The Kennedy Half-Century (3 page)

As the Kennedys came down the plane’s stairway, a cheer went up from a crowd of spectators gathered behind a five-foot-high chain-link fence. They had been waiting all morning to catch a glimpse of the world’s most famous couple. Some of them waved placards that read HOORAY FOR JFK, WELCOME, MR. PRESIDENT, KENNEDY-JOHNSON, and NIXON GO HOME, a slap at the former vice president, who had left Dallas after his own visit earlier that morning. A few held signs that expressed contempt for Kennedy and his politics: YANKEE GO HOME, IN 1964, GOLDWATER AND FREEDOM, and YOU’RE A TRAITOR.
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The Kennedys shook hands with the official welcoming party waiting at the bottom of the stairs. It included Vice President Lyndon Johnson, Texas governor John Connally, and Earle Cabell, mayor of Dallas. Cabell’s wife, “Dearie,” handed Jackie a dozen red roses, which the First Lady happily accepted. JFK knew that his bodyguards wanted him to proceed directly to his car, but the soon-to-be candidate could not resist the adoring crowd on the other side of the fence. People were shouting, “Welcome to Dallas, Mr. President!” and “Jackie! Over here! Look over here!” He moved toward the fence. The spectators surged forward, desperate to clasp his outstretched hands. Jackie soon joined her husband, generating additional excitement. It was a dangerous moment, and a live TV announcer noted that the unscheduled, wide-open contact seemed to cause unease among the Secret Service agents.
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Anyone with a pistol could have fired through or over the fence at point-blank range. The Secret Service crew did all they could to keep the Kennedys safe. They watched “every hand as it was held out, ready to jump if they saw so
much as a flicker of metal or a grasp that held on a second too long.”
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Nothing untoward happened. Nothing had happened in a hundred similar situations over the past three years.

The agents were relieved when the Kennedys finally climbed into the backseat of their convertible, even though the bubbletop was down and they were still exposed from the shoulders up. Jim Lehrer, afterward for many years the host of PBS’s
NewsHour
, remembers seeing the limousine with the bubbletop in place earlier that morning. At the time, Lehrer was a reporter for the
Dallas Times Herald
and had been assigned to cover the story at Love Field. When someone from his newsroom called to ask if the bubbletop would be on JFK’s car during the parade, Lehrer passed the question on to an acquaintance in the Secret Service waiting on the tarmac. “And so the agent looks up at the sky,” Lehrer recalls, “and he says, ‘Well, it’s clear here,’ and he yells at another agent, he’s got a two-way radio, and he says ‘What’s it like downtown?’ The guy goes ‘Clear downtown!’ So the agent turns to another agent and says words to this effect: ‘Take the bubbletop down.’”
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Texas governor John Connally and his wife, Nellie, sat in the jump seat right in front of the Kennedys, while two Secret Service agents, Bill Greer (the driver) and Roy Kellerman, rode up front. Most of the other agents piled into the follow car. Some rode on the car’s running boards while others relaxed a bit in its leather seats. One agent put an AR-15 assault rifle on the floor of the automobile. Dallas County sheriff Bill Decker rode in the lead car, ahead of the presidential limo, along with Jesse Curry, the city’s police chief, and two more Secret Service agents, Win Lawson and Forrest Sorrels.
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The president was scheduled to deliver a luncheon speech at the Dallas Trade Mart, a sprawling business complex that had opened its doors only five years earlier. The city’s most prestigious civic groups, business leaders, and government officials had purchased tickets for the event and would all be there. But the upcoming political campaign mandated that the average citizens of Dallas—those who toiled on construction sites and in office buildings, flower shops, newsstands, restaurants, and dozens of other small businesses—see Kennedy first, on the theory that one is a little less likely to vote against a president one has seen up close and personal. Despite having a Texan on the ticket, Kennedy had won the state by only 46,257 votes in 1960; this was not a battleground that could be taken for granted in 1964.

Ralph Dungan, one of JFK’s aides, remembers the president calling his staff together right before he departed for Dallas. “We had a little meeting in the cabinet room,” Dungan told us. “It was the first meeting of the next campaign. He talked about being able to do some of the things in the second term that he wasn’t able to do in the first, without specifying the kinds of things he had in mind. But he just felt that in the second term, he was going to be much
freer to move.” But first Kennedy would have to win the second term, and one big step in that direction was for the president to heal the split in the Texas Democratic Party.

Kennedy’s motorcade left Love Field at 11:55 A.M for the 9.5-mile trip to the Trade Mart. Everyone in Dallas knew the precise details of the president’s route; it had been printed in the newspapers and discussed on local television during the week.
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The limo crawled along Mockingbird Lane for a few seconds before turning onto Lemmon Avenue. At the corner of Lemmon and Lomo Alto Drive (near Craddock Park), JFK spotted a group of schoolchildren frantically waving a sign that read MR. PRESIDENT, PLEASE STOP AND SHAKE OUR HANDS. He ordered the driver to pull over. The children, as well as giddy adults, squealed with delight and swarmed the convertible. “He shook my hand! The president shook my hand!” exclaimed one little boy. Dave Powers, JFK’s political adviser, knew a campaign commercial when he saw one and filmed the encounter from the follow car. After a few moments, the president said, “All right. Let’s travel on.” But he ordered his limo to halt a second time when he saw a nun with a group of Catholic schoolchildren. It was “an irresistible temptation for America’s first Catholic president.”
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Meanwhile, on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository building, a twenty-year-old African American man named Bonnie Ray Williams was eating lunch and wondering where his friends could be; hadn’t they all agreed to meet on that floor to watch the presidential motorcade? The Kennedys would soon be passing underneath the large double windows facing Elm Street, but Williams was there by himself. He could hear pigeons cooing on the roof and someone moving around downstairs. He ignored the stacks of boxes in the southeast corner, knowing that they had been moved there by workers installing a new floor. He waited a few more minutes and then went to a lower floor to look for his colleagues, leaving behind a paper sack and an empty Dr Pepper bottle.
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As the president’s limo drew closer to the downtown area, the crowds lining the road grew larger. On Turtle Creek Boulevard, people began spilling out into the street, forcing the police motorcycle escort to drop back. “[Secret Service agent] Clint Hill jumped off the left running board of the follow-up car, ran to the back of the limousine, and hopped onto the back foot stand,” where he crouched down “in an uncomfortable squat” and “scanned the crowd.”
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Hill and his fellow agents were part of the thinnest of thin blue lines, tasked with protecting the leader of the free world—an unenviable job that carried huge risks and a tiny paycheck. They knew that presidents had long
been the preferred target of America’s madmen, and that one person armed with a gun could change the course of history. Three presidents (Abraham Lincoln in 1865, James A. Garfield in 1881, and William McKinley in 1901) had been assassinated, and half a dozen others had been physically attacked. President Kennedy had had more than his share of assassination threats since the 1960 election. Sooner or later, someone else was bound to make an attempt on the president’s life. Congress knew it and the Treasury Department (which supervised the Secret Service) knew it, and yet a mere handful of Secret Service agents formed the nucleus of the government’s response to the looming threat.
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On Main Street in Dallas, people were hanging out of open windows and throwing confetti at the motorcade. Buildings were festooned with red, white, and blue bunting. Men with crew cuts and women in cateye glasses stood on the streets and sidewalks, grinning and gawking at the sleek presidential auto. They shouted and clapped and whistled over the roar of the motorcycles.
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At one point, a teenaged boy emerged from the crowd and sprinted toward JFK’s car. “Slow down! Slow down!” he shouted. Agent Jack Ready jumped off the follow car and shoved the boy back into the crowd, causing several people to crash into each other.
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“The crowd appeared good natured and friendly and no other agents reported seeing pickets or unfriendly signs other than one … sign having something to do with Cuba.”
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When the motorcade, nearly at the end of its route, reached the intersection of Main and Houston Streets, it turned right onto Houston; looming directly ahead was the nondescript Texas School Book Depository. Proud of her fellow Texans for behaving themselves, Nellie Connally turned around in her seat and uttered one of history’s great ironic lines: “Well, Mr. President, you can’t say Dallas doesn’t love you.” A few seconds later, the motorcade slowed for an unusual hairpin left turn onto Elm Street. The crowds were noticeably thinner as downtown’s landmarks receded in the rearview mirror. A handful of people smiled and waved from the grassy strips inside Dealey Plaza. The giant Hertz Rent-a-Car clock on top of the Depository changed from 12:29 to 12:30. The Trade Mart was but five minutes away.

And then …

Shots.

Bone, blood, and brain matter flying through the air.

The First Lady crawling on the trunk of the convertible.

Mothers and fathers lying on top of their children.

Screams.

People running in all directions.

Drained faces.

Shock.

Horror.

Bewilderment and disbelief.

Fear.

Crying and grieving.

Bonnie Ray Williams, James Jarman, and Harold Norman saw it happen from the fifth floor of the School Book Depository. Williams had found his co-workers there at 12:20 P.M. He hadn’t paid much attention to the first shot because he “did not know what was happening.” But other shots sent a chill down his spine. The reverberations from a gun rattled the building, causing a fine layer of plaster dust to fall on Williams’s head. Harold Norman heard the
cha-chuck! cha-chuckl
of a fast-moving bolt action rifle and the
ping! ping! ping!
of brass cartridges falling on the floorboards above his head. After pausing a few minutes to assimilate what had happened, they went outside and found a policeman talking to a construction worker who had seen a man pointing a gun out of a window in their building. Williams and his co-workers told the officer their story.
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Another officer, Marrion L. Baker, also thought that the shots had come from the Depository. Was the assassin on the roof? Having recently returned from a hunting trip, Baker immediately recognized the sound of a high-powered rifle. He dashed into the lobby of the building and began searching for a way upstairs. Roy Truly, the building’s superintendent, showed him the way to the freight elevators, both of which were up on five. “Let’s take the stairs,” said Baker, knowing that he didn’t have a second to lose. He drew his revolver and followed Truly into the stairwell. On the second floor, through a small window in the stairwell door, he saw a man walking away from him into an employee lunchroom. Baker followed the man. “Come here,” he commanded. The man stopped dead in his tracks and turned around; he was not out of breath and didn’t appear ruffled to see an armed police officer. Truly, who up until this point had been a few steps ahead of Baker, bounded back down the stairs and stood behind the patrolman. “Do you know this man, does he work here?” Baker asked. “Yes,” said Truly, immediately recognizing Lee Harvey Oswald. Satisfied, Baker turned around and raced back up the stairs toward the roof.
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A minute later, Geraldine Reid passed Oswald in an office on the second floor. He was walking toward the front stairwell, carrying a full bottle of soda. Reid had been watching the parade from the sidewalk in front of the building and had dashed inside when she heard gunfire. “Oh, the president has been shot, but maybe they didn’t hit him,” she offered optimistically.
Oswald mumbled an indecipherable response and continued toward the stairs and eventually the Depository’s front exit. The building had not yet been sealed off by police.
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At 12:39 P.M., Oswald banged on the side of a bus stopped in traffic seven blocks east of the Depository. The driver let him in. This particular bus happened to be traveling west on Elm in the direction of the crime scene at Dealey Plaza. Once it became clear that the commotion up ahead was blocking traffic and that the bus would not be moving anytime soon, Oswald asked for a transfer and stepped out into the street. He then proceeded to a bus station on the corner of Lamar and Jackson to catch a cab. “I wonder what the hell is the uproar,” said his driver. Police sirens were wailing in the background. Oswald kept his mouth shut.
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The cabbie dropped off his passenger in the Oak Cliff section of Dallas. Earlene Roberts, the housekeeper of a boarding house in Oak Cliff, was fiddling with the television in the living room when Oswald, one of her tenants, rushed in. “Oh, you are in a hurry,” she teased. Oswald did not respond and went straight to his small adjacent bedroom. Shortly afterward, he emerged from his room wearing a windbreaker. Roberts watched him go out the front door and walk a few feet to a bus stop for buses headed into downtown Dallas. She later recalled hearing a car horn honk, and said she saw a police cruiser near her house.
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