by Jim Lehrer
• He was assigned to sit in the rear seat of the first lead car and keep his eyes on windows of buildings and other possible danger spots.
• He was not ordered to arrange or to participate in pre-event floor-by-floor searches of any buildings on the motorcade route. As far as he knew there were no such searches.
• He was not ordered to arrange or participate in the positioning of armed law enforcement personnel on rooftops or other high-visibility locations.
• He did not participate in any discussions about the need for special security vigilance when the motorcade had to slow down to make the left-hand turn back west on Elm immediately in front of the Texas School Book Depository.
• He was never informed of the presence of Lee Harvey Oswald, a returned defector to the Soviet Union, in Dallas. Oswald was not on any “threat potential” list he ever saw.
• He did not know and had never heard of Jack Ruby until he shot Oswald in the basement of the Dallas police station.
• He was aware of the recent incidents in Dallas at which right-wing demonstrators attacked UN ambassador Adlai Stevenson and, before that, Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson. He also knew that a shot was fired through a house window at retired army general Edwin Walker, an outspoken critic of the Kennedys, among others.
• He had glanced at a black-bordered advertisement in The Dallas Morning News that welcomed President Kennedy to Dallas with words of hostility but he had not had time to read every word in it.
• He had coordinated with Washington-based Secret Service personnel assigned to the Dallas visit to have guards posted in the out-of-sight area where the presidential X-100 open Lincoln Continental limousine and other motorcade vehicles would be held overnight after their arrival on a transport plane from Washington.
• He left his Dallas home on the morning of November 22, met other Secret Service officers at the Sheraton Hotel downtown, had breakfast with them, and then proceeded by car to Love Field, arriving there at approximately nine o’clock.
• He assisted the presidential detail agents from DC arrange the order of the motorcade vehicles, inspect them for absolute spotlessness, double-check all seating assignments, and look around for potential security hazards.
• He received notice by handheld radio when Air Force One was airborne from Fort Worth for the twelve-minute flight to Dallas.
• He was ordered to help guide the various Secret Service agents and other drivers as they moved the vehicles up the ramp to their positions on the tarmac to one side of where the White House press plane and Air Force One would be parked.
• He, with other agents, maintained visual protective surveillance of members of the public and others behind a fence observing the arrival at Love Field of the presidential party.
• He took his seat in the lead car, directly in front of the presidential limousine.
Marti’s summary detailed what Van Walters saw and did after the shots were fired at the motorcade. Marti said she remembered some of that from the conversations she overheard between her mother and father at home that late night after the assassination.
She had searched the Warren papers and everything else for an answer to the simple question: Did her dad feel there was anything he could have done as an agent of the U.S. Secret Service to have prevented the death of President Kennedy?
None of the many official interrogators raised it, at least according to her own readings. She said also nobody even asked him—just for the record—if he believed the assassination was the work of a conspiracy.
In my conversation with her at the apartment, I did some follow-up questioning of my own. I picked up on several of her references to “Oswald or whoever fired the shots.”
“Do you think there was a conspiracy?” I asked her directly.
“Do you?” she shot back.
“No, and, trust me, I spent months trying my best to prove one, as did every reporter who ever worked on the story,” I said. “There were no Pulitzers to be won by just confirming the official findings that Oswald acted alone.”
I pressed her for her own answer.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if sometime in the future, maybe as much as fifty years from now, there was a deathbed confession of some kind from somebody who helped Oswald in some way. Drove a car, made a phone call—did something to get the assassination show on the road. A co-conspirator, of even the lowest grade.”
I let that stand without comment. Maybe she was right. There might have been somebody else involved. But based on my hours of crawling through culverts and over grassy knolls, interviewing hundreds of witnesses who ended up seeing nothing, and reading hundreds of documents that ended up saying nothing I hadn’t already read, I didn’t think so.
Marti told me she wrote nothing about the assassination in her brief “Dear Moms,” sticking almost exclusively to happy-sounding and irrelevant bits and pieces of her school life in Texas.
Her sister students in San Antonio—the 200 boarders as well as the 450 day students—were mostly from Texas. She had chosen St. John’s over any of the more prominent girls’ schools in the East partly because it was in Texas. Portland was great but there hadn’t been enough time to make it seem homey to her the way living in Dallas had done for Texas. Texas was known for having a lot of writers, and she was also thinking she might really try to work toward being a writer or, at least, a writer who wrote about writers. She did write to Rosemary that a St. John’s teacher, as good as Miss DeShirley in Kansas City, had praised her work in the English and composition classes.
Most critically, what she did not write to her mother was that she was working on a master plan to run away from school and San Antonio. She was going to be a literary runaway. The day before Christmas she would pack up a notebook and a ballpoint pen along with a few clothes in a pillowcase and a cache of saved allowance money, walk the twelve blocks to North Broadway—which was U.S. Highway 81—and take out hitchhiking to wherever a life of letters took her. Some of the inspiration came from her having just read Jack Kerouac’s On the Road in her Contemporary American Literature class. But there was more to it than that.
She would start by going to Kyle, the small Texas town where Katherine Anne Porter lived as a child, and then maybe move on to Indian Creek, the even tinier Texas place where Porter was born. Marti knew from a map that Indian Creek was more than a hundred miles west near Brownwood, but Kyle was barely thirty miles up Highway 81 from San Antonio toward Austin. Marti had only read in a biography about Porter’s Texas beginnings and had no idea if either place was publicly noted. Maybe Marti Van Walters would be the first to create some kind of “It was here that the author of Ship of Fools and other great works of fiction was born …” placard. Eventually Marti, living off the land of experience and adventure, would go to Concord, Massachusetts, to commune with Emerson and Hawthorne. Maybe she’d hunt down J. D. Salinger in New Hampshire or wherever he may be, hit the road to Catfish Row in California to visit with John Steinbeck, double back for a few days in the North Carolina country of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe, and Carl Sandburg, and even go over to Georgia to sample the flavor of Flannery O’Connor and Carson McCullers, and then to Jackson, Mississippi, to search for at least a glimpse of the great Miss Eudora Welty.
The literary stuff aside, Marti admitted that she figured suddenly disappearing into the unknown would get everybody’s attention. Maybe even the U.S. Secret Service would keep a lookout for a retired agent’s missing daughter—“a gorgeous, brilliant young woman of nearly eighteen destined for the pages and places of greatness.”
Despite the urgency of our mission that day in Philadelphia, I was delighted she took the time to go off-message about herself like this. I loved listening to Marti talk, and I had been one of those young newspapermen who bought into Hemingway’s advice to anyone who wanted to be a writer: Get a job on a newspaper. It’ll keep food on the table, force you to deal with the English language in a semi-coherent way, and, if you pay attenti
on, give you material and characters to use later in your short stories, novels, or plays. The Dallas Tribune newsroom was populated by Hemingway wannabes. Our hero was Jerry Compton, a political writer who authored a funny satirical novel about the modern-day retaking of the Alamo by a small band of renegade Mexican soldiers. It was made into a movie with Anthony Quinn and Richard Widmark. Jerry had made enough money to quit his job and become a full-time writer.
I must admit that it was with no small amount of embarrassment—and, yes, even a hint of shame—that I had already begun to think that the story of Van and Marti Walters might eventually make for a book as well as a good story in The Dallas Tribune for me to write. I hadn’t gone as far as deciding who should play me in the movie, but maybe Audrey Hepburn would be perfect as Marti? Glenn Ford as Van Walters?
Meanwhile, on Marti’s runaway literary future, she said a “fix-up” fall prom date with a cute guy from a nearby private boys’ school jarred her back to reality. She stayed right there at St. John’s and after graduation went on to Penn for the next three years.
After our nostalgic digression, she moved our conversation back to what mattered to her now. She showed me a Xerox copy of the one pertinent exchange about the bubble top that she could find in the entire Warren transcript. It was an exchange between Special Agent Van Walters and an investigator for the Warren Commission named Arlen Specter:
Q: Who made the decision to take the bubble top off the car at Love Field?
WALTERS: I did.
Q: What caused you to make that decision?
WALTERS: We had word from our agents downtown that the early-morning rain had definitely stopped.
Q: So it was on the limousine originally only as a protection from the rain, not from a gunshot or a similar violent attack?
WALTERS: That is correct.
Q: Was the bubble top bulletproof?
WALTERS: No, sir. Some thought so, apparently, but it was not.
Q: Describe its material.
WALTERS: One-quarter-inch clear unreinforced Plexiglas.
Q: Bulletproof or not, what effect do you believe the bubble top’s being there might have had if those same shots were fired at the presidential limousine?
WALTERS: It is impossible to say, sir.
Q: Could you speculate?
WALTERS: No, sir.
Marti handed me more portions of transcripts from the commission, the press, and other sources about who actually was responsible for the bubble top being off or on the Kennedy limousine. They included those from Secret Service agents who were there at Love Field.
The only mention of Van Walters’s involvement was a statement from a fellow agent that “Agent Walters was one of those at Dallas Love Field who put up the bubble top and then, later, took it off.”
There was even a former agent who was adamant in several statements that the bubble top was never put up and that he—and he alone—was the one who made that decision.
“That didn’t make sense, of course,” Marti said to me. “Besides yours, I found statements from many other eyewitnesses who saw the car with the bubble top up earlier while it was still on that Love Field ramp.”
There was one in Marti’s stack from a Secret Service agent assigned to then Vice President Johnson who spoke in the jumbled way real people often do when they are nervous:
“I knew that there … that the bubble top could be used or not be used. And I know that a decision was made, and I do not know by whom because I was not involved in the deciding making process, that, uh, not to do it. There was concern because it was rainy in Fort Worth and there was some concern about the rain. And when we got to Dallas, the sky, the skies, sky, excuse me, skies cleared up and a decision was made. I don’t know who made it to take off the bubble top.”
A prominent Dallas public relations woman who was professionally involved in the private side of the Kennedy visit said in a post-assassination exchange with a foreign journalist:
“At Love Field was first that I knew that he [President Kennedy] wasn’t going to have the bubble, the protective bubble over the convertible. I had sort of counted on it because I thought maybe he would have it anyway, and I didn’t want something to be thrown or maybe, you know, a placard to sail out in the airport … something like that. I remember feeling a little twinge, and we all talked about it later that … whether it became a matter of life and death that day for him because if he had the bubble, it wouldn’t have happened.”
There was an exchange with the then Congressman Jim Wright, a Democrat from Fort Worth, who said it was Kennedy’s decision to keep the bubble top off the limousine.
“By the time we got to Dallas, and he opted for his open touring car, the Secret Service tried to convince him to use a bubble top limousine which they had prepared for him there because of the safety precautions, security. He turned it down. John F. Kennedy made the judgment.”
“Did you hear that or did you …?”
“Yes, yes. He wanted to demonstrate his confidence and his faith in the people of Dallas and to be part of them, to share with them, see them, to be seen by them, to look in their eyes, to wave to them.”
There was a different—and also partly incorrect—take from the assistant White House press secretary, Malcolm Kilduff, who was to later announce the death of President Kennedy at Parkland Hospital. He said the only reason to have the bubble up was if the weather was bad.
“It was a piece of plastic is all it was. I mean, it folded up into what it was two parts? And two parts that folded up and went into the trunk and all it was was to protect him from the weather. Now, I don’t say that the bullet would have gotten as clean a shot through that bubble as it would without the bubble, but you still could have gotten at him with the bubble on top. But the president always felt that the people … if the people were good enough to come out and see him that he was good enough to sit there in the open car and let them see him and so he could see them.”
Other Secret Service agents in Warren Commission statements and statements elsewhere said various things about whether having the top up would have made any difference:
“I would think that it would have deterred for, let’s say, the velocity of a missile coming in at great speed, I think it would deter …”
“If we had had a bubble top there would have been some obfuscation of the assassin’s view. It is a deterrent.”
“It might deflect a bullet …”
From the son of an agent: “My dad did remark several times that he felt that one thing did kind of bother him about events that did unfold in Dallas. He felt the bubble top might have shielded the assassin’s view perhaps of the President or it may have possibly have deflected a shot and the President might have been alive today.”
Another agent, when asked by a reporter whether the bubble top was planned for use in Dallas:
“That Lincoln, of course, was not an armored car. The bubble top was not bulletproof. But I think most people figured that it probably was. Looking back on it now, you couldn’t help but wonder if Oswald would have tried the shot at all because he might have thought, ‘Oops, you know, this is a … this isn’t going to work because, you know, it’s bulletproof.’ Or the next thing is, if he had of tried, that thing has a curvature to it, and maybe it would have hit and glanced off? The next thing, that thing was put together in sections, and it had these … these strips about this size [holding fingers apart approximately two inches] metal strips and that thing was configured so you could have the bubble top on the front. You could have had it on and Oswald could had said, ‘Well, OK, I’m going to try it anyway,’ and shot and maybe it would have hit one of those metal pieces that helped keep the thing on. So, you just never know. That’s something to think about.”
The most direct and succinct of the bubble top statements was from Larry Akins, the Secret Service agent in charge of the Kennedy visit to Dallas.
“I was responsible for the bubble top. I ordered it put on the car when we thought it would
be raining during the motorcade and I ordered my agents at Love Field to take it off when the skies over Dallas cleared. Period. Full stop.”
And, full stop. I was impressed by two things. First, by the amount and the thoroughness of the work Marti had put into this effort to help her dad. Second, by how good a story this was.
Marti brought me back to the point of this whole meeting—her point, at least.
“Were you serious when you said you would talk to Dad?” she asked.
There it was. She had asked with a directness that was jarring.
“If you think it would help, certainly,” I said. “Where is he, exactly?”
“He’s in Kinderhook now. Near Albany. Dad’s hometown. Mom says he’s deteriorating quickly.”
I remembered mentions of Kinderhook from earlier conversations. My mind raced to Bernie, from whom I would try to get airfare and reporting time for Albany.
“He and Mom arrived from Singapore a few days ago,” Marti said. “They’re staying at least for Christmas, maybe longer, and I’m going to join them there next week after classes end.”
And as simply as that, I was left with nothing more to say other than I would see if I could make the arrangements to join her at Kinderhook.
It was time to go. We shook hands quickly.
I made a dash to 30th Street Station for a late-evening train back to DC from Philadelphia. I figured saving The Dallas Tribune the cost of a hotel room was the least I could do on this day of many accomplishments I had made for American journalism.
There was a sleety, sticking snow falling with an outside temperature of twenty-nine degrees when Marti and I rode into Kinderhook two weeks later. It was thirteen days before Christmas.
She had picked me up at the Albany airport in the Walters family station wagon, a year-old boat-sized Pontiac Safari. After first thanking me profusely for coming, she talked in a fast jabber during the entire forty-minute drive.
