The Day Kennedy Was Shot (63 page)

Caroline looked up from her pillow. The shiny face frowned. The nurse could no longer see the words in the book. “What's the matter, Miss Shaw? Why are you crying?” The nurse leaned toward the child and placed both arms around the little body. “I
can't help crying, Caroline,” she said, “because I have very sad news to tell you.” “What?” the child asked. Miss Shaw wiped her eyes and began the story of a terrible accident in Dallas. It could be minimized only to a point. When a small voice asks “How badly is he hurt?” the impasse is reached. There is only one way of saying “he died.”

Caroline began to cry. Maude Shaw, having inflicted the involuntary cruelty, sat weeping and patted the child's hand. She held that hand and kept patting it until fatigue overwhelmed the little girl. She slept.

Halfway between the White House and the Capitol is a huge mocha-colored doughnut called the Department of Justice. The north wing, facing Pennsylvania Avenue, is headquarters of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The lights were on. Agents in pairs entered the corner doors on the Ninth and Tenth Street sides. Twenty had already left for Dallas. The FBI was in charge of the federal investigation into the case. Gordon Shanklin, at the Dallas office, and his agents Vincent Drain and James Hosty had been working on it since 12:40
P.M.
Shanklin had pulled in agents working on other cases and had put them in Sheriff Decker's office, in Captain Fritz's office, at Love Field, in Irving, Texas, and the School Book Depository building.

The Washington office required no special organization. It was ready. Alan Belmont, assistant to Director J. Edgar Hoover, was in command of all the skeins of investigation and evidence. Assistant Director Alex Rosen assigned the agents who would probe the mystery. One man, who worked as liaison in the exchange of common information between the Secret Service and the FBI, was in SS headquarters on M Street. Assistant Director William C. Sullivan was in charge of the internal security aspects—and background—of the suspect, Lee Harvey Oswald. Inspector James Malley took charge of all agents assigned to the case in Dallas.

The IT of the case was intelligence and tact. Except for presidential fiat, the FBI had no right to examine the prisoner, the background of the case, or the evidence. The assassination was not a federal crime. The agents would work gently and inoffensively with the Dallas Police Department. They would be in the same delicate position as the Secret Service men who sat with Captain Fritz, listening to the questions and responses, but seldom asking a question without permission.

Closed-circuit teletypes began to rap out information to field offices all over the United States. New York was listening. So were New Orleans, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, San Francisco, and others. Everything that was learned was put on teletype so that, if anyone in another office could offer assistance, it would be on a return teletype to headquarters in a few minutes. The offices in the long corridors of the building were well peopled that night, and men began the work of sorting information and misinformation.

In the Fire Arms Identification section, Robert Frazier cleared the decks for a long night. He was surprised when an agent walked in. The man was Elmer Todd, and he said he had a bullet given to him by a Secret Service man at Andrews Air Force Base. Frazier asked where it came from. “It fell off a stretcher in Parkland Hospital,” Todd said. The bullet was almost pristine. Frazier smiled down at it rolling in his hand. “The first reports,” he said, “claimed that the gun was a 7.35 Mauser. This is very interesting.” He placed the bullet into a device. “Just as I thought,” he said. “This is not 7.35. It is 6.5 millimeter. Did the Secret Service man know which stretcher it was on?”

“No,” Todd said. “The man who found it thought it came off Governor Connally's stretcher.” Frazier began his work of examining the bullet scientifically. “Can't tell who manufactured it,” he said, “without a cartridge case.” He held the back end of the bullet up below a microscope. “It's not foreign-made,” he said. “This is American.”

The FBI, knowing that it had a small file on Oswald—mainly spot checks in Dallas to make certain that the man who defected to Russia did not get work in a sensitive defense plant—examined the reports and turned them over to William Sullivan, who was building up a skeletonized background on Oswald. He contacted the Central Intelligence Agency to see if they had anything on the suspect. Another man was sent to the State Department, to check their records of Oswald's read-mission to the United States. Abram Chayes was still in his office, trying to make a digest of this material for Dean Rusk.

The New York office came in on the teletype asking for more information on the ammunition and the gun. They had an idea that they could run down the principal manufacturers of cheap rifles quickly. New Orleans came in, offering a detailed report on Oswald's arrest for distributing Free Cuba leaflets on the streets; they also had a detailed report on his recent trip to Mexico. Two men, Francis X. O'Neill and James W. Sibert, were making notes at the autopsy.

“I'm going to stop for a minute,” Henry Wade said, as he parked the car beside police headquarters. The district attorney was seldom seen at the municipal building more often than, say, once a year. He had a big air-conditioned office in the county building and a staff of investigators and assistant prosecutors who worked to smooth the wrinkles in criminal cases before Mr. Wade tried them. He was big and shaggy, a type-cast Texan with wild wavy hair with streaks of gray.

He left Mrs. Wade and a couple in the car and walked inside and took the elevator to the third floor. Police who saw him nodded, or smiled, or shook hands and said, “Hello, Mr. Wade. What brings you over here?” He got to the third floor and, big and broad, shouldered the press aside with bantering words. He passed the Homicide office and headed for the office of the chief. His big feet slammed tripods and skidded over black
television cables. To all questions, he drawled: “Fellas, I don't know nuthin'.”

When he achieved the sanctum of the superior officers, he turned right and found Curry sitting at his desk. “How is the case coming along?” the district attorney said. Curry began to speak. Wade listened and asked questions. The prosecutor was beset by an involuntary verdict: he doesn't know. The big man listened to the little one, but he wasn't getting the facts he wanted.

The chief opened a desk drawer and gave Wade a memorandum from Detective Jack Revill. It stated what Revill thought that FBI Agent James Hosty had admitted to him about Oswald. The prosecutor refolded it and gave it back to Curry. An old memory popped into Henry Wade's mind: he recalled that there was a woeful lack of communication between Jesse Curry and Will Fritz.

Over three hours ago, Sheriff Decker had told Wade that the Dallas Police Department had a “good suspect.” If it were true, Henry Wade would have to prosecute the biggest criminal case of the twentieth century. He would like to know how good the case was. “What are you going to do with Revill's memorandum?” The chief looked up. “I don't know,” he said. One thing is certain. Chief Curry thought it best not to draw the memo to the attention of the FBI; instead it might have more power if released to the press and television. Certainly it tended to show that the Federal Bureau of Investigation was aware of Oswald and felt that he had the potential of an assassin. As an incidental bonus, it would take the press off the back of the Dallas Police Department and point it toward the FBI.

Down the hall, Captain Fritz suspended the interrogation. Justice of the Peace David Johnston had arrived with a warrant for the arrest of Lee Harvey Oswald on a charge of first degree murder. At his side was a tough and coldly venomous prosecutor, Assistant DA William Alexander. Judge Johnston composed
himself, unfolded a document, and read aloud to Oswald that he was being charged with the willful and deliberate murder of Police Officer J. D. Tippit. “I didn't shoot anybody,” Oswald said. The tone was not belligerent; it was a flat declaration of innocence.

Johnston gave the document to the captain, who scrawled “Will Fritz” across the bottom line. “Didn't you also shoot President Kennedy?” Fritz said. His tone was a soft bass. Oswald shook his head. “I didn't shoot anybody.” Mr. Alexander took the signed document for safekeeping at Wade's office. The justice of the peace said: “I remand you in the custody of the sheriff of Dallas County.” This order should have been executed but wasn't.

The postal inspector, H. D. Holmes, said that he had a question to ask. Fritz nodded. Holmes reminded Oswald that the records he had in his hand indicated that Oswald had rented Post Office Box 30061 when he was in New Orleans. The prisoner saw no objection to this. He said he had rented the box. The inspector said that the application listed one Marina Oswald and one A. J. Hidell as the only persons, beside Lee Harvey Oswald, who were entitled to take mail from that box.

If the prisoner saw a trap, he pretended not to notice it. “Well,” he said loudly, “so what? She's my wife, and I see nothing wrong with that, and it could very well be that I placed her name on the application.” The postal inspector and every police officer in the room knew that one of the vital points in the interrogation was to prove that Lee Harvey Oswald and Alex J. Hidell were the same person. The name had appeared on the post office application in Dallas. “I know,” said Holmes softly, “but what about this A. J. Hidell?” Oswald stared down at his handcuffs. He shrugged. “I don't recall anything about that,” he said.

In the outer office, James Hosty marveled at the number of law officers who could be crowded into Captain Fritz's fishbowl.
It was impossible to count the people in the hall, but the FBI agent made an effort to tally the enforcement men inside. There were three or four Texas Rangers, five or six Secret Service men, four Federal Bureau of Investigation agents, two postal inspectors, six Dallas detectives, a deputy sheriff, and Captain Fritz. These were in adjoining offices measuring ten feet by fourteen. In this standing-room-only situation, Hosty sought Forrest Sorrels, Secret Service agent in charge of the Dallas office.

The FBI man wasn't aware that his agency had been appointed to press the federal investigation into the assassination, so he assumed that the Secret Service was the dominant body. Hosty said that there was additional information at FBI headquarters which could be furnished to the Secret Service. Sorrels asked, “What?” There were two items which Hosty had in mind, but he did not feel at liberty to reveal them. Liaison between the two organizations was good, so Hosty proposed that Sorrels advise his Washington office to ask for material on Lee Harvey Oswald.

Sorrels thanked him and said he would take care of it. The two items were the contacts Oswald had with the Soviet embassy in Mexico City two months ago and the several letters he had written to the Soviet embassy in Washington, D.C. Down the hall Hosty waited for a public telephone to inform Gordon Shanklin of developments in the case.

The ultimate indignity is not death but what men do to the dead. The man on his back under the lights was nude, defenseless, broken. The gentlemen of science, like white wraiths, moved about the body in the manner of whispering druids. They made small and sometimes indecipherable notes on pads. Commander J. J. Humes and Commander Thornton Boswell joined in a medical ritual of exactitude. There were prescribed steps to be taken in this profound abuse of the body and, if they were carried out precisely, the President of the United States
would leave the room as a shell, and the physicians would be able to say with certainty that he had succumbed to a gunshot wound in the head.

Kennedy was measured. He was 72½ inches tall. He weighed: 170 pounds. They looked at his eyes: blue. His hair, they decided, was reddish brown. He was 46 years of age, a male, and the subject of autopsy number A63-272. “The body is that of a muscular, well-developed and well-nourished Caucasian. . . . There is beginning rigor mortis, minimal dependent livor mortis of the dorsum, and early algor mortis.” The left eye was swollen and black and blue, obviously from the shot which hit the right rear of the head and pressed the brain violently forward toward the left optic.

Clotted blood was found on the external ears. The President's teeth were declared to be “in excellent repair” although there was some pallor of the oral mucous membrane. The doctors were observing. They moved about the body slowly, looking, pointing, noting. There was nothing they missed, from the midline of the head down to the squared toenails. He who would not appear in a country club locker room without a robe and towel was under the merciless eyes of a score of men.

The small diagonal scar in the lower right quadrant of the abdomen was noted. The fact that he had arrived at Bethesda without clothes was recorded. A ragged wound was noted near the base of the larynx. Gently the body was turned over. The posterior was examined. The head wound was gross and obvious. There was a small oval puncture wound between the spine and the right shoulder blade. An inserted probe was stopped by the strap muscles. A frown darkened the faces of the medical priests. How could a missile go in there and (1) not come out in front somewhere; (2) still be inside? The doctors had a mystery. There was a separate small hole in the back of the head.

There was a long vertical scar along the midline of the spine below the lumbar region. The man on the slab had felt that the
operation almost killed him. It had not even relieved the steady toothache-of-a-pain which wearied every waking moment; it was the excruciating lightning which he was fond of denying when a well-wisher shook hands and yanked the President toward him. It was the dull ache which rang an alarm bell every time he arose from a chair; this was the moment when he smiled with his teeth and died a little in the eyes.

Strong arms turned him face up again. The doctors had already noted recent violations of the skin. Near the nipples were two incisions, done at Dallas. No hemorrhage and no bruise mark showed; therefore he was probably dead when these were made. Two more were in the ankles. And one in the left mid-arm. Along the front of the right thigh was an old scar which no one but John F. Kennedy would remember.