Reclaiming History Page 19

  In December 1946, at the age of twenty-two, J. D. married his high school sweetheart, Marie Frances Gasaway, age eighteen. They briefly moved to Dallas to find work after the war, but soon returned to Red River County, where they hoped to farm and raise a family. Nature’s wrath took its toll on J. D.’s dreams of farming, and in July 1952 he joined the Dallas Police Department to feed his growing family. At $250 a month, Tippit soon found himself moonlighting to make ends meet. In early 1961, J. D. took a part-time job as a security guard from 10:00 p.m. until 2:00 a.m. every Friday and Saturday night at Austin’s Barbeque in Oak Cliff, a popular teen hangout, and every Sunday afternoon at the Stevens Theater located in a shopping center. Tippit enjoys the free time he spends with his family—enjoying his three young children, taking dance lessons with his wife, listening to the music of Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys, or horsing around with his boyhood pal and brother-in-law, Jack Christopher.

  In fact, J. D. has plans to see Jack and his family tonight. Earlier this morning, J. D. stopped at his sister’s house on the way to work and got a ticket to the South Oak Cliff High School football game, where his niece, Linda, will be performing with the Golden Debs cheerleading squad. As he’s done on Friday nights past, he’ll have to beat it over to Austin’s Barbeque before the game gets out and a good part of the grandstand shows up. It’ll be another busy Friday night keeping the high school rowdies in line at Austin’s.383

  12:57 p.m.

  In a second-floor operating room at Parkland, an anesthesiologist rapidly evaluates Connally’s condition and starts to put the governor under for an operation that will last well over three hours.384

  Dr. Robert Shaw and Dr. Charles F. Gregory, chief of orthopedic surgery, enter the operating room, where Connally lies ready for surgery. Dr. Shaw removes the temporary dressing and inspects Connally’s chest wounds. After three years with the U.S. Army Medical Corps in the European Theater of Operations, Shaw is no stranger to bullet wounds.385

  The surgeons place an endotracheal tube into the pharynx and trachea to control the governor’s breathing, then roll him over to inspect the entrance wound just behind his right armpit, a roughly elliptical puncture with relatively clean-cut edges. Turning to the large and ragged exit wound below the right nipple, Shaw excises its edges, and then carries the incision back along the right side of the governor’s chest and finds that about four inches of the fifth rib have been shattered and carried away from what appears to have been a glancing strike by the bullet. Several small fragments of the rib are still hanging to bits of partly detached tissue from the rib’s lining. An X-ray reveals no metallic fragments left behind by the bullet in the area of the ribs. There’s a lot of damage to the right lung, which is engorged with blood and rib fragments. It will have to be closed and sutured, along with the muscles surrounding the rib cage, but the diaphragm is uninjured, and the wounds are far from fatal. The governor has also sustained wounds on both sides of his right wrist and a superficial wound in his left thigh. X-rays reveal a shattering of the radius bone just above the right wrist and the presence of a number of small metallic fragments. There’s several hours of work to do, but it’s clear to the surgeons that Governor Connally will survive his injuries.386

  12:58 p.m.

  An unmarked squad car pulls up to the front of the Book Depository, and Police Captain Will Fritz, Detectives Sims and Boyd, and Sheriff Bill Decker climb out. An officer in front of the building tells them that the man who did the shooting is believed to be still in the building. Several officers take out their shotguns and follow Fritz and his men as they enter the Depository. They quickly locate an elevator and go up to the second floor, where they see several officers already there. They continue up, finding officers already stationed on the third and fourth floors.

  This particular elevator only goes to the fourth floor, so Fritz and his men exit the elevator and cross over to the freight elevators near the northwest corner of the building, and take one up to the fifth floor. They make a hurried search along the front and west side windows, then, joined by some other officers, go up to the sixth floor. A few officers get off on the sixth, and Fritz, Sims, and Boyd continue up to the seventh floor and start to search along the front windows.387

  Father James Thompson drives into Parkland in the black Ford Galaxie belonging to Holy Trinity Church. Parkland is only three miles from the church, but the traffic is brutal. Even though he took a “secret route” taking advantage of back streets, he and Father Oscar Huber found themselves held up by what seemed like endless traffic delays. Both of them are worried because they know that the last rites of the Catholic Church, to be valid, must be administered to the dying before the soul has left the body. Father Huber, like many parish priests, takes a liberal view of that—to his way of thinking, there can be quite a long time between what the doctors call clinical death and the eventual flight of the soul, but that’s no reason to dally. As they pull up, Father Thompson tells Father Huber to jump out of the car and hurry into the hospital while he finds a place to park.388

  Father Huber saw Jack Kennedy, it seems to him, only minutes ago. He knew that the president’s motorcade would pass within three blocks of Holy Trinity, and when he rose at five this morning in his room at the rectory, he resolved to go down to see it. He was disappointed that he couldn’t interest any of the other priests in the project.

  “Well, I’m going,” he told them. “I’m seventy years old and I’ve never seen a president. I’ll be danged if I’m going to miss this chance.”

  Huber, a short, stocky man, had to leap up and down to see over the heads of the dense crowd, but managed to get a glimpse of Kennedy, who turned and seemed to look right at him. Now he hurries to the emergency entrance to give the last rites to this once-vibrant man. The significance of his arrival is not lost on anyone.

  “This is it,” Congressman Henry Gonzalez thinks as he sees Huber arrive at the hospital. Malcolm Kilduff, the president’s acting press secretary, whispers to Congressman Albert Thomas, “It looks like he’s gone.”389

  In Oak Cliff, at 1026 North Beckley, Earlene Roberts tugs at the “rabbit ear” antennas trying to get a clear picture on the television set when the young man she knows as “O. H. Lee” enters, walking unusually fast, in shirt sleeves.

  “You sure are in a hurry,” the housekeeper says, but he goes straight to his room without saying a word.390

  That isn’t so strange. Since renting the room in mid-October, “O. H. Lee” has hardly said two words to anyone. Once, Mrs. Roberts said “good afternoon” to him and he just gave her a dirty look and walked right past her. At night, if one of the other boarders had the television on in the living room, he might stand behind the couch for a couple of minutes, but then he’d go to his room and shut the door without a word. For the most part, “O. H. Lee” has kept to himself, which is why Mrs. Roberts doesn’t really know anything about him, least of all the fact that his real name is Lee Harvey Oswald.391

  Oswald is in his room just long enough to get his revolver and his jacket. He comes out of his room, zipping up his jacket, and rushes out.392 Mrs. Roberts glances out the window a moment later and notices Lee standing at the curbside near a bus stop in front of the rooming house. That’s the last she sees of him.393 He apparently doesn’t wait to board any bus since there is no record of anyone seeing him on a bus after one o’clock, and if he had boarded a bus in front of his home, it would take him in a direction away from where we know he was next seen.

  1:00 p.m.

  At Parkland Hospital, Dr. Kemp Clark feels the carotid artery in the president’s neck for a pulse. There is none. Clark asks that a cardiotachyscope (a cardiac monitor that measures heartbeat) be connected to the president’s body, and starts external heart massage,394 an unsophisticated physical procedure practiced by physicians from the sixteenth century, even before they understood anything about the circulation of blood in the body.

  The anesthesiologists, Drs. Jenkins and Giesecke, now report a
carotid pulse in the neck, and Dr. Jones reports a pulse in the femoral artery in the leg. After a few moments, Dr. Perry takes over for Dr. Clark, who is in an awkward physical position to continue the rigorous cardiac massage.395

  “Somebody get me a stool,” Dr. Perry commands. A stool is slid near the table and Perry stands on it to get better leverage as he works the livid white flesh beneath his palms. Drs. Jenkins and Clark watch the cardiotachyscope. The green dot suddenly darts across the screen trailing a perfectly smooth line of fluorescence, without the tiniest squiggle of cardiac activity.396 Dr. Clark shakes his head sadly, “It’s too late, Mac.” Perry slowly raises himself up from the body, steps down off the stool, and walks numbly away. Dr. Jenkins reaches down from the head of the cart and pulls a white sheet up over the president’s face as Dr. Clark turns to Mrs. Kennedy.

  “Your husband has sustained a fatal wound,” he says solemnly.

  Her lips move silently, forming the words, “I know.”

  It is one o’clock and it’s all over. The thirty-fifth president of the United States is dead.397*

  As the senior neurosurgeon, Dr. Clark will sign the death certificate, and the cause is so obviously the massive damage to the right side of the brain.398 It is what they call a four-plus injury,† which no one survives, even with the five-star effort they made. Clark knows what Carrico and the others knew from the outset—medically, the president was alive when he entered Parkland Hospital, but from a practical standpoint he was DOA, dead on arrival.399 As New York Times White House correspondent Tom Wicker, who was in Dealey Plaza at the time of the shooting, put it, Kennedy probably died way back on Elm Street a half hour earlier. He “probably was killed instantly. His body, as a physical mechanism, however, continued to flicker an occasional pulse and heartbeat.”400

  Dr. Jenkins starts disconnecting the multitude of monitoring leads running to the lifeless body and removing the intravenous lines. Admiral Burkley begins to weep openly. Mrs. Kennedy moves toward the hospital cart where her husband lies, and Jenkins retreats quietly to a corner of the room. Looking pale and remote, she leans down and kisses the president through the sheet on the foot, leg, thigh, abdomen, chest, and finally on the partly covered face.401

  Father Oscar Huber enters the room out of breath and walks directly to Jackie Kennedy. He whispers his sympathies, draws back a sheet that is covering the president’s face, pulls the purple and white stoll over his shoulders, wets his right thumb with holy oil and administers in Latin the last rites of the Catholic Church, the sacrament of extreme unction, including the anointing of a cross with his thumb over the president’s forehead. Because the president was dead, a “short form” of absolution was given, and in a few minutes he finishes and steps back.

  “Is that all?” Admiral Burkley blurts out, offended at the brevity of the ceremony. The death of a president deserves more, he thought. “Can’t you say some prayers for the dead?”

  Father Huber quickly obliges with a recitation of the Lord’s Prayer and a Hail Mary, joined by the widow and Admiral Burkley, while the nurses who are cleaning up the appalling mess in the room remain still, their heads bowed. Father Thompson, having parked the car outside, steps in just as they are finishing.

  Mrs. Kennedy turns and walks back out into the corridor, slumping into the folding chair just outside the door. The two priests follow.

  “I am shocked,” Father Huber says to her, his body beginning to tremble. “I want to extend my sympathy and that of my parishioners.”

  “Thank you for taking care of the president,” she whispers. “Please pray for him.”

  “I am convinced that his soul had not left his body,” he assures her. “This was a valid last sacrament.”

  Mrs. Kennedy’s head drops down as she struggles to keep from fainting. Father Thompson signals a passing nurse.

  “Do you want a doctor?” Father Huber asks Mrs. Kennedy.

  “Oh, no,” she mumbles. The nurse brings her a cold towel anyway. The First Lady presses it to her forehead and leans over until the spell passes.402

  Across the hall from Trauma Room One, the two priests confer briefly. What will they say to the horde of reporters outside as they leave? It’s clearly not their role to make any statement at all. In fact, as they head for the exit a Secret Service agent warns Huber, “Father, you don’t know anything about this.”

  Just as they feared, they are besieged in the parking lot by the news media. Father Thompson refuses to give his name, but Father Huber is unable to remain silent.

  “Is he dead?” Hugh Sidey of Time magazine asks.

  “He’s dead all right,” Huber answers.403

  1:05 p.m. (2:05 p.m. EST)

  At his Virginia home, Robert Kennedy is in an upstairs bedroom with his wife, Ethel, preparing to leave for Dallas. The White House extension phone rings and he practically dives for it. It’s Captain Taz Shepard, the president’s naval aide, with news from Parkland.

  “Oh, he’s dead!” Bobby cries out in anguish.

  “Those poor children,” Ethel says in tears.

  The attorney general stares out the window.

  “He had the most wonderful life,” he finally manages to say.

  Bobby Kennedy descends the stairs and pokes his head into the living room where Robert Morgenthau and several others are watching television coverage.

  “He died,” Kennedy says in a low voice and walks toward the pool, where the extension phone has rung. It’s J. Edgar Hoover again. He informs the attorney general, in a cold and unsympathetic manner characteristic of the FBI director, that the president is in “very, very critical condition.” Bobby Kennedy listens politely, then says, “It may interest you to know that my brother is dead.”404

  RFK is plunged into a staggering gloom and depression by his brother’s murder, one from which his intimates said he never recovered. For months thereafter, a biographer wrote, he “seemed devoured by grief. He literally shrank, until he appeared wasted and gaunt. His clothes no longer fit, especially his brother’s old clothes—an old blue topcoat, a tuxedo, and a leather bomber jacket with the presidential seal—which he insisted on wearing and which hung on his narrowing frame. To close friend John Seigenthaler, he appeared to be in physical pain, like a man with a toothache or on a rack. Even walking seemed too difficult for him, though he walked for hours, brooding and alone…On many winter nights he arose before dawn and drove, too fast, in his Ford Galaxie convertible with the top down, sometimes to see his brother’s grave.” That is why it is all the more remarkable that within an hour of his brother’s death, and in the trancelike midst of his dark abyss, the protective concern over his dead brother’s well-manicured image enables him to extricate himself enough to call JFK’s national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy, over at the White House. He instructs Bundy to immediately change the locks on his brother’s personal files in the event that Lyndon Johnson decides to comb through them, and transport them to the offices of the national security staff located in the Old Executive Office Building, with a round-the-clock guard. And though he has no jurisdiction over the Secret Service, he has them dismantle and remove the secret taping system his brother had installed in the Oval Office and Cabinet Room.405

  1:06 p.m.

  It doesn’t take long for Captain Fritz, Detectives Sims and Boyd, and other police officers to assure themselves that there’s no one hiding on the seventh floor of the Book Depository and no sign that anyone fired at the president from there. The whole floor is one big open space with a few stacks of books here and there, some shelves, and not much else. A storage room in the southeast corner yields nothing but a collection of forgotten desks, chairs, and other office space odds and ends. The windows facing Elm Street are still closed, as they were at the time of the shooting.406

  On the sixth floor below, Dallas police officers and deputy sheriffs are systematically searching the entire floor—from the cleared space on the west side, where the new flooring is going down, toward the stacks of boxes tha
t have been piled into rows on the east side.

  Deputy Luke Mooney is near the southeastern corner of the floor when he whistles loudly and hollers to his fellow officers.407 He’s inside the sniper’s nest, a roughly rectangular screen of boxes stacked around the southeasternmost window. Anybody sitting or crouching behind them would be completely hidden from anyone else on the floor. Two more cartons on top of each other are right in front of the window. A third box lies closer to the window, resting in a canted position on the windowsill. In the corner, a long, handmade, brown paper bag is bunched up. On the floor, at the baseboard beneath the window, are three spent cartridge casings—“hulls,” as they call them in Texas.

  Dallas police sergeant Gerald L. Hill walks over to an adjacent window, sticks his head out and yells down to the street for the crime lab, but fears that no one can hear him over the sirens and crackling police radios. He starts down himself to report the find and meets Captain Fritz and Detectives Sims and Boyd at the freight elevator on the sixth floor. They had heard Mooney’s and Hill’s shouts through the cracks in the floorboards and came down to investigate. Hill tells them he’s going down to the street to make sure the officers know where to send the crime-lab boys.408