by Jim Bishop
In a minute, he was out in the cool midnight air, hurrying to the parked car. On the front seat, Sheba sat waiting. Ruby sometimes referred to her as “my wife.” He started the car and moved it quickly to the curb in front of KLIF. There, across the sidewalk, was the door. Ruby parked, grabbed the big bags, slammed the door, and hurried to the building. The door was locked. The reporter had missed his first deadline.
He stood in front of the door, breathing. He waited ten minutes. Russ Knight came down the street, returning to KLIF with a fresh interview with Henry Wade. “I brought some sandwiches and soda for you guys,” Jack Ruby said. Knight unlocked the door. They went upstairs to the radio station. The Good Samaritan had bought his way in for $9.60.
The several parts of the funeral had been hammered together. Nothing was “finalized,” but Sargent Shriver and his White House “pickup team” could see the outlines and the stages at 1 A.M. The handsome, square-jawed man who directed the Peace Corps could not sit in Dungan’s office any longer. Walking was a necessity. He chose to go all the way across the White House to inspect the decoration of the East Room.
As Shriver stood, he beckoned to David Pearson and Lloyd Wright to follow him. He walked sturdily, purposefully through the curving empty corridor of the main floor. Somewhere ahead, he heard John F. Kennedy speaking. It was strange and depressing to hear once more the clear New England accent of a man who would not be heard in this building again. Mr. Shriver continued ahead. In a small office, empty, a television set was on. Pearson and Wright followed their man to the doorway and watched him take an empty chair.
The President, with chin high, was addressing the people of West Berlin. He was stirring and forceful and, beneath the stand, scores of thousands of Germans turned bright expectant faces upward, like cool petals to a warming sun. “Ich bin ein Berliner!” shouted Kennedy in limping German and a deep roar of approval came up from the crowd. Sargent Shriver stood. He left the set on, as though he didn’t want to be a party to stilling that voice forever.
At the office of the President, Shriver paused again. A United States marine, stiff in dress blues, guarded the empty place. He flicked the office lights on, and the bright interior became the natural frame for the voice coming from a box. Every place, every sound was designed to salt sorrow with recollection. The outside walk, between the swimming pool and the Rose Garden, clicked with the Kennedy heels, the Kennedy chuckles when the children rushed him from ahead, the Kennedy laughter when he was in the pool with Dave Powers and Dave said: “I had to learn the breast stroke because it’s the only way I can swim and talk to you.” Next to the boxed hedge, the President dozing fitfully behind sunglasses on the lounge, hands behind head, the lean figure as straight as an exclamation point, secretly watching his wife and the children at the swings and the slides.
Shriver was a couple of strides ahead of Wright and Pearson, as the President used to be a couple ahead of O’Donnell and Salinger. The ridiculous recollections could go on and on. Shriver continued along the grand corridors, empty except for a pair of Secret Service eyes at posts along the way. He walked along the main corridor to the East Room and inside. The artist who had studied the Lincoln funeral, William Walton, was lighting a cigarette. Shriver nodded to him and to Richard Goodwin, who had another book in his hand.
“She wants the East Room to be prepared for him,” said Walton, knowing that there was only one “she”—”like it was for Lincoln.” The visitors had known this for hours. So had Walton and Goodwin and Schlesinger. It is possible that Walton was relating this to himself. “If they are going to get here about two-thirty, I doubt that we can match the Lincoln scene. . . .”
There was an artistic disinclination to do the room á la Lincoln. Goodwin said: “They were pretty rococo in those days.” Shriver looked over some of the drawings of ninety-eight years ago and agreed. The catafalque was heavy with black bunting. Mirrors were covered with black gauze, as though the sight of an image alive might bring bad luck. The hanging crystal chandeliers were swathed with circular black; the windows were edged with crepe. It was overdone. To imitate it would be deliberately depressing. Shriver agreed with Walton.
“I think we can capture the right feeling,” said Walton, “and yet adapt it a little more to Jack Kennedy.” The artist decided to make the room mournful without making it sob. The mirrors would have slender skeins of black around the frames, but not across the glass. Bits of black here and there in the room would establish the proper aura of respect for the dead, without darkening the place and robbing it of life.
Pearson said: “Maybe there ought to be a crucifix.” Like everything else thought of or devised that night, it was “sent for.” Christ Himself must be in good taste. When a bloody crucifix was tendered, Sargent Shriver declined it and sent for one in his Maryland home. Someone brought up the option of open casket versus closed. The artist was positive that the President would prefer to have it closed. “Jack didn’t like to be touched,” he said quietly to David Pearson. “I doubt whether he would like to be stared at now.”
The elevator door opened on the fourth floor and Deputy Chief Lumpkin and four detectives stepped off. Within the embrasure of heads was Lee Harvey Oswald. He carried his handcuffs forward of his body and he watched the procedure of transfer from Homicide and Robbery Division to the municipal jail with no interest. One of the jailers asked if he had been fingerprinted and mugged, and a detective said: “I think so.” The prisoner knew he had not been photographed. The frisking was repeated. A prisoner’s card was filled out by the jailers as a receipt for the custody of Oswald.
The party went to the fifth floor. There, Lumpkin turned his man in for the night. The late shift in the prison went through the procedures as though Oswald had not been through it before. This time he was permitted to keep trousers and an undershirt. Two men led him to the old row of three cells and put him in the center one. The cuffs were taken from his wrists. He asked about permission to take a shower and he was told to get some rest. For the second time, he announced that he had “hygienic rights.”* The two men who kept the dangling ceiling bulb lit sat for a long night. If Oswald noticed that the Negro had been removed from Cell Number Three, he made no comment.
On the floor below, Officer R. D. Lewis completed his polygraph test on Wesley Frazier. He had nothing to show for fifty minutes of work. Two policemen had been stationed behind a one-way mirror watching the witness and listening to his replies to questions, and they, too, were convinced that, if there was such a thing as an assassination plot, this young man was not a party to it.
Lewis ran through the tape, studying the controls and the intensity of response, and shook his head negatively. One of the policemen phoned Captain Fritz. The captain ordered the three detectives to release the boy and to take him home. The detectives were to report off duty and be available in the morning. It did not assist morale to know that Fritz was more overworked than his men. Stovall knew that he would get home about 2 A.M., after delivering Frazier and Linnie Mae Randall and the Baptist minister to their homes in Irving. The officers would have to be out of bed and ready before 8 A.M. The only man who might sleep straight through the night was Oswald.
Robert Frazier was explicit. Evidence was going to continue to come into the FBI’s Weapons Identification Section all night long. He wanted each item to be tested exhaustively. New York had just Telexed Alan Belmont that a firm in Chicago called Klein’s Sporting Goods was known to have sold the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle by magazine coupon. Chicago had been asked to track down Klein’s management and, if necessary, to get them out of bed and try to locate a Dallas or New Orleans order from Lee Harvey Oswald, Lee Oswald, L. H. Oswald, Alex Hiddell, A. Hidell, or A. Hidel.
Handwriting experts would be studying the Oswald and Hiddell signatures; others were working all night in New Orleans to get background and biographical matter; a man was in the State Department working on Oswald’s Russian file; Gordon Shanklin in Dallas had a group of agents with the police
and the Secret Service; Drain was having evidence photographed before flying it to Washington; Frazier was taking a team to the White House garage to examine the President’s car.
The hour was late, but the men, members all of an elite corps of law enforcement agents, wanted to “wrap the case up” before dawn. In Dallas, Chief Curry and Captain Will Fritz thought it was already “wrapped.” The FBI considered that Dallas had a good case against Oswald; the bureau wanted to secure the loose ends, such as tracking and tracing the rifle and revolver to Oswald; identifying a bit of metal taken from the President’s brain as coming from that rifle; examining that recent trip to Mexico, inch by inch, to find out whether Oswald was part of a conspiracy or acting alone.
Frazier, who looked like a twenty-year bank teller, led Agents Charles Killian, Cortlandt Cunningham, Orrin H. Bartlett, and Walter E. Thomas onto Pennsylvania Avenue on the west side of the building. Two Agents, Sibert and O’Neill, were on their way in. They said they were returning from the autopsy. Supervisor Frazier didn’t have time to listen to a summary of the results. All he asked was: “Did you find anything?” They said yes, and displayed a shallow salve jar. The top was unscrewed. On white cotton batting were slivers of lead.
“Here are some metal fragments from the President’s head,” Sibert said. One weighed 1.65 grains; the other was 0.15 of a grain. Frazier touched them as though they were rare gems. “Is this all you found?” They said that X-ray plates disclosed that there were thirty or forty tiny bits of metal along the edges of the skull and embedded in the brain, but the doctors felt that they were too tiny to locate and withdraw.*
The Frazier group drove to M Street and identified themselves to the Secret Service agents. Deputy Chief Paterni had agreed to an FBI examination of SS-100-X, and they trundled it out from the alcove by hand. The plastic cover was removed; so was the leatherette convertible top. An FBI photographer mounted an aluminum ladder and began a series of shots from above, from the sides, from front and back. A shortwave aerial on the left side was broken off. Robert Frazier guessed it might have happened when Clint Hill made a dash for the back of the car as Mrs. Kennedy tried to climb out. Shots were made of the interior of the trunk.
When this phase was complete, Frazier and his agents moved in for an intense survey of the vehicle. The radiating crack on the windshield was examined, measured, and photographed. The glass was double, fused together by a gelatinous substance. The outside of the crack, at the front of the windshield, was smooth to the touch. On the inside, it felt like a small sharply edged crater. A receptacle was held under it; then Frazier ordered it carefully scraped with a sharp jack knife. Metal fragments, as small as bits of rust, were recovered. The metal content was identical with that of the bits of bullets recovered.
A dent was found in the upper frame of the windshield. This too was measured and observed. Frazier thought that a bit of flying metal might have hit it.* Inch by inch, the FBI men examined the exterior of the automobile, the body, the doors, the wheels, fenders, hood, trunk, even the ribs of the tires. No one hurried. The work was tedious. Frazier opened the back doors, then the front doors. The interior was still laden with petals of red and yellow roses.
Each one was removed and examined to see if any metal content adhered to the flower. The two limousine blankets, sealed in pockets in the doors, were removed and spread on the floor of the White House garage to be felt and dusted. On the back seat and on the rug FBI men picked up dry clots of blood and brain tissue. These scrapings were placed in envelopes, in the same manner that Doctor Burkley’s warrant officers had done earlier. Most of these grisly bits were sifted between rolling fingertips for metal.
The metal runner which held the rug down, in the front section as well as the rear, was carefully unscrewed and lifted clear. Some FBI agents held bright spotlights as others began the painstaking task of feeling each inch of the rugs, then lifting them clear to the floor of the garage for additional examination. The floorboards of the car were probed.
Three bits of lead missile material was found on the rug. The rear seat, which operated on a hydraulic lift, was removed. The trunk was opened. In all cases, a visual examination came first; notes were taken. The two sizable bullet ends found earlier in the front of the car were already being tested in the Weapons Identification Section of the FBI. It was considered possible that, as the President fell to his left with his head angling down, the third bullet may have crashed through the back of the skull, tumbled through the brain and out the top of the head, and spun to the inside of the windshield on the driver’s side, to inflict a crack in the glass and fall to the floor.
Frazier realized that many suppositions would never be proved. There were possibilities and probabilities and few provabilities.
On a table with dead microphones Jack Ruby made a space and put the bags of sandwiches and soda down. “Well!” he said happily, and then comically slapped a hand over his mouth and pointed to the mikes. The radio announcer on duty, William Glenn Duncan, Jr., pointed to a thick glass section, where a sound engineer was playing a tape. “You can talk,” he said. Russ Knight came in. He was going to splice his interview with Wade so that it would be a flawless interview. Ruby waved everyone in to shop for the right sandwiches and drinks.
One of each was brought into the sound engineer, who smiled and nodded his mute thanks. “Isn’t it awful,” said Ruby. “A weasel like that.” He chewed a sandwich and looked around. It was not the first time he had been in a radio studio. On the receiving end, in his automobile, radio stations always sounded loud and imperative and musically busy. In a room like this, a man felt like a dead fish in a vault. Excitement seemed to be one room removed, except when Mr. Duncan cut in with the late news. For a few minutes, Ruby stopped chewing and listened in fascination as the words fled in all directions to be heard in homes and automobiles and restaurants all over the Dallas prairie.
There were times to be quiet and times to speak. Jack Ruby asked Knight if he had seen that “terrible ad” placed in the News by someone named Bernard Weissman. It referred to President Kennedy in disgraceful terms, and Jack Ruby was afraid it might reflect on the Jewish community. Knight didn’t think so, but Ruby feared that the gentiles would think, with a name like Weissman, that it had been inspired by Jews. Besides, Ruby was sorely afflicted with a feeling that Dallas assessed Jews as being without courage. “Jews have guts,” he said frequently. “They’re ready to stand up and fight for the things they believe in.”
Knight played the interview with Wade. A little later he devised an oral editorial about the assault on Adlai Stevenson and the Weissman advertisement. Ruby said that Russ Knight was one guy who “will go to bat immediately if anything is wrong.” Once again, the nightclub owner was manipulating the news in a small way. He was part of a big story, and he would remain as long as he was within it. Russ Knight kindly mentioned Jack Ruby as the man who suggested, at the press conference, that reporters ask the D.A. if Oswald was sane. It was pleasing to know that one’s name was flying through the night sky to thousands and thousands of ears.
The men were told to go home, complete whatever they were working on and leave. Captain Fritz knew that some of them had been on duty sixteen hours. He wanted them back in the morning. In the race to close the case, he had an understandable ambition to help Homicide and Robbery to lead it. Fritz, sitting alone in his office, thumbing through the reports, was sorry that all that evidence had gone up to Washington. If Chief Curry had given the captain one full day, he would probably have traced that cheap rifle to some shop in Dallas and from there right to Oswald.
The phone rang. He picked it up and learned from Lieutenant Knight, in charge of the Bureau of Identification, that there were no fingerprint and no mug shots on Lee Harvey Oswald. Fritz thought he recalled prints being made. These were done by Lieutenant Day for swift comparison with latent prints on the rifle and the cardboard box. Knight wanted something more permanent. The captain said that the prisoner had been sent up to the
fifth floor for the night and to go get him.
Knight and Sergeant Warren went to the jail and filled in a checkout card at 12:35 A.M. Oswald did not protest. He was lying on a lower bunk, still in his T-shirt and slacks. He sat up and announced that he had been fingerprinted, but it was explained that it had been done with an inkless pad. Now that two felony counts had been filed against him, the Dallas department required permanent prints and photos. Copies of these would be sent to the Federal Bureau of Investigation as a matter of course to find out if the prisoner had a criminal record or if he was wanted by any other police department.
The car stood halfway in the gate at Carswell. Vincent Drain sat in back with his evidence. An Air Force sergeant phoned that he had a visitor without permit who wanted access to the hardstand. Except for the yellow overhead lights at the gate, Carswell Air Force Base was dark. In the distance, a service runway was flanked with deep blue lights. Drain and his FBI driver waited. A car pulled up behind them.
A man got out, walked up, and introduced himself as Winston Lawson, Secret Service agent. “I remember,” said Drain. “You were at headquarters this afternoon.” Lawson said that Inspector Kelley had heard about the evidence being transferred and had ordered him to accompany Drain. The FBI man had no objection; Gordon Shanklin had agreed to it. The sergeant at the gate was told that there were now two men to get aboard a special plane—one FBI, one Secret Service.
A few minutes later an officer arrived in a staff car. He greeted the agents, apologized for the delay, and took them through the barracks section in the darkness and out onto the air strip. They had to climb a small iron ladder. Lawson said he would help Drain with the packages. The FBI man declined with thanks. He clutched the material because his function was to protect the chain of evidence. Drain knew that when he arrived in Washington, no matter how tired he felt, he would have to remain with this material until Robert Frazier’s section had completed its exhaustive tests; then he would have to reboard this jet tanker at Andrews and fly back to Carswell and return the material to Captain Fritz.
