The Day Kennedy Was Shot

by Jim Bishop

  “What we are trying to do in this country and what we are trying to do around the world, I believe, is quite simple, and this is to build a military structure which will defend the vital interests of the United States.” The President’s right hand was pointing outward now, then back up, and out again as punctuation for an informal talk. No matter what he said, or what the President left unsaid, the crowd permitted the veils of mist to shine its collective face and it endorsed every pause with open throats and enthusiasm for the man.

  “And in that great cause, Fort Worth, as it did in World War II, as it did in developing the best bomber system in the world, the B-58, and as it will now do in developing the best fighter system in the world, the TFX, Fort Worth will play its proper part. And that is why we have placed so much emphasis in the last three years in building a defense system second to none—until now the United States is stronger than it has ever been in its history.” He was not telling them anything they did not know; they would have preferred to hear him tell what he was going to do to Senator John Tower and the Texas Republicans next year, but Mr. Kennedy was on a defense topic and found it difficult to separate the bait of federal payrolls and the fish of local workers.

  “And secondly,” the President said, “we believe that the new environment, space, the new sea, is also an area where the United States should be second to none.” This was a thought borrowed from his dedication of the Houston Space Center yesterday, but the crowd whistled approval.

  “And this state of Texas and the United States is now engaged in the most concentrated effort in history to provide leadership in this area and it must here on earth. And this is our second great effort. And in December—next month—the United States will fire the largest booster in the history of the world, putting us ahead of the Soviet Union in that area for the first time in our history.”

  Again he was borrowing from the Houston speech. Mr. Kennedy had fallen into a witty slip of the tongue at the Space Center by calling the booster the “largest payroll in history” instead of the “largest payload.” Mist was now shining on his forehead; the Governor and the Vice-President faced the crowd with neutral expressions. Reporters made notes, even though they knew that the speech at the breakfast and the one at the Trade Mart in Dallas were the ones with built-in impact.

  “And thirdly, for the United States to fulfill its obligations around the world requires that the United States move forward economically, that the people of this country participate in rising prosperity. And it is a fact in 1962, and the first six months of 1963, the economy of the United States grew not only faster than nearly every Western country, which had not been true in the fifties, but also grew faster than the Soviet Union itself. That is the kind of strength the United States needs, economically; in space, militarily.”

  “And in the final analysis, that strength depends upon the willingness of the citizens of the United States to assume the burdens of leadership.” He was finished. He had to find a thought to get him off the stand. “I know one place where they are, here in this rain, in Fort Worth, in Texas, in the United States. We are going forward. Thank you.”

  There was a thunder of applause, shouts, and rebel yells. The President and Vice-President hopped down from the truck, and stood before the American flag and the Seal of the President, pumping hands, trading smiles, studying the awestricken faces which would never forget this moment. The Secret Service began to break through the crowd, back toward the hotel.

  Mr. Kennedy stopped a moment to reach up and shake hands with the ponchoed troopers who sat on their horses and kept the lane open for him. Along the corridor on the eighth floor, the word was passed: “He’s on his way back to the hotel.” The police on the rooftops slid their shotguns under their arms and watched him disappear under the big metal canopy which said: “Welcome to Texas.”

  The man with the dark wavy hair initialed a paper and placed it in the outgoing box. A cigarette, dying on a tray, was touched to a fresh one and puffed. Gordon Shanklin depressed a button. “Let them come in,” he said. Behind his head was a color photograph of J. Edgar Hoover, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Mr. Shanklin, head of the Dallas office of the FBI, was a well-dressed, low-key man. He administered the field office, in the old Santa Fe Building, in the manner of a confident banker who would rather listen to the depositors than talk.

  He was ready to start the biweekly meeting with his agents. They came in and said good morning. Some stood and some occupied chairs against the wall opposite Mr. Shanklin’s desk. He had their reports before him and he went over them, asking a few questions, making suggestions. This morning he wanted to bring up the matter of the President’s visit to Dallas once more. The protection of the President and Vice-President and their families was the province of the United States Secret Service, but there was always a chance that one of his men might have a lead on something, and he had reminded them, at earlier meetings, to mention any they might have in mind, so that such tips could go out at once to Washington and the PRS, and also to Roy Kellerman, who was the Secret Service agent in charge in Dallas today.

  They had nothing. “If there is any indication of any possibility of acts of violence,” Mr. Shanklin murmured through his own smoke, “against the President or the Vice-President. . .” He glanced along a row of forty faces. “If you have anything,” he said, “anything at all, I want it confirmed in writing.” Agent James P. Hosty was in the group. He had nothing to offer. Neither did anyone else. Hosty was rated as a solid, non-panic agent, a man who, in the absence of any big cases, kept checking a number of small ones and who often sat in the outer office in the late hours laboriously pecking at a typewriter to keep his reports up to date.

  The FBI men listened to Mr. Shanklin’s admonitions. He ran down a list of pending files. Each man involved gave an oral report on the status of the case to support the written work on Shanklin’s desk. Most of them would not see President Kennedy today. Their work was in other areas and, unless they could arrange to have lunch somewhere in the neighborhood, they wouldn’t get to see the reception on television either.

  Hosty, for example, had learned by accident last night that there was going to be a motorcade. He was home reading a newspaper. He scanned the story of Big D’s welcome to Mr. Kennedy, and noticed that there was a map diagram of the parade route, but he didn’t study it. Hosty’s path crossed that of the President only indirectly. Yesterday he had seen some street pamphlets with front and side-view pictures of President Kennedy and the words: “Wanted for Treason.”

  The matter may have been of small moment, but Hosty had carried them over to the Secret Service office and had given them to Agent Warner. A man in James Hosty’s squad had some information about someone in Denton, Texas, who had made threatening remarks about the President. This, too, was given to the Secret Service. Last night, there had been a tip about a demonstration against Kennedy at the Trade Mart—picketing, perhaps—and this, for whatever it was worth, was passed from FBI to SS.

  The only thing that Hosty recalled about the parade route was that it would come down Main Street about noon, and he thought that, when the Friday morning meeting closed in Mr. Shanklin’s office, he might get a window table and have lunch at a restaurant along Main. He had no reason to think of any of his small “follow-up” cases in relation to the safety of the President.

  One of them was Lee Harvey Oswald. Mr. Hosty’s most recent report on this matter had been filed with the Washington office four days ago. It said that Oswald had been in communication with the Soviet Embassy in Washington. Oswald was a chronic chore to Mr. Hosty. He had been on it a year. The Federal Bureau of Investigation had interviewed Lee Harvey Oswald when he returned from Russia with Marina and baby June.

  Oswald felt he had nothing to hide. He had served his country as a United States marine in foreign service, and his country had rewarded him with a dishonorable discharge. The Soviet Union turned out to be a disappointment because there was no freedom for the
workers. He had been employed in a parts factory in Minsk; the trade union meetings had turned out to be dull and doctrinaire. At one time he couldn’t even get permission to leave Moscow. At another, he couldn’t leave Minsk to join his wife at a vacation resort.

  The exploitation of the workers, Oswald said, was even worse in the United States, but here he could go where he pleased, and he did not have to answer Mr. Hosty’s questions. If Hosty intended to inform Oswald’s boss of his defection to Russia, then he would be harassed out of work. All Lee expected was to be left to work in peace and support his family. Yes, he was a communist, but he didn’t expect an FBI agent to understand the word. He was a Marxist in the purest sense; not a socialist-despot like Stalin and Khrushchev; a true communist.

  Mr. Hosty checked the Oswald case regularly. Oswald was never home. Hosty spoke to Marina Oswald, who resented him, through Mrs. Ruth Paine, who interpreted. To the agent, Mr. Oswald was a chronic complainer who lost jobs regularly. He had no friends. He had no admiration for the Russian expatriates who tried to befriend him and his wife. They detested communism.

  There was a small communist cell in the Dallas area, and the FBI had an undercover agent in it, but none of them knew Lee Harvey Oswald and the young malcontent had no desire to join. He felt superior to them and, in the time Hosty kept him under surveillance, Oswald vacillated between wanting to stay in the United States; sending Marina back to Russia with the baby; getting a Soviet visa for himself so that he could get to Cuba and the communist bloc countries. From day to day, he seemed to change his course abruptly, so that even his wife could not understand him.

  Hosty was aware that the newest job Oswald had was in the Texas School Book Depository. He worked filling book orders, but there was nothing sinister in this. Another thing: Oswald was not a violent person; he was never seen with firearms; never walked a picket line; never wrote hate letters to newspapers; he never even went to a motion picture.

  If Hosty had followed the newspaper diagram of the parade route and noticed that it would pass the Texas School Book Depository, it would have been witless to draw the attention of his superiors to the presence of the defector, because he represented no physical danger to anyone. Hosty made the trips out to the little house in Irving as a matter of duty, but he never met his man. The investigation disclosed Oswald as a sullen braggart—nothing more.

  At Love Field, the captain of American Airlines Flight 82 asked for taxi clearance. In a few moments, he would be headed for Idlewild Airport in New York. One of the passengers, a stewardess had told him, was Richard Nixon. Apparently the former Vice-President was not going to remain in Dallas to watch the presidential parade.

  9 a.m.

  The chefs stood motionless beneath the gleaming ranks of hanging pots and kettles as the Secret Service men burst into the kitchen. One man ran ahead and placed a chair in the doorway leading from the cooking ranges to the Grand Ballroom. The President strode through the kitchen, walking fairly fast between the counters where, in the past hour, over two thousand breakfasts had been cooked and carried on huge trays. He wasn’t smiling. He patted his forehead and thick hair with a handkerchief and glanced back at the entourage of political chieftains.

  It nettled him to know that he could not settle intraparty disputes by fiat. Over the years, Kennedy’s personal loyalty to party, and especially to party hierarchy, had been constant, and it seemed to him that when the President of the United States said, “Do this,” that all hands should do it, not merely as a matter of unity, but in obedience to the wishes of the Chief.

  The President sat in the chair and commanded a view of the double-tiered head table, with the big “Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce” banner hanging behind it. He got to his feet, looked through the assortment of faces waiting in the kitchen and summoned Agent Duncan. “Where is Mrs. Kennedy?” he said. “Call Clint Hill and tell him I want her to come down to breakfast.” He would have preferred to escort her to the head table, but, like many husbands, he had little understanding of the natural feminine contempt for time.

  Loudly he said: “Everybody set?” and again sat. The men and their wives began to move toward the doorway, skirting the chair and listening to the rising sound of applause from the Grand Ballroom. The President chatted again with Ralph Yarborough; no one heard the words, but the face of Mr. Kennedy was stern and frowning, and the index finger pointed and probed whatever point was being made. The Senator didn’t appear to resist the President; his features appeared to be in shock, as though he could not credit the words or ideas he was hearing. Ralph Yarborough went on into the ballroom, a man unconvinced that his political quarrel with the Connally-Johnson forces had any bearing on the President’s future.

  A moment later, as the Governor passed, the President said: “John, did you know that Yarborough refused to ride with Lyndon yesterday?” The Governor knew. The President didn’t seem to understand, or perhaps appreciate, that Governor John Connally was a prime mover in this battle and that he had an interest in war rather than peace. In every case he had thwarted the Yarborough group, even to the point of denying them seats of honor in the presidential party.

  The rich, the affluent, the oil money of Texas backed Connally and it was important for the Governor to display his antagonism to Yarborough and, in a more subtle manner, his lack of enthusiasm for Kennedy himself. It was the Governor who had postponed this visit to Texas several times; it was Connally who felt that a Kennedy-Johnson ticket might be defeated in his state in 1964, and there was considerable risk in being seen with Kennedy.

  Yes, the Governor knew that the Senator had refused to ride with the Vice-President. “What’s the matter with that fellow?” Kennedy said, as though the political schism was obviously the fault of Yarborough. The Governor said he didn’t know. “Well,” the President said, “I’ll tell you one thing: he’ll ride with Johnson today or he’ll walk.”

  The Governor moved into the big ballroom with Nellie; a burst of applause greeted the handsome couple. For a minute, the President would sit alone, except for the agents who stood near him, before making his entrance. The chefs still remained immobile behind the chopping blocks, the counters, the gleaming steel sinks. In that minute, the President’s mind, like a waterbug on a big summery lake, could dart in many directions. His speech was already under the yellow light at the lectern. He could hear Ray Buck’s booming voice and the crest of laughter, but he couldn’t decipher what was being said.

  In the seat of power there is sometimes a lofty loneliness, and this was one of those minutes. Like primordial man, he desired most of all to leave a good deep scar on the wall of the cave, to be remembered as a leader with high purpose and firm resolution. He was at his best when he was politically, economically, and inspirationally far ahead of his people, beckoning over his youthful shoulder for everyone to follow him. His heels were fleet, but the veterans of Congress studied this man through other prisms and often viewed him as an opportunistic son of a rich and merciless man. Beckoning to the people, Kennedy learned, is good publicity, but not good politics. His party had a clear majority in the legislative halls, but the President could not command it.

  Sometimes he revealed himself in flashes, as when a friend asked him why he wanted to be President. “Because it’s the seat of power,” he had said. “I don’t know anybody around can wield it better than I. Do you?” In the White House swimming pool, Kennedy had floated on his back and said he wouldn’t want the job more than eight years. “Look at it. Laos may go to hell again next week. There’s this nuclear testing thing. Berlin, Vietnam—all that. Yeah, I know that’s what makes it exciting, that’s what makes it challenging. But eight years seems enough.”

  After the first year in office, he had said: “This job is interesting but the possibilities for trouble are unlimited. It’s been a tough first year. But then they’re all going to be tough.” He was the scion of Irish forebears who placed a premium on adversity. None of them desired an easy victory; none would admit to one. M
en fought, won or were beaten, but they never wept. Mercy, forgiveness, compassion—these were the pious pity of the effete. “I run for the presidency of the United States,” he had shouted in the Boston Garden, “because it is the center of action. . . .”

  On his wedding night, he dismayed his bride by locking the door to their suite at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel and sitting at a desk to note his speaking engagements for the following two months. Emotions, like ablutions, are best concealed. The family had a horrifying history of sudden death and disaster, but the Kennedys learned to steel themselves against whimpering. Always they were grim pallbearers turning in unison to face the Roman Catholic Church.

  The President stood, compressed the knot in his tie with his fingers, and strode into the ballroom to a standing ovation. Grinning, the arms waved for the people to sit, to return to their breakfast. In the back of the huge room, a small red light began to glow on a television camera. Overhead, wagon wheels festooned with small lights served as pioneer chandeliers.

  The gray head of Monsignor Vincent Wolf of Holy Family Church was too full of excitement to do justice to the food. He turned toward the back of the head table and motioned to Peter Saccu, the catering manager. Mr. Saccu took an envelope from the priest and carried it to the President. The note read: “We, the school children, the nuns and priests of Holy Family Church in Fort Worth are happy to offer one thousand Masses for the spiritual and temporal welfare of you and your family, and to show our love and devotion to the President of the United States of America. . . .”

  Mr. Kennedy looked down the length of the table, caught the eye of the monsignor, and nodded his thanks. The message went into his jacket. To the Roman Catholic endowed with full unquestioning faith—and the Kennedys are such—there is both solace and protection against the unknown in the holy sacrifice of the Mass. It is the most direct appeal to God, and Masses which are said by innocent children are, to some Catholics, the most inspiring of all.