by Jim Bishop
He was going to pause in his labors to write personal notes to Caroline Kennedy and John Kennedy, Jr. The mute and welling grief which he had fought all day gained an ascendancy only when the work pace slowed. The new President would tell them how he felt about their father, how proud they should be of him. Lyndon Johnson did not expect that the notes would mean much to the children now; he was thinking that, when the children matured, they might like to know that his successor thought of the Kennedy children on the day that their father had been cut down.
Cliff Carter walked down the high-ceilinged hall. He found the office. A middle-aged woman was sitting behind a silent typewriter. He asked for the two letterheads and the envelopes. Her mouth became firm. “Who are they for?” she said. The Texan said: “President Johnson.” The woman stared at him in disbelief. Then she opened a drawer and took the stationery out. “Goddamn that man!” she shouted. “The President isn’t even cold in his grave yet and he wants to use White House stationery. Goddamn him!”
Carter was a big man with a colorless face. He was big enough to afford good manners in trying situations. He said thank you and departed. The sheets were handed to Mr. Johnson. Carter went on to the next duty without telling the President what had happened. Mr. Johnson wrote the notes and asked that they be delivered to the White House at once. It left him depressed. He sat behind the desk, staring at the blotter. The President was thinking of Mrs. Kennedy. He looked up at Moyers and Carter and shook his head negatively. “I wish,” he said, “that I could reach up and bring down a handful of stars and give them to that woman.”
The doorbell rang and Mrs. Grant opened it. Jack Ruby was back again. He was behind a huge grocery bag. “Here’s twenty-two dollars in groceries,” he said cheerfully. He put them in the kitchen. Eva may have wondered what she was going to do with all these cold cuts and delicatessen salads. Her brother bought cold cuts as some gallants buy flowers. She watched him pick up the phone to call Dr. Coleman Jacobson. Two old friends—Jacobson and Stanley Kauffman—often upbraided Ruby for not attending temple services on Friday nights. He wanted to tell Dr. Jacobson, and Mr. Kauffman, too, that tonight he would attend. He did not want to appear boastful, so his excuse for each phone call was to ask what time services would begin.
Eva, looking at the groceries, murmured: “I never thought in my lifetime I would ever hear of a President being assassinated.” She said that barbarians were running around. She went out into the kitchen and made some scrambled eggs and salmon for her brother. Ruby got off the phone and went out into the kitchen and ate hurriedly and silently.
“Really,” he said to his sister, “he was crazy.” Then he rushed into the bathroom and was swept by waves of nausea. When he came out, Mrs. Grant said: “That lousy commie. Don’t worry, the commie, we will get him.” Her brother wiped his eyes. Eva Grant had watched the story of the assassination unfold on television. She knew more about it than her brother. “This guy could have been sent here to do this,” Eva said. Her brother said: “What a creep!” He had to leave to go back to his apartment and change his clothes. The departure was as abrupt as the arrival. Eva Grant sat alone in her kitchen and finished eating the eggs.
The Secret Service man waited inside the door. “Miss Shaw,” he had said, “I’m sorry but we have to go back to the White House immediately.” The bags had not been unpacked. Mrs. Auchincloss was distressed at parting with the children. The little ones, still in the dining room, were disappointed. “Children,” Maude Shaw said. “Mummy wants us. Caroline, be my bestest friend and help John on with his coat.” The little girl began to play mother. She got the coat and held it. “Come on, John-John,” she said patiently. “Put your coat on. We’re going home again.”
In a few moments, the children punctuated their goodbye kisses with Grand-mère and were driven quickly from the elegant old streets of Georgetown to the broad boulevards of Washington. In the dark, they could see the crowds of people, like deeper shadows, clustered in Lafayette Park. They saw others like ink blots along the White House fence on Pennsylvania Avenue. White House police were asking the people, quietly, to keep moving. In the driveway, flashbulbs winked like giant fireflies, and Caroline said: “What are all these people for?”
The nurse was saddened. “To see you,” she said. The car moved slowly around to the South Grounds. The little party alighted at the Diplomatic Entrance. White House police, in uniform, nodded at the children and Miss Shaw. A Secret Service agent on a portable phone announced that the Kennedy children and nurse were returning to the mansion.
The back of the building was bright with light. Inside, the ushers nodded gravely to the children and tried to look cheerful. In the downstairs lobby, Chief Usher Bernard West, who had served several Presidents, sat on a chair staring blankly at a wall. Men and women were trotting in opposite directions. There was a sound of many murmuring voices, as in a vaulted cathedral. For the first time, Caroline and John paused in their childish flight to look upward at the faces of adults. A secretary stared at them and burst into tears.
The little faces became grave. So much activity at night was unusual. This was their house, the only one they remembered. They had become accustomed to seeing many strange faces in it—walking, sitting, crouching to hug them, faces fine and faces fat and sweaty, some of which became familiar in time, others seen but once. It was an unusual house, but they knew no other existence and therefore the unusual was usual. This was a new experience. Some, whom they regarded as old friends, turned away. One or two wept. Others stared at them and shook their heads. Most people didn’t want to see them.
The party was led across the corridor and up the elevator to the second floor. This, the private section of the mansion, the living quarters of Presidents, was full of people. The girl and the boy looked up at the faces, many of them dear friends, but a search showed no parents. Maude Shaw whispered to a few of these people, and they told her, “She’s expected here soon.”
In the small suite of rooms, Maude Shaw closed the door. The British woman felt more fatigued and more nervous than she remembered. The phone rang and she asked the children to be quiet. It was an usher. He said that Mrs. Kennedy might go to Bethesda first with the President and return later to the mansion. Maude Shaw, far from resenting it, appreciated it. She could get John-John to bed and then have a moment to speak to Caroline.
She undressed John and bathed him and put him in his nighties. The nurse kept reminding herself that the children were good, so good. The phone rang several times. Each message was different from the last. Mrs. Kennedy was on her way to the White House. Mrs. Kennedy expected to be home soon. Mrs. Kennedy might not get home until late. Mrs. Kennedy . . . Mrs. Kennedy . . . Mrs. Kennedy.
A depression engulfed Maude Shaw. She could no longer act the happy playlet of bedtime. There were no stories, no bright promises for tomorrow. As Caroline was bathing happily, the nurse returned to her small room and looked out the front window. The stately trees were still there, dark branches of arteries against the night sky. The people out front seemed to be gathering, as though grief were a vigil of many eyes. In the hall, she could hear running feet; sometimes there were muffled voices.
It was a night of running panic. A bad time. To her, John F. Kennedy was more than a President. He was a magnificent man, a powerful friend. More than anything else, he was a father. More a father, perhaps, than a husband. Maude Shaw knew these innocents as well as anyone. She could not imagine how anyone, in the kindest manner, could inflict such cruel news upon them. John-John might not comprehend, but he would miss the big, affectionate hero who took him on helicopter rides, who teased him and made small man jokes. Caroline would be conscious of the permanence of death. She would understand that the tall, loving man who studied her printed alphabet and who always said in exaggerated surprise: “Caroline! Did you do this?” would not be seen again. She could not rationalize death, but she could understand the permanence of forever.
As the nurse watched them, her spiri
t became oppressed. They noticed that she did not play with them, so they played with each other—John-John running big skidding circles around the room as Caroline removed the dolls from her pillows. Miss Shaw helped John-John recite his night prayers and tucked him in bed. He would squirm for a few moments and maybe call her on one pretext or another, but then he would fall asleep and, for one more day, he would not know.
She went across the little foyer to Caroline’s room and sat on the edge of the bed as Caroline primly turned down the bedclothes. The big girl, at six, had a special privilege. Every night she was permitted to read a page or two from a child’s book. Miss Shaw took the book from her and began to read. The sound of her voice was unreal, and the tears came.
Caroline looked up from her pillow. The shiny face frowned. The nurse could no longer see the words in the book. “What’s the matter, Miss Shaw? Why are you crying?” The nurse leaned toward the child and placed both arms around the little body. “I can’t help crying, Caroline,” she said, “because I have very sad news to tell you.” “What?” the child asked. Miss Shaw wiped her eyes and began the story of a terrible accident in Dallas. It could be minimized only to a point. When a small voice asks “How badly is he hurt?” the impasse is reached. There is only one way of saying “he died.”
Caroline began to cry. Maude Shaw, having inflicted the involuntary cruelty, sat weeping and patted the child’s hand. She held that hand and kept patting it until fatigue overwhelmed the little girl. She slept.
Halfway between the White House and the Capitol is a huge mocha-colored doughnut called the Department of Justice. The north wing, facing Pennsylvania Avenue, is headquarters of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The lights were on. Agents in pairs entered the corner doors on the Ninth and Tenth Street sides. Twenty had already left for Dallas. The FBI was in charge of the federal investigation into the case. Gordon Shanklin, at the Dallas office, and his agents Vincent Drain and James Hosty had been working on it since 12:40 P.M. Shanklin had pulled in agents working on other cases and had put them in Sheriff Decker’s office, in Captain Fritz’s office, at Love Field, in Irving, Texas, and the School Book Depository building.
The Washington office required no special organization. It was ready. Alan Belmont, assistant to Director J. Edgar Hoover, was in command of all the skeins of investigation and evidence. Assistant Director Alex Rosen assigned the agents who would probe the mystery. One man, who worked as liaison in the exchange of common information between the Secret Service and the FBI, was in SS headquarters on M Street. Assistant Director William C. Sullivan was in charge of the internal security aspects—and background—of the suspect, Lee Harvey Oswald. Inspector James Malley took charge of all agents assigned to the case in Dallas.
The IT of the case was intelligence and tact. Except for presidential fiat, the FBI had no right to examine the prisoner, the background of the case, or the evidence. The assassination was not a federal crime. The agents would work gently and inoffensively with the Dallas Police Department. They would be in the same delicate position as the Secret Service men who sat with Captain Fritz, listening to the questions and responses, but seldom asking a question without permission.
Closed-circuit teletypes began to rap out information to field offices all over the United States. New York was listening. So were New Orleans, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, San Francisco, and others. Everything that was learned was put on teletype so that, if anyone in another office could offer assistance, it would be on a return teletype to headquarters in a few minutes. The offices in the long corridors of the building were well peopled that night, and men began the work of sorting information and misinformation.
In the Fire Arms Identification section, Robert Frazier cleared the decks for a long night. He was surprised when an agent walked in. The man was Elmer Todd, and he said he had a bullet given to him by a Secret Service man at Andrews Air Force Base. Frazier asked where it came from. “It fell off a stretcher in Parkland Hospital,” Todd said. The bullet was almost pristine. Frazier smiled down at it rolling in his hand. “The first reports,” he said, “claimed that the gun was a 7.35 Mauser. This is very interesting.” He placed the bullet into a device. “Just as I thought,” he said. “This is not 7.35. It is 6.5 millimeter. Did the Secret Service man know which stretcher it was on?”
“No,” Todd said. “The man who found it thought it came off Governor Connally’s stretcher.” Frazier began his work of examining the bullet scientifically. “Can’t tell who manufactured it,” he said, “without a cartridge case.” He held the back end of the bullet up below a microscope. “It’s not foreign-made,” he said. “This is American.”
The FBI, knowing that it had a small file on Oswald—mainly spot checks in Dallas to make certain that the man who defected to Russia did not get work in a sensitive defense plant—examined the reports and turned them over to William Sullivan, who was building up a skeletonized background on Oswald. He contacted the Central Intelligence Agency to see if they had anything on the suspect. Another man was sent to the State Department, to check their records of Oswald’s read-mission to the United States. Abram Chayes was still in his office, trying to make a digest of this material for Dean Rusk.
The New York office came in on the teletype asking for more information on the ammunition and the gun. They had an idea that they could run down the principal manufacturers of cheap rifles quickly. New Orleans came in, offering a detailed report on Oswald’s arrest for distributing Free Cuba leaflets on the streets; they also had a detailed report on his recent trip to Mexico. Two men, Francis X. O’Neill and James W. Sibert, were making notes at the autopsy.
“I’m going to stop for a minute,” Henry Wade said, as he parked the car beside police headquarters. The district attorney was seldom seen at the municipal building more often than, say, once a year. He had a big air-conditioned office in the county building and a staff of investigators and assistant prosecutors who worked to smooth the wrinkles in criminal cases before Mr. Wade tried them. He was big and shaggy, a type-cast Texan with wild wavy hair with streaks of gray.
He left Mrs. Wade and a couple in the car and walked inside and took the elevator to the third floor. Police who saw him nodded, or smiled, or shook hands and said, “Hello, Mr. Wade. What brings you over here?” He got to the third floor and, big and broad, shouldered the press aside with bantering words. He passed the Homicide office and headed for the office of the chief. His big feet slammed tripods and skidded over black television cables. To all questions, he drawled: “Fellas, I don’t know nuthin’.”
When he achieved the sanctum of the superior officers, he turned right and found Curry sitting at his desk. “How is the case coming along?” the district attorney said. Curry began to speak. Wade listened and asked questions. The prosecutor was beset by an involuntary verdict: he doesn’t know. The big man listened to the little one, but he wasn’t getting the facts he wanted.
The chief opened a desk drawer and gave Wade a memorandum from Detective Jack Revill. It stated what Revill thought that FBI Agent James Hosty had admitted to him about Oswald. The prosecutor refolded it and gave it back to Curry. An old memory popped into Henry Wade’s mind: he recalled that there was a woeful lack of communication between Jesse Curry and Will Fritz.
Over three hours ago, Sheriff Decker had told Wade that the Dallas Police Department had a “good suspect.” If it were true, Henry Wade would have to prosecute the biggest criminal case of the twentieth century. He would like to know how good the case was. “What are you going to do with Revill’s memorandum?” The chief looked up. “I don’t know,” he said. One thing is certain. Chief Curry thought it best not to draw the memo to the attention of the FBI; instead it might have more power if released to the press and television. Certainly it tended to show that the Federal Bureau of Investigation was aware of Oswald and felt that he had the potential of an assassin. As an incidental bonus, it would take the press off the back of the Dallas Police Department and point it toward t
he FBI.
Down the hall, Captain Fritz suspended the interrogation. Justice of the Peace David Johnston had arrived with a warrant for the arrest of Lee Harvey Oswald on a charge of first degree murder. At his side was a tough and coldly venomous prosecutor, Assistant DA William Alexander. Judge Johnston composed himself, unfolded a document, and read aloud to Oswald that he was being charged with the willful and deliberate murder of Police Officer J. D. Tippit. “I didn’t shoot anybody,” Oswald said. The tone was not belligerent; it was a flat declaration of innocence.
Johnston gave the document to the captain, who scrawled “Will Fritz” across the bottom line. “Didn’t you also shoot President Kennedy?” Fritz said. His tone was a soft bass. Oswald shook his head. “I didn’t shoot anybody.” Mr. Alexander took the signed document for safekeeping at Wade’s office. The justice of the peace said: “I remand you in the custody of the sheriff of Dallas County.” This order should have been executed but wasn’t.
The postal inspector, H. D. Holmes, said that he had a question to ask. Fritz nodded. Holmes reminded Oswald that the records he had in his hand indicated that Oswald had rented Post Office Box 30061 when he was in New Orleans. The prisoner saw no objection to this. He said he had rented the box. The inspector said that the application listed one Marina Oswald and one A. J. Hidell as the only persons, beside Lee Harvey Oswald, who were entitled to take mail from that box.
If the prisoner saw a trap, he pretended not to notice it. “Well,” he said loudly, “so what? She’s my wife, and I see nothing wrong with that, and it could very well be that I placed her name on the application.” The postal inspector and every police officer in the room knew that one of the vital points in the interrogation was to prove that Lee Harvey Oswald and Alex J. Hidell were the same person. The name had appeared on the post office application in Dallas. “I know,” said Holmes softly, “but what about this A. J. Hidell?” Oswald stared down at his handcuffs. He shrugged. “I don’t recall anything about that,” he said.
