The Day Kennedy Was Shot (10 page)

In the Longhorn Room, agents hurried to the elevator door
on the left and asked the politicians and their wives to move back. The door swung open and a polite patter of applause rippled across the room as the President walked from group to group, shaking hands, nodding good morning to the Vice-President and Mrs. Johnson; the Governor and Mrs. Connally; a special word to Congressman Jim Wright; a pause before Senator Ralph Yarborough to freeze the smile and growl: “For Christ's sake, Ralph, cut it out!”

He was ready to go, and a few joined the President on the elevator. Others hurried down the flight of stairs. In the lobby, a cheer went up from the group permitted to wait beyond the manager's desk. The President saw the clerks at the drugstore and behind the florist stand staring agape and he smiled and nodded. Lightly he danced down the few steps to Eighth Street, a sizeable entourage behind him, and out into the street. He was one of the few who was bareheaded, and the crowd saw him step into the street and shouts went up: “Here he is!” “Here's the President!” A Secret Service man ran up to Mr. Kennedy with a raincoat, but he was waved away. Mr. Kennedy began to chuckle. He got up on the buckboard truck and saw the immensity of the crowd, more than twice the size of the one expected at the breakfast, and, although he made no comment, it induced laughter in his throat as he studied the density of human beings waiting in the rain, and there was no doubt that Mr. Kennedy was impressed and encouraged regarding the warmth of Texans.

The roar of the crowd broke against the red brick of the Hotel Texas and, up on the eighth floor, the face of Mrs. Kennedy could be seen for a moment, looking down. In another room Evelyn Lincoln and her women crowded at a window to watch. Behind them the door opened and Mary Gallagher came in to announce that she and Mrs. Lincoln should be getting out to the plane. She wanted to be aboard before Mrs. Kennedy.

The Vice-President and the Governor flanked the President on the truck. Their brows were grim in the drizzle. Up in Dr.
Burkley's room, O'Donnell and O'Brien watched Kennedy's arms trying to flag the crowd into silence. They had spoken to Senator Yarborough before the President saw him, and their persuasion had been fruitless. Yarborough had his own reasons for not wishing to ride with Mr. Johnson, he said, and, besides, no one was watching who rode with whom; the people of Texas were out to see the President. Besides, he had ridden into town with the Vice-President last night and that ought to be enough.

Like a receding wave, the parking lot welcome began to soften and fall back. The President, smiling and waving, saw more than the crowd. His eyes caught the policemen on the roof of the Continental Trailways Bus Terminal and on the roof of the Washer Brothers Building with riot guns. The big broad smile did not change; it was an irritant which went with the job, like listening interminably to “Hail to the Chief.”

“Mr. Vice-President,” the President said loudly, chin a little high before the microphone, and the crowd shouted again. “Mr. Vice-President, Jim Wright, Governor, Senator Yarborough, Mr. Buck, ladies and gentlemen”: Another cry went up for Raymond Buck, president of the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce. “There are no faint hearts in Fort Worth, and I appreciate your being here this morning.”

Someone yelled: “Where's Jackie?” and Mr. Kennedy broke into laughter with the crowd. “Mrs. Kennedy is organizing herself. It takes longer, but, of course, she looks better than we do when she does it.” The people whooped. “But we appreciate your welcome.”

For a moment, his thoughts wandered. “This city has been a great Western city, the defense of the West, cattle, oil, and all the rest. It has believed in strength in this city, and strength in this state, and strength in this country.”

He was trying to appeal to their pride and their civic vanity, but the words were not marshaled and clichés boomed through the loudspeakers. In the small bedroom in Suite 850, Mrs. Kennedy could hear the voice of her husband and the shouts of the
citizens. She hoped the rain would continue so that the bubbletop would be on the car; even a slow-moving motorcade twisted hair into dissolute tendrils. Besides her mirror told her that her eyes were fatigued.

“What we are trying to do in this country and what we are trying to do around the world, I believe, is quite simple, and this is to build a military structure which will defend the vital interests of the United States.” The President's right hand was pointing outward now, then back up, and out again as punctuation for an informal talk. No matter what he said, or what the President left unsaid, the crowd permitted the veils of mist to shine its collective face and it endorsed every pause with open throats and enthusiasm for the man.

“And in that great cause, Fort Worth, as it did in World War II, as it did in developing the best bomber system in the world, the B-58, and as it will now do in developing the best fighter system in the world, the TFX, Fort Worth will play its proper part. And that is why we have placed so much emphasis in the last three years in building a defense system second to none—until now the United States is stronger than it has ever been in its history.” He was not telling them anything they did not know; they would have preferred to hear him tell what he was going to do to Senator John Tower and the Texas Republicans next year, but Mr. Kennedy was on a defense topic and found it difficult to separate the bait of federal payrolls and the fish of local workers.

“And secondly,” the President said, “we believe that the new environment, space, the new sea, is also an area where the United States should be second to none.” This was a thought borrowed from his dedication of the Houston Space Center yesterday, but the crowd whistled approval.

“And this state of Texas and the United States is now engaged in the most concentrated effort in history to provide leadership in this area and it must here on earth. And this is
our second great effort. And in December—next month—the United States will fire the largest booster in the history of the world, putting us ahead of the Soviet Union in that area for the first time in our history.”

Again he was borrowing from the Houston speech. Mr. Kennedy had fallen into a witty slip of the tongue at the Space Center by calling the booster the “largest payroll in history” instead of the “largest payload.” Mist was now shining on his forehead; the Governor and the Vice-President faced the crowd with neutral expressions. Reporters made notes, even though they knew that the speech at the breakfast and the one at the Trade Mart in Dallas were the ones with built-in impact.

“And thirdly, for the United States to fulfill its obligations around the world requires that the United States move forward economically, that the people of this country participate in rising prosperity. And it is a fact in 1962, and the first six months of 1963, the economy of the United States grew not only faster than nearly every Western country, which had not been true in the fifties, but also grew faster than the Soviet Union itself. That is the kind of strength the United States needs, economically; in space, militarily.”

“And in the final analysis, that strength depends upon the willingness of the citizens of the United States to assume the burdens of leadership.” He was finished. He had to find a thought to get him off the stand. “I know one place where they are, here in this rain, in Fort Worth, in Texas, in the United States. We are going forward. Thank you.”

There was a thunder of applause, shouts, and rebel yells. The President and Vice-President hopped down from the truck, and stood before the American flag and the Seal of the President, pumping hands, trading smiles, studying the awestricken faces which would never forget this moment. The Secret Service began to break through the crowd, back toward the hotel.

Mr. Kennedy stopped a moment to reach up and shake
hands with the ponchoed troopers who sat on their horses and kept the lane open for him. Along the corridor on the eighth floor, the word was passed: “He's on his way back to the hotel.” The police on the rooftops slid their shotguns under their arms and watched him disappear under the big metal canopy which said: “Welcome to Texas.”

The man with the dark wavy hair initialed a paper and placed it in the outgoing box. A cigarette, dying on a tray, was touched to a fresh one and puffed. Gordon Shanklin depressed a button. “Let them come in,” he said. Behind his head was a color photograph of J. Edgar Hoover, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Mr. Shanklin, head of the Dallas office of the FBI, was a well-dressed, low-key man. He administered the field office, in the old Santa Fe Building, in the manner of a confident banker who would rather listen to the depositors than talk.

He was ready to start the biweekly meeting with his agents. They came in and said good morning. Some stood and some occupied chairs against the wall opposite Mr. Shanklin's desk. He had their reports before him and he went over them, asking a few questions, making suggestions. This morning he wanted to bring up the matter of the President's visit to Dallas once more. The protection of the President and Vice-President and their families was the province of the United States Secret Service, but there was always a chance that one of his men might have a lead on something, and he had reminded them, at earlier meetings, to mention any they might have in mind, so that such tips could go out at once to Washington and the PRS, and also to Roy Kellerman, who was the Secret Service agent in charge in Dallas today.

They had nothing. “If there is any indication of any possibility of acts of violence,” Mr. Shanklin murmured through his own smoke, “against the President or the Vice-President. . .” He glanced along a row of forty faces. “If you have anything,”
he said, “anything at all, I want it confirmed in writing.” Agent James P. Hosty was in the group. He had nothing to offer. Neither did anyone else. Hosty was rated as a solid, non-panic agent, a man who, in the absence of any big cases, kept checking a number of small ones and who often sat in the outer office in the late hours laboriously pecking at a typewriter to keep his reports up to date.

The FBI men listened to Mr. Shanklin's admonitions. He ran down a list of pending files. Each man involved gave an oral report on the status of the case to support the written work on Shanklin's desk. Most of them would not see President Kennedy today. Their work was in other areas and, unless they could arrange to have lunch somewhere in the neighborhood, they wouldn't get to see the reception on television either.

Hosty, for example, had learned by accident last night that there was going to be a motorcade. He was home reading a newspaper. He scanned the story of Big D's welcome to Mr. Kennedy, and noticed that there was a map diagram of the parade route, but he didn't study it. Hosty's path crossed that of the President only indirectly. Yesterday he had seen some street pamphlets with front and side-view pictures of President Kennedy and the words: “Wanted for Treason.”

The matter may have been of small moment, but Hosty had carried them over to the Secret Service office and had given them to Agent Warner. A man in James Hosty's squad had some information about someone in Denton, Texas, who had made threatening remarks about the President. This, too, was given to the Secret Service. Last night, there had been a tip about a demonstration against Kennedy at the Trade Mart—picketing, perhaps—and this, for whatever it was worth, was passed from FBI to SS.

The only thing that Hosty recalled about the parade route was that it would come down Main Street about noon, and he thought that, when the Friday morning meeting closed in Mr.
Shanklin's office, he might get a window table and have lunch at a restaurant along Main. He had no reason to think of any of his small “follow-up” cases in relation to the safety of the President.

One of them was Lee Harvey Oswald. Mr. Hosty's most recent report on this matter had been filed with the Washington office four days ago. It said that Oswald had been in communication with the Soviet Embassy in Washington. Oswald was a chronic chore to Mr. Hosty. He had been on it a year. The Federal Bureau of Investigation had interviewed Lee Harvey Oswald when he returned from Russia with Marina and baby June.

Oswald felt he had nothing to hide. He had served his country as a United States marine in foreign service, and his country had rewarded him with a dishonorable discharge. The Soviet Union turned out to be a disappointment because there was no freedom for the workers. He had been employed in a parts factory in Minsk; the trade union meetings had turned out to be dull and doctrinaire. At one time he couldn't even get permission to leave Moscow. At another, he couldn't leave Minsk to join his wife at a vacation resort.

The exploitation of the workers, Oswald said, was even worse in the United States, but here he could go where he pleased, and he did not have to answer Mr. Hosty's questions. If Hosty intended to inform Oswald's boss of his defection to Russia, then he would be harassed out of work. All Lee expected was to be left to work in peace and support his family. Yes, he was a communist, but he didn't expect an FBI agent to understand the word. He was a Marxist in the purest sense; not a socialist-despot like Stalin and Khrushchev; a true communist.

Mr. Hosty checked the Oswald case regularly. Oswald was never home. Hosty spoke to Marina Oswald, who resented him, through Mrs. Ruth Paine, who interpreted. To the agent, Mr. Oswald was a chronic complainer who lost jobs regularly. He had no friends. He had no admiration for the Russian expa
triates who tried to befriend him and his wife. They detested communism.

There was a small communist cell in the Dallas area, and the FBI had an undercover agent in it, but none of them knew Lee Harvey Oswald and the young malcontent had no desire to join. He felt superior to them and, in the time Hosty kept him under surveillance, Oswald vacillated between wanting to stay in the United States; sending Marina back to Russia with the baby; getting a Soviet visa for himself so that he could get to Cuba and the communist bloc countries. From day to day, he seemed to change his course abruptly, so that even his wife could not understand him.