The Day Kennedy Was Shot (73 page)

The boy's minister told him to tell the whole truth and no harm would befall him. Frazier nodded. He understood. He had no desire to get into trouble of any kind; at work he was known to be amiable, obliging, a boy who seldom disagreed with anybody. At another desk, his sister watched the pen of a detective spell the words she spoke, about the Russian woman who lived up the street with the Paines, the surly face of Lee Harvey Oswald getting in her brother's old car, getting out of it, waiting for Wesley in the driveway—a peculiar man who never smiled, seldom spoke, an assortment of features which formed themselves into an everlasting grudge.

Wesley was certain of his answers until the detectives asked them a second or third time; the more he meditated, the less sure he was. The curtain rods were “about this long” [twenty-six inches]. “How long?” “This long” [indicating about twenty-eight inches]. “Does he bring his lunch from home?” “All the time, except today.” “Why except today?” “I don't know. Lee never buys lunch, but this morning he said he was going to buy his lunch and eat in the domino room.” “Why do you call it the domino room?” “Some of the fellas, when they have lunch and there is still time, they play dominos.” “Did Oswald ever talk politics?” “Not with me.” “Did you ever see him with a rifle?” “No, sir.” “Ever talk about one?” “Not to me.” “Did he discuss the visit of President Kennedy?” “Not that I remember.” “Ever see him with a pistol?” “No, sir.” “Do you have any objections to having your fingerprints taken?” “No, sir.” “Ever been arrested?” “Yes, sir. In Irving tonight.” “Besides that?” “No, sir, never have. . . .”

On the fourth floor, Lieutenant Day looked at the side of the rifle, smiled, and murmured: “Yes, sir.” It wasn't much of a print, and it was coming up slowly, but there it was as plain as a slap mark on a tender cheek. “The metal is rough,” he said to an assistant. “If it was smooth, this print would be sharper.” It was part of a palm of a hand, on the underside of the wood stock. The screws of the stock were loosened, and the print seemed clear. The police photographer took several closeup shots of it. Day took Scotch tape, carefully applied, and slowly lifted the print free. It was faint, but it was discernible.

He had a palm print on a carton taken from the sixth-floor window. If both were of the same hand and they matched, the lieutenant would put them on a projector beside some he had taken from Oswald. If all three matched, then Oswald handled this gun and also sat in that window. Vincent Drain of the FBI came up to the laboratory to see how the lieutenant was doing. Day showed him the material. The FBI man reminded Day that headquarters in Washington was prepared to lend any assistance required. The lieutenant said he appreciated it, but the chief would have to handle matters like that.

The tall, good-natured Drain left. The men on the fourth floor continued their work. They knew that the FBI wanted all this material. Day had orders to process it, and that's what he was doing. The room smelled of developer. Lights went on and off as negatives were fixed. The men worked in silence, at microscopes, cameras, acid baths, calipers, projectors, spectroscopes. There were hairs on the blanket which housed the rifle, but they were short and kinky. They were pubic. Someone had once slept in this thing nude.

A clear palm print was thrown up on the projector. The smudged print from the underside of the rifle went up beside it. The officers stopped work to look. The one from the rifle wasn't clear enough. Still, the swirls which could be defined appeared to match the ones taken from Oswald's left hand tonight. The
photos were reversed, and the eyes of the men scanned them again. It wasn't the best of evidence, but both appeared to be made from the same hand.

“Be back in a minute,” the lieutenant said. He ran down the stairs and into the chief's office. “I make a tentative identification from a palm print on the rifle which matches one I got from Oswald,” he said. The chief smiled and looked up from his desk. “Good,” he said. Day fought his way down the center hall into Fritz's outer office. He called the captain out. Fritz said that the prisoner was on his way down again. He was making a couple of phone calls. The lieutenant whispered the story of the print match. Fritz smiled a little. “Give me a report on it when you have it,” he said. “We're moving along—a little at a time.” “It's tentative,” Day said. “It looks pretty good.”

America was beset by an anguished desire to be punished for the crime. It was on family faces in Oklahoma and Oregon, in Salem, Sioux City, San Antonio, and San Francisco. The shock wave had leveled off into a mass what-did-we-do? guilt. Psychologically, the nation was on its knees. This morning it had been rich, powerful, and unafraid. Within nine hours, the self-appraisal had been revised downward. There was a subterranean violence in the national character, one which few suspected. Some remembered the abortive attack by Puerto Ricans on the life of President Harry Truman. Others, older, recalled that a madman named Zangara had fired at President-elect Franklin Delano Roosevelt in Bayfront Park, Miami, and had hit Mayor Charles Cermak of Chicago. Cermak had died. In time so had Zangara.

The sense of guilt was felt everywhere. A man named Oswald may have pulled the trigger, but what kind of a country had bred him? America was a sophisticated land where even the common union laborer owned a television set and a car and perhaps played golf on Sundays. Passions seldom rose high enough
for the people to use any weapon other than a ballot or a fist to show displeasure with a politician. This image had been broken. The people looked into a mirror and the glass was intact but the face was cracked. By 9
P.M.
Central Standard Time, millions of people were prepared to believe the worst about themselves. It was easy to blame the whole thing on a nut named Oswald. Too easy. The guilt could be shoved off on Dallas too. Or even the whole state of Texas. For once, something was too big for Texas.

The dark, lined face of Edwin Newman was picked up by the National Broadcasting Company and he was prepared to tell the people what they wanted to hear: “This event is unreal,” he said, “absurd—one of the things we just don't let happen. But if one in one hundred ninety million wants to kill the President, he will. The unpleasant truth about America is that it is a country of violence.” There, it had been said.

“Violence plays a part in our very lives—yet what we worry about is our image abroad. Today, America does not appear to be an adult country. Emotions run high—regional, religious, and economic. We must begin at the top, for the political climate is set by the President. In the days to come we will hear much of how we must stick together. It is within our power to take our public life more seriously than we have. Americans tonight are a grossly diminished people.”

The camera left Newman and, in Washington, D.C., the lopsided, boyish face of David Brinkley came on: “If we have come to the point where a President cannot appear in public without fear of being shot,” he said, “then we are less civilized than we think we are.” As a mark of its sincere sorrow, the three major television networks canceled the sandwiches of advertising which are their meat more than the public's and fasted.

The city of Dallas was anxious to dust its municipal cloak of Lee Harvey Oswald at once. Mayor Earle Cabell did it before the cameras at eighteen minutes after 10
P.M.:
“. . . It is hard to believe,” he said, “but I don't believe this event will hurt Dallas
as a city. This was the act of a maniac who could have lived anywhere—a man who belonged to no city.” It probably did not occur to the excited mayor that a statement of that type hurt Oswald's chances of securing a fair trial in Dallas County.

Chief Petty Officers William Martinell and Thomas Mills watched as the Secret Service men completed the examination of the President's limousine. They knew why they had been brought from Admiral George Burkley's office. On the way in from Andrews Air Force Base, Special Agent Kinney thought he had seen some hair and skull under a jump seat. If it was true, the petty officers would be charged with taking it to Bethesda Hospital.

The examination was near its end when Deputy Chief Paterni of the Secret Service said softly: “Here it is.” It was a three-inch triangular piece of skull and hair lying under what had been Mrs. Connally's seat. Martinell lifted it on a piece of paper and dropped it into an envelope. He asked if he could remove some of the whitish tissue from the back seat. The deputy chief and Floyd Boring had no objection. Martinell took his piece of paper, curved it into a small shovel, and removed chunks of tissue from the back of the seat and the area between the jump seats.

It was placed in a separate envelope. Mills, running his hand across the rug under the windshield, found a metallic fragment and turned it over to the Secret Service. The plastic cover was placed over the car. The petty officers signed receipts for the material and started out for the hospital. The three-inch piece of skull they carried, in addition to the piece found in the road on Elm Street, Dallas, represented about two thirds of the massive fracture in the President's head.

The doctors had completed that part of their work. A few of the witnesses were escorted to the naval commissary for food. The notes kept by the doctors were in scribbles, sometimes only a phrase to remind them of an entire event: “Blood & hair up
per medias” “only a few in size 3—5 mm.” “no missile in the wound” . . . Doctor Humes leaned across the chest and made a Y incision. It extended from both shoulders down to the center of the sternum, then cut straight down to the pelvis.

The rib cage was lifted open, exposing the thoracic cavity. The lower flaps were pulled back, opening the abdomen. The three doctors studied the torso. The final report would state:
“CAUSE OF DEATH:
Gunshot wound, head,” but pathology decrees that an autopsy should be complete, even when the cause of death is obvious. The organs should be examined for grossness and disease.

On the seventeenth floor, the impatient young Attorney General was accelerating his pace. The phone was in constant use. Shriver told him that the President's office was now empty of Kennedy keepsakes. From the desk had been taken the coconut shell in which he had sent a message that a Japanese destroyer had sunk his PT 109. The phone calls continued and at last Robert Kennedy became irritated.

He asked the Secret Service where Dr. Burkley was. The rear admiral had made several trips up to the suite, advising that the Navy doctors would not require much more time to complete the autopsy. But the hours kept grinding onward. Kennedy looked at his watch. It was after 10
P.M.
Eastern Standard Time. Clint Hill phoned the autopsy room and spoke to Kellerman. He spoke to Burkley, who said: “It's taking longer than they thought.” The Attorney General hoped that the doctors would get on with it.

In the White House, Sargent Shriver completed a call to Richard Cardinal Cushing of Boston, hung up, and clapped a hand to his handsome forehead. “My God!” he said. “We forgot to invite Truman, Ike, and Hoover!” Ralph Dungan, whose office was being used for the massive funeral campaign, leafed through a copy of
State, Official and Special Funeral Policies and Plans.
Major General Ted Clifton kept calling Godfrey
McHugh at the hospital to ask, within reason, when the President was coming home. He had to know for several reasons: artist Walton had to complete the funeral atmosphere of the East Room. Clifton had displayed an etching of the Lincoln catafalque to the White House carpenters and demanded that they duplicate it at once (someone had neglected to pass the word that the original Lincoln catafalque had been located in the basement of the Capitol building).

General McHugh kept saying that no one knew when the doctors would be finished. An embalmer hadn't been summoned. Originally, without consultation, most of the autopsy observers had figured that the body would be in the East Room by midnight. Well, it would be later than that. One o'clock? said Clifton. No one could be sure. Maybe two. Maybe even later. Time had dragged all day. Now events were dragging.

At the Library of Congress, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Dick Goodwin could not believe that, after authorities opened the place for them, they would have to hunt for Lincolniana up and down the musty aisles with flashlights. The interior lights of the library were on time clocks. The White House aides were guided in their literary voyages by two competent men: David C. Mearns and James I. Robertson. They picked up pertinent books and copies of old magazines and newspapers. No one would be able to read, absorb, and appropriate the ideas entombed within these publications, but the men thought that it would be better to bring back too much than too little.

A new officer sat listening to Fritz and Oswald. He was fiftyish, a man with blue eyes, a high, freckled forehead, and spectacles. He was Inspector Thomas Kelley of the Secret Service and he had been in Memphis, Tennessee, when the crime occurred. Rowley had called him and asked him to hurry to Dallas to supervise the Secret Service aspect of the investigation. Kelley was a low-key man. The first assignment he gave himself was to
sit quietly and try to assess the prisoner and Captain Will Fritz. Earlier, in the outer office, Forrest V. Sorrels had given the inspector a summary of all that had happened up to 9
P.M.
Kelley had asked numerous questions.

As he sat in the crowded office, he had a fairly good idea of the game. He felt that Fritz was on solid ground with this young man. He watched Oswald closely and he became impressed with the fact that, unless he was misjudging the gigantic ego of the prisoner, Lee Harvey Oswald was the type who wouldn't share the credit for the assassination with anyone.

Kelley was also impressed with the slow, deliberate manner of Will Fritz. He liked an officer who didn't press the quarry too closely or harshly. For seven hours in elapsed time these two men had fenced carefully, almost with respect. The captain's best weapon was that he knew how much evidence was already in, how many persons had already identified Oswald at the lineups. His questions led from strength. Oswald's weapon was that he could maintain a quiet conversation with the captain until a sensitive one surfaced; at that point he could refuse to respond.