The Day Kennedy Was Shot

by Jim Bishop

  Chayes was studying his State Department files and duplications of Central Intelligence Agency and FBI files on Oswald. The more he studied them—after the assassination the most innocuous reports appeared portentous—he wondered if his department had a “lookout” card on the accused. He got a man named Johnson, in charge of the Passport Office, to report in and open the door to the “lookout” section. This is an area of special files on persons who, for one reason or another, are, in the view of the United States government, “sensitive personages.”

  The room itself was so sensitive that the door had a combination safe lock on it. Chayes, with assistants and FBI men numbering five in all, admonished each man to recall each step he made in this room and to report it. Assistant Secretary of State Schwartz accompanied the party and Johnson went to the “O” section. There was no mention of Lee Harvey Oswald. “Why isn’t there a card on this man?” said Chayes. No one knew. No one could say whose responsibility it would be to have a “lookout” card on a man who wanted to renounce his citizenship.

  In the autopsy room at Bethesda Hospital, Secret Service Agent Roy Kellerman received a phone call and tiptoed out. It was Chief Rowley. “In Dallas someone found a bullet practically intact on a stretcher. It was flown up here and I ordered it turned over to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.” “Yes, sir.” “I don’t know what the doctors are looking for, but they should be told that a pristine bullet has been found.”

  The disorder of the apartment seldom irritated Jack Ruby. He was dressed to go to services, but the spirit flagged. He phoned his friend Ralph Paul and said: “Meet me and we’ll go to services together.” Mr. Paul felt no inspiration. Ruby hung up. He was dressed in a gray single-breasted suit, a white shirt and a blue tie. He was ready, but he hesitated, as though whatever good would come from attending services for President Kennedy had already arrived on the wings of self-serving phone calls and speeches to his sister.

  The single bed with the off-white headboard was rumpled. The sheets were gathered in the middle of the bed. The drapes behind the bed were pulled back and there was nothing outside that window except blackness. A late newspaper was on the floor. A pair of cheap bedroom slippers lay on their sides. A carton marked “Johnson’s Baby Oil” occupied one night table. His private phone book and a telephone were on the other one. The dowdy broadloom was white with lint and bits of paper. The atmosphere was cheap and depressing.

  It was time to leave for the temple, but Jack Ruby permitted the time to pass. Rather than listen, he preferred to be heard. He sat on the bed and phoned his brother Hyman in Chicago. Jack told how awful it was. A terrible thing. Such a fine man. “I’m thinking of selling the business and going back to Chicago,” he said. In each phone call, he appeared to be anxious to establish his prior right to mourn because the tragedy had occurred in his town. Ruby could make it appear that he felt like a Kennedy. There was a slowly welling emotion which had to be wrung dry. He phoned his sister, Marion Carroll, also in Chicago. This was followed by one to another sister, Ann Volpert. He busied himself with the telephone.

  This was, in truth, the busiest day in the history of the telephone. The attorney general of the state of Texas, Mr. Waggoner Carr, swore he had received a phone call from someone in the White House but could not recall who it was, although he called the party back. The Kennedy crowd would hardly call Mr. Carr, so the forgotten man was limited to such names as Johnson, Valenti, Moyers, and Carter. The mystery caller asked Waggoner Carr if he had heard a rumor that the Dallas County authorities were going to draw up an indictment alleging an “international conspiracy.” The White House would be interested in having this eliminated unless there was proof of a conspiracy. Carr said he hadn’t heard the rumor but he would phone Henry Wade and find out. The caller said that the White House would not want to influence Dallas County, but if they were thinking of dropping a charge like that loosely, then the White House would like to know about it.

  Mr. Carr phoned Mr. Wade. The Dallas district attorney said he hadn’t heard such a thing and wouldn’t be a party to it unless there was some proof more tangible than high emotion. From what Wade had heard at police headquarters, the evidence appeared to be following a pattern which would implicate Lee Harvey Oswald and, so far, no one else. “It won’t be in there unless it belongs in there,” said Wade. A call came in for Wade from his old friend, Cliff Carter, who was now at the side of President Johnson. “Are they making any progress on the case?” Carter said. “I don’t know,” said the prosecutor. “I have heard they got some pretty good evidence.” It pointed to Lee Harvey Oswald. Cliff thanked his friend.

  At headquarters, Captain Will Fritz kept his men to the task of clearing the case up. Slowly, the captain was reaching an opinion: it was Lee Harvey Oswald and, quite possibly, nobody else. Mr. Fritz had a second opinion: this boy would never confess. He would play with the interrogations as a musical prodigy might with a piano. The Homicide Bureau was going to have to secure enough evidence to lock this case up without a confession. The boy talked quietly enough, mannerly at times. But he anticipated the meaningful questions and refused to answer them. Anything that would tend to clear the case up, or add to the evidence, was blocked or sidetracked.

  The captain sat at his desk and wondered if Oswald had training in these matters. He had asked him once: “When you got to Minsk, what did you do, get some training, go to school?” The prisoner said: “No, I worked in a radio factory.” The captain suspected that Oswald might have been trained in sabotage.

  On the fifth floor, Oswald was complaining. He wanted to take a shower. “I have hygienic rights, too,” he was shouting. The jailers paid no attention to him. They had word that his brother Robert had returned to headquarters and asked to see Lee. Captain Fritz had no objection, so it was being arranged in a room with a huge pane of glass bisecting the space. Robert Oswald sat in a miniature booth with a telephone on a shelf in front of him. His brother would come through a door on the other side of the glass and would pick up a phone and talk. It was the instrument of the day.

  Robert watched that door through the dusty glass. He looked away, and, when his glance returned, the door was slamming closed, and Lee was walking toward him. Robert remarked to himself that the door was made of steel and so was its casing, but he had heard no sound. It seemed unreal that Lee strolled toward the other side of that glass so slowly, so carelessly, almost a lounging stride; he looked at his brother blankly, bereft of affection or rancor. Lee sat in the cubicle opposite Robert and motioned for the older one to pick up a phone.

  The voice was flatly calm as he said: “This is taped.” Up close, the bruise around the eye was plain. “Well,” said Robert, “it may or may not be.” Robert leaned forward. He could see iodine or Mercurochrome on the bruise. “What have they been doing to you?” he said. “They haven’t bothered me. They’re treating me all right.” Robert, in his personal agony, hoped to get an unequivocal statement of innocence or guilt from his brother—if not by word, then by some sign.

  To the contrary, Lee Harvey Oswald was relaxed and was willing to talk of other matters, other days, but not about the crime which had convulsed a nation. Robert thought that his brother acted as though all of the frenzy in Dallas and all over the United States swirled around his feet but did not touch him. Lee would neither deny nor confess. Robert no longer occupied the privileged position of confidant. The little boy had seldom wept his problems to the big boy.

  The family situation had worsened. Robert, the only one to meet Lee and Marina at Love Field when they returned from Russia, was an outsider. Lee could be civil. And yet he appeared to be conscious that he, not Robert, was in the headlines of the world. They spoke a few minutes about nothing. Sadly, the thing they had in common this day was that both noticed that little June Oswald had a toe sticking out of one of her red sneakers.

  Down the street, taverns blazed with light. The signs winked on and off. Inside, the jukeboxes blared their sad ballads of love. Men and wom
en who had cheered and emitted rebel yells for the handsome man from Boston and his gorgeous wife now sat and sipped their drinks. In the half light of the bars, the dancers moved slowly in shades of charcoal; the glasses glistened; ice cubes collided in small clinks; beer rose to the top of steins, foamed, and slid like lace down the sides. Steer horns adorned the walls; cocktail waitresses in hiplength black stockings rotated their hips as they carried trays and wore revolvers in big belts. The conversation was not on Kennedy. It was on football and women and Indian summer.

  The barflies brooded over the assassination but, when it was mentioned, someone said: “Yeah” or “Too bad” or “Why the hell did he have to come where he wasn’t wanted?” The topic was delicate, not to be mixed with whiskey. A middle-aged man bent forward, his forehead glistening like his cowboy boots, dropped three dimes into the jukebox and played “The Yellow Rose of Texas.” This changed the drinkers’ moods momentarily. The customers sang loudly and poorly and fell back on that old Southern game of coy and meaningless flirtation.

  Down Commerce or Main, between the tall office buildings, assortments of traffic lights flicked their colors against the few cars and buses which defied the gloom. A broad well-lighted window near the Statler Hilton Hotel proclaimed “Dallas Public Library.” It was closed. Knowledge and culture could wait until morning. The city was in no mood for a book or a lecture. There were many more people indoors than out. From Richardson to Oak Cliff, from Mesquite to Irving, the enormity of the event began to seep darkly into the municipal conscience. The man who, after lunch, said: “It ain’t gonna cause me to lose no sleep” would not repeat the remark at this hour.

  Violent death was not as harsh an event in the West as in the East. The state of Texas averaged a thousand murders per year. The men were earthy and carried guns as phallic symbols of manhood. They talked tough and had a contempt for the soft emotions. Tears were for women. Little boys, at the grave sites of their mothers, were taught to stand tall and manly. Pride in being a Texan born and bred could be exceeded only by a municipal pride which pitted Dallas against Forth Worth; Houston against Galveston; San Antonio against Austin; Abilene against Wichita Falls.

  Dallas was not callous. A shock wave went through the city at noon. Regret and sorrow were genuine. The metropolis would have been content to apprehend the guilty at once and hang him and be done with it. The grievous wound to the city was felt at once by Mayor Cabell and police officials and Jack Ruby and newspaper editors, but it was not until night that the people had time to absorb from their network television shows the nationwide indictment of Dallas as a “climate of extremists.” The world was making much more of a fuss over the President’s death than had been anticipated, and it was pointing a finger of scorn at Dallas.

  The average householder did not worry about “what this will do to business in Dallas” because the average householder had no stake in business. He began to wonder, sickened, if his city was going to become a tourist attraction for those who desired to see the place where Kennedy was shot. In his heart, he knew that Dallas was bigger, better, and worthier than that, and, collectively, the Dallasite listened to the pundits in New York and Washington with sinking heart. “It could have happened anywhere” was his impotent response. It could, but it had not.

  At one point in the interviews between Captain Will Fritz and his composed prisoner, the officer said: “You know you have killed the President and this is a very serious charge.” “I did not,” said Oswald. The captain unlaced his fingers and spread the palms apart. “He has been killed,” he said. Oswald sat back. “The people will forget in a few days and there will be another President.” In that statement, he spoke for Dallas at lunchtime but not for Dallas at 8:30 P.M. The city, helpless in its horror, began to realize that the world was saying that Dallas had shot a great man in the back.

  What had to be done had been done. President Johnson stood behind his desk, a sign that he was ready to leave. He told Walter Jenkins, an overworked aide and friend, that Jenkins would be responsible for setting up the meeting of the cabinet at 10 A.M. “That plane from Hawaii is coming in sometime tonight,” the President told Jenkins, “and I want someone out at Andrews to tell them that we’ll meet in the Cabinet Room at 10. There is going to be no gap in this government.” He stared through the gleaming spectacles at Jenkins. “No excuses either.”

  He would not permit himself to dwell on the assassination; he knew that if he opened that topic, the young men who stood around offering suggestions and executing orders would fall into melancholy soliloquies. The event had brought its own dark thoughts. Frozen in the little first aid cubicle at Parkland Memorial, Johnson had been convinced by the Secret Service that he too might be marked for death. It was shameful to think of a new President as a prisoner in a tiled room hardly bigger than a shower stall. The crouching run to get into an automobile, the race to Love Field and sanctuary were, at best, degrading images in a great democracy, even though the attitude of the Secret Service, “maximum possible danger as part of a massive plot,” was the correct attitude.

  “You know,” the President said, “Rufe did a brave thing today.” The man with the honey-sweet Georgia accent had folded the new President onto the seat and had exposed himself to rifle fire by sitting high on the shoulder of Mr. Johnson. The act was more than brave; it was dutiful. In a manner of speaking, Rufus Youngblood had taken charge of the President before Mr. Johnson had taken charge of the country. “You will follow me . . .” “We will stay right here . . .” “Our best bet is to get aboard Air Force One and get you back to the White House at once . . .” For an hour, the President who did not like to take orders accepted them from the agent who did not like to issue them.

  The oaken door marked “The Vice-President” opened, and Lyndon Johnson stood in the light. “Come on, Jack,” he said to Mr. Valenti. “You come home with me.” He told Juanita Roberts and Marie Fehmer to finish up and go home for some rest, because tomorrow would be a big day. Emory Roberts and Rufus Youngblood fell into step ahead of the President. Behind him, Cliff Carter, Bill Moyers, and Jack Valenti hurried to keep pace. This was the new O’Donnell, O’Brien, and Powers group. The corridor was empty. The office where a White House secretary had condemned Lyndon Johnson’s soul was dark.

  The party emerged from the side entrance. Rufus Youngblood was on the sidewalk first, waving the limousine into position and studying both sides of the closed street. Johnson walked around the car and occupied the right rear seat. Valenti came in the other door and sat with the President. The other two folded the jump seats back and sat sideward so that they could see the President. The car started and, on the right, the pale lighting of the White House brought it into view between the trees. Lyndon Johnson took a look and sat back. He had known this ghostly mansion for thirty-five years; it, too, was his. The government of the country was his, but, like the house, the tantalizing role of caretaker could be unrewarding. The government, the house, the fortunes of the country were more Johnson’s responsibility than his proprietary right. For the next fifty weeks he must work to preserve them and enhance their value. Then the electorate would tell him whether he would be permitted to continue or send him away to let another man do the work.

  The witnesses were in attitudes of fatigue. For them, too, time was slow. The brain examination was almost complete. The curiosity of science was almost satiated. The doctors stood behind the head, peering, whispering, making notes. The cerebellum was fixed with formaldehyde because the brain, in its common state within the skull, does not lend itself to adequate examination. Like an intact walnut, the brain forms two complete hemispheres. The flocculus cerebri—a tuft of wool-like fibers—had been smashed. More than half the right hemisphere was gone.

  When the brain was removed, more photos were taken. The disruption of the tissue moved from a medium-low position in the back of the head to an increasingly shallow depth as it ran toward the top of the head. The path of injury was parasagittal about 2.5 centimeters to t
he right of the midline, which connects the hemispheres. The parietal lobe was missing. Such lacerations as could be traced had a center which was jagged and irregular and which radiated into smaller lateral lacerations. The corpus callosum—a thicket of fibers which connects the hemispheres of the brain—was cut. By looking down, Humes, Boswell, and Finck could see parts of the ventricular system, where spinal fluid is normally stored. The smashing speed of the bullet had jammed the front portion of the brain against the right orb, causing a black eye.

  The witnesses watched rheumy-eyed. The FBI men and Kellerman continued to make notes, but, as none had been medically trained or oriented, the notes amounted to personal observations reinforced by whatever opinions they could hear from the doctors. The rest sat stupefied. No one had a desire to study this event, and yet the tan, lean body on the table was compelling in its surrender. No one became ill. Men looked or turned away. The doctors may have been a little more zealous than usual, a little slower, but this was understandable.

  Humes and Boswell cut the scalp down to both ears. Bits of the skull continued to fall off, and fissure fractures ran like tributaries to a deep lake on top. The doctors required little saw work to remove the top of the skull. Studying the X-rays, they were able to locate and lift two bullet fragments in the front of the brain. As they worked, the doctors must have reasoned that death from this wound would be practically instantaneous. On the X-rays, they counted between thirty and forty bits of metallic “dust,” too small for a search but large enough to be visible on the plate.