Reclaiming History (19 page)

The three stock boys on the fifth floor of the Depository peer down at the confusion unfolding below them. With the last shot still ringing in his ears, James Jarman jumps up and moves toward Bonnie Ray Williams and Harold Norman.

“That’s no backfire,” Jarman says. “Someone’s shooting at the president.”

“No bullshit!” Bonnie Ray says rising to his feet, still in disbelief.
²⁵³

“I think it came from above us,” Norman says. “I’m sure of it.” Jarman and Williams agree.
²⁵⁴

The three stock boys run toward the west side of the building where Jarman yanks a window open so they can see what’s going on below. Jarman can see police officers and people running across the railroad tracks to the west of the building, the area behind the pergola, and the police “searching the boxcar yard and the passenger train.”
²⁵⁵

It doesn’t take long for Jarman to also see the plaster dust in Bonnie’s hair.

“That shot probably did come from above us,” Jarman concedes.

“I
know
it did,” Norman answers excitedly. “I could hear the action of the bolt and the cartridges hitting the floor.”
²⁵⁶
Norman is very familiar with the sound of the bolt being pushed backward and forward because he has fired a bolt-action rifle before.
²⁵⁷

12:31 p.m.

In the lead car, Sheriff Decker takes the radio microphone from Chief Curry and identifies himself to the police dispatcher.

“Go ahead, Dallas One [Decker],” the dispatcher replies crisply. Decker blurts back instructions over the wail of police sirens.

“Have Station Five [call sign for the sheriff’s radio dispatch room] move all men available out of my department,” Decker says, “back into the railroad yards there in an effort to try to determine just what and where it happened down there, and hold everything secure until the homicide and other investigators can get there.”

“Ten-four, Dallas One. Station Five will be notified,” the dispatcher says.
²⁵⁸

By now the motorcade is flying at top speed
*
along Stemmons Freeway, all sirens screaming, past the stunned and puzzled onlookers scattered along both sides of the freeway to see the president. Curiously, the motorcade is still on its planned route, although now, when the cars turn off Stemmons onto Industrial Boulevard, they will pass their original destination, the Trade Mart, and go straight to Parkland Memorial.
†
In the backseat throughout the ride to the hospital, Jackie Kennedy cradles the president’s head in her lap, bending over him and saying, “Jack, Jack, Jack. Can you hear me? I love you Jack.” As she would later recall, “I kept holding the top of his head down, trying to keep his brains in…but I knew he was dead.”
²⁵⁹

At police headquarters, the dispatcher asks Chief Curry for any information he can give him.

“Looks like the president’s been hit,” Curry shoots back. “Have Parkland stand by.”

“Ten-four. Parkland has been notified.”
²⁶⁰

Bob Jackson doesn’t know what happened, or where the press car is going now, or why, only that it is following the rest of the motorcade toward Stemmons Freeway at a high speed. He is still holding his empty camera in his lap. The other one, which is loaded, is still strapped around his neck.
²⁶¹
It all happened so fast he didn’t get a single photograph. If he had only gotten a picture of the rifle barrel in the window, he undoubtedly would have won the Pulitzer Prize for the best news photograph of the year.
*

Journalist Merriman Smith is sitting beside the driver of the press pool car, which puts him in control of the car’s only radio telephone. He grabs it and calls the Dallas bureau of United Press International and tells the bureau operator, “Three shots were fired at President Kennedy’s motorcade in downtown Dallas.” He goes on talking as the press car shoots forward, trying to catch up with the rapidly vanishing motorcade. He has little to add to his one-liner, except to say that there are “no casualties” to report, but the longer he can keep the phone out of the hands of Associated Press reporter Jack Bell, sitting directly behind him in the center of the backseat, the bigger his “beat” of the rival wire service. On an event as big as this, getting the story even a couple of minutes ahead of the competition is a coup. Smith, stalling, asks the bureau operator to read back his dictation. Bell is beside himself, but Smith claims that nearby, overhead electric wires could have caused interference and he has to be sure his news bureau got the story. Bell, by now furious, tries to grab the phone. Smith, hanging onto it, crouches under the dash, while Bell flails at him. When Bell finally gets the phone, it goes dead in his hands.
²⁶²

D
eputy Sheriff E. R. “Buddy” Walthers and dozens of sheriff deputies are sprinting across the lawn in Dealey Plaza. They were out on the sidewalk on Main Street, in front of the Dallas County Criminal Courts Building, when they heard what sounded like shots. Some run toward the Book Depository Building, but Walthers and others, like Deputy Sheriff Eugene Boone, dash across Houston Street and run toward the grassy knoll area, Walthers going over the stockade fence, Boone the concrete retaining wall, into the train yards and parking area to the rear to search for the gunman.
²⁶³

R
oy Truly and Officer Baker arrive at the back of the Depository, having crossed the first-floor shipping area, and find that neither freight elevator is there. Truly looks up the shaft and sees that both elevators appear to be on the fifth floor. He punches a nearby button, trying to summon the west elevator. A bell rings, but nothing happens—the elevator gate has been left open on the fifth floor.

“Turn loose the elevator!” he shouts up the shaft. He punches the button and hollers again. Nothing.

“Let’s take the stairs!” Baker says, impatiently.

“Okay,” Truly replies, and in a wink, spins and bolts up the northwest stairwell.
²⁶⁴

Baker draws his service pistol and races up behind him. Truly is already pounding up the flight of stairs leading to the third floor when Baker reaches the second-floor landing. Just as the officer leaves the stairway and steps out onto the second floor, his eyes sweep across the area to his right through the window of the second-floor door, and he catches a glimpse of a man inside, walking away from him. Baker opens the door and runs through the doorway, then sees the man more clearly through a little window in the door to a vestibule that leads to a lunchroom. The man, twenty feet away, continues to walk away from Baker inside the lunchroom. Baker opens the vestibule door and walks through the vestibule about five feet to the door frame of the lunchroom. Leveling his gun waist-high at the man, he commands, “Come here.”
²⁶⁵

The man turns and walks back to within three feet of the officer. He appears calm, expressionless.
²⁶⁶

Meanwhile, Roy Truly, who realizes that the officer is no longer following him, comes back down the stairs to the second floor, hears voices in the lunchroom, and steps into the vestibule behind Baker. He sees that the officer has drawn a gun on Lee Oswald, one of his employees. Oswald doesn’t seem to be excited, overly afraid, or anything. He might be a bit startled, like Truly might have been if someone had confronted him with a gun, but otherwise Oswald’s expression doesn’t change one bit.
²⁶⁷

“Do you know this man?” Baker asks, turning slightly to look at Truly over his left shoulder.

“Yes,” the building superintendent says, “he works here.”
²⁶⁸

Officer Baker doesn’t waste another second. He doesn’t even bother to look back at Oswald. He brushes past Truly, makes his way back to the stairwell, and continues toward the roof, the building superintendent close behind him.
²⁶⁹

T
homas P. Alyea, a camera-reporter for WFAA-TV in Dallas, is stopped (with his partner, Ray John) at the traffic light located at Commerce and Houston streets listening to Dallas police radio as well as the WFAA commercial radio. He hears a voice (Chief Curry) over the police radio instructing officers to go to Parkland Hospital. He has no reason to associate this with President Kennedy, but twenty seconds or so later he hears newsman John Allen over the commercial radio announce that shots had been fired at the president. Alyea immediately grabs Ray John’s fully loaded camera and three extra cans of film, gets out of the car, and runs toward the intersection of Houston and Elm, filming the emerging, chaotic scene along the way. He notices several people pointing toward the upper floors of the Depository Building and runs inside along with a number of others who appear to be plainclothes detectives. Right behind him is
Dallas Morning News
reporter Kent Biffle. Biffle with his pencil and pad and Alyea with his camera would end up being the only two newsmen in the building during the period after the shooting. While Alyea starts filming, and Biffle recording on his notepad, the police search for the assassin on the various floors of the building.
²⁷⁰

Newsman Robert MacNeil, of later
MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour
fame, far down the motorcade in the first press bus, is jolted out of a half sleep by the sound of a shot, but he isn’t sure. Working on three and a half hours of shut-eye, a light breakfast, and then an unwise Bloody Mary on the flight to Dallas from Fort Worth, he has been finding it hard to stay awake. MacNeil was only recently made the number-two man on NBC’s White House detail covering the president’s Texas trip because Sandy Vanocur chose to accompany most of the cabinet on a mission to the Far East.

From his seat in the bus he has only been catching glimpses of the president’s limousine seven cars ahead, and when he hears two more very distinct explosions, he knows they are shots, and he shouts out, “Stop the bus! Stop the bus!”

The driver opens the door as he turns the corner onto Elm Street, and MacNeil jumps out. People are down on the grass on both sides of the street, covering their children, and the air is filled with screaming. The sun is so bright it makes his eyes ache. Seeing some people run toward the far end of the grassy slope right next to the railroad overpass, MacNeil dashes after them—they may be chasing the sniper. But he really can’t imagine that the president was hit. It must be some right-wing nut making some kind of crazy demonstration.

MacNeil climbs up on the bottom ledge of the concrete railroad bridge alongside many other spectators and looks over the top with them. He sees nothing of significance except police searching the area and realizes he had better find a telephone, fast.

He runs back and into the first building he comes to, the Texas School Book Depository, running into a young man in shirtsleeves coming out whom he would later come to believe may have been Oswald. He asks for a phone. The young man points inside to a man talking on a phone near a pillar. “Better ask him,” he says.

Inside, MacNeil asks another young man, who steers him to another phone in an office, four of its five lines occupied. Mercifully, he gets through to the radio news desk in New York, but, infuriatingly, is asked to wait. He screams into the phone until Jim Holton comes on the line. “This is MacNeil in Dallas. Someone shot at the president.”

Holton switches on a tape recorder and MacNeil records all he knows so far: “Shots were fired as President Kennedy’s motorcade passed through downtown Dallas. People screamed and lay down on the grass as three shots rang out. Police chased an unknown gunman up a grassy hill. It is
not
known if the shots were directed at the president. This is Robert MacNeil, NBC News in Dallas.”

Outside again, MacNeil rushes over to a policeman listening to the radio on a motorcycle. “Was he hit?”

“Yeah. Hit in the head. They’re taking him to Parkland Hospital.”

MacNeil dashes out into the street, dodging the police cars whose wailing sirens are pulling up from all directions, bouncing over curbs, flowerbeds, and lawn. Not a taxi in sight. Traffic is beginning to jam. He sprints across Dealey Plaza to Main Street and leaps out in front of the first car that comes along.

“This is a terrible emergency,” he tells the driver. “The president’s been shot. I’ll give you five dollars to take me to Parkland Hospital.”

The driver, about thirty, not too swift, smiles and says, “Okay.” The car is filled with packages that look like cake boxes. “Yeah, I heard something about that on the radio a couple of minutes ago,” he says.

“Where’s the radio?”

“I put it in the backseat.”

MacNeil grabs the little transistor and holds it out the window to clear the antenna. They are already bogging down in the rapidly jamming traffic. He begs the driver to speed, take risks, run red lights, anything—MacNeil will pay the fines. All the police cars are headed in the opposite direction, back toward the Texas School Book Depository.
²⁷¹

12:32 p.m.

Mrs. Robert A. Reid, a clerical supervisor, had been watching the motorcade from in front of the Book Depository Building. Right after the shots were fired she runs into the building and is returning to her desk in the big central office space on the second floor of the Depository as Oswald cuts through the office from the lunchroom, a full bottle of Coke in hand.

“The president has been shot,” she tells him as he walks past her, “but maybe they didn’t hit him.”

Oswald mumbles something in reply, but what it was does not register with her. She feels it is a little strange for a stock boy to be up in the office at that time. Indeed, the only time she had seen Oswald in the office before is when he needed change, presumably to get a drink from the soda machine in the lunchroom. But this time, Oswald already has a Coke. She takes off her jacket and scarf as Oswald heads toward the stairs leading to the front entrance of the building.
²⁷²

Baker and Truly round the stairwell on the fifth floor and discover one of the freight elevators. They take it to the top floor—the seventh—then climb one more flight of stairs to come out, through a little penthouse over the stairhead, onto the roof. Officer Baker trots over to the west side of the roof and immediately realizes the parapet, five feet high, is too high to look or shoot over. He has to stand on tiptoes to even see the street and the railroad yards below. He starts to check the huge Hertz sign atop the Depository roof, but after climbing ten feet up the ladder attached to it, Baker rules that out too—there’s nothing to hold onto up there.
²⁷³