by Jim Lehrer
I knew that Marti was probably recalling the same thing I was—Reynolds’s earlier analogy with cancer as a malady beyond cure.
But we didn’t talk about it. Not then.
Before going up to my cold bed, I had some white wine and a supper of beef stew and green salad with Marti and her mother. There was no conversation about anything that mattered. Nobody had the energy to talk anymore about the man in the room down the hall and his prognoses.
It had been a long, hard, disappointing day. And now, here in bed, it wasn’t over yet.
What do we do next?
I had no answer to Marti’s question. And I am not proud to say what I was thinking. As a helper, I had done my best. As a reporter, I had my story. Van Walters, the Secret Service agent who ordered the bubble top taken off the presidential limo, was dead—or about to die—because he believed he was responsible for the death of President John F. Kennedy. Period. “Thirty,” as they said in the newspaper business.
“What kind of marine were you?” Marti asked from her position next to me in bed. She looked at me, but still there was no touching.
She caught me off guard. “A damn good one,” I said, having no idea where this was going. Stupid me.
“Did you learn to shoot a rifle?”
“Absolutely. I qualified on the rifle range as an expert each of the three years I was on active duty.”
“Are you as good a shot as Oswald?”
“Better …” Whoops. Still mostly eyeing just the ceiling, I said, “What in the hell are you thinking?”
Everything in the bed and the room went from cold to hot.
“What about trying another kind of reenactment? A real one?” Marti said as she turned to face me and a hand fell loosely on my shoulder. Her knee touched mine.
“Let’s talk about it in the morning,” I said, making no reciprocal move.
“But what if we could prove to Dad that the rifle shots would have shattered that Plexiglas and killed everyone? That would do it. It might do it. Isn’t it worth a try?”
I was now thinking intently about not sleeping with a source, a rather loose unofficial rule in the world of The Dallas Tribune and American journalism. I had particularly resolved never to do such a thing after the Kennedy assassination over my annoyance with a reporter from a competing newspaper who made no secret of doing so in the interest of “cultivating sources.” (I will let the details lie—to protect the guilty.)
But I knew if I did not get Marti Walters out of this bed and away from me right now …
“You’re a college girl and I really am ten years older than you are,” I said, jerking the covers off me and moving to jump out of bed.
“This is the sixties, for God’s sake,” Marti said, on the verge of laughing. “I thought marines were … well, marines.”
I was now standing on the floor, my feet instantly turning icy cold.
“Promise to think about it,” she said, making her own move to get out on the other side of the bed.
“Think about what?”
“Reenacting Oswald shooting at Kennedy with the bubble top on the car.”
“Okay, okay, I promise.”
She slipped out of my bed, pranced to the door, and disappeared.
I returned to bed with thoughts that had nothing to do with reenacting, bubble tops, or rifle shots. I was busy—ever so busy—imagining, in detail, something else entirely.
I walked right up to a young sergeant in dress blues and spit shines at the marine recruiting station in Albany. He was seated at the first desk in the room.
“I am a former marine and I need some help,” I said, having marched in unannounced and most uncomfortable.
Marti had driven me here to the downtown federal building. She planned to park in a lot across the street and go to a pay phone at a café nearby to make some phone calls about Plexiglas.
The marine sergeant in front of me, in his late twenties, looked like he had stepped right off a recruiting poster. He had a close-cropped warrior haircut, a solid build, and an upright bearing. I glanced at the ribbons over the left pocket of his dark blue tunic and was most impressed. He had been awarded the Bronze Star with a V for valor and a Purple Heart for his wounds—clearly from duty in Vietnam. It made me want to apologize for not having seen combat and then just get the hell out of there.
But it was too late for that. He had jumped to his feet, his face lighting up, when I first appeared, obviously having thought he had a live one—a walk-in volunteer ready to go fight the commies in Vietnam.
“I’m Lambert—Sergeant Greg Lambert—have a seat, sir,” he said after hearing my opening line. “Tell me about yourself.”
The young sergeant had lost some of his live-one enthusiasm as soon as he realized I was no recruit, but the smile was there. I was at the recruiting office because, after a morning of heavy talk with Marti, this was the only place I could think of to go. I had no way to acquire a high-powered rifle on my own. Marti said she would take care of the facsimile bubble top search. Sure. Good luck with that. I thought I was just going through the motions, to be honest.
“I always believed marines could do anything,” Marti had said, at the end of our very tough conversation about the whole thing.
I had begun by saying no. No way. I would not participate in any such reenactment exercise. Even if we—I—could somehow arrange it, the end result might be just the opposite of what she wanted.
“What if it doesn’t shatter?” I said maybe fifty times. “What if the bullets are deflected? What if we prove your dad is right to believe the bubble top might really have saved Kennedy’s life?”
Her argument back was always the same. “What do we have to lose? Dad is going to die if something isn’t done by us, Dr. Reynolds, or some unknown god out there.”
Reluctantly, most reluctantly, I agreed to at least try to see what could be done. I knew that I was being further sucked in to—to what I didn’t know, exactly. I was careful not to think the scenario all the way through to any definitive conclusion.
Now with young marine sergeant Lambert, before laying out my request for help, I responded to the request to tell him about myself. I said I had been on active duty from 1959 to ’62 and, for good measure, I showed him my reserve ID card, which had my photo and rank as first lieutenant. I was in the so-called Ready Reserve—ready to go if called but with no ongoing responsibility to attend meetings or organized activities. I said nothing about being a newspaperman.
“What outfit were you in, Lieutenant?”
“One-Nine,” I said, marine talk for the First Battalion Ninth Marine Regiment of the Third Marine Division.
“They had a rough time at Khe Sanh, sir.”
I had heard about that. I had known several marines who were there. What they went through was so rough, in fact, that One-Nine drew the permanent nickname of “the Walking Dead.” Having already given him my active-duty dates, I did not have to underline the obvious—and embarrassing—fact that, unlike him, I had not been in combat.
“You, Sergeant? Your outfit?”
“Most of my time at ’Nam was in Two-Five,” said Lambert. Two-Five was an infantry battalion in the First Division.
I made some stupid comment about how tough it had been and still was for all marines in Vietnam, which the sergeant acknowledged. Then he turned the attention back to me.
“You said you needed some help, sir. You know what we say in the corps. ‘The difficult will be done immediately, the impossible will take a little longer.’ What can I do for you?”
I knew I was about to ask this young marine to do something that was definitely difficult and, most likely, impossible. I had warned Marti that I might very well draw outright refusal, if not ridicule. I told her the marines of Albany might even turn me over to local police or mental health professionals for even suggesting such a crazy thing.
But here I went: “Sergeant, it’s a long and involved story but, to get right to the point—I want to create an exp
eriment involving the assassination of President Kennedy.”
The sergeant’s pleasant we’re-all-marines-together grin became a frown.
“I’m trying to help a former Secret Service agent who was there on duty that day in November 1963,” I said quickly, not giving the sergeant enough time to say anything. “He’s literally dying from the guilt of it. What his daughter and I are suggesting is a way to keep him alive. She is waiting outside. Her father lives in Kinderhook—across the river not far from here.”
The frown was gone but the smile had not yet returned. Just a hint of curiosity was there.
It was enough to keep me talking. “He was the Secret Service agent who decided to take down the bubble top from the presidential limousine. He believes it was a decision that led to the death of Kennedy. That belief has led to a mental breakdown that has turned physical and brought him to the brink of death.”
The sergeant seemed ready to respond. I let him.
“How could that be?” he asked. “I don’t get it.”
Oh, Sergeant, I thought but did not say, you are on the route to being had. You just opened the door. Maybe.
Once I finished going through the various theories and possibilities, Sergeant Lambert asked the only question that mattered. “What exactly do you need from the marines, sir?”
“I need to borrow—or rent—a high-powered rifle as similar as possible to the one Oswald used,” I said.
“To do what exactly?”
“Fire into Plexiglas and see what happens.”
Lambert reached for the phone and dialed a number. “Gunny, this is Lambert over at recruiting,” he said into the receiver. “I’ve got a former marine who is looking for a particular weapon.”
He listened for a few seconds and said, “Thanks, Gunny. His name is …” He looked up at me.
“Gilmore. Jack Gilmore,” I prompted from across the desk.
“Jack Gilmore,” the sergeant repeated. “He was a platoon commander in One-Nine. I’ll send him right over.”
Lambert hung up and tore a sheet of paper from a memo pad on his desk. He wrote down a name, an address, and some directions then slid the paper across to me.
I took it in one hand, shook the sergeant’s vigorously with the other, and said, “Thank you, Sergeant.”
“A pleasure, Lieutenant,” said the sergeant. “You’re in the Ready Reserves, right?”
I nodded.
“Well, I’d bet the corps would put you on active duty in a flash and promote you to captain just like that,” the sergeant said, snapping his fingers. “They’re needing every officer they can get in ’Nam right now.”
“I hear you, Sergeant. Semper Fi.”
“Semper Fi, Lieutenant,” Lambert said in response.
That’s short for Semper Fidelis—always faithful. It’s how marines say good-bye to one another.
MARTI HAD NO trouble following the directions to Gunny’s Weapons and Wisdom, a gun and military surplus shop barely a mile away.
“I think I’ve found a place to get the Plexiglas,” she reported with excitement as we rode.
Marti, with my consultation, was trying to locate six one-quarter-inch-thick pieces that roughly replicated those I had seen myself on the Kennedy limo and in a couple of photographs since. None of the big hardware stores had what we needed, she said. Neither did half a dozen glass repair shops she called. One said they did have a small supply of Plexiglas, but the pieces they described sounded too thin and small.
“But there’s a Mack Truck sales, repair, and body shop up north of the city,” Marti said. “Based on what they told me on the phone, they not only have the right size and texture Plexiglas, they also have all the saws and stuff it’ll take to cut it into pieces the way we want.”
I told her that was just great. Good work for a kid college student majoring in American literature.
But first there was the weapon.
“Jonah Dickens (Gunny)” was the name the sergeant had written down on the memo paper. I resisted Marti’s push to come inside with me. I had almost given up trying to do or not do anything that did not suit her. She was, well … hard to resist. But she did agree to stay in the car.
There were no other customers in Gunny’s shop, which was a place unlike any I had seen since I left the Marine Corps. Standing behind a glass display counter of rifles, pistols, and other firearms, Gunny Dickens appeared more normal than I was expecting. He was a clean-shaven, paunchless, shaved-head man in his mid-forties who wore a dark green sweater and freshly starched olive-green dungarees, carefully bloused with rubber bands over the top of spit-shined dark brown combat boots—items from the standard marines’ field uniform of the day.
After an introduction and my explanation about who sent me, he and I made some small talk about our respective records. He had been a gunnery sergeant in Korea, where he’d nearly frozen to death at the Chosin Reservoir. He went through a descriptive list of his various body parts and fluids that had been frozen. He spoke in a low, gravelly voice that, like everything else about him, was standard issue.
The chitchat finally finished, I said, “I’m looking for a rifle like the one Oswald used to shoot Kennedy.”
“The whole world knows that Oswald never fired a round at Kennedy,” Gunny Dickens said without so much as a blink. “They planted that palm print on the stock of the rifle and then hid it behind those boxes at that Texas School Book Depository building to implicate Oswald and then set him up for Ruby to kill him.”
I remained silent as Gunny went on.
“The killers of John F. Kennedy on November twenty-second, 1963, were a squad of seven Mafia-trained CIA assassins who were paid by a rich anti-Catholic defrocked Episcopalian priest fanatic with ties to Castro, Johnson, and Steinbrenner, the leadership of South African army intelligence, Merrill Lynch, Chrysler, and the New York Yankees.”
I said only, “Mmmmmmm.”
He went on. “The Kennedy killing team fired twelve shots—four from up and behind through four different windows in two separate buildings, two below street level on Elm Street directly below from a sewer culvert, three from the grassy knoll up north and on the west side of the motorcade, two from the railroad underpass directly in front, and, of course, one from inside the presidential limousine itself by a rogue Secret Service agent.”
Though I had heard this kind of crap many times in my post-assassination reporting, I had never heard it spit out in such a one-two-three organized fashion and with so many details aggregated into one idiotic plot.
I still said nothing but I was careful to maintain eye contact—to at least fake hanging on his every stupid word.
“Why do you want such a weapon?” Gunny finally asked.
“I want to try a reenactment,” I said.
“Why? I just told you what happened. Everybody knows it.”
“I have a friend with a serious, personal reason to find out what would have happened had there been a bubble top on Kennedy’s car when the shots were fired,” I said.
Gunny nodded. That’s all he did. He just nodded. I knew from my own reporting experiences that conspiracy nuts had conversations like this as routinely as if they were about whether cheeseburgers are better with mustard or mayonnaise.
“The rifle they claim was used on Kennedy, of course, was an Italian Carcano bolt-action, single-shot 6.5-caliber piece of nineteen-ninety-five mail-order junk,” Gunny said. “There’s no way in hell it could have hit both Kennedy and Connally—” He stopped himself from going on.
“I don’t have one of those,” Gunny continued after a beat. “But I’ve got something as close as you can get. It’s a Model 39 Mosin-Nagant sport rifle made in Finland about the same time as the alleged assassination Italian piece.”
He motioned for me to follow him and, after unlocking three doors, one of them of solid steel, we went into a back room that contained enough weaponry to outfit a small army. There were dozens of pistols, automatic rifles, grenades, and rocket launchers,
along with a couple of sixty-millimeter mortars and even a flamethrower.
After looking about the vault for a few minutes, Gunny handed me a bolt-action rifle with a telescopic sight that very much resembled the weapon Oswald—or whoever—used to kill John F. Kennedy. Both the dark brown wood stock and the metal parts glistened from polish and care. Gunny told me that rifles like this were mostly used by snipers in Russia and Eastern Europe.
“Here’s a box of seven rounds,” he said. “Don’t be wasteful—there’s not much of this kind of stuff.”
I promised to use the ammo wisely.
And when I asked what it was all going to cost to rent it for a couple of days, Gunny said: “The ammo’s a dollar a round. I gave you the four extra in case you wanted to practice a bit first. The rifle’s yours to use—on the house, marine to marine. Pay for the ammo when you return the weapon. Just clean it before you bring it back, Lieutenant.”
I said I would do that. That was a rule of the shooting road. No professional ever returns a borrowed weapon uncleaned. Gunny handed me a cleaning kit, which was a fold-up rod with cloth swabs that were thrust up and down inside the barrel of the rifle after firing. I’d had plenty of experience doing that to the M1 rifle I used during my officers’ and infantry training.
“Some people think that Kennedy would have lived, no matter what, if they’d kept the bubble top on the Kennedy limo,” I said as we parted, just to give Gunny one last turn-on. “Might have deflected the shots or scared off Oswald to begin with.”
“Only some weirdo on dope would ever believe a thing like that,” Gunny said. “Oswald never knew that Carcano rifle existed till the cops found it after the assassination behind those boxes where the CIA’s mob hit team planted it.”
Gunny, like all good marines, seldom disappointed—even when talking absolute nonsense.
AS I WALKED out of Gunny’s carrying that rifle, I knew that for at least this exact moment in time, Marti Walters adored me. A worshipful look flashed across her face that was unlike anything I had ever seen.
She grabbed me long and hard when I finally sat down by her in the right front passenger seat of the Pontiac wagon after carefully laying the rifle on the floor of the backseat.