The Day Kennedy Was Shot (20 page)

The Attorney General was a vital wire of a man, a sort of combat Kennedy. He relished the prosecution of crooked union leaders and members of the Sicilian Mafia. The latter had grown rich in an era when America had enforced the Volstead Act, which prohibited the sale of spiritous liquor of any kind. Since the repeal of that act and the return of licensed liquor in the United States, the criminal element, still organized into “families” with assigned terrtiories, had worked their way into legitimate businesses. The Attorney General was fascinated with the notion that he could drive them out of business and into prison, or out of the country.

He was a man who dared. His experience in matters of law was not extensive, but he was enthusiastic about his new role as the righteous prosecutor battling a world of evil. Robert Kennedy was designed to play the part of David.

Someone remarked that the wives always looked bright and refreshed in the early hours. Perhaps it was the plumage, or the makeup, but they smiled and brightened a scene which, to the men, might be grim. The time was 6:55
A.M.
at Honolulu, and the ladies had arrived from Washington the night before. It wasn't often that they had an opportunity to make a trip with their busy husbands, and this one was going to Japan.

The men had been in Honolulu for two days of conferences, at the direction of the President. He had been possessed of a suspicion that American military involvement in Vietnam was beginning to stick to his fingers. Mr. Kennedy, as was the case with Mr. Eisenhower, his predecessor, would like to be out of Vietnam. Each day the military boots of the United States sank a little deeper in this Oriental rice paddy.

Mr. Kennedy had become disenchanted with the Vietnamese President, Ngo Dinh Diem, and Diem distrusted Kennedy.
The American military advisers complained that supplies sent to Vietnam were being diverted, that American suggestions regarding the conduct of the war were ignored, that Diem and his “dragon lady” wife, his brother-in-law, a Catholic archbishop, his brother, a general—all of them spent more time fighting the Buddhists than in ridding their land of Vietcong terrorists and North Vietnamese soldiers.

Less than two weeks ago, President Diem and his brother had been assassinated in a military coup. The Catholic archbishop was out of the country; the “dragon lady” had fled, presumably to Italy. The situation, as far as the Americans were concerned, should have been good, but it wasn't. There were whispered charges that President Kennedy had agreed to the assassination of Diem, that he had been aware of the palace plot and had kept the American ambassador, Henry Cabot Lodge, from warning Diem. True or untrue, there was an odor of American chicanery in his assassination, and world newsmen spent the better part of a week trying to piece the story together.

Kennedy had ordered five Cabinet members and his press secretary, en route to Japan for a state visit, to pause in Honolulu for conferences with Ambassador Lodge and General Paul D. Harkins, who flew east from Saigon. Pierre Salinger, the press secretary, sat in as an observer, and he felt that the Vietnamese generals who were not in control “were doing a good job.” To some of the other conferees, this was a secondary aspect of a larger problem. The United States was spending blood and treasure beyond its means in Southeast Asia. Further, it had lost the sympathy of the world.

At the conferences were Secretary of State Dean Rusk; Secretary C. Douglas Dillon of the Treasury Department; Robert McNamara of Defense; McGeorge Bundy, presidential adviser on Foreign Affairs; Luther Hodges, Secretary of Commerce; Orville Freeman, Secretary of Agriculture, and Stewart Udall, Secretary of the Interior. It is hardly likely that this much of
the Cabinet, in effect, the United States government, had met in Hawaii to hear Lodge and Harkness tell how well the new regime was doing. They could appreciate that from the daily précis in the Situation Room of the White House. It is more likely that they were worried over public interest in Kennedy's involvement—if any—in the assassinations and how best to divert attention from it. They may also have discussed how best to extricate the U.S. from Saigon; in fact, it was a probable topic and the President may have asked the military for a timetable of withdrawal.

The conferences were made important by the status and number of the conferees. The meetings had broken up last night, and Secretary McNamara and McGeorge Bundy had taken a plane back to Washington. At 6:55
A.M.,
the remaining Cabinet members and their wives walked out onto the strip at Hickam Airport and boarded a presidential jet for Japan.

In Tokyo, Rusk, Dillon, and the others would discuss trade agreements with their Japanese counterparts. It was a beautiful day. Pierre Salinger got aboard with his wife Nancy and remembered that a good breakfast had been promised on the plane. The press secretary had one additional assignment: he was to sound out the Japanese secretly on the possibility of John F. Kennedy's making a state visit to Japan in 1964. The President didn't want any of the student riots which had turned Dwight Eisenhower back from a similar visit at the halfway point.

The Japanese would have to maintain public order if they wanted Kennedy. It was Salinger's job to find out. The door closed and the wives were thrilled to be making the trip. It would take all day, even flying with the sun, and there would be one stop at Wake Island for fuel. From the air, Oahu looked like a fresh salad in mint aspic.

The sun was high and steady and the few remaining edges of gray in the sky changed to snow-blinding white. This was a day to match the springtime of a man. All the threats of the heavens had been dissipated by a band of light which warmed the concrete of Dallas. The welcome had been hesitant; a little stiff, like offering the courtesies of the house to a policeman. From Inwood Road on, the faces old and young, stern, senile, congenial, analytical, and apathetic became infused with warmth and the smiling eyes all blinked the same message: “Hello, Mr. President. Glad to see you.” It was cordial and a little more than that. They looked upon him with favor. Their sound, provincial judgment told them that he was a handsome young man with a friendly grin and blue eyes that drifted from face to face, laughing and glad to be alive.

His little woman was perky, too. Bright and sweet, a girl who didn't have her hair all frizzed and was not so made up you couldn't tell what she was like. Liked horses, too, this one. Rode some good hunters when she wasn't busy having babies. And lookit that pink two-piece suit with the little collar and cuff trim. Couldn't cost more than forty or fifty dollars down at Neiman Marcus. The President's wife—nothing put on about her. Nice couple with no scandal running their marriage into the ground. Almost too young—wouldn't you say?—to be the First Family of the entire United States. Like a couple of zippy kids ready to kick up their heels at the Grange.

Dallas, slow to admire, to enjoy, to give affection; quick to suspect, to indict, to distrust; this giant of Texas which was the
end of the South and the beginning of the West, which was neither and was both, this multiphrenic city sitting alone on a hot prairie like an oasis spouting a fountain of silvery coins gave its elixir to John F. Kennedy. The decision was made somewhere along Lemmon around Mahanna and the throats began to open with a continuous roar which spread from street to street and ran ahead of the motorcade. It swept over the sound of the motorcycles and made them run, as it were, silently. None of it affected the men with offices high up in the Southland Life Building or the oil men in the mahogany chambers with the deep pile rugs, the men with the cowboy boots and the pendulous bellies; none of it altered the opinion of the monarchs of Big D. They watched Kennedy on their color television sets and snapped him off. They had millions of dollars and they wanted additional tax breaks and write-offs and they wanted offshore oil drilling, too. They recognized the face of the man who would stop them.

The people did not matter. Dallas could buy and sell people. The metropolitan area had a population of 1,125,000 and the cheapest, meanest millionaire had more money than that. The city was so new it squeaked. One hundred and twenty-two years earlier, John Neely Bryan had built a log cabin on the confluence of three forks of the Trinity River. It wasn't a good choice, but the settlement was named after George M. Dallas, Vice-President of the United States. Dallas became the runt of the northern plain.

It was a stop for pioneers; a railhead; a haven for wholesalers; a cotton broker. The state government, in 1908, passed a restrictive law making it mandatory for all Texas insurance companies to make their headquarters in Dallas. The city grew at once. Oil companies followed the insurance organizations. Banking followed both. The biggest commodity in Dallas to buy, to sell, to exchange or trade was cash. With riches and growth Dallas developed a constitutional inferiority complex.

Everything it did had to be civically bigger and better than anywhere else. For the advancement of poetry appreciation, five Browning Societies were organized. It had more air conditioning per cubic foot than any city in the world. The rich women dressed richer; the Neiman Marcus store featured “His” and “Her” planes. The Symphony Orchestra, the Civic Opera Guild, the Museum of Fine Arts were oversubscribed annually.

The city wasn't crude. It was isolated. It was a wealthy hypochondriac looking away from himself; a kept woman living in a florist shop; a sultan with a hat full of diamonds begging for a glass of water; a tower in a tunnel. Dallas consists of five main sections, but North Dallas, lying between downtown and Love Field and Highland Park, was worthy of special attention.

To a Dallasite, the ideal was always to narrow everything to the ultimate. The best country is America; the best state is Texas; the best city is Dallas; the best section is North Dallas. Across the Trinity River to the south were the 280,000 people of Oak Cliff. One of them, in a rooming house on North Beckley, was Lee Harvey Oswald. Oak Cliff was used car lots and movie houses, supermarkets, filling stations, and unpainted porches; it was clerks, cops, and warehousemen; crooked flagstones, bargain stores, and buses. The damp dark bed of the Trinity might as well have been the Great Wall of China.

West Dallas and South Dallas are slum areas. Shacks and unpainted tenements abound; automobile cemeteries line the expressways. Religion is fundamental Protestant; the churches of North Dallas are more sophisticated, but for old-fashioned Bible-whacking and brimstone, the outlying districts are preferred. Oak Cliff supported 215 churches. Sin was the secret pleasure of the rich. The ladies of North Dallas were expected to flirt with their friends' husbands, but this was cocktail polo. The men all knew a motel clerk on the Dallas-Fort Worth Turnpike who specialized in keeping his mouth shut; each one knew an eager stenographer or an airline stewardess; the rich men
exchanged gifts five feet five inches tall; a welcome stranger was always asked: “Want me to take care of you?” The question was asked of John F. Kennedy on his first visit to the area in the presidential campaign of 1960. Many men recalled the question; no gentlemen remembered the answer.

Downtown Dallas supports all the others. The money is here. It consists of three parallel avenues: Elm, Main, and Commerce, which run from east to west, ending at Dealey Plaza. They are crossed by a dozen side streets. From the sky it looks like a broken banjo. Within this small embrasure are the tall office buildings, the courthouse, city hall, the library, the airlines offices, banks, insurance companies, county jail, hotels, smart shops, and fine restaurants. The freeways and viaducts lead into and out of Dallas within these three avenues and the power downtown is almost absolute. Any notions which are not approved by the powers are denounced as “creeping socialism” or “communism.” Here, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, Mr. Earl Warren, was a traitor. The living thing, the treasured spirit was the frontiersman with his Conestoga wagon, his mules, his woman, his horse, and his rifle. The enemy, once the hostile Indian and the rattlesnake, was now the government in Washington.

Physically, downtown Dallas is as clean and unpolluted as any business area in the country. The leaseholders are rich in natural gas, and everything but the sewers are air-conditioned.

Old, sunbaked buildings come down and edifices with tinted glass go up. Dallas will decline a government loan for downtown improvement but accept $50 million or $100 million from one or two of its own families, such as the Murchisons and the Hunts.

Nightlife in Dallas is superficial. There are three choices: a cultural binge at the symphony in a black tie and strands of pearls; a private party at a palatial home where husbands and wives mingle only at dinner; strip joints, where the big
gest thrill is amateur night and the moist-eyed customers sit at darkened tables pouring drinks from a bottle which remains in a brown paper sack. Of the latter, Jack Ruby's Carousel Club was one of the poorest. By midnight, downtown Dallas is dead, except for the lights used by the women who scrub the office floors and the drunks who stagger along the dark walls looking for a taxi.

Dallas is out of bed early and to work early. The executive and the elevator operator are often in that skyscraper before 8:00
A.M.
and the men work hard to find new ways of forcing money to make more money. Nor are the giants of industry above quarreling over the price of a steak or a tip to a waiter. The desire not to be swindled forced one man to buy eight automobiles for his family so that he could postpone trading the vehicles in at a loss. The same man would donate a million dollars for a new laboratory at the University of Dallas or buy a $100,000 ranch house as a wedding present for his daughter.

The group he represented, The Establishment, built two small cities within Dallas—Highland Park and University Park. They abut influential North Dallas and have their own taxes, police departments, and fire departments. No Negro lives among the 35,000 residents, but Negroes commute to Highland Park and University Park as servants. Separating the two communities is a boulevard called Lovers Lane.