End of Days

by James L. Swanson

  This is not to say that Lee did not harbor violent fantasies. From Moscow, he had written to his brother Robert on November 26, 1959, that he would like to see the government of the United States overthrown: “In the event of war I would kill any American who put a uniform on in defense of the American government—any American.” But he had never spoken that way about John Kennedy.

  ON THE nineteenth, the Dallas Morning News had published the details of the route President Kennedy’s motorcade would follow when, in three days, Air Force One would lift off from Fort Worth and land at Love Field, Dallas. From there, the presidential limousine—a big, custom-built Lincoln Continental convertible—would take JFK on a long, circuitous motorcade through downtown Dallas to a lunch for more than 2,000 people at the Trade Mart, a huge convention center and wholesale merchandise mart.

  The motorcade was unnecessary. There were shorter, quicker routes from Love Field to the Trade Mart. But a parade would allow tens of thousands of Dallas citizens who would not otherwise glimpse JFK to assemble on the sidewalks and streets to see the president in person.

  In addition, many people working in office buildings along the route could open windows overlooking the street to enjoy a good, unobstructed view of the president. After the limousine drove through downtown Dallas, it would turn right from Main Street to Houston Street, proceed one block, turn left on Elm Street, and finally, as the crowds thinned in an area known as Dealey Plaza, pick up speed, vanish under an underpass, and follow the Stemmons Freeway for a short trip to the Trade Mart lunch.

  Anyone familiar with the streets of Dallas would know that after the president’s car turned left onto Elm, it would pass directly below a seven-story office building and warehouse known as the Texas School Book Depository. Everybody knew the Depository. It had a big, yellow clock atop the roof—put up by the Hertz rental car company—that made it a local landmark.

  Lee Harvey Oswald was familiar with Dealey Plaza. Since mid-October, before the president’s Texas trip had been finalized, he had held a job at the Depository as a low-level order filler who moved cardboard boxes of school textbooks around the building and pulled boxes to fulfill customer orders. But he didn’t know that John F. Kennedy would be driving right past the place he worked in three days because he probably failed to read the newspaper on the day the story ran. Too cheap to buy a daily paper, Oswald was in the habit of reading stale, day-old newspapers left behind in the lunchroom by coworkers. Thus, it is possible that it was not until the morning of Wednesday, November 20, two days before President Kennedy was scheduled to arrive in Dallas, that Oswald learned for the first time that the president of the United States would drive past his work-place.

  Oswald must have realized the implications of what he had just read: someone with the mind to do it could open a window on one of the upper stories of the Book Depository, wait for the president’s motorcade to drive by, and shoot Kennedy as he passed. The distance between an open window on, say, the fifth, sixth, or seventh floors and Elm Street was too great to fire a pistol at a stationary target below, let alone at a moving car. A pistol’s short barrel could not guarantee sufficient accuracy at that range. But Oswald would have known from his military training that someone would need to use a rifle to hit someone from such a distance.

  It had never been attempted before: no American president had ever been assassinated from long distance by a rifle. Three of them—Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, and William McKinley—had all been murdered at close range—no more than several feet—by lone gunmen firing pistols in 1865, 1881, and 1901. But sometimes pistols were not enough to get the job done.

  In 1912, former president Theodore Roosevelt had been shot in the chest with a revolver during his campaign for reelection as a third-party candidate, but he survived the wound. On February 15, 1933, an assassin in Miami, Florida, fired a pistol at a convertible car occupied by president-elect Franklin Roosevelt. The gunman missed his target but wounded the mayor of Chicago, Anton Cermak, who was standing next to Roosevelt. Cermak died the next month.

  And on November 1, 1950, two Puerto Rican nationalists who wanted complete independence from the United States tried to assassinate President Harry Truman by fighting their way with pistols into Blair House, the government guesthouse where he was living during White House renovations. The terrorists shot three policemen, wounding one fatally. One of the assassins was killed, and the other was captured. The gunmen never got into the president’s residence.

  Four years later, on March 1, 1954, while Congress was in session, a gang of four other Puerto Rican nationalists sitting in the visitor’s gallery of the House of Representatives opened fire with semiautomatic pistols wounding, but not killing, five congressmen. To this day, bullet holes from this attack scar the furniture in the House chamber. No, a pistol was not a foolproof weapon for an assassination.

  SO ULTIMATELY John Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald were brought together by a staggering coincidence. It is likely that Oswald would never have thought of killing Kennedy at all if the publicized motorcade route had not taken JFK to the doorstep of Oswald’s place of employment. It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity—the president was coming to him!

  Earlier in the year, on March 15, less than a month before he tried to assassinate General Walker, Oswald wrote to his brother Robert: “It’s always better to take advantage of your chances as they come along.”

  Oswald must have thought about it. He possessed the necessary skill and equipment. He had learned to shoot in the U.S. Marine Corps, and he owned a rifle. He could do it. Yes, he could. But would he? And why?

  Sometime between the morning of November 19 and the afternoon of November 21, Oswald decided to assassinate President Kennedy. No one knows exactly when he made that decision. It could have been as early as the morning of Tuesday, November 19, but only if he broke his habit and read the morning paper the same day it came out. If he followed his usual custom, then he would not have read Tuesday’s paper until the following day, the morning of November 20. Once Oswald read the day-old paper, perhaps he also consulted Wednesday’s Dallas Times Herald, the afternoon paper, which confirmed the motorcade route. Then, on Thursday, November 21, to make sure that the public knew where to go to see the president, the morning paper published a map of the route that Kennedy’s limousine would follow.

  WHEN AIR Force One landed at San Antonio International Airport, Jackie Kennedy was first to disembark, ahead of her husband. He wanted the crowd to see her first. JFK loved the excitement she caused. Waiting to receive them was Vice President Lyndon Johnson, along with various dignitaries. Johnson had flown from his ranch to San Antonio on his own private plane, arriving about an hour before the president. He killed the time by having lunch with his wife and getting a haircut. A reception committee presented Jackie with a bouquet of yellow roses.

  Also waiting was the presidential limousine, flown in the night before from Washington. It was a Lincoln convertible that had been custom-built by the Ford Motor Company. A second car had also been flown to San Antonio—a 1955 open-top Cadillac that followed close behind the president’s car in motorcades and that the Secret Service had nicknamed the Queen Mary.

  One hundred twenty-five thousand people lined the motorcade route, including a large number of high-school students carrying flags and friendly signs. At one high school, each student waved an American flag. In honor of the president’s visit, merchants had put up their Christmas decorations one week early. A handmade sign tried to entice Jackie to slip into a swimsuit: JACKIE, COME WATERSKI IN TEXAS. Other signs welcomed the Kennedys in Spanish.

  Outside the airport, JFK had spotted one disturbing sign. It did not protest his visit—but warned him of racial injustice: MR. PRESIDENT, YOU ARE NOW IN A SEGREGATED CITY.

  Along the whole route, crowds cheered the motorcade. They were loud and would not stop screaming. It was a fantastic welcome that put the president in a great mood.

  The motorcade took him to Brooks Medical Cente
r, a United States Air Force facility, where twenty thousand people waited for him to give an outdoor speech on the “New Frontier.” When the Kennedys got out of their limousine, the crowd went wild. People clamored to present gifts. One wild woman broke from the crowd and reached Jackie. “Mrs. Kennedy, Mrs. Kennedy, please touch my hand!”

  As in da Vinci’s painting of God touching his fingertip to the form of man to give him life, Jackie touched the woman. In ecstasy the Jackie disciple cried out, “O, my God! She really did touch me. She really did.”

  John Kennedy gave an invigorating speech on the challenges of the future.

  “We . . . stand on the edge of a great new era filled with both crises and opportunity. . . . It is an era which calls for action, and for the best efforts of all those who would test the unknown and the uncertain in every phase of human endeavor. It is a time for pathfinders and pioneers.”

  The president turned to one of his favorite topics.

  “This nation has tossed its cap over the wall of space—and we have no choice but to follow it . . . with the help and support of all Americans, we will climb this wall with safety and with speed—and we shall explore the wonders on the other side.”

  From Brooks Medical Center, the Kennedys rode in a half-hour motorcade to Kelly Field, a military airfield adjacent to San Antonio International, where Air Force One had been moved. Five thousand people waiting for them there cheered their arrival. They boarded the plane at 3:48 P.M. for the forty-five-minute flight to Houston.

  EVEN BEFORE John Kennedy had touched down in San Antonio at 1:30 P.M. on the afternoon of November 21, Oswald had already decided to kill him. A deviation from Oswald’s normal behavior offers an intriguing clue. On the morning of November 21, he ate breakfast at the Dobbs House restaurant. He was not in the habit of eating breakfast out, and he couldn’t afford to do it. Did breaking his routine by treating himself to a special breakfast signal that something was different and that he had decided by the morning of the twenty-first to assassinate the president?

  Depending on the exact timing of his decision, Oswald had about twenty to fifty hours to make—and carry out—his scheme. He was a trained and experienced rifleman who would have known that a successful assassination required careful advance planning.

  He could not just poke his rifle out of a random Book Depository window on the spur of the moment on November 22 and start shooting, hoping to hit his target. No, a proper sniper attack combined angles, timing, stealth, concealment, and patience. And an escape route. Oswald could not leave these details until the last minute.

  Where, Lee Oswald might have asked himself, was the best location in the Texas School Book Depository from which to shoot someone driving by on Elm Street?

  One of the upper floors, high over the street, would place him above the sight lines of parade watchers and the passengers in the multicar motorcade. That way he could position himself to shoot down at the president, from an angle that would make it difficult for witnesses to spot him. Oswald chose the sixth floor. It was a floor he knew well. He had spent a lot of time up there wandering around with his clipboard and searching for boxes of books to fill customer orders.

  Additional circumstances made the sixth floor an even better choice. A portion of the wood flooring was being refurbished, so workers had moved many heavy cardboard cartons full of books to the south side of the floor, near the row of windows looking down upon Elm Street. There were twice as many boxes on that side of the building as normal. Stacks of them obstructed a clear sight line across the room and would shield anyone who wanted to remain hidden from anyone else on that floor. It would be as easy as a child stacking building blocks to move some of those cartons and arrange them into a wall on November 22. Oswald could set up his position at the window of his choice. He could even shift a couple of boxes to the edge of the windowsill and rest his rifle on the top one to steady his aim.

  The large number of boxes on the floor would also make it easy for Oswald to stash his weapon. On November 22, he would need to hide the rifle from other Book Depository workers for four hours, between the time he brought it to work by around eight A.M. until around noon, when he would retrieve it. Then he would take his position behind the boxes and wait for his prey.

  After he shot the president, what would he do with the rifle? Oswald planned to leave the weapon behind at the Book Depository. There was almost no chance he could descend five flights of stairs (or take the elevator) without encountering coworkers or any policemen or Secret Service agents who might storm the building after they heard the shots. It wouldn’t look good if he was clutching the rifle in his hands. Even if he didn’t pass anyone while escaping the building, he could hardly expect to stroll unnoticed down Elm Street with a rifle slung over his shoulder. He could try to disassemble it on the sixth floor and stuff it into the same brown paper bag he planned to use to carry it to the Book Depository the morning of the twenty-second, but that would cost too much time, at least one minute and maybe two. Every second would be precious to Oswald’s escape. He would have to abandon his weapon on the sixth floor.

  No criminal wants to leave a murder weapon behind at the scene of the crime. A firearm is an incriminating piece of evidence. It can bear fingerprints that identify a gunman. Firearms possess serial numbers that can be traced. The inside grooves of a rifle barrel leave unique marks on a bullet so that a spent round can be identified later as having been fired from that particular weapon. A brass cartridge case ejected from a rifle after the bullet has been fired can bear telltale signs that match it to the weapon from which it came.

  It was risky for Oswald to leave his rifle at the Book Depository. Yes, he had purchased it by mail under a false name using a postal money order, not a personal check, and he had directed it to be shipped not to his home address, but to a post-office box, which he had rented using a false name. But even taking those steps did not guarantee secrecy. There was still a chance that law-enforcement officials could trace the weapon to him, but that, he figured, should take a while.

  The would-be assassin had now chosen his floor and his method of disposing of his weapon. Now he had to pick his window. Fourteen large, tall double-hung windows ran along the south wall facing Elm Street. President Kennedy would drive within view of all of them. Oswald had a choice of any of them from which to aim his rifle. He selected one, the window at the far southeast corner. At some point he might have rehearsed his plans, performing a walk-through of the assassination.

  Perhaps he walked the length of the wall, peering down to Elm Street through each window, assessing the suitability of its angle of view. At the last window on the left, Oswald must have noticed its two advantages over all other windows on the floor. First, it looked straight down Houston Street, the route that Kennedy’s limousine would follow to Elm Street on November 22. As Oswald watched the traffic come up Houston Street, he had to have seen what an easy target a car on that road would be.

  The president would follow that identical route. In other words, for one block, the president would drive directly toward the Depository, up Houston Street, and toward that window. From Kennedy’s point of view, the window was the one on the far right end of the sixth floor. From Oswald’s point of view, he would have an unobstructed, head-on look at the president’s car as it drove closer and closer toward the Book Depository.

  Second, right below the Depository, the president’s car would have to slow almost to a stop to make the hairpin, tight-angled left turn onto Elm Street. Then, from almost the moment the car made the turn and then continued along the length of the Book Depository, anyone standing in that window would have, for at least ten or fifteen seconds, a perfect view of the back of the presidential limousine. That was plenty of time to get off two to four well-aimed shots. No other window on the sixth floor offered an earlier look at the president’s approach up Houston Street or a longer look at the back of the car once it turned onto Elm. This was where Oswald would build his sniper’s nest.

&nb
sp; BY THE afternoon of Thursday, November 21, Oswald was willing but not yet equipped to carry out an assassination the next day. Oswald was spending weekdays at a Dallas rooming house at 1026 North Beckley Street, while Marina lived in Mrs. Ruth Paine’s house in Irving. He kept his .38-caliber snub-nosed revolver and its leather belt holster (designed for concealment) in his room. Police-style revolvers, unlike Oswald’s, had longer barrels, which made them more accurate but harder to hide from view. But he needed his rifle. It was at Mrs. Paine’s house, in her garage, lying flat on the floor, wrapped in a blanket. But it was a Thursday, not a Friday, and he was not supposed to drop in at Ruth Paine’s unannounced. He had never gone to Irving on a weekday. Tonight, he would have to make an exception to that rule. Lee, who did not own a car or have a driver’s license, asked Buell Wesley Frazier for a ride to Irving. Buell had been giving Oswald a lift to Irving every Friday.

  Between eight and ten o’clock on Thursday morning, Oswald approached Frazier at a first-floor work table, handling orders.

  “Could I ride home with you this afternoon?”

  “Sure. You know, like I told you. You can go home with me anytime you want to, like I say anytime you want to go see your wife that is all right with me.”

  Frazier’s house, at the corner of Westbrook and Fifth, stood about half a block east from Ruth Paine’s, both on the north side of Fifth. Frazier realized it wasn’t Friday, Lee’s customary day to visit Marina for the weekend.

  “Why are you going home today?”

  “I am going home to get some curtain rods. You know, put in an apartment.”

  “Very well.”

  Frazier asked Oswald if he would also like a ride home after work tomorrow afternoon too, on Friday afternoon after work, but Lee said no, he did not need a ride on November 22. He would not be going home to Marina that day. For the rest of Thursday, they did not talk any more about the ride. They got off work at 4:40 P.M., and Buell drove Lee to Irving. It usually took until 5:20 P.M. to 5:35 P.M. to get there, depending on traffic and the length of stops at train crossings. During the trip, neither man mentioned President Kennedy’s visit to Dallas.