Top Down (6 page)

“Wasn’t that something the way Dandy played against the Browns, Daddy?” Marti said to her father as they moved toward the kitchen. She was going to bring it up even if he didn’t. The Cowboys were an important thing between them.

Rosemary raced ahead, chattering about throwing together a soup and maybe some sandwiches.

“I’m very, very tired,” said Van Walters, ignoring Marti’s Cowboy question with a distancing shrug.

He turned around and headed to his bedroom, having said nothing more. Marti had so many
other
questions, too. Where had he been and what had he been doing the last five days? Had he even seen the Cowboys game on television? What about all of the Kennedy funeral and the rest of the mourning? Did he watch any of that? Maybe by himself in a hotel room? At a Secret Service office in Dallas or somewhere else? Fort Worth, Houston?

Marti was suddenly sad all over again—and very scared.
Maybe he really did do something that killed Kennedy?
It was a terrible, terrible thought. But she couldn’t help herself. It
seemed that something monumentally horrible must have taken him over and now possessed him. Like in one of those horror movies she no longer watched because they gave her nightmares.

Her mother, tears dropping slowly over her cheeks, silently followed Van to the bedroom.

Marti went to the closed door. She listened for a couple of minutes or so before realizing that there was nothing to overhear.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
her father was already gone by the time she got up and dressed for school. All her mother said, almost in passing, was, “Your dad has to work so the two of us will just scrape something together for Thanksgiving tomorrow. He also thinks it’s not going to work out for us to go to Albany and Kinderhook for Christmas this year,” she added.

“What’s he going to be doing tomorrow and Christmas—aren’t they holidays even for the Secret Service?” Marti asked her mother, too afraid of the answer to look at her.

“Taking statements and things,” Rosemary replied, almost absently. “You know, working on the assassination—I guess.”

M
ARTI TOLD ME
it was time to go. She had to catch a train back to Philadelphia. She was talked out and tired, it seemed, as was the sunshine. I, too, was running out of listening and remembering steam.

We walked together back into the once grand Washington Union Station. The majestic structure made famous by presidents
had slowly become dilapidated. Congress had recently passed multimillion-dollar legislation to transform it from a train station into some kind of national Constitution center, but railroad fans and history advocates were up in arms over the proposal so no work had begun. There were holes in the high ceilings, gaps in the walls, and signs and smells of neglect and decay throughout the cavernous building.

Marti and I spoke vaguely about continuing our conversation soon in Philadelphia. She was anxious to get me to see her father, to try to help him come to his senses about the bubble top.

“Could you come to Philadelphia tomorrow?” Marti asked suddenly while we waited in line at the ticket counter.

“Sure,” I said, without hesitating.

She gave me her number and a few minutes later at the platform gate to her train we said a completely touchless good-bye, not even a handshake.

I left the station and jogged to my car, which was parked on a street nearby, drove as fast as I could to my apartment in Foggy Bottom, and sat down at my typewriter.

I spent the rest of the evening typing every single word from my notes and memory, taking no time to use capitalization or punctuation. All care for spelling went out the window. I did not want to lose one word if I could help it.

B
Y THE TIME
I got to the bureau office in the National Press Club building the next morning, I had made a decision.

I went straight to Bernie Shapiro, the
Tribune
’s bureau
chief. “It’s off the record for now but, I tell you, I am on to a really great story,” I said.

I had worked for Bernie in Dallas when he was assistant managing editor. Two years ago he had finally taken up the offer to run the Washington bureau, having decided with his with his wife that their three daughters were old enough to enjoy and benefit from living among the sites and sights of the nation’s capital. He had been very involved in selecting me for my job in the six-person bureau. Bernie and I had hit it off, most particularly in cooperating on assassination stories.

“As you know, Young Jack, off-the-record stories do not appear in newspapers—ours included,” Bernie said.

“Well, I’m pretty sure I can eventually get it on the record,” I said.

“You’re pretty sure? What
is
the story, Young Jack?” I didn’t particularly enjoy Bernie’s “Young Jack” name for me, but he was the boss.

I waited for the magic words from Bernie. “Just between us, of course,” he said. “I won’t tell a soul, not even one in Dallas.”

So I told Bernie the story—in one long lead-only sentence.

“The Secret Service agent who ordered the bubble top removed from the Kennedy limo is seriously ill from a mental breakdown he’s had over the guilt of what he did and he may not make it.”

“That’s crazy,” Bernie said. “But it sounds like one helluva story.”

“Exactly,” I replied. Bernie had blessed me. And I was
thrilled. “I need to go to Philadelphia this afternoon and I need expense money for the trip—maybe even to spend the night.”

“Okay, okay. You got it. Philadelphia? Is that where the sick agent is?”

I put a finger to my lips. No more information now—though I couldn’t have answered it anyhow because I had no idea where Van Walters was.

The lunch-hour rush, if there had been one at the small café near the Penn campus, was finished by the time I arrived from the Philadelphia train station just after two o’clock. There were a handful of student-looking types spread out and about the place, which had the casual look and feel of every college hangout I had ever frequented. It even had the familiar mixed aroma of paper and books, strong coffee, and cheap food.

Marti was waiting for me at a table in the corner farthest from the door. It was beyond the hearing of any of the customers. The sounds of portable typewriters and low-volume rock music further assured privacy.

“We’ll talk awhile and then I’ll take you over to my apartment, if that’s okay,” Marti said after a quick greeting. “There are some things I want to show you—assassination kinds of things.”

She looked campus-cool in a navy-blue sweatshirt with
PENN
in red across the chest over a white collared blouse and blue jeans. To my observant reporter eye, her brown hair
seemed looser than yesterday—probably the result of a recent shower.

Her sense of urgency was in full bloom. She was clearly fresh, ready, and fired up to get on with her story—but also, I figured, eager to discuss ways I might be able to help her father. I had thought about nothing else during the ninety-minute train ride from DC, but nothing had come to mind.

A waitress came by, and we both ordered coffee. When we had settled ourselves, I began by reminding her that back in Washington she had been talking about Thanksgiving 1963. Wasn’t it a funny coincidence that now, here we were, just three days until Thanksgiving 1968?

“Thanksgiving with all the trimmings was not that big a deal at our house in Kansas because Dad always had to work,” I said. “Newspaper editors—at least the good ones—feel obligated to be there on holidays with the troops.”

Marti closed her eyes, as if willing me to shut up. She obviously did not care about my Kansas boyhood holidays.

After a deep sigh and my continued silence, she quickly described what it was like at that Dallas Thanksgiving alone with her mother. They sat at their white Formica kitchen table, sharing only a few short, insignificant words along with a tiny baked unstuffed chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, green beans, and a pumpkin pie.

When they weren’t at the dinner table, Marti said she spent most of the rest of Thanksgiving Day watching football on television. She couldn’t have cared less that the Oakland Raiders beat the Denver Broncos 26–10. Her pro-football interest
was Cowboy-centric. Even the 15–13 win by the Texas Longhorns over the Texas A&M Aggies didn’t rouse her emotions. But the games helped pass the day.

“Christmas, a month later, was even worse,” Marti said, moving the story along.

I pressed her for more what-happened-next details, but she said that she remembered little of what happened in the month from Thanksgiving to Christmas. Her father was physically absent most of the time and, even when he was there at the house, increasingly gone mentally, too, it seemed to her. He seldom spoke much more than a few sentences, and what he did say was nonsense. Meanwhile, her mother seemed determined to ignore that and most everything else that was going on, keeping up a pose that nothing was wrong.

Marti assumed her father was out there still being busy about what had happened on November 22, but she didn’t ask her mother about that. Or about much of anything else. That was not the way it had been before—before the assassination. The two of them had once talked and laughed together a lot, mostly about little things that had happened at her school and her mother’s bank. Now mother and daughter stayed isolated even when they were in the same room.

A sense of loneliness, silence, and misery was Marti’s only real memory of the thirty days between the holidays. Her eyes went moist as she told me that those days had always been full of happy expectation and joy for her and, she believed, for her parents. The Walters trio had never been one of high spirits
and loud voices. They were a quiet little family. The only time anybody yelled much was when the Cowboys won.

She said Christmas Day 1963 itself was truly awful. Her father came out of the bedroom in the late afternoon to eat with Rosemary and Marti. The gift highlights were a sleeveless pink sweater for her, an olive-and-gray-checked tie for her dad, and a pair of thin brown leather gloves for her mother. There were no
TO
and
FROM
tags on anything, the family custom being that most presents still came from Santa. Marti spent two dollars from her allowance money on a tiny jar of lavender-scented bath salts for her mother and a solid cream-colored pocket handkerchief for her dad.

Physically, Marti said Van looked changed. His face had grown gray and pasty. Between each of the times Marti had seen him—which, as best as she could recall now, added up to only half a dozen between Thanksgiving and Christmas—he seemed to grow thinner and smaller and more withdrawn.

Over Christmas dinner Van barely cracked a smile or spoke a word, other than to recite a Dutch Reformed prayer for Christmas that had been a tradition since Kinderhook days. He prayed this time over a bleak meal—several slices of turkey with cranberry sauce and a fruit salad. It seemed clear to Marti, who stayed out of the kitchen when it was being prepared, that most of the food, including the turkey, had been brought in. A handout, most likely, from another Dallas-based Secret Service agent’s family table.

The only semi-drama of the day was the ongoing one Marti
had invented for every meal, however few, she spent with her dad. She tried relentlessly to get him to make direct eye contact with her. But she seldom succeeded. His once bright brown eyes had taken on a glassy, far-off stare, and even his glances were usually slightly off to the side, above, or below where she was sitting or standing. He seemed not to even see her.

Another of her grim habits became counting the occasions when she smelled alcohol on her mother’s breath. Marti was up to fourteen separate instances the day the three of them sat down to eat their Christmas meal. She assumed by now that Rosemary had a bottle of something stashed in the house where neither husband nor daughter could stumble over it accidentally.

She felt very alone in every way a teenage girl could feel, unable to discuss with anybody her mother’s drinking or what had happened on November 22. Marti had a few girlfriends at school but no real pals—nobody to spend time with after school or during the many no-school days brought on by the assassination and the holidays.

Then, two weeks after the New Year, the worse got worser. The Secret Service transferred Van Walters to the Kansas City office. He would go as a regular field agent, not as a special agent in charge or even as an assistant in charge, the job he had held in Dallas. He had been demoted.

Marti was in the bathroom when she heard her dad, having just come home, report the news of the Kansas City transfer to her mother.

“I was told that ‘for several reasons,
we
think it would be
good for the service that
you
be away from Dallas proper but fairly close geographically. Also, the freer
you
are of management duties the better off
you’ll
be as the assassination investigations proceed.’ That’s what Washington said.”

Her father was quoting “Washington” a person—a force.

The Walterses knew all about Washington. Marti had been born in Washington’s Sibley Hospital on September 23, 1950, during Van’s first Washington assignment to counterfeit money cases. After that, he worked on the presidential and vice presidential protection details for the next five years, mostly protecting Mrs. Eisenhower and Vice President Nixon. From Washington he went to field offices in Minneapolis and then Charlotte before being sent to Dallas in 1961, a step designed to eventually lead to Van being a special agent in charge.