by Jim Lehrer
“You’re not really Marti’s boyfriend, are you?” she asked without preamble.
“Maybe more of a future possibility than a present reality,” I said, not having really thought about what I was saying. Was it a future possibility? Not if I broke the off-the-record agreement.
“One thing you should know,” she said, her magazine now in her lap, her glass on the table. I was still standing in front of her. “I seldom drank before November twenty-second, before Van got sick about what he believed he did, before we went to Singapore in search of cures and salvation.”
“I understand, Mrs. Walters,” I said.
“No, I don’t think you do. You think I’m a worthless drunk who has left my husband and daughter for the bottle.”
“No, ma’am. I do not think that …”
“I’m a ricochet in this little family drama, Jack. That’s what I am. The shrapnel hit Van front and center and then glanced off and came right at me. Thank God, we—I—had sense enough to get Marti out of the line of fire or she’d probably have taken even worse hits than she has.”
“I hear you loud and clear, ma’am. I really do understand what you’re saying.”
As I moved away, I did everything I could to memorize exactly what Rosemary Walters had just said. That “ricochet” quote cried out to have a prominent place in what I would eventually write.
THINGS DID NOT start well the next morning. In fact, we almost lost control of the whole thing before it really began.
“I am not going,” Van Walters announced at eight fifteen. He was once again slouched in the sitting room chaise, having made no effort to dress for the mission ahead. He was still wearing a dark brown robe over wrinkled pajamas. “This is not going to work. I just know this is not going to work.”
We had assembled downstairs in Van’s room to begin our final preparations. Marti had warned us that something like this might happen despite all the good signs since we’d laid out our plan. He said this to Marti and me and her mother, who, joy of joys, gave off not even a whiff of a drink.
Her father, over the last two days, had in fact become slightly stronger physically. He had increased the size and number of meals he ate and took two “practice” walks outside accompanied once by Marti, the other time by Rosemary. But Marti reminded me repeatedly that her dad was still a very sick man and it was unrealistic to think he was going to suddenly get better. Even if the Plexiglas did shatter, it would at best be only the beginning of his very long recovery, not the ending. Dr. Reynolds, with whom Marti had stayed in steady contact by phone, agreed.
Now, after her father’s balking statements, Marti calmly signaled me with a head motion. Without a word, I dutifully followed her to the front door of the house and waved to the car outside.
It was Reynolds—our safety valve. He had agreed to be present for our reenactment but only to observe and stand by in case of an emergency. He had driven over from Boston last night and stayed in a motel near Kinderhook.
I met Reynolds between the car and the house and, as we walked, told him the latest setback with Van Walters.
And Walters said to Reynolds immediately when they saw each other a few moments later, “This is not going to work, Reynolds. Forget it.”
“It already is working, Mr. Walters,” Reynolds said smoothly.
“What do you mean?” Walters barked back. I couldn’t help noticing how much his voice was beginning to sound like his daughter’s.
“Listen to yourself, look at yourself—you are a different man from the one I saw and talked to a few days ago,” said Reynolds. “You’re already on the way toward being alive again.”
Walters lifted his head but nothing more of himself. “No matter what happens to that Plexiglas, nothing is going to be resolved,” he said.
“Why not?” Reynolds asked, still speaking soothingly. “I don’t understand.”
Walters looked away.
After a few seconds, Reynolds said, “If I may open up a difficult possibility for you, Mr. Walters. Let’s say Jack fires his three shots, as planned, and the bullets ricochet off the glass.”
The face of Van Walters turned to that of a boy about to face an angry school principal. “That would prove it!”
“Prove what, exactly?”
“That I was responsible for the death of Kennedy and we’d be right back where this all started,” Walters said, pointing a finger against the side of his head. I read that to mean that he would be crazy—again? Still?
“What if the glass splits up into many sharp and dangerous pieces that become flying weapons?”
Walters stood up. “All right, all right. Let me get dressed.”
Good work, Dr. Safety Valve!
Van Walters walked into a small adjoining room that he had been using as a bedroom and dressing room and closed the door behind him.
Marti and I exchanged right thumbs-up with each other—and then Reynolds. Rosemary Walters just smiled. I had the feeling that she had taken a tranquilizer of some kind. One of an odorless sort, at least.
MARTI DIRECTED THE seating assignments for the station wagon. She drove, her mother rode in the passenger seat, and I sat in the back with her father. Reynolds followed in his own car.
All of us were dressed properly for forty-degree coolness—sweaters under jackets with gloves and caps. Van Walters needed no special orders. He wore heavy, baggy dark green corduroy pants, a heavy black wool jacket over at least two layers of shirts, bulky gloves, and his brown felt Secret Service snap-brimmed hat. Nobody had to hold an arm or help him in or out of the car.
After parking behind Lindenwald, Marti told her father and mother to remain in the station wagon, which both did without comment or protest. There was no doubt about Marti being in charge. She left the motor running with the heater on.
Marti and I began putting everything in its proper place for the reenactment. We had carefully loaded and arranged all of the equipment in the large rear storage compartment of the Pontiac Safari so each item could be brought out in the order needed.
First, we assembled the card tables. There were four of them, two we borrowed from neighbors “for a party.” We carried them to a spot on the ground below the tower we had identified as being roughly one hundred feet from where the shots would be fired. Then we brought out the six pieces of Plexiglas and, using the masking tape, set the panels together on the tables the way we planned. The end result had the look of a clear plastic rectangular box that was four feet high and just over six feet long. My measurements of the glass panels had been eyeballed estimates, but this result was a remarkably consistent replica of the bubble top that had been taken off the back of the presidential limousine that fateful afternoon. I worked from my memory but also from some photographs I had found in various newspaper and magazine articles at the Kinderhook public library.
Our assembly took barely five minutes. Marti and I had rehearsed this a couple of times yesterday in the secluded backyard of the family house.
Next came three small canvas folding chairs. We set them on the ground roughly halfway between the tower and the card tables but several yards away from what was soon to be the line of fire. These were for the audience on the sidelines—the critical eyewitness chairs.
Marti went to the Pontiac, leaned in and turned off the ignition, and said to her parents, “Come with me. We’re almost ready.”
Van Walters was pointed to sit in the middle chair with Marti on his left, Rosemary on his right. The view of the bubble top was unobstructed for all three. Whatever the three rounds I fired did to that Plexiglas had to be clearly observable. I had been slightly concerned that deflected pieces of bullets or splintered glass—whatever the case would be—might fly toward the Walterses. I was most mindful of Rosemary’s talk of her being a kind of ricochet victim. I sure as hell didn’t want her daughter or husband to be a literal one. But I determined, mostly by uncalculated speculation, that both the distances and the likely lines of flight presented no serious hazard. And
Marti barely listened to me when I laid out the possibilities of danger.
The show must go on!
Now Marti went to the house and unlocked the back door. Curtain time was approaching.
She went to sit with her father and mother while I removed the rifle from the rear of the station wagon’s back storage space. I had wrapped it in a gray wool blanket.
I noticed Reynolds, now out of his car, taking a position behind some trees so he could watch the shots hit the glass but also witness Van’s reactions. He had assured Marti that he was prepared to step into the picture, whatever it might look like, if and when it seemed necessary to do so.
I slammed the car trunk and held the rifle with both hands across my chest with the barrel raised to my left at a level just above my head and the butt down below the waist—at port, as they said in the military. I approached the back door and began my trip up the winding staircase.
My head was jumping with complicated, confusing, contradictory thoughts. I knew that I would do the shooting the way it needed to be done. I had known for years how to handle rifles—even before I was in the marines—because of my dad. He took me hunting for coyotes, groundhogs, and rabbits. We even went skeet shooting several times with rifles equipped with scope sights, which he taught me how to adjust. So even without a test firing of the Finnish weapon, I was sure the shooting would be no problem.
Carrying the rifle brought back being a marine. Sergeant Lambert. His Silver Star. Vietnam. His Purple Heart. And I was hit by a powerful thought: I’m not there. I am in Kinderhook, New York, shooting at Plexiglas. Real Marines are in Vietnam being shot at. I thought about Rosemary Walters, that poor woman who was there but not ever really there. The other Walters family casualty. Marti Walters. She was just a kid. What were my feelings about her? They were all over the place.
Is the Plexiglas going to shatter all over the place? What if it doesn’t? Van Walters goes into a further funk and dies? Isn’t it a better story for me if he does die? What an outrageous thought! My story. How do I convince Marti to let me write and report her father’s story? How do I either pass through or work around off-the-record? Lovely Marti. Tough Marti. Smart Marti. How in the hell am I going to manage her?
I arrived at the top of the tower, stepped up through the opening to the floor of the portico. I went to the closed waist-high wooden railing that faced the south side of the grounds, where the Plexiglas was mounted on the card tables on the ground below.
I carefully put the rifle on the top of the railing, using the blanket as a surface to rest the gun. I wanted to make damn sure I got no scratches on Gunny Dickens’s valuable weapon.
I knelt down to the firing position. My left hand cradled the front part of the rifle as I gently settled the butt into my right shoulder and brought my right arm and hand forward across the stock to the trigger.
I leaned forward and put my right eye on the telescopic sight. I was confident I could properly adjust the sight to hit the target. I went through the process meticulously. I found the Plexiglas in the crosshairs. Moved the small adjustment wheel to heighten the image. Then I moved the rifle away from the target to a leaf on a nearby tree to test the sighting before returning to the glass box.
I was ready.
“Ready if you are!” I shouted down at the Walterses.
Marti looked up at the open tower, me, and my rifle. “Ready, Jack,” she hollered back.
I pulled open the rifle bolt, removed a long shiny brassjacketed bullet from a pocket, shoved it in the chamber, pushed the bolt forward, and locked it down.
I switched off the safety.
“First shot!” I yelled.
I put the sight with the crosshairs on the bubble top just above the front panel, aiming for a spot at the top of the glass.
I took a deep breath, slowly squeezed the trigger.
Pow!
The rifle kicked back against my shoulder—just as I had remembered it would.
I could see that the bullet hit the glass and ricocheted forward, leaving the glass undamaged.
Ricocheted forward leaving the glass undamaged!
I yanked the bolt open, and the empty shell casing flew to the floor. I inserted another bullet.
“Second shot!” I yelled.
I sighted a place in the back glass panel about where the head of a person sitting in the backseat of the limo would be.
I squeezed the trigger.
There was another simultaneous Pow! and kick.
I saw the bullet hit the Plexiglas in the center—right where I had aimed. It seemed from my view that it made a hole and then flew off to the left. But it was hard to tell for sure.
One more to go.
“Third shot!”
This time, again just as I had intended, the bullet struck the side panel on the right. I saw some cracking of the glass, and then the bullet slug seemed to tail off forward to the right. Another ricochet?
I quickly grabbed the three expended bullet casings off the floor and, with the rifle and the blanket, raced down the stairwell as fast as I could.
I went from the bottom floor in one leap out the door to the ground, and then around to the south side where Marti and her family had been seated.
The first things I saw were the unmoving bodies and heads of Marti, Van, and Rosemary Walters. They sat in those three folding chairs like three statues. They seemed paralyzed. Stunned. Frozen.
I went up behind them. “Let’s go see exactly what happened to the glass,” I said.
Nobody said a word or even looked back at me.
Finally, Van Walters stood. He took a deep breath that, from his back, seemed to have begun down in his toes and come out through the top of his felt hat. It was as if he were a large rubber balloon that had been inflated and then immediately deflated.
Van Walters began walking toward our card table assembly. I moved around to his side. Marti and Rosemary followed us. Not a word had yet been spoken except by me.
“Let’s look at them one shot at a time,” I said to Van Walters.
Walters nodded. All four of us moved to the bubble top.
Shot one. There was a heavy, deep scratch on the top panel, obviously where the bullet had hit and been deflected.
Shot two. A bullet hole in the back panel. There was some small cracking surrounding the hole. Where had the bullet gone from there? I led the three Walterses around to the left side. There was another hole there. It was smaller, clearly an exit hole. The bullet, in other words, had gone through the panel, slowed down and thrown off its direct path to the left, where it made another hole and disappeared somewhere out there in the Lindenwald lawn.
Shot three. There was a long, severe perforation on the right panel with much more cracking than in either of the first two shots. But the bullet, again, kept moving off into the countryside somewhere.
“I’ll go see if I can find the three slugs,” I said, a statement that drew no answer.
And there we stood, the four of us in what had become a rough circle. Van, Rosemary, and Marti Walters—and me, Jack Gilmore, reporter-adorer-helper-marksman-liar/honest-man? (“Still to kum,” as they write at the end of a piece of unfinished newspaper copy.)
I kept my eyes on Marti, who had hers focused on her father. I could tell something was about to give.
“Oh, Daddy, oh, Daddy,” Marti sobbed, throwing her arms around Van Walters. “I had so hoped—believed with all my heart and soul—that Jack’s and my six panes of Plexiglas were going to be at least fifty pieces of shattered glass. We would all be yelling Hip, hip hooray! The glass pieces would range from ragged hunks to spear-like pointed shards.”
“Yes,” Rosemary said, putting an arm each around the backs of her husband and daughter and holding tight. “Spear-like pointed shards.”
“I was right, I was right,” Van Walters said. His voice was sad—but firm. I had begun to expect that right about now something dramatic and awful was going to happen. I had no idea what it might be, but standing on
ly a couple feet away from the Walterses I was at the ready. I had wrapped the blanket back around the rifle and put it on the ground so I had both hands ready to do whatever needed to be done.
“But, Daddy, it doesn’t really mean anything,” Marti said quickly. “Don’t say what you’ve been saying—thinking—for five years. It doesn’t mean that …”
“That I killed Kennedy?”
Taller than both his daughter and wife, Van Walters placed his hands on the top of each of their heads.
I tensed up my arms and hands. And I looked back to the trees. Reynolds had moved up to within a few feet of where we were. He, too, was at the ready.
Van Walters said, his voice gaining in strength: “They’d all have been killed. The Kennedys, the Connallys, the agents in the car. If that bubble top had been on the limo they’d all have died.” He paused to kiss both women on their foreheads. “That’s what all the others said to me over and over. Akins said it. The other agents said it. The doctors said it. You two said it. Everyone said it. But they were all wrong. I was right. The bubble top would have saved Kennedy’s life. I would have saved Kennedy’s life.”
“Daddy, you said it right the first time. The bubble top might have saved his life. An inanimate object. Not a person—not you or anyone else. Lee Harvey Oswald, or whoever fired the shots, killed Kennedy. He took life and death upon himself. You didn’t …”
“Let me see that rifle,” Van Walters said to me. It was an order.
So here we were, having arrived at that awful moment I had felt coming.
“I can’t do that, sir,” I said.
“Give me the rifle, young man!”
I looked over at Marti. Help!
Marti, to my horror and surprise, nodded to me. The nod said, It’s okay. Give him the rifle. Give my crazy daddy the rifle.
I glanced over at Rosemary. She just closed her eyes.
I felt the presence of Reynolds behind me. But he didn’t touch me or say anything to me.
