Killing Kennedy (33 page)

Oswald does not hate the president. He has no reason to want JFK dead. He is, however, bitter that a man such as John Kennedy has so many advantages in life. Oswald well understands that it’s easier for men born into privilege to distinguish themselves. But other than that small amount of envy, he does not speak unfavorably about the president. In fact, Oswald would very much like to emulate JFK.

Above all, he wants to be a great man.

*   *   *

“Can I ride home with you this afternoon?” Oswald casually asks coworker Wesley Frazier. The nineteen-year-old’s home is a half block from where Marina Oswald lives with Ruth Paine. Oswald often catches a ride out to the suburb of Irving on Friday in Frazier’s nine-year-old black Chevy four-door and then makes the return trip back into Dallas with him on Monday.

“Sure,” Wesley replies. They are standing on the first floor of the Texas School Book Depository, next to a large table. “You know, like I told you, you can go home with me anytime you want to, like I say, anytime you want to go see your wife that is all right with me.”

But then Frazier realizes that today isn’t Friday. It’s Thursday—and Oswald never rides to Irving on Thursdays. “Why are you going home today?” Frazier asks him.

“I am going home to get some curtain rods,” Oswald replies.

Oswald then steals a length of brown wrapping paper from the depository’s shipping department. He spends the rest of his workday fashioning a bag in which to conceal his “curtain rods.”

Through it all, as he folds the paper to form the best possible sheath in which to hide his rifle, Lee Harvey Oswald is unsure that he will actually kill President Kennedy. What he really wants is to be permanently reunited with Marina and the girls. Tonight, he will beg his wife to take him back.

But if she doesn’t, Oswald will be left with no choice.

That is how delusional Lee Harvey Oswald’s world has become. He now deals only in absolutes: either live happily ever after—or murder the president of the United States.

23

N
OVEMBER 22, 1963

I
RVING,
T
EXAS

6:30 A.M.

The Oswalds have been fighting. Again. But this time is different. This time it’s over. Lee Harvey stands at the foot of the bed in their cramped room at Ruth Paine’s house, dressed for work in gray pants and an old shirt. He twists the wedding band off his left hand and drops it into a china cup on the dresser. It was once a symbol of his love for Marina, but now it is yet another confirmation of the failure that envelops his life.

Today Oswald will do something to change all that. Today he will prove that he is not a failure, even if it means losing his own life in the process.

He drops $187 in cash onto the dresser as a going-away present to his wife and daughters. After all, it’s not as if he has a future.

Marina lies on the bed, half awake. Hers and her husband’s last night together was not romantic. Oswald tossed and turned while Marina was up with the baby twice. They did not make love, although Marina made a 3:00
A.M
. attempt at tenderness. He responded by angrily kicking her away.

Oswald’s trip home was primarily to get his rifle. But he was willing to set aside his dark plan if Marina agreed to live with him. All evening long he pleaded with his wife to reconcile. He told her how much he missed his girls, and even promised to buy Marina a washing machine because he knew how much she wanted one.

But Marina was furious that he had come to see her on a Thursday, which was against Ruth Paine’s house rules. So Oswald’s pleas turned into yet another round of bickering. But still he didn’t give up.

Marina, however, doesn’t seem to want him back. They spent the evening outside, playing with June and Audrey on the dying autumn grass of Ruth Paine’s lawn. Oswald pleaded with Marina to become his wife again. She wavered, because Lee Harvey Oswald had once been the love of her life. But she did not give in.

Oswald went to bed early. He lay there thinking. Even when Marina came to bed, her body warm and smelling like soap from a late-night bath, he pretended to be asleep. The hours passed. Over time he found his courage. He had nothing left in the world. He would go forward with his plan.

Now, at dawn, after dressing for work and leaving his worldly possessions on the dresser, Lee Harvey Oswald hears Marina stir behind him.

“Don’t get up,” he tells her. “I’ll get breakfast myself.”

She’s exhausted and has no intention of getting up. Audrey fusses, and Marina reaches for her to nurse her. Oswald softly lets himself out of the room without saying good-bye.

The assassin fixes himself a cup of instant coffee in the kitchen, then steps into Ruth Paine’s crowded garage to retrieve his rifle. He unrolls the blanket lying next to his olive-green Marine Corps seabag, revealing the 6.5-millimeter Mannlicher-Carcano infantry carbine. He lays the gun in the brown paper wrapping he stole from work yesterday.

Holding the “curtain rods” by the barrel, he steps out of the garage, forever leaving his old life behind.

By 8:00
A.M
., Oswald and Wesley Frazier are pulling up for work at the Texas School Book Depository. Oswald is out of the car before Frazier cuts the engine. He has grabbed his brown package and raced inside the building before Frazier can catch up and ask him why he’s in such a hurry.

*   *   *

“It’s raining,” says George Thomas, stepping inside John Kennedy’s Fort Worth hotel suite. The president’s valet rouses him at precisely 7:30
A.M
. A crowd is already gathering in the parking lot eight floors below, waiting to hear Kennedy speak to them from the back of a flatbed truck. The audience of nearly five thousand is mostly male, and primarily union workers. Many have been standing in the rain for hours.

“That’s too bad,” Kennedy replies to his valet. He rises from bed and heads for the shower. Rain means that the bubble-top roof will be buckled onto his limousine for the Dallas motorcade. Not only will the local citizens be upset by having to wait in the cold and rain for hours until he passes by, but their inability to get a clear glimpse of the president and First Lady inside the bubble will do little to sway their votes come next November.

The president wraps himself in his back brace, tightly adjusting the straps. He then dresses in a blue two-button suit, a dark blue tie, and a white shirt with gray stripes from Cardin’s in Paris. He reads the CIA situation reports, paying close attention to the casualty count from Vietnam. After that, he scans several newspapers. The
Chicago Sun-Times
is reporting that Jackie just might be the pivotal factor in helping him get reelected in 1964. That’s the best news of this trip so far: everyone loves the First Lady. The uproar over her bikini photos has clearly been forgotten.

The people of Texas screamed and cheered for JFK on the first day of the Texas trip. But as big as his ovations are, and as intently as the audiences hung on every word of his speeches, the reception John Kennedy received was nothing like what his wife is experiencing. Jackie is the talk of Texas, and bringing her along may just be the smartest political move the president has ever made.

By 9:00
A.M
., John Kennedy is standing on the back of the flatbed truck, looking upbeat and triumphant. “There are no faint hearts in Forth Worth,” he says approvingly to the crowd. He has a well-deserved reputation for not giving in to the elements. The union workers knew their waiting in the rain would be rewarded and that the speech would not be canceled.

“Where’s Jackie?” someone shouts.

“Where’s Jackie?” yells another voice.

John Kennedy smiles and points up to her hotel room. “Mrs. Kennedy is organizing herself,” he jokes. On the eighth floor, sitting before her vanity, Jackie can hear the speech rising up from the parking lot. She enjoys hearing her name and how easily her husband banters with the crowd.

“It takes her a little bit longer,” the president adds. “But, of course, she looks a little bit better than we do when she does it.”

The crowd roars in laughter, as if the president is their coolest drinking buddy and he’s sharing some juicy tidbit about his personal life.

But the truth is that, today, Jackie doesn’t just need a little extra time to get ready—she needs a lot of time. The First Lady looks visibly exhausted as she primps before the mirror. Campaigning is hard work. Yet she is determined to stick this out. There is to be another swing through California in two weeks, and she wants to make that trip, too. In fact, Jackie Kennedy is determined to be at her husband’s side from now until he is reelected next November.

But all of that is in the future. What matters now is that the Texas trip is halfway done. All Jackie has to do is make it through this day, and then she can relax. “Oh, God,” she says, looking at her frazzled image in the mirror. “One day’s campaigning can age a person thirty years.”

The First Lady has no idea that today will age her like no other day in her young life.

*   *   *

The energy in the Fort Worth parking lot fuels the president, who delivers a powerful and impassioned speech. “We are going forward!” he exclaims in closing, reminding his audience that he is keeping the promises he made in his inaugural address less than three years earlier. The cold war is behind us, he’s saying, all the while implying that the future is a Camelot for all Americans.

The earsplitting cries of approval from those thousands of hardened union men is all the proof John Kennedy needs that Texas really isn’t such a bad place after all.

The president rides a wave of adrenaline off the stage and back into the hotel. Campaigning revitalizes him, even in an early-morning Texas drizzle.

But as good as he feels, the president knows that the rest of Friday, November 22, is not going to be easy. From both a political and a personal standpoint, he must be at the top of his game if he is going to win over the hardened people of Dallas.

Or, as the president warns Jackie, “We’re heading into nut country today.”

24

N
OVEMBER 22, 1963

T
EXAS
S
CHOOL
B
OOK
D
EPOSITORY,
D
ALLAS

9:45 A.M.

Crowds of eager Dallas residents stand on the curb in front of the Texas School Book Depository. The president won’t pass by for three hours, but they’ve come early to get a good spot. Best of all, it looks like the sun might come out. Maybe they’ll get a glimpse of John F. Kennedy and Jackie after all.

Lee Harvey Oswald peers out a first-floor window of the depository building, assessing the president’s route by where the crowds stand. He can clearly see the corner of Elm and Houston, where John Kennedy’s limousine will make a slow left turn. This is important to Oswald. He’s selected a spot on the depository’s sixth floor as his sniper’s roost. The floor is dimly lit by bare 60-watt lightbulbs and is currently under renovation, and thus empty. Stacks of book boxes near the window overlooking Elm and Houston will form a natural hiding place, allowing Oswald to poke his rifle outside and sight the motorcade as it makes that deliberate turn. The marksman in Lee Harvey Oswald knows that he’ll have time for two shots, maybe even three if he works the bolt quickly enough.

But one should be all he needs.

*   *   *

Air Force One crabs into the wind as Colonel Jim Swindal eases her down onto the runway at Dallas’s Love Field. John Kennedy is ecstatic. Peering out the windows of his airplane, he sees that the weather has turned sunny and warm and that yet another large Texas crowd is waiting to greet him. “This trip is turning out to be terrific,” he happily confides to Kenny O’Donnell. “Here we are in Dallas and it looks like everything in Texas will turn out to be fine for us!”

Police cars circle the field, and officers are even stationed on rooftops. But these are the only ominous sights at the airport. For the estimated welcoming party of two thousand are overjoyed to see Air Force One touch down, marking the first time a president has visited Dallas since 1948. Grown men stand on their tiptoes to see over the throngs in front of them. Airport personnel leave their desks inside the terminal and jostle into position near the chain-link fence separating the runway from the parking lot. The U.S. Air Force C-130 carrying the president’s armored limousine lands and opens its cargo ramp. The bubble top remains on board the plane. The convertible top is completely down. A local television newsman, who is covering the spectacle live on air, enthusiastically reports that the bubble top is nowhere in evidence and that people will be able to see the president and First Lady “in the flesh.” The reporter also reminds his audience that the president will be returning to Love Field between “2:15 and 2:30” to depart for Austin.

Lyndon Johnson and his wife, Lady Bird, await the president on the tarmac, as they have on every leg of the Texas trip. The vice president’s job is to stand at the bottom of the ramp and greet the president. Johnson is not happy about this assignment, but he puts on a good face as Jackie emerges from the rear door of the plane, radiant in the pink Chanel suit with the matching pillbox hat. Two steps behind, and seen in person for the first time by the people of Dallas, comes John Kennedy.