The Day Kennedy Was Shot (6 page)

The paintings, the appointments drew no huzzahs from the sophisticated. The rooms seemed small, almost dowdy, to the Kennedys. To Fort Worth, a friendly, old-fashioned cattle town, the suite was lavish. The large bedroom on the left had a double bed, or rather two singles pressed together under a broad walnut headboard. There was a chest of drawers, a pineapple bridge lamp, a green-tiled bathroom with a recessed formica vanity and chair. The walls were painted blue; a portable television set was on casters near the bathroom door. Under a glass top was a message: “Hotel Texas. Check out time is 12:30
P.M.
If you plan to stay after this time please contact Assistant Manager.”

There was also a green upholstered chair on the opposite side of the room from the bed, a small coffee table, a golden lamp with a shantung shade. A couch reposed against the far wall with checkered upholstery; a phone, an ash tray, and a phone book reposed on the small table. An extra phone had been placed in this room. It was hooked up to the Secret Service men in the corridor. A few colored throw pillows were on the bed. Mr. Kennedy glanced out the window. Fort Worth was quiet. He saw lighted signs proclaiming: “Hotel Texas Official
Parking Lot.” “The Fort Worth Press.” In the distance, the yards of the Texas & Pacific Railroad and “Bewley Mills.”

This bedroom, the larger, had been set up for him. He glanced into the bathroom. The tub, judging from the breadth of the shower curtain, appeared to be small. None of it was spectacular; still the management and the scions of the Amon Carter family, who owned it, had worked hard to display Western hospitality to the First Family of the nation.

The sitting room faced south and east. Mrs. Kennedy, fatigued, walked through it glancing left and right and rubbing her arms against the chill of the place. There were three windows facing south, toward the parking lot. On the opposite side of the room was a recessed bar. Radio music was coming from the ceiling somewhere. A green Chinese cabinet, which had no relation to anything else, held a television set behind gold-ornamented doors. At the corner window was a black-topped table with four chairs upholstered in blue.

In the ceiling were two chandeliers with electric candles. Proceeding toward the second bedroom, there was a long tan couch against the windows. A low serving table stood before the couch. A Gideon Bible and a lamp reposed on a cabinet. Walking slowly, Mrs. Kennedy pushed open the door to her bedroom. It was smaller than her husband's.

The bed was small, with a brass headboard designed like harp strings. End tables on each side were adorned with Oriental base lamps. She saw a blue easy chair, a leather chair, and one window. There were two framed crests over the bed. The closet was small. Two snack tables were folded inside. The bathroom was small. The tub was small. The glass shelf over the basin was not big enough for lotions and unguents.

The caterer, Peter Saccu, arrived in the suite and turned the air conditioning off. Mr. Kennedy asked if a window in his room could be raised “halfway.” Saccu lifted the window and noted that the President might be awakened by the slamming
of freight trains in the Texas and Pacific yards. Mr. Kennedy smiled for the first time. It wouldn't bother him, he said.

The word flashed up and down the hall that the President and Mrs. Kennedy had retired. The sudden relaxation of tension hit the Secret Service. Stiffly erect bodies sagged. The agents standing out in the drizzle on Eighth and along Main began to chat with each other. In the corridor, the soft whirl of elevator cables started and stopped. Some off-duty agents went to bed. Others looked for an hour or two of relaxation.

They asked the clerk behind the desk if there was any place open after midnight. The clerk pointed up Main. “The Cellar,” he said. A group of agents walked up three blocks and saw a flashing sign. They entered, but The Cellar was not in the cellar. It was up a flight of dark stairs with a red light at the top.

A young man asked them for a dollar apiece entry fee. They gave it and he stamped the backs of their hands with invisible ink which shows up under ultraviolet light. This was to identify customers who might depart and return or non-customers who claimed that they had already paid.

The Cellar was a huge square room lighted in perpetual dusk. The walls were painted flat black. In a corner on the right, a combination of young men with long hair hooked their guitars to loudspeakers and lyrics roared. The waitresses, young and slender, with opera-length stockings, and breasts which appeared to float on top of corset stays, took orders for “setups.” In Fort Worth no one can buy an alcoholic drink. Customers bring their own in paper sacks and buy ginger ale, Coke, and ice in a glass.

The Secret Service men found seats at a long straight board table in the rear. They shouted their orders as the country rhythm pulsed against the walls. The only lights were small red bulbs in the ceiling. A waitress, noting that they were strangers, tried to tell them that soft drinks would cost sixty cents. No one could understand her.

It was too dark to read a small legend in white on the far wall. It said: “Tomorrow is cancelled.”

A sweet, sad face was framed in the window. Mrs. Linnie Mae Randall was washing the dishes in the kitchen sink and looking out at the veiling of rain, at the same time partly listening to the breakfast chatter of her younger brother, Buell Wesley Frazier, her mother, and the children. The house is on West Fifth Street in Irving, but the kitchen faces Westbrook Drive.

She saw Lee Harvey Oswald, bare head down, coming up Fifth Street with a long package in his hand. He held the fat part under his arm; the tapered end was pointing at the sidewalk. The rain didn't seem to bother him. He walked steadily, up Fifth, across the corner lot, toward Mrs. Randall's garage. She kept watching him, a dark, pretty woman with shoulder-length black hair. By rote, she set the dishes upright in the drain.

Mrs. Randall did not know Mr. Oswald, but in a way she had gotten a job for him. In early October her neighbor, Mrs. Ruth Paine, had asked about employment for the husband of the Russian woman, and Mrs. Randall had said that her brother Wes worked at the Texas School Book Depository, and they were looking for people. It wasn't much; if a man earned a dollar or a dollar and a quarter an hour, it was as good as he could expect. The work was digging book orders out of the warehouse on the upper floors and bringing them down for shipment to school districts in Texas.

Lee Oswald got the job. He wasn't at it long, but he didn't like it. There was nothing to it but drudgery. He picked up book orders on the main floor, took one of two elevators to the sixth or fifth floors, dug out the proper number of copies of the right book from the right carton, and brought them back downstairs. Lunch was 12 to 12:45. A ten-minute coffee break could be worked into the afternoon. Mr. Roy Truly, the boss, expected all
hands to be on time, 8
A.M.,
and he was a fair and firm man who expected a day's work and no trouble.

Oswald had been there six weeks. Mrs. Randall watched him walk toward her garage and she wiped her hands on her apron and opened the kitchen door in time to see him open the right rear door of Wes's old car and drop the bundle on the back seat. He stood waiting under the shelter of the overhead garage door. He was alone, but not lonely; friendless and solemn. Wes had helped him get the job, and it was Wes who gave him a free lift to Irving on weekends and a free lift back to Dallas.

Her brother was sipping his coffee and talking about some kiddie program that the little ones had watched earlier this morning. Wes was a tall, dark Alabaman with the twang of the back country heavy on his tongue. He took the easy way with people, work, and problems. He enjoyed getting along with people, and so he was often given to conversation in which he said what he thought the other person might want to hear. It didn't cost anything.

Mrs. Randall was peeking out her kitchen window when she saw that Mr. Oswald had changed his position. He was staring in at her. This irritated Mrs. Randall. “Wes,” she said. “Somebody waitin' on you out there.” Her brother left the table, donned his jacket, snatched a bag of lunch, and went out to the car. He hopped into the driver's side and turned the windshield wipers on as Lee got into the front seat with him. Frazier kicked the old car and it started. The battery was low, and the teenager knew that it would either start at once or die with a moan.

Wes turned to look behind him. “What's in the package, Lee?”

“Curtain rods,” Oswald said, looking at the glistening pavement along Fifth Street. The drive from there to the Texas School Book Depository was about ten miles and required about a half hour in the morning flow of freeway traffic. “Oh yeah,” said Wes. “You told me about them yesterday.” Lee didn't nod.
Most conversations were closed abruptly. Yesterday, when some of the fellows had lain dozing on the ground floor counters at lunch time, Lee had borrowed a
Dallas Herald
and had read the story about Kennedy's visit. He had seen the chart showing that the motorcade would end as it passed the Texas School Book Depository. After that, according to the newspaper account, the group of cars would go under the overpass, turn up onto the Stemmons Freeway, and get off at the Harry Hines cutoff for the Trade Mart.

Two hours after lunch, Oswald had met Frazier in the rear of the ground floor at the Depository and asked if he could get a ride to Irving. Wes nodded. “Sure, Lee. But I thought you usually go out Friday.” Lee said he wanted to visit his wife to pick up some curtain rods for the little room he had in Dallas. “Sure, Lee,” said Wes. “Any time.” Oswald's room at 1026 North Beckley, across the Trinity River in the nearby Oak Cliff section, had four small windows on one side. The landlady, Mrs. A. C. Johnson, had long ago equipped them with Venetian blinds and filmy curtains. She did not permit roomers to make changes.

The car hit speed and swung east on Carpenter Freeway. As the traffic melted onto Stemmons Freeway, the two young men could see the skyscrapers of downtown Dallas. Wesley Frazier stared through the snapping wipers, and he tried to think of something to say. He knew he had to be careful, and he was aware that Oswald felt at ease with children. “Did you have fun with the little ones?” he said. Oswald nodded. “Yeah,” he said. Then he smiled. “Yeah we had fun playing around.”

Lee always carried a little brown bag with a sandwich and an apple. “Didn't you bring lunch today?” Wes said. Oswald said no. “I'm going to buy some in the lunchroom.” Wes did not understand Lee, and he was abashed by the total absence of male conversation. For example, he would not dare ask
where
Lee had a room. Nor did he understand how a man could have a wife and children living with a lady in Irving, while the man had a
small place in Oak Cliff. It was none of Frazier's business, and any allusions to Oswald's private life would elicit a dead stare.

Once, about a year before, Mr. Oswald began to write a book about Russia called
The Collective.
It was not finished, although he paid a typist to render one part of the manuscript into the printed word. At the time, he thought that it was “literary” to include a short biography of the author, and Wes would have learned more in the one written paragraph than in all the weekend trips to and from Irving:

“Lee Harvey Oswald was born in Oct 1939 in New Orleans La.,” it read, “the son of a Insuraen Salesmen who early death left a far mean streak of indepence brought on by negleck. Entering the US Marine corp at 17 this streak of independence was strengthed by exotic journeys to Japan the Philippines and the scores of odd Islands in the Pacific immianly after serving out his 3 years in the USMC he abonded his american life to seek a new life in the USSR full of optimism and hope he stood in red square in the fall of 1959 vowing to see his chosen course through, after, however, two years and alot of growing up I decided to return to the USA. . . .”

The sun was kind to the pale beauty of the White House this morning. The day was cloudy, but the yellow shafts of light poured through the holes and fingered the great building in Braille. The men in the Situation Room in the cellar of the West Wing worked on the next précis to be sent to the President through the military switchboard. The policemen at the East and West Gates stopped cars, counted and studied faces, examined passes, and waved the vehicles on. Two presidential assistants were in the barbershop. Others, young lawyers, worked at their desks on the multitudinous tasks of legislation, studying it, writing it, rewriting it, condensing it. For Bernard West, the urbane chief usher, it was an easy day in his between-floors office. The President's personal secretaries—with the exception
of Mrs. Evelyn Lincoln, who was with him—had a backlog of letters to write, some to be stamped with Mr. Kennedy's signature, others to wait on his desk for his personal scribble.

The Rose Garden, outside the President's office, dozed behind stiff, unyielding leaves, waiting for winter. The swimming pool remained heated at ninety degrees, even though no one, including the Kennedy children, would use it today. The long melancholy corridors, flanked with the faces of history in frames, were empty except for the stations where Secret Service men stood. The huge East Room was in semi-darkness, with an ornate grand piano at one end and a Stuart painting of George Washington at the other.

A crowd queued up outside the East Gate. These were citizens. They would tramp through all the public rooms on the ground floor, and some would pluck a piece of gold fringe as a souvenir, and others would stare gaping at the deep rugs, the damask wall covering, the gold pen and ink sets, and the dishes of many administrations. The White House was, at this time, looking better. Jacqueline Kennedy had assumed the burden of calling in decorators and going over the White House warehouse inventory to see what furniture, what paintings, what bric-a-brac might be restored.

She had brought such color and beauty and life to the old mansion that it was being compared to the elegant palaces of the Old World. The work had been arduous, and sometimes she was forced to beg an owner of an historical chair or bust to please donate it. She had even established a President's personal library in a small room on the ground floor, near the South Grounds. The magic of her work showed in the brightness and dignity of the rooms. There was an historical
lift
to the mansion; visitors who had once shouted carelessly now whispered. Guides passed out ornate pamphlets explaining the significance of the items in each room. President Kennedy so admired the result that, instead of holding all formal dinners in the state
dining room, he now preferred to use the Blue Room for small parties and both for big ones.