The Day Kennedy Was Shot (58 page)

The well-nourished George Ball, Acting Secretary of State until the return of Dean Rusk from Hawaii, received a phone call from the Federal Bureau of Investigation advising that the man arrested at the assassination was Lee Harvey Oswald, of Dallas, an expatriate who had fled to the Soviet Union in October 1959. He had tried to renounce his citizenship and, failing, returned to the United States with a wife and baby on or about June 13, 1962. Mr. Ball might want to check his department records.

President Lyndon Johnson had appointed the Federal Bureau of Investigation to take charge of the federal government's interest in the assassination. As the bits and pieces fall into place, J. Edgar Hoover, who had been Director of the FBI since 1924, kept his strong bulldog face behind his desk and surrounded himself with his best advisers so that the flow of in
formation from Gordon Shanklin in Dallas to Washington was smooth, the delivery of evidence by air was swift, and the dissemination of information to responsible parties in Washington was almost instantaneous.

George Ball learned of the involvement of the State Department, and he decided that it could not be researched by a clerk. He phoned Abram Chayes, legal adviser to the State Department, at his home, 3520 Edmunds Street Northwest, and asked him to return to the department at once. The assignment was simple and formidable. Chayes was told that Dean Rusk would be in Washington by morning at the latest. His function would be to spend the night poring over State Department files to find any which might relate to one Lee Harvey Oswald of Dallas, Texas.

Mr. Chayes was a good lawyer. He recruited a couple of assistants and turned the lights on in a few dark departments. Some of the old files had red seals on them; some had other colors. It did not matter whether files were secret or not, locked or not, or hidden in vaults. Abram Chayes understood that a high crime had been committed, and his function was not to extricate the State Department from a possible cul-de-sac, but to dredge up anything bearing on the man who might have perpetrated the crime.

The subordinate sections of the State Department do not relish surrendering their sovereignity to anyone, including superiors, but Mr. Chayes knew that the press would be at the departmental gates by morning, so he had to work fast. The women who cleaned the floors and waste baskets that night saw a man possessed—working to learn all that he could about one man in one night. First he went to the passport file and found the records on Oswald. From there he hurried to the State Department security office to find out if there was any record that this man might be a risk to his country.

There were records, but Oswald was not regarded as dangerous. Chayes went to the SCS file (Special Consular Services)
which covered the issuance of a visa to Mrs. Oswald and the loan of money to Lee Harvey Oswald to transport his family to the U.S. Locating them was not a simple matter in a vast bureau which prides itself on maintaining records. Secondly, the exhausted lawyer would have to start with the first item—an application for a passport in September 1959 by Lee Harvey Oswald in which he stated that he wanted to become a student at a college in Switzerland but wanted a visa for several other countries, including the Soviet Union.

The whole story would have to start there. Abram Chayes would then have to find the second bit of information, which was a secret report from a U.S. consular official in Moscow that one Lee Harvey Oswald had appeared and demanded the right to renounce his American citizenship. It was a long road of papers, documents, reports. Somewhere in the mountain of material was the final item, where Lee Harvey Oswald had concluded repayment of the loan. When the research was completed, at some small hour, Mr. Chayes would be expected to dictate or type a digest of all he had learned. Dean Rusk would have to be armed with more than press releases; President Johnson was expected to ask some questions, too.

Lyndon Johnson has two gaits. One, when he wants to talk, is slow, with his head cocked toward the listener, sometimes with one hand in a trouser pocket. The other stride is swift and reserved for when he is doing the listening. He walked with head up and arms swinging. He emerged from the South Lawn of the White House at the head of a small group of people, moving fast. The two at his side were Bundy and McNamara.

The President had some ideas of his own: 1. He was the only person who could not afford a display of maudlin grief. In tragedy, the people look for strength, not weakness. 2. He must persuade the Kennedy team to continue with him until he acquired full control and understanding of the reins of govern
ment. 3. He would need all the bipartisan congressional support he could get. To achieve this, he would be forced to trade on old friendships on both sides of the aisle, but he had to have it. 4. It would be necessary to be briefed at once on all executive matters to which a Vice-President is not privy.

Bundy was close to trotting. “There are two things I am assuming, Mr. President,” he said. “One is that everything in locked files before 2
P.M.
today belongs to the President's family, and the other is that Mrs. Kennedy will handle the funeral arrangements.” Johnson didn't break stride. “That's correct,” he said. It was a poor assumption because some things in the President's personal files could be related to official decisions, commitments, and policy. It might have been better for a person like Bundy, or Sorensen, to sift through those files at once and acquaint the new President with matters which might have a bearing on his official conduct. The President of the United States is in the position of a paid government employee whose acts and decisions are the property of the people.

Silently, Johnson passed the White House policemen who stood in the darkness along the walk. Throughout the White House, Secret Service agents heard the beep on their radios and the word that the President of the United States was about to enter the Executive Mansion. Lyndon Johnson had become the prisoner of protection, and would continue to be for a number of years. He would not make a move, from office to hallway, from bedroom to East Room, from ranch house to front lawn without knowing that the word was being passed. Later, when he moved into the White House, the mere removal of the newspapers from in front of his bedroom at 7
A.M.
would cause the night man across the hall to open his microphone and whisper: “Volunteer One is awake.”

Directly ahead he saw the lighted French windows of the Oval Office. It was now his, but he would not use it. The drapes
were half drawn. The inside, in brand-new colors, was as serene and majestic as ever. He had known that office, with awe, from the days when his hero Franklin Delano Roosevelt sat behind the desk, the burnished eyeglasses winking with light, the cigarette holder tilted upward. There had been times when, in a conference with President Kennedy, a government problem had been recited and the handsome young man would turn his stern gaze through a semicircle of advisers, prepared to ask: “Well, what should we do?” and Lyndon Johnson always hoped that the President would not ask him first.

The door to Evelyn Lincoln's office was held open for him, and he walked through. Someone said that Johnson should use the office of the President, and the President said: “No. That would be presumptuous.”

He passed it, went out into the curving white hall, kept walking down through the West Wing, out past the Press Room, into the night air again, and down the walkway to East Executive Avenue, then across the street into the dismal old structure which had once been the State Department, but which was now called the Executive Office Building or EOB. Any department which had no White House priority, from telephone operators to mail room to Vice-President, was jammed in among the old high ceilings and exposed heating pipes.

Johnson went upstairs to his office and said hello to his private secretary, Mrs. Juanita Roberts. They were always in excellent balance: he roared, she whispered. He looked around and learned that he had picked up some men on the way from the helipad. He went behind his desk, moved all the pending papers to one side to clear the blotter and looked up at the men who stood. He told Ted Reardon that he wanted a Cabinet meeting at 10
A.M.
He was going to require a lot of service tonight and he wanted no excuses. Reardon left to begin phoning the Cabinet ministers—some of whom were on a plane coming in from Hawaii.

Johnson was not in doubt. He knew the necessary steps but to prod these people he put on his son-of-a-bitch face. Kilduff, who had worked so hard for the new President, was dressed down for not having the casket leave by the front ramp. The President didn't care for excuses; it would have been proper for him to leave the plane with Mrs. Kennedy and the body of John F. Kennedy. Who the hell's idea was it to get that forklift at the back of the plane?

A Secret Service man informed him that his home phone number at The Elms had been changed. It was now hooked into the White House. “Luci Johnson was picked up at school and is at the house. Lynda is at the home of Governor Connally with the Connally children.” It eased the worriment in his mind to know that the girls were protected by agents; it made him feel better to know that Mrs. Johnson was on her way home. He knew that the scar of noon would never heal in his wife. The house would be a warm refuge for her.

All evening long highly placed men would come to this second-rate office to reassess the new Chief Executive and to be reassessed by him. To all, he enunciated the same battle order: “There must be no gap in government. We must go forward in unity.” He sent for soup. He took phone calls. He made phone calls. At one point he was dictating a memo, and the President lapsed into reverie. His eyes stared at the far wall. “Rufe did a heroic thing today,” he murmured, almost to himself. “He threw me down in that car and threw himself on top of me.”

There was one facet of Johnson's character which few people knew. He was genuinely surprised when someone did something for him gratuitously.

A few automobiles were in the lot, parked against the wall of Holy Trinity Church. The big starry lights at the entrance were lighted, though few attended the first solemn high Mass for the repose of the soul of John F. Kennedy. It was fitting that
it should be celebrated by the last priest to see him alive and the first to see him dead. Father Oscar Huber, looking smaller than usual in the enormous chasuble, holding the gold chalice under its cover, ascended the brilliantly lighted altar and felt a weariness in his body.

His acolytes held his garment up the three steps, then stepped back as Huber set the chalice down and touched the altar stone with both hands. The few communicants in the dimness of the pews arose with a shuffling of feet. Others, who had come only to say the Stations of the Cross, decided to stay. No one told them that this Mass was for a President. It had not been announced in the parish bulletin, and the few in the church assumed that it must be for the dead President.

It would have pleased the President. The Church, the Sacraments, Mass, religious love and fear were instilled in the Kennedy children early. Their mother retained the faith of a child. In Palm Beach, Jack Kennedy was an usher at the Catholic church and helped to take up the Sunday collection. When he went to Washington as President, a wry monsignor, leaning over the pulpit one Sunday, said: “And now let us say an Our Father and a Hail Mary for an usher who has left us. I'm not allowed to mention his name, but he got a new job in Washington.”
^*

The Roman Catholic Church is always more of a joy to a sinner than a saint because within its gates lie forgiveness and love. The President, if his friends can be believed, was closer to being a merry sinner than a saint. He was attracted to the sins of the flesh and found them difficult to resist. In this, he joined hands with the average man everywhere. In his church, in his conscience he was a silent penitent. He seldom discussed religion
and was never known to permit his Catholicism to influence his thinking as a statesman. Some thought that, as President, he was slightly antagonistic to his church.

Father Huber turned to the gospel and opened the big book, tilted on a stand, to the red ribbon which bisected a page. It was opened to the Twenty-fourth Sunday after Pentecost, Matthew 24, verses 15 to 35. “ . . . for as the lightning comes forth from the east and shines even to the west, so also will the coming of the Son of Man be. Wherever the body is, there will the eagles be gathered together . . .”

On the third floor, Detective Guy F. Rose was busy working a neglected angle. A woman neighbor of the Oswalds had said her brother had driven Oswald to work with curtain rods. The cop flipped the pages of his notebook. That was Linnie Mae Randall; Linnie Mae Randall, who said her brother's name was what? Frazier. Wesley Frazier. She had volunteered that her brother was at some hospital if the police wanted him.

Rose wanted him. It had occurred to Will Fritz and his overworked Homicide squad that Frazier might be a party to a plot to take the life of the President. Frazier worked with Oswald. Frazier and Oswald were buddies of a sort. Where did the Frazier boy go after the assassination? Where was he during the shooting?

Guy Rose phoned Parkland Hospital. The operator had no patient named Frazier. She would connect the policeman with the record room. He waited for a response. Rose could have taken Mrs. Linnie Mae Randall to headquarters with him while taking the Paines and Mrs. Oswald. Also, when she mentioned that her brother was at some hospital, Rose could have phoned Fritz and asked a detective to pick him up. They could be most important witnesses; anyone who had studied the Lincoln assassination might see a parallel between the Fraziers and the Surratts.

Parkland was sure that it had no record of a Frazier. Calls were placed to other hospitals, to sanitariums, to clinics in and around Dallas. The detective made a list of doctors in Irving Professional Center. He did not want to think that young Wesley Frazier had slipped through his fingers. It could be most important; it could be nothing at all. As he made the phone calls, Detective Rose watched Detective Senkel herding Marina Oswald and the Paines out of the Forgery office. He dialed the Irving Professional Center and identified himself. A nurse supervisor said yes, they had a Mr. Frazier senior as a patient.