by Jim Lehrer
Marti was waiting for me at a table in the corner farthest from the door. It was beyond the hearing of any of the customers. The sounds of portable typewriters and low-volume rock music further assured privacy.
“We’ll talk awhile and then I’ll take you over to my apartment, if that’s okay,” Marti said after a quick greeting. “There are some things I want to show you—assassination kinds of things.”
She looked campus-cool in a navy-blue sweatshirt with PENN in red across the chest over a white collared blouse and blue jeans. To my observant reporter eye, her brown hair seemed looser than yesterday—probably the result of a recent shower.
Her sense of urgency was in full bloom. She was clearly fresh, ready, and fired up to get on with her story—but also, I figured, eager to discuss ways I might be able to help her father. I had thought about nothing else during the ninety-minute train ride from DC, but nothing had come to mind.
A waitress came by, and we both ordered coffee. When we had settled ourselves, I began by reminding her that back in Washington she had been talking about Thanksgiving 1963. Wasn’t it a funny coincidence that now, here we were, just three days until Thanksgiving 1968?
“Thanksgiving with all the trimmings was not that big a deal at our house in Kansas because Dad always had to work,” I said. “Newspaper editors—at least the good ones—feel obligated to be there on holidays with the troops.”
Marti closed her eyes, as if willing me to shut up. She obviously did not care about my Kansas boyhood holidays.
After a deep sigh and my continued silence, she quickly described what it was like at that Dallas Thanksgiving alone with her mother. They sat at their white Formica kitchen table, sharing only a few short, insignificant words along with a tiny baked unstuffed chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, green beans, and a pumpkin pie.
When they weren’t at the dinner table, Marti said she spent most of the rest of Thanksgiving Day watching football on television. She couldn’t have cared less that the Oakland Raiders beat the Denver Broncos 26–10. Her pro-football interest was Cowboy-centric. Even the 15–13 win by the Texas Longhorns over the Texas A&M Aggies didn’t rouse her emotions. But the games helped pass the day.
“Christmas, a month later, was even worse,” Marti said, moving the story along.
I pressed her for more what-happened-next details, but she said that she remembered little of what happened in the month from Thanksgiving to Christmas. Her father was physically absent most of the time and, even when he was there at the house, increasingly gone mentally, too, it seemed to her. He seldom spoke much more than a few sentences, and what he did say was nonsense. Meanwhile, her mother seemed determined to ignore that and most everything else that was going on, keeping up a pose that nothing was wrong.
Marti assumed her father was out there still being busy about what had happened on November 22, but she didn’t ask her mother about that. Or about much of anything else. That was not the way it had been before—before the assassination. The two of them had once talked and laughed together a lot, mostly about little things that had happened at her school and her mother’s bank. Now mother and daughter stayed isolated even when they were in the same room.
A sense of loneliness, silence, and misery was Marti’s only real memory of the thirty days between the holidays. Her eyes went moist as she told me that those days had always been full of happy expectation and joy for her and, she believed, for her parents. The Walters trio had never been one of high spirits and loud voices. They were a quiet little family. The only time anybody yelled much was when the Cowboys won.
She said Christmas Day 1963 itself was truly awful. Her father came out of the bedroom in the late afternoon to eat with Rosemary and Marti. The gift highlights were a sleeveless pink sweater for her, an olive-and-gray-checked tie for her dad, and a pair of thin brown leather gloves for her mother. There were no TO and FROM tags on anything, the family custom being that most presents still came from Santa. Marti spent two dollars from her allowance money on a tiny jar of lavender-scented bath salts for her mother and a solid cream-colored pocket handkerchief for her dad.
Physically, Marti said Van looked changed. His face had grown gray and pasty. Between each of the times Marti had seen him—which, as best as she could recall now, added up to only half a dozen between Thanksgiving and Christmas—he seemed to grow thinner and smaller and more withdrawn.
Over Christmas dinner Van barely cracked a smile or spoke a word, other than to recite a Dutch Reformed prayer for Christmas that had been a tradition since Kinderhook days. He prayed this time over a bleak meal—several slices of turkey with cranberry sauce and a fruit salad. It seemed clear to Marti, who stayed out of the kitchen when it was being prepared, that most of the food, including the turkey, had been brought in. A handout, most likely, from another Dallas-based Secret Service agent’s family table.
The only semi-drama of the day was the ongoing one Marti had invented for every meal, however few, she spent with her dad. She tried relentlessly to get him to make direct eye contact with her. But she seldom succeeded. His once bright brown eyes had taken on a glassy, far-off stare, and even his glances were usually slightly off to the side, above, or below where she was sitting or standing. He seemed not to even see her.
Another of her grim habits became counting the occasions when she smelled alcohol on her mother’s breath. Marti was up to fourteen separate instances the day the three of them sat down to eat their Christmas meal. She assumed by now that Rosemary had a bottle of something stashed in the house where neither husband nor daughter could stumble over it accidentally.
She felt very alone in every way a teenage girl could feel, unable to discuss with anybody her mother’s drinking or what had happened on November 22. Marti had a few girlfriends at school but no real pals—nobody to spend time with after school or during the many no-school days brought on by the assassination and the holidays.
Then, two weeks after the New Year, the worse got worser. The Secret Service transferred Van Walters to the Kansas City office. He would go as a regular field agent, not as a special agent in charge or even as an assistant in charge, the job he had held in Dallas. He had been demoted.
Marti was in the bathroom when she heard her dad, having just come home, report the news of the Kansas City transfer to her mother.
“I was told that ‘for several reasons, we think it would be good for the service that you be away from Dallas proper but fairly close geographically. Also, the freer you are of management duties the better off you’ll be as the assassination investigations proceed.’ That’s what Washington said.”
Her father was quoting “Washington” a person—a force.
The Walterses knew all about Washington. Marti had been born in Washington’s Sibley Hospital on September 23, 1950, during Van’s first Washington assignment to counterfeit money cases. After that, he worked on the presidential and vice presidential protection details for the next five years, mostly protecting Mrs. Eisenhower and Vice President Nixon. From Washington he went to field offices in Minneapolis and then Charlotte before being sent to Dallas in 1961, a step designed to eventually lead to Van being a special agent in charge.
“He’s gone … to bed,” her mother said to Marti when she emerged from the bathroom. “Hard day.”
All days were hard days for Van.
“Kansas City? Do we have to go to Kansas City?” Marti asked her mother. It was one of the most direct and real questions she had asked aloud since the night of the assassination.
Rosemary didn’t answer directly but said in a mumble, “No telling where we’re going next—and next, next, and next. They want to get rid of Van and all the others. Nobody even wants to see them.”
Rosemary had said it more than once, and Marti certainly knew that to lose a president was the cardinal failure for anyone in the Secret Service. But clearly there was much more to it than that. Still, what exactly? She remained haunted by that first overheard conversation between h
er parents, when Van had described the day in such horrific detail. But there was not even one mention of her dad in the assassination investigation stories she scoured in the Dallas newspapers every day. If he had really been responsible for Kennedy’s death, wouldn’t somebody be saying so in public?
Rosemary Walters left the room mumbling in her distant way, “The sooner we get out of Dallas, the better it will be for us all.”
But Marti loved Dallas even if Lee Harvey Oswald had shot the president there. She loved Dealey High School. She loved the Cowboys. And she loved Eddie LeBaron.
SHE SAID THE house in East Dallas was not sold until nine weeks after they had moved to Kansas City. But the Secret Service granted “assassination-associated” agents financial courtesies that included a “special advance payment” to Van Walters for the Kansas City rent deposit. Back in Dallas, a Realtor had stuck a fifty-one-thousand-dollar asking price on the Crestmont Street house, which was great considering they had bought it on Van’s GI Bill for forty-five thousand barely two years before.
The Walterses, despite the DC-to-Minneapolis-to-Charlotte-to-Dallas kind of moving around that went with working for the Secret Service, had always bought rather than rented their homes. Van told Marti more than once that it was all about equity, equity, equity, and someday that equity would put her through college.
But this time, a small two-bedroom rental apartment on a street south of downtown Kansas City called The Paseo was just fine. In fact, as far as Marti could tell, there wasn’t even any serious talk of buying a house in Kansas City. Her mother did the finding and renting and her dad mostly just shrugged and nodded when told anything about it.
For Marti, the move to Kansas City was just the latest terrible thing to happen in her rapidly deteriorating life. Kansas City had a pro football team called the Chiefs; they’d been the Dallas Texans until they moved to Kansas City last spring. It was something, but they weren’t the Cowboys. Marti told her dad, on one of the few times he was home in Kansas City, there was no way she could ever root for the Chiefs. Van Walters, again, barely tossed a shoulder in reaction. It seemed to Marti all he did now when she or Mother spoke, and sometimes he didn’t even do that.
Not only did she miss Dallas and the Cowboys, but the move also meant going cold into another strange school, now for the fifth time. This one was at least named for a writer, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, rather than a newspaper publisher like that one in Dallas.
As she walked into the first classroom on her schedule, her English teacher asked without preamble, “Are you a reader?”
In the most superior and snotty manner she could muster, Marti snapped, “Yes, I can read.” She wasn’t sure what had gotten into her but so what? “I can write, too,” she added. “I can even add and subtract.”
Miss DeShirley was the teacher’s name. She was tall and heavyset, an ugly woman with black hair wrapped in a bun at the back of her head. “How anecdotal,” she replied in an even voice without a hint of annoyance or so much as the blink of an eye. “I find that students who can read and write, add and subtract sometimes tend to learn more quickly than those who cannot. But that is not always the case. That, of course, is why I used the term anecdotal. I suppose then, in your case, it remains to be seen.”
Teacher and student were standing across from each other in the front of the classroom, just out of hearing range of the thirty-plus students sitting at desks, a few of whom were eyeing the new midterm arrival while the rest mostly talked among themselves. It was eight thirty in the morning, with the bell for first period only minutes away.
“Can you stand on your head?” Miss DeShirley asked.
“No, not really,” Marti said, her confidence now disappearing along with her attitude.
“Can you fly?” asked Miss DeShirley.
“No, ma’am,” said Marti, her face red, chest warm—grin beginning.
“Have you read any short stories by Guy de Maupassant?”
“Oh, yes, ma’am. ‘The Necklace’ is the only one of Maupassant’s …”
“Always use the de. His full name is de Maupassant.”
“Yes, ma’am. I thought the ending—when it turns out the necklace was a fake one to begin with—is too tricky.”
“I agree,” said Miss DeShirley.
“But Shirley Jackson is my real favorite,” Marti said. “There are no tricks in ‘The Lottery.’ ”
“No indeed,” said the teacher. Miss DeShirley was now in a full smile herself and no longer seemed so ugly.
“Maybe it’s because she’s a female writer,” Marti said. “They don’t use a lot of tricks like the men seem to do.”
Marti, desperate for human contact, was on to the other subject in her life, besides Cowboys football, that truly excited her.
“Maybe so, maybe so.” Miss DeShirley was now beaming—and even kind of pretty. “Now, that truly is anecdotal.”
After moving a few steps toward the front of the classroom, she asked for the class’s attention.
“Please welcome Miss Marti Walters to our eleventh-grade class and to Longfellow School,” she said in a voice of command and presence. “She comes to us from Dallas …”
“They killed Kennedy there!” some boy yelled from the back.
“Kill the Cowboys!” shouted another.
Suddenly several others were yelling things about the Cowboys and murdering the president.
“We’ll have none of that kind of talk,” Miss DeShirley said sternly. “Marti is one of us and you will treat her as such.”
Marti managed only a half smile and a nod before the bell rang and Miss DeShirley began her lesson. The rest of her first day remained uneventful after that.
BY MARTI’S PRECISE count, Van Walters was only physically in Kansas City for twenty-two days over the next six months. Only five years later did she find out that the rest of the time he was away mostly testifying, preparing to testify, or waiting to testify. That was mostly in Washington, before Secret Service inspectors, FBI agents, and a wide variety of Warren Commission investigators, lawyers, and finally two of the important commissioners themselves—the diplomat John J. McCloy and the minority leader of the House of Representatives, Gerald R. Ford, a Republican from Michigan.
As predicted, with an even greater push after Ruby shot Oswald, the Kennedy assassination was turned into a federal case. And Hoover and the FBI did, in fact, go after the Secret Service. Her dad said not a word to Marti about any of his testimony, of course. And her mother also barely mentioned what Van was doing all the time he was away. Most of what Marti knew about the investigations came, as in Dallas, from her own eager attention to stories in the newspapers and on radio and television.
With Van gone so many days at a time, there was also seldom anything for Marti to overhear except through the occasional phone exchanges between her parents about logistics and travel plans. When Dad was home the conversation only covered how long he might stay this time and how many pairs of underwear, shirts, and ties he would need.
The liquor-smell count on her mother went up into the high forties. And while she never witnessed or heard him, red eyes suggested crying by her father at least half a dozen times.
There was one hushed conversation she caught just the barest of clues from. She knew it was important when she heard it but she couldn’t find anything in the dictionary at the school library that helped her understand. “Sodium something or other that could be administered through a needle …” That was what Marti heard Van say to her mother.
THEN, AFTER ONLY six months, came Portland—in some ways so wonderful and in some others so awful.
Within hours after his official assassination testimony ended, Van Walters was sent from Kansas City 1,805 miles west to the field office in Portland, Oregon. Again, he was sent as a regular agent—not as a special agent in charge or an assistant. Again, there was no warning and not even, to Marti’s knowledge, an attempt at a placating explanation.
The message from Washington or wh
erever was just, Go away, Agent Walters. Go! Now! That was how Marti saw it, at least.
But the Walterses did arrive in Portland with money in their pockets. Because Rosemary hadn’t ever tried seriously to buy a house in Kansas City, they still had fifty-four hundred dollars in cash left over from the sale of the Dallas house. Combined with a GI Bill mortgage, that down payment bought them a nice two-bedroom brick house in the Stardust section of Portland. Equity, equity, equity.
Rosemary immediately landed a job as a teller at Stardust Savings and Loan in a shopping center just a short four-block walk from the house. There was no question that her husband’s being a Secret Service agent helped her get the banking jobs, including earlier ones in Kansas City, Minneapolis, Charlotte, and Dallas. Bankers couldn’t help but react favorably to “U.S. Secret Service agent” cited in a job application or brought up in an interview as her spouse’s occupation. Secret Service were the good guys. They were the ones who caught counterfeiters and other money-related crooks.
And Marti hadn’t really minded going to Portland—taking another hike into the unknown. Marti’s school life at Longfellow High in Kansas City turned out to be empty and boring. Miss DeShirley’s English class was her only respite. Otherwise, it was not a great fit. The boys seemed rougher and dumber, the girls prettier and sillier than those in Dallas.
Marti’s escape to Portland had an unpleasant beginning at Sunset High School. First, while being introduced to the entire student body at lunchtime, the principal made her say “Let us pray” out loud to everyone in the lunchroom before eating. The principal said it was a terrific way to introduce new students—by having their voices heard right away by everyone. Marti was mortified but then she felt pretty good about how she had been somebody special, at least for a few brief moments.