Reclaiming History Page 23
“My friend, I’m the special agent in charge of the White House detail of the Secret Service,” he says. “This is the body of the president of the United States and we are going to take it back to Washington.”
“No, that’s not the way things are,” Rose snaps, waving his finger.
“The president is going with us,” Kellerman argues.
“You’re not taking the body anywhere,” Rose lashes back. “There’s a law here. We’re going to enforce it!”
“This part of the law can be waived,” Kellerman insists, every muscle tightening.
Rose shakes his head, no.
“You’ll have to show me a lot more authority than you have now,” Kellerman says.
“I will!” Rose shoots back, reaching for the phone.
The law, of course, is on the medical examiner’s side. The president was murdered on a Dallas street, and unbelievably, killing a president was not a federal crime at the time unless it was committed on federal property, which wasn’t the case here.† Also, since Texas law required an inquest by a justice of the peace for all homicides, and then, if ordered—as it automatically would have been done in this case—an autopsy,492 Rose has a legal obligation to Dallas County to make sure an autopsy is conducted. Telephone calls to the sheriff’s office and police department assure him that he is right, that an inquest and autopsy are mandatory.
Ken O’Donnell and others in the presidential party, imagining the ordeal for the widow if she has to remain in Dallas for another day or two, take turns arguing with the medical examiner. This is not an ordinary homicide, but an assassinated president. He has been examined by doctors and will certainly undergo a federal-level autopsy on his return to Washington, D.C. Further delay will serve no purpose and could cause undue misery for his widow. And so on.
Dr. Rose concedes that he could legally release the body to a Texas justice of the peace functioning as a coroner, but without that, there’s no way he will permit them to remove the body from his jurisdiction. The president’s men start making phone calls to find an authority who can overrule him.493
At the Texas School Book Depository, police officers are conducting a roll call outside of Supervisor Bill Shelley’s office, and collecting the names and addresses of the building’s employees. Superintendent Roy Truly notices that Oswald isn’t among the dozen or so stockroom boys talking to the police. In fact, Truly hasn’t seen Oswald since he and Officer Baker ran into him in the second-floor lunchroom right after the shots. That encounter may be the only reason Truly is thinking of him now.
“Have you seen Lee Oswald around lately?” Truly asks Shelley.
“No,” Shelley replies.494
Truly approaches O. V. Campbell, the Book Depository vice president.
“I have a boy over here missing,” Truly says. “I don’t know whether to report it or not.”
Truly thinks that another one or two boys are also missing,* but the only one who sticks in his mind is Oswald, if for no other reason than that he had seen Oswald on the second floor of the building (when almost all of his other employees were out on the street) just an hour or so earlier.
Truly calls down to the warehouse personnel office to get Oswald’s telephone number, home address, and description from his employment application. He jots it all down, and hangs up. Deputy Chief Lumpkin is a few feet away.
“I’ve got a boy missing over here,” Truly tells him, instinctively focusing in, again, only on Oswald. “I don’t know whether it amounts to anything or not.”
“Let’s go up and tell Captain Fritz,” Lumpkin says as the two head upstairs.495 They find Captain Fritz on the sixth floor at the top of the stairs, standing with a group of officers and reporters. Lumpkin pulls Fritz aside to listen to Truly, who repeats his story and gives him Oswald’s address and general description: age twenty-three (he was now twenty-four), five foot nine, about a hundred fifty pounds, light brown hair.496
1:33 p.m.
The large double classroom in the medical school, room 101–102, is jammed with noisy, excited reporters who have difficulty calming down when Malcolm Kilduff takes his place at the teacher’s lectern. He starts to speak, then stops. “Excuse me, let me catch my breath.” Kennedy has been dead for half an hour and everyone in the room knows it, but Kilduff still can’t think of what to say or how to say it. He wonders whether he will be able to control his quivering voice. Finally, he begins, “President John F. Kennedy…”
“Hold it,” someone calls, as cameras click. Kilduff starts over.
“President John F. Kennedy died at approximately one o’clock Central Standard Time today here in Dallas.”
“Oh God!” a reporter blurts out.
Kilduff welcomes a moment of respite as the wire reporters rush out to find a telephone.
“He died of a gunshot wound in the brain,” Kilduff continues. “I have no other details regarding the assassination of the president. Mrs. Kennedy was not hit. Governor Connally was not hit. The vice president was not hit.”
Reporters will discover Kilduff’s error about the governor soon enough.
Tom Wicker, the New York Times White House reporter, starts to ask whether Johnson has been sworn in as president, but breaks down. Kilduff’s voice also breaks as he tries to answer. Another correspondent asks, “Has the vice president taken the oath of office?”
“No,” Kilduff says. “He has left.”
The reporters demand a briefing by the attending doctors, and Kilduff, who hadn’t thought of it, promises to see what he can do.497
1:34 p.m.
In the parking lot in back of the Texaco station, Captain Westbrook turns around and starts toward the Abundant Life Temple, a four-story brick church at the corner of Tenth and Crawford, located right behind the Texaco parking lot. But he sees it’s already covered. Officer M. N. “Nick” McDonald was standing at the rear of the Temple and McDonald calls in to the radio dispatcher, “Send me a squad over here at Tenth and Crawford. Check out this church basement.”498
1:35 p.m.
Dallas police officer Charles T. Walker drops a couple of newsmen off at the Tippit killing scene and drives off to comb the neighborhood. Turning onto southbound Denver, he spots a man, fitting the description of the suspect, running into the library a block ahead, at Jefferson and Marsalis. Walker punches the gas and grabs his radio mike, “He’s in the library, Jefferson—East 500 block!”
The radio suddenly comes alive with excited chatter.
“What’s the location, 223?” the dispatcher asks.
“Marsalis and Jefferson, in the library, I’m going around the back, get somebody around the front…Get ’em here fast!” Walker shouts as he wheels to the curb, tires screeching.
Police and sheriff deputies, including the officers about to search the church, scramble for their cars. Within a minute, the library is ground zero, surrounded by nearly every squad car in the area. Police feel certain they have the cop killer cornered.499
1:36 p.m.
Six blocks west of the library on Jefferson Boulevard, twenty-two-year-old Johnny C. Brewer, manager of Hardy’s Shoe Store, listened to the president’s arrival at Love Field and the motorcade on a little transistor radio, and has been riveted since the first vague reports of the shooting of the president were heard. From what he can gather, a policeman has also been shot, less than three-quarters of a mile away.500 He’s been hearing the periodic wail of sirens for nearly twenty minutes.
Now, Brewer can hear police sirens coming west on Jefferson, their wail growing so strong it sounds like it might land on his doorstep at any moment. Suddenly, a young man walking west on Jefferson steps into the lobby—a large recess, fifteen feet deep, between the sidewalk and the door of the shop, with display windows on either side. The fellow, wearing a brown sports shirt over a white T-shirt, his shirttail out, is behaving very strangely. Brewer is only about ten feet away, just beyond the display window, and is looking directly at his face. Brewer finds it quite unusual that w
ith all the commotion going on outside, the man keeps his back to the street. His hair is messed up, he’s breathing heavily and looks like he’s been running, and he also looks scared. Brewer thinks he recognizes him as a particular persnickety customer who once took an agonizingly long time to make up his mind to purchase a cheap pair of black crepe-soled shoes.501 (Police did recover a pair of “black low quarter shoes, John Hardy Brand,” from Oswald’s Beckley room on November 23, 1963.)502*
Just as the man stepped into the foyer, Brewer can see the approaching police cars make a U-turn at Jefferson and Zangs, a few stores away, and head back east on Jefferson toward the library, sirens screaming. The man in the foyer turns and looks over his right shoulder toward the receding police cars, then, seemingly after making sure they have gone by, steps out of the foyer and continues west on Jefferson. The more Brewer thinks about it, the more suspicious he becomes. About a half minute later, curiosity gets the better of him, and Brewer steps out onto the sidewalk to see where this character is going. The suspect is already fifty yards away, walking at a good clip, nearing the marquee of the Texas Theater, which is showing a double-feature, Cry of Battle and War Is Hell.503
Julia E. Postal, the forty-seven-year-old ticket-taker, has been listening to the radio too. Just before the Texas Theater opened for business at 12:45 p.m., her daughter called to tell her that someone had shot the president, and she has been listening right there in the box office ever since. Though most of the police cars had turned around, one continued on, its siren blasting as it shot past the theater box office. John Callahan, the theater manager, who is standing next to Mrs. Postal, says, “Something’s about to pop.”
They both scramble out onto the sidewalk. The squad car looks like it’s stopping up the street. Callahan gets into his car at the curb to go see what’s happening.504
Shoe store manager Johnny Brewer, on the sidewalk east of the theater, sees the suspicious man, “walking a little faster than usual,” slip into the Texas Theater behind Postal’s back.505 For Brewer, it’s all adding up.
Postal watches her boss drive off, then turns to go back to the box office. Brewer is standing there, having walked up from the shoe store. He asks her if the man that just ducked into the theater had bought a ticket. “No, by golly, he didn’t,” she says looking around, half expecting to see him. She saw the man out of the corner of her eye when she walked out with Mr. Callahan.506
Brewer tells her the man’s been acting suspiciously. He goes inside and checks with concessionaire Warren “Butch” Burroughs, but he was busy stocking candy and didn’t see anyone come in. Brewer returns to the box office.507
“He has to be in there,” Postal says. She tells him to go get Butch and have him help check the exits, but don’t tell him why because he’s “kind of excitable.” Brewer goes back in and asks Burroughs to show him where the exits are. The concessionaire wants to know why? Against Postal’s advice, Brewer tells him he thought “the guy looked suspicious.”508
The Texas Theater, an architecturally decorative structure built in 1932, was the very first in a chain of theaters built by inventor Howard Hughes. Upon entering the theater lobby from Jefferson Boulevard, patrons find themselves to the rear of the theater, where a concession stand is set up. A staircase near the stand leads up to a spacious balcony above the main seating area. Another staircase at the far end of the lobby leads to the theater office. Being an L-shaped theater, from the concession stand a theater-goer can only enter the main seating area by walking farther into the lobby and turning right down one of four aisles. The main seating area in the middle of the theater has an aisle on each side of it, and smaller seating areas to the left and right have an aisle adjacent to the left and right walls. The seats descend downward in typical theater style toward a large movie screen rising above a narrow area (“stage”) not large enough for live performances, though the theater was built during the vaudeville era. There are five (today, six) fire exits, one to the left of the stage, one at the far end of the lobby, two on the balcony level, and a fifth on the small floor above the balcony, where the projection room is. Four of the fire exits lead directly into an alley running parallel with Jefferson Boulevard.509
The flickering images of War Is Hell dance across the screen as Brewer and Burroughs check the lock bars on the two ground-floor exits. They are still down, meaning whoever ducked into the theater is still there.510 There are twenty-four patrons in the theater who have purchased their ninety-cent tickets for the double-feature.511
1:38 p.m. (2:38 p.m. EST)
On CBS television, Walter Cronkite again repeats details of the shooting as he awaits official word on the president’s death. Viewers can see two newsmen ripping fresh wire-copy from the Teletype machine in the background, then race over to the anchorman, and hand him the sheet. Cronkite slips on his heavy, dark-frame glasses and glances at the copy. Now, for the first time, without equivocation, Cronkite tells a waiting nation, “From Dallas, the flash apparently official, President Kennedy died at one o’clock Central Standard Time—two o’clock Eastern Standard Time—some thirty-eight minutes ago.”
The words catch in his throat, and for a moment, the most respected news anchor in the business is about to lose his composure. Choking back tears, Cronkite clears his throat and continues, “Vice President Lyndon Johnson has left the hospital. We don’t know to where he has proceeded. Presumably, he will be taking the oath of office and become the thirty-sixth president of the United States.”512 During a later break, Cronkite answered a network telephone and heard a snobbish-sounding woman caller say, “I just want to say that this is the worst possible taste to have that Walter Cronkite on the air with his crocodile tears when everybody knows that he spent all his time trying to get the president.” The newsman shot back, “Madam, this is Walter Cronkite and you’re a goddamned idiot!” and slammed the phone down so hard he thought for a moment he had damaged it.513
With the news of the president’s death, men and women across the country “sobbed in the streets of the cities and did not have to explain why,” historian Theodore White wrote. “Not until he was dead and all men knew he would never again point his forefinger down from the platform in speaking to them, never pause before lancing with his wit the balloon of an untidy question, did Americans know how much light the young president had given their own lives—and how he had touched them.”514 Comedian Bob Hope wasn’t trying to be funny when he said, “The lights had blown out in Camelot and the whole nation was stumbling around in the dark.”515 The New York Times’ Tom Wicker wrote, “People were unbelieving, afraid…desperately unsure of what would happen next. The world, it seemed, was a dark and malignant place; the chill of the unknown shivered across the nation.”516
Many in America, a nation of 190 million people, “simply stood, stupefied, no longer listening to the staccato voices that sounded unceasingly on the radios. Church bells tolled and the churches began to fill…Strangers spoke to each other, seeking surcease,” wrote Relman Morin, a Pulitzer Prize–winning correspondent who covered the assassination for Associated Press and was a personal friend of the president’s. In Boston, he continued, “the Boston Symphony broke off a Handel concert to play a funeral march by Beethoven. The gong sounded in the New York Stock Exchange, suspending trading. Hundreds of football games to have been played Saturday were postponed. Race tracks closed…Sessions in the United Nations came to a halt…Television and radio networks announced that they were withdrawing all entertainment programs and commercials from their schedules to devote full time to…the assassination; normal programming would not be resumed until after the funeral.”517
What happened in New York City is a microcosm of the country as a whole. The New York Times reported,
The cry rang across the city, echoing again and again: “Is it true?” Another cry quickly took its place as the news of the death of President Kennedy swept with sudden impact: “My God!”…In all parts of the five boroughs, motorists pulled up their cars
and sat hunched over their dashboard radios…Hundreds of thousands reached for so many telephones that the system blacked out and operators had to refuse calls…Uptown, midtown, downtown, work in offices came to an abrupt halt…The biggest city in the nation turned into something of a ghost town. All Broadway theaters and all musical events…were cancelled…One common scene was the tight grasp of one’s hand on another’s arm as they discussed the assassination…Those who had no one familiar at hand walked up to strangers…The grief and the acts of mourning knew no special group, no particular section of the city…The sorrow and shock were unfolded in the human vignette, the collection of individuals who stared as though in a trance from their subway seats, their stools at luncheon counters, their chairs near television sets…A postman…encountered many housewives who wept as they told him the news. They talked about it just as if they had lost their son or daughter…. A dentist, weeping, said: “I can’t work. I’ve sent two patients home and I’ve closed my office.”…A bartender said: “Everybody feels dead, real dead.”…A department store saleswoman declared: “I would do anything to bring him back.”…As dusk came, automatic devices turned on the huge, gaudy signs that normally blot out the night in Times Square. Then, one by one, the lights blinked out, turning the great carnival strip into what was almost a mourning band on the city’s sleeve.518*
It was not too different in most foreign countries, people weeping in the streets of the world’s great capitals—Berlin, London, Paris, Rome. Even peoples who did not understand a word of English that Kennedy spoke had sensed that he was special, and he somehow touched the heart of these millions. “To them, Kennedy symbolized youth, new ideas, a fresh approach, the New Generation. Indeed, he had sounded that chord himself in his Inaugural Address. ‘Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans, born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace.’” Kennedy had come to power after the greatest and most destructive war ever, “only to be followed by the specter of an even greater war in which new weapons could decimate the human race.” Because of his leadership, soaring oratory, and innate charisma, millions throughout the planet felt that a peaceful resolution to the world’s problems was more likely with him leading the way. People somehow believed in the possibilities of his vision of “a new world…where the strong are just, and the weak secure and the peace preserved…Let us begin.”