End of Days

by James L. Swanson

  By 2:00 P.M., the arresting officers at the Texas Theatre had brought Oswald to police headquarters. When detectives took him into an interrogation room, a man there recognized Oswald at once. It was Bill Shelley, foreman at the Texas School Book Depository. He was there giving an affidavit to a policeman. Shelley told the police, “Well, that is Oswald. He works for us. He is one of my boys.”

  Oswald said his name was “Hidell.” In his wallet, one piece of identification said his name was Hidell, and another said it was Oswald.

  A detective asked which name was real.

  “You find out,” Oswald replied.

  At 2:20 P.M. on Friday, November 22, Oswald was moved to the office of Captain Fritz. The Dallas district attorney, Henry Wade, had jurisdiction over the Tippit case, as he did over all murders in Dallas. Even when it became obvious that Oswald was also a suspect in the murder of President Kennedy, Wade and the Dallas police retained control of Oswald. No federal statute made killing a president a federal crime, so the U.S. attorney and the FBI had no power to seize Oswald from the custody of the Dallas Police Department.

  Detective Elmer Boyd asked Oswald why he had a bruise above his eye.

  “Well,” Oswald explained, “I struck an officer and the officer struck me back, which he should have done.”

  Oswald was playing contrite for now. Captain Fritz entered the office and, by 2:30 P.M., the first interrogation of Oswald had begun. It would be the first of four.

  Fritz asked for his full name.

  “Lee Harvey Oswald.”

  Fritz asked where he worked.

  “Texas School Book Depository,” Oswald said.

  Fritz wanted to know how he got the job.

  Oswald told him that a lady he knew recommended him for the job, and that he got it through her.

  Fritz was a master of the conversational style of interrogation. He wanted to warm Oswald up with a series of routine questions to get him talking.

  Why, the detective asked, did he possess a card that identifies him as “Hidell”?

  It’s just a name that “[I] picked up in New Orleans.”

  The employment records of the Book Depository said Oswald lived in Irving.

  No, Oswald said, he lived on Beckley in the Oak Cliff section of Dallas.

  Oswald added that his wife was staying with friends in Irving. This is the first the police had heard about the Dallas rooming house. The place might be filled with evidence. Fritz sent officers to North Beckley Street to search Oswald’s room.

  Soon two FBI agents arrived to join the questioning. One was James Hosty, the special agent who had called on Marina Oswald a few times after she and Lee had moved to Texas. Those visits had infuriated Lee. Now, he and Hosty were meeting for the first time.

  “Oh, so you’re Hosty, the agent who’s been harassing my wife!”

  “You have the right to remain silent,” Hosty advised him.

  Oswald had remained calm while Captain Fritz questioned him. Now Oswald was enraged, screaming and cursing at Hosty. What was the story, Fritz wondered, between Oswald and this FBI agent?

  “My wife is a Russian citizen who is in this country legally and is protected under diplomatic laws from harassment by you or any other FBI agent.” Oswald was out of control. “The FBI is no better than the Gestapo of Nazi Germany! If you wanted to talk to me, you should have come directly to me, not my wife.”

  The angry exchange between Oswald and Hosty alarmed Fritz. Just when the homicide detective was having a calm chat with his prisoner and getting to know him, the FBI barged in and infuriated Oswald. It would be tough to question him now. Fritz wanted to know what was going on. What did Oswald mean by “accosted”?

  “Well, he threatened her. He practically told her she’d have to go back to Russia. He accosted her on two different occasions.”

  Oswald was so angry about the visits that after they happened, he dropped off an anonymous menacing letter for Hosty at the local FBI office, warning that unless the special agent stopped bothering Marina, he would take action against the FBI.

  Oswald’s hands were cuffed behind his back. He told Fritz he wanted the handcuffs removed. That might be dangerous. Oswald was a suspect in the murder of a policeman. And he had tried to shoot more cops at the Texas Theatre. Free of the cuffs, he might spring from out of his chair, tackle one of the detectives or special agents, and grab for a gun. Fritz settled on a compromise, telling his men to remove the cuffs and recuff Oswald’s hands in front of his body.

  “Thank you, thank you,” Oswald said.

  To Hosty, he said, “I’m sorry for blowing up at you. And I’m sorry for writing that letter to you.” Now that Oswald appeared to have calmed down, Fritz hit him with his first serious question.

  “Do you own a rifle?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  Asked if he had ever seen a rifle in the Texas School Book Depository, Oswald said that he had seen one there two or three days before the assassination and that Roy Truly and some men were looking at it.

  Oswald was trying to implicate the manager of the Book Depository in the assassination.

  “Did you ever own a rifle?” Fritz repeated.

  “I had one a good many years ago. It was a small rifle . . . but I have not owned one for a long time.”

  Hosty interrupted Fritz’s line of questioning and asked Oswald if he had ever been to Mexico.

  “Sure. Sure I’ve been to Mexico. When I was stationed in San Diego with the Marines, a couple of my buddies and I would occasionally drive down to Tijuana over the weekend.”

  Fritz jumped back in. He did not want the FBI agent to take the interrogation off track or anger Oswald. He asked Lee if he had a Russian wife, if he had ever been to Russia, and for how long. Oswald answered all the questions. Then Fritz asked whether he had owned a rifle in Russia.

  “You know you can’t own a rifle in Russia. I had a shotgun over there. You can’t own a rifle in Russia.”

  Hosty interrupted with another question. “Mr. Oswald, have you been in contact with the Soviet embassy?” Oswald’s blood started boiling again.

  “Yes, I contacted the Soviet embassy regarding my wife. And the reason was because you’ve accosted her twice already!”

  Hosty continued. “Have you ever been to Mexico City? Not Tijuana. Mexico City . . . have you ever been to Mexico City?”

  “No! I’ve never been there. What makes you think I’ve been to Mexico City? I deny that!”

  Captain Fritz told Oswald to calm down. It was obvious to Fritz that allowing the FBI agent to question the suspect was counterproductive. Whenever the police detective soothed Oswald and got him talking, Hosty provoked him.

  “Okay,” Fritz said, “let’s take break.”

  AT THE Paine house, Ruth and Marina watched television coverage of the assassination. News reports that the shots were fired from the Book Depository troubled Marina, but the presence in the garage of what she assumed was the rifle still rolled in its blanket had calmed her. If she still had the rifle, that meant it could not have been Lee. Soon the police, following up Depository employment records, drove out to Ruth’s house. When they arrived, the screen door was closed but the front one was open. They could see Marina sitting in the living room watching television. Ruth Paine invited them in.

  They wanted to speak to Marina. They asked her if her husband owned a rifle. “Yes,” she answered. They began to search the premises.

  “When they came to the garage and took the blanket,” she thought, “well, now, they will find it.”

  Then it happened. One of the policemen reached down to pick up the blanket and its contents. It sagged in his hand. “They opened the blanket but there was no rifle there.” Until this moment, Marina did not know the rifle was gone. She could guess where it was now.

  Marina was devastated. “Then, of course . . . I knew that it was Lee.” So that’s why he had come to Mrs. Paine’s one day early.

  IN THE rear of Air Force One, Jackie Kenne
dy sat next to her husband’s coffin during the entire flight back to Washington, D.C. Top aides to John Kennedy took turns visiting her at the back of the plane, where they reminisced and told stories of happier days. They did not want her to mourn alone. Dave Powers told stories about the president’s trip to Ireland that June. Ken O’Donnell said, “You know what I’m going to have, Jackie? I’m going to have a hell of a stiff drink. I think you should too.” He offered to make her a scotch. “I’ve never had a scotch in my life,” she replied. Godfrey McHugh said that didn’t matter. “Now is as good a time as any to start.” Jackie acquiesced and downed two. It was the beginnings of an Irish wake. Ken O’Donnell remembered how this day had begun. “You know what, Jackie? Can you tell me why we were saying that this morning? What was it he said at the hotel? ‘Last night would have been the best night to assassinate a President.’ Can you tell me why we were talking about that?”

  Surrounded by the men who would miss Jack the most, Jackie was overcome with emotion. “You were with him from the start and you’re with him at the end.”

  During the flight, passengers divided into two camps, those who had served President Kennedy, and those who worked for Lyndon Johnson. For the duration of the flight, an uncomfortable tension filled the air. Some Kennedy aides had never liked LBJ, whose chief nemesis had been the president’s own brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy. Some of President Kennedy’s staffers were snobs who believed that Johnson, who had attended a teacher’s college in Texas, not an elite, Ivy League university as many of them had, was their social and intellectual inferior. Behind his back, they called him “cornpone” and mocked him as a crude country hick from the Texas Hill Country.

  In truth, Johnson was a master politician with a record of important achievements. Johnson’s earthiness was a mask that often concealed his sophisticated grasp of events and his keen understanding of the minds and behavior of others. Without Johnson as his vice presidential running mate in 1960, it is unlikely that John Kennedy would ever have been elected president in the first place. In their anguish, some Kennedy staffers now resented Johnson for becoming president. In fact, on November 22, Lyndon Johnson acted with grace and dignity. He did the best he could under the most trying of circumstances.

  Forty thousand feet below the jet carrying home the body of John Kennedy and the new president, Lyndon Johnson, was a stunned nation grieving its fallen leader. By midafternoon, almost everyone in America knew about the assassination. On the flight back, Jackie Kennedy began to plan her husband’s funeral. Before she was done, she would oversee the biggest, most majestic public funeral in American history since the death of Abraham Lincoln ninety-eight years earlier.

  IN DALLAS, at 3:40 P.M. (CST), Captain Fritz returned to his office and continued to question Oswald.

  “I asked him why his wife was living in Irving and why he was lving on Beckley.”

  His wife, Oswald explained, was staying with Mrs. Paine, who is trying to learn Russian. Marina teaches her, and Mrs. Paine helps her out with the baby.

  “How often do you go out there?” the detective asked.

  “Weekends.”

  Why didn’t Lee stay at Mrs. Paine’s full-time? Fritz wanted to know.

  Oswald said that he didn’t want to stay there all the time because Ruth Paine and her husband did not get along too well.

  Fritz asked Oswald some questions about his schooling, his background, and whether he owned a car. No, he had no car, Oswald said. Then Fritz asked about his Marine Corps service.

  “Did you win any medals for rifle shooting in the Marines?”

  “The usual medals,” said Oswald, admitting that he had received an award for marksmanship.

  It was part of Fritz’s interrogation style to shift from one subject to another, unrelated one, to keep a suspect off balance and never allow him to get too comfortable. He did that now.

  “Lee, why were you registered at the boarding house as O.H. Lee?”

  It was the landlady’s fault, said Oswald. “The lady didn’t understand me.” He just left it that way.

  Another of Fritz’s tactics was to ask a suspect a question he already knew the answer to, and which the suspect could answer truthfully without incriminating himself. Observing how a suspect behaved while he was telling the truth would help Fritz intuit when he was telling a lie. He asked a series of the easy questions now.

  Did he work at the Depository today?

  Oswald said yes, and that he had worked there since October 15.

  Fritz asked what part of the building he was in at the time the president was shot.

  Oswald claimed he was having lunch on the first floor. They broke for lunch about noon, and he came down and ate.

  “Where were you when the officer stopped you?”

  On the second floor drinking a Coca-Cola. There’s a soda machine in the lunchroom there. Oswald said he went up to get a drink.

  Fritz asked what Oswald did after the president was shot. He said he left the building.

  And where did he go?

  Oswald said he went home to his room on Beckley. He was telling the truth. “I took the bus and went home, changed my clothes, and went to a movie.”

  That was an odd thing to do, Fritz thought. Who goes home to get a pistol before going to the movies?

  Why did he do that?

  “ ’Cause I felt like it.”

  “Because you felt like it?”

  “You know how boys do when they have a gun, they just carry it.”

  Now Captain Fritz slipped in a real question.

  “Did you shoot Officer Tippit?”

  It was not a silly thing for the detective to ask. He was a master at questioning murder suspects, and Oswald would not have been the first one he had lulled into confessing his crime. Fritz hoped Oswald would make it easy for him.

  No, Oswald said. “The only law I violated was in the show: I hit the officer in the show, and he hit me in the eye and I guess I deserved it. That is the only law I violated. That is the only thing I have done wrong.”

  Fritz asked Oswald what he did in the Soviet Union, and Lee told him he worked in an electronics factory. The detective jumped back to the assassination.

  Why did Oswald leave the Depository after the shooting?

  “Shortly after the president was shot . . . I figured with all the confusion there wouldn’t be any more work to do that day.”

  Fritz asked him what kind of work he did there. Oswald explained that he filled orders. What floors, Fritz continued, did Oswald have access to? The detective might have been curious to see if Lee would lie about the sixth floor. But Oswald was nonchalant.

  “I was just a common laborer,” he said, and “as a laborer, I have access to the entire building.” Oswald told Fritz that the books were kept on the third through sixth floors. So he went to all the floors. Including the sixth.

  It was time, Fritz decided, to ask another zinger of a question.

  “Did you shoot the president?”

  It did not work. Oswald was not ready to admit anything.

  “No, I emphatically deny that.”

  A detective walked into Fritz’s office to tell him that some Secret Service agents, including Forrest Sorrels, were waiting to speak with him. Fritz terminated the interrogation and went to see them.

  The first round of Fritz’s interrogation of Oswald had not gone badly. No, Oswald had not blurted out a confession. But the police detective had already learned several things about the suspect. Foremost, Oswald would talk to Fritz. It became obvious that he was a man who liked to talk. He was not one of those people who, once in custody, would clam up and refuse to say a word. He had not even demanded a lawyer before conversing with Fritz. Oswald was calm and arrogant. His disdain for the authorities oozed from his voice, facial expressions, and body language. But he could lose control when needled by an FBI agent.

  Agent Hosty had gotten under Lee’s skin and caused him to lose his temper. Fritz concluded that he, and not t
he FBI or the Secret Service, should remain Oswald’s principal interrogator. Too much direct interaction between Lee and the men from those federal agencies might be counterproductive and ruin the trust that the wily old Texan cop was trying to build with Oswald. After decades on the job, Will Fritz had a sixth sense about innocence and guilt, and truth and deception.

  And Oswald had already told several lies. He claimed he did not own a rifle, had never been to Mexico City, had not registered at the boardinghouse under a false name, had eaten lunch that day on the first floor of the Book Depository, and had not shot President Kennedy.

  Forrest Sorrels asked Captain Fritz if Oswald had confessed. No, Fritz said, but the interrogation was far from over. Sorrels said he would like to talk to the suspect at some point. How about right now?, Fritz offered. The detective led the Secret Service agents to a room behind his office, and then had Oswald brought in. Oswald stiffened at the sight of them.

  “I don’t know who you fellows are, a bunch of cops.”

  Sorrels gave Oswald his name and showed him his identification.

  “I don’t want to look at it.” Oswald was defiant. “What am I going to be charged with? Why am I being held here? Isn’t someone supposed to tell me what my rights are?”

  “Yes, I will tell you what your rights are,” Sorrels said. “Your rights are the same as that of any American citizen. You do not have to make a statement unless you want to. You have the right to get an attorney.”

  Oswald asked, “Aren’t you supposed to get me an attorney?”

  Sorrels said no, but informed Oswald that he was free to be represented by the attorney of his choice. “I just want to ask you some questions,” Sorrels continued. He got Oswald talking about his time in the Soviet Union, but Lee became impatient. “I don’t care to answer any more questions.” This round of interrogation was over.

  ABOARD AIR Force One, Johnson worked the phone. There was one call he dreaded to make. It was to President Kennedy’s mother, Rose. “What can I say to her?” he asked Lady Bird. Then he spoke to Rose Kennedy: “I wish to God there was something I could do.” She replied, “We know how much you loved Jack and how Jack loved you.” LBJ was uncomfortable and wanted to get off the phone as soon as possible. “Here’s Lady Bird,” he said as he handed the phone to his wife. “Oh, Mrs. Kennedy,” she said, “we must all realize how fortunate the country was to have your son as long as it did.” Rose Kennedy did not want to linger on the phone any more than the Johnsons did. She ended the call, “Goodbye, goodbye.” Then he called political allies and congressional leaders. He wanted to meet with some of them tonight, and more tomorrow.