The Day Kennedy Was Shot

by Jim Bishop

  The temple was disturbing. All the bad memories of long ago swelled to flood in his mind. In the long ago, the beards, the curls, the black hats were a mockery to the unbeliever. How could a strong growing boy protect these ancients from attack among the tenements and still judge them as ridiculous? It was easy if the young man could subscribe to the thesis that the Jews were helpless, poor, and persecuted. Think of them, not as strong and righteous, a people with a heritage of culture and learning, but as the downtrodden. He could turn his electrifyingly swift mind in that direction, but then he could no longer admire them. No matter what the prophets said, this world could not be inherited by the meek. Never the meek. Looking at his parents, his temple, his heritage, Jack Ruby bent the golden rule so that it spake: Do it to him before he does it to you. A man can inflict this cruelty on his world if, in addition, he persuades himself that he is noble and generous and compassionate to the afflicted.

  The service was over. The nightclub owner had endured fifteen minutes of it. The worshipers stood in groups, whispering, and some moved on to another room where the ladies cut plain cake and poured cups of steaming coffee and punch. Rabbi Hillel Silverman had more important things to do. His job was not only to preach the word of God but also to hold the people of his temple together in unity of purpose. The coffee and cake could wait. He walked back toward the exit, exchanging greetings, listening to questions, offering counsel, shaking hands, tapping the satin yarmulke on his head to make certain that the badge of the male had not slipped.

  Ruby went to the refreshment room and had a glass of punch. Mrs. Leona Lane, with her mother and growing sons, paused to say hello. The woman reminded Jack that they had had Passover dinner together four years ago at Sam Ruby’s house. He was vague. She said that the assassination was a terrible thing. “It’s worse than that,” he said. The rabbi knew Ruby as a man ruled by emotion rather than reason. Silverman recalled that Ruby had not attended services until 1958. The senior Rubenstein died, and Jack appeared in the temple, shaking and weeping. For eleven successive days he sought a minyan and recited kaddish. The display of the spirit died as quickly as it was born. To some, everything is “worse than that.”

  Only two months ago Ruby had returned to temple services for the high holy days. This time he burst into tears and told the rabbi that his sister Eva refused to sit with him. They had had a disagreement. Eva Grant disapproved of her brother’s behavior in dating a girl “too young for him.” Jack said that “at a time like this, families should be together.” The rabbi was in an awkward position. He phoned Mrs. Grant and, by coaxing, arranged for her to have lunch with her brother.

  Silverman made a mental note to exchange greetings with Ruby tonight. The rabbi’s spirit was crushed, and he found it difficult to raise others. His President had been assassinated in this city of riches and splendor. The Jewish community, perhaps more sensitive to violence than others, was stunned. The dreadful thing which had happened to the most powerful could therefore happen to anyone. At the door, the Jews sought comfort from their teacher, an explanation of how such a thing could happen, but he had little to offer. He, too, was confused and depressed.

  Jack Ruby went to the rabbi and shook hands. Silverman was certain that he was about to listen to an emotional dissertation on the assassination. Jack Ruby did not mention it. He sought the rabbi’s sympathy through the illness of his sister. He told what she had gone through in the hospital and of how she was now at home trying to regain her strength. He thanked the rabbi for stopping in the hospital to see Eva. In a moment the nightclub owner was gone.

  The dark of the city matched Ruby’s mood. It was a blackness which could be relieved by the miraculous flick of an electrical switch. Dark, bright, dark again. Big bare roads in the night chalked with warm light and, in the fields beyond them, nothing. Moods, too, had an electrical switch—high, low, on, off. Near the downtown area, the colored neons flirted with the mind. “Girls, Girls, Girls.” “Strippers.” “Sensational.” “First time anywhere . . .” “Fresh from New York!” “Treasure Chest.”

  He kept the radio on. The Dallas Police Department was working overtime. The radio stations were working overtime. Civic, righteous, church-going Dallas would expunge this obscene graffiti from its conscience with swift, sure Texas justice. No stone would be left what? Bali-Hai was open. Jack Ruby, driving through the garish lights, took note that his clubs—Carousel and Vegas—were closed in memorial to the President of the United States, a mark of respect. But not Bali-Hai. The lights were on; the people were there. Ruby took note.

  The Gay Nineties was closed. Note, closed. That is class. The trade would be forced to patronize the open places. The big sweaty men would sit at dark tables with their setups, their brown paper bags of liquor, and the more they drank the more courageous they would become, and they would stare with reptilian fascination at the soft white skin on the little box of talcum called a stage and chant hoarsely: “Take it off. Take it off.” The memorial mood could not tolerate this. This was a night for putting it all back on, from neck to ankles; a night for men to weep for each other because of what had happened to him. The baggy pants comics would crack dirty jokes and the customers would laugh the louder, to prove that they understood. Who could laugh? Somewhere far off that poor woman huddled with those two babies, crying their innocent hearts out. Who could laugh tonight?

  There was nothing else to do. The duties of motherhood were complete. The little ones slept; the house was quiet. Marina said in Russian: “May I borrow the hair dryer?” Ruth Paine got it. “I am not sleepy yet,” Mrs. Oswald said. “A shower lifts my spirits. I will take a shower and set my hair.” A vigorous shampoo would kill time. She wandered around the living room, carrying the dryer, and asking aloud what Lee could have “against” President Kennedy. Nothing.

  That was the strange thing. He had read articles to her, translating into Russian as the avalanche of phrases and sentences tripped from the mind in English to the tongue in Russian, and she knew that he always injected his opinions. Marina tried to remember his rendition of these articles about John F. Kennedy. He had said nothing critical about the man. If he felt no hatred for the man, then he could not have killed him. The motive, the pressure, the compulsion were not present. Unless, of course, a man was willing to kill any great man who passed that close to the window that day—Khrushchev, Johnson, De Gaulle, Adenauer, Harold Wilson, Erhard, or Mao. Then it becomes motiveless, and the mind retreats from the field of reason.

  Ruth Paine said good night. They might have felt a compulsive interest, not in dryers but in television. Both women were helpless, swinging in the orbital perimeter of the assassination, but they switched it off and another light was extinguished. Marguerite Oswald made a place for herself on the couch in the living room. There would be time to think in the morning, time to propagate a mother’s views on what mysterious and secretive force had assigned her son to kill Kennedy. Her mind was made up, as it always was. All she had to do was to hammer the facts into shape to fit the jigsaw which told her that her poor son was under orders to do this thing. Assuming, of course, that he did it.

  There were three women in this small house at 2515 Fifth Street in Irving. The night hours brought no tears, no beating of breasts. There was regret without understanding; curiosity without mourning; self-interest embodied in a hair dryer. Like anti-magnetic satellites, the closer these women drew the faster they would fly apart. For Marina, there was the Slavic sense of gloom encompassed by possible deportation. Whatever flashes of sorrow she felt for her husband were brief and bright. Whether he was guilty or not, he had hurt her world—hers and her babies’.

  For Ruth Paine it was a new and exciting existence. Within the span of one afternoon, she had been whirled up and out of the drab life of dirty diapers and high chairs and the Book-of-the-Month Club and set onto the edges of the story of the century. She was a celebrity. Policemen, reporters, and photographers hung on her words, her opinions, and she, Ruth Paine, Quaker, was
the umbilical cord between Marina Oswald and the U.S. government. Everything would turn out good in the end, because, to a dedicated Christian, it always does. To a woman hitherto stranded on the sandbars of marital discord, this was an exciting ride down the rapids.

  Robert Oswald understood Marguerite. The dear, sweet, protective mother would fall asleep on time and wake up on time. Guilt or innocence could be secondary to the last, the final chance to stand before a derisive world and take a bow. All of the earlier bitterness, the lack of understanding by others, the snubs of the fine ladies in the shops where she worked, the marrying and losing of men, the teenage loss of three sons—all of it might be prelude leading to this great shining moment when once more she could storm into the capital city of Washington demanding to see the high and mighty and assert herself as a mother. If, in addition, there was a dollar to be earned, it might be a most attractive buck.

  Marina felt pity for the grandmother tonight. The poor thing hadn’t known that she was a grandmother again until she arrived at the police station. The first vague distrust of Ruth Paine was in Marina’s mind. The young Mrs. Oswald, in her muteness, felt that she had been thrust aside. Ruth was too gay and buoyant a mouthpiece for Marina. Her personal opinions were strong and sometimes meticulous, as in her verdict that all guns were black or dark brown; they all looked alike in their deadly venom; one could not differentiate between one with a telescopic sight and one without—nor could any amount of interrogation alter that opinion.

  There was female accommodation in the hair dryer, but, underlying it was Marguerite’s determination that the euphoric Mrs. Paine would not be permitted to answer the questions and resolve the mystery. Grandma would cultivate the confidence of her daughter-in-law only so long as both of them agreed upon who was running the show. Disagreement, which was bound to occur, would cause Marguerite to revert to her original notion that Marina was nothing more than a “foreign person.”

  In a little while, all the lights would go out in that house. All of them.

  There was irritation in Jesse Curry’s telephone ear. For a couple of hours he had been receiving calls from men of importance in Dallas County which began: “I received a call from Washington . . .” or “I got a call from the White House . . .” The message was the same: please turn the evidence over to the Federal Bureau of Investigation for a day or two. The chief did not think he should. His captain of Homicide did not think he should. Who called from Washington? “Well, somebody pretty high up . . .” or “I’m not at liberty to disclose a name . . .”

  What most people did not seem to understand, Curry kept saying with exaggerated patience, was that this was a Dallas County case. “It is a straight homicide as far as I’m concerned. Fritz says we need the evidence here. I have to back my men.” The calls kept coming. They came to Captain Fritz, who deferred to his chief, and to Curry, who deferred to the captain. One call came in to Fritz from Henry Wade asking whether the prisoner was to be transferred to the county jail for security. Justice of the Peace Johnston had ordered him handed over to Sheriff Decker.

  Fritz understood the order but had no intention of complying. “We don’t want to transfer him yet,” he said. “We want to talk to him some more.” His opinion was that Oswald would neither crack nor confess. And yet, as the man in charge of the police work, he owed it to his department to keep tapping at what he could see of the iceberg in the other chair in hopes that one final rap would split it.

  The district attorney backed off. He was pleased that the department had made so much progress in the face of official confusion. Wade was seldom sure who was in charge: Dallas Police Department, Secret Service, FBI, Texas Rangers, the United States Department of Justice. All of them were busy asking questions, exercising prerogatives, assuming responsibility. Each had an interest a priori which was not to be denied. There was no hostility between the groups, although the Dallas department felt frustrated and irritated with outside attention. Some, in ironic tones, asked if Governor Connally was strong enough to call out the National Guard.

  Progress on the case was steady and inexorable, a masterful amount of minutiae which kept growing, kept pointing directly at Lee Harvey Oswald. Fritz didn’t need help to pin this case on this man. He was convinced that, in a day or so, he would have sufficient evidence to convict him of either or both of the murders. The captain emitted an aura of shaggy modesty, but he would be foolish to want to share this one with any other agency. All he asked, at this hour, in addition to the evidence he had, was to connect the spent bullets to that rifle and that revolver, to prove that A. Hidell had bought both guns, and that Alex Hidell and Lee Harvey Oswald were the same person.

  Fritz was an old-line, experienced officer. All the other homicides were preparatory to this one. He would like to have wrung a confession from Oswald, but it wouldn’t be necessary, he thought, to the successful prosecution of the case. He had his man “coming and going.” As soon as he could get a justice of the peace, Fritz would formally charge Oswald with the assassination. The captain had confidence in himself and in his men.

  Additional help might have been welcome. A naïve police department, beset by sectional jealousy, would decline the services of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Curry and Fritz were aware that, after they had catalogued and tested evidence, there would be no use for it in Dallas until the day of trial. They had no intention of lending it to any agency. They resisted the phone calls in concert, and this represented one of the times they were in agreement.

  10 p.m.

  Fatigue was not obvious on the faces of the three doctors. The work was exacting, and weariness was there as they strode around the corpse, making their observations, nodding agreement, trying too strenuously not to overlook any aspect of the body and its wounds. The trio of white ghosts walked the post of the dead with such infinite care that their signed conclusions were predestined toward error. When mistakes are most costly, careful craftsmen are the first to pay.

  With the chest and belly open, Humes, Boswell, and Finck examined the lining of the thoracic cavity and found it “unremarkable.” The organs were removed one at a time to be washed, weighed, and examined for grossness. The man on the table, in spite of his chronic back pain, was a healthy human. The coronary arteries were smooth-walled and elastic. In the abdomen there was no increase in peritoneal fluid. An old appendectomy displayed a few minor adhesions between the cecum and the ventral abdominal wall.

  Fresh bruises were found on the upper tip of the right pleural area near the bottom of the throat. There were also contusions in the lower neck. Humes called his doctors away from the table and asked the Navy photographer to shoot additional Kodachrome pictures. The lens picked up a bruise in the form of an inverted pyramid. It was a fraction short of two inches across the top, coming to a point at the bottom. A few of the contused neck muscles were removed for further examination.

  The autopsy was complete. The men of medicine had been on their feet a long time. The outer covering of the body was sewed in place again. The Navy passed the polite word—this time to Admiral Burkley—that it had completed the autopsy and declined to do the embalming. The Navy photographer passed the cassettes of film to Roy Kellerman and waited for a receipt. A long sheet was floated across the body. Enlisted men began to untie the backs of medical gowns and the doctors peeled gossamer-thin gloves from their fingers.*

  Witnesses stood. They stretched their limbs. The last act was over, but the spotlight remained focused on the long sheet. The long bony feet stuck out. Greer looked and remarked that they were amazingly white. The toes turned slightly outward. He wondered why the vision struck an echo in his mind. He had seen those feet looking like this at Parkland Memorial Hospital. Trauma One. A man could be forgiven for asking himself how long ago that might be. No one noticed the enlisted men hosing down the floor.

  The dead man was scarred, but so were the living. He would not remember his scars, but they could not forget theirs. Greer, solid, strong, middle-aged, had y
ears of dependable work in him but the thought had crossed his mind to get out of the Secret Service and spend more time with Mrs. Greer, who was not strong, and a growing son, who would appreciate male guidance. Kellerman was granite, but for years to come his mind would freeze in immobility when he thought of November 22, 1963. He could not force himself to discuss the day.

  Some Federal officers would quit within the next month. Others would ask for other assignments. A few became embittered. Rowley, the Chief, would remain on to defend his men and expand the Secret Service, even though he had sustained the greatest loss—losing “the boss”—and the private knowledge that, at home, a most attractive daughter was losing her sight.

  In the nation’s capital, the day began its final hour by collecting the ticking seconds and forming them into sedate minutes. They were stacked neatly, one on top of the other, and they should have brought a resignation to the people, but the country remained in a continuing trance, shaken and disbelieving. In Lafayette Park a bronze general stared across the broad boulevard to the big light on the portico of the White House. Beneath him people stood in groups, staring as he stared.

  It was now a blustery night. Gusts combed the crisp leaves from the branches. Behind the White House, a claret-colored light winked solemnly near the top of the Washington Monument. The people remained in Lafayette Park, and more passersby paused to look, to whisper questions, to wait. They knew, even if he came home now, they would see a vehicle, perhaps a box lifted from the back of it, but the people remained steadfast and cold, not in morbid curiosity, but to get a glimpse of the box and convince themselves that it had really happened. This would tell them that he was dead.

  The salads glistened under glass. The ham, the corned beef, the imported salami reposed on wooden boards. In wells, the potato salad, the cole slaw, the tuna fish salad reposed. Behind the counter, John Frickstad waited for the customers who sit and talk and nibble. This, of all nights, was a time when Dallas could be expected to frequent the neighborhood restaurants—the pizza-pie pickups, the short-order beaneries, and the German-Jewish delicatessens. The housewives were too depressed for full-scale work in the kitchens.