The Day Kennedy Was Shot (11 page)

Hosty was aware that the newest job Oswald had was in the Texas School Book Depository. He worked filling book orders, but there was nothing sinister in this. Another thing: Oswald was not a violent person; he was never seen with firearms; never walked a picket line; never wrote hate letters to newspapers; he never even went to a motion picture.

If Hosty had followed the newspaper diagram of the parade route and noticed that it would pass the Texas School Book Depository, it would have been witless to draw the attention of his superiors to the presence of the defector, because he represented no physical danger to anyone. Hosty made the trips out to the little house in Irving as a matter of duty, but he never met his man. The investigation disclosed Oswald as a sullen braggart—nothing more.

At Love Field, the captain of American Airlines Flight 82 asked for taxi clearance. In a few moments, he would be headed for Idlewild Airport in New York. One of the passengers, a stewardess had told him, was Richard Nixon. Apparently the former Vice-President was not going to remain in Dallas to watch the presidential parade.

The chefs stood motionless beneath the gleaming ranks of hanging pots and kettles as the Secret Service men burst into the kitchen. One man ran ahead and placed a chair in the doorway leading from the cooking ranges to the Grand Ballroom. The President strode through the kitchen, walking fairly fast between the counters where, in the past hour, over two thousand breakfasts had been cooked and carried on huge trays. He wasn't smiling. He patted his forehead and thick hair with a handkerchief and glanced back at the entourage of political chieftains.

It nettled him to know that he could not settle intraparty disputes by fiat. Over the years, Kennedy's personal loyalty to party, and especially to party hierarchy, had been constant, and it seemed to him that when the President of the United States said, “Do this,” that all hands should do it, not merely as a matter of unity, but in obedience to the wishes of the Chief.

The President sat in the chair and commanded a view of the double-tiered head table, with the big “Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce” banner hanging behind it. He got to his feet, looked through the assortment of faces waiting in the kitchen and summoned Agent Duncan. “Where is Mrs. Kennedy?” he said. “Call Clint Hill and tell him I want her to come down to breakfast.” He would have preferred to escort her to the head table, but, like many husbands, he had little understanding of the natural feminine contempt for time.

Loudly he said: “Everybody set?” and again sat. The men and their wives began to move toward the doorway, skirting the chair and listening to the rising sound of applause from the Grand
Ballroom. The President chatted again with Ralph Yarborough; no one heard the words, but the face of Mr. Kennedy was stern and frowning, and the index finger pointed and probed whatever point was being made. The Senator didn't appear to resist the President; his features appeared to be in shock, as though he could not credit the words or ideas he was hearing. Ralph Yarborough went on into the ballroom, a man unconvinced that his political quarrel with the Connally-Johnson forces had any bearing on the President's future.

A moment later, as the Governor passed, the President said: “John, did you know that Yarborough refused to ride with Lyndon yesterday?” The Governor knew. The President didn't seem to understand, or perhaps appreciate, that Governor John Connally was a prime mover in this battle and that he had an interest in war rather than peace. In every case he had thwarted the Yarborough group, even to the point of denying them seats of honor in the presidential party.

The rich, the affluent, the oil money of Texas backed Connally and it was important for the Governor to display his antagonism to Yarborough and, in a more subtle manner, his lack of enthusiasm for Kennedy himself. It was the Governor who had postponed this visit to Texas several times; it was Connally who felt that a Kennedy-Johnson ticket might be defeated in his state in 1964, and there was considerable risk in being seen with Kennedy.

Yes, the Governor knew that the Senator had refused to ride with the Vice-President. “What's the matter with that fellow?” Kennedy said, as though the political schism was obviously the fault of Yarborough. The Governor said he didn't know. “Well,” the President said, “I'll tell you one thing: he'll ride with Johnson today or he'll walk.”

The Governor moved into the big ballroom with Nellie; a burst of applause greeted the handsome couple. For a minute, the President would sit alone, except for the agents who stood
near him, before making his entrance. The chefs still remained immobile behind the chopping blocks, the counters, the gleaming steel sinks. In that minute, the President's mind, like a waterbug on a big summery lake, could dart in many directions. His speech was already under the yellow light at the lectern. He could hear Ray Buck's booming voice and the crest of laughter, but he couldn't decipher what was being said.

In the seat of power there is sometimes a lofty loneliness, and this was one of those minutes. Like primordial man, he desired most of all to leave a good deep scar on the wall of the cave, to be remembered as a leader with high purpose and firm resolution. He was at his best when he was politically, economically, and inspirationally far ahead of his people, beckoning over his youthful shoulder for everyone to follow him. His heels were fleet, but the veterans of Congress studied this man through other prisms and often viewed him as an opportunistic son of a rich and merciless man. Beckoning to the people, Kennedy learned, is good publicity, but not good politics. His party had a clear majority in the legislative halls, but the President could not command it.

Sometimes he revealed himself in flashes, as when a friend asked him why he wanted to be President. “Because it's the seat of power,” he had said. “I don't know anybody around can wield it better than I. Do you?” In the White House swimming pool, Kennedy had floated on his back and said he wouldn't want the job more than eight years. “Look at it. Laos may go to hell again next week. There's this nuclear testing thing. Berlin, Vietnam—all that. Yeah, I know that's what makes it exciting, that's what makes it challenging. But eight years seems enough.”

After the first year in office, he had said: “This job is interesting but the possibilities for trouble are unlimited. It's been a tough first year. But then they're all going to be tough.” He was the scion of Irish forebears who placed a premium on adversity. None of them desired an easy victory; none would admit to one. Men fought, won or were beaten, but they never wept.
Mercy, forgiveness, compassion—these were the pious pity of the effete. “I run for the presidency of the United States,” he had shouted in the Boston Garden, “because it is the center of action. . . .”

On his wedding night, he dismayed his bride by locking the door to their suite at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel and sitting at a desk to note his speaking engagements for the following two months. Emotions, like ablutions, are best concealed. The family had a horrifying history of sudden death and disaster, but the Kennedys learned to steel themselves against whimpering. Always they were grim pallbearers turning in unison to face the Roman Catholic Church.

The President stood, compressed the knot in his tie with his fingers, and strode into the ballroom to a standing ovation. Grinning, the arms waved for the people to sit, to return to their breakfast. In the back of the huge room, a small red light began to glow on a television camera. Overhead, wagon wheels festooned with small lights served as pioneer chandeliers.

The gray head of Monsignor Vincent Wolf of Holy Family Church was too full of excitement to do justice to the food. He turned toward the back of the head table and motioned to Peter Saccu, the catering manager. Mr. Saccu took an envelope from the priest and carried it to the President. The note read: “We, the school children, the nuns and priests of Holy Family Church in Fort Worth are happy to offer one thousand Masses for the spiritual and temporal welfare of you and your family, and to show our love and devotion to the President of the United States of America. . . .”

Mr. Kennedy looked down the length of the table, caught the eye of the monsignor, and nodded his thanks. The message went into his jacket. To the Roman Catholic endowed with full unquestioning faith—and the Kennedys are such—there is both solace and protection against the unknown in the holy sacrifice of the Mass. It is the most direct appeal to God, and
Masses which are said by innocent children are, to some Catholics, the most inspiring of all.

And yet death was as common as the veils of rain which drifted up Eighth Street outside the hotel. In California at this moment a great writer, a mind of compassionate sophistication, was in final coma. Aldous Huxley was dying. At Hobe Sound, in Florida, a man who exerted considerable influence on John F. Kennedy had died of cancer, and no one had bothered to tell the President. The Rev. George St. John, headmaster of Choate School, who often exhorted students like Kennedy: “Ask not what your school can do for you, ask what you can do for your school,” was dead at the age of eighty-eight.

Nor had the presidential eye paused at Page 14-A when reading the
Dallas Times Herald
this morning. There had been twenty-five death notices, a normal complement, ranging from James Meek, who had struck it rich in oil, to a relatively unknown man named Carl Lucky. Ten miles south of Norwalk, Ohio, brisk winds fanned a blaze in the Golden Age Nursing Home. Sixty-three persons would die there this day, none of them quickly or easily.

The sky over Irving brightened and darkened and brightened again. Marina Oswald, tidying the breakfast dishes, was interested in the weather. She and her hostess, Ruth Paine, always washed their own laundry; nothing was sent to a cleaner's; no diaper service truck ever stopped in front of 2515 West Fifth Street. Today was to be a laundry day, but it was too threatening to start washing clothes now.

Besides, the television set had been left on. Marina never turned it on without asking permission. This morning Ruth had left early for a dental appointment with one of her children. Mrs. Paine remembered that the President of the United States would be in this part of Texas and had left the set on before Marina arose from bed.

The laundry could wait. Marina sat on the couch in the little ranch house, so that she could watch June, playing on the floor, hear the baby if she cried, and watch America's First Family. Mrs. Oswald did not dress. Household laziness was a prerogative she exercised at will. The babies could not be taken out in the rain anyway. She heard the commentator's words, but she understood only the camera.

She had not looked in her grandmother's Russian teacup; therefore, she had not seen Lee's wedding ring. Nor had she examined the money in the dresser drawer. If she had dwelt on her husband at all, Marina Oswald recognized the situation for what it was: a problem which could be postponed at least until next week. The young woman with the straight brown hair, the piquant Nordic face, the Soviet peasant philosophy that it was a husband's right to beat a wife, wanted to remain in America. She would return to Russia, if it was Lee's will, but it would not be hers.

All of her roots, her relatives, her culture, were in Leningrad and Minsk, and yet the seductive influence of the United States, with its air-conditioned shops, its TV, its millions of small homes with gardens, the benevolent ease with which travel was permitted, the lack of suspicion among neighbors who owned automobiles and would give one a lift into town or home, the gatherings of friends over beer and cheese, the lack of restrictive forces in private or public life all superseded the natural affection of this woman for her homeland.

Her husband seldom saw anything as she saw it. To the contrary. At this moment he was on the ground floor of the School Book Depository, picking up a book order. He was looking across the counters to the front entrance of the building. Lee asked James Jarman, Jr., a checker, what the people were crowding the front step for. They would be waiting to see the President, Jarman said. He didn't know what time, but he guessed it would be late this morning.

Oswald looked surprised. “Which way do you think he's coming?” he said. Jarman was surprised, too, because it seemed as though everybody in town knew the President was coming, all except Lee. Then, too, it was rare to elicit this much conversation from the silent man. The checker said he had heard that Kennedy was coming on down through Dallas on Main Street, then right on Houston, and left on to Elm, right out in front of that door.

“Yes,” Oswald said. “I see.” The early arrivals were few. There were vantage points for seeing the motorcade all over Dealey Plaza, and, as this was the place where the President would pick up speed for the run to the Trade Mart, it wasn't considered good enough to attract crowds. Most of the curbside watchers would be employees from buildings around the square, in addition to some who chose to remain free of crowds. The few on hand were trying to keep out of the rain.

Weather was a subject of interest to Special Agent Sam Kinney of the Secret Service. Twice he had left the underground parking lot at Love Field to study the sky. And twice he had returned to tell his co-worker, Agent George Hickey, that he didn't know whether to put the bubbletop on or leave it off. Right now, it wasn't raining hard enough to put it on the big special Lincoln. It would be better to wait awhile.

The decision, which was of concern to so many people this morning, could be decided when Forrest V. Sorrels picked up Kinney and Hickey at 11
A.M.
Mr. Sorrels was special agent in charge of the Dallas office. This, for him, was a big day. He was the man in charge, even though he shared his decisions with and could be countermanded by Jerry Behn at the White House, Chief Rowley at Secret Service Headquarters, Kenneth O'Donnell, and the President. For three interminable weeks Sorrels had worked this assignment, doing the field assignments and reporting to Washington.