The Day Kennedy Was Shot (9 page)

More young than middle-aged men carried firearms. It seemed, symbolically, to be a part of growing up. Gun play came to life in only two types of cases: too much alcohol or a fight between two men over a woman. It was common for police, in heading off a car full of wild boys, to frisk the occupants and find three or four revolvers. They were the badges of manhood; they gave the young men a strutting walk and a consciousness that they were as big as any man in the world, but their use was considered a violation of the police permit.

Shotguns and rifles were even more common. The outlying areas of the city were good for hunting, and men cleaned and pampered their rifles in the manner of little boys shining bicycles. In the off-season, many of the men took their rifles to local ranges to fire at targets and reset the windage markers and the drift of steel-jacketed shells. This was not equated with violence in Dallas, because the constitution guaranteed citizens the right to bear arms, and Dallas was not too many generations removed from its own frontier settlement days, when the Trinity River, a watering place for cattle, frequently was a battleground.

Tippit, a tall, wavy-haired policeman, was a minute late getting out to his car, number seventy-eight, and moving it away from the Southwest Substation for patrol. At 8:01
A.M.
he was on his way.

The Hotel Texas elevator took Vice-President and Mrs. Johnson down to the mezzanine with their Secret Service man, Rufus Youngblood. Mrs. Johnson, who was gifted with the animated face of a happy child, composed her features in rare solemnity as the car slid silently downward. Secret Service men watched them get off the car, nodding good morning. In the dimly lighted Longhorn Room, the Democratic leadership of Texas gathered, whooping loud greetings to each other and falling into whispering groups along the wall.

On the eighth floor, Mrs. Evelyn Lincoln finished breakfast and hurriedly recompleted her makeup. She was a small, dark woman, the adoring private secretary of John F. Kennedy for twelve years. At the White House, it was her function to keep the half dozen daily deliveries of mail coming into the President's desk between appointments, just as it was expected that she would keep the covey of stenographers in her office busy with outgoing mail. This consisted of more than the President dictated. If he learned that a Democratic politician was ill, it was Mrs. Lincoln's function to compose a “get well” letter or
send flowers or both. On her desk small plates of enticing candies reposed for those who,
en passant
, felt like reaching.

She kept her door to the President's Oval Office slightly ajar unless he ordered it closed. This was so that she could hear him if he called to her. It was she who knew when to admit George Thomas to the inner office with freshly pressed suits of clothes, a tie and a shirt, several times each day. He crossed the office noiselessly when the President worked alone and hung the clothing in the little lavatory.

Mrs. Lincoln was also the liaison between the President and Mrs. Kennedy. She could tell Jacqueline when he was too busy to talk to her; she could judge the time that his daily work would be completed and he would be ready for dinner in the President's eight-room home on the second floor; Mrs. Lincoln kept a secret “log” of every presidential appointment and what was discussed, promised, and refused; she lifted every fiftieth letter from the mass of unsolicited mail and opened it and placed it among the letters the President should read.

She was more than an amanuensis; Mrs. Lincoln was Kennedy's confidante from the time he emerged on the Washington scene as the junior Senator from Massachusetts. She worked long, exhausting hours because she believed in Kennedy's “star.” Her office walls were heavy with color photographs of the First Family, and she applied herself with complete loyalty to his every wish.

It wasn't necessary for Mrs. Lincoln to have made this trip. There were younger stenographers in the White House pool, but Mrs. Lincoln, like Mrs. Kennedy, had a desire to make this one quick trip to Texas. She had written happily to her sister-in-law's sister, Mrs. Jo Ingram of Dallas, inviting her to breakfast “very early” at the Hotel Texas in Fort Worth, so that Mrs. Ingram might meet the President of the United States briefly after breakfast. Mrs. Ingram, in a burst of feminine enthusiasm, had replied that she would be there, and she was bringing her cousin and her cousin's daughter.

The four sipped hot coffee and waited for the Secret Service to advise Mrs. Lincoln that the President was ready to emerge from his suite. The anticipation was too much for the ladies. The breakfast was still on the table in the bedroom, and the four rushed up and stood in the corridor near the elevator, watching with excitement as men hurried up and down the hall, screening the waiting elevator and the young Mexican girl who stood at the controls.

In the parking lot, the crowd now numbered more than four thousand. In the rain they looked like a conglomerate of shiny colors. They lit cigarettes; they joshed each other; the mounted police herded them into a large circle around the speaker's stand and the loudspeakers. Some stood off on the next block, leaning against shop windows which had awnings. Many wore the big fawn-colored Texas hats. These were not the elite of Fort Worth, who would be inside at the breakfast. These, until two days ago, were the forgotten supporters of the President: the railroad brakemen, the clerks, the off-duty policemen, housewives, waiters, mechanics, store managers, also the unemployed.

They did not think of themselves as an “afterthought.” Fort Worth is a lusty, hospitable Western town, and the local citizens were glad of the opportunity to see their hero person-to-person and to see the beauteous Mrs. Kennedy. These, multiplied many times, were the men and women who had given the electoral votes of Texas to John F. Kennedy in 1960. They asked nothing in return but a hearty hello, a few witty expressions to be remembered later, and a “Godspeed.”

At 8:20
A.M.
they numbered close to five thousand—double the number sheltered inside against the rain—and some began a good-natured hog-calling shout: “Come on, Jackie. Come on, Jackie.”

The coffee was on, and Troy West watched the excited percolation as he wrapped the first early delivery of books. He had a long shiny counter on the first floor and he could pack the
books into cartons, buttress them with old newspapers, seal, and twine them while watching that percolator. Mr. West had been a mail wrapper at the Texas School Book Depository for sixteen years and he always arrived early, put the coffee on, and began the wrapping as though his heavy hands could do the work without involving his mind at all.

The air was aged. It had been imprisoned in the archaic building a long time, like Troy. The floors had been scuffed so long they had concave paths between the counters and the two birdcage elevators. The windows, large and dusty, had rounded tops, reminiscent of Ford's Theatre in Washington. The Texas School Book Depository had never lifted anyone's spirit; it was a warehouse of work, with school books coming in by the gross and being mailed out by the dozen. There were seventy-two persons on the payroll, and two were absent this day because of illness.

It was a place where Negroes and whites worked well together. The wits told jokes and perpetrated pranks; the serious ones, fellows and girls, gravitated together and had discussions on their lunch hour; the loners nodded soberly and moved toward the rack with the fresh orders, yanked one out, took the elevator upstairs, filled the order, came downstairs, put it on Troy West's counter, and went back to the rack for another order.

There were thirteen employees working on the sixth floor. More than half of them were laying a tile floor. It wasn't easy, as Bonnie Ray Williams learned. He and the others had finished the fifth floor, which entailed starting at one corner of the huge square barn, moving cartons of books out of the way, cleaning a section and laying tiles, then moving the cartons farther away until they became jammed in another corner. At that time, they had to be lugged back to the freshly finished part—hopefully, dry—while the last corner of the floor was worked on.

On the sixth floor, moving the cartons made the work of the order-fillers difficult. Men like Danny Arce and Wes Frazier, Lee Oswald and James Jarman, Jr., had to sort among the pyramids
of cartons to locate histories, mathematics books, and grammars. They worked the sixth floor and knew where to find any book, but the floor crew started work at the west end of the room and, on their knees, were working east. Little by little, the boxes of books were being inched toward the front windows of the building.

Some of the fellows were in the habit of disappearing into a small place on the ground floor called the Domino Room to sip Troy's steaming coffee. Lee Harvey Oswald never chipped in with the others toward the purchase of a pound of coffee and never asked for a cup. He sometimes joined the others merely to rummage through yesterday's
Dallas Times Herald
or the current day's
Dallas News.
No one ever saw him buy a newspaper, but he often sat alone, running through the news items swiftly, seldom pausing to respond to a greeting.

The Depository faced Dealey Plaza with little confidence. There were new glassy buildings around the perimeter, including the Dal-Tex and county sheriff's office. The School Book Depository and the old stone county courthouse were all that was left of old Dallas. The plaza itself was dedicated to Joseph Dealey, founder of the
Dallas News
, and he stood in bronze facing away from what he had wrought.

The grassy square was the funnel for downtown Dallas. Three main streets, Elm, Main, and Commerce, met in the plaza, carrying the bulk of traffic headed south, southwest, west, and northwest out of town. The buildings formed an inverted U at the top of the plaza, and the cars ran downhill for two hundred yards toward a railroad overpass, then disappeared underneath to reach any one of six viaduct speedways.

The final part of the presidential motorcade would come down the middle avenue—Main. When it reached the plaza, it would turn right for one block to Elm, facing the Texas School Book Depository at the top of the hill. The cars would make a left on Elm, pass directly in front of the Depository, and go downhill, the President and Mrs. Kennedy waving to the last few
hundred people on the parade route. Once at the underpass, the automobiles would speed up, make a right turn up onto Stemmons, and head for the Trade Mart, less than three miles away.

To those who work hard within small horizons, there is little excitement in seeing a President. There was more interest among the deputy sheriffs on the opposite side of Dealey Plaza than in the School Book Depository. Some of the Negro employees at the Depository said that they wanted to eat their lunches quickly and maybe get a look at Mr. Kennedy, but to the majority of $1.25-an-hour laborers this was a drizzly morning, the day before Saturday's late sleeping.

Some did not know that the motorcade would pass here; some felt no desire to see the Chief Executive; a few said they had too much to do. Roy Truly, the short, bespectacled manager, sat in his half-glassed office inside the main entrance, thinking nothing at all of the motorcade. At lunchtime he had an appointment to meet one of the owners of the business, and this took precedence over any parade. He hunched over his desk, puffing on a cigarette, now and then looking up at his jacket hanging on a clothes tree without seeing it.

Duty was all. Every morning Mr. Truly made a quiet inspection of the building, getting a head count from his foremen, nodding a soft greeting to old hands, glancing at the order rack to make certain that the merchandise was moving, and getting a fresh feel of the plant.

He knew the good workers and the shirkers. He was aware that his presence spun all hands into bursts of activity, and he knew which ones would loaf when he disappeared. The workers knew that Mr. Truly was fair; he gave a man an even break. Old hands broke new ones into the routine. If an employee didn't want to work, he was paid according to the clock and dismissed. Six weeks ago, Mr. Truly had hired Lee Harvey Oswald because he liked the quiet, almost uncommunicative attitude of the boy, and especially the way he prefaced his responses with “Yes sir” and “No sir.”

Truly was in his middle years, and he gave his best efforts to everything he undertook. He wasn't much more of a conversationalist than young Oswald, but he was shrewd. When he was thinking, he pulled on his ear, and his philosophy was that “nothing is going to change my life. No matter what happens, I am not going to get an ulcer.” He had seen this business start small, and now he was shipping school books to five states.

The foreman, Bill Shelley, told Roy Truly that the boys laying the floor were now working the sixth floor, and, while it would not be finished today, it certainly would be by Monday. The only two employees who had a facial resemblance worked that floor that day. Billy Nolan Lovelady, a crew-cut with a lean pale face and a grim mouth, was setting tiles. At the other end of the room, Lee Oswald was filling orders which involved books published by Scott Foresman & Company.

There was a burst of silent activity on the eighth floor. It was electric without the crackle, just a man leaning over a telephone. His whisper could not be heard: “The President is on his way to the mezzanine.” The door to Room 850 opened, the wood gleaming against the lights in the corridor. Mr. Kennedy came out. He looked young and tall and buoyant; his light step made his shoes twinkle.

The elevator was waiting when he saw Evelyn Lincoln and her ladies. At once the President stopped and his secretary introduced them. He shook hands and, in mock surprise, said: “Are these some more of your relatives?” Mrs. Lincoln chuckled and said: “Well, relatives of relatives.” He backed toward the elevator, said, “Good morning” to Elaine San Duval, the operator, and turned to see agents Clint Hill and Muggsy O'Leary and complained that Mary Gallagher was not available when Mrs. Kennedy required her services. He wanted someone to “get her on the ball.”