The Day Kennedy Was Shot

by Jim Bishop

  Kellerman waited until the doctors appeared to be taking a rest. Then he told them that an almost whole bullet had been found. His chief, James Rowley, ordered him to report it to them. One of the doctors made a note. After a brief respite, they continued with their work. The government and the people had to know, but the work and the findings were dreary. The solemn thought which gripped the laymen sitting across the room was that early this morning this had been a working body and an intelligent brain, both buoyant and integrated, and on the table they lay destroyed. The driver, William Greer, who felt a personal affection for the President, was beset by a feeling that what was left on the table was no longer Kennedy.

  Lee Harvey Oswald never had a friend. He had not been able to comprehend the concomitants of friendship—confidence, affection, and loyalty. He was born with the pout of the discontented. There was his mother—slavish, domineering, complaining—and there was nobody. A snapshot of him as a boy, smiling among his classmates, gives the impression that he was obedient to the whim of the photographer. His impatience with a world of three billion people who would not recognize his greatness was borne silently for years, eventually inducing an explosion of the brain second only to that which President Kennedy sustained.

  People remembered him. They murmured: “Lee Oswald” and rubbed their chins or shook their heads. “A loner.” “He could be polite, but he was far away.” “Braggart . . . a liar.” “Dreamer.” “Didn’t dance, date, play cards, never had a hobby. Never laughed.” “You could say hello, but Lee wouldn’t answer.” People remembered him in Dallas and Irving and New Orleans and Fort Worth and El Toro, California. They were remembering tonight, as his face stared sullenly in their living rooms, but they were troubled about what to remember. Some said: “Yes, he would do a thing like that.”

  A few career sergeants of the Marine Corps snorted: “Ossie Rabbit? Not him.” An intelligent liar is difficult to read. He is secretive and presents the face he wants one to see, whether it is a real face or a spurious one. To a few old buddies in the Marine Corps, he was an okay guy who kept his gear clean, studied radarscopes for landing patterns, and enjoyed arguing politics. To a librarian, he was a bookworm. To a boss, lazy and disinterested. To a wife, weak on sex drive and strong on despotic domination. To a doting mother, an all-American boy. To God, an atheist. To the Russians, a potential suicide. To a New York psychologist, a neurotic with overtones of paranoia. To the women of an orphanage, a silent child who sat in one place with one toy all day.

  He lived in a concrete cocoon. Lee Oswald was fifteen years old when he found room inside it for Karl Marx. He read Das Kapital, but he did not understand it. The boy enjoyed the dogmatic and doctrinaire phrases of communism. They had a ring of mystery; they were incontrovertible. They could be tossed into conversations and people would rage futilely against them without knowing, anymore than he, what they were fighting. The world struggle of the working classes was not appreciated in Texas or Louisiana so Lee Harvey Oswald could identify with it and feel himself part of a small secret band.

  School was anathema because school was regimented knowledge. Lee was superior to this. He could attain passing grades, but he had to work hard to achieve them. A dispute with a teacher was a better thing than study. Someday, he said, he would go to Russia. The Soviet system would not permit his poor mother to suffer the way she had when jobs were difficult to find. The Soviets took care of everyone according to his needs. And yet he found it increasingly difficult to tolerate the presence of his mother. When he was thwarted, sometimes he would lash out with his fists.

  He accepted the drudgery and degradation of being a “boot” in the Marine Corps. His marksmanship on the rifle range was not as good as his drill instructors expected. Some called his work “sloppy.” When other recruits enjoyed liberty, Lee Oswald was in the rifle pits firing. “Come on, scum!” they shouted. “Drill that target.” Little by little, he improved. In time, he was given a test “for the record” and he scored 212 points. The gradations were “Marskman,” “Sharpshooter,” “Expert.” Lee Oswald became a Sharpshooter. He became proficient in the use of pistols. His battalion went to Japan, to the Philippines, but Lee Oswald did not feel captivated by alien culture or hospitable people. He called himself an instrument of imperialism.

  Sometimes he hopped into his “rack” to read. At others, he might be persuaded to go to the nearest town with his comrades and drink beer. Once, he hit a sergeant on the head with a mug and was court-martialed. On other occasions, when the boys went to a house of prostitution, “Ossie Rabbit” waited outside. Some marines said Oswald hated the Corps. He argued that Nikita Khrushchev was a great man and stated that he would like to kill President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

  Nobody knew the nobody. Except for peeps at the world, he lived inside the cocoon. Marine Peter Connor said: “When the fellows were heading out for a night on the town, Oswald would either remain behind or leave before they did. Nobody knew what he did.” The cocoon, in time, becomes a warm womb. It is self-sustaining and requires no fuel. It resists the hand of friendship, the pressure of soft lips. Sentiment and affection are threats to the cocoon.

  Many were pondering what they knew of this man. On Fifth Street, Ruth Paine was trying to unravel her skein of thoughts about Lee Oswald. She asked her husband to go out and get some hamburgers. No one was in a mood for cooking. Marina came out of the bathroom and said wistfully: “Last night Lee said he hoped we could get an apartment together soon.” Another thought, another thread which matched none of the others. Mrs. Oswald was hurt, as though she wondered how he could have held out such a bright promise to her and the babies if he planned a dark deed. There was no proof that he planned anything. Casually, Ruth said: “Do you think Lee killed the President?” The Russian girl frowned. “I don’t know,” she said slowly. Marguerite Oswald swept out of the bathroom, proclaiming that if the Oswalds were prominent people there would be three lawyers down in police headquarters right now to defend that boy. “This is not a small case, Mrs. Oswald,” Ruth said. “The authorities will give it careful attention—you’ll see.” Marguerite didn’t see.

  Mrs. Paine was perplexed. None are so blind as Good Samaritans. She, too, remembered last night. Lee had arrived before dark unexpectedly. To her, he was always a strange and aloof man. She had befriended this little family, had given it sustenance and a roof when it had neither, but Lee Oswald felt no gratitude. He had ordered the Russian community of Dallas to stop offering gifts to his children and his wife; Lee Oswald would provide. The dependency he required from his wife was so complete that he forbade her to learn to speak English.

  Ruth had watched him at play with little June on the lawn. The little girl came the closest to teaching love to the man. He did not understand the emotion and ridiculed it in action, but the expression on his face approached pure joy when the child ran to his enfolding arms. Ruth had seen it. Marina had seen it. Wesley Frazier had heard about it. In innocence, the chubby little girl was tiptoeing on the cocoon and almost put one foot in it.

  The thoughts of these people on this night were like recollections of the dead. They run at top speed and are not connective, darting in this direction and that, as though searching for a reason for a tragedy. Still the remembrances were dissimilar. At nine o’clock last night, Mrs. Paine was aware that Lee Oswald, crouching before the television set, had tried to reestablish himself with his wife and had failed. It was not a pleasant situation, but it had occurred under her roof and she could not turn her ears off. He had followed his wife back and forth as the babies had been fed, arguing huskily in atrocious Russian, but Marina had decided to keep him on parole. At times he seemed desperate to establish a rapport with his wife, as though it must be tonight or never. Marina rejected the ultimatum. By 9 P.M. Lee Oswald was in bed alone.

  Michael would return soon with the hamburgers. Mrs. Paine recalled that, as Lee retired, she went out into the garage to set some toy blocks on the deep freeze for repainting. The naked bul
b in the garage was lit. Irritably Ruth Paine wondered who had left it on. Bills for services were always high enough without wasting power. This was waste. Who would come out into the garage after dark and for what purpose?

  She remembered, late this morning, that Marina said she had retired around 10 P.M. When she had crept into her side of the bed, Mrs. Oswald was aware that Lee was awake. She couldn’t explain it; she knew. He said nothing. He did not try to touch her. She was certain that he was lying awake in the dark. It was a strange feeling. Sleep had never been a problem to Lee. Sometimes, she felt that she did not know this man. In her mind, he became “my crazy one.” She did not mean it to indicate insanity; it was synonymous with unpredictability.

  He had worked at the radio factory in Minsk, ignoring the summons of the commissar to attend party meetings and complaining that the doctrines were dull and repetitious. Lee Oswald was unteachable. The city was too big and too cold. He would prefer Moscow, but he could not get a permit to go there. His apartment, because he was a foreigner, was better than that of comparable craftsmen in the Soviet Union, and his earnings were augmented by a monthly check from an organization ironically called the “Russian Red Cross.” He was a worker who was being “kept” until the foreign office could decide what to do with him.

  Overnight he fell in love. Miss Ella German was dark and attractive. It is possible, when Mr. Oswald’s restrictive emotions are understood, that he could not fall in love but rather that he condescended to offer himself to Miss German as a husband. The lady was unimpressed with the foreigner. She declined. Lee Oswald could not believe that, once he had decided to take a wife, that he could be spurned. He was an oddity, a rarity, an American. Ella German said no. He walked the deep snows of February 1961 pondering this crushing blow, barely seeing the stony bones of the great museums and libraries and, in venomous retaliation, proposed marriage to Marina Nikolaevna Prusakova.

  The blonde pharmacist toyed with the notion and said yes. They married, moved to a larger apartment granted by the government, and, within a month, Lee Oswald was writing in his English diary:

  “The transition of changing full love from Ella to Marina was very painful esp. as I saw Ella almost every day at the factory but as the days & weeks went by I adjusted more and more to my wife mentally . . . she is madly in love with me from the start.” Lee Oswald was fascinated with the thought of owning a domesticated animal which would lick his hand. He could take, but he could not give. Oswald was making love through a pane of glass. He could see her, but he could feel no tenderness.

  He switched his energies to getting out of Russia with his wife. He appealed to the Soviet government, which looked upon the rights of the individual as an oddity. Oswald wrote to the United States embassy. He appealed to Senator John Tower of Texas by mail: “I beseech you. Senator Tower, to rise the question of holding by the Soviet Union of a citizen of the U.S. against his will and expressed desires.” This was a change in political direction from his fist-pounding rage of October 31, 1959, when he had shouted at the American consul in Moscow that no one could stop him from renouncing his American citizenship and becoming a Russian. The best the consul had been able to do was to postpone the renunciation, and Lee Oswald later changed his mind. He didn’t want to become a Soviet citizen, but he didn’t know whether charges had been filed against him in America. He wanted the State Department to lend him money to return to Texas, and he demanded a pledge that he would not be prosecuted for any fancied crime.

  A letter went to John Connally, former Secretary of the Navy. Oswald was never known to flinch in the face of an outrageous lie; all he asked of himself was that it be palatable and close to being credible. The note to Connally protested that after he had been honorably discharged from the U.S. Marine Corps the record had been altered to “undesirable” as the result of a visit to the Soviet Union. As a fellow Texan, Oswald wanted Connally to know that he had been a good and true U.S. marine and he wanted that record to be changed back to “honorable.”

  The defector hoped that Connally had not seen the two interviews he gave to correspondents in Moscow, one in which he said he “hated” the United States, the other in which he said that the Soviets were about to accord citizenship to him. “In November 1959,” he wrote, “an event was well-publicized in the Fort Worth newspapers concerning a person who had gone to the Soviet Union to reside for a short time. (much in the same way E. Hemingway resided in Paris.)” In the middle of the letter, he became a flag-waving Marine. “I shall employ all means to right this gross mistake or injustice to a bona fide U.S. citizen and ex-serviceman.” Two years earlier, he had offered the Soviet government all the Marine Corps “secrets” about radar. He was crushed when the authorities displayed no interest.

  Marina could remember a great deal. A woman, she felt, could work a little harder to make a success of marriage. She did not understand the Americans but, when she arrived in Texas, she began to appreciate what they had. For the first time, she saw supermarkets with small mountains of food. There was no rationing on merchandise or clothing or rooms. She saw sleek cars and buses which could go anywhere without permits. The government could be criticized; there were people in Dallas who spoke her native tongue and who offered hearts and help. Marina could not understand why her husband denounced the institutions of this country. Still, she worked to keep the marriage intact.

  Six months ago Lee had come home pale. He admitted that he had tried to kill Major General Edwin Walker. In Russian her husband told her: “He is very bad man. A fascist.” The girl was astounded. “This does not give you the right to kill him. . . .” He shook his head. “If someone had killed Hitler,” he said, “millions of lives would have been saved.” Earlier on that day in April 1963 he had left a note for her in Russian. It told her what to do in case he was suddenly taken from her.

  One part said: “Send the information as to what has happened to me to the embassy and include newspaper clippings (should there be anything about me in the papers.)” The only embassy Marina knew was the Soviet embassy. Her head ached when she read: “If I am alive and taken prisoner . . .” Marina kept the document and threatened to show it to police if he attempted an assassination again. A short time later, he tried to leave the little apartment with a pistol in his belt to “kill the Vice-President.” On this occasion, Marina had locked him in the bathroom until he promised to behave.

  The cocoon became crowded. Lee Oswald was too big for it. The wild threshing inside his mind increased. Picayune jobs at a dollar an hour became impossible to hold. Marina was on a ration of ten dollars a week to maintain her little family. Her husband ran off to Mexico, ostensibly to head for Havana and join Fidel Castro. The defeat rankled deep when he learned that the socialist world had no place for him. The Cuban embassy refused a visa; the Soviet embassy said that such a document would require three months of waiting.

  Oswald had slammed doors and had shouted insults. Again he had offered marriage to his love and had been spurned. No one appreciated his great worth. If they thought that Lee Harvey Oswald was a nothing—a cipher—he would have to do something to revise their estimates. Including Marina’s.

  The long black car came down the street slowly and turned in at The Elms. Hurriedly the television cameramen snapped their big lights on and a knot of neighbors set up a faint cheer. There was no acknowledgment from inside the car. The big man in back hunched forward to search among the faces, but the one he wore was long and dour. A few journalists shouted questions at the car, but it rolled through the gates, bumping a little on the hard stones.

  Secret Service men were out front, looking over the heads of the curious, curious themselves. They had lost a big man today, and now they overreacted to situations. They pushed people back, and shouted harshly to step aside. Each of them knew that solitary lesson: in any crowd, one madman is enough. All their adult lives they were sifting people with their eyes, waiting for the suspicious reach into a pocket, the tossed bouquet, the rifle on a roof. Two
agents at the wrought iron gates drew their revolvers. They wanted to get their man indoors, that’s all. And that’s what they did, with Youngblood and Roberts watching him come out of the car and them walking backward behind him.

  Lyndon Johnson was surprised to see people in the living room. They were surprised to see him, and even though they were old friends and neighbors, no one said: “Hi, Lyndon!” He wore a new mantle. They knew it and they were abashed. Some said: “We must be going” and no one said: “Please stay.” It had been a long day, a day of evil rather than triumph, and it had worn all the central characters down so that the spirit sank in fatigue but the body spurned sleep.

  The President hung a gray hat on a rack. He looked up the staircase in time to see Mrs. Johnson coming down. She knew he was depressed, and she pasted a smile on her face. He didn’t say hello. Johnson leaned down and wrapped his huge arms around her back. He held his cheek close to hers and she said that she had made a lot of nice chicken. Her man had simple tastes in food: chicken, beef, lamb, and pork, lots of it—and two helpings of tapioca pudding. He had the hearty appetite of the Texas rancher. Lyndon Johnson enjoyed eating for its own sake.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I should have phoned you, honey. I had a hamburger at the office.” Mrs. Johnson said she was going to keep the chicken hot anyway; the men with him would want to pick at something. The President walked into the ground-floor den, idly waving his hand for Valenti, Moyers, and Carter to follow him. It was a small room with books and a desk, a cold fireplace, and the leathery atmosphere of a man’s sanctum.

  Someone made a brace of drinks. “All right,” the President said. “I think I’ll take a Scotch tonight. Put a lot of water in it.” The drinks were made and he sat in a winged fabric chair, sagging in it like a man who has just walked offstage and doesn’t have to pretend anymore. Jack Valenti knew that Johnson would not quit working, so he opened drawers until he found a pen and a white pad. Ideas would be tossed in air, some to be discarded, some to be acted upon, and Valenti wanted to record them all.