The Day Kennedy Was Shot

by Jim Bishop

  The hatch on the K-135 closed, and the two men secured seat belts as the big silvery bird waddled to the head of the runway and received permission to take off for Andrews. When the shrieking of the engines settled down and the craft was airborne, Lawson took out a pencil and asked Drain what kind of evidence he had. It consisted of the following:

  (1) A live 6.5-millimeter rifle shell found in a 6.5 Mannlicher-Carcano rifle on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository building; (2) three spent 6.5-millimeter shells, found on sixth floor of the Depository inside the northeast window; (3) one blanket found in garage of Mrs. Ruth Paine, 2515 Fifth Street, Irving, Texas; (4) shirt taken from Lee H. Oswald at police headquarters; (5) brown wrapping paper found on sixth floor, near rifle, believed to have been used to wrap the weapon; (6) sample of brown paper used by School Book Depository and sample of paper tape used for mailing books; (7) fragment of bullet found in the wrist of Governor John Connally; (8) Smith and Wesson .38 revolver, V510210, taken from Lee H. Oswald at Texas Theatre; (9) .38 bullet recovered from the body of J. D. Tippit; (10) One 6.5-millimeter bolt action rifle, inscribed “1940, Made in Italy,” serial number C2766. Also inscribed on the rifle was a crown which appeared similar to an English crown. Under it was inscribed “R-E.” Also inscribed was “Rocca,” which was enclosed in rectangular lines and was on the plunger on the bolt action on the rear of the gun. On the four-power scope of the gun was inscribed “Ordnance Optics Inc., Hollywood, California, 010 or 010 Japan.” Also inscribed was a cloverleaf and inside the cloverleaf was “OSC.”

  The copilot came back with cardboard containers of coffee. Lawson completed his list and looked out a window. The night was bright with stars. The plane raced them but appeared to stand still. The drone of the engines reduced conversation and increased drowsiness. A radio operator told the agents that they would make Andrews about 4:30 A.M. Eastern Time. Vincent Drain turned his watch ahead an hour. He estimated that he would have this material in Frazier’s hands by 5 A.M.

  The show was over. The audience had dissipated. Roy Kellerman phoned Clint Hill on the seventeenth floor. “Come on down,” he said. “I want you to look at these wounds.” The Gawler group arrived. Joseph Hagan introduced himself and his assistants to a Navy enlisted man. For the embalming, he had Mr. John Van Haesen, Mr. Edwin Stroble, and Mr. Thomas Robinson. They would not begin their labors until the autopsy team signified that its work had been completed.

  It had. Brigadier General Godfrey McHugh remained in the room with the body, as he had vowed to do. Dr. George Burkley got to his feet, walked over to the sheet-covered remains, and worked on the left hand. The wedding ring came off. The doctor, who felt emotional about the death of his patient, took the gold band and went to the seventeenth floor with it. The Attorney General came to the door and held out his hand. The graying man said he would like to deliver it “personally” to Mrs. Kennedy. There was no reason to doubt that Robert Kennedy would give it to her. Still he held the door open and Burkley went inside and handed the ring to Jacqueline Kennedy. The rear admiral made a touching speech about his feelings. For a moment, grief matched grief in mutual appreciation.

  In the autopsy room, the sheet was removed from the President’s body, and Kellerman ordered Clint Hill to make his observations. The body was turned face down, then returned to its original position. Hill was stoical as he noted a bullet puncture at the base of the neck in the back and a small hole in the rear of the head, in addition to the big rent in the middle of the head. He was sent back to the Kennedy suite to stand guard and to file a personal report.

  The Navy doctors removed their X-rays from the opaque screen and their notebooks from the autopsy table. They were zealous men who had tried to reduce observations and measurements to a precise science and failed. They could and would correct original impressions, but those who enjoy varnishing history with suspicion would not forgive the doctors for misreading a tracheostomy.

  The three men were replaced by four. The function of the new men was to restore John Fitzgerald Kennedy to an approximation of serene sleep. In a manner of speaking, this is the most tender and most difficult of services. It is normally performed in secrecy. For Joseph Gawler’s Sons, it would have been easier to take the body to their establishment. The instruments and material would be at hand, and the body could have been returned in ninety minutes.

  This was not permitted because Mrs. Kennedy did not want the body taken from the hospital. Understandably the word hospital did not have the note of finality encompassed in “funeral home,” “autopsy,” and “embalming.” It lifted the weary spirit a trifle to think of a Navy officer in a Navy hospital. It postponed a final accounting.

  1 a.m.

  The shrewd amiability of Lee Harvey Oswald wore off. He had spoken more words to more people on this day than on any other in his life. He had hidden his antisocial attitude, had worn his aura of innocence with authority, and had used the keyboard of the world press to beg for the civil rights which should have been his. The game had become a bore a long time ago. The clock had passed Oswald’s bedtime by three hours.

  He was not pleasant in the Identification Bureau on the fourth floor. Posing for the mug photographs, he obeyed directions like an automaton; the teaspoon edge of the lower lip began to emerge in the sullen pout which had been his badge from the age of two. Oswald would not roll his fingers on the print pad; he dragged the fingers across it until a policeman took the digits one by one and rolled them properly. Again he was asked to sign his name at the bottom of the card and he said: “No.”

  The police did not remonstrate. They tossed a dirty cloth, damp with benzine, for him to wipe his fingers clean. At ten minutes past one, the negatives and prints were declared satisfactory, and two jailers escorted him through the little foyer with the file cabinets and back up to the fifth floor. He noted that one guard sat on a chair propped outside the alley of three maximum cells; one was inside. There were no greetings either way. He went to his cell—the one in the middle—washed his hands in the chipped sink, urinated in the sloping basin built into the floor, and settled down for the night.

  He was on his back on a lower bunk, hands clasped behind his head, eyelids almost closed and glistening at the naked ceiling light. He kept his shirt and trousers on this time, kicked the loafers off, and crossed ankles. The guards could not tell whether he was awake or sleeping. The respiration appeared to be slow.

  The guard who sat opposite Cell Two would surmise that Lee Harvey Oswald fell asleep quickly. He could have been wrong, but after a few minutes the toes did not twitch, the eyelids were closed, the features appeared to fall into the relaxed aspect of a weary child. No man who had a grave crime on his mind could relinquish it so easily. No innocent person, charged with so heinous an offense, could sweep the terror from his mind and lapse into sleep.

  There was nothing on the conscience of Jack Ruby, and yet he could not entertain the thought of sleep. The two men were only a few hundred yards apart, but Ruby burned brighter as the hours faded toward dawn. He could not let go of his part in this story, small as it was. He asked the men at KLIF how they liked the Exotic Cola. They said fine. Was the interview with Henry Wade satisfactory? Indeed it was, and Glen Duncan and Russ Knight were thankful to Jack Ruby for setting it up.

  He wasn’t boastful. Nor was he feverishly excited. The nightclub owner coaxed endorsement from the professionals. He spoke to Russ Knight—known to his fans as Weird Beard—about the techniques of conducting an interview and of how the tapes are cut and spliced to eliminate the weak and irrelevant sections. The mood, which was exuberant, dropped to resentment when Ruby thought of the man who had no name, “you know, the creep.” Jack Ruby had not the slightest doubt that the prisoner was guilty. Dallas had the right man.

  Knight was working and listening. Ruby, still the editorial strategist, asked why Gordon McLendon, owner of KLIF, could not deliver a sermon on radio against the forces which spawn “creeps” who placed treasonable advertis
ements in newspapers, pelt statesmen like Adlai Stevenson, and shoot Presidents who are guests of Dallas. The city was violent. The radio reporter was not too familiar with political terms, but he sensed that Ruby expected that someone “with guts” would speak out against the extreme right wing in Texas. Those who knew Ruby were aware that he had a chameleon character which could switch colors, from hilarity to resentment, from generosity to fisticuffs, from charitable impulses to tears, without changing emotional gears.

  Duncan got the impression that the entrepreneur dropped the role of crusader abruptly and, far from grieving for President Kennedy, appeared to relish the personal contacts he had established in headquarters. Out of great tragedy had come a small measure of stature.

  He wandered around the studio as Duncan prepared the 2 A.M. newscast and struck up a conversation with a young man. Ruby gave him a card to the Carousel Club. He found another employee, Danny Patrick McCurdy, and confided that he had announced that he was closing his nightclubs for the weekend. Moodily, Ruby stared at the floor and figured it would cost him between $1200 and $1500, but he would rather lose it at this moment in America’s history. Such a loss could easily be translated into a mark of respect for the President.

  The shine began to wear off KLIF. Jack Ruby, rumpled and righteous, had told everyone how he felt about everything. He was on the side of the angels. The broadcasts would continue all night long, but there was nothing to be gained in the studio. The paper bags were empty. Everyone had been thankful. Ruby was sure he could gain entrance at night again. He had established a rapport with KLIF. Besides, a new idea had crossed his mind. He had seen the Dallas News ads at Phil’s Delicatessen, and in capital letters they said: CLOSED under the names of his nightclubs. The Dallas Times Herald would be wide awake at this hour, and he could drive over there and make certain that those small one-column ads shouted “CLOSED.” Also he could see the advertisements of his competitors. So far, those gentlemen showed an elemental lack of “class” by remaining open and making a profit.

  The final abuse of the body was under way. Pumping leads were established under the armpits. One forced a formaldehyde compound through the arteries of the body as a tube on the opposite side accepted the last of the body’s blood. Gawler’s men were efficient and almost silent. The four maintained their separate tasks. This time it was difficult to keep the hands from trembling. All of the four had lived in and around the capital with this charmer, this buoyant President. When the sheet was curled off the body, the professionals looked at what was left. Each man kept his features immobile, but each felt the depression of death.

  A cosmetician studied the bloated face. Roy Kellerman got to his feet, walked over, and whispered: “How long?” The answer, whispered, was “Not long.” He asked again: “How long?” An embalmer looked at his wristwatch. The time in Washington was 2:30 A.M. “An hour,” he said. “An hour and fifteen minutes.” Roy Kellerman strode back to his witness chair and phoned Clint Hill. “Tell the Attorney General we leave about 3:45,” he said. “Tell the White House too.”

  The art of making a body presentable is no favor to the dead. It is designed to please the next of kin, to assure the living that he sleeps. The ultimate hypocrisy is jamming shoes on the dead. All of it is countenanced, expected, and paid for by the living. Gawler’s, known for its discretion and good taste, knew from experience that the restoration of those who die by violence—especially with head or face wounds—is particularly difficult. Joseph Hagan walked around the body, noting the lacerated areas, and snipped a small bit of hair from behind the President’s head.

  “Go back and match this,” he said to one of his men. “Bring enough to cover this open section on the head.” He looked toward the bench where Kellerman and Greer and Burkley sat like dazed dolls. “And hurry,” he said. A slight curved mesh was fashioned for the missing part of the head. It was a malleable fabric. The scalp would be pulled tight over it.

  The Dallas casket, which had reposed against a wall, was taken away.* The dark mahogany one was wheeled in on a trolley. The President’s clothing was placed on a chair, the creases neatly folded. Deft touches of a compound were placed on his eyelids to keep them closed. The lashes were brought down. White shorts were brought up over the legs. Black sox were peeled upward over the feet and ankles. The unresistant body began to take on the hue, the composed expression of John F. Kennedy.

  Justice of the Peace David L. Johnston was ready. There was nothing the young man had to do except to read the charge to the prisoner, advise him of his rights, and tell him that murder in the first degree was a nonbailable offense in Texas. The magistrate had been in the room when Fritz signed the document at 11:26 P.M., and he could have read it to Lee Harvey Oswald at that time. There was no room for an exercise of options by the judge. Anyone could have read it and disposed of the hearing within ten minutes.

  At 1:30 A.M. he was ready. Lee Harvey Oswald was sleeping. The judge told Chief Curry to get the prisoner and find a safe place for the arraignment. The chief thought that the jailers could bring him down to the I.D. Bureau on the fourth floor, the same place where Lieutenant Knight had made the fingerprints. Phone calls were made. Superior officers of the police department were ordered to be present. This, they were told, was the big charge—assassination of a President.

  Fritz slammed a desk drawer closed and took an elevator up. Chief Batchelor walked up. So did Chief Stevenson. Assistant District Attorney William Alexander represented Henry Wade. Another assistant D.A., Maurice Harrell, was present. On the third floor, most of the reporters had left for the night on the assurance that nothing exciting would occur until morning. Many of them were in hotels, tapping out final recollections of a bad day. A few, notably wire service men, remained in the corridor, and asked why top-ranking officers were hurrying to elevators and stairwells.

  It was “nothing.” None of them guessed that it would be a hearing on the assassination because the press had been assured that Oswald had been arraigned on that charge before midnight. Some in the hall surmised that the excitement was caused by a possible attack on a jailer by Oswald. Or maybe he had committed suicide. Or tried to. On the other hand, it could be that he had cracked and wanted to confess the crime. He could be bargaining for a second degree plea.

  In the nearby hotels, out-of-town reporters were chagrined to learn that Dallas room service stops at 10 P.M. In New York and Washington, they told their hotel operators, there were places where a man could phone for a steak and a bottle of liquor at any hour. They were reminded that they were in Dallas, where decent people are sleeping at this hour. Besides, liquor was out of the question. The chief of the Los Angeles Times bureau, Robert J. Donovan, asked if it would be possible to pay a bellboy to go out and get some food.

  An old Negro arrived. Donovan looked at him. The man was an anachronism, even for Dallas. The black shiny skin was furrowed; the hair was white along the sides. He wore a jazzy uniform with bell-bottom trousers and a gay pillbox hat on his head. “We are a bunch of newspapermen,” said Donovan. “We haven’t had anything to eat since breakfast in Fort Worth. We would appreciate it if you could go out somewhere and get us something to eat.” The old man looked at the tired faces and nodded. It could be done.

  “Now,” said Donovan, “we can pay you a little extra if you can get us a jug. We know we can’t get liquor in Dallas. We figure that you would know a place.” The dark compassionate eyes of the old man swept the room. “No,” he said. “I can’t do that.” The voice was deep enough to come from the throat of a prophet. “Ain’t there been enough laws broken in Dallas today?”

  Two jailers awakened Lee Harvey Oswald in his cell and he demanded to know what was going on. Sergeant Warren said: “I got my orders from the chief. He says to bring you down to I.D. again.” If the prisoner silently debated the notion of refusing, he gave it up. For a bond hearing, they would have carried him. Docilely he held his wrists out and the handcuffs were snapped. He was sandwiched between guards and le
ft the maximum security area, half sleepy, half angry, and was taken down a flight of stairs.

  On the fourth floor there was a heavy metal prison door. This was unlocked, and Lee Harvey Oswald found himself in the presence of a considerable company of men. Normally this hearing would have been held in one of the courts on the first or second floor of this building. It was not put on the statute books to become an act of secrecy. This is what it was. The little foyer with the file cabinets was a chosen setting. The prisoner could holler as loud as possible for counsel—or shout his innocence—and no one could hear him except those police officers who believed him guilty. The outcome of the hearing would have remained the same in any case, but there was a desire on the part of the law to recite both charges—Tippit and Kennedy—in a private place. There could be but one reason for this: to keep Oswald’s mouth shut.

  Judge Johnston stood behind a check-in counter. He had the formal charge before him. Oswald glanced at all the faces. He saw no friends. This could not have hurt him because he never had one. “Is this the trial?” he said sarcastically. Oswald knew better. The justice of the peace held the affidavit up. “No,” he said. “I have to arraign you again on another offense.” Oswald did not want to be a party to it. The judge appeared to be nervous.

  He began to parrot the printed form before him, stating that he was arraigning Lee Harvey Oswald for the murder with malice of John F. Kennedy, cause Number F–154, the state of Texas versus Lee Harvey Oswald.* The malcontent appeared to be offended. “Oh,” he shouted at the assemblage, “this is the deal, is it?” The judge kept talking, saying that this charge had been filed at 11:26 P.M. on November 22, 1963, by Captain J. W. Fritz of the Homicide Bureau of the Dallas Police Department, and that Fritz, as the complainant, had signed it.