Reclaiming History (23 page)

“It was a rifle?” the dispatcher asks.

“A rifle, yes,” Sawyer replies.

“Any clothing description?”

“The current witness can’t remember that,” Sawyer says.
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The dispatcher immediately throws a switch in the radio room that allows him to broadcast simultaneously on both channels of the Dallas police radio, effectively reaching every officer in the city. “Attention all squads. Attention all squads. The suspect in the shooting at Elm and Houston is reported to be an unknown white male, approximately thirty. Slender build, height five feet, ten inches. Weight one hundred sixty-five pounds. Reported to be armed with what is thought to be a thirty caliber rifle.” The dispatcher repeats the message, adding, “No further description or information at this time. 12:45 [p.m.] KKB-364, Dallas.”
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12:45 p.m.

In Irving, Marina is hanging up clothes in the backyard when Ruth comes out and joins her with the latest news: “They’re reporting that the shots were fired from the Texas School Book Depository.”

Marina’s heart drops. She thinks about the rifle she knows that Lee has stored in Ruth Paine’s garage, about the last time he used it—a few months earlier in trying to murder Dallas John Birch Society figure Major General Edwin Walker—and whether that might have been the real reason he came out to the house last night. She hopes that Ruth can’t see the fear in her face.

As soon as she can do it inconspicuously, Marina slips into the garage. She knows exactly where the rifle is, wrapped in a green and brown wool blanket, near the garage door, by some suitcases. She saw the blanket there in early October and unwrapped it then and found the rifle inside. Is it still there? When she gets inside the garage, she sees the familiar bundle laying in the same place it had been before, and feels a great weight lift from her shoulders.

“Thank God,” she thinks.
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W
illiam Whaley, a squat, burr-haired former navy gunner who won a Navy Cross during the battle of Iwo Jima, pulls his cab up to the cabstand at the Greyhound bus station on the northwest corner of Jackson and Lamar, four blocks south of Elm Street, and realizes that he’s out of cigarettes. He’s about to go inside the terminal to get a pack when he sees a fare walking toward him down Lamar Street.
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“May I have the cab?” the man asks.

“You sure can,” Whaley says. “Get in.”

To Whaley, Lee Oswald looks like a wino who has been off his bottle for about two days, like he’s been sleeping in his clothes, although he isn’t actually dirty or nervous or anything.
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Oswald gets in the front, which is allowed in Dallas, and Whaley’s got nothing against it. A second later an elderly woman pokes her head in the passenger’s window and asks if she can get in his cab.

“There’ll be a cab behind me in a few moments that you can take,” Whaley tells her, and he vaguely recalls that Oswald may have told the woman something similar.
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As he pulls the 1961 Checker sedan out into Lamar and turns west into Jackson, he asks his fare where he wants to go.

“Five hundred North Beckley.”

Police cars, their sirens wailing, are crisscrossing everywhere.

“I wonder what the hell is the uproar,” Whaley muses, but Oswald doesn’t answer and Whaley figures he’s one of those people who doesn’t like to talk, which is fine with him.
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Whaley, who has been driving cabs for thirty-seven years, notices Oswald’s silver ID bracelet. He always takes note of watchbands and identification bracelets because he makes them himself, and this one is unusual. Most of them are made with chain links, not stretch bands, like this one.
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They drive in silence, turning left at the first corner, Austin, and then onto Wood. They catch the light at Lamar and Jackson and several others as they move smartly through traffic down to Houston, the street they call the “old viaduct,” which is the fastest way to Oak Cliff.
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D
allas police radio dispatcher Murray J. Jackson can see from the callboard in front of him that many of the patrolmen assigned to the Oak Cliff area (south of the Trinity River, which separates it from downtown Dallas, and before the emergence of North Dallas in later years, perhaps the biggest area of Dallas) have gone downtown to help in the assassination investigation.
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He knows that if an emergency such as an armed robbery or a major accident occurs in that area, there might not be anyone to respond quickly to the call. He decides to pull two of the outermost patrol units in Oak Cliff closer to central Oak Cliff just in case something comes up. Units 78 and 87 (radio call numbers for Dallas Police Districts 78 and 87)
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get the call—J. D. Tippit and Ronald C. Nelson.
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“[Units] 87 and 78, move into central Oak Cliff area,” Jackson orders, basically giving Tippit and Nelson a blank check to move at will within the roughly five or six police districts that could be considered as Oak Cliff.

Tippit, cruising his beat alone in south Oak Cliff on the 7:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. day shift, lifts the radio microphone first.

“I’m at Kiest and Bonnieview,” Tippit replies.

But Nelson shoots back, “[Unit] 87’s going north on Marsalis, [at] R. L. Thornton.”
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Dispatcher Jackson knows from Nelson’s location that he is already on his way downtown to join other units. He decides to let him go. Tippit can handle anything that might come up, he figures. Jackson has known “J. D.”
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for eleven years and in that time they’ve become close friends. In fact, it was Tippit who originally got Jackson interested in police work. In 1952, Murray was a high school graduate working at a Mobil filling station where Tippit and his partner used to stop occasionally. Tippit was his image of a hero, and through J. D.’s encouragement, Jackson was successful at joining the force. After a promotion to patrolman, Jackson and Tippit were partnered for eight months and the bond between the two men strengthened.

One night in the early 1960s, Jackson was working temporarily with new partner Bill Johnson when they arrested seven teenagers for being drunk and disorderly. En route to the Oak Cliff substation, the teenagers decided they didn’t want to go to jail and a fight broke out in the squad car. Jackson put out a call for assistance and J. D. was the first to arrive.

“Thanks, partner,” Jackson told him, “you saved my life.”

The humor of the situation wasn’t lost on Tippit, who joked and chided Jackson, “I turn you loose one time and I got to come down here and save your life.” Of course, Jackson’s life wasn’t really in any danger. It was just Tippit’s way of kidding his former police apprentice.

It was with this incident in mind that Jackson called on Tippit to help him out again, this time by covering an area outside his own assigned district.
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But it obviously wasn’t necessary for Jackson to have this prior relationship with Tippit to get him to go into central Oak Cliff. Tippit was on duty and had to go wherever assigned. Moreover, Tippit was not the type of officer to complain about much, being easy to get along with. Not overly ambitious, and with only a tenth-grade education, he wasn’t “sharp enough,” as one Dallas detective who knew Tippit said, to pass department promotional exams. However, the shy officer loved his job and seemed more than satisfied to remain a patrolman, resigned to his inability to advance because of his limited education. Well liked by his fellow officers, his immediate supervisor on the force, Sergeant Calvin B. Owens, described Tippit as a “good officer” who used “good common sense.” A Dallas police officer, Donald Flusche, said that Tippit and he “worked together in West Dallas. He was really a good and decent man…He was pretty much a country boy…He was kind of bashful, thought a little slow, moved a little slow, but there was nothing dishonest about him.”
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Seldom talking about politics, Tippit, age thirty-nine, had voted for John F. Kennedy in the 1960 presidential election. On this day, Tippit had come home to have lunch with his wife, Marie, around 11:30 a.m., hurried through his food, and reported back for duty by 11:50 with a “78 clear” transmission from his car radio to the police dispatcher.
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12:50 p.m.

Forrest Sorrels, the agent in charge of the Dallas Secret Service office, arrives at the side of the Texas School Book Depository and walks to the same backdoor used by Frazier and Oswald that morning.
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There is a black employee on the loading dock who doesn’t seem to realize what’s happened.

“Did you see anyone run out the back?” Sorrels asks him, as he approaches.

“No, sir,” the man replies.

“Did you see anyone leave the back way?” Sorrels probes.

“No, sir,” the man says again.
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The agent proceeds to the first floor by the rear loading-dock door, and to his surprise there’s nobody in law enforcement there to challenge him.

“Where is the manager here?” he asks upon entering the building.

Someone directs him to Roy Truly. Sorrels pulls out his Secret Service credentials.

“I want to get a stenographer,” he tells him, “and we would like to have you put down the names and addresses of every employee in the building.”
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Sorrels has not yet learned that shots have been fired from the building. He simply wants to establish the identity of everyone present at the time of the shooting so that they can be interviewed later.
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Sorrels heads for the front of the building, pushes open the glass front doors, and steps out onto the concrete landing, “Is there anyone here that saw anything?”

“That man over there,” a voice calls out, pointing to Howard Brennan standing nearby.

Sorrels bounds down the steps and identifies himself to the construction worker.

“What did you see?” he asks.

Brennan tells him what happened and how he glanced up at the building and saw the man take deliberate aim and fire the third shot. “He just pulled the rifle back in and moved away from the window, just as unconcerned as could be,” Brennan says.

After Brennan gives him a description of the gunman, Sorrels asks him if he thought he could identify him and Brennan says, “Yes, I think I can.”

“Did anyone else see it?” Sorrels asks Brennan, who points out Amos Euins.

Sorrels questions the boy and learns that Euins also saw the gunman for a few brief seconds, but now Euins isn’t sure if the man he saw was white or black. Asked if he, too, thought he could identify the man if he saw him again, Euins says, “No, I couldn’t.”
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Eventually, Sorrels escorts the two eyewitnesses over to the sheriff’s office across the street to give a statement.
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12:52 p.m.

“This will do fine,” Oswald tells the cabdriver. William Whaley pulls over to the curb at the northwest corner of Neely and North Beckley, which is the 700, not the 500 block Oswald had first requested, but it’s all the same to Whaley.
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The meter on the six-minute trip has just clicked over to ninety-five cents, about two and a half miles. Oswald gives Whaley a buck, gets out, and crosses the street in front of the cab, and that’s the last Whaley sees of him. A big tipper.
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When he finally gets around to entering the trip in the passenger manifest required by the Dallas authorities, he writes it up as 12:30 to 12:45 p.m. Nobody at the cab company really cares about exact time, so when he gets a chance Whaley just marks it to the nearest quarter-hour or so.
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12:53 p.m. (1:53 p.m. EST)

All three networks headquartered in New York are gearing up for exclusive coverage of the shooting in Dallas for what will turn out to be over three consecutive days. A representative network is NBC, which, at 1:53 p.m. EST, cancels all regular programs to devote all of its time and resources to the unfolding events in Dallas. This will continue until 1:17 a.m. Tuesday morning, November 26.
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12:54 p.m.

Police dispatcher Murray Jackson checks in with patrol Unit 78—Officer J. D. Tippit.

“You are in the Oak Cliff area, are you not?” Jackson asks.

“Lancaster and Eighth,” Tippit responds affirmatively.

“You will be at large for any emergency that comes in,” Murray says.

“Ten-four,” J. D. replies.
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The patrolman cruises north on Lancaster. He’s a long way from his roots in Red River County. Born and raised south of Clarksville, Texas, J. D. Tippit grew up during the Great Depression on the family farm, where electricity and running water were only dreams. The Tippits were sharecroppers, renting farmland to raise cotton. The work was hard and the tools of the day primitive. J. D., the oldest of five brothers and two sisters, spent many days behind a mule team and plow. He grew to become a crack horseman and although outsiders found him quiet and reserved, his family knew him as fun-loving. As World War II entered its last bloody year in Europe, J. D. joined the U.S. Army, volunteering to become a member of the elite paratroopers. In 1945, he landed in France as an ammo bearer with the Seventeenth Airborne Division as it fought its way through the Rhine Valley. Like many men, the war made deep impressions on him and he returned with a renewed sense of duty and honor. Tippit’s background was similar to that of many other officers on the force who came from small Texas towns with names like Athens, Palestine, and Ferris. Not a lot of academics, many not quite making it through high school. A lot of military service, which is good—guys who knew something about discipline and teamwork and were comfortable with firearms and uniforms.

In December 1946, at the age of twenty-two, J. D. married his high school sweetheart, Marie Frances Gasaway, age eighteen. They briefly moved to Dallas to find work after the war, but soon returned to Red River County, where they hoped to farm and raise a family. Nature’s wrath took its toll on J. D.’s dreams of farming, and in July 1952 he joined the Dallas Police Department to feed his growing family. At $250 a month, Tippit soon found himself moonlighting to make ends meet. In early 1961, J. D. took a part-time job as a security guard from 10:00 p.m. until 2:00 a.m. every Friday and Saturday night at Austin’s Barbeque in Oak Cliff, a popular teen hangout, and every Sunday afternoon at the Stevens Theater located in a shopping center. Tippit enjoys the free time he spends with his family—enjoying his three young children, taking dance lessons with his wife, listening to the music of Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys, or horsing around with his boyhood pal and brother-in-law, Jack Christopher.