Reclaiming History (77 page)

After running through the list of evidence, Wade fields questions from the reporters.

“Do you know whether Oswald’s been recognized as a patron of Ruby’s nightclub here?” a reporter asks.

“I don’t know that,” Wade replies.

“Do you know of any connection between Mr. Ruby and—?”

“I know of none,” Wade shoots back.

“Are you investigating reports that [Oswald] might have been slain because Ruby might have feared he would implicate him in something?”

“The police are making an investigation of that murder,” Wade says. “I don’t know anything about that. Although charges have been filed, it will be presented to the grand jury on Ruby immediately within the next week and it’ll probably be tried around the middle of January.”

“Has the district attorney’s office closed its investigation of the assassination of the president?”

“No, sir,” Wade replies. “The investigation will continue on…with reference to any possible accomplice or—that assisted him in it.”

“Do you have any suspicions now that there were?” someone asks.

“I have no concrete evidence nor suspicions at present,” Wade says.

“Would you be willing to say in view of all this evidence that it is now beyond a reasonable doubt at all that Oswald was the killer of President Kennedy?”

“I would say that without any doubt he’s the killer,” Wade answers firmly.

“That case is closed in your mind?” a reporter asks.

“As far as Oswald is concerned, yes,” Wade tells them, asserting the very thing that angered Wade when a national television commentator accused Wade of saying it.

“What do you think Oswald’s motive was?” someone asks.

“Don’t—can’t answer that,” Wade says.

“How would you evaluate the work of the Dallas police in investigating the death of the president?” a reporter asks.

“I think the Dallas police did an excellent job on this,” Wade replies, “and before midnight on [the day Kennedy] was killed had the man in custody and had sufficient evidence to convict him.”

“Is there any doubt in your mind that if Oswald was tried that you would have him convicted by a jury? With the evidence you have?”

“I don’t think there’s any doubt in my mind that we would have convicted him,” Wade replies. “But, of course, you never know what—we’ve had lots of people we thought—but somebody might hang the jury or something, but there’s no question in my—”

“As far as you are concerned,” a reporter interrupts, “the evidence you gave us, you could have convicted him?”

“I’ve sent people to the electric chair on less,” Wade replies.

Speaking of the electric chair, a reporter wants to know if Wade will also seek the death penalty against Ruby. Wade says, “Yes.”
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By the time the district attorney gets back to the third-floor police administrative offices, there is a phone call from an FBI inspector, asking him, “Please don’t say anything more about the case.”
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9:45 p.m.

Robert Oswald finds that getting his brother’s body released from the morgue for burial turns out to be more difficult than it sounds. Parkland Hospital refuses to release the body merely on the basis of a phone call, even from a Secret Service agent. Eventually a procedure is worked out. Parkland will give a message to the Dallas police with a secret password. The police will pass it on to the Secret Service at the Six Flags motel. They will tell Robert, and Robert will call the hospital, saying only the password to the person who answers. When the time comes, Robert places the call to Parkland. Administrator Bob Struwe answers the phone.

“Malcolm,” Robert says.

“All right,” Struwe replies and hangs up.

The password was the first name of one of the emergency room surgeons, Malcolm Perry, who tried so hard to save the lives of both Jack Kennedy and Lee Oswald.
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A
ll through the night, the three national TV networks silently cover the endless procession of mourners past the president’s bier, only making periodic observations, such as that the music in the background in the rotunda is Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, second movement—a dirge; of the changing of the guard every half hour; of Washington police announcing that mourners were still lined up for three miles, five abreast; the temperature dipping to thirty-two degrees, freezing, at 3:15 a.m. EST; Jersey Joe Wolcott, former heavyweight champion of the world, filing past the coffin; and so on.
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The president’s body would lie in state for eighteen hours. By the time the viewing in the rotunda is over at nine Monday morning, a quarter of a million mourners have filed silently past the body of the fallen president, and five thousand have been turned away. At the tail end of the line allowed in before the rotunda was closed were a group of nuns, who had been waiting since 1:00 a.m.
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Monday, November 25

8:30 a.m.

Robert Oswald has been up for two hours in his two-room suite at the Inn of the Six Flags. He telephones Paul J. Groody, funeral director at the Miller Funeral Home, and learns that Laurel Land Cemetery on Old Crowley Road in Fort Worth will hold the burial service. Groody admits, though, that he is having a hard time locating a minister to give the service. Robert can only shake his head in disgust and says he’ll start telephoning ministers in the Dallas–Fort Worth area to find one to conduct the burial services. They both agree to set the funeral for four o’clock that afternoon.

Marguerite Oswald pounces on the photograph of Jack Ruby in the morning newspaper, her first glimpse of the man who killed her son. She brings it to Robert. “This,” she whispers to him dramatically, “is the same man the FBI showed me a picture of Saturday night” (referring to the man outside the Russian embassy in Mexico City).

“All right, Mother,” he barks. “If that’s so, don’t tell me. Tell the Secret Service man right over there.”

Robert is offended, impatient. He has had a lifetime of his mother’s cunning conspiracies, all of them somehow designed to prevent Marguerite from being recognized as the pivotal figure she has always imagined herself to be. If the FBI had really showed Marguerite a photo of Jack Ruby before Ruby shot Lee, Robert is certain that the Secret Service agents will report the episode to the proper authorities. Right now, he doesn’t want to hear any more about it.

Robert begins telephoning ministers in the Dallas–Fort Worth area. He is absolutely astonished at the reactions of the ministers he speaks to. One after another flatly refuses to even consider his request to have someone officiate at his brother’s funeral. One minister, a prominent member of the Greater Dallas Council of Churches, says sharply, “No, we just can’t do that.”

“Why not?” Robert asks.

“We just can’t go along with what you have in mind.”

Robert has only the simplest possible funeral service in mind and can’t understand what the minister means. Then he hears the minister say, “Your brother was a sinner.”

Robert hangs up and breaks down.

Robert Oswald is still making phone call after phone call into the late morning to find a clergyman when Marina tells him she wants to watch the funeral service for President Kennedy. Robert switches the television on. As they wait for the sound to come on, one of the Secret Service agents says, “Robert, I don’t think you all should watch this.” He leans down to switch it off.

“No,” Marina says firmly. “I watch.”

As they watch the funeral services in Washington, a call comes in for Robert. It is Chaplain Pepper, from Parkland Hospital, asking whether all the funeral arrangements have been taken care of. Robert tells him about the reactions he’s been getting from the ministers in the area.

“It seems to me that there are a lot of hypocrites around,” Robert tells him. “After all, can the assassination be the act of a sane man?”

“Maybe I can convince some of the ministers by raising that question,” the chaplain says. “They surely would agree that you can’t hold an insane person responsible for his acts.”
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9:23 a.m. (10:23 a.m. EST)

In Washington, D.C., the weather, milder than yesterday, is still raw and wintry with whipping winds. But the day is crystal clear, with deep and hard-edged shadows. Six limousines wait in the White House driveway to convey the Kennedy family to the Capitol rotunda. Jackie Kennedy appears first, quickly followed by Pat Lawford, Bobby, Teddy, Eunice Shriver, and other Kennedy in-laws and children. The late president’s children, Caroline and John-John, are notably absent—their mother is sending them on ahead to St. Matthew’s Cathedral, where she will meet them for the Low Pontifical Mass. She has planned to spare the children the trip to the cemetery as well.

It takes thirteen minutes for the motorcade procession to reach the Capitol plaza, where Jackie and the president’s brothers once again climb the broad, imposing flight of steps to the rotunda. They kneel briefly at the coffin, back away, and leave, reentering their limousine for the trip back to the White House.

It takes another seven minutes for the military pallbearers to remove the flag-draped casket from the rotunda and place it on the caisson that will bear it down Constitution Avenue and then Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House and then to St. Matthew’s on Rhode Island Avenue, N.W. The huge crowds lining the streets are so quiet that the clop of hooves, the grating of the caisson’s iron tires on the pavement, and the mournful tolling of the bell at nearby St. John’s Episcopal Church are easily heard on the radio and television broadcasts being listened to and seen by a global audience.

It is now a full military funeral procession, including the Marine Band—called “the President’s Own”—and crack drill units from all four academies, army, naval, air force, and coast guard, and it takes about three-quarters of an hour for the slow-moving cortege to reach the front of the White House.
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The funeral procession stops in front of the White House around 11:35 a.m. EST, where the Kennedy family leaves its limousines and joins the ranks of foreign heads of state, reigning monarchs, and dignitaries who had gathered in front of the White House. After several minutes, the procession sets out on foot, with Mrs. Kennedy, the first First Lady ever to walk in her husband’s funeral procession, and the slain president’s two brothers on each side of her, leading the way on the long eight-block march to St. Matthew’s Cathedral.

It’s a bodyguard’s nightmare. Walking bareheaded, in plain view of any potential sniper, are twenty-two presidents, ten prime ministers, and much of the world’s remaining royalty—kings, queens, princes, and emperors. There are more than two hundred officials from a hundred countries, the United Nations, other international organizations, and the Roman Catholic Church. An estimated one million people line the funeral procession route.
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The Secret Service, seeing the obvious danger, urges the president to ride to the funeral in a bulletproof car, and Johnson considers it for a moment, but refuses. He and Lady Bird walk along right behind the Kennedys, trailed by the color guard with the presidential flag.
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The great phalanx of luminaries marches straight into the lens of the television camera, the front line dominated by the towering figure of General Charles de Gaulle.
*
Queen Frederika of Greece is remarkable as the only woman dignitary visible.
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They set out to the skirl of pipes played by the band of the Royal Highland Black Watch Regiment, which interrupted an American concert tour to appear at the funeral, at Jackie’s behest. Just twelve days earlier the renowned pipers had played on the White House south lawn for the Kennedy children and seventeen hundred other children, and the president put aside his own duties to view their performance. It would be the last public appearance of the presidential family together.
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Shoulders erect and her eyes straight ahead, Jackie Kennedy, as one observer noted, bearing her grief “like a brave flag,” walked with a poise and grace as regal as any king or queen who followed her. Indeed, the
London Evening Standard
was moved to say extravagantly, “Jacqueline Kennedy has given the American people from this day on the one thing they have always lacked—majesty.” UPI’s Helen Thomas said, more soberly, that Mrs. Kennedy had “hidden tears and kept a decorum that few women could under such circumstances.”
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Arriving at the cathedral just before noon (EST) the family is greeted by Richard Cardinal Cushing, an old and beloved friend, who comes out to meet them. Cushing, the archbishop of Boston, had married John and Jacqueline, christened their two children, and only last August buried their infant son, Patrick Bouvier Kennedy, who died thirty-nine hours after his birth. He bends to the two children, kissing Caroline and patting John-John on the head, then puts a comforting arm around Mrs. Kennedy’s shoulder.
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As the military pallbearers, who seem to be carrying the weight of the world, struggle up the steps of St. Matthew’s, the familiar voices of the television commentators are drenched in emotion.
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By far the largest television audience in history, perhaps even to this day, had been watching the historic events unfold. In America alone, an estimated 93 percent of all sets, and 175 million people, were transfixed by the images on the screen, and Relay, a U.S. communications satellite orbiting the globe, brought segments of the events into the homes of twenty-three other countries; for the citizens of Russia, it was the first time they had ever been permitted to watch live television from abroad. The apex of the viewing audience seemed to be the funeral.
National Geographic
magazine, with representation worldwide, captioned a portion of their 1964 article, “World Stops at Moment of Funeral.” The magazine reported that “for the next few minutes [referring to the casket being brought from the limousine to the cathedral portico], whatever the hour in other lands, countless millions of the earth’s people paused to honor the dead President…Across our nation trains stopped. Jets halted on airport runways. The Panama Canal suspended operations. Motorists paused in New York’s Times Square. Evening traffic halted in Athens, Greece. Around the world flags stood at half-mast.”
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