Reclaiming History (40 page)

“We’d better get this straight in a hurry, Mrs. Paine,” one of the officers says, “or we’ll just take the children down and leave them with Juvenile while we talk to you.”

Ruth doesn’t take this lying down. She makes a point of saying to her daughter, who, unlike her son Christopher, was up and about, “Lynn, you may come too.”

For the trip downtown Michael was put in another car, but Marina and Ruth, Lynn, Marina’s little girl, and her baby were all jammed in together with three police officers.

Marina, who had been shaking all over with fright before they got into the car, calms down as they drive toward Dallas, and the two women speak quietly in Russian. One of the officers, Adamcik, tries a little Czech on them, but they don’t understand him. Marina can tell how shaken Ruth is. Ruth had never ridden in a police car before, had never even envisioned doing so, and the experience is unnerving.

One of the officers in the front turns back to ask Ruth, “Are you a Communist?”

“No, I am not,” she replies firmly, “and I don’t even feel the need for the Fifth Amendment.”
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On the trip downtown, Ruth Paine starts to be tormented by “if only” thoughts. If only she had known that Lee had hidden a rifle in her garage. If only she had appraised him as someone capable of such terrible violence. If only the job she helped him find had not put him in a building overlooking the president’s parade route. If only she had done a dozen things differently, the country might have been spared this tragedy, and Marina, whom she has come to love as a sister, would not have been made into an assassin’s wife, bullied by overbearing policemen in a language she doesn’t comprehend.

Ruth wonders whether her determination to look for the good in everyone prevented her from seeing Lee clearly. Just three days ago she learned that Lee was using a false name in his Dallas rooming house. How much truth was there in anything he ever told her? What sort of a man was he beyond the confines of Ruth’s house, where he was simply Marina’s husband and Junie’s and Rachel’s father?

Is it possible that he is a Soviet agent? She finds that impossible to believe. He’s neither bright nor organized enough for such an assignment. Even if he had volunteered his services to the Russians, they wouldn’t have accepted him, or they are bigger fools than she ever dreamed.
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5:26 p.m. (6:26 p.m. EST)

Just twenty-eight minutes after Air Force One landed at Andrews Air Force Base, a helicopter delivers President Johnson to the south lawn of the White House. The president, his wife, Secretary of Defense McNamara, and McGeorge Bundy, special adviser to the president, walk in the chilly night through the rose garden on the White House grounds on their way to the Oval Office. When they come to the french doors of the president’s office, all stop except Johnson, who pauses, then walks in, alone, and stays for but a minute.

After Johnson closed the door behind him and exited the Oval Office, he and his party went across the street (West Executive Avenue, a blocked-off street across from the West Wing of the White House) to his vice presidential office on the second floor of the Executive Office Building, where congressional leaders from both parties stopped by to pledge their bipartisan support for the good of the grief-stricken nation.
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Before he meets with anyone though, the president takes the time to pen two notes to a little boy and a little girl, the first two letters of his presidency:

Dear John—It will be many years before you understand fully what a great man your father was. His loss is a deep personal tragedy for all of us, but I wanted you particularly to know that I share your grief—You can always be proud of him.

He signs it “affectionately,” as he does the next letter.

Dearest Caroline—Your father’s death has been a great tragedy for the Nation, as well as for you at this time.

He was a wise and devoted man. You can always be proud of what he did for his country.

It is 7:30 p.m. as Lyndon Johnson hands the letters to his secretary, gets up, and goes out to the anteroom to meet the men upon whom the continuity of the government of the United States now depends.
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5:55 p.m. (6:55 p.m. EST)

It is near dusk as the presidential motorcade, having left Andrews at 6:10 p.m. EST, takes the Suitland Parkway to Bethesda. FBI agent James Sibert, in a car right behind the navy ambulance carrying the president’s body, will never forget the sight of people lining the many bridges over the parkway, holding white handkerchiefs to their eyes. At 6:55 p.m., the navy ambulance with its escort of cars and motorcycle police arrives at Bethesda.
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By the time the navy ambulance with its escort of cars and motorcycle police arrives at the Bethesda hospital,
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crowds, alerted by the television coverage of the arrival of the president’s body at Andrews, are waiting silently. More than three thousand people have worked their way inside the grounds because of the hopelessly inadequate cordon improvised by Captain Robert Canada Jr., commanding officer of the hospital. Canada had only twenty-four Marine guards at his disposal, so he mobilized all of his off-duty corpsmen, but still hasn’t got nearly enough men to keep the ever-growing crowd from surging toward the ambulance.
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It’s one solid mass of humanity, people standing shoulder to shoulder, between the semicircle drive in front of the hospital (which comes off Wisconsin Avenue and returns) and Wisconsin Avenue a few acres away.
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The ambulance, now joined by a sedan with a chaplain and nurses, sweeps up to the main entrance. Robert and Jacqueline Kennedy disembark and are met by Captain Canada, Rear Admiral Calvin Galloway, and a chaplain. After a brief exchange, Secret Service agents Clint Hill and Paul Landis accompany RFK and Mrs. Kennedy to one of the two VIP suites on the seventeenth floor of the hospital’s high, stone tower.
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Jackie had been expected to join her children, John-John and Caroline, before their bedtime and tell them of their father’s death, but she decides instead to spend the night at the hospital so as not to leave her slain husband. Although the children were shielded from the news throughout the afternoon, Caroline will be told that evening and John Jr. sometime later (see later text).
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The hospital suite consists of three rooms—a bedroom and a kitchen facing each other across a small hallway, at the end of which was a long narrow drawing room. While it is comfortable enough, with air-conditioning, wall-to-wall carpeting, and a bedroom television, the walls, furniture, carpet, and drapes were depressing because of their lifeless and uniformly beige color. The entourage is met at the suite by the president’s sister, Jean Kennedy Smith; Jacqueline’s mother and stepfather, Janet and Hugh Auchincloss; and Ben Bradlee, Washington bureau chief of
Newsweek
and a longtime friend of the president and his family, along with his wife, Toni. Secret Service agents Hill and Landis move quickly to secure the entire floor, taking control of communications and making sure that no one will be allowed to enter without authorization. Since Mrs. Kennedy is determined to wait until the autopsy is over, they know it’s going to be a long night.
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An overnight bag and makeup case with Jackie’s initials, J.B.K. (B is for Bouvier, Jackie’s maiden name), on it are brought to Jackie, but both remain unopened in the long hours ahead. Among the friends who will come to the seventeenth floor to try to console her are political columnist Charles Bartlett and his wife, Martha. It was they who had contrived to introduce Jackie to JFK at a dinner party in their Georgetown home in May of 1951. At the time, Jackie was a Georgetown socialite with blue-blood roots (like JFK, her schooling had been at the best private schools—Miss Porter’s, Vassar, the Sorbonne in Paris) who was excited to be working as an “inquiring photographer” and celebrity reporter about town for the
Washington Times-Herald
, and he was a young, dashing war hero who was a member of the House of Representatives from Massachusetts.
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It wouldn’t be until September of 1953, when JFK had become a U.S. senator, that the two would wed in Newport, Rhode Island,
the most
correct social address at the time. A church ceremony attended by over three thousand guests was followed by a grand,
beau monde
reception at Hammersmith Farm, an estate overlooking Narragansett Bay. JFK may have been twelve years her senior (ages thirty-four and twenty-two at the time they met two years earlier), but Jackie would later say, “I took the choicest bachelor in the Senate.” Few would disagree that by the time JFK was elected president, “Jack and Jackie were America’s royal couple.”
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Below the seventeenth floor, at the main entrance, Larry O’Brien, Kenny O’Donnell, General McHugh, and other members of the Kennedy party are standing in front of the hospital talking. The navy ambulance carrying the president’s body is nearby, with Secret Service agent Bill Greer still in the driver’s seat. Secret Service agent Roy Kellerman has gotten out and gone in to find out where the entrance to the morgue is located.
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After several minutes, Baltimore FBI agents James W. Sibert and Francis X. O’Neill Jr., who had been ordered to accompany the procession from Andrews Air Force Base, witness the autopsy, take custody of any bullets retrieved from the president’s body, and deliver them to the FBI laboratory,
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approach the group of men and ask what the delay is all about. Larry O’Brien says they don’t know where the autopsy room is. The FBI men tell them to follow them around to the rear of the hospital.

When the caravan reaches the morgue entrance, Secret Service agent Roy Kellerman comes out onto the rear loading dock. FBI agents Sibert and O’Neill approach him and identify themselves and their mission.

“Yes, I’ve already been informed,” he tells them and moves down the stairs toward the rear of the ambulance, where Secret Service agent Bill Greer waits. First Lieutenant Samuel R. Bird’s honor guards quickly assemble and help Secret Service and FBI agents pull the casket out of the back of the ambulance and onto a conveyance cart, and shuffle it toward the steps leading to the small landing at the rear door.
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At the base of the stairs, the cart is abandoned and the casket is hand-carried up to the loading-dock entrance.
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Along the way, General McHugh insists on helping to carry the commander in chief into the hospital and relieves one of the casket team members. One end of the casket dips precariously as General McHugh struggles to carry his share of the weight.
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Just inside the loading-dock entrance, the team returns the casket to the cart and wheels it a short distance down the corridor toward a naval attendant holding open a double-door marked “Restricted—Authorized Personnel Only.”

The Bethesda Naval Hospital morgue is stark and spotless. It was newly renovated just four months earlier. They enter an anteroom equipped with eight refrigerated lockers labeled “Remains.” To their right is a swinging-type double-door, with glass panels, that leads to the main room where the autopsies are performed. The tiled autopsy room is lined with equipment specialized for postmortem work: scales, a sterilizer, a washing machine, and a power saw. Situated near the center of the room are two eight-foot-long, stainless-steel autopsy tables, their tops perforated with hundreds of drain holes that feed into pipes set in the floor. Against one wall, on a two-step riser, is a small gallery section that contains a short tier of bleacher-style benches, enough for thirty to forty medical students and young doctors to observe autopsies being performed. This night, the students and young doctors are absent.
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The casket team rolls the casket through the doors into the autopsy room and veers to the left, where they come face-to-face with Drs. Humes and Boswell and several other Bethesda personnel dressed in surgical garb, who direct the team to move the casket next to autopsy table number one.
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Major General Wehle orders his aide, Richard Lipsey, “not to leave the body for any reason,”
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as Lieutenant Sam Bird’s casket team takes up guard duty outside the two entrances to the autopsy room, with the assistance of a detachment of marines.
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5:57 p.m.

Detectives Stovall, Rose, and Adamcik march Michael and Ruth Paine and Marina Oswald and her two small children up to the third floor to Homicide and Robbery’s outer office. They are unaware that Lee Oswald sits a few feet away, behind the closed venetian blinds of Captain Fritz’s private office. It is near bedlam in the homicide office, full of the noise of incoming telephone calls and constant traffic. Within a few minutes, the detectives move them to the Forgery Bureau office next door, to get away from the congestion of homicide.

After getting the Paines and Marina Oswald settled and calling for an interpreter, Detectives Stovall and Rose turn their attention to locating Wesley Frazier. If for no other reason than that he had driven Oswald to work that day and his present whereabouts are unknown, Frazier has become a suspect. Although they’d been told that Frazier was at Parkland Hospital visiting his ailing father, it takes the detectives nearly forty-five minutes to determine that he is actually at the Irving Professional Center, a medical facility. The detectives telephone the Irving Police Department and make arrangements for Frazier to be arrested.
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6:16 p.m.

In the fourth-floor crime lab, Lieutenant Carl Day examines the rifle carefully, looking for fingerprints that the gunman might have left behind. Captain Fritz walks in and tells Day that Marina Oswald has arrived
*
and is downstairs in the Forgery Bureau office.

“I want her to look at the gun and see if she can identify it,” Fritz says. “But there’s an awful mob down there. I don’t want to bring her through that crowd. Can you bring the rifle down there?”