Reclaiming History (55 page)

“Come on down,” Bowie advises him.

By the time Robert walks the many blocks down to the DA’s office, located in the same building as the sheriff’s office, Wade has arrived and asks Robert to come right in. They talk for an hour, mostly in generalities, but also about the likely date of Lee’s trial. Henry Wade assures Robert that Lee will be tried in a state court, for a reason Robert finds really odd—something about there being no federal law prohibiting the killing of a president.

Wade wonders when Robert had last seen his brother. Robert says that it was about a year ago, at his home in Fort Worth.

“What can you tell me about him?” Wade asks.

Robert tells him a bit about his brother’s defection to Russia and other general information. The district attorney decides to play cop for a moment.

“Now, let’s see, you last saw Lee…” Wade repeats, casually, much of what Robert has just told him, but purposely gets some of the details wrong. The ruse is pretty transparent to Robert, who finds Wade’s attempt at trickery to be fairly amusing. He just smiles at Wade, who grins broadly at having been caught. The DA leans back in his leather chair and chats amicably about subjects other than the assassination. Robert begins to realize that Wade is just a plain politician who, after a blundered effort to trick him, now only wants to make sure he leaves with a favorable impression.
¹⁰⁷²

“I was wondering, Mr. Wade,” Roberts finally asks, “if you could arrange for Marina, my mother, and myself to see Lee today?”

“I don’t see why not,” Wade tells him, and telephones Captain Fritz, who tells him that arrangements have already been made for all of them to see Oswald at noon. Wade relays the information to Robert.
¹⁰⁷³

“You appear to be a good citizen,” Wade tells him, “and I think you will render your country a great service if you will go up and tell Lee to tell us all about this thing. The evidence is very strong against your brother in the assassination,” Wade adds cautiously.

“What do you think about it?”

“Well, he is my brother,” Robert says, “and I hate to think he would do this. I want to talk to him and ask him about it.”

Robert is curious about the shooting of the police officer. Wade tells him that there are several eyewitnesses to the crime, and their accounts have convinced the DA of Lee’s guilt on that murder too.
¹⁰⁷⁴

The two men rise and shake hands. Wade warns him that reporters are waiting outside.

“I won’t have anything to say,” Robert says and walks out.

Wade steps to the window and looks out front to see Robert Oswald push through the throng of pesky newsmen and walk off, without a word. The district attorney is impressed by the young man from Denton.
¹⁰⁷⁵

A
t the compound of the Kennedy family in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, the family decides that as frail as the patriarch of the family, Joe Kennedy Sr., is from his massive stroke on a Palm Beach golf course in 1961, which left him partially paralyzed on the right side and no longer able to speak, they could no longer keep the truth from him. His wife, Rose, had learned the previous day over television of the shooting in Dallas even before her son Bobby had telephoned her. Tragedy was no stranger to Rose, having already lost a son and daughter in air crashes, but she quietly sank into a chair, trembling. She then went down to the lawn by the sea, where she strode back and forth for the rest of the afternoon. Now, the late president’s youngest brother, Ted, tells his father that “there’s been a bad accident. The president has been hurt very badly.” Though the stroke had also caused aphasia in the old man—an impairment in the ability to understand the spoken or written word—his head snaps back and he stares directly into his son’s eyes. “As a matter of fact,” Ted says to his father, “he died.” The elder Kennedy, as tough an Irishman as they come, immediately starts to sob. Ted and his sister Eunice try to comfort him, but it is unavailing. Even a sedative administered to him doesn’t seem to alleviate the emotional response.

The next day, Rose, her daughter Eunice Shriver, and her son Teddy will board a plane,
The Caroline
, at the Hyannis Port airport for the trip to Washington, D.C., for Monday’s funeral. Joseph Kennedy will remain behind in the care of his niece, Ann Gargan, and a trained nurse, Rita Dallas. Both have been with him since his stroke.
¹⁰⁷⁶

10:10 a.m.

Shortly before Oswald was brought down from the fifth-floor jail for interrogation, Chief Curry was stopped by reporters as he made his way down the third-floor corridor toward his office.

“What evidence has been uncovered so far, Chief?”

“I wouldn’t want to elaborate on all the evidence that has been uncovered,” Curry says hesitantly.

“How would you describe his mood during the questioning?”

“Very arrogant,” Curry snaps back. “Has been all along.”

“What does he still say, Chief?”

“He just denies everything,” Curry says.

“Does he say anything else?” a reporter asks, hoping for more details.

“Not too much,” Curry answers, looking for words, then admits, “I don’t know. I haven’t personally been interrogating him.”
¹⁰⁷⁷

“Is there any doubt in your mind, Chief, that Oswald is the man who killed the president?”

“I think this is the man who killed the president, yes,” Curry says firmly.

“Chief, could you tell us what you might have found in his rooming house in the way of literature or any papers connecting him—?”

“We found a great, great amount of Communist literature, Communist books,” Curry replies. “I couldn’t tell you just what all of it was, but it was a large box.”

“Chief, we understand you’ve had the results of the paraffin tests which were made to determine whether Oswald had fired a weapon. Can you tell us what those tests showed?”

“I understand that it was positive,” Curry tells them.

“But, what does that mean?”

“It only means that he fired a gun,” Curry says.
¹⁰⁷⁸

“Chief, is there any plan for a reenactment of the crime? To take him to the scene or to do anything in that respect?”

“No.”

“Is there any evidence that anyone else may have been linked with Oswald to this shooting?”

“At this time, we don’t believe so,” Curry answers. “We are talking to a man [Joe Molina] that works in the same building that we have in our subversive files and we are talking to him but he denies any knowledge of it.”

One reporter wants to know how Oswald covered the distance between the Depository and the Tippit shooting scene in Oak Cliff. “I don’t know,” Curry says. “We have heard that he was picked up by a Negro in a car.”
*

“That is not confirmed?”

“No, it is not confirmed, as far as I know,” Curry replies.

“Have you been able to trace the rifle? Do you know where it was purchased?”

“No,” Curry says, “we are attempting to do that at this time.”

“With this man’s apparent subversive background,
was there any surveillance
? Were police aware of his presence in
Dallas
?”

“We in the police department here did not know he was in Dallas. I understand that the FBI did know he was in Dallas,” Curry replies, the thought of Lieutenant Jack Revill’s memo fresh in his mind.

“Is it normally the practice of the FBI to inform the police?”

“Yes,” Curry says curtly.

“But you were not informed?”

“We had not been informed of this man,” Curry reiterates.
¹⁰⁷⁹

I
t doesn’t take long for FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to get wind of Curry’s statements to the press and become livid. Hoover calls Dallas FBI special agent-in-charge Gordon Shanklin and orders him to call Chief Curry and tell him to retract his statement about the FBI having prior knowledge of Oswald being in Dallas.

“The FBI is extremely desirous that you retract your statement to the press,” Shanklin tells Curry over the phone, assuring him that what he said could suggest that the FBI had interviewed Oswald in Dallas and had him under surveillance, neither of which was true, he assured Curry.
¹⁰⁸⁰

Curry agrees to make a retraction and orders Lieutenant Jack Revill to remain silent about the matter as well.
¹⁰⁸¹

L
ieutenant T. L. Baker answers the telephone jangling at his desk in Homicide and Robbery. The caller is one of the supervisors at City Transportation Company, a taxi service. He’s calling to report that one of his drivers, William W. Whaley, came in this morning and said that he had recognized Oswald’s picture in the morning newspaper and believed he was the same man he drove out to North Beckley in Oak Cliff yesterday afternoon. Baker informs Captain Fritz, who instructs him to bring Whaley and the cabdriver who was a witness to the Tippit shooting, William Scoggins, to police headquarters to view Oswald in a lineup.
¹⁰⁸²

In the meantime, Fritz asks his detectives to bring Oswald down to his office for further questioning.

10:20 a.m. (11:20 a.m. EST)

The FBI sends another Teletype to all of its field offices:

Lee Harvey Oswald has been developed as the principal suspect in the assassination of President Kennedy. He has been formally charged with the President’s murder along with the murder of Dallas Texas patrolman J.D. Tippet [
sic
] by Texas state authorities…All offices should [continue] normal contacts with informants and other sources with respect to bombing suspects, hate group members and known racial extremists. Daily teletype summaries may be discontinued. All investigation bearing directly on the President’s assassination should be afforded most expeditious handling and Bureau and Dallas advised.
¹⁰⁸³

In Washington, D.C., even the weather appears to have taken respectful cognizance of the tragedy that has befallen the nation’s capital more than any other American city. Rain falls slowly from a bleak, overcast sky through most of the day. A shaken capital tries to piece together a new mosaic of national rule “to replace the one shattered by an assassin’s bullet 24 hours before.” President Johnson, the eighth vice president to be elevated because of the death of a president, has taken over the machinery of government amid pledges of support from leaders of both parties as well as from leaders throughout the civilized world. He holds his first cabinet meeting, with Attorney General Robert Kennedy present
*
and asks all members to continue to serve under him.
†
Later in the day, he receives former presidents Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower in the Oval Office. Though the Kennedy family has requested of the public that no flowers be sent, encouraging people to contribute instead to their favorite charity, bouquets of flowers arrive throughout the day and are accepted by the White House guard.

At midmorning in the East Room of the White House, where the fallen President and First Lady had once presided over their famous, glittering White House affairs and danced gaily with their friends, seventy-five intimates and relatives of the Kennedy family attend a private mass with Mrs. Kennedy and her two children said by the Reverend John J. Cavanaugh, the former president of the University of Notre Dame and a longtime friend of the family. It is believed to be the first Roman Catholic mass ever said in the White House. (Almost concurrently, in New York City, where the day is also bleak and overcast, twenty-five hundred mourners crowd into the twenty-three-hundred-seat Saint Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue for a pontifical requiem mass in which 250 clergymen take part.) After the mass, a procession of government leaders begins to file into and out of the East Room, where the president’s body lies in a flag-draped coffin.

“The medium of television,” the
New York Times
observed, “which played such a major part in the career of President Kennedy, is the instrument that is making the tragedy of his death such a deeply personal experience in millions of homes over this long weekend. In hushed living rooms everywhere, the uninterrupted coverage provided by the three national networks and their affiliated stations is holding families indoors to share in history’s grim unfolding, the home screen for the first time fulfilling the heart-rending function of giving a new dimension to grief.”
*

In countries throughout the world there is mourning.
†
“From Madrid to Manila churches filled and American embassies were thronged with people who wanted to sign memorial books.” American viewers see downcast crowds gathering outside the American embassy in London, where the twelve bells of St. Paul’s Cathedral announce the national memorial service there. More than ten thousand Poles line up eight abreast to sign the book of condolences at the U.S. embassy in Warsaw. In Berlin, Mayor Willy Brandt asks his people to light candles in their darkened windows. Within minutes, candles are flickering throughout the city. “We all feel somewhat left alone,” Brandt said. Radio Moscow broadcasts a concert of memorial dirges. In Tokyo Bay, Japanese fishing boats, flags at half-mast, drift alongside U.S. warships. Buddhist monks offer prayers in front of black crepe–draped images of President Kennedy. In Paris, French men and women gather solemnly around outdoor radios, their tears hidden by the pouring rain. In Kenya, weeping Kipsigis warriors in ceremonial feathers and body paint listen as their leader extols the virtues of the murdered president. America learns just how many people around the world considered John F. Kennedy
their
president too.

World leaders also weigh in. England’s prime minister, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, notes that John Kennedy left “an indelible mark on the entire world. There are times in life when the mind and heart stand still, and one such is now.” Premier Khrushchev appears at the American embassy in Moscow to pay his respects, lamenting the blow the president’s death has dealt Soviet-American relations. Unable to travel to Washington because of illness, Italian president Antonio Segni, attending a mass in Rome, openly sobs. The words of a “profoundly saddened” Pope Paul VI to a crowd of thirty thousand gathered in St. Peter’s Square in Rome are relayed around the world by satellite. The pope expresses his hope that “the death of this great statesman may not damage the cause of the American people, but rather reinforce it.” Nineteen chiefs of state and three reigning monarchs let it be known that they will attend the president’s funeral on Monday, among them France’s General Charles de Gaulle.