The Day Kennedy Was Shot

by Jim Bishop

  Their report would state: “This opening was probed by Dr. Humes with the finger, at which time it was determined that the trajectory of the missile entering at this point had entered at a downward position of 45 to 60 degrees. Further probing determined that the distance traveled by this missile was a short distance inasmuch as the end of the opening could be felt with the finger.” The use of the phrase “end of the opening” was a conclusion. No one had called it “the end of an opening.”

  It is one thing to draw attention to a mystery; it is another to resolve the mystery without qualification. Secret Service Agent Roy Kellerman followed the agents to a similar conclusion as a result of the superficial findings of the physicians. “There were three gentlemen who were performing the autopsy,” he wrote. “A Colonel Finck—during the examination of the President, from the hole that was in his shoulder, and with a probe, and we were standing right alongside of him, he is probing inside the shoulder with his instrument, and I said: ‘Colonel, where did it go?’ He said: “There are no lanes for an outlet of this entry in this man’s shoulder.’”

  Doctor Humes, in his preliminary notes, courted the same easy conclusion: “The pattern was clear,” he stated. “One bullet had entered the President’s back and had worked its way out of the body during external cardiac massage, and a second high-velocity bullet had entered the rear of the skull and had fragmentized prior to exit through the top of the skull.” By the time Humes was ready to write his official findings, to be signed by Boswell and Finck as well, his opinion of that neck wound had been reversed by information from Parkland Hospital:

  “. . . The missile contused the strap muscles of the right side of the neck, damaged the trachea, and made its exit through the anterior surface of the neck. As far as can be ascertained this missile struck no bony structures in its path through the body.” The important phrase, this time, is “through the body.” It is to be doubted that any physician, encountering strap muscles which had reclosed the lane after opening it for the neck bullet, could have divined that the tracheostomy, so plainly surgical on the front of the neck, could have started out as a small exit wound. But then it is doubtful that many physicians would have permitted themselves to be badgered into a summary opinion.

  The event is rare, but it sometimes happens that animals can, if they persevere, overcome their keepers. The reporters had been pressed back against the corridor walls to form an open lane, and they had closed it at once. The situation had an element of danger. The writers were being pressed hard by editors for a story on Lee Harvey Oswald. The police knew that it would be poor tactics to reveal the case they had against Oswald; they had no right to try the case in the newspapers. The reporters pressed the police with louder and louder demands. The target of their venom had been the prisoner; now it was the police.

  No detective shouldered his way down that hall without being pelted with a hail of questions. Captain Glen King, in charge of security at police headquarters, realized that cooperation had been too complete; Assistant Chief Batchelor had ordered police at the foot of the elevator to check newspaper identification cards and to issue Dallas cards because, in the morning, a man without a Dallas card would not be admitted. Curry had bucked the line several times and been mauled orally by the tigers of the press. A local reporter apologized to the city manager: “It isn’t us; it’s the out-of-town press.” Forrest V. Sorrels of the Secret Service had the sober impression that the press had taken over police headquarters.

  The editors of the morning newspapers were on solid ground. They could assume that all readers were aware of the death of the President. In the parlance of the trade, he had died “for the afternoon papers.” The morning newspapers could not headline: “KENNEDY ASSASSINATED!” They required an overnight lead, something akin to:

  DALLAS COMMUNIST ARRESTED

  FOR MURDER OF PRESIDENT!

  The small bits and pieces of material filtering into newspaper offices all over the world supported this story, but the reporters could not find enough quotable material to support it. Many did not know that Lee Harvey Oswald already had been arrested for the killing of Officer J. D. Tippit. Nor were they interested. The killing of a Dallas policeman was a local story; Kennedy and Oswald were the big news and, as the hour passed 10 P.M. and morning editions went to press, the reporters became louder, more unruly. Either the police had a case against Oswald or they didn’t. They demanded a statement. They demanded to know if he was charged with the assassination—yes or no. The reporters were caught between the inexorable pressure from the city desk and the immovable Will Fritz.

  The Dallas Police Department, especially the upper echelons, was imbued with an ardent desire to cooperate with the press. These officers knew how succinctly the man behind the typewriter could make a law enforcement body appear ridiculous. Curry, King, and a privately hired press agent labored to divert the animals by feeding them scraps. It didn’t work. Henry Wade returned to headquarters after dinner to make certain that no one would charge “international conspiracy” unless there was one. Wade could not believe that a man as big as he was would struggle to walk fifty feet. He had another fear: that the Dallas police, in their anxiety to remove this horrifying crime from its shoulders, would file a murder charge against Lee Harvey Oswald without having sufficient evidence for Wade to prosecute successfully.

  Wade got to Fritz and brought him into an anteroom. The district attorney towered over the chief of Homicide. Fritz began to recite the case he had on the Tippit murder and Henry Wade said he wasn’t interested. If Fritz was going to file a charge in the Kennedy case, Wade wanted to know just what evidence was in the hopper. The captain would have been in an excellent position if he had ordered someone like Jack Revill to summarize the material in a written report, but the best he could do was to rely on his memory. He explained the curtain rod story; the affidavit of Mrs. Oswald that her husband kept a rifle in the garage; three witnesses on the fifth floor who heard the rifle blasts overhead; the cop who caught Oswald in the commissary; Brennan and Euins and others who had identified Oswald as the man in the sixth-floor window; the testimony of Earlene Roberts that he had hurried to his room to change his jacket; the revolver; the shooting of Tippit; the capture in the Texas Theatre; the finding of the rifle on the sixth floor, the—“All right,” said Wade. “Do you have anything that hooks him up to anybody else?”

  No, the captain said. They had a neighbor up on the fourth floor, waiting to take a polygraph test, but Fritz didn’t feel that this boy was part of a conspiracy; he just wanted to make sure he was telling the truth. Was it possible that Oswald was a member of a Dallas Communist Party cell? No, the FBI had been cooperating on the case, and it was possible they had a plant in that cell, and the word was that Oswald never joined anything. He was a little bit unbalanced on Fidel Castro, and Fritz believed that Oswald may have organized his own unit of a Fair Play for Cuba Committee; he may even have signed the membership cards with the name Alex Hidell.

  The district attorney was satisfied. The Dallas Police Department was not dumping a weak case into his big lap. He conferred with his assistant district attorney, William Alexander. Wade heard that there was a map, found in Oswald’s furnished room, depicting the parade route in relation to an X marked at the School Books Depository building.* The cops had the blanket in which the rifle had been wrapped. They also had a palm print on the rifle which seemed to match the grooves and loops of Oswald’s right hand.

  At the elevator a reporter stalked a detective for information. The cop said he had spent the day running from Sheriff Decker’s office back to headquarters with signed affidavits. The writer said that a little information had been dribbling from Glen King’s office but it was not the stuff about which leads are written. The assassination had, in effect, brought all the nuts out of the woodwork. They phoned by the score from all over the country, and everyone had a means of finding out if Oswald had really done it. The funniest was the old lady who reminded the police that a part
ly eaten chicken sandwich had been found on the windowsill of the sixth floor. The suggestion was to examine Oswald’s stool for the next few days and, if chemical analysis detected chicken, they could be sure they had the right man. The policeman who took the call said that this would make Oswald the chicken-shit assassin.

  Curry learned that Wade was conferring with Fritz. He left his office and lunged through the hall. The chief was not a big man, but he had a big voice. “When are we going to see Oswald?” one man shouted, backing in front of the officer. “When are you going to let us talk to him?” someone else shouted. “Has he admitted anything yet?” “Come on, chief. We don’t have all night. What’s the story?” They retreated before him, the microphones nodding like holy water censers. This time, he offered no information. He was on his way to discuss the press and publicity.

  The exchange of ideas did not require much time. The men in the hall could see the three, inside Fritz’s anteroom, debating the matter. Fritz entertained the least interest in the plight of the press. He and his men were plodding with secrecy and luck up and down this case, and they desired to continue to walk alone. An observer might surmise that they would prefer to dispense with all assistance—from Sheriff Decker to Secret Service and FBI. They ignored their own chief of police to a marked degree. Fritz was in favor of sitting tight on the whole case. The chief felt that he had to “live” with the press and it was up to him to decide how much information could be given out at this hour without prejudicing the case. Something would have to be done. The hour was late.

  The district attorney was in favor of making some sort of statement to keep the “boys” happy. He was not inclined to publicize the items of evidence but, if Fritz was about to file against Oswald in the assassination, there could be no harm in announcing it.

  The three walked into the hall together. The reporters in front began to shout to those far in the rear. Floodlights switched on. Sound gear began to whir. Humans began to press down from both ends of the hall toward the center. Thayer Waldo, a veteran reporter of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, glanced around and assured himself that there must be two hundred and fifty men crushed in this space.

  Fritz, laconic, blinking behind those trademark glasses, began to speak in a deep whisper. A wave of shouts swept backward: “We can’t hear you! We can’t hear you!” The captain glanced at the district attorney. Henry Wade, who had a booming courtroom manner, announced that Lee Harvey Oswald had been formally charged with the assassination of President Kennedy. The news was electrifying, and some of the stringers left at once to file the flash. Others shouted: “Henry, we can’t hear you! We can’t hear you! Can’t we hold this someplace else?”

  There was a whispered conference. The chief faced the microphones and the sea of heads peering over a sea of heads. Someone asked: “Has he confessed, sir? Has he made a statement?” The chief, who had planned to offer a sop to the press by suggesting the police assembly room as a spacious place in which to make the announcement, found himself responding to questions. He listened to each one, looked down to think, then squinted into the lights with an answer. Curry was caught in a dress rehearsal to a press conference. Although Fritz had maintained his independence and had worked the case alone, it was the chief who was now seizing public relations by the horns, and it was Curry whose face would adorn millions of television sets tonight. “He has not confessed. He has made no statement. Charges of murder have been accepted against him.”

  The voices, of different pitch, different intent, piped up from all over the hall. There were polite questions, incisive ones, sarcastically framed queries, inane enigmas. “Any particular thing that he said that caused you to file the charges regarding the President’s death against him?” “No, sir,” said the chief. “Physical evidence is the main thing that we are relying upon.” “Can you name that physical evidence?” Before Curry could respond, another question was flying his way. “When will he appear before the grand jury, sir?” “I don’t know.”

  “Is that the next step?” Curry nodded. “The next step would be that.” Henry Wade stepped back to listen, to stand by in case Curry began to impinge on Oswald’s right to a fair trial. Fritz looked at all the faces as though he had not seen such a collection before. The chief was at stage center. An old reportorial axiom is that if you keep asking questions long enough, the victim will respond to an explosive one. The legal watchdog, Henry Wade, was sucked into the oral vortex and disappeared without a trace.

  “Do you think you have a good case?” Wade brazened the big lights and said: “I figure we have sufficient evidence to convict him.” In a community where the utterances of the district attorney are accorded more respect than the denials of the prisoner, this could be considered prejudicial. “Was this, was there any indication that this was an organized plot or was there just one man?” The questions were being fired like rocks, and they hit just as hard. “We believe,” said Wade, “there is no one else but him.”

  The caged animals were devouring the keepers. “Do you know whether he will be tried in federal court, county court, or where he will be tried because this was a presidential murder? Do you care to comment on the jurisdictional dispute which has been arising?” No jurisdictional dispute arose. Each agency which checked the statutes arrived at the same quotient: the case belonged to Dallas County and no one else. Wade set them straight: “He has been charged in the State Court with murder with malice. The charge carries the death penalty, which my office will ask in both cases.”

  The journalists realized that the long-awaited morning story was coming rich and pure. “Mr. Wade, within forty-eight hours do you think he might be before the jury?” The chief growled: “Let Mr. Wade make a statement.” The district attorney mulled it for a moment. “There are still some more ends that we’re working on. This will be presented to the grand jury just as soon as some of the evidence is examined. It will be examined today, tonight, and tomorrow. He has been filed before, filed in Judge David Johnston’s, justice of the peace, Precinct Two of Dallas, and been held without bond on this case and the other case too.* It will probably be the middle of next week before it goes to the grand jury because of some more evidence that has to be examined by the laboratory.”

  Officials are swept through a press conference by exuberance. A difficult case well handled, on the way to solution within a few hours, sometimes establishes a rapport between the hunter and the hounds of the press. It sometimes results in an editorial lynching. The law enforcement element joins forces with the press to overstate the case. “Mr. Wade, can you tell us if he has engaged a lawyer?” The chief decided to field that question. “We don’t know that,” he said. “His people have been here but we don’t—”

  It was a snide response because Fritz—listening—knew that Oswald had not been able to contact the counsel of his choice. The captain did not correct the chief; Curry should have known whether Oswald had a lawyer. It would be Wade’s business to know the name of his adversary. “His people have been here” constitutes verbiage which could give the impression that the prisoner had a lawyer; it could also be interpreted as meaning that his family had been with Oswald and that they were taking good care of the matter. The questions began to come faster; they tumbled over each other so that a man might hear three before he could frame words to answer one. “Are there any fingerprints on the gun?” “Mr. Wade, can we get a picture of him?” “Are you going to bring him out?”

  The district attorney said “I . . .” “Could we get a room where we could get a picture of him?” “Can we get a press conference where he could stand against a wall and we could talk to him?” “Has where he will be tried been determined yet?” Wade was beginning to weary. “It will be in the Dallas County Grand Jury,” he said. “Where did he say he was when the President was killed?”

  The interrogators, under interrogation, became confused. Fritz, Wade, and Curry turned their faces inward and whispered. The situation in the corridor was out of control. “Wade! Henry!�
� “Captain Fritz, can we go to the assembly room, sir?” The district attorney stood tall and ran his hand through the wavy gray hair. “We will get in a larger room here,” he shouted. “That’s what we’re talking about.” The three men returned to the sotto voce conference.

  “What about the assembly room?” Wade looked at the mass of crushed faces. “Is that all right?” Captain Fritz said: “That’s . . .” “Let’s go down there,” Wade said. This opened the door to new questions. “Will there be a way to make any pictures?” “—make pictures right then and there?” Wade became helpless again. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t even know where it is.” Someone asked if pictures could be made of Lee Harvey Oswald. This triggered an uproar of shouts. “I don’t see any reason to take any picture of him,” the district attorney said.

  “Of Lee?” a television man said, incredulity dripping in the tone. “Yes,” said Wade. The newsman looked behind him for confirmation. “Well,” he said, “the whole world’s only waiting to see what he looks like.” The district attorney began to lose patience. “Oh,” he snapped, “is that all? The whole world?” “That’s all,” the reporter said. “Just the world.” An edge of acrimony set in. The chief, perhaps to continue an amiable relationship with the press, held up both hands and announced: “All right. We’ll set it up in the police assembly hall in the basement for Mr. Wade to make his announcement if that’s what you want.” The three men returned to their whispering attitude, and Curry broke away to say: “And I’ll have the prisoner brought down for you, too, if you like.”

  The television cameramen shouted: “Not right away! We have to get these cameras downstairs!” Others pleaded for additional time. In the rear some began an exodus by stairwell and elevator to stake out the best positions in the assembly room. Curry shouted over the bedlam: “We can do it in about twenty minutes!” It was too important to be rushed. Some shouted back: “We need more time. Don’t rush it.”