Oswald's Tale

by Norman Mailer

  That evening as the twilight deepened, it was still warm enough in Texas in November to fool around outside:

  McMillan: Lee went out on the front lawn and played with the children until dark—the Paine children, the neighbors’ children, and June. He hoisted June to his shoulders and the two of them reached out to catch a butterfly in the air. Then Lee tried to catch falling oak wings for June.17

  One can have a sense of final moments—the last time we catch oak wings together.

  McMillan: The evening was a peaceful one. Lee told Ruth, as he had Marina, that he had been to FBI headquarters, tried to see the agents, and left a note telling them in no uncertain terms what he thought about their visits. Marina did not believe him. She thought that he was “a brave rabbit,” and this was just another instance of his bravado. After that, the conversation at supper was so ordinary that no one remembers it; but Ruth had the impression that relations between the young Oswalds were “cordial,” “friendly,” “warm”—“like a couple making up after a small spat.”18

  Ruth is right on the nose again, right on the nose of total error. Oswald has reached that zone of serenity that some men attain before combat, when anxiety is deep enough to feel like quiet exaltation: You are finally going into an action that will be equal in dimension to the importance of your life.

  McMillan: Marina was still at the sink when Lee turned off the television set, poked his head in the kitchen, and asked if he could help. Marina thought he looked sad.

  “I’m going to bed,” he said. “I probably won’t be out this weekend.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s too often. I was here today.”

  “Okay,” Marina said.19

  MR. JENNER. What did you do that evening? Did you have occasion to note what he did?

  MRS. PAINE. We had dinner as usual, and then I sort of bathed my children, putting them to bed and reading them a story, which put me in one part of the house. When that was done I realized he had already gone to bed, this being now about 9 o’clock. I went out to the garage to paint some children’s blocks and worked in the garage for half an hour or so. I noticed when I went out [to the garage] that the light was on . . .

  MR. JENNER. Was this unusual?

  MRS. PAINE. Oh, it was unusual . . . I realized that [Lee] had gone out to the garage [before me.] They were getting things out from time to time, warmer things for the cold weather, so it was not at all remarkable . . . but I thought it careless of him to have left the light on.20

  Possibly, he had gone out there to break down his gun and put the stock and barrel in the long paper bag he had glued and taped together at the Book Depository and had brought back with him to Irving this evening.

  McMillan: Marina was as usual the last to bed. She sat in the tub for an hour, “warming her bones” and thinking about nothing in particular, not even Lee’s request that she move in to Dallas. Lee was lying on his stomach with his eyes closed when she crept into bed. Marina still had pregnancy privileges; that is, she was allowed to sleep with her feet on whatever part of his anatomy they came to rest. About three in the morning, she thinks, she put a foot on his leg. Lee was not asleep and suddenly, with a sort of wordless vehemence, he lifted his leg, shoved her foot hard, then pulled his leg away.

  “My, he’s in a mean mood,” Marina thought.21

  The domestic intimacy of her foot must have felt suffocating to Lee at that instant—a false promise designed to divert him from any kind of daring project.

  McMillan: Lee usually woke up before the alarm rang and shut it off so as not to disturb the children. On the morning of Friday, November 22, the alarm rang and he did not wake up.

  Marina was awake, and after about ten minutes she said, “Time to get up, Alka.”

  “Okay.”22

  He did not kiss her when he left. He merely told her that he had left some money on the bureau.

  When she did get up, she discovered that the sum was nothing less than $170. If we know with hindsight that it left him with only a few dollars for a getaway, it was also his way of suggesting that she could still call him at work. But she was not about to. Her warning system was not on alert. She did not even discover that he had left his wedding ring in a cup on the dresser, and that was something he had never done before.

  3

  Pigeons Flew Up from the Roof

  From an FBI report: On the morning of November 22, 1963, at approximately 7:10 A.M., LINNIE MAE RANDLE was standing at her sink in the kitchen looking out the window when she saw LEE HARVEY OSWALD walking . . . toward the carport which adjoins the kitchen. She opened the back door a slight bit to see what he was doing and saw him go to the far side of her brother’s car [where] OSWALD opened the right rear door of the car . . . [and she] called to her brother, BUELL WESLEY FRAZIER, that OSWALD was waiting . . .

  Mrs. RANDLE stated that at the time she saw OSWALD . . . he was carrying a long package wrapped in brown paper [which] appeared to contain something heavy . . . 1FRAZIER went to his car, entered the left front door while OSWALD entered the right front door, both getting into the front seat. As he started to drive out of the yard, FRAZIER glanced back and noticed a long package, light brown in color, lying on the back of the rear seat [and] OSWALD explained that it was curtain rods. FRAZIER then remarked to OSWALD, “Oh, yes, you said you were going to get some curtain rods yesterday.” . . .

  FRAZIER stated that he and OSWALD drove to work and he parked the car about two blocks north of the [Texas School Book Depository] building. OSWALD got out of the car first and FRAZIER . . . observed that OSWALD had . . . the one end of the package . . . under his armpit and the other end [was] apparently held with his right fingers. OSWALD then walked toward the building with his back to FRAZIER and continued in front of FRAZIER for the entire distance, possibly 200 or 300 yards . . . By the time OSWALD reached the Texas School Book Depository building, he was at least 50 feet ahead of FRAZIER, and when FRAZIER entered the building, he did not see OSWALD and does not know where he went. He did not subsequently see him with the package again.2

  Ruth Paine awakened after Lee left.

  MRS. PAINE. . . . the house was extremely quiet and the thought occurred to me that Lee might have overslept [but] I looked about and found a plastic coffee cup in the sink that had clearly been used and judged he had had a cup of coffee and left . . .

  MR. JENNER. A plastic cup with some remains in it of coffee?

  MRS. PAINE. Instant coffee; yes.3

  When Roy Truly, superintendent of the School Book Depository, arrived at 8:00 A.M., he could see that Lee was already working, clipboard in hand.

  McMillan: Knowing Marina’s fascination with the President and Mrs. Kennedy, Ruth had left the television on when she went out . . . [and Marina] settled down on the sofa to watch . . . a rerun of a breakfast Mr. Kennedy had attended in Fort Worth. Somebody gave him a ten-gallon hat and he seemed to enjoy it.4

  After the breakfast, Jack Kennedy had gone back to his hotel room for a few minutes of relaxation before he and his entourage would get into Air Force One for the brief flight from Fort Worth to Love Field in Dallas. In this passage taken from William Manchester’s book Death of a President, the First Lady is speaking:

  “Isn’t this sweet, Jack?” she said . . . . “They’ve just stripped their whole museum of all their treasures to brighten this dingy hotel suite.” . . . Taking the catalogue, he said, “Let’s see who did it.” There were several names at the end. The first was Mrs. J. Lee Johnson III. “Why don’t we call her?” he suggested. “She must be in the phone book.” Thus Ruth Carter Johnson, the wife of a Fort Worth newspaper executive, became the surprised recipient of John Kennedy’s last telephone call. She was home nursing a sick daughter. She had watched the ballroom breakfast on WBAP-TV, and when she heard the President’s voice she was speechless.5

  Mrs. J. Lee Johnson III! One has to observe that her married name bears the first initial of J. Edgar Hoover, has Lee in the middle, and ends with the last n
ame of the President who will succeed Jack Kennedy. (As a bonus, her maiden name is Carter.) Perhaps the cosmos likes to strew coincidences around the rim of the funnel into which large events are converging.

  Manchester: [Kennedy] apologized for not phoning earlier, explaining that they hadn’t reached the hotel until midnight. Then Mrs. Kennedy came on. To Mrs. Johnson she sounded thrilled and vivacious. “They’re going to have a dreadful time getting me out of here with all these wonderful works of art,” she said. “We’re both touched—thank you so much.”6

  Ken O’Donnell, the President’s assistant, now carried in an unpleasant item. There was a full-page ad in the Dallas Morning News with a black border of the sort that accompanies the announcement of a death. It welcomed the President in one breath and then proceeded to accuse him of being a Communist tool. The people who had paid for the ad called themselves “The American Fact-Finding Committee.”

  Kennedy was not amused by what he read. His face showed as much when he passed the Dallas Morning News over to Jackie:

  Manchester: Her vivacity disappeared; she felt sick. The President shook his head. In a low voice he asked Ken, “Can you imagine a paper doing a thing like that?” Then, slowly, he said to her, “ . . . You know, last night would have been a hell of a night to assassinate a President.” . . . He said it casually, and she took it lightly; it was his way of shaking off the ad . . . . “I mean it,” he said now . . . “There was the rain, and the night, and we were all getting jostled. Suppose a man had a pistol in a briefcase.” He gestured vividly, pointing his rigid index finger at the wall and jerking his thumb twice to show the action of the hammer. “Then he could have dropped the gun and briefcase—” in pantomime he dropped them and whirled in a tense crouch—“and melted away in the crowd.”7

  The flight to Dallas took less than twenty minutes, and Vice-President Johnson was there at Love Field to head up the welcoming committee. The Kennedys got into the rear seat of the presidential limousine and Governor and Mrs. Connally took the jump seats. They would ride to the Trade Mart for a lunch scheduled to begin at twelve-thirty.

  On the sixth floor of the Book Depository, a large part of the floor had been ripped up, and five men were laying plywood all morning. Lee had been around the sixth floor from time to time, but they had paid no particular attention to him since he had been busy filling orders from stacks of books some fifty or sixty feet away. Besides, they could not see him much of the time—there were walls of cartons from floor to ceiling all over that warehouse space on the sixth floor.

  McMillan: At 11:45 or 11:50, the five men who were laying the floor broke for lunch. [They] got on the freight elevators, and raced each other to the ground floor. On the way down, they saw Lee standing by the fifth-floor gate.

  Once he was on the ground floor, [one of them], Givens, realized that he had left his jacket, with his cigarettes in it, on the sixth floor. He rode back up and once again saw Lee.8

  Another one of the men, Bonnie Ray Williams, had been planning to watch the President drive by. From the sixth floor there would be a good view of his motorcade as it came down toward the building from Houston Street. Then it would take a sharp left on Elm Street to pass right beneath them; in fact, the left turn from Houston to Elm was so sharp that the motorcade would have to slow down. So it would offer a boss view of Kennedy. Bonnie Ray Williams did not go down in the freight elevator, therefore, with the others, but ate his lunch on the sixth floor. Since none of the others came back up, he had to eat his food alone, and then he went down to look for them.

  Even if Oswald was ensconced behind book cartons at the other end of the sixth floor, he must still have been put into a state at all these comings and goings. How could he know whether he would be alone when the time came? There might be a crowd of workers hooting and hollering on just the other side of all those cartons.

  In Dealey Plaza, people had collected on the grassy knoll and on the two triangular islands of grass formed by the convergence of Elm Street, Main Street in the middle, and Commerce Street into side-by-side routes through the triple underpass. Hundreds of people had gathered, most of them on both sides of Elm Street, and the atmosphere had a hint of that agreeable mood which comes on a sunny day to a county fair. A big event is coming, a man is going to be shot out of a cannon, but it will all be over by the time you hear the boom. Even so, people on Elm Street can feel the excitement of that crowd half a mile away who are lining the sidewalk on Main Street as the motorcade comes toward Dealey Plaza like a slow tide rolling in. Time is there to burn. It is like a little money you will never see again. Not every day does the President come to Texas, not even to Dallas, insurance capital of the world.

  Forrest Sorrels, the Secret Service man in charge of the Dallas office, was in the lead car of the motorcade. He was perhaps thirty feet in front of the presidential limousine:

  MR. STERN. Do you recall remarking on anything you observed in the windows as you drove along Main Street?

  MR. SORRELS. Yes, I do; there was a tremendous crowd on Main Street. The street was full of people. I made the remark, “My God, look . . . They are even hanging out the windows.” . . .

  MR. STERN. Now, as you made the right turn from Main Street onto Houston Street, did you observe anything about the windows of any building in your view?

  MR. SORRELS. Yes, I did . . . The Book Depository, as we turned to the right on Houston Street, was right directly in front of us . . . I saw that building [and] I remember distinctly there were a couple of colored men that were in windows almost not quite to the center of the building, probably two floors down from the top . . . But I did not see any activity—no one moving around or anything like that . . . I do not, of course, remember seeing any object or anything like that in the windows such as a rifle or anything pointing out the windows . . . No activity, no one moving around that I saw at all.9

  Let us put ourselves in the mind of a rifleman who has set himself up in a nest of book cartons on the sixth floor. As the motorcade on Houston Street approaches the Depository building, there is an open view of the face and body of the President in the rear seat of his open convertible. It is a direct head-on shot with the target steadily growing in size through the eyepiece of the telescopic sight.

  On the other hand, trained professionals are staring at the Book Depository windows from the lead car in the motorcade, and police on motorcycles are scouring the building with their eyes. A sniper’s instinct would probably pull him back into relative darkness a few feet from the window.

  If the sniper is, in addition, an amateur and not certain whether he will or will not have the stuff to cross the irrevocable bridge that leads to squeezing off his shot, if he should choke on the trigger and not shoot, will he ever trust himself again?

  The motorcade slows down and turns to the left on Elm Street and the first large opportunity has been lost.

  From an FBI deposition: I, BONNIE RAY WILLIAMS, freely furnish the following voluntary statement . . .

  I am a Negro male and I was born September 3, 1943 at Carthage, Texas . . .

  On November 22, 1963, I, along with HAROLD “HANK” NORMAN and JAMES EARL JARMAN, JR., both of whom are also employed by the Texas School Book Depository, were on the fifth floor of the Depository Building looking out the windows waiting for the presidential motorcade . . . 10

  Finally, the limousine with JFK in it passed under their window:

  MR. WILLIAMS. The last thing I saw him do was he pushed his hand up like this. I assumed he was brushing his hair back. And then the thing that happened then was a loud shot—first I thought they were saluting the President, somebody—maybe even a motorcycle backfire . . . I really did not pay any attention to it, because I did not know what was happening. The second shot, it sounded like it was right in the building, the second and third shot. And it sounded—it even shook the building, the side we were on. Cement fell on my head.

  MR. BALL. You say cement fell on your head?

  MR. WILLIAMS. Ce
ment, gravel, dirt, or something . . . because it shook the windows and everything. Harold [Norman] was sitting next to me and he said it came right from over our head. If you want to know my exact words, I could tell you.

  MR. BALL. Tell us.

  MR. WILLIAMS. My exact words were, “No bullshit.”11

  This was for keeps. Something big had just happened. “No bullshit.” Hank Norman agreed.

  MR. MCCLOY. . . . after you heard the shots, did you have any thought that you might run upstairs [to the sixth floor] and see if anybody was up there . . . ?

  MR. NORMAN. No, sir.

  MR. MCCLOY. Did you feel it might be dangerous to go upstairs?

  MR. NORMAN. Yes, sir.12

  Unarmed, he would not feel all that inclined to mount a flight of stairs and face a gunman. Not at those wages. James Earl Jarman decided it was time for them to “get the hell away from there.”13

  Secret Service agent Forrest Sorrels was unable to see from which window the shots came because his car was by then on Elm Street in front of the President’s Lincoln and the angle from his rear window was too great. The sound, however, was engraved upon his ear.

  MR. STERN. Can you estimate the overall time from the first shot to the third shot?

  MR. SORRELS. Yes. I have called it out to myself, I have timed it, and I would say it was very, very close to 6 seconds.