Reclaiming History Page 11

  The morning visit to the News is a regular Friday event for Jack, one he looks forward to. He takes particular pains composing the weekend ads in the classified-ad office of the News for his two clubs, because the weekend is “very lucrative,” and Jack has a way of making his ads, as he says in his strange way of talking, “where they have a way of selling the product I am producing or putting on the show.” It’s not always easy to figure out what Jack is saying. “It’s been a lovely, precarious evening,” he might say, or, to an attractive woman, “You make me feel very irascible.” A favorite expression is “In lieu of the situation, let’s do this.”100

  On his way to the elevator in the lobby, he spots a News employee he’s always friendly with and has recently dated, Gladys Craddock, who works in the classified-ad department on the first floor, and cheerily shouts out to her across the lobby, “Hi, the president is going to be here today.”101 He gets a quick breakfast in the building’s cafeteria on the second floor102—part of his Friday routine.

  Jack then saunters over to the advertising and promotion department, also on the second floor. He could walk around the department blindfolded. He knows its big bullpen for the ad-space salesmen, and the cubicles along the sides for the executives. He knows every employee, and he knows the routine: how to leave his ad copy in the box if John Newnam (not Newman), his designated salesman, isn’t there and how to get help if he needs it in preparing his ad.

  Newnam isn’t there today. This morning a lot of the twenty-six ad salesmen are adjusting their schedules to take in the presidential motorcade when it cuts through the downtown on Main Street a few blocks away.103

  The fact that Newnam isn’t there is no problem for Jack. It gives him time to go up to Tony Zoppi’s office on the third floor of the building.104 Zoppi, the paper’s nightclub editor, is one of Jack’s preoccupations. He has known Zoppi for a dozen years—Zoppi will never forget being introduced to the audience in one of Ruby’s clubs, the night they first met, and hearing Ruby explain how “superfluous” it was to have Tony Zoppi there.105 Ruby is always trying to get Zoppi to mention his clubs in his daily column or his television show. That’s worth far more than any amount of advertising, and what’s more, it’s free, while the ads have to be paid for in cash. At least Jack’s ads do. His credit with the News, in spite of the fact that he’s a steady customer, is not terrific. In fact, it’s nonexistent.

  Zoppi isn’t there either—someone tells Jack he’s in New Orleans for a couple of days—but Jack sees the brochure he left for Zoppi a few days before about the emcee at the Carousel, Bill DeMar. Jack is annoyed with Zoppi, who promised him a story, which amounted to a “build” of one or two lines. Picking up the brochure, Jack meanders back to Newnam’s desk to work up the copy for his weekend ads when Don Campbell turns up to distract him.

  Campbell is not just another ad-space salesman, but a friend and a colleague, so to speak. Campbell operates and manages the Stork Club, a supper club out on Oak Lawn across from another club called the Village, and they often talk shop. Jack particularly wants to apologize for the other evening, when Campbell came over to Jack and his friend, Ralph Paul, as they were having dinner at the Egyptian Lounge to invite them to come along with him to the nearby Castaway Club. Jack, still seething over the way the Castaway Club had once pirated his whole band from the Vegas, turned down the invitation, and now wants to be sure Campbell’s feelings weren’t hurt.

  Jack has a lot on his mind: his troubles with Jada, the crazy stripper from New Orleans who’s going to get him closed down if she doesn’t clean up her act; the struggle to keep his two clubs afloat. Campbell has known Jack for three or four years, and it’s not the first time he has heard Jack’s complaints about the lousy business they are in, running nightclubs. Jack moans about the fights he gets into with what he regards as undesirable customers, “characters” or “punks,” as he calls them. Fortunately, Jack is, he tells Campbell, a very capable fighter. Also, anytime he is fixing to have trouble with someone, he gets a gun and keeps it on his person.

  Neither Campbell nor Ruby mentions the presidential motorcade, which will be passing within four blocks of the News building in a few minutes. When Campbell goes off to see another client about 12:25, Jack is still sitting at Newnam’s desk, working on his ad copy.106

  11:25 a.m.

  The flight from Carswell Air Force Base in Fort Worth to Love Field, Dallas’s airport, is just thirty miles and takes but thirteen minutes. The presidential party could easily have driven the distance in half an hour, but presidential aide Ken O’Donnell vetoed that. It would cut out the welcome at the airport for the president and Jackie, and O’Donnell knows that the airport arrival, with the inevitable cameras recording the enthusiasm of the crowd, is as important to modern political campaigns as all those whistlestop appearances on the rear platform of the cross-country train were to Harry Truman’s astonishing upset victory in 1948.

  Short as the flight is, O’Donnell and the president use the fleeting minutes to put the squeeze, as O’Donnell puts it, on Governor Connally, who is aligned with LBJ against Yarborough in the state’s Democratic bloodletting. The president motions at Texas congressman Albert Thomas from the doorway of his cabin and asks him to “give Kenny a hand with Connally.” Thomas is glad to oblige, and the governor begins to wilt under their pressure.

  Senator Yarborough was particularly incensed about a deadly slight Governor Connally had in store for him—after selling $11,200 in tickets to tomorrow night’s dinner in Austin, there was no place for his wife. Worse, he hadn’t been invited to the Connally’s formal reception for the Kennedys.107

  “It was my wife who didn’t want the senator at the reception, not me,” Connally tells O’Donnell and Thomas, taking advantage of Nellie’s temporary absence. “She said she wouldn’t let that man in her house, and when your wife says something like that, what can you do?”

  At a strategic moment O’Donnell nudges the governor and the senator into the president’s cabin, and watches his boss expertly wield the overwhelming Kennedy charm to solve the problem in three minutes. The governor finds himself agreeing not only to invite Senator Yarborough to the reception at the Governor’s Mansion, but to seat him at the head table for the dinner.

  The president, who has already changed suits once that morning, excuses himself to change his shirt. The governor mutters to the smug O’Donnell, “How can anyone say no to that man?”

  “So we land in Dallas with everybody on the plane in love with each other and the sun shining brightly,” O’Donnell thinks. The day is looking up.108

  11:40 a.m.

  Air Force One, code-named Angel, touches down at Love Field, just north of downtown Dallas, and rolls across the puddled tarmac to the red and green terminal building.109* The last U.S. Weather Bureau temperature reading at Love Field, at 10:55 a.m., was fifty-seven degrees. But by the next reading, at 11:55, sixteen minutes after the president arrived, it had risen to sixty-three degrees.110 The president is pleased at his first glimpse of the waiting crowd from the plane’s window. He says to O’Donnell, “This trip is turning out to be terrific. Here we are in Dallas, and it looks like everything in Texas is going to be fine for us.”111

  The stage directions for the airport welcome call for the vice president’s plane to land ahead of the president’s by a minute or two, enough time to allow Johnson and his wife to position themselves to greet President and Mrs. Kennedy at the foot of the ramp, as though they hadn’t just left them a quarter hour earlier in Fort Worth.112

  Aura, though a reality, cannot be adequately described. It just is. And JFK’s aura was legendary. Reporting live for radio KBOX in Dallas, reporter Ron Jenkins waits for the door to Air Force One to open. When it does, no one emerges for several moments. “And then all of a sudden President Kennedy appeared,” he would later recall. “And he had a way of doing this like no one I had ever seen before. And it was a presence bigger than life. I never knew how tall the man was, or anything else,
but he looked about 7 feet tall when he came out of that door all by himself.”113 Unwittingly, Jenkins’s words contained their own validation. He was so struck by Kennedy he had forgotten that Jackie Kennedy, someone few overlooked, had emerged from the plane door ahead of the president.

  Texas governor John Connally and his wife, Nellie, followed Kennedy and Jackie down the stairs of Air Force One in the dazzling sunlight. “We were two couples in the prime of our lives,” Nellie Connally recalled. “We were two women, so proud of the men we loved…That day, November 22, 1963, the autumn air was filled with anticipation.”114

  11:45 a.m.

  Police Chief Jesse Curry, waiting in the open door of the motorcade’s lead car, checks on communications with Deputy Police Chief George L. Lumpkin. A few minor problems are solved.

  “Ervay Street is completely blocked with pedestrians and is completely out of control,” Sergeant Campbell informs Inspector J. H. Sawyer.

  “I’ve got two reserves I’m bringing down now,” Sawyer says.

  “I have two 3-wheels [a three-wheel police motorcycle] with me,” Campbell adds, “and we still can’t get the pedestrians off of Ervay, so Ervay is completely closed.”

  “Ten-four [radio jargon for “acknowledged”]. I’m on my way.”

  Captain J. M. Souter asks the dispatcher for a progress report. The dispatcher contacts the driver of the pilot car, Deputy Chief Lumpkin, who is assigned to drive over the motorcade route a quarter of a mile ahead of the main body of the procession in an effort to spot and avert any potential trouble.

  “Are they moving yet?” the dispatcher asks him.

  “No,” Lumpkin replies.

  “Have not started yet,” the dispatcher relays to Captain Souter.115*

  Bill Greer, the president’s Irish-born driver and, at age fifty-four, the oldest man in the Secret Service’s White House detail, will drive the waiting presidential limousine—a 1961 Lincoln Continental convertible built at Ford Motor Company’s Wixom, Michigan, plant and customized to rigid Secret Service specifications for the president by the Hess & Eisenhardt Company in Cincinnati. The car was leased to the White House in June of 1961. To the Secret Service it is known as SS-100-X.116 Weighing about seventy-five hundred pounds with its special build and heavy armor, and being a full twenty-one feet eight inches long, it is a big chore to deliver it to every place the president intends to be—which is why they didn’t have it in Fort Worth. A government C-130 cargo plane—the kind they fly tanks around in—brought it from Washington, D.C., down to San Antonio. From San Antonio they flew it down to Dallas, skipping the president’s stop in Houston and overnight stay in Fort Worth.117

  In addition to the armor, the car is fitted with jump seats behind the front seat, effectively making the car comfortable for seven passengers and allowing the president to accommodate guests without having them obscure the crowds’ view of him on the slightly higher backseat. There is also an electrical system, operable by the president himself provided the top is down, to raise that seat and its footrest by as much as eight inches from their normal positions.118 Over the back of the front seat, a sort of roll bar, fitted with handholds, allows the president to ride standing up for certain occasions. On the back bumper, on each side of the elegant spare-tire housing at the rear of the car’s trunk, are two steps, each large enough to permit a Secret Service agent to ride there while holding on to the special handgrip fitted to the trunk. Dashboard-controlled, retractable running boards run along each side of the limousine and can accommodate additional agents, but unlike prior presidents who had agents riding on the side running boards of their limousines, Kennedy does not want this, and these side running boards are never used. It is also possible to bolt a bubble top—six panels of clear plastic kept in the trunk—to the frame, with a black canvas-type cover that buttons over the top of the plastic. Neither plastic nor canvas are bulletproof, or even bullet resistant, just protection from the weather.119

  Today, the car is without the bubble top. Kennedy never wanted it when the weather was clear. This morning in Fort Worth, Ken O’Donnell told Secret Service agent Roy Kellerman that with the weather breaking, there would be no need for the bubble top. Kellerman passed the word on to the Secret Service’s advance man in Dallas, Winston G. Lawson.120

  11:47 a.m.

  Some of the stock boys in the Texas School Book Depository Building are laying new flooring up on the sixth floor. The schoolbook business is a little slow this late in the year, and rather than lay the boys off entirely, Bill Shelley, a Depository manager, put them to work resurfacing the upper floors, where most of the books are stored.* Half a dozen of them are at it—Bill Shelley himself, Bonnie Ray Williams, Charles Givens, Danny Arce, Billy Lovelady, and occasionally Harold Norman, when he has time to give them a hand.

  The work is pretty straightforward. They have to move the heavy cartons of books from one side of the floor to the other, then back, as they lay new flooring over the old planks. It took them about three weeks to do the fifth floor, and they’re just starting in on the sixth, moving as many cartons as they can from the west side of the open floor over to the east. Given the number of books they have to move, they aren’t very far along. They’re still working on the first section, on the westernmost portion of the sixth floor.121

  At one point, Bonnie Ray Williams thought he saw Lee Oswald, though he is not sure, messing around with some cartons near the easternmost freight elevator on the sixth floor, during the half hour before noon. He didn’t pay much attention though. Oswald is always messing around, kicking and shoving cartons around.122

  The warehouse crew usually knocks off about five minutes before noon to give themselves time to wash up for lunch, but today, anxious to see the president, they quit a little earlier. In high spirits, the young men commandeer both of the big freight elevators for a mock race to the bottom. Bonnie Ray, Billy, Danny, and Charlie all pile into the east elevator and head for the bottom. The rest of them take the west elevator. It isn’t really much of a race. The east elevator is faster, and they all know it.123

  Charlie Givens notices Lee Oswald in front of the elevator shaft on the fifth floor as they flash past on their way to the ground floor.124

  “Guys!” Oswald calls after them. “How about an elevator?”

  Givens tosses his head back as the freight elevator plunges down.

  “Come on, boy!” Givens calls out, suggesting Oswald come down to the bottom floor too, though apparently not on their moving elevator.

  “Close the gate on the elevator,” Oswald shouts down the shaft, “and send the elevator back up.”125 Oswald means the west elevator. The east elevator has to be manned, but the west one can be summoned from any floor if its gate is closed.126 When they get to the first floor, however, no one bothers with Oswald’s request.

  Out at Ruth Paine’s house in Irving, Marina Oswald, who still hasn’t dressed for the day, watches television alone. Ruth has left to run some errands. Marina doesn’t understand much of what the announcers are saying, but the live images speak for themselves.127 She sits on the edge of the couch and watches as Air Force One taxies up close to the reception line at Dallas Love Field. Crewmen run under the wings and throw down the chock-blocks as the jet comes to a halt and the engines wind down. A ramp is pushed up to the back entrance of the jet as the door is propped open. The excited crowd watches the back door, giggling with anticipation. Suddenly, Jackie’s pink suit comes into view.

  “There is Mrs. Kennedy and the crowd yells,” the TV announcer says, a smile in his voice, “and the President of the United States. And I can see his suntan all the way from here!” The President and First Lady descend the ramp and shake hands with the official welcoming party, one of whom, the Dallas mayor’s wife, Mrs. Earle Cabell, presents Mrs. Kennedy with a brilliant bouquet of red roses.* The sunshine is blinding, the weather absolutely beautiful. They look like Mr. and Mrs. America.128

  Robert Donovan, Washington bureau chief of the Los Angeles Times,
thinks to himself that if Hollywood had tried to cast a president and his wife, it could never have dreamed up John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy. They were just two beautiful, glamorous people, and were receiving a screaming reception. (He would later add that “there was never a point in the public life of the Kennedys, in a way, that was as high as that moment in Dallas.”)129

  Marina can see the presidential party making its way toward the cars. Suddenly, the President and First Lady turn toward the cheering crowds hugging the fence line.

  “The press is standing up high, getting a lot of shots of this!” the television announcer says excitedly. “This is great for the people and makes the eggshells even thinner for the Secret Service whose job it is to guard the man.”

  Secret Service agent Roy Kellerman, the assistant special agent in charge of the White House detail for this trip to Texas, slips up close to the fence, scrutinizing every hand that reaches over toward the president. The happy and loudly exuberant crowd, perhaps two thousand strong,130 is tightly packed behind the fence at gate 28. The president can’t seem to soak up enough of their warmth. He moves along the fence line, his image growing larger on local television screens as he nears the pool camera setups. The eager, outstretched hands reach for him. Jackie follows closely behind, radiant and gay, her beauty enhanced by the bouquet of red roses.131

  “And here they come, right down toward us!” the TV announcer gushes. “I can see Mrs. Kennedy, and they’re going to come right on down and shake hands with everybody. Mrs. Kennedy gave a lovely wave and a smile that time. There’s the president shaking hands with the people. He’s waving at a lot of people. Smiling. Secret Service men all around. Boy, this is something!”132

  But there is palpable tension at Love Field too. Those on the scene are all too aware of the discordant placards among the signs of welcome. “IN 1964, GOLDWATER AND FREEDOM”; “YANKEE GO HOME”; “YOU’RE A TRAITOR.” Liz Carpenter, Jackie’s assistant, thought some of them were the ugliest she had ever seen.133