The Day Kennedy Was Shot

by Jim Bishop

  Across the bottom of it, Judge Johnston penned: “1:35 A.M. 11-23-63. Bond hearing—defendant remanded to Sheriff, Dallas County, Texas. No Bond—Capital offense.” Oswald watched, and said: “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He began to ask about John Abt. He spelled it for the judge. Oswald’s plea was that if he had constitutional rights, then one of them included the services of a lawyer. He had asked for John Abt of New York almost all day. In addition, he told the judge, he had said that if Abt was unavailable he would accept the services of a Dallas American Civil Liberties Union lawyer.

  “You will be given the opportunity to contact the lawyer of your choice,” Johnston said blandly. The prisoner was irritated; this is what he had heard all day. He had pleaded for legal assistance for the past eight hours. He had begged for it at the press conference. He had phoned for it. No one had stepped forward. Some of the police officers who now stood silently behind him knew that the American Civil Liberties Union had contacted the police to protect Oswald’s rights. The law lied when it said he had declined the services of a lawyer.

  He was boxed in firmly and in inquisitorial secrecy by men who proclaimed themselves the upholders of the law. He cannot have hoped to escape the charge of assassination: there were too many witnesses; he had hidden his gun between cartons; the dead shells were still on the floor when he departed; he must have known that the curtain rod fable could be checked and that even his naïve friend, Wesley Frazier, would not believe it. Lee Harvey Oswald knew, once he made up his mind not to flee Dallas, that he would be caught and charged with the assassination.

  Whatever grand design he had in mind for himself involved the use of an attorney. There can be no doubt that, considering the obvious trail of evidence he left behind him, that he would probably have been convicted in a reasonable trial. The mirror maze of thinking in which he involved himself was not deficient in simple logic. Arrested—Tried—Convicted must have been arithmetical progressions to him. Above all, he required a forum, a debating pedestal. He could have made a bid for fame in a Marxist speech at a trial. Or he might have penned a runaway best seller in prison. He was a bookish man. In his extreme penuriousness, he had once spent hard-earned dollars to have a public stenographer in Fort Worth pen the “history” of his visit to the Soviet Union.

  Had he listened to Judge Johnston, Oswald might have noted that this was the second time he had been “remanded” to the custody of the sheriff, Bill Decker. He had the right to demand the transfer “forthwith.” It would have embarrassed Fritz and Curry and perhaps the judge.* The hearing was over. Curry nodded to the jailers. They took their man back through the iron gate and up to the fifth-floor cell. He would be permitted six hours of sleep.

  Sheba was patient. She dozed on the front seat for hours. The noise of pedestrians seldom disturbed her. The little dog recognized the voice, the cough, and the step of her master. When Jack Ruby came out of KLIF, Sheba was alert, standing on the front seat. He slid in on the driver’s side, made the cooing expressions he always did when he returned to one of his dogs, and put the car in gear.

  He was driving west. The streets appeared bright with light, but there was no one on them. Ruby could look down a mile of broad avenue and watch the diminishing rows of traffic lights switch, like an array of colorful soldiers, from orange to red to green. The trouble, as far as Ruby was concerned, was that he had time. He was a night person. The Carousel and the Vegas were closed, but his mind was alert and open. It would not shut down for sleep.

  Since childhood he had had a fear of being alone. He spent as little time as possible in the apartment. He asked his friend George Senator to share the place with him so that there would be someone to talk to. When there wasn’t, Ruby read the papers quickly, tossed them on the bedroom floor, and reached for the phone. The hour didn’t matter: “Did I wake you? I’m sorry. Listen, I just thought of something. . . .”

  Even the dogs were there for the monologue. He had several. They were small, like Yorkshires, and they stared moodily at Ruby from overstuffed chairs and beds. By day, when he had no work to do, he could stop in the bank to make a deposit or a withdrawal, kill an hour in a newspaper advertising department, stop in at police headquarters and talk crime with the police, visit Eva for an hour, work on ideas to peddle a notion he had, called The Twistboard, shop for groceries, visit a stripper, hand out free cards to his nightclubs, kill time in Phil’s Delicatessen, or glue himself to the phone.

  He had no real yearning to visit the Times Herald, except to check his advertisements. He might find someone there to discuss the assassination with him, and he could tell how he nailed Henry Wade for one interview after another, and of how he corrected him—politely, of course—about the Free Cuba group. Jack Ruby knew what a big shot was. He also knew he wasn’t one.

  2 a.m.

  Dallas was so quiet that Jack Ruby could listen to the continuous kiss of his tires on Jackson Street. The night air was chill and sweet and clear. On his left a big sign flashed hope to the emptiness: “Life Building.” At a red light near Field Street, if a man sat quietly, he could hear the summer thunder of the freight yards at Lamar Street rippling the length of a hundred cars or more. It was a noise similar to the one President Kennedy had heard from his pillow at the Hotel Texas last night. Another town; another railroad; another man.

  Ruby turned right on Field. A car flashed lights at him. A horn honked. A policeman yelled: “Hello, Jack.” Ruby followed the lights into a parking lot diagonally across the street. The policeman, Harry Olsen, was a friend. There was a woman with him. She worked for Jack. She was a British girl with a lilting accent. He called her Kathy Kay, but her name was Kay Helen Coleman.

  The nightclub owner had trouble understanding people who were in love. It embarrassed him. Olsen was in love with Kathy and was going to marry her in a month. But Ruby could not see it that way; he thought of Olsen as still married to another woman, going out on dates with this English girl. Mr. Ruby thought of this liaison as “secret”; Olsen was a man with “marital problems.”

  The policeman and the nightclub girl had met at 11 P.M. and they had been drinking beer and conversing about the assassination. The more beer, the more emotional the event became. The three met near the shack of the parking attendant, Johnny. There were vast level empty spaces, and a few automobiles left overnight. The four asked each other: What do you think? Wasn’t it terrible? The standard question.

  Sheba was permitted to sniff around the parking lot. When she wandered too far into the silent darkness, her master called her with a chirrup. The dog returned happily, scampering around the legs of Jack Ruby, as though daring him to try to catch her. This once, the nightclub owner found two persons who were more emotional than he. He would like to have told Olsen about Jack Ruby and the district attorney, but the couple had been wound up tight, and they had opinions which must be vented at once. “If he was in England,” Kay said in that prim lilting accent, “they would have dragged him through the streets and would have hung him.” Olsen thought that Oswald should be cut, inch by inch, into ribbons.

  The nightclub owner listened to them and to Johnny, the parking attendant, and he decided to leave. They grabbed his arm and held him. Jack Ruby was told that he was the greatest guy in the world. Just the greatest. They did not want him to go. The conversation had the quality of a snowball running downhill; it became bigger, more magnificent as the mood plumbed the depths. At times, any two of them would burst into tears.

  No one asked Olsen why he had not been on duty as a Dallas patrolman that day. He had fallen and broken a kneecap weeks before. The leg was still in a cast and he had been assigned to “light duty.” Ruby’s face sagged. When he found room in which to elbow the conversation, he kept saying: “What a wonderful man President Kennedy was. You know, I feel so sorry for Mrs. Kennedy and those little children.”

  Mrs. Coleman told Ruby that, since Harry broke the kneecap, they seldom got out. They were so depressed this evening that she h
ad driven him to the Sip and Nip on Commerce Street. They had some beer, and they expressed their solemn sentiments to Lee, the bartender. The place closed at midnight, so they had driven around, looking for places in which to exercise the catharsis of conversation.

  “I took some sandwiches down to the boys,” Ruby said, lying to the policeman. This was another generous gesture that made Ruby the greatest guy in the world. The parking attendant listened, but no one gave him room for opinion. He knew Ruby was the owner of the Carousel, a block away at Akard and Jackson. Right now Mr. Ruby was sitting in the driver’s seat of his car with the door open. Olsen was leaning on the open windowsill. Kay Coleman noticed that her boss had his “starey, wild-eyed look.” She soon found out what had upset him. He was angry because his striptease competitors at the Theatre Lounge and the Colony Club had remained open, doing business, earning profits after he, Jack Ruby, had shown the proper manner in which to show respect for a dead President.

  Olsen discussed Oswald, and Ruby quietly played his trump card. “I saw him.” He waited for the proper reaction. They said: “You did? What did he look like?” Ruby said that he had seen him taken down at the assembly room and had been close enough to Lee Harvey Oswald almost to touch him. “What do you think, Jack?” said Olsen. The nightclub owner, in a clearly superior position, bent his lip into a sneer. “He looked just like a little rat. He was sneaky-looking, like a weasel.”

  His friends nodded sagely. That was the impression they had. It was a sad day for Dallas that a thing like this had to happen because some crazy creep had a gun. “It’s too bad that a peon like that can get away with something like that,” Ruby said. The group nodded agreement. They talked on, Ruby calling Sheba back into the car, stroking her head and calling Oswald a “son of a bitch.” Patrolman Olsen congratulated Ruby for closing up for the whole weekend. The conversation became repetitious, but the foursome continued; excited thoughts were flung to the night air, hardly listened to in passing, and others spurted upward, like an erratic fountain of thought.

  Ruby decided that, no matter how late this agreeable debate lasted, he was going to stop at the Times Herald before taking himself and Sheba back to the smelly little apartment and throwing himself on a bed.

  The four men were no longer sharp of mind. They studied the supine President as Gawler’s men studied another one, except that this one was alive and new. Jack Valenti, so fatigued that he sat too erect, riffled through the pages of notes and suggestions. Cliff Carter, as big as Lyndon Johnson physically, was crushed by the weight of the hours. Bill Moyers, the facile student of government, kept a vigil on the President’s eyes.

  The lids were heavy. They dropped a little, then lifted suddenly and stared at the hypnotic screen. A station was running a hastily wrought biography of “Lyndon Baines Johnson, 36th President of the United States.” The subject placed the bedclothes up under his arms and fought sleep. The men around him had no further words, no suggestions. Johnson felt a confidence in each one, but none of them were politicians. This was a “pickup” team. It is doubtful that, collectively, they knew more about the seat of power than its title. Their loyalty to him was touching but temporarily unproductive.

  Lyndon Johnson understood power and its uses. Like a slow and ambitious student, he had studied twice as hard as his competitors in the Congress and at the White House. He had a more practical feel for government than his predecessor because he had watched the wheels of congressional committee spin eccentrically, and he understood the relationship—the true relationship—of the men on the Hill with the men on the High Bench, in relation to the Man in the White House.

  Each of these was the right man for his time. The country had been aroused by the youth and exuberance of John F. Kennedy, who admonished citizens and legislators to execute his plans, not because it was politically right, but because it was good for America. The new frontier, as was true of the new gimmickry, was in outer space. Kennedy could draw more attention shooting his cuffs than Johnson could declaring war.

  The country was not prepared to receive Lyndon Johnson. To retreat a step, it was not prepared to lose its Galahad in Texas. In pain, the people acquired guilt. They had felt it, in a similar situation, three times in the past hundred years. This time the scars would be deeper because of the almost instant communication of television. They saw what happened in Texas. They saw it again and again, as a repentant slayer relives his crime.

  Those who had opposed John F. Kennedy were now prepared to receive him. The people who voted against him wept. The Congressmen who had disarrayed his program, stifled his progressive measures in committee, beat him on the floor of House and Senate with loud “Nays,” worked hard this night on speeches of sanctification and superlatives to be laid reverently in the back of The Congressional Record.

  The mass of people, like lovers who have strayed, desired to touch him. They would pray for him, defend him, buy a color photo of him or an ashtray with his name on it, adore his widow and vote for his brothers, change the names of boulevards, schools, hospitals, capes, and stadia to Kennedy. The people would resurrect him and they could not do this without spiritually rejecting Lyndon Baines Johnson.

  The new face was older, tougher, earthbound. The features were not intended for flights to the stars. The accent was Texas. Ironically none of the Texans around the bed could hear it. The new man understood the phrases: to think; to do; to produce. He knew more about them than Kennedy, and he had just completed the first eleven hours of earning his salary. And yet efficiency was not good enough. Grief is not an intellectual exercise. The national heart was depressed; the country was taking its pulse.

  “It’s getting late, Mr. President,” Cliff Carter said. It was a hint to close the book for the day. If he said: “Stay,” they would remain seated. The brown eyes opened wide, moving from man to man. “It is,” he said. The President propped himself up on one elbow. “Now you all go to bed and get some sleep.” He looked at the little clock on the night table. It was nine minutes past three. “We’ll be leaving here at eight in the morning.” If there was shock, none showed it. They would be up at seven. Moyers asked if he should shut the television set off. “No,” the President said. “I’ll take care of that.”

  They said “Goodnight, Mr. President.” As they left, he was still awake, still looking.

  To the witnesses, the morticians were, in a manner of speaking, magicians. They had been given a broken shell of a man, and they had walked around him many times, whispering incantations to each other, applying the laying on of hands, and the shell began to look more and more like John F. Kennedy. The brows, the cheeks were smoothed outward and downward. The natural complexion of the President seemed to return. Thatches of thick chestnut hair were applied to the head and were combed out.

  It had not hurt as much for the Greers and Kellermans and Burkleys and McHughs to stare at him when he was torn and broken. It hurt now. An undershirt, a pair of trousers, a white shirt were put on the unresisting frame and, when the tie was knotted, he had everything but breath. Greer turned away. Kellerman found it difficult to believe. Perhaps McHugh or Burkley might have fleetingly remembered the old story about the genie who could grant but one wish.

  The entire evening had been morbid and gruesome, but the government had insisted on having witnesses. Death, in this case, was not a personal matter but an affair of state. From the moment the first shot in Dealey Plaza split the sky until the last volley drifted across the green hill at Arlington Cemetery, everything that happened to this man, everything that was noted, surmised, or conjectured, every conclusion for good or ill would become history.

  The dark jacket was put on. It was buttoned and the hands were entwined across the front. The shoes were put on. Hagan and his men walked around the body again and again, tugging at wrinkled cloth, smoothing the hang of the suit of clothes, studying the serene features from the sides, the front, and even from the back of the head. All of it would have to be done again, when the body left the t
able, but the men wanted to be reasonably sure that they were satisfied with their work.

  The long night was running out. There was a morning chill on the stone of Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome. The amber rays from the high windows crossed swords inside the nave. Paul VI knelt at an ornate prie-dieu before the main altar, the dark baldachinos lifting a canopy over the Host as the assembled monsignori carried the Pope’s heavy brocade vestments forward to cover the prayer bench.

  Thus began the pontifical requiem Mass for the repose of the soul of John F. Kennedy, a supplicant Roman Catholic, a sinner. The Pope clasped his hands, the fingertips touching each other, and he began his entreaty to Almighty God by asking forgiveness of sin. The early communicants at St. Peter’s Basilica, pious Romans and inquisitive tourists, saw the Pope and knelt on the marble floor in astonishment. Prayers had been assaulting the gates of heaven for John F. Kennedy in many tongues and many temples, but if the credos of the Catholic Church are to be accepted, the real authority, the valid plea for the soul came from the lips of Father Oscar Huber, the little priest who had never seen a live President.

  Thousands of miles to the west, Vincent Drain rested his eyes. If he had a prayer to say, it had been said. The tanker was high in the sky and a little smile crossed his lips. The FBI agent approached the ladder laden with packages of evidence, the military personnel had saluted him.

  As he was smiling through the closed eyes, he felt something move at his feet and looked down to find a sergeant removing his shoes. “Hey,” the FBI man said, “what are you doing?” “You look like you need rest, mister.” The shoes came off. The jacket was hung. Then sleep fled, and Vincent Drain went forward with his evidence, to sit behind the captain and await the pink flush of dawn on the flight deck.