The Day Kennedy Was Shot

by Jim Bishop

  Officials at the Pentagon were calling the White House switchboard at the Dallas-Sheraton Hotel asking who was now in command. An officer grabbed the phone and assured the Pentagon that Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and the Joint Chiefs of Staff “are now the President.” Somehow, in the flight from the hospital, the new President had overlooked The Bagman and Major General Chester V. Clifton, who understood the coded types of retaliation. If, at this time, the Soviet Union had launched a missile attack, referred to in the Department of Defense as a “Thirty-Minute War,” it would have required a half hour for The Bagman and General Clifton to get to Johnson’s side.

  Jefferson Boulevard between Zangs and Bishop is a Friday night shopping area. The street is broad, and cars on both sides park in parallel rows. It is one of the brightest, busiest parts of Oak Cliff at night, but this was Friday at 1:30 P.M. The only parked cars were owned by store clerks. A couple of women chatted and studied the windows. A bus on its way out to Cockrell Hill took its time. One or two shop managers, with no customers inside, stood along the curb in shirtsleeves, absorbing warm sun.

  At 1:15 P.M. the box office of the Texas Theatre had opened. Julia Postal, the long-time cashier, had a little radio on and she looked through the slotted window at fourteen customers lined up for the first show. The marquee, jutting out over the sidewalk, proclaimed:

  CRY OF BATTLE

  VAN HEFLIN

  WAR IS HELL

  She took ninety cents apiece from each of them. Mrs. Postal was not discouraged. There would be plenty of customers before the day was over. The Texas Theatre had a one-price policy: ninety cents no matter what time the customer arrived. The war pictures always attracted the men. The manager, Mr. John A. Callahan, was inside. He was excited about the shooting of the President. He was talking to Butch Burroughs, who handled the hot buttered popcorn and the candy inside the lobby. It was a small movie house, part of a chain, but Callahan and Mrs. Postal and Burroughs kept it clean.

  On the same side of the street, Johnny Calvin Brewer managed Hardy’s Shoe Shop. Mr. Brewer was only twenty-three years old, but he was ambitious and industrious. He had been entrusted with his own shop for fourteen months, and the big bosses did not regret it. At the moment, there wasn’t a customer in the store, and Johnny Brewer, neatly dressed in a nice suit and tie, listened to a radio telling the awful events going on in downtown Dallas. A moment ago another flash had come on: some policeman—no name was given—had been shot at Tenth and Patton, right here in Oak Cliff.

  The youthful manager wondered what the heck the world was coming to. He was listening and facing the open front door when he heard the shrill scream of a siren. It was approaching the store seemingly at top speed. Mr. Brewer was waiting to see which way it was going when a young man in a flappy shirt turned in toward the store. The windows were recessed from the sidewalk in a “V.” The stranger appeared to be studying the shoes in one of the windows. The police car whizzed by and the stranger walked out on the sidewalk and continued on his way.

  The manager thought that the man seemed suspicious. He couldn’t say why, and perhaps if a customer had been in the store he might have paid no attention to the matter. But the store was empty, and the radio was full of flashes of terrible deeds, one of them only eight blocks away. Johnny Brewer stepped out on the sidewalk and shaded his eyes.

  He looked toward the Texas Theatre and saw Julia Postal—now free of customers—out at the curb. Mr. Callahan was hopping into his car and she was talking to him. The stranger with the dirty-looking sports shirt and the slacks turned into the Texas Theatre, without buying a ticket, and disappeared. Callahan was telling Julia Postal that he was going to follow that police car to find out what the excitement was.

  Johnny Brewer approached the cashier as she returned to her post, and he asked her if she had sold a ticket to a man “wearing a brown shirt.” She said she couldn’t remember one. Mr. Brewer, who is not easily dissuaded, said that a man had ducked into the movie while she had been out talking at the curb. The shoe store manager insisted that this was a most suspicious person because, as the police car approached his shop with the siren at its loudest, the man had pretended to look at shoes and then had walked on to the Texas Theatre and was now inside without purchasing a ticket.

  She hadn’t sold a ticket in the past ten minutes. The movie was just starting, so Brewer walked inside and asked Butch Burroughs if he had seen a man in a brown shirt passing through. No, the candy butcher said, he had been busy and he wanted to know why. “I think the guy looks suspicious, that’s why.”

  It seemed like a lot of trouble for one ninety-cent gate crasher, but Brewer was going to follow his lead all the way. He reminded himself that the cashier’s booth is flush with all the storefronts on the street and, if the man had stopped to buy a ticket, he would have been in plain view from the shoe store. Besides, Julia Postal wasn’t in the booth. And another “besides”—why didn’t the man look up to watch that shrieking police car go by? Who looks at shoes at a time like that? Brewer thought the stranger looked “messed up and scared.”

  The cashier was excitable, but she thought that Butch Burroughs was more excitable, and she warned Johnny Brewer not to look for the stranger but to check the exits to make certain that he was still in the theater. The exits were properly locked from the inside. Julia Postal could not contain herself any longer, so she dialed the operator and asked for the police.

  They were busy with two homicides. Mrs. Postal told the officer that she thought “we have your man.” He said, “Why do you think it’s our man?” and the woman gave him a description of a floppy sports shirt and a young man of medium build. “All I know,” she said, “is this man is running from them for some reason.” The policeman asked why, and she said, “Every time the sirens go by he ducks.” The policeman asked casually what kind of a complexion the man had, and Julia Postal said she had not really seen him but it was “ruddy.” She heard “Thank you” and a dial tone.

  Mrs. Postal then phoned up to the projectionist. He didn’t understand the request, but the cashier asked him to look through his little peephole to see “if he could see anything.” She said she had called the police. “Do you want me to stop the picture?” he said. He looked out at the screen. Audie Murphy, an American war hero, was explaining why “war is hell” as a prologue. “No,” she said. “Let’s wait until they get here.” She didn’t have long to wait. A moment after she hung up, police cars began to pile up in front of the theater in awkward parking postures, and men were running toward the lobby with guns drawn. Julia Postal pointed inside and said: “He’s upstairs,” although she was surmising.

  Johnny Brewer had finished checking all the exits except one. That was a door behind the stage. He opened it slowly and found himself staring at a gun. A policeman said: “Who are you?” It was not a time to hesitate. Brewer said that he was the one who had spotted the suspect. “I’m the one who told the cashier to phone the police,” he said. Four cops, including Nick McDonald, turned Brewer around and they went back into the theater. As they got onstage, in front of the screen, the house lights began to go on. They weren’t bright. Policemen were in the balcony; others, with shotguns, sealed the aisles at the rear of the theater.

  The customers, scattered thinly over the orchestra, began to look around in surprise. Nick McDonald heard young Brewer tell a policeman: “He’s not in the balcony. There he is,” and he pointed to a man sitting alone between aisles near the rear of the theater. McDonald took officer C. T. Walker offstage and up the left-hand aisle. The others—T. A. Hutson and Ray Hawkins—started up the right side.

  McDonald was pretty sure that he saw the man he wanted. The officer ordered two customers down front to stand, and he frisked them as Walker stood behind him with his gun out. His eye was on the target, and he noticed that the eye of the target was on him. The stranger did not move. The house lights were up, but the projectionist forgot to shut the movie off, and the screen danced with pale figures. Th
ere was the crack of rifle fire and the whistle of bullets.

  Hawkins and Hutson, working the other aisle, stood behind two seated customers and said: “On your feet.” The men were frisked for weapons and told to sit and remain seated. Nick McDonald moved out of one row of seats to the right-hand aisle. His target was in the second seat off the edge toward center. The two men locked eyes for a moment and McDonald walked toward the rear at a leisurely gait. There was a man and a woman sitting behind the stranger, and McDonald kept looking at them, so that he could keep his quarry within the perimeter of his vision.

  The police officer almost passed the target. He kept walking back and, at the last second, swung in quickly and shouted, “On your feet!” Lee Harvey Oswald stood, bringing both hands up and said: “It’s all over.” Nick McDonald reached from the row in front, to slide his hands down the sports shirt. Other policemen began to come in from both aisles, front and rear. It was at this moment that Lee Harvey Oswald had a change of heart. He had known, from the moment the house lights went up, that the Texas Theatre was full of policemen. There were sixteen—outnumbering the customers by two. There was no possibility of escape. If he had no plan to flee Dallas—and barely the means—this should have been an ideal way to achieve a public surrender. He did not know, of course, whether they were taking him in for the Kennedy murder or the Tippit, and this may have made a difference to him, although it is difficult to follow such a line of reasoning. Either one, on investigation, would lead to the other crime.

  Suddenly he brought both hands down a little. With the left, he punched Officer McDonald and knocked his uniform cap off. The right went to his belt and he withdrew the Smith and Wesson revolver. The policemen began to react by instinct. All of them recognized the danger, and each knew that if this was the man who had killed Tippit, killing one or two more policemen would hardly alter the issue for him.

  Some dove at him from behind. McDonald swung hard and punched Oswald over the eye. The other hand grabbed Oswald’s right hand and both came up with the gun. The nose of it gouged Nick McDonald’s cheek and he and other officers heard a click. There was no explosion. Oswald and McDonald fell down between the rows of seats. The cop yelled: “I’ve got him!” but he didn’t. Hutson was directly behind Oswald and he caught the young man’s neck in the elbow of his right arm and squeezed. C. T. Walker grabbed Oswald’s left arm and Hawkins, on the opposite side, fell on the pile of writhing humans and kept pawing for the hand with the gun.

  Detective Bob Carroll hurried into the aisle in time to see McDonald bring the revolver up by the butt. He grabbed for the wrist as two other cops, down in the pileup, tried to force the prisoner’s hands behind him. In a moment there was a snap and one of Oswald’s hands was handcuffed to a policeman’s. The cop hollered that they had one wrong hand, and there was additional confusion as they tried to free the policeman and secure both of Oswald’s hands behind his back. Carroll got the gun and put it in his pocket.

  The prisoner was lifted up like a submerged object. His pouting mouth was framed in a painful “O” and he called the policemen “Sons of bitches!” and “Bastards!” A policeman brought his fist up hard and caught the defenseless prisoner in the head. McDonald, chubby and perspiring, was still down between the seats, looking for his cap and flashlight, both of which had rolled under the seats.

  “Don’t hit me anymore!” Oswald shouted as he was dragged out into the aisle. The customers down front turned to watch, but they remembered that they had been told to remain seated, so no one moved. The cops were not sympathetic. All of them had heard, on Channel One, that Officer 78 had been DOA at the hospital and had heard the dispatcher ask a sergeant to please stop at Tippit’s house at once to break the news to Mrs. Tippit before she could hear it on radio.

  “This is police brutality!” Oswald shouted as he was half dragged, half carried through the lobby. Butch Burroughs, nervous in normal situations, watched the big group go by and saw Oswald’s hands being brought up high and tight against his spine. Oswald shouted “Ow!” and called upon the theater patrons to witness this violation of his rights. “Just get him out,” said Sergeant Owens. As they passed the lobby clock, the hands pointed to 1:50.

  Trade people and passing motorists had stopped to see the excitement and, as Oswald was shoved toward a police car at the curb, fifty or sixty men began to shout: “Kill him!” “String him up!” without bothering to find out the charge or the guilt or innocence of the prisoner. Sergeant Jerry Hill pointed to a sedan and said: “Put him in the back seat.” Oswald, sensing alienation from the crowd, shouted: “I want a lawyer. I know my rights!” An excited middle-aged man in the crowd shouted: “That’s the one. We ought to kill him.” The prisoner was hustled across the sidewalk, protesting: “This is typical police brutality. Why are you doing this to me?” It amounted to more words than most acquaintances had heard from Lee Harvey Oswald at one time.

  The car pulled away from the curb and Sergeant Hill got on Channel One and said that the suspect in the Tippit homicide had been arrested, after a struggle, in the Texas Theatre on West Jefferson. They were now bringing the prisoner to headquarters. Carroll, driving, got the revolver from his pocket and handed it to the sergeant. The car turned into Zangs Boulevard and moved at good speed across the Houston Street viaduct into downtown Dallas. As the sedan turned onto Elm Street, the School Book Depository flashed by on the left side. No one in the car gave it more than a glance.

  “Why don’t you see if he has any identification?” the sergeant asked Officer Paul Bentley. In the back, the policeman began to go through the pockets. “Yes,” he said. “He has a billfold.” Oswald, trying to bring his wrists down behind him into a more comfortable position, said: “I don’t know why you are doing this to me. The only thing I have done is carry a pistol in a movie.” Another policeman said: “You have done a lot more. You have killed a policeman.” The net effect of this exchange was that Lee Oswald now knew which crime had led to his entrapment. “Well,” Oswald said quietly, “you can fry for that.”

  The policemen thought that their man was in a talking mood, and they decided to take advantage of it. They didn’t know that he had already taken advantage of them. “What’s your name?” one asked. “That,” said Oswald, “is for you to find out.” Another cop said: “You’ll fry.” The prisoner shrugged. “They say it only takes a second.” “Here’s his name: it’s Lee Oswald.” The sergeant said: “You Lee Oswald?” The prisoner had lost interest. “No,” the policeman said, “I have another card here. Are you Alex Hidell? Hidd-ell, or High-dell?” There was no response. The sergeant asked Carroll: “Is this gun yours?” “No,” the driver said, jerking his head toward the rear of the car. “It’s his.”

  Walker and Bentley, in the rear seat, tilted Oswald this way and that to get to his pockets. In one they found a handful of .38 cartridges. Sergeant Hill opened the chamber of the gun in his hand and found that one bullet had a dent in the back. The concern of the five policemen was to drive the sedan into the basement at police headquarters, get this man Hidell or Oswald up to Captain Fritz’s Homicide division on the third floor, deliver him intact, and book him on suspicion of homicide—to wit, the slaying of Police Officer J. D. Tippit.

  Back on Jefferson, young Johnny Brewer suddenly remembered his shoe store, open and unprotected. As he skipped along the sidewalk, he wondered how long he had been away. The total time was eight minutes.

  The shock was now universal. It was as real among those who disliked or disagreed with John F. Kennedy as among his friends. Dark of night had descended on Munich, Germany, when the flash arrived at 7:44 P.M. At once, Radio Free Europe beamed the tragedy to Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria in several languages. At Parkland Hospital, the sun was still high and hot as an irritated student held a sign aloft which said: “Yankee Go Home.”

  Secret Service agents drove the President’s car back to Love Field, and Dallas citizens who saw the bubbletop flash by paused to stare unbelievin
gly. It could not have happened. It did not happen. It would all go away. At a fashionable school in Dallas, a teacher sat forlornly at her desk, head down, hand clasping forehead. She knew that she could not teach these bright little faces anything more today. Weakly she said: “You may have the rest of the day off.” The next few words were drowned in a mass cheer: “The President of the United States has been shot!”

  A. C. Johnson and his wife were in their little restaurant at 1029 Young Street when a policeman friend phoned and said, “The President’s been shot.” They had no radio, so they went out in the parking lot and sat in their car listening to all the excitement. A. C. and his wife worked hard. They had the little sandwich place and they had bought a small house over at 1026 Beckley and rented rooms. One of the roomers was Mr. O. H. Lee.

  The demise of the President had an effect everywhere, but not the same effect. Jack Ruby announced in his Dallas News advertising that he was keeping his two small nightclubs closed. He could, in a breath, phone his sister Eva and weep emotionally over the President; in the next breath he would ask a friend casually: “Well, what do you think? Will it have any effect on business in Dallas?” Secretary of State Dean Rusk, coming in to Hickam Air Force Base with his diplomats, had difficulty trying to convince himself of two items: one was the fact that President John F. Kennedy was indeed dead; two, there was a possibility that this was part of a plot by a foreign power. Neither of these appeared to be true. Sorrowing, he ordered the plane refueled and flown directly to Washington.

  In Fort Worth, Marguerite Oswald had finished her lonely lunch. The mother of Lee sat on a couch and stared at her talkative friend, the television set. A commentator said that the President had died in Parkland Memorial Hospital, and Mrs. Oswald thought that she would like to continue to watch, but she had the three-to-eleven shift at a rest home, and she liked to be there early.