Parkland (Movie Tie-In Edition) Read online

  President John F. Kennedy throws back the comforter and swings his legs over the side of the bed, planting his feet on the icy floor. His first appearance of the day is out of doors, and later, several motorcades are planned—useless for vote-getting if the president and his wife have to be driven past sodden, disgruntled crowds, hidden beneath the limousine’s plastic bubble top. While the president showers, Thomas lays out his clothes—a blue-gray, two-button suit, a dark blue tie, and a white shirt with narrow gray stripes.31

  If, for a few moments in this blandly impersonal hotel room, he seems like just another American head of a household getting up to go to work, that’s an illusion, for Jack Kennedy is the chief executive of the most powerful government on earth, the commander of its most powerful military machine, the most powerful man alive. Even the impression that this nondescript eighth-floor suite* in Fort Worth is far from the White House is an illusion. The White House is there, in the hotel with him, in the suite, never beyond the sound of Jack Kennedy’s voice. To make sure that none of the far-flung people and agencies of the American government are out of range of that voice, an elite group of Signal Corps technicians from the White House Communications Agency travels ahead of the president to install a jungle of special telephone circuits, relays, and networks that are tied back to the key switchboard in the east basement of the executive mansion, and Jack Kennedy is never allowed to be more than five minutes away from that network.

  Many of his enormous entourage are already awake and waiting for him to emerge from the shower. Some who watched through the night, like the nine Secret Service agents of the White House detail† on the twelve-to-eight shift, will sleep only after passing their responsibilities on to the next shift. John F. Kennedy’s presidency is in fact a collection of special teams that never sleep, teams with code names: an S team for communications, a D team for the Secret Service, a W team for the president’s staff, a V team for the vice president’s staff. The L team is the president and his family—Jack is Lancer, Jackie is Lace, their children Lyric and Lark, and they all live in the Crown (or Castle), a code name for the White House. There are political advisers, medical men, the military, secretarial pools, and a luggage crew, and every individual has a precisely worked-out itinerary and schedule specifying his transportation, accommodations, and duties for every moment of the three-day trip through Texas.32

  A peculiarly inconspicuous but nonetheless vivid symbol of the president’s power is Warrant Officer Ira D. Gearhart, the man with the “satchel,” or the “football.” The football is a locked metal suitcase jammed with thirty pounds of codes and equipment that Kennedy can use to launch America’s nuclear strike force. In the event of a missile attack on America or Europe the president will have only fifteen minutes to make up his mind on how to respond. Kennedy’s military aides will actually operate the equipment, but it is Gearhart’s lugubrious duty to be there with the football—and to remember the combination of the lock—if Kennedy decides to push the button. Gearhart, known to the president’s staff as “The Bagman,” is never far from the president.33

  7:52 a.m.

  In Dallas, the drizzle from a gray sky has stopped by the time Wesley Frazier and Lee Oswald exit Stemmons Freeway. The Pacific cold front that rolled in from New Mexico last night is moving faster than predicted and is already on the way out of central Texas, taking its scattered thundershowers with it. The air behind it is cold, but it looks as though the day will turn fair after all.34

  Wesley circles around up Record Street to McKinney and down to the wire-fenced parking lot reserved for employees at the corner of Munger and Broadway, across the street from the Texas School Book Depository Warehouse. It’s about a twelve-hundred-foot walk back to the Depository’s rear door, but they’ll be able to get there for the workday, which starts at 8:00 a.m. and ends at 4:45 p.m., with a forty-five-minute lunch period starting at noon.35*

  Lee gets out, takes his package from the backseat, and starts toward the rear of the Depository Building. Wesley stays in the car for a minute or so to rev the engine so his car battery will have a good charge when they quit work. Trains are switching back and forth in the train yards off to the west. Lee waits for him at the end of the cyclone fence, and Wesley notices that Lee is carrying the long, paper package in his right hand.36 When Wesley cuts the engine and gets out, Lee starts off toward the Depository again. As Wesley begins to follow, Oswald quickens his pace, keeping an ever-increasing distance between them. It’s the first time that Lee has walked ahead of him; usually they walk together.37

  Wesley doesn’t bother to catch up. They’ve got plenty of time and he likes to watch the switch engines shunting freight cars around the yards. He stops to watch some guys welding a section of track. You have to be careful crossing the tracks here, because you never know when a string of boxcars might be bearing down on you. Wesley steps over the rusty rails, avoiding the puddles, and spots Lee, fifty feet ahead, still carrying the package, as he goes in the back door of the Depository, the one near the Houston Street loading dock. By the time Wesley gets there, Lee is nowhere in sight. Wesley goes downstairs, hangs up his coat, puts up his lunch, and goes to work filling orders for schoolbooks.38

  8:00 a.m.

  In a Fort Worth hotel bathroom, the president can hear the murmur of the crowd awaiting him eight floors below as he drags a razor across his face. In the mirror he looks good. He has to. Americans want their president to be the picture of robust health. They will never know how much it costs him to give them that image. Although muscular and well developed, the president has been bedeviled all his life by an endless series of debilitating illnesses, starting in his early childhood when he had all the traditional childhood illnesses, including scarlet fever, as well as high fevers and allergies. “Jack was sick all the time,” a boyhood friend would say. He was thirty before the doctors figured out that most of his health problems stemmed from Addison’s disease, an extremely grave disorder of the adrenal glands that weakens the immune system, leaving the victim unable to fight off infection. The first crisis occurred on a trip to England in 1947. The British doctor who first diagnosed the disease in Kennedy gave him a year to live. He was taken off the ship that brought him home, the Queen Mary, on a stretcher, so near death that he had to be given the Catholic Church’s sacrament of extreme unction—the last rites.39

  Even though the disease has been brought under control by a relatively new (1939) hormone derived from the adrenal gland, cortisone, the hormone causes odd fat deposits, such as a slight upper-back “buffalo hump” and full cheeks, both of which the president exhibited, and he is forced to keep himself well tanned to hide its typical brownish discoloration of the skin. His frequent bouts of fever are explained away as recurrences of the malaria he caught during the war. In fact, he is extremely prone to infection and takes various medications, including painkillers, every day—including some that had never been prescribed by his White House doctors40 and might earn anyone else a stretch in jail.

  The most painful of his multiple disabilities is his back, which never ceases tormenting him and even causes him to use crutches or a cane in private.41 One of his shoes has a quarter-inch riser in it, he wears a stiff, six-inch-wide elastic corset to immobilize his lower back, and he sleeps on a special bedboard of thick plywood with a five-inch horsehair pad. Two of these Spartan devices follow him wherever he goes. By 1954, Kennedy’s back pain “had become almost unbearable. X-rays showed that the 5th lumbar vertebra had collapsed, most likely the consequence of the corticosteroids he was taking for the Addison’s disease. He could not bend down to pull a sock on his left foot and he had to climb and descend stairs moving sideways.”42 In 1954, he again was given the last rites when he fell into a coma after a risky operation to fuse the deteriorating vertebrae—with no better than a fifty-fifty chance of surviving. Because of his condition, the family has stashed small quantities of deoxycorticosterone acetate, or DOCA, the powerful corticoid drug that might save his life in the event
of another crisis, in safe deposit boxes all over America.43 His brother Robert, the attorney general, is one of the few who knows that Jack spends half the hours of his life in pain.*

  The president finishes shaving and begins the arduous task of wrapping himself firmly in his back brace.44 As he slips on his shirt, he decides to have a look at the crowd in the parking lot eight floors below. He can’t see them from where he is, so he tiptoes into his wife’s bedroom.

  “Gosh, look at the crowd!” he beams.

  About five thousand people are down there, hemmed in by two loan companies, two bus stations, a garage, a theater, and mounted police in rain-wet yellow slickers. The politician in him is pleased. It looks like a great crowd, mostly working men—Texas senator Ralph Yarborough’s constituency—tough men who don’t mind a bit of rain, with a few secretaries from nearby office buildings. They had begun to gather about two hours before dawn to see and hear the president. He appreciates every opportunity to show himself to ordinary people. He needs every one of their votes. He tells Jackie he’ll see her later at breakfast in the hotel, where he is meeting with the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce. In the meantime she can catch another hour of sleep.45

  Jackie is still recovering from the death of their infant son Patrick, who died just forty hours after his birth in August. Only those close to the First Family know how devastating the loss was for both of them. Jack had wept hard, and in his grief had put his arms around the small white casket at the grave site. Jackie didn’t leave the hospital until four days after the funeral, and her emotional convalescence was long. Once, when Jack was comforting her, she told him, “There’s just one thing I couldn’t stand—if I ever lost you.”46

  Jackie has tried hard to put the trauma of that sorrowful event behind her, and even though she has never campaigned with him before, the dark-haired beauty with a European elegance who disdains the vulgarity of politics can muster a practical gesture on occasion, and she volunteered to make this trip to Texas. To everyone’s delight, she actually seems to be enjoying herself, prompting the president to ask her if she would like to accompany him on a forthcoming trip to the West Coast, and she said yes. After leaving the White House the previous morning, the president and Jackie had flown to San Antonio, where Vice President Johnson and his wife, Lady Bird, joined the presidential party, and the president had dedicated new research facilities at the U.S. Air Force School of Aerospace Medicine. The four had then flown to Houston in the late afternoon for a testimonial dinner that evening for U.S. Representative Albert Thomas. (There had been motorcades through both San Antonio and Houston.) They arrived in Fort Worth after 11:00 p.m., leaving very little time to sleep and get ready for another vigorous day that would end that night with a fund-raising dinner in Austin. Then back to Washington, D.C., on Saturday morning in time for their son John-John’s third birthday on Monday.47 Jack is grateful to Jackie for accompanying him on the trip and being such a trooper. He knows her presence is an enormous plus, but doesn’t want to put her under any more strain than absolutely necessary. He slips out of her bedroom and quietly pulls the door shut.

  The president, who loves a good cigar from time to time, reaches a friend, James Chambers Jr., on the phone. “Can you get me some Macanudo cigars?” Kennedy asks. “They don’t have any over here in Fort Worth.” Chambers, president of the Dallas Times Herald, is delighted to hear from the president and answers, “Sure.” “Well, get me about a half a dozen.” “Fine,” Chambers says. He goes to the United Cigar store in Dallas and gets the president six expensive Macanudo cigars. He’ll give them to the president at the luncheon scheduled that day at the Trade Mart.48 The president finishes a light breakfast consisting of coffee and a roll, and is knotting his tie and fastening it with the obligatory PT 109 tie clip when David F. Powers, one of his closest friends and confidants, enters the suite. The president lets him know how thrilled he is over the crowd awaiting him below, speaks of the great crowds in San Antonio and Houston yesterday, and the brilliant reception accorded Jackie, who is turning into the star of the whole show. It seems that most of the crowds have come to see her rather than the president.49

  8:30 a.m.

  Brigadier General Godfrey McHugh, Kennedy’s air force aide, comes into the president’s suite with the CIA situation report on Saigon, Cyprus, and Korea, which the president looks over. He also scans the leading metropolitan dailies.50

  The news for November 22, 1963, is pretty light: a Labour victory in a British by-election; a Soviet note complaining about American convoys to Berlin; the death of the “Birdman of Alcatraz” at the age of seventy-three; the trial of Jimmy Hoffa in Nashville—brother Bobby’s doing; and the removal of a portrait of the president from an American Legion Post wall in Abilene because he is “controversial.” The crucial news—for a president all too aware that his trip to the South to shore up support for next year’s election, and how he is received in Texas, represent the real beginning of the campaign for his reelection—is the squabble in the Texas Democratic Party between its conservative and liberal wings.

  An editorial in the Chicago Sun-Times confirms his instinct about the value on this matter of the enthusiastic reception Jackie has received thus far on the Texas trip: “Some Texans, in taking account of the tangled Texas political situation, have begun to think that Mrs. Jacqueline Kennedy may turn the balance and win her husband this state’s electoral vote.” Other papers are less reassuring. The front-page headline stories in the Dallas Morning News hammer the point home: “Storm of Political Controversy Swirls around Kennedy on Visit” “Yarborough Snubs LBJ” and “President’s Visit Seen Widening State Democratic Split.”51 But one of the main purposes behind the Texas trip was to narrow this split, bridge the gap between the two factions, which would help not only the Democratic Party in Texas, but, with a united front, Kennedy’s own reelection effort in the state.52*

  In recent days and weeks, although Dallas’s morning paper has been carrying plenty in its front pages about the widening chasm in the state’s Democratic Party, the paper’s emphasis this morning in its lead editorial is simple, extending a welcoming hand to the young president as he arrives in a city, it says, “with a substantial Republican representation.”53 The previous day, former vice president Richard Nixon, in town for a bottler’s convention, urged Dallas residents to give President and Mrs. Kennedy “a courteous reception.”54 United States Attorney Barefoot Sanders says he is investigating whether certain scurrilous leaflets—apparently mugshots of Kennedy captioned “Wanted For Treason,”55 five thousand of which appeared on the streets the previous day and that morning—violate federal laws. Dallas police chief Jesse E. Curry says anybody caught distributing them will be arrested for littering,56 and in a press conference on Wednesday, November 20, says that “nothing must occur that is disrespectful or degrading to the President of the United States. He is entitled to the highest respect, and the law enforcement agencies of this area are going to do everything possible to insure that no untoward incident” takes place. “We will take immediate action if any suspicious conduct is observed, and we also urge all good citizens to be alert for such conduct…Citizens themselves may take preventative action if it becomes obvious that someone is planning to commit an act harmful or degrading to the president…I am sure that all but a handful of our citizens will cordially welcome the president of the United States to Dallas.” Curry said 350 Dallas policemen, about a third of the force, would be assigned to the Kennedy guard detail, and this would be supplemented by forty state police and fifteen Dallas deputy sheriffs. Police officials said it was the largest security detail ever assembled in Dallas.57*

  The businessmen of Dallas, not natural Kennedy supporters, have nonetheless made it clear to Curry that they want his eleven-hundred-man force to do everything possible to ensure that there be no incidents, however trivial, during the presidential visit. A front-page article in the Dallas Morning News of November 17, 1963, was captioned “Incident-Free Day Urged for JFK Visit,�
�� and quoted Dallas leaders such as the president of the Dallas Chamber of Commerce and the county Republican chairman asking Dallas citizens to put aside politics and accord the president of the United States a very warm and hospitable welcome. Dallas, a notorious hotbed for right-wing conservatives, simply couldn’t afford any repetition of last month’s Stevenson incident. What happened to UN Ambassador Adlai Stevenson in Dallas shocked America and gave Dallas a black eye. On October 24, UN Day, after speaking optimistically about world peace through the United Nations to an audience of five thousand people, Stevenson was jeered by a mob of unruly demonstrators, hit in the head with an anti-UN picket sign carried by a woman, and spat upon as he left Dallas’s municipal auditorium and was being escorted to his limousine.58 The following day, one hundred Dallas civic and business leaders sent a telegram to Stevenson apologizing profusely and saying the city was “outraged and abjectly ashamed of the disgraceful discourtesies you suffered at the hands of a small group of extremists.”59 Mayor Earle Cabell lashed out at the “right wing fanatics” responsible for the Stevenson incident, saying these “so-called patriots” were “not conservatives” but “radicals” who had become “a cancer in the body politic.”60

  And it’s not just the lunatic right-wing fringe that was capable of the Stevenson kind of incident. Back in 1960, then-senator Lyndon Johnson (years before his civil rights legislation, when few perceived him as liberal) and his wife Lady Bird had been spat upon at Dallas’s Adolphus hotel—and the Johnsons were Texans. Some members of Kennedy’s staff opposed his visiting Dallas, being the cauldron of conservatism it was, and indeed the state itself, much of Texas not being favorably disposed to the president. And Stevenson, as well as Byron Skelton, the National Democratic committeeman from Texas, urged Kennedy not to make the trip. From 1961 to 1962, the Secret Service had recorded thirty-four threats on the president’s life from Texas.61