Top Down (2 page)

She really was just a kid, sad and hurting about something very real. Although I believed in the sanctity of off-the-record, I also knew that there were ways to work through and around it—even ethical and responsible ways—in certain situations. One thing at a time.

“Okay,” I said. “Off the record it is.”

Her face showed gratitude and relief—as well as purpose. She was ready to get on with it.

“My dad believes he’s responsible for the death of John F. Kennedy.” She said it just like that. No preamble, no setup.

She must have seen something on my face. Shock, disbelief. Hopefully, she didn’t see my imagined headline:
AGENT BELIEVES KENNEDY DEATH HIS FAULT
. I couldn’t help myself.

“I know, I know—but hear me out, please,” she said.

There was no question I’d hear her out … and that I had been right to wear the good sport coat.

“My dad’s guilt about that day has made him sick, at first
mentally and now physically. If something is not done to reverse his decline, he will die.”

Here was what she had come to say. And now she had said it.

“Because of the bubble top?” I asked with an incredulity I was unable to disguise.

“Yes. He thinks that if the bubble top had been on the limousine, then Oswald—or whoever did the shooting—might not have taken the shots.”

“But that bubble top was not bulletproof,” I said. “It was just quarter-inch-thin plastic.”

“I know that. You know that. But Dad believes Oswald might have thought it was bulletproof and might have decided not to shoot. He thinks that even if he did fire the shots, the glare from the glass might have disturbed his aim or might have somehow deflected the shots. Whatever, however, he thinks Kennedy would have lived.”

I recalled mentioning this theory at the tail end of a
Tribune
story about the many agonies of Secret Service agents charged with protecting Kennedy. I also reported, briefly and in passing, the counter possibility.

I said to Marti, “Some people also thought it was possible the Plexiglas might have shattered into a hail of sharp shards that could have killed not only Kennedy but also Jackie, the Connallys, the two Secret Service agents—”

“I know, I know,” Marti interrupted. “But I want to know what
you
know that might make a difference—what you know
that I might use to convince Dad to come to his senses about this.”

My reporter mind went racing again toward imagined headlines such as
KENNEDY AGENT SICK FROM GUILT. BELIEVES BUBBLE TOP COULD HAVE SAVED JFK
.

I shrugged. I wasn’t quite sure what she was getting at.

“What did you say at that panel last Tuesday?” she asked impatiently.

“I told the story of Love Field …”

“In detail?”

“Yes.”

“And the bubble top?”

“Yes.”

“Do you have a copy of what you said?”

I smiled, nodded, and pulled a copy of my presentation out of my pocket. I unfolded the two sheets of single-spaced typed paper and handed them to her.

“Read it to me—out loud, please,” said Marti. She was beginning to annoy me.

I showed no sign of it, though, asking Marti if she wanted a drink. A Bloody Mary? A glass of wine maybe? This kid was about to jump out of her skin with anxiety. She needed a sedative of some kind, it seemed to me, because all she’d had to drink so far was coffee, with a couple of refills. All coffee was doing was make her nerves—and impatience—worse.

She shook her head. No drink, thank you. Start reading, thank you.

“How about a cigarette?” I asked, taking out my pack of Kent filters and offering her one.

“I don’t smoke—never have, never will,” she said as if she were the surgeon general of the United States.

Now I had a problem. I had been smoking since I was eighteen. It was a habit that began when I was going to college, went big-time while I was a marine, and was now an integral part of my life as a newspaperman. I couldn’t imagine coming up with a creative thought, much less a coherent sentence on a typewriter, without the company of a cigarette. I did not know of a single person in the
Tribune
newsroom or the Washington bureau who didn’t smoke.

“I guess then that you’d prefer I didn’t … smoke?” I asked. That was maybe the first time in my life I had actually said such a thing to anybody—except for my mother back home in Salina, Kansas.

“They’re your lungs. Your life you are endangering,” Marti said.

I slipped my Kents back into a pocket and prayed for the strength to survive for a while without a cigarette. But for how long? Fifteen minutes? An hour?

Too much was at stake here, I decided. I pointed in the general direction of the restrooms, excused myself, and went away for a few crucial minutes—long enough to take several fulsome puffs from a Kent.

Marti said nothing when I returned, and neither did I.

I went right to the beginning of my press club presentation. “Having just graduated from writing obits and the weather, I
was the federal beat reporter. But the presidential visit was happening right in the middle of our major deadlines, so the entire city staff was on the job.

“For my assignment, the
Tribune
had arranged for a special telephone to be installed against a fence right in front of where Air Force One would taxi up. There was an open line to the city desk downtown.

“Just before the plane was scheduled to leave Fort Worth for the short flight to Dallas, a rewrite man from the office called and asked me if the bubble top was going to be on the presidential limousine. It would help to know now, he said, before he wrote the story later under deadline pressure. The bubble top was a question only because it had been raining early that morning in Dallas. The advance word was that Kennedy insisted his limousine be open during motorcades so the American people would not feel he was a museum piece to be viewed only under glass from a distance. The bubble top, which was made of a thin plastic that was not bulletproof, was designed only to protect against bad weather.

“I put the phone down and walked over to a small ramp where the motorcade limousines were being held in waiting, out of view. I saw that the plastic covering was, in fact, on the president’s car, completely covering the backseat where the Kennedys would be sitting as well as the middle seats where Texas governor Connally and Mrs. Connally would be, and the front where a Secret Service driver and another agent would be stationed.

“I approached an agent who was standing at the head of
the ramp: ‘Rewrite wants to know if you’re going to keep the bubble top up.’ The agent was Van Walters, the assistant agent in charge of the Dallas office, a man in his early forties, quiet-spoken but pleasant, friendly. Among
Tribune
and other federal beat reporters, Walters was not known to volunteer much information for a story—but he also, when questioned, never seemed to hold back. His regular work, like that of all Secret Service agents working out in the field, mostly involved counterfeiting, government check theft, and similar cases under the jurisdiction of the Treasury Department, the Secret Service’s parent agency …”

I paused and glanced up at Marti Walters. Her eyes were closed, her hands folded in front of her. She had calmed down and was listening intently.

“Thanks for what you said about him,” she said to me without even opening her eyes.

“I didn’t just make it up for … you know, for you to hear now, if that’s what you might be thinking.”

Her eyes popped open. “No, I was not thinking that. I assumed you, as a newspaperman, told only the truth.”

“Where are you at college?” I asked, realizing suddenly that we had gone so quickly into what mattered, this question about her father’s guilt and health, that there had been no exchange of biographical small talk.

“Penn—the University of Pennsylvania,” Marti responded.

“Your major?”

“English.”

“A special interest?”

“American literature.”

“What kind?”

“The good kind—mostly the kind written by women.” This, she said with some shortness.

What a great 1968 answer, I thought. A woman—a kid—of the times.

She motioned her head toward the papers in my hand.
On with it, please. Enough small talk
was the clear message.

I continued reading.

“Walters glanced up at the bluing sunny sky and then hollered over at another agent who was holding a two-way radio in his hand. ‘What about the weather downtown?’ he yelled.

“The agent talked into his radio, listened for a few seconds. ‘Clear!’ he hollered back.

“Van Walters yelled to the five or six other agents who were at get-ready positions in and around the cars: ‘Lose the bubble top!’

“I watched as the agents began the process of unsnapping the several pieces of plastic from the car.

“I returned to the phone, reported to rewrite, and went on with my business covering the Kennedys’ arrival and then, over the next many hours, various aspects of the tragedy that had occurred. I was sent first from Love Field to Parkland Hospital, where I was when Kennedy’s death was formally announced by a White House press spokesman.

“Next, I went downtown to police headquarters where I became part of the chaos along with hundreds of other reporters from all over the country and the world and law enforcement
officers at all levels of government. There was a mix of sadness and disbelief that was beyond anything I had ever witnessed—or even imagined. I felt like I was an actor in a slow-motion horror movie about chaos and grief …”

I stopped again and said, “Sorry about the purple prose.”

Marti waved me on, which I took as an English teacher’s absolution.

“Around midnight—nearly twelve hours after the shots were fired at Dealey Plaza—I went to await the breakup of a closed-door meeting in the chief of police’s office at the end of a hall on the second floor.

“After a while the door opened and out walked several men in suits. I recognized one as Secret Service Agent Van Walters.

“He came over to me. Tears in his eyes, he mumbled slowly, deliberately, as if speaking in a trance: ‘If I just hadn’t taken off the bubble top.’

“The words blew me backward. And for the first time, I wondered: What if
I
hadn’t asked Walters the bubble top question in the first place? What if I had ignored the rewrite man’s request? What if the rewrite man never asked the question?

“And so, I, too, became one of the many people connected to the Kennedy Texas trip who were plagued by varying levels of what-if guilt. A guilt that would stay with us forever. Van Walters and I shared the burden with political and White House staffers, Secret Service agents and other law enforcement officers, and all kinds of other people involved in Dallas and elsewhere.

“
What if I hadn’t pushed for a motorcade or for going to Texas or Dallas at all? What if I had argued harder to have the lunch at Fair Park instead of the Trade Mart? What if I’d seen a rifle sticking out the sixth-floor window? What if I had reacted faster when the first shot was fired?

“These were the questions being asked aloud and silently in the minds and hearts of people everywhere.

“What if, what if?”

I began folding up the papers and said, “I went on—to a few laughs in the audience—to tell the story of how I ran out of gas in the middle of the next two nights while going home from the Dallas police station … but that’s pretty much it.”

Marti was looking right at me, but her thoughts went through me to somewhere and someone else.

“So he really did do it,” she said finally. “Dad really did make the decision to take off the bubble top.”

“But it wasn’t a real decision,” I said quickly. “The rain stopped and that was it. The weather made that top come off.”

Marti, as if a plug had been pulled, sank back limp in her chair. She said nothing for several seconds, digesting, it seemed to me, what I had said and if there was any truth to it.

Her rigid tension abated right before my eyes. She seemed defeated. “I had hoped that your story was such that … well, that you knew for a fact that somebody else in the Secret Service, somebody on the White House detail or somebody in Washington, somebody anywhere … had made that decision. Not Dad, not Dad all by himself. So many agents and other people have made all kinds of conflicting statements about
who did what that day. I have read them all. They’re very confusing, and today … Well, I wanted you to tell me something that I could take back to him that would make it absolutely clear to him what happened and make his guilt go away forever. I understand from my mother that all kinds of people, doctors and shrinks, have tried and tried with no success. But I was hoping, hoping, hoping …”

I very much wanted to take another break for a much-needed smoke. I wanted time to think about what I might be able to give her to take to her dad. But the cigarette could wait.
I
could wait. I decided to open up the conversation and see where it might lead. Perhaps I was stalling, but suddenly it seemed very important—essential, in fact—that I ask her that same universal question.

“Where were you, Marti? Where were you that day?”

At first she frowned, and for a moment I thought she would not answer me. But I was wrong. She very much wanted to talk. And she talked—and talked and talked for hours there in and around the Washington train station and then later in Philadelphia and elsewhere over the next couple of weeks about that day and the days afterward that had led to where she and her father were now.