The Day Kennedy Was Shot (17 page)

Detectives and off-duty patrolmen in civilian clothes were assigned to mingle with crowds and man rooftops where crowds were expected to be heavy. Sixty-three policemen surrounded the Trade Mart, and 150 more were already inside the big building. The Dallas Police Department totaled 1,100 men. Of these, 850 were now working this one tour of duty, and most of them were within the presidential area of four miles. Captain King was satisfied. The superior officers knew from experience that the visit of a VIP always brings the hotheads and a few mentally irresponsible people to the front. Dallas had seldom entertained a President of the United States, and Glen King wanted no trouble, no irate citizens, no threats to the motorcade. The depart
ment was literally breaking its back to make certain that Dallas would “come up smelling like a rose.”

There was additional assistance which Captain King did not add to his list. Off-duty firemen were impressed into service. Sheriff's deputies were on duty. The State Police Department of Texas sent men in big, curling hats. The Texas Rangers were stationed from airport to Trade Mart. Governor Connally's own Department of Public Safety sent its best men from Austin. Chief Jesse Curry issued a pronunciamento empowering anyone—in case of riot or disturbance on this day—to make a citizen's arrest.

Henslee was monitoring Channel Two and Assistant Chief Batchelor came on in a worried tone. “Nine,” he said. “Have you received information that his arrival is twenty minutes late?” Henslee said: “I have not received that information.” The President was due at the Trade Mart at exactly 12:30. The Secret Service and the police had made the dry runs four or five times and it required forty-five minutes, allowing for a speed of fifteen to twenty miles per hour in the rural sections and ten to twelve in the crowded streets. Twenty minutes amounted to a great deal of time. It would stretch the travel between the Hotel Texas and the Trade Mart, a distance of thirty-three miles, to two hours and a half, including jet plane.

Batchelor was wrong. The schedule was seven minutes slow and could be improved by allowing a shorter time for official greetings at Dallas and a faster run from the triple underpass to the Trade Mart. Secret Service agents at the airport were lining up the cars for the motorcade, and chauffeurs were moving ahead or back in line as ordered. City police held a large crowd of sightseers behind the steel fence. A group of fire engines, foam trucks, an ambulance, and a jeep with a tailgate marked “Follow Me” moved out on runway 31.

The sun came out, not peeking, but staring. The temperature was 76 degrees Fahrenheit. Dallas, the narcissistic city, found
itself impressed by an alien. The people not only were lining the curbs from the airport to the underpass, but a second wave, seeing the hot sun, now jammed buses and cars on the roads. Almost everybody was headed for a part of downtown Dallas. Each one, so it seemed, felt that there would be plenty of room for watching the motorcade. Cedar Springs and Main and Lemmon and Mockingbird and the roads between were lined and triple-lined with people.

The porches of homes were heavy with people who stood looking. Others leaned in shop doorways. Some sat on gravel roofs. In the skyscrapers venetian blinds were pulled up. Faces appeared in windows. Secretaries tore old scrap paper and watched it float, like confetti, toward the crowds below. The Lamar Street viaduct was choked with cars coming in from Oak Cliff, trying to find a place near Main to park. Some left their cars along the curb between the
Dallas News
and the railroad station, even though police citations would be tied to the windshield wipers. The city had decided, with the advent of the sun, to stage a rip-roaring hell-bent-for-election Western-style welcome. For this day, this moment, Dallas did not want to be reminded of the politics of John F. Kennedy. He was the President of the United States, and, if San Antonio gave him an “Olé!” and a big, sprawling Houston tossed its Stetson in the air, and Fort Worth waited patiently with rain on its face to roar, “Where's Jackie?” then Dallas was about to deafen this Easterner with a roar of sound and a bear hug that would send him to the LBJ Ranch dancing with joy.

Those who could not hurry downtown turned the television sets on and left them on. In the
Dallas News
, E. M. Dealey, publisher, permitted the young secretaries to use his television set to watch the proceedings. In Irving, Ruth Paine hurried from the dental appointment to find Marina Oswald excited and still in her bathrobe, explaining in Russian that the President and his pretty wife had left Fort Worth but there was nothing on
television at the moment because the plane had not arrived in Dallas.

In City Hall, a portable set was on and too many faces tried to watch. In shopping centers, crowds anchored before radio stores to watch the proceedings on TV sets in the windows. At Parkland Memorial Hospital, sets were turned on. Starched nurses, en route from room to room with tiny paper “cocktails” of pills and water, watched the excitement. In the rectory of Holy Trinity Church, Father Oscar Huber sat upstairs in the recreation room with Father James Thompson. Huber, the pastor, was a small, alert man with a wry Missouri humor.

The blue veins in his snowy hands were pulsing with excitement. He watched the jets lift off from Fort Worth and he said to his younger confrere: “I have never seen a president. Want to walk up to Lemmon and Reagan with me and watch him pass by?” Father Thompson did not. He would be content to watch the proceedings on TV. The little pastor sat for a moment, watching, then got up and put on his black jacket and left. He had heard that the nuns at Holy Trinity Church were escorting students up to Lemmon and Reagan, and, if it was good enough for them, it was good enough for him.

The clouds, like swirls of mud in a blue lagoon, jarred the three jet planes as they approached the glide path to Dallas. General Ted Clifton, on
AF-2
, could not understand the reasoning behind O'Donnell's decision to fly rather than ride. Between clouds, the flat prairie of Texas, modified by thousands of white ranch houses, lush green golf courses, and damp river beds, came into focus and disappeared in the next cloud. The seat belt sign went on and most passengers were of the opinion that they had hardly left the ground.

Colonel Swindal's first officer, wearing a headset, could hear Love Field repeating the warning for all aircraft to stay away: “D.V. Arriving. D.V. Arriving. D.V. Arriving.” The Distinguished
Visitors, even though locked inside these flying aluminum tubes, were busy, each with his own problem. Senator Yarborough felt that he had made the peaceful move by riding with Vice-President Johnson; now it was up to the President to see that Yarborough was treated like a United States Senator at Austin tonight. That, unfortunately, could not be solved by a seat in a car. Governor Connally, a fellow Democrat, had no intention of honoring Yarborough at the party affairs this evening. Nellie Connally was more spiteful. She would not invite the Senator to the cocktail party at the Governor's mansion, although it belonged to the people of Texas. Yarborough might surrender to persuasion, but the Connallys were going to maintain the split in the party, and the President could not persuade them to be civil. The Governor felt little enthusiasm for Kennedy.

Mrs. Lincoln, with a handful of memoranda which had been typed the previous night, was trying to steady herself as she went aft to ask the President to sign them. Chris Camp and Pamela Turnure split parts of the Austin speech and tried to type some of it before the plane reached Dallas. For a moment, Mr. Kennedy was in the main cabin, sitting at his desk, facing Texas politicians. They were boasting about the fine receptions, and the President conceded with gratitude, but kept coming back to the scurrilous attacks of the newspapers, and the congressmen reminded him that they had no more control over the press of Texas than he had in Massachusetts.

Without reading, he signed the memos Mrs. Lincoln placed on his desk, and he returned to the papers. He had a new one. It was a column published in the
Dallas Times-Herald
two days ago. “Why Do So Many Hate the Kennedys?” was the title. It was written by A. C. Greene. As Mr. Greene analyzed it, antipathy was felt toward all the Kennedys, the President, his wife, father, brothers, “his daughter, Caroline, and to some extent, even the little tyke, John Jr.” The President was referred to as a man whose “money still stinks.”

Mary Gallagher was in the private cabin, helping Mrs. Kennedy to get ready for the automobile ride. In a few moments she was out, sitting beside Mrs. Lincoln, who urged the young lady to join the motorcade. But Miss Gallagher, who had worked eleven years for the Kennedys, was afraid of incurring the President's wrath twice in one day. “Remember Adlai Stevenson!” said Mrs. Lincoln. “We may run into some demonstrations.” She also thought that the President seemed to be nervous. Mary decided to take a chance and join the parade. There might be some perverse excitement.

A brilliant burst of sunshine came into the plane and President Kennedy arose from his desk and walked aft. “It looks as though our luck is holding,” he said to the congressmen. In the narrow alley between the main lounge and the aft breakfast nook, Mr. Kennedy noticed that O'Donnell was chatting with Governor Connally. The President must have known at once that Larry O'Brien was forward chatting with Yarborough. Keeping the Governor and the Senator apart on one plane was not easy.

Kennedy did not want to listen to the persuasions and evasions. He called Mr. Dealey, the publisher, a bad name and went into his cabin. He motioned Congressman Albert Thomas, the only stowaway on
AF-1
(he was on
AF-2
's manifest), to step inside with him. Mr. Kennedy sat with the legislator, and Kennedy, who always ate before keeping dining dates, asked a steward to bring some fruit and sugar.

Powers came in briefly to display the large-type copy of the Trade Mart speech. The Congressman, shaking his head dolefully, said: “I'd be careful what I say. Dallas is a tough town.” Kennedy did not answer. He was scanning the speech, rocking with the turbulence of the aircraft, and preparing to take care of his personal ablutions before the landing. In the speech, he was going to rock the right-wing element of Dallas and he was as adamant about it as the Connallys were about Yarborough. This
equated the President with the people he criticized because, if they were stubborn and refused to see, so was he.

He detested the fanaticism he detected in himself. The rich Hunts and Richardsons and Murchisons of Texas represented the radical right—the Dealeys, too—and Mr. Kennedy saw them as implacable and hateful, preaching a dead doctrine to an ignorant people. The reactionaries saw Kennedy as a spiteful liberal who had seized the dammed-up political power of America and had opened the valves to flood the country with the venom of civil rights and who drowned all opposition with fancy phrases which painted them with decay and himself with youthful nobility.

The rich of Texas remembered Kennedy's words with bitterness:

“I believe in an America where every family can live in a decent home in a decent neighborhood—where children can play in parks and playgrounds, not the streets of slums—where no home is unsafe or unsanitary—where a good doctor and a good hospital are neither too far away nor too expensive—and where the water is clean and the air is pure and the streets are safe at night. . . .

“Terror is not a new weapon. Throughout history it has been used by those who could not prevail either by persuasion or example. But inevitably they fail, either because men are not afraid to die for a life worth living, or because the terrorists themselves come to realize that free men cannot be frightened by threats and that aggression would meet its own response. . . .

“I don't think, really, in any sense, the United Nations has failed as a concept. I think occasionally we fail it.”

It was a standoff of the obdurates and the obstinate; he in Washington, they in Dallas. The affluent Texas begged for less government; Kennedy gave it more. Texas asked for lower taxes; Kennedy tried to seal the tax loopholes. Texas was narrowly nationalistic; Kennedy was a sophisticated European. They put
millions of dollars into their propaganda; Kennedy nullified their work with a White House press release.

Now he had come to their land, their home. The millions of Texans who do not matter were awestruck by the presence of youth and power wrapped in one aluminum smile. The Texans who did matter sat behind their money and wondered if he had come as a friend, or if he was about to start more trouble. They backed Governor Connally, and the Governor had assured them that he had tried to postpone the visit into oblivion, but the President had insisted and, if he must come to Texas, it was better to have some control over the stops, the parades, the luncheons and dinners than to divorce oneself from the headstrong young man.

Jack Ruby was one of the millions who do not matter. The lumpy body carried the tired face across the gleaming floor of the
Dallas News
lobby on his way upstairs to see Toni Zoppi, the amusement editor. He noticed a classified ad clerk, Gladys Craddock, and the features hoisted themselves toward congeniality and he yelled, “Hi!” Then, en route to the elevator, they slid again toward his chin as he contemplated the phrasing of the weekend advertising he wanted for his nightclub, and the cutting words he was saving for the person who accepted the “Welcome, Mr. President” ad.

There is a warm effusion of righteousness when a little man can indict a big one. Jack Ruby, under threat of dropping his one-column two-inch ad, proposed to “dish it out” to the
News
advertising department for ridiculing the President of the United States. Ruby also wanted to know who Bernard Weissman was. As he waited for an elevator, it is doubtful that he heard the whine of jet aircraft.

Now he could see the first one. It was under the floe of broken clouds on final. Jack Jove stood in the glass octagonal tower and watched the Clipper coming, head on, with about 20-degree flaps, like a dragonfly trailing a dirty veil. It was over the sky
scrapers of downtown Dallas, dropping steadily. The overhead speaker crackled and the first officer gave his call letters and said: “. . . on final, 31 right.” Jove, chief of FAA at Love Field, watched five of his men work the consoles. A radar man below had the plane on scopes and said: “Okay, Pan American Clipper 729.”