The Day Kennedy Was Shot (89 page)

Greer took the order from Kellerman. The ambulance lights went on. The rotating red beacon on top swept the night air with carmine crayon. The motorcycle cops forced their weight down on their starters and the racket of exhausts was like gunfire. They moved out onto Palmer, behind the giant monument of Bethesda.

There were houses of naval personnel here. The hedges and lawn flowers were stiff and dead, but the occupants were soft and alive. In the dark, they stood on their porches, watching the cortege come toward them, the sweeping beacon magnetizing the eyes of parents and children. They saw it coming toward them, the phalanx of police a spearhead, and they saw it pass, and they watched it go away, up the climb of Palmer toward the front drive, where the grass was velvet green. Commanders in pajamas shifted sleepy youngsters from one arm to the other and came to stiff salute. Some women watched and wept. Some shook their heads perplexedly. A few blessed themselves and wished him a long calm voyage to whatever haven sailors seek.

On shortwave, the word went to the White House. The President of the United States was on his way home. Hurriedly, a triangular piece of crepe was hung on the front door of the main entrance. Sleepy honor guards were whipped by words to attention. Officers strode up and down in the darkness, sabers against shoulders, the mouths forming the same truculent O which was so common to the face of Lee Harvey Oswald. The final tape of black was tacked to the bottom step of the big catafalque. In the darkness, saffron lights shone from the second
floor. The great fountain on the lawn tossed a stream high in color, and it diffused in veils as it fell.

The house waited for him as it had waited for others. The sound of sobs had been heard here before. The house had heard the rattle of death, the smacking kiss of the bridegroom, the cry of an infant. This man had no more days to go. The house must live on, to endure what time would bring.

Stage center was empty. The actors were resting. A police department cleaning employee pushed a broad broom down the third-floor corridor. It held a sizable assortment of cigarette butts, bits of film, and used photography bulbs. The hall was empty of reporters. In the press room, a typewriter clacked, but no one could identify the young man who hit the keys with one finger. A detective sat, with hat off the edge of his forehead, in Forgery.

A building employee moved from door to door, snapping lights off. Captain Will Fritz was gone. The chief had called it a night. A deputy chief sat in the front office reading the morning paper. It was so quiet one could hear the pulsing refrigerant in the soft drink machine. Paper cups filled trash baskets and the most recent ones rolled on the floor. Lieutenant Day's bureau was locked.

A radio operator listened to a DWI—driving while intoxicated—report coming in from a squad car somewhere in the night. Phones rang, and no one answered. On the basement floor, a prison admission clerk read a soft-cover novel. On the fifth floor, a maximum security guard got off the chair and walked a few paces up and down to keep awake.

Lee Harvey Oswald slept. The mouth was slightly open; the respiration was slow. He could not have been fearful. Sleep had come naturally and swiftly. If he had dreams, they were secret. He murmured no words. The limbs did not twitch. The sleep was restorative, and he would be ready for Fritz after a hearty breakfast.

Dallas stood tall and cool in the night. The Texas School Book Depository building, except for the night-light on the ground
floor, was dark. The Hertz sign on the roof flashed: “3:08” then “62 degrees,” but it did not disturb the pigeons, who slept with their heads under their wings. The switch engines made their short hauls across the overpass, coupling and uncoupling strings of cars. The brightly lighted building behind the railroad station was the
Dallas News.
The diesel trucks on Stemmons Freeway made pulsing sounds as they rushed through Dallas and out the other side. A novelty shop, closed with all lights on, featured a dinner dish with a portrait of Mr. and Mrs. John F. Kennedy for a dollar ninety-eight.

Jack Ruby looked at his watch and said he had to go. The policeman and his bride-to-be said okay. Sheba, curled on the front seat, had no opinion. The shame of the whole thing, said Jack Ruby, was that poor little woman who would have to come back to Dallas for the trial. Every time he said it, the sentence took on the aspect of a whole new thought. It was difficult to ascertain whether he was depressed by the assassination or exhilarated with his role as public relations adjudicator.

Marina Oswald slept with hair rollers wound tight. Marguerite knew how to foreclose a crisis to get proper rest. Trauma One, at Parkland Hospital, was dark. Even with sedation, Governor Connally slept restlessly. Lacerated flesh and broken bones had returned from shock to protest. Roy Truly, the manager of the School Book Depository, had grimly told himself: “I'm not going to get an ulcer over this,” and he wasn't. It had taken some time for Wesley Frazier to fall asleep, but he made it. The few who were still wakeful were those whose night duties required it; those who were chronically ill and could not sleep; those whose dull lives had been improved with a new topic and whiskey.

The automobile appeared to be in sections. The rear seat was on the floor of the garage. The bubbletop was sitting by itself. The floor rugs, the metal stripping were in a separate group. Even the interior of the trunk had been taken apart. Whatever
SS-100-X could tell the FBI had been told. The dream car was a nightmare. Robert Frazier ordered his men to put it together. Two Secret Service men watched. When the job had been completed, the car was tested and found to be in running order. The ignition was shut down, and the men pushed the car back into the alcove at the rear.

The New York office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation had traced a big shipment of cheap Italian military rifles to Crescent Firearms, which sold in lots to mail order distributors. Early in the evening, the Dallas office had notified Washington that the rifle found on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository building was a 6.5-caliber Mannlicher-Carcano with the serial number C2766 stamped on it. Alan Belmont had passed this information on to all field offices. The New York group, contacting one gun house after another, found that Crescent had them.

The company had cooperated in keeping the office open as the FBI agents watched employees run through the files. The records were not overly precise, but they indicated that C2766 had been sent to Klein's Sporting Goods, Incorporated, at 4540 West Madison Street, Chicago. The Chicago office of the FBI was alerted and, late at night, found William J. Waldman, vice president of Klein's, at his home, 335 Central Avenue, in Wilmette, Illinois.

Mr. Waldman agreed to accompany the FBI agents to the office. It would be reopened, and he might need some of his own personnel to help run through the records. Lights were turned on, and file cabinets were ransacked. The first order of business, Mr. Waldman said, was to check up on the purchase records of the company. It was not a simple matter because Klein's purchased a lot of sporting goods, a variety of merchandise, of which guns was but one.

It was after midnight when an invoice was uncovered from Crescent Firearms of New York. It was dated February
7, 1963, and cited a shipment of Mannlicher-Carcano 6.5's, amounting to a hundred rifles per box. It was shipped by North Penn Transfer-Lifschultz and there were ten cases. Waldman showed a receipt, indicating that the guns had been paid for on March 4, 1963.

The guns had been advertised in hunting and sporting magazines. Purchasers filled out a coupon and remitted money orders. The next move, Mr. Waldman said, would be to start hunting through the microfilmed photostats which were kept on file. This would take some time because they were dropped into the files as they were received. There was no specific order of filing. Locating C2766 was going to be tedious rather than difficult.
^*

The drive before dawn was one of reflection. It was not planned that way. From the ambulance back through the cortege of six cars, conversation was slow or brief, and each of the mourners had time for his personal thoughts. It had been a long, long day. They were in another day but, not having had the blessing of sleep, it was considered to be the same one. In an hour the first streaks of light would be coming up behind the Capitol dome.

Death was not devised for simple meditation. The mind must be ordered to think about it, to absorb the crushing finality of it, to accept it, to plan logically. The sorrowing mind will refuse. This often leads to a carousel of thoughts which follow in sequence leading to no conclusions. William Greer, for example, was driving the ambulance slower than he or Kellerman had expected and deep within Greer he could hear the President reciting the lonely lines of Robert Frost:

It is not a refrain which can be shut down. “And miles to go . . .” The route from Bethesda was nine and a half miles to the White House. It was the last time Greer would drive the President. He would take his foot off the accelerator, watch the police escort move ahead, then see them turn and slow down. A cab driver, dozing on a street corner, would watch the procession, then sit upright and put his car in gear and try to keep pace with those who wept with reason. A milk truck joined the line of cars, and a motorcycle patrolman was dispatched to go back and turn it away.

Each one had his separate memories, and if they crossed the line of thought of someone else in those cars, it was accidental. The thoughts raced from comedy to solemnity, and some tried to recall whether John F. Kennedy had discussed his death and if, in doing so, displayed a divination. Some wondered what he would be remembered for; he was here so short a time. He was the second man to free the Negro and, like the first, he departed, leaving the Negro to fight for it.

He had driven the Russians and their ugly missiles from Cuba; he had banned the testing of nuclear bombs in the atmosphere; found time to impart his benevolent blessing to the arts; what else? What else? He had inaugurated a new and less paternalistic attitude toward his brethren in South America; he had stopped Big Steel from contributing to the spiral of inflation; Castro had stopped him at the Bay of Pigs. He had made America feel excited about itself, a thing which is not measurable in tangibles.

Did anyone smile ruefully at the darkness remembering the time the President had asked David Powers to stay with
him while Mrs. Kennedy was in Europe, and Powers said to the President: “This has got to stop. My family calls me John's Other Wife.” The young widow, flipping through a mental album of portraits, remembered that, late at night, he often asked her to play the record from the play
Camelot.
He would sit at his “night work,” barely listening, until the last part of the last song. Then he dropped his pen as the voice sang:

He was moved by those words, and he would stare at his wife intently, smile, and pick up the pen. Mrs. Kennedy thought about it, this time with poignancy. “There will never be another Camelot,” she whispered. No one had to discipline Kenny O'Donnell's emotions. The champ was up front under that rotating light. He was dead and would never be seen or heard again. For a man who exults in battle there is no solace behind a hearse. If Robert Kennedy was able to lift his thoughts higher than the grave, he realized that there was a future for the Kennedys. There were always graves for young Kennedys, and there was always the future borrowing a tinge of Rose over the next hill. It was, in a way, as though some school bully had beaten his brother. The boy would have to take Robert on next.

Kellerman was all cop. He could keep his mind on that grotesque autopsy for hours—if so assigned—and he could concentrate on the motorcycle cops and the pace of the cortege. Duty divorces emotion. Mr. Kellerman glanced up and down each passing side street as though he was still looking for a threat. The political philosopher, Larry O'Brien, would remain in the arena where the action was. He did not know Lyndon Johnson well, but he knew that Johnson had long ago assessed
him. If the President asked him to stay, O'Brien would stay. If he was asked to leave, he would go home to Massachusetts. There were high-ranking government officers who could not sleep tonight trying to remember whether they had been cordial or cold to Lyndon Johnson. Men and their wives sat recounting every meeting, trying to remember every word. The conundrum resolved itself to: “Never mind my impressions of him. What were his impressions of me?”

The cortege passed Georgetown University and turned left. Greer was in no hurry. He was moving slowly and he looked at the familiar houses and shops on M Street and then he curled the ambulance around and onto Pennsylvania Avenue. There was a slight slick on the pavement as though a drizzle had dampened this part of Washington.

The ambulance kept to the middle of the street. A few people were out in front of Blair House, one of them a woman with her knuckles in her open mouth.

The motorcycle police approached the West Gate. Across the street in Lafayette Park, the people stood stonefaced as they had on the morning of April 15, 1865. They did not weep because many of them could not yet believe. The ambulance came to a stop. The police escort wheeled away from it like a fleur-de-lis. Inside the main door of the White House, the men who had worked so hard all night said: “Here he comes” and, in a body, they retreated.

Sargent Shriver went out to the front porch and stood waiting under the big light. His skin was pale. A Negro usher began to open the great front doors, the latches snapping loudly. Two White House policemen opened the double west gates. On the driveway, a double row of servicemen heard an officer shout an order and it rang off the front of the mansion. Greer bent low behind the windshield, nodded to the policemen, and started up over the sidewalk slowly and onto the big curving driveway. The soldiers, the marines, the Air Force recruits
flanked the ambulance and marched beside it, their officer in front of the bumper, lifting his legs high, the saber leaning on his shoulder. The thump of boots hitting the pavement in cadence could be heard inside the ambulance. They could be heard in the silence across the street. The lights of the cars passing slowly onto the grounds washed the dark old bark of the big trees.