Crossfire

by Jim Marrs

  The entire affair was toned down and quietly forgotten—except by Cellar owner Kirkwood. During the intervening years, Kirkwood has admitted that while the Cellar had no license to sell liquor, nothing prevented him from giving it away. And give it away he did. In a 1984 article in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram recalling the wild days of the Cellar, Kirkwood recalled, “We had strange rules. We’d give drinks to doctors, lawyers, politicians, stag girls, policemen, anybody we thought we might need if something broke out.”

  Kirkwood’s mother recalled that sometimes her son would “give away five hundred dollars’ worth of whiskey in a month.” This author, even though underage, was served alcohol in the Cellar when accompanied by older news reporters. In the newspaper article, Kirkwood mentioned the Secret Service incident:

  After midnight the night before [the assassination], some reporters called me from the Press Club [of Fort Worth], which didn’t have a license to sell drinks after midnight. [They] said they had about 17 members of the Secret Service and asked if they could bring them to my place. I said sure. About 3:30 [a.m.], these Secret Service men were sitting around giggling about how the firemen were guarding the President over at the Hotel Texas. That night got the Cellar mentioned in the Warren Report.

  Jimmy Hill, who managed the Cellar for eleven years, was even more to the point in that same article:

  After the agents were there, we got a call from the White House asking us not to say anything about them drinking because their image had suffered enough as it was. We didn’t say anything, but those guys were bombed. They were drinking pure Everclear [190 proof alcohol].

  It might be noted that no one saw the agents in a drunken revelry—although at least one unmarried female reporter tagged along with them for company. In fact, according to most present, the agents sat by themselves quietly talking and drinking. However, the fatigue of the multi-stop Texas trip coupled with the alcohol and lack of sleep obviously left the agents in less-than-optimal condition to perform their duties.

  During the wild ride to Parkland Hospital, presidential aide Kenneth O’Donnell thought about the interval between the final shots. Years later, he wrote:

  If there was an interval of at least five seconds between the second and third shots, as it seemed, that was long enough for a man to run 50 yards. If the Secret Service men in the front had reacted quicker to the first two shots at the President’s car, if the driver had stepped on the gas before instead of after the fatal third shot was fired, would President Kennedy be alive today?

  Former senator Ralph Yarborough echoed O’Donnell’s concern when he wrote the Warren Commission:

  All of the Secret Service men seemed to me to respond very slowly, with no more than a puzzled look. Knowing something of the training that combat infantrymen and Marines receive, I am amazed at the lack of instantaneous response by the Secret Service when the rifle fire began.

  The reaction-impairment issue aside, conspiracy-minded researchers, noting that throughout history a great man’s bodyguards usually have been the key to a successful coup d’état, have suggested that Kennedy’s guards may have been aware of the coming events in Dealey Plaza and were under too much stress to get a quiet night’s sleep.

  Interestingly, none of Vice President Johnson’s Secret Service guards were in the entourage that drank at the Press Club and then moved on to the Cellar.

  Aside from the sluggish reaction of the Secret Service agents in Dealey Plaza, other oddities occurred in the motorcade during the assassination.

  One agent, John D. Ready, did start to react by jumping off the follow-up car (a 1956 Cadillac touring sedan convertible). However, he was recalled by special agent in charge Emory Roberts.

  This was reminiscent of an earlier incident as the motorcade left Love Field. Captured on film by ABC’s Dallas affiliate WFAA, agent Henry J. Rybka can be seen being waved off Kennedy’s limousine by Roberts. He then throws his hands several times to reflect his confusion over this unusual and unexplained order.

  Then there is the much-publicized story of agent Rufus Youngblood, who reportedly threw himself valiantly on top of Vice President Johnson after the shooting began in Dealey Plaza. Youngblood was considered the hero of the hour. In his report of that day, Youngblood wrote that upon hearing the first shot, “I quickly looked all around again and could see nothing to shoot at, so I stepped over into the back seat and sat on top of the vice President.”

  In a statement to the Warren Commission, Johnson mentioned the incident:

  I was startled by a sharp report or explosion, but I had no time to speculate as to its origin because Agent Youngblood turned in a flash, immediately after the first explosion, hitting me on the shoulder, and shouted to all of us in the back seat to get down. I was pushed down by Agent Youngblood. Almost in the same moment in which he hit or pushed me, he vaulted over the back seat and sat on me. I was bent over under the weight of Agent Youngblood’s body, toward Mrs. Johnson and Senator Yarborough.

  Years later in his book, The Vantage Point, Johnson elaborated:

  It is apparent that there were many reactions to the first shot. . . . I did not know what it was. Agent Youngblood spun around, shoved me on the shoulder to push me down and shouted to all of us, “Get down!” Almost in the same movement, he vaulted over the seat, pushed me to the floor, and sat on my right shoulder to keep me down and to protect me. Agent Youngblood’s quick reaction was as brave an act as I have ever seen anyone perform. When a man, without a moment’s thought or hesitation, places himself between you and a possible assassin’s bullet, you know you have seen courage. And you never forget it.

  However, former Texas senator Ralph Yarborough, who was sitting beside Johnson that day, told this author, “It just didn’t happen. . . . It was a small car, Johnson was a big man, tall. His knees were up against his chin as it was. There was no room for that to happen.”

  Yarborough recalled that both Johnson and Youngblood ducked down as the shooting began and that Youngblood never left the front seat. Yarborough said Youngblood held a small walkie-talkie over the back of the car’s seat and that he and Johnson both put their ears to the device. He added, “They had it turned down real low. I couldn’t hear what they were listening to.”

  It would be most interesting to learn what the men listened to, since Dallas police radio channel 1 designated for the presidential party was blocked from radio traffic for about eight minutes beginning at 12:26 p.m., about four minutes before the shooting, by a transmitter stuck open. It may have been that Johnson and Youngblood were listening to a channel reserved for inter-vehicle radio traffic, but no transcripts of this channel have been made public.

  Obviously, either Yarborough or Johnson and his Secret Service agents did not tell the truth of what happened in the motorcade.

  In reviewing the Secret Service activity in the course of Kennedy’s Dallas trip, even the gullible Warren Commission concluded that while “the detailed security measures taken at Love Field and the Trade Mart were thorough and well-executed, in other respects . . . the advance preparations for the President’s trip were deficient.”

  The House Select Committee on Assassinations was even harsher, stating:

  In summary, the committee concluded that the Secret Service did in fact possess information that was not properly analyzed and put to use with respect to a protective investigation in advance of President Kennedy’s trip to Dallas. Further, it was the committee’s opinion that Secret Service agents in the Presidential motorcade in Dallas were not adequately prepared for an attack by a concealed sniper. Finally, the committee found that the investigation by the Secret Service of a possible assassination conspiracy was terminated prematurely when President Johnson ordered that the FBI assume primary investigative responsibility.

  There is cause for suspicion over the mystery of men encountered by several people in Dealey Plaza—including at least one policeman—who claimed to be Secret Service agents and even displayed credentials. Officially, all agen
ts were in the motorcade or already at the Trade Mart. No government panel has ever adequately investigated this matter to determine whether these men were bogus or real agents.

  Whether laxity, negligence, violations of regulations, or even malice, all the accusations against the Secret Service pale when compared to the 1992 nonfiction book Mortal Error, in which author Bonar Menninger claims that Secret Service agent George Hickey, riding the backup car, attempted to return fire at Oswald in the sixth floor, but bumbled and accidently shot Kennedy in the back of his head with an AR-15, the civilian model of the Army’s M-16 rifle. Menninger, then a reporter for the Kansas City Business Journal, obtained most of his theory from Howard Donahue, a retired ballistics expert from Towson, Maryland. In 1995, Agent Hickey sued publisher St. Martin’s Press over this claim but the suit was dropped in 1997 due to arguments that too much time had passed since the book was published. In 1998 a settlement for an undisclosed sum was reached between Hickey and St. Martin’s. While warmly embraced and publicized by the Establishment media at the time, Menninger’s thesis was largely dismissed by the JFK research community, primarily on the basis that films of the assassination showed no such shooting by Hickey was possible. However, it is true that Hickey brandished an AR-15 after the motorcade left Dealey Plaza, as was seen and described by Ed Hoffman and others along the route to Parkland.

  While the president’s guards certainly had the opportunity to achieve Kennedy’s death—either through direct action or through inaction—no motive has been established. And since the Service is a small agency within the federal government with relatively little power or influence, no one seriously believes that the Secret Service initiated or orchestrated the assassination.

  However, there remains a real possibility that certain individuals within the Secret Service may have been working for someone other than John Kennedy on November 22, 1963.

  Rednecks and Oilmen

  By the fall of 1963, President John F. Kennedy had acquired more domestic enemies than just irate anti-Castro Cubans, vengeful mob bosses, and disgruntled intelligence operatives.

  Both big business and supporters of states’ rights felt threatened by the new Kennedy brand of federalism—the wielding of total power from Washington.

  Hatred of Kennedy also was being fomented among those people opposed to the growing civil rights movement, particularly in the old Confederate states, which included Texas.

  Into this cauldron of century-old passions stepped Kennedy the politician, hoping to find a middle ground between the radical activists—on both sides.

  Kennedy friend Theodore Sorensen wrote, “Jack Kennedy . . . knew comparatively little and cared little about the problems of civil rights and civil liberties.”

  However, during the presidential campaign of 1960, Kennedy found it expedient to chastise the Eisenhower administration for not doing more to end segregation, despite the fact that two civil rights bills were passed during that time, the first such major legislation since the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863.

  In his 1961 inaugural address, Kennedy spurred on the expectations of millions of black Americans when he said:

  Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans . . . one unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed and to which we are committed today at home and around the world.

  Such rhetoric was effective for Kennedy. During the 1960 election, blacks responded to Dr. Martin Luther King’s support of Kennedy. They turned out a hefty 78 percent vote for the Massachusetts senator.

  By 1962, polls showed Kennedy ranked behind only King himself in popularity among black Americans despite the fact that immediate action by Kennedy on civil rights was limited. Although Kennedy had promised to end segregation in federal housing, it was nearly two years after taking office, with violent racial incidents increasing across the nation, before he took action. Kennedy dawdled until June 1963, before sending his own civil rights bill to Congress and even this did not pass until after his death, when the measure was adroitly maneuvered through Congress by President Lyndon Johnson.

  By September 1961, following a summer of tension, violence, and bus “Freedom Rides,” the Interstate Commerce Commission, acting on a request by President Kennedy, banned segregation on buses and in terminals.

  While the Kennedys certainly did not invent the problem and, in fact, joined the push for civil rights belatedly and reluctantly, they nevertheless were the first major American leaders to fully address the problem and appeal for wisdom and restraint from both blacks and whites.

  And despite its faint beginnings, some of the most dramatic accomplishments of the Kennedy administration were in the area of civil rights. For the first time blacks were appointed to major government jobs as well as judgeships; civil rights laws aimed at ending voter discrimination and public segregation were vigorously enforced by the Kennedy Justice Department despite a recalcitrant J. Edgar Hoover, and an executive order was issued creating a Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity headed by Vice President Johnson.

  But racial problems continued. The day after Kennedy’s inaugural address, a black Air Force veteran named James Meredith applied for enrollment to the segregated University of Mississippi but was rejected. In his fourth attempt to enroll, Meredith arrived in Oxford, Mississippi, on September 30 accompanied by three hundred US marshals. He was met by a crowd of about 2,500 segregationists and students who turned Meredith and his supporters away with bricks and bottles. The marshals responded with tear gas, and a bloody night-long riot ensued—leaving two people dead and more than 375 injured, including 166 federal officers.

  The violence was quelled by the arrival of 3,000 Army and National Guard troops and Meredith was enrolled on October 1 under the protection of marshals who remained with him until his graduation in August 1963. One of those involved in that bloody incident was a former Army general named Edwin A. Walker who later would be connected with Lee Harvey Oswald.

  A Bullet for the General

  About 9:10 p.m. on April 10, 1963, Major General Edwin A. Walker was narrowly missed by a rifle bullet that crashed through a first-floor window and slammed into a wall of his fashionable Dallas home.

  Seventeen months later the Warren Commission concluded that Walker’s assailant was none other than Kennedy’s alleged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. This conclusion has increasingly been called into question as more information about the event has become known.

  By the fall of 1963, Walker was notorious in conservative Dallas. A native Texan born in 1909, Major General Walker was commander of the US Army’s 24th Division, stationed in West Germany, where he used his position to indoctrinate his troops with right-wing propaganda, including the assertion that both the US government and the military had come under “communist control.” The Korean War hero once declared, “We must throw out the traitors, and if that’s not possible, we must organize armed resistance to defeat the designs of the usurpers and contribute to the return of a constitutional government.”

  Ordered to stop this practice, Walker instead resigned from the Army in 1961 and returned to the United States, where he began making political speaking tours. He even made an unsuccessful bid for governor of Texas in 1962, losing to John Connally.

  On September 30, 1962, Walker was in Oxford, Mississippi, aligned with those who were trying to prevent the university enrollment of James Meredith. After Walker was charged with being a ringleader of the violent Oxford mob, Attorney General Robert Kennedy ordered that he be held temporarily in a mental institution.

  By 1963, Walker was back in Dallas and had become a prominent figure in right-wing political activity there, particularly in the John Birch Society. In a 1964 interview with this author, Walker outlined his beliefs:

  The United Nations charter, which is only eight pages, should have been placed before [the American public] to study. Very
few . . . have even seen the Fulbright Memorandum or the Walter Reuther Memorandum submitted to Attorney General Kennedy upon his request. . . . Very few had even seen these papers or the UN declaration on racial discrimination, the UN term for integration. This paper declares that the whole world will integrate. I do not know where such authority comes from or who it represents. I can realistically predict that no one living today will see 600 million Chinese integrated with 100 million Japanese, Turks integrated with Greeks, or Mohammedans with Israelis. . . . A cause for America first and last and always is essential to our existence. All organizations which are implementing such a cause are in the best interest of the country and are needed. The Birch Society is doing a great job in educating people and exposing such memoranda as I have referred to previously.

  Walker’s connections in the months preceding the assassination are both convoluted and intriguing.

  A driver and aide to Walker in the fall of 1963 was the brother of Larrie Schmidt, who along with Bernard Weissman authored the infamous “Welcome Mr. Kennedy to Dallas . . .” ad that ran in the Dallas Morning News the morning of November 22. The ad, which carried a heavy black border, asked twelve loaded questions of Kennedy ending with “Why have you scrapped the Monroe Doctrine in favor of the ‘Spirit of Moscow’?” Financial contributors to this anti-Kennedy ad included oilman H. L. Hunt’s son, Nelson Bunker Hunt; Joseph Grinnan, volunteer coordinator for the local John Birch Society; and H. R. “Bum” Bright, former owner of the Dallas Cowboys. The ad was signed “The American Fact-Finding Committee,” but Weissman admitted to the Warren Commission that the group was “formed strictly for the purpose of having a name to put in the paper.”