The Day Kennedy Was Shot (52 page)

Robert Sargent Shriver, Jr., handsome wavy-haired head of the Peace Corps, was the ranking officer. His wife was Eunice Kennedy, sister of John F. Kennedy. He had walked into the White House, selected a sizable office, and begun to recruit assistants. At the time, the government of the country was being directed by assistant secretaries and undersecretaries of the several ministries and it would limp along sans decisions until the new President reached the White House and began the true assumption of power. However, in the matter of a funeral, Sargent Shriver could and did make decisions all afternoon and evening.

The room in which he sat had the trappings of a dispatcher's office. Men came and went; no one seemed to stay for more than a moment. The commands were enunciated; the arguments were given brief ear; the alternatives were examined. At one time or another, Ted Sorensen, Kennedy's myopic speech writer, was present; McGeorge Bundy, who was handling the Situation Room in the basement, appeared and departed; Jerry Behn, Secret Service agent in charge of the White House, helped in whatever way he could; Ted Reardon, Kennedy politician, volunteered; so did Walter Jenkins, a Johnson assistant; old Averell Harriman, the elder ambassador; Dick Goodwin, writer; Cap
tain Taz Shepard, the president's Navy aide; a priest from St. Matthew's Procathedral; numerous dragooned public relations men from several bureaus; and Lieutenant-Colonel Paul Miller, the U.S. Army's chief of ceremonial affairs. In addition, stenographers trotted in and out with phone calls to make, messages to type or deliver orally. The curving white hallway, with its Secret Service agents and White House police, was jammed with men who thought of this matter or that in connection with the impending funeral and who had to see Shriver about it at once.

Some men were there merely to keep other men out. The area generated an enthusiasm akin to a campaign. Words, ideas, suggestions, and questions flowed and ebbed through the room as though history was being made here and the participants wanted it to be flawless. It was possible that Mrs. Kennedy might desire to bury her husband in Brookline, Massachusetts, beside their infant son Patrick Bouvier Kennedy. This was the most likely choice. And yet Shriver thought of the National Cemetery at Arlington and phoned Superintendent John Metzler to resolve some of the difficulties attendant on such a matter.

Roman Catholics are admonished to be interred in consecrated ground. Shriver had to know whether Arlington could be considered such. Mr. Metzler said it could. How about children? Could they be buried with their parents? Yes. Would there be any objection to the interment of a President there? Had the matter ever come up before? No. Yes. Was suitable space available in case the family made a decision in favor of Arlington? Yes, there was. In fact, the men who administered the cemetery were prepared to offer a three-acre plot for John F. Kennedy. As a serviceman, even as a President, Kennedy was not entitled to such a large allotment of space, but this was not a time for anyone to be rational.

Colonel Miller told Shriver that a private funeral home would be necessary to prepare the remains. Everyone within earshot bristled. The colonel said that the military could not
embalm and dress the body. It would have to be done by the family. This led to a discussion of Washington funeral homes. A firm decision was made to try Gawler's. Someone phoned Bethesda and the Navy hospital agreed to embalm Kennedy but could not dress him. Colonel Miller alerted Gawler's. A moment later, someone said that Bethesda could do the whole job. Shriver ordered the other arrangements canceled. All hands listened, and no one did it.

Miller also ordered a funeral detachment of ceremonial soldiers to report to Gawler's at once and commence rehearsing the Deathwatch. In the press room, second-stringers from the newspapers asked what was going on, and there was no one to keep them informed. Some were filing stories that the body was coming directly to the White House by helicopter; some followed the lead of the National Broadcasting Company, which announced solemnly that Kennedy would be buried in Massachusetts.

McGeorge Bundy ordered an assortment of top-priority filing cabinets emptied and locked. He sealed them in the name of President Lyndon Baines Johnson and thrust the keys into his pocket. The tall, spare figure of Angier Biddle Duke, chief of protocol, was almost grafted to a telephone as the embassies of many nations phoned and asked the proper means of expressing condolences, whether it was possible to pay respects at Andrews Air Force Base, should the minister wear mourning clothes, and who would greet him. It was necessary to find a large silver tray for the State Department, so that
cartes de visite
could be dropped.

The atmosphere was not mournful. The White House had no time for tears. Dozens of men of governmental second, third, and fourth rank hurried into the office with terse questions, listened to the battle orders, and rushed out to execute them. The chief had fallen on his shield. America was going to see a funeral designed to scar the conscience of every citizen.

In the Fish Room, a small radio was on and a few secretaries listened to NBC's McGee announce: “At no time has Mrs. Jac
queline Kennedy lost her composure, although her clothes were spattered with President Kennedy's blood.”

The elevator was slow. It slid upward with Oswald and his guards as though their weight was overwhelming. The operator sat behind heavy wire mesh in a private prison. At the fifth floor, the door opened and the prisoner was taken to a counter at the left. A clerk and a policeman stood behind it. They were casual. Lee Harvey Oswald was asked to empty his pockets. A detective said that his pockets had been emptied twice.

The handcuffs were removed. The prisoner rubbed his wrists. He talked softly to one detective as though this man was a solitary exception to the enmity of the world. Oswald spoke briefly about his wife. He had two children; how many did the detective have? He did not feel abused because the policeman in the theatre punched him in the eye. After all, Oswald had lashed out first. He had no objection to anything except the damned questions about a dead policeman and President Kennedy. The suspect felt that the Dallas Police Department should start looking elsewhere for guilt. The FBI men didn't like him.

There was an exchange about life in Minsk, Russia. Oswald assured the officer that the Soviet Union, while severely disciplined, was better than most people would believe. The detective decided to capitalize on the friendly attitude. Did Oswald have a rifle in Russia? No, he didn't. There is a law in Russia that rifles and revolvers cannot be sold or bought. He had purchased a shotgun, which is permissible, but he found only small game in the forests around Minsk, and the weather was too cold for hunting.

The man behind the counter asked one of the detectives to go back down to Robbery and Homicide and fetch the items taken from the prisoner. They had to be placed in an envelope and signed for. Deputy Chief Lumpkin phoned to the fifth-floor jail and ordered Oswald placed in maximum security cell F-2
with two guards on duty twenty-four hours a day. A policeman frisked Oswald once more and said laconically: “No necktie. No shoelaces.” The belt was taken from him.

The sergeant behind the counter glanced at Oswald. “Okay, son,” he said. “Let's have the clothes.” Oswald looked to his detective for help. “What clothes?” he said. The man leaned over the counter patiently. “Are you wearing underwear?” he said. Yes, he was. “Shorts; no undershirt.” “O.K. Everything comes off but the shorts and socks.” Lee Harvey Oswald began to retreat into one of his belligerent I-know-my-rights attitudes. “I don't have to undress.”

The officer shrugged. “How is it going to be—the easy way or the hard way?” Oswald began to unbutton his shirt. “They told me I can use a phone,” he said. The clerk pointed behind Oswald. “It's around that corner,” he said. “Two men are using the phones now.” Oswald removed his shoes and trousers. He could see two men behind glass, with the door locked, using the phones. One man had stretched the receiver so that he could lie on the floor and talk. A guard stood outside the booth with the key to the door. The Dallas Police Department had a sense of honor. It never tapped this line.

The clothing was shoved into a large paper bag. “When they want you downstairs again,” the clerk said, “you just come out here and pick up your duds.” Lee Harvey Oswald stood quietly in shorts and socks. The socks were falling down. The prison was warm, but the act of degradation was not lost on Lee Harvey Oswald. The brownish hair was wispy. The angry face tapered to a chinless point. The neck was long with a lumpy Adam's apple. The shoulders were polished knobs. The arms and wrists were well muscled. The belly was flat and hard. As a human he was, for a moment, as insignificant as John F. Kennedy under a hospital sheet.

The guard took him by the arm and led him back toward the elevator and past it and across a broken concrete floor. “I
want a lawyer,” the prisoner said. “I know my rights.” The guard nodded. They walked through a heavily barred door. They were now in a narrow alley with a wall on the right and three prison cells on the left.

The first two were empty and open. In the third, a Negro was head down on a bunk. Oswald was herded into the second cell.
^*
The door clanged behind him. He examined the square space which was now his, and the perpetual pout returned to his pursed mouth. There were four bunks, two on each side of the door. The lower ones were wooden and partly bare of paint. The upper ones had springs and skimpy mattresses. Across the top of the cell there were bars. Above them he could see the ceiling, lumpy with coats of pale paint.

Four light bulbs, screened by wire, lit the little alley. In the back of the cell, a porcelain sink with chipped sides entertained the steady drip of one faucet. Near it a sloping hole in the floor was ready for functions of the body. There was no flushing system, no bucket for water. Oswald looked around. His steady eyes fell on the Negro in the next cell. The head had not lifted. He must have heard the exchange of words as Oswald was brought into the maximum security area. And yet, whatever crime they had pinned on him, whatever despondency had been induced by stripping him to his underwear and putting him in here, he would not raise his head to look.

Oswald glanced out into the alley. At one end, an officer sat in a round-backed chair with his arms folded across his chest. His eyes were on the vertical prisoner. At the other end of the alley, only eight or nine steps away, another man sat. The eyes fastened themselves onto the prisoner's skin. “How about that phone?” Oswald said in his aggrieved tone. The man at the far end of the alley did not move. His lips said, “Soon as we get the
word.” “I want New York,” the thin body said. The policeman seemed to have an allergy to conversation. He took his time. “In a little while,” he said.

The dialogue ended. He knew and they knew that he would be brought downstairs for more interrogation. The next time he was guided through the press, he would have sense enough to make a
cause celebre
out of the matter of legal counsel. All he would have to do is to tell the world that he was being denied the right to an attorney of his choice. It would put the police department on the defensive. Not that a lawyer could alter matters for Oswald on this particular day; Texas law would not permit bail in a capital case. The lawyer would be of little assistance in the matter of interrogation because Oswald's attitude was that he could do well by himself. He responded to the questions which he felt were innocuous; he roared defiance and lapsed into sullen silence when the questions became dangerous.

A lawyer might press the district attorney's office either to file a charge against Oswald or to admit that it did not have sufficient evidence to hold him. He had not been booked for any crime, nor had he been charged with being an accomplice, a conspirator, or a material witness. He did not know that Helen Markham had been behind that screen a short time back. No one told him that, with her affidavit, they could hold him in the murder of Officer Tippit. The evidence was far from overwhelming but it was sufficient.

For Oswald, the real hurt was in being silenced. Here he could shout and no voice would respond. For a little while, he had been a celebrity, a curiosity worthy of the attention of ranking police officers, Federal Bureau of Investigation agents, and Secret Service men. His was a face on television. How could anyone look at Kennedy without also seeing the unknown who was charged with bringing him down? He was, in every sense, a figure of history. As an omnivorous reader, Lee Harvey Oswald
was aware of this, and it may have been responsible for whatever exalted feelings he had. Guilty or not guilty, the name of Oswald would not die.

The two policemen had lazy eyes. They watched him flip himself onto the upper bunk. The hands were cupped behind his head. From the prison kitchen, he could hear the babble of voices. Prisoners were cutting chunks of meat to be cooked for supper. Potatoes were being peeled and halved for boiling. The friendly derisions of the damned flew back and forth. The giggles of the Negro prisoners lasted the longest. None of them had a radio or a newspaper. None of them knew who Lee Harvey Oswald was.

The cordial atmosphere in the Paine household dissipated into something akin to rancor. There had been a come-on-in-we've-been-expecting-you attitude when the police arrived, but it had not been reciprocated. The cops were still searching and piling their findings on the living room floor. In response to suggestions or questions, they grunted or did not reply. Out front, three automobiles were parked. This was sufficient to attract the neighbors who had been listening to television and who knew that a Russian woman named Oswald lived at 2515 Fifth.

They stood in gossipy groups on the sunny sidewalk, waiting, perhaps, to witness a mass arrest. The estranged husband, Michael Paine, was both gentlemanly and sophisticated and he could not understand why these men walked around his home for an hour with big cowboy hats on. His wife Ruth was a devotee of patience, but she was running out of it. The police were ransacking her bedroom. Her cheerful demurrers fell on blank stares. They told her to get ready to accompany them back to police headquarters in Dallas. She asked what she was going to do with her two children, and the police said they didn't have the faintest idea. Nor could they be convinced that Mrs. Paine had no connection with the case at all, except that she gave shelter
to Marina Oswald and the babies and, with some reluctance, permitted Lee Harvey Oswald to board free on weekends and use her garage for the Oswald furnishings and bric-a-brac.