by Jim Lehrer
“You really are wonderful, Jack,” she said. “I will sing the ‘Marines’ Hymn’ in your honor for the rest of my life.”
I thought she might add a few tears of joy to her demonstration of appreciation but she held back.
We still had another important stop to make.
She drove us nearly forty-five minutes north to the Mack Truck shop. It took only a few minutes for two men in the parts department to pull out two large sheets of Plexiglas and then, per my instructions, cut them into the six pieces that we were going to need.
I stacked them carefully in the backseat as Marti handed a ten-dollar bill to the guy in charge. I didn’t know the going rate for Plexiglas but that seemed awfully cheap to me. Maybe he had been charmed by Marti. Whatever happened, we drove off from the truck place.
“So, what now?” I said.
Our planning had been undertaken with what could only be termed a one-step-at-a-time approach. I had more or less insisted on that, because I was really doubtful we would ever get our hands on a suitable rifle, among the other necessary things. Frankly, I was mostly just playing along. I never thought we would get this far in staging the reenactment Marti had in mind.
“We go back to Kinderhook—and then to Lindenwald,” Marti said, her face in a huge grin.
“Lindenwald?”
“Martin Van Buren’s old house. The tower would be perfect. I think it would have a special meaning to Dad for it to be there, too.”
“For what to be there?”
“Our reenactment—of course.”
We rode in silence for a few minutes, long enough for an obvious thought to finally find a logical place in my mind.
“You know, Marti,” I said, “we don’t have to go to all of that big reenactment trouble to find out what your dad needs to find out.”
She didn’t even turn her head in my direction. “I know that,” she said.
Just to make sure we were talking about the same thing, I said: “We could go into a secluded place in some woods, put up a piece of the Plexiglas somewhere, and take a shot at it from ninety feet away at the appropriate angle …”
“Don’t even suggest such a thing.”
“Why not? Then we’d know now—right now, without having to produce some crazy staged shooting from a tower. We’d know. And we could just tell him. We could save him from all this effort.”
“Tell him we already know what’s going to happen when those shots are fired?”
“No, no. Maybe we don’t tell him anything. But if it doesn’t shatter we could keep quiet and try to think of something else or turn it over to Reynolds to do his thing …”
“Don’t tell Dad if it turns out that the glass does not shatter? Tell him only if it does?”
Her question had no answer. She wasn’t really listening to me. Clearly, there had to be a reenactment, and that was that.
Glancing harshly at me, she said, “It has to be an honest reenactment for it to work for Dad. He would know if it were not real—not straight. He would know if we already knew what was going to happen. Dr. Reynolds wouldn’t approve of that, either. He believes in real reliving therapy.”
I very much doubted the veracity of either of her points but I chose not to answer, letting the silence take over the last several minutes of our drive back to Kinderhook.
I also doubted that she adored me quite as much as she had a few minutes ago.
OVER THE NEXT two days, I came to believe Marti Walters was the smartest, toughest twenty-year-old kid, male or female, I had ever encountered—marines included.
She brought an energetic sharpness to every aspect of the planning and preparation of our Lindenwald adventure. She also had an abundance of shout, guile, and charm, with the sense to know when and in what proportions to employ each.
“Dad, always remember that this is about you and for you,” she said to Van Walters when we first told him what her “team”—she and I plus maybe her mother—were planning.
He kept his eyes open and his head up as we began going through the details. But he started shaking his head maybe fifteen minutes in, as I was explaining how I was going to arrange the six pieces of Plexiglas into a makeshift version of the bubble top.
“What is it?” Marti asked her father.
“Never going to work, never going to work, never going to work.”
“I’ve got some strong masking tape to keep the pieces together,” I said quickly in response.
“Never going to work, never going to work, never going to work.”
Van Walters closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the pillow on the chaise lounge where he still spent most of his days and nights.
Marti stuck her face right down in his and shouted: “You listen to me, Special Agent Walters! You listen to me with every ounce of whatever you have left in your mind and soul!”
His eyes popped open.
“You are dying! D-y-i-n-g—dying! The only thing that can save your life is if Jack and I can prove something to you that will convince you that you do not have to die!”
No Parris Island DI could have matched the force with which that little American literature major delivered those words.
“Kennedy would have died no matter what you did about that bubble top! No matter what! That is the fact and we are going to prove it to you! Let’s go get our work done, Jack!”
My marine instincts almost had me saluting and saying, Aye, aye, ma’am! despite my own very real question about what would happen once those shots were fired. I had no idea—and neither, of course, did Marti—if the glass was going to shatter or deflect, if it was going to protect or kill.
Out in the hallway with the door slammed by Marti behind us, she said in her normal voice, “I’m going to have to shake him and shake him. Keep on him and stay on him. But right now let’s go check the tower to make sure it works.”
I followed without a word.
Marti had used a Walters family connection to convince the owners of Lindenwald and the Kinderhook police that there were good reasons for allowing the live firing of three rifle shots down at some Plexiglas ninety feet on the ground below. “It’s part of a very confidential exercise—that I don’t fully understand the extent of myself—to explore several unknowns about presidential assassinations.” That was the line she used.
I was not with her for that conversation, so all I know is what she told me. “I sealed the deal when I told them that a marine sharpshooter who’d won the Medal of Honor in Korea and had investigated the Kennedy assassination for a government commission was going to do the actual shooting.” Guile, guile—lots of guile. Lies, lies—lots of lies.
The federal government had recently begun a process for eventually taking over ownership as well as possession of Lindenwald, the eighth president’s house. The plan was eventually to restore the three-story mansion to its early splendor and to open it to the public. The critical word was eventually. For now it remained vacant in a well-worn, deteriorating state having been used, at various times, as a privately owned residence and a for-rent venue for parties.
We drove off Highway 9 down a short gravel road. When the house came into view, we followed a drive and stopped behind the building.
Marti had been given a key to the place by a member of the family that owned Lindenwald. We used it to enter through a back door on the first floor and took a staircase that we knew led up to the tower, which rose another floor higher above the house itself. The place was a mess of cracked plaster walls and ceilings, warped and scarred wooden doors. There were small stacks of junk around—hardened paintbrushes, dead potted plants, scraps of carpet, old newspapers and magazines. The staircase, large and square-cornered, was enclosed by plaster walls adorned by a few cheap paintings and sketches of nineteenth-century gentry and scenery. The stairs and banisters were a dark brown wood that was badly in need of refinishing and varnish. We kicked up whiffs of must and dust with each step we took.
I figured the preservation feds w
ere going to arrive here in barely the nick of time to save Lindenwald from its aging and neglect.
But the inside of Lindenwald was not what Marti’s and my excursion was about. What mattered was the view from the tower’s ten-foot-by-ten-foot-square portico. It was covered with an Italianate roof but open on all four sides.
Within a few seconds, I knew this was going to work for our enactment.
I had stood and knelt at the sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository more than a dozen times while working on various stories for the Tribune. I was always struck by how close everything was. Ninety feet from the window down to where the presidential limousine was moving at barely fifteen miles an hour seemed like it was close enough to touch the Kennedys and the Connallys. Like many others who had also been to the window, I was not surprised that Oswald hit his target. It would have been an easy shot for almost anyone with any level of marksmanship training. Oswald, who was a former marine—a fact that pained me every time I had to write it in my newspaper—would have definitely had that training.
I felt exactly the same way about the vantage point now, looking down from the Lindenwald tower portico. The angles and distance were nearly identical. There were even some light tree branches in both lines of sight. It was spooky.
“You were right, it really is perfect,” I said to Marti.
She threw her arms around me and held on tight. “Thank you, Jack,” she said. “Let’s go shake Dad some more.”
MY NEW REPORT to Van Walters had his attention from the beginning. I couldn’t tell if it was sinking in, but there was a new, brighter light in his eyes. A light of life? Of interest? I couldn’t tell.
“The same angle and distance?” he said to me.
“Yes, sir,” I said. “Almost exactly.”
He said: “I know Lindenwald from back when I was a kid. I played up there in the tower … threw rocks, shot BB guns down from there at birds and squirrels. Wasn’t supposed to, of course, but we did it. Got caught a few times but nothing came of it. The Secret Service would have never hired me if I had a juvenile record. Did Marti ever tell you about Martin Van Buren Bates?”
I shook my head and said, “No, sir.”
Marti rolled her eyes and said quickly: “Dad told me about him. He was the tallest man in the world—seven feet eleven inches tall, married a woman seven feet. They met in a freak show while on tour in England. Love at giant sight. Now let’s get on to the business at hand …”
But I had question. And out of simple curiosity, I asked: “Why did his parents name him Martin Van Buren? Was he from Kinderhook?”
Van Walters laughed—for the first time ever in my presence—and answered: “No, Kentucky. Van Buren was president when their son was born so they named their own big man for the biggest man of the day.”
That was enough of that for Marti. “Let’s forget the freaks now, Dad. Jack says the view downward from the Lindenwald tower really is a perfect match for Dallas,” she said sternly, underlining my earlier point, and then adding a very important new one. “You’ll be able to see that for yourself, of course.”
The light in Van Walters dimmed slightly.
“You’re coming to Lindenwald, Dad, with us—that’s the plan and that is what you will do,” said his daughter. “I don’t know about that,” he mumbled. “Yes, you do. I just told you.”
The next step in the Marti-directed show-and-tell was the rifle that would be used. She motioned to me.
“Take a look at this,” I said, holding the Finnish sport rifle across my chest with both hands. “You want to hold it, sir?”
Walters tossed his head to the side. No thank you, reporter/friend, whoever you are. But he did give the rifle a steady look from the tip of the barrel down through the sight and bolt to the wooden stock.
“Some weapon,” said Walters.
“Almost identical to the one Oswald used, sir,” I said.
“How do you know that?” Walters said. There was a snap to it. Maybe all of this was, in fact, getting to him.
“A marine firearms expert told me, sir.”
Van Walters moved his body straight forward as if he was going to stand up. “What is your time line, Marti, for this reenactment of yours?” he asked, turning directly to his daughter.
“Two days from today, Dad—Tuesday morning,” she said. She was about to burst with energy and something close to pleasure.
“It’s going to be cold out there, isn’t it?” Van Walters said.
“Yes, but we’ll bundle you up well.”
That annoyed him. “I was thinking about the shooting, not my physical comfort,” he snapped. “Cold weather can affect the accuracy of a bullet’s trajectory.”
Another sign of real life from this man!
“I must do some walking over the next two days … and maybe even outside … to get myself ready,” he said, as if he was talking to himself.
Then to me: “Those fools at the Warren Commission should have done a reenactment on that bubble top. They would’ve seen what difference it would have made. God knows the FBI idiots wouldn’t have done such a thing. All they were interested in was protecting themselves. You know, the FBI knew Oswald was in Dallas but they never told us. He wasn’t on any threat list. If we had known he was there and was a commie defector with marine rifle training now working at the book depository building, we’d have gotten him out of there—put him in some kind of protective custody or done something ahead of time. There’d never have been an assassination. Kennedy would still be alive right now, maybe serving a second term. I so wish he were still alive. I hate it that we let him die. I hate it that I let him die.”
Former Secret Service special agent Martin Van Walters stood up under his own power and wandered out of the room.
Afterward, amid flowing tears of absolute joy, his daughter said to me: “He has not talked that much like that since … since I don’t know how long ago. I need to tell Mom.”
I went with her to give the good news to Rosemary, who was in a small sewing room on the other side of the house. She was reading a copy of McCall’s magazine. The smell of alcohol was everywhere.
Marti told her what her dad had just done—and said.
“Great,” she said, in a slight slur. “But if those bullets don’t do the right thing when they hit that glass, won’t it only make it worse for him?”
Marti frowned and angrily motioned for me to join her in getting the hell out of there.
Outside, I made no comment on the truth that Rosemary Walters, drunk or not, had just uttered. Neither did Marti.
That remained the unspoken cloud over all that we were doing and what was to come on Tuesday morning.
The good news was that the weather forecast called for a high in the mid-forties the day we chose for the reenactment. At this time of year, that was considered a heat wave by the locals of Kinderhook. Also, the sky was clear and sunny with no rain or any other weather on the horizon for the day—a monumental day for a former Secret Service agent and his family, no matter the result.
There were monumental possibilities for me, too, frankly. Confused feelings of guilt and anxiety were rising with the passing of every second, the speaking of every word.
I had been on the phone twice with Bernie Shapiro since my arrival at Kinderhook. “Okay, whattya got?” That’s how he started both of our conversations, as he did with almost every Tribune reporter, no matter his or her location or story. I often wondered if he said that when his wife or kids called: Whattya got, sweetheart? Whattya got, Bernie Junior?
“It’s coming together,” I said to Bernie, more or less, both times.
“A little more specific, please, Young Jack,” he answered, more or less, both times.
“Can’t talk now, Bernie. Sorry.”
“We on the record yet?” he asked.
“Not quite.”
“What does that mean?”
Both times I ended the conversation with a phony excuse that someone was coming in
to the room where the telephone was. I had to dispense with my burning desire to follow up on his earlier talk about a possible new assignment that would require a passport. One thing—story, assignment—at a time. I was very busy right now.
Since arriving, I had, of course, taken complete notes on everything that had been said and done in Kinderhook by everybody. They were rapidly filling up my reporter’s spiral notebook, which I hid between the mattress and box spring of the bed after each nightly writing session in my freezing third-floor room. Marti had not made a second late-night visit here. I didn’t expect her to. But I didn’t want to take any chance of the notebook’s being found.
The anxiety was coming with the knowledge that my moment of truth—literally—was fast approaching. Was I a hungry, ambitious reporter about to figure out a way to violate (or ignore) a confidence in order to break a big story? Or was I a wonderful, selfless new friend who arrived, like Superman, to rescue the lives and happiness of a sick man and his desperate young daughter?
I was certain I would have to answer the question no matter what the three rounds I fired from the Finnish sniper rifle did to the Plexiglas. The glass shatters. A probable step toward a dramatic cure for former agent Walters? The glass deflects the bullets. Agent Walters either remains down and sick or begins to get even worse? Either way, a good story for The Dallas Tribune and all ships at sea. Or, no story at all because of the off-the-record deal?
Marti and I had no choice but to include Rosemary Walters in the operation, because we realized that we might need some additional help getting our show on—and off—the road. One of the reasons for staging the event in the morning was to mitigate the certainty that Marti’s mother would come to the task lubricated with alcohol. Managing how much she could consume by nine o’clock in the morning was a lot easier than keeping her away from the stuff any longer.
I’d had an unplanned private conversation with Rosemary just before dinner. We happened to run into each other in a small second-floor sitting room off to one side of the house. She was sitting by herself with a glass of something and an Atlantic magazine. And she was smoking a cigarette. So be it. It was her turf. I wasn’t going to do that here.
