by Jim Bishop
The importance of the press was never underestimated by the Kennedys. The President, having served his apprenticeship as a reporter, understood professional jargon such as “overnight,” “bulldog,” “lead to come,” and “folo-up.” In a manner of speaking, he was his own press secretary. The post was nominally filled by a stout, jolly man named Pierre Salinger, a onetime investigator for the Senate McClellan Committee, whose counsel was Robert Kennedy. The President dealt with the press through Salinger, and the reporters heard only what Mr. Kennedy wanted them to hear, without exposing himself to charges of “managing” the news.
The attitude of the President was that the press, in a real sense, was akin to a fire: it can warm a man, but it can also burn him. At morning conferences, he and Salinger tried to anticipate the questions—especially “the curves”—which might be asked at Salinger’s daily briefings. The increasing importance of the press to presidential aspirations is seen in the fact that, in the Woodrow Wilson administration, his personal secretary, Joseph Tumulty, dealt with the newspapers when he was so disposed, whereas in the Kennedy administration, Mr. Salinger, assisted by Malcolm Kilduff and Andrew Hatcher, occupied a suite of White House offices full of researchers and stenographers.
It is possible that the Kennedys (Mrs. Kennedy feared press coverage and especially unflattering photographs of herself) attributed more importance to the press than it deserved. Mr. Kennedy began his Administration by trying to seal the sources of news and information. He demanded that ministers of Cabinet rank and less, even servants in the White House, agree not to take notes and write tracts, magazine articles, or books about their experiences. He also asked bureau and department heads not to write articles of major importance or make speeches without first submitting the copy to the White House for endorsement.
On the surface, Mr. Kennedy handled the press with urbane wit and a first-name camaraderie. As a minority President, one who had won election by the narrowest of margins, he was aware that he needed the goodwill of these questing men and women who, by the nature of their daily work, had to fear being used by a charming man and his attractive wife. The breakfast speech on this particular morning was of no moment if addressed solely to the 2,000 members of the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce and their guests. It must be directed more to the press, which could funnel the words and their import to 180 million Americans outside the area.
Under the surface, the President was chagrined to find that the goodwill of the press had to be solicited anew every day. No warm handshake, no inscribed photograph, no off-the-cuff confidence could keep the press loyal to Kennedy. Their words flogged his hide after the Cuba Bay of Pigs disaster. Their attitude after the Vienna Summit Conference was that the Russians had tweaked the young man’s nose. The current trip to Texas was assessed as a two-day whirlwind to sweep up the 25 electoral votes of Texas for the Democratic Party. To Mr. Kennedy, the smiling faces he saw everywhere represented 9.25 percent of the 270 electoral votes required for reelection.
The intraparty fight between Senator Ralph Yarborough and Governor John Connally assumed no great importance in John Kennedy’s mind until he read the Texas press. He had been misinformed about the depth of the schism and, when he left the White House yesterday, the President had been certain that a presidential knocking of heads together would settle the dispute and align all Democrats behind him. He was pained to find that Governor Connally had arrogated to himself all arrangements for the trip, and invitations, too. The conservative side of the party, which would never support the President with enthusiasm, got all the choice seats, while Yarborough’s liberal followers, who would and did endorse Kennedy, were cast in the role of pariahs and outcasts.
Kennedy became increasingly irritated. This morning he had read in the Dallas papers that, far from healing the Connally-Yarborough breach, he was widening it. Governor Connally, who had postponed this visit several times because, even though Kennedy had heeded the intercession of Vice-President Lyndon Johnson and appointed Connally, who was Johnson’s onetime assistant, as Secretary of the Navy, the Texas Governor was never a “Kennedy man.” As host, he was in the position of a man who could manipulate the luncheons, dinners, and cocktail parties in such a manner that his following sat in the places of honor while Yarborough’s liberal wing was either ignored or confined to the back of the hall.
Kennedy found it impossible to bring the Governor and the Senator together for a smile and a handshake, so he settled for asking that Yarborough ride with Vice-President Johnson. In this instance, Johnson was tractable, but Yarborough declined. The President, increasingly incensed at what might become a Connally trap, stopped requesting that the Senator ride with the Vice-President and demanded it. Yarborough rode with the Vice-President and Mrs. Johnson on the final short midnight leg of the trip from Carswell Air Force Base to the Hotel Texas. Few people were in the streets to witness the demonstration of party unity.
This morning, the Washington press corps, which had featured the President’s unexpected welcome from Texas, began to read the Fort Worth Telegram and the Dallas Herald. The sophisticated wire services had been aware of the party fight, but had not pinned their leads on it because, like Kennedy, the press assumed that Kennedy’s personal charm would bring the contentious ones together. They were changing their minds.
That is why the President, through Kenny O’Donnell, ordered Yarborough to ride with Johnson “or walk.” In effect, he was working the easy side of the street. The proper move would have been to thrash the matter out alone with Connally and Yarborough, but Kennedy was too insecure a party leader to risk a state ultimatum. The Governor, as O’Donnell and O’Brien should have known, was not even sympathetic to the President. Connally, facing reelection in the next year, felt no desire to be seen with the President or to be his host. Connally was a handsome man with a long splash of white backing away from the temples, but he had a stubborn jaw and a thin lip. He and Nellie had come a long way, and he had no relish for sitting in the jump seat of anybody’s car.
In Texas, the Governor was accustomed to the comfort of the big seat. He knew his people and he felt that his star was ascending, while that of Kennedy had dissipated its light in a shower of sparks. A national political poll had dropped the President to his lowest point of popularity less than a month ago, and Congress had felt no mandate from the electorate to push the Kennedy reforms. In a test of loyalty, the Governor felt much closer to Vice-President Johnson than to the President. He was also aware that Johnson and Yarborough had fought each other “bare knuckle” for federal patronage in Texas; it was also true that Yarborough had fought the Texas leadership of Lyndon Johnson, even though the Vice-President had a majority of the party faithful in his corner.
At times, it seemed that the President didn’t understand Texas at all. “Lyndon thinks we’ll carry Texas next year,” he had said to the Governor, “but he says it will be hard. Texas is Democratic country; we shouldn’t have a hard race in Texas.” It seemed pointless to explain the situation again. Instead, the Governor hoped that Mrs. Kennedy would be with her husband in Texas. At the White House, Mr. Kennedy had glanced up sharply from his reverie and said: “I agree with you. I would hope that she would come.”
Obviously he was in no position to pledge the presence of his wife. He would consult her about it. But it was Johnson who remained in the most awkward position. He had vowed, when he was nominated, to subscribe with enthusiasm to everything his President proposed, and he had been caught, time and again, doing things and saying things which were opposed to his best political judgment. To keep peace in the family, Johnson had to agree to share an automobile with Ralph Yarborough, even though every student of Texas politics would know that Mr. Johnson, a master assessor of the practical, would not share any part of the state with him. The two men in one car might be worth a photograph, but it would be like tossing two cocks in a pit.
On the thirteenth floor of the Hotel Texas, Rufe Youngblood, the Vice-President’s bodyguard, ask
ed: “Anything new from PRS?” There was nothing new from the Protective Research Section of the Secret Service. On the eighth floor, Clint Hill asked the man in front of 850 if Mrs. Kennedy was going across the street with the President. The answer to that was no, so Hill got a cup of coffee and a biscuit and leaned against a corridor wall.
Mrs. Johnson had finished dressing and felt a sudden uneasiness. Her hand was shaking. She had a poetic passion for her native state, but Dallas was the only city which had ever frightened her. Once, just once, an unruly mob of people had chased her and her husband across a street and into the lobby of the Hotel Adolphus, and the lady had never quite forgotten it. No real harm had come to them, but Mrs. Johnson knew that “Big D” took its politics seriously, and the extremely conservative side of it was not timid about demonstrating. She wasn’t worried about her husband this time; it was the President. She wished that it was all over and they were at the ranch. She kept thinking: “There might be something ugly today.”
On the eighth floor, Mrs. Kennedy had finished breakfast earlier than she had planned. This would give her more time to dress. She might have been happier (Mrs. Connally, too) if the President had decided to put the bubbletop on the car. Men didn’t seem to realize what an open car could do to a coiffure, even a slow-moving automobile. The decision had been made, and Mrs. Kennedy had laid out a street outfit the night before. It consisted of a strawberry pink suit with a burl weave and a grape-purple collar. She would comb her shoulder-length dark hair down straight and part it in front toward the left side of her head. She had a matching pillbox hat to be worn well off the forehead. She would wear a small gold bracelet on the left wrist and white gloves. It was a good cool-weather open-car ensemble. In addition, Mrs. Kennedy dropped a pair of sunglasses into her purse.
The nine-year-old Chevrolet came off the freeway. Wes Frazier wished he could think of something to say, but he couldn’t. The big trucks had tossed mud and mist at his windshield, and the old wipers smeared the mess so that Frazier had to stare around the arc of the wipe to see. Now he turned them off and said: “I wish it would rain or clear off altogether,” but Lee kept his pouty mouth closed.
The car was driven around behind the Texas School Book Depository. The area was flat and open, full of railroad tracks and sidings. Wes pulled the car into a space and put the clutch in neutral. Then he revved the engine to restore a little strength to the battery. Oswald said nothing. He opened the door and got out, reached in back for his curtain rods, and left. The back of the Depository building was two hundred yards ahead.
Frazier was saying something, but Oswald could not hear him over the roar of the old motor. He kept walking toward the loading platform. Wes shut the engine off and followed, calling to Lee, but he didn’t pause. On top of the building was a big flashing Hertz Rent-a-Car sign. The clock on it proclaimed the time to be 7:56 A.M. Under the sign, a cote of gray pigeons nested, waiting for the rain to stop, so that they could swoop along the railroad tracks, looking for spilled grain.
Lee Harvey Oswald didn’t say “thank you” for the free ride. This was not unusual. But Wesley Frazier kept asking himself why, for the first time, Lee was walking ahead of him? They always walked the last few yards together, watching the diesels yanking and shoving strings of cars back and forth. This time, Lee Harvey Oswald reached the loading platform fifty feet ahead of Wes, and didn’t hold the door for him.
8 a.m.
The second platoon lined up. The policemen stood under their metal helmets at attention. Lieutenant William R. Fulghum studied the faces until the three sergeants had the men dressed in two rows. This was the Southwest Substation of Dallas; the men patrolled the residential areas of Trinity Heights, South Oak Cliff, Fruitdale, and Oak Cliff. This was a fragment of a police department, one of the outlying fragments which would not be devoted to the big assignment of the day.
Some of them had already listened to the dispatcher calling the brass at headquarters, at Love Field, the Trade Mart, Stemmons Freeway, on the motorcade route. Others had heard the solemn warning of the chief. These men were glad to be out of it. They did not know that the presence of a President for 180 minutes would require a cancellation of days off, a repetitious dry run of the motorcade route, a host of conferences with Secret Service men—a sapping of the city’s law enforcement for the safety of one man.
Sergeant Hugh F. Davis called the roll and the patrolmen hollered “here” to such names as Truman Boyd, Rufus High, J. D. Tippit, and Roy Walker. Dallas had a humorless department. It was composed largely of young “skinheads” with a passion for promotion. The word had been out for years that the men who controlled Dallas demanded a clean city, and these young men, zealous and with little formal education, kept it clean.
They also kept the old jail on top of city hall well populated. Some of the trustees had to peel potatoes all afternoon just to keep the sullen Negroes and loudmouthed whites fed. Every day, batches of new prisoners were being brought in, mugged, fingerprinted, and led upstairs to the dismal rows of cells. Naked bulbs stared down at gray concrete.
Dallas policemen had a deceptive politeness reserved for lawbreakers. They said “yes sir” and “no sir” while writing out a traffic violation, and, if this encouraged a motorist to use bitter and abusive words, he was quickly carried off in a squad car to the prison on an additional charge: resisting arrest. When violence occurred, the Dallas policeman was never afraid to draw his revolver and seldom hesitated to use it. His manner of dealing with known hoodlums who could not be trapped into breaking the law was to make certain that he “fell,” thus converting an ambulatory person into an ambulance case.
Lieutenant Fulghum recited the patrol areas with Boyd, Tippit, and Walker, and reminded all hands that they were to tune in to police Channel Two, because One was being reserved for Curry and the motorcade. They were to be especially vigilant, because all suburban squads were short of men today, and, if trouble developed, they would be moved from area to area, and Fulghum wanted an immediate response.
At police headquarters, Captain Perdue W. Lawrence had his huge detail of police motorcyclists ready, and he again read the orders of the day. This group was to report to Love Field and patrol it to keep people away from the President and his party. No strange planes would be permitted near Gate 24, even if given permission by Love Field tower. The entrances and exits to the field were to be sealed; additional men would patrol the passenger terminal.
When Mr. Kennedy was ready to leave the field for Dallas, the time would probably be 11:45 A.M. A line of motorcycle policemen would follow the first car, which would be a quarter of a mile ahead, and it would be followed by Chief Curry and a Secret Service man in the headquarters car. Four men on two-wheel motorcycles would flank the President’s car, slightly behind him on both sides.
In the event that the crowd broke the police lines at any intersection, the Secret Service would hop off their follow-up vehicle and fend the people off. If they needed help, they would motion the four motorcycles forward. Otherwise, they were to remain slightly behind the President. Captain Lawrence was still reading the order when a thought occurred to him. His men, on three-wheel motorcycles, would close out the back of the parade, but there were too many of them.
Also what should they do in case someone tried to cut in behind the parade and move up past the three-wheelers? The captain got on Channel One and asked Assistant Chief Charles Batchelor, already at the airport, what to do. No, Batchelor said, no regular Dallas traffic should be permitted to overtake the motorcade from behind. Lawrence asked if he had permission to send some of his extra men up on Stemmons Freeway. He wouldn’t need them in the motorcade, and it seemed to him that, when the presidential cars left Dealey Plaza, they would get up on Stemmons for a high-speed ride to the Trade Mart.
Part of the freeway had rises in the roadway and the President’s men might go over one and find a citizen dead ahead at low speed. This would constitute a danger. Batchelor agreed, and Captain Lawrence said t
hat he would send some of his men directly from the airport to Stemmons, and that they would be staggered along the freeway so that they could signal each other to get local traffic out of the way as Kennedy negotiated the last part of the Dallas run.
Lawrence made the changes, but to protect himself he put asterisks on the squad chart, showing where the men had been diverted and why. Someone said it was still raining out, and the captain gave the men permission to wear raincoats. “If the weather clears,” he said, “take those raincoats off and stuff them in the motorcycle bags.”
The department refused permits to all groups which might want to protest anything or anyone on this day. Their spokesmen were asked to return to headquarters on Monday, and permission would be granted. The worst thing that could happen, the superior officers knew, was for some bystander to throw a rotten tomato or an egg at the motorcade. Or someone in a lofty office building might drop an object on the parade. This, Curry knew, would be featured on every front page in America, and on every television news channel. Dallas was jealous of its image as a rich, reactionary city, and it was not going to be baited into cheapening that image by permitting some emotionally unstable adherent to bring the city into national contempt.
The possibility of an assassination attempt had been studied, but this was thought to be a remote possibility. The Secret Service had scanned the police lists of agitators, professional protestors, the insane-at-large, the known communists, and the poison pen writers. Curry’s police worked in concert with the Secret Service in running down every lead. The city was as secure as it could be made. Even those violent ones who had left Dallas were checked at their distant residences to make certain that they would not be in the city on Friday.
