Live by the Sword

by Gus Russo

  At the time of the shooting, the people closest to Oswald’s position were three Depository workers, all of them watching the motorcade from the window one floor directly below the assassin. Bonnie Ray Williams, Junior Jarman, and Harold Norman’s recollections were clear and consistent about what happened. Norman repeated them in 1993:

  At the time of the shooting, James Jarman and myself were on the fifth floor. Somehow he [Bonnie Ray Williams] lost us. But he did come down to find us just before the motorcade came through. So he joined us and we pulled up some cartons, standing in the window waiting on the motorcade. And as the motorcade came by, we started looking and we had a good view. And all of a sudden, we hear something. “Boom, ack, ack, boom, ack, ack, boom.” I told Jarman, “I believe somebody’s shooting at the President.” And he said, “Yeah, that certainly sounds like it.” And then by this time we looked over and there was some debris or dirt or something fell on top of Jarman’s head. And that was three of the shells I heard on the floor. And when the police officer asked about it, we told them about it and they went up there and that is what they found up there on the sixth floor. Three empty shell cartridges up there.72

  Norman was thus the first person to deduce that the shooter was not only in the sixth floor window of the Depository, but that he was using a bolt-action rifle (making the “ack-ack” sound). He summed up his experience: “I could hear the sound of the click, I could hear the shells hitting the floor, I could hear everything. Three shots. No doubt in my mind.”73

  After the shooting, Norman and his friends walked out into the street in front of the Depository. Watching them emerge, Howard Brennan instantly recognized the men he had seen watching from the fifth floor window. Brennan saw them just as clearly as he saw the man shooting one floor above. But unlike Norman and his friend, Brennan had actually seen everything that they correctly deduced was happening. Brennan later wrote of his experience of staring directly at Lee Oswald as he killed the President:

  What I saw made my blood run cold. Poised in the corner window of the sixth floor was the same young man I had noticed several times before the motorcade arrived. There was one difference—this time he held a rifle in his hands, pointing toward the Presidential car. He steadied the rifle against the cornice and while he moved quickly, he didn’t seem to be in any kind of panic. . . Then came the sickening sound of the second shot. . . I wanted to cry, I wanted to scream, but I couldn’t utter a sound. . . He was aiming again and I wanted to pray, to beg God to somehow make him miss the target. . . The sight became so fixed in my mind that I’ll never forget it for as long as I live. . . Then another shot rang out. To my amazement, the man still stood there at the window. He didn’t appear to be rushed. There was no particular emotion visible on his face except for a slight smirk. It was a look of satisfaction, as if he had accomplished what he set out to do. . . [Then] he simply moved away from the window until he disappeared from my line of vision.”74

  Brennan reported what he saw to Dallas police inspector Herbert Sawyer, whom he met outside the Depository. As a result of this encounter, an accurate description of Oswald was quickly dispatched on police radios all over Dallas. That night at the police lineup, Brennan refused to positively identify Oswald. It was, however, a calculated refusal. Oswald could have accomplices at-large, and Brennan, fearing for his family’s safety, worried that word would get out that he was the only man who could identify the killer. Why invite difficulty, he decided, “since they already had the man for the murder, that he wasn’t going to be set free to escape and get out of the country immediately, and I could very easily. . . get in touch with [the FBI] to see that the man didn’t get loose.” Brennan later admitted to the official investigators, “But with all fairness, I could have positively identified the man.” As he wrote in his autobiography, “I knew I could never forget the face I had seen in the window on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository.”

  By the time Brennan encountered police inspector Sawyer outside the Depository building, Oswald had stashed his rifle between some boxes on the far side of the sixth floor, and had left the building weaponless. He proceeded to walk east on Elm Street for seven blocks, where he caught a bus heading in the direction of his Beckley Street room. He asked for and received a bus transfer slip—it’s unclear where the transfer was to. It was 12:36 p.m., six minutes having elapsed since Oswald had shot off the right side of President Kennedy’s head.75

  President Kennedy arrived at Parkland Memorial Hospital in a matter of minutes. Emergency procedures were performed at a frenetic pace, although Kennedy had arrived in what physicians refer to as an “agonal state”—no blood pressure, and a rather meaningless sporadic cardiac sputter. He was clinically dead. But in the frenzy to do something, the attending medical staff, busy performing a tracheostomy and “cutdowns” for liquid replenishment, were too preoccupied to sort through Kennedy’s shock of hair and see what they were up against.

  Baltimore-based emergency room physician Dr. Robert Artwohl says he understands what the Dallas doctors were thinking. “We all have the same response,” says Artwohl. “Some deaths are just harder to accept—a five-year-old child, for example—and certainly a President of the United States. So you proceed, hoping this case will be the one in a million where a miracle takes place.”76 William Manchester later wrote of the scene:

  Everything Parkland had was going for Kennedy now. Ringer’s solution, hydro-cortisone, and the first pint of transfused blood were entering his vessels through the two catheters. A nasogastric tube, thrust through Kennedy’s nose and fitted behind his trachea, was clearing away possible sources of nausea in his stomach. Bilateral chest tubes had been placed in both pleural spaces to suck out chest matter through the cuffed tube and prevent lung collapse. Now, in a treatment older than the invention of the most primitive medical device. . . [Dr.] Perry was stroking and palpitating the tough, well-muscled flesh over the Presidents rib cage, trying to coax a single beat from the heart until his own sinews ached and begged for relief.77

  After some twenty minutes of this futile activity; the chief physicians, Drs. Malcolm Perry, Pepper Jenkins, and Kemp Clark, finally scrutinized the President’s head and realized the hopelessness of their task. It was then that Jenkins declared, “We have no way of resuscitating him.” Jenkins later recalled, “That was the first time anyone looked at it [the head wound].”78

  In later years, the Parkland doctors would give descriptions of Kennedy’s head wound that differed from the description on the autopsy protocol. The Dallas description, placing the large wound more rearward, seemed to indicate a shot from the front, exiting the rear. These statements fed the suspicion that there had been multiple shooters in Dealey Plaza.

  When these statements are read in toto, however, one sees that the Dallas doctors often prefaced their statements with phrases like “I really didn’t get a good look at it, but. . .,” or “I could be wrong, because we never lifted his head. . .,” or “I was at the other end of the table, but I glimpsed out of the corner of my eye. . .” Critics never include these qualifications in their accounts of the Dallas statements. One of the attending physicians, Dr. James Carrico, recalls, “Everyone in that room was trying to save a life, not figure out forensics. . . We were trying to save a life, not worrying about entry and exit wounds.” Dr. Pepper Jenkins told the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) in 1992:

  I was standing at the head of the table in the position the anesthesiologist most often assumes—closest to the President’s head. My presence there and the Presidents great shock of hair were such that it was not visible to those standing down each side of the gurney where they were carrying out their resuscitative maneuvers.79

  The bottom line is that the overwhelming majority of those in the crowded trauma room agree with the Bethesda autopsy findings of a rear-entering shot.80

  While the President’s medical attendants were coming to grips with the impossibility of their task, Governor Connally�
��s physicians were hard at work in the next room. His “sucking” chest wound and collapsed right lung were serious, but not critical if given prompt attention, which they were. After two hours of surgery, his lung and torn muscles were repaired, and his condition stabilized.

  Although Dr. Kemp Clark pronounced John Kennedy dead at 1 p.m., the official announcement was delayed for one hour. During that hour, JFK was given the last rites of the Catholic Church, and his body was prepared for transport to Air Force One. Before the lid was closed on his coffin, Jacqueline Kennedy placed her wedding ring on her husband’s finger.81

  Hickory Hill

  “There’s so much bitterness. I thought they’d get one of us, but Jack, after all he’d been through, never worried about it. . . I thought it would be me.”

  —Robert F. Kennedy to Ed Guthman, November 22, 196382

  “J. Edgar Hoover’s calling,” yelled Ethel Kennedy. Her husband Robert was home at Hickory Hill for a working lunch with two of his Justice Department assistants, Robert Morganthau and Silvio Mollo. The men were sitting by the pool eating clam chowder and tuna fish, the luncheon having started in a typical RFK manner—with a swim.

  At that moment, Bobby Kennedy suspected that something was wrong because “he wouldn’t be calling me here.”

  “I have news for you,” Hoover said. “The President’s been shot.”

  “What? Is it serious?” Bobby responded.

  “I think it’s serious. I’ll call you back when I find out more.”

  Hoover sounded matter-of-fact, Bobby later recalled—not a bit upset or sympathetic. He was, Bobby stated, “not quite as excited as if he was reporting the fact that he found a Communist on the faculty of Howard University.”83

  Robert Morganthau watched as Bobby turned away, a look of horror on his face, clapping his hand to his mouth. He then turned to his aides and screamed, “Jack’s been shot! It might be fatal.” Bobby then went back to the main house, walking around in a state of shock. Later, followed by Ethel, he went up to their bedroom to try calling Dallas. He was simultaneously preparing to pack for an emergency flight to Texas.

  Eventually, RFK’s call to Parkland Memorial Hospital was put through—he wasn’t sure to whom, though he believes it was to Secret Service agent Clint Hill. Bobby remembered the conversation:

  They said that it was very serious. And I asked if he was conscious, and they said he wasn’t, and I asked if they’d gotten a priest, and they said they had. . . Then, I said, will you call me back, and he said yes, and then he—Clint Hill called me back, and I think it was about thirty minutes after I talked to Hoover. . . and he said, “The President’s dead.”84

  “Oh, he’s dead!” Bobby cried.

  In his traumatized state, Bobby proceeded, as if on auto-pilot, to call family members, friends, and Air Force One. He also called CIA director John McCone at Agency headquarters, which was only a short distance from Hickory Hill. McCone came over immediately. When he arrived, Bobby asked him if any CIA people could have been involved in the shooting. McCone, a fellow Catholic, assured him, in a way that convinced the Attorney General, that there had been no CIA involvement. Then Hoover called back.

  The FBI director was, for once, not on top of the news. He was calling to tell Bobby that the president’s wounds appeared critical.

  “You may be interested to know,” Bobby said, “that my brother is dead!” With that, he slammed down the phone.85

  The next day, while the rest of the world mourned in front of their television sets, and a vast team of investigators pursued a still-hot trail, J. Edgar Hoover went to the race track.86

  Washington

  In Washington, when the news from Dallas arrived, the participants in Bobby Kennedy’s “secret war” were still hard at work at the CIA safe house. At the same time, RFK’s appointed exile leader, Harry Williams, was ensconced at the Ebbitt Hotel on H Street, NW, with journalist Haynes Johnson. Johnson had been hand-picked by Bobby Kennedy to chronicle the Bay of Pigs story; the Ebbitt was the CIA’s hotel of choice for lodging exile partners in the Cuba Project.

  Soon the phone was ringing. Answering the call, Harry Williams immediately recognized the Boston accent on the other end. It was his friend Bobby Kennedy, who by now had gotten it into his head that one of his plots against Castro may have boomeranged. Kennedy asked Williams to pass the phone to Haynes Johnson. Johnson later recalled, “Robert Kennedy was utterly in control of his emotions when he came on the line, and sounded almost studiously brisk as he said, ‘One of your [Cuban] boys did it.’”87

  Safely distanced from the exile meetings, Desmond FitzGerald was at lunch at the City Tavern Club in Georgetown when the call came. His executive assistant, Sam Halpern, remembered that the usually ruddy-cheeked FitzGerald emerged from the call “white as a ghost.”

  “The President’s been shot,” FitzGerald said.

  “I hope this has nothing to do with the Cubans,” said Halpern as they raced across the Potomac to CIA headquarters. The two were silent for the rest of the ride. Nothing needed to be said: Both men were thinking the same thing. Both knew that Bobby and FitzGerald had ignored Castro’s threat of September 7, and both had proceeded full steam with the AM/LASH plot. And FitzGerald had been warned that Castro might be wise to the plot. Castro most assuredly was aware of the planned-for coup, which had been exposed in Miami newspapers. The question now crystallized: Had Castro struck first? Both men knew what was then underway in Paris, and how devastating it would be to all involved if it became known.88

  The next day, FitzGerald went to see Director McCone’s assistant, Walt Elder. He confessed to meeting with Cubela regarding a future shipment of weapons, but withheld the most explosive information—that, at Bobby’s request, he had had his agents furnish Cubela with a poison pen at the very moment Kennedy was driving through Dallas. However, Elder sensed that FitzGerald was not revealing all that was troubling him. Years later, Evan Thomas wrote:

  “Des was normally imperturbable, but he was very disturbed about his involvement,” recalled Elder. The director’s assistant couldn’t understand why FitzGerald seemed so distraught, wringing his hands and shaking his head. “I thought Des was overreacting,” says Elder.89

  Elder, like most everyone else, was unaware of the troublesome linkages of Oswald, Cubela, Mexico City, and Bobby’s New Orleans-based exiles.

  Paris

  It was evening in Paris when President Kennedy was shot. AM/LASH’s all-important meeting with the Bobby Kennedy/Des FitzGerald envoy, Nestor Sanchez, was progressing smoothly. They were going to change history.

  But just moments earlier, Lee Oswald had beat them to the punch, had stopped them dead in their tracks. The CIA AM/LASH file reflects the instant effect the shooting had on the meeting: “The situation changed when the case officer left the meeting to discover that President Kennedy had been assassinated. Because of this fact, plans with AM/LASH changed and it was decided that we could have no part in the assassination of a government leader (including Castro).”90

  Cubela recalls, “[The meeting] ended in a hurried abrupt manner because of a telephone call received by the CIA person [Sanchez] and it said that President Kennedy had been killed.”91

  Sardinia, Italy

  Bill Harvey, the CIA’s former Mongoose coordinator, was unconscious. His drinking had progressed from habit to disease after his excile to Italy a year earlier. When the telex noting Kennedy’s murder was received by his deputy, Harvey had to be awakened from a late-day martini stupor. The man who hated the Kennedys, both for their treatment of him and for their naive directives regarding Cuba, staggered to his feet.

  What he said to his deputy should be taken with Harvey’s condition in mind, and the fact that there is only one witness to his comments, but that witness was so stunned that he wrote it down for posterity. “This was bound to happen,” blustered Harvey, “and it’s probably good that it did.” Soon, when Harvey discovered that his deputy was spending time helping local officials wit
h condolences, he sent the deputy packing for the U.S. “I haven’t got time for this kind of crap,” Harvey told him.92

  Love Field/Dallas

  Aboard Air Force One, chaos reigned. Lyndon Johnson, the new president, understandably, feared a wide foreign conspiracy, and wanted the presidential plane to take off quickly. But he was in a quandary. He refused to leave Dallas without Jacqueline Kennedy, and she wouldn’t leave without her dead husband’s body aboard the plane. Johnson thus ordered the Secret Service to bring the body immediately from the hospital, local ordinances notwithstanding.

  Although Texas law required that an autopsy had to be performed locally in a homicide case, both Lyndon Johnson and the Kennedy entourage demanded otherwise for the dead President. After a heated argument, the Texas officials relented, and Kennedy’s body was delivered to the waiting Air Force One at Love Field.

  When Kennedy’s body finally arrived, Johnson’s O.K. was needed for the take-off. Because Johnson’s belongings were being transferred from Air Force Two to Air Force One, no one dared give the order without consulting the new President. Aides boarded Johnson’s plane to secure his take-off command. However, Johnson couldn’t be found. President Kennedy’s Air Force Aide, Brigadier General Godfrey McHugh, commenced a frantic search for the new chief executive. McHugh boarded the Presidential jet—no Johnson. McHugh searched the Presidential bedroom—still no Johnson. Finally, McHugh opened the door to the tiny toilet area, where he discovered Johnson, “hiding in the toilet. . . muttering, ‘Conspiracy, conspiracy, they’re after all of us!’” McHugh spent the next few minutes calming Johnson down.93