by Jim Lehrer
“What medicines have they given him?”
“Mostly a barbiturate, Sodium Pentothal.”
“Tell me about Sodium Pentothal,” Marti demanded.
Reynolds, smiling and patient, said: “Technically called thiopental, it became the first of the really popular anesthetic drugs for animals. In humans, it was mostly prescribed for minor or short-term purposes such as cesarean section births. But with different dosages and combinations it is used for all kinds of things including a truth serum. The psychiatric use, quite simply, has been to calm people down enough to help them recall experiences or memories they may have repressed.”
“LSD?” I asked. “I read where some psychiatrists are experimenting with LSD on Vietnam vets—those having serious mental problems. Is that right?”
Reynolds only got half a sentence out: “That is true—”
“That would make him really crazy! Do not let anybody give my dad LSD!” Marti’s voice was somewhere between a marine DI and a hysterical child. “Did they already do that in Singapore?”
“I don’t believe so,” Reynolds said calmly.
“What about psychiatric therapy, with or without drugs—trying to talk it out of him?” Marti asked. “Have they tried that on Dad?”
“Yes. That’s been prescribed and utilized more than once.”
“Did it do any good?”
Reynolds shook his head. “His situation has continued to worsen.”
“They gave him a lobotomy in Singapore, didn’t they?”
Reynolds moved his head slightly. “No, they did not. In fact, I understand it was a move toward such a possibility that caused your mother to bring your father back here from Singapore.”
“Are you sure they didn’t?” Marti persisted.
“Certain,” Reynolds said. “There would be a cutting scar right down the center of his forehead if such a thing had been done.”
Marti sat back down in a defeated slump. End of attack mode—for now. “You know, Mom has problems herself but she definitely made the right decision to get him out of there.”
She had directed that to me. “It certainly seems that way to me—yes,” I responded.
To Reynolds, Marti said: “Even without a lobotomy, they’ve almost killed him, haven’t they? With drugs and electricity. Put him at death’s door. He is dying.”
Reynolds ignored that. “The important point is that I am involved now at your mother’s request. I am trying to develop new forms of treatment for your father and others similarly afflicted. There is an escalating effort because of the war in Vietnam and the casualties of the mind it is producing …”
“What kind of new treatments? No LSD, right?”
“No LSD—not from me, I can assure you. My interest is in approaches that get the patient to relive the experience that caused the trauma in the first place but with the goal of reaching a different result. I am interested in possibly even employing various forms of reenactment.”
Marti looked at me. She nodded, a signal for me to go ahead. Tell him. Tell him about the ramp and the bubble top. Tell him you’re a reporter. It’s okay. Do it.
And I did.
When I finished my full story, Reynolds said, “First, let me understand that we are talking here on a confidential basis and that you are not functioning as a journalist or anything remotely similar to such a thing?” He spit out the term journalist as if it were comparable to serial killer—or a particularly severe new strain of venereal disease.
That is so, I semi-lied.
“So you are telling me that you are prepared to attempt a reenactment of Agent Walters’s and your specific actions that day concerning the removal of the plastic covering?” There was now a hint of positive excitement in Reynolds’s voice.
I told him I was.
“Excellent,” said the doctor. I was no longer a crook or a scourge—temporarily, at least. “That is excellent.”
“Will this cure him? Will this bring him back to life?” Marti asked.
“There is no sure answer to that question at this point,” Reynolds said. “But we are going to try our best—that is all that can be said.”
Reynolds and I discussed in detail how I should go about reliving the most traumatic experience of Van Walters’s life and, in a much smaller way, my own.
Finally, Marti, her energy and spark now long gone, asked: “Doctor, are there mental disorders that … well, are like cancer? There are treatments galore but, in the end, no cures?”
Reynolds showed some real stuff with his answer, I thought. “Yes, there are. I wish there weren’t but wishing has never cured anything, including certain types of cancer of the mind as well as the body.”
In different circumstances among three different people that might have been a natural prelude for a quick kneeling at the altar of the Dutch Reformed Church of Kinderhook. But nobody offered a prayer for Martin Van Walters. The only one who knelt was Reynolds. He went from his chair to Marti on the pew next to me, took both of her hands, and said: “Miss Walters, in a professional sense, if your father dies it will be over my very own dead body.”
I laughed. It was actually a very funny line. Marti smiled as she blew her nose in a handkerchief.
“Well, then, let’s get on with it,” she said as she stood up, ready to get on with it—right now.
I BARELY RECOGNIZED Van Walters. His physical appearance was much worse than Marti’s descriptions and anything I had imagined. He was a shadow, a ghost, a small piece of the man I had known five years ago as the assistant agent in charge of the Dallas office of the United States Secret Service.
He wore a short-sleeved dark blue shirt, his skin gray and loose, his bones on the verge of protruding from his cheeks, hands, and arms. He was lying, fetal, on a chaise lounge. A heavy red college-initialed blanket covered him from the chest on down. The felt agent’s hat Marti had mentioned was on a table beside him. His bare head displayed no lobotomy scar, only the traces of the shock treatments on his temples. A few strands of hair, silken thin and white, were all that was left on his head.
I knew for a fact that this man was forty-two years old. But based on what I was seeing with my own two eyes I would have sworn that he was at least a hundred. Marti’s assertion that he was dying or near death seemed suddenly an understatement. The miracle was that this achingly sad figure was still breathing.
“Dad!” Marti said to him sharply. “Dad! There’s somebody here to see you!”
Van Walters’s body—I figured it couldn’t weigh much more than 120 pounds—trembled slightly. He raised his head and tried to open his eyes.
“Look at him, Dad! You might remember him!”
I leaned forward as far as I could without touching him. His breath was sour. I could see his eyes up in the sockets trying to focus on me as his daughter had ordered him.
“I’m Jack Gilmore. The reporter for The Dallas Tribune,” I said.
He frowned. It was slight and quick. But it proved that Van Walters was, in fact, still alive. All it took to rouse him was to mention that I was with The Dallas Tribune.
Marti motioned for me to continue—to get on with it.
“I was at Love Field that day. I was the one who asked you about the bubble top. Do you remember?”
His eyes clicked wide open. “Yes,” he said in a weak voice.
“I talked about how rewrite wanted to know if the bubble was going to be up during the motorcade …”
Van Walters stopped me. He did so with a quick wave of his right hand. I barely saw it. But he was signaling that he didn’t need to hear all that. He remembered.
“If I hadn’t asked the question maybe it would not have been taken off the car,” I said, getting down to the real business.
“Wrong,” Walters said with a little more force than his yes. “I … killed … Kennedy.”
“No, sir. That is not true.”
“The … order to take it down … I gave … it.” The words came slowly—but they were coming. He w
as growing in strength before my very eyes.
“Doesn’t matter,” I said with as much authority as I could muster. “The shots would have probably shattered the bubble top and everybody would have been killed. Mrs. Kennedy, the Connallys.”
“A theory … not … never proven.” He stopped talking. Then, after taking a couple of breaths, he said, still haltingly but firmly, “Nobody … no … body … ever did any … tests … about that.” Another pause. “Did they?”
I had to agree with him. “No, not that I know of.”
Marti gave me an agitated, disappointed look. Did she want me to lie about it? Say, yeah, sure, there was a test of the shattered glass idea? Well, forget it. No way, Miss Walters. I may spin and evade but I will not lie—not even for you.
I stayed on the course that Reynolds had laid out in our conversation at the church.
“There is one thing that we could do that might be helpful, Agent Walters,” I said.
“No more … not an agent anymore.”
“All right, sir. Mister Walters. We could—you and I—relive, reenact what we did at Love Field that day.”
I could tell there was a reaction in Van Walters’s body as well as his mind. So could Marti. Tears of joy—real, incredible joy—were forming in her eyes.
“Why? Why … would we want to do that?” Van Walters asked.
“Maybe, who knows, something could trigger new thoughts for you, sir. Maybe you would see it all differently so that it could make a difference in the way you have reacted to the Kennedy tragedy. It could lead to some healing.”
Walters closed his eyes and laid his head back. He seemed simultaneously defeated and stronger as he said with no breaks or pauses: “I don’t think that is possible. You’re not doing a newspaper story about what’s happened to me are you?”
Damn. “No, sir,” I semi-lied. “I’m here because your daughter asked me to come. She read something in the paper about what I said about you and me at Love Field and the bubble top.”
“Why and where did you say it?”
“At a Kennedy assassination anniversary panel discussion.”
“What anniversary?”
“The fifth.”
Walters’s head came up off the back of the chaise. His eyes went wet. “Five years since I killed him? I cannot believe it.”
“You did not kill him, sir. You really didn’t. Let’s do the reenactment.”
Now we were at nut-cutting time. He either got up on his feet, so to speak, or not.
“Waste of time,” said Walters, his voice still gaining strength. “Won’t prove a thing. I know what I did. Doing it again isn’t going to change anything.”
“Please give it a try. That’s all I ask.”
“Why do you care about me, Mr. Reporter?”
Great question, sir, I wanted to say. I wanted to tell him that maybe I care because … well, because I feel a part of the events that have led to your terrible sickness. I care because … well, I’ve developed a do-what-she-wants fondness of sorts for your daughter who is ten years younger than me. And I care because … well, what’s happened to you has the makings of one helluva story not only for The Dallas Tribune but for, as they used to say in the newspaper business, the world and all ships at sea.
What I said was, “I feel a part of what happened and I want to see if I can help you.”
That must have rung some kind of bell because he gave a head motion to Marti to give him a hand. A hand to help him stand up. A hand to help him do what this reporter wanted.
She was delighted and so was I.
Marti didn’t weigh much more than her father but she and I, working on both shoulders and arms, managed to get the dangerously frail man to his feet.
We helped him take a few steps forward, away from the chaise lounge. He steadied himself. I moved backward so I was still facing him.
“All right, sir, remember, I said what I did about rewrite …”
“No need to go through that.”
“Okay, you looked up into the sky … right?”
“Right.” He turned his head upward slightly and then right back down.
“Remember what you said?” I pressed.
“ ‘Looks clear’ … that’s what I said. Something like that.”
“Then what did you do?”
“I turned back to the other agents down the ramp.”
“That’s right. I listened to you say something to one of them …”
“ ‘Check if it’s clear downtown.’ That’s what I said.”
“Exactly. And the agent talked into a handheld two-way radio …”
“That was Ed Ellison. He was on the White House detail.”
I waited for Walters to finish the story on his own. He remained standing—but silent.
So I said: “ ‘All clear downtown!’ Isn’t that what Agent Ellison said?”
Van Walters nodded.
Now we were there—at the moment that mattered.
I did not want to prompt him any further. Reynolds had said at our church meeting that the key was to get Walters to repeat on his own as much of his words and actions as possible.
Seconds of silence went by. Marti was anxious—ready to do some prompting if necessary, it seemed. I signaled with a quick shake of my head not to say a word. Don’t interfere.
It seemed an eternity but it was probably only thirty or forty seconds.
I felt I had to make the final push. “Please say what it is you said then to the other agents.”
Van Walters, still on his feet, was staring off in space beyond me. I thought maybe he was seeing things out there—possibly the exact scene at the top of that Love Field ramp.
“Say it,” I said again, this time in not much more than a loud whisper. “Just go ahead and say it, sir.”
“ ‘Lose the bubble top!’ That’s what I said.” His voice was still weak, but there was no question that Van Walters was recreating his yell from November 22, 1963.
Marti was bawling. It took almost everything I had not to do so myself. I felt a great sense of accomplishment.
Then, with no help from either of us, Walters returned to the chaise lounge, sat down, stretched out on it, and closed his eyes as if nothing at all had happened.
Dr. Reynolds and Rosemary Walters, both of whom had been watching and listening through cracks in doors from adjoining rooms, came rushing in.
Rosemary leaned down and kissed her husband on the cheek.
“Well done, Mr. Walters,” Reynolds said. “I think you have taken a giant step toward recovery.”
Van Walters made no sign or noise of response.
“Dad,” Marti said. “We could be on our way somewhere good …”
“No, I don’t think so,” said her father. “All your gentleman reporter friend and I have done is proven that I made the decision that ended up killing the president. The fact remains and will always remain that if the bubble top had been on that limo, Kennedy would have not died.”
IT WAS AS ice-cold up in my little cubbyhole room as it was outside. If heat from a furnace or anything else was supposed to rise up that far into the old house, it had failed to do so. The bare wooden floor with its frigid temperature gave the room the feel of a meat locker. (And I knew about meat lockers. I was in one once with Dallas sheriff’s deputies checking out the body of a cheating gambler who’d been stored there after having had his throat cut.)
Shivering, I quickly got ready for bed and climbed under the several layers of covers on the double bed—three wool blankets of various colors and designs, a flowered quilt, a heavy white sheet on the bottom, and an olive-green bedspread on top. That all made for quite a load, but it felt good and I was warmer within minutes. There was a smell of soap and mothballs that reminded me of my parents’ seldom-used guest bedroom back home in Kansas.
I was just about to switch off the lamp on the bedside table when there she was. Marti.
She was tiptoeing through my door wearing a pair of white furry sli
ppers and a large flannel robe that hung down to the floor. I had no idea what she was wearing underneath the robe. It was an immediate thought I just couldn’t help.
“Hi, Jack,” she said.
It was a scene that I had witnessed in the movies but never before in real life. I had occasionally imagined such a happening—a beautiful young woman slipping into my room unbidden and unannounced … But it had never happened. Not until right now … this very moment.
“Well … hi,” I replied.
“May I?” she said, grabbing the covers and scooting in under them next to me. I had no problem making room for her.
So much, I thought, for my rule against sleeping with sources. So much for a lot of things …
But she did not reach out and grab me. I didn’t do that to her, either.
“Don’t get the wrong idea,” she said matter-of-factly. “But it’s too cold for me to sit down on that big old pillow over there in the corner. And we need to talk about what we do next.” Her head and eyes pointed toward the ceiling, which I knew—because I was doing the same thing myself—was nothing more than a blank expanse of plaster.
We had ended our evening downstairs with a long post-ramp-reenactment discussion with Marti’s mother and Reynolds.
Reynolds had tried his best to put a good face on the failure of the reenactment to trigger anything at all in Van Walters. The truth was, it really hadn’t done what we all hoped it would do. Yes, he did actually speak clearly and responsively and get up on his feet, but that was as far as it went. For Van Walters there was no new way to look at what he had done on November 22, 1963. Reynolds said he would make arrangements for Walters to come to Boston for hospitalized in-patient treatment the next day.
“What kind of treatment?” Marti had asked. “Not drugs. No LSD, right?”
“Definitely not. But beyond that I’m not sure: a therapy of a specific nature still to be determined,” said Reynolds, an honest man. “To leave him here in this condition while he continues to fade away … well, that is unacceptable, is it not?”
Marti and her mother agreed.
