by Jim Lehrer
“Thanks for what you said about him,” she said to me without even opening her eyes.
“I didn’t just make it up for … you know, for you to hear now, if that’s what you might be thinking.”
Her eyes popped open. “No, I was not thinking that. I assumed you, as a newspaperman, told only the truth.”
“Where are you at college?” I asked, realizing suddenly that we had gone so quickly into what mattered, this question about her father’s guilt and health, that there had been no exchange of biographical small talk.
“Penn—the University of Pennsylvania,” Marti responded.
“Your major?”
“English.”
“A special interest?”
“American literature.”
“What kind?”
“The good kind—mostly the kind written by women.” This, she said with some shortness.
What a great 1968 answer, I thought. A woman—a kid—of the times.
She motioned her head toward the papers in my hand. On with it, please. Enough small talk was the clear message.
I continued reading.
“Walters glanced up at the bluing sunny sky and then hollered over at another agent who was holding a two-way radio in his hand. ‘What about the weather downtown?’ he yelled.
“The agent talked into his radio, listened for a few seconds. ‘Clear!’ he hollered back.
“Van Walters yelled to the five or six other agents who were at get-ready positions in and around the cars: ‘Lose the bubble top!’
“I watched as the agents began the process of unsnapping the several pieces of plastic from the car.
“I returned to the phone, reported to rewrite, and went on with my business covering the Kennedys’ arrival and then, over the next many hours, various aspects of the tragedy that had occurred. I was sent first from Love Field to Parkland Hospital, where I was when Kennedy’s death was formally announced by a White House press spokesman.
“Next, I went downtown to police headquarters where I became part of the chaos along with hundreds of other reporters from all over the country and the world and law enforcement officers at all levels of government. There was a mix of sadness and disbelief that was beyond anything I had ever witnessed—or even imagined. I felt like I was an actor in a slow-motion horror movie about chaos and grief …”
I stopped again and said, “Sorry about the purple prose.”
Marti waved me on, which I took as an English teacher’s absolution.
“Around midnight—nearly twelve hours after the shots were fired at Dealey Plaza—I went to await the breakup of a closed-door meeting in the chief of police’s office at the end of a hall on the second floor.
“After a while the door opened and out walked several men in suits. I recognized one as Secret Service Agent Van Walters.
“He came over to me. Tears in his eyes, he mumbled slowly, deliberately, as if speaking in a trance: ‘If I just hadn’t taken off the bubble top.’
“The words blew me backward. And for the first time, I wondered: What if I hadn’t asked Walters the bubble top question in the first place? What if I had ignored the rewrite man’s request? What if the rewrite man never asked the question?
“And so, I, too, became one of the many people connected to the Kennedy Texas trip who were plagued by varying levels of what-if guilt. A guilt that would stay with us forever. Van Walters and I shared the burden with political and White House staffers, Secret Service agents and other law enforcement officers, and all kinds of other people involved in Dallas and elsewhere.
“What if I hadn’t pushed for a motorcade or for going to Texas or Dallas at all? What if I had argued harder to have the lunch at Fair Park instead of the Trade Mart? What if I’d seen a rifle sticking out the sixth-floor window? What if I had reacted faster when the first shot was fired?
“These were the questions being asked aloud and silently in the minds and hearts of people everywhere.
“What if, what if?”
I began folding up the papers and said, “I went on—to a few laughs in the audience—to tell the story of how I ran out of gas in the middle of the next two nights while going home from the Dallas police station … but that’s pretty much it.”
Marti was looking right at me, but her thoughts went through me to somewhere and someone else.
“So he really did do it,” she said finally. “Dad really did make the decision to take off the bubble top.”
“But it wasn’t a real decision,” I said quickly. “The rain stopped and that was it. The weather made that top come off.”
Marti, as if a plug had been pulled, sank back limp in her chair. She said nothing for several seconds, digesting, it seemed to me, what I had said and if there was any truth to it.
Her rigid tension abated right before my eyes. She seemed defeated. “I had hoped that your story was such that … well, that you knew for a fact that somebody else in the Secret Service, somebody on the White House detail or somebody in Washington, somebody anywhere … had made that decision. Not Dad, not Dad all by himself. So many agents and other people have made all kinds of conflicting statements about who did what that day. I have read them all. They’re very confusing, and today … Well, I wanted you to tell me something that I could take back to him that would make it absolutely clear to him what happened and make his guilt go away forever. I understand from my mother that all kinds of people, doctors and shrinks, have tried and tried with no success. But I was hoping, hoping, hoping …”
I very much wanted to take another break for a much-needed smoke. I wanted time to think about what I might be able to give her to take to her dad. But the cigarette could wait. I could wait. I decided to open up the conversation and see where it might lead. Perhaps I was stalling, but suddenly it seemed very important—essential, in fact—that I ask her that same universal question.
“Where were you, Marti? Where were you that day?”
At first she frowned, and for a moment I thought she would not answer me. But I was wrong. She very much wanted to talk. And she talked—and talked and talked for hours there in and around the Washington train station and then later in Philadelphia and elsewhere over the next couple of weeks about that day and the days afterward that had led to where she and her father were now.
Marti remembered every detail of her November 22. Her memories were remarkably vivid and precise.
I had begun immediately taking notes in the reporter’s notebook I had brought that day to our meeting. Marti did nothing to stop me from doing so, a fact that signaled that off-the-record might, in fact, be only a short-term restriction. I was delighted.
She began her story with football. It had been noon, and dissecting the Dallas Cowboys was what Marti and some of her boy classmates always did over lunch at the George Bannerman Dealey High School in East Dallas.
“Dandy is never going to make it—never,” Marti had declared.
“Eddie, Eddie, he’s the one!” a boy had agreed.
Dandy was Don Meredith, the recently anointed co–starting Cowboys quarterback. Until a few weeks earlier Eddie LeBaron had been the starter but now he was sometimes alternating with Meredith at that most important position, with coach Tom Landry calling the plays from the sidelines. “Mount Landry” was the nickname for Landry, who was famous for always wearing a coat, a tie, a felt hat, and no sign of emotion on the sideline. His National Football League expansion team had won only nine of forty games in its first two years of life, just three of ten played so far this 1963 season.
The conversation was especially heated because an away game with the Cleveland Browns was coming up in two days, on Sunday, November 24.
“Dandy’s too funky to call the plays,” said another boy.
“Eddie’s too short to see the receivers,” somebody yelled back. “He’s a shrimp, a half-pint midget.”
“Can’t hardly see over the scrimmage line,” another anti-LeBaron Meredith supporter chimed in.
; Marti recounted this with what I thought of as tomboyish pride. She boasted that she was in a league all by her female self at Dealey when it came to football details and the Cowboys. She said the boys let her participate in the obsessive discussions because she knew more about the players and football than anyone else. But she also knew that it helped that her dad was a Secret Service agent, who, unlike everyone else’s father, not only carried a gun but also caught counterfeiters and protected presidents.
And it was from Martin Van Walters that she’d gained the critical information and the devotion that turned her into a Cowboys fan like her father. On the quarterback argument, for instance, Marti said it was from her dad that she learned enough to remind the anti-LeBaron boys that while LeBaron was only five-seven he had won a Silver Star, a Bronze Star, and a couple of Purple Hearts as a marine infantry platoon leader in Korea. All Dandy Don Meredith had done was strut around as a hillbilly singing football star at Southern Methodist University here in Dallas.
“Little people do as many big things as big ones,” Van Walters had said to Marti, not having to mention the obvious fact that he was a small man himself—five-eight, 160 pounds.
The Walters father-daughter pair—Van and Marti being the names they used—were a match. She called them a “proud match.” Their full names were Martin Van Walters and Marti Van Walters. The small Hudson Valley town of Kinderhook, New York, where the Walters family lived, was the hometown of Martin Van Buren, the eighth president of the United States. Marti told me that an Albany newspaper once reported that in the years following the Van Buren presidency, more than seventy-five male babies born in the area had been given Martin Van combo names. There had also been half a dozen or so Marti and Marsha Vans, and though neither she nor her father had ever attended such a thing, there were even occasional gatherings of “any and all varieties of Martin Vans and their descendants” as a way to draw tourist attention to historical commemorations in Kinderhook.
Beyond their names and small bones, she also shared her bright dark brown eyes and soft brown hair with her dad. His hair was closely cut, almost like a military recruit’s. Hers was short, too—barely halfway to her shoulders.
Her dad had a stern way of talking sometimes, as if he were everybody’s father. Marti believed part of it came from the fact that he had spent three years as a criminal investigator with the army military police during the Korean War before becoming an agent of the U.S. Secret Service. He had been in the army ROTC at the University of Albany, a State of New York school, which led to a commission as a second lieutenant upon graduation. Van Walters always told Marti that going from the army into the Secret Service had been an easy and natural move.
As she talked to me of herself, at the time a high school junior, her attention turned to that November 1963 day in the cafeteria. While biting into her tuna salad sandwich on wheat bread, she heard somebody trying to say something over the school public address system. It sounded like the principal, Mrs. Caldwell. She was most likely just making announcements about an old-clothes collection drive, maybe further try-outs for the student production of Oliver!. Marti already had a part playing one of the poor grubby orphan girls in the chorus …
But there was something different in the voice on the PA. Was someone crying? What was wrong?
“Please, please,” Marti finally heard her say. “If I may have your sad … sad … attention. Something awful … something really terrible has happened.”
Teachers ran into the room, several of them in tears. They were holding up their hands, signaling for quiet.
“Quiet. Quiet. Listen,” the music teacher, Miss Roberts, said. Marti said she and the other students paid attention because Miss Roberts was a gorgeous blonde in her late twenties. In a few seconds the room was silent.
She recalled the exact words spoken by Mrs. Caldwell over the speaker system:
“I regret to say … to announce … that President Kennedy has been shot … here in our own Dallas. He was on his way to the Trade Mart … Governor Connally was shot, too …”
Marti felt confusion and panic overwhelming her whole being. Daddy! she wanted to yell. Daddy! Daddy!
As if in a dream, she recalled vaguely hearing Mrs. Caldwell then call on everyone to close their eyes and observe a moment of silent prayer for the survival of President Kennedy and Governor Connally.
But in that silence all Marti wanted to shout was, What about my daddy?
She heard loudly and clearly Mrs. Caldwell’s final message to the students: Classes at Dealey High and all over Dallas were immediately dismissed. Parents were being notified to come get their children from school.
There were hoots and applause all around the cafeteria.
Marti was stunned by what the kids yelled.
“Can we go now?”
“Yeah, we’re out of here!”
“Weekend gets longer—right on!”
Marti fought back anger and tears.
“No! Don’t say that!” she shouted. “My daddy’s out there!”
But nobody was listening. Not to her, not to the teachers, not to anybody. It seemed to Marti as if everyone in the lunchroom was making some kind of noise, moving around, being part of the commotion.
“I hope he dies!” she heard a boy yell.
A girlfriend of Marti’s said back, “Don’t say that! That’s an awful thing to say because … because of so many things.”
Because my daddy was protecting the president! That was what Marti wanted to say.
Many kids and teachers knew her dad was Secret Service and was, in fact, working on the Kennedy visit to Dallas. One of the teachers had even brought it up in home room first period a few days ago.
“You must be proud of your father doing such important work,” the teacher had said.
“Yes, ma’am, I am,” Marti answered. And that was the absolute truth. Marti loved the look of awe that appeared on the boys’ faces when she first told them her dad was a Secret Service agent.
She most enjoyed the questions about whether her dad carried a pistol. What kind was it? Was it always loaded? Had he ever shot anybody? Marti usually answered with a whispered, “Sorry, it’s all a secret. Can’t say a word about it.”
Actually, her dad never said anything about the dark gray revolver that seemed to Marti the most exciting part of being in the Secret Service. When not being worn on his right hip in a black leather holster under an always-unbuttoned suit coat, the weapon was kept in a locked metal box in her parents’ bedroom closet. All of her dad’s suit coats had been specially altered—at Secret Service expense, her mom said—to allow extra space around the hip to accommodate the holstered pistol. The service also paid for the brown felt hat that he wore while on duty. It was considered as much a part of his uniform as Coach Landry’s game-day getup was.
Marti knew that Van Walters spent most of his time, between rare presidential visits, in the southwest region of the country looking for counterfeit money and bonds, stolen government checks, and other malfeasance directly related to the Treasury Department. And that was the only part of his work that was available for father-daughter discussion.
Among the non-presidential stuff, there was occasionally something interesting to hear about. Van told Marti about the case of Rubber Stamp Rudy, a retired jewelry engraver from McKinney, north of Dallas, who perfected a rubber stamp that exactly replicated the face of Andrew Jackson and the black print on the upside of a twenty-dollar bill. He used only authentic currency paper from one-dollar bills that he bleached white before stamping on a twenty. The guy floated through a dozen or more Texas towns and several more in New Mexico and Arizona casually making twenties, getting away with almost four thousand dollars’ worth of food, clothing, and travel before being arrested.
“We caught him when a small grocery store owner accidentally dropped one of the bad bills into a pail of water and it turned blue from the bleach,” said Van Walter to his delighted daughter.
There had been one brief co
nversation, though, the night before, November 21, about the Kennedy visit and the fact that her dad would be leaving the house at six o’clock in the morning.
“Dad, a lot of the kids at school say everybody in Dallas hates Kennedy. Is that true?” Marti remarked to her father. “Vice President Johnson, too, and he’s even from Texas!”
“Hate’s a strong word, sweetheart,” Van Walters replied with that tone of finality that Marti was most familiar with. “It’s politics, that’s all.”
End of sentence, end of discussion.
So it was only from the comic book Steve of the Secret Service that Marti learned much of anything about her dad’s work protecting presidents. There was one issue in particular about how they were trained to go toward an assassin’s bullet instead of ducking or flinching—much less running away.
And how to throw themselves spread-eagle over a president who was under fire.
IT WAS PROBABLY only a few minutes, but Marti said it seemed like an eternity before her mother showed up at Dealey High School.
Rosemary Walters rushed into the lunchroom, frantically grabbed her daughter, and pulled Marti to her. It was obvious to Marti that she must have run like lightning the ten blocks from the neighborhood bank, where she worked as a teller.
Her mother’s light brown hair was mussed, her blue eyes were circled in red and streaming tears, her face was off-white—almost gray. Marti was used to the spirited aliveness of her beautiful tanned mother. Now she looked almost dead.
Dead. Before Marti left the school with her mom, a teacher had yelled out at the front door of the school that Kennedy had been declared dead.
And so, too, were a Dallas police officer and a Secret Service agent.
“Is Daddy dead?” Marti asked her mother as they walked away from the school. “Is he dead? Is Daddy dead?” She repeated the question over and over.
Her mother was shaking and sobbing. All she could do was repeat over and over, “I’m sure he isn’t. I’m sure he isn’t.”
But Marti, now also crying loudly, could tell that she was anything but sure.