JFK & the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters (90 page)

About a minute later, Carr heard what he thought was a car’s backfire or a firecracker. Then he heard two more such reports in quick succession. From his perch above Dealey Plaza, he looked toward the triple underpass where he thought the noises were coming from and saw people falling to the ground.
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Carr descended the stairway to see what had happened. On Houston Street, he was surprised to see the same man in the sport coat who had been at the Depository window. The man was walking quickly toward Carr, looking back over his shoulder.
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Carr watched him turn and walk a block east very fast. Then the man in the sport coat got into a 1961 or 1962 Rambler station wagon, parked on Record Street. The driver was “a young negro man.”
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The Rambler drove off to the north.

The station wagon then apparently headed two blocks north, made a left turn onto Elm Street, and continued a block and a half down Elm. It was soon spotted there, by Roger Craig and four other witnesses, as it stopped abruptly in front of the Texas School Book Depository.

Helen Forrest witnessed the same scene Roger Craig did but from the opposite side of the street. Forrest told historian Michael Kurtz she was on the incline by the grassy knoll, when she “saw a man suddenly run from the rear of the Depository building, down the incline, and then enter a Rambler station wagon.”
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Like Roger Craig, Helen Forrest was clear in identifying the running man. “If it wasn’t Oswald,” she said, “it was his identical twin.”
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Forrest’s account was corroborated by another eyewitness, James Pennington.
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Craig’s, Forrest’s, and Pennington’s stories of the Rambler’s grassy knoll pick-up were supported by the testimony of two passing drivers, Marvin C. Robinson and Roy Cooper.

Shortly after the assassination, Marvin Robinson had to jam on his Cadillac’s brakes in front of the Texas School Book Depository. The light-colored Rambler just ahead of him had pulled over suddenly beside the curb. It was about to pick up a man coming down the grass from the Depository.
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Robinson’s employee, Roy Cooper, driving just behind him, told the FBI he saw the near-accident. Cooper said the man coming down the incline waved at the Rambler, then jumped into it. The Rambler sped off ahead of Cooper and Robinson in the direction of the Oak Cliff section of Dallas,
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where Dallas Police Officer J. D. Tippit would soon be killed, and where Lee Harvey Oswald would then be arrested in the Texas Theater.

The Warren Commission rejected Roger Craig’s testimony on Oswald and the getaway Rambler, supported by a chorus of eyewitnesses, since the Commission decided by that time that Oswald must have escaped from the scene on a city bus.
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The
Warren Report
also rejected Craig’s account of the dialogue with Oswald in Fritz’s office, because Fritz denied Craig was even there.
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As we have seen, the same Captain Will Fritz, perhaps after moving into the circle of those who “needed to know,” told the Louisiana State Police he had no interest in questioning Rose Cheramie as a witness, excluding her testimony just as effectively as he discredited Craig’s. Deputy Sheriff Craig would also be attacked on the basis of an FBI report that seemed to show Ruth Paine did not own a Nash Rambler but rather a 1955 Chevrolet station wagon.
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Judged in terms of its source, the report proved nothing. The FBI agent who wrote it would later confess to a Congressional committee, as we shall see, that he was guilty of deliberately destroying key assassination evidence in obedience to his FBI superior’s orders.
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By rejecting Roger Craig’s testimony, the Warren Commission could ignore the significance of Oswald’s words to his interrogator, Captain Fritz. According to Roger Craig, it was Oswald who said the car that picked him up was a station wagon, and who identified the owner of the station wagon as Mrs. Paine, whom Oswald then defended. Moreover, as a result of the incident and his own comments on it, he acted as if he had just blown his cover. Thus he said bleakly, “Everybody will know who I am now,” implying his involvement as an undercover intelligence agent.

He was, of course, wrong in thinking now everybody would know who he was. Two days after his remark, Oswald would be dead. And no one beyond a secret circle would know the details about just who he had been. The mouth that was beginning to blurt out the truth of his undercover life would be quickly sealed.

The person nearest to President Kennedy when he was shot to death was his wife, Jacqueline. Her presence in Dallas beside her husband was a sign of the couple’s deepening support for each other since the death in August 1963 of their infant son, Patrick Bouvier Kennedy, which had devastated both of them. In his response to the death of their son, we can discern a hidden truth in the life of John Kennedy.

Although Kennedy was a Cold Warrior who had taken the world to the very brink of nuclear war, there was a more peaceful element in his character from which God could create something new. What was the seed of his transformation? As an author trying to understand his turnaround with Nikita Khrushchev from the depths of the Missile Crisis, I have puzzled over what it was in Kennedy’s character that made possible his turn toward peace. What was the seed of his change from the president of a national security state into a leader with a more universal humanity, which, as Thomas Merton foresaw, would then mark him out for assassination?

At least one natural component of that seed for change was, I believe, his love for his children, and his ultimately transcending ability to see in them everyone’s children. In reading his story, one is struck by the depth of love he had for Caroline and John, the global lessons he repeatedly drew from his feeling for their lives and the lives of all children, and the deep pain he and Jacqueline experienced at the death of Patrick.

On August 7, 1963, in the same morning Jacqueline Kennedy began to have premature birth pains, John Kennedy was in a meeting with Norman Cousins and a group of organizers to mobilize the public to urge Senate ratification of the Atmospheric Test Ban Treaty.
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As we have seen, Kennedy understood the test ban treaty as an absolutely crucial issue for his presidency, yet one whose success he remained pessimistic about, even after his negotiation of the treaty with Khrushchev. Its biggest obstacle, Kennedy knew, lay not in Moscow but in Washington. Now that he and Khrushchev had come to terms on the treaty, how was he to get the Senate to approve it?

Given the Cold War’s continuing hold on the United States and Congress in particular, the president thought getting the Senate’s necessary two-thirds approval of the treaty would be “almost in the nature of a miracle.”
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Nevertheless, he told his advisers, he was committed to waging an all-out campaign to win the Senate’s approval of the treaty, even if it cost him the 1964 election.
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The reason for his total commitment to the test ban treaty, a critical first step toward peace, was apparent in what Kennedy repeated to friends about his dread of nuclear war: “I keep thinking of the children, not my kids or yours, but the children all over the world.”
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Robert Kennedy, who knew his brother’s deepest concerns better than anyone else on earth did, said that in the Cuban Missile Crisis “the thought that disturbed him the most, and that made the prospect of war much more fearful than it would otherwise have been, was the specter of the death of the children of this country and all the world—the young people who had no role, who had no say, who knew nothing even of the confrontation, but whose lives would be snuffed out like everyone else’s. They would never have a chance to make a decision, to vote in an election, to run for office, to lead a revolution, to determine their own destinies.”
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President Kennedy was also becoming more deeply conscious that children all over the world were already innocent victims of the radioactive fallout from his and other governments’ testing of nuclear weapons.

As we have seen, Kennedy was a keen listener. Sometimes a single sentence with a momentous truth was all he needed to hear.

One afternoon in his office, he was talking with his science adviser, Jerome Wiesner, about the contamination from the U.S. and Soviet nuclear testing. While rain fell outside the White House windows, Kennedy asked Wiesner how nuclear fallout returned to the earth from the atmosphere.

“It comes down in rain,” Wiesner said.

The president turned around. He looked out the windows at the rain falling in the White House’s Rose Garden.

“You mean there might be radioactive contamination in that rain out there right now?” he said.

“Possibly,” Wiesner said.

Wiesner left the office. Kennedy sat in silence for several minutes, looking at the rain falling in the garden. His appointments secretary Kenny O’Donnell came and went quietly. O’Donnell had never seen Kennedy so depressed.
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Nor later, in August 1963, had his advisers ever seen Kennedy so determined as he was to win Senate confirmation of the test ban treaty. He gave the reason for his determination in his televised appeal for the treaty on July 26, 1963:

“This treaty is for all of us. It is particularly for our children and our grandchildren, and they have no lobby here in Washington.”

He emphasized what was especially at stake: “children and grandchildren with cancer in their bones, with leukemia in their blood, or with poison in their lungs.”

In retrospect, one of his most memorable statements was: “The malformation of even one baby—who may be born long after we are gone—should be of concern to us all.”
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He said these words two weeks before his own newborn baby would die.

On the morning of August 7, at the same time as Kennedy was meeting at the White House with Norman Cousins and the Citizens Committee for a Nuclear Test Ban, Kenny O’Donnell “received word from Hyannis Port that Jackie was undergoing emergency surgery at the Otis Air Base hospital for a delivery, five weeks premature of a baby boy.”
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A minute later, Evelyn Lincoln, the president’s secretary, came into the test ban meeting and handed Kennedy a note. Norman Cousins watched JFK’s face become clouded as he read the note. Kennedy got up from his chair, and disappeared through the door to his own office, abruptly ending the meeting.
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He then flew quickly to Otis Air Base to be with Jackie.

By the time he arrived, his four-pound, ten-and-one-half-ounce son, Patrick Bouvier Kennedy, had been delivered by Caesarean section and was in an oxygen-fed incubator. The premature baby “was suffering from hyaline membrane disease, a lung condition that blocked the supply of oxygen to the bloodstream.”
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The base chaplain immediately baptized him. While Jackie was still in surgery, her husband agreed with doctors to move Patrick to the better-equipped Children’s Hospital in Boston. While an ambulance pulled up, JFK wheeled Patrick’s incubator into Jackie’s room for the only look she would ever have of her son.
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As Patrick’s breathing failed over the next day, doctors moved him again, this time to a high-pressure oxygen chamber in Harvard’s School of Public Health, where JFK stayed overnight in a waiting room. At 2:00 a.m. on August 9, the president was awakened and summoned to the side of his son’s oxygen chamber. When the doctors knew Patrick was about to die, they brought him out of the chamber to be with his father. Patrick died at 4:04 a.m. on August 9, at the age of thirty-nine hours and twelve minutes, with his father holding his fingers.
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JFK went back to his room, sat on the bed, and wept. A helicopter took him to the Otis Air Base hospital, where he and Jackie spent an hour alone together.
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In his own dying child, Kennedy saw other afflicted children. While he was waiting to see Patrick for the last time, he noticed a badly burned child in another hospital room. He asked for the mother’s name, borrowed pen and paper, and wrote an encouraging note to be given to her when she came to visit her child.
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When he returned to the White House, now with an even deeper sense of the death of children, he worked with renewed determination for passage of the test ban treaty. Thanks to the mobilization campaign of Norman Cousins and the Citizens Committee, as overseen by the president, public opinion turned around.

On August 28, Cousins sent a progress report to President Kennedy “on your specific suggestions for the public campaign to ratify the test ban treaty.” In his memorandum to the president, Cousins ticked off a series of recommendations JFK had given the Citizens Committee in the August 7 meeting. Cousins also listed the follow-up the committee had accomplished in the three weeks since then. It comprised an outreach program to the nation through business leaders, scientists, religious leaders, farmers, scholars and university presidents, unions, newspapers, key states, and liberal organizations such as SANE (National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy), UWF (United World Federalists), and ADA (Americans for Democratic Action).
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They had all been specified by Kennedy in the August 7 meeting, just before he was given word of Jacqueline’s emergency and departed quickly from the White House. As the result of a whirlwind August campaign managed by Cousins, summarized in his memorandum to the man behind it, the American public reversed course on a critical Cold War issue. The people, and their president, were more open to change than Congress was. But senators could also feel new winds of peace blowing. They, too, turned toward a new possibility.