Where Were You?: America Remembers the JFK Assassination (8 page)

HAWKINS: When I came in here, I was also looking for somebody who had shot Officer Tippit. I hadn’t yet made the connection to President Kennedy. When I heard that he was the chief suspect in the assassination of the president—oh, my—I thought we were lucky to be here, just living through that. But I don’t even know what I thought when we were coming up the aisle in the theater before we found out he could be connected with the assassination. It was just really a weird night, a weird day and a weird night, really. We were lucky that nobody else was shot. I don’t know why Oswald let us walk all the way up in the theater and didn’t shoot one of us. I thought of that afterward; I didn’t think of it then. I thought we were lucky just to lose one officer.

BREWER: When Oswald pulled the pistol, it kind of brought me back into focus, and still I’m wondering,
Why am I doing this? What have I just got myself into? What am I doing here?
Pretty soon, it kind of all came together that it was probably a pretty good thing. It happened so fast, and yet it kind of plays back in slow motion a lot of times. But I really didn’t have time to think about what was going on, what danger there might be, or anything—it was just fast.

HAWKINS: They had a car out front that we put him in after we got him handcuffed and everything. There was quite a crowd out there too. They wanted to do their own justice. They were angry.

BREWER: I didn’t see that because I was detained here, getting information. By the time I got outside, it’d already cleared out and was just like a ghost town. Shops were closing up.

HAWKINS: When I saw his face, he looked like just another citizen. He had a little mark across his face or two after we arrested him. But he just looked like an ordinary citizen, someone you would see walking down the street, which he had been doing. Nothing outstanding in one way or another that I could see.

BREWER: I got home and turned on the TV. My wife at that time worked for Blue Cross Blue Shield downtown. They had closed down, as everybody else had. I’ve got the TV on, and my wife says, “That happened pretty close to where you—” I said, “Yeah, that happened pretty close.”

Then my mom called from Lockhart, Texas, and said, “I just saw that Oswald was arrested by your shop. I just pray you weren’t anywhere near that.”

I said, “Mom, I got a story to tell you.” It still didn’t dawn me, really. But then the news came in more and more. They’re showing Oswald; they’re showing the rifle there at the police station, showing Captain Will Fritz. And then you hear Oswald saying he didn’t do anything—he was seeking representation, I believe. It really started sinking in that he actually was the main and only suspect for the Kennedy assassination, and it was pretty much a given that he had murdered Officer Tippit.

I came to work the next morning, and of course there were sound trucks and all sorts of media trucks out. I thought,
I’m not used to that,
and it was just pretty much rapid fire, speaking with reporters, media. In fact, it got pretty annoying after a while, and it went on for quite a while, maybe a couple of months. Then I was transferred to the downtown store on Main Street, and it kind of started quieting down. We didn’t have that mass or instant media like they’ve got now. It still didn’t dawn on me just how big an operation that was, but it did dawn on me that, like Ray said, a lot of people could have got hurt.

HAWKINS: The next day at headquarters, we were still doing reports and getting it all together, and it was really busy. There were four or five of us who had come in the theater first, and we were all writing up reports and letters to the chief on what had happened. But what had happened finally sank in that day. It didn’t seem that night like any of this stuff had happened earlier, or it wasn’t anything. Then it did sink in—the next day, really—that any number of us could have been killed. I could have been shot; any of us could have been shot.

On Sunday I was watching TV at home. I saw Jack Ruby shoot Oswald. I knew Jack, had been to his club a few times. He wanted to be noticed and known; he really liked the police. He just wanted everybody to like him, I would say, especially the police. Several of them went to his club, kind of a police hangout, because he was friendly with police. You could go after hours and have a beer.

I didn’t realize who it was at first. Then I heard them, or I saw when they pulled him back who it was, and I thought,
Oh, no
. I just couldn’t
believe it was Jack who did it. Then a lot of people said he was connected with the Mafia here and in Chicago and all this, but I never did get that impression of him. He was just somebody who liked the police and was good to the police and wanted a little attention. He liked it. He liked us to recognize him, and if we took someone down to his club, he was always friendly. But it was a surprise.

BREWER: I was out in the parking lot when Ruby shot Oswald, washing this brand-new Ford Galaxy XL that I’d taken delivery on the night before the assassination. I wasn’t even supposed to be on duty at the store the next day. My assistant called in, his young child was ill, so I went to fill in. I had every intention just to cruise around in that car, which had a police interceptor engine in it, so I didn’t see the Ruby shooting at all. My wife came out and said, “Come in; you’re not going to believe this.” It was just—damn, when is this going to stop?

I thought before and after that it wasn’t Dallas’s fault. A lot of people took it upon themselves to make Dallas the whipping child. Dallas, to me, didn’t change. I enjoyed Dallas, I enjoyed going to the Cotton Bowl, where we would watch Tom Landry and Roger Staubach.

HAWKINS: I agree with you, John. The city itself got a bad name, but there was really no way of stopping what occurred. It seemed that after this happened, the citizens banded together; they even seemed to take more interest in the police department. I think it hurt a lot of people. I know I didn’t appreciate the things that were said about Dallas, but I was born and raised in Dallas. I felt it was a bad story that they put on the city, but there’s not a whole lot you can do about that.

BREWER: When I got out of the service in 1969, I had the option of staying in Dallas, retaining my job. I’d already grown tired of the assassination, so I moved to Austin. To this day—it’s kicked off a little bit the past couple of years—there are people who have known me for the longest time, who I work with, who have no idea I was involved, unless they came into the house and might have seen something framed. There was a letter from President Johnson, and they’ll ask, “What’s this?” But I play it really low key. Many people don’t have a clue. I have recently been recognized by the Dallas Police Department, got its Good Citizen Award—but I was just in the right place at the right time, however dangerous it was.

Brewer (left) and Hawkins

HAWKINS: And you handled it right, didn’t get shot at the back door or anything.

BREWER: I appreciate that. The assassination brought the country together. It was scary times when we listened to the Cuban Missile Crisis live broadcast of the Russian ships turning around, so there was a lot of Cold War tension. The assassination kind of centralized Dallas, and afterward I don’t know if it was a coming together or just a realizing that, hey, we’ve all grown up here pretty quick.

HAWKINS: I think it did bring the country together. The United States, a lot of people, myself being one of them, didn’t really pay much attention to the election. We voted, but I don’t think we really put that much into it. I think this got everybody more interested in government, exactly what was going on, and things our government was doing. I felt like it did that much for us. It changed me. I, one of those who didn’t pay a lot of attention to politics, now tried to stay up on things that were happening in the country more than I had before.

BREWER: A couple of weeks later I had a customer on a late afternoon and saw a taxi pull up out front. This lady got out, and I recognized her from TV. It was Marguerite Oswald. She walked in just like
Here I am
and said, “Mr. Brewer.” I said, “Yes, Mrs. Oswald?” My customer kind
of looked up. She only wanted to say that she felt Lee was innocent, and she wanted to hear from me what had happened. Not taking any sides, I said, “Mrs. Oswald, I don’t know for sure that he did kill the president, but I’m pretty sure he killed a policeman. I’m pretty sure he was involved, but, as a mother, you’re standing up for your son.” She said nothing, she just twirled around, hopped in the cab, and away she went.

I still see that scene in my mind fifty years later, every day just about. Something just real brief, but I think about it quite a bit. I don’t dwell on it, but it was a part of my life and continues to be. Not a bad part at all, but I’m not just a one-trick pony. I’ve done other things to define my life. But it’ll be part of the legacy, I guess. Not a bad one, not a bad one at all. I acted on instinct, not knowing where it was going or how big it was—a little instinct and some stupidity probably, not knowing what could happen.

Ruth Hyde Paine

Raised in Columbus, Ohio, Ruth Hyde Paine, a Quaker convert, moved to the Dallas suburb of Irving with her husband after he got a job with Bell Helicopter in Fort Worth. By 1963 they had separated amicably, and she was a thirty-one-year-old single mother and part-time Russian language teacher. That same year, through her interest in Russian, she met and befriended the Oswalds.

I
was in Irving, which is a suburb of Dallas. A friend of mine knew that I was studying Russian and knew this couple was coming to a party he was having, so he invited me, thinking I might enjoy meeting them. Marina was a young mother who didn’t speak English and didn’t understand the English at the party, so I talked with her in a bedroom where she was changing June’s—her baby’s—diaper. We just talked about mother things; we both had very young children.

She was glad to have someone to talk to. I had studied enough Russian that I could converse with her a little bit, and I could understand what she said, which helped a lot. Her husband, Lee, was enjoying the attention of telling about going to Russia, then deciding that wasn’t a good place, then coming back. He was talking to the group in the living room or kitchen, wherever it was, about that. But I wasn’t really listening; I was mostly spending my time with Marina in a separate room.

I realized she was feeling very lonely, so I got their address—they didn’t have a telephone—and wrote to her. I asked if I could come by sometime to visit, and we worked that out. I visited at least once, and another time we invited both of them to my house to have dinner with me and my husband. Although we were separated at this point, he did come for dinner occasionally; we all had dinner together.

Ruth Hyde Paine visits the Dallas Police Department
(photograph by Lawrence Schiller)

Lee didn’t talk very much. He didn’t want to talk English with me, but he would talk with my husband, Michael. I overheard some of the conversation. I felt like Lee would take offense if you disagreed with him, that it was easy to have him dismiss you as somebody who didn’t understand things. I wasn’t willing or able, for that matter, to talk politics with him, so I avoided talking with him.

Marina really did care about him. He was kind of exotic in Russia, somebody very different and interesting, and apparently he paid attention to her and so on. But she did find herself in a country where she didn’t speak the language, and he didn’t want her to learn it, which really bothered me. She just didn’t have very many friends. I learned later that they did have some friends in the Russian community but at that point were not seeing them, and they had very little money. He lost his job in Dallas at a photographic shop. I went to visit one time when they were living in Oak Cliff, and he said he was going to look for work in New Orleans and had bought a bus ticket for Marina to go to New Orleans with her little baby and all the paraphernalia that goes with that. I was kind of appalled. He was going to send a letter when he had a place for her to come to, and I said, “Why doesn’t she just come and stay with me for a couple weeks or whatever it takes while you look for a place? Then you can call me and say when you’re ready to have her come down.”

He did, and after about two weeks I drove Marina and the baby, along with my two kids, to New Orleans. They were there over the summer, and
when I visited them in New Orleans, I discovered that Marina, eight months pregnant, had never seen a doctor. I was worried about that.

Then Lee was saying he was going to look for work somewhere else. He’d lost his job again, and I said, “You haven’t been able to get medical care here because you haven’t lived in Orleans Parish long enough to get help with that. But you’ve lived in Dallas County long enough. Come back, and she can stay with me. I can get her to a doctor’s care, and to the hospital if necessary, and could translate to do that. So how about if she just stayed with me for a little while?” He was really quite glad of that. He seemed grateful, helped us pack up the car and everything.

He looked quite sad when she was leaving. There really was caring between them. It was a troubled relationship, and Marina did wonder whether she could stay with him and whether it would be all right. She said, “He has fantasies,” and she was worried about his doing things in order to think of himself as a great man. I could see how she was worried about him.

We got back to Irving, and she was at my house from the end of September really until the day after the assassination. Lee showed up early in October to say he was in town and ask if he could come out. He actually asked if I could come and get him in Dallas, and Marina, who talked with him on the phone, said I couldn’t because I had just given blood at Parkland Hospital, anticipating that she would be there. They wanted a blood donation as the only way we could pay for entering there if the baby came.

Anyway, he hitchhiked out and spent the weekend, and he spent almost every weekend from then until Thanksgiving. They were definitely friendly. Probably being separated was actually good for the relationship; they then enjoyed each other, and he was relieved of some anxiety about their care. They sat on the sofa, watched a movie or something together; he patted his lap, and she sat on his lap—there was definite affection there.

One day I was next door at a neighbor’s, discussing the fact that it’d been well over a week, maybe two, and he wasn’t having any luck finding a job, and his unemployment payments were coming to an end. Here was a young man who didn’t drive. He went right into the Marine Corps at age seventeen, lied to get in, and the kinds of jobs he could get were pretty limited. My neighbor said her brother was working at the School Book Depository, and he thought they might be still hiring; it was early fall.

They were delivering books, so I translated to Marina what the conversation had been about. She asked me to tell Lee that when he called, which he usually did in the evening to talk to her. I told him; I guess he showed up at the School Book Depository, and they hired him.

There was a lot of fear about President Kennedy coming to Dallas. Just a few weeks before, Adlai Stevenson had been poorly received there. A lady banged him on the head with a placard, and there was a lot of hostility. People were worried. It was definitely in the air.

Marina thanked me for turning on the TV that morning, and we watched the motorcade as it came into Dallas. It was such an enthusiastic crowd, and the feelings were so good in the reception. I heard over the television that shots had been fired and that the president’s head had been hit. I was afraid it might be fatal.

Marina said, “Oh, this is so sad for Mrs. Kennedy and for the two children.” She was feeling as a parent how that would be. I lit a candle, and she said, “Is that a way of praying?” I said, “Yes, it’s just my way.” Then we sat watching television until we heard that he was, in fact, dead.

It was really not too long after that there was a knock at the door, and several police officers said they had Lee Oswald in custody for shooting an officer. They wondered if they could come in, and I asked, “You have a
warrant?” They didn’t, but I didn’t see any problem with their coming in. One of them asked, “Did Lee have a gun?” I said, “No,” and translated to Marina. She said, “Yes, he did,” and led them into the garage, where there was a blanket roll. She thought the gun was in there; she had seen it there.

The police officer picked up the blanket roll and it folded over his arm. I realized that there had been a gun and that it was gone, that he probably had come out that night, as he never had on a weeknight before, and got the gun. It was at that point, when I saw the blanket roll was empty and discovered that he’d had a gun, that I thought it could’ve been Lee. I felt like, whatever these policemen need, I’ll help them find what they need. But it was the loss of Kennedy that was the most powerful feeling for me right then. That it might’ve been Lee who shot him was added distress. But I really was like the rest of the country, feeling that loss.

It’s very hard to go back through the pain of that time.

The police wanted us all to come down to the police station, to make statements and so on. Marina really didn’t say anything. She was very worried and distressed, but we all were. They wanted her to come, but they wouldn’t let her go into the bathroom to change her clothes; they didn’t want her to disappear from their view. I had to get a babysitter to stay with my son, who was asleep. The police had no idea who we were or what kind of people we were, so they were very nervous. At the police station, we were separated, put in different rooms, and I was grateful to hear that they’d arranged for a translator to be with Marina. They interviewed me and had me look over a statement, which I signed after I corrected the grammar. My mind was reeling at that point—you go into a kind of stupor almost, not really able to take it all in.

We went back to my house after the police station. We came back, and Lee’s mother was there as well. She didn’t know about the new baby—the second daughter was born in October, and Lee didn’t want his mother to know about it. He didn’t want any contact with his mother. Marina felt that was wrong, so when she saw Marguerite Oswald, there was a reunion; Marina showed her the baby and so on. They all came back to my house. Marguerite hinted that it would be very hard for her to get back to Fort Worth, so I said, “If you can sleep on the sofa, you can stay at my house.”

Marguerite and Marina were together in the evening, and I was putting my kids to bed; it was late. We knew it was going be a hard day the next day; we’d better get sleep if we could. I don’t really know what Marina did at that point with her mother-in-law. The next morning some people Marguerite had invited from
Life
magazine came with a translator; they were going with Marina and Marguerite to try to see Lee at the jail. They left that morning with Marina’s two little girls. I didn’t see Marina again until after she testified in Washington. She left on the 23rd, that next morning, and it was well into March of the next year before I saw her. I think she was getting advice, probably from Oswald’s brother, not to talk to me.