The Day Kennedy Was Shot (23 page)

Now he had the whole sixth floor to himself. He had erected a small enclosure of book cartons, although there was no one to look over them, no one to challenge him. He was alone with his curtain rods, and he and they were about to make history. Never again would he be regarded as a human cipher; a dollar-an-hour
book clerk; a U.S. marine with a dishonorable discharge; a baby whose father had died two months before he saw light; the lonely kid who slept with his mother; the renegade who slashed his wrists in Moscow; the hero who had rescued a Soviet maiden from despotism to earn her contempt in Texas; the non-hero in Russia who hadn't even been asked to broadcast his hatred of the United States of America; the boy who at sixteen told a friend he would like to kill President Dwight D. Eisenhower; the silent, sullen psychotic.

The rifle was across his legs. The man and the rifle made a combination. Neither was quite accurate. The Mannlicher-Carcano Italian military rifle fired a 6.5-millimeter jacketed shell. This one, serial number C2766, had been manufactured and tested at an Italian army plant in Terni. It was twenty-three years old; he was twenty-four. On top of it, the man had bolted a four-power scope. The crosshairs were a bit high—not too much—but a little bit. The gun, when fired, had a tendency to bear slightly to the right. The young man knew this; it was like windage. All he had to do at, say, three hundred feet, was to aim a bit to the left of the target. Not much. A little bit. A foot. No more than two.

Lee Harvey Oswald got up, rifle slung under his right arm, and stood near the window. He did this when he wanted to see behind his position, to look at Houston Street, which crossed between Main and Elm. Below, there was a knot of people around a sergeant's three-wheel motorcycle. A spectator had fainted. The sergeant had called for an ambulance some time ago. The man was lying near the curb. Bubbles were coming from his lips and a spectator had tried to stick his crooked finger down the man's throat. An Oneal ambulance came down Main and stopped. The epileptic was rushed to Parkland Memorial Hospital.

As the ambulance raced down Elm and beneath the triple underpass, some of the spectators at Main and Houston looked
up and saw the blinking red light of Chief Lumpkin's advance car. The motorcade was coming. Policemen began to blow warning whistles. Automobiles were diverted. Traffic was stopped. Citizens were ordered to get back on the curb. The word was passed. A thrill passed through the thin rime of people. Up in the county jail, Willie Mitchell, known to the Dallas deputies as “a colored boy,” pressed his face against the bars in a silent shouldering battle with other prisoners.

They had read in the papers that the motorcade was going to pass here, and some had asked permission to congregate in the big tank on the north side to watch the parade. Mitchell was serving a sentence for driving while intoxicated. He had big eyes and excellent vision. The dark eyes, with a shading of brown in the whites, roamed Dealey Plaza. These were the free people; free to watch; free to ignore; free to roam or stop or say no to somebody. Willie Mitchell, elbowing and being elbowed, kept his hands on the bars and saw the array of citizens on the grass; the pencil line of pedestrians lining Elm Street; the cops pushing cars back and making them disappear against the will of the drivers. Mitchell missed very little.

At the head of Dealey Plaza stood an ornate white memorial pavilion. It was low along the curving edges, around a shallow pool and a fountain. Here, on the Elm Street side, Howard L. Brennan sat. He was forty-five, a good family man, a steamfitter by trade, and a cautious human being who was easily frightened. He had finished his lunch in a nearby cafeteria and had some extra time. Mr. Brennan staked out the low white wall and knew that, when the motorcade came by, he could stand on the wall and look over the people in front.

He was only a few feet from Elm and Houston. Facing him was the front door of the School Book Depository, one hundred and seven feet north. There, had he known them, stood Wesley Buell Frazier, Danny Arce, Billy Lovelady, and, fifteen feet to the left, near the lone V-shaped oak tree, Mr. Roy Truly and
Mr. Ochus Campbell. Farther down, on a slight rise of grassy knoll, stood an elderly manufacturer, Mr. Abraham Zapruder, who was nervously focusing his 8-millimeter zoom lens camera, warning the secretary behind him: “If I back up to you, don't think I'm being fresh.”

Brennan knew none of them. His gaze flitted across the faces and back to the School Book Depository several times. He crossed one leg over the other and studied the fire escape on the Depository. It wasn't much. Then he saw faces at the windows and his eyes conned the floors and the windows, roaming without pattern. On the fifth floor he saw three Negroes leaning out, chatting in the bright sunlight, and laughing. Over them he saw a youngish man at a partly opened window. The man held a rifle.

Brennan saw nothing unusual in this. “He is just sitting there,” Brennan thought, “waiting to see the same thing I'm going to see, the President.” Brennan studied what he could see of the man. He appeared to be sitting. He might be, thought Brennan, in his early thirties, a slender man of perhaps a hundred sixty-five or one hundred seventy pounds. His clothing was light colored but not a suit. The steamfitter noticed that the man with the rifle was on the floor under the top floor, whatever number that might be. Mr. Brennan was a man for looking and minding his own business.

Around the plaza were twenty-two persons with cameras. Ten had motion picture cameras. Six found vantage points halfway down Elm Street, near the grassy knoll. Mary Moorman, with her friend, Mrs. Jean Hill, paced up and down the center triangle of grass, swinging a Polaroid camera. They reminded each other that, with an automatic one-minute developing process, they would be able to shoot one photograph, no more. Miss Moorman would aim the camera and shoot it as the President's automobile went by. Mrs. Hill would yell “Hey!” or something if Mr. and Mrs. Kennedy weren't looking toward the camera. The
two friends had been making photographs ever since the sun came out. But this one would be important.

Mr. and Mrs. Arnold Rowland stood close together on the grass. They were a very young couple; Arnold was eighteen, a high school student. To them, it was an enormous thrill to see the President, to be able to say that they had seen him. The young husband was busy glancing everywhere. He studied the Hertz clock on the roof of the Depository, watched the last freight train inch across the trestle, and saw a man in the Depository with a gun.

“Want to see a Secret Service agent?” he said. Mrs. Rowland, turning, said, “Where?” He pointed. She looked. She was nearsighted. She saw no one. Arnold said he must have stepped back, because he saw a man with a rifle. He said the man appeared to be thirtyish. Arnold knew that there was protection all over the city for the President. It didn't surprise him that there was a Secret Service man up in a window. He even noticed that the man had the rifle sloping across the front of his body, pointing downward toward the left foot. It was bigger than a .22 rifle, Mr. Rowland said. He knew.

Some saw the man in the window. Some did not. Some looked up. Some held transistor radios to their ears. A group stood in front of the statue of Mr. Dealey, looking up Main Street. The motorcade was plainly in view now, because it was coming down a slight grade. The stomachs of some tickled with the approaching vision of the President and the First Lady of the land.

The President was close to the new County Courts Building, a steel skeleton reaching for the sky. Lamar Street, then Austin. Two clerks from the county auditor's office, Ronald Fischer and Robert Edwards, had been given permission to remain out—“at lunch”—until the motorcade passed. They were excited and could hear the approaching phalanx of motorcycles. Edwards elbowed his friend. “Look at that guy there in that
window,” he said pointing. “He's looks like he's uncomfortable.” Fischer looked. The only thing he found interesting about the man in the window was that he appeared to be a statue. He never moved his head or his body.

Fischer thought the man was lying down, facing the window. The man had light, close-cropped hair. He wore an open-neck shirt. As the motorcade came closer, Mr. Brennan glanced up again. He had done this several times, and sometimes he saw the man with the rifle, at other times he wasn't there. This time he looked up and wondered why the man seemed to be crouching in the bottom part of the window. Suddenly, the crowd's attention was diverted to Deputy Chief Lumpkin. His pilot car had paused in front of the Depository, and he warned the policemen working traffic that the motorcade was only two minutes behind him.

Someone, anyone, might have approached the car and asked: “Say, who's the man up there with the gun?” Someone, anyone, could have asked the question—no matter how ridiculous it seemed—of any policeman. The deputy chief left the scene and headed swiftly for the underpass, then up onto Stemmons Freeway for the Trade Mart. He warned Captain Lawrence's men that the President was right behind him and to clear traffic from the freeway.

A few minutes earlier, Mrs. Carolyn Walther, who worked as a cutter in a dress factory, walked to a point opposite the School Book Depository with Mrs. Pearl Springer to watch the parade. Mrs. Walther saw a man at the end window of the fourth or fifth floor. Both his hands were on the ledge and in his right hand he held a rifle, pointed downward. The stranger was staring across Houston, toward the edge of Main, where the parade was expected momentarily. Mrs. Walther was sure that she saw another man “standing” in the same window. Because the window was dirty, she could not see the head of the second man.

Traffic was stopped in the area, and the streets were clear. Commerce Street, with inbound traffic, was still open. A few cars and trucks began to slow down, the drivers hoping to catch a glimpse of the President. The police did nothing about it, so some additional cars stopped in the left lane. James T. Tague's car, half under, half out of the underpass, stopped. He put on his parking brake and cut the switch. He got out. He would spend a few minutes watching, even though he was standing next to the Commerce Street abutment, farthest across Dealey Plaza from the turn at the Depository. A couple of deputy sheriffs and a policeman stood near Mr. Tague. They, too, were watching.

The lead car popped out of the foot of Main Street onto Dealey Plaza as a cork might leave a bottle. Suddenly, there were no dense crowds, no tall buildings, no diffused roar of throats. Chief Curry edged the car well out into the open and turned slowly to his right. He saw a panorama of fountains and green lawn, clusters of friendly faces, and some buildings, old and new, forming a square horseshoe.

The chief squinted through his glasses and caught sight of the President's car coming down Main directly behind him. The motorcade was over. One more block along the foot of the horseshoe to the right on Houston, then a slow left onto Elm, and a downhill run to the underpass. Curry could afford to breathe easily. There had been no incidents of disrespect to the President. To the contrary, staid old Dallas with its ironclad politics had taken the Kennedys to its heart. The chief could not recall any political event in Big D which matched the hospitality of this one.

Forrest V. Sorrels sat in the back seat on the right-hand side. His job was to study crowds and buildings. The Secret Service agent needed a convertible to do his work correctly. From Love Field onward, he had been straining, swinging, gawking, stick
ing his head out of the open window in an effort to look up at windows. He sat on the edge of the back seat, and he saw the knot of people to the left, around the statue of Mr. Dealey, then the head swung to the right, along the sidewalk of Houston. No unusual activity anyplace.

He glanced up and down the sides of buildings, moving farther and farther ahead until he spotted the last edifice on this trip. His eyes fanned the old red brick façade of the Texas School Book Depository. Sorrels saw some Negroes leaning out of an upper window. No unusual activity there. The eyes moved up to the roof. A Hertz Rent-a-Car sign indicated 12:29
P.M.
in electric lights which could barely fight the sun. Then quickly down to the people ahead who lined Elm Street, and Sorrels saw nothing untoward.

Not many, even in the plaza, noticed the group of girls squealing with anticipation on the fourth floor of the School Book Depository. They clasped and unclasped their hands with delight as the lead car approached. The office belonged to Vickie Adams. She had invited her friends, Sandra Styles, Elsie Dorman, and Dorothy May Garner to watch with her. The girls were thrilled because of the exceptional view, looking downward into the car, and the possibility of seeing the youthful, attractive First Lady and what she was wearing. The girls were prepared to discuss Mrs. Kennedy's shoes, gloves, hat, coiffure, even the roses.

The big Lincoln swept out into the top of the plaza, sunbeams spangling off the fenders and sides. From Elm to Commerce, from the old courthouse to the overpass, attention was on that automobile. Greer was down to eleven miles an hour and he made the turn wide, into the center of Houston. Kellerman, at his side, glanced from side to side, noticing the sudden thinness of numbers, and looked ahead to the Depository. The car could have gone straight down Main, which would have kept it in the middle of the plaza, but it could not have made
the turn up onto Stemmons Freeway without inching over an eight-inch concrete curb that separated Main from Elm. It was easier to turn right to Elm, and go under the trestle and up onto Stemmons Freeway.

In the jump seats, the Connallys maintained the crystal smiles to left and right. Mrs. Kennedy, looking left and finding few people, was waving to the right side. So was her husband. He did not know where he was in Dallas, but he knew that the motorcade was at an end, that this was a small thread on the edge of an impressive piece of fabric. He maintained the shiny smile and ran his left hand back across the thick brown hair. The eyes were sailor's eyes, cracked in Vs along the edges. He must have seen the old gray turreted courthouse on his left as Greer made the turn, and he could not have avoided seeing the faded old Depository above the windshield.