Reclaiming History (38 page)

4:35 p.m.

The darkened detail room in the basement, where the officers get their assignments at the beginning of each shift, is full of men, some in uniform, others not. At one end of the room is a narrow stage, about two and a half feet high, screened off from the rest of the room by a one-way black nylon scrim. The stage is hotly illuminated by floodlights overhead and at the floor level, making it easy for the witnesses standing in the darkness to see the suspects through the scrim, but impossible for the suspects to see them in the darkness beyond.
⁶⁹³
Detectives Sims, Boyd, and Hall have Oswald in a holdover room next to the stage. They are joined by Officers Perry and Clark, and a jail clerk (a civilian employee), Don Ables, who will appear in the lineup with Oswald. Each of them is handcuffed to the other.
⁶⁹⁴

Helen Markham, who had been close to fainting before being given ammonia, is brought out of the first-aid room and into the darkened area of the detail room by Detectives Leavelle and Graves. Captain Fritz, Chief Curry, and Detective C. W. Brown join them momentarily.
⁶⁹⁵
Mrs. Markham, who still hasn’t recovered from the shock of seeing the murder, is terribly jittery, and the darkened roomful of policemen isn’t all that reassuring.

The word is given and Detectives Sims, Boyd, and Hall troop the four men out onto the stage.
⁶⁹⁶
As soon as Oswald comes out, Mrs. Markham feels cold chills run over her and begins to cry.
⁶⁹⁷
The four men come to a stop, each positioned underneath a large number. Left to right, from Markham’s position, the four men are W. E. Perry (under number 1), Lee Harvey Oswald (2), R. L. Clark (3), and Don Ables (4).
⁶⁹⁸

Though Markham is confident Oswald is the man she saw shoot Officer Tippit, she wants to be sure and whispers to one of the policemen that she wants them to turn Oswald sideways, which was standard procedure anyway. Detective Leavelle tells the men to turn to their right, left, to the rear, then back to the front. Each man is then asked a question or two so that Markham can hear them speak. Leavelle doesn’t ask Oswald his name because Markham might have heard it since the shooting.

Mrs. Markham can’t forget the way the killer looked at her on Tenth Street—the glassy, wild look in his eyes.

“The second one,” Markham says.

The police aren’t sure what she means—second from the left, or the right?

“Which one?” they ask.

“Number 2,” she says.

There’s an immediate stirring of voices in the room, and Mrs. Markham, faint again, falls over.
⁶⁹⁹

Detectives Sims, Boyd, and Hall march the men off the stage and Oswald is taken back up to Captain Fritz’s office on the third floor.
⁷⁰⁰

4:45 p.m.

The unmarked squad car pulls up in front of the rooming house on North Beckley in Oak Cliff and four men, armed with a search warrant, climb out.

After showing the search warrant to the landlord, Mr. Johnson, Alexander and the detectives enter Oswald’s room. They notice the sagging single bed framed in a metal headboard, and the movable wardrobe, an old blonde oak dresser with missing handles. When they open two dresser drawers, some clothing spills onto the floor. Alexander finds an empty leather holster hanging from a doorknob. A shelf on a wall has some food atop it. The room, Alexander sees, is “messy but not dirty.”
⁷⁰¹

The detectives begin piling everything on the bed for the trip downtown: clothing, shoes, a shaving kit; a city map of Dallas with some suspicious pencil markings on it, including some at the Texas School Book Depository and Elm Street; an address book, some paperbacks—
A Study of the USSR and Communism
and a couple of James Bond books—a Gregg shorthand dictionary, a copy of
Roberts Rules of Order
; a pair of binoculars; several pamphlets and handbills; a certificate of Undesirable Discharge from the U.S. Marine Corps, and a lot of other documents.

The detectives are particularly struck and alarmed by the stuff in Russian and the left-wing literature. It’s not the kind of thing they find too often in Dallas. There’s a letter about photography from Gus Hall, leader of the American Communist Party, one in Russian from the Soviet embassy in Washington, and another from someone called Louis Weinstock of the Communist Party’s paper, the
Worker
. There are two letters from the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, sent to Oswald at an address in New Orleans, a letter from the Socialist Workers Party—a Trotskyite organization—regarding membership, and a Russian passport with Oswald’s photo in it. Alexander thinks to himself that there’s a lot of difference between a homegrown killer and someone who appeared, from what he could see, to be a card-carrying Communist with overseas connections. The possibility of a Communist conspiracy enters his mind. Even the thought of Russian military transport planes, landing in Dallas, flashes across his mind.

Over the next hour and a quarter, they nearly strip the room, using the pillow cases and one of Oswald’s own duffle bags to carry everything to the waiting patrol cars. Only a banana peel and some uneaten fruit are left behind when they leave just after 6:00 p.m.
⁷⁰²

A
board Air Force One, the flight back to Washington has been abuzz with a continuous and overlapping series of communications with the outside world, some to pick up the threads of the American government so brutally ripped asunder just hours ago, some to let profoundly worried officials and congressmen have a reassuring word with the new president, but most of the conversations are about the fallen president.
⁷⁰³
As Air Force One zoomed through the sky to its Washington, D.C., destination at more than 600 mph, there are conflicting reports about the extent, if any, of the tension existing between the old and the new presidential administrations. At a minimum, the ride to Washington, as Mrs. Johnson says, was “strained.”
⁷⁰⁴
And it’s clear that the aides to Kennedy and Johnson were separated on the plane, Kennedy’s aides in the rear of the plane with Mrs. Kennedy and the casket. A top Kennedy aide is said to have told a news reporter, “Make sure that you report that we rode in back with our president, and not up front with him [LBJ].”
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Was a lot more involved? Kennedy assistant press secretary Malcolm Kilduff was quoted as telling one source, “That was the sickest airplane I ever was on.” And he told the
Los Angeles Times
that there was friction between Kennedy and Johnson factions on the flight. “I think that there are things that happened that could be embarrassing to both the Kennedys and the Johnsons,” he said, though he would not describe the events referred to. Another passenger, wishing to remain anonymous, said, “They refought the battles of 1960,” during which Johnson and Kennedy had bitterly contested for the Democratic nomination. But, under the circumstances, much of this seems unlikely, and Jack Valenti, an LBJ aide, remembered no such discussion and acrimony, adding that the extreme grief of Kennedy’s top aides, Kenneth O’Donnell and Larry O’Brien, was “simply beyond anything as casual as hostility.” Charles Roberts of
Newsweek
, who was aboard, wrote, “As an unbiased witness to it [the transition of power], now that questions have been raised,…it was careful, correct, considerate and compassionate.”

As far as President Johnson’s conduct on the plane, rumors abounded that he had been “rude,” “overbearing,” and “boorish,” one anonymous source even saying he had been impatient with Jackie when she did not “immediately come forward to witness the oath-taking.” However, the evidence from named sources contradicts this. William Manchester himself, who, in writing
The Death of a President
, probably interviewed more people, including all the Kennedy entourage on the plane, than anyone else, said, “I think Johnson acted in incredibly difficult circumstances. I think he behaved well,” particularly, Manchester said, in being solicitous and caring to Jackie throughout, a view which sounds much more believable to me. And Roberts of
Newsweek
said that although Johnson was very “capable of crudities,” the new president’s conduct during the four hours of flight was completely proper and “four of Johnson’s finest.” Indeed, even Kilduff, who spoke of hostility on the plane between the two camps, said in a radio-television interview on November 21, 1966, on the Westinghouse Broadcasting network, “I can’t help but feel that he [President Johnson] showed the utmost…personal concern for Mrs. Kennedy, all members of the Kennedy family, and the whole Kennedy party that was with us.”
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About certain things, everyone agrees. As author Relman Morin writes, as the plane thundered toward Washington it was “heavily freighted with grief and horror and memories and the aching sense of loss.” Also, that Johnson, with the levers of power now in his hands, started working immediately at his new job. He was on the phone to Washington calling for a cabinet meeting the next morning, requesting that Robert S. McNamara, the secretary of defense, and McGeorge Bundy, the special assistant to the president for national security affairs, be at Andrews Air Force Base when Air Force One landed so they could instantly bring him up to date on the very latest developments flowing from the assassination throughout the world, and so on. The transition of power was also filled with the unavoidable poignancies that strike at the heart. During the flight, in the Oval Office “a sad task was going forward. They were removing some of [JFK’s] most prized mementos: the coconut shell in which he had sent the message for help after the Japanese destroyer
Amagiri
rammed and sank PT-109, the framed photographs of his wife and of Caroline and John-John at different ages, the silver calendar that marked the dates of the beginning and end of the Cuban missile crisis, his famous rocking chair.”
⁷⁰⁷

During the flight, Rufus Youngblood and Roy Kellerman conferred frequently by phone with the head of the White House Secret Service detail in Washington, D.C., Gerry Behn, to arrange security and procedures at Andrews Air Force Base. Behn wanted President Johnson to come immediately to the White House, where both security and communications were best, but Youngblood told him that the president was adamantly against it. “That would be presumptuous on my part,” Johnson said. “I won’t do it.” Instead, Johnson instructs Youngblood to have the Secret Service secure the Johnsons’ Washington, D.C., residence instead.
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A dispute over how and where to take the body broke out. Admiral Burkley advised Captain Taz Shepard, the president’s naval aide, to make arrangements with Bethesda Naval Hospital, while Ted Clifton informed Dr. Leonard Heaton, the army’s surgeon general, that the autopsy would be performed at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, the great hospital in the nation’s capital that since 1909 had treated grunts and generals, even presidents and Winston Churchill.
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General McHugh ordered an ambulance, but was informed that it was illegal in the District of Columbia to move a dead body by ambulance without a coroner’s permit. McHugh didn’t give a damn.

“Just
do
it,” he snapped. “And don’t worry about the law.
I’ll
pay the fine.”
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Eventually, the choice of hospital was left to Mrs. Kennedy. Dr. Burkley made his way back to the tiny rear cabin area where she held vigil next to her husband’s coffin. He knelt in the aisle beside her, and explained to her that the president’s body would first have to be taken to a hospital. “Why?” she asked. To have the bullet removed for evidence, Burkley improvised, not knowing if there was a bullet inside the president’s body. He was careful not to use the word
autopsy
, which would conjure up the image of a dissection. Burkley told her that he would be willing to arrange to have it done at any place that she felt it should be done, although for reasons of security it should be done at a military hospital. The president was, after all, the commander in chief. That effectively narrowed the choice down to two hospitals in the Washington, D.C., area: the army’s Walter Reed or the U.S. Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland.

“The president was in the navy,” Burkley said softly.

“Of course,” Jackie said, “Bethesda.”
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Then she thought of Secret Service agent Bill Greer, the driver of the limousine in Dallas. Greer had been remorseful all afternoon, feeling that somehow he might have been able to save the president if only he had swerved the car, or sped away before the fatal shot. Mrs. Kennedy felt sorry for him and requested that Greer drive the casket to the naval hospital.
⁷¹²

There had been a steady stream of visitors to the cramped cabin in the rear of the plane throughout the flight, but, with the casket at their feet and so many seats removed, there was not enough room for them to stay long. President Johnson, otherwise closeted with his advisers Cliff Carter and Bill Moyers, came back for a visit, telling Kennedy’s men that he hoped they would stay on at the White House: “I need you now more than President Kennedy needed you.” Later Moyers came back and asked Ken O’Donnell, Dave Powers, and Larry O’Brien to join the president for a conference about arranging a meeting of the congressional leadership, but they didn’t want to leave Jackie.

“We understand perfectly,” Moyers agreed.

By then, a small Irish wake, full of melancholy reminiscences, had been unrolling in the rear compartment. Jackie recalled how much Jack enjoyed the singing of tenor Luigi Vena at their wedding, and decided to ask Vena to sing “Ave Maria” and Bizet’s “Agnus Dei” at the president’s funeral mass. Dave Powers and Ken O’Donnell told her about Jack’s meeting with Cardinal Cushing at the North American College in Rome a few months ago. Many U.S. cardinals attended the coronation of Pope Paul VI, but only Cushing was there when the president arrived. “They’ve all gone home, Jack,” the cardinal laughed. “I’m the only one who’s for ya! The rest of them are all Republicans.” It was decided that Cushing, who married Jack and Jackie, would say the low requiem mass, because Jack liked that better than the solemn high ritual.