The Day Kennedy Was Shot (30 page)

Salinger started out of the communications shack. One of the operators said: “AP bulletin is just coming in. President hit in the head. That just came in.” The Secretary of State made the decisions. He instructed Admiral Harry D. Felt at Pearl Harbor to have a fueled 707 jet ready when this plane got back to Honolulu. The other plane would take Salinger, Rusk, and
Manning nonstop to Dallas. That is, if the President was alive. The plane they now were using would refuel at once and take the members of the Cabinet back to Washington.

Now, someone would have to go back into the other cabin and tell the ladies.

The body on the table was stripped of dignity. It was supple, nonresistant. There were eight doctors left in the small room, two registered nurses, and two aides. All of the proper medical procedures had been dutifully instituted and exhausted. Dr. Kemp Clark, slipping in the watery blood on the floor, tried manual chest manipulation, pressing down hard, holding, releasing, pressing down hard. He asked for a stool. The table was too high, the patient was almost out of reach. A stool was placed under his feet and the doctor worked desperately to preserve life.

Oh, my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee

There was a tube sticking in the throat. There was one in the right ankle. Another one was in the left arm. The doctor's strong hand depressed the chest cavity and, when he lifted up, the dead man breathed a loud sigh. The other doctors, busy with their individual functions, quit silently one by one. No one said he was dead. It was as though everything had been tried, and nothing had worked, just as each man knew all along that nothing would work.

and I detest all my sins because I dread the loss of Heaven

A nurse slipped a watch off his wrist. It went into her uniform pocket. His blood had congealed in the bracelet. Outside, Mrs. Johnson stooped over the withdrawn figure of Mrs. Kennedy and found herself beyond tears as she clasped those hands in hers. Mrs. Kennedy looked up, the drawn, dead expression still on the features, the dark eyes searching Mrs. Johnson's face for something. The new First Lady began to tremble violently. Two men took her arms. She turned to an old friend on the
other side of the tiny hall. “Oh, Nellie! Oh, Nellie!” The women embraced, as women do when grief is too dark and deep for expression, or when happiness bubbles in the throat.

and the pains of Hell, but most of all because they offend Thee

The cruelty continued for Mrs. Kennedy. Somehow, she contained herself when it was beyond forbearance. He was dead. She knew it. She said it. Twenty interminable minutes ago she had said it. They could do nothing, none of them. All she asked was to sit in the car with his head in her lap—where surely he would want to be—to say her own farewell in her own way. To say prayers for the repose of his soul. To feel the final communion of man and wife before sturdy hands lifted him away forever.

My God, who art so good and deserving of all my love;

She had pushed that young nurse away rudely. The girl had stepped into the car, speaking in a clipped British accent, and had tried to lift his head. Mrs. Kennedy had looked up, glaring, and shoved those alien hands away. She had said “No” to Emory Roberts. When Clint Hill had dropped his jacket, Mrs. Kennedy had folded it tenderly around her husband's head—tenderly and slowly because she, above all, knew that there was no reason to hurry. Now she sat waiting for a priest. A priest had been requested. It would be unthinkable to permit his soul to leave for an unseen place and an unknown judgment without absolution.

I firmly resolve, with the help of thy grace, to confess my sins
,

They came to her, sitting demurely on the little chair, and they murmured the sympathetic words, and sometimes, in kindness, she roused herself to respond. Mostly she sat in silence and nodded. The gloved hands manipulated the fingers and she watched them lace together and part. She saw doctors leave the room where her love lay dead, and she looked up to get a word, a report. Failing all else, Mrs. Kennedy would have settled for permission to step inside and hold his hand. They had nothing
to say. They swept out, glanced briefly at her, and fled with the dignity of busy men. She arose and moved to go into the room. Mrs. Doris Nelson, the supervisor, said: “Please, Mrs. Kennedy.” It did no good. Mrs. Nelson's hands were pushed away, and Mrs. Kennedy leaned against the door and went inside.

to do penance, and to amend my life.

She looked so small. A nurse was bunching the bloody sheets on the floor. She made a mopping motion, saw Mrs. Kennedy, and hurried outside with the bundle. Dr. Burkley moved over and took Mrs. Kennedy's arm. The doctors who remained in Trauma One retreated toward the back wall. There was nothing more that science could do or say; the shocking scene could not be softened; they stood under the clock. One moved forward, as though he sensed an indecency. He took a fresh sheet from the pile and drew it over the body of the President. He stopped a moment, and, with his thumbs, he tenderly closed the eyelids and patted the jaw closed under the chin. Like putting a baby to sleep. The sheet was pulled up over the head. It wasn't long enough. The shinbones and feet of John F. Kennedy gleamed white under the overhead light.

The unhurried hands of the wall clock were at 12:46. The dark head of Roy Kellerman came into the room. He studied the backs of Mrs. Kennedy and Dr. Burkley, looked at the doctors against the back wall, and the white-hooded body on the table. He went out into the hall and ordered Clint Hill to get back on the phone with Jerry Behn at the White House. “Clint,” he said, “tell Jerry that this is not for release and not official, but the man is dead.”

He had served as the thirty-fifth President of the United States for one thousand thirty-six days. John F. Kennedy had sought the post because “that's where the action is.”

The fat man was getting just enough warm sunlight into the left side of his taxicab to induce a half doze. The huge belly was
almost imprisoned by the wheel. Mr. William Whaley edged his taxi driver's cap off his forehead and, for a moment, took in a haze of sight and sound. He was parked at the Greyhound Bus Terminal at Lamar and Jackson, and the big buses were pulling into Dallas and pulling out for the long hauls.

He could hear the scream of sirens around Dealey Plaza, a few blocks away, and Whaley vaguely wondered why they made so much noise. Then he saw the young man walking toward his cab and, with the instinct of the veteran operator, reached over and began to open the back door. To Whaley he was “this boy.” The boy shut the back door and asked if he would take him to the 500 block of North Beckley. The driver told him to hop in. The boy didn't want to get in the back. He went around the taxi and hopped in beside the fat man.

Lee Oswald might have taken a bus. Any bus to anywhere. They were pulling in and pulling out and roaring across the north Texas plains to other states. He could have bought ten or twelve dollars worth of geography and been out of Dallas with ease. This was the place to do it. Instead he chose the fat man's taxi and chose to go to a furnished room.

Whaley was ready to pull away from the curb, had pulled the meter down, when a woman looked in and asked if she could take this taxi. The fat man said there would be another one right behind him. The vehicle made its turn and headed for the Houston Street viaduct. The driver was a veteran and had adopted the conversational ploy of taxi drivers and barbers: if the customer wants to talk, talk; if he doesn't, keep quiet.

He asked Oswald what all the sirens were about. There was no response. Whaley turned to look at the profile beside him. “The boy” kept looking straight ahead, as though he had heard nothing. The fat man swung left and passed the
Dallas News
and began to creak and squeak his way across the viaduct. On the other side, he turned up Zangs, swung onto Beckley and, in the 500 block, the fare said: “This will do.” Whaley pulled to
the curb. Oswald dug into his trouser pocket and brought out a dollar bill. The meter read ninety-five cents. “Keep the change,” he said and slammed the door. He started walking south, away from his room.

Oswald was four blocks beyond the little white cottage. Whaley, in a burst of blue exhaust smoke, started out again for the Greyhound Bus Terminal. Oak Cliff was quiet. The array of small homes, lopsided flagstones, young mothers with baby carriages, the high-crowned roads with intermittent traffic were familiar to Oswald. Looking around, it was as though nothing had happened. No sirens could be heard; no running policemen with drawn guns; no screaming citizens falling on lawns; not even a puddle from the morning rain.

The word was out. The shattering news snapped and crackled around the world. No one knew the man was dead except the privileged few at the hospital. The word said that shots had been fired at the President; there were additional flashes of information: he had been wounded; it was thought that he was wounded; he had a head wound; it was alleged that he had a head wound; he might not live; he probably would not live. The shocks met the preceding shocks on the far side of the world and men, great and venal, paused. The sun was down in Berlin. Tokyo waited for dawn.

The sturdy men in the Kremlin sat in bowls of office light not believing. It was almost 2
P.M.
in Ossining, New York, and the young woman driving south on Route Nine would not walk again. She hummed with the music on the car radio, and then the flash came and the road spun in gray dizziness and her car tried to climb the front of a building. She was paralyzed from the hips down, a permanent memento of the day.

The news swept through Boston like a breathless hurricane; in Baltimore, shoppers began to weep. In the nation's capital, the antidote to shock became the telephone. All the circuits
were tied up. Much of the majesty of the United States government was at the mercy of a busy signal. At the Trade Mart, the Texas politicians decided that, on account of the shooting, their women had better be sent home, but the men would get on that bus and drive down to Austin for the presidential ball. A commitment is a commitment.

New York stopped dead. It came to a stunned pause, as though the subways would not run roaring through the bowels of the metropolis; as though Wall Street would not take the economic pulse again; as though buses and elevators and private cars and jet planes and traffic lights had frozen. The city, lying under its charcoal blanket of smoke, stopped breathing. Everybody told everybody else that it could not be; not in this enlightened century, this cultured era of cocktail party sophistry.

The powerful transmitters of the world picked up the news and city editors everywhere called for reporters to drop everything and get on the next plane to Dallas. In the newspaper morgues, the filed obituaries on “Kennedy, John Fitzgerald” were yanked and updated. The picture editors demanded everything on the motorcade from the wire services in Dallas. Two women on television were discussing fashion in front of a curtain and a man with a drawn, frightened expression came up behind them and they kept glancing at him, trying to keep the conversation in motion, and he was trying to say: “I'm sorry, ladies, but the President has been shot” and the words kept coming out across their discussion of necklines and hemlines, so that neither could be understood.

The phone near the swimming pool at McLean, Virginia, had rung and Robert Kennedy had heard the first word from J. Edgar Hoover. In the United States Senate, the strong jaw and good face of Edward Kennedy sat at the rostrum as president pro tem until someone edged up to him and whispered. Senator Kennedy's world of opulence and politics cracked like old ice, and the voices below, pompous and pedantic, rose and fell like
separate sounds not to be hooked together to make a measure of sense. The Senator excused himself. The polished mahogany gavel of authority was placed on its side, tenderly, and the clerks below turned faces up to the young Senator to ascertain what had happened.

The bedlam was worse at the hospital emergency entrance. In the warmth of the early afternoon, windows were open in the several buildings, and patients in pajamas and robes pressed pale, inquisitive faces to the glass. Below, a broad stream of automobiles, the sun glinting off hundreds of windshields like spangles on a stream, were heading for the hospital. The police, on Harry Hines Boulevard, at Inwood, at Butler, became testy and shrieked their whistles of authority and flailed their arms to turn the tide away from the hospital. A good part of Dallas, which had bid the President a warm welcome, now had its automobile radios on loud and had come to the deathwatch.

Deputy Chief George Lumpkin managed to squeeze his car into the emergency area, and Curry ordered him to report at once at the School Book Depository and “take charge.” Captain Fritz, not required to examine the President's table at the Trade Mart, reported in, and Chief Curry sent him on to Dealey Plaza with his Homicide detectives. It was a homicide. There was no federal law against killing a President, but there was a local law against killing a person, and this was the law which would apply.

Secret Service Agent Forrest V. Sorrels was the first federal man to return to the Depository building. The police and the sheriff's department had worked closely with him in all the advance work; now he wanted to work with them to clean up the tragedy. He drove back, listening to Channel Two all the way:

Patrolman L. L. Hill: “Get some men up here to cover this School Depository building. It's believed the shot came from, as you see it on Elm Street, looking toward the building, it would be the upper right-hand corner—second window from the end.” Dispatcher Henslee: “How many do you have there?”
Hill: “I have one guy that was possibly hit by a ricochet from the bullet off the concrete and another one saw the President slump.” Henslee: “Ten four.” Patrolman E. D. Brewer: “We have a man here who says he saw him pull the weapon back through the window from the southeast corner of the Depository building. . . .”