The Day Kennedy Was Shot (50 page)

Marguerite Oswald was taken to a room where she was introduced to two men. They said they were FBI agents, although
they showed no I.D. cards. Strangely they had the same name: Brown. Mrs. Oswald said she had something important to tell them—something they should know before this assassination investigation got out of hand. “I want to talk with you gentlemen,” she said, sitting, “because I feel like my son is an agent of the government, and, for the security of my country, I don't want this to get out.”

The men glanced at each other. They appeared to be shockproof. “I want to talk to FBI agents from Washington,” she said. One of them nodded. “Mrs. Oswald, we are from Washington.” The lady wasn't certain that these were the right men. “I understand you work
with
Washington,” she said, “but I want officials
from
Washington.” They told her that she had the right men. “I do not want local FBI men,” she said. Her manner bespoke one who wants to reveal a hyper-secret which will climax the events of the day.

“Well,” one of the Mr. Browns said, “we work
through
Washington.” This did not mollify Mrs. Oswald. “I know you do,” she said, pursing her lips and staring candidly at them. “I would like Washington men.” The conversation ground to a geographical stalemate. They were not quite from Washington but they would not produce FBI agents who were.

She decided to tell them who she was. Mrs. Oswald, as was her right, always emphasized her mother role. Throughout her life, when minor debates appeared to be lost because of logic, she often said: “I am a mother. You do not know how a mother feels. . . .” The lady got a lot of mileage from pathos.

“For the security of the country,” she said at last, “I want this kept perfectly quiet until you investigate.” They nodded rapidly. “I happen to know that the State Department furnished the money for my son to return back to the United States, and I don't know, if that would be made public, what that would involve, and so please will you investigate this and keep this quiet.” They looked at each other as though they weren't certain
what weight to apply to the statement. The money of which she spoke had been lent to Oswald on his plea that he was broke. He had promised to repay the State Department, and he had, to the last penny.

“Congressman Jim Wright knows about this,” Marguerite Oswald said. She also gave them the names of four officials of the State Department whom she had badgered to help her son. The two Browns left her. They thanked her and said they would contact Washington. She might have added that her son Lee, on his return from the Soviet Union, had protested a dishonorable discharge from the United States Marine Corps. He had addressed this demand for a hearing to the Secretary of the Navy, who was John Connally. Mrs. Oswald did not mention this, although it seemed to some outsiders that Oswald's protest had merit, inasmuch as he had served his hitch in the Marines honorably and had earned an honorable discharge. What he did afterwards as a defector to the Soviet Union occurred after his military service.

Marguerite Oswald had given the FBI something to think about. In a little while she left for Dallas Police Headquarters. She wanted to see her boy.

The cold night wind swept the face of Europe. It came strong and steady out of the northwest, combing through the hedgerows of the Scottish moors, swinging the street lamps in Antwerp. There was a chill in it and pedestrians walked the Ring of Vienna with heads down and collars up to find that the opera had been canceled. The shops along the Champs-Elysées were bright with light, but the doors were locked. Under the Arc de Triomphe the eternal flame was whipped by a night wind which had no gusts but which pulled steadily at the crisp leaves along the Bois de Boulogne.

Radio Eireann canceled its programs as though anything more frivolous than Brahms would be sacrilegious. A Dublin commentator said: “It's as if there was a death in every family in Ireland.” In the little Wexford town of New Ross, Andrew Minihan remembered that John F. Kennedy stood in the square and said: “This is not the land of my birth, but it is the land for which I have the greatest affection, and I certainly hope to be back again in the springtime.”

Out in the hills beyond Dublin, Sean O'Casey, eighty-three and finished, the eyes dim beyond repair, sat under a bright light, the blue-brooked hands trembling, and wrote: “Peace, who was becoming bright-eyed, now sits in the shadow of death; her handsome champion has been killed. Her gallant boy is dead. We mourn here with you—poor sad American people.” In London, the great bell of Westminster Abbey began the solemn bass tone which reverberated across the bridge and up toward The Strand. No one paid much attention until it passed the
count of ten. It would toll for a solid hour, a tribute reserved for royal dead.

In Burdine's store in Miami, Mrs. Christine Margolis sobbed on the phone behind the cosmetics counter. Her daughter was trying to tell her what had happened, and Mrs. Margolis moaned: “Honey, don't cry. Don't cry.” A Marine sergeant in Caracas, Venezuela, had an hour of daylight left. He strode smartly to the flagstaff in front of the United States embassy, saluted, and pulled the halyards until the banner was at half-staff. A Greek barber in New York said: “I cry.”

Richard Nixon reached his home in New York and dialed J. Edgar Hoover. The FBI Director said that the Dallas police had picked up a suspect named Lee Harvey Oswald. He was a member of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee and a self-proclaimed Marxist, Mr. Hoover said. Nixon sat thinking of his Texas statement that Lyndon Johnson might be dropped from the Kennedy ticket. In the East, three race tracks closed—Aqueduct, Narragansett, and Pimlico—“in memory of President John F. Kennedy.” Many of the bettors did not know that he was dead.

At Andrews Air Force Base the order went out to don “dress uniforms.” The Air Force posted a ceremonial cordon of honor guards on the hard stand where
Air Force One
would stop. The Army sent three squads of men from Fort Myers, men properly drilled in a deathwatch. Helicopters coming in from the White House with distinguished mourners were requisitioned and ordered to stand by in case Mrs. Kennedy and the new President wanted to use them. The Marines, the Navy, the Coast Guard sent representatives. Someone suggested that it would be fitting if one or two men from each branch of service was used. They began to learn to drill together within the hour.

Nuns in convents all over the world knelt in dim chapels—no matter what the hour—intoning the rosary for the repose of the soul of a Roman Catholic chief of state. Dr. Russell Boles, Jr., was summoned from Boston to the side of
Joseph P. Kennedy at Hyannis Port to ascertain whether the father, convalescing from a cerebral hemorrhage, could withstand the shock of the news. At the United Nations in New York, the news was whispered to the pink bald head of General Dwight D. Eisenhower. For a moment, he showed outrage. “There is bound to be a psychotic sort of accident sometime,” he said and put on his topcoat and left.

There was an astonishing river of flame in West Berlin. It started with students holding torches, parading toward the Rathaus. The parade picked up volunteers on each street. By the time it reached the big square with the rough-stoned buildings, 300,000 Germans were carrying torches, and a band began the slow sad strains of
Ich hatt' einen Kameraden.
In Bonn, Chancellor Erhard proclaimed a military alert; the German government feared a Soviet invasion.

An advice was received by the U.S. Naval Hospital at Bethesda, Maryland, that an autopsy would be performed there. Doctors were summoned to the administration office by flashing numbers in the corridors, and teams were made ready for the work. A suite of rooms on the seventeenth floor, including kitchen and sitting room, was prepared for the Kennedy family. The doctors at Bethesda were aware, from radio and television reports, that the dying President had been taken to a place called Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas. No Navy doctor thought of phoning Parkland to ask what procedures had been tried, what wounds had been treated, to ask to what surgical abuses the body had been submitted. Nor did it occur to Parkland, when the news was broadcast that the remains were headed for Bethesda, to phone with a summary report of Texas procedures.

Shortly after 4
P.M.
in Dallas, Dr. James Carrico completed a two-page summary of medical findings and procedures at Parkland. It encompassed only the emergency work of Carrico and his confreres. No one had time to examine the President thoroughly before he died. Or after. In another office, Dr. William
Kemp Clark completed a two and three-quarter page medical summary in his own rapid scrawl. It might have helped Bethesda to know that the extruding hole in the President's neck had first been a small exit wound and that it had been enlarged surgically to permit a tube to be inserted into the bronchial area to assist breathing.

It was not a good day for professional thinking of any kind.

There is a penalty for being the so-called “good boy” in a family. Robert Oswald was the good boy. He wore the attributes of a responsible citizen when he was very young. His mother put him and his brothers into an orphanage. Robert understood unquestioning obedience, respect to elders, how to face misery, to live in hardship and poverty, and to protect a younger brother. Robert Oswald was born old. The only time he ever boasted, he said: “I do not go to pieces.”

He was a medium-dark young man who married early and was a steady provider. He worked in a brick plant in Denton, Texas, and the company sent him to Arkansas for additional training. Life was exacting, but Robert and his wife knew that in time, they would own a little house and be able to stake out fifty feet of grass as their own. He kept away from his mother because she whined and had little tact. His older half-brother, John Pic, was in the same situation and managed to remain aloof from Marguerite except for the time, years ago, when she left Texas and tried to move in with the Pics in New York. Inevitably, there had been trouble between the women; inevitably, there had been maternal ultimata; the mother had taken the sullen little brother, Lee, and moved to another apartment. The boy was a truant, and the school authorities in New York had put him away for psychiatric evaluation. Marguerite managed to escape the courts of New York by running back to Texas with the little one.

Robert could not divest himself of the responsibility he felt for Lee. The publicity in the newspapers when Lee sailed for
the Soviet Union fell on Robert. When Lee came back to Texas, Robert was at the airport to meet him. Lee said: “Hi!” and slapped his brother on the back. Then he looked around and said: “Where are the reporters?” There weren't any, and Robert hoped that the family name would not get into the newspapers again. He couldn't understand his younger brother's disappointment at not seeing newsmen at the plane.

Today, late in the afternoon, the name Oswald boomed from a small portable radio set in the plant. Robert had been at work and had heard about the assassination. Like his co-workers, he felt badly, doubly so because it had happened in Big D. It did not stop him from applying himself to his job. The radio could be heard as the men worked. There were bulletins about the hospital, about the death, about Johnson, the finding of a rifle. Much of it was sporadic and incoherent. Robert hoped that the police would get whoever was responsible.

Then the blow fell and Robert stood nodding dumbly. Men were around him saying that the police had arrested someone named Lee Harvey Oswald. They had him for shooting a policeman and the commentators said that maybe the same man shot the President. Robert nodded. That was his brother's name. Sure. Not just a relative; a kid brother. The men wanted to know what Robert was going to do. Young Mr. Oswald stood in the middle of the shop, thinking. What to do? The first thing to do was not to “go to pieces.” The second thing would be to see the boss and ask for some time off to go to Dallas.

There was never any doubt about the second move. Didn't Robert always protect Lee from the big kids in the orphanage? Wasn't Robert the one who used his meager spending money to buy Lee a toy, a game, a ball to bounce? Robert could do anything except pry that kid loose from mother. Nor did he try. He knew, all along, and even when he was too young to know, that there was something wrong in an existence where a mother worked all day and ordered a little boy to play by himself
in a room. There seemed to be something overly protective in having the little fellow sleep with mother until he was eleven. There was something wrong in that deep silent stare that the kid turned toward the world. When Lee returned from Russia, Robert and his wife tried to be friendly, but Lee talked about political doctrines which Robert could not comprehend. The two couples experimented with a friendship which died almost at once. The Russian bride could not be understood. Lee kept his family at Robert's house, but the younger brother immersed himself in books. He was not interested in old memories or discussions about mother. Robert said he might speak to some people and try to get Lee a job. His brother's eyes came up from a book and they were remote. Lee said he could handle his affairs.

The office phone was nearby. Robert Oswald called his wife. “Vada,” he said, “you been listening to the television?” Yes, she said. The news was awful. Had she heard Lee's name mentioned? No, she hadn't. His name had been mentioned. He was arrested. “I'm leaving here for home,” Robert said. It was said in a calm tone. As he hung up, the phone rang again. It was for Oswald. The credit manager, Mr. Dubose, was calling from the Forth Worth office. “Bob, brace yourself,” he said. “Your brother has been arrested.”

“Yes, Mr. Dubose. I know. I just heard.” Robert Oswald felt a fear. He could steel himself against the words, “Your brother has been arrested,” but he felt that he could not stand to hear such words as “for the assassination of the President of the United States.” He took a deep breath, and Dubose said, “Your mother has been trying to reach you.” Oswald said, “Thank you” and hung up.