The Day Kennedy Was Shot (45 page)

Mrs. Kennedy ordered another drink.

Dallas lost its official mind. Two and a half hours after the event, the aura of fatalistic acceptance was shattered. The professional calm of the police department was replaced by shouting officers who elbowed their way in and out of headquarters; poorly thought-out orders were executed, amended, and sometimes revised by telephone. Chief Jesse Curry, who might have supervised the hunt for the assassin, spent time telling the widow that she should go back “and lie down.” The district attorney, Henry Wade, was trying to make certain that the crime was either his “baby” or the “baby” of U.S. Attorney Barefoot Sanders. Cops were sent out to Beckley and to Irving to search and seize, but they had no warrants for such work, and neither they nor their superiors had thought of getting them.

A police dispatcher, speaking to Captain C. E. Talbert on Channel Two at 3:01
P.M.,
said: “A Mr. Bill Moyers is on his way in to swear in Mr. Johnson as President and he will need an escort, but we don't know when he is going to get here.” At Love Field, Curry was telling Mayor Earle Cabell that his police department had a suspect in the killing of Tippit and Kennedy, but neither official hurried to headquarters to serve the cause of justice.

The district attorney, the competent Henry Wade, found out that the crime was not federal. It was his “baby,” but he permitted the clerks in his office to go home. It was a Dallas County matter, as Dr. Earl Rose had insisted it was, but the authorities had only the most superficial pathological findings from the doctors to present at any criminal trial. Fritz questioned
Oswald, but employed neither stenographer nor tape recorder and would have to depend upon his memory if the prisoner disappeared, died, or was tried.

In the county building, Sheriff Decker's deputies were processing witnesses by the dozen, taking affidavits, having girls type them, asking witnesses to sign, permitting some to leave, asking others to remain. Three Dallas detectives were waiting on Fifth Street in Irving for a couple of county deputies from Decker's office. They would wait a half hour before the county men arrived so that they could search the home of Mrs. Ruth Paine and ask Mrs. Oswald if her husband had ever owned a rifle.

Portable television sets began to appear in the parking lot of Parkland Memorial Hospital. A police officer asked for reinforcements to get “these people out of here, because it's going to be worse when people start coming home from work.” It was a macabre picnic. Off-duty policemen were being called in to headquarters, and they were falling over each other and the press. One lieutenant ran upstairs from the basement and had a good lead: he had just found out that someone named Oswald was missing from the School Book Depository and he might turn out to be the man they were all looking for.

There is a mass madness which begets madness. It is contagious: calm faces contort; mouths shout; impatience is paramount; ordinarily good minds become scrambled; feet run, hesitate, stop, and reverse themselves; dignity is discarded; and, when it is over, the memory of the victim is highly inaccurate. The third floor of police headquarters was, on the afternoon of November 22, 1963, the fulcrum of the madness of Dallas.

The city, sorry at first for Mrs. Kennedy, was suddenly sorry for itself. The vain community was crushed. Earle Cabell was ahead of his time that day when he moaned: “Not in Dallas!” Jack Ruby, the boss of the strippers, was not far off the mark when he asked what the assassination might do to business. The
city whose sin was pride had blood on its hands. It had only the most perfunctory pity for John F. Kennedy. The tidal wave of reporters and photographers from all over the world, crashing in on the city all day and all night, the spotlight of the world focusing on Dallas brought the realization that with world attention could come condemnation. The community could be morally indicted by the nation and the world. The city which bought and sold money began to search frantically for its soul.

The third floor at headquarters was shaped like a crucifix. At the bottom was the press room, a dustbin of old stories and muted metallic voices coming out of a police radio. On the right side, coming up the green floor, was the Juvenile Bureau, the Forgery Bureau, an unmarked room, and a transcribing room for reducing taped confessions and affidavits to the written word. On the left side was “313, Auto Theft”; “316, Burglary and Theft”; “317, Homicide and Robbery”; a water cooler and a private elevator to the fifth-floor jail.

On the crossarm to the right were restrooms, elevators, and an office marked “Police Personnel.” On the opposite crossarm was a curving stone stairway, a “Perk-O-Cup machine,” and “Soda, fresh milk.” Facing these was a cigarette machine and one which reduced dollar bills to coins. At the top of the cross, on the left, was a big square office for radio dispatchers. Straight ahead were the private offices of the police hierarchy—the chief, assistant chiefs, deputy chiefs, and inspectors.

The third floor was a madhouse. The press scrambled for advantage like ruffians. Thick black cables snaked up the outside walls and across the floor. Reporters invaded police bureaus and hid telephones in desk drawers and wastebaskets. Enormous television cameras on dollies stared myopically from above the crowd. Still photographers hung from the tops of glass partitions to get pictures. The local newspapermen were inundated by their alien cousins.

A police lieutenant said that there were a hundred people in
the hall. A sergeant, who had charge of screening credentials at the elevators, estimated three hundred. The net effect was as though some giant crap game had been raided and there was no place to put the prisoners except in the corridor with policemen stationed at the elevators and stairways while everyone protested or demanded counsel. The gate had been opened by Captain Glen King, the police department press agent. He had worked with the press before; he had worked with as many as four or six at a time. His credo was: “If they have press credentials, admit them.” They were in, and more were on the way. Six men were coming from
The New York Times
alone, to assist Tom Wicker.

The infestation of madness which had infected the police department now assailed the reporters and photographers. The shouted questions were incessant; the demands to see Lee Harvey Oswald became a chant; all hands called for a press conference with the prisoner. The structure of authority began to fall apart. Captain Glen King consulted Deputy Chief Ray Lunday about permission for television cables to come from outside, through King's office window, onto the third floor. Lunday felt that the cables were permissible but not the unwieldy television cameras which go with them.

The deputy chief was certain that King, working directly for Chief Curry, required no permission. The request was, in effect, a courtesy call. Deputy Chief George Lumpkin was in his office, but King did not consult him. “King was operating on his own,” Lumpkin said. Curry had signed “General Order Number 81” long before it stressed cooperation with the press. He “saw no particular harm in allowing the media to observe the prisoner.” A woman was sitting in a glassed-in office crying and wringing her hands and the press demanded to know who she was.

No one could identify her. A policeman had brought her in and, on receiving fresh orders, had left. Detective L. C. Graves walked across the hall and found out that she was Mrs. Helen
Markham, who had witnessed the shooting of Officer Tippit. The woman was hysterical and could barely speak. Graves tried to take a statement and said he would have to ask her to stay until they could stage a police “showup” or “lineup.”

City Manager Elgin English Crull walked across from City Hall to headquarters and was appalled by the crush of human beings. He noticed particularly that those of the press who required electricity were using city power. Switchboxes had been opened and outlets tapped. He might have shouted for silence and asserted his authority, but Mr. Crull didn't. He seemed mollified because one of the local reporters said to him: “Please don't blame us for what is going on. We don't act this way.”

The blinds were drawn across the office of Captain Fritz, and he tried to blot out the roar of sound. Oswald was saying: “I know your tactics. There is a similar agency in Russia. You are using the soft touch, and, of course, the procedure in Russia would be quite different.” Unfortunately, the police department seemed to have lost control of the interrogation. The suspect did not appear to be frightened either by his arrest, the marshaling of damaging evidence, or the enormous amount of attention he was now getting from the world. If one could judge by appearances and responses, Lee Harvey Oswald felt that he was the trapper, not the trapped. He would answer the questions he could handle without risk; he would shout and snarl and lapse into silence when the interrogation touched a sensitive nerve.

He refused to discuss his military service record. He would not listen to questions about his handwriting as “Alex Hidell,” nor about Hidell's renting a post office box in Dallas and purchasing a rifle with a telescopic sight or a snub-nosed revolver from mail order houses. He waved aside questions about his wife and children. He would respond, in the manner of a pedantic lecturer, to questions about the Soviet Union, but when asked if he had shot Officer Tippit he snapped: “No!” When asked: “Did you shoot President Kennedy?” he shouted: “No!”

With a shrug, he said he had once been to Tijuana. No one had asked. Fritz interrupted the interrogation by walking out into the bedlam of the hall to listen to reports from detectives and to hand out fresh assignments. Each time, before he left, he would glance through his bifocals at Bookhout and Hosty and say: “Any questions?”

The captain had no time for lunch, but he offered some to Oswald. The young man said he would like coffee and doughnuts. A policeman went for them. The questions continued. Often they were the same questions. As Oswald sipped the steaming coffee, Fritz reminded him that he would be fed again “upstairs.”

The panic which seized Dallas ran from its head through its nervous system. It did not show on the streets. The shops were open. Women feasted their eyes on expensive gowns at the air-conditioned Neiman Marcus store and, when the obsequious clerks murmured: “Wasn't it awful . . . ?
”
the customers glanced up sharply and said: “Yes, it was awful. How much is this Hawaiian silk print?” Politicians teed off at the Dallas Athletic Club and remembered to keep their heads down. Lovers lounged in Turtle Creek Park, holding hands in the warm sun and dreaming the dreams they should.

As it was in Dallas, so it was in the capital of the nation. The buses ran their routes. Taxicabs with noisy transmissions whined through Rock Creek Park. The statue of Alexander Hamilton failed to lift a granite brow. On the edge of the Potomac, Negroes shucked bins of cherrystone clams, peeled the cellophane skin from pink curving shrimp, hacked the heads and tails from fat scaly bluefish, and gulls stood silently against the leaden sky waiting for the scraps to go overboard.

Washington did not panic outwardly. From the sky, scores of thousands of automobiles on the highways north and south and east and west picked up a ray of sunlight and bounced it
briefly from windshields. The city went about its business. The shops, the vendors, the offices, the officious bureaus continued to function as though the body politic were not prostrate and numb. On this one afternoon, there was no government. The executive branch was momentarily headless; the legislative branch adjourned in grief and dissipated its august membership to the winds. The Supreme Court, which can only say “Do not,” is not constituted to contribute a positive act to the well-being of the nation. Nine learned men in black cannot balance a casket nor alter the hysterical posture of government.

In code and in plain English, radio messages flashed across the skies of the world, assessing the assassination, asking directives, reassuring command posts in far-off places, creating false alerts, tensing military muscles, causing lights to burn in embassies and legations in many countries. A member of the Cabinet asked the rhetorical question: “Who has his finger on the missile button?” No one. And no one wanted to believe that no one did. An act as stunning in its magnitude as occurred at 12:30
P.M.
in Dallas could not be accepted anywhere as the deed of a lonesome malcontent. Nor would Washington or Moscow or Peking or Paris be willing to truckle to the truth for many years to come. Who could accept the thesis that a meteor, racing across the heavens, could be brought down by an idiot with a cork gun?

It was this which shook the city of Washington internally and tied up the phones, the circuits, the switchboards, even the area code, so that paralysis muted a second great city. The world knew that aircraft 26000 was up there somewhere, returning a gallant young man to his fathers, but who the hell was Lyndon Johnson? A short time before this day, an amusing program called
Candid Camera
had scored a hearty hit on television by asking pedestrians in a remote city: “Who is Lyndon Johnson?” Some had said: “The name is familiar. Why don't you consult a phone book?” Others did not know. Whoever he was, he was
also high in the sky with that metal casket and he was reaching for the reins of government, quickly and surely, acting patiently and almost obsequiously, which were not his characteristics. He was, basically, a boss man; a doer; a demander; a tall, awkward person blunt enough to think tact was something on which to hang a picture. When he was a young man, he and Tom Connally and Sam Rayburn and John Garner had agreed that there was no more lofty position in the world than being a senator from Texas. The vice-presidency was a step backward. On this afternoon, the tough man felt fear. Loneliness too. No one said: “Hey, Lyndon . . .” The form of address, even from old friends like Valenti and Thomas and Gonzalez and Moyers, was: “Yes, Mr. President.”