by Jim Bishop
In London, Sir Alec Douglas Home knelt in Westminster Cathedral, peering like an emaciated owl over the tops of his spectacles. The first British services for Kennedy had begun. In Paris, groups of blue-clad laborers stood before the window of a television shop, studying the animation of a face which was no more. Down the Kurfürstendamm, past the Kaiser Wilhelm Kirche and the zoo paraded the remnants of the torch carriers of Berlin.
There were torchbearers in Bern, too, but the Swiss started before dawn. In the black velvet of the hills, they had made a glacial river of fire descending toward the old city. Thousands of Britons braved the needle veils of morning rain to stand in reverence before the United States embassy in London. A long time ago, the dead President had called this home. He and young Joe had come here to study and to be at the side of their father, Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr.
The Kennedy boys had complained at wearing homburgs and carrying furled umbrellas, but they had come to know the ambassador as an absolute authority. They had made fun of each other in the embassy when the hats went on. The people who braved the morning drizzle knew nothing of these things, but they paid their homage in rain because they felt they had lost “well, a cousin of sorts.”
Everywhere the hearts of the multitude felt regret at the passing of a man. Governments were different. Official grief was stereotyped: a wreath; a warm cablegram to a widow; signing a book in an embassy foyer; an emissary at a funeral. Governments are concerned with the living. The morning reaction would be coming in from everywhere. Britain understood Kennedy, but could the United Kingdom depend upon Johnson? Germany believed that the format and policy of the Kennedy regime would remain intact, but would the spirit be alive? Argentina was worried. Italy would appreciate assurances of continued support.
France, well, France would send De Gaulle to find out for himself. America, too, was fearful. It had gone to bed with its confidence shaken. How much did it know about Lyndon Johnson? Didn’t he have a heart attack? Who succeeds Johnson? Well, there was old reliable John McCormack, seventy-one years of age, Speaker of the House. He was an excellent politician, an ideal lieutenant—but a captain? Politically and philosophically, he was hardly sophisticated. Behind him, in line of succession, came Senator Carl Hayden of Arizona. He was eighty-six years of age, a man revered by his confreres as a great American. The mileage on his mind was insuperable. In a day, America had lost its youth.
The casket was wheeled sideward toward the table. They touched. The witnesses offered assistance, but Hagan declined. He and his men worked easily. Both lids of the casket were open. On a signal, they lifted the body, kicked the autopsy table away, and held the body over the casket and lowered it gently. The final tender service to the flesh had begun. The men walked back and forth around the box, straightening feet and seams and shirring. The tie was firmly held under a clasp, and the jacket was draped softly downward.
The hair was carefully combed once more. A rosary was carefully laced through the fingers. The morticians examined their work from every side. They rubbed cloths over the dark mahogany, where hands had touched it. Joseph Hagan looked across the room at the witnesses. “We are ready,” he said softly. The lid came down.
The word reached the seventeenth floor. The Attorney General looked at his watch. It was close to 4 A.M. Relatives and friends hurried to get coats, women to powder. A pall of cigarette smoke hung in the sitting room and it undulated as the guests made ready. They had served the widow well. Conversations of many hues had diverted her mind from the permanent shock. She had been forced, for a time, to think of other things. She had lapsed into a staring, dull expression, but there was always someone present to ask a question, tell an anecdote, make a suggestion.
Robert F. Kennedy had been heroic. He sublimated his crushing sorrow to serve hers. It is possible that Robert Kennedy had more courage than either Joe or Jack or Ted. Everything affected him more and showed less. He often felt pity, rancor, indignation, contempt, and sorrow—and denied them. His likes were as fierce as his dislikes and as possessive. He was small and tough and shyly sentimental. It was the Attorney General who originally divided the world into “them” and “us.”
Mrs. Kennedy spoke this evening of her husband as though he were living. Bobby spoke of him as dead. He had spent time in the kitchen with McNamara and others discussing the Kennedy regime, the Kennedy policies, as though they had been killed in Dallas, and he wondered aloud if Lyndon Johnson would try to resurrect them. He had loved his brother slavishly, so that if an error was committed, he wanted to take the onus upon himself. When Robert irritated men of lofty station, they complained to the President, and he smiled and said: “I can handle Bobby.”
He could. Jack was dead, and old Joe could not speak, and for a time Robert F. Kennedy would wander in the fields of McLean, Virginia, with his Newfoundland dog, wondering about himself, asking himself if the attainment of power was worth the result, brooding over Jacqueline’s brooding, worried because the face in that majestic office wasn’t Jack’s. There was no one to handle Robert Kennedy. For several months, he would not be able to handle himself.
At the stone dock, a Navy ambulance was backed tight. Limousines sat in the dark. Ranking naval officers, summoned by subordinates, appeared. The witnesses who had waited all night, stood for a moment. Kellerman met Hill and Landis in the corridor, and led the party to an anteroom. The Attorney General, head down, took his sister-in-law’s elbow. Behind them, in slow procession, were the Kennedy sisters, Ted Kennedy, Powers, O’Donnell, O’Brien, McNamara, the old friends, the new Cabinet members—they filed on in greater numbers than anyone had thought.
Naval personnel stood around the casket. Kellerman smiled briefly. “We’ll take care of that,” he said. The Secret Service agents wheeled it out onto the dark dock and into the ambulance. The trolley was taken from underneath and pulled back to the autopsy room. Roy Kellerman made the arrangements. He held a whispered conversation with the Attorney General and came back to the dock. “Bill,” he said to Greer, “you drive. I’ll sit up with you. Mrs. Kennedy and the Attorney General are going to ride in back with the body. Clint, take the second car.”
There were motorcycle policemen in a wedge on Palmer Road. Kellerman went out and told them the route back to the White House. He wanted no sirens, no noise. They would aim for about thirty miles per hour and hold it. The cops could get the cortege through the red lights. They would go down Wisconsin and then left to the White House. At the northwest gate on Pennsylvania Avenue, the motorcycles would turn away, permitting the ambulance and the automobiles to go through.
Kellerman hurried back to the dock. He saw the widow stooping to get through the back, where, as before, she sat on one side of the casket and Robert sat on the other. They drew the shades. The doors of the limousines were slamming. Drivers put their lights on. Officers of the United States Navy stood on the dock at salute. The faces, the uniforms, the rank were blurred in the night light. A few enlisted men had put white caps on and stood on the ground, saluting.
Greer took the order from Kellerman. The ambulance lights went on. The rotating red beacon on top swept the night air with carmine crayon. The motorcycle cops forced their weight down on their starters and the racket of exhausts was like gunfire. They moved out onto Palmer, behind the giant monument of Bethesda.
There were houses of naval personnel here. The hedges and lawn flowers were stiff and dead, but the occupants were soft and alive. In the dark, they stood on their porches, watching the cortege come toward them, the sweeping beacon magnetizing the eyes of parents and children. They saw it coming toward them, the phalanx of police a spearhead, and they saw it pass, and they watched it go away, up the climb of Palmer toward the front drive, where the grass was velvet green. Commanders in pajamas shifted sleepy youngsters from one arm to the other and came to stiff salute. Some women watched and wept. Some shook their heads perplexedly. A few blessed themselves and wished him a long calm voyage to whatever haven sailors seek.
<
br /> On shortwave, the word went to the White House. The President of the United States was on his way home. Hurriedly, a triangular piece of crepe was hung on the front door of the main entrance. Sleepy honor guards were whipped by words to attention. Officers strode up and down in the darkness, sabers against shoulders, the mouths forming the same truculent O which was so common to the face of Lee Harvey Oswald. The final tape of black was tacked to the bottom step of the big catafalque. In the darkness, saffron lights shone from the second floor. The great fountain on the lawn tossed a stream high in color, and it diffused in veils as it fell.
The house waited for him as it had waited for others. The sound of sobs had been heard here before. The house had heard the rattle of death, the smacking kiss of the bridegroom, the cry of an infant. This man had no more days to go. The house must live on, to endure what time would bring.
3 a.m.
Stage center was empty. The actors were resting. A police department cleaning employee pushed a broad broom down the third-floor corridor. It held a sizable assortment of cigarette butts, bits of film, and used photography bulbs. The hall was empty of reporters. In the press room, a typewriter clacked, but no one could identify the young man who hit the keys with one finger. A detective sat, with hat off the edge of his forehead, in Forgery.
A building employee moved from door to door, snapping lights off. Captain Will Fritz was gone. The chief had called it a night. A deputy chief sat in the front office reading the morning paper. It was so quiet one could hear the pulsing refrigerant in the soft drink machine. Paper cups filled trash baskets and the most recent ones rolled on the floor. Lieutenant Day’s bureau was locked.
A radio operator listened to a DWI—driving while intoxicated—report coming in from a squad car somewhere in the night. Phones rang, and no one answered. On the basement floor, a prison admission clerk read a soft-cover novel. On the fifth floor, a maximum security guard got off the chair and walked a few paces up and down to keep awake.
Lee Harvey Oswald slept. The mouth was slightly open; the respiration was slow. He could not have been fearful. Sleep had come naturally and swiftly. If he had dreams, they were secret. He murmured no words. The limbs did not twitch. The sleep was restorative, and he would be ready for Fritz after a hearty breakfast.
Dallas stood tall and cool in the night. The Texas School Book Depository building, except for the night-light on the ground floor, was dark. The Hertz sign on the roof flashed: “3:08” then “62 degrees,” but it did not disturb the pigeons, who slept with their heads under their wings. The switch engines made their short hauls across the overpass, coupling and uncoupling strings of cars. The brightly lighted building behind the railroad station was the Dallas News. The diesel trucks on Stemmons Freeway made pulsing sounds as they rushed through Dallas and out the other side. A novelty shop, closed with all lights on, featured a dinner dish with a portrait of Mr. and Mrs. John F. Kennedy for a dollar ninety-eight.
Jack Ruby looked at his watch and said he had to go. The policeman and his bride-to-be said okay. Sheba, curled on the front seat, had no opinion. The shame of the whole thing, said Jack Ruby, was that poor little woman who would have to come back to Dallas for the trial. Every time he said it, the sentence took on the aspect of a whole new thought. It was difficult to ascertain whether he was depressed by the assassination or exhilarated with his role as public relations adjudicator.
Marina Oswald slept with hair rollers wound tight. Marguerite knew how to foreclose a crisis to get proper rest. Trauma One, at Parkland Hospital, was dark. Even with sedation, Governor Connally slept restlessly. Lacerated flesh and broken bones had returned from shock to protest. Roy Truly, the manager of the School Book Depository, had grimly told himself: “I’m not going to get an ulcer over this,” and he wasn’t. It had taken some time for Wesley Frazier to fall asleep, but he made it. The few who were still wakeful were those whose night duties required it; those who were chronically ill and could not sleep; those whose dull lives had been improved with a new topic and whiskey.
The automobile appeared to be in sections. The rear seat was on the floor of the garage. The bubbletop was sitting by itself. The floor rugs, the metal stripping were in a separate group. Even the interior of the trunk had been taken apart. Whatever SS-100-X could tell the FBI had been told. The dream car was a nightmare. Robert Frazier ordered his men to put it together. Two Secret Service men watched. When the job had been completed, the car was tested and found to be in running order. The ignition was shut down, and the men pushed the car back into the alcove at the rear.
The New York office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation had traced a big shipment of cheap Italian military rifles to Crescent Firearms, which sold in lots to mail order distributors. Early in the evening, the Dallas office had notified Washington that the rifle found on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository building was a 6.5-caliber Mannlicher-Carcano with the serial number C2766 stamped on it. Alan Belmont had passed this information on to all field offices. The New York group, contacting one gun house after another, found that Crescent had them.
The company had cooperated in keeping the office open as the FBI agents watched employees run through the files. The records were not overly precise, but they indicated that C2766 had been sent to Klein’s Sporting Goods, Incorporated, at 4540 West Madison Street, Chicago. The Chicago office of the FBI was alerted and, late at night, found William J. Waldman, vice president of Klein’s, at his home, 335 Central Avenue, in Wilmette, Illinois.
Mr. Waldman agreed to accompany the FBI agents to the office. It would be reopened, and he might need some of his own personnel to help run through the records. Lights were turned on, and file cabinets were ransacked. The first order of business, Mr. Waldman said, was to check up on the purchase records of the company. It was not a simple matter because Klein’s purchased a lot of sporting goods, a variety of merchandise, of which guns was but one.
It was after midnight when an invoice was uncovered from Crescent Firearms of New York. It was dated February 7, 1963, and cited a shipment of Mannlicher-Carcano 6.5’s, amounting to a hundred rifles per box. It was shipped by North Penn Transfer-Lifschultz and there were ten cases. Waldman showed a receipt, indicating that the guns had been paid for on March 4, 1963.
The guns had been advertised in hunting and sporting magazines. Purchasers filled out a coupon and remitted money orders. The next move, Mr. Waldman said, would be to start hunting through the microfilmed photostats which were kept on file. This would take some time because they were dropped into the files as they were received. There was no specific order of filing. Locating C2766 was going to be tedious rather than difficult.*
The drive before dawn was one of reflection. It was not planned that way. From the ambulance back through the cortege of six cars, conversation was slow or brief, and each of the mourners had time for his personal thoughts. It had been a long, long day. They were in another day but, not having had the blessing of sleep, it was considered to be the same one. In an hour the first streaks of light would be coming up behind the Capitol dome.
Death was not devised for simple meditation. The mind must be ordered to think about it, to absorb the crushing finality of it, to accept it, to plan logically. The sorrowing mind will refuse. This often leads to a carousel of thoughts which follow in sequence leading to no conclusions. William Greer, for example, was driving the ambulance slower than he or Kellerman had expected and deep within Greer he could hear the President reciting the lonely lines of Robert Frost:
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
It is not a refrain which can be shut down. “And miles to go . . .” The route from Bethesda was nine and a half miles to the White House. It was the last time Greer would drive the President. He would take his foot off the accelerator, watch the police escort move ahead, then see them turn
and slow down. A cab driver, dozing on a street corner, would watch the procession, then sit upright and put his car in gear and try to keep pace with those who wept with reason. A milk truck joined the line of cars, and a motorcycle patrolman was dispatched to go back and turn it away.
Each one had his separate memories, and if they crossed the line of thought of someone else in those cars, it was accidental. The thoughts raced from comedy to solemnity, and some tried to recall whether John F. Kennedy had discussed his death and if, in doing so, displayed a divination. Some wondered what he would be remembered for; he was here so short a time. He was the second man to free the Negro and, like the first, he departed, leaving the Negro to fight for it.
He had driven the Russians and their ugly missiles from Cuba; he had banned the testing of nuclear bombs in the atmosphere; found time to impart his benevolent blessing to the arts; what else? What else? He had inaugurated a new and less paternalistic attitude toward his brethren in South America; he had stopped Big Steel from contributing to the spiral of inflation; Castro had stopped him at the Bay of Pigs. He had made America feel excited about itself, a thing which is not measurable in tangibles.
Did anyone smile ruefully at the darkness remembering the time the President had asked David Powers to stay with him while Mrs. Kennedy was in Europe, and Powers said to the President: “This has got to stop. My family calls me John’s Other Wife.” The young widow, flipping through a mental album of portraits, remembered that, late at night, he often asked her to play the record from the play Camelot. He would sit at his “night work,” barely listening, until the last part of the last song. Then he dropped his pen as the voice sang:
Don’t let it be forgot,
That once there was a spot