The Day Kennedy Was Shot

by Jim Bishop

  From the sixth-floor window, Bonnie Ray Williams had seen the people collecting on the green below and had known that the excitement would begin soon. He had finished his soda pop and his bony chicken sandwich. The remains were on the windowsill. It was strange, he felt, that the fellows had talked about coming upstairs and watching the parade from the window, but where were they? Billy Lovelady had said he was coming up. And that Spanish boy—what’s his name?—Danny Arce said he was coming up. Bonnie Ray saw a wall of cartons stacked around the easternmost window, so he leaned against them and finished a bag of Fritos while watching and waiting.

  Once, he thought he heard some conversation below. The floors were so worn that cracks of daylight could be seen between the ribs. Mr. Williams crumpled the empty bag and took the elevator down to the fifth floor. If no one was there, he would try the fourth. As he emerged from the elevator on the fifth, he spotted two Negro co-workers, Harold Norman and James Jarman. They had a whole array of windows to themselves, and there was a lot to see.

  If you leaned out far enough, you could see the people directly below, on the Elm Street sidewalk. Billy Lovelady was down there. So were Wesley Frazier and William Shelley, the foreman. Frazier didn’t know where Oswald was, and Wes was too keyed up to ask. Lee wasn’t too friendly driving to and from Irving, so there was no use chasing him to ask if he wanted to see the President. Frazier did, and he kept moving up and down the front steps of the Depository as the time of the motorcade approached.

  Roy Truly left for lunch with his boss, Ochus V. Campbell. They stopped on the sidewalk and decided to watch, hoping that the motorcade wasn’t too far away. They saw the people gathering, as family groups and couples might at a picnic on the green. Some sat on the grass. Others stood with arms folded watching the late traffic move up and down the three streets which funnelled into the underpass: Elm, Main, and Commerce. Still others were involved in the complexity of threading fresh film into balky cameras. On the opposite side of the square, prisoners in the county jail gathered at a window, like caged birds on a perch. In a post office building window, an inspector used his seven-power binoculars and leaned on a fifth-floor windowsill to bring the individuals up close.

  As the Hertz sign on the depository roof clicked to 12:15, the pigeons jumped in flight and circled Dealey Square, a peerless view unencumbered by people.

  Channel Two was busy. Captain Souter called Deputy Chief Stevenson at the Trade Mart: “Advise three that the ambulances have arrived and are standing by.” Chief Curry: “One. Just turning off Turtle Creek.” The conversation was almost incessant and, on the loudspeakers of the cars, it sounded strident and flat as it cut through the surging sound of the people on the sidewalks. Channel One was busy with a report from Detectives J. R. Leavelle and C. W. Brown. They had been looking for a man named Calvin E. Nelson, who was wanted for armed robbery. At 12:15 P.M. Leavelle said that they had arrested “this subject” at 2421 Ellis Street and were bringing him into headquarters for questioning.

  Patrolman Chance came on. He was at Fairmount and Cedar Springs. The parade had passed, but he had a problem: “There is a V-shaped piece of land out here,” he announced, “with no improvements on it. Someone during the parade backed over a water faucet and it is shooting water into the air. Wonder if you can contact the water department and have them come out here and turn it off.” Dispatcher McDaniel came on: “Ten-four,” he announced as a token of compliance.

  “Come on. Come on. Get out of there.” The policemen in front of the Trade Mart had orders to keep the canopied entrance clear. The 2,500 guests had been told to be in the Trade Mart at noon, and some were still coming up the feeder road from Harry Hines Boulevard. Police cars were standing around, parked awkwardly, their speakers still on broadcasting the voice of Chief Curry from the motorcade. Time was running out here and the guest cars had to be hurried to a position behind the Trade Mart at once.

  “Come on. Come on. No, I got no time for questions. Get that car out of here.” Superior officers of the Dallas Police Department watched from the curb and ordered all traffic cleared away when the President reached Dealey Plaza. Deputy Chief Stevenson wanted no problems, and if a few latecomers missed lunch, let them steam. It was no fault of his. Inside, the huge arena buzzed with the indefinable sound of mass conversation. Byron Melcher, the organist, was warming up a special symphony organ, which had been brought in from California, by playing “Hail to the Chief.”

  Special dispensation had been given to the Catholics present to eat steak. The fruit cup and the tossed green salad, along with the sprays of flowers, already adorned all the long tables which stretched across the width of the Trade Mart like stripes. In the kitchen, white-hatted chefs perspired over the green beans amandine and the twenty-five hundred broiled steaks, which flamed and subsided sporadically. The Crotty Brothers firm of Boston, who had catered the affair, supervised the waiters who streamed in one door and out another laden with small plates of rolls and butter. Others were cutting up huge apple pies and spinning them away to make room for more. An array of stainless steel percolators chuffed steam, permeating the kitchen with the odor of hot coffee.

  The city of Dallas had announced that the carrying of placards “peaceably” would be permitted, but the Texas State Police had not heard of it. Without rancor, they picked up three youths by the neck and trousers and carried them and their signs off in squad cars. In the lobby, Dallas police officers checked the last of the guests heading inside, and Secret Service men stood by, watching the checking. Others patrolled the catwalks with walkie-talkies. Captains of waiters pleaded with the guests to please take their places. Overall, there was an elite atmosphere throughout the room. The best of Dallas had been invited and, with only twenty-five hundred tickets to satisfy all, there had been some belated scrambling to buy them. The best of Dallas society, Dallas civic welfare, the leaders of the Dallas County Democratic conservative wing, the rich, the leaders of the arts were all present. Many of them may not have been in sympathy with Kennedy, but none had come to jeer. He was about to be accorded the hospitality of the house. Deputy Chief Stevenson asked a lieutenant to check with the dispatcher on Two and find out where the motorcade was.

  The parade was off Cedar Springs, heading slowly across Harwood toward Main and the center of the city. Deputy Chief Lumpkin, now a third of a mile ahead, radioed back to Curry: “One. Crowd on Main in real good shape. They have them back off the curb.” Curry, driving his Ford slowly, studying the crowds which now spread up walls to pop out windows and off rooftops, picked up the microphone and murmured: “Good shape. We are just about to cross Live Oak. Curry, speaking to the motorcycle escort: drop back. We will have to go at a real slow speed from here on now. One to escort—hold up escort. O.K. Move along. . . . Check and see if we have everything in sight. Check with the rear car.”

  The crowds, with whole sections screaming “Jackeeeee!” began to close in on the limousine. Greer knew what to do. He turned the car toward the left side so that motorcycles could come up on the President’s side and protect him. The Secret Service men dropped off the running board of the follow-up car and trotted beside the President and First Lady. Two helmeted policemen on motorbikes moved up with roaring engines to drive the people back from the President’s side.

  In a moment, they were at the head of Main Street. On the left stood Police Headquarters. Duty officers stood in the windows, waving. Prisoners on the top floor strained to look down. Chief Curry made a right turn and could see Lumpkin’s car far ahead. Greer turned the President’s car behind the Chief. For the first time, the Kennedys could see the real welcome that Dallas was tendering to its Chief of State. Except for a center lane of pavement, the entire gourd of skyscrapers was covered with people. The heads were solid for twelve blocks straight down and up the sides of the buildings. It was as though all the rest had been prelude; now the curtain had been raised and, in a flash, the big uninvited part of Dallas was ready to tender its respects.

  G
overnor Connally saw it and thought: “They’re stacked from the curb to the walls.” Paul Landis, agent on the follow-up car, saw a boy leave the crowd, evade the policemen, and head for the President. He nudged Agent Ready, who dropped off. The boy had a big smile and held his hand before him to be shaken. Ready ran and headed him off. He pushed the boy back into the crowd. A reporter in the press bus made a note that there were “a whale of a lot of people.” Lawrence O’Brien, squeezed between Congressmen in the wrong car, heard the representatives say that the crowd was large, but too reserved. Congressman Walter Rogers leaned out of his car and shouted to the people to “smile and look perky.”

  Malcolm Kilduff, the press secretary, looked up in time to see three letters pasted in three windows. They spelled “BAH.” Kenneth O’Donnell, adding and subtracting an election a year ahead, thought: “They are not unfriendly nor terribly enthusiastic.” Still, he was pleased. The President’s domestic political expert was glad that the congressmen who had been reading in Texas newspapers how unpopular Kennedy was could be along to see the size of the cordial crowd. Greer, driving, thought: “They are very close to us. And very large crowds.” As he favored the left side of the street, the motorcade slowed. Greer always allowed four or five car lengths between himself and the lead automobile so that, if an emergency occurred, he could depress the accelerator and swing to left or right. The maneuver is called “getting the hell out of here.”

  On the press bus, Charles Roberts of Newsweek listened to the conversation of other reporters. He felt that there was a consensus that “John F. Kennedy would be unstoppable in 1964. . . . He has everything working for him, including his wife.” In Curry’s car, Secret Service Agent Winston Lawson listened to the Channel Two chatter and swung his head back and forth over the crowds, looking for an unusual sign, an unusual movement. Forrest V. Sorrels, a fellow agent, looked out the rear window of the sedan and said: “My God, look at the people. They are even hanging out the windows.” He and O’Brien, in separate parts of the motorcade, felt that the welcome had changed character suddenly. It was now bigger than ever, more boisterous, more enthusiastic. A shock wave of sound roared down Main Street like a bowling ball down an alley.

  Lawson, besides looking dead ahead, had to look backward at Greer because the speed of the motorcade was controlled by the President. This requires swift and certain eyes. As the advance man on this trip, Lawson worked well with Chief Jesse Curry and he kept murmuring: “Move the escort up a little, chief. There. Hold them there. Now, back a little. A little more. Right.” When the crowd bulged out toward the center of the street, Lawson requested the chief to use the motorcycles as a wedge.

  The President was at Field Street. He was halfway down Main, in the center of a canyon roaring greetings. In the crowd stood an Army intelligence agent and James Hosty, of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Both were pleased with the big turnout. Hosty, who had worked on the Lee Harvey Oswald case, never gave the sullen young man a thought as the glittering cars swept by. The President had eight more blocks to go, then a right turn on Houston, a left on Elm, and down through the underpass to the luncheon.

  He had won the endorsement of the people in spite of their masters.

  The sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository was dead quiet. Some of the windows were up about a third from the bottom. Black pipes and naked electric bulbs marred the gray ceiling. The beige boxes were stacked like small forts in a child’s game. A remnant of the breeze puffed lightly through the windows. The sills were only four and a half bricks from the floor so that, if a man stood behind those glass frames, he could be seen clearly from his head to his shinbones.

  A man sat there. He was thin-lipped, brown-haired, a flat-bellied man with a permanent pout to his mouth. At the easternmost window, he sat on a small carton, screened completely by a brick wall and two heating pipes near his back. He could look diagonally westward, down the slope of Elm Street from where he sat. He could see all the way down to the underpass and could see the people collecting on the tracks above it. This was a patient man who was compelled to do the thing he planned to do. It is doubtful that he asked himself why. Twice before he had hoped for immortality, aspired to it by plotting against the life of Major General Edwin Walker, an extreme rightist, and again by telling his wife that he would kill the Vice-President of the United States, a Texas liberal.

  Now he had the whole sixth floor to himself. He had erected a small enclosure of book cartons, although there was no one to look over them, no one to challenge him. He was alone with his curtain rods, and he and they were about to make history. Never again would he be regarded as a human cipher; a dollar-an-hour book clerk; a U.S. marine with a dishonorable discharge; a baby whose father had died two months before he saw light; the lonely kid who slept with his mother; the renegade who slashed his wrists in Moscow; the hero who had rescued a Soviet maiden from despotism to earn her contempt in Texas; the non-hero in Russia who hadn’t even been asked to broadcast his hatred of the United States of America; the boy who at sixteen told a friend he would like to kill President Dwight D. Eisenhower; the silent, sullen psychotic.

  The rifle was across his legs. The man and the rifle made a combination. Neither was quite accurate. The Mannlicher-Carcano Italian military rifle fired a 6.5-millimeter jacketed shell. This one, serial number C2766, had been manufactured and tested at an Italian army plant in Terni. It was twenty-three years old; he was twenty-four. On top of it, the man had bolted a four-power scope. The crosshairs were a bit high—not too much—but a little bit. The gun, when fired, had a tendency to bear slightly to the right. The young man knew this; it was like windage. All he had to do at, say, three hundred feet, was to aim a bit to the left of the target. Not much. A little bit. A foot. No more than two.

  Lee Harvey Oswald got up, rifle slung under his right arm, and stood near the window. He did this when he wanted to see behind his position, to look at Houston Street, which crossed between Main and Elm. Below, there was a knot of people around a sergeant’s three-wheel motorcycle. A spectator had fainted. The sergeant had called for an ambulance some time ago. The man was lying near the curb. Bubbles were coming from his lips and a spectator had tried to stick his crooked finger down the man’s throat. An Oneal ambulance came down Main and stopped. The epileptic was rushed to Parkland Memorial Hospital.

  As the ambulance raced down Elm and beneath the triple underpass, some of the spectators at Main and Houston looked up and saw the blinking red light of Chief Lumpkin’s advance car. The motorcade was coming. Policemen began to blow warning whistles. Automobiles were diverted. Traffic was stopped. Citizens were ordered to get back on the curb. The word was passed. A thrill passed through the thin rime of people. Up in the county jail, Willie Mitchell, known to the Dallas deputies as “a colored boy,” pressed his face against the bars in a silent shouldering battle with other prisoners.

  They had read in the papers that the motorcade was going to pass here, and some had asked permission to congregate in the big tank on the north side to watch the parade. Mitchell was serving a sentence for driving while intoxicated. He had big eyes and excellent vision. The dark eyes, with a shading of brown in the whites, roamed Dealey Plaza. These were the free people; free to watch; free to ignore; free to roam or stop or say no to somebody. Willie Mitchell, elbowing and being elbowed, kept his hands on the bars and saw the array of citizens on the grass; the pencil line of pedestrians lining Elm Street; the cops pushing cars back and making them disappear against the will of the drivers. Mitchell missed very little.

  At the head of Dealey Plaza stood an ornate white memorial pavilion. It was low along the curving edges, around a shallow pool and a fountain. Here, on the Elm Street side, Howard L. Brennan sat. He was forty-five, a good family man, a steamfitter by trade, and a cautious human being who was easily frightened. He had finished his lunch in a nearby cafeteria and had some extra time. Mr. Brennan staked out the low white wall and knew that, when the motorcade came by, he could stand
on the wall and look over the people in front.

  He was only a few feet from Elm and Houston. Facing him was the front door of the School Book Depository, one hundred and seven feet north. There, had he known them, stood Wesley Buell Frazier, Danny Arce, Billy Lovelady, and, fifteen feet to the left, near the lone V-shaped oak tree, Mr. Roy Truly and Mr. Ochus Campbell. Farther down, on a slight rise of grassy knoll, stood an elderly manufacturer, Mr. Abraham Zapruder, who was nervously focusing his 8-millimeter zoom lens camera, warning the secretary behind him: “If I back up to you, don’t think I’m being fresh.”

  Brennan knew none of them. His gaze flitted across the faces and back to the School Book Depository several times. He crossed one leg over the other and studied the fire escape on the Depository. It wasn’t much. Then he saw faces at the windows and his eyes conned the floors and the windows, roaming without pattern. On the fifth floor he saw three Negroes leaning out, chatting in the bright sunlight, and laughing. Over them he saw a youngish man at a partly opened window. The man held a rifle.

  Brennan saw nothing unusual in this. “He is just sitting there,” Brennan thought, “waiting to see the same thing I’m going to see, the President.” Brennan studied what he could see of the man. He appeared to be sitting. He might be, thought Brennan, in his early thirties, a slender man of perhaps a hundred sixty-five or one hundred seventy pounds. His clothing was light colored but not a suit. The steamfitter noticed that the man with the rifle was on the floor under the top floor, whatever number that might be. Mr. Brennan was a man for looking and minding his own business.

  Around the plaza were twenty-two persons with cameras. Ten had motion picture cameras. Six found vantage points halfway down Elm Street, near the grassy knoll. Mary Moorman, with her friend, Mrs. Jean Hill, paced up and down the center triangle of grass, swinging a Polaroid camera. They reminded each other that, with an automatic one-minute developing process, they would be able to shoot one photograph, no more. Miss Moorman would aim the camera and shoot it as the President’s automobile went by. Mrs. Hill would yell “Hey!” or something if Mr. and Mrs. Kennedy weren’t looking toward the camera. The two friends had been making photographs ever since the sun came out. But this one would be important.