by Jerry Parr
We were waiting for a call from Bob Gaugh, the Secret Service agent I was replacing. We’d bought his house, a one-year-old brick split-foyer with a big yard at 4818 Sunlight Drive. Gaugh had run into a snafu with his own mover, and we didn’t want to move in until he had moved out.
Though my transfer to Nashville was a lateral move, it felt like a promotion. I’d soon advance from a GS-7 government grade to GS-9, with a $2,000 raise. But the main benefit was that it cost so much less to live in Nashville than in New York. The three-bedroom, two-bath house with a garage and rec room seemed enormous compared to our one-bedroom garden apartment in New York. We were about to move up from the working poor to the middle class!
It was twelve thirty Nashville time, and I was absently surfing TV channels. When I hit CBS, an invisible voice-over interrupted a soap opera, As the World Turns, for breaking news. Suddenly Walter Cronkite was on the screen.[11] He tried to keep his voice calm, but in the newsroom behind him, I could see that chaos reigned. He said, “There has been an attempt . . . on the life of President Kennedy. He was wounded in an automobile driving from Dallas Airport into downtown Dallas, along with Governor Connally of Texas. They’ve been taken to Parkland Hospital there, where their condition is as yet unknown.”
Like so many people who heard those words that day, Carolyn and I began to pray for the president. Then Cronkite switched to the Dallas Trade Mart, where a group had gathered to hear President Kennedy speak. Reporter Eddie Barker of Dallas WKRLD started talking:
As you can imagine, there are many stories that are coming in now as to the actual condition of the president. One is that he is dead. This cannot be confirmed. Another is that Governor Connally is in the operating room. This we have not confirmed.
Perhaps picking up our vibes, Jenny started to cry. Carolyn gave her a bottle. I grabbed my gun and ran outside. Am I crazy? I thought. There’s no enemy to shoot. Back inside, I paced like a caged lion, a sick feeling in my stomach.
More details were coming in. “He is now in the emergency room at Parkland Hospital in Dallas. He is remaining in the emergency room because Secret Service aides say that the facilities there are as good as elsewhere. They have moved Governor Connally . . . to the operating room at Parkland Hospital. Mrs. Kennedy . . . was not injured but was said to be in a state of shock. . . . The president slumped into her lap with . . . a bullet wound in the head.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. In my mind I started to bargain with the news. Maybe he was grazed. Maybe it wasn’t fatal.
Cronkite said, “We have just been advised from Dallas that blood transfusions are being given to President Kennedy.” A staffer in the newsroom then handed Cronkite a note.
Back to the Trade Mart, where people were praying. Eddie Barker of WKRLD said, “The report is that the president is dead. This is not confirmed. . . . Word just came to us a minute ago. The word we have is that President Kennedy is dead. . . . He was shot by an assassin at the intersection of Elm and Houston Street just as he was going into the underpass. . . . A doctor on the staff of Parkland Hospital . . . says that it is true. He was in tears when he told me just a moment ago.”
I thought, A doctor would not be crying if it weren’t true.
The shot was fired at 12:30 p.m. central standard time. The president was pronounced dead thirty minutes later. The world was informed shortly after that.
Carolyn and I just looked at each other, too stunned to speak, struggling to absorb what we were hearing. In addition to shock and grief, I felt a primal sense of failure on behalf of the Secret Service. I determined right then and there that nothing like this would happen on my watch. I’d give my best gifts—intellectual, physical, emotional, spiritual—to be certain. This would not happen on my watch.
The jingle of a phone broke our silence. Bob Gaugh said, “Our movers have come and gone, but we can’t tear ourselves away from the TV. Why don’t you just come on over, and we’ll watch it together.” So we did.
I’ve often wondered what Bob must have been feeling on this, his last day as a Secret Service agent. He and I were watching every agent’s worst nightmare unfold in real time. His wife had persuaded him to take a commission in the Army, which she thought would be better for the family. Little did they foresee that Bob would be deployed to Vietnam only a few months later.
We huddled together in the basement amid untouched boxes, eyes riveted to the TV as scene after scene unfolded. Parkland Hospital announced that Governor Connally was seriously wounded but would survive. A single bullet had struck him in the back, an arm, and a leg. Doctors speculated he may have been pierced by the bullet that passed through the president.
Cameras showed people still standing, frozen along the parade route. Maybe if they didn’t move, the scene could be replayed with a different ending. Now a casket was being carried from Parkland and loaded into a borrowed hearse to be driven to the airport. Mrs. Kennedy got in the back and rode with the body.
Two hours after the shooting, Vice President Johnson was sworn in as president of the United States with Lady Bird Johnson on one side and Jacqueline Kennedy on the other, still wearing her blood-stained pink suit. On Air Force One, where John F. Kennedy’s body rested to be flown to Washington, federal judge Sarah Hughes wept as she administered the presidential oath of office.
The trauma was being shared by the entire country. As happened later on September 11, 2001, the whole world, in fact, was watching.
Now a suspect, Lee Harvey Oswald, was in custody. He’d also shot and killed a young police officer, J. D. Tippit, as he tried to flee.
Long after dark, the Gaughs finally tore themselves away.
Though I was on annual leave that Friday, I called Paul Doster, my new SAIC. He said, “Come in to work on Monday. But you’ll probably be going to Dallas in a few days.” In fact I didn’t go into the office until Tuesday, because Monday was declared a national day of mourning for the president’s funeral. The public wept before TV sets all over the United States as we saw Jackie Kennedy covered in black, with Robert and Ted Kennedy leading the funeral procession from the White House to St. Matthew’s Cathedral. Heads of state and dignitaries from more than ninety countries followed. They included Charles de Gaulle and Willy Brandt. Every heart broke at the sight of two-year-old John-John saluting his father’s casket.
As I watched, my thoughts were a little bit different from the public’s. I shared in the outpouring of grief, but I was also thinking about the security nightmare of that event—and my heart was going out to the exhausted and heartbroken agents working it. They were now protecting President Johnson, Jacqueline Kennedy, and her children. They were coordinating security for the entire event with ninety international security details and the State Department, which was then responsible for the visiting heads of state. Police, special agents from other federal agencies, FBI, and military all had a critical role in keeping participants and the public safe. A bomb in St. Matthew’s during the requiem mass could have decapitated the governments of the entire Western world—and more.
Added to their personal pain of losing the president, those agents must have been feeling the burden of massive failure. I was. An agent’s professional life has one mission: to protect the principal. When that mission fails, it fails utterly. There’s no silver lining, no learning for next time. There are still agents today who can’t talk about the Kennedy assassination. Many of the guys in Dallas that day drank their way to retirement, defeated and weakened by losing the president. At that time many of us wondered whether the Secret Service itself would survive. A Congress disgusted with the assassination could have transferred presidential protection to the FBI or the military. I wasn’t sure I’d still have a job six months from then.
Before I could leave for Dallas, a police groupie named Jack Ruby shot and killed Lee Harvey Oswald while Oswald was in custody of police officers in the basement of the Dallas police station. Again on live TV. Was this part of a conspiracy to silence Oswald? Were the po
lice involved? There was so much death in the air, so much pain.
I’m now convinced that the Warren Commission, which President Johnson appointed to investigate Kennedy’s assassination, was correct: Lee Harvey Oswald was a lone gunman. But at that moment there were many unanswered questions.
I flew to Dallas the following Friday, November 29. To my surprise there seemed to be a lot more grief in me than I sensed as the pervasive mood in Dallas.
Many people in Dallas did not like the president. The Democrats themselves were deeply split between liberals and conservatives, who threatened to bolt the party. Unhappiness focused on the same two issues: foreign policy and civil rights.
Though Kennedy had partially redeemed himself with a trip to Berlin, where he declared, “Ich bin ein Berliner” (“I am a Berliner”)[12]—and with ending the threat of missiles in Cuba—conservatives were still smarting about his handling of Khrushchev in Europe. They feared we had given away too much power in the test ban treaty that Kennedy had signed on October 7, 1963. Many Americans did not trust the Russians to abide by it.
Kennedy’s civil rights stance had also evoked fear and hatred, especially but not solely in the Southern states. In the South ministers and students, white and black, were joining hands in peaceful sit-ins, eat-ins, teach-ins, and voter registration campaigns. In the North Malcolm X was urging a more active kind of resistance to de facto segregation of schools, workplaces, and neighborhoods. On June 11 two African American students, James Hood and Vivian Malone, walked through the doors of the University of Alabama, escorted by the federalized Alabama National Guard. In a speech announcing this action President Kennedy had named integration—both north and south—as “a moral issue.”[13] A week later he’d sent proposed civil rights legislation to Congress.
As a result, the Dallas air had been thick with tension as the president’s visit approached. Less than a month before, UN Ambassador Adlai Stevenson had a frightening experience in Dallas. As he left the Memorial Auditorium Theater, where he had just received a standing ovation from 1,750 people, a woman struck him in the face with a sign, just missing his eye. And a young man spat on him. This happened on October 24, 1963.
Embarrassed, Dallas city leaders rushed to assure the world that Dallas was a hospitable city. The mayor, chamber of commerce president, and many conservatives signed an apology to Stevenson—with a copy to President Kennedy—for “a minute group of uninvited irresponsibles.” Governor John Connally, the leading Democratic conservative, called the troublemakers “a handful of people who let their emotions run away with them” and asserted they “are not representative of the people of Dallas.” The Dallas Times Herald apologized in a front-page editorial: “Dallas has been disgraced. There is no other way to view the storm-trooper actions of last night’s frightening attack on Adlai Stevenson.”[14]
But I learned that not all the violence came from the right wing. Some had come from the left.
I recently asked Roger Warner, who had been an agent with the Dallas field office at the time of Kennedy’s assassination, how he viewed the atmosphere in Dallas before and after the president’s murder. He said, “Jerry, here’s what you were seeing: in April a sharpshooter tried to kill General Edwin Walker, a right-wing hero, by shooting into his house. People were already on edge because the shooter was loose and still unidentified. Then we had the Stevenson incident. And now it was the president!
“Then Jack Ruby shot Oswald. Every day seemed to bring more shock, more trauma, more drama. Rumors were flying. People were afraid we might be going to war with Cuba. What you were probably sensing in Dallas, Jerry, was fear.”
But the truth remained: whatever I sensed in Dallas was very different from the adulation I’d seen in New York.
My first couple of days in Dallas I “backed up” autopsy pictures of Oswald; that is, I wrote up all the details of the autopsy report on the back of each photo: his name, the time of the autopsy, the hospital, doctor, pathologist—that kind of information.
Then I was assigned to Marguerite Oswald, the assassin’s mother.
There were two reasons to protect her. First, there had been enough killing. Oswald’s mother; his wife, Marina; and even his brother Robert had received threats. How many more Jack Rubys might be lurking, seeing themselves as avenging angels for the death of the president? The cycle of vengeance had to stop.
The second reason was that the FBI wanted to question Oswald’s family, to see what they knew about Lee’s motive for going to Russia, marrying a Russian woman, and seeking asylum there. When the Russians wouldn’t take him, Oswald was forced to return to the United States. It was known that he had gone to Mexico in September 1963, where he visited the Cuban embassy and sought permission to travel to Cuba. Permission was denied. The FBI wanted to know more, and specifically whether others were involved.
As it turned out, Marguerite and Robert didn’t really know anything, and after a few weeks their protection was dropped. But we kept a detail with Marina until the Warren Commission report came out in September 1964.
For now, I was driving to Fort Worth to begin my assignment protecting Marguerite Oswald, who lived in a modest house with a porch. I was greeted by Marguerite, a grandmotherly nurse who appeared to be in her early sixties, with thinning gray hair pulled back in a bun. She wore large glasses with dark rims, pointed at the sides. She enjoyed getting protection because it made her feel important, but it was really more like house arrest. Four of us took turns with her: Bob Camp, Carl Hardy, Gary Seals, and I. She drove us all nuts.
As we’d say in the South, Marguerite Oswald was a piece of work. In a nasal, grating voice she insisted—loudly and repeatedly—that Lee was an agent of the CIA, sent to Russia by the US government. She referred to herself proudly as “a mother in history.” I never heard her say she was ashamed or even embarrassed by the fact that her son had murdered the president of the United States. On the contrary, she reveled in the attention she was getting. Her son was said to have hated her, and after a short time I could understand why. I was with her only four days, December 1 to December 4, but I spent every minute possible out on the porch.
On a Sunday afternoon some kind women from a Baptist church came to visit and brought Marguerite a bouquet of lovely pink and white calla lilies. One of them said, “We were thinking how upset you must be about what happened, and we wanted to tell you we’re praying for you. We thought you might enjoy these flowers from the altar today.”
As soon as they left, she angrily threw the flowers in the trash. “I don’t want no used flowers!” she huffed.
By the time I was assigned to Marguerite Oswald, her son had already been murdered and buried. According to Roger Warner, getting him in the ground had not been a walk in the park.[15] After the autopsy the family managed to get him embalmed, but then no cemetery wanted him. Finally, the Secret Service prevailed upon Rose Hill Memorial Burial Park in Fort Worth.
A funeral was out of the question because of the danger of a riot. But Oswald’s wife, Marina, would not agree to bury him unless a minister was present, and no preacher in Dallas or Fort Worth would do it. So the FBI found someone from outside the area who agreed to come in and say a prayer for the family.
The next problem: no one wanted to act as a pallbearer to help lower the casket into the ground. Secret Service agents couldn’t do it—they needed to have their hands free. Some guys from the press eventually pitched in.
Just before the casket was lowered, both Marguerite and Marina wanted to look at Oswald’s body one more time. So the casket was opened and they each kissed him. Roger saw Marina lay her wedding ring on his chest. Maybe she wanted to get rid of it.
Marguerite harped on the idea that “Marina’s going to get rich, and I deserve some of that money.”[16] Allan Grant, a LIFE magazine photographer who tried to take Marguerite’s picture, said she demanded $2,000. (He could not get authorization from his managing editor to pay her.) She alternated between hating and loving Marina, but sin
ce Marina spoke no English, she blessedly didn’t know it.
Marguerite also obsessed over the thought that someone would steal her son’s body. Unlike most of her notions, this was a real possibility. Unconfirmed ghoulish rumors were flying. (One was that an employee of the embalmer wanted to cut off Oswald’s trigger finger as a souvenir!)
One night I overheard Marguerite yelling on the phone. The guy on the other end was from the Tarrant County Sheriff’s Department. Marguerite screamed, “I don’t care if it takes every policeman in Tarrant County. I don’t want Lee’s body dug up!” They couldn’t keep a guard there all the time, so finally they covered the casket with poured concrete to make it hard to steal.
A postscript: like everything else surrounding the Kennedy assassination, conspiracy theories abounded about Lee Harvey Oswald’s burial. A British lawyer, Michael Eddowes, was convinced that Oswald’s body had been switched with a Russian agent’s. Finally, to quell the rumors, Oswald’s body was exhumed on October 4, 1981, and examined by Baylor University. Dental records conclusively proved that the coffin did indeed contain the remains of Lee Harvey Oswald.[17]
After my few days on Marguerite’s porch, I was relieved to be transferred to Marina, a pale brunette with large, frightened eyes. She lived in a house with the Paines, acquaintances of Oswald’s who had taken her and the children in. Young and terrified that someone would try to kill her and her children, Marina never smiled. She spoke no English and had two babies almost the exact ages of mine. I was surprised that, unlike my kids, her children almost never cried.
From what I learned, Marina’s life with Oswald had been miserable. Her lack of English and her two babies had kept her trapped. She never knew what to expect from her husband: he’d disappear and not come back for days, which was a relief from his harsh temper and occasional blows. They were living apart at the time of the shooting.