Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  “What evidence has been uncovered so far, Chief?”

  “I wouldn’t want to elaborate on all the evidence that has been uncovered,” Curry says hesitantly.

  “How would you describe his mood during the questioning?”

  “Very arrogant,” Curry snaps back. “Has been all along.”

  “What does he still say, Chief?”

  “He just denies everything,” Curry says.

  “Does he say anything else?” a reporter asks, hoping for more details.

  “Not too much,” Curry answers, looking for words, then admits, “I don’t know. I haven’t personally been interrogating him.”1077

  “Is there any doubt in your mind, Chief, that Oswald is the man who killed the president?”

  “I think this is the man who killed the president, yes,” Curry says firmly.

  “Chief, could you tell us what you might have found in his rooming house in the way of literature or any papers connecting him—?”

  “We found a great, great amount of Communist literature, Communist books,” Curry replies. “I couldn’t tell you just what all of it was, but it was a large box.”

  “Chief, we understand you’ve had the results of the paraffin tests which were made to determine whether Oswald had fired a weapon. Can you tell us what those tests showed?”

  “I understand that it was positive,” Curry tells them.

  “But, what does that mean?”

  “It only means that he fired a gun,” Curry says.1078

  “Chief, is there any plan for a reenactment of the crime? To take him to the scene or to do anything in that respect?”

  “No.”

  “Is there any evidence that anyone else may have been linked with Oswald to this shooting?”

  “At this time, we don’t believe so,” Curry answers. “We are talking to a man [Joe Molina] that works in the same building that we have in our subversive files and we are talking to him but he denies any knowledge of it.”

  One reporter wants to know how Oswald covered the distance between the Depository and the Tippit shooting scene in Oak Cliff. “I don’t know,” Curry says. “We have heard that he was picked up by a Negro in a car.”*

  “That is not confirmed?”

  “No, it is not confirmed, as far as I know,” Curry replies.

  “Have you been able to trace the rifle? Do you know where it was purchased?”

  “No,” Curry says, “we are attempting to do that at this time.”

  “With this man’s apparent subversive background, was there any surveillance? Were police aware of his presence in Dallas?”

  “We in the police department here did not know he was in Dallas. I understand that the FBI did know he was in Dallas,” Curry replies, the thought of Lieutenant Jack Revill’s memo fresh in his mind.

  “Is it normally the practice of the FBI to inform the police?”

  “Yes,” Curry says curtly.

  “But you were not informed?”

  “We had not been informed of this man,” Curry reiterates.1079

  It doesn’t take long for FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to get wind of Curry’s statements to the press and become livid. Hoover calls Dallas FBI special agent-in-charge Gordon Shanklin and orders him to call Chief Curry and tell him to retract his statement about the FBI having prior knowledge of Oswald being in Dallas.

  “The FBI is extremely desirous that you retract your statement to the press,” Shanklin tells Curry over the phone, assuring him that what he said could suggest that the FBI had interviewed Oswald in Dallas and had him under surveillance, neither of which was true, he assured Curry.1080

  Curry agrees to make a retraction and orders Lieutenant Jack Revill to remain silent about the matter as well.1081

  Lieutenant T. L. Baker answers the telephone jangling at his desk in Homicide and Robbery. The caller is one of the supervisors at City Transportation Company, a taxi service. He’s calling to report that one of his drivers, William W. Whaley, came in this morning and said that he had recognized Oswald’s picture in the morning newspaper and believed he was the same man he drove out to North Beckley in Oak Cliff yesterday afternoon. Baker informs Captain Fritz, who instructs him to bring Whaley and the cabdriver who was a witness to the Tippit shooting, William Scoggins, to police headquarters to view Oswald in a lineup.1082

  In the meantime, Fritz asks his detectives to bring Oswald down to his office for further questioning.

  10:20 a.m. (11:20 a.m. EST)

  The FBI sends another Teletype to all of its field offices:

  Lee Harvey Oswald has been developed as the principal suspect in the assassination of President Kennedy. He has been formally charged with the President’s murder along with the murder of Dallas Texas patrolman J.D. Tippet [sic] by Texas state authorities…All offices should [continue] normal contacts with informants and other sources with respect to bombing suspects, hate group members and known racial extremists. Daily teletype summaries may be discontinued. All investigation bearing directly on the President’s assassination should be afforded most expeditious handling and Bureau and Dallas advised.1083

  In Washington, D.C., even the weather appears to have taken respectful cognizance of the tragedy that has befallen the nation’s capital more than any other American city. Rain falls slowly from a bleak, overcast sky through most of the day. A shaken capital tries to piece together a new mosaic of national rule “to replace the one shattered by an assassin’s bullet 24 hours before.” President Johnson, the eighth vice president to be elevated because of the death of a president, has taken over the machinery of government amid pledges of support from leaders of both parties as well as from leaders throughout the civilized world. He holds his first cabinet meeting, with Attorney General Robert Kennedy present* and asks all members to continue to serve under him.† Later in the day, he receives former presidents Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower in the Oval Office. Though the Kennedy family has requested of the public that no flowers be sent, encouraging people to contribute instead to their favorite charity, bouquets of flowers arrive throughout the day and are accepted by the White House guard.

  At midmorning in the East Room of the White House, where the fallen President and First Lady had once presided over their famous, glittering White House affairs and danced gaily with their friends, seventy-five intimates and relatives of the Kennedy family attend a private mass with Mrs. Kennedy and her two children said by the Reverend John J. Cavanaugh, the former president of the University of Notre Dame and a longtime friend of the family. It is believed to be the first Roman Catholic mass ever said in the White House. (Almost concurrently, in New York City, where the day is also bleak and overcast, twenty-five hundred mourners crowd into the twenty-three-hundred-seat Saint Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue for a pontifical requiem mass in which 250 clergymen take part.) After the mass, a procession of government leaders begins to file into and out of the East Room, where the president’s body lies in a flag-draped coffin.

  “The medium of television,” the New York Times observed, “which played such a major part in the career of President Kennedy, is the instrument that is making the tragedy of his death such a deeply personal experience in millions of homes over this long weekend. In hushed living rooms everywhere, the uninterrupted coverage provided by the three national networks and their affiliated stations is holding families indoors to share in history’s grim unfolding, the home screen for the first time fulfilling the heart-rending function of giving a new dimension to grief.”*

  In countries throughout the world there is mourning.† “From Madrid to Manila churches filled and American embassies were thronged with people who wanted to sign memorial books.” American viewers see downcast crowds gathering outside the American embassy in London, where the twelve bells of St. Paul’s Cathedral announce the national memorial service there. More than ten thousand Poles line up eight abreast to sign the book of condolences at the U.S. embassy in Warsaw. In Berlin, Mayor Willy Brand
t asks his people to light candles in their darkened windows. Within minutes, candles are flickering throughout the city. “We all feel somewhat left alone,” Brandt said. Radio Moscow broadcasts a concert of memorial dirges. In Tokyo Bay, Japanese fishing boats, flags at half-mast, drift alongside U.S. warships. Buddhist monks offer prayers in front of black crepe–draped images of President Kennedy. In Paris, French men and women gather solemnly around outdoor radios, their tears hidden by the pouring rain. In Kenya, weeping Kipsigis warriors in ceremonial feathers and body paint listen as their leader extols the virtues of the murdered president. America learns just how many people around the world considered John F. Kennedy their president too.

  World leaders also weigh in. England’s prime minister, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, notes that John Kennedy left “an indelible mark on the entire world. There are times in life when the mind and heart stand still, and one such is now.” Premier Khrushchev appears at the American embassy in Moscow to pay his respects, lamenting the blow the president’s death has dealt Soviet-American relations. Unable to travel to Washington because of illness, Italian president Antonio Segni, attending a mass in Rome, openly sobs. The words of a “profoundly saddened” Pope Paul VI to a crowd of thirty thousand gathered in St. Peter’s Square in Rome are relayed around the world by satellite. The pope expresses his hope that “the death of this great statesman may not damage the cause of the American people, but rather reinforce it.” Nineteen chiefs of state and three reigning monarchs let it be known that they will attend the president’s funeral on Monday, among them France’s General Charles de Gaulle.

  Jack Kennedy’s political opponents are no less sincere in their grief. The man he defeated to win the presidency, Richard Nixon, speaking from his home in New York, tells the viewers, “President Kennedy yesterday wrote the finest and greatest chapter in his Profiles in Courage. The greatest tribute we can pay is to reduce the hatred which drives men to do such deeds.” Senator Goldwater, at a news conference in Muncie, Indiana, also speaks warmly of the president. Even the two implacably segregationist, Democratic governors of Alabama and Mississippi, George Wallace and Ross Barnett, whose fierce political opposition may have damaged Kennedy more than that of the Republican Party, publicly honor his memory.

  An avalanche of mail pours into the networks, as though the viewers feel the necessity to enter into a dialogue with them. Many write poems. At CBS, Walter Cronkite realizes that people are “desperate to express themselves about this thing. And poetry seems a natural form. They seem intent either on finding a way to accept the guilt we are all feeling or laying it on someone or something else, or simply eulogizing the man.”

  NBC’s Chet Huntley and ABC’s Edward P. Morgan are also swept away by the outpouring of grief. “It is probable that when all this is over,” Morgan muses prophetically, “we will find it created a more personal response than any other event in history.”1084

  10:25 a.m.

  As the newsmen in the third-floor corridor grow anxious for Oswald’s anticipated reappearance en route to Homicide and Robbery for further questioning, Deputy Chief Stevenson steps into the hubbub and in a commanding voice instructs them that there will have to be some order when Oswald is brought through the hallway.

  “Gentlemen!” Stevenson shouts above the din. “Whenever this door [pointing to the jail elevator door] is open and they come through here, we don’t want any of you questioning this boy. We don’t want any of you pushing him. We want to cooperate with you. We want to help you every way in the world that we can but we’re going to have to have room to work.”

  “Do you mind if we shout a question at him?” a reporter ignorantly asks.

  “I don’t want you shouting a question at him in no way!” Stevenson barks. “The more you upset him the more difficult it is for us to talk to him.”

  “We want to do whatever you want us to, so if you say no questions—” a reporter says cooperatively.

  “Back up as far as you can against that wall,” Stevenson orders as the reporters try to melt into the wall, but there is no place to move.

  “Let’s make it clear we have all agreed with the chief that we will not ask Oswald any questions,” a reporter yells to fellow journalists.1085

  A moment later, the jail elevator door opens and Oswald is led through the subdued crowd by Detectives Hall, Sims, and Boyd. The reporters follow orders and refrain from bombarding Oswald with questions. He soon disappears behind the closed doors of Captain Fritz’s office.

  10:35 a.m.

  This morning, Oswald faces a formidable array of faces, including FBI agent Jim Bookhout, Dallas Secret Service agent-in-charge Forrest Sorrels, Secret Service inspector Thomas J. Kelley (in from Washington, D.C.), Secret Service agent David B. Grant, and Dallas U.S. marshall Robert I. Nash. Homicide detectives Boyd and Hall remain in the office as security.1086 As usual, it is the soft-spoken, gravely voiced Captain Fritz who takes the lead.

  “Lee, tell me what you did when you left work yesterday?” Fritz begins.

  “I took a bus to my residence,” Oswald says, self-assuredly, “and when I got off I got a transfer and used it to take another bus over to the theater where I was arrested. A policeman took the transfer out of my pocket at that time.”1087

  Fritz nods agreeably, although he knows that officers actually took the transfer out of Oswald’s pocket several hours after his arrest, not at the theater. The fact that Oswald said he took a bus to his residence, not the cab Fritz knows he took, hasn’t escaped the homicide captain.

  “Lee, did you bring curtain rods to work with you yesterday morning?” Fritz asks.

  “No,” Oswald replies.

  “You didn’t bring any curtain rods with you?” Fritz asks again.

  “No, I didn’t,” Oswald shoots back.

  “Well, the fella that drove you to work yesterday morning tells us that you had a package in the backseat,” Fritz tells him. “He says that package was about twenty-eight inches long, and you told him it was curtain rods.”

  “I didn’t have any kind of package,” Oswald says. “I don’t know what he’s talking about. I had my lunch and that’s all I had.”

  “You didn’t have a conversation with Wesley Frazier about curtain rods?” Fritz probes.

  “No.”

  “When you left his car, did you go toward the building carrying a long package?” Fritz inquires.

  “No, I didn’t carry anything but my lunch,” Oswald repeats.1088

  “Didn’t you tell Wesley you were in the process of fixing up your apartment…”

  Oswald doesn’t wait for the rest of the question, “No!”

  “…and that the purpose of your visit to Irving on the night of November 21st was to obtain some curtain rods from Mrs. Paine?”

  “No, I never said that,” Oswald replies.1089

  Oswald’s denials are meaningless to the thirty-year homicide investigator. He has learned long ago that if someone has the immorality to commit a serious crime, he certainly possesses the far lesser immorality to deny having done it. Fritz is sure, in his own mind, that Oswald carried the rifle wrapped in a long package into work Friday morning. Fritz just wants him to admit it.1090 The homicide captain saunters over behind his desk, taking his time with his line of inquiry.

  “Did you ride in a taxicab yesterday?” Fritz finally asks.

  “Well,” Oswald says hesitantly, “yes, I—”

  “I thought you said you rode a bus home?” Fritz snaps back.

  “Well, that’s not exactly true,” Oswald says with a smirk, like a child caught with his hand in the cookie jar. “Actually, I did board a bus at the Book Depository but after a block or two it got stalled in traffic, so I got off and took a cab back to my room. I remember a lady looking in the cab and asking the driver to call her one as I got in.”

  Oswald is good at volunteering details that don’t amount to much.

  “Did you talk to the driver during the ride home?” Fritz asks.

  “Oh, I
might have said something just to pass the time,” Oswald answers.

  “Did he say anything to you?”

  “He told me the president had been shot,” Oswald says.

  “How much was the fare?” Fritz asks.

  “It was about eighty-five cents,” Oswald replies.

  “This the first time you ever rode in a cab?” Fritz asks innocently.

  “Yeah, but that’s only because a bus is always available,” Oswald answers.

  “What’d you do when you got home?” Fritz asks. The question has been put to Oswald before, but Fritz is keenly aware that repetition will frequently trip up liars. They just can’t keep their story straight because they don’t have the truth as their framework of reference. That’s why there’s an expression that liars have to have very good memories—they only have their verbal lie to remember, not the full experience of the truth.

  “I changed my shirt and trousers and went to the movies,” Oswald says.

  Fritz makes a mental note that Oswald has again changed his story. Yesterday, Oswald said he only changed his trousers.

  “What did you do with your dirty clothes?” the homicide captain asks.

  “I put them in the lower drawer of my dresser,” Oswald says matter-of-factly.

  “Lee, would you describe this clothing?”

  “The shirt was a reddish color with a button-down collar and the trousers were gray.”1091

  11:00 a.m.

  Robert Oswald arrives at the Hotel Adolphus and finds that room 906 is a suite. A stranger answers his knock.

  “I’m Robert Oswald. Is my mother here?”

  “In the next room,” the man says. “Just come on through.”

  The suite has been transformed into the local headquarters for Life magazine. A Teletype machine clatters away as Robert makes his way past several reporters and photographers. In the next room he finds his mother, Marina and her children, an interpreter, and FBI agent Bardwell Odum. Not surprising to Robert, Odum is in the middle of an argument with Marguerite. The FBI agent wanted to ask Marina some questions, but the controlling Mrs. Oswald had intervened.