by Jim Bishop
Some tried to speculate about the Johnson “team.” The Cabinet was surprised at how little it knew. Lyndon Johnson had been Vice-President for almost three years and he worked across the street from the White House in an office in the old State Department Building, where there were baroque doors and high Victorian ceilings laced with heating pipes. They seemed sorry to admit that they had not cultivated him. It was recalled that Johnson had been the youngest majority leader in the United States Senate, but that showed legislative acumen, not judgment.
Secretary of Labor Willard Wirtz, the man with the pepper-and-salt hair, had campaigned for Adlai Stevenson in 1960. At the time, he had no appreciation for the upstart from Massachusetts. Now he said tactlessly: “I gather you don’t think the world is at an end?” The poker game broke up. The gentlemen began to bicker. The plane hung between sky and sea and the men of power accused each other and used words like “rumormonger,” “treachery,” “hearsay.” They were not sure that Johnson had not been shot, too. There was word that a Secret Service man and a Dallas policeman were dead—so the plot must be widespread.
They owed allegiance and each was eager to flex the knee in fealty, but to whom? Even Rusk, meditating in his private cabin, wasn’t sure. The big Boeing shrieked through the sunny skies. There was no time for tears. The dry eye of power was focused on power.
The flow of information from Gordon Shanklin’s office to FBI headquarters in Washington was steady. Except for a few lapses, the line might have remained open. Shortly after 3 P.M. the agent in charge spoke to Washington and said he had some news on the rifle found in the Texas School Book Depository. It was not a Mauser or a British weapon, but rather a cheap Italian military surplus rifle called a Mannlicher-Carcano. The caliber was 6.5 and the four-power scope was Japanese. The serial number, Shanklin said, was C2766.
His men had phoned local sports goods houses in Dallas and had learned that they had little call for Mannlicher-Carcanos. However, their catalogues showed that the importer was a firm named Crescent Firearms, Inc., of New York. The New York office should be alerted and start tracking that C2766 at once. There was similar information about the snub-nosed revolver carried by Oswald, but the FBI was much more interested in the genesis of the gun which they believed killed the President. It was almost closing time when the New York FBI descended on Crescent Firearms, but the records were brought out. C2766? That was part of a big shipment of rifles sent to Klein’s Sporting Goods, Inc., of Chicago. The trail bent to the Midwest, and the FBI followed it.
Official Washington began to depart for Andrews Air Force Base, across the river. Second-echelon officials, diplomats from many countries, Supreme Court justices, bureau chiefs, wives, congressional leaders, all began the pilgrimage. The Attorney General was shocked. One of the many opinions of that day which cannot be rationalized was that Robert Kennedy seemed to look upon the homecoming as a private funeral. It was closer to being the return of Caesar to Rome, but Bobby thought of it as the return of his dead brother. He tried forbidding or dissuading some from going to Andrews. Then he heard that more and more dignitaries were already waiting there. Others were asking the military for helicopters. Black limousines were crossing the river to the air base with pale shocked faces silent in the back seats.
Others called at the White House first, although there was no one present to whom condolences could be offered, and some of these were put to work. Sargent Shriver, the handsome and articulate brother-in-law of John F. Kennedy, arrived and assumed the position of chef de cortège. He was director of the Peace Corps, but, even though the body was not back in Washington, the work of organizing funeral arrangements and—more important—the team of reliable men who would be needed night and day, every minute of every hour, to assist Sargent Shriver, had to begin now.
Two stenographers were in President Kennedy’s office removing some of his keepsakes. The memento book of photos of his trip to the home of his Kennedy forebears at Wexford, Ireland, reposed on a table behind the desk and suddenly disappeared. A painting of a sailing ship followed. A mounted fish in an office across the hall came off the wall. The rocker with the U.S.S. Kittyhawk embroidered on it was placed on a dolly and wheeled into the hall. It was incredible that anyone could have issued such a callous order, but the mementos were being moved abruptly.
By hurrying them outside to be carried away to a private place, the press cameras could make the Kennedy bric-a-brac appear to be forlorn mementos, could make it seem as though the new man was in a hurry to take over the executive office. In time, the Queen Victoria desk would disappear, too, although it was the property of the United States.
Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota phoned the White House and asked if he could pay his respects by waiting at the air base for the body of the President. He was told “No.” “The hell with you,” Humphrey said. “I’m going.” The President’s alter ego, Ted Sorensen, sat at his White House desk, his back to the fireplace mantle. He had researched and assisted Kennedy with a book called Profiles in Courage. Sorensen—an incisive phrase-maker—had written many of the speeches John F. Kennedy had delivered. The President had drunk deeply from the semantic genius of the quiet man, but there had been no public accolade for Sorensen. He was the Man in the Back Room, the man who could make mundane matters sound lofty and idealistic. All day long and far into the evening he had hand-polished words for his god. He sat in the office, thinking as the sun leaned west and bronzed the black oaks on the lawn. Ted Sorensen was asked if he would go to the airport. “If the others go,” he said, “I will go.”
The Pentagon monitored a Red Chinese radio at Hsinhua, which announced the sudden death of President Kennedy at 4:14 A.M. Hsinhua time. Radio Budapest played solemn organ music and commented that Cardinal Mindszenty, who had imprisoned himself years before in the American embassy in Hungary, would sing a memorial Mass for Kennedy. At 3:20 New York time, Martin Agronsky announced for NBC: “After the initial shock, President Kennedy’s secretary began methodically removing mementos from his desk—the family pictures, the PT-109 souvenir—making ready for the new President’s arrival.”
There was a world full of people who each would have liked to render some small service, and this applied also to men of position and power. The commanding officer at the U.S. Naval Hospital at Bethesda, Maryland, Captain R. O. Canada, Jr., ordered an ambulance to be dispatched to Andrews Air Force Base. So far as the captain knew, no one had asked for one. Aboard AF-1, two requests for an ambulance had been relayed to the capital city, but both had been refused on the grounds that the District of Columbia had a law prohibiting the transportation of the deceased in ambulances.
Canada, who sat at his television set, recalled that, eight years ago, Senator Lyndon B. Johnson had sustained a myocardial infarction. It had been moderately severe, and Johnson had been his patient. The crushing events of this day could—probably wouldn’t—but could induce another heart attack. Captain Canada sent the ambulance and told the personnel to wait for Air Force One. Two attendants left at once, driving slowly through the rolling autumnal hills of Maryland, across the fresh-running streams, through the city, and down Route Five into the farm country where, almost a hundred years before, a man with a broken leg rode a horse to escape a shattered and disorganized government after the assassination of a President.
One of the first witnesses to get home was Howard Brennan. He carried his steel helmet up the walk at 6814 Woodward Street, Dallas, and his mind was troubled. For a long time he had been joining pipes along the railroad right of way at the overpass. Brennan had been content working in the open. He was hitting the middle years and he had learned the value of not becoming involved in anything but pleasantries. His daughter and a little grandson had returned to live again with him and with Mrs. Brennan, and Howard Brennan had accepted it, plodding on with his daily labor and taking his ease at home after supper.
He was an eyewitness. Sitting on a low wall, he had looked up and had seen a man in a window take caref
ul aim and kill a President. Howard Brennan had submitted to the questioning of policemen and deputy sheriffs. He had stood in the county building with others milling about, shouting and declaring and denying, and his spirit began to shrivel. He was an eyewitness. Reluctantly he had read the statement and signed it, but Brennan had no heart for any of this.
“Will this be confidential?” he had asked, worried. The policemen said it was confidential. Brennan wished hard that he had not opened his mouth. He began to think that he was the only true eyewitness. Nobody knew who or what organization was behind the assassination. Somebody said a Secret Service man was already dead. Also a cop in Oak Clif. There may have been others. The Secret Service man who questioned him appeared to be excited.
Mr. Brennan began to feel a growing fear. They had asked him pointedly: “Do you think you could recognize the man with the gun if you saw him again?” Howard Brennan said: “Yes.” Why had he said that? Why become involved? He was living in an era in which families prided themselves on not knowing who lived next door. No one wanted to be involved in any controversial situation—even a traffic accident.
In the house, he learned that his wife knew about the assassination. Everybody knew. There was nothing else on television or radio. Howard Brennan sat with his wife and told her quietly that he was an eyewitness. He had seen it. Actually watched it happen. The husband said that he had a growing fear that something bad could occur to the whole family. No one knew who or what was behind the assassination and Brennan did not want to be known as the man who could identify the rifleman.
He talked of moving out of Dallas secretly. They could take their daughter and grandson and get out. No one need know. It would mean giving up his job as a steam fitter. Mrs. Brennan was troubled because her husband was frightened. She listened to him patiently and said it wouldn’t work. A person can’t get away, she said. A person can’t hide—no matter where he may go.
One of the surprising aspects of Lieutenant J. C. Day’s work was that he couldn’t find fingerprints. Normally there would be prints on the barrel of the rifle and the stock. There should be parts of prints on the empty shells from the gun. He and his Crime Laboratory left police headquarters and returned to the School Book Depository. Of course Day knew that, in his work, when a suspected lethal instrument was found to be free of fingerprints it was usually a sign that it had been carefully wiped by a person who might have a sense of guilt.
The entire sixth floor had been isolated by policemen. Day and his assistants went to work in that corner window where the empty shells had been found. They dusted the bricks on the ledge; they examined the heating pipes behind the assassin’s seat on a cardboard box. The men moved about gingerly, disturbing nothing. They got nothing until they brushed the top of the box lying in front of the window. This, it was assumed, would be the low seat for the killer. On the front edge, facing the window, they saw a palm print come up clearly.
It was the first technological discovery, and yet it proved nothing. Anyone could have been sitting near that window, and anyone could have leaned on a box. The case against Oswald was to be built of chips and bits of evidence, the whole weighing more than the sum of the parts. The lieutenant backed his men away from the print, took strips of Scotch Tape and pressed it down on top of the white palm print. Then Day wrote on the box: “From top of box Oswald apparently sat on to fire gun. Lieut. J. C. Day.” He tore the top off and took it back to headquarters.
The front door of the Carousel Club was open. The afternoon light bounced off the glassed-in photographs of strippers and shoveled a little radiance to the dusty interior. It was a place smelling of old cigar smoke and whiskey-stained tables. LaVerne Crafard kept the bar as clean as possible for his boss, Jack Ruby. Mr. Crafard was twenty-two; everybody called him “Smokey.” The chairs were still upside down on the tables. A machine behind the bar hummed as it made ice cubes.
Joy Dale arrived. She had an appointment to give a novice a dancing lesson. Miss Dale was an exotic dancer. Strip joints presented a difficult means of earning money. The pay was small. The customers demanded new bodies. The men were raucous and sometimes ungentlemanly in their comments. They tired of the same girls. A dancer with a good figure must, of necessity, develop new seductive routines and new and enticing ways of removing clothing.
Miss Dale had been to the hospital with her daughter. When she arrived at the Carousel, a light was over the bar. The rest was dim as such places usually are in daylight. The fat, rumpled figure of Jack Ruby emerged from his little office. “The club won’t be open tonight and tomorrow night,” he said briskly. “I don’t know how long.” He stared off for a moment, and then wagged his head slowly. “It’s unbelievable!” he said. “How could a man shoot the President of our country?”
Joy Dale thought of it from a maternal side. “Can you possibly think how this woman feels?” she said. “She just lost her son, and now she’s lost her husband.” Ruby began to weep. His emotions, good and bad, were multitudinous and always close to the surface. Often they persuaded him to be unduly generous, or to fight, or to want to exterminate an anti-Semite, or to weep for someone he had never met.
“You shouldn’t,” he said, choking. “He should be killed.” Jack Ruby called Crafard and ordered him to prepare a sign for the front door of the club, proclaiming that it would be closed. It was not to be posted until a late hour, because Ruby did not want his competitors to know until the last moment. It was, in a real sense, Ruby’s contribution to the memory of a President. Business, on the other hand, had been poor. The sacrifice would not cost much.
His moods changed and blended as the colored prisms of light did on the stage. Jack Ruby found the world to be complex and confusing, and he simplified it to “creeps” and “good guys.” The “good guys” sometimes became “regular guys,” but the “creeps” were unalterable. Policemen were “regular guys” unless they gave Mr. Ruby a summons for a nightclub violation or a traffic citation, at which point the individual policeman became a “creep.”
Ruby never charged a policeman for attendance at his nightclubs. He often took them into his office and pulled a bottle of whiskey from a drawer and set it on top of the desk. Some, who were more ambitious, were given personal introductions to certain strippers. “Be nice to this guy,” Ruby would say. “He’s a frenna mine.” Ruby had felt his Jewishness from the ghetto days in Chicago, but he found no happiness or pride in it. Ruby was a defensive Jew who forbade his comedians to tell dialect jokes from the stage, who fought furiously with his fists any man who cast aspersions on Jews, but who was seldom seen in a synagogue.
This afternoon he thought seriously of going to Friday night services. It would be an additional mark of respect from Ruby to Kennedy. It was not something he would do for anybody, not even for himself. But closing the club and praying in a tallis in a temple had the mark of what Ruby referred to as “class.” He would do it.
He watched Joy Dale giving the dance lesson to the student, without seeing any of it. Then he went back to his office and called his sister Eva. Mrs. Grant was tired of the phone calls. She tried to forestall her brother’s nonstop dissertation by reminding him that they had no food for the weekend. He told her that he would stop in the Ritz delicatessen and pick up some cold cuts and salads. This, too, assumed the form of an accolade because Jack Ruby often bought pounds of salami and wurst and potato salad and cole slaw for policemen who worked late on a big case, firemen fighting a night battle with flames, radio commentators who talked through the late hours.
He told his sister that the policeman who was shot, Tippit, was a dear friend of his. This was an honest mistake. There was another Tippit on the police force. Ruby had never met the dead man. Mrs. Grant told him that the killer had been arrested. Someone named “Oswald.” Her brother’s reaction was typical: “He’s a creep. He has no class.” The grief, the welling tears were transmuted at once to roaring anger. He talked on and on about the dead President, his poor weeping wife, and the little k
iddies who had no father. He was thinking, he said, of sending flowers to the place where the shots were fired. Thinking . . .
On the second floor at Parkland Hospital, Dr. Shaw was completing chest surgery on Governor John Connally. The patient responded well. He displayed good reserves. Shaw and his team were finishing the sutures and examining the drains when Dr. George T. Shires arrived. This man had been in Galveston when he heard the news and had managed to return to Dallas in incredibly fast time. Shires was professor of surgery at Parkland, and Chairman of the Department of Surgery at Southwestern Medical School.
He was senior to all the doctors present, but Shires did not impose this on them. He scrubbed and was gowned and, walking around the supine form of the Governor, he was given a whispered rundown of injuries and saw that the work remaining was the multiple fracture of the right wrist and the laceration of the left thigh. Without further conversation, Dr. Shires enlisted the assistance of Doctors McClelland, Baxter, and Patman, and they began the delicate job of putting a complex wrist back together.
On Oak Lawn, the ambulance of Vernon Oneal pulled into the back parking lot. He was irritated. The whole day had been frustrating. The phones inside jangled with calls from patients who, in the shadow of the catastrophic event, had heart attacks, fainting spells, and nausea. They wanted ambulances and they were wanted at once.
Oneal recalled that one ambulance, on an epileptic call, had been impounded at the emergency entrance to Parkland by the Secret Service. The ambulance and the personnel had nothing to do with the assassination but the men were forced to sit in the “bus” waiting for permission to leave. Then Oneal himself had responded to the crisis call for “the best casket you have,” and that had resolved itself into a series of arguments between Dallas and the federal government over an autopsy.
