.
He asked Bill Moyers to handle the phone calls. The lean and taciturn Baptist minister, standing at the side of the big desk, started the next phone call as the President was speaking. Johnson was talking to Dwight D. Eisenhower, and the President offered to send a plane. Eisenhower was a Republican. He understood the importance of consensus and said he and Mrs. Eisenhower would arrive in Washington in the morning. The phone calls were brief and, as Johnson hung up the phone, Moyers handed another transmitter to him.
A call went in for J. Edgar Hoover. The Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation was home watching television. President Johnson said that he wanted a complete investigation and a report on the assassination. He was appointing the FBI to take charge of it, and he was herewith giving Hoover whatever plenary powers he would require to see it through. Hoover called FBI headquarters and ordered twenty agents to fly to Dallas this night. He phoned Gordon Shanklin in Dallas—a man who had forty agents in the area—and informed him that the FBI was now in charge of the federal investigation.
Johnson arose from his desk and strode into the anteroom, where the Republican and Democratic leaders of the Congress waited. The President walked around the group, shaking hands, looking at each man eyeball to eyeball. Some were still stunned. They looked like distraught children, asking guidance from father. The tall Texan leaned against a table and said he was speaking, not as a President, but as “friend to friend.” He needed their help. They knew he needed it.
In a manner of speaking, the tragedy had brought the nation to its knees. Strong leadership would be required, and he was prepared to render it, but without Congress he could do very little. If ever there was a time when they could forswear party labels and criticism, this was the time. He would have a message for the Congress in a couple of days—perhaps Monday or Tuesday—but Johnson wanted their support right now. The honored gentlemen murmured assent. He had nothing special to ask them now. The President returned to Room 274.
It was happening as Mrs. Johnson knew it would. He was “pulling all those people together, pleading; he would give a little to get a little. . . .”
The policeman’s hand smoothed the bus transfer on his desk. Lieutenant Wells had finally traced that little piece of paper. He had known that each driver had his own punch, but the problem of finding out who used a punch shaped like an old-fashioned door key with one crooked tooth had not been easy. The lieutenant studied the piece of paper, and he called Dhority and Brown over. “This bus transfer was found on Oswald,” he said. “It was punched today. The thing may be of no importance, and yet it may turn out to be something we should know about. The bus companies have gone over their records, and they say that this punch belongs to a man named Cecil McWatters.
“Drop over to Commerce and Harwood and wait for a Piedmont bus. They’re sending the driver in on it. Pick him up, find out what you can about when he issued this transfer. See if he can remember who got it. Sometimes a driver doesn’t punch more than one or two in a round trip. If he remembers, I want him to take a look at Oswald in a showup.”
Someone said: “Oswald just came back up from a showup.” Lieutenant Wells shook his head. “He’s available. We may have a half a dozen before this night is over.” Dhority and Brown wanted to know how they would recognize McWatters. “He’ll get off the bus. He’ll be looking for you.”
Across the hall, Lee Harvey Oswald crossed his legs and said he was getting tired of answering questions. “I did not shoot the President,” he said softly. “My wife and I like the President’s family. They are interesting people. I have my own views on the President’s national policy.” He shrugged. “I have a right to express my views. . . .” Thomas J. Kelley, inspector of the Secret Service, was sitting in on the interrogation. He asked several questions. Oswald looked around the room, from face to face, the master rather than the slave, the feared rather than the fearful.
He said he would like to get one thing straight. Questions had been answered all day. He didn’t think it was right to continue unless he had counsel. Captain Fritz reminded the prisoner that arrangements had been made for him to use the phone. Oswald gave him a little smile. He might have mentioned that his collect call to John Abt in New York had been declined. If the police department had returned his thirteen dollars, Oswald could have paid for the call. The cops had given him ten cents. The money was his; there was no reason to impound it. In a way, his rights were infringed. But Mr. Oswald did not mention these matters. He said he still hoped to retain the services of John Abt; failing that, he hoped that the Dallas Civil Liberties Union would help him to get a lawyer.
Captain Fritz sat listening. He could have said: “Use my phone.” Some of the law officers present were qualified attorneys: they could have offered to make the call to Abt; they could have suggested that Oswald be permitted to use his own money to make the call. They could have called the Dallas Bar Association at once and asked for someone to advise Lee Harvey Oswald of his civil rights. No man present was prepared to buck Will Fritz. No one had a desire to help a loathsome creature who might have killed a President with no more motive than to become well known by doing it.
In spite of the recalcitrant attitude of the prisoner, the questioning went on. Whenever he balked, they gave him a rest for a few moments, talked about casual things—family, jobs, Russia—and returned to the crimes he denied as though, this time, the response might be different. No force was used or contemplated; a few officers believed that the deadly monotony of the questions would, in time, crack Oswald’s resolve. To the contrary, it is probable that he enjoyed jousting with the police.
McWatters was brought in to an office on the other side of the hall. The reporters shouted questions at him, but he was as confused as they. Cecil McWatters was a veteran bus driver. All Dhority and Brown told him was that he was wanted in police headquarters to answer some questions. When he saw the crowd and realized that it had something to do with the assassination, he felt frightened.
The cops pointed to a chair and the driver sat. They said that they had a transfer, issued for Lamar Street and marked 1 P.M., and they would like to know if he recognized the paper. He took it in his hands, looked it over carefully, and held the punch hole up to a green-shaded light. “Yes,” he said. “This is my punch.” He dropped it back on the desk. The bus driver picked up a blank sheet of paper, took his metal punch, and squeezed. “See?” he said, holding it up. The marks were identical. No other driver would have a similar punch.
There was a roar of sound from the press in the hall. A detective and a Secret Service man had Howard Brennan by the arm. The man who had sat on the low wall in Dealey Plaza, his tin hat on the back of his head, and had seen the assassin in the window, was a frightened witness. As Mrs. Brennan had pointed out, there was no use running away; the Brennans would be found.
The pipe fitter was a strong man. The nervousness was plain. Forrest Sorrels of the Secret Service introduced him to Captain Fritz in an anteroom. Brennan said he could promise nothing. In fact, he was sure he would not recognize the man he saw with the rifle. He had seen th
e gun first; the man was dim in the background behind the partly opened window. Once or twice the gunman had leaned forward, so that he was clear in the sunlight, but it had happened so quickly that a man would have to be pretty sure before pointing a finger at anyone. Fritz said he understood. The police didn’t want lies or exaggerations which would not stand up in court.
Brennan was taken to another office. He looked miserable. In the next glass cubicle, the bus driver sat waiting. Two offices away, Ted Callaway, an automobile salesman who had heard shots and had seen a young man running down Patton, also waited. A Negro porter, Sam Guinyard, was patient. He worked at a used car lot at Patton and Jefferson, and he watched a dogtrotting man stick a revolver in his belt and pull his sports shirt outside his trousers to cover the weapon.
Detectives herded the witnesses toward the elevators, through the dense crowd which shouted questions. McWatters told a policeman that the bus transfer was not on the Piedmont line, which he was working this evening. It was the Lakewood line, which he had worked earlier today. He was told that he could draw up an affidavit later, explaining everything.
In the showup room, the witnesses were sitting behind the screen. None knew any of the others, except for Callaway and Guinyard. They worked at the same car lot. A policeman turned lights on and the small space down front was flooded with brightness. Fritz and Sorrels came down with the prisoner and he looked at the same faces of policemen who would be shackled to him. Those who watched his face closely could detect no rancor, no fear. He must have known that, in the darkness out front, witnesses sat staring at him, perhaps ready to point a finger at him and tie him to the Kennedy and Tippit murders.
If this is so, Oswald acted as though he had no cares. He became the number two man in the lineup, and, this time, two unshackled plainclothesmen accompanied the four “prisoners” into the powdery light. Lieutenant Sims conducted the questioning. He asked each man to state his name, his age, his address, where he went to school, whether he drove a car, and, if so, which type. Each was asked to face front; to turn and stand left; turn and stand to the right.
The bus driver studied all six men, even though two were obviously policemen. He found them to be of different ages and sizes, but he recalled issuing a transfer to a woman who wanted to catch a train and a young fellow who left the bus at the same stop. Cecil McWatters was certain that, of all the passengers that day, he could not recall more than a woman and a young man leaving the bus a few blocks east of Dealey Plaza.
He looked surprised as he studied the men on the stage. He leaned toward a detective. “There’s one feller up there is about the size and build of the man who got on my bus and then asked for a transfer and got off.” “Yes?” the detective said. “Which one?” “That second one from this side.” “The number two man?” “If you call it that. But I couldn’t positively identify him. That’s just the size and general complexion.”
Brennan sat next to Captain Fritz. He looked startled. “That one,” he whispered, pointing, “is the closest resemblance to the man in the window.” Fritz was whispering. “You said you couldn’t make a positive identification.” “That second one is the closest,” said Brennan. “Did you do that for security reasons personally, or couldn’t you?” “I did it because I was afraid for my wife and family. Me and my family might not be safe.”
Fritz nodded gravely. “He’s not dressed in the same clothes,” Brennan whispered. “In what way?” Fritz said. Brennan said he didn’t know. The clothes were not the same as he had seen in the window. The pipe fitter was shocked because he knew that he could make a positive identification of Lee Harvey Oswald. He had sincerely believed that he would not be able to recall the fleetingly seen face in that sixth-floor window. He recognized the man and was willing to state that Oswald was “the closest resemblance to the man in the window,” but it would take a long time before Brennan would be ready to admit that he had identified the man at first glance, positively and without doubt.
Officer James Leavelle leaned across Callaway and Sam Guinyard and said: “Take your time. See if you can make a positive identification.” The car salesman smiled. “The short one,” he said. Leavelle continued: “We want to wrap him up real tight on killing this officer. We think he is the same one that shot the President. But if we can wrap him up tight on killing this officer, we have got him.” Callaway left his seat and went to the back of the room. He wanted to see all the men from the distance he recalled earlier in the day.
Coming back, he whispered: “The short one.” “Which one is that?” “The short one—number two.” He pointed to Lee Harvey Oswald. Guinyard nodded vigorously. “That’s the one,” he said. “Same one. I saw him running.” Leavelle asked if he was positive. Both said yes. He asked them to return to his office and furnish a sworn statement. The showup room was dark again.
Six hours after the assassination, the Dallas Police Department had control of the case. The men had worked hard running down leads. There was an element of luck. It was the shoe store manager who told them where to find their man. Without his assistance, Oswald might have sat through the show—perhaps several of them. At night he could have emerged, but he had no place to go. No money to speak of, no refuge.
He could not return to his room. He knew that the police would check every employee of the School Book Depository. It was an automatic move. Ironically Oswald had made certain that he could not survive a police screening. He had spread the word that he was a “pure Marxist” and was eager to explain to anyone what it meant. He was in the newspaper files and the FBI and State Department records as a defector who fled to Russia and tried to renounce his American citizenship. To make himself conspicuously suspicious, he continued to carry his Fair Play for Cuba identification card on his person.
When he faced capture in the Texas Theatre, why did he shout: “It’s all over!” What was all over? Why try to shoot a policeman with scores of them in the aisles ready to gun down such a gunman? Was this a quick exit he had designed for himself? He drew a gun and a hammer clicked. Is this the behavior of a man who is innocent? Is this the behavior of a man who is guilty but is certain that the state has no case against him? Or is this the philosophy of a man who feels that one more murder might bring merciful darkness to him and historic recognition?
The accidental discovery that the prisoner sitting in police headquarters was the missing employee from the Book Depository was of enormous help in redeeming the day for Dallas. For several hours, the police work seemed to be scattered and ineffectual. By 6:30 P.M. all of the loose pieces began to fall together. Two crimes overlapped their focus onto one face: Oswald’s.
Superior officers were so busy that they didn’t have time to assess the work of the men. In the murder of Tippit, they had affidavits from Helen Markham, Callaway, Scoggins the cab driver, Sam Guinyard, and the shoe store manager, Johnny Calvin Brewer. They also had a statement from stout Earlene Roberts, the rooming house housekeeper. They had others from witnesses at the scene of the shooting—sworn statements—which had not yet been typed.
In the Kennedy murder, they had affidavits from a dozen employees placing Oswald on the sixth floor; they had Brennan and Amos Euins pointing the finger at him with a rifle in the window; they had his rifle and his revolver and were tracing the ownership of both to him; they had a palm print taken from a cardboard box in the sixth-floor window; they had a cop who saw him in the second-floor commissary three minutes after the assassination; Roy Truly also swore to this. They had a woman clerk who spoke to him on the way out of the building; there was a bus driver who could identify a transfer; a cab driver who suffered a silent young man to sit up in front with him en route to North Beckley; Earlene Roberts in the matter of rushing in, changing clothes, and rushing out again. There was a statement from his wife that he owned a rifle; Wesley Frazier was ready to swear to a long, thin package called “curtain rods” carried to work that morning. Linnie Mae Randall saw the package, too. The pieces of bullets recovered—from the r
ifle as well as the revolver shots in Tippit’s body—would be traced to Oswald’s firearms. There were three employees who would testify that all three shots came from over their heads as they stood on the fifth floor, and they would swear that they heard the empty shells bounce on the floor above.
Considering the magnitude of the case and the weakness of motive, Captain Will Fritz and his men had achieved remarkable results within six hours.
A closed road separated the pristine luminosity of the White House from the dismal gray of the Executive Office Building. A bright light from an office in each of the buildings mingled on the old Belgian blocks in the middle of the street. Sargent Shriver sat in Ralph Dungan’s office in the extreme west end of the White House, burying one administration. On the second floor across the street, the light from Johnson’s office poured downward as he brought an administration to life.
In the outer office, Jack Valenti knew that the President was beginning to feel sure of himself, because the orders to “get me Averell Harriman”; “I want to talk to the ranch”; “Let me speak to Shriver” were enunciated patiently. The strident fever was gone from his voice. “Cliff,” the President said to Mr. Carter, “go down the hall and you will find a White House secretary. Ask her for two sheets of White House letterhead and two envelopes.”