Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  Roy Kellerman follows the president by inches, ready, like the other nearby agents, to use his body as a human shield. Any contact with the public is a nightmare for the Secret Service, but the agents also know that it is the lifeblood of electioneering. So far, they have been unable to persuade Jack Kennedy to be more cautious on these occasions.134†

  Bill Greer, noticing how far down the fence the president is getting, drives the armored Lincoln at a crawl alongside him. Other Secret Service men are trying to get everyone to take his or her place in the long line of vehicles strung out along the fence behind the president’s car. The radio networks are alive with reports, queries, and advisories. Security men strung out for miles along the route all the way to the Trade Mart know from their radios that the president is on the ground, that the next forty-five minutes, as the motorcade threads its way across the city, will require their utmost alertness and preparedness.

  The president and Mrs. Kennedy finally step toward the presidential limousine, where Governor Connally and his wife wait, standing just in front of the jump seats. Newsweek White House correspondent Charles Roberts manages to get in a quick question to Jackie: “How do you like campaigning?” “It’s wonderful, it’s wonderful,” she says, sounding as if she almost means it.135 The president places his hand in the small of Mrs. Kennedy’s back and helps her into the backseat first. She moves to the left side as the president steps in and takes his seat on the right. Mrs. Kennedy places the bouquet of red roses on the seat between her and the president. The governor and his wife fold the jump seats back and sit down, the governor in front of the president, and Nellie in front of Mrs. Kennedy. Secret Service agent Roy Kellerman takes his position in the front passenger seat next to the driver, Special Agent Bill Greer.

  Television cameras zoom in on the limousine as the president and Mrs. Kennedy continue waving to the cheering crowds.

  “The party is now leaving Love Field,” the announcer tells television viewers. “And of course thousands will be on hand for that motorcade now, which will be [through] downtown Dallas, down Cedar Springs to Harwood, and on Harwood it will turn on Main, from which point it will go all the way down to the courthouse area, which is the end of Main, it’ll turn on Houston Street to Elm, under the Triple Underpass, out to the Mart, where the president talks at approximately one o’clock, which will also be carried live right here on most of these channels. And then we’ll be back here, as we told you, at about two-fifteen for the president’s departure.”136

  11:55 a.m.

  The motorcade finally gets underway on its scheduled nine-and-one-half-mile journey to the Trade Mart, driving right through an opening in a section of the Love Field fence that Special Agent Forrest Sorrels has had removed. Sorrels has been working on the presidential visit since November 4, when Special Agent-in-Charge Gerry Behn of the White House detail alerted him to the likelihood of the visit, and he is reasonably sure that the arrangements they’ve made are satisfactory under the circumstances.137 An advance car, driven by Dallas police captain Perdue D. Lawrence, head of the Traffic Division, is already a half mile out in front of the motorcade watching for any potential problems.

  First through the opening in the fence is the so-called pilot car, a white Ford sedan driven by Deputy Chief Lumpkin, who scouts the route a quarter of a mile ahead, on the lookout for motor vehicle accidents, fires, obstructions, or any other problem necessitating a last-instant change of route or procedure. Along for the ride are two Dallas homicide detectives, B. L. Senkel and F. M. Turner, and Lieutenant Colonel George Whitmeyer, commander of the local Army Intelligence reserve unit.138 Three two-wheel Dallas police motorcycle officers under the command of Sergeant S. Q. Bellah are next, followed by five two-wheel motorcycle officers under the command of Sergeant Stavis Ellis. The “lead car,” an unmarked white Ford police sedan driven by Dallas police chief Jesse Curry, follows a short distance behind. Accompanying Curry are Secret Service agents Lawson and Sorrels, and Dallas sheriff Bill Decker.

  Five car lengths back, and the third car in the motorcade, is the presidential limousine with four motorcycle escorts, two on each side, flanking the rear bumper. Although, as indicated, the president’s car is equipped to allow Secret Service agents to ride on the running boards or rear bumper steps, no agents are there this day. Kennedy is weary of seeing bodyguards hovering behind him every time he turns to see the crowds.139

  Less than a car length behind is the Secret Service follow-up car, a black 1955 four-door modified Cadillac convertible touring car—“Halfback” to the agents—with Agent Sam Kinney at the wheel. Emory Roberts, the car’s commander, is at his side. Agent Clint Hill is standing on the left running board, Agent Bill McIntyre right behind him. Agent John Ready stands on the right running board, Agent Paul Landis behind him. President Kennedy’s close friends and advisers, Dave Powers and Ken O’Donnell, are seated in the right and left jump seats. Agent George Hickey sits in the left rear seat, Agent Glen Bennett on the right. Between them is an AR-15 .223 caliber automatic rifle, capable of blowing a man’s head off.

  Two and a half car lengths behind Halfback is the vice presidential limousine, a light-blue 1961 Lincoln convertible carrying the vice president and Mrs. Johnson, Senator Yarborough, Secret Service agent Rufus Youngblood, and the driver.

  Immediately behind the vice president is another Secret Service follow-up car, a yellow Ford Mercury four-door hardtop nicknamed “Varsity.” Driven by Texas Ranger Hurchel Jacks, the car contains vice presidential aide Cliff Carter and three Secret Service agents. Dallas mayor Earle Cabell and his wife ride in the next vehicle, a white Ford Mercury convertible, along with Congressman Ray Roberts.

  The national press pool car, a blue-gray Chevrolet sedan on loan from the telephone company, complete with driver, follow through the fence opening next. Assistant Press Secretary Malcolm Kilduff and United Press International (UPI) correspondent Merriman Smith occupy the front seat, with Smith in the middle, next to the radiophone mounted on the transmission hump under the dashboard. Jack Bell of the Associated Press (AP), Robert Baskin of the Dallas Morning News, and Bob Clark of the American Broadcasting Company (ABC) are in the backseat.

  The rest of the motorcade follows: two camera cars carrying local motion and still photographers; two Dallas police motorcycle escorts (H. B. McLain and Marrion L. Baker); a third camera car; three cars full of congressmen; a VIP staff car carrying a governor’s aide and the military and air force aides to the president; two more motorcycle escorts (J. W. Courson and C. A. Haygood); a White House press bus; a local press car with four Dallas Morning News reporters; a second White House press bus; two more Dallas police motorcycle escorts (R. Smart and B. J. Dale); a Chevrolet sedan carrying the president’s physician, Admiral George G. Burkley, and the president’s personal secretary, Evelyn Lincoln; a 1957 black Ford hardtop carrying two representatives from Western Union; a white 1964 Chevrolet Impala containing White House Signal Corps officer Art Bales and Army Warrant Officer Ira Gearhart (“Bagman”); a 1964 white-top, dark-body Chevrolet Impala; a third White House bus carrying staff and members of the Democratic Party; a 1963 black-and-white Ford police car; and at the rear, a solo three-wheel Dallas police motorcycle escort.140

  In a long procession the motorcycles and cars turn left out of Love Field onto Mockingbird Lane, then almost immediately southeast onto Lemmon Avenue, heading for downtown. There aren’t many people along this first long straightaway down Lemmon Avenue, which is flanked by those low, nondescript structures characteristic of the light industry near airports. Clumps of people, mostly workers from the factories, have gathered to watch the procession flash past, but there are long barren stretches too. Mostly, the road looks much like any avenue through a suburban industrial park in the middle of an ordinary workday.

  Jackie, squinting in the bright sunshine, looks forward to the looming Cotton Belt overpass—cleared of onlookers by police orders—for the fleeting moment of shade it will provide. She tries to put on her s
unglasses, but the president asks her not to—the people have come to see her, and the dark glasses might make her look distant and aloof. She keeps them in her lap, though, and sneaks them on for a moment or two whenever there is no one along the road to see.141

  12:00 p.m.

  At the Book Depository, some of the stock boys wade into their lunches in the small, first-floor employee’s lounge, which the architects designated as the recreation room and which employees call the “domino room,” after their favorite pastime, while others eat while standing in front of the building. Charlie Givens discovers he left his cigarettes in the pocket of his jacket up on the sixth floor. The thirty-eight-year-old navy veteran goes back up on the elevator. The sixth floor appears deserted as he crosses the wide space they cleared for the new flooring, but when he gets back to the elevator with the cigarettes and prepares to go down, he is startled to see Lee Oswald, whom he had seen a few minutes earlier on the fifth floor, now on the sixth floor, walking along the east aisle, away from the southeast corner of the room, clipboard in hand.

  “Boy, are you going downstairs?” Givens calls out. “It’s near lunchtime.”

  “No, sir,” Oswald replies. Oddly, he again asks for the west elevator gate to be closed when Givens gets back downstairs.

  “Okay,” Givens shrugs.142

  When he returns to the first floor on the east elevator, he turns to close the west elevator gate, as Oswald requested, but finds it missing—it’s up on some other floor.143 After eating lunch in front of the building, he joins Harold Norman and James Jarman inside at a first-floor window looking onto Elm Street, but after a bit they decide to go outside for the motorcade. Later, Norman and Jarman change their minds and go back in to watch from the fifth floor, while Givens walks over to the corner of Main and Record to watch the motorcade with a couple of friends.144

  12:06 p.m.

  At the corner of Lemmon and Lomo Alto Drive, the president’s eye catches a group of children with a large placard: “MR. PRESIDENT, PLEASE STOP AND SHAKE OUR HANDS.”

  “Let’s stop here, Bill,” Kennedy calls to the driver.

  The car is immediately mobbed by the squealing, ecstatic kids. People as far as a block away start to run toward the car. When he realizes that the president has stopped, Chief Curry stops the lead car and begins to back up. The motorcycle escorts in front of him wheel around and head back toward the limousine. It’s all Secret Service agent Kellerman and the men from the follow-up car can do to restore some order and get the motorcade moving again.

  A few blocks farther on, the president stops again, this time for a bunch of little children and a nun—an irresistible temptation for America’s first Catholic president. The nervous agents don’t interfere, partly out of tact and partly because they are satisfied with their progress so far. They still have every chance of getting to the Trade Mart in good time.145

  At the Book Depository Building, Bonnie Ray Williams had picked up his lunch in the domino room on the first floor, gotten a Dr. Pepper from the soda machine, and taken the east elevator back up to the sixth floor, expecting to find some of the other guys up there. Billy Lovelady said he was going to watch the motorcade from there, and Bonnie had more or less agreed with Danny Arce that they would too—but he doesn’t see anyone on the sixth floor when he gets there.

  Bonnie settles down anyway, in front of the third double-window from the southeast corner overlooking Elm Street, to eat his lunch—a piece of chicken on the bone, two slices of bread, and a bag of Fritos. No one else shows up. After a while he gets up and perches on a “two-wheeler,” one of the hand trucks they use to buck the heavy boxes of books around. It’s dead quiet up here, nothing moving but specks of dust in the air. To his right he can see the west wall, because that’s where they cleared the books out to resurface the floor. His view to the left is blocked by the unusually high piles of boxes the workers moved there in preparation for the reflooring job. It’s so quiet he can hear the pigeons on the roof above and someone moving around on the floor below—someone walking, then moving a window. He hears the traffic and growing murmur of the crowd in the street below. It’s finally clear that no one else is coming up to watch from the sixth floor. He finishes off his Dr. Pepper, puts the chicken bones back in the paper sack, leaves the bottle and sack there, and goes back to the elevator to see who’s on the floor below.146

  12:12 p.m.

  Howard L. Brennan, a forty-four-year-old steamfitter, watches the crowd gathering outside the windows as he finishes his lunch in the cafeteria at the corner of Record and Main streets. Brennan could join the crowd right there on Main Street, but folks are already jostling for position, and he reckons he’ll walk back toward the railroad yards near Elm and Houston, where he’s been working on a pipeline for Wallace and Beard Construction for the past seven weeks.147

  12:15 p.m.

  Arnold Rowland and his wife Barbara find a place to watch the motorcade on the sidewalk in front of the Criminal Courts Building on Houston Street, near the west entrance to Sheriff Decker’s office. The young couple are still students at Dallas’s Adamson High School, but both got off early today and came downtown to shop for a while before Arnold goes to his job at the Pizza Inn on West Davis Avenue.148

  A hundred yards to the west the Rowlands can see policemen on the railroad bridge over the Triple Underpass and another two-dozen or so uniformed officers in the streets around the plaza. Arnold and Barbara remember the nasty incidents involving Adlai Stevenson and Lyndon Johnson not too long ago and understand that security will be tight for the motorcade.149 Arnold knows the building on the next corner very well—several times he has been to the Texas School Book Depository to get books, including a physics notebook he bought there two or three weeks ago.150 He and his wife take note of a number of people looking out the windows of the building, including a black man hanging out of one of the southeast corner windows.151

  A nearby police radio squawks out the progress of the motorcade.

  “What’s the location?” Inspector J. H. Sawyer asks.

  “Now turning onto Cedar Springs Road off of Turtle Creek,” the dispatcher informs him.

  “Ten-four,” Sawyer replies.152

  Arnold Rowland can tell from the conversation that the motorcade is about two miles away now.153 As he continues to scan the upper floors of the Depository, Rowland would later say he spotted a man holding a high-powered rifle at port arms (across his chest) in the window at the west end of the sixth floor. That’s some distance away, but Arnold knows his way around guns, and he can tell by the relative proportion of the scope to the rifle that it’s a heavy piece, no .22 caliber. Though the rifleman is a couple of feet back in the shadows, Arnold, whose eyesight is better than 20/20,154 sees him very clearly, a slender man in his early thirties, with a light complexion and either well-combed or close-cut dark hair, wearing a light-colored, open-collared shirt over a T-shirt.155

  “Hey, you want to see a Secret Service man?” he asks his wife Barbara.

  “Where?” she asks, staring intently at a commotion developing across the street.

  “In the building there,” Arnold says, pointing back up at the Depository. His wife, however, is paying no attention and instead directs him to look across the street at a couple of police officers assisting a young black man who’s having some sort of epileptic fit. By the time Arnold gets his wife’s attention and points out the open window, the man with the rifle has disappeared.

  “What did he look like?” she asks, disappointed to have missed him.

  Arnold describes the man and how he was holding a rifle with a scope.

  “Oh,” she sighs, “I wish I could have seen him. He’s probably in another part of the building now, watching people.”

  Her attention returns back to the action across the street, where an ambulance arrives to take the epileptic to Parkland Hospital. Although Arnold continues to scan the upper floors of the Depository every thirty seconds or so, hoping to catch another glimpse of
the man he assumes is a Secret Service agent so that he can point him out to his wife, he doesn’t see the rifleman again. Nor, to his later regret, does he bother to mention what he saw to a nearby police officer.156

  Bonnie Ray Williams steps off the elevator onto the fifth floor of the Depository. He discovers Harold Norman and James “Junior” Jarman there.157 With seven big double-windows across the Elm Street face of the building, there’s plenty of room for the three of them to watch the motorcade. Harold squats at the window in the southeast corner, and Bonnie Ray joins him there, taking the second window of the pair. Junior kneels at the second double-window, leaning over the low sill. If they lean out far enough, they can talk to each other outside. The view is terrific, since from their perch they can see south to the corner of Houston and Main and beyond, as well as all the way west down the curving sweep of Elm to the Triple Underpass, with nothing in their line of sight but the thick foliage clustered on the branches of an oak tree158 nearly right below them along the north side of Elm. Except for that oak, they will get a pretty good view of the motorcade from the moment it turns off Main Street until it disappears into the shadow of the underpass leading to the Stemmons Freeway.159

  12:20 p.m.

  In the pilot car, Deputy Chief Lumpkin rolls closer to the downtown area. As each block passes, the skyline of Dallas grows taller and larger and the crowds increase in size. Already, police officers are finding it nearly impossible to keep people back onto the sidewalks and behind the barricades.

  “Need some motorcycles—just to kinda keep the crowd over to Harwood and Ross,” Chief Lumpkin warns Curry over the radio. “They’re kinda getting out into the street here.”

  “We’ve got ’em,” Curry answers.