He has a clear view into Walker’s home. The general is easily visible, sitting at his desk. A few feet from the window, a squat-bodied gas meter is sticking out of the ground like a little silver-gray figure with spindly arms. There are narrow, ten-foot-high bushes just beyond the gas meter. Oswald quickly surveys the area around him. Now is the time.
He steps up to Walker’s pale-colored, wood-lattice fence, formed with pickets that are four to six inches wide and five feet high. The fence, with the open squares in the lattice serving as solid notches, is perfect for resting and aiming a rifle. It is 120 feet from the fence to Walker’s desk.
There are escape routes from this vantage point:
Deeper down the dark alley.
A sprint from the alley to the east into the greenbelt and the engulfing woods.
Racing southeast for the hidden trails, those tiny paths, to the railroad tracks. Then a long, quick walk to catch a bus home from a different part of the city.
Oswald lifts his rifle and stares into the window. Surrounding Walker are folders, books, and stacks of packages wrapped in brown shipping paper. The walls are decorated with panels of foil wallpaper embossed with an Asian-style flower motif. Walker’s head is in profile. He has a pencil in hand, and he is perfectly still, focused on something at his desk. From outside looking in, it must look a bit like a painting—as if Walker is caught in thought with the right side of his face clearly visible.
Oswald squints into his telescopic sight, and Walker’s head fills the view. He looks so close now, and he’s sitting so still, that there’s no possible way to miss. Drawing a tight bead on Walker’s head, he pulls the trigger. An explosion hurtles through the night, a thunder that echoes to the alley, to the creek, to the church and the surrounding houses.
Walker flinches instinctively at the loud blast and the sound of a wicked crack over his scalp—right inside his hair. For a second, he is frozen. His right arm is still resting on the desk alongside his 1962 income tax forms. He doesn’t know it, but blood is beginning to appear. A thought instantly blinks in his mind:
A firecracker. Somebody just threw a firecracker at me. How the hell did some damned kid throw a firecracker through the screen?3
He realizes now that there was another noise. A brutish punching, thudding sound. He instantly pushes away from the desk so that he is no longer visible through the window. Looking back at where he had been sitting, he sees a large hole in the wall, very near where his head had been. He carefully, quickly, moves upstairs, looking for his pistol. He grabs it and comes down the staircase, and as he does he glances out a south-facing second-floor window.
There is a car beyond the trees, some kind of car, just making the turn out of the alley by the church. Heading to Turtle Creek Boulevard.
Walker makes it to his back door and gingerly steps into the inky night. Gun in hand, he stares hard into the darkness. The taillights he spotted from his upstairs window have vanished.
He returns to the house. By now he realizes that his right arm is bleeding in four or five places. Walker calls the police and asks them to come as soon as possible. Then he calls Robert Surrey.
The first Dallas cops arrive within five minutes. Surrey pulls up to Walker’s house a few minutes later, joined by a second police car with detectives from the burglary and theft squad.
Inside the house, one of the detectives tells Walker to sit down.
Patrolmen are in the backyard, trying to see if they can line up the shot, follow its path. There is a chip, a notch, on the fence—maybe a spot that could be used to rest a rifle.
“He couldn’t have missed you,” one of the officers says to Walker.
“He must have been a lousy shot,” Walker replies.
“It was an attempted assassination,” adds a detective named Don McElroy.
“What makes you call it that?” asks Walker.
“Because he was definitely out to get you,” replies McElroy.4
Examining the point where the bullet entered through the window, the cops can see that it slammed into the upper portion of the wooden window frame. That collision was just enough to alter the bullet’s trajectory a fraction so that it passed through Walker’s hair—instead of boring into his right temple.
When Surrey is allowed inside, he sees Walker seated at his desk as the cops try to reconstruct the affair. Surrey can also see that there is something strange, white and gray, in Walker’s hair.
“What happened? What’s going on?” asks Surrey.
Walker points to the gaping, exploded hole in the nine-inch-thick wall.
“Oh, you found a bug,” laughs Surrey, laying on the sarcasm.
Walker shakes his head. “No,” he says, “I have been shot at.” He raises an arm and points to the shattered window.
Surrey sees the blood oozing out of Walker’s right arm. He reaches down. Walker holds up his wounded arm for inspection and says, calmly, “The jacket of the bullet must have come apart when it went through the window.”5
Now Surrey can see several pieces of metal sticking out of Walker’s skin. He bounds upstairs and finds a first-aid kit. He brings down tweezers, bends over Walker’s arm, and begins patiently extracting the bullet fragments as the police continue to ask questions.
As he works and listens, Surrey grows convinced this is not a case for the damned burglary squad.
Surrey hears a patrolman named Billy Norvell say: “I found it.”
The cop has gone into another room, on the other side of the hole blown through the wall. There, among the stacks of Walker’s patriotic literature, Norvell has discovered the spent bullet. It is resting atop a pile of Walker’s most popular pamphlet, Walker Speaks… Unmuzzled!
Norvell scratches his initials on the base of the bullet and hands it to McElroy from the burglary squad. Later, McElroy will take the squashed, mushroomed bullet for processing at the Crime Scene Search Section at police headquarters downtown.6
By now, reporters who have heard the news on police scanners are racing to Walker’s home. They mingle easily with the cops and push toward Walker, asking for his reaction.
“Somebody took a shot at me,” says the general. “That is the closest I have ever been missed in 30 years of military service.”
The burglary detective, McElroy, tells the reporters: “Whoever shot at the general was playing for keeps. The sniper wasn’t trying to scare him. He was shooting to kill.”7
It is close to midnight by the time Oswald finally returns home. If he had a car, he could have easily driven from Walker’s house in fifteen minutes. If he took a bus near the general’s house and made the easiest connections, he could have been home within an hour. But he played it safe, catching a bus as far away from Walker’s neighborhood as possible.
When he enters the duplex, Marina is waiting. She became worried during the evening by his long absence, and she began rooting around the home, hoping to find some clue about what he was up to. She discovered the note he left for her with its painstakingly detailed set of instructions.
When he steps inside, she’s relieved to see that he doesn’t appear to have any weapons with him. She shows him the note and speaks in her native Russian:
“What happened? What is the meaning of this?”
He looks pale and he brushes her off, telling her not to ask him any questions. He goes to the radio and snaps it on, turning the dial and trying to find a news station. She stays beside him, pleading for him to tell her what is going on.
Frustrated that there is no news on the shooting, he finally tells her: He traveled across town to shoot someone—a man, a former general, who needed to die. She stares at her husband. He is edgy, nervous. She is stunned.
“Where is the rifle? What did you do with it?” she demands.
He says that he buried it. That dogs could find things by a sense of smell. That he didn’t want to be caught carrying the rifle.
She listens and begins crying. She is worried about his mind, his mental state. She is
worried that the police are on their way to arrest them all. What happens to our daughter?
“This was a very bad man,” he explains to her. “He was a fascist… he was the leader of a fascist organization.”
“You have no right to take his life,” she replies.
He is very serious. “If someone had killed Hitler in time it would have saved many lives.”8
She decides not to call the police.
There is their child, June. The child and her husband have been her world. She knows she is almost completely dependent on him in this new country where she barely speaks the language. He has a brutal vein. He has punched her. And now he has tried to kill a man. Yet somehow, she feels that she still harbors some attachment to him.
As night wears on, he takes her into his confidence and explains more. He tells her he has been planning to shoot Walker for the last two months. He tells her about his photographs of Walker’s house, his maps, consulting the bus schedules, writing his plans in English in his private notebooks… and writing his good-bye notes to her in Russian. He strikes her as being proud of what he did.
Now it is after midnight and he continues to search the radio for news. Nothing yet is being reported. Finally, after another hour, he gives up and goes to bed. She tries but can’t sleep at all. Her mind is racing with more questions, but she decides not to ask them.
The next morning Marina finds her husband listening to the radio again and studying the newspapers.
“I missed,” he tells her, angry with himself.
She has decided to keep the good-bye note, with his explicit instructions, hidden away in a cookbook. And now she threatens to use the note against him, to give it to the police, if he tries another assassination attempt on Walker. She says that Walker was kept alive for some reason—and that was reason enough for him not to be shot at again.
He promises her he won’t try to kill Walker again.
She listens as he shakes his head and repeats that he took aim. Very good aim.9
Three days later, on the Saturday before Easter, Oswald is still monitoring the news reports. A story announces that one witness reported seeing two men in the church parking lot right after the shooting, and that one of them drove away. The police seem intent on following this lead.
He laughs, scoffing at the way the police are fixated on mysterious getaway cars:
“Americans are so spoiled,” he tells his wife. “It never occurs to them that you might use your own two legs.”10
Later that day he goes out again. When he returns he has his rifle. Carefully, he places it inside a closet and drapes a coat over it. Then he shows her parts of his private notebook. It is written in English, on legal-size paper. She doesn’t understand some of it. There are descriptions of Walker’s house, notes about distances, notes about the distribution of the windows in a house. There are also photographs inside the book. She asks him what they are.
“Well, this one is the picture of the house of General Walker’s—his residence,” he replies.
She stares at the notebook. “It would be awfully bad to keep a thing like that in the house,” she says.
He goes into their bathroom, carrying the notebook and some matches. He bends over the sink, strikes the matches, and sets fire to the notebook and some, but not all, of the images of Walker’s house.11
Later that night, unexpected visitors begin banging on their duplex door. Marina is terrified, certain it’s the police. She calms down when she hears the familiar voices belonging to two of the very few people she and her husband have grown close to in Dallas. It is the De Mohrenschildts, and they have come to deliver an Easter basket to her child. Like many people in Dallas, the visitors have been reading the stunning news about Walker. As they step inside the duplex, George calls out in his loud voice:
“Lee, how is it possible that you missed?”12
It is a joke, of course, but she can see how her husband freezes. Lee seems to shrivel, sink in on himself. He is speechless. The pained silence in the room makes everyone uncomfortable.
At home, as his wounds heal and his security guards stay on high alert, Walker feels validated.
The fact that someone has tried to kill him in the heart of Dallas proves how right he has been—and how successful his national crusade has been. He has been stirring up the snakes around America, and now they are being revealed. He knows that some people in the media consider him a crackpot, that they don’t believe his predictions about the thinly veiled menace being uncorked by the socialists and the communists.
He might have officially resigned his military command, but right now he is still a warrior—and still subject to enemy fire. He decides to issue a public warning. Maybe this time people will hear him:
“The Kennedys say there’s no internal threat to our freedom. (But) there are plenty of people on the other side. You don’t have to go overseas to earn a Purple Heart.
“I’ve been saying the front was right here at home… in Dallas.”13
It is a glorious Easter Sunday morning, four days after the mysterious, unsolved assassination attempt on Walker. The temperatures are in the low sixties, and the carefully cultivated azaleas all over North Dallas are just beginning to bloom. It is the time of year, many residents say, when the city looks and feels its finest—the pleasant, slightly cooler month before the onslaught of the brutal, grinding heat that often begins to grip the city in May. At the downtown police station there is, all morning, a flurry of frantic incoming calls. Neo-Nazis have swept through the city during the night, vandalizing the homes of several prominent Jews with a custom-printed decal. The marauders have even located Stanley Marcus’s postmodern house on Nonesuch Road. The sticker is blood red with a bold black swastika. Under the swastika are the words: WE ARE BACK.
That same night the vandals strike again. This time they sweep through downtown Dallas, targeting Jewish-owned businesses. Office workers arriving on Monday morning discover the ominous swastikas plastered on at least a dozen stores. Stanley Marcus can see it all over the glittering window displays that families in Dallas normally flock to see: The windows, filled with Easter finery and exclusive haute couture from the Parisian runways, are now covered in swastikas. Many people in the city know Marcus is a Jew. There is a precise reason people singled out the Neiman Marcus windows for swastikas.
At the police station, the cops say they have theories but no suspects. The only thing certain is that the decals are not the work of amateurs. It is clear that they have been professionally printed.
The campaign against Dallas’s Jews intensifies. The next week, a desk officer at the police station receives a telephone call from a man about Temple Emanu-El—the graceful home of the city’s oldest Jewish congregation, established nearly a hundred years earlier.
“Can you hear me?” the caller says. “There is a bomb in Temple Emanu-El. If you don’t want a bunch of dead people, you’d better send someone out there.”
Six police cars rush to the scene, where they find bright red swastikas painted on the temple. After a thorough search, no bomb is found.
While the swastikas are appearing around Dallas, the police continue to investigate the assassination attempt on Walker. Even Walker is confused by what is going on in Dallas. He is a professed super-Christian, someone who has just traveled the nation with an ultra-Christian-conservative. Is it possible that some of Walker’s supporters are moving into some more aggressive stage that even he would never endorse?
Walker denies any knowledge of the actions, but tells police he “thinks there may be a tie-in” between the recent attempt on his life and the swastikas targeting the city’s most prominent Jews.14
MAY
Publicly, Walker is blaming “the other side” for having tried to kill him. But privately, the general and his closest advisers believe that it could have been an inside job. The police check into a former Walker aide, someone Surrey has suspicions about, but the investigation goes nowhere.
For weeks,
police still are telling reporters that there are no suspects in the assassination attempt. The Friends of Walker organization in Dallas offers a reward for the capture of the shooter. Walker’s inner circle seems to grow tighter around him. One of the members of the group, a woman much devoted to the general, believes that the motive is jealousy. Romance, not politics:
“Many women flocked around the general [but] he did not seem to notice them,” she tells the police. It was an act of unrequited love. “One of them took a shot at him.”1
Elsewhere in the city, people are beginning to wonder if there is a bigger price being paid for Walker’s presence. Things seem spiraling: An assassination attempt in one of the lavish, most secure parts of town.
And there is Walker refusing to back down—seeming emboldened, validated, by having someone in Dallas fire a gun at him.
JUNE–JULY
As the city surrenders to the unforgiving heat of the summer, another force in Dallas is hammering away at Kennedy. The ex-FBI agent Dan Smoot, who had earlier helped H. L. Hunt spread his radio messages across America, is now the star of his own radio program, The Dan Smoot Report, heard by millions of listeners across the country. Smoot’s tone is increasingly alarmist as he centers, over and over again, on the communist-Negro-Kennedy conspiracies:
“Kennedy, by Executive Orders which bypass Congress, has already created a body of ‘laws’ to transform our Republic into a dictatorship,” argues Smoot on his broadcast and in his weekly newsletter with a Dallas dateline. His followers learn that it is a “dangerous delusion” to trust Kennedy—who “wants a socialist dictatorship” in the United States.1
Smoot, who is friendly with General Walker’s inner circle, has also just published a book called The Invisible Government—which is rapidly gaining favor inside super-patriot circles and has already gone through five printings. It argues that the Council on Foreign Relations—which includes key members of John F. Kennedy’s administration—is in actuality part of an elaborate plot to prepare America for socialism. On his Dallas-headquartered radio show and in his weekly newsletter, it can easily occur to many that Smoot is speaking for most of the city—or a significant portion of the people who run it.
Dallas 1963 Page 22