Parkland (Movie Tie-In Edition)

by Vincent Bugliosi

  Kennedy overlooks another article about Nixon in the same paper—“Nixon Predicts JFK May Drop Johnson.”* Jack Kennedy, though elected by a mere handful of votes over Nixon in 1960 (Kennedy’s margin of victory was one-tenth of 1 percent, receiving 34,221,355 votes to Nixon’s 34,109,398), has nevertheless been popular with most Americans from the beginning of his administration. His approval rating soared to 83 percent in April 1961, ironically in the wake of his biggest failure, the abortive invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. By now, though, three years after his election, it has slumped to 59 percent. Just last month, in October, Newsweek estimated that Kennedy’s pro-black position on the civil rights issue had cost him 3.5 million votes and reported that no Democratic president had ever been so disliked in the South. In Georgia the marquee of a movie theater showing the film PT 109 read, “See how the Japs almost got Kennedy.”62 Indeed, less than two months earlier, the chairman of the Georgia Democratic Party had persuaded JFK to cancel a speech in Atlanta because of the political climate in his state resulting from JFK’s pending civil rights bill.63 However, Kennedy did include Florida on the trip that took him to Dallas, since Florida had gone Republican in 1960.64 The South, overwhelmingly Democratic in presidential elections since the Reconstruction era following the Civil War, was more conservative than any other region of the country. But the long-standing distrust by southerners for the Republican Party (northern Republicans were largely responsible for Reconstruction, which brought the former Confederate states back into the United States and was unpopular in the South) was showing signs everywhere of melting away.

  Kennedy can ill afford to lose those southern votes to Barry Goldwater, the conservative senator from Arizona who appears to have a lock on the Republican nomination for president. Texas voted for Kennedy over Nixon in 1960 by a mere 46,233 votes out of more than two million cast (he lost in Dallas, the only large American city to vote for Nixon over Kennedy), mostly owing to Lyndon Johnson’s presence on the ticket. Texas, being conservative, had voted for Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956.65 Texas’s senior senator, Ralph Yarborough, also accounted for a lot of votes by appealing to the state’s dwindling, old-style liberals and unionists. Texas, three years later, now looks weak for the Kennedy ticket, and it is Kennedy’s own suggestion and desire to come to Texas to raise money and to try to appeal to the business community (which was suspicious of him) and the conservative wing of the Democratic Party, thereby enhancing his political fortunes there.66 He couldn’t have a better forum to appeal to that group than at the luncheon that noon. The Dallas Citizens Council, an informal organization of the leading businessmen of Dallas which had been a “behind-the-scenes force in Dallas affairs” for years, was the main sponsor of the luncheon.67 Governor Connally tells his wife and others, “Nellie, if the people of Texas can just get a look at him, up close, I know they will vote for him.”68

  However, Johnson, Connally (Johnson’s conservative protégé and ally), and the liberal Yarborough are at each other’s throats, hacking the Democratic Party right down the middle. If they and their factions cannot be reconciled soon, or at least made to look as though they are, the Democrats could lose all twenty-five of the state’s electoral votes in the 1964 election, an unthinkable disaster.

  Kennedy, angered by the story which suggests that his visit is widening the split in the state’s party, grabs the phone to call Kenneth P. O’Donnell, one of his principal political advisers and the one responsible for all the arrangements of the Texas trip. O’Donnell, whose official title is appointments secretary, is Kennedy’s political right hand, troubleshooter, devil’s advocate, and, per White House press secretary Pierre Salinger, “the most powerful member” of the president’s staff.69 Another member, Dave Powers, has been with Kennedy the longest, ever since he emerged from Boston’s Eleventh District to back young Jack’s first campaign for the Senate in 1946, one of several young World War II veterans who helped shape the “new generation” rhetoric that Kennedy continues to employ into the 1960s.70 O’Donnell and Larry O’Brien are of more recent vintage, dating from the 1952 senatorial campaign which saw the creation of the “Kennedy machine.” O’Donnell, one of Bobby’s classmates and friends at Harvard, where he captained the football team, has a reputation for cool, ruthless efficiency that rivals Bobby’s own, and Jack means to employ it now.71

  Kennedy has had enough of the childish antics of Connally, Yarborough, and Johnson. For weeks, ever since the Texas trip was first suggested, the three of them have been arm wrestling each other for the symbolic trappings of political power, freezing each other out of seats at ceremonial dinners, refusing each other places in the Texas trip motorcades, and bending the president’s itinerary to suit their own agendas and to humiliate their rivals. None of this has gone unnoticed by the Texas papers, which are watching and reporting on the day-to-day ups and downs of the embattled Yarborough: “Yarborough Seating Pondered” “Yarborough Gets JFK Table Spot” “Yarborough Invited to Travel with JFK” “Demo Factions to Be Pacified, Salinger Says” “New Fuss Erupts over JFK Tickets.”72

  Kennedy may indeed have widened the rift between Johnson and Yarborough when he acceded to Johnson’s demand for half of Yarborough’s senatorial patronage—the right to select judges, postmasters, and other presidential appointments in Texas—but the quarrel has to end now, before it brings the Texas party down with it. Kennedy orders O’Donnell to tell Yarborough to get in the vice president’s limousine today. O’Donnell and O’Brien have to make it clear to the senator that he no longer has any choice.

  “You tell him,” Kennedy barks at O’Donnell, “it’s ride with Lyndon or walk.”73

  8:50 a.m.

  The president starts down to the parking lot, meeting Fort Worth congressman Jim Wright and his party in the corridor. He speaks briefly to his Secret Service bodyguards who fall in behind him, pauses for a word with an elderly woman in a wheelchair, and graciously offers to be introduced to some Dallas friends of his personal secretary, Evelyn Lincoln.

  As the president moves toward the parking lot, his entourage snowballs. He picks up Vice President Johnson, Governor Connally, Senator Yarborough, several congressmen, and Raymond Buck, president of the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce. Bill Greer, his veteran Secret Service driver, dashes up with the president’s raincoat—it’s drizzling again—but Kennedy shrugs it off. He walks out under the marquee that reads “Welcome, Mr. President” and “Welcome to Fort Worth, where the West begins,”74 and around to the parking lot to mount the flatbed truck awaiting him there.75

  After a brief introduction by the vice president, Jack Kennedy steps to the microphone to address the crowd that has waited in the rain for three and a half hours to see him. “There are no faint hearts in Fort Worth!” he says gaily to the crowd, which manages a cheer in spite of the drizzle. “Mrs. Kennedy is [still] organizing herself. It takes her a little longer”—the crowd breaks into laughter as the president grins broadly—“but, of course, she looks better than we do when she does it.”76

  Upstairs in her bedroom, Jackie hears her husband’s voice booming over the public address system. She is glad it is still raining. She hopes the Plexiglas bubble top will be on the presidential limousine for the noon motorcade in Dallas. Then her hair won’t get mussed in the open car. She sits at her dressing table and looks into the mirror. She looks tired.

  “Oh, God,” she moans to an attendant, “one day’s campaigning can age a person thirty years.”77

  9:10 a.m.

  Bolstered by the enthusiastic Fort Worth crowds, the president reenters the hotel and climbs aboard the elevator to take him to the next event on the schedule, a formal breakfast. However, in the elevator, Acting Press Secretary Malcolm Kilduff* persuades Kennedy to make a slight detour. Kilduff has read the newspapers and shares the president’s political concerns. To improve the situation, he has convinced Governor Connally to hold a press conference and thought that the president might want to discuss it with the governor first. The president
agrees and is escorted to the Longhorn Room, down the mezzanine from the Grand Ballroom, where hundreds of breakfast guests await his presence.

  Kennedy reviews the governor’s prepared statement and finds it rather bland and meaningless. Nevertheless, the president endorses it and returns to the hallway, where he runs into Senator Yarborough and bluntly tells him to ride in the vice president’s car. When the senator starts to object, the president lets him have it.

  “For Christ’s sake cut it out, Ralph,” he snaps. Yarborough responds that he had ridden to the hotel with Johnson. Kennedy shook his head. It wasn’t good enough. He had no intention of being thwarted by evasions.

  The president turns and makes his way into the kitchen of the Grand Ballroom, leaving the chastised senator to lick his wounds. For a moment, the entourage stands wedged between a corridor of stainless-steel sinks and gigantic pots and pans. Kennedy looks over his shoulder. One member is missing.

  “Where’s Mrs. Kennedy?” he asks a nearby Secret Service agent. “Call Mr. Hill. I want her to come down to the breakfast.”

  The guests in the Grand Ballroom are on their tiptoes, straining their necks in the direction of the kitchen entrance. Amid a spattering of applause, Governor Connally, Vice President Johnson, Senator Yarborough, and other dignitaries file into the ballroom. As they stand at attention at the head table, the band breaks into the familiar “Hail to the Chief,” and a smiling John F. Kennedy strolls into the ballroom. Now the cheers are loud and sustained, although many present must be disappointed that the First Lady is not with him.78

  Upstairs, Jackie Kennedy is putting the finishing touches to her outfit, a navy blue blouse and matching purse and a rose pink suit with a navy collar and matching pink pillbox hat. The president wants her to be elegant in Dallas and she means to be, although it does take time. She wavers over two pairs of white gloves, one short and one long. She decides the short ones are more restrained, and holds up her wrists while her attendant buttons them for her. She has become so preoccupied with the idea of going to Dallas that she forgets all about the breakfast reception downstairs. When the elevator arrives at the mezzanine floor, she is confused.

  “Aren’t we leaving?” she asks Secret Service agent Clint Hill, who accompanies her on the ride down.

  “No, you’re going to a breakfast,” he says.79

  9:20 a.m.

  In the Grand Ballroom, the anticipation that the First Lady may appear is tremendous. The crowd has been keeping an eye on the kitchen entrance throughout breakfast and the subsequent performance by the Texas Boys Choir. When toastmaster Raymond Buck spots Agent Hill peering from the kitchen entrance, he steps to the microphone at the head table and introduces the First Lady like a ringmaster: “And now—an event I know you have all been waiting for!” Buck sweeps his arm toward the kitchen door as Clint Hill leads Mrs. Kennedy into the ballroom. Two thousand businessmen and their wives leap to their feet and cheer enthusiastically. The First Lady spots her husband smiling from behind the head table and is drawn toward him through the cheers and smiles of a generous crowd. As the spontaneous response dies down, the president is introduced and steps to the microphone.

  “Two years ago I introduced myself in Paris as the man who had accompanied Mrs. Kennedy to Paris,” he says. “I’m getting somewhat that same sensation as I travel around Texas.”*

  The crowd cheers wildly as the president grins.

  “Nobody wonders what Lyndon and I wear—”

  A wave of laughter sweeps again over the crowd. The president is hitting all the right notes and the guests are loving every minute of it.80

  After what one reporter described as a “ripsnorting political speech”† by the president, in which he emphasized national defense,‡ the president of the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce provides a jovial moment when he presents the President and First Lady with parting gifts. “Mr. President, we couldn’t let you leave Fort Worth without providing you with some protection against the rain,” he says, and offers the president a ten-gallon hat. The audience shouts for him to put it on. Jack, who dreaded the idea of looking ridiculous, has always managed to avoid putting on a cowboy hat, sombrero, or Indian headdress. He grins and dodges the gesture, responding, “I’ll put it on in the White House on Monday. If you’ll come up there you’ll have a chance to see it then.”81

  9:45 a.m.

  Lee Harvey Oswald ostensibly continues to go about his work. His job is to pick up orders for schoolbooks on the first floor, fix them to his clipboard, take one of the two big freight elevators at the back of the Depository Building up to the sixth floor, search out the requested books from the thousands of titles stored there, take them back down in the elevator to the order desk on the first floor for eventual shipping, and pick up the next lot of orders. He’s a human conveyor belt, not particularly distinguishable from the fourteen other “order fillers,” or stock boys in the warehouse crew.82 But this particular morning, only one order was known to have been worked on by Oswald.83

  The Texas School Book Depository Company is, in spite of the official ring to its name, private, with no connection to the state of Texas. The seven-story building, which has been occupied by the company since January of 1962, is an old, rust-colored brick structure at the corner of Elm and Houston, not the original building at this location. That building, erected in 1883, was home to the Southern Rock Island Plow Company. In 1901, the building was struck by lightning and almost burned to the ground. It was rebuilt that same year to look identical to the previous structure, only the new building had seven stories instead of five.84*

  In view of the enormous number of titles handled by the company, the stock boys tend to specialize. Since starting work at the Depository, Lee has been focusing on the books of Scott, Foresman & Company, some of which are kept on the first floor, which is handy to the shipping department, with the vast majority up on the sixth floor. The women in the office write orders and drop them down a sort of dumbwaiter to the men below, who carry them to a little table by the checking stand and sort them out by publisher and location. If there aren’t enough orders for Scott, Foresman & Company to keep him busy, Lee will fill orders for one of the smaller publishers, like Gregg Publishing Company, but that doesn’t happen often.85

  Most of the people working in the Depository Building this day are not aware of Oswald, he goes about his work so unobtrusively. Lee’s boss, Roy S. Truly, did happen to notice him earlier in the morning.

  “Good morning, Lee.”

  “Good morning, sir,” Lee answered.

  Truly likes that, the word “sir,” one which a lot of the other stock boys don’t use. Truly is pleased with Lee, who is “quiet and well-mannered, a nice young fellow.” The job is only temporary, but when he hired him, Truly assumed that Lee was just out of the Marines—Lee had mentioned no other employment history—and the young man certainly needed work, with his second child due shortly after he took the job. In fact, the baby was born at Dallas’s Parkland Memorial Hospital just five days later. Mr. Truly remembers that well, because Lee asked for and got a few days’ grace in filling out his withholding tax deduction form, which allowed him to claim the new dependent. Truly occasionally asked about the baby, and Lee would respond with a big smile, but that was about the extent of any conversation he’d ever had with him. Lee is a loner, working day after day on his own, taking the orders up, bringing the books down, keeping to himself, but that’s fine with Roy Truly.86

  One of the few other employees in the Depository who even notices Lee this morning is the order checker, James Jarman Jr. It’s “Junior” Jarman’s job to make sure the books brought down to the first floor by the order fillers match those on the order forms. He saw that Lee was already at work when he came in that morning around eight, and later had occasion to send him back upstairs to correct a botched order.87

  It’s between 9:30 and 10:00 a.m. when Jarman sees Lee at one of the windows between two of the long book bins on the first floor. Outside, people are
already beginning to gather on the corner of Elm and Houston and Lee asks Jarman why. Jarman tells Lee they’re picking spots to watch the presidential motorcade, which is supposed to pass right by the building this afternoon.

  “Do you know which way he’s coming?” Lee asks.

  Junior explains that the motorcade will be coming down Main, turning right onto Houston, then left onto Elm, passing right under their windows.

  “Oh, I see,” Lee says, and walks off.88

  10:15 a.m.

  The president and his wife don’t make it back to suite 850 until after ten o’clock, but find they have nearly an hour before the flight to Dallas. Kennedy takes time to call former vice president John Nance Garner to wish him a happy ninety-fifth birthday while Jackie spends a moment looking around the suite. She discovers something they were all too busy to notice until now, that the paintings aren’t the usual by-the-yard hotel-room art, but real paintings—a Monet, a Picasso, a Van Gogh, a dozen others, and some bronzes, all borrowed from the local museum for the pleasure of America’s First Couple. From a specially prepared catalog they find the name of the woman who made it all possible, Ruth Carter Johnson. The First Couple telephone Mrs. Johnson, the wife of a newspaper executive, and thank her for her kindness. Mrs. Johnson is both flabbergasted and touched by the graciousness of the gesture, one she will never forget.89

  Ken O’Donnell shows the president what is at best a disrespectful advertisement in the Dallas Morning News. It’s a full-page ad draped with a funeral black border, and headlined “WELCOME MR. KENNEDY TO DALLAS.” Placed by the “American Fact-Finding Committee,” chaired by one Bernard Weissman, the ad, with twelve questions for Kennedy, rapidly moves from inane innuendo—“WHY has Gus Hall, head of the U.S. Communist Party, praised almost every one of your policies and announced the party will endorse and support your re-election in 1964?”—to outright accusation of treason—“WHY has the Foreign Policy of the United States degenerated to the point that the C.I.A. is arranging coups and having staunch Anti-Communist Allies of the U.S. bloodily exterminated?”90