Where Were You?: America Remembers the JFK Assassination (6 page)

Before I got off to Irving, the radio said they had captured a man outside of the Texas Theatre in Oak Cliff, and the more they talked about what went on, I put things together and realized they were talking about Lee. I said, “My gosh. I can’t believe what I’m hearing.” Since I’d gotten off early, my mother and my stepfather were up visiting one of my sisters and her husband and three children. He had had a heart attack, so he was in the hospital at Irving Boulevard and Pioneer. I thought,
I can stop by and check on him
, so that’s what I did. I was in his room, and then a nurse came to the door and said, “I have a phone call for you at the desk.”

I said, “Just patch it through here to the room.”

She said, “I’m new; I don’t really know how to do that.”

I said, “OK, I’ll be there in just a minute.” Well, I opened the door to go to the nurses’ station, and two guys grabbed me and threw me up against the wall; I was totally shocked. I said to them, “What is going on here? Why are you doing this to me?”

They said, “We’re arresting you.”

I said, “For what? I haven’t done anything.”

That was Detective Rose and Detective Stovall. They took me to their car, and we stopped at the Irving Police Station. They talked with someone there, and then they took me on to downtown Dallas. They asked about everything you could think of. It was just repetitious—over and over and over for hours. Detective Rose and Stovall started off; then they took a break, and two more detectives come in and quizzed me with the same questions, over and over. They just asked me things about Lee and my work and stuff like that. Things I knew I could tell them. They asked about the package Lee had with him. I said, “He did bring a package with him this morning.” They asked me about the length of the package, and I told them, “It was roughly two feet, give or take an inch or two either way.”

Every answer I gave them was the answer I knew. One time, Captain Will Fritz, who was head of the Homicide Department, brought in a typed statement, and he wanted me to sign it. Now, Captain Fritz, I’m sure, did a lot of good things for the Dallas Police Department, but over the years, I’ve asked myself:
Somewhere along the line did he become like the people he hunted?

When he put the paper down in front of me, I started to read it. He wanted me to sign a paper that I was confessing to being part of the assassination and that I knew of it—that I had knowledge of it and that it was going happen. I told him I wasn’t signing that. I told him it wasn’t the truth. Well, Captain Will Fritz was quite hot-tempered. When I told him I wasn’t signing it, he drew back his hand to hit me, and I took my arm up to block. I was sitting there at the table, and all during the questioning, I just had to look straight into a wall. I couldn’t look sideways or anything, and when I told him I wasn’t going to sign it, I think he really could have struck me. But I told him, “Outside that door are some policemen, and before they get in here, we’re going to have one hell of a fight. I’m going to get some punches in.” He walked out, and I never did see the man again. I don’t want to come across as though I hated the man. I just was so unhappy with the way he treated me.

On Saturday morning I was cleared to go home. They cleared me one time, and we were on the way out to Irving when they got a call and turned around and brought me back. That’s when they did the fingerprints and a mug shot. I couldn’t believe what was going on. This was kind of like a nightmare to me. We went back, and after more questioning and so forth, they finally let me go. I didn’t know anything about Lee shooting the policeman, J. D. Tippit. When I’d tell them something, they’d come back and say, “That’s not true.” But I knew it was. I knew what I was telling them was the truth, and I didn’t deviate from that.

On Sunday morning I was in the kitchen there at the house. I’d just got through eating breakfast.
Someone turned the TV on, and there it was, live. They were going be transporting Lee from the jail on Horowitz Street down to another jail. They were in Dallas, and then they were in the basement. They said where they were. There was a transfer, and everything was going to happen. As we were watching, Jack Ruby stepped out of the crowd and stepped right in to Lee and fired the shot.

It wasn’t easy. I just sat down and asked myself,
What have you gotten yourself into?
All I’d wanted to do was come to work in Dallas, save money, go to college. I wanted to go to college right out of high school, but I didn’t have the money.

Since that weekend, it’s been kind of like a roller coaster. My life has been valleys and peaks, and most of it’s been living in valleys far more than peaks. Hasn’t been good. I’ve had some good times, but I’ve also had some rough times, trying to figure out: How do you adjust this. How do you go on with this? I was just a young boy, nineteen years old, from a rural town. I wasn’t worldly; I wasn’t ready for anything like this. It was just very hard. There were jobs I lost because they found out I was a friend of Lee Harvey Oswald at one point. I have a hard time understanding why someone would take something out on you when you had nothing to do with it. Now, we know people read things, and the fact is: Everything you read about the John F. Kennedy assassination is not true.

There’s so many books that have been written about this subject, and some of the authors give their readers the impression that they know me personally and they’ve talked to me. I wouldn’t know them if I passed them on the street. I’ve never talked with them. A lot of them just take something out of somebody else’s book and put it in their book. The truth is the only thing that matters. So many people have not done that.

I know that right after this happened, the language I used to converse in was very bad. I’m really ashamed of that, but that’s the way I talked. That’s who I was at that time. A person can use bad grammar, but that doesn’t mean you’re a bad person. If I had been investigating this and I was questioning a young boy, me, what I would be most interested in was the truth. Whether he used the correct grammar or not, that wouldn’t even be
considered by me. I’ve made a lot of improvements in my grammar, but I still make a few errors now and then. It’s just hard to realize that this thing happened, even though it’s been nearly fifty years.

I’ve asked myself many times,
How could you be involved in it? How’d you get involved in that? Why’d that happen to you?
I’m not angry with anybody. It’s just a bad thing that happened, and I just happened to be there. So I tell myself every morning when I get up and shave, I look at myself and say, “Who is Buell Frazier?” I know—but a lot of people don’t have a clue because they try to judge me from my past.

I try to stay out of the limelight. I do things sometimes with the Sixth Floor Museum, but I don’t go out looking for publicity. That’s just not me. I think about it every year, but I just have some way I just deal with it, because I know I can’t change anything. If I could go back and change things, it would never have happened—not to me, not to anyone. But it did, and so you have to regroup and move on, and hopefully you learn from things. Hopefully this country’s learned a few things.

I firmly believe, if you go back and look at where America was in 1963, with the assassination of John F. Kennedy, that’s when America began to fall from God’s grace. The man I know as Lee Oswald, I didn’t think he was capable of the assassination. I’ll tell you why. My sister’s three little girls used to go down the street about half a block to Ruth Paine’s house. Lee and Marina had two children. They had two girls. One was just an infant when this happened, and the other one was several years old. Lee used to play with the neighborhood children around that large oak tree that still stands there today, and sometimes I would hear them laughing.
They said, “That man that rides to work with you; he’s a nice man.” You stop and think about a child. A child can see a lot of things in a person that adults can’t see. So, two Lee Harvey Oswalds? Possible. I think they had the body exhumed, and they measured it and so forth. Or did he have split personalities? I’ve asked myself that many times over the past years. I’ve asked myself,
Did I really know the true Lee Oswald?

I don’t come to Dallas very often, because it has a lot of bad memories for me.

Marie Tippit

In 1963 Marie Tippit was living in the Dallas suburb of Oak Cliff, not far from Lee Oswald’s apartment. She was thirty-five, married for eighteen years to thirty-nine-year-old Dallas policeman J. D. Tippit. The couple had three children—two boys, ages thirteen and five, and a girl, age ten—and lived paycheck to paycheck on J. D.’s $490-per-month income. Officer Tippit was cited for bravery twice. On the morning of November 22, 1963, Marie got a call that their son, Allan, was sick and needed to be picked up from school. He was there when his father came home for a quick lunch. About an hour later, a relative called with the news: J. D. had been shot to death by the man suspected of assassinating the president.

I
t started out as an ordinary day: Got the kids off to school; J. D. went to work. He was working day hours. He had the rotating shift, so everything was going as usual. Allan, the oldest, got sick at school, so I went to school and picked him up and brought him home. Then J. D. called and said could I make him a sandwich; he wanted to stop by and have a bite to eat. They were real busy; the president was coming to town, so he could just run by and get a sandwich. I was really fast in those days. I’d fry some potatoes and have the sandwich ready by the time he drove there. This was really something for him to come home for lunch. J. D. never got to come home for lunch.

He ate lunch and of course left. Allan was watching the television, waiting for the president to come on so that he could see what they were doing. He had the radio on as well because they had announced that the president was shot. I said, “OK, Allan, you’re going have to turn one of those off. How about just turn the radio on in your room?” I think that’s how we missed hearing J. D.’s name mentioned on the television.

J. D. and Marie Tippit

His district was in Oak Cliff, so I thought he would probably be safe, just busy, you know, working on things that happened in that area. Little did I know that he would encounter the killer of the president.

From what I was later told, J. D. noticed Oswald walking down the street toward the squad car, and when Oswald saw that it was a squad car, he turned around and started going the other direction. That was when J. D. became suspicious.

J. D.’s sister, Chris, called and asked, “Have you heard from J. D.?”

I said, “Well, he came home for lunch.”

She said Wayne, their brother who lived in Lubbock, had just called and said he had heard—on the radio or television. I don’t remember which—that J. D. had been killed. She said, “You need to go check and find out for sure.”

I didn’t really want to believe that. So I called the station and told them who I was and asked them, would they check on Officer J. D. Tippit—that I needed to know if he was all right. They told me that, no, he was not. J. D. had been killed. This was a day that everything was turned upside down.

I called very quickly. I didn’t give them a chance to visit me—they probably would have later, but I didn’t give them a chance. I had called already. Patsy Anglin, the wife of another policeman, lived three doors down and was my best friend. I called her and told her that she needed to come down quickly. I needed her. At that point, Allan and I were both
crying. It was just unreal. He was so upset, and so was I. He came down and stayed with me, and one of the neighbors went to the school and brought Brenda home.

People start showing up at our door at that point, police officers and news media people as well. I was so upset that I just—it was so unbelievably horrifying that I appreciated their company and their concern and their love for me, that they came and showed they cared. I never got bitter and angry. That’s not a Christian’s attitude. You just go to the Lord, and you pray about it, so that’s what I did. I asked the Lord for his guidance and strength to see it through. Without that, I don’t think I would have made it then or now, so I’m really thankful looking back that I didn’t get bitter. That wouldn’t have brought J. D. back, and that’s all I wanted.

It was so hard because when you’re married, you grow closer together. We’d grown so close together that he was the other part of me that was missing, and I didn’t know what to do about it. I didn’t know how I was going to carry on.

I got mail from all over the world, and there were a thousand cranes that Japanese students made and sent to me that signified that you had a million years of happiness on Earth and in Heaven. I kept them hanging in my house as a reminder to the children that people care about others all over the world. You don’t have to be next door to care about them. We got some financial support as well. The financial support certainly helped take care of the children, and it showed them all the love that the people felt and the concern they had, realizing the situation we were in. We were so grateful and appreciative.

Robert Kennedy called me and told me that he was so sorry that J. D. had been killed and that if Jack hadn’t come to town he would probably still be alive. I said, “Yes, that’s true, but both of them were doing their job. J. D. as the patrolman out there, and him as the president of the United States. They just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.” He was such a nice fellow. It was just so nice
to talk to him because he had genuine concern, and I felt that he could understand. We were comforting each other.

Lyndon Johnson called me as well, and I spoke with him. I appreciated that. I did correspond with Jacqueline Kennedy. She sent me a letter, and I appreciated it so much because she said in the letter if she could ever do anything for me just to let her know. She said that she had lit a flame for Jack and it would burn forever, and she would consider that it burned for my husband too.

Dear Mrs. Tippit,

What can I say to you? My husband’s death is responsible for you losing your husband. Wasn’t one life enough to take on that day? You must be so bitter. I don’t blame you if you are. Please know that I think of you all the time, not that that can help in any way. It doesn’t seem fair to me that, because my husband was more famous than yours, that more attention is turned toward my bereavement than to yours.

If there is anything I can ever do for you for the rest of my life, it would make me so happy if I knew you would ask me. You know, I lit a flame for Jack at Arlington that will burn forever. I consider that it burns for your husband, and so will everyone who ever sees it.

With my inexpressible sympathy,

Jacqueline Kennedy

That tells you what a wonderful lady she was. She was so considerate and thoughtful of other people, and this was someone who could understand how I felt; we really shared a bond. That’s the thing you always want: somebody just to understand how you feel—and she did. She had children she had to raise by herself. Even though she was first lady of the United States,
she recognized that I was suffering too. Isn’t that wonderful, that we had a first lady that was so caring of everyone?

Afterward, life became very much a struggle because I had to deal with three kids who loved their daddy so much and were so close to him. Curtis would sit at the window and watch for him when it was time for him to come home. That’s pretty emotional. Brenda was getting stomachaches every day. Curtis was getting stomachaches. You have to deal with all that, along with your own grief. How can you have the strength, as Mrs. Kennedy said, to keep going?

Now there is a plaque where J. D. fell. I’m so proud we have that now. When I’m there, I just tell him how much I loved him, how much I miss him, that someday I’ll be able to see him again in Heaven. I wished for that many times—that I could have another conversation with J. D., that I could just see him again. I think that’s normal, isn’t it? Probably everybody does that. I’d tell him how much we miss him, how much we need him and love him. I’d tell him his name lives on forever, not only in my heart and the children’s hearts, but many others’ I know as well.

People began to be more concerned about others. I know there were a number of good things that happened for others as a direct result of J. D.’s death. The police department had no insurance for their police officers, and because of J. D. they went ahead and got insurance for them. The state didn’t pay any money for widows to help them, and now they do. J. D. caused that. I’m thankful for that. When there’s such a tragedy, there’s always something good comes of it, and that was good.

I’ve thought about that day every day for fifty years. J. D. had a wonderful sense of humor. He was caring about everybody else. He was such a loving person, and he made friends easily, and he was a Christian man. He wanted to do things that were right, and that really attracted me as well. As long as he was around, I knew I was loved. There’ll never be another man for me.