by Jim Bishop
The deputy chief was certain that King, working directly for Chief Curry, required no permission. The request was, in effect, a courtesy call. Deputy Chief George Lumpkin was in his office, but King did not consult him. “King was operating on his own,” Lumpkin said. Curry had signed “General Order Number 81” long before it stressed cooperation with the press. He “saw no particular harm in allowing the media to observe the prisoner.” A woman was sitting in a glassed-in office crying and wringing her hands and the press demanded to know who she was.
No one could identify her. A policeman had brought her in and, on receiving fresh orders, had left. Detective L. C. Graves walked across the hall and found out that she was Mrs. Helen Markham, who had witnessed the shooting of Officer Tippit. The woman was hysterical and could barely speak. Graves tried to take a statement and said he would have to ask her to stay until they could stage a police “showup” or “lineup.”
City Manager Elgin English Crull walked across from City Hall to headquarters and was appalled by the crush of human beings. He noticed particularly that those of the press who required electricity were using city power. Switchboxes had been opened and outlets tapped. He might have shouted for silence and asserted his authority, but Mr. Crull didn’t. He seemed mollified because one of the local reporters said to him: “Please don’t blame us for what is going on. We don’t act this way.”
The blinds were drawn across the office of Captain Fritz, and he tried to blot out the roar of sound. Oswald was saying: “I know your tactics. There is a similar agency in Russia. You are using the soft touch, and, of course, the procedure in Russia would be quite different.” Unfortunately, the police department seemed to have lost control of the interrogation. The suspect did not appear to be frightened either by his arrest, the marshaling of damaging evidence, or the enormous amount of attention he was now getting from the world. If one could judge by appearances and responses, Lee Harvey Oswald felt that he was the trapper, not the trapped. He would answer the questions he could handle without risk; he would shout and snarl and lapse into silence when the interrogation touched a sensitive nerve.
He refused to discuss his military service record. He would not listen to questions about his handwriting as “Alex Hidell,” nor about Hidell’s renting a post office box in Dallas and purchasing a rifle with a telescopic sight or a snub-nosed revolver from mail order houses. He waved aside questions about his wife and children. He would respond, in the manner of a pedantic lecturer, to questions about the Soviet Union, but when asked if he had shot Officer Tippit he snapped: “No!” When asked: “Did you shoot President Kennedy?” he shouted: “No!”
With a shrug, he said he had once been to Tijuana. No one had asked. Fritz interrupted the interrogation by walking out into the bedlam of the hall to listen to reports from detectives and to hand out fresh assignments. Each time, before he left, he would glance through his bifocals at Bookhout and Hosty and say: “Any questions?”
The captain had no time for lunch, but he offered some to Oswald. The young man said he would like coffee and doughnuts. A policeman went for them. The questions continued. Often they were the same questions. As Oswald sipped the steaming coffee, Fritz reminded him that he would be fed again “upstairs.”
The panic which seized Dallas ran from its head through its nervous system. It did not show on the streets. The shops were open. Women feasted their eyes on expensive gowns at the air-conditioned Neiman Marcus store and, when the obsequious clerks murmured: “Wasn’t it awful . . . ?” the customers glanced up sharply and said: “Yes, it was awful. How much is this Hawaiian silk print?” Politicians teed off at the Dallas Athletic Club and remembered to keep their heads down. Lovers lounged in Turtle Creek Park, holding hands in the warm sun and dreaming the dreams they should.
As it was in Dallas, so it was in the capital of the nation. The buses ran their routes. Taxicabs with noisy transmissions whined through Rock Creek Park. The statue of Alexander Hamilton failed to lift a granite brow. On the edge of the Potomac, Negroes shucked bins of cherrystone clams, peeled the cellophane skin from pink curving shrimp, hacked the heads and tails from fat scaly bluefish, and gulls stood silently against the leaden sky waiting for the scraps to go overboard.
Washington did not panic outwardly. From the sky, scores of thousands of automobiles on the highways north and south and east and west picked up a ray of sunlight and bounced it briefly from windshields. The city went about its business. The shops, the vendors, the offices, the officious bureaus continued to function as though the body politic were not prostrate and numb. On this one afternoon, there was no government. The executive branch was momentarily headless; the legislative branch adjourned in grief and dissipated its august membership to the winds. The Supreme Court, which can only say “Do not,” is not constituted to contribute a positive act to the well-being of the nation. Nine learned men in black cannot balance a casket nor alter the hysterical posture of government.
In code and in plain English, radio messages flashed across the skies of the world, assessing the assassination, asking directives, reassuring command posts in far-off places, creating false alerts, tensing military muscles, causing lights to burn in embassies and legations in many countries. A member of the Cabinet asked the rhetorical question: “Who has his finger on the missile button?” No one. And no one wanted to believe that no one did. An act as stunning in its magnitude as occurred at 12:30 P.M. in Dallas could not be accepted anywhere as the deed of a lonesome malcontent. Nor would Washington or Moscow or Peking or Paris be willing to truckle to the truth for many years to come. Who could accept the thesis that a meteor, racing across the heavens, could be brought down by an idiot with a cork gun?
It was this which shook the city of Washington internally and tied up the phones, the circuits, the switchboards, even the area code, so that paralysis muted a second great city. The world knew that aircraft 26000 was up there somewhere, returning a gallant young man to his fathers, but who the hell was Lyndon Johnson? A short time before this day, an amusing program called Candid Camera had scored a hearty hit on television by asking pedestrians in a remote city: “Who is Lyndon Johnson?” Some had said: “The name is familiar. Why don’t you consult a phone book?” Others did not know. Whoever he was, he was also high in the sky with that metal casket and he was reaching for the reins of government, quickly and surely, acting patiently and almost obsequiously, which were not his characteristics. He was, basically, a boss man; a doer; a demander; a tall, awkward person blunt enough to think tact was something on which to hang a picture. When he was a young man, he and Tom Connally and Sam Rayburn and John Garner had agreed that there was no more lofty position in the world than being a senator from Texas. The vice-presidency was a step backward. On this afternoon, the tough man felt fear. Loneliness too. No one said: “Hey, Lyndon . . .” The form of address, even from old friends like Valenti and Thomas and Gonzalez and Moyers, was: “Yes, Mr. President.”
Two men wearing small buttons in their lapels walked up the short marble staircase of the old Washington Hotel into the lobby and then to the elevator. They pressed the button marked “6.” When the car stopped, they got off and walked down until they stood in front of the old rosewood door at the corner of the hotel. They knocked. The Speaker of the House of Representatives, Mr. John McCormack, had a lean face with a big nose and the nasal tone of the Boston politician.
They told him that they were Secret Service men. The Speaker was next in line for the presidency. If the plane crashed, killing Lyndon Johnson, this faithful old party warhorse would take the oath as President of the United States. John McCormack never tried to be what he wasn’t. He was not a giant intellect nor a skilled debater. He understood his countrymen and their requirements; the old man with the white hair and the slight snarl had an instinct for national government. A strong President could set the policy of the administration and John McCormack would fight for it even though he might not subscribe to some of its measures.
The Speaker refused to admit the two men. He was brusque. It was not necessary for them to tell him he was the next man. He and Mrs. McCormack were averse to altering their private lives in the shadow of the Secret Service. He would not have these men accompany him in an automobile or stand over Mrs. McCormack in the shops. “Please,” he said as softly as he could, “get out of the hall.”
A block away, Maude Shaw sat in her room on the second floor of the White House. The children still slept, but she knew that they would soon awake. The thoughts of the English nanny were gloomy. She could hear the President calling from his bedroom “John-John” and “Buttons.” In her mind’s eye she could see the delight in the faces of the youngsters as they ran down the hall to the bedroom with the open door. Inside, the young President of the United States braced his breakfast tray with both hands as the children leaped upon their father with the lavish love and wet kisses which are its concomitant.
She could, in this interval of lonely introspection, remember the time that John-John disappeared in his father’s office. No one could find him and the President called his son’s name with sharp petulance. Then, from the panel of the front of his father’s desk, a door swung open and the little boy fell out, laughing uncontrollably. The desk had been presented to President McKinley by Her Majesty Victoria of Great Britain. No one knew that, behind the majestically carved Presidential Seal, there was a gateway inside the desk.
Robert Foster tapped on her door. He was a young Secret Service man and his assignment was to break the news to Miss Shaw. The facts did not lend themselves to tact or gentility. “The President is dead,” he said, and the thin, middle-aged woman bowed her head. He nodded toward the children’s rooms. “We have to get out of the White House by six o’clock,” Foster told her. “Mrs. Kennedy is flying back and doesn’t want the children around. Hurry, we haven’t much time.”
The suitcases were in Miss Shaw’s room. Foster helped her to pack. “Where are we going?” she said. The phone beside her bed tinkled softly and the light flashed. It was Mrs. Robert Kennedy, wife of the Attorney General. “I think you had better take the children to meet their mother,” she said. Ethel Kennedy’s voice trembled. “She will be at Andrews Field at six.” Miss Shaw did not know what to say. Somehow she felt that the suggestion was wrong. “Oh no,” she said at last. “Surely not. I am sure Mrs. Kennedy would not want to see the children just now. Please don’t ask me to do that.”
Ethel Kennedy thought about it. “All right,” she said. “Bring the children here. I can’t think of anything else. Can you? Anyway, I’ll leave it to you. You know best. . . .” The phones were hung up. Foster was in a hurry. His orders had been to get the Kennedy children out of the White House at once. To where? The Secret Service man was on the floor, jamming clothing into suitcases, looking at Miss Shaw pleadingly, and Maude Shaw thought of the proper retreat: their maternal grandmother’s house in Georgetown.
Mrs. Hugh Auchincloss was ideal. She loved the children, and she was gifted with a sweet maternal manner. The children loved her and, in the late afternoons, their mother had taken them to “Grand-mère’s” house many times. They would feel less “strange,” less inclined to tension or alarm in her house than anywhere else. Maude Shaw phoned, and, when the two women said “hello,” both burst into tears. Foster was hoping for a quick decision, but the sobs and the intermediate conversation delayed the decision. Mrs. Auchincloss was surprised that the children were not to be with their mother, but she kept saying: “Bring them over. Bring them over to me. This is the place for all of you. Come and stay here. . . .”
The grandmother fought for control of her emotions, then her voice softened. “Miss Shaw,” she said, “there is something I would like you to do, and I know my daughter would too.” “Of course,” the nanny said. “Anything.” “We feel that you should be the one to break the news to the children—at least to Caroline.” Maude Shaw relapsed in shock. “Oh no,” she said loudly. “Please don’t ask me to do that.”
“We feel that you should be the one . . .”
This made it the wish, the command, of the mother as well as the grandmother. “Please, Miss Shaw. It is for the best. They trust you. . . . I am asking you as a friend. . . . Please. . . .” The children’s nurse was overwhelmed by a feeling of horror. She stood at the phone as Foster stared at her beseechingly. “All right,” she murmured crisply. “I will tell Caroline when I put her to bed tonight.”
The children were awakened. They were cheered to find that they were leaving at once for the Auchincloss home. Nighties and pajamas and spare dresses and slips and shoes and little suits and blouses were all tucked into the valises. Also a special toy or two, a doll. Foster led the little party out and down the broad dark corridor to the elevator. He had a car on the South Lawn and it had been waiting a long time.
Maude Shaw wondered, “Why me?” The family was full of intelligent people. There were cousins and uncles and aunts aplenty. Could not one of them sit in privacy with these babies and break the news gently? Could not someone explain that God often calls a soul suddenly, one that he wants in heaven at once? Could not someone have told them that death is nothing more than a postponed reunion? That their father would be as happy waiting for them to join him as they were sorrowful at his leave-taking?
Maude Shaw made half a promise. She would tell Caroline only.
The Cabinet plane, a third of the way back from Hawaii to California, was on an almost identical course with Air Force One and at practically the same speed, but they were several thousand miles apart. Dean Rusk’s 707 begged for additional information, and it arrived, either on teletype or by phone, chopped in segments. The Secretary of State remained in the private cabin. The others wandered in the public area, brooding, trying to assimilate the fact that Kennedy was gone and trying to decipher what this would mean to each of the careers aboard this plane. The shock to the personal senses was the passing of Kennedy; the shock to the political senses was the accession of Johnson. No one doubted that the new man would achieve a keynote of continuity by announcing that he would adhere to the Kennedy policies; it would be a violation of historical precedent to do it with the same assortment of faces.
Someone suggested a poker game. A table was found and some chairs. There was nothing better to do. Cards would be preferable to thinking. The gentlemen placed money on the table—perhaps the money they had planned to use for shopping in Tokyo. Pierre Salinger, the cigar smoker, enjoyed the game immensely but seldom won. The players agreed on table stakes and, in a moment, the mourning period had been postponed and Kennedy’s august appointees were saying: “Here’s your ten and ten more.” “Dealer draws three.” “Smiling ladies, like the Andrews Sisters.” “All pink.”
Alone, except for a mess sergeant, Dean Rusk read the teletypes. At last a sketchy story on the suspect, Lee Harvey Oswald, began to click on the plane. It told about his defection to the Soviet Union, his life in Russia, and his membership in the Fair Play for Cuba group. This was difficult to believe, because most knowledgeable persons were certain that the assassin must have been an extremist-right-winger.
A Communist in Dallas, Texas? This would be as difficult to digest as a story that Josef Stalin had been killed by a Russian fascist. “If this is true,” Rusk said to no one in particular, “it is going to have repercussions around the world for years to come.” It is possible that he saw the news as the first evidence of a Communist conspiracy. This would have amused the loner who parried questions in far-off Dallas. When he worked in Minsk, the Russians couldn’t even get him to attend party meetings in the factory.
The biographical material on Lee Harvey Oswald had also passed through the hands of Forrest V. Sorrels, the wandering Secret Service man. He asked Chief James Rowley in Washington whether PRS had been aware of Oswald’s Marxist background. PRS—the alert file of persons dangerous to the President—did not have a listing under Oswald. Rowley, hearing of Oswald’s defection to Russia, asked his superiors at the Tr
easury Department to contact the State Department to find out what they knew about the prisoner. Rowley would be interested to know why his agency had never been told about this defector.
Wheels were turning. They spun slowly at first but, with each passing minute, they accelerated. Files which were dusty with time were reopened, and cards of various colors withdrawn, scrutinized, and copied. The State Department had a dossier on one Lee Harvey Oswald. Several agencies became interested. Treasury wanted to relay all possible information on this man to the Secret Service, the agency primarily responsible. They wanted a digest of the dossier. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, which had a small file on the man, now wanted every shred of information. The Central Intelligence Agency, which sensed international complications, asked for copies. Aboard Air Force One, the news reached President Lyndon Johnson through Major-General Chester Clifton, who was sorting messages in the communications shack forward. The President asked for a quick check of the Oswald situation to find out if the State Department had erred in permitting this man to return to the United States.
There was blame to be spread, guilt to be impugned, punishment to be meted. No crime as monumental in size as this could be laid at the feet of a sullen ignoramus. It was a blessing that he was a Marxist, because, by negation, it absolved Dallas. Of course Oswald’s brand of Marxism was not related to the despotic socialism practiced in Russia, but the American mind lumps the two in political idealism, even though they are anathema to each other, and both have contempt for Bolsheviks, nihilists, and Mensheviks. It was sufficient to call Lee Harvey Oswald a Communist. The only other question to be resolved was to find out who was responsible for bringing him back from Moscow.
The poker players drank. They spoke in grunts, and Salinger won almost a thousand dollars. The drinks and the money were meaningless. For a time one player or another would break in with a fond recollection of Kennedy, but these sad pleasantries petered out. These were professionals with additional streams to cross and hills to climb, so they concentrated on Lyndon Johnson, wondering aloud what kind of a man he was. Everyone agreed that he was a master politician. Call him a horse trader, a locker-room Disraeli, a compromiser—Johnson was a winner. He was a doer; they knew that.
